Cormac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, dubbed him—a “disciple of William Faulkner.” He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. Speaking of Joyce, he says,
James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.
So what “weird little marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation:
1. Quotation Marks:
McCarthy doesn’t use ’em. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.” Otherwise, confusion reigns.
2. Colons and semicolons:
Careful McCarthy reader Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy confirms: “No semicolons.”
Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said. Like, these are the reasons.” This is a specific occasion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, genuflects to a very specific logical development, enumeration. McCarthy deems most other punctuation uses needless.
3. All other punctuation:
Aside from his restrictive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” It’s a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.
McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay “by Swift or something” and hearing his professor say, “this is very good, this is exactly what’s needed.” Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, “to make it easier, not to make it harder” to decipher his prose. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appreciation for his streamlined syntax.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Punctuation is like the beams in a house: the beams are there to support the structure of the house, to prevent it from falling into disarray and to give an added level in the house. An excess of beams, if artistically fashioned, can be passed off as pillars, which are essentially superfluous but help the onlooker to recognize that, yes, this is indeed a house.
Punctuation was not a whimsical invention conceived by our long-winded progenitors in order to hamper literature. Quite the opposite, in fact: punctuation serves as a clarifier and a speech-guide.
Of course, one can argue that the less punctuation one uses, the more skill one has a writer in order to pull this stunt off. However, this brings us to the golden rule in writing: the more straight-forward one writes, the better the style. A straight line from A to B is quicker and easier to follow than a convoluted chain of twists and turns.
Bottom line: punctuation should neither be wanting nor in abundance, unless one is shooting for a particular style. I use punctuation where punctuation is grammatically necessary or stylistically or contextually useful, and, as a writer, I will not go out of my way to dash out a comma, a pair of quotation marks or even a semicolon.
“However, this brings us to the golden rule in writing: the more straight-forward one writes, the better the style.“nnnnYou should take your own advice.
If you’re a grammar geek and enjoyed this article, you’ll enjoy reading this CultureMap I found at Mediander titled “Proper Punctuation and its Enemies” http://goo.gl/JdzQJZ
A well-punctuated piece.
McCarthy’s first book is titled ‘The Orchard Keeper’ not ‘The Orchard Tree’
I thought I’d just chuck in an additional oblique Irish reference which is that the famous gay Irish Nationalist Roger Casement was hanged in 1916 ostensibly on a comma. Poor Roger was convicted of treason carried out in Germany but on the detection of a virule, a prototype comma, in the medieval act covering treason written in Norman French, the interpretation was such that he was found guilty.
I was attempting not to use punctuation in the above ;)
Why would you feel a need to bleat out that Casement, a true patriot, was gay? What possible relevance has it, true or otherwise ??nnNote the excess use of punctuation. Your mindless post has driven me to it.
Written language has grown closer and closer to spoken language. Many readers including myself, like to see a comma where a speaker would pause briefly in delivery. Confusingly, the “comma pause” of most speakers is identical to their “period pause” and their speech is delivered as one long sentence. I think that Cormac McCarthy wants to emulate spoken language as closely as he can. That, I believe, is the motivation for the long sentences that typify the McCarthy style.
I would have preferred McCarthy to use commas more. To me, a long sentence without commas suggests a droning monotone.
This article has given me much to think about. I adored McCarthy’s The Road, found it hauntingly beautiful and about as close to poetry as prose gets. However, on the subject of quotation marks in particular, I’m not sold.
How do you, for instance, distinguish the difference between an author’s paraphrase and word-for-word dialogue? In some cases, it makes a difference. I’m thinking mystery writing in particular, but also perhaps in drawing differences between narrators and characters.
And here’s where the question applies directly to my own writing: My first novel (still being shopped around) is partly told through letters that originally did NOT include quotations around dialogue. There are many letters, btw, that cover a span of several years.
My sense in writing it that way to begin with was that letter writers don’t tend to compose like authors, but to tell a story through their own voices, typically paraphrasing others comments. Without the quotation marks, though, it became difficult sometimes–and unnatural, actually–to show where dialogue ended and the letter writer’s thoughts resumed. It also felt limiting in how detailed I could be with events, etc. in the story told through the letters. I actually got comments to this effect from readers.
I ended up testing both styles on multiple readers and got a consensus that the quotes added clarity. And so far no new readers have mentioned them as feeling unnatural within the letters. On the other hand, it could be the skill of the writer, meaning me!
If any of you have thoughts on this, I would love to hear them.
Does anyone else find it terrifying to write and article like this or even comment on it? One slip of a grammatical nature and anything you write goes up in smoke.
As a writer, I find those punctuation rules rather restrictive and would inevitably confuse his poor readers. Rules are good where appropriate, not in extreme.
And this is precisely the reason I sometimes lose enjoyment of McCarthy’s work: a lack of punctuation.
Let’s see what punctuation can do!
where james had had had john had had had had had had had had the teachers approval
Now with punctuation.
Where James had had ‘had’, John had had ‘had had’. ‘Had had’ had had the teacher’s approval.
McCarthy is an amazing writer. The Road is, as someone wrote above, damn near poetry. And the style of the book’s writing is eerily suited to the subject matter.
I cannot agree that all writing should be this way. Not all stories have the same tone or feel. Not all characters would/should speak in short, clipped sentences. And I think varying sentence length can often strengthen a piece of writing, moreso than aiming for tyrannical consistency.
I just picked up ‘on the road’ and noticed the absence of commas straightway and thought I would turn this issue up, on the web to see if this was intentional. For example ‘…the word of God God never spoke ’ p5 needs punctuation so as to yield any meaning.
On the Road is by Jack Kerouac and ‘the word of God God never spoke’ doesn’t need any sort of punctuation. It’s understandable as it is and only a fool would think otherwise.
you seem upset
If only you knew that the comma went before the quotation mark.
McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian which is one of the greatest books of the modern age. He can do what he’d like with punctuation. It’s like Dick Dale playing a guitar upside down, without reversing the strings — sure, it’s wrong, but he makes it work. McCarthy makes it work. If you want to live without quotation marks and commas, go ahead. I bet he doesn’t take cream or sugar in his coffee either.
McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian which is one of the greatest books of the modern age. He can do what he’d like with punctuation. It’s like Dick Dale playing a guitar upside down, without reversing the strings — sure, it’s wrong, but he makes it work. McCarthy makes it work. If you want to live without quotation marks and commas, go ahead. I bet he doesn’t take cream or sugar in his coffee either.
Yes but we can hardly forgive his Yahoo bowdlerising of Swift.
Providing very minimal punctuation but instead relying on the natural rhythms of sentences is frequently a crap shoot. Writing with fairly generous punctuation, although maybe not easy on the eyes, is more than likely to assist with comprehension and communication.
What a blow hard. The rules of punctuation are not subject to interpretation. I never read a book which inspired me to keep asking, “Dang, these quotation marks are sure confusing me as to who is supposed to be speaking.” The semi-colon is a perfectly friendly punctuation mark; it lets two dependent clauses with warm feeling towards each other snuggle up a bit.
What a blow hard. The rules of punctuation are not subject to interpretation. I never read a book which inspired me to keep saying, “Dang, these quotation marks are sure confusing me as to who is supposed to be speaking.” The semi-colon is a perfectly friendly punctuation mark; it lets two dependent clauses with warm feeling towards each other snuggle up a bit.
What a blow hard. The rules of punctuation are not subject to interpretation. I never read a book which inspired me to keep asking, “Dang, these quotation marks are sure confusing me as to who is supposed to be speaking.” The semi-colon is a perfectly friendly punctuation mark; it lets two dependent clauses with warm feelings towards each other snuggle up a bit.
What a blow hard. The rules of punctuation are not subject to interpretation. I never read a book which inspired me to keep saying, “Dang, these quotation marks are sure confusing me as to who is supposed to be speaking.” The semi-colon is a perfectly friendly punctuation mark; it lets two dependent clauses with warm feelings towards each other snuggle up a bit.
You have no imagination or style. This is why McCarthy is a real writer and you’re not.
The article is about punctuation, not imagination nor style.
You prescriptive grammarian types, always eating the shell and spitting out the kernel. McCarthy is one of the greatest and most original writers of the last century. He makes his style work and work brilliantly. Meanwhile, you’re pedantically concerned with a lack of quotation marks?
Tossing The Elements of Style into the trash right now.
“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
“By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”
“And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders”
About every 2–3 pages Cormac pens a bombshell of a sentence, and I stop in wonder of it. In reading The Road I became the third person with them in the story. I would try to figure out how did he write like this. I look for books that do this but nothing. Like one reviewer I saw, wrote: I. Love. This. Book. Showing the short sentenes Cormac uses. Can’t find any fiction that comes near this.
I don’t know about losing quotation marks. I can’t help but worry about what eschewing quotation marks would do to some really great writers of dialogue–like Mark Twain or P. G. Wodehouse, for instance.
I’m currently reading The Road, and at first I was taken aback by McCarthy’s lack of punctuation. I’ve never read any of his novels, so the style is a little jarring. It’s unlike anything I’ve read before.
there’s a semi-colon in the orchard keeper
Let us all heed the Very Important Man and his not-at-all arbitrary points on punctuation.
Some of McCarthy is good, some of it bad. The bad stuff reads like an affectation to achieve “literary value”. Whenever he sacrifices clarity for the sake of literary value, it’s a screw-up. Whenever you’re stopped because you don’t know if someone said the words or thought them, it’s a screw-up. He strives too much to be literary when he ought to strive for clarity.
Petar’s example above is not an issue with punctuation, but instead with lexical variety.
Where James had had ‘had’, John had had ‘had had’. ‘Had had’ had had the teacher’s approval.
What if we used more meaningful variety and maintained Cormac McCarthy’s punctuation stylistics?
Where James wrote had, John wrote had had. Had had won the teacher’s approval.
“McCarthy doesn’t use ‘em.”
“‘em” should use this style apostrophe, ’em.
Not the one you used, ‘em.
I hope I’m in the correct venue for such matters. :)
Punctuation is an interesting topic for some readers. However, before the writer of the article dives into that…he should probably double check the title of McCarthy’s first novel.
This article is highly punctuated…
Orchard Keeper
It’s said that you have to know the rules before you can break them.
The punctuation thing is something that gets me. I do think it’s supposed to relate how the dialogue is the story by merging it with the rest of the text. I recall an English teacher of mine tell me that you should describe character interactions more through dialogue, showing the emotion through the conversation than telling it through prose, but McCarthy’s lack of quotations reverses this concept, by making it carry the same weight.
Also, while reading Blood Meridian, I was taken back by his use of multiple “ands” in a sentence. I had thought it was bad grammar, but realized during the Kid and the two corporals journey through San Antonio that it’s the equivalent of a long shot in film. Instead of breaking it up into easily-digestible per-sentence pieces, McCarthy uses the multiple conjunctions to overwhelm the reader in one go. The best example is the Commanche ambush, which has almost one-page sentences, which hits the audience all at once. So much is happening that the reader not being able to process all of it, resembling the shock the Kid and Captain White’s filibusters are experiencing.
Two independent clauses separated by a comma can be a beautiful thing. Long unpunctuated sentences may offer a stylistic effect, breathless speech or intensity, for example, but too much of anything can be monotonous, fatiguing, artless.
Can everyone please just accept that his style works for some people and not for others?
That’s really what everything boils down to, just saying.
Oh, is that right? Judging from your expertise you must be a really brilliant writer.
Actually what you are doing there is wrong, and should instead be punctuated with a colon as you are developing what came before it: using a semi colon is only recommended for when two sentences, of which the latter sentence has nothing to do with the former, are put together in a single sentence, joined by the semi colon. Example: The ferocity with which the dog bit her was terrorising: it tore through her skin, she felt herself going faint; the softness with which the cat she had been playing with earlier in the day had bitten her – which she had mistakenly interpreted as ferocious – oh how she wished for that now.
Also yes, I understand before that my example was not that good: in this case I was merely exemplifying what I was saying, rather than trying to create a literary masterpiece in a comments forum.
It’s even more than those three rules. McCarthy leaves out the apostrophes in negative contractions:
‘The old man didnt answer.’
‘It got ever opportunity. Likely it wont.’
‘I couldnt tell ye.’
But he will add the apostrophe in possessives, past perfect and conditionals:
‘These people cant be far. See if you can find them. And see if there’s any forage here for the animals.’
‘He’d taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Kentuckian, a veteran of the war.’
‘Sproule turned and looked at the kid as if he’d know his thoughts but the kid just shook his head.’
(examples from Blood Meridian)
Seems like a lot of you responding in dismay to this article have never bothered to read a full McCarthy novel. I highly recommend Blood Meridian, most likely my favorite book of all time. You will then understand the power of minimizing punctuation, as you can link imagery much more tightly together and forge a landscape and an active moving scene in your mind. It’s incredible.
Punk Shoe A Shun (haiku) “Write well; all you’ll need — are periods, capitals — and a few commas”
why are you so angry
Read Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. Not only is her prose absolutely lovely, and on the level of McCarthy’s IMHO, but she also eschews quotation marks. Instead she simply places a dash before dialogue. Maybe it’s just for visual affect, being easier on the eye than seeing a slew of marks. I think it works pretty nicely.
I think the first novel was The Orchard Keeper, not The Orchard Tree.
There’s no such thing as, “I did it because it looked less cluttered on the page.” In fact, any writer who uses that justification is being facetious, disingenuous, and intends his comments only for non-writers because it would be too much of a hassle to go into the why’s of such a decision, and a writer does not really want to do that. The absence of quotations has a very specific meaning, and if a writer tells you simply that he/she is doing so because it looks nice (if they really mean so, which I don’t think McCarthy does), then they are wrong. Dead wrong.
I would go on a disquisition on McCarthy’s decision to do without quotations for dialogue, but that knowledge is hard won, and I am a stingy son, so I won’t. But do believe that McCarthy has a very good reason for his decision. I can’t say so for lesser writers.
“There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”
Yeah. I tried that with my grammar teacher in high school. She didn’t buy it.
People are very divisive over whether this should or could be a proper usage of punctuation, and I think we’re missing the larger issue. Grammar is not by necessity prescriptive. The variety of writers who have chosen to use it differently and have become popular makes this clear. The issue is whether or not a story is both readable and effective in the style in which it’s written. Cormac McCarthy’s stories are both, whether or not you actually personally like them. They’re spare vast landscapes of tales and they use grammar just as sparingly.
In a cluttered, city-set story where a clamor of people are all talking at the same time, the main characters are all very well educated and there are lots of quick events, it might not work. Or it wouldn’t be appropriate. But I think Cormac McCarthy’s more than proven his ability with language.
He must never have read Emily Dickinson.
I’m a aspiring writer and have read The Road and Outer Dark and several other McCormac novels. I never noticed the lack of punctuation in The Road but I did in Outer Dark. I am in awe of his imagination and writing style. I attended Catholic schools as a kid and lack of punctuation gave you a slap on the knuckles with a ruler or if you were a boy someone wearing an ankle length black habit and a stiff white collar around her neck aka a nun would take hold of the shorthairs on your neck and Pull it. Pull it hard. Whack your knuckles with a ruler. A ruler with sharp metal set in the wood. I guess to draw a very straight line or to teach a child a lesson. Bloody knuckles can scare you straight snd give up your best buddy
The three Bad Boys in Outer Dark made my skin crawl. Why did they want to destroy innocents? I noticed the word ‘revenant’ in the story and I had just watched ‘The Revenant’
on demand. I thought of Cormac McCarthy and his terrifying ‘Three Bad Men’.
Meanwhile I’m writing about abuse of elephants. Now I am thinking I’m glad there were no elephants around in the
‘Outer Dark’.
my friend once said “I broke up with my girlfriend but she said we can still be cousins”.
This article made me lol out loud
A very intracite article. I love writing and Jesus!!1!!!!1!111!1111
We are reading The Road in class and I love this book. #themanandlittleboiFTW
Punctuation makes writing easier to read. Why make it harder for the reader by eliminating the punctuation? He sounds arrogant.
I ended up here because my friend had given up on reading a McCarthy book because of the lack of punctuation. He found it illegible. Said it was like reading a book by a 5 year old with a rich vocabulary. He also didn’t like that the dialog was right there mixed up in the text with everything else. So I googled to try to find excerpts, and here I am. It’s a funny situation IMO. Regarding the comment mentioning Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, in French we can use “-” to denote a dialog line. Such as:
- Hey!
- Hello? How are you?
- Good, replied the other character.