Cormac McCarthy's God
the writer's last work is his most religious, sort of
Cormac McCarthy died yesterday. While there’s always the vulturine hope that his estate may one day bring out some unpublished works and papers — Tolkien remarkably continued publishing for 50 years after his death — by all accounts The Passenger and Stella Maris, two novels he released as companion works in 2022, are his last. They are also far and away his weirdest, and the most preoccupied with questions about the basic nature of reality. They trade Faulknerian country for intense and prolonged discussions of physics and mathematics, obviously influenced by McCarthy’s decadelong trusteeship at the multidisciplinary-but-chiefly-science-inflected Santa Fe Institute.
McCarthy’s treatment of religious and existential themes shift throughout his corpus of work. The Sunset Limited is McCarthy’s most sustained treatment of religion, and takes the form of a debate over (mostly) the existence of God and the question of meaning in life between a Christian ex-convict and an atheist professor. The atheist wins the argument and so kills himself, thus sort of undermining the rightness or at least the utility of his beliefs (“If the rule that you followed brought you to this…”). Outer Dark, his second novel, is nihilistic and faintly absurdist, but Blood Meridian — his most infamously dark book — is a work of occulted Gnosticism, offering hints of some transcendental reality beyond the lapsarian world. The Road tempers its depressive bleakness with a faintly optimistic humanism that shines through most clearly at the end.
Stella Maris, by contrast, frontloads mathematic mysticism. Math appears not as abstract equations that merely describe some aspect of nature but as ontological realities in themselves. On this point McCarthy, or Alicia, is emphatic: “Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not.” Math may have its own will, possibly malevolent — the whole system, Alicia states, is “led by a group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionably circuitry of its creators brain not unlike the rebellion which MIlton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God and man alike.” Alicia is being flippant here — she is always flippant, it is one of her only defenses against an existence which to her is largely agonizing — but she is not joking, not really.
As an aside, it is very difficult to read and write about McCarthy for any length of time without being tempted to slip into mimicry of his prose style. I can feel it happening.
Both books go out of the way to directly challenge the reader’s expectations of what a McCarthy novel is. When The Passenger starts with a mysteriously downed plane, a missing person, and a shadowy organization or organizations whose pursuit sends the main character — Alicia’s brother and almost lover — on the run, it looks like familiar territory. A man in love with his sister and haunted by fate is Outer Dark. Long hunts at the margins of the underworld are No Country for Old Men. But this plot peters out, goes nowhere; none of its questions are resolved, and by the midpoint of the book they barely matter. In lieu of odysseys in Appalachia or violence the desert West there are long discussions of how the mass of the W-boson in giga-electronvolts, or quantum chromodynamics, or how the ballistic physics of the Kennedy assassination strongly suggest a second shooter. The world of the novel makes no sense, refuses to cohere, and mysteries of plot dovetail with mysteries of mathematics, physics, and history to render a universe incomprehensible even in theory. Bobby’s life, like everyone else’s, is ruled by forces wholly beyond understanding, whether these take the form of the unknown agency hunting him or the physics of the car crash that put him in a coma and prompted his sister’s suicide before the novel’s opening.
And Stella Maris, formally speaking, is barely a novel at all. It consists entirely of dialogue between Alicia and a psychiatrist at the mental hospital she’s checked herself into. The title of the book is the name of the institution, but it’s also an old name for the Virgin Mary. Alicia herself — virginal, singular, visited by entities who really seem to be angelic emissaries of some sort, very possibly from a god above the Gnostic shaper of this world — invites comparisons to the Blessed Mother, and when she hangs herself from a tree on Christmas day her colors are blue and red, Mary’s colors.
The Road was released in 2006, The Passenger and Stella Maris a month apart in 2022. In between them McCarthy’s only publicly released work was the screenplay for a remarkably bad film and “The Kekulé Problem,” an essay on the origin of language for the smallish magazine The Nautilus. The piece is short — seven pages, with room for illustrations and splash quotes — and concerned with the question of why the unconscious speaks to us not in language but in strange and alluisve dream images. The Kekulé of the title is the discoverer of benzene’s molecular structure. He had labored at the problem for some time before falling asleep and dreaming of an ouroboros; when he awoke he knew that benzene was a ring. McCarthy’s conclusion is that the unconscious evolved long before language appeared, and it doesn’t like or trust it.
But the essay is far more interesting for its brief asides than for its central point. Above I said that language “appeared,” because this is how McCarthy envisions it. It did not evolve, or does not seem to have evolved, and its incarnation in humanity has a weird and metaphysical air to it. “Language,” he suggests, “acted very much like a parasitic invasion” of the human brain. It appeared only once, in “the ur-language of linguistic origin out of which all languages have evolved,” and spread instantly to the whole human race irrespective of distance. It did not develop — “[t]here is no language whose form is in a state of development.” It has little if anything to do with the signalling calls of birds or chimps, because these lack “the central idea of language — that one thing can be another thing.” McCarthy does not speak more about the origins or nature of this inexplicable, almost supernatural visitation of language, though I wish he had.
“There are a number of examples of signaling in the animal world that might be taken for a proto-language…But what is missing here is the central idea of language—that one thing can be another thing. It is the idea that Helen Keller suddenly understood at the well. That the sign for water was not simply what you did to get a glass of water. It was the glass of water. It was in fact the water in the glass. This in the play The Miracle Worker. Not a dry eye in the house.”
Stella Maris builds heavily on “The Kekulé Problem,” at times lifting passages from it almost verbatim. In that essay, McCarthy abandoned language as a tool of thought (“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”). Here he abandons it as a vessel of higher knowledge at all: mathematics existed “[f]or a million years before the first word was ever said. If you want an IQ of over a hundred and fifty you’d better be good with numbers.” The mystical hints in “Kekulé” are developed and made explicit. Math opens up other planes of reality; topos theory brings those who study it to “the edge of another universe,” the transcendental nature of transcendental numbers takes on a religious or at least a spiritual dimension, and music joins language as a problematic given that exists beyond us and possibly reality itself. The supernatural is admitted, sort of, as the Wittgensteinian “whereof one cannot speak” — that which is unknown and unknowable to us due to the simple fact that our sensory systems and sensory processing systems evolved for the sole purpose of ensuring our survival and are not calibrated for detecting or analyzing anything that does not strictly bear on Darwinian matters.
In both books Alicia is haunted by the appearance of strange and comical figures, who if they have any purpose at all seem to be chiefly trying to stop her killing herself. Most reviewers seem comfortable accepting these figures as hallucinations, but the novels themselves are ambiguous on this point. Certainly Alicia is. And when, near the end of The Passenger, Bobby has a visit from the same beings his sister used to see, we should be more inclined to take seriously their stated hints that they are emissaries from somewhere else. On this point McCarthy gets metatextual: Alicia at one point experiences a mystic vision of “keepers at the gate,” who seem something like Gnostic archons, and of “the archatron” beyond them who rules over, and may be responsible for the creation of, this material universe (since, as Alicia asks, “if you were a wholly spiritual being why would you dabble in the material at all?”). The archatron is curiously not unique to Stella Maris but appears also in Cities of the Plain, in a dream within a dream, where it is the leader in a ritual of bloody human sacrifice. Its name and attributes strongly suggest the Gnostic demiurge, misguided creator of matter, which the horror writer Brian Hodge somewhere called “a schizophrenic combination of god and demon.”
Though in form and content the two companion novels are a radical departure from the rest of McCarthy’s body of work, in many ways they’re a culmination of the whole project. The themes and questions he raised in his previous books recur with force, but with less of the nihilism that animated (say) No Country for Old Men. The universe is still a bleak and hostile place — in one of Stella Maris’ most memorable lines, “the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.” But it is also more mysterious, more charged with mysticism, than before. It is also, very definitely, very Gnostic.