O Cormac, Where Art Thou?

An amusing piece, All Possible Plots by Major Authors, published on the website Lit Hub, suggests that everything an author writes is a variation on a single idiosyncratic plot. Here are some examples:

Jane Austen Your obligation to make a judicious alliance with an alluring newcomer is constantly pressed upon you by your relations. You despise them all.

Ernest Hemingway On the journey you drink beer from cold bottles, and peasant’s wine from the big leather sacks the fisherman gave you. When you arrive in the town square, you stop by a café for a bottle of champagne and a bottle of cheap wine. You hate the man you are with. You order more beer. Soon it will be time for lunch.

F Scott Fitzgerald Ginevra Beauregard and Redmond Ingram (known as Red at Princeton) are honeymooning in the South of France. They are beautiful, clever and rich. For reasons never fully explored, they have resolved to make themselves unhappy.

D H Lawrence You look upon his bright loins of darkness as they gleam in the Midlands sun. ‘Before we have sex,’ he says, ‘here are several of my opinions.’

Cormac McCarthy Nothing can ever be right again. Here’s a horse. 

They are all amusing but the last triggered lasting mirth, so perfectly does it parody two of the McCarthy books that I have listened to: The Road and All the Pretty Horses. I chuckle whenever I recall it.

I recently wrote a short piece on Jane Austen’s Emma, discussing the complexity of the language and alluding to the way in which language both shapes and limits the stories that authors tell. To illustrate the point, I said: “Using his accustomed language, Cormac McCarthy could not write The Portrait of a Lady ...”

Whether by chance or the contrivance of some prankster god the next book I chose to walk with was, indeed, The Portrait of a Lady. At close to its mid point the Countess Gemini declaims: “I don’t come and see my brother—I make him come and see me. This hill of his is impossible—I don’t see what possesses him. Really, Osmond, you’ll be the ruin of my horses some day, and if it hurts them you’ll have to give me another pair. I heard them wheezing to-day; I assure you I did. It’s very disagreeable to hear one’s horses wheezing when one’s sitting in the carriage; it sounds too as if they weren’t what they should be. But I’ve always had good horses; whatever else I may have lacked I’ve always managed that.”

I started laughing at the thought of Cormac McCarthy emerging with a wink, a raspberry or the finger - possibly all three - as an epiphenomenon from the only reference to horses in the book I said he couldn’t have written. The final sentence of the Countess’ expostulation made me laugh so hard and loud that I almost broke a rib: 

“My husband doesn’t know much, but I think he knows a horse.” 

O Cormac, where art thou!?