“I think you have to have language to have craziness…you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.”
Those words, spoken in psychiatric care by Alicia Western, seem to be a key point Cormac McCarthy is getting at with “Stella Maris.” A smaller companion novel to “The Passenger,” the book takes place entirely in dialogue, offering transcriptions of talk-therapy sessions between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen.
Alicia is not well. Just twenty, she has visions. She barely eats. She’s just fled the bedside of her brother, a race-car driver who’s suffered an accident in Europe that has left him in a coma, one that has doctors pleading with her to pull the plug. She’s also a math genius, someone who seems barely tethered to this world. The daughter of a Manhattan Project scientist, Alicia is the possessor of an intellect so vast that the problems she pictures when she closes her eyes–topography and systems–feel more real than the painful detritus of our everyday world.
Mentally ill, Alicia remains intelligent, dark and funny. She has checked herself into care at Stella Maris, the facility that gives the book its name, but she doesn’t seem optimistic about getting better. She likes to talk, though, about mathematicians and growing up in Wartburg, Tennessee and the illusions and delusions we sell ourselves. McCarty does a masterful job of weaving the dialogue between doctor and patient into something engrossing, an illumination of her particular world, even if Alicia suspects it may just be a shoddy projection.
“Stella Maris” engages several of McCarthy’s abiding themes: the problem of evil, a lurking sense of malign intent in the universe, a hermitage of the soul–a leave-taking of mores–for those shaken by these deeper truths. “My guess is you can only be so happy,” Alicia says at one point. “While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.”
What’s new in this latest pair of novels is a focus on mathematics. Where McCarthy’s books once covered the terrain of horses and killers, here we get Godel and Gauss, topology and gauge theory. It never makes much sense to me, but it sounds credible in Alicia’s voice. McCarthy succeeds in building her up as an untethered genius.
That brings us to Alicia’s other issue, a secret she doesn’t want to talk about at first but one that seems to compel her to keep participating in these sessions. She’s in love with her brother, Bobby. Romantically. She told him as much, threw herself at him. But even while he seemed to feel the same–in her eyes, at least–he rejected the possibility of a future together, one she would have been happy to embrace.
Why does McCarthy introduce this element, both here and in “The Passenger”? In part, it may be to underscore that Alicia is genuinely detached. It would be easy to view her as “the real sane one,” a troubled truthteller, but the element of incest only underscores how bereft and alien she is.
McCarthy also invests much of his work with a Biblical heft and cadence, and incest is an element there as well, something bizarre and otherworldly, conjuring the mysteries of Abraham and Lot. McCarthy has introduced the topic in other works, notably “Outer Dark” but also “Child of God.” It’s certainly unnerving.
There’s a compact most of us live with, McCarty seems to say, but there are those who step outside it. That applies to math, and that applies to other things as well.
“I just thought we would always be together,” Alicia says near the end of the novel. “I know you think I should have seen that as more aberrant than I did, but my life is not like yours.”
Quotes
“…I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.”
“I don’t have any politics. And I’m pacifist to the bone. Only a nation can make war–in the modern sense–and I don’t like nations. I believe in running away. Much as you’d step out of the path of an oncoming bus. If we’d had a child, I would take it to where war seemed least probable. Although it’s hard to outguess history.”
“We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war.”
“Yes. Well, it’s probably like bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war won’t arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.”
“Psychiatrists have trouble dealing with the unconscious in a straightforward way. But the unconscious is a purely biological system, not a magical one. It’s a biological system because that’s all there is for it to be. People aren’t happy talking about the unconscious unless there’s a certain amount of hokum involved. But there isn’t. The unconscious is simply a machine for operating an animal. What else could it be?”