Stella Maris

 Well, I promised at the end of my last post that I would next read the second volume in Cormac McCarthy's latest pair of novels—Stella Maris (the companion volume to The Passenger)—and report back on whether it supported or contradicted any of my hypotheses as to the first novel's themes. I have read it and can now confirm: I think I was on the right track. If the first volume is about the realms of nonsensical and incoherent truths that our apparently logical reality forces us to confront, at its outer limits, then the second volume makes these same intellectual preoccupations even more explicit—and even more central to its narrative. 

The novel is told in a series of conversations—philosophical dialogues, really—between Alicia Western, the sister of the protagonist of The Passenger, and her therapist. Gone are the hardboiled noir-ish elements of the first novel in the series. Gone too are the passages of omniscient narration that provide the amplest scope for McCarthy's characteristic prose style. But otherwise the novels share an unmistakable kinship that makes them a package. They concern the same characters and many of the same events, for one, and are larded with intertextual references to one another (Alicia at one point calls the counselor a "nosey parker," and he remarks on the oddness of the phrase coming from an American—yet we know that Bobby Western has used the same unusual locution in the previous volume, suggesting she picked it up from her brother). 

What does one make of these novels at the level of quality, though? Are they any good? It's partly a question of taste. There is a deep strain of romanticism to both volumes that some readers will find hard to stomach. Everything about their two central characters is exalted beyond the bounds of realism. They have tragic, doomed, incestuous loves and losses that they use to justify their own misery and retreat from life. They have prodigiously exaggerated intellects and personal histories. They aren't just geniuses, that is to say, but approaching TV genius level (to use a handy term from the website TV Tropes). Alicia enters the University of Chicago at age twelve and graduates at fourteen. (Granted, such chronological quirks were somewhat more possible in the Hutchins era.) She tells us at one point that she spends eighteen hours a day puzzling through math problems. Later on, she says she read two books a day and probably spent twenty hours a day reading. Well, now, which was it? It can hardly have been both! Unless she had a time-turner. 

To be sure, the novels are bleak, both in their events and their philosophical outlook; but this is in no way incompatible with a certain strain of romanticism. The novel is, perhaps, an exercise in the Gothic sublime. Stella Maris concerns entirely the thoughts of a character whom we know from the previous volume will end up dead at her own hand. The central brother and sister are both haunted by a conviction of their own doomed fate and make no exertion to save themselves from it. Both too are prone to philosophical musings in which they contemplate some unnamed horror and evil at the heart of all things, from which the ultimate and irreversible extinction of the universe can only come as a potent relief. In short, the novel is full of what Stella Gibbons would call "wallowing"—that is, the type of self-inflicted melancholia that carries with it the strong suspicion that its sufferers are actually enjoying themselves. 

Some readers, I repeat, might find all this too rich for their blood—but not me. I love a good wallow, and I have always been pleased to drink from the springs of Schopenhauerian pessimism. Admittedly, there may be something grandiose and self-serving in McCarthy's use of these characters, whom he has portrayed as universal genius-prodigies, as a mouthpiece for his own philosophical musings and theories about the development of language and the subconscious. (What is it that a character who has purportedly read ten thousand books has learned from all her knowledge and speculation? Would it surprise you that it resembles what McCarthy himself would like to talk about?) But here, too, I have no real complaint: for I find the comparison no less flattering, given that the novels mirror in some sense my own intellectual history and philosophical speculations too!

I suggested as much, recall, in the previous post, when I told the tale of my own gradual loss of faith in the certainties of logical positivism and the belief that the fundamental structures of our perceived reality can ever be explained or even made sense of. In Stella Maris, Alicia charts this same intellectual journey. At one point in the novel, she repeats the anecdote that Bertrand Russell told of himself, namely that Wittgenstein had convinced him to abandon mathematics by persuading him that it did not reveal any fundamental truths about the universe, but was merely a series of self-referential definitions—tautologies, in a word. This would be consistent with a strict logical positivism: one in which the world contained no mysteries: only analytic knowledge that is ultimately reducible to tautologies, synthetic knowledge composed of a posteriori sense impressions, and then a third domain of mere "nonsense," including religion and metaphysical speculation, which ought all to be discarded once we realize the inherent impossibility of thinking beyond the limits of human cognition. 

But by the end of the novel, Alicia is more concerned with the great intellectual discovery that defeated the positivist experiment of reducing mathematics to a closed and finite set of internally self-referential definitions: namely, Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Alicia's therapist notes that this theorem is rather incompatible with Russell's notion of mathematics as tautology; and the climax of the novel—if such a plotless set of dialogues can be said to have such a defined point in its narrative—comes with Alicia's recollection of a dream in which the significance of Gödel's finding suddenly became clear to her. 

The novels therefore chart an intellectual development mirroring in many ways my own growth of philosophical consciousness (and maybe the whole last century's too): the world reveals itself as one that cannot be reduced to logic. Even the very fundament of our sense of reality is riddled with internal inconsistencies and forces us to embrace inconceivable ideas: the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the paradox of a perpetually "incomplete" mathematics, not to speak of the problems I discussed in the last post, and found echoed in the words of McCarthy's Bobby Western—such as the problem of whether space-time is discrete or continuous.  

I find it somewhat gratifying to realize that another mind has gone down the same paths as mine (and appealingly flattered, as noted above, to find these same ideas attributed—however self-servingly—to figures depicted as hyper-intelligent). But there are times when the parallel becomes so close as to be eerie (because of the coincidence) or else merely depressing (because it shows that what I once regarded as unique insights are in fact the same as anyone might arrive at by pursuing the same speculations). Perhaps, that is, that there is nothing new under the sun; maybe everything that one might think has been or will be thought by someone else. 

I'll give an example. Here was me, writing on this blog in 2014 about the Buddhist critique of the self as an illusion. I thought this notion, in order to appear convincing, relied on a fallacious pseudo-logical step: 

Some schools of Buddhism teach, I wrote, that there can be no such thing as the self, because our consciousness is plainly composed of an infinite number of discreet [sic] thoughts, moments, and feelings -- "thought-events," we might say -- rather than of one, continuous ribbon we could call "me." [...] All of these thoughts contain the same intuitive leap. Yet it is not clear to me at all that the leap is justified. Does the self really not exist, merely by virtue of the fact that it is composed of smaller units of thought and memory? [...] The larger phenomenon does not cease to exist just because it is made up of smaller, constituent parts. 

Now here is Alicia, as created by Cormac McCarthy, having much the same insight in a novel published late last year. Her therapist has just asked her whether she believes "the sense of self is an illusion," and she replies (complete with a McCarthean (and Faulknerian before him) apostrophe-less contraction): 

I think you know that the consensus among the neural folk is yes. I think it's a dumb question. Coherent entities composed of a great number of disparate parts arent—as a general rule—thereby assumed to have their identities compromised. I know that seems to be ignoring our sense of ourselves as a single being. [But...] you might even ask that if the self is indeed an illusion for whom then is it illusory?

Tell me truly—confirm it's not all in my head—that my "The larger phenomenon does not cease to exist just because it is made up of smaller, constituent parts" is not in some sense a prophecy, or anticipatory echo, of McCarthy's "Coherent entities composed of a great number of disparate parts arent—as a general rule—thereby assumed to have their identities compromised"?

This is the sort of thing, then, that makes me love Stella Maris, and its companion volume, even as I recognize all these senses in which they might not be everyone's preferred flavor. They show me that there are minds out there that work somewhat like my own, and have thought the things that I have thought. They leave me with that shock of recognition that the best literature can attain, when it hits upon something held in common across human selves. And in this way, it goes some length to lessening the terrible loneliness in which we live. For this, I applaud the novel. I am grateful that such works can still be written in this time, and that McCarthy is still among us.