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Malaise of modernity in McCarthy’s ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’

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In 1985, at Cornell University’s Chekhov Festival, Walker Percy gave a pessimistic lecture entitled “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise” (later published in his collection of essays, “Signposts in a Strange Land”). Among the gloomier of Percy’s observations is that “most contemporary novelists have moved into a world of rootless and isolated consciousness,” in which the individual person is lost in a world of abstractions and generalities. Percy blames this partly on the rise of technology, which, while making our lives more comfortable, has also separated us from one another and, indeed, even from ourselves. Rather than to see technological advancement as ordered toward some greater reality beyond itself, we have instead made an idol of technology.

Citing Chekhov’s novella, “A Dreary Story,” Percy observes that “our victory in science seems to be attended by a strange sense of loss and impoverishment,” manifested in terms like “loss of community [and] meaning,” of “purposelessness” and “loss of values.” This is because science “is not interested in you as an individual but only in you and your symptoms insofar as they resemble other individuals and other symptoms.” In other words, any sense of the self is abstracted from individual moral agents into rootless propositions about the nature of selfhood. Percy argues that the moral decline in modern culture is but a symptom of a deeper and more troubling situation. It is, he contends, “an ontological impoverishment.” Thus, the modern scientist “has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual,” Percy observes. But this does not help us “to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.”

Thus, Percy asserts, the modern malaise is caused, at least in part, by “the great gap in our knowing, knowing ourselves and how it stands between ourselves and others.” This is a gap that science cannot close. But if the scientist cannot close the gap, who can? “The novelist can,” asserts Percy. Indeed, “the only instrument” for exploring this great gap, he suggests, may be “art in general and literature in particular.”

I thought of Percy’s lecture as I read the late Cormac McCarthy’s riveting new two-volume sequence of novels “The Passenger” (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, $30) and “Stella Maris” (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, $26). The Pulitzer Prize-winning author died June 13 at the age of 89. McCarthy’s latest two novels (set, respectively, in the early 1980s and 1970s) seem to have been written with Percy’s essay at his side. For good or ill, McCarthy seems to have taken up Percy’s observation that the novelist is best equipped to account for “what it is like to be an individual living in the twentieth century.” After having read both novels twice, the open question in my mind, however, is whether they are examples of the state of affairs Percy describes or possible antidotes to it.

The novels tell the stories of brother and sister, Bobby and Alicia Western, set in the context of the latter’s suicide, which we are told about in the first sentence of “The Passenger.” Bobby was a brilliant student, having studied physics at Caltech, before chucking a career in science to race Formula 2 cars in Europe and, later, work as a rescue diver in and around New Orleans. Seven years younger than Bobby, Alicia is an other-worldly brilliant mathematician, having graduated from the University of Chicago at the age of 17, and completed three drafts of a Ph.D. dissertation on topological theory by age 20. They were the children of a mathematician who, in the 1940s, worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, with such luminaries as Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi.

Later in chronology but meant to be read first, “The Passenger” describes Bobby’s decade-long struggle with his sister’s suicide, while “Stella Maris” accounts for Alicia’s psychiatric treatment up to the approximate day of it. The latter is only loosely a novel, as the entirety of the book is a dialogue between its only two characters, Alicia and a University of Wisconsin psychiatrist, treating Alicia at the mental hospital to which she has admitted herself. (In this regard, “Stella Maris” is reminiscent of Percy’s novel, “Lancelot.”) While shorter and largely devoid of narrative structure, “Stella Maris” is the more compelling of the two books.

Aged 21, Alicia has admitted herself — having thrown her Ph.D. dissertation into an incinerator and abandoned mathematics — because she has had active suicidal ideations, including detailed plans for drowning herself. She has been loosely diagnosed with schizophrenia, largely because she has had visual and auditory hallucinations in the form of the “Thalidomide Kid,” a human-like creature with flippers for arms, and a motley group of hangers-on, whom Alicia calls, “the Cohort.” Through Alicia’s conversation with the psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, McCarthy takes us on a deep dive into the human condition that Percy describes in his Chekhov lecture. Indeed, as Dr. Cohen records their sessions, it is not clear whether he is more interested in treating Alicia than in writing a paper about her condition.

The real issue is that Alicia is lost in hopeless abstraction illustrated through the metaphors of mathematics and theoretical physics. She was alienated from the world and herself by her inability either to exhaust mathematics or to find in mathematics any real meaning. Mathematics was a system for probing abstractions, but it did not provide the concrete references she needed as a social person. Indeed, she even questions the reality of mathematics or the reality that it is supposed to represent. Inexhaustible in theory, does it correspond to anything real?

Living in the world of string theory and topological mathematics, Alicia has no telos to which her life is oriented. She has no signposts to give her cues and references, but rather lives in a world of abstract theory and metaphysical bewilderment. McCarthy illustrates Alicia’s inability to construct a concrete life by her description of random drives around the country. She leaves a hotel, for example, and walks to the corner to look at the newsstand to see what city she is in. Indeed, it seems as though her hallucinations are the inadequate substitute for a real-world experience of concrete and particular personhood. But, of course, one cannot live in a hallucinatory world.

Bobby flirts with the same destiny as Alicia. He is briefly visited by the Thalidomide Kid, for example. And while he tried to order his life, through the signposts that give us all identity, he had similar abstractions imposed upon him. But after a mysterious persecution guised as an IRS prosecution, the resolution of his malaise is very different from Alicia’s. Indeed, Alicia “saves” Bobby from the grave by leaving him enough assets to escape the “investigation” and live a life that is not prosperous, but content. His contentment comes in the mundane interactions with villagers, tourists and passersby: the particularities that help us to know who we are, and to escape the terror of unmoored existential abstraction.

In the Chekhov lecture, Percy observes that when “traditional cultural symbols no longer work, man is exposed in all his nakedness, which is unconformable for man but revealing for those of us who want to take a good look at him; which is to say, ourselves.” As the agent for that examination, the novelist must send messages, sometimes in “halting and muted dialogue,” he explains. “One speaks; the other tries to fathom his meaning — or indeed to determine if the message has any meaning.” Thus, Percy concludes, the novelist should “explore … not only the nature of the human predicament but the possibility or nonpossibility [sic] of a search for signs and meanings.” In “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” respectively, Cormac McCarthy has written books on both sides of the disjunct. Read together, they might be his finest work.

Kenneth Craycraft is a columnist for Our Sunday Visitor and an associate professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati. Follow him on Twitter @krcraycraft.