Cormac McCarthy successfully published a fiction book with no capitalization (and some reduction in other punctuation), The Road, to critical acclaim. Of course, it didn’t lead to a groundswell of novels without capitalization.
I haven’t read The Road, but: isn’t this a case like (e.g.) Riddley Walker or A Clockwork Orange where the language is deliberately nonstandard, and meant to be perceived as nonstandard, as a sign that we’re looking at a world radically changed from the present one?
Yes, it is intended to be nonstandard, and underscores the misery of the world, as if to say they things have gotten so hopeless they can’t even muster up the energy to add quotation marks.
Then (to make explicit something I left implicit before) I don’t think it says anything about what success a publisher would have trying to use currently-nonstandard orthography just because they think it’s better.
(Note that even if some nonstandard orthography would be better if everyone used it, it may still be much worse for most readers now because it’s not what they’re used to, and readers will likely not be happy to have their reading made more difficult because a publisher is on a crusade to improve the English language. And, accordingly, publishers won’t do that because they like selling books.)
But The Road is the only one of his that I’ve read, partly because of that, so to say more I’d need to do more research than a quick look at Wikipedia.
Cormac McCarthy successfully published a fiction book with no capitalization (and some reduction in other punctuation), The Road, to critical acclaim. Of course, it didn’t lead to a groundswell of novels without capitalization.
I haven’t read The Road, but: isn’t this a case like (e.g.) Riddley Walker or A Clockwork Orange where the language is deliberately nonstandard, and meant to be perceived as nonstandard, as a sign that we’re looking at a world radically changed from the present one?
Yes, it is intended to be nonstandard, and underscores the misery of the world, as if to say they things have gotten so hopeless they can’t even muster up the energy to add quotation marks.
Then (to make explicit something I left implicit before) I don’t think it says anything about what success a publisher would have trying to use currently-nonstandard orthography just because they think it’s better.
(Note that even if some nonstandard orthography would be better if everyone used it, it may still be much worse for most readers now because it’s not what they’re used to, and readers will likely not be happy to have their reading made more difficult because a publisher is on a crusade to improve the English language. And, accordingly, publishers won’t do that because they like selling books.)
My understanding is that parent commenter is wrong, and The Road was like that just because Cormac McCarthy generally writes novels like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy
But The Road is the only one of his that I’ve read, partly because of that, so to say more I’d need to do more research than a quick look at Wikipedia.