Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
Cormac McCarthy is an example of a writer who successfully breaks the rules. But you have to think he knew them well before he broke them. I myself don't agree with his wanton disregard for punctuation but he's got awards while I've just got MobileRead karma to show for it.  |
It isn't that McCarthy disregards punctuation. It's that he uses it (often by avoiding it) in a rigorously idiosyncratic way. That's very different from being unable to use punctuation correctly.
Think of it as you would a painter moving from a traditionally representational style to German expressionism. They haven't forgotten how to paint anatomically correct figures. They've assigned different proportions to the figures to express different insights and emotions. To say they'd forgotten anatomy would be like saying Samuel Beckett had lost the ability to write in complete sentences.