The Passenger, Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Gender Roles
To understand The Passenger is, I think, beyond our
ken. It is not meant to be
understood. If it were, it would have
been told in a more straightforward fashion.
Instead, we are asea from the get go and, when a writer with this much
talents leaves us asea, it must, it seems, be intentional. I will retell the tale, or reorganize it, describing
the main characters, and see if this allows us to glimpse something that has
been intentionally obscured. Perhaps then
we will be in a position to wonder why it was hidden – why we were cast into
confusion from the get go.
So, the dramatis personae:
Alicia, or Alice, Western.
Her character haunts the book from the opening lines when we learn of her suicide. Ethereal, not of this world,
she is brilliant – and her brilliance, like that of so many other characters in
this book, brings her no solace – quite the contrary. She is tortured by what she knows, both about
her father, who helped construct the atomic bomb, but even more centrally about
herself. She knows that she is a person who
does not belong to or in this world; she is a visitor, an alien. I picture her as being “on the spectrum” or
schizoidal – cut off from others not because she has no feelings, but because
she feels so intensely. The presence of
others who have an interest in her is painful, and yet she cannot not be in
contact, so some of those that she seeks out are crazy, but even they realize
that she is “special” and not one of them, and they respect her as an other.
Among other things, we discover that her two greatest gifts
are mathematical and musical. She
combines these when she works on understanding the engineering, the creation,
of sound. These gifts often go together
in people, mathematical brilliance and musical ability, and often these
individuals can seem remote or distant.
One such person, an engineer by later training, and somewhat clunky
interpersonally, described his experience when he was a student in one of the top
music conservatories. He knew, in
exquisite detail, the moods of his fellow chamber orchestra members when they practiced
together based on their approach to playing on that particular day, even though they might not have exchanged any words - words which might not have carried the weight that their playing apparently did. One thing this novel points out to us is the
paradox that a mathematically defined discipline – music – informs, or perhaps
even forms, and certainly is the best medium for expressing our emotional selves. How discordant is it that our emotions, which
rise and fall organically and smoothly can be described, indeed conjured forth
by essentially digital means? Of course, a chunk of the book is taken up with Godel, who was asking about whether numbers are, in fact, as continuous (or discontinuous) as they seem.
Robert (Bobby) Western is, apparently, the subject of this
novel – at least the nonitalicized portions of it. We meet him when he is engaged in a salvage
dive in the waters near New Orleans (and that he has a relationship with Alice,
who is his sister, is not at all clear for a very long time and becomes apparent to us only based on oblique references). He has been assigned to investigate the
wreckage of a private plane that apparently crashed into the water. All nine people aboard are dead and eerily
strapped into their seats. The “black
box” and the flight log are not on the plane, which has been sealed at the
bottom of the sea since the crash. In
addition to the mystery of the missing flight information, there were,
apparently, ten people on board when the plane took off and now there are only
nine. This missing passenger, along with
Alice, haunts the rest of the book – and we might even think the title refers
to him – except that he is never named and we learn nothing about him, except
that Bobby’s knowledge of his existence and of the plane in general appears to
be problematic enough to plunge Bobby into a Kafkaesque relationship with IRS
where all of his assets are stolen and he is eventually kept from travelling
internationally.
While the plane and its passenger are presented as very
real, they also serve a metaphorical purpose.
Bobby is, and all of the characters are, merely passengers in this
book. There isn’t, I don’t think, a
single character who is the master of his or her own fate, unless we consider
Alice’s suicide as an act of mastery.
All of the characters are being carried along by huge forces outside of
their control. Perhaps the passenger is
the one who is free. He did not die on
the plane. His fate was not tied to the
fate of the others – but even having knowledge of him imperils the freedom of others. That said, among all the characters, Bobby is
the most passive and most enigmatic (with the possible exception of his sister –
more on that in a moment).
Bobby has the ability to draw others out. It is through his conversations with the
manifold secondary characters that we get to know them. We do learn a bit from them about Bobby – that
he, like his sister, is a mathematical genius, though his genius is better
understood in applied than theoretical form; that he was a racecar driver; that he
recovered a fortune from his mother’s basement after she died and he split it
with his sister; he visited his sister after she was institutionalized, and
deeply regrets not having “saved” her.
He spends the book grieving the loss of his sister, but what is he
really grieving? What does she
symbolize?
Alice, seven years younger than Bobby, is said to have been
his one true love and he is haunted by her candlelight performance for him when
she was just becoming an actor. Other
women are interested in Bobby, but he appears to have no interest in them,
though he proves himself capable of flirting with the waitress in a small-town
diner. None of the secondary characters are
women except for Granellen, Bobby’s grandmother, and Debussy (Debbie), a
stunningly beautiful transwoman.
The first of the secondary characters that we meet is Oiler,
Bobby’s diving partner and boss, the person who assigns the salvage jobs. He and Bobby discover the missing black box
and the bodies in the plane. Oiler then
reluctantly tells Bobby of his experience in Vietnam in a brutal recounting of
his time as a helicopter gunship gunner.
He regrets his actions – is appalled by them, but, as he says, he (and
many others) got a taste for it in Vietnam.
We are introduced to a number of other New Orleans characters,
the most salient of whom is Long John Shedden, a Knoxville native and ne’er do
well who fancies himself minor royalty and enjoys using multiple twenty five
cent words when a nickel word would do. He
also enjoys plying Bobby with fine food and wine courtesy of purloined credit
cards, is on parole because he was apprehended in hilarious fashion in a failed
drug deal, and he regularly checks himself into the mental hospital to recharge
and to try to wheedle some good pharmaceuticals.
There is a Steinbeckian quality to this portion of the
novel. We might as well be on Cannery
Row and we sense that Bobby, like Doc, is slumming it. Bobby is a passenger on the road through the
depths of the steamy south, travelling beneath the touristy veneer to connect
with the living breathing denizens of the grittiest city in all of
America. He is there, not liked the others who
don’t appear to have an option, but, apparently, out of choice, and he is accepted
by them, though it is apparent that he comes from a different world for two
reasons. First, because he listens, and he does so
without judgement. Second because he is,
essentially, like them. Long John Sheddon
wonders if Bobby has a death wish, hoping to never return from his dives to the
deep, and we wonder that with him.
Even a quick reading of Cormac McCarthy’s biography points
to parallels between McCarthy’s lived life and Bobby’s. It is not hard to imagine the brilliant novelist
slumming it with the characters that he would later write about with a somewhat
bemused air; not judgmental, but surprised none the less at the variety of ways
that people can live and think about the world. You can also imagine, without
much effort, the sense that McCarthy, as bemused as he was, also recognized a
kinship with these people, perhaps because they, like he, are constantly
confronted by their own mortality and are somewhat desperately and even at
times perversely clinging to life.
Because of what he knows about the plane, Bobby does not
just lose his assets, but he is actively pursued by G-men. To try to make sense of this, Bobby seeks out
Kline, a Jewish private eye with mob connections who used to be a fortune teller. Bobby tells his tale only to Kline. We are not privy to much of the description,
but we suspect that it is mostly about the situation Bobby is in, not about who
it is that he believes himself to be.
Kline also lets us know that he knows that John F. Kennedy’s
assassination was a mob hit. This, sort
of like the plane crash that sets the whole story in motion, seems to come out
of left field and it doesn’t seem to move the plot forward. So it seems that it, like the plane, must be
a signal, a beacon of some sort.
Something that will shed light on Bobby and Alicia. My working hypothesis is that this is here to
show that even someone as saintly as JFK (McCarthy is from a Catholic family ,
and more than a few Catholics revere JFK as a martyred saint) is actually
sordid, and the whole damn world, therefore, is tainted.
Of course, the other thing shedding light on Alice are her
hallucinations, and the last character I will introduce (though far from the
last one in the book) is The Kid. Her
central hallucinatory figure, The Kid is a diminutive chum with thalidomide flippers
instead of hands (perhaps a symbol of how our scientific solutions to problems
can go awry?). The kid, like John Sheddon, speaks in highfalutin’ language, but
his is more clearly gibberish that is streaming out of him, and his malapropisms
are hilarious, in part because of their incredibly lucid fluency that is just
abeam of what he seems to be trying to say.
The kid, like the side show freaks that he brings to entertain (?),
enlighten (?), engage (?) Alice also irritate her. Their banter is annoying and, though they do
seem to be interested in helping Alice become better integrated, they also seem
to be symptomatic of her increasing dysregulation and disorientation.
When The Kid somewhat surprisingly visits Bobby during
perhaps Bobby's most distressed moment, when he is on the lam in a shack in a god
forsaken marsh next to sea with the elements howling at him on a regular basis,
The Kid is much more cogent and is presented both as an autonomous agent
working on behalf of an other worldly entity and as a shared part of Alice and
Bobby’s psyche. It is at this point that
I wonder to what extent Bobby is grieving the loss of his sister as a separate
entity and to what extent he is grieving her as a connecting point between himself
and the universe. She is the only
character who is as other worldly as he, and the only one who, like him, can
approach the mystery through math and science, even if thorough explorations of
both disciplines leave them maddeningly far from touching it. She is, in a word, his twin. But this might lead us to believe that she is his alter ego - the part of himself that he admires but can't access.
Alice and Bobby have as little chance of solving the mystery
as you and I do of knowing what happened the day Kennedy was shot, or of knowing what happened to the passenger on the plane.
Did he rip out the black box, steal the log, disable the plane, and
parachute to safety? Why would he do
this? Why was there no report of the missing
plane in the papers? How could nine
people on a private plane – or ten – simply disappear? Why did Bobby’s father build the atom
bomb? And pick his mother out from the
others working on enriching uranium to be his second bride? Why did Oiler, an apparently decent guy, get a
taste for it in Vietnam?
These are big questions that are left unanswered in the text
and, I think, at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s life. Many of the questions he raises are
psychological questions that are concretized within these particular
characters, and my science has made maddenally little progress on them in the
150 years or so of its existence. In
fact, I think psychology has largely turned away from these essential questions and focused many
of our efforts on more trivial and answerable ones – questions that can be
quantified and observed rather than wondered about and pondered over.
The fabulous Debussy, drag queen, trans woman, does what
Bobby cannot do – she, at his request, reads the final letter from Alice – her suicide
note. Debbie is overcome with feeling
while reading it and we are not privy to what has moved her so. The only content that gets conveyed to Bobby
is the value and location of Alice's remaining assets; primarily the violin and
some cash that she left at Stella Maris, the mental institution. These assets are presumably what allows Bobby
to buy a new identity from Kline, travel to a mill on a Spanish Island in the Mediterranean,
and live out his days wrestling with the mystery.
After reading this book, and Stella Maris, the reluctant
wife agreed to watch No Country For Old Men with me, despite our both knowing
that it would be extremely violent. In
the movie, which McCarthy originally wrote as a screenplay, the question of living
by a moral code – the brutal value of that – is explored. There seems to be a certain mindlessness to
following rules – but he is also concerned that, without rules, there will be
lawlessness. In my mind, at least, McCarthy
seems to be obsessed with the ways in which masculine approaches to solving the
world’s problems – rules of engagement, if you will, have failed us. Alice seems to represent the feminine self –
the feminine aspect of Bobby who is, it sees to me, McCarthy’s alter ego.
In Stella Maris, the accompanying text to this one, there is
a transcript of a series of interviews that a psychiatrist undertakes of
Alice. The psychiatrist seems as mystified
by Alice as everyone else has been. He is
interested, curious, engaged, and clueless.
I wonder whether McCarthy’s brilliance , which allows him to draw others
out, also allowed him to remain remote.
This, to my mind, speaks to a kind of power, the power to be unmoved and
uninvolved, while being deeply engaged – as if under a moral imperative. Unfortunately the cost of that power is that
wielder of it remains isolated and remote.
In the only other book of his that I have read, The Road, I
was impressed with the achingly beautiful portrayal of paternal care what was
painted as a father guides his son in a post-apocalyptic world that has few resources
and many dangers. The apparent care that
the father offers felt, actually, maternal rather than paternal. I wonder if part of McCarthy’s isolation
involved cutting himself of from his feminine self – keeping what he saw as
perhaps ephemeral and, at least in my mind, weak and needy parts of himself at
bay.
As I was finishing this post, I looked up Stella Maris to
see if there was an actual institution by that name in Wisconsin. In doing that, I discovered that Stella Maris
is the name that seagoing folk give to the Virgin Mary, who is their patron
saint. McCarthy’s Catholic roots,
including the perhaps the gender based attributions that are so deeply woven
into the faith, seem to inform the architecture of this book. He seems to be praying to the Saint who oversees the seas, hoping that she will bring him safely to port.
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