( published in: http://rivista.overleft.it/ )
QUESTIONS OF STYLE: FICTION, IMAGE AND TRUTH IN CORMAC McCARTHY
Franco Romano
"now crowded around the car several hundred people, and all spoke in a growing buzz. The sun was just above them. Seemed to hang there in a dazzling stillness, as if he had stopped, perhaps surprised to see those dolls still on the ground of mud that had been placed there long ago. The men on the bridge had begun to pull out the front door, some on tiptoe, to go and see the remains in the body of the wagon. "
The first novel from which this short quote is taken out of the dark is one of the first written by Cormac McCarthy.
In this scene, the protagonist is an initial crowd of men and women who approach in a chariot, on which something happened, it is the typical situation that is created after an accident or the scene of a crime.
The second protagonist is obviously the sun. It hangs, dazzling, motionless, astonished. Each of these adjectives, but apparently the two most obvious as the second and third, they are not at all if we consider the entire sequence. The last, also coupled to the first, triggering an expansion of meaning. The sun can be hung and surprised only if it becomes a metaphor for something else and this becomes clearer later in the song, where life gets a double metamorphosis. The first is that it is subjected, by implication, the sun itself, the second concerns the hundreds of people. This double transformation from sun god, and puppets for persons with mud, a short circuit, but not all.
The sun, McCarthy writes, was just above them. This description further clarifies why it is hung. Who can see this way and where you can see in this way? The experience of being directly above the other, unless it does not consider himself God, assumed to exist, the high towers, skyscrapers and the cameras hanging from their stand. The sun-god, really, therefore, is a sun-god-tower-camera, it takes from the whole scene, as in a film set. The multitude, who approaches the car, however, is made up of men in mud-puppets.
asymmetry accentuates the irony implicit in designating the human species with an expression that returns us to the biblical text. If, in fact, nature (the sun) and technical (the camera as a modern expression of the human capacity to build tools and implants) may change at any time and always shows the same power with historical and indecipherable as sphinxes that look from above - god-like human events, in total indifference to what happens, the puppets of mud are those that are and were. The only discernable difference between nature and development of technology (from the towers to the machine to be taken), is the immutability of the processes that affect them, the latter privilege that both share with the gods.
What they want to represent these few lines so intense and dense? A god tired of humans or a simple transposition of literary fiction of the nineteenth-century omniscient narrator in the new clothes of a camera all-encompassing? The fact is that this track seems so simple now reveals to us (we are at the beginning of his literary path), one of the stylistic elements of Cormac McCarthy: his special relationship with the image and the cinema. Of course there are other aspects
absolutely crucial here already in place, that the novelist will resume in all his works: the mutual indifference of nature and history, where the first is a sphinx without looking to intervene (the reference to Leopardi is a must), often shines a dazzling beauty and lives of a life of its own in humans also belong, but - it seems - no longer in a privileged position.
The immediate continuation, following the passage quoted, takes us into a scenario as typical of the narrative maccartiana: cruelty, indeed, even more, the wickedness of human behavior, a trait that goes beyond the violence in the strict sense. We leave this issue in a tight angle, because there are other novels, compared to this, where it becomes more crucial. Back
style. We always do out of the dark, some pages later.
Take a chair, he invited a woman.
Thanks.
The other was at the stove, and poked the fire, turning the ash gray and pale. Are not you married? Churches.
No ma'am.
... ... ... ... ..
Where is your son?
How?
I said where is your son.
I have none.
The child, the child crooned the old.
There is no child.
The peculiar characteristics of this dialogue leap to the eye: missing quotation marks that usually mark off a box on the other. The words of the two women run concurrently with the actions taken by the third woman who is in the room. Movement and speech can not be separated from each other, their mixture and the simultaneous elimination of almost all the devices rather specific to fiction writing, once again alluding to the cinema and also, in this case more clearly, this is a scene that takes place in an interior, the theater represented on stage.
Cinema, theater and literature.
If McCarthy is writing fiction since its origins steeped in theatrical and cinematic influences, runs immediately an obligation to tell how it is, very important issue because even a lot of contemporary fiction, especially Italian, inspired plenty of cinematic technique.
should, at this point, do a minimum of the history of relations between literature and cinema.
For a long period of time after its birth, the seventh art looted the literature, making some great novels, the ideal subject for films and screenplays. For some it was a real apotheosis: I am nineteen (eight of them in Italy), films whose subject Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, to say nothing of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, the Promised spouses. The narrative, or more child who was (I think even the Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Citadel, etc.. and so on), was an inexhaustible reservoir.
Television, the Italian with the glorious tradition of the drama series, edited by world-class directors and actors just as prestigious, was once an instrument of undoubted promotion of literary taste, nurturing a whole generation, and which impact on book sales. It was quite normal, then, for the directors, please contact the writers for the screenplay. All this until the late '60s. Since then in the next decade we are seeing a movement in the opposite direction, which reaches its climax in recent times. You refer to the novel more often to the cinema and instead are increasingly rare filmmakers who work with writers: the couples-Cerami Benigni Wenders and Handke-are exceptions to Cristina Comencini, writer and director, another special case.
The first in Italy to write a novel technique with a very close, perhaps too, the script was Pasolini, with Theorem in 1969. Pasolini himself with oil, was preparing to sharpen his way with much greater awareness, unfortunately, tragically interrupted by his assassination.
The French nouveau roman, however, in previous years, had approached the movies. The Ecole du regard arose, in fact, as a poetic influence is capable of the narrative and cinematic technique: Jean-Luc Godard was at once a staunch supporter of the poetic, but also the one that the development brought to exasperation. Even some of the first descriptions alienating LeCleziò affected by these influences and the same can be said of Calvino's Palomar.
The narrative part of McCarthy's path toward a movie, without hypothesize a direct influence from the Ecole du Regard or other about him, partly because the distinctive features that make it different and they are too strong decisive.
McCarthy started his thinking to the myth of the frontier, thus defying the American cinema on his own land, that of the western genre, the most holliwodiano by definition, also anchored in that segment of American history that has its roots in a distinctively modern myth.
Secondly McCarthy welcomes grammar and syntax of the cinema all that can make it even more essential writing, removing any unnecessary frills or free wink to the reader.
This is enough to indicate the abysmal difference between the way of approaching the film from McCarthy, compared with the results yet, where it tries to mimic its effects. I am not speaking of the most cheesy and consumption that have little to do with literary writing, I mean, as example, as recently as one novel among them is certainly the most decent and its author one of the best writer of his generation: the first chapter of Sandro Veronesi's Quiet Chaos.
The crescendo that distinguishes it seems to be taken out of whole cloth by the sequence of the first twenty minutes of Indiana Jones (no no importance that the issues are different, so it's worse.)
The effect of this rapid pace on the reader is to take away my breath yes, but at the end, all the facts narrated, the concatenation of the same, too similar to the clichés of action movies and that would take away the tragic death of Lara, with which the chapter ends. We've seen in abundance of these sequences, what matters is the paradigm. In Indiana Jones, after a series of escapes, murders, twists, stunts of all kinds, quotations from other movies, when everyone is finally on the helicopter, it happens that a fake snake recreate a tense moment further, it is However, a joke (as if it were normal to joke like that after a dozen murders and so on), which ironically casts a retrospective light on everything that has been seen before. It was all a joke, not just the final part, we are inside the fences of the pre-adventure genre and the scene with Spielberg reminds us, in fact, he does not certainly want to suggest a tragic film.
Veronesi, however, I would like, but the sequence is so overloaded with plot twists at the end that it is tragically wrong, a trick used to ferry the reader to the second trick: the choice of Paladini, who decides to live in his car parked in front of the school of her daughter Claudia. From this second trick, he arrives at the third (the encounter with the woman rescued at sea, with predictable sex scene deferred.)
In the middle you have the feeling that the novel proceeds just waiting for the next big scene, and that the other meetings, many of which are discounted, however, are needed to fill a void.
TRUTH AND FICTION.
The art of course is always fiction, but according to a footnote definition that I have to paraphrase, there is a difference between truth and fiction, declaring that a fiction instead repeats itself with a sequence of special effects, whose sole purpose is to entertain.
Of course one could argue that drawing a sharp line between the fiction is difficult if not impossible, but it is possible to determine the similarities, because I think everyone intuitively understands the difference, if placed in front of a concrete example.
One, old, fiction that tells the truth is that which occurs in the Odyssey Homer, When Odysseus arrives at the court of Alcinous. With his customary guile, the hero blunt the investigations of the king with answers that elude all of his questions, but for this rise in Alcinous suspicion and even irritation. The hospitality is sacred, but he ponders to unhinge the defense of Ulysses, and one evening staged a real coup de theater. Nth dinner in honor of his guest, the king also called on Demodocus, an old blind singer (the same as Homer, according to legend) that sometimes entertains the court telling the stories of the Greeks. Ulysses, convinced in this way to perpetuate their camouflage even better, invite the singer to tell the story of the siege of Troy. When it comes to deception of the horse, However, faced with the reality of his actions do not, but the fiction of their theatrical staging, Ulysses bursts into tears and revealed to be the one who caused those deaths. Here the work an admirable example of how fiction can have a cathartic value, and then morph and truth. In fact, after the tears Ulysses will find the way open space for the return to Ithaca: the winds that so often were hostile to the drive home, but perhaps it is not only the inclemency of the sea, but of his inner storms that have finally place!
McCarthy's use of narrative fiction is, especially in his greatest works such as The Border Trilogy and The Road, is similar.
In the novels The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses, Cities of the plain, prosaic and fierce he makes the epic of the West by attacking the representation provided by the cinema sweetened holliwodiano: does it contrasts with a word and then stripped and anti anti-heroic epic, which describes detail until more raw, as in this passage from Blood Meridian:
Each of these young victims, seven even eight, had made a hole in the jaw and had been hung by the neck with broken branches of a mesquite . Naked eye without staring at the sky. Bald and pale and swollen, as a being of unimaginable larvae ...". 2
Another author, which ours can be approached, and Faulkner, masterful interpreter of the negative dynamics of the relations between whites and blacks in the American deep south.
There is a character that embodies all the others in the trilogy McCarthy: that of the court, always in Blood Meridian.
He is a man who can cram his speeches to literary quotations from the Gospels or even drawn from the Bible and looking at the human world from above, as a tragic hero of antiquity. In fact, it's a gang leader who gathers around him, misfits of all kinds. Set in the second half of the 800, in the border zone between the U.S. and Mexico, the novel is also based on a broad set of official documents. The actions of the gang do not serve any cause, are simply the expression of a cruelty that has no purpose and does not want to have, if not that of their sadistic power over others. The conquest of the frontier here becomes a pure forward and fill the space, occupying the territory, destroying any previous culture, beginning with that of the natives, found a corresponding law and is exhausted only in the amount of violence and terror that is capable to release. McCarthy creates an anti-heroic character, but does so by identifying a way radically different from that followed by a large part of twentieth-century European fiction. The latter tried to all'estenuazione derision, the parody has indeed demystify the hero, but ended up shut themselves up in the size of a desperate nihilism, sometimes sarcastic, often simply mocking.
With the novels This is not a country for old men, and subsequently left the McCarthy Road and West takes a leap of two hundred years time. The first of the two, however, succeeds in being too didactic: the transposition of the paradigm of contemporary American cruelty of the conquest of the West (as if to say that the ruthless rules of survival are still those), it is a bit ' Forced expression of a preconceived thesis too. In
The road, however, he comes to the contemporary with a completely different path, but that has to do with a genre once again, this time literary.
In the latter case it is the apocalyptic or dystopian genre, whatever you want, which is crammed with the fiction of the Anglo American 900, beginning with Orwell and Huxley, then moved to Golding (Lord of the Flies), to arrive Finally, in Ballard, Burroughs, Le Guin, Dick), sometimes this kind was also proposed in the cinema, with different results and sometimes ingenious as in Blade Runner.
McCarthy's novel, the main characteristics of this genre are taken to the extreme, but not because the author enlarges the catastrophic effects or their representation expression, but down because some contracts express or implied, on which the works of authors cited were based. The first of these agreements concerns the time.
The horizon of the great twentieth-century dystopias is always the future (even better in the future), even when the narrative time chosen is the past tense: in this sense, Orwell's 1984 text is the most emblematic. A second issue concerns the relationship between disaster and scientific prediction. Ballard, The underwater world that is perhaps the author who comes closest to the more apocalyptic novels of McCarthy, said the disaster in those terms (polar ice caps melting due to solar radiation) by projecting it inevitably into the indefinite future, locking at the same time within the walls of the science fiction genre.
The fiction which serves at least McCarthy is instead to assume that the catastrophe has already occurred, without explaining quite why: there is nothing in the novel, in fact, that we may provide some indication in this regard. The peremptory nature of the beginning (the first two or three pages) that provide the key and set the tone for the whole novel, testified in an impressive way.
A second element, combined with this, it creates in the reader the feeling of being inside the story and not screened in who knows what time to come. Consider for example this passage:
"The land was barren, eroded, gutted. Marshes scattered bones of dead creatures. Piles of waste indistinct. ... All without a shadow nor a precise outline. The road down into a jungle of vines shriveled. A marsh covered with a layer of dead reeds. On the horizon a dark haze that permeated and sky. In the late afternoon it started raining and continued holding his towel over his head, with the wet snow that hissed against the plastic. "3
The common lexicon, the simple adjective, simplicity and brevity of the periods, sometimes without any verb, but simply descriptive (Heaps of waste indistinct) give to the phrase maccartiana a strong communicative impact. If we isolate each period as if they were shots of a slow sequence shot in mid-plane or American, we can easily recognize in each of these scenarios, we have to observe every day: it is their slow accumulation that becomes disturbing because it settles in a reader mosaic that resembles the world in which we live already, but it makes us feel just a little 'gray and more aligned to its most extreme distress.
Even the players who inhabit this world, beginning with the two most important and that the father and son, are immersed in a social end, where there are few rational actions that can be made: the need for survival rests with to that of the defense. In this world skeleton unfolds the story of the harrowing and tragic journey of the two, until its conclusion. The path taken leads in the direction of California, namely the south and west, where he had completed the conquest and where it also begins the narrative of McCarthy.
The finish, in my opinion, moving, mysterious and cathartic, marks another evolution in the path of the author, but I do not want to talk about why would my wise far beyond issues of style that I wanted to put it to the reader.
conclude by mentioning only briefly, like a suggestion to read two other works that seem to go beyond the path shown here but that arise in my opinion as a final reflection on life by the American writer. The first, Sunset Limited, is more or less simultaneously in the street (I mean the writing is not the date of publication of two works in Italy). The second, but in fact above, you Suttrie, 1979.
Sunset Limited is a play that has as its protagonists a white (nihilist) and a black man, who has just saved from a suicide attempt under the train Sunset Limited, the literal translation and the English title very significant.
Suttrie, however, is the name of a protagonist who, having abandoned a life of bourgeois comfort and even his religious torment, he decides to live beside a river in a deserted hut. His company is the animals that inhabit the river and its surroundings, not domestic ones, but the most primitive: with them a plethora of misfits of all kinds, including the funny, weird and paradoxical Harrogate, a figure Halfway between wild animals and humanity, in the name that echoes the word Arrogance. In the river, in his debris, in those who inhabit the banks, seems to pour, as in a large bath, all the American epic. The trip from the road, many years later, culminating in a river, life there seemed to pulse as ever, mysterious and sublime at the same time, but not necessarily humans.
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