The Writing Style of Cormac McCarthy: Pretentious or Genius?!

[@afnanbogey]

C-Mac just needs speechmarks and he’s golden. The point of punctuation is clarity. His flouting of excessive marks shapes the writing itself (for the good), but ultimately his choice is arbitrary and stylistic. Why bother with periods and capital letters? Original arabic script didnt even have dots or vowels, if he was so bothered by unnecessary notations.

[@theliterarynomad]

This is a largely pointless hypothetical, but I often wonder what the initial reading experience of his works would have been if he formatted them "correctly". Would it be better? Worse? Exactly the same? Impossible to know, obviously, but interesting to think about. I personally love his stylistic formatting, but it very well could be that I just love it because he's an incredible, once-in-a-generation writer. Maybe it's just as simple as anything a writer as talented as he does is, well, good.

[@afnanbogey]

@@theliterarynomad yeah I’m inclined to agree. I personally dont take too much stock in his stylistic choices wrt punctuation in itself. The gold comes from the mindset that led to those choices, and how those choices demand clarity of his authorial voice. If nothing else, they’re a fun dated postmodern aesthetic quirk.

[@stevejanowiak1982]

I tried reading Sound and the Fury and I thought my head was going to explode. Talk about a tough read.

[@theliterarynomad]

100%. I've found that online resources and "reading guides" are really helpful when trying to unlock difficult texts. Otherwise, it sometimes feels like we're just stumbling through the dark without a flashlight.

[@colemandennis9103]

You're going to love Suttree

[@hexesandsoldiers6032]

Neither?

[@VirideSoryuLangley]

It's strange how people refer to American Indians as "indigenous cultures", but then deny that same status to Europeans living in Europe.

[@theliterarynomad]

Who is claiming Europeans aren't indigenous to Europe?

[@VirideSoryuLangley]

@@theliterarynomad ...Pretty much every leftist politician in Europe? In fact, I think you can even go to jail in certain countries for stating that Europeans are native to Europe. There's a big effort to rewrite history and convince people that Europe was never our homeland; that we don't have a homeland. But besides that, whenever I hear the word "indigenous", it's never applied to Europeans for some reason; always Indian Americans, Meso-American peoples, Africans, Australian aboriginals...