Joy Williams, a writer I like and sometimes admire, recently wrote about Cormac McCarthy's two new novels for Harpers. The piece is a kind of fan fawning and self-validation - a great writer noticing another great writer. Also, the two have things in common: Christianity, namely, or the possible impossibility of it. McCarthy's voided and bleak worldview is Williams' main portal through which we should be enjoying him. That and that language is an imperfect conveyor of reality - stuff we know.
This isn't a review of McCarthy's The Passenger - it's my thoughts about the book; I'm not going to quote (or maybe I'll go back and add some later); I'm not going to do a plot breakdown. Bobby and Alicia are brother and sister - they are in love, or were in love. This is, obviously, a forbidden love. There are echoes of Shakespeare, namely Hamlet and probably Romeo and Juliet. There are echoes of McCarthy's other books. I've never enjoyed a book and felt more distant from it than this one; I appreciate McCarthy as a stylist, but my worldview - really, the reality I experience - is no longer lined up with his. I view the novel as a novel of the western canon, affirming that canon. I see Shakespeare, Hemingway, Melville, etc, here. There are allusions to quantum physics, some general relativity, and lots of god-play. It is the most Western Canon Novel I've read in a long time. Compared to most other contemporary novels, it's much more interesting, much more enjoyable to read - it sort of screams Capital L Literature and yet is completely readable. And yet. I'm a tough read, and, often disappointed by contemporary novels, I was looking forward to this one. It was one of the oddest reading experiences I've had: let me try to break down why I think so below.
I haven't read Stella Maris yet because I wanted to let The Passenger sit in my mind - or, as McCarthy might have it - in my unconscious. The book read quickly. Being in McCarthy's world is like being in a bad dream, but one that's fun to be in. You're being chased, but you don't know by whom! Just like Bobby Western is being chased by some ambiguous "they," the government, the FBI, the IRS, so too the reader is being chased by an awful nightmarish vision of reality. Like Joseph K in The Trial, Bobby has been arrested, though he's never captured, caught - he's on the lam. It's a bit of McCarthy fun to sort of wander, very, very barely paranoiacally, through New Orleans, eating at places that sound really nice to eat at. I kept finding myself hungry when I was reading about lobster or linguine with clams (white sauce, I'm assuming). There are lots of conversations, purportedly deep ones. McCarthy is at his best when he's describing scenes, which means, things, objects, physicalities (like Oiler telling about the atrocities he witnessed and participated in in Vietnam (blowing up an elephant, for instance) or people wandering and lost and dying in the aftermath of one of the atomic bombs, thinking the world had ended). The best cheeseburger a character ever ate is conjured - sounded great. It's the prose style, of course, that keeps one reading: just how McCarthy renders the physical world is wonderful, a complete delight. But, let's be honest: he's not a great explainer of ideas. In fact, for a novel packed with ideas, this novel didn't feel like it really grappled with many of those ideas, which I found odd - the ideas were just sort of there, like the vague "they" that track Bobby, somewhere out there, but not really tangible. Likewise, inner states are not McCarthy's thing. Or, better put, the mind isn't really his thing - this is strange for a writer so enamored and interested in the unconscious. It's really hard to see Bobby. He feels a bit like a blank slate, until you sort of realize the hellish reality he's in is his inner life. Symbolic of it at least. But if that's the case, then all I know of Bobby, really, is that he's atmospherically moody, sad, possibly apocalyptic. It just felt vague, by which I mean, Bobby did. Psychology, as Williams rightly points out in her essay, is beside the point, which make the sister sections of the book feel a little silly. This is madness? The sister talking to a mutated dwarf? It reads like if Goofy tried to explain the cosmos to you, which is to say: something I'd like to watch, but not easy to pull off. The sections don't work as being anything other than interesting wordplay - a little like reading literary theory. Thanks for the game, now I have to make a cup of tea. I mean, I get it: the kid is Alicia's unconscious protecting her - however insanely - from some deeper, more horrific understanding of reality. I just didn't buy it, though I enjoyed reading it. I often felt McCarthy was doing an impression of Shakespeare - which is to say, at least he's going for it. Yet. Where is the life and mind we're all living now? How does this novel relate? Does it need to? Probably not? Sheddan was immediately a Falstaff - so now we've got echoes of the Henry plays. There's a way in which the novel felt like McCarthy going: look, the Western Canon, and I, an author of important things. That sounds mean, but there's a bit of that in the book.
After I let the book sit, it sort of sank, like Bobby into the deep, diving on some salvage mission, only to come up with, well, not much: the world is a howling void and will return to howling voidness. That's fine. Shall we be in terror the rest of our lives? Even the folks on Naked and Afraid - hungry and gaunt - eventually get a fish. Really though, those paintings by our elders in caves, the ones of horses and creatures to kill and eat, that was nice, wasn't it? I mean, we're here.
McCarthy is interested in big ideas in the book. Capital M mathematics, but I don't see much evidence of any sort of math except simple addition. Nor is it clear how Alicia's math skills have led her to some larger understanding of the world, but they have. She sounds like a genius, I guess, but then I've never been very interested in geniuses. McCarthy is. Quantum Mechanics is there - the world wasn't there until there was someone to observe it. The book makes reference to primal eyeballs - the awareness necessary. But when those eyeballs weren't there, was there anything? Stuff was moving, one character tells us. So, here we are. There are some basic physical principles that freshmen get in Intro to Physics. The unconscious is conjured to a strange degree - Alicia's seemingly-protective hallucinations and Bobby's bad dreams (weird and anciently, spiritually "scary," though I was never scared). The people have it hard in the book, living rough lives, almost all of them, like Bobby, seemingly on the lam, and yet I kept wondering what McCarthy's office at the Santa Fe Institute was like. Probably a nice chair there. I bet he gets emails. Hard, hard lives. Pie is eaten fairly frequently in this hellscape or purgatory.
So, where did the book leave me? It feels like a book that could only be made by a person enamored with Christianity and the afterlife, being mad at an absent god. Grief-stricken about the unfairness of all that - at times I felt it whiny, but we all have our complaints. It's true that humans are destructive and stupid, violent and cruel, have desires we can't reconcile, and that nature is seemingly indifferent (is it?), and it's equally true that it's not necessary to layer meaning onto such a reality. In other words: McCarthy's novel seems to be saying: cruelty and human confusion is bad. And confusing. Also tragic. And in the same breath that the book says cruelty and confusion bad, it then says: but if nothing means anything then it's not bad, it's just nightmarish. The problem here is that that meaninglessness is a great layering of meaning onto reality. The very thing that McCarthy purports to understand - that even mathematics is just a description of reality, never reality itself; that language can only direct at best, distort at worst - is what he's failing to embody as a writer. He's not describing reality, in other words; he's describing how Cormac McCarthy views things.
In rendering the world either an empty, desolate place, or one that could possibly belong to the nightmare of some terrible god, McCarthy is adding a layer of meaning atop the world. He is mad about god, that there is no good one. He's mad that there's a void, grumpy about it, irritated. Bobby is sad about his sister, misses her terribly, is losing her, her memory, sick in love as they say, and sister is existentially sad about the void - or the deep demon - she's seen into due to, uh, math. The problem, as other critics have noted, is not that neither of them come off as real people, it's that their ideas feel, well, dated: for someone as supposedly up on math and science as McCarthy is, reading nightmarishness onto, or into, reality feels not just odd, but incorrect: as most any natural science will tell you, the world is an interconnected reality; the cosmos itself forming itself from itself. Violence is just what it is - a simple fact, and also, a way that energy changes form - but for McCarthy, this cruelty (the cruelty of just being here when we didn't ask, of being in this human form when we didn't want to be, and have no idea why we're here or where we're going) is evidence of a horrible, terrible reality, cooked up by some demon or cruel god. Whereas from a scientific point of view, and from a Buddhist point of view, it's just life doing what it does.
My own view (which is a view) gets us into all kinds of slippery places regarding climate change and apocalypse, which McCarthy is concerned about (the bomb is referenced, it's world-ending-ness always there - Bobby and Alicia's dad worked on the Manhattan Project, so), and so let me try to clear some of that up: speciation loss is sad, tragic, but it's only sad and tragic from a certain point of view, namely, ours. It's deeply, heartrendingly sad that we don't know how to better take care of living beings. Maybe we'll learn. Maybe we won't, and it's too late. Either way, the dinosaurs went away, and so might we - the universe doesn't particularly care. But it's not indifferent either - it can't be indifferent since we are it. And we (at least some of us) are not indifferent, and yet we live in an inescapable system of harm - dismantling that system is nearly impossible. But it will eventually be dismantled, of its own accord - we can only hope that life goes on. Like Gary Snyder, I suspect it will, though changed, and perhaps non-human. In any case, this, of course, is where McCarthy's ideas - and Joy Williams ideas - feel dated: the characters - the mythic Adam and Eve in this book, as well as the other characters - are passengers seemingly upon the world, upon reality. Like McCarthy's layering of meaninglessness and possible demiurgery - the people in The Passenger are not of the world. They are passengers upon it, lost in this nightmare or purgatory. In other words, weirdly, the vestiges of a Christian worldview make it so that McCarthy's characters are separated from reality itself. They are in reality, but they are not of it, they are alien to it, and like central characters of other writers (see Moshfegh, Lacey, and Ferrante) wish to escape it, disappear from it, or to have never been born in the first place. It makes for a good, if bleak, read.
There's a part in the book, toward the end, where Bobby protects some tired birds on their migratory journey. It's a lovely moment. "That none disturb these passengers." A little moment of light. Of love. It works nicely against the backdrop of what feels like evil. In its smallness, the moment is grandiose.
I've loved Cormac McCarthy's books, but they no longer speak a language I understand. If we are the sentient part of that universe, then caring is in us, and when it's in us, it's in - not in, is - the world, is reality itself. This is really what McCarthy's books fail to see, and what most Christian theology struggles with. Books dedicated to the external, to notions of god and evil and souls, essences, are bound to be bound - the rules are strict and manmade. Some souls are good, some bad - god knows all. Be wary of evil - incest. What if something else is true: there is no metaphysical reality that confers either meaning or feeling (ie, love) onto the world. No god or demon beneath the physical world pulling the strings. No, as Alicia suggests, demonium at the core of reality. No meaning and no meaninglessness. Not atheism and not theism nor deism. There is just the world - just as-it-isness. This as-it-isness is all that there is. Nothing more is required. That you are here is it. And that it is here is you.
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