How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style

Throughout a career that spanned six decades, Cormac McCarthy produced twelve novels that, while often quite different from one another, show a consistent commitment to formal experimentation motivated by a love of language and the possibilities therein. While it is McCarthy’s grim depiction of violence and his texts’ complex philosophical perspectives that receive the most attention from scholars, readers who admire the author’s work are often drawn to it initially, as Bill Hardwig was, at the level of language, attracted by the breathtakingly original way McCarthy strings together words and paints images in the minds of readers.

In How Cormac Works, Hardwig suggests that McCarthy’s defining attribute as an author falls not in the realm of psychology, philosophy, or history but in his experimentation with language--in the style that gives his books their atmosphere, mood, and tone. Hardwig’s analysis foregrounds the ways in which McCarthy utilizes and manipulates language, how he uses it to simultaneously create and withhold meaning, draw clear images, and resist this clarity. How Cormac Works focuses less on the what--what McCarthy writes or what the characters say--and more on the how--how McCarthy structures his fiction and how that structure contributes to his literary style and meaning.

Bill Hardwig is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the author of Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900.