The Secret of Style: Part II

Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

Dan Brown was an English teacher.

So were Rick Riordan and Joyce Carol Oats. Throw in Stephen King and, combined, they’ve sold over 780 million copies. English teachers are a force to be reckoned with.

(If you’re wondering, and I know you’re wondering, Stephen King has sold 350 million copies.)

In The Secret of Literary Style, I began with King’s efforts to be accepted as a great writer by the critics who always insisted on calling him a storyteller, and I suggested that moving into a literary style means leaving behind or moving beyond much of what we learned in High School English.

When I described my theory of what makes for literary prose, I dubbed its alternative “balanced” prose, saying that literary prose, like music, plays with tension and release while balanced prose is sure-footed—its balance maintained—and ”release,” on a syntax level, is rarely required. Both types of writing can be wonderful or woeful. To claim you write literary prose isn’t to say you think you write better; literary prose can be awful, but in its purest forms, nothing matters more than the quality of the prose—so if you’re going to get published, the writing has to be superb. That’s where the confusion begins. The more important the story becomes, the more a storyteller can get away with suboptimal writing.

However, if in making that argument, I’ve suggested there are two choices, balanced writing on one side and literary writing on the other, I’ve dissembled, dissimulated, and deceived.

Balanced writing in its most unadorned state is what serves us well in most circumstances, but there are changes that can be made. One is the application of advanced techniques and the other is pushing it off balance and into the realm of tension and release. Chances are, if you do the latter, you’re doing both.

How many techniques you use and how off balance you push your writing is a matter of taste, and the idea of “literary” speaks more of a goal than a boss fight won in the fiction-writing video game where at last you’ve done enough to unlock the literary writing achievement. The goal might be to experiment with form (see

Andy Futuro

) or to play with syntax like you’re a special effects department instead of a writer (see

Emil Ottoman

), but you have a goal to entertain that extends beyond the story. You do that by following the same mantra Ezra Pound used to help usher in modernism: make it new.

If our book is a restaurant, balanced prose is raw meat. Advanced techniques are the seasoning, and tension and release are types of preparation. You can serve the dish unseasoned and unprepared, but if you’re reading my series, I don’t believe that’s your intent. You can add a little seasoning and a little preparation, whatever suits your taste, without stretching your prose beyond whatever fits your genre. On the other hand, if your goal is to write with a literary style, your desire may be to challenge the ways your favorite stories are told. Your goal is valid, whatever it is, and I want to examine how techniques and imbalance can be applied and to what effect.

Let’s begin by looking at our governing rules.

In my new literary analysis series, I’m examining Cormac McCarthy’s style in All the Pretty Horses. The introductory essay is available now, and I’ll cover the first 100 pages of the book in two weeks. Let’s steal from that effort and look at a rule McCarthy made for himself and why.

A writer can employ a rule for just one story or for his own oeuvre, and McCarthy chooses not to depart from his. Famously, McCarthy uses a minimum of punctuation, and while the quotation marks are the most obvious, there’s a decided lack of commas. To overcome the challenges this creates, McCarthy uses polysyndeton, an intentional abundance of conjunctions in close proximity.

He dismounted and opened the gate and walked the horse through and closed the gate and walked the horse along the fence.

All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy

When we use conjunctions instead of commas, it slows the reading down and bestows each action with a greater significance. John Grady and Rawlins are running away from home, and John Grady’s first movements are deliberate and meaningful. Another author would put us in the character’s head, but that’s not McCarthy’s style. We know a man by what he does, and while a prettier sentence could be made, this is how McCarthy gives weight to an otherwise forgettable sequence.

The same surface-level information could be conveyed with: He walked the horse through the gate and along the fence. Everything else could be assumed, except for the importance of each moment—simple actions done for the last time.

But by all that’s literary, you can’t keep that up forever.

He dismounted and opened the gate and walked the horse through and closed the gate and walked the horse along the fence. He dropped down to see if he could skylight Rawlins but Rawlins wasnt there. He dropped the reins at the fence corner and watched the house. The horse sniffed the air and pushed its nose against his elbow.

That you, bud? Rawlins whispered.

You better hope so.

All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy

He dropped down to see if he could skylight Rawlins—we have release when he moves from a pattern of short 3-4 syllable phrases between each of the conjunction, provides a coda of 7 syllables, and then transitions into a new clause with an easy rhythm through its 12 syllables.

New patterns are provided: He dropped… He dropped. That’s now three sentences in a row that begin with He. Most teachers would comment in your margins, telling you that’s a problem, but instead of breaking up his sentences, he ends the paragraph by transitioning to the horse.

He then abruptly transitions into dialogue leaving Rawlins without introduction, creeping up out of the dark, and leaving us (and perhaps John Grady) wondering if the horse had learned to speak.

Before we get into the next passage from McCarthy, consider this:

After the rain, the grass by the roadside was green, and flowers bloomed. He slept that night in a field, away from any town, and didn’t build a fire. He listened to his horse graze and the wind blow and watched the stars move and disappear in the sky. His heart ached, and he felt that pain like a presence within him. He’d known the presence before, but he hadn’t known it was mindless, heedless of the limits of a man’s endurance. He feared now no limits existed.

Let’s begin with how McCarthy treats our character listening to his horse graze and taking in the world around him:

He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.

It’s a very different feel from his previous example, despite the polysyndeton. It’s beautiful, each phrase painting its own picture across the Sistine Chapel of the western sky, and ending with violent emotion.

Let’s see how he treats our entire passage:

The rain had ripened all the country around and the roadside grass was luminous and green from the run-off and flowers were in bloom across the open country. He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there may be no limits.

All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy

I said earlier that it wasn’t McCarthy’s style to put us in the character’s heads but that’s an incomplete idea. There’s something here that I see comparable to indirect dialogue, but instead of conveying speech, it’s thought.

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there may be no limits.

John Grady has killed a man, a situation he was forced into by injustice, brutality, and the need to survive, but despite these mitigating factors, guilt finds him.

Every sentence but the first and last begins with He. It’s a paragraph of simple actions and beautiful descriptions until McCarthy confronts us with John Grady’s pain. Unadorned simplicity and a long series of vivid descriptions, juxtaposed, lead to a philosophical confrontation with the limits a man can endure.

We see contrast and contradiction in the beauty and the pain, and through the contrast the pain is heightened. John Grady has secured his freedom, and you can imagine him reveling in his adventure and success. Such is not to be.

Yet, the transition into John Grady’s pain is not as abrupt as it seems. The last image presages its coming.

[He] watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world…

We see it too in the image before that, when we know what we’re looking for.

he listened to the wind in the emptiness

Emptiness. He’s made no fire. The wind moves through emptiness, and the stars die at the end of the world.

Although beautiful, these descriptions aren’t random but reveal his inner state. McCarthy understands what he’s doing and why. We need to do the same. I’ve used polysyndeton and grumbled when my editors struck it down, but I didn’t understand its purpose and therefore wasn’t using it for its strengths, only its weaknesses. How many techniques have I tried on like clothes, fancying their looks but unaware of the weather? If I understand one purpose for setting rules for yourself, it’s so you know what tools you’ve chosen and can focus on using them well.

As I consider the differences between the plain rendition and McCarthy’s, I see again how McCarthy wants us to take our time. He’s not focused on the most efficient way of saying what needs to be said. He has a Biblical rhythm and slows us down where he chooses. His narrator is not his character, and when he describes John Grady’s thoughts, he uses words we don’t imagine to be John Grady’s: parasitic; incubate; heedless. This confirms the indirect nature of our access to his thoughts and distances us from them.

McCarthy’s tension and release is subtle compared to some, and the impact of much of his writing hits like a two-fisted combination of a penny western and the Holy Bible. He holds to a system of personally crafted rules, right down to which contractions deserve an apostrophe and which don’t. The syntax he employs compensates for the punctuation he ignores, but it’s more than that for him and should be more than that for us if we devise our own rules. There are reasons beyond the coolness factor—and this is today’s secret of style. It’s not merely that we choose to employ fancy techniques but that we understand the effects they create and use them intentionally that our words might wield the most power.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Catch up on all the essays: