Mccarthy And Faulkner Essays - Modernist Literature,

Mccarthy And Faulkner I will never claim to be an expert as an undergrad at anything, but in my personal opinion, McCarthy is not the son of Faulkner in the Southern Literary Renaissance. McCarthy and Faulkner share common view in the complexities of nature and its subsequent weave with the human condition. The psychological complexity of Faulkner also stems from his desire to explore the true heart of people and not their surfaces (note his Nobel Prize Speech). While McCarthy exposes personalities and creates unbelievable characterizations (the Judge) I don't personally feel that sometimes a true soul is left out. I do not believe that this takes away from his writing, but he would probably focus on distancing himself as far from the Faulkner stigma southern writers are labeled with in order to produce a distinct new form of literature (which in some realms he has). The violence stems from human nature and has been a part of literature for centuries. Most notably, the Victorians may have influenced McCarthy with depressing yet duty bound works as Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Browning's poetry of destruction and desolation. Then again, this is just my unqualified position dashed out at a first response. Thank you for your time and would like to read others opinions. From: Christian the Heretic What in God's name are you talking about? You're sounding as logical as Fat Freddie Freak after a long speed binge. How can you possibly say that Faulkner is not an influence on McCarthy's fiction? It doesn't make sense. I will agree with you that there are certainly other influences and these are as pervasive (perhaps) as Faulkner, but Faulkner is all through McCarthy's work. This is a hot button for me as well since I'm currently working on Light in August in comparison to Outer Dark and Child of God. First the writing style IS similar, although this is arguable from any perspective. While Faulkner uses huge and bulky sentences, McCarthy tends to use a similar rhythm broken by periodic periods. I realize that my explanation of this makes no sense. A more definable and arguable position is with the themes that lie in Faulkner's work. Particularly when we view LIA, we see characters living on the borderlands of society. Joe Christmas, Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Gail Hightower, Johanna Burden--all of them are characters who (like Rinthy and Lester Ballard and all the rest of them jake legged melon *censored*ing necrophiliac sons of bitches) exist on the borderlands. And there is certainly a mirroring of Faulkner's treatment of Joe Christmas and McCarthy's treatment of Lester Ballard, not to mention the Rinthy Holme / Lena Grove parallels. Both Faulkner and Mc Carthy like to play with Christian imagery (as characters with more than one father ala Christ and all the other Biblical imagery in LIA among others). This is all to say that Faulkner is certainly an influence on McCarthy. True that scholars are perhaps beating that influence to death at the expense of looking at other influences but that doesn't mean that it's not there--any such argument smacks of a knee jerk reaction. From: Anonymous As you can see, there's a good case to be made for McCarthy as an inheritor of Faulkner and as a new breed, more closely akin to O'Connor or (it pains me slightly to agree with Mr. Wallach) even Hemingway. My own opinion is that critics tend to lump McCarthy into the Faulknerian school primarily because he's prone to using long, viny sentences. Secondarily, the fact that both authors usually address characters and situations which are outcast, marginalized, etc., makes for easy categorization. While these similarities are substantial, there is a difference in method (rather than style) which, I think, distinguishes the McC's approach from Faulkner's. At the core of this difference is the fact that Faulkner's prose takes place, and is generally constructed around, the internal environments of his characters. To some degree his writing can be described as comparative psychological portraiture (forgive me for interjecting my own made-up jargon here). McCarthy, to make a slightly tired p oint, stays external in regard to his characters, treating them as artifacts or products of the world. They play roles in the grand scheme