Children of the Atom: On “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris”
Cormac McCarthy | The Passenger | Knopf | October 2022 | 400 Pages
Cormac McCarthy | Stella Maris | Knopf | December 2022 | 208 Pages
A hundred pages into Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Bobby Western sits in a church pew. He’s thinking about his father, a nuclear physicist who worked on the atomic bomb. In fact, he beheld “Trinity” with Oppenheimer et al., in goggles and gloves “like welders,” their colleague Teller “passing around suntan lotion.” Together, they watched something irrevocable being test-run, the prologue to Hiroshima, Nagasaki. McCarthy writes, pace Adorno:
In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.
An easy rejoinder: it didn’t. Or, it didn’t seem to, we don’t think—they’re still releasing poetry, right? A McCarthy character might say: it did, we just haven’t been apprised. If there’s any takeaway from McCarthy’s frustrating, thought-provoking new novels—which touch on, among other things, quantum mechanics, Amati violins, paranoid schizophrenia, Schopenhauer’s belief in the primacy of music, and why, when you photograph a thrown handful of sticks, there are more verticals than horizontals—it’s this: the list of things we can be absolutely certain of is worryingly short.
Yes: novels, plural, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The relationship is somewhat asymmetric, with The Passenger as the core experience, and Stella Maris its supplementary. The latter is entirely unattributed dialogue, as per McCarthy’s house style, and, though it could technically be read independently, its emotional weight is intertextual. The novels orbit one another like a binary star—with a certain intrinsic aloofness—at their center the star-crossed Western siblings, Robert (“Bobby”) and Alicia (née “Alice”).
Tellingly, “Bob” and “Alice” are common placeholder names in cryptographic and scientific thought experiments. Alicia changes hers, but neither seems to escape the long shadow cast by their remorseless father and his actions. Moreover, their own relationship is complicated by an unconsummated, incestuous attraction. This is not without some literary precedent: One Hundred Years of Solitude, War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, and McCarthy’s own Outer Dark. While the latter’s incest was abject, here McCarthy aims for proper, Attic pathos. Bobby recalls Alicia, aged thirteen, performing Euripides’s Medea alone in a natural quarry-cum-amphitheater:
The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. [...] He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost.
Occasionally the effect is bathos, as when Alicia candidly recapitulates a wet dream.
Befitting the novels’ independence, the Westerns never substantially occupy the same scene, with Bobby comatose in Italy in Stella Maris, and Alicia already dead when The Passenger begins. The latter’s prologue—a solemn, lapidary page of italics echoing the first pages of Outer Dark and The Orchard Keeper—establishes Alicia’s suicide as the defining disjuncture of these otherwise not-terribly-violent new novels. Everything thereafter (or, chronologically, before) is keyed by the stark image of her body hanging in the wintry forest around Stella Maris, a psychiatric institute, “her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered.”
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The simplest point of entry is the second chapter of The Passenger, our introduction to Bobby. At 37, he works as a salvage diver out of New Orleans. He studied physics at Caltech, eventually admitting intellectual defeat. Then he drove Formula 2 cars overseas until a crash left him in the aforementioned coma. Now, it seems he’s just marking time, his off-hours spent drinking in the French Quarter. Still, traces of the past persist. He has a Maserati in a storage unit, an eidetic memory, and, while he can be stone-cold glib with the best of McCarthy’s creations, he will sometimes say things like:
It wasn’t just the quantum dice that disturbed Einstein. It was the whole underlying notion. The indeterminacy of reality itself. He’d read Schopenhauer when he was young but he felt that he’d outgrown him. Now here he was back—or so some would say—in the form of inarguable physical theory.
He is, fundamentally, a loner, initially signposted by McCarthy as a noir-loner who, like Elliot Gould’s shaggy take on Philip Marlowe, comes home to an empty apartment and a cat.
Enter intrigue.
Bobby is on a routine salvage operation, diving to a plane at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The scene is understated and moody and immersive, a procession of plain, investigative sentences:
Oiler had cut away the latching mechanism and the door stood open. He was just inside the plane crouched against the bulkhead. He gestured with his head and Western pulled up in the door and Oiler shone his light down the aircraft aisle. The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation.
The submerged plane shows no signs of having “crashed,” and there’s a missing black box, a missing flight control panel, a missing body (ahem, passenger). It’s not long before a couple of suited G-men show up at Bobby’s apartment with questions. They have a cagey conversation with Bobby and we are to understand that we haven’t seen the last of them. The plot is afoot.
Well, sort of. The Passenger is reminiscent of Don DeLillo’s more talk-y, recursively plotted books, like The Names or Ratner’s Star. The ostensible who-dunnit (or what-even-was-actually-dun-and-why) plot of Bobby’s narrative serves mostly as an armature for the staging of dialogs with the French Quarter’s characters. A standout is John Sheddan (“Long John,” “The Long One”), a rakish grifter who addresses Western as “Squire” and pays for meals with appropriated credit cards. He’s verbose, dissolute, circling the drain with a theatrical self-consciousness:
Again, I’ve encountered no greater mystery in life than myself. In a just society I’d be warehoused somewhere. But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.
Elsewhere, his buddy Oiler tells of blowing up elephants in Vietnam. The well-realized Debussy Fields describes her mother's reaction to her returning home as a trans woman. Some of these encounters seem germane to the book’s project, others, to quote T.S. Eliot, like vacant shuttles weaving the wind.
Bobby’s meandering narrative is regularly broken up by italicized flashback chapters focusing on Alicia, beginning when she’s young and proceeding elliptically. She’s exceptional in a way that makes Bobby look like Joe Sixpack: preternaturally beautiful, a graduate of UChicago at sixteen, something of an authority on certain makes of violin, and embattled on the frontiers of mathematical topology. She’s also severely troubled, her psychosis having, she believes, given her glimpses of a fundamental malevolence prefiguring all things. In Stella Maris, she tells her psychologist about her peek at age twelve through the “judas hole,” what she saw and realized:
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.
Around puberty, Alicia began seeing things, institutional diagnosis eventually compassing her as “paranoid schizophrenic with a longstanding etiology of visual and auditory hallucinations.” Her primary hallucination is the Thalidomide Kid: three foot two, “odd looking,” with flippers for arms. He presents as a vaudevillian ringmaster, an intercessor who occasionally proffers other characters to perform for her…enjoyment? Distraction? Edification? Alicia isn’t sure. Initially, these episodes seem full of potential. McCarthy is obviously having fun with choreographic descriptions (“The Kid did a little buck and wing and another long slide across the linoleum and stopped and began to pace again”), and the magical realist vibes promise levity and alterity in the novel’s otherwise grounded and fairly serious context.
Unfortunately, it’s not long before The Kid’s persona—quick-talking, blasphemous, F-bomb dropping—loses its luster. Early on, when Alicia accuses The Kid of just spewing gobbledygook, he responds:
Yeah? Well just remember whose hand is on the nandgate Ducky. Because it aint the cradlerocker and it aint the dude in the runic tunic. If you get my drift. Hold it. I got a call. He rummaged in his pockets and produced an enormous phone and lapped it to his small and gnarly ear. Make it quick, Dick. We’re in conference. Yeah. A semihostile. Right. Base Two. We’re on fucking oxygen up here. No. No. Tough titty. Two wrongs dont make a riot. They’re a pack of dimpled fuckwits and you can tell them I said so. Call me back.
While The Kid’s declarations aren’t always this caffeinated, neither does McCarthy really deliver on the thematic and philosophical promise of this invention. Excepting a few poignant scenes (after Alicia undergoes electroshock therapy, he appears with a soot-black face, hair singed and cloak smoking), The Kid rarely rises above his default mode: relentless snark.
At its best, the brusque, pragmatic prose McCarthy has increasingly assumed since All the Pretty Horses hums like a luxury car in low gear:
He could feel the hull of the boat upriver to him by the change in the current. Like a shadow in the moving water. He put up his hands before him. An acoustic feedback. What he touched was the edge of the rudder. He ran his hand over the rough steel plate and knelt and followed it down into the sand.
Though, at times, the prose tends towards the flat style of The Road. Absent the post-apocalyptic eschatology of that novel and compounded by the occasional sense that narrative wheels are spinning in the mud, the result is, bluntly, boring:
There was a bed in one of the downstairs rooms and he pulled the mattress off and dragged it into the kitchen and he set an old Eagle oil lamp on the linoleum floor and filled it with kerosene from a can of it he’d found in the mudroom and he lit the lamp and set the glass chimney back.
The major episode of this “survivalist” prose comes when the suits finally tighten the thumbscrews (again, sort of). The IRS puts a lien on Bobby’s bank account, the Maserati gets impounded, and Bobby flees west on a bleak odyssey, holing up in farmhouses and beach huts. It’s not long before he’s down a few waist sizes, wandering beaches naked. Later, hermit-bearded, trundling a child’s cart from the nearest town back to his latest squat, he catches sight of himself in a shop front and emits an empty chuckle.
Perhaps worth noting: while McCarthy’s Blood Meridian days of thunderous, occasionally too-much-of-a-muchness prose are long gone, there is a short dream sequence in The Passenger featuring the words “crucible,” “autoclave,” “penetralium,” “heresiarch,” and “calyx,” that ends with something emerging from a “hellish marinade,” which is pretty metal, but also unintentionally suggests barbecue.
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In 2017 Cormac McCarthy published his first and only piece of nonfiction, an essay in the scientific magazine Nautilus entitled “The Kekulé Problem.” One product of the many years he’s spent now as a fellow at the Sante Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, the essay chews on the relationship between the unconscious and language, compassing linguistics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy. Noteworthy in and of itself, it’s found a second life here in Stella Maris, where concepts and anecdotes have been lifted wholesale and emerge unchanged from Alicia’s mouth.
August Kekulé was a German chemist credited with discovering the ring structure of benzene molecules. His eureka moment, purportedly, was a dream he had of a snake coiled in a hoop, tail in mouth—Ouroboros. McCarthy’s essay’s titular problem then is this: if the unconscious “understands” language such that Kekulé’s was apprised of his struggling inquiry, why, when it came time to address him, did it employ mythopoetic metaphor and not words?
His conclusion, broadly, is that the unconscious is simply recalcitrant towards language, a non-biological system only a few thousand years old. McCarthy frames this as a Kekulé moment of his own, something he realized while consolidating bedroom/kitchen wastebaskets:
The answer of course is simple once you know it. The unconscious is just not used to giving verbal instructions and is not happy doing so. Habits of two million years duration are hard to break.
In light of its “insistence,” its habit of repeating dreams and experimenting with a variety of potentially edifying images, McCarthy concludes that the unconscious does operate, however obtusely, under “a sort of moral compulsion to educate us.”
This sounds almost teleological. Of course, properly religious terminology does appear in McCarthy’s works: “mendicant” is a favorite word, an early description of a main character in Outer Dark is as a “witless paraclete,” and the tenor of chunks of Blood Meridian is decidedly Old Testament-y. But when McCarthy deploys this vocabulary, it is to a beleaguered, world-historically ironic effect: the light illuminating these words is late-received, as from a dead star. And yet, I’ve always felt like some governing intelligence suffuses McCarthy’s worlds—they’re too well written to come off as pointless exercises in nihilism.
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The term “Hobbesian” has been used by critics to describe McCarthy’s early work. Theirs are worlds where the distinction between civility and that inchoate “state of nature” has absconded, leaving things, in general, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Those qualifiers fit Outer Dark and Child of God, McCarthy’s second and third novels, works of capital-L literature concerned with pathetic—sometimes irredeemably so—characters: the benighted, incestuous Holmes siblings, and the aberrant social pariah Lester Ballard, respectively.
What’s curious and beguiling about this period of McCarthy’s oeuvre is how his prose—at turns baroque and exquisitely reserved, often very beautiful—is employed to, effectively, describe moral vacuums. For instance, in Outer Dark, Culla Holmes, having abandoned his baby born of incest in the woods, is careering dementedly (McCarthy’s verbiage, of course) through the woods—finally, nightmarishly, crashing back into the glade where he deposited the child:
And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare.
While at first blush this is all Faulknerian knots and polysyllables, its complexity is at once meaningful and efficient: the baby bird metaphor suggests a realization of his moral impotence lancing Culla’s withered conscience; the odd interruptive grammar of “[...] and outrageous from […]” mirrors the literal interruption of the sudden lightning; and “shapeless white plasm,” while not exactly free indirect discourse (i.e., the phrasing of his consciousness, appropriated by the narrator), still reinforces his sense of alienation from his own child. Even “from dark to dark” echoes verbatim one of the novel’s first lines, when Culla’s sister shakes him awake from an apocalyptic nightmare into the quiet night environs. Despite the seeming nihilism of the scene, of its universe generally, the prose is pushing back, asserting at least an aesthetic order to things. The effect compounds. In Child of God too, the prose defies the ostensibly Godless, meaningless environs, every thoughtful, meaning-ed description “laboring under a moral compulsion to educate” its benighted subjects, themselves necessarily ignorant of their graceful circumscription. This intelligence lingers its gaze on Lester Ballard, several beyond-deplorable deeds under his belt, and observes with clarion calm:
There is a spring on the side of the mountain that runs from solid stone. Kneeling in the snow among the fairy tracks of birds and deermice Ballard leaned his face to the green water and drank and studied his dishing visage in the pool. He halfway put his hand to the water as if he would touch the face that watched there but then he rose and wiped his mouth and went on through the woods.
And so, for all that McCarthy has toned down the transgression and focused on somewhat more likable—or, at least, less reprehensible—characters since his mid-career success with All the Pretty Horses, his later works’ more austere style has the effect of making their worlds colder and more univocally bleak than even the absurdly pitch-black Outer Dark. Stella Maris—entirely dialogue, without even an occasional physical description—is the logical terminus of McCarthy’s denatured late-style. If you relish the respite McCarthy’s descriptions and environments give from what comes out of his characters’ mouths—and the sometimes ironic juxtaposition of what characters say or do and the way the narrator describes them—this work might not resonate as much; there’s no buffer between the reader and characters saying things like:
Because I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.
Alicia is convinced the world is an amoral—that is, patently evil—one, and Stella Maris’s spare, indifferent presentation neither privileges nor denies her perspective. What the novel succeeds at is breathing life into Alicia, who, in The Passenger, has an italicized, Pre-Raphaelite insubstantiality. Moreover, it turned out to be something of a palate-cleanser, enriching my sense of the novels’ shared world, and inclining me to overlook The Passenger’s back-half slog.
Still, for all that McCarthy’s been mulling over the concept of the unconscious these past however many years, his latest works have a perhaps too conscious quality, his dialogs occasionally sounding a little like McCarthy with a sock puppet on either hand.
Put another way: if McCarthy’s early works often achieve the inescapable, phantasmagoric quality of nightmares, The Passenger and Stella Maris, at their worst, assume the ho-hum, daylit tonality of a dream explained post-hoc and at not inconsiderable length—calyxes and all.
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To be clear, these novels are not without horror. It’s that its vesture is not grisly or macabre, but the plain apparel of stark historical data: “There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated.” Likewise, one of the more surreal tableaux is Alicia’s literal description of the nine warehouses at Tennessee Eastman Chemical Co., where 1,152 women, each monitoring a calutron, kept a beam current maximized toward most efficiently separating the natural U-238 uranium from U-235, enriched uranium. (The first time they turn on the magnet, their hairpins zing across the room in legion.) There are no larger-than-life agents of malevolence or gnomically phrased chaos—instead, just atomic facts like this: “The U-235 for the Little Boy bomb that leveled Hiroshima was carried to Santa Fe on the train a few pounds at a time in a briefcase carried by an army officer in a business suit.”
I was reminded of another work of art, a collection of photos called 11:02 Nagasaki. In 1960 the photographer Shomei Tomatsu was commissioned by the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs to create a photographic document of the Nagasaki bombing’s effects. The resulting photos are stark, profoundly metonymic: defaced statuary, a beer bottle surrealistically malformed. The most powerful are of people, Tomatsu having been introduced to “hibakusha,” a designation which historically meant “person affected by a bomb.” A woman in a kimono regards the lens circumspectly, her cheek marked with a latticework of keloid scarification. More difficult: a person in lurid, low-angle chiaroscuro, the eyes black holes of shadow, the ear a gnarled aperture, the skin having become a kind of withered, stretched mask. The collection’s thesis is contained in a single photo, Time Stopped at 11:02, 1945, Nagasaki: a pocket watch, dirtied but legible, sits like police evidence on a neutral surface. Tomatsu claimed two temporalities for the event: the moment of detonation, and the duration of suffering thereafter.
Time also stopped in McCarthy’s last novel, The Road. At 1:17, with no clarifying date, at which point there was a “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” An understated account of doomsday, much like the book itself, with its pitch-black cover and simple white font for one of fiction’s simplest titles. The general sense: this book speaks for itself. Here, McCarthy’s bleakness finds, in thermonuclear end times, a limit case where it actually seems apropos of a specific circumstance, both tonally and formally (this is also true of Blood Meridian). When The Road came out—sixteen years ago!—its cultural footprint was that of the Very Important Book. A Pulitzer prize, induction into Oprah’s book club. Post-apocalyptic ideation sells, and perhaps more than any other fiction of this kind, The Road genuinely feels like a kind of thought experiment: What do you really have when it seems like you have nothing? In his 2006 review, James Wood observed the post-9/11 resurgence of the genre, the way that the systemic, environmental collapse these novels imagine “holds and horrifies the contemporary imagination.” Given the genre’s staying power since, it seems post-apocalyptic fiction also provides a curious catharsis to the fearful. The worst is confirmed, yes, but there is a quiet, thanatic yearning at the genre’s core: Surely there will be some psychic release when the clocks just go ahead and stop for good?
Well, as the Thalidomide Kid, jabbering receptacle of puns, malapropisms, and paper-thin gags, might say: don’t call me Shirley. The Passenger and Stella Maris are about the world we actually live in, where bad things happen but only some clocks stop. They are messy and frustrating, the fractured chronology coming off as both interesting and ineffective. Neither book feels—arguably by design—complete unto itself. At the same time, they’re a potent reminder that we still live in the long, dark shadow of the twentieth century—the bargains made therein, the general Faustian demeanor accepted as a national character—and that a certain kind of serious, Modernist fiction still has a place and resonates. Put simply, they’re about indifference— a trait, in William James’s inimitable formulation, to make the very angels weep. As Alicia says of her father’s cohort:
I think most of the scientists didn’t give much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they’d never had so much fun in their life.