—7 NOVEL PLOTS—

Obviously, many great novels don’t adhere to the structures outlined below. But most do, & I’ve found these diagrams helpful in both reading & writing novels.

1. Comedy: in this most common of plots, the protagonist goes from a low to high place:
bad to better. 2. Tragedy: this is obviously another common plot shape, the inverse of Plot 1. The protagonist goes from a high to a low place, from better to worse.

There’s a certain kind of novel that’s always being reread by its admirers. MOBY-DICK comes to mind, so does ULYSSES and BLOOD MERIDIAN. As Harold Bloom said of HAMLET, “One never gets to the end of it.”

Here are some common characteristics of these novels: 1. Written in candescent, Shakespearean prose. The prose itself becomes an atmosphere that readers reside in. Readers speak to other readers in the secret language of the book, its cadences, syntax, and diction.

The Greatest Novelists Are:

1. James Joyce
2. William Faulkner
3. Herman Melville
4. Cormac McCarthy
5. Vladimir Nabokov
6. Don DeLillo
7. Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. Albert Camus
9. Denis Johnson
10. Marilynne Robinson 11. Joseph Conrad
12. Michael Ondaatje
13. Philip Roth
14. Kazuo Ishiguro
15. Marcel Proust
16. Ford Madox Ford
17. Thomas Mann
18. Virginia Woolf
19. Roddy Doyle
20. Cervantes
21. Jean Rhys
22. Ian McEwan
23. Martin Amis
24. Hilary Mantel
25. Roberto Bolaño

Last night, I unlocked all posts on my Blood Meridian S*bst*ck and made them free. Anyone who wants to view those essays can, but I won’t be posting new ones. Any revenue that comes in will be donated to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 2. My YouTube Channel (which has been devoted to Cormac’s work) won’t feature any new McCarthy content. I’ll post lectures on other books & authors.

Weirdly, I have an article on Cormac’s Gnosticism about to come out that I started last year. It will be my final piece on him.

CORMAC MCCARTHY—ANATOMY OF A PARAGRAPH:

This is one of my favorite passages from ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. Here’s what I see Cormac doing, technically:

1. Starts with a short, physically-grounded sentence: “They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland.” 1. [cont] Note the use of compound words: “fenceline,” “pastureland.” This is a move Cormac borrowed from one of his literary heroes, James Joyce: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit.” u.s.w.

If you’re writing a short story and you know the conflict + what your protagonist wants, the story is providing you its resolution: your protagonist will either want the reverse of what s/he wanted at the beginning or his/her psychological *condition* will be reversed. 2. If you want to test whether your story’s conflict is strong enough, ask, “Does the trouble that starts the story have the power to change its protagonist irrevocably?”

Do you know people who’ve been changed by the type of conflict you’re writing about?

That’s precedent.

NOTES TOWARD A LITERATURE OF THE REDNECK:

1. Cormac McCarthy
2. William Faulkner
3. Eudora Welty
4. Larry Brown
5. Barry Hannah
6. Harry Crews
7. Tom Franklin
8. Breece D'J Pancake
9. Flannery O’Connor
10. Richard Ford
11. Dorothy Allison
12. Tony Earley
13. Brad Watson 14. Donald Ray Pollock
15. Bobbie Ann Mason
16. Mark Twain
17. Andrew Nelson Lytle
18. Katherine Anne Porter
19. Robert Penn Warren
20. Carson McCullers
21. James Dickey
22. Charles Portis
23. Daniel Woodrell
24. Brian Evenson
25. Kevin Powers
26. Alan Heathcock
27. Jack Butler

A True Story of Rural Oklahoma:

I grew up on my grandparents’ ranch. Across the road from us lived this couple: Johnny & Lois Shoemaker, the unhappiest couple who ever lived.

One morning, Johnny woke up and declared he’d never spend another night under the same roof as Lois. 2. Now, when people make those kinds of declarations today, they get a divorce.

Not Johnny Shoemaker.

He had a foundation poured about twenty feet from his house, then built a little one-room replica of that house on the east side of his yard. Like, identical, but smol.

Was very angry in my early 30s. Had gotten everything I'd worked so hard for in my 20s and my response wasn't gratitude, but rage. Such a response is silly, self-defeating, and pointless--it's also, as I learned, very common. I woke up in the morning angry and went to bed angry. 2. I spent a tremendous amount of time feeling hateful toward people I imagined had wronged me, and I had the weird notion that my hatred would somehow psychically travel into the universe and affect them.

Of course, it didn't. It only made me more miserable.

As I said, a blueprint to destroy Literature. 📚 ☢️ 💣

https://twitter.com/americangwyn/status/1810738666932768784

2. What Meg’s got ain’t nothing new. It goes all the way back to Plato, who argues, in The Republic, that dramatists should be kept out of his ideal city. He said they stirred up too many dangerous emotions in audiences. And actors were allowed to literally play gods on stage.

a thought about Absalom, Absalom:

as a boy in the mountains of western Virginia, Sutpen was raised in an atmosphere of rough fairness. He thought *that* was America.

Then, as a teenager, he drifted down to the Tidewater & discovered American hierarchy & it shattered him. 2. Rural America will fill you with beliefs about equality (as it did Lincoln, for instance) and urban America will empty you of those beliefs.

A follower asked me for a reading list. Here are my American picks, off the top of my head.

If you don’t like my list, please consider making your own. 2.

No Country for Old Men (novel) is fundamentally about the wars for the 20th century: WWII, Vietnam, the War on Drugs and what will become the GWOT.

Underpinning the heist-chase narrative and the thematic concerns about chaos/order, randomness/patterns, is a question: 2. How do moral men behave in a world that’s shifting quickly and radically from Nation States (and Nation State Terror) to Market States (and Market State Terror)?

There is no understanding this question without reading Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt.

In his translation of The Iliad, Robert Fagles has Achilles call Agamemnon a “King who devours his people.”

Emily Wilson, in her new translation, renders that line: “Cannibal king, you eat your people up.” 2. Shoutout to my Cannibal Kings.

From John Sepich's phone interview with Cormac McCarthy about Blood Meridian: "We tended to agree that it seemed 'probable' that Holden, out of the novel’s last chapter, could live forever. He said there were, he thought, 'certain indications of the supernatural' in the book." https://t.co/uxX6CeVerztwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
2. Apologies to @MicahSVernon with whom I publicly disagreed on the subject of the Judge's preternatural nature.

He was right and I was wrong.

Some Notes on the Composition of Blood Meridian and Cormac McCarthy's Sources for the Novel:

Will write a proper Substa*k about this at some point, but have decided to give away some information to anyone interested.

Here goes: https://t.co/HMlTZtQIj5twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
1.

--How Came the Learned Man--

Most fans know that Cormac relied heavily on Samuel Chamberlain's memoir, My Confession. Chamberlain was a US Army soldier who went AWOL during the Mexican-American War & ended up with Glanton's scalp-hunters.

[S.C's depictions of the Judge] https://t.co/kAwjbwTY6Utwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

SOME LITERARY CRITICISM/THEORY WORTH YOUR TIME:

A follower asked for some Lit Theory/Crit recs for “amateurs.” These are just some works I’ve enjoyed and found useful.

Also, all my theory is up at my office in Charlotte, and I’m here at the cabin rn.

Here goes: 1. Erich Auerbach’s MIMESIS:

Wrote it without his library when he was on the run from the Nazis. Completely brilliant study of the representation of reality in the Western Canon. Beautifully written and crystal clear.

Have thought about this reply all morning. I'm pretty sure I don't understand it. I *know* I don't understand "settler-colonial gaze."

I'm not well-versed in Lacan and most uses of "gaze" seem either reductive or pretentious to me.

Also, I might just not be smart enough.

https://twitter.com/AdamDavidMorton/status/1666320346474229760

2. I'm not dunking on Adam: I think his reply is in good faith.

If the "settler-colonial" gaze is a phenomenological system in the American West in 2023, it seems like it would be hard for white Americans to say much about it or see beyond it. Perhaps impossible?

The main problem with the first 40+ years of Finnegans Wake scholarship is that it focused on finding a "skeleton key" or cracking a code, picking a lock, etc. Critics understandably wanted to "make sense out of it"--i.e. to make it behave like a standard novel.

This = FAIL.

https://twitter.com/AmericanGwyn/status/1665749081661087746

2. Not until Roland McHugh came along w/ his Annotations did FW scholarship get on track.

Sentences in FW don't function like sentences in this tweet: they're "weird, crystalline entities."

The closest you can come to deciphering the book is translating the 70+ languages in it.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOUR SHORT STORY HAS A LARGE ENOUGH CONFLICT:

The chief function of Conflict in a short story is to drive the protagonist to the point where s/he makes a consequential CHOICE—after which, s/he will never be the same. 2. A story is always a narrative about a transformation, a metamorphosis.

“Once upon a time, X was a certain way. Trouble entered X’s life and s/he made a choice to get out of trouble and was never the same again.”

WHY SAPIENS FIND FICTION SO COMPELLING:

Humans are story/meaning-making machines. We evolved to live in communities of 150. At some point, pictorial representation and verbal storytelling entered our lives. The stories we told allowed for greater tribal cohesion. 2. Then a great evil entered our lives: Sapiens in Mesopotamia began to plant seeds in the ground. It was possible to manipulate the primary food source and sustain a population larger than 150.

The City was born.