Hey, look, a blog post.

I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian lately, and like the previous novels of his that I’ve read – Child of God and The Road – it aggressively underlines the fact that McCarthy is a genius. I’d rank him along with Faulkner as one of the greatest American novelists, and probably the greatest living American novelist.  I don’t include Pynchon as competition because, try as I might, I cannot stand Pynchon.  Many critics would roll their eyes and stop reading right here.

But yes – McCarthy is a genius.  I don’t use Faulkner’s name at random, of course – McCarthy’s hyper-violent, disturbingly grim depiction of a geographical, ethical, and metaphysical wasteland in the American south is too reminiscent of Faulkner to not mention.  “Wasteland” is a loaded word when discussing literature, too, ever since Eliot’s poem, and there would be much to examine in the parallel between “The Waste Land” and Blood Meridian. McCarthy’s novel has also been compared to The Iliad, The Inferno, and Moby Dick - a combination which suffice remarkably well, as a whole, to describe the novel’s character.  It’s a work of genius because it is beautifully written; the prose is rich and heavy and delicious.  But it’s also full of layers to appreciate.  The plain narrative itself, the characterization, the standard surface-level readings are perfectly satisfying and fascinating.  Thematically, it works on all sorts of levels as well; a high school student could analyze Blood Meridian and come up with something interesting, and so could a seasoned academic critic of literature.

But what I’d like to talk about is the quotation marks, or rather their absence.

McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks.  He isn’t alone; many great authors don’t use them.  But he doesn’t use anything, not even any form of punctuation as substitute.  Joyce used dashes, for example, to set off dialogue from the rest of the text.  Many authors and poets ignore or distort punctuation (Faulkner not least of all), but mostly they mess with punctuation and its relationship to syntax – they use semicolons and colons in strange ways to affect the rhythm of the sentence, or they use lots of commas when they should be splitting sentences up according to prescriptive usage rules, etc.

So McCarthy is still curious.  He doesn’t set off his dialogue from the text at all.  In fact, you’ll notice that he doesn’t use apostrophes in some of his writing, either, and he seems to actively avoid using words that have apostrophes in some cases.

Naturally, we must ask why.  Why doesn’t McCarthy use quotation marks (and sometimes apostrophes)?

My first response, and one that I had very strongly when reading The Road, is an interesting one, I think – it’s a matter of visual aesthetic.  He is controlling the visual impact of the text as the reader takes it in with their eyes, as a whole, behind and beneath the specific line or phrase they’re reading at any given moment.  This is intriguing to me because authors, in our contemporary publishing context, don’t generally have any control at all over the visual aesthetic of their writing.  Maybe they have some control over the formatting of the text on the page, but maybe not; often they have no control over the pagination and the text falls where it may, differing from edition to edition, from pocketbook to paperback to hardcover to trade.  They don’t get to decide, necessarily, what’s on the cover; they don’t get to choose the font, or the means by which chapters are indicated.  Sometimes they do, I’m sure; sometimes the author might get to make those decisions.  But by and large, publishers and their marketing staff make them, and that’s why there is a picture of Viggo Mortensen marring the cover of my edition of The Road.

Is McCarthy reclaiming some control over the visual impact of his book?  Maybe, but that’s an ancillary concern.  I think that he is more concerned – or at least, I am – with the effect of the textual aesthetic.  The Road, like his other novels, is bleak.  In particular, it is stark, dreary, a horrible terminal monotony of barely-surviving.  The characters of the novel are nameless; in fact, capital letters are avoided as well, and there are only two proper nouns in the entire book: Coke, and Rock City.  McCarthy is flattening the visual aspect of the text, turning every sentence into a string of letters, turning the page into the bleak monotony of the road and the experience of his characters.  He’s making you see in the text – not in the words, but in the shape of the text itself – the very nature of The Road and its narrative.

“Flattening out” is definitely the term I like. When you look at those blocks of text, without defining features or distinguishing characteristics or vertical variety, they begin to blend together, to lose their identity, to descend into a formless mass.  This is what happens to the people in The Road. They are nameless, desperate, barely there both physically and mentally, their individuality flattened and subordinate to their one shared need, which is survival.  The people in the novel are largely identical, for the most part; they are desperate survivors.  They are no different from each other than one animal is different from another animal of the same species, to us.  They are just featureless paragraphs on a page.

This is the nature of McCarthy’s distortion of language and style in The Road. But let’s get back to Blood Meridian.

Blood Meridian has plenty of capital letters.  I would wager it has less than most novels by a large margin, but it’s got city names and names of men by the handful.  There is certainly room for investigation there, but I’d like to focus on the absence of quotation marks, and what it means herein.

So we have to ask ourselves: what do quotation marks do? People will often respond, “Well, they tell you who’s speaking.”  But they don’t, not directly.  In fact, a long chain of dialogue sentences with no narrative connection to the speakers often becomes confusing if only marked by quotation marks, and you may find yourself counting sentences to see who spoke which.

What quotation marks really do is tell you that speech is occuring. They don’t tell you who’s speaking; that tell you that someone is speaking at all.  They delineate speech from narrative; they set off dialogue from the rest of the text.

Inevitably this has an effect on us as readers.  It removes speech from the narrative flow; it differentiates it.  I would say it elevates it and places it above the rest of the text – that is, the description, the narrative.  That text is the world.  For the reader, it is the phenomenal experience of the fictional reality in question, and in this context I mean “phenomenal” in the philosophical sense.  The fictional reality only exists insofar as it is described in the text.  But speech and dialogue are made separate; when set apart by quotation marks, they seem to represent a layer of reality that is distinct from the surrounding text.  It puts me in mind of theatre performance and scripts for plays – in a play, the dialogue forms the fabric of reality, and the set is usually just a gesture, a suggestion of a reality, serving to frame the speech that takes place.

There is a whole lot of structural and poststructural talk about language being privileged and set apart.  Most notably, Derrida tears apart a number of texts which elevate speech.  But that might be too smart for me.  All I can see is that flattening-out happening again, like I described above, only in a different and more subtle way.

McCarthy, in Blood Meridian and his other novels as well, does not use quotation marks because he is not separating speech from the rest of that phenomenal fiction-reality.  We are told in high school that when we write dialogue, we use quotation marks, and when we write descriptions of “what people said,” we do not, i.e., he said “I am hungry,” and he said that he was hungry. When McCarthy writes dialogue, it is not dialogue per se, as distinguished from the rest of the narrative; it is simply another description of events and entities involved in those events.

Notice that dialogue has a specific name and clear definition, while that-which-is-not-dialogue is a little less specific; “narrative” and “description” are vague and nebulous terms, and the former could well include dialogue.

But yes, McCarthy is not privileging language or specifically speech.  He is making it into another event taking place, another interaction between entities.  What is the consequence of this flattening-out, of this compressing language into the rest of the text, the erasure of the binary?  To know this, we would have to investigate what is said, along with how it is framed (or how it is not framed).  I don’t intend to go into such depth at this late hour, because I have to work in the morning.

But I have a tentative conclusion: McCarthy is undermining the power of language.  He is undermining the capacity for humans to inspect, disassemble, compartmentalize, analyze and comprehend reality, which we do almost exclusively through language, in speech and writing and thought.  The speech that occurs is terse, short, full of unsaid meanings and subtexts, and it is so often written to be frustrated, as though the character cannot express their perceptions, or their thoughts, or their meaning, or any meaning at all.  They are attempting to use language to engage the world, and it ultimately fails. McCarthy’s beautifully written evocative narrative can’t help but inhabit their thoughts, expressing them to some degree, and the divide between their speech and their thought yawns wide and swallows up their attempts to communicate and interact and engage.

Because of this, it behooves us to be suspicious of any character whose use of language is elegant and descriptive and full of meaning, like the judge; is the meaning behind the judge’s cryptic, biblical speech itself suspect, or does its truth betray his nature as inhuman – an allegory, or a thematic spirit, or perhaps the devil himself?  I am reminded of the generalissimo in Faulkner’s A Fable, who spoke in proper syntax with excellent usage in a novel where sentences were so twisted up and drawn out as to be incomprehensible, and who was a terribly evil man who deceived and lied and twisted the truth.

It really seems like a critique of logocentrism, as I understand that term (and mine is a limited understanding, to be sure), which I find fascinating, and I wonder if McCarthy has read Derrida.  I would bet that he has, and I would furthermore bet that he understood far, far better than I did.