on Stella Maris
Like her doctor, one Dr. Cohen, we are also hoping for answers. At the beginning of the previous book, we find Alicia hanging doll-like from a tree. The two books that follow—The Passenger and Stella Maris, some 560 pages—suggest there might be something more to say about her suicide. And say is what she does, in a lopsided Socratic mode, the superior intellect pummeling her audience with inarguable notions. Well, “her” audience. Alicia, more than any of McCarthy’s previous creations, is a kind of sock puppet, her talk a ventriloquy of his style and preoccupations. At one point, she repeats ideas from McCarthy’s 2017 essay on language almost verbatim.
What is going on here? If McCarthy had more things to prove, wouldn’t he have written further essays? In this odd and final novel, we are stuck in fiction’s waiting-room, which in this case is also a waiting-room for death. Doomed Alicia issues provocations about language, insanity, genius, mathematics. Surely many of these are McCarthy’s. But how could we tell? He has couched it all, rather unconvincingly, in fiction. Stella Maris, even more than The Passenger, is a tiresome book of ideas. And yet it constitutes a kind of thought experiment, disappointing in itself but perhaps helpful for reading McCarthy’s fiction as a whole. As Alicia herself notes, “Bob and Alice are the names of the two characters in certain questions of a narrative type in science,” personifications of A and B. Alicia’s name was Alice before she changed it. Questions of a narrative type. Fine, let’s give it a try.
Alicia, a math prodigy who has given up math, a schizophrenic who rejects the very premise of diagnosis, a suitress of the one boy she cannot love, is right to be upset. Like her brother, Bobby, who drifts through The Passenger, she is thrice-cursed: with the sheer fact of having been born, with the legacy of a father who helped make the A-bomb, and with an unrealized incestuous longing. The Western siblings cannot be unborn, the bomb cannot be un-dropped, their love cannot be consummated. The world they live in is a world of grief, both for what was and for what will never be.
This is not lost on Alicia, who describes to Cohen a dream she once had of children crying, which prompted her “to wondering why they cried all the time.” After listening to the babies at the bus stop for a while, she concluded that “The more I thought about it the clearer it became to me that what I was hearing was rage.” And furthermore: “The injustice over which they are so distraught is irremediable. And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.”
One foundational premise of McCarthy’s fiction is that the world is a brutal thing, impervious to our wishes that it bend some gentler way. That we can imagine possible worlds, by theorizing and talking and writing, is more useful than endlessly bawling, but ultimately still little help. For to soften the world with belief in God or Man is to imperil yourself, like the faithful blind man at the end of Outer Dark, tapping his way toward a swamp. Even ambivalence is risky. At the beginning of Blood Meridian, a kid finds himself in the hovel of a strange old man, who asks him, “where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he liked better?” The kid replies: “I can think of better places and better ways.” The old man retorts: “Can ye make it be?” The kid’s answer—of course—is “No.” The book that follows is a grand reverberation of this No. All the rest is grief. Things do not end well for the kid.
Things do not end well for anyone, least of all the virtuous. The antagonists of McCarthy’s books are often wicked men who insist that their wickedness is in fact the way of the world. Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden, No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, and The Counselor’s Jefe1 all justify heinous acts with orations on martialism, determinism, solipsism, chance. One dilemma for readers of McCarthy’s work is that these men are, if not correct, most compelling. They also go unmatched and unpunished. In Child of God, for instance, the serial killer and titular “child of God,” who murders seven people and defiles at least one corpse, dies not from execution but pneumonia. And Judge Holden? “He says that he will never die.”
This makes for enthralling and foreboding fictions, which gather authority from parable, epic, and myth. Events roll on in McCarthy’s famous style, polysyndetic and Pentateuchal, all the Old Testament’s teeth-gnashing without even the dangled promise of Jerusalem. With his unflinching Darwinism and his gemcutter’s lexicon, McCarthy sets about prying the scales from our eyes.
Stella Maris, however, has more spectral antagonists. In The Passenger and Stella Maris, indomitable villains are replaced by shadowy entities: some government agents, in Bobby’s case, and, in Alicia’s, a deformed dwarf of her own mind’s making, who jeers at her and does vaudeville shows. This all makes for a more atmospheric but less compelling pessimism, in which parabolizing takes on a preachiness, characters attenuate into caricature, plot into dialogue, and dialogue essentially into monologue—each thin character speaking in a univocality of authorial style. These problems, more acute in Stella Maris, also trouble The Passenger, in which Bobby plays Dr. Cohen to a number of friends and acquaintances, all of whom give long expository talks—about JFK’s assassination, the Manhattan Project, the Vietnam War. Math, time, and so on. McCarthy famously does not read contemporary novels, and it finally shows, as he attempts to reckon with the 20th Century in ways that writers like Don DeLillo and Joy Williams have done already, and better.2
Stella Maris is not McCarthy’s first such book, in which plot gives way to polemic. The Sunset Limited, published in 2006 as “A Novel in Dramatic Form,” is a play with no action, a conversation between a white professor named White and a black Christian named—you guessed it—Black. They return to Black’s apartment after Black saves White from jumping in front of a train. Rather than thanking him, White scorns the man’s beliefs, lays out his apologia for suicide, and leaves, presumably to kill himself again. (Black, doomed from the start, does an admirable job.) Alicia’s resolution about the bleakness of the world is the much the same as White’s. Compare White’s tirade—
If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I dont believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.
—with Alicia’s:
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 wasnt 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.
The challenge Alicia’s supposed insanity poses to her brother is the same faced by Black—the thought that the troubled person may not be crazy at all. In both books, the idea is that, knowing all that we know, the truly insane thing—more insane than suicide by train or self-committal to a madhouse—would be to live a normal life.
It’s a hard thing to deny, but evangelism from any corner is tiresome, particularly when your audience expects a novel (or, god forbid, a “novel in dramatic form”). The problem with disabusing people of their truths is that such conviction can harden into a sort of truth itself. White: “I dont think that this is just the way I see it. I think it’s the way it is. Are there alternate views? Of course. Will any of them stand close scrutiny? No.”
In The Sunset Limited and Stella Maris, the dilemma is less that the violent world prohibits man’s “better places and better ways” than it is that language and belief offer no consolation. The gulf between the world and our notions yields to the gulf between the world we perceive and the world we invent. One contention of Stella Maris is that these are essentially the same.
In “The Kekulé Problem,” his 2017 essay on the origin of language, McCarthy wonders why some things come to us in dreams. Particularly, why the chemist August Kekulé came upon the molecular structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake eating its tail. “Why the snake?” McCarthy asks, “That is, why is the unconscious so loathe [sic] to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.” (Alicia, sock puppet aflap, explains to Cohen: “For historical reasons it’s loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures.”)
McCarthy’s solution is a somewhat eccentric theory of the unconscious, which he defines as “a machine for operating an animal,” the biological operating system we’ve all evolved that looks after our needs. By McCarthy’s reckoning, it speaks to us in visions and dreams because of the simple fact that it preceded language by millions of years. Language, McCarthy holds, is not an evolved trait but a cultural invention. The unconscious has just not gotten used to it. Thought is not the same thing as language; the former is integral and ancient, the latter a cultural system that we are still reckoning with, whose central idea is “that one thing can be another thing.”
Alicia concurs:
someone a hundred thousand years ago sat up in his robes and said Holy Shit. Sort of. He didnt have a language yet. But what he had just understood is that one thing can be another thing. Not look like it or act upon it. Be it. Stand for it. […] What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization.
And yet she insists that “intelligence is numbers. It’s not words. Words are things we’ve made up.”
For all Alicia’s dismissal of language, for all her Platonism around music and math, we never see her do any math at all. We never see her demonstrate her genius in the thing that supposedly makes her one. Instead, her intelligence shines forth in language. She speaks in metaphors. She even hectors Cohen for misquoting Congreve, which sounds very much like something McCarthy would do. But she’s resistant to the idea that language might solve her problems or explain the merciless world. This is because language, apparently, cannot solve problems at all. Here’s McCarthy in “Kekulé”:
the actual process of thinking—in any discipline—is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.
Alicia, a little less defiant, says much the same:
A written statement—or an equation—is a sort of signpost. A waystation. It tells you where you are and gives you a new place to start from.
So language is the signposting our unconscious takes on the way to knowledge? But on the way to what? What does this knowledge look like? How could we tell one signpost from the final one? For every truth arrived at has its attendant metaphors. As Alicia lectures Cohen:
Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? […] Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting.
Here, Alicia answers her own question, likening synapses to blind knitting. How better to conceptualize them? For the road to knowledge is not a matter of shedding metaphors so much as finding better ones. Some are better suited to the world than others—Darwin’s Tree more than some medieval Chain of Being—but how would we conceive of it without language? Nietzsche’s famous dictum, that “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors” is itself a metaphor. So when Alicia details her grand vision of the universe to Cohen, it sounds less like some great truth and more like some new metaphor she’s trying out:
I saw through something like a judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me.
Something terrible.
Yes. 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.
You were how old?
Ten. I think ten.
Did you have this vision again?
No. There was nothing else to see. The keepers at the gate saw me and they gestured among themselves and then all of that went dark and I never saw it again. I called it the Archatron.
It may well be that the unconscious, like this hidden Archatron that undergirds the world, crouches deep within us, feeding us messages in dreams. But wait. Something that prefers metaphors? Difficult visions? Something that tries out versions of the same wordless dream to make some mysterious point? Take another dream Alicia has:
My mother. She was dead in the dream and she was being carried through the streets in a boat on the shoulders of a crowd. The boat was heaped with flowers and there was music. Almost like band music. Trumpets. When the cortege came around the corner I could see her face pale as a mask among the flowers. And when it came down the street past me. And then they passed on. And then I woke up.
This is a revision of another dream, not from Stella Maris but McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, where a defeated Ed Tom Bell dreams of his father going on ahead in the dark:
and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
Not the same dream but variations on the same. In “Kekulé,” McCarthy writes,
Of the known characteristics of the unconscious its persistence is among the most notable. Everyone is familiar with repetitive dreams. Here the unconscious may well be imagined to have more than one voice: He’s not getting it, is he? No. He’s pretty thick. What do you want to do? I dont know. Do you want to try using his mother? His mother is dead. What difference does that make?
Here’s another idea: the unconscious may well be imagined as an analog for the author himself. After all, such an idea is not incompatible with McCarthy’s conclusions. Maybe he passes along whatever his own unconscious is working through to his readers, like these dreams of ancestors passing onward. Maybe what seems like lazy recycling is a keeping at it, trying to get it right, hoping that we “get it.”
Take this for instance. In Child of God, the narrator describes how
Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black.
Lovely. But in The Passenger, Bobby’s friend Sheddan recalls something Bobby said,
that time might be incremental rather than linear. That the notion of the endlessly divisible in the world was attended by certain problems. While a discrete world on the other hand must raise the question as to what it is that connects it. Something to reflect upon. A bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. Whose sum is one bird.
Maybe his unconscious helped. I doubt he remembers writing it, these passages set nearly 50 years apart. But McCarthy finally figured it out. At some point the light in the barn became the very zoetrope of Time. Movement the illusion of movement. One thing some other thing. A wasp. A bird. Black and black. Bird by bird. A lifetime between them. Whose sum is—what?
Say what you will about language, but it invites elegant solutions to its own problems. Maybe the unconscious is just a metonym for the writer’s long, recursive task, writing variations of the same thing to reach some clearer meaning. It cannot breach the chasm between the brutal world and our notions of it, or make “better places and better ways.” I reckon that’s beyond our solving. But it is awfully good at maneuvering in the ensuing grief, a complex system we can tinker with in a savage world we can’t.
The unconscious, the Archatron—these are literary notions masquerading as Gnosticism and think-tank biologism. Metaphors are McCarthy’s mileposts, and better metaphors make better mileposts, along a lifelong quest for congruency between unconscious and conscious, writer and reader, word and thing. McCarthy, in his long life’s work, has done a noble job. For what can the author do but return, over and over, to some dream or description until it turns to metaphor? So that it might stand, but for a moment in the barnslats, as truth.
ben tapeworm
1 The Counselor, a screenplay adapted by Ridley Scott into an unwatchable film, along with The Sunset Limited, are more like The Passenger and Stella Maris than maybe any of his other works. It’s understandable that reviewers elected not to mention them. It’s possible (and also understandable) they simply haven’t read them. Cormac McCarthy, the guy who wrote Blood Meridian and The Road, is the giant of American letters whose Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter sold at auction for $254,500. Cormac McCarthy, the guy who wrote a screenplay full of howlers like “you have the most luscious pussy in all of Christendom”? Maybe not.
2 Williams, for her part, praised The Passenger but called Stella Maris “a performance of authorial sport and maybe necessity.” On McCarthy’s renderings of women: “He does cats better. Cats, dogs, horses.”