Crit lit

“Manifesto” by Critical Mass Roma

Of all the great benefits of living the rich, lengthy lives that we first-world denizens are blessed with, the greatest must surely be having the ability to cycle through multiple iterations of the self. It appears that, collectively, our reptilian brain still hasn’t quite caught up with this concept – research shows that people of all ages systematically underestimate the extent to which their future selves will change, despite ample evidence that their past selves underwent radical evolution throughout their lives. But personally, I’m a big fan of the idea. I take perverse pleasure in knowing how different my current self is from the self of my teens or early 20s, and I gleefully await the strange new person who will be looking back at my life ten years from now and smiling ruefully.

So, it’s no skin off my back to admit that a decade ago, I held a particular opinion about the world, and that opinion was that Cormack McCarthy was an annoying, conceited, terrible no good writer. It was a popular opinion at the time – in some circles, anyway. B.R. Myers had just released an entire manifesto dedicated to taking down a generation of mainstream literary darlings, from Annie Proulx to Don DeLillo, and he reserved special ire for McCarthy’s brand of “muscular,” “edgy” prose. I was in college then, taking an advanced creative writing course with a professor who hated McCarthy and assigned “A Reader’s Manifesto” as a de facto writing bible, and this was the kind of literary criticism I could get behind. In addition to its sneering acid tone, the essay advanced a tidy us-against-The-Literary-Establishment-Man argument  – all the hallmarks of a college student’s view of the universe.

Of course, I had never read anything by McCarthy at the time. But that didn’t stop me from singling him out for special abuse in my assigned response to “A Reader’s Manifesto.” While vigorously applauding Myers for his absolute ideological correctness on the subject of contemporary fiction, I believe I may have compared one of the snippets from All The Pretty Horses that Myers chose to eviscerate (“He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war… Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see.”) to the “horse is like a man” Borat sketch. (Okay, I have to admit that was a pretty good zinger. Nice work, past Maryana.)

As I said, though, I’d never actually read any McCarthy, other than the quotes that Myers had plucked out for ridicule in his essay, nor did I stop to think how my beloved Faulkner would fare if cherry-picked and held under microscopic scrutiny by some priggish grammarian.

A few years later, I finally did pick up a copy of The Road from the desk of a fellow grad student who shared an office with me at Harvard and happened to be T.A.ing for James Wood’s Contemporary American Fiction course. I breezed through it in a few hours to stave off grading midterm exams and found it a moderately better use of grad school procrastination time than my usual forays into the depths of Google Reader. Later still, I saw the movie starring a disheveled Vigo Mortensen (clearly laying the ground work for Andrew Lincoln’s portrayal of Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead), and it’s hard now for me to separate the movie from the novel; both were equally engrossing and forgettable, sort of like Fight Club in the appearance of holding immeasurable weight for a brief glimmering instant, before disappearing into the ether.

However, to say that I was put off by the pompous prose or convoluted syntax would be a lie. It did hold a certain charm, an appropriately scrabbling, relentless cadence for end-of-the-world genre fiction, the kind B.R. Myers was okay with as long as it wasn’t endorsed by the Oprah Book Club.

It’s been a few years since I left the frosty academic bubble of Cambridge behind, but my inner grad student bubbled back up this morning when I followed a link to a blog post titled “Is Cormac McCarthy a Terrible Writer?” I read through the appraisals of McCarthy’s writing by vaunted literary scholars like the aforementioned James Wood, as well as those of ordinary readers, and I cringed – first at the literary scholars and their sad attempt to imitate the prose style of the subjects of their reviews (“When critics laud him for being biblical, they are hearing sounds that are more often than not merely antiquarian, a kind of vatic histrionic groping, in which the prose plumes itself up and flourishes an ostentatiously obsolete lexicon.” Ugh.) But I cringed even more at the ordinary readers’ comments:

Language structure is there to aid communication, it should not be modified willy nilly by some hack author as a literary device in a way to inject what he is unable to convey through language. In this case all you have is a clumsy, choppy, piece of sub-par writing.

McCarthy’s writing is full of incomplete sentences and anastrophe, completely lacks quotation marks, and frequently embeds dialogue in the middle of paragraphs… Each of these conventions is a barrier to straightforward reading…

It’s as if a century of literary innovation – generations of writers deciding to take wild, imaginative departures from established conventions – had simply never existed. I imagined a horrifyingly hilarious scenario: what if James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, or even Ernest Hemingway, had lived in the world of blogs and Amazon book reviews? What kinds of reader criticism would be lobbed at them? Terrible grammar? Archaic lexicon? Run-on sentences?

Sadness and indignation welled up in me reading those comments and feeling like those generations of writers clearly lost the game: all their brilliance and innovation sank like a stone, with barely a ripple across the smooth surface of reader expectation. Or to put it in the terms of one commenter who, like me, must have felt the ripple in various graduate-level courses and seminars, but can now only wail Cassandra-like at the uncaring masses: “Stick to John Grisham. THAT guy knows where to put an apostrophe.”

But the parting words of the post felt like vindication:

This is the reason I think debating “literary merit,” or ranking or rating books, quickly becomes an exercise in either folly, futility, or bullying. If you’re going to ask “but is it any good?” you need to flesh out the question: good at what? for what? for whom? There are myriad ways a novel can be. A much more interesting discussion will come from asking “what does McCarthy’s prose do?” or “what are the connections between McCarthy’s literary strategies and the central ideas of The Road?” then from asking if he is a good or a bad writer. Why would you even ask those questions, though, if you didn’t think the work was worth spending that kind of time and thought on? By assigning The Road to my class, I’ve implicitly endorsed it as good writing, haven’t I? And, to return to where I began, I think it is good writing. Good at what? Good for what? Well, one of the things it is unequivocally good at, or good for, is provoking discussions about good (or bad) writing.

Literary criticism has undoubtedly changed in the decade since “A Reader’s Manifesto.” Even in my brief tenure living among their tribe, I saw fewer academics issuing proscriptions like Harold Bloom or James Wood (or, for that matter, B.R. Myers) and more behaving with self-conscious restraint in their assessment of the literary canon. Instead of spilling ink to pontificate about what is Good and Right, they’d started asking questions like, “Good at what? Good for what?” Given how much people change in the brief course of their lives, it’s amazing how static the world of the arts has remained despite the centuries of shakeups and rebellions. It’s nice to see that even that entity is not immutable, and I suppose it shouldn’t be so surprising that its acolytes, standing on the cusp, are often too myopic to see it.