Review of The Passenger, Stella Maris published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House
In memory of Cormac Roth who told me the first night we met at Bennington that he was named after Cormac McCarthy.
It’s an odd phenomenon having read everything a writer’s ever published. It smacks of puberty and the sudden, embarrassed intimacy with your parents’ tics and foibles. Martin Amis’s male characters, for instance, enjoy a boisterous, splashy hummer (you know, a while you’re down there, a nose dive, a honk on the ol’ bagpipe). His inherent (if not iterative) “philo-semitism,” the strength of Time’s Arrow and the unsung Zone of Interest, could not be extinguished even by his House of Meetings, which in Amis’s long phylum of philo’s features his most cramped attempt to remind the reader of his glimmering morality: its nameless narrator gaily, guiltlessly rapes and murders his way through half of Europe pausing only to express, at random intervals, a naive incredulity at the very possibility of anti-semitism. That is, Amis overplays a calling card and fashions a contentedly evil man who cannot fathom, well, evil, and winds up like the author and many of his leading men: obsessively, predictably in love with a Jewish beauty.[1] Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, was more orderly with his twin flame and flaw, and created an entire genus to contain them: nymph-, as in the nymphets of half a dozen novels and novellas and the Nymphalidae, Satyrinae, or wood nymph butterflies of his lepidoptery.
Blowjobs, philo-semitism, nymphets, butterflies—these literary themes are of course not in themselves flaws, but upon their sixth or seventh iteration our reflexive eye-rolls begin describing the outline, in the distance, of a boundary coming into disappointing focus: the writer, our hero, our parent, has limits. There is a horizon beyond which they will not be going and beyond which they will not be taking us with them, page in hand. But we must master this disappointment, because parents do not live forever and we ourselves are not patternless. There is a lot to learn from last novels and the fading shimmers of their well-wrought patterns.
So what stands out about 89-year old Cormac McCarthy’s latest (last?) work of fiction, The Passenger and its diminutive, incestuous (though not quite scandalously enough) little sister Stella Maris? It’s not a well-worn bushwack or a refurbished saddle, but its new terrains—that is, a break in McCarty’s familiar landscapes. As well we McCarthyites might’ve hoped, for with The Road’s publication in 2006 the outline of McCarthy’s corpus had come into the completed, satisfying shape of a mountain with two distinct climes: Blood Meridian capped the ascending peak, and The Road waited at its foot. What more could be said, putting our packs down, unlacing our hiking boots?
Before answering that I’d like to describe this mountain in a little more detail, because expeditions there have been, for the most part, promising failures. Moreover, I’d like you to share in my adventurous mountaineering, and you strike me, dear reader, as game. May I take you on an immediate, charming little tangent?
Scaling Mt. McCarthy
The base of Mt. McCarthy is located in the chains of Melville, Hemingway, Joyce (via the succession line of Faulkner) and a brief sliver of its platelet connects below the Atlantic floor to Milton’s sacred caps. Its formation begins in civilization with McCarthy’s first novel The Orchard Keeper (1966), bunched tightly to Faulkner’s hillock and distinguishable only by its novel archaisms (strop), original neologisms (applehalf) and the physics (parallax) and geological (Pleistocene) terms then seeping into the writings of Thomas Pynchon (entropy), Don DeLillo (ditto) and all the other major novelists of that American graduating class. Quickly, Outer Dark (1968) and Child of God (1973) send the mountainpath steepening until Suttree (1979) outstrips Faulkner’s Appalachia entirely, with a speed only the theory of inflation could attempt to account for.
This opening trajectory is premonitory. There are warning signs for first-timers that something big waits at the summit. Like, really big. Something on the scale of Noah’s Ark. For the succession of each novel is hellbent on arriving upon a missing Greek tragedy or Biblical apocrypha.
The evidence of this momentum is found in the novels’ terrain, its geology offering clues and blurs of Mt. Ararat. The topsoil is composed of Faulknerian settings and idioms, the flora are distinctly Melvillean metaphysical images connected by Hemingwavian “ands” and the soothing rhythm of utilitarian details, iridesced by Joycean neologisms, portmanteaus, faunal constructions that don’t exist in the American-English fossil record—or should not still exist in this epoch, this American altitude—knotted into a pre-Socratic sunbeam. This is, to indulge in competing imageries, the glass of McCarthy’s opening glassblown prose, heated into a molten gob with a pre-Socratic interpretation of quantum physics blowing the gob into its cooling shape. By Suttree, we have the shape this breath leaves, its cooling form—but not yet the breath itself.
We too are breathless. Approaching Mt. McCarthy’s summit hiker’s fatigue sets in, dizziness. There are whiffs in the air, we suspect but can’t countenance, of something sacred… is that… sniff sniff… burning bush I smell? Yes, it is. Finally, after the steep false summit of Suttree (which some experts in the field contend, through the rigor of pure disorientation, is the true summit) the mountainpath arrives woozily upon a language that could have sculpted Old Testament apocrypha—The Word, the breath of God—itself. This is the startling peak of Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). This is breath caught in the hands. A quantum tale old as time playing out against the summit’s brimstone and massacreous sunsets. A non-Euclidean work that could make two and two equal five. In the midst of post-modernism’s bloating inanity, Cormac McCarthy brought Heraclitus to life, got him up to speed on quantum mechanics, taught him the King’s English and let him run rampant in mid-19th century America with a Bowie knife, pausing only to put him to bed every night reciting Paradise Lost into the tracery of his ear.
American mountain ranges are simply not supposed to go this high. And I want you to note, too: we can see the ocean from here.
Now, dear reader, take any old McCarthy from your shelf and hold your thumb down below Blood Meridian:
The Orchard Keeper
Outer Dark
Child of God
Suttree
Blood Meridian
A perfect sequence. Holding your thumb here is like holding all the sumptuous glitter of Nabokov’s American novels (though gems hide below, of course). Any major novelist would want these titles under their belt, surely.[2] But ask yourself: Where do you go from here? Stylistically, I mean. What more can be achieved in the vein that leads one to Blood Meridian? There is no Bloodier Meridian, no Even More Evening Redness in the West. For between these hermetically sealed covers McCarthy jiggered with the known laws of the universe. He theorized his own McCarthyean Interpretation of quantum mechanics, whose expression was only possible in imageries that formulae had not yet caught up with. Specifically—and many McCarthyites miss this, though I won’t let this happen to you—he synthesized the pre-Socratics with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.[3]
McCarthy was, in that brief moment, a physicist artist—a prolific feat in our Babelic era of hyper-specialization and impenetrable silos. The research for that book won him one of the first MacArthur Genius Grants. It won him the deep friendship and recognition of physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who named the quark particle after a neologism in Finnegans Wake. Blood Meridian is called, alternately, the anti-western, or the last western (the latter by those who haven’t read the superb No Country for Old Men). It is more than that: it is the holy book of physics, full of mythological license and only a Creator’s artistic hemming room.
Now, I’ll ask again: what do you do when you’ve just created the universe from Heraclitean top to quantum bottom? What do you do when you’ve summited all possible altitudes? Well. Some might rest. Some might stay put forever, building a succession of derivative lean-to’s. Joyce himself erected a bedeviling Rorschach with Finnegans Wake: some see an embarrassingly steep cliff, others a stairway to heaven dangling just out of reach through a pulled apart hole in the clouds the size of a scuttling, eye-patched Dubliner. Not McCarthy. To avoid superfluity McCarthy made a stylistic change. Having glimpsed the ocean from this height, he descended toward sea-level simplicity. There was, after all, a leg down the mountain he needed to bivouac. Like Zarathustra, he might as well bother himself with returning to civilization—or joining the board at the Santa Fe Institute and despoiling an element of his creative ear, which he almost promptly did.
Getting Down Off the Mountain
We have an analogue for this stylistic shift in McCarthy’s literary family tree. Samuel Beckett is a cousin. Not that there’s a trace of Beckett in McCarthy (their relation is not by blood nor, perhaps, artistic meridian), but after transcribing the blindening Joyce’s Wake, our language’s most maximalist creation, Beckett went minimalist. In fact, he went French, knowing he could never cast anything longer, deeper, inkier than Joyce’s shadow if he continued to write and writhe in it.
McCarthy did not begin writing in French but he did abdicate the King’s English. That is, the King James Translation of his early prose gave way to the New Living Translation, and the Old Testament parables became New Testament allegories. Like all of McCarthy’s plays and screenplays The Stonemason does not need to be reread (to McCarthy’s credit, he keeps his minor keys in mostly minor forms—plays and screenplays are often nothing more than announcements of seismic shifts, approaching switchbacks, stimulus checks). But, begun in the 1980s directly after Blood Meridian, it introduces the proceeding style: radically simple, allegorical, moral, terse: Hemingway. All the Pretty Horses (1992) makes it official. He will be leaving the days of wild linguistic abandon behind him, he will not be making any more inroads into the opaque volupty of the unknown.
A clue to this switch is buried in Blood Meridian’s namelet itself: Evening Redness in the West. This is how the sentences of the next books shall read. Metaphor (Blood Meridian) shall give way to declarative imagery (Evening Redness). So no, we do not descend the mountain saying two and two equal five—McCarthy begins letting us know, or rather, letting us down, that two and two do actually equal four and have a moral, if not Euclidean, obligation to correctly sum.
Now, leaving the plays and screenplays out of it, shift your thumb up above All the Pretty Horses:
All the Pretty Horses
The Crossing
Cities of the Plain
No Country for Old Men
The Road
Any minor novelist would want these titles—as would any major novelist who never earned a penny creating last century’s greatest single work of art (Blood Meridian). This is not exactly a decline, but a smooth inversion, a perfect five novel declination to McCarthy’s prior five novel ascent, ending on the anti-Blood Meridian: The Road, McCarthy’s Old Man and the Sea and— despite The Passenger and Stella Maris’s sly pub dates—probably the last novel McCarthy actually wrote from A to B. (Some begin Mt. McCarthy at The Road, God bless them).
While this downhill is not a drop-off, per se, a certain non-Euclidean iridesence does go out of the prose, never to return. Our geological content shifts, and the fossil record bespeaks a newer, more kempt epoch. So too a certain reticence emerges, a scientific doubt reducing the imageries to what McCarthy can be sure he can be accurate about describing. The true scholar might be tempted to see a Joyce-Beckett dichotomy playing out in real time—others might note McCarthy’s sudden friendships with the hard world of Doubting Thomases in Santa Fe.
However, like all defects in philosophy, we can trace this, at least partially, to a Prussian source. It is the emergence of a Wittgensteinian syntax, a syntax which is really dogma, absolutes, hiding in titillating phrasings. Wittgenstein’s charming dead-end maxims mark like no other the moment when philosophy fell down an entire rung and became a decadent, albeit enchanting, art. The moment in which philosophy, the love of wisdom, could no longer be judged intellectually, but aesthetically. That is, when wisdom went out to buy a pack of smokes. It wasn’t long before Foucault, seeing what success Sartre had with novels, began—but that’s another story…
Except when Oprah comes calling, McCarthy is not usually one for the posed moment. But in recent hour-long interviews flooding YouTube, he’s taken to quoting our dastardly Ludwig, particularly the opening of his Tractatus:
“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” [Emphasis mine.]
McCarthy stops here, but let us have the fuller’s quote import—or, to refashion Beckett for our purposes: McCarthy can’t go on, let’s go on:
“The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking; or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
“The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.” [Emphasis mine.]
A stirring antithesis to McCarthy’s earlier, optimistic motivations. After all, the “whereof” was his bread and butter—and it was far from nonsense. The “whereof” was Judge Holden, it was the writings of Anaximander the Judge quoted (none of which actually survived the Alexandrine fires or Christianizations of antiquity), the artifacts and traces of lost Meso-American civilizations he jotted in his ledger before pressing irrevocably into the dust, his immortality, et al.
After transcending the limits of his own language and yet remaining in corporeal form, McCarthy needed a new creed, and so drew a scientifically rigorous limit to the expression of thoughts, falling prey to an age-old conflation between the relatively brief, fluctuating structure and capabilities (on an evolutionary timescale) of human language with the “definite” limits of knowledge. For some scientists and colleagues at Santa Fe, this is acceptable. For an artist, this is creative fatalism.
But being a true artist as well as a daring, captivating downhillsman, McCarthy did not take this as absolute gospel. He had one more act of God in him, blending this alluring, one-dimensional hue with the great, immovable Hemingway icebergs of the Atlantic, creating metaphysical icebergs, syllogisms with missing, submerged correlates.
Quick Lesson in Syllogistic Icebergs
For instance, in Stella Maris, “Nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual. Bearing in mind that to claim reality for what is unknowable is already to speak in tongues.”
Why does excerpting something from the absolute render it perceptual? Because: “The absolute is imperceptual. To excerpt is to render something perceptual. Nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual.”
Why does claiming reality for what is unknowable mean you are already speaking in tongues? Your turn to babble.
Getting Back to Getting Down Off the Mountain
These are simple exercises, of course. For McCarthy had figured out his—excuse the horrid expression—algorithm, and algorithms are simple things even a computer can do. Like when the Stones figured out Start Me Up—there’d be no more Tumbling Dice, no more Sweet Virginia. (But there would be Plundered My Soul, a revamp of a 40 year abandoned demo from the ’71-’72 sweetspot, which starts nudging us in the direction of The Passenger.)
Now, it’s not much to brag about, but reading McCarthy makes one feel, well, intelligent. It necessitates working the brain in a kind of traditional discourse as old as Western civilization. Syllogistical syntax like his leaves the reader wandering in heavenly inference, and once clued in makes the reader God in possession of some puzzle piece cinching a truth. This is extinct metaphysics. But metaphysics about what we cannot know. That is, anti-metaphysics, pessimistic wisdom—which is not wise.
One senses post-Blood McCarthy measuring himself against his scientific cohorts and, in so doing, shortchanging his own creative abilities, taking something of a cerebral refuge in syntactical, Prussian illusions. Thus, in contrast to the Judge who does know all, who will never die, who quotes the lost maxims of Anaximander, the John Grady Coles and Billy Parhams of the lower altitudes are conspicuously hemmed in by a Wittgensteinian limit. All post-Blood drama and conflict flows from the minor scrapes of bumping up against this boundary: all those McCarthyean trains of events beyond a character’s control, set off by some small action they’ll never know the meaning of nor purpose behind; all the actions they’ll never be able to reverse, only live out. They all point to one new, rosy recourse: morality.
With all of this in hand, the eastern side of every leaf pinked in Blood Meridian’s primeval sunlight, the whereof’s flattened out, complexities simplified, Mt. McCarthy’s downhill steepens. It points West. Gravity picks up and the novels become increasingly, pressingly readable, simple even, and we are carried along by the the sensation of pure speed instead of complex slaloms. The wind pushes our hair back and save for sections of The Crossing it is impossible for the reading public to get lost downhill or have any dangerous bust-ups, possible only to enjoy ourselves until we reach and glide across The Road and the smooth, frictionless, frozen laketop of its perfect minor prose.
Now, once you’ve written The Road, a masterpiece of minor novels (which does not particularly need to be reread), where do you go? Many have been deferring to Oprah, who broached one of McCarthy’s missing subjects: women. While McCarthy’s third clime does include his second ever female lead, the true missing subject has been a more subtle hint, something McCarthy is so shy about, he’s kept it secret for four decades and has hidden it in a dead language: Maris, as in Stella Maris, as in: the sea.
In retrospect, we can see it has been buried all this time in the parallax of McCarthy’s North and South Poles: The Road, like Blood Meridian, ends on a brief glimpse of the ocean, as if with Blood Meridian McCarthy summited high enough to see the sea and then charted his Road there. For a devout Melvillean, this environ has always been his thematic iceberg.
Thus, at sea-level where The Road left us, backtracking into civilization (there are no guns or horses where we’re going), and with a female demi-lead to boot, we embark upon McCarthy’s third and final epoch with all the subjects he’s been skirting, trading in our spurs and hiking boots for flippers, our mountain range for a neat, final island.
Though, I can’t keep it from you any longer: The Passenger and Stella Maris are not the first time he tried to get his sea legs…
Sea-level Secrets
There’s another reason I hurried you down off McCarthy’s summit earlier besides the impending hallucinations and cerebral edema that results from being at so high an altitude. I didn’t want to confuse things by refuting the established McCarthy record. Or rather, I did not want you to disregard what I am about to say as something borne out of the heat of the moment, out of the dizzying heights, the warped view of McCarthy’s distant ocean: The very tame, blank, marbled Stonemason was not McCarthy’s first project after Blood Meridian. No. Stylistic transitions are rarely so clean cut. In the mid-80s McCarthy set out to the Argentine sea with a whale biologist by the name of Roger Payne and wrote a screenplay called—yes, you’ve felt it coming all this time, haven’t you—Whales and Men. He’d just finished writing the 20th century’s Moby Dick and then decided to write it again. And it is the ur-text of the two post-Blood epochs.
You don’t think he would have got to the top of Ararat without leaving the Ark behind, do you? How else can do you propose we venture to his new island?
I have it here. Yes. It is held together by a medium sized binder clip. It is fondly rose-margined by the illegible ivies of my red pen. It is both superior and more flawed than anything he wrote after. It is, alas, too on the nose of the American muse to have ever been published without a slight wince. It was turned down by several producers. It is set in 1984, the year it was begun. It is set in civilization. It contains no murders or horses or coinflips. It is relatively early and prescient and profound on the present extinction of whales and, adjacently, climate change. It is the ash from which The Passenger and Stella Maris quickly arose and the secret hazy plume within which they gestated for nearly 40 years. It is open to this asterisked passage:
“The record of the bones seemed clear enough. We had our origins in this earth. Yet something made us long for another nativity altogether. Something had made us almost despise the earth. What was it? What was it that had made us outcasts in this paradise created for us. What had made us refugees from joy and orphans of delight. What was it that characterized our species, that was found nowhere else in nature?” [Inconsistent use of question marks McCarthy’s.]
Can you guess, dear reader? Think back to our syllogistic exercises, Prussian illusi—
—“Language. Yes.”
Language, yes.
We are going to skip around this particular Socratic episode of Whales and Men, one of many in a script which, among other things, shows the first British idiomatic influence in McCarthy and reads alternately like Melville in the opulent 80s and a next-gen Thomas Love Peacock metaphysical dinner party. But this passage in particular is the artistic codification of Wittgenstein, a turn of the back on the Judge, the iceberg that haunts the second and third climes of McCarthy’s corpus, and an argument about language that existed basically undisturbed for four decades, finally published in Nautilus magazine as “The Kekule Problem” (2017):
“…there was no such thing as an unalloyed benefit… the thing that has most benefitted man is language… so what are the penalties?… what had begun as a system for identifying and organizing the phenomena of the world had become a system for replacing those phenomena. For replacing the world… what we live in is a linguistic model of the world. We have no way of even knowing what’s been lost… You see what I was really after was why the world was going to be destroyed. I thought there had to be a reason. More and more language seemed to me to be an aberration by which we had come to lose the world. Everything that is named is set at one remove from itself… We endow things with names and then carry the names away with us. But the name is not the thing and we experience nothing. We end up like tourists, having seen nothing in our travels but the round glass of a camera. We’d even come to confuse language with intelligence… But what if there existed a dialogue among the lifeforms of this earth from which we had excluded ourselves so totally that we no longer even believed it to exist? Could it be that dialogue which we still sense in dreams?… I knew that dreams were prelingual… Language is a way of containing the world. A thing named becomes that named thing. It is under surveillance. We were put into a garden and we turned it into a detention center.”
This recasting of language as man’s unique, original sin, sits oddly in a work that is concerned with the almost numinous (and numinously written) communication of the leviathan. A work which has passages such as:
“The reason blue whales are a hundred feet long may just be so that they can talk long distance… I suddenly realized that at certain angles of incidence these sounds were bending… they were not reflecting off the bottom and off the underside of the surface in the normal way but were refracting and that what was being gained was an entire order of magnitude. When I realized this I realized simultaneously that blue whales were sending and receiving signals the entire width of the Pacific Ocean and I can’t describe the feeling.”
Somehow, this does not count as language, but McCarthy’s advocate for this position, whale biologist Guy Schuyler, is not indisputably convincing and rubs up against his outrageously wealthy benefactor who, Judge-like, is hellbent on knowing everything. This benefactor thinks the laws of the universe are evolving and that there exists “a matrix, a mother field, outside of time.” Unlike the Judge, however, his hubris dooms him. He shall not live forever or know everything or shoot drunk, dancing bears. He is the Judge’s failed, modern day twin. His name is John Western and he used to race cars in Europe. Sound familiar?
Third Acts: Old Man and his Sea
Like Whales and Men, The Passenger is set in the 1980s and begins with Mozart’s second violin concerto off the coast of Florida. Instead of opening to the reflection of man smearing in the eyeball of a beached whale, it opens underwater with salvage diver Bobby Western investigating a submerged plane that contains a few absences: a missing passenger, missing black box, missing flight log. Actually, that’s a lie, the novel opens with a total jackass, the Thalidomide Kid (a deformed human, or “ectomelic hallucination” if you rather, with flippers for hands), showcasing one of McCarthy’s new, left-handed skills: the ability to annoy your pants off.
Now, these novels are supposed to be two things: McCarthy’s “woman” books and his “physics” books (so say the unlearned). Historically, something about writing explicitly about physics and math (as opposed to subterreanly like in Blood Meridian) brings out the slapstick and jackassery of writers—see Pynchon’s entire corpus, see DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, see this Pynchonian ditty McCarthy makes Grogan, another hallucinated deformity, sing in the opening pages (the hallowed opening pages, dear reader):
Them old cangrejos
Is a-leapin in me lederhose
Why I bedded with the bitch
Is somethin only Jesus knows
And it’s off to the chemist
For a pot of ointment I suppose
Since Molly’s gone and left me
Here alone with the…
Yes… A newfangled low compared to McCarthy’s fandangled highs. Perhaps the only real low of McCarthy’s career—one half-expects a kazoo to make an appearance. At least with a virtuoso of the instrument such as Pynchon one might have been able to fill in the ellipse…
Now, it’s said that a writer dies twice: once when the bloom comes off the corpus and lastly when the soul comes off the corpse. Igor Stravinsky, the brilliant neo-classical composer, could only bring himself to meddle in the 12-tone style of contemporary Arnold Schoenberg when Schoenberg physically passed away—when 12-tone achromatics passed from contemporary to “classical” and gave him license to “neo-” around with it. It would appear after DeLillo passed away on October 20th, 2020 with The Silence: A Novel (true silence would have suited him much better) and ten years of 85 year-old Pynchon’s convincing possum play, McCarthy is finally ready to write left-handed (or flipper-handed) and give us a glimpse of all the little Pynchonisms and DeLillean tricks he could have been doing all this time, but (correctly) didn’t deign. For instance, a partial character list of the dyad runs: the Thalidomide Kid, Long John, Bianca Pharaoh, Darling Dave, Willy V., Debussy Fields, Brat, Henry Harbenger and Count Seals. He also seems to be doing his damndest to get caught up on all the post-modernesque topics he’s missed. A handful of the new, big themes and ideas he trots out into the finally acknowledged digital lights of the 1980s runs thusly: transgenderism (one of the dyad’s most beautiful scenes), digital currency, racist IQ tests, the atom bomb, American totalitarianism, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, surveillance capitalism, paranoia, Judaism, philo-semitism, and, Oprah’s red herring: women. We also get our first ever use of the words computer, cheeseburger, Creedence Clearwater Revival, gay, Islamic. Wow. No, that’s one too: “Wow.” In a Cormac McCarthy novel. Wow.
This really is civilization.
And this really is as far into civilization as McCarthy is willing to go: the 1980s, the mothy afterglow of Blood Meridian. He’s far more willing to travel space than time, covering the rest of the American and Hemingwavian haunts he never got around to: Florida and all the islands in her stream, Montana, Illinois, and Spain (like a good Hemingwavian McCarthy wrote his first novel in Paris and travelled Europe). We even meet our first McCarthyean elephants—though they are exploded by American helicopter pilots in Vietnam.
I commend McCarthy’s Stravinskian impulse for stopping at Pynchon and DeLillo (a great many trees might have been saved or put to better use by us all doing the same). And there is really no evidence that if McCarthy lived another fifty years that we would start writing autofiction. There is evidence, though, that McCarthy has been reading Evelyn Waugh. So says Alicia Western, Bobby’s little sister (who at some point rechristens herself Alice, as shall we), “If you want to actually talk to me we’re going to have to cut through at least some of the bullshit. Don’t you think? Or do you?” (emphasis mine and Waugh’s. See Vile Bodies. We know McCarthy’s been reading G.K. Chesterton—that’s just one of the dispensable names he drops throughout the books.) Characters also “lie doggo” and say things like, “Quaint, that.” Furthermore, a surname like Western is redolent of English comic novels with their satiric patronyms—though there's no comedy meant here. Keep in mind, however, that Brits don’t have to venture too far for irony, Bloody Olde being a place you will quite literally run into real live people with names like Guy Pringle, or the character name that eluded Martin Amis into reality and friendship: Will Self.
The Flaw
McCarthy has always been faithful to the American muse, and vice versa. She still pays him especial attention and, not to mislead you too far, McCarthy stands as comfortably in digital lights as he does in Appalchian homes that have never seen electricity. The bloom is yet on the six decade corpus. The sudden Britishness of these novels, however, is evidence of the otherwise beautifully crisp novel’s excusable flaw: having too many conversations with the British scientist David Krakaeur, his closest friend at the Santa Fe Institute, and the rest of the scientists gathered therein. Listening to a YouTube conversation between Krakaeur and McCarthy one sees the pretentious fingerprints of the very British-speaking American Long John/the Long One/John Sheddan, who can’t help but namedrop authors and pun just to hear himself pun. Hear Sheddan, talking about Bobby (but really describing himself):
The man’s a seducer of prelates and a suborner of the judiciary. Hes an habitual mailcandler and a practicing gelignitionary, a mathematical platonist and a molester of domestic yardfowl. Principally of the dominecker persuasion. A chickenfucker, not to put too fine a point on it. [randomly missing apostrophes McCarthys—whoops, McCarthy’s.]
Early reviews were absolutely flattened by McCarthy’s use of language.[4] “Stogged” and “nacelles” drew particular awe, like it should be odd or unprecedented for a writer to have a mastery of their own language. (This is, after all, the age of Rooney.) And while McCarthy still possesses the touch for the right archaisms, while his writing still serves as a masterclass for George Saunders on how to properly portmanteau (though some recent attempts betray the threads and stitches holding them together, i.e. “daylives”), the exotic English has now seeped from the narrative into the dialogue and thereby lost some of its unearthly luster. Later, when Long John says “bathypelagic” it is only by masterful discipline I reach for my red pen, underline the beast of unknown meaning and then have a rumble with my dictionary. (I must however note that this Long John fellow makes the most successful U-turn I’ve ever seen in literature, becoming one of the novel’s best characters. I can’t but therefore assume Krakaeur is a fine chap too—just try to imagine McCarthy keeping bad company.)
Now we’re gonna take one by the horse doctor dose. Try this by the Thalidomide Kid, a hallucination (or, you know, not a hallucination but rather an entity from the deepest layer of reality, natch) who haunts Alice:
We’re still getting one hundred leptons to the drachma which is okay in the sense that it’s not really wrong but we hope that most of this classical stuff will come out in the wash and we can get down to the renormal. You’re always going to see different shit once you get everything under the light. You just differentiate, that’s all. No shadows at this scale of course. You got these black interstices you’re looking at. We know that the continua don’t actually continue. [You too, dear reader, need not continue from here, but may skip ahead, leaving this Proustian paragraph block far, far behind.] That there ain’t no linear, Laura. However you cook it down it’s going to finally come to periodicity. Of course the light won’t subtend at this level. Wont reach from shore to shore, in a manner of speaking. So what is it that’s in the in-between that you’d like to mess with but can’t see because of the aforementioned difficulties? Dunno. What’s that you say? Not much help? How come this and how come that? I don’t know. How come sheep don’t shrink in the rain? We’re working without a net here. Where there’s no space you cant extrapolate. Where would you go? You send stuff out but you don’t know where it’s been when you get it back. All right. No need to get your knickers in a twist. You just need to knuckle down and do some by god calculating. That’s where you come in. You got stuff here that is maybe just virtual and maybe not but still the rules have got to be in it or you tell me where the fuck the rules are located? Which of course is what we’re after, Alice. The blessed be to Jesus rules. You put everything in a jar and then you name the jar and go from there a la the Godel and Church crowd and in the meantime the real stuff is hauling ass off down the road at deformable speeds with the provision that what has no mass has no volume variant or otherwise and therefore no shape and what cant flatten cant inflate and vice versa in the best commutative tradition and at this point—to borrow a term—we’re stuck. Right?
Right. Bloody brilliant, nods David Krakaeur.
But no, not bloody brilliant. This is supposed to be McCarthy’s science, mathematics novel. But all characters ever do is talk about physics, about mathematics—because that’s all McCarthy’s been doing for the last few decades, listening to people talk about and around physics. We witness a recounting of facts and unclever evasions by characters with flippers for hands who supposedly know the answers but don’t convince and, naturally, won’t budge on answers (of course, the flippered one is supposed to embody the Uncertainty Principle or perhaps the unconceived child of Bobby and Alice had they consummated, but he is far too literarily predictable and below McCarthy’s quantum precedents). There is a chapter in which Bobby Western sits at a bar and gives a replay of the historical developments of physics up to the present day of the novel. Not a delve into the implications of these developments. Just a brief, terse history. X discovered Y. But Y was missing Z. That’s where W came in. W figured out that V was really U when looked at from T. That’s how he found Z. That sorta thing.
This is fine—and actually impressively declarative writing about humanity’s most bedeviling subject—so long as we get something less Hemingwavian, more Joycean on the subject later on. We don’t.
Blood Meridian won McCarthy the respect of the physics community, particularly Murray Gell-Mann. It won him a residency at the Santa Fe Institute. It also got him too much time chatting with scientists. After Blood, after running rampant with a metaphysical command of physics, he dropped physics as an outright theme for five novels. Upon returning, he has opted for the chatter of physicists versus artistic prods into the metaphysical material of the immaterial. Not topos theory (which Alice studies) but the topography of conversations.
It takes 592 pages (yes, I counted) and a whole nother book (Stella) to get to this:
Things like the deeps of cohomology or Cantor’s discontinuum are tainted with the flavor of unguessed worlds. We can see the footprints of algebras whose entire domain is immune to commutation. Matrices whose hatchings cast a shadow upon the floor of their origins and leave there an imprint to which they no longer conform.
Talk about the flavor of unguessed worlds! Yes, combining math with imagery. This is what the novel’s dealings with physics sorely misses: creativity, literature. With an expert knowledge of physics and a well-established mastery of the English language, we want to see what McCarthy can do with his paint set, not his blackboard. Nabokov said that at certain altitudes science and art are combinable. For too much of this dyad McCarthy leaves science—or perhaps it is art itself, come to think—out in the lurch, uncombined, unmated.
Speaking of which, there’s supposed to be an incestuous theme here too by the way. A forbidden love between Bobby and Alice. But the love that dare not speak its name takes this adage a little too seriously, taking 544 pages (and yes, another book) to get this, spoken by Alice:
I thought the fact that it wasn’t acceptable wasn’t really our problem. I knew that he loved me. He was just afraid. I’d known this was coming for a long time. There was no place else for me to go. I knew that we would have to run away but I didn’t care about any of that. I kissed him in the car. We kissed twice, actually. The first time just very softly. He patted my hand as if in all innocence and turned to start the car but I put my hand on his cheek and turned him to me and we kissed again and this time there was no innocence in it at all and it took his breath. It took mine. I put my face on his shoulder and he said we can’t do this. You know we can’t do this. I wanted to say that I knew no such thing. I should have. I kissed his cheek. I had no belief in his resolution but I was wrong. We never kissed again.
In a book about incest, we could have done with more, well, incest. We needed to be scandalized much more by the sensuality of the forbidden emotion, the forbidden love, in order to be drawn through the flippered torments—we needed to be tugged into the primordial whirlwind and all the blurry collisions of particles in their transcendent superpositions that are unleashed by defying nature and angering McCarthy’s moral universe. Nabokov played these moments to perfection in Lolita, which is why it can be mentioned in the same breath as Oedipus Rex—The Passenger and Stella Maris cannot. No, in this forbiddenly hallowed realm, these sibling novels are too cold, too calculated, too devoid, and the lost Greek tragic theme of incestuous brother-sister love still awaits its novel (its minor note was sounded four-hundred years ago in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford and, in an honorary mention, by Amis in Success). Though, with the unresolved, dropped theme of The Passenger’s missing passenger, one guesses this is probably the point of the whole dyad: What is missing. What is unreachable. What is uncoupleable. Stella Maris means star of the sea—not the real star but its smeary, ungraspable, uncoupleable reflection. We could have done with a bit more of the blurs and smears that result from getting so close to such a hot, throbbing sun.
That, or we could have done with, sorry Oprah, less Alice. Not because the theme is not interesting or worthy, but because the finished Alice product does not meet the standard of the Bobby sections. The novel precedes in tidy order: Alice in italics, Bobby in Bodoni, and the Bobby sections are undoubtedly its best—the Bobby sections are rereadable. That’s because there’s a good chance these sections were written before The Road, and the Alice sections, perhaps, post-Oprah. My clue here, by no means conclusive evidence, is in the Britishness of American Alice. It is she who “lies doggo” and echos Wavian modes of speech. And since The Road, we’ve seen a Britishness seep into McCarthy’s natural usage. For instance, in The Kekule Problem, it’s all “bloody” this and “chap” that—probably the type of idiomatics one picks up havin the craic with Krakauer.
No, McCarthy should have Jefferson Bibled the novel and unStella’d the dyad—leaving us just with Bobby and his best writing (and his best writing is superb). I did.[5] There is no wincing. There is only the pure, novel pleasure of McCarthy wandering around civilization talking to modern day folk in perfect prose. The Passenger is, in its essence, a wandering novel, with a wandering Jew at its center—not so far from the Old Testament of his first clime, then.
Yes, McCarthy’s sea smells something like corpus completion. Kekulean tail-biting.
The Flame
Let us sound our opening note. Misattributing Ada, or Ardor as the bloom coming off the Nabokovian corpus, Martin Amis declared, “When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.” There is no broken glass in The Passenger or Stella Maris, no three-eyed dogs or children with webbed feet—well, besides the Thalidomide Kid. Him not withstanding, the rest of the flaws aside, the novel is more than rereadable. It is—and you may not expect me to say this—a beautiful, poignant farewell.
Like a parent, intimacies with a favorite writer have their uncomfortable moments. One can feel hemmed in, stylistically claustrophobic. Our eyes become so conditioned to their slips, so trained with the emotional expectation of them keeping their Word. If it sounds like I’ve been grumbling about McCarthy’s latest venture, well, it’s because of what is emotionally at stake for me. I used to live by a wise rule, passed down by my father and one which I will pass down to my children: don’t read living authors. Cormac McCarthy was the first writer I broke this rule with, on my father’s insistence. The continued violation of this rule has been one of the most deliberated, fruitful transgressions of my life. More often than not, breaking rules has its merits and intense pleasures.
For McCarthy, breaking his own rules has spawned the good and evil of his new, final style. It has put him out on a new-formed island, where he sits like an 89-year old debut novelist marshalling a novel confluence of muses: Hemingway, Wittgenstein, physics chatter and the definite presence of Cormac McCarthy without coming off as remotely imitative, like Willem Anker. This debut novelist is a writer of adjective novels, as opposed to the verb, plot novels of his influences. There are a few winces and vulnerabilities to the post-modernist hootenanies that can be expected of a 21st century debut, but certainly enough original thrust for take-off. Moreover, he is preposterously well-equipped to handle his task with neo-classical sleekness, muscularity and an undeniable knack for readable dialogue.
Thus, trading in guns for flippers, we get a metaphysically beautiful, elegant handling of contemporary themes such as transgenderism—perhaps better than the handlings, or lack thereof, of Alice. It is as if our debut novelist is refreshingly ignorant of the reflexive patterns of speech of the transgender debate, and in just two scenes is able to affect an homage to the blocked love affair of The Sun Also Rises and get at the nature of the feminine: “To be a woman is to be something older even than being human.” The underwater scenes are exquisite and should have been doubled, tripled (if the whole thing took place underwater we’d be talking about something on the scale of, quite possibly, this century’s Blood Meridian). Long John, as I mentioned, makes a remarkable U-turn. The chapters in the Floridal bars are fun—we even see a McCarthy character pick up (but then not follow through) a few women with real charm and true cleverness. Moreover, there is something wry, charming, youthful, moveable about the prose and the characters. They remind of Hemingway, if his prose could have stayed sober in Florida—or if he took himself a little less seriously, without losing any of the confidence. McCarthy is even on great terms with the final American theme: Europe. He arrives there, in Spain, with every window and whitecap awaiting his reflection, every road his footsteps—every final page awaiting his ink. And what a relief it is to watch Bobby nearly freeze to death in an abandoned Montanan house with hay bails as insulation, walking 10 miles to town for food when writers today can’t even make it two blocks down Houston Street without stopping for a kombucha!
Even the Thalidomide Kid has his uses. About five Thalidomide scenes in one feels the real human weight of his harassments. He’s more than just an insufferable prick: he’s a psychic torment. If every time he comes onto the page we wish he would go away and never have existed in the first place, then we can understand something of the lengths Alice goes to to actually make him go away: suicide. It is something of the David Foster Wallace approach, though, The Pale King written intentionally boring in order to emulate the nothingness of being an IRS agent. (Though one should take this track with extreme caution, for not even David Foster Wallace could finish The Pale King, a bloated enormity that was an absolutely unnecessary undertaking.)
So as the pages of The Passenger came to their winnowing, I found myself growing deeply attached. I found myself reading to a muted rhythm, an ultraviolet plea: don’t leave us. I read slower, I read to savor. I would have gone to any Florida bar with Bobby, talked about any subject, met any of his friends, gone to any state. To be in Spain for the first time, what lasting memories! There is a particularly cute moment towards the end where Bobby and I are sitting in the back of his truck and one of our legs falls asleep and so, jumping down to the ground we trip and fall into a ditch and lay there laughing to ourselves at how silly we are! I would lay there laughing still.
But alas, I finished the book and took some admittedly awed moments to hold it, leaf through its frustratingly staggered, faux-antique widthed pages (impossible to flip through quickly), read back my notes, read back my underlines, read back section blocks I bracketed. Then, as the days went by, I listened to its dark, subsonic throbs. The utterly dropped theme of the missing passenger and the ensuing conspiracy that plays so far outside the bounds of Bobby’s interest that it hardly penetrates into the novel let alone his mind began to, in a similar state of disarticulation, haunt, swell resonantly in mine. I found I was carrying the book around with me everywhere I went, not in hand but—I don’t mind being treacly—mind and heart. Between every lull in thought I found myself returning to that central symbol of the missing passenger, a symbol itself an odd creative choice—so odd a thing for McCarthy to do that it is actually hardly central: it is unconscious.
Stella Maris came in the mail and I read it with the same urgency but without the same satisfaction. Instead, the original haunting stayed, the missing passenger played below Stella Maris’s surface. Hmm, I thought. A mysteriously removed figure. The distant, unsolvable, numinous mystery that ultravioletly marionettes the plot—well, isn’t that McCarthy’s God, the prime mover who has absented himself and so reigns in the backgrounds and muted foregrounds of McCarthy’s novels, in a state of present-absence? With its supposed moral urgings (“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us…”—The Kekule Problem) why, isn’t this also McCarthy’s theory of consciousness and its relation to language? The Thalidomide Kid—is he not an entity, one of the unconscious’s quantum, constituent particles that comes to life and teases like a quark rather than gives definite answers?
I think most critics have missed the mark entirely (do we expect anything less?). This is not McCarthy’s physics novel, not his mathematics novel, not his female novel. No, it is something more central to McCarthy’s true proclivities as a writer: it is his consciousness novel. His theory of language novel. For the whole work plays upon the subtle but definite presence of the unconscious’s preferred means of communication: symbol over word.
And yet language is so damn alluring, McCarthy won’t give it up until the end.
Finis
There is another element to our troubled intimacies. No matter how much we may quip in the margins, we don’t want to see our writer go. And as they do, so too do our images of them lose their tack, slip their docked cleats, submitting themselves to looser, more numinous conceptions. The awful truth is, despite it all, we still have not completely known them. And they become once again a mystery to us.
And so even though I don’t agree with McCarthy’s theory of language—that it is inorganic, unique to humans and something of a virus that spread through man—something of his conception of the unconscious so far as it is played out symbolically in The Passenger has been sitting quite comfortably in the back of my head. Though it poses more questions than answers, it is settling organically, quietly, and, yes, languagelessly.
We are allowed to gripe with outright masters, we are not held to absolute praise for names and busts already awarded stands in the pantheon. Still, as I contemplate the fact that these may be the last new McCarthy novels I read, I can’t help but chide myself for having been potentially too harsh in my criticisms. After all, reaching the highest American altitude yet summited with Blood Meridian, holding McCarthy’s prior genius and the natural ends of its prolific lifespan against his later work is not a rational or becoming thing to do, especially when the later work is still excellent. In that spirit I could have kept quiet and deferred to my own rugged, terse praise which is well bushwhacked. But there is something about Wittgenstein that goads, there is something about old age and limits, and so under a potentially heretical inspiration I feel it is better to inverse our Prussian than live by him unadulterated, and fly below this negative: whereof one can speak, one must not remain silent. Wish me a nice tailwind.
Speculative Addendum: Would Nabokov Have Liked McCarthy?
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