From Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy:
They posted guards atop the azotea and unsaddled the horses and drove them out to graze and the judge took one of the packanimals and emptied out the panniers and went off to explore the works.
In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat.
A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings.
The judge smiled.
Books lie, he said.
God dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until
they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.
What does the last line entail? Are they fools for believing the judge in that gods words are the world, or is he laughing that they are so dumb as to believe scripture?
Thanks.
Yes.
He’s laughing at them for fools because they don’t follow from understanding in either case. In the beginning, they believed scripture because of what it said, not because it came from a place of understanding beyond understanding scripture as authority. In the latter - in the new order - they believed in everything he said because he was learned, entirely from his authority rather than from a place of personal understanding
This makes perfect sense. I wonder why I had issues, because with hindsight it seems incredibly obvious.
I interpret it as they are fools because they can be convinced of anything and become proselytizers in the course of a day. They didn’t really engage with the idea, they are just zealously parroting what someone else told them.
Jesus, those are some egregious run on sentences. I’ve never read McCarthy, now I’m not sure I should. Is this typical of his writing?
I’m not sure. Regarding Blood Meridian exclusively, the sentence structure is pretty jarring, but the vividness of his descriptions is really wonderful and it gets super metaphysical out of nowhere, which I love.
If you’re reading English literature for grammatical purity… I don’t even know what to tell you, frankly.
It’s not what I read for primarily, nor did I say so. Your supposition is something of a strawman argument. There’s no need to be defensive on McCarthy’s behalf. Any writer receives much worse criticism than that no matter how good they are, often from themselves. We tend to be our own worst critics.
That said, poor grammar pulls me out of a story and that’s a common reaction.
A good writer might use such run on sentences sparingly as a matter of style, to good effect. William Kennedy’s opening paragraph in Quinn’s book is a good example. The quoted passage from Blood Meridian may be another such. As I said, I haven’t read McCarthy and don’t know if such run-on sentences are typical of his writing, so I asked.
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Yeah, my stupid tablet somehow completed my comment submission before I finished typing it. I finished in an edit.
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I think Holden’s calling them fools for believing that the natural world reflects the intentions of god (i.e., he either thinks the world arose naturalistically; or he thinks it reflects the intentions of some power distinct from god, like a gnostic demiurge).
