The thing I appreciate most about Cormac McCarthy is that he managed to write in a stream-of-consciousness style without ever actually bothering to get in a character’s head.
If you were to describe his style to someone at a bar — relentless, slurred, punctuation-less, and dark, and concerned with the evilest furnace in our hearts — they’d assume the text never left some ranting, rage-filled, Bernhard-ian head. But no! There’s horses. And mountains. And darkness and blood. (Which is to say he did what all writers should at least attempt to do — give us renewed access to reality through original style, freshen the mother language to make her once again glow.)
As a sidenote — it’s funny to see all the articles come out about Cormac McCarthy in the immediate aftermath of his death, as if it were a race to say the smartest thing while the body is still warm. They’ve now mostly dried up.
In theory, you could write about Cormac McCarthy whenever you want. The same corpus exists now as did three weeks ago. But we are so addicted to the everyday churn of the news cycle, that you have to try and smuggle some intelligence into a ‘relevant’ story that’s irrelevant in a week. And then the window closes.
Isn’t the whole point of this dumb endeavor we dare call literature to break out of the info-technic hamster wheel in which we are otherwise forced to live?
I bet book sales of everything he wrote are up.
How many have actually been opened? Or was the act of purchasing tribute enough. A gesture toward intelligence, as everything has become? Including this, I suppose.
(Image pulled from here.)