If you've ever doubted the dramatic
degrees in which language truly evolves, then you've never read Jane Austen
back-to-back with Cormac McCarthy.
I did that recently. It was almost
scary.
First I read McCarthy’s The Road, which I eulogized earlier on
this blog. I couldn't put it down. I
wanted to. But I could not. I loved it.
Writing like this is why:
…They’re
going to kill those people, aren't they?
Yes.
Why
do they have to do that?
I
don’t know.
Are
they going to eat them?
I
don’t know.
They’re
going to eat them, aren't they?
Yes.
And
we couldn't help them because then they’d eat us too.
Yes.
Okay.
But then, Jane Austen was like:
“Her grateful and gratified heart
could hardly restrain its expressions within the language of tolerable
calmness.”
As soon as I read that sentence – which
is from Northanger Abbey, the book I started after The Road – I knew.
The different writing styles did
two things alike: they each joined in to and became part of their stories. And
they did so by creating the emotions of each scene in which they had been
placed.
In fact – and this was what I
learned – their writing styles became intimate with their respective places in
their narratives. They drove their narratives. They did not just record them.
McCarthy’s setting is simply the
end of the known world. That’s all. The earth had finally been burned to some
kind of dystopian crisp, leaving a boy and his father to fend for themselves in
a world returned to primeval savagery.
Austen’s scene is set among the
privileged lives of the comfortable, socially well placed of England’s Nineteenth Century (a world
Austen parodies and plays with elegantly, by the way).
After getting over my shock in
moving from McCarthy’s bleak smoking planet to Austen’s lavish social niceties,
the different writing styles began to appeal to my sometimes dense
sensibilities.
But the writers’ styles did more
than make sense. They improved their respective narratives by writing to their
scenes rather than simply describing them.
Straight-up, preferably impartial
descriptive journalism was the rule of my early writing.
No wonder it fell so flat in my
first tries at contemporary fiction.
