FREE ESSAY ON MCCARTHY AND FAULKNER

MCCARTHY AND FAULKNER

I will never claim to be an expert as an undergrad at anything, but in my personal
opinion, McCarthy is not the son of Faulkner in the Southern Literary Renaissance.
McCarthy and Faulkner share common view in the complexities of nature and its subsequent
weave with the human condition. The psychological complexity of Faulkner also stems from
his desire to explore the true heart of people and not their surfaces (note his Nobel
Prize Speech). While McCarthy exposes personalities and creates unbelievable
characterizations (the Judge) I don't personally feel that sometimes a true soul is left
out. I do not believe that this takes away from his writing, but he would probably focus
on distancing himself as far from the Faulkner stigma southern writers are labeled with
in order to produce a distinct new form of literature (which in some realms he has). 
The violence stems from human nature and has been a part of literature for centuries.
Most notably, the Victorians may have influenced McCarthy with depressing yet duty bound
works as Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Browning's poetry of destruction and desolation. 
Then again, this is just my unqualified position dashed out at a first response. Thank
you for your time and would like to read others opinions. 
From: Christian the Heretic
What in God's name are you talking about? You're sounding as logical as Fat Freddie Freak
after a long speed binge. How can you possibly say that Faulkner is not an influence on
McCarthy's fiction? It doesn't make sense. I will agree with you that there are certainly
other influences and these are as pervasive (perhaps) as Faulkner, but Faulkner is all
through McCarthy's work.
This is a hot button for me as well since I'm currently working on Light in August in
comparison to Outer Dark and Child of God. First the writing style IS similar, although
this is arguable from any perspective. While Faulkner uses huge and bulky sentences,
McCarthy tends to use a similar rhythm broken by periodic periods. I realize that my
explanation of this makes no sense. A more definable and arguable position is with the
themes that lie in Faulkner's work. Particularly when we view LIA, we see characters
living on the borderlands of society. Joe Christmas, Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Gail
Hightower, Johanna Burden--all of them are characters who (like Rinthy and Lester Ballard
and all the rest of them jake legged melon *censored*ing necrophiliac sons of bitches)
exist on the borderlands. And there is certainly a mirroring of Faulkner's treatment of
Joe Christmas and McCarthy's treatment of Lester Ballard, not to mention the Rinthy Holme
/ Lena Grove parallels. Both Faulkner and McCarthy like to play with Christian imagery
(as characters with more than one father ala Christ and all the other Biblical imagery in
LIA among others). 
This is all to say that Faulkner is certainly an influence on McCarthy. True that
scholars are perhaps beating that influence to death at the expense of looking at other
influences but that doesn't mean that it's not there--any such argument smacks of a knee
jerk reaction. 
From: Anonymous 
As you can see, there's a good case to be made for McCarthy as an inheritor of Faulkner
and as a new breed, more closely akin to O'Connor or (it pains me slightly to agree with
Mr. Wallach) even Hemingway. My own opinion is that critics tend to lump McCarthy into
the Faulknerian school primarily because he's prone to using long, viny sentences.
Secondarily, the fact that both authors usually address characters and situations which
are outcast, marginalized, etc., makes for easy categorization. While these similarities
are substantial, there is a difference in method (rather than style) which, I think,
distinguishes the McC's approach from Faulkner's. At the core of this difference is the
fact that Faulkner's prose takes place, and is generally constructed around, the internal
environments of his characters. To some degree his writing can be described as
comparative psychological portraiture (forgive me for interjecting my own made-up jargon
here). McCarthy, to make a slightly tired point, stays external in regard to his
characters, treating them as artifacts or products of the world. They play roles in the
grand scheme of things (especially evident in the closing of Blood Meridian) and their
individual personalities are entirely secondary to these roles. Maybe you could say, or I
could suggest, that in Faulkner the outside world is a reflection or a consequence of the
characters' internal makeup, while in McCarthy the internal makeup is only sufficient to
the tasks of the outside world. Does this offend anyone's sensibilities?
From: Rick Wallach
Probably it offends lots of sensibilities, but that's surely no reason to retract your
comments. The problem with studies of influence in modern criticism is that when we speak
of influence, we usually mean cause...as in, Faulkner causes McCarthy's style. This
unfortunate (and often involuntary) brand of illogic is probably a byproduct of the
pedagogic imperative to argue rather than demonstrate -- which, in turn, is a subspecies
of the old H.L. Mencken observation that the reason academic politics is so vicious is
that the stakes are so small. 
But if not cause, how then does influence operate? How do you prove that the mere fact of
a sequence of two authors' preoccupation with similar themes represents influence as
opposed to mere observation of comparable phenomena in the world around both of them? Are
we justified in using the term influence when what we observe is the dialogue between an
author and a predecessor? Is one author's deliberate parody of a situation or a character
in an earlier author's work...ie, the Rinthy Holme / Lena Grove correlation...a form of
influence ? I'm not sure about that...such broad-form recourse to a term like influence
empties it of specificity and makes a cliche out of it. I submit, however, that the only
time McCarthy actually sounds anything like Faulkner is in The Crossing, where his
sentences tend to get away from him and unravel like a dropped string ball, in an
incidental mimicry of Absalom, Absalom's torturously synthetic diction.
At any rate, I certainly agree with one thing Christian the Heretic said -- that his
explanationof the similarity between McCarthy's sentence construction and Faulkner's
makes no sense at all. If I got this right, he seems to argue that Faulkner constructs
his sentences the same way as McCarthy, except that he uses different types of words and
punctuation. Uh...okay, I can live with that assertion, I suppose. But don't look for it
to surface in Chris's forthcoming article in Southern Quarterly. Betcha he plays it safer
there!