Riding Shotgun to the End of the World
The following review is part of RealClear Books and Culture's symposium on Cormac McCarthy's 'The Passenger.'
“Man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality.”
-W.B. Yeats
After Cormac McCarthy’s death last week, we can see the contours of his novel, The Passenger, a bit more clearly. Upon first reading it, it felt like a last book, which it indeed turned out to be: a suitable swan song for one of the last authentic greats in American literature. It is a novel of “things in their farewell,” permeated by the sense of an ending. We feel the main character, Bobby, gradually taking leave of his world, retrospectively making sense of his life and his doom-eager century. Now, we know that it was also McCarthy’s farewell, a pitch-perfect finale bringing a lifetime’s work to its conclusion.
In writing about The Passenger, the reviewer is bound to scratch the surface, perhaps merely nick it. One is struck by its intimidating scope. The Passenger manages to wrangle together intellectualized barroom gregariousness, an incest plotline in the Byronic mode, the initial beats of a political or corporate thriller, lush physical description, vaudevillian hallucination, apocalyptic and prophetic tones, the history of modern physics, a culinary tour of classic New Orleans restaurants, and a bit else besides. It somehow hangs together. But how?
Set in 1980, The Passenger tells the stories of Alicia and Bobby Western, two siblings trapped in a state of (apparently unconsummated) incestuous yearning. Before the action of the novel commences, Alicia kills herself after a stay in a Wisconsin mental health facility, while Bobby nearly dies in a Formula Two racing accident. Recovering, he becomes a salvage diver and hangs out with a range of Southern eccentrics in New Orleans. In flashbacks, Alicia is revealed to have been a math genius teetering on the edge, haunted by hallucinations such as The Thalidomide Kid. The Kid is a dwarf with flippers for hands and a penchant for surreal vaudeville-like productions that tease Alicia (and the reader) with the sense of something meaningful that never quite comes clear. As if suicidal tendencies, precarious genius, and forbidden passion weren’t burdensome enough, the siblings bear the weight of history, being the offspring of a Manhattan Project scientist.
Bobby is haunted both by his father’s fatal legacy and by his sister’s suicide, and the book charts his attempt to reach some sort of reckoning or at the very least keep himself together. Simultaneously, he is hunted by the Feds after salvaging a downed private plane full of corpses. Bobby discovers that one passenger seems to be missing from the flight log, which puts Bobby’s life at risk for reasons that are never revealed. This aspect of the plot mainly functions to get him out and moving, talking to old friends, roaming from Idaho to Spain, as the Feds hover behind him, making his cat vanish, freezing his assets and bank account, and possibly stalking him while he is alone on an oil rig.
If this sounds convoluted, it doesn’t come off that way. The plot is a tertiary matter. Like McCarthy’s earlier novel, Suttree, the book is a beautiful ramble, taking an oddly meditative and leisurely ride, as Bobby journeys into the past, talking to friends like Debussy Fields, a transsexual lounge singer, and John Sheddan, a courtly drug dealer who speaks with entertaining and incongruously Shakespearean eloquence. The book is really about Bobby’s own understanding, of himself and of the world, as it develops in the course of his wanderings. Other reviewers have found Bobby to be a taciturn tough guy, but the richness of his character is externalized by McCarthy’s powerful descriptions of the world through which Bobby moves. Far from being inscrutable, he is the sensitive center of perception in this story.
A quick note should be made about The Passenger’s companion volume, Stella Maris, an extended dialogue between Alicia and her therapist, contemplating science, math, incest, and suicide. I think it’s best to consider Stella Maris as an appendix to The Passenger, rather than a meaningful epilogue. It adds background rather than summing anything up or providing any key to exegesis. The dark themes of The Passenger are mitigated by the humor and charm of Bobby’s various interlocutors, whereas Stella Maris is rather bleak straight through. In McCarthy’s earlier play, The Sunset Limited, a Christian and a nihilist face off in a verbal duel. There is tension and stakes. Stella Maris lacks any such dramatic push-and-pull. It is consistently bent towards death, as Alicia unravels her inner torment, her incestuous longings, and her frustration at her inability to intellectually penetrate to the nature of things. Her psychiatrist, David Cohen, is no match for her intellect and puts up no resistance whatsoever as she gradually reveals the facts about her peculiar form of madness and her suicidal desires. She is a much colder and more alien personality (though interesting) than the colorful and varied characters in The Passenger. This is not to criticize McCarthy’s representation of the character but to situate it properly. Alicia is meant to be uncomfortably alien, a stranger on this earth, and reviewers complaining that she is not a relatable young woman are missing the point.
With synopsis out of the way, we can consider what The Passenger actually means. Curiously, McCarthy was a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, a major center for scientific research founded by his friend, the late Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. McCarthy had a rep as a science fan, an admirer of the great physicists of the 20th Century. But you only need to watch his recent interview with his friend, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, to notice that something else is going on. In the interview, McCarthy mostly humors Krauss, appearing to agree with him on various points. Krauss is an uncritical enthusiast of scientific progress, who seems to take a certain pleasure in the prospect of science eventually overcoming and replacing all other forms of human endeavor. After Krauss says that, although he’s “a huge a fan of Shakespeare […], it’s hard to think that it competes ultimately with the edifice of the Standard Model of particle physics,” McCarthy responds, somewhat cryptically, “I think Spengler is right, we’re going to have science after everything else is gone.”
He coyly avoids expanding on the full implications of this, but his apocalyptic meaning is clear for those who read his work. Despite McCarthy’s evident scientific erudition and the respect and friendship he has for scientists, The Passenger argues that the Western World is seeking its own annihilation through rationalist hubris: “the forces of history which had ushered [Bobby’s] troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.”
On a personal level, an excess of rationality drives Alicia to suicide, in addition to leading her to toy with the possibility of incest, a transgression fenced by no clear moral barrier for her. On a wider global level, the same passion for unbridled thought, the Faustian drive, leads to the possibility of total nuclear annihilation. This is the very catastrophe Alicia and Bobby’s father helped to make an abiding possibility. The drive to organize, analyze, categorize, and control hounds Bobby in the form of the federal agents who pursue him, the representatives of the national security state made inevitable by the invention of the bomb. The passenger of the title remains a mystery, never named or known, who escapes the net of categorization, who vanishes. Maybe the passenger is Bobby himself. After all, he starts out as a helpless passenger, riding shotgun in Western Man’s own hellbent quest for total knowledge and total destruction. By the time the book ends, he is in a different place.
McCarthy had long seen the scientized push for power and control as the enemy of mankind, and one of his greatest fictional creations, the Judge from Blood Meridian, forcefully voices this Satanic drive for total rational domination of the earth: “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of every last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” He concludes, “The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.”
This project of total control is unstoppable, and in The Passenger, it is clearly evidenced by the Feds who pursue Bobby and the Manhattan Project that effectively sponsored his birth. At one point, Bobby hires a private investigator to help him figure out why the Feds are pursuing him. Keeping in mind that this is set in 1980, the private investigator offers some prescient thoughts about the future of the U.S.: “There wont be any actual money. Just transactions. And every transaction will be a matter of record. Forever. […] What the government hasnt figured on yet is that this scheme will be followed by the advent of private currencies. And shutting these down will mean the rescinding of certain parts of the Constitution.” This character is presented as paranoid, but with the ironic caveat that much of this has already come true. The acceleration won’t stop, the cat won’t get back in the bag.
The book offers no hope about solving this state of affairs, which has contributed to the impression that it is a particularly bleak read. However, its conclusions are not authentically nihilistic. Christianity (or faith of some form) is presented as a live option, particularly by Bobby’s friend Debussy. Additionally, Alicia’s hallucinations, like the Thalidomide Kid, are apparently trying to urge her away from the path of purely critical rationalism. They are products of the unconscious, which McCarthy views as a source of visions and images that have an ultimately moral intent, nudging us toward the good life in an albeit confusing manner. It seems too that the name and appearance of the Thalidomide Kid are meant to warn us away from the products of unchecked scientific rationality, since they refer to the birth defects caused by thalidomide when it was first made available as an over-the-counter anti-anxiety and morning sickness drug in Europe in the 1950s.
Bobby denies being an atheist and eventually finds himself “trying to learn how to pray” in isolation, while lighting candles in Spanish churches, seeking refuge from the same forces that, in one sense, killed his sister, and, in another, threaten to annihilate the world. Admittedly, McCarthy offers no hope for the world, no hope for civilization. But faint flickerings of personal hope remain, however obscure. Bobby muses in his notebook: “Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.”
The longing for mercy is essential to The Passenger – mercy for oneself, for others, for the sins of the world, for the entire corrupted process of history. It is there at the end and present at the beginning, when, on the first page, a hunter discovers Alicia’s frozen body hanging in the woods. McCarthy writes:
“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 attitudes ask that their history be considered.”
Confronted with this sight, the hunter “bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. He knelt there for a long time.”
The words “Tower of Ivory” and “House of Gold” are invocations of the Virgin Mary from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, and Alicia’s corpse’s pose resembles an “ecumenical statue” of the Holy Mother. This disturbing and provocative image is clearly a challenge to the reader. We are forced to see the sorrows of the world made manifest, embodied in a single figure. Yet that figure simultaneously evokes for us the embodiment of mercy and makes its necessity, its indispensability, plain. After many travails and apocalyptic forebodings, it hits us: Cormac McCarthy believed in love.
Sam Buntz is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Praxis Society Journal, Athwart, and The Critic, and his books “The Great American Cougar Hunt” and “The God of Smoke and Mirrors” are available on Amazon. You can find him on Twitter at @SamBuntz.
Titus Techera's contribution to the symposium: The Rugged Individualism of Cormac McCarthy | RealClearBooks
Justin Lee's contribution to the symposium: A Conversation with the Thalidomide Kid | RealClearBooks
