ome degree his writing can be described as comparative psychological portraiture (forgive me for interjecting my own made-up jargon here). McCarthy, to make a slightly tired point, stays external in regard to his characters, treating them as artifacts or products of the world. They play roles in the "grand scheme of things" (especially evident in the closing of Blood Meridian) and their individual personalities are entirely secondary to these roles. Maybe you could say, or I could suggest, that in Faulkner the outside world is a reflection or a consequence of the characters' internal makeup, while in McCarthy the internal makeup is only sufficient to the tasks of the outside world. Does this offend anyone's sensibilities?From: Rick WallachProbably it offends lots of sensibilities, but that’s surely no reason to retract your comments. The problem with studies of "influence" in modern criticism is that when we speak of influence, we usually mean "cause"...as in, Faulkner "causes" McCarthy's style. This unfortunate (and often involuntary) brand of illogic is probably a byproduct of the pedagogic imperative to argue rather than demonstrate -- which, in turn, is a subspecies of the old H.L. Mencken observation that "the reason academic politics is so vicious is that the stakes are so small." But if not "cause," how then does "influence" operate? How do you prove that the mere fact of a sequence of two authors' preoccupation with similar themes represents "influence" as opposed to mere observation of comparable phenomena in the world around both of them? Are we justified in using the term "influence" when what we observe is the dialogue between an author and a predecessor? Is one author's deliberate parody of a situation or a character in an earlier author's work...ie, the Rinthy Holme / Lena Grove correlation...a form of "influence" ? I'm not sure about that...such broad-form recourse to a term like "influence" empties it of specificit...
