Bitnami mean stack enable passenger4/3/2023 ![]() I checked.) As for this Christmas Day, it will turn out that the woman hanging there is Jewish. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.” (Did people, in some far-flung time, used to say “spoken” to mean risen or begun - parallel, perhaps, to “morning is broken”? No. The hunter “thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing.” (Really? “Have mercy on her soul”? He’d not that?) We read that the woman has tied a red sash around her dress, providing “some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” (What pathetic fallacy is this? Who has scrupled in creating this desolation?) Then we are told that this is happening “on this Christmas day. The way McCarthy deploys it, you hear what it means even before you know.īut the paragraph descends into the wrong kind of portentous. You can also stog something into the snow, like a stake. In the first paragraph he does one of his McCarthy things and makes you look up a chewy old word, “stogged.” The hunter who finds the woman, we are told, knelt and “stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him.” To be stogged is to be stuck in the snow or mud. The teetering wouldn’t be interesting if he weren’t capable of those spellbinding descriptive passages, a trademark. Still, it was a thrill to hear new McCarthy sentences read aloud. I read this novel when I was recovering from the infantilizing misery of a 15-millimeter kidney stone, and my 11-year-old daughter read parts of it to me because the pain pills made me want to barf when I tried to read, and at one point she put down the book and said, “Why does he say AND so much!” Something attention-seeking in the syntax. You hear Hemingway and the curious loudness of those supposedly clipped and stripped-down sentences. It paints a barren scene, a snowy field in which a young woman has hanged herself: “It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones.” Before you’ve even settled in, McCarthy has thrown “and” at you four times, a word that both splits and fuses. The first paragraph of “ The Passenger” works as a microcosm of the problem. He teeters more in these new books than in the several novels for which he is judged a great American writer. ![]() There is bravery involved, especially at heights of style where the difference can be between greatness and straight badness. McCarthy has always been willing to balance on this fence. Applied to prose, it can mean that a writer has attained a genuinely prophetic, doom-laden gravitas, or that the writing goes after those very qualities and doesn’t get there, winding up pretentious. “Portentous,” according to Webster’s, can mean foreboding, “eliciting amazement” and “being a grave or serious matter.” But it can also mean “self-consciously solemn” and “ponderously excessive.” It contains its own yin-yang of success and failure. The experience of reading Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, “The Passenger” - alongside its twisted sister, “Stella Maris,” which comes out later this year - kept making me think about the word “portentous.” Not finding this word identified as a Janus anywhere, I hereby nominate it for candidacy. You are using a different word when you say “cleave” to mean “split” than when you use it to mean “fuse.” Janusness is slippery this way. ![]() “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers,” the King James has it, but then, in another place, “the clods cleave fast together.” Beware, though: The two meanings descend from separate Old English verbs, clíofan and clífan. Probably the most famous Janus word is “cleave,” which means both to chop in two and to bind. ![]() “Fast” is a convenient example: People run fast, but they can also stand fast, i.e., stay in place. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings.
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