I see. I guess I can appreciate that the style is aiming for a particular aesthetic, but for me it’s giving up more in clarity than it gains in aesthetic. In a phrasing like “Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.” I have to think about who each part of the dialogue belongs to, and which parts are even dialogue, all due to the missing quotation marks.
This style reads to me like someone removed a bunch of parentheses from a math formula, ones which may not be strictly necessary if one knows about some non-universal order of operations. This may look prettier in some sense, but in exchange it will definitely confuse a fraction of readers. I personally don’t think this tradeoff is worth it.
That’s a valid reaction. However, my take is that removal of the quotes is aesthetically useful precisely because it complicates our ability to parse the words as dialog and muddles that sort of naive clarity. Spoken words are sounds, sounds are part of the environment, and it is both a choice and an effort to parse those sounds as dialog.
Most authors opt to do this work for the reader through punctuation, which also enforces interpreting these passages as dialog first and sounds second, if at all. McCarthy makes it easier to interpret spoken words as sounds that are part of the environment. If your aim as a reader is to parse dialog, it will be harder to do this in a McCarthy novel. If your aim is instead to have an aesthetic experience of spoken words as sensation interlaced with other impressions of the environment, then McCarthy’s method of punctuation makes this simpler (and even plants the suggestion that this might be something you as a reader might want to do, if you hadn’t considered the possibility before).
I see. I guess I can appreciate that the style is aiming for a particular aesthetic, but for me it’s giving up more in clarity than it gains in aesthetic. In a phrasing like “Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.” I have to think about who each part of the dialogue belongs to, and which parts are even dialogue, all due to the missing quotation marks.
This style reads to me like someone removed a bunch of parentheses from a math formula, ones which may not be strictly necessary if one knows about some non-universal order of operations. This may look prettier in some sense, but in exchange it will definitely confuse a fraction of readers. I personally don’t think this tradeoff is worth it.
That’s a valid reaction. However, my take is that removal of the quotes is aesthetically useful precisely because it complicates our ability to parse the words as dialog and muddles that sort of naive clarity. Spoken words are sounds, sounds are part of the environment, and it is both a choice and an effort to parse those sounds as dialog.
Most authors opt to do this work for the reader through punctuation, which also enforces interpreting these passages as dialog first and sounds second, if at all. McCarthy makes it easier to interpret spoken words as sounds that are part of the environment. If your aim as a reader is to parse dialog, it will be harder to do this in a McCarthy novel. If your aim is instead to have an aesthetic experience of spoken words as sensation interlaced with other impressions of the environment, then McCarthy’s method of punctuation makes this simpler (and even plants the suggestion that this might be something you as a reader might want to do, if you hadn’t considered the possibility before).