Cormac McCarthy's abhorrence to using punctuation is the worst facet of his writing, and made the dialog in `Blood Meridian` practically unfollowable.
No. His (lack of) use of punctuation in his work is mesmerising and beautiful, and part of what made Blood Meridian one of the greatest novels of the last century.
Obviously that technique is less likely to be constructive in science writing.
Agree. The lack of punctuation in Blood Meridian is an artistic decision and aids the flowing, biblical narration and the terrifying yet beautiful aesthetic of the novel. It's intended to be trance-like, feverish and flowing, and I think the lack of punctuation aids in this. Blood Meridian reads like a terrifying, beautiful nightmare, rooted in fact and history, and the writing style is perfect IMO.
I likewise agree. When I read both Melville and McCarthy, I'll often find myself mid-run-on-sentence and think to myself, "welp, he's gone too far this time" only to find, by golly, they pull it off in the end. What would otherwise be complete pretension and chaos is, when wrought by true literature artists, simply breathtaking. There are times when I'm reading McCarthy and I literally, out loud, utter "Lord have mercy" for the beauty/fullness/meaning that man can lay upon us.
He’s probably my favorite author. Full tangent, but anyone who likes western novels should also check out Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry) and Paradise Sky (Joe Lansdale). Both are extremely moving and beautiful stories about the Wild West.
This quote from Blood Meridian is one of my favorite in all of literature and I think capture McCarthy's magic. He has such great talent to describe simultaneously with vivid details yet inexact clarity/meaning.
> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
McCarthy was my gateway to McMurtry and it was McMurtry who hooked me on Texas…McCarthy is from Knoxville after all so his Texas is as an outsider who never risks killing Pecos Bill by design and Blood Meridian wanders into the further west beyond El Paso.
Anyway, I am on another McMurtry kick since the new year that began rereading Texasville and then a first reading of Custer…For me, McMurtry is a triple threat of fiction, nonfiction, and essays: I enjoy everything he wrote.
`Blood Meridian` is a great novel in spite of, not because of his lack of punctuation.
Do you not see the irony in his own use of four commas and a colon while telling us to minimize our punctuation use in this article?
> While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
Perhaps he merely considered the "Oxford comma" unnecessary!
When I read The Road I found the lack of punctuation distracting rather than mesmerizing. I was using an e-reader and my initial thought was, "Is this right? Maybe they OCRed this and only glanced at the output." I had heard that the book was good from a few different sources, but none mentioned the unusual style. I Googled it to find out that this was, in fact, how it was supposed to be, and continued.
I am used to reading text with punctuation marks. When I enjoy a book, I forget that I am reading words on a page, and it feels like I'm seeing the story play out in my mind. The syntax of The Road constantly took me out of that feeling. It served only to remind me that I was reading a book by a dude who thinks adhering to the conventions of written English is beneath him.
The book was fine. I would have liked it a little more if it was punctuated normally, but of course, different strokes for different folks.
I would compare it to adjective order. You might say that the Goodyear Blimp is a big old blue polyester balloon. Never that it's a polyester old blue big balloon. It sounds wrong the second way. If I were a novelist searching for a gimmick, I could intentionally disregard standard adjective order and arrange the adjectives in another order every time I described something. It would give my writing a unique flavor. But it wouldn't make me any more descriptive, just annoying to read, because every time you hit a description your brain would throw an exception and then catch it going "oh, he's doing this again..."
Technical writing has swayed too much in the direction of over relying on punctuation, rather than writing good simple sentences. Trying to read a scientific paper is now a chore because of all the footnotes, parentheses, definitions and abbreviations, dashes and subclauses. They read more like legal documents than something you can actually read from start to end to understand a point.
No. His (lack of) use of punctuation in his work is mesmerising and beautiful, and part of what made Blood Meridian one of the greatest novels of the last century.
Obviously that technique is less likely to be constructive in science writing.