How Herman Melville wrote Blood Meridian

Aping the Style of Classic Authors: 2

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

This was the quote recommended me when I searched for the passage below to be certain it was mine:

Their light overwhelms me from within that unaccountable mass of shade and shadow, and in my blood, which pulses with their rhythm, I feel their lack of rest. Paradise denied them, their souls forever search the ocean’s desert floor, alone with themselves in the vast, dense, darkness; and there, I find my own New Bedford, which, though neither heaven nor hell, might be either for the man who brings her with him; and I carry both her cold and indifference; a past escaped, still awaiting.

These lights cast shadows. They fill the sea with their troubled wake.

Kraken in a Coffee Cup, Thaddeus Thomas and Herman Melville

I wasn’t certain of the authorship because the book is largely written using pieces of Moby Dick, shuffled and stitched together. It’s been a couple of years since I wrote it, not knowing what to do with it before Substack, where at last it sees the light of day. When searching to be certain the passage didn’t originate with Melville, McCarthy could come up because Melville played a large role in influencing McCarthy’s early style.

In turn, Melville was influenced by Shakespeare as well as by his own friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and both McCarthy and Melville’s styles were heavily touched by the King James Bible.

However, we know McCarthy didn’t write my passage, because he considered the use of semicolons to be “idiocy.”

Faulkner also heavily influenced McCarthy, and Melville influenced Faulkner, too. What surprises me is that, although long stretches of sparse syntax define McCarthy’s prose, he’s rarely compared to Hemingway. It may be, in part, because while Hemingway was known for parataxis, McCarthy favored polysyndeton.

Out on the road the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Whereas parataxis avoids conjunctions, polysyndeton uses them in excess.

Ask anyone about the style of Cormac McCarthy; the first thing to come to mind is his lack of punctuation, and the result of this choice isn’t merely flourish. When you refuse to use quotation marks, our common shorthand signifying speech, that choice impacts the structure of your sentences. It encourages a drastic difference in voice, separating character and narration.

He credits MacKinlay Kantor as the first author he saw use this technique.

Reading McCarthy takes some getting used to, and some* never bother, but he makes an effort to help you understand who’s speaking.

(*More now, as of the Vanity Fair article.)

As noted previously with Hemingway, extremes denote McCarthy’s style, this time distinguishing (often) uneducated speech from a poetic formality reminiscent of the King James Bible. An unsettling byproduct is that the Judge, one of the most evil characters ever to grace a page, speaks in an educated and high manner more similar to the narration than to the other men around him, implicating less the unnamed narrator than the fabric of the world itself, as if decency is the aberration and the Judge’s character a mere result of bestowing nature with the awareness of its own existence.

Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Many commented on how my Pooh story captured the feel of the original stories, but as often as I imitate Milne, I also imitate McCarthy. I don’t mimic the way he discards punctuation, but I borrow his declarative sentences, his dark subject matter, and his use of similes and metaphors.

The bear’s getting rather tired by now, which is why he talks to Christopher Robin, even though Christopher Robin isn’t talking back. He stops on a branch just a little too low to reach Christopher Robin’s feet, and he listens just as hard as he listened before. Christopher Robin doesn’t answer. The bear hears only the nothing-noise and nothing else in the whole wide Wood. Even the birds have taken the brethren’s vow of silence.

The branch on which he stands is stained with the dried red fluff which flows from a boy when a boy is cut. It stains the length of the branch and much of the trunk, and down below, the fluff speckles more and more branches red. When it still flowed, it must have run like a waterfall, but it isn’t flowing now.

The bear watches the feet swing in the wind that runs through the tops of the trees, and he feels a great emptiness, as if it were his fluff that’s stained the tree. 'It all comes of being loved so much,' he says.

The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, Thaddeus Thomas

Again, I’m left harping on the need for variation in the styles used in any given story. One of the few times I’ve ever thrown a book across the room was in reading Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. While otherwise a very good book, Lehane employed metaphorical visuals in conveying his world and the action within it, and there was at least one moment in the book when Lehane brought the technique into an inappropriate context, diluting an emotionally powerful moment and causing his style to stand out in an unfortunate way.

His main character has just learned that his daughter is dead, and he makes the dreaded call to convey the news. As he waits for the call to connect, he imagines the signal traveling through the wires like some red-eyed beast, and I didn’t buy it. That character didn’t care about Lehane’s style. He’s not imagining any of this, not with the news he carries. Absolutely not.

I will resent that sentence until the day I die, and my tombstone will be marked with a decidedly pointed Goodreads review.

Bringing too few tools to the story leaves us obligated to use the one we have. Hammer thoughtlessly at the keyboard, and every word becomes a nail.

This doesn’t mean that we bring every style possible to a given project either. Another lesson learned from McCarthy is that restrictions placed upon our writing will (or should) impact its form. Style is created, in part, by what we choose to cast aside.

McCarthy is restrained in his use of style, which is evident when compared against Melville’s experimental approaches to various chapters of Moby Dick. Harold Bloom said Moby Dicks isn’t even a novel but a prose epic, but this was not its first incarnation. It began as a more straightforward story of the great whales, including the nearly mythic Mocha Dick, peppered with insight from Melville’s own experiences upon whaling ships. When Melville met Hawthorne, however, he was inspired to imbue the story with a more Shakespearean quality. Drawing from King Lear, Captain Ahab was born.

In the rewrite, Moby Dick becomes a metaphysical tome and Ahab a symbol of man’s obsessive rage. Taking from this tradition, McCarthy has given us his own villains of enduring literary fame in the Judge and Anton Chigurh and Lester Ballard, each reflecting a different aspect of man’s darkest nature.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Interested in reading Kraken in a Coffee Cup? Begin with the introduction / table of contents or jump into the first 3 chapters.

Or you can read The Last Temptation of Winnie the Pooh.