Review

Books

Culture

2 February 2023

7 min read

Cormac McCarthy's harrowed inheritance

Written before the death of Cormac McCarthy, Austin Stevenson reviews the acclaimed author's last sibling novels, exploring the frugal conversations within them and how dialogues shape virtue.

Austin Stevenson

Austin is a philosophical theologian who works at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and culture.

A diver swims above a crashed plane lying on the sea bed.

A diver investigates a crashed plane on the seabed.

Mael Balland via Unsplash.

This review was first published in March 2023, before Cormac McCarthy's death in June 2023.

When reading The Passenger, the first novel Cormac McCarthy has published since his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Road came out in 2006, I was reminded of a comment E. M. Forster jotted in his notebook about Henry James. ‘However hard you shake his sentences no banality falls out.’ McCarthy has drawn forth prodigious lyricism and acuity by some syntactical alchemy. Rarely in contemporary fiction have I drawn so much delight from just the words on the page. Much of his prose is poetry shrouded in paragraphs.

He scanned the landscape.

Here’s a dream.

This man was a forger of antiquities.

He travelled in documentation.

In the instruments for their preparation.

An old world figure. A dark suit, somewhat travelled in.

A down at the heels formality

to which yet clung the odor of the exotic.

A spectre of saccharine sincerity haunts modern fiction, and the fear of it has all but eviscerated mainstream novels of the polyphonic ornamentation of classical literature. What McCarthy has accomplished here is to recover the elegance, musicality, and intricacy of such great works, but in the context of a spare and denuded grammatical landscape. Sentimentality could not survive for a moment in these two novels, and yet they are genuine and raw to the core.

The Passenger follows Bobby Western, a deep-sea salvage diver who is inspecting a private jet that crashed off the Gulf Coast. He observes that, among the bodies strapped to the seats in this sunken tomb, one passenger from the manifest is missing. This kicks off the plot of the novel, wherein shadowy figures interrogate and surveil Bobby to ascertain what he knows about the missing passenger, seizing his assets and pushing him to an itinerant existence on the road. And yet, to explain the plot of The Passenger is largely to conceal what it is about, for it is primarily a book about ideas: physics, metaphysics, mathematics, and language.

The Passenger’s sibling novel, Stella Maris, is set eight years earlier, in 1972, and follows Bobby’s younger sister, Alicia. It is named for the midwestern psychiatric institution Alicia checks herself into and consists of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist. Bobby and Alicia are the children of a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer. “His father. Who had created out of the absolute dust of the earth an evil sun by whose light men saw like some hideous adumbration of their own ends through cloth and flesh the bones in one another’s bodies.” Both initially followed his footsteps into academia, but Bobby dropped out of Caltech to race cars in Europe. Alicia quit after having exhausted the intellectual grist internal to mathematics and failed to resolve the foundational questions haunting the discipline (and reality) itself. “She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture.”

Bobby is lying in a coma in Europe for the entirety of Stella Maris after crashing in a Formula 2 race. By the time he wakes, Alicia has died by suicide. She is ever-present in The Passenger but only as a memory, and the novel is punctuated by chapters that recount her conversations with the Kid, a hallucinatory figure that has followed her since puberty. “The Thalidomide Kid and the old lady with the roadkill stole and Bathless Grogan and the dwarves and the Minstrel Show. All of them gathered at the foot of her bed.” Alicia may or may not be schizophrenic. And autistic. She is also a world-class violinist.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that it is from those who came before us that we receive the depth or poverty of our language and, to some degree, our conversational habits, and it is through the right kinds of conversations that we learn the relationship between the various goods to which we order our lives and become educated in the virtues. The poverty of conversational idioms that many of us have received does much to cut us off from participation in and pursuit of the goods that contribute to our flourishing. I wonder if literature is a possible antidote to this. Specifically, literature with rich dialogue. And this is one of McCarthy’s great strengths.

'McCarthy is intent on exploring the nature of reality in this novel.'

In dialogue, his characters often start with the end in mind, and then find their way together. Or don’t. Their conversations are frugal, consisting primarily of three- or four-word sentences, and yet they almost always stumble onto to questions of deep significance. There are a lot of rough characters in these novels, but they share a surprising vulnerability. As always, McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks or tell us who is speaking. When he wants us to, it is easy to follow the flow of dialogue, but occasionally he throws us off the scent. Particularly when Alicia is conversing with her hallucinations, their voices often meld together. The effect amplifies the ethereal quality of their exchanges.

Bobby is in the habit of asking people if they believe in God—a practise he seems to have picked up from his Granellen (his grandmother).

Do you believe in God, Bobby?

I don’t know, Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway.

No one has confident answers to this question, but it often serves to push the conversation along an interesting direction. “I dont know who God is or what he is. But I dont believe all this stuff got here by itself.” McCarthy is intent on exploring the nature of reality in this novel, and for him, the question of God is clearly part of that exploration, wherever it may lead. Fortunately, he is well aware that the question of God is not the same question under debate between fundamentalists and atheists.

Do you think of yourself as an atheist?

God no. Those were the good old days.

In their own ways, these characters exhibit an immanence that is haunted by transcendence. This search for some kind of meaning in the everyday stuff of existence might stand behind McCarthy’s frequent use of sacramental imagery drawn from the Catholicism of his youth. Evil cannot be depicted adequately without a conception of the good of which it is a privation. One might read McCarthy as reverse-engineering this process—ascertaining goodness by staring down its absence.

There is a tension in these novels between words and numbers. Which is more real? These questions are closely bound up with the characters’ struggles with mental illness and grief. For Alicia, “intelligence is numbers. It’s not words. Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not.” She insists on the transcendent nature of mathematics and many of her conversations with her therapist centre on precisely these questions about what is real, true, stable, with frequent mention of Platonism. This brought to mind Viktor Frankl’s insistence that treating mental illness requires that we acknowledge its existential dimension. ’Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life.’ Alicia’s mental illness is bound up with her own search for meaning, and vice versa, as well as with the dark cloud that hangs over her family’s legacy. “For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection.” History falls short of the forms of the age.

Transcendence isn’t the only spectre that haunts these pages, and there is a kind of paranoia running through the narrative that seems fitting in an era rife with conspiracy thinking. Given his father’s exploits, Bobby is not particularly surprised to discover documents missing from Granellen’s home, or his own apartment rifled through while he’s gone. As Joseph Heller wrote, 'Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.' It’s clear that someone is after Bobby, and the entire family may or may not be subject to clandestine observation. But there is also a broader sense of powers beyond our control watching, hounding, manipulating.

You think somebody’s after you?

I don’t know. I just wonder if maybe lots of people dont feel that way.

For no reason.

Yeah.

They have inherited a troubled legacy, but each, in their own way, has learned to talk about it, and that’s no small thing. This may be McCarthy’s most ambitious work, and you don’t need to understand it to find it extremely enjoyable.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.