Not Book Reports
There is an obvious question hovering over my ongoing Cormac McCarthy project:
Why am I doing this?
Not why McCarthy. I already tried to answer that in Why Read These McCarthy Essays?. He helped shape how I understand language, fiction, attention, and some of what I am trying to do on Open Doors.
I mean why go book by book like this.
These essays are not summaries. They are definitely not book reports. If someone wants to know what happens in Suttree, there are much faster ways to find out than reading several thousand words about exposed feet, ticking watches, graves, Harrogate, shifting tense, frozen Knoxville, and whether Suttree sometimes seems to have become a ghost.
The plot matters.
But, the plot is not really the project.
The project is attention.
I wrote recently in Fine, particularly in “I Can Read Too,” that close reading is really a kind of thinking with evidence. You notice something. You wonder whether it matters. You notice it again. Maybe a pattern forms. Maybe the pattern breaks, and the exception becomes more interesting than the pattern ever was.
That is basically what I have been doing with McCarthy.
I listen. I stop. I think. Sometimes I come here and write a few sentences about a watch turned inward on a dead man’s wrist. Fifty pages later, something happens that changes what I thought that image was doing. A phrase from Outer Dark turns up again in Suttree. Snow starts behaving like snow did three novels ago, except not quite.
Eventually an essay appears.
But, the essay is almost the residue of the process.
Part of this project is for me.
I am learning how to read better by reading someone who rewards almost absurd levels of attention. I am learning how to stay with an interpretation without needing to nail it down immediately. I am learning when to follow a detail and when to stop taking notes and simply let the language move.
And, because reading and writing are not cleanly separable, all of that goes somewhere.
It goes into the fiction.
It goes into essays that have nothing to do with McCarthy.
It affects how I notice repetition, how I structure a paragraph, how long I let an image sit before explaining it, how much I trust a reader, and how comfortable I am leaving some things unresolved.
So, these pieces are about McCarthy.
But, they are also a record of someone practicing attention.
That may be the real project underneath the project.
Not proving that I have understood these books.
Learning how to notice more.
Some of that
But, more than that here
Keeps going
