Holding Hands in the Penumbra
on The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
Your gut may be telling you that the name Cormac McCarthy and the phrase joie de vivre should keep little company. Spotting any glimmer of joy in McCarthy’s oeuvre demands the reader to search “with one eye squinted” through pages splattered with the stuff that makes your stomach churn: bloodshed and gore galore, genocide, environmental catastrophe, sociopathic necrophilia, post-apocalyptic cannibalism, star-crossed incest, and every dark shadow imaginable that’s cast from the problem of evil. Indeed, McCarthy’s letters seem to rage under the aegis of what Pope Saint John Paul II warned in Evangelium Vitae to be a “culture of death.” Death glitters mythically in the baroque and bloody prose of McCarthy’s famous “legion of horribles” passage near the end of Chapter IV of his masterpiece Blood Meridian, where our visceral response to the “fevered dream” of ecstatic violence must be uttered with the sergeant: “Oh my god.” Death swings low, and death swings lofty. Consider (Professor) White’s final words in The Sunset Limited during his exodus of the apartment of Black, an evangelical Christian ex-convict who rescued White from attempted suicide:
Oh yes. Indeed I do. I know what is out there and I know who is out there. I rush to nuzzle his bony cheek. No doubt hell be surprised to find himself so cherished. And as I cling to his neck I will whisper in that dry and ancient ear: Here I am. Here I am. Now open the door...I’m sorry. You’re a kind man, but I have to go. I’ve heard you out and you’ve heard me and theres no more to say. Your God must have once stood in a dawn of infinite possibility and this is what he’s made of it. You say I want God’s love. I dont. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there is no one to ask it of. And there is no going back. No setting things right. Perhaps once. Not now. Now there is only the hope of nothingness. I cling to that hope. Now open the door. Please (140-141).
“Joy of living” might be a stretch.
Charles McCarthy (as an adult he would change his name to Cormac, a childhood nickname) was born on July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island. His family later moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where McCarthy attended Catholic schools and even served as an altar boy at his parish. Something of a polymath with wide-ranging interests and hobbies, McCarthy grew up to study physics and engineering at the University of Tennessee before dropping out in 1953 to join the Air Force. It was during his time stationed in Alaska that he dove into copious reading. Upon his return, he began writing. What followed was a literary career that would span nearly sixty years.
Though McCarthy insisted that writing was “way, way down at the bottom of the list” of interests, critics lauded him as the greatest living American novelist. Harold Bloom, who endured multiple failed attempts to get through the disturbing violence of the novel, praised Blood Meridian as “the major aesthetic achievement of any living American writer.” “Books are made out of books,” McCarthy once said in a Times profile. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” Thus, McCarthy drew his writing upon Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, and Herman Melville, who, like him, were most concerned to “deal with matters of life and death” in all their primality and profundity.
Preoccupation with such matters of life and death and the mysteries at the heart of nature led him in his later years to take up a residency at The Santa Fe Institute. From here, his musings on the nature of consciousness and the limitation of language as expressed in his 2017 scholarly piece “The Kekulé Problem” echo in his final works The Passenger and Stella Maris, published as sibling novels just eight months before his death in July 2023.
Goodness appears in strange places within the diptych of The Passenger and Stella Maris. So, tolle legge these treasures by McCarthy—if you think you could stomach him, that is. Herself having been accused of being a “hillbilly nihilist,” Flannery O’Connor recalled frustrations of being misunderstood: “Some old lady said that my book left a bad taste in her mouth. I wrote back to her and said, ‘You weren’t supposed to eat it.’” So, if you find yourself to be of the “some old lady” persuasion, maybe McCarthy isn’t who you want to introduce to your Bible Study pals to. Be warned: where there’s McCarthy, there’s blood. In a 1992 profiler in The New York Times, McCarthy states: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is really a dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.” Of course I have my reservations about simply labeling McCarthy as a contemporary nihilist of “morbid realism,” as he’s described in this same profiler. More than a contemporary nihilist, McCarthy is a contemporary mystery man. Mysteries are not solved. They are deepened.
That being said, let’s dive into The Passenger and Stella Maris. Of course “joy of living” might be a stretch here too. In fact, The Passenger literally opens with the scene of a suicide. McCarthy’s haunting overture is worth a close-read:
It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history by considered. That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures. The hunter knelt and stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him and took off his gloves and let them fall and folded his hands one upon the other. He thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing. He bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. He knelt there for a long time. When he opened his eyes he saw a small shape half buried in the snow and he leaned and dusted away the snow and picked up a gold chain that held a steel key, a whitegold ring. He slipped them into the pocket of his huntingcoat. He’d heard the wind in the night. The wind’s work. A trashcan clattering over the bricks behind his house. The snow blowing out there in the forest in the dark. He looked up into those cold enameled eyes glinting blue in the weak winter light. She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she’d be found. Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day (3).
For a man so suspicious of language, McCarthy certainly has a command of vocabulary and sifts out the mot juste for just about everything (have you ever even heard of the word “stogged” before reading this?). His prose is incantatory with a “lingering scent of divinity,” as his character Black from The Sunset Limited would put it. And Jessica Hooten Wilson observes, “The simple declarative sentences, polysyndetons, and parataxis made McCarthy’s prose sound biblical. The stark simplicity of his style carries the weight of revelation.” (The Lamp 39). Those of us who pray the Litany of Loreto recognize the Marian titles “Tower of Ivory” and “House of Gold,” rays of morning light which bring something strange and sacred into this “scrupulous desolation.” What traces are there of how “the Word became flesh” on this “barely spoken” Christmas day? We are left shivering and silent and Christ-haunted.
Forgive the spoiler, though there isn’t much to spoil in terms of plot. As James Wood puts it in his review of these novels for The New Yorker, “McCarthy, for the first time in his career, has set out to write fiction about ‘ideas’—about the nature of math and matter.” Ideas, not action. The blurb on the book jacket of The Passenger is the most attention McCarthy would want you to focus on in terms of plot, though even that might be generous:
PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suite and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seat, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, an inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.
Sure, it looks like a mystery novel—but not the sort of whodunnit mystery novel we’re used to. It’s a mystery novel in the sense that it’s about mystery. It’s about deepening.
The Passenger and its proto-sequel, Stella Maris, follow Bobby and Alicia Western, both haunted by their father’s participation in developing the atomic bomb, a “fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people.” In addition to the sins of the father, the Westerns are conflicted with another Faulknerian taboo: Bobby and Alicia are in love with each other. What follows is a sort of Greek tragedy chorusing ideas of grief and nature and the cruel and unusual cosmos.
Both Western children are gifted geniuses. Under the tutelage of Alexander Grothendieck, Alicia studies mathematics at the University of Chicago where she graduates at age sixteen and continues into the doctoral program. Alicia’s mind has journeyed as far into mathematical thought as any human can dare to imagine. But her mind is also diseased. McCarthy lets on in the opening page of Stella Maris that Alicia “has been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with a longstanding aetiology of visual and auditory hallucinations”(3). The novel’s title, Stella Maris, refers to the non-denominational facility where Alicia admits herself for the third time. This novel contains no plot or exposition, but rather is a transcript of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, spanning subjects of mathematics, quantum mechanics, music theory, obscure philosophy, and, of course, disturbing fantasies of incest. Alicia also converses with Dr. Cohen about the realer-than-real hallucinatory figures who visit her in the guise of vaudevillian entertainers. The slippery ringleader of these cohorts, or “horts,” is the dwarfish, ectromelic “Thalidomide Kid” (“The Kid,” for short) who belittles Alicia and sputters out solipsisms and malapropisms. Each chapter of The Passenger begins with an italicized passage depicting Alicia’s interactions with these hallucinations in Alicia’s mind, which oscillates between the sublime beauty and order of mathematics and a theatre of the absurd. One such exchange between Alicia and The Kid, with Alicia speaking first:
How did you get here?
We came on the bus.
You came on the bus.
Yeah.
You didnt come on the bus...Could they see you?
The other passengers?
Yes.
Who knows? Jesus. Probably some could and some couldnt. Some could but wouldnt. Where’s this going?
Well what kind of passenger can see you?
How did we get stuck on this passenger thing? (54-55)
Mystery not solved. Only deepened. The Kid continues with a speech that could be something out of Robert Penn Warren’s work:
The question is always going to be the same question. We’re talking infinite degrees of freedom here so you can always rotate it and make it look different but it aint different. It’s the same. It’s going to keep coming up like a bad lunch...When you carry a child in your arms it will turn its head to see where it’s going. Not sure why. It’s going there anywyay. You just need to grab your best hold, that’s all. You think there’s these rules about who gets to ride the bus and who gets to be here and who gets to be there. How did you get here? Well, she just rode in on her lunarcycle. I see you looking for tracks in the carpet but if we can be here at all we can leave tracks. Or not. The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every wordline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death (56).
The question is always going to be the same question. And you have not answered the question.
Meanwhile, Bobby is a Caltech physics Ph.D. dropout who pursues a career as a Formula 2 car driver in Europe, though his career is cut short after a crash leaves him in a temporary coma. It is during Bobby’s coma that Alicia dies by suicide. When he regains consciousness, Bobby grieves that he could not save his sister, and he becomes a salvage diver based around New Orleans. Bobby’s story in The Passenger begins about a decade after Alicia’s death.
So, read this story for its capacity to force you to peer into the abyss of myth, history, nature’s secret hiding places, and all the darkness McCarthy has distilled throughout his literary career. But I also urge you to read this story for its food, its fellowship, its friendship. After all, another major player of The Passenger is the table. This is not the first time McCarthy has made mealtime the locus of where his characters are most themselves and most human, exposing primality in a way we don’t normally expect from this author. In fact, one of the most touching scenes of The Sunset Limited is when Black pauses his zealous apologetics and fixes White dinner (it doesn’t hurt that Black learned how to cook in Louisiana). Being fed at the table, White comments on the soul food Black has prepared: “It looks good,” “This is good,” “This is very good,” “It’s very good,” all strange echoes of the sort of repetition we find in the Book of Genesis (98-99). Such feasting keeps pace in The Passenger. Much of the novel takes place in 1980’s New Orleans where Western drifts through the streets of our beloved port city and encounters oddballs at bars and restaurants such as Old Absinthe House and the ain’t-dere-no-more Seven Seas, the classic Café Du Monde, and old-school fine-dining establishments like Galatoire’s and Arnuad’s.
“People forget that this town is a port. Overrun with tourists as it is,” comments Western’s longtime acquaintance John Sheddan, a quixotic drug dealer based on McCarthy’s real-life friend of the same name (136). Indeed this port city of ours embodied both/and, where the veil between the natural and the supernatural hangs thin. And on the certain people New Orleans draws in, we can remember the words of James Joyce, “here comes everybody.” Sheddan observes with a certain gut-busting disgust that could come from John Kennedy Toole’s misanthropic Ignatius J. Reilly: “I’ve seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy” (136). Sheddan’s description of New Orleans’s “oddities of every stripe” comes after he recounts having seen “sitting at the bar in illfitting clothes what [he feels fairly certain] to have been a hairy-eared dwarf lemur from the Madagascar highlands. Tethered to a stool alongside a seaman and drinking beer from a bowl” (136). We who frequent the streets of New Orleans are strange passengers from strange places, pilgrims on this side of the veil as lofty and bawdy as the ones Geoffrey Chaucer depicts in The Canterbury Tales. Best be explained as hallucinations, and maybe hallucinations like the ones wandering through Alicia’s mind: realer-than-real.
And Sheddan himself is not exempt from being part of that number of “oddities of every stripe.” He is one of the many peculiar passengers drawn to Western. As expected from McCarthy, even the lowliest of these characters are unexpectedly learned, especially more sophisticated than you would believe to encounter in the Big Easy (for instance, Sheddan references the writings of Asclepius while drinking at The Napoleon House) (27). Like Job’s friends, Western’s friends are eager to offer him consolation in response to his suffering, often between musings of philosophy, quantum mechanics, theology, conspiracy theories, and the secret nature of the cosmos. Dining at Arnaud's, Sheddan speaks these words to Western:
I think you’ve some idea. I know that you think we’re very different, me and thee. My father was a country storekeeper and yours a fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people. But our common history transcends much. I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, dont we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the word is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave you heart. Ah, the waiter (137).
These are words worth the linger. His thoughts glide upon a sublime arc that dives deliciously into the bathos of “Ah, the waiter.” Matters of myth, history, and life and death plunge back into the everyday. We see Sheddan at his most Sheddan and McCarthy at his most McCarthy.
But unlike Job’s friends, Western’s are not “miserable consolers” pointing accusatory fingers at their suffering co-passenger (Job 16:2). In Book VIII of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that “without friends, no one would chooseto live” and we therefore must strive for the virtue of friendship, which demands “bearing goodwill and wishing well to each other.” Of Aristotle’s three types of friendship (friendship for pleasure, friendship for utility, and friendship for the good), Western’s prove to be friendships for the good. This is the type of friendship rooted most in genuine, virtuous love. Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches us in the Summa Theologiae that to love is to will the good of the other as other. And perhaps this speaks to Black’s shortcoming in The Sunset Limited where he zealously seeks to win the good of White instead of will the good. But Western’s friends non-competitively want the best for him and love him as other simply because he loves them as other.
This friendship for the good is witnessed especially in Western’s accompaniment with Debussy Fields, his transgender friend who finds comfort in the writings of Pascal while in recovery from alcoholism. Debussy recounts:
I had trouble with the God thing. A lot of people do. And then I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I was lying there and I thought: If there is no higher power then I’m it...About a year after this I woke up again and it was like I had heard this voice in my sleep and I could still hear the echo of it and it said: If something did not love you you would not be here. And I said okay. That’s it. Plain enough. Maybe it doesnt sound like much. But it was to me (69-70).
So amid all of McCarthy’s accounts of bloodshed, cannibalism, necrophilia, and stark darkness in his oeuvre gleams this pearl of wisdom: being here depends on being loved. And as one of my philosophy professors once observed, “I depend, therefore I am.” Leaving lunch at Galatoire’s where these friends have discussed matters of femininity, recovery, and theology, Debussy speaks first in this exchange:
All the time I’ve known you, I’ve never once asked myself what it is that you want.
From you?
From me. Yes. That’s very unusual for me. Thank you.
He watched her until she was lost among the tourists. Men and women alike turning to look after her. He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Dont close your eyes (71).
As blinding as the abyss may be, “dont close your eyes” to meeting people where they’re at in these strange places of grief, of recovery, of revelation. As he is dying from Hepatitis C, Sheddan likewise praises Western’s reverence for the other as other in this letter:
Several acquaintances have remarked upon my sangfroid at this turn of events but in all truth I cant see what the fuss is about. Wherever you debark was the train’s destination all along. I’ve studied much and learned little. I think that at the least one might reasonably wish for a friendly face. Someone at your bedside who does not wish you in hell. More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place. Enough. I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife—and I pray most fervently that there is not—I can only hope that they wont sing. Be of good cheer, Squire. This was the ongoing adjuration of the early Christians and in this at least they were right. You know that I’ve always thought your history unnecessarily embittered. Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice. Thank you for your friendship. In twenty years I dont recall a word of criticism and for this alone deep blessings be upon you. If we should meet again I hope there will be something in the way of a wateringhole where I can stand you a round. Perhaps show you about the place. Look for a tall and somewhat raffish looking chap in a tailored robe.
Always
John (347-348).
“Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.” Okay. That’s it. Misery is a choice, and so is virtue. So is loneliness. So is friendship. So is journeying to strange places where God’s goodness appears—because often it appears in the strangeness of suffering. Pope Saint John Paul II says in his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris that “Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering by which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.” And that’s the thing: share it. Share it with others not as a means of externalizing our anguish, but rather as a means of understanding the self and in turn understanding the other, for “the more he shares in this love, man rediscovers himself more and more fully in suffering: he rediscovers the ‘soul’ which he thought he had ‘lost’ because of suffering.”
So in answering the question—The question is always going to be the same question—“to be or not to be?”, perhaps taking arms against a sea of troubles means taking the hand of someone else in friendship. Part of the genius of The Passenger and Stella Maris is McCarthy’s presentation of the reality that--as personal as suffering is--we are not meant to suffer alone. Even Alicia understands this in her love-hate comfort in the cohorts who keep her company, and in her checking herself back into Stella Maris so she could visit “fellow loonies” who have become her friends. On the final page of Stella Maris, Alicia has this exchange with Dr. Cohen. Dr. Cohen speaks first:
I think our time is up.
I know. Hold my hand.
Hold your hand?
Yes. I want you to.
All right. Why?
Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something (190).
Being here depends on being loved, and how mysterious is this impulse to hold hands in the penumbra, in this thinly-veiled space between the matters of life and death that McCarthy devoted so much of his work to.
So go ahead and read The Passenger and Stella Maris, but don’t read it alone. Grab a friend and grab the Oxford English Dictionary for words like “stogged” and “glissade.” Make a pilgrimage to the bars and restaurants Western visits, and have good conversations about these characters’ good conversations. Hold hands in the penumbra. Dont close your eyes, and be of good cheer.
Rachel Moore studied English at The Catholic University of America and received her masters in pastoral leadership at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. She is a Society Artist of The St. Louis IX Art Society.
