Cormac McMonthly: Stella Maris (2022)
Love is quite possibly a mental disorder itself.
Cormac McCarthy was one of the greatest American writers of fiction. During his life, he published 12 novels. Over the course of this year, I have been reading one of those novels each month, in publishing order, and reflecting on the experience here. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.
Any visit to one’s homeland, after a long absence, is an attempt to recapture and relive the past. Places, and the connections we’ve formed with people who live in those places, provide us with fossil records, proving (we hope) that we are who we think we are, and suggesting reasons for why we’ve evolved the way we have.
I hadn’t been back to Canada – specifically Southern Ontario – since early 2020, when it seemed possible to escape the scary respiratory virus everyone in the news media kept talking about. Hopeful in the moment. Foolish in retrospect. Even with everything that came after, those pre-Covid weeks are uniquely insane to think about now.
But I’m in Canada as I type this. I’m at the very end of my first visit in nearly four years. It’s been grey and rainy for almost the entirety of this two-week stay. I’ve seen people I’ve known my entire life, or close to it. People who shaped me and my consciousness. I’ve been visiting places that don’t quite look the way I remember them looking, whether because I remembered them wrong, or because they’ve been built upon, or torn down.
I’m flying back to Japan tomorrow. Bittersweet.
Stella Maris is both an archaeological dig, and a parting shot from a true artist—a declarative statement. It’s a bold and appropriate note to go out on, from someone fortunate enough to broadcast such a note to a large and receptive audience.
Stella Maris is paid DLC for The Passenger, offering backstory for Alicia Western, and some amount of context for McCarthy’s penultimate novel. Where The Passenger is bloated, unfriendly and provocative, Stella Maris is concise, unfriendly and provocative.
In form, Stella Maris reads like no other McCarthy novel. It is, start to finish, a dialog between two characters: Alicia, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen. Alicia is not very old, but has led a tragically and bewilderingly full life, as the daughter of a man who contributed to America’s development of the atomic bomb, who herself is a math prodigy that happens to be in love (yes, incestuously) with her brother. Stella Maris is the name of the institution in which she finds herself, at least to some extent voluntarily.
More interestingly – at least to me, a person who chose to devote a year to studying Ol’ Cormie’s works – Stella Maris feels like a reminder of the frivolity found in trying to understand any work of literature. Because through Alicia’s talks with Cohen, we learn not only about how one woman was constructed, by circumstance and society and time, but also about how impossible it is for two people to every truly come to know one another. And if it’s not possible for two – the smallest non-one number of people you can have – then it becomes even less possible when more people get involved. More people, or more time, or more layers of obfuscation.
This isn’t just an engaging dialog between two intelligent conversationalists. Although it is that, and enjoyable enough on that level, even if Alicia’s staggering intellect and ability to namedrop mathematicians and philosophers with the brevity and insightfulness of a college textbook, all while being delightfully coy and catty, beggars belief. It is, more importantly, a drawer full of deep learnings and observations made by a sensitive soul over his lifetime, pulled open so its contents can be laid out for us carefully, one by one.
There really is no plot to speak of here. This is a character sketch, and a fascinating one, of a woman too intelligent, too aware of – and confident in – herself to fit herself into any of the boxes that the people in her life would find convenient.
I came away from this book, which I read entirely on airplanes and double-decker highway buses, thinking deeply about the nature of our internal selves, and the struggle inherent in presenting those selves to other selves being presented. The constant negotiation. The fact that our entire social world is a long and complex equation of such presentations.
And what happens when one of those selves pulls itself out of a familiar context for an extended period, only to reappear later on the timeline, and only briefly, only to disappear once again? At least from the point of view of all those present except for that one self in question? For that one self, of course, each experience is a node on one long and continuous string.
Let’s assume, just for fun, that the dilemmas McCarthy poses in this book are worth considering, and do have real-life implications for every single one of us. What does the existence of these quandaries mean for each of us, in our desperate and fumbling attempts (or, willfully, not) to make meaningful human connections?
The act of language is our clumsy attempt to apply a set of rules by which we can describe reality. But it’s never a full or accurate description. Mathematics, on the other hand, occurs naturally, as a way for nature to reveal itself to us. It is received by minds which are open enough, and equipped for the task. Or something like that. I don’t know. I barely escaped math in high school and never looked back.
Contemplating math now makes me feel like a character in a Lovecraft story.
Why does it appear as though mental illness does not exist in any animal species other than humans? Does the very existence of language – and our constant usage of it – cause mental illness? Or have we constructed the category of “mental illness” because our language-based interpretation of the world boxes certain people out?
Have you ever really contemplated the mysterious nature of music? Those notes already all existed before we got here. Why does it please us when they are achieved and combined in certain ways? Does this not point to systems of information and experience that lie outside of our grasp? All we can really do is try and describe and manipulate them.
As a man ages, his ability to assert himself physically on the world diminishes, and he retreats into his mind, which is itself a cave or a trench he has dug for himself using only the tools he has come to possess over his lifetime.
I find it interesting that, up until Stella Maris, every single McCarthy novel tells tales of scary and damaged men setting forth and wreaking havoc over some portion of their domain. Meanwhile, his final novel is a slim volume in which no action occurs, a shift from the external to the purely internal, with his first woman protagonist.
And yet it is, still, a woman recounting tales of scary men exerting themselves on the world, and on her.
This book was published just half a year before McCarthy died, and though he mentioned in a 2009 interview that he’d been "planning on writing about a woman for 50 years,” he waited till the very end to do it.
So whatever thoughts any of us may have had about any of that, Ol’ Cormie escapes contending with them.
But does all of this ontological navel-gazing amount to a satisfying reading experience? Eh, I don’t know if that’s the point.
Cormac McMonthly
January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)
February: Outer Dark (1968)
March: Child of God (1973)
May: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
June: All the Pretty Horses (1992)
July: The Crossing (1994)
August: Cities of the Plain (1998)
September: No Country for Old Men (2005)
November: The Passenger (2022)
I’m sad this series is over. Amazing reviews.
That's a really cool personal challenge -to read all of a given Author's titles in a given time frame! Yay, You!!!