I started reading Gravity's Rainbow and in it pynchon, at least so far, uses more flowery language than McCarthy in Blood Meridian. So why is it that a common complaint about McCarthy is that he uses people prose, but not about Pynchon? Not that I think either really do. Is it just because McCarthy describes pretty landscapes?
What the fuck is "people prose"
>>7808597
Purple prose
>people prose
>>7808588
The thing that makes prose "purple" isn't how fancy or stylized it looks, but how superficial the content behind it is.
Corncob "Tortillas" YeCarthy is a vapid fuck with the puddle-deep sensibilities of an edgy teenager. His prose is both "purple" and pretentious in that it's a flimsy cover for how little he actually has to say about anything. In other words, he uses his particular form of stylized prose to create a superficial veneer of "depth" rather than genuinely having any creative, interesting, well-thought out, even mildly original or worthwhile ideas.
>>7808622
seconded t b h
>>7808622
I swear there's a DFW interview where he caricatures McCarthy's prose. Something ludicrous like "stools upon which toads had been rumored to sit"
But I can't find the interview. Wish I could.
>>even dfw can see mccarthy's prose as turgid
>>7808692
Google turned this up. Idk if it's what you were thinking of.
---
DFW: You're really wielding the old baton on this aren't you? To be honest... my faves?
GVS: Yeah.
DFW: Ones that people don't know all that well? Oh, that's right this is a British magazine so they won't have heard of a lot of these. Cormac McCarthy, have you read "Blood Meridian"? It's literally the western to end all westerns. Probably the most horrifying book of this century, at least fiction. But it is also, this guy, I can't figure out he gets away with it, he basically writes King James English, I mean, he practically uses Old English thou's and thine's and it comes off absolutely beautifully and unmannered and ungratuitous. He's got another one called "Suttree," God that one, God that would make a fantastic movie.
GVS: (perks up) What's it called?
DFW: It's called "Suttree."
GVS: How do you spell that?
DFW: S-u-t-t-r-e-e. It came out, oh golly, mid 70s. But it's about a down and out college educated man named Cornelius Suttree who has kind of abandoned everything to live in a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late 40s and early 50s and all of his friends in his entire world are derelicts and retards and twisted people. It's about four hundred pages of the most dense lapidary prose you can imagine about characters who are at the level of functional idiots and are drinking rot-gut. "Suttree" is the book that got him a MacArthur grant and he used the MacArthur to go to Mexico and do the research for "Blood Meridian." Okay, we'll play. Are there any new movies coming out that you like?
>>7808588
>people prose
>>7808622
Yea dfw loves mccarthy sooooo yea. Also you're wrong
>>7808773
No, that's the one I keep finding also. I seem to recall he also talks about Pynchon and Zadie Smith (though the latter not so sure). Possible I'm imagining the whole thing.
But thanks anyway, anon.
>>7808795
From an article about the pale king:
At times, even in the midst of their beauty and terror, there's a whiff of parody or pastiche to the Toni Ware sections. Wallace seems to be making fun of bad Cormac McCarthy, the incorrigible McCarthy who, when he wants to write "toadstools," writes "mushrooms with serrate and membraneous soffits where-under toads are reckoned to siesta." Wallace has Toni Ware remember boys who "wore wide rimpled hats and cravats of thong and some displayed turquoise about their person, and of these one helped her empty the trailer's sanitary tank and then pressed her to fellate him in recompense."
"People prose" if ever I saw it
>>7808790
DFW was wrong about a lot of things.
