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Stella Maris book review: The Hard Goodbye
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- Опубліковано 20 січ 2023
- My review of Cormac McCarthy's fleeting novel Stella Maris, the coda/companion piece to The Passenger, and also likely the last book he'll ever write. 😭
![Дон ДОН, Алаудинов и СБЕЖАВШИЕ из под Курска ахматовцы 😁 [Пародия]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dEfCf5IK26Q/mqdefault.jpg)
By the way, I’ve reread this and listened to it six times. Oddly it’s comforting, because I understand her thinking and frustrations, though I’m not solipsistic. It is one of books to listen to while I fall asleep.
This is definitely something that lends itself to a great degree of rereading, for sure. :)
I came to these new books only about a month after I discovered Blood Meridian-and was blown away by it. I don’t know if McCarthy’s other books follow the Blood Meridian pattern, but because of Blood Meridian I came to The Passenger and Stella Maris on high alert for cleverly hidden clues to DEVASTATING REALIZATIONS to come. I was ready to interpret characters partly as allegories. I was also looking for a momentous climax of some kind in the book’s last few pages, like in Blood Meridian.
Right now I judge the new books POSITIVELY: they tried something original and ambitious and arguably succeeded. But I can see a rational reader taking a NEGATIVE PERSPECTIVE, which might be summarized something like this: “McCarthy is just vomiting up his pet philosophical musings through the mouth of a genius character in his story; the genius character is not realistic; the love story is not compelling.” I’ll mention one other specific concrete flaw in the books below, but now let me turn to my positive interpretation of the story.
The story can be said to be “about” multiple things, but let me start with the suggestion that The Passenger is about schizophrenia, or more broadly: ways we try to attribute meaning to the events of our lives. We are reminded in the text that there is a genetic component to schizophrenia. The sister is diagnosed with some kind of (atypical) schizophrenia. Meanwhile the brother discusses various paranoid theories with people he knows. To quote Nirvana, “just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” When The Kid comes to visit the brother, I saw that as a dramatic confirmation that the brother has a milder case of whatever the sister has. No magical (or quantum physical) explanations are required, since he has heard her describe The Kid in detail.
Two possible, hypothetical routes to some kind of salvation for the brother or sister appear in the story. One is their LOVE. In other works of literature, love is often presented as the purpose or meaning of life; and we are told that love conquers all. The brother and sister represent a deep and pure tragic love like that between Romeo and Juliet. The other potential path to salvation in the books is MATH, PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY-some kind of intellectual or transcendental insight or mode of being that might “make it all worthwhile.” As I read I was looking for some way the two (love and math-physics) could be married to create some kind of consummation of their love, or redemption and peace, or something.
So now the story is not just about schizophrenia, and I would say it’s not really about math, or the atomic bomb, or the Kennedy assassination either. It’s about whether there is a way to interpret life that is not…nihilistic or absurd or tragic. At least for these characters.
We start with the puzzle of the missing passenger in the submerged plane. We realize that is not where we are going to get answers. These characters are also past looking for ultimate answers from organized religion. So we (they) are left with love, or modern physics and math.
Over the course of the story we are presented with various dreams and hallucinations that might be clues to some transcendental reality in which the lovers are able to fulfill Alicia Western’s impossible dream of having a child with her brother. We have Miss Vivian, the older woman obsessed with the screaming of babies-could she be some kind of future-past Alicia? We have the possibility that the pair did have sex but lied about it or repressed the memory. Maybe there was even an abortion, and the Kid is an image of that and mechanism for “not thinking about that.” We have some characteristically McCarthian passages describing dark creatures emerging from strange primordial demonic soups. Most dramatically to me, we have the moment where the Kid brings a trunk and inside the trunk is a doll and the trunk is labeled Property of Western Union but the Kid reads it as “PROGENY OF WESTERN UNION.”
Given that the siblings are named Western, “Progeny of Western Union” was like a slap in the face. On the next page Alicia is crying and saying she’s sorry to the doll. I thought that had to be a baby. The only thing that didn’t fit is that she said “I was only six years old.” What could that mean, I thought.
Maybe the answer is in the unread letter in The Passenger. Nope. (Spoiler answer: she was six years old; the doll was just a doll. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”)
I was also carefully noting the allusions to physics and math. The main way I could see modern physics contributing to actualizing their love would be through the phenomenon of ENTANGLEMENT, whereby distant parts of a quantum system can be in instantaneous interaction no matter how far apart. Interestingly, this central concept in quantum physics was not really discussed explicitly but only hinted at for example when Alicia says she’d like to discuss BELL’S THEOREM in Stella Maris. In Stella Maris we also get references to the possibility of loops in time, and the possibility that “simulation” will be the real “afterlife.”
Will the final pages reveal that they had sex and a baby? Or that their love created a quantum baby “made purely of light” that needed to be protected in some platonic realm? Or that Bobby’s life was just a simulation his brain created in a coma? Or that they are their own parents and that somehow that’s why Bobby or Alicia or maybe their mom is the missing passenger in the plane? (That last one isn’t even coherent, I don’t think.)
No. We get a bit more about sex-talk and dreams between them, but no consummation nor any baby. I don’t think we get any far-out modern physics interpretation such as Philip K Dick might have written. No, the “boring” interpretation of the story works just fine: they had a forbidden love, they were miserable, and they died lonely and apart. They were preoccupied with things that could never solve the real problem: we’re all dead in the end.
None of the potential “reveals” I could imagine as a reader would really solve the existential problem the characters face. But if the book did end with a reveal like that, that would give us as readers a sort of satisfaction that the characters can’t access-and neither can we in real life.
So if there is an articulable point to the story, it might be a sort of warning to us newfangled atheistic types who get intoxicated by the apparent profundities of math and physics-that although they might appear to give us alternatives to traditional religion for making sense of the world, and making it appear benign or intelligent (as in the line in Stella Maris where she says the issue is whether the universe might be intelligent)-we might trick ourselves into thinking science offers an alternative optimistic worldview-but no. This book is a smack in the face to wake us out of our smug scientist-minded worldview.
So ultimately, we pass THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS LIKE ALICE AND LEWIS CARROLL, BUT END UP BACK IN THIS BLEAK WORLD WITH SCHOPENHAUER. In Schopenhauer’s view the universe does have a mind, but it’s not conscious except in us and other animals. The mind of the universe is a blind will to exist that leads to different parts of the universe eating each other not realizing they are eating themselves. So everything lives according to urges we don’t understand, suffers more or less, and disappears with no lasting trace.
Aside from the many funny parts in The Passenger (perhaps unexpected in such a dark story), the faint happy notes in the story result from human connections, such as the holding of hands at the end of Stella Maris. One other point I have not seen mentioned by others is THE RED SASH that Alicia’s body is wearing at the start of The Passenger. In Stella Maris she says she wants to be completely erased from existence and not found, but in the Passenger we are told explicitly that she wore a red sash “so that she’d be found.” So maybe she had developed her relationship with Dr. Cohen enough that she wanted to reestablish a connection with the rest of humanity-if only after her death.
In summary: the worst spoiler for this story is: there are no spoilers. What appear to be spoilers are decoys. There are no spoilers because there are no satisfying answers that can be revealed, to the problems faced by the characters-or us.
Final note regarding an apparent flaw: the author uses “dubious” multiple times when he appears to mean “doubtful.” This is not so minor because the characters are supposed to be hyper-intelligent and hyper-educated, and they make a habit of correcting others’ pronunciation and grammar. So it broke the spell for me (to some extent) when it turned out they don’t know the difference between DUBIOUS and DOUBTFUL.
Having read them both, I can't shake the feeling that McCarthy is performing a misdirection, a kind of magacian's trick: the misdirection is believing that THE PASSENGER is the real story and STELLA MARIS is the codec, the companion. But my feeling the reverse: STELLA MARIS is what McCarthy truly wanted to write, it is everything, his whole consciousness, distilled, and THE PASSENGER was simply his justification for it, his justification to his publisher for this strange, and sad, Socratic dia-logos of his very soul.
Interesting theory. I definitely agree that these 2 books are probably the most "him" that he's ever written. But he still put a heck of a lot into The Passenger, so I'm not sure it's really a throwaway just to get to this.
@@TH3F4LC0Nx Oh certainly not throwaway; McCarthy is a genius, he writes nothing without reason. I only mean to suggest, by way of analogy, if the PASSENGER is the body of the work, STELLA MARIS is the secret soul, the true *essence* for lack of a better word. But just a theory, the vibe I got after finishing it.
And that last line, when when Alicia asks Cohen to hold her hand and Cohen asks why, she says: "Because that's what you do when you're waiting for the end."
The last published line of a 90 year old man. Kills me. So beautiful.
@@aray4031 I know, right?! That last line hit so hard! It was like a sad final wink at the camera. 😭
Great discussion. So glad you love these two books and it really is a bittersweet ending to Cormac's writing career.
Yep, if I'm correct in assuming that these are his last books, then he went out like a G. 😁
We are told in the book that "tron" means measurement device or standard, like a ruler. You reminded us that "Arch" means the chief. So we get ARCHATRON, the Cosmic Measurement Device, the Ultimate Perceiver, the Eye of God, which as you point out might be the Eye of the Demiurge aka the Eye of Sauron! Or it might not be conscious at all, but merely a "mechanical" instrument--after all it is described as shrouded in darkness in the text. Thank you! I didn't see that until I watched your video! Excellent!
Schopenhauer is referenced a few times in these books. I think the worldview that we get through Alicia is basically Schopenhauer's. Check out the first volume of his masterwork World as Will and Representation. It is readable and entertaining! He makes fun of other philosophers! But he gets to the heart of the matter on page 1. As a bonus he makes Kant understandable.
However I appreciate your excellent points about the connection to Gnosticism and the Archatron! (Demiurge)
One of the books says “tron” means a measuring standard or instrument…
Could Holden be the archatron?
It's all connected... 😉
Good to know this book depends on reading the other one. I still need to read _The Crossing_ and _Cities of the Plain._ Interesting connection.
Read before and after. Both of these books are my favorite of all of his books. I am a lot like her, and see how her talk about mathematics relates to her life, and her dread, and I could keep up with the mathematics. I an often as full of dread and a sense of seriously evil intent from the universe, or downright apathy from the universe- but only when sliding into deep depression. Like her I suffer from Asperger’s, but my life isn’t wrapped up in one person, so I can fight my way out of my solipsism, though often it is very difficult. She didn’t reach out to help others. No escaping solipsism and despair without helping others. Love this book, and think every psychiatrist and counselor should read both.
I do think The Crossing is probably the best of the Border Trilogy. Hope you like 'em! :)
The lighting on this video is not great. Sorry. Did Bobby recover, or was The Passenger his experiences while in a coma?
Sorry; best I can do with the current setup. And I'm pretty sure The Passenger wasn't just a dream. I think he did recover; I don't think McCarthy would go in for that kind of fake-out.
@@TH3F4LC0Nx Agree. Postulating his life as a coma-dream doesn't add or solve anything. Also the lighting seems fine to me.