The Road To Guy Lit
A review of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ through pink lens’
This novel is about a father and son’s post apocalyptic journey trying to secure safety. This was my first Cormac McCarthy novel and after hearing so much about his work and reading that he received a Pullitzer Prize for this novel I was desperate to read it myself. While reading this novel I discovered I was uncovering something very interesting. I was uncovering the elements of guy lit- chick lit’s male counterpart. In fact in an interview with the New Yorker McCarthy was dubbed “a man’s novelist.” I tried to figure out exactly what it was about the tone of his work that felt male.
Element #1 Minimalism
McCarthy is known for using minimal punctuation as a form of speeding up the pace. For example, there is passage and forgive me for not knowing the page but I read this on my kindle.
Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn’t fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.
These I believe are the narrator’s thoughts rather than dialogue but I found it hard to decipher between the two. In terms of how this informs my work often times I have thought that punctuation puts distance between the words and the reader and that removing punctuation would be like placing a zoom lens on the text. After reading this and experiencing a somewhat disjointedness, I would have to disagree. I think it is just being really cute and sexy but can come off as annoying.
There were also some passages that were missing entire words, which may have been his way of trying to capture true thought process. Sometimes we leave out words. This minimalism technique is also associated with guy lit. For example there was this line.
Light the color of washwater congealing in the dirty panes of glass.
This novel contained lots of moments like this where the prose was poetic but I found myself reading it over and over again and noting “wtf” then I realized he was doing that leave out words and punctuation thing.
Element #2 Repetition
Another reason this may qualify as boy lit is the heavy repetition.
Here's an excerpt from p. 170:
I don't know.
You don't know?
People give you things.
People give you things.
Yes.
To eat.
To eat. Yes.
No they don't.
You did.
No I didn't.
Or from p. 159:
I threw it away.
You threw it away?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
This sort of dialogue also feels a little unreal in that no one is interrupting anyone they are taking their separate turns speaking and it has a flat effect to it.. or rather affect in that I interpret these words as reading really monotonous almost bored.
In reading other reviews on this novel I came across this one guys hilarious rendition of a “Cormac impersonation”
You just repeat what I say.
I just repeat what you say?
Stop it.
Okay.
Okay?
Okay.
Okay.
What?
Huh?
What?
Huh?
Echo?
Echo.
(You get the picture)
Element #3 Vocabulary
Mccarthy made a point of using a ton of esoteric words. In fact, while I was looking up definitions I discovered a listing of 591 words that were unique to this novel alone. I have attached this list for your review. But then I got it! I unlocked the mystery of why this novel was so great. In looking up these words I was becoming a part of a community of active readers. Every esoteric word was linked to some egghead that took the time to really get into either the derivative of the word or to deconstruct this novel. For example I looked up the word “salitter” and got here:
Lowebrow
occasional thoughts about reading, writing, and the lowelife
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Salitter
In my search for the meaning of the word salitter, which Cormac McCarthy uses in The Road and which isn't even listed in the OED, I came upon this review by SF writer and critic John Clute, who provides a fine introduction to a very fine novel (though his reading is perhaps a mite too 'literal' in conflating the boy and Christ, despite the biblical overtones). And Clute even explains salitter.
For the curious: Hegel in one of his lectures on the history of philosophy also references salitter:
We find him [medieval theologian B. Jacob Boehme] also calling it the great Salitter — now the divine and now the natural Salitter — as well as Salniter. When he talks of this great salitter as of something known to us, we cannot first of all conceive what it means. But it is a vulgar corruption of the word sal nitri, saltpetre (which is still called salniter in Austria), i.e. just the neutral and in truth universal existence. The divine pomp and state is this, that in God a more glorious nature dwells, trees, plants, &c. “In the divine pomp or state two things have principally to be considered; salitter or the divine power, which brings forth all fruits, and marcurius or the sound.”(11) This great salitter is the unrevealed existence, just as the Neo-Platonic unity is without knowledge of itself and likewise unrecognized.
Posted by Lee at 7:47 PM
In terms of how the vocabulary informs my work I would have to say that at the end of a long chain of definitions for colors he usually tended to use words that represented the origins of a color so instead of brown he may have used ‘creoste’ which I will allow you to look up for kicks.
ELEMENT # 4 Male Influence
In the 1992 New Yorker interview with McCarthy it was said that his style owes much to Faulkner in its recondite vocabulary (see element 3) portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world- a debt McCarthy doesn’t dispute.
McCarthy’s list of “good writers” all seem to dwell in this category of boy lit: Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner. Note they are all men themselves. Hmm…very interesting.
ELEMENT # 5 No ladies no feelings
There was a very minimal female presence in this novel. There was a dead mother who we do not see die and the main character flashes back to her memory maybe once. The two traveling guys do come across a woman once which the reader may be hoping (as I was) that this stirs up some sort of sexual desire in the otherwise sexless narrator but she doesn’t. In fact, she just stands there cold and scared and answers two questions then voosh she’s gone. The most definitive man moment in this novel though I must say was the following dialogue between father and son:
When you wake up coughing you walk out along the road or somewhere but I can still hear you coughing
I’m sorry.
One time I heard you crying.
I know.
So if I shouldn’t cry you shouldn’t cry either.
Okay.
I mean really this is a conversation between a man and his son; the son suggesting that his dad should not cry. They are stuck out in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere, trying to evade cannibals, and in search of other people that are not cannibals. They have no food, no property, no safe space, they only have each other and they can not cry??? Why the fuck not? The only reason I could come up with is because my friend, this is man lit. And there are no women or feelings in man lit.
Overall while I enjoyed this novel very much as an active reader looking up words and becoming part of this community of incessant note takers I enjoyed this novel more when there were women and feelings in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I know that is a cruel and unusual thing for one writer to say about another but presently I am nobody and I just spent 7.99 on this book so I feel very entitled.
SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #004 |