Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.”
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (p. 331)
An impossible job to select a sentence from this literary giant’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. My copy of this book is heavily underlined, and yes, he takes us to the deepest depths of savagery and anguish, and yes, that depth is wrapped in musical, often baroque prose. That, for me, is part of his originality and allure: the stark contrast between content and style. You are swept along in the music and rhythm of the language—it becomes hypnotic, this bewitching song—and the next thing you know, you’re swallowed whole into the violence.
Harold Bloom in his book, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, calls McCarthy the disciple both of Melville and Faulkner. “…the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and Faulkner’s,” writes Bloom.
McCarthy’s sentence, like his novel, sweeps you up and carries you along the violent, turbulent current. It’s a mid-branching sentence that opens with the subject, “Only that man” and then we have to wait for the verb because McCarthy interrupts the sentence with two relative clauses, which drench the middle of the sentence with imagery.
1. Who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war
2. Who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart
The first relative clause ushers in the image not of war, but the more vivid blood of war, echoing the blood-stained pages of the book. He uses hyperbaton, inverting the normal word order (as many of his sentences do). McCarthy writes, “offered up himself,” instead of the more common, “offered himself up.” That wakes the ear. And so does the extra word “entire,” which is redundant, already implied by the word “himself.”
But with “entire,” (and not the grammatically correct “entirely) McCarthy creates a pattern of soft stress followed by heavier stress:
Who has OFFered UP himSELF enTIRE
In the second relative clause, McCarthy uses synecdoche, a part of the whole, with “floor of the pit” which stands for despair or misery. The beauty of synecdoche is the abstract becomes a concrete image. It functions to render rather than describe experience.
McCarthy uses precise imprecision with “the horror in the round,” with “round” mentioned throughout the novel but not as a stable image. For instance, on page 130, the judge says, “...our mother the earth was round like an egg,” and on page 248, the men sit “each in his round of darkness in that round of dark.” Critics often talk about McCarthy’s otherworldly tone, and it’s in part due to diction like this. In addition, the tone seems timeless because he revives the archaic, moving it to the present storyline, such as “inmost” a word from Old English, to describe the deepest part of the heart.
With such a long interruption between the subject and the verb, McCarthy repeats the base clause at the end and adds the verb “can dance.” Dance is another synecdoche, which stands for being alive or living fully, invoking Nietzsche’s idea of the free spirit (The Gay Science): to live fully one must embrace all of life, the savage and the beautiful.
Your turn
Open with your subject.
Add your first relative clause. Use “who” to describe the subject further. Can you use hyperbaton and reorder words to deviate from the traditional sequencing? Can you add an extra word to create a pattern of stresses?
Add your second relative clause that begins with “who.” Can you use synecdoche? Think of an emotion. Now come up with an image that portrays an aspect of that emotion. Can you add not an adverb but an adjective?
Now repeat the subject again and include the verb.
Do you hear the sounds in McCarthy’s sentence:
Assonance: that/man/dance; floor/horror; pit/in/it/his/inmost
Alliteration: learned/last
Try it!
Let me know what else you see in this sentence!
About Me
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with this practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com (including “How to Write Stunning Sentences” and “Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal).
My new novel Afterword is available now! If your book club chooses my book to read, I can Zoom in and talk to the group. So far, I’ve done three of these events and they’re really fun.
Order links:
Page One Podcast: I was thrilled to talk to Holly Payne on her Page One Podcast! She had me deconstruct the first paragraph, talking about style techniques. We also talked about artificial intelligence.
Here’s the link:
Next Reading:
If you live near or in Pleasanton, California, I’ll be at Towne Center Books on June 20, 10:00. I’m teaching a class called “Making Metaphor,” then reading from AFTERWORD, and Judy Wheeler, the owner, will serve Japanese food! You can come for part of it or all of it.
Excellent selection and a great tribute. Blood Meridian is my favorite book.
Thank you, Nina. One of the most interesting, challenging, idealistic and one-of-a-kind writers. I feel I should read his entire oeuvre. I often find him disturbing, but his glorious command of language usually drowns out my misgivings. (And possibly my misgivings are misplaced mistakes, anyway!)