Reverse Engineering Cormac McCarthy’s Sentences

How exactly does Cormac McCarthy do it? How does he write such elegant, intricate, and formally complex sentences? How does he manage to incorporate the biblical heft of high-flown imagery alongside finely observed realist texture? And how does he manage to use archaic registers in a way that doesn’t feel false or affected? His prose seems almost to have been etched in stone, such is its physical weightiness, yet paradoxically, it also feels nimble and spritely, capable of moving in unexpected directions. How on earth is he able to do both? David Foster Wallace gets to the heart of this puzzle in his 1998 reflections on Blood Meridian, which he claims is

literally the western to end all westerns. Probably the most horrifying book of this century, at least fiction. But it is also, this guy, I can’t figure out he gets away with it, he basically writes King James English. I mean, he practically uses Old English thou’s and thine’s and it comes off absolutely beautifully and unmannered and ungratuitous.¹

If such questions baffle scholars and devotees of McCarthy’s work, they must seem even more baffling to first-time readers, among whom are the many students who come to his fiction in undergraduate classes. Teaching McCarthy presents many challenges, but one of the most pressing is how best to help students as they grapple with a profoundly unfamiliar prose style. For many new readers, his sentences will seem thoroughly off-putting: confusing, dense, and baroque in their complexity. Of course, contextualizing and introducing the novels via discussions of broader themes and narrative arcs plays a key role here, but at some point, teachers and students alike need to come to terms with the strange internal mechanics of the sentences themselves.

One useful teaching tool I’ve stumbled across for helping students in this way involves slowing down and reverse engineering McCarthy’s prose. To do this, one strips down a sentence to its bare essentials, and then slowly rebuilds it to uncover the particular tools and materials with which it was constructed. This exercise is occasionally used in fiction-writing instructionals and works well on a range of different authors, but a particularly good example was posted online in 2009 by James Tanner, who breaks down a 100-word sentence by David Foster Wallace into nine distinct stages.² Dismantling and then rebuilding a sentence in this way gives us a chance to see the subtle shades of meaning that particular linguistic choices enable, as well as showing how inextricable form and content really are. The approach works nicely on Wallace, but it works equally well on McCarthy, whose style is similarly elaborate and just as idiosyncratic. By peering into the intricate machinery humming away beneath the surface of the polished sentence, many of McCarthy’s stylistic particularities suddenly become visible.

This close-up perspective also provides a useful way of getting classes thinking about a range of literary devices and strategies. In my experience, there are always some students who approach literature classes with the fear that looking too closely at texts will inevitably lead to feelings of disillusionment. Many seem to imagine a deeply upsetting, Wizard-of-Oz-like moment of revelation, in which the novel they previously loved is revealed to be nothing more than an assemblage of literary techniques. (Here, the wizened old man lurking behind the velvet curtain, turning knobs and dials, becomes the godlike novelist, marshalling a range of formal techniques to generate particular emotional responses. I like to call this The Man-behind-the-Curtain Fallacy.) And to be fair, students have often been encouraged to think in this way by particularly arid introductory classes on poetry, where they might reasonably get the impression that specific poetic techniques (such as apostrophe, anaphora, and alliteration, to take just a few of the as) have value in and of themselves, completely independent of their relation to a poem’s broader meaning or concerns. But closely analyzing McCarthy’s sentences gives us the chance to look at many of these same techniques anew, showing that...