Cormac McCarthy’s Uncertain Journey

So. Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to his own selfordinated duties. A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix. And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was a thread that was he and he woke weeping.

— From The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy

There is a lot to discover in Cormac McCarthy’s latest novels. Enigmas and puzzles aplenty. Plot mysteries to solve or not. Allusions to catch. References to hunt down. Jokes to get; lots of jokes; funny jokes; R-rated jokes and G-rated jokes and jokes of the ratings between.

Which would all be frivolity if offered for its own sake. But The Passenger and Stella Maris present their wit and erudition as supports from which to consider the inherent burdens of the soul: to feel the shock of our existing and to weigh its mystery as we ought, with the courage of a fair scale but the expectation that it must fail under the burden.

The main characters are Bobby and Alicia Western, orphaned children of a Manhattan Project physicist who graduated to blowing up hapless South Pacific atolls with hydrogen bombs before succumbing to cancer. He has seen with his own closed eyes his own bones in his own hand, backlit by the radiation of the first atomic test blast.

Alicia and Bobby suffer from a doomed love for each other, a love of lovers, not of siblings. When she was 14 and he was home for the summer from Caltech, they started “dating.” This meant they went out and she danced while he played his mandolin with the band; their physical desire was never consummated because Bobby would not allow it to be. But each understands that neither will ever love another.

What each may love most is the other’s mind. No one else seems a true companion, largely because no one else is as smart. Alicia, a prodigy in math and music, graduated from the University of Chicago at 16. The Ph.D. program was beneath her, so instead she went to France on a fellowship under Alexander Grothendieck. She knows physics, can quote volumes of poetry and literature, is ready to expound Gödel or Wittgenstein or topology or the workings of a calutron at whatever level of sophistication the listener requires. Equations she sees in synesthetic color. Time she keeps to the second without need of a clock. An emotional virtuoso too, she is now bullying and now vulnerable, now wisecracking and now weeping, and in general someone to hypnotize you.

She has also been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The diagnosis is not apparent in her speech, which is never more than eccentric, but she receives visitations from beings or hallucinations she calls “eidolons” (originally a Greek word for an apparitional double) or “horts” (coined from “cohort,” their collective). Their boss, whom she names the “Thalidomide Kid” owing to his physical deformity, is a cantankerous stage director who puts on semi-incompetent acts to entertain her: “Edwardian dwarves dancing the Charleston in my bedroom at two o’clock in the morning,” for instance. He is also an archivist of her life and knows everything she has spoken or written. Pacing up and down and gesticulating with his flipper-hands, insouciant and unflappable and always ready with a needling sarcasm or an exotic interjection (“Christ in a crinoline”), he made me think of a vulgar Bugs Bunny. But every now and then he will lean close and whisper into her ear something like this:

Listen, Ducklescence. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. And now, good night.

Readers may rebel against passages that find Alicia or Bobby holding forth on obscurities in math or physics or philosophy. But fine print is not required to get the gist of what troubles Alicia’s thoughts. It is her anxiety of not knowing what lies at the heart of reality — the world’s, her own — and her suspicion that this is not even an unknowable answer but an unaskable question. The “whereof,” she calls it, quoting the conclusion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”).

That a moment in time is a fact, not a possibility — that the collapse of the wave function replaces a probability with a certainty — is a physical example of inquiry’s displacing what is addressed. But what Alicia seeks, knowledge of “a reality that is durable enough to support its own endless experimentation,” cannot come from physics anyway, since “whatever else physical reality may be it is finite.” The real crisis is when she realizes that “the laws of mathematics supposedly derive from the rules of logic” but “there is no argument for the rules of logic that does not presuppose them.” Logic/math is then a faith-based enterprise and, her faith lost, Alicia abandons it.

One might wonder why such realizations are troubling. Why would we expect the whole edifice of logic/math to rest on a single set of rules whose soundness we have established? What could such rules even look like — general enough to lie at the root of it all yet specific enough to select between alternatives and thereby have meaning? Were we meant to stand as if beyond thought itself and then, thinking, take thought’s measure?

But the real source of Alicia’s torment could be that she thinks she has glimpsed the “whereof” and is qualified to speak of it after all. At age ten or eleven, “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.” This she calls the “Archatron.” It presides over an inverted Platonism. Alicia considers it possible “that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection,” a possibility “Plato might have considered but could in no way bring himself to express”: that “at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium.”

The name “Archatron,” a coinage, seems important. The first syllable means primordial or original and suggests also chief; the last syllable comes from the Greek for a balance scale and can mean instrument. So Alicia thinks she has perceived something like the Primordial and Chief Measurer. But isn’t this the very thing she concluded could not be seen, the foundational rules or principles (or their personification) by which to judge all else? The Kid told her she would never know what the world was made of, but to measure something requires that we know what we are measuring so as to apply the right scale. Maybe his point was that Alicia should be terrified not by the world’s failure to disclose itself to her but by her clashing sense — a clash she cannot yet feel — that she nonetheless shares in some Archatronic knowledge of it.

Finally she kills herself.

Proximately the suicide may be due to Bobby. Most of what I have described so far comes from Stella Maris, a set of dialogues that Alicia and a psychiatrist have while Bobby lies in a coma after crashing a Formula 2 race car. Alicia does not expect him to wake up. At some point he does, and The Passenger, set ten years later but to be read first, shows his life after her death.

Bobby studied physics because in conversations with Alicia he “had seen briefly into the deep heart of number and he knew that world would be forever closed to him.” This seems almost a joke when later we learn that for Alicia math is not especially numerical: It is more about relationships between abstract structures manipulated according to directives, and she thinks the unconscious does it best. Bobby’s real issue, she understands, is that he is afraid of depths. He didn’t stick with physics, either, dropping out of his own Ph.D. program to race cars. When we finally meet him in 1982 he is working in and around New Orleans as a salvage diver and has settled into a condition of permanent mourning concealed under a laconic easygoingness.

A job looking for survivors of a shallow-water plane crash begins the upending of his accustomed life. Much is inexplicable about this crash. The pilot’s flight bag and the plane’s data recorder have been removed, although no one entered the plane before Bobby and his dive partner. The crash is not in the papers. Mysterious pairs of presumed government agents question Bobby about a missing plane passenger, but an arcane aviation regulation suggests no one was missing after all. Unidentified persons ransack his apartment. People around him start to die. The IRS freezes his bank account and takes his Maserati. He loses his cat.

Meanwhile he dines and drinks (never very much) with an amusing and occasionally reprobate motley of friends and kind-of friends, some of whom suspect him of high crimes or trade in lurid falsities about his past. (Making a minuet-and-trio trilogy by rereading The Passenger after Stella Maris has adjusted your view of Bobby will turn the first into a different book.) Unable to solve or even identify his problems, he passes the days in pointless activity and starts to isolate himself as his paranoia grows.

You might think this is building toward some revelation of who pursues Bobby and why, but not a thing gets explained, a verisimilitude of the unresolved that can seem strange as fiction yet true to life or to our dreams and nightmares of it. Things get weirder. Bobby notes that as a boy he found a crashed plane in the woods, but if you look up the plane (“a” Laird-Turner Meteor) you will find that there was only one, it never crashed, and its tail number was not what Bobby recalls. Conversations take the form of interrogations. Identical remarks or questions (“What’s a gluon?”) come from the mouths of unacquainted characters in different books, as if minds were mutually porous across space and time. Mobsters who killed JFK dine at a nearby dinner table. The Kid shows up for a chat with Bobby. So does a dead person.

I wondered more than once whether this is all a hallucination of the comatose Bobby. That seems too easy an out. But even if these events were a kind of dream, I would want to know what it meant. Because I am not sure, I have turned to some of McCarthy’s other works for clues. The following interpretation might therefore be the eccentric result of an idiosyncratic selection. I offer it as a tentative possibility regardless.

Bobby and Alicia’s surname suggests McCarthy’s western novels. The protagonist of Blood Meridian is of course also called the “kid,” and that book contains a psychopath judge whom I associated with the Archatron. But it was among the tragic cowboys of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy that I found the most interesting possibilities.

The final book of the trilogy (Cities of the Plain) contains a passage in which the neologism “archatron” also appears. There, Billy Parham, an old man and like Bobby and Alicia an orphan, meets a man who tells him of a dream he had of a man having a dream. This second, the dream-man, sleeps on an ancient sacrificial rock and in his own dream is approached by second-order dream-tribesmen and their intended sacrificial victim. They want to learn something from the dream-man asleep on the rock, but he has come to his “knowing” only “by the abandonment of every former view” and announces that he will tell them nothing. So their leader, the “archatron,” beheads him. Like Alicia’s if less obviously, this archatron seems a false measurer on behalf of the “whereof.” He has a certain theory of its ritual demands and smites heads off according to the procedures.

In the trilogy’s incomparably beautiful second volume (The Crossing), Billy as a teenager loses his family and meets an unlikely succession of teachers. One of them is a former priest who lives in a ruined church in a ghost town. He tells Billy of another man who, having suffered great loss, concludes terrible things of God but comes finally to pity the divine isolation. The man believes God has spared his life precisely so that he may curse God, and this so that God may confirm His own existence against the opposition of something else’s.

The priest attempts refutations but soon realizes that he knows nothing of God, since unlike the man cursing God he has never stood “on perilous ground” and “engaged the living thing.” To Billy the now ex-priest also explains that “rightly heard all tales are one” and that “acts have their being in the witness”: that the meaning of the world is contained in the lives of the living and the meaning of each life in the lives of them alongside. Yet it cannot be that there is only this plurality of witnesses and meanings, for then “there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it.”

The untying of this tangle is that the curser’s assumption is wrong: God needs no witness but rather provides the witness that gives the world its unity. But since God is not in turn available to be witnessed or accept mythic blood sacrifices, our worship must take the form of treating one another in such a way as to align ourselves with the intended identity of the world as a place of blessing rather than a demonium. “There is no man who is elect,” the ex-priest perorates,

because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.

Billy later meets a group of Gypsies recovering a crashed plane. (Yet another. In a complicated and semi-fraudulent way it turns out to be two planes, like Bobby’s Meteor.) Their leader describes to Billy a group of old photographs that his father once displayed on their cart. The people in these photographs were kin to one another but unknown to the boy, who realizes that “as the kinfolk in their fading stills could have no value save in another’s heart so it was with that heart also in another’s in a terrible and endless attrition and of any other value there was none. Every representation was an idol. Every likeness a heresy.” And yet “what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men’s hearts”: “The world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all the things within it.” One might think of this as Platonism made modest: The world of perception, including perception of ourselves and others, is evanescent and unreal, yet in its depths is a mode of being that, though indefinable, is real and perhaps offers a repository of value lost.

Readers sometimes debate what are the moral economy and theology of McCarthy’s novels. Are they nihilist? I don’t think so. There is too consistently some candleflame of intelligent gentleness refusing to gutter in the dark — in Bobby’s kindness to his grandmother, say, or in Billy’s inquisitive respect for every peasant-philosopher he meets. You feel these characters’ goodness and do not find it illusory or pointless; rather you want to honor them for it.

Is the world presented as the work of a malevolent higher power? I don’t think so. When Billy sits down on a remote and dark road to weep at the end of The Crossing, it is the “right and godmade sun” that finally rises “for all and without distinction.” The only “sudden and unholy day” is the one in whose radiation Bobby’s father saw his hand bones — a work not of the demiurge but of scientists and generals and politicians, and a work of destruction, not creation.

“Without distinction” because God is remote and indifferent? I don’t think so. To witness all is to be indifferent to none and perhaps to suffer with all. The ancient ritual of human sacrifice in Cities of the Plain “was then and is now an affront to God.”

What I think we are being given is a literary analogue to theodicy. That is, an artistic presentation of the tragic and the terrible within a totality that remains beautiful and worthy of affirmation in whole and in each part. No theory of everything is on offer, only philosophical wonder. And therefore we each as if deputized have a necessary part to play in making the world’s meaning good, for all and without distinction. “Every man’s death is a standing in for every other,” we read near the trilogy’s end. “And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. . . . That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?”

Bobby finds a certain peace at the end of the tale that is him. He is keeping a windmill on an island in the Spanish Mediterranean. He is trying to learn to pray. He has ordered a collection of Grothendieck’s papers and studies them by lamplight at night, understanding the problems while puzzling over “the deep core of the world as number.” You wonder what he makes of Plotinus and Origen.

The Passenger’s concluding images are most of them a parade of pessimisms. An ancient coin on the beach. “A molten bolide trundling across the firmament.” Seared and irradiated people “upon the road naked and howling.” The face of his sister, of whom he has no photograph, dying in Bobby’s memory.

But at the end, the candle: “He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him.” As if the dark were not a lack but a hiddenness in which their minds might meet at last, or at first, or however one presumes to speak of eternity.