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One of the funny things about McCarthy is how he is associated with minimalism. It forces you to really think about what "minimalism" means. While his punctuation is minimal, his writing is not "short". But his writing is distilled. As the article notes, while he has less punctuation than Faulkner he has double the words per mark. How can a writer be minimal when his sentences are longer? It's easy to see when you read him: he paints an image so vividly (even when the image itself is unsure/opaque!), that you can hardly imagine adding or removing a word.
> On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination allowed them by the chance drop of a seed.

- The Orchard Keeper, pg 11 (his first novel)

For example, one could easily dice this sentence into multiple sentences or divide it with a semicolon. Somebody could also remove several words. But there is an image so completely captured by the sentence, an image in its fullness, that I can only admire it.

I have very bad brain fog today, so this might be that talking, but I don't even know for certain how to parse that sentence grammatically. There doesn't seem to be a verb or object, only one long extended subject, unless both "shelves" and "climbs" are verbs, in which case thats some serious Calvin-and-Hobbes verbing, but it works I suppose. In any case trying to understand this sentence required several read-throughs before I came up with the second explanation, and made my headache about two increments worse. I'm not a huge fan. It doesn't matter much to me whether writing is "difficult" in to sense of having a lot of big words, complex sentence structure, or long sentences, but I hate ambiguous writing.
What you're missing is some context to McCarthy's writing which is the specific voice he uses in a book like Orchard Keeper (in addition to the plot of course). It's a southern style famously associated with Faulkner and meant to mimic the spoken word of regional Southern areas in many ways. It helps to read it out loud.

You called it "ambiguous", but McCarthy's writing is often extremely verbose, an avalanche of specificity, painting extremely evocative landscapes and imagery. Here for instance is his famous description of a Comanche sneak attack:

> A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Nope you’re not off. I chose McCarthy’s earliest novel because it is him at his most “impressionistic” and indeed many sentences require multiple read through to determine what’s being said. But that’s the artistic pleasure in it: a scene is painted slowly in my mind’s eyes that, once fully formed/comprehended, is hard to find elsewhere in literature. This being art, you are completely free to find it off putting and completely ignore it. But I’ve found beauty in McCarthy that is, well, hard to put into words. His writing, much like technical documentation, can require many readings to get the picture.
I believe it's just saying "a few unlucky trees have taken root upon this steep and rocky cliff".

I don't really like fanciful writing like that either, but to each their own! I feel like mass media writing has gotten simpler in recent times, targeting a lower grade level than before. Good for me, bad for folks who prefer poetic scenery.

Raymond Carver defined minimalism as “the gradual accretion of meaningful detail, the concrete word as opposed to the abstract.” McCarthy’s writing seems to fit that to a T.
Surprised to hear he is associated with minimalism. I read half of one of his books and it seemed really maximalist thematically and narratively. Very gratuitous, flippant, unstructured, violent, sexual, etc. Very little subtlety or restraint.
Only some of his books are associated with minimalism in the common parlance of the word. A book like The Road or No Country for Old Men is wildly more minimalistic than Blood Meridian or Suttree.
I haven't read every McCarthy novel, but from what I've seen, he wrote less flowery prose in his later works.
I have read half of his work. I recall that he would dictate to his wife who would then write.

I wondered if the lack of punctuation is just text to speech made manifest.

What do you know - that actually makes perfect sense for how melodious the writing is. It was sound before it was text!
Man, McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons makes sense in his hard-bitten Western prose, but does it really make sense to have zero semicolons in these nonfiction books? When used properly, semicolons reveal a layer of meaning that occurs in natural speech: when you have two sentences that are grammatically separate sentences but have a link in meaning or make a larger point together.

That said, I can't say I would turn down a free copyediting job by Cormac McCarthy even if I had to drop all my semicolons in exchange.

Once you write enough you realize most of these all or nothing pronouncements on grammar and punctuation are more like personal vendettas and affectations. Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability.

Some people think all non-fiction writing has to abide by technical writing standards, but that's hogwash and pointless hardheadedness once you actually know how to write and use complex sentences to capture complex ideas well.

Ward Farnsworth says it well:

> A lapse from a supposed rule of style isn't an offense against nature. It's just a choice with consequences, and sometimes you want the consequences.

> Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability.

You are a member of an ever-smaller group of people who feel that way. https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-melancholy-decline-of-the-se...

> In 2017, author Ben Blatt discovered that semicolon use dropped by about 70% from 1800 to 2000. The ghosts of several authors are now rejoicing. Writers like George Orwell, who called semicolons “an unnecessary stop”. Or Edgar Allan Poe, who preferred the dash. Or Kurt Vonnegut, who famously advised against their use, saying “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” The symbol is facing the same melancholy fate as the dodo, the dinosaur, and the Soviet Union. Extinction.

> Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability.

They can, but not all prose needs to rely on them. Indeed, the quoted semicolon could easily be swapped for a period with no loss. In such a case it serves more as ornamentation than semantics.

I've noticed that high-performing people often develop idiosyncrasies that shape how they do what they do. I wouldn't use McCarthy's rules about semicolons as a general rule for any writer except maybe as an exercise. Constraints breed creativity. I think the number of successful writers who do use semicolons validates their usefulness. But I would also argue that somehow McCarthy figured out that ditching them was part of what allowed him to write as well as he did.
McCarthy also was averse to apostrophes and quotation marks. I remember when I had my first iPhone thinking that Cormac McCarthy would hate how it turned dont into don’t.
I've done a lot of writing in the past decade and I can honestly say I've never felt the need for a semicolon. I think writers overestimate the finality of a period. If one sentence follows another, readers will understand the implicit connection between them. After all, you put them next to each other.
It's also Kurt Vonnegut's rule, for what it's worth.

I think the problem with semicolons is twofold:

1. It allows you to write these horrible long sentences (that thankfully nobody does anymore, but if you look at like a Dickens novel they are everywhere).

2. They're a sort of mark of sophistication and wordiness, probably for reason (1), and it's very much the mainstream of the US tradition to reject that.

For all their desperation for simplicity, I don't actually think US novelists are particularly simple writers - Cormac McCarthy is kinda purple a lot of the time. So my feeling is just wanting to get away from wrought sentences and superficial sophistication isn't really worth anything in itself - it just brings you to a different manner of expressing sophistication.

As a copyeditor myself, who works in academia, I have to say that such 'rules' usually only work for the people applying them to their own work, but that doesn't mean they have no value. Why do it? It clearly provides a kind of discipline that makes you consider what's necessary for clarity. Do these two parts of a sentence really need to be together, or can they be separate? For technical or academic writers who may have difficulty expressing themselves clearly, a little artificial restraint could help.
I found McCarthys style of writing to really frustrate me. I think it really took me out of the book to read and try to piece the way conversations were going. I really, really didn't enjoy reading that book.

I read it a LONG time ago, and I know how popular it is and I've read just about every post-apocalypse book I can find, my favorite being A Canticle for Leibowitiz.

So I checked out the 1* Amazon reviews and there are some really funny ones written in McCarthys style - https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0307265439/ref=acr_dp...

edit: I didn't say what book, The Road. I do believe someone has told me to read Blood Meridian, but I haven't tried.

The Road is probably his most "accessible" book (it was recommended by Oprah after all), second being All the Pretty Horses, which is a modern and romantic western written in his style.

But you might just not like his stylistic tics. His lack of quotation marks is a stylistic move that repeats across all of his books.

I kinda liked Blood Meridian, but I think I couldn't quite appreciate it.

but man, "Passenger" and "Stella Maris" is some of the most bittersweet, heartbreakingly beautiful literature I've experienced.

Audiobook is exceptional.

I have wondered what McCarthy's actual relationship to science was. The article quotes him saying, about his tenure at the Santa Fe Institute:

> "I’m here because I like science, and this is a fun place to spend time"

I would not have drawn that conclusion from reading his novels, or from his essay about The Kekulé Problem. I took The Passenger and Stella Maris to be something like a summary of where he, personally, stood at the end of his life, and they both seemed to take a more complicated stance on scientific progress. Blood Meridian did too. There are plenty of other examples; it's a theme. I don't believe you can fairly draw conclusions about what an author believes based on what they put in their books, but when a consistent trend emerges over time, it's hard to ignore it. I'm not implying that he secretly hated science, I just wonder if he didn't appreciate it in a different way than you might assume given the quote above. Maybe it's the "progress" part of scientific he was cynical about?

I'm surprised you find the Kekulé Problem not supporting that he liked science. I think of it more as pointing out that the unconsciousness has been ignored scientifically, but he certainly frames it as a question of science: "The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." "To repeat. The unconscious is a biological operative and language is not."

For those who are interested, here is the article https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

As you say, Cormac's relationship with science is a bit hard to get from his novels. But I also think he really did love science, you might enjoy one of the most memorable days during the short time I was at the Santa Fe Institute https://dabacon.org/babel/2023/06/13/cormac/

I took that essay to be at least in part about how much of what we think of as a world governed by symbolic logic is really governed by a powerful unconscious world that is resistant to the scientific way of thinking. Not to say it is magical, but that underneath our modern brain is an older brain that works differently. I first read that essay after reading The Passenger, and wanted to connect it to what I took to be one of the themes of that book, which is that humans fundamentally aren't prepared to wield the tools of symbolic thinking, math and language. That they tend toward destruction (atomic warfare in the book) and, beyond that, a kind of insanity. That leads me to think he is fascinated by science, but not in the uncomplicated "fuck yeah science!!!" way.
Worth a watch if you're interested in McCarthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUy1Vn2KdI

The gist is that he liked smart people. He was good friends with Murray Gell-Mann and others at The Santa Fe Institute. I absolutely think he "liked science," I don't think he was cynical about it, though I do see where you could pick that up in his writing.

According to Gell-Mann, McCarthy knew a lot about 20th century physics...not in terms of math but in a "history of ideas" sense, i.e. where major physicists stood on various questions.

> According to Gell-Mann, McCarthy knew a lot about 20th century physics...not in terms of math but in a "history of ideas" sense, i.e. where major physicists stood on various questions.

This really came across in The Passenger and Stella Maris.

I think he was quite cynical of a totalitarian mindset of control and mastery that can rest in the background of the scientific "project." Many things that we would generally consider horrific by modern standards were considered completely reasonable in the past when done "in the name of science."

Judge Holden is, after all, the main villain of Blood Meridian, and yet he says in a speech:

> Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. [...] The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

I'm sure many people here would, without understanding the context of the quote and his character, identify with that quote nonetheless precisely because of what it offers --- control and mastery.

Maybe interested in science, but disliked scientism?
From Stella Maris:

>Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Hardly even a partial list. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Church is still alive. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. The ancients of course. You look at these names and the work they represent and you realize that the annals of latterday literature and philosophy by comparison are barren beyond description.

If anything, I would say the book suggests he was cynical about literature rather than science!

But what about this one:

> You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you don't. Not in your heart you don't. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet.

Almost Lovecraftian to me. I don't think he is drawing a distinction between literature and science either, they are similar in this view of the world. It's more like pre-modern vs. modern, not art vs. science.

I got through most of this but does anyone know why McCarthy famously hated punctuation marks and only, "believed in periods, capitals, and the occasional comma"?

Everyone makes a big deal of it but is it really just preference or is the idea deeper, that like a all the meaning should be contained in the words anyway and punctuation is a shortcut?

His wildest choice to me is using “could of” etc. I get it’s for pronunciation purposes, but now that it seems on its way to replace the correct spelling, it really jarred me.
Wild? Using it in dialogue seems perfectly reasonable. It's a common malapropism.
Made me think of Gene Wolfe (an engineer and later editor for Plant Engineering magazine) and Orson Scott Card, who continued to write for Compute! even after Ender's Game became popular (see https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/index.php?autho...)

Regarding "McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons" (@metaxy2) there are a number of high profile writers who are very particular about grammar. Example: Stephen King's On Writing shared some opinions about adverbs:

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one in your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day…fifty the day after that…and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.”

I think he was also joking a little bit. Profligately is an adverb.
If only he diverted a little of his rage against the adverb and pointed it toward the exclamation mark.
I think that's what happens when you see too many adverbs. :)
I'm going to stick my neck out here: Sometimes Cormac McCarthy is a bit _too_ minimalist. Sections of his prose can be sparse, ambiguous and difficult to follow, the ending of Blood Meridian being the classic case in point.
> Another point they stress: the adventure of wrestling with big ideas and expressing them: “Just enjoy writing,” they say. “Try to write the best version of your paper. . . . You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself.”

Miller put two colons into the first sentence. There are four quotation marks wrapping text that isn't actually quoting anyone, in an article about a novelist who doesn't use quotation marks even when characters are speaking. The quoted paraphrase includes an unnecessary ellipsis.

Does Miller believe that McCarthy's rules are good ones?

Actually, I was able to get to the Nature article through my library. I had thought the material in quotes was Miller paraphrasing. In fact, he's quoting from two separated points in the article but has changed the punctuation. The original used a colon.

> Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can't please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself.

I think in the context of writing about how a writer uses punctuation, these choices are significant.

Well, a man's gotta earn a living somehow. I'm sure he never made much from his books - they were too good.
I am reminded, when something doesn't make sense to me -- the relationship between McCarthy and the Santa Fe Institute -- I have collapsed someone's entire day to day experience into a short phrase.

McCarthy did not leverage acclaim into Hollywood work like Faulkner. He worked with people who appreciated his skills directly.

McCarthy had a day job. That makes sense. My unease with imagining his playing celebrity was worthy.

FWIW, pretty sure Faulkner only wrote for Hollywood to pay the bills. Recall a story I wish I could locate about him impersonating a servant when bill collectors showed up at his crumbling family estate. He also had a stint as the night watchman at the University of Mississippi (which, unlike Hollywood, allowed him time to really write). Until The Portable Faulkner was published in 1946 most of his books were already out of print.
"This conclusion section could really use an aside about a trapper who wore a necklace made of ears"
Obligatory: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-reade...

Excerpt:

> Now read this from McCarthy's The Crossing (1994), part of the acclaimed Border Trilogy: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her."

> Thriller writers know enough to save this kind of syntax for fast-moving scenes: "... and his shout of fear came as a bloody gurgle and he died, and Wolff felt nothing" (Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca, 1980). In McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described. And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927), he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992), creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently from you, therefore I am a Writer."

> The same message is conveyed by the stern biblical tone that runs through all of McCarthy's recent novels. Parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations abound: "They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire"; "and they would always be so and never be otherwise"; "the captain wrote on nor did he look up"; "there rode no soul save he," and so forth.

> The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the effect: "It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching repetition of words ... Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences ... gather to a magic." The key word here is "accumulation." Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.