Ending on the name of Mary
In Canto V of his Purgatorio, Dante the pilgrim encounters Buonconte da Montefeltro, son of that Guido he’d met in the eighth circle of hell. Buonconte, relating the events that have somehow, contrary to expectation, led him to the mountain of Purgatory, tells us that, having been wounded in the throat, he fled across a war-torn plain and fell down in death, ending on the name of Mary. And she, hearing this last desperate prayer, commanded angels to save his soul from the rending clutches of the demons who, denied their prey, determined to desecrate Buonconte’s body.
The diptych of novels with which Cormac McCarthy concluded his long, masterly, secretive career begin and end, as it were, on the name of Mary. In the opening passage of The Passenger, a hunter finds the corpse of Alicia Western. She has hanged herself from a tree limb, a red sash tied about her so that she would be found. Her “frozen hair [is] gold and crystalline,” her eyes like gelid jewels, so that her whole person is suspended like a new Jerusalem above the frozen waste of the Wisconsin woods. Her neck is bowed, her hands turned slightly outward, suggesting the priestly orans position. The hunter, falling to his knees in the snow, stogging his rifle in a drift as a shepherd might his crozier, has no prayers for the occasion but can only murmur to himself, “Tower of Ivory…House of Gold.” And in Stella Maris, the companion work and last to bear McCarthy’s name, he concludes his literary oeuvre with a journey into Alicia’s mind and soul in the sanitarium named for Our Lady, Star of the Sea, guide and hope to those who have set off upon the face of the sightless deep.
McCarthy’s corpus is not one we would associate readily with Mary’s Immaculate Heart. His is a cosmos spined, clawed, and acute, one where boys are raped, men and women are held cellared in cannibalistic bondage, and long shears of light plunge the world into ash and darkness. In his pages, creeds and schools are kept in abeyance, to borrow from Whitman. If any principles should be ascribed to him, those of nihilism would seem most apt.
But there lies an answer to all the violence of McCarthy’s fiction in the gaze of the sorrowful mother who looked on as a sword pierced her heart and the long parade of human wickedness and agony pressed the life from her son. And while McCarthy’s last works are by no means full-throated cries of “Miserere mei,” they are nonetheless fora in which, through his characters, the master grapples with the mystery of death, and death not simply as common terminus of flesh but as a personal prospect imminent, grave, and awful. In The Passenger and Stella Maris, we find the testament of a man whose sentence has come due. Thus nearly all of the principal players in The Passenger are at some point confronted with the same question: Do you believe in God?
The responses are rarely clear-cut. Jeffrey, one of Western’s interlocutors during a visit to Stella Maris, has once seen Jesus and so cannot but believe in him: “When you have seen Jesus once you have seen him forever. Case closed.” Joao, on the other hand, the bartender of Bobby’s Spanish latter-years, can only take God’s silence in the face of human events as evidence of his non-existence. But most of the novel’s characters, from John Sheddan to Debussy Fields to the Westerns themselves, occupy that uncertain middle ground to which a good many of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, remain consigned in the sensible world.
Debussy, as she confesses to Western over lunch at Galatoire’s, finds something compelling in the argument from contingency. “If you sound it to its source,” she says of nature, “you arrive at an intention.” More important still is her nocturnal realization that she is not God, and that if not for something out there that loves her, she simply wouldn’t exist. “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly,” as another Galatoire’s diner once remarked.
The case of Sheddan, McCarthy’s narcotized, gin-sodden, bibliophilic Falstaff, is more comic, earthy, cavalier. He is haunted by dreams of infernal reaches yawning from the seafloor and of erstwhile friends who will not let down a drop of water to cool his tongue. While he prays most sincerely that there is no afterlife—and that, if there is, there will at least he no singing—nonetheless he hopes just as sincerely to see Bobby again, to stand him a round at a heavenly watering hole, and to resume their conversation.
Bobby Western has never seen Jesus. Son of the Manhattan Project, brother of a mathematical genius, chaser after thrills and dogged confronter of fears, he is, for the span of the novel, a kind of Lazarus, having emerged from the coma which in part drove Alicia, his sister, to her suicide. The Western we meet already occupies what amounts to an afterlife, a purgatorial journey into the vast divide which existed between him and Alicia in life and persists in her death. Destined for each other, as it were, by the shared burden of their death-dealing heritage, they nonetheless occupy disparate positions with respect to earthly life and its consequence. Alicia, alone in the world and in her apprehension of that world, despairing of Bobby’s awaking from his coma or of doing so intact, goes to her death. Bobby, having been among the departed, awakens to a world of mourning. Alicia’s trouble was that she couldn’t believe that Bobby would “wake from the dead.” Bobby’s, says the Thalidomide Kid, that sliver of Alicia’s consciousness which emerges throughout the novels to play the Shakespearean fool—is that he doesn’t “really believe that she’s dead.” So the cloud of unknowing remains between the two, who now meet only in letters and in dreams like scenes from Greek tragedy, where everything is ash.
For all his grief, Bobby lives. And he lives in search of signs. Alicia ensured that she herself would be one of these signs, binding herself in a red sash so that her body, hanging there like an “ecumenical statue,” would be found. She is--in a strange, subversive way, one which disallows any easy allegorizing--a sign of contradiction, a crystalline message in the frigid morn. Despite the sterility of her life, she is cinctured in death in a fashion suggestive of Mary and her virginal pregnancy. And so even as Bobby’s memory of her fades, he maintains, in his actions if not in his stated belief, some hope that the possibility of contact remains. He reads her letters, he writes to her, he sits in darkened churches where he lights candles for the dead and tries to learn to pray.
Perhaps it is his own brush with death and his own hope for heavenly reunion with Alicia that fuels Bobby’s interest in the fate of the passenger from whom the novel initially takes its title. Bobby is a salvage diver, and we first meet him in the three o’clock hour of a cold morning on the waves of the Gulf of Mexico near Pass Christian, Mississippi, where a small plane has gone down. It’s an odd scenario in many respects, from the plane’s undamaged appearance to the missing pilot’s bag and navigation panel to the fact that no news outlets report, in the coming days, on the loss of a multi-million-dollar jet and the nine people aboard. It’s only when Bobby is paid a visit by a pair of nondescript government agents that he learns of the existence of another passenger, one who should have been aboard the plane but wasn’t when Bobby and his crew cut their way into the wreck.
Returning to the scene in a hired skiff, Bobby searches the various barrier islands in the sound and eventually comes upon signs of the passenger: footprints in the sand and a rolled-up rubber raft hidden in the litter of an oak.
The mystery of the passenger is never resolved. And while it’s easy to think of this strand of the plot as mere hook, a throwback to the thrilling devices whereby works like No Country for Old Men keep readers flipping pages at speed, it is perhaps more likely that in the person of the passenger McCarthy has given us an image of the limits of human knowledge with regard to the afterlife. For all humans are passengers on earth (and characters throughout the novel are called passengers). When death comes, it leaves behind it unsettling signs—a body which, in many cases, looks no different from that of one living, a family or business or city which seems unchanged for the loss of one of its members—and yet, for those with eyes to see, there are signs that something has gone on, has endured, has taken up a new existence and bids us follow into the thicket of death, where who knows what snakes (Bobby fears rattlers in the scrub oak of the island) and what angelic messengers await.
The passenger is to Bobby a sign of hope, a sign that perhaps those he has loved and sought to help and failed to understand, from Alicia to Sheddan to his own father, are still, in some sense, alive.
If the person of the passenger is no mere passing thrill, then neither is the Marian imagery of the novel simple ornament. In Alicia, McCarthy seems to be approaching the mystery of sin by way of language curiously suggestive of that which Bernanos once used to describe Mary. As the old curé suggests in Diary of a Country Priest, the life of Mary must have been exceedingly strange: “Think what we must seem to her, we humans. Of course she hates sin, but after all she has never known it....The eyes of Our Lady are the only real child eyes that have ever been raised to our shame and sorrow.”
Alicia, in her mathematical genius, seeing as she did into the depths of number where the Word is at work, “saw everything differently,” as Bobby says. The world presented itself to her differently than it did to everyone else, and so her life became one apart from the run of humanity. Other people remained strange to her.
Possibly, McCarthy muses, this is a state for which all humans are made: “It may even be,” says the Kid, “that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it.” The preservation of Mary in the sinlessness for which we were originally meant makes her unique in an authentic sense. Only in her Son can she find that loving, unifying gaze which Adam and Eve knew. Alicia, through the Kid, wonders if she is similarly unique, the “one-off” that the Kid calls her. “Nobody is totally unique,” she says, and he replies, “Nope. Just you.” But to call something one of a kind demands us to ask “What kind?” One demands two, as Adam with Eve. Hence the intensity of Alicia’s loneliness, which can only find a tortured respite in Bobby. Hence the lamentation of one who in her genius approaches some vestige of the original solitude known to Adam but can find none who is bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh except her brother. Hence the final strangeness, the half-subverted quality of McCarthy’s use of Marian imagery, when the one who images her does not share her sinlessness.
There are several times throughout The Passenger, whether on the shores of Bay St. Louis or in a farmhouse in Idaho or in the windmill in Spain, when Bobby’s monastic solitude becomes more distinctly eremitic. His life spins up echoes of St. Augustine: “Mihi quaestio factus sum.” An old acquaintance, spotting Bobby in his final seclusion, asks, “Are you a puzzle to yourself?” Bobby can only reply, “Sure. Aren’t you?” He is a seeker, one who hopes to meet the dead again. He wants to pray, to remember, perhaps to believe. He becomes in a way a new Stephen Dedalus. There in his windmill, like Dedalus in his tower, where the cultures that have informed the Western world--Phoenician, Semitic, Roman, Arabic—wash ashore, he seeks a new conscience, one which must come to terms with the death the West has handed out in its latest centuries. Like Dedalus, he is haunted by ashen dreams of dead women. And like Dedalus, he persists in his paganism.
An artist who lived among scientists, a practitioner of chilling and beautiful fiction, a man often numbered among the nihilists who nonetheless offers us a world shot through with meaning, Cormac McCarthy has left us with a complex legacy, a body of work which may well be fought over, like the body of Buonconte da Montefeltro that Dante presents to us. For his inability to embrace any particular faith, McCarthy persisted in what can surely be called a fundamental optimism concerning man and the soul. He has ended on the name of Mary and left us with cause to hope.
