I’ve been rereading Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy said that writing that doesn’t “deal with matters of life and death” is “not literature”; writers who he felt fail to meet that standard include such fêted names as Henry James and Marcel Proust. I won’t go so far as to condemn those two writers, if only because I’ve only read one of their books each. but what I would gain by passing such harsh generalizations is undeniable.
my writing lately is stagnated in plots I find small and inconsequential: a love story, a tale of a cracked homeless man, a domestic story with a sheen of psychosis. they’re fine, I need to finish editing them and get some feedback, but I haven’t found an expression for the deeper, wider, stranger subjects that draw me to my favorite works of literature—I agree with McCarthy that literature ought to address those questions that have long haunted humanity through its somnambulant tottering towards annihilation. no doubt love, eroticism and epistemology are among those questions, but striking at the heart of them requires a much more forceful stab than what I’ve mustered so far.
reading McCarthy has me thinking a lot about what the writing life demands. he was someone who totally dedicated himself. he didn’t work a day job. granted, it was easier to get by in 1976 not working a day job than it is in 2024. but granting that isn’t an excuse for not writing. friend of the blog jordan sent the groupchat this tweet a few weeks ago:
it’s been a struggle to build better habits and structures. distraction is so easy—the way the world is now, everything is competing for everyone’s attention. the past few weeks have been a process of quieting the mind. but even that’s become a method for procrastination. all that’s needed is to do.
outlining a novel, an idea that’s come upon me suddenly that I feel is necessary to work through before I can move onto other, grander ideas. but McCarthy can teach me two other lessons: work on multiple things at once, and quit outlining. the current idea for a novel, I’m treating as though it were a screenplay, with a semi-definite idea of genre and an eye for structuring the plot into scenes beforehand; but I’m running into a problem where I feel ill-equipped to make the pieces of the plot lock together. this, I hope, I can avoid by starting with the premise and writing by feel, contra what I thought about outlining to get basic beats down so that I could be more spontaneous in the writing. total coherence is also unnecessary, especially on first pass. this idea’s a kind of slacker noir thriller, a la the big lebowski.
how much of these gestures towards questions of life and death, whether the universe is hostile or hospitable, if eroticism isn’t inherently dangerous despite the liberal insistence that shame around sex is merely a cultural artifact of puritanical societies—are these only a matter of rhetoric, and not a matter of content? need a novel be about a marauding mob of murderous misfits to pose questions rooted in gnosticism and nietzschean horror?
well, no, but sometimes extreme gestures help give perspective on what’s necessary.
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