Doomed Yet Dogged Strivers
The long goodbye of Cormac McCarthy's "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris"
Cormac McCarthy died just long enough after the release of The Passenger and Stella Maris for the initial reviews of the pair of novels to be honest. Instead of reading the books as “Cormac McCarthy facing down life’s unanswerable questions in the twilight of his life,” critics got to read them just as “Cormac McCarthy’s latest books in over fifteen years,” and the reaction was mostly: huh? His previous novel, The Road, for all its cannibalism and grimness, was at its core a book about a father and son trying to survive the apocalypse; it was an Oprah book for chrissakes, at least somewhat palatable. These two books, though? The follow-ups? Stella Maris is 200 pages of conversation between a suicidal math-genius mental patient, Alicia Western, and her psychiatrist, filled with long digressions on math and science and theory and bare of any plot, let alone any kind of description; The Passenger is about her brother, Bobby Western, a slightly less-genius ex-physicist ex-racecar-driver turned salvage diver. It has all the trappings of a No Country for Old Men type thriller plot at the outset – Bobby Western (the name never gets less funny) has found something that he’s not supposed to, and is being dogged by an omnipresent force because of it – before gradually shedding any interest in the propulsion of that plot. Bobby Western mostly just sits with his lawyer at restaurants in New Orleans and briefly discusses how much trouble he’s in before switching to a different conversation topic. He goes obliquely on the lam, but there’s no Anton Chigurh chasing him, just some IRS agents making his life more officially difficult. A run from no one to nowhere, a looming threat never really seen, alternating periods of intense isolation and then returns to civilization, where another conversation over drinks can be had. Oh yeah, every chapter or so there’s an italicized break where Alicia Western talks to some kind of vision - a djinn, a eidolon, specter, hallucination, messenger from another world - called the Thalidomide Kid, a three-foot tall being with dolphin flippers for hands who “looked like he’d been brought into the world with icetongs.” (Italics Cormac’s, not mine, it’s sort of his thing.) He speaks in malapropisms and bad jokes, and occasionally calls forward any number of strange vaudeville type acts to further torment and/or enlighten Alicia. He - it? - doesn’t really have any stated purpose, or at least not one he can state; Bobby sees him once, so he - it?- is either a shared delusion or more likely some unearthly and scrambled Hermes delivering news from the “demonium.” Sorry, just a couple more things: Bobby and Alicia are the children of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, and are cursed to be in love with each other; Alicia yearns for him throughout Stella Maris, as Bobby lays in a racing accident induced coma, and Bobby grieves for her throughout The Passenger, which opens with Alicia’s suicide. Got all that? Do I need to repeat anything to the class? Perhaps huh? is just the appropriate response; more appropriate, at least, than the claim that the novels are nihilist paeans to meaninglessness. (See link below!) Reading the novels now, the claim is even more laughable; these novels, however strange and dark, are testaments to McCarthy’s deep and abiding belief in human persistence despite meaninglessness.
Being a Cormac McCarthy book, The Passenger is filled with gorgeous description, arcane language, grimly philosophical conversation, and stuff for dudes. Eventually shed of that bothersome plot, the book is a topos of masculinity, as Bobby Western goes around doing Guy Stuff, to the point of parody. (Is Bobby Western not a ridiculous enough name for that?) He drives a cool car really fast. He has a dangerous job that he doesn’t particularly like. He has trouble with his taxes. He thinks about killing himself, and otherwise keeps his feelings to himself. He talks about the JFK assassination. A friend might say to him: “I suppose that when a man is sick of pussy he’s sick of life but I do think the bitches may have finally done me in.” Or: “Sink’s so full of dishes you got to go outside to take a leak.” You know, guy stuff. The great irony, of course, is that this pinnacle of manhood – so strong, so smart, so handsome, so mysterious – has no interest in women besides his dead sister. It is Jake Barnes’ cruelly ironic dick-injury in The Sun Also Rises taken to its extreme. Bobby will walk away from a table where his dinner companions will speak of him as if he is facing down life’s greatest indignity:
Well he seemed very nice to me.
He is very nice. I’m enormously fond of him.
But he’s in love with his sister.
Yes. He is in love with his sister. But of course it gets worse.
Bianca smiled her odd smile and licked her upper lip. He’s in love with his sister and . . . ?
He’s in love with his sister and she’s dead.
Speaking of Hemingway, though I’ve always found McCarthy to be trailing in the wake of Faulkner (and what’s more Faulknerian than incest?), so much of this book seems to be wrestling with the big burly legacy of Hemingway; Bobby first escapes to Idaho, the state of Hemingway’s suicide, and then to Spain, where he doubles up on influence by living in an old Quixotic windmill, the newly lost (generation) ex-pat wriggling his way back to the beginning of the novelistic tradition. Add in some wrangling with McCarthy’s contemporary somewhat-reclusive peer in Thomas Pynchon – references to an unknown and powerful “They,” shadowy and mysterious government intrigues focusing on missiles, bad puns, and characters breaking into song – and you have something like McCarthy’s most referential text yet. While he’s always been writing after Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner, he’s never been quite so anxious about his influences.
Legacy would be a too-pat and easy posthumous reading of the grander aim on the novels, and McCarthy frequently rejects the idea of any one person surviving into the eons. But he is intensely interested throughout the novels in the human instinct to try to create, the primordial instinct to record. Language, as figured by Alicia, was a “parasitic” development within humanity, something that came from the depths of the unconscious and essentially led us down the path to self-destruction. (Language → civilization → science → atomic weaponry.) Whatever pushed that lever way back when was likely not friendly, if not totally inimical, to human life. Alicia, in Stella Maris, reports a vision
into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me […] A being. A presence. And that the search for shelter and for a covenant among us was simply to elude this baleful thing of which we were in endless fear and yet of which we had no knowledge.
She calls the presence the “Archatron” and whether it is some otherworldly being beyond our comprehension or just a manifestation of the creepy corners of the unconscious, it is the seeming source of the essential dolor that hangs over the novels. Even if it contains the seeds of human destruction, though, language also has the magic ability to create new meaning(s); one thing can be another via metaphor, these metaphors and feelings can be strung together and enrich our experience of whatever it is we call reality. (Alicia is so terminally smart that she’s dubious about the whole enterprise of a ‘shared reality.’) How to muddle along in a world that has no special interest in us or a higher meaning for us might be the supra-plot of the novels, and while Alicia’s journey ends in suicide, The Passenger points towards the persistence of expression. Which way, (Bobby) Western man?
“I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart,” a friend of Bobby’s tells him. In that same conversation: “But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.” (Being a Guy Stuff book, these sentiments sandwich a story about “someone unleash[ing] a truly villainous fart” in a restaurant.) Walking around New Orleans late in the novel, as night falls, Bobby thinks to himself “that men would band together in the hills. Feeding their small fires with the deeds and the covenants and the poetry of their fathers. Documents they’d no gift to read in a cold to loot men of their souls.” This image at once suggests a death of expression while also touting language’s life-sustaining properties; it also ties neatly into the motif of fires, and carrying a flame to generations anon, that are so central to some of McCarthy’s previous works – Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road. The novel ends with twinned images of doomed yet dogged strivers: a last view of the Thalidomide Kid, “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest” (!) and Bobby bent over a book of grammar - the very foundations of language - “[l]ike those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods … the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.” Again, this is happening in Spain, so you could see them as two knights errant, the conscious and the unconscious, riding their donkeys into the sunset. Even if everything goes to dust eventually, if everything tends towards oblivion, if “All reality is loss and all loss is eternal,” well, you come into the world screaming in inchoate rage, you can leave the same way. Humanity and the world itself and everything we know will desert us entirely, but there’s always still something to say, even if beyond comprehension. Alicia’s final warning to Bobby in the novel, via one last letter, is that “there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.” The only alternate to the world of pure simulation is “those antic shapes” of whatever remains of language. It may not be the most comforting idea, but at least it’s not nothing.
Language’s ability is certainly something to McCarthy, who still relishes the opportunity to hit the reader with one stunning and uniquely syntaxed bit of scenic description after another: “In the dying light a river like a frayed silver rope. Lakes deep in the stone coulees white with ice. The western mountains burning […] When he woke later far to the north a desert city was passing under the wing and sliding off into the darkness like the Crab Nebula. A cast of stones upon a jeweler’s blackcloth.” Or, in Idaho: “Great sheets of chloral green and purple light flaring over the sky to the north.” Stella Maris frustrates because it lacks any of these descriptions, it’s just two floating heads talking to one another; The Passenger alternatively thrills and flounders in the way it juxtaposes standout writing with, well, all the goofy parts. McCarthy was always a less overly-serious writer than he was given credit for, but The Passenger is all over the place tonally, swerving between pathos and laconic humor, between thriller set ups and gigantic anticlimaxes. I was never quite sure if I should treat the funny stuff seriously or the serious stuff as a joke; that’s life’s rich pageant, I suppose, but the tonal shifts do consistently undercut the effects of the novel. To take one example, there’s a scene where Bobby’s longtime friend, John Sheddan, writes a final note to his friend before death. It feels as close as a reader might get to Cormac McCarthy’s thoughts about his own impending death, via authorial stand-in. It’s a beautiful little send-off to the world, and it sticks with you up until, a couple of chapters later, who pops up again in a vision/dream of Bobby’s but ol Long John Sheddan himself, who just has a little bit more to say now, and he’s cracking jokes about synchronizing dreams “[l]ike the periods of sorority sisters.” (Writing of and about women: never McCarthy’s strong point. Alicia Western, as drawn in these novels, is barely even human, let alone a believable woman.)Whatever grief one may have felt at Sheddan’s removal from the story is erased by his quick reappearance, like a party guest who keeps leaving in order to get more tearful goodbyes, and it feels so little earned as to call into question any grief within the book – and The Passenger is overwhelmingly about grief – given that the missed person is only one spectral tune-in away. Then again, the visitor we want is rarely the visitor we get, and Alicia’s fading memory never promises to reappear around Bobby’s corner. Her entire wish is to have never existed at all; it’s only respectful that she does indeed disappear, even from the next world. She never wrote anything down anyway, never wanted to record: “What you write down becomes fixed,” she says to the Kid in one of his nocturnal and italicized visits.“It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign, You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price.” Alicia would never pay that price; Bobby and Cormac McCarthy would, even if they seem to suffer from an essential estrangement of the soul. Them’s the breaks.
Turning what turn out to be your last novels into a destruction of your own gravitas is a pretty good bit, as is writing a a big long parody of your own stereotypically manly characters and plots. I would love it if I knew that’s what Cormac McCarthy was doing with these last two books, but I also can see him being deadly serious about it all. It’s probably somewhere in the middle, a strange chimerical mix of the absurd and the essential that is only ever itself and only ever as strange as life. “It’s an odd place, the world,” John Sheddan reports to Bobby at one point:
I was in Knoxville a while back and there was this wino got hit by a bus. He was lying on the sidewalk where he’d been carried and people were just sort of standing around. […] And I bent down to ask him if he was all right. I mean he damn sure wasn’t all right. He’d just been run over by a bus. And he opened his eyes and looked up at me and he said: My sands are run. Jesus. My sands are run? The ambulance came and they took him away and I scoured the paper for several days but I couldnt find anything about the incident.
Maybe he was sent to carry a message to you.
Maybe. Life is brief. Carpe diem.
Or maybe just watch out for buses.
The message is either carpe diem or watch out for buses; McCarthy always did love an ambiguous ending.
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One word for ya: Suttree