Faulkner’s Most Noble Son.

On Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy made his career carrying the weight his literary father, William Faulkner, couldn’t anymore before he died. The Sound And The Fury, Light In August, and As I Lay Dying set the scaffolding of so much great literature; ink and paper-strewn juggernauts that fused the literary avant-garde with the American mud and gave America a tragic reference language to deal with its demons honestly. They also didn’t sell worth a damn( or at least initially, and nowhere near as the excruciatingly overwrought syntactical bathos of Thomas Wolfe.) The pressure to write like him, to add more unneeded adjectives and luridness, along with a crippling addiction to booze, slowly dimmed Faulkner’s power; but not without Absalom, Absalom and Go Down Moses, electric voice and character possessed modernist masterworks that told, retold, and untold a myriad of American and biblical myths

My case for the defense of McCarthy’s novels is twofold. First, he carried and added his own twist to the best traditions of Faulkner in his maximalist middle to late period. In between the verbs and symbols of their baroque styles were new ways of seeing fiction and narrative. That he could develop and modulate his style to include minimalism(I’m specifically thinking of the tersely beautiful polysyndetic syntax in All the Pretty Horses) was another homage to Faulkner by learning from his mistakes( the graphically awful final works where alcohol ( and later dope) had rendered his style to nothing but volume at the end.