“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

(Dylan Thomas)

1In the fall of 2022, the editorial world was bewildered by the publication of not one, but two novels by Cormac McCarthy, within a month of one another. An editorial and literary earthquake, this two-fold event is now inseparable from McCarthy’s passing, in June 2023, a few weeks before his ninetieth birthday and just a few months after the eventual release of the two novels that have become his last, now forever infused with a sense of impending end and loss. A sixteen-year gap separates the publication of McCarthy’s last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, from that of his previous novel, The Road (2006). But the Passenger project had been in his mind for much longer than that. Stephen Frye’s 2013 Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy starts with a chronology whose entry for the year 1980 indicates: “Returns to the west in August. Conceives and begins drafting his as yet unpublished novel The Passenger by October” (xix). McCarthy’s last novels actually correspond to a four-decade old project with which he spent nearly half of his life and which involved decades of reading on a baffling variety of topics. His colossal personal collections of books have been discovered recently as, months after his death, his brother Dennis allowed a group of academics to come to his house and start cataloguing the twenty thousand books, “many of which are annotated with margin comments” (Grant), they found on bookshelves McCarthy designed (for he was also a devoted carpenter) and in hundreds of boxes—an experience that journalist Richard Grant recounts in an article for the Smithsonian Magazine:

• 1 “One of the first discoveries made by the visiting scholars was that McCarthy was something of a ho (...)

The second major discovery, discernible in his work but confirmed beyond doubt in his library, was that McCarthy was a genius-level intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity. His interests ranged from quantum physics, which he taught himself by reading 190 books on the notoriously challenging subject, to whale biology, violins, obscure corners of French history in the early Middle Ages, the highest levels of advanced mathematics and almost any other subject you can name. (Grant)1

5In this article, I argue that the late style that is displayed in McCarthy’s last novels emerges from a series of stylistic entanglements—or “bizarre concatenations,” in Bobby Western’s words in The Passenger (141)—which organically sprout from the bulk of his work, highlighting the persistence of certain metaphors and haunting images, while simultaneously offering something radically original.

McCarthy’s generic freedom

novel, nearly always an extended fictional prose narrative, although some novels are very short, some are non-fictional, some have been written in verse, and some do not even tell a story. Such exceptions help to indicate that the novel as a literary genre is itself exceptional: it disregards the constraints that govern other literary forms, and acknowledges no obligatory structure, style, or subject-matter. Thriving on this openness and flexibility, the novel has become the most important genre of the modern age… (151)

7This is an aptly malleable definition for McCarthy’s dealings with the novel, which are indeed marked by their unflagging novelty. Critics have simultaneously considered him a gothic, a naturalistic, and a dystopian writer of detective stories and southwestern novels. Mark Tardi emphasizes that “McCarthy’s bona fides as a contemporary master of American Gothic and an inheritor of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft are well established by now” (507). While Michael Clarke contends that McCarthy’s fiction “contains all the features of naturalism” (55), David Holloway considers that “McCarthy’s resurrection of language itself is a more or less modernist aesthetic space” (189), with a strong ecocritical positioning in its “questing after uncommodified landscape” (188). An heir to classic gothic tales and to Faulkner’s brand of modernism, McCarthy’s random sources of inspiration also include a deep-seated interest in sciences, nurtured by his having been a long-term fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, where he thrived in the company of scientists that might have sharpened his concern for the deplorable state of the world. In one of the numerous tributes published right after McCarthy’s death, Daniel R. King contends that “McCarthy’s work divides into two sections—one spanning the period 1965-1979 and the other from 1985-2022. The first section is southern, gothic and modernist, set in McCormac’s native Appalachia. […] The second period of McCarthy’s career begins with […] Blood Meridian […] [m]arking McCarthy’s move to the south-west.” However, King seems to admit that The Passenger fails to enter in his mostly undebated appreciation of the evolution of McCarthy’s writing career, constituting a singular object of its own: “The Passenger […] is a return to Suttree, but one in which its similar cast of grotesques and ne’er-do-wells is filtered through McCarthy’s interest in mathematics and its implications for our understanding of ourselves and the world.” As they agregate stylistic and thematic features encountered in his previous novels with new thoughts on the world and new writing experimentations, McCarthy’s last novels constitute an ending as well as an opening.

9What happens at the intersection of McCarthy’s postmodern rejection of exclusive aesthetic choices and the late and last writing of an aging man? When, daringly enough, Jurgensen actually asked McCarthy, then in his late seventies, how the notion of aging and death affected his work and whether it had “become more urgent,” McCarthy dismissed the question by responding matter-of-factly: “Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John.” In answer to another question, he added, “Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, ‘Because I was good at it.’ And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it.” While in their joint “Historicizing Late Style as a Discourse of Reception,” Linda and Michael Hutcheon remark that “late style is always a retrospective critical construct with its own aesthetic and ideological agenda and, most importantly, its own view of both aging and creativity” (54), they also echo McCarthy’s emotionless pragmatism by recalling that “with age comes late style, and that one does not grow out of, but rather dies into” (55).

10I contend that, as McCarthy’s belief in his talent and determination to keep doing what he was “good at” never flagged, his late writing shows none of the symptoms of “the old-age style” inventoried by Kenneth Clark in his famous lecture “The Artist Grows Old”: “[a] sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct” (87). While, as he was completing his late companion novels, then in his mid-eighties, McCarthy’s practical sense of his own finitude and diminishing future must have become more imminent, the outcome of years of late work encourages the reader to believe that the inexorable approach of death became “a catalyst” more than an obstacle to creativity, somehow whetted by “a new restlessness and urgency […], because time is no longer an “inexhaustible commodity” (Hutcheon 60). McCarthy’s late style indeed reflects his tenacious and vivacious creativity and somehow exacerbates the generic undecidability of his work through its use of plural modalities of writing in terms of form, style, tone and register, this time within the confines of two volumes, the first of which is probably his most hybrid creation.

11Though very different from a formal perspective, The Passenger and Stella Maris both exemplify, through the unexpected assemblage of heterogeneous objects and the stylistic variety they offer, what Fredric Jameson refers to as the constitutive impurity of the novel: “For novels are put together out of all kinds of raw material; they don’t really have the purity of the older genres. Rather than thinking in terms of linear narrative, we might do better to imagine a pile of separate and uneven strata, geological layers, irregular laminates, each one like an encyclopedic relief map, tactile as braille.” Indeed, McCarthy’s last two novels do a number of things at the same time: while interweaving a compelling variety of material, they once again reinvent writing through new thematic and stylistic departures; they pay discrete tribute to his masters; they hint, perhaps more evidently than ever before, at his own previous works—which is why welding appears to be a privileged metaphor for the singular conjoining of distinct tones, registers and narrative choices in his late style.

We’re going down there to replace a run of old flange joints that’re leaking. The Taylor barge left two days ago and I expect we’ll be gone a while.

How long a while.

I dont know. Probably two months.

You cut out the joints and weld in a pup joint.

That’s right. Then you got a completely welded pipe. No problems. Taylor developed all the technology. We did the first hyperbaric welded joints on a pipeline in the North Sea about sixty miles out of Peterhead. Not that long ago.

[…]

Anyway, you can run pipe with a lay barge around the world if you want to. You just keep welding new lengths topside as you go and lower them into the sea behind you. But you cant join two pipes. And that’s what we did. On the sea bottom. (80-81, my emphasis)

A chamber of intertextual echoes

17The second category of intertextual resonances contains implicit allusions to some of McCarthy’s earlier novels, which the aging writer thus fondly acknowledges in his last written pages. As in the case of intertextual references to the authors he appreciated, those echoes are too numerous for all of them to be identified. Therefore what follows are a few examples of the various forms they are likely to take. Some are merely accidental, as in the case of the reference to flipping coins—“All right. You want to flip for double or nothing?” (161)—, which recalls Chigurh’s sinister play with chance, and the life and death of others in No Country for Old Men. Some are subtler and more developed. Amidst Bobby’s recurring recollections of his sister a couple of Mexican scenes in The Passenger are strangely reminiscent of the pages devoted to the star-crossed lovers, John Grady Cole and Alejandra in Part IV of All the Pretty Horses, including the interaction of English with untranslated Spanish and a bottomless sense of sadness:

They went to El Paso on the bus. Twenty-four hours. The smoke from the Mexican cigarettes like a burning landfill. She slept with her head in his lap. A woman two seats ahead kept turning and looking back at her. At the golden hair spilling over the armrest.

Mi hermana, he said.

She looked back again. De veras? Sí. De veras.

A dónde va?

A Juárez. Y ustedes?

No sé. Al fin del camino. (118)

18Such scenes exemplify McCarthy’s incomparable talent to conjure up conflicting human feelings (in this instance, tenderness, shame, fear) without actually verbalizing any affect, verifying the principle at work in most of his novels, but perhaps most strikingly in The Road, as highlighted by Jurgensen in the following exchange with McCarthy:

WSJ: The Road is this love story between father and son, but they never say, “I love you.”

CC: No. I didn’t think that would add anything to the story at all.

19Part of the compelling power of McCarthy’s writing certainly lies in its reticence to name human emotions—a way for him to acknowledge ambivalent complexities that words (and among them a word like “love”) cannot possibly encapsulate. The strongly visual dimension of his writing, as in the example of the scene on the bus, which paradoxically often emerges from parsimonious, if not minimalist, wordings, partakes of McCarthy’s obvious bias for showing rather than telling. One of the strengths of his writing style therefore derives from the apparently irreconcilable tension between the evasion of spoken feelings and the surfeit of practical, or technical, details conveyed in an exactingly accurate language:

McCarthy’s prose can be so exact that it seems artificial, and his style ranges amazingly from plainest human speech to a dense, polyphonic rhetoric. […] He is obedient to the claims of the physical world. The texture of the world in his novels is dense and specific; the moral and intellectual implications of experience are left intriguingly vague, always eluding the reification of thought. (Bell 2023)

Out at sea the ragged wire filaments of lightning stood briefly and then again along the darkening rim of the world. (274)

In the morning he sat with his feet crossed under him and watched the sun rise. It sat swagged and red in the smoke like a matrix of molten iron swung wobbling up out of a furnace. (311)

21Indeed, McCarthy’s lyricism often emerges from rather unexpected places, as his writing combines the poetry of elements (the sea, a thunderstorm, the sun, the edge of the earth) with his usual predilection for technical observations (wire filaments, molten iron, furnace) that somehow recall the all-embracing welding metaphor.

22In his 2022 review of The Passenger, Andrew Dix aptly remarks:

Given McCarthy’s advanced age, it might […] be tempting to see this novel as ultimately one of termination, expressing a dying of the light (to quote Dylan Thomas […]). Such a reading is supported by the book’s many echoes of McCarthy’s previous fiction as if what we have in front of us now is summing things up. As if it is the writer’s last testament.

It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered. (n. p.)

24With this pervasing sense of looming darkness, which is now and again pierced by unlikely moments of blinding light, McCarthy pays a final tribute to his masters while completing his own literary edifice with its last two stones, “conjoining the blackest insight and the brightest creativity” (Dix).

Entwined narrative modalities

25The structure of welded assemblages that underlies The Passenger enfolds fleeting moments, seemingly unattached to one another, as suggested by the numerous typographic blanks—a layout typical of McCarthy’s novels—separating them. As a result, the concreteness of the welding process and the detailed lexicon associated with it and, more generally, with McCarthy’s predilection “for things—for parts of things, for aspects of various processes, and how things get done” (Bell, 1983 39), thus contrast with the evanescent quality of certain pages. This fleetingness mostly results from two correlated recurring motifs in the novel, wandering and dreaming. In the process, the circuitousness of The Passenger sharply contrasts with the apparent straight line of Stella Maris, which reports weekly psychiatric sessions in an unfailing chronological order and observes a stark unity of place, as the two protagonists, Alicia and Doctor Cohen, seemingly never move from the seats facing one another they occupy from the start of the novel. Obviously, however, Alicia’s rambling thoughts are characterized by their own meandering associations of objects between past and present, as should be expected from a cure.

26Throughout the novel, carrying his depthless chagrin, Bobby Western keeps wandering through places and thoughts, space and time. Purposeless in the present of narration, he walks the streets of New Orleans night and day, which allows McCarthy to draw a fragmented portrait of the city: “He couldnt sleep. He’d taken to walking the Quarter at all hours” (249). But Bobby most frequently returns to the past of his memory of Alicia, as a consequence of which he magnetically revisits, “[l]ike some wandering mendicant” (210), the places where they lived or traveled together, including their grandmother’s place near Knoxville, Tennessee, Mexico City and Texas, as well as the place where Alicia exiled herself, the Stella Maris psychiatric hospice, where he goes twice in the course of the novel, in search of her ghost (see 257-260; 320-332). While apparently motivated by his efforts to escape the unidentified people that are after him in the affair of the missing passenger in the wrecked aircraft, Bobby’s wanderings mostly fill the vacuity of the present.

27Even in Sheddan’s dreams of him, Western is seen wandering: “I dreamt you were wandering in your weighted shoes over the ocean floor. Seeking God knows what in the darkness of those bathypelagic deeps” (28). If Bobby frequently appears in his close friends’ dreams, it is, as Debussy puts it, because they are concerned about his disconsolate sadness: “I had a dream about you and when I woke up I was worried” (102). In The Passenger, Sheddan actually shares three dreams he had about Bobby (28, 377, 378), all of which are told in his typically voluble, erudite and poetic—very McCarthyan—idiom, as in the following example:

I had this recurring dream of you. One of two. Alone on the ocean floor in your indiarubber unionsuit. Fleeing some yawning subduction. You struggled in those hadal deeps like a man wading through mucilage while the pugs of your leaden shoes closed slowly in the loam behind you. The plates creaking. The clouds of silt rolling slowly up to engulf you. Your lamp had eked out and you were left to make your way in the eerie light of the ancient fumaroles smoking in the distance like standing candles. There was something more than poetic in your flight before those hellish sealamps out of whose sulphurous womb it well may be that life itself was brokered in the long ago. (377)

28McCarthy indeed lends Sheddan his inclination for contrasting noun clauses with elaborate unpunctuated sentences (except for periods), his taste for coinages (indiarubber, unionsuit, sealamps) and hyper-specialized terms (hadal, subduction, mucilage, fumaroles), and his poetic rendering of the darkness of the world, together with his metaphysical concern for the “sulphurous womb” of life. Sheddan also recalls dreams of Bobby’s, which the reader therefore has access to thanks to him: “You told me of a dream once that you may or may not remember. Rather curious. We were moving along a stone wall in a slurry of ash. A scene of ruin. There were dark flowers hanging over the wall” (144). It turns out that this dream echoes Bobby’s later vision of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Bobby’s second visit to Stella Maris long after Alicia’s death, he similarly has access to one of Alicia’s dreams through his conversation with one of her old friends and confidant, Jeffrey (326-28). Alicia’s dreams, often indistinguishable from her hallucinations, also surface from the italicized pages The Passenger devotes to her: “From that day the God of her innocence had slowly ebbed from her life. In a dream she’d seen him weeping over the cold clay of her childsbody in a nameless crossroads, kneeling to touch his dead handiwork” (188). Alicia’s dark visions allow no distinction between reality and dream, equally marked by the imprint of desired death.

29Bobby both wanders and dreams, and “[c]ertain dreams [give] him no peace” (315). What Western “seeks,” to repeat a phrase used by Sheddan, wherever his hectic movements take him, is tragically unattainable, as confirmed by his own dreaming about his sister:

In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. (184)

30Bobby’s dreams of Alicia are particularly excruciating because they are simultaneously the only locus in which she is alive and (possibly) smiling, and a poignant reminder of the fact that she no longer is—forever evanescent and inexorably fading. While The Passenger exemplifies the Borgesian theme of “the contamination of reality by dream” (Barth 144), notably at work in his Fictions, the intertwining of physical wanderings with the intrusion of dreams contributes to underscoring the tragic dimension of Bobby Western’s fate. In another of the rare interviews McCarthy agreed to, this time in 2011, he made it clear that, according to him, the tragic hero epitomizes the human condition: “‘the idea of tragedy,’ he said, is not only ‘the core of literature,’ but is ‘at the core of human experience, and it’s what we have to deal with’” (Flatow et al.). The Passenger encompasses two irreconcilable human impulses: the memory of what he lost dooms Bobby Western to a life of insuperable sorrow that materializes in his disengagement from most, if not all, things in the present of the novel. Yet the possibility that he might forget what haunts him engenders an even greater anguish:

He had gotten out of the habit of talking to her when he was in New Orleans because he’d find himself talking in restaurants or on the streets. Now he was talking to her again. Asking her opinion. Sometimes at night when he would try to tell her about his day he had the feeling that she already knew.

Then slowly it began to fade. He knew what the truth was. The truth was that he was losing her. (318)

31In the novel’s last chapters the perimeter of Bobby’s wanderings keeps enlarging; his solitude therefore becomes even more radical, as his conversations with friends no longer divert him, if only momentarily, from his sorrow. It is then that he fully faces “the truth” he has kept evading: all things, even the most unconceivable grief, end up vanishing. Soon Alicia will completely escape him. For all their inconsolable sadness and keen awareness of the transience of life, McCarthy’s last two novels are neither completely dark, nor completely dejecting. At this point, though there is no room here to develop this aspect, I have to make a corrective for fear of giving a false impression. McCarthy was known for his caustic humor, which often emerges from unlikely situations (No Country for Old Men typically offers quite a few instances of wry humor). Improbable comic moments similarly emerge from The Passenger, including from its darkest pages, in the exchanges between Alicia and the Kid, whose mock didactic tone produces memorable lines:

After the math comes the aftermath? Tell you what. Comic interlude. Okay? Stop me if you’ve heard this one. (11)

Concentrated populations of the deranged assume certain powers. It has an unsettling effect. You spend some time in a nuthouse and you’ll see. (16)

Yeah, said the Kid. He dredged up his watch and checked the time. Maybe you’d better go eat. You need to keep your strength up if you aim to wrest the secrets of creation from the gods. They’re a testy lot by all accounts.

He closed the watch and put it away. He shook his head. Jesus, he said. Where do the days go? (114)

32The invention of the character and voice of the Thalidomide Kid, which deserves a full study on its own, is one of the most singular aspects of McCarthy’s last style. That the voice actually is part and parcel of Alicia’s, which Stella Maris confirms, makes McCarthy’s late turn to the creation of a full-fledged female character all the more arresting. In such instances, the “unsettling effect” derives from the knitting together of a (derisive) scholarly tone with colloquialisms, both articulating startling verities, and from the use of the second person you, which embraces Alicia (though at the time, she is conversing with herself) and the reader.

Tell me about it. I have weird dreams, man. I dream about animals sometimes and they’ll be dressed up in robes like judges and they’ll be trying to decide what to do with my ass. In the dream I dont know what it is that I’ve done. Just that I’ve done it. You may be right. Maybe I need to get out of here. (232)

34Earlier in their fifteen-page long conversation, Borman and Bobby philosophize about the nuances between being “a prick,” “a turd,” “a dumb fuck” or “a sick fuck” (230-231). Their absurdist exchange constitutes one of the novel’s moments of comic relief and confirms McCarthy’s constant play with a most impressive variety of narrative modalities and registers within the bulk of a single novel.

The entanglement of collective history and personal grief

35The Passenger takes place about a decade after Alicia left Stella Maris in the winter of 1972 to take her own life. Yet in the present of narration, Bobby’s grief is as sharp as the first day. As he admits it, “[he’s] not past anything” (273): immune to the work of mourning, his posture is one of treasured melancholy. As suggested before, Bobby keeps returning to places where he is likely to retrieve Alicia’s vanishing memory. The quarry in Tennessee near their grandmother’s place is one of those places:

In the morning he left the house at dawn and walked up the road to the bridge and crossed the fields to the old quarry, following the faint ruts of the quarry road into the woods. […] Great square blocks of stone stood in the woods beyond. The stone was the same color as the treetrunks and the quarry formed an amphitheatre in the woods. […]

He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.

When it was over he stood and clapped. The flat dead echo halting off the quarry walls. She curtseyed twice and then she was gone, striding off into the dark, the shadows of the trees bowing to her in the light from her lantern where it swung by the bail. He sat on the cold stones with his face in his hands. I’m sorry, Baby. I’m sorry. It’s all just darkness. I’m sorry. (178-179, my emphasis)

37At the heart of the novel’s many entanglements lies the inscription of Bobby’s personal sense of grief within the larger context of world history. The Western family story is indeed embedded in World War Two. In an earlier passage also taking place at the quarry, Bobby is reminded of his inauspicious origins:

He reached the crest of the ridge in less than an hour and sat in the broken sun on a fallen log and looked out over the countryside below. He could see his grandmother’s house and the barn and the road and the adjoining small farms beyond, the pieced fields and the fencelines and woodlots. The rolling hills and ridges to the east. Somewhere beyond that the installation at Oak Ridge for enriching uranium that had led his father here from Princeton in 1943 and where he’d met the beauty queen he would marry. Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West. (165, my emphasis)

39The following excerpt is ensconced between a brief description of Bobby’s visit of the Saint-Louis cathedral in New Orleans, on a November evening shortly after the premature death of his friend Oiler, and a reminiscence of a stay in Mexico City with Alicia. Horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the atomic bombings are thus inseparable from Bobby’s grief for his sister’s death, sharpened by the recent loss of a dear friend:

There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors. (115-116, my emphasis)

41More than any previous McCarthy novel perhaps, unlike its main character who ends up choosing to live an ascetic life as far as possible from the tumult of the world, The Passenger asserts its right to meddle with the affairs of the world—the western world in particular—and revisits, through the creative process of writing, some of its darkest pages. McCarthy’s last novels are his chosen medium for him to leave his readers with some of the reflections on the nuclear age which he must have been nesting for a long time as he spent the last decades of his life in the company of scientists. But as an artist who created an impressive variety of different worlds with words, McCarthy was not directly concerned with scientific truth. In The Passenger and Stella Maris, he erected a monument to loss—to various interconnected forms of loss. With its ongoing reflection on memory—its necessity, its pain, its obligations, the threats weighing over it—McCarthy’s swan song leaves us with a single intangible truth, a simple, yet trying, truth that is as material as his writing style can be, both in its flourishing and in its minimalist forms: everything is meant to pass, we and our memory included.

A few more years and his grandmother would be gone and the property would be sold and he would never come here again. The time would come when all memory of this place and these people would be stricken from the register of the world. (177)

The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours. (298)

All reality is loss and all loss is eternal. There is no other kind. And that reality into which we inquire must first contain ourselves. And what are we? Ten percent biology and ninety percent nightrumor. (378)

42As pointed out by Bell, in McCarthy’s writing, “the raw materiality of the world is both charismatic and overpowering: the ego is as fragile and as transient, and perhaps as illusory, as any imagined form” (1983 39). Human finitude may be the main topic of The Passenger, whose unresolved title is now imbued with a different coloring inspired by the polysemy of the verb pass, forever tainted with the memory of “the charred skeletons of the passengers” of trolleycars in Hiroshima.

Farewell, Squire

43Late in the novel, boisterous John Sheddan is unexpectedly faced with the news of his untimely death, which he accepts with a clear-sightedness and good humor that are so compelling that I decided to reproduce his farewell letter to Bobby in extenso in order to conclude this article. In true postmodernist fashion, this letter stands out against the body of the text as it is printed in a smaller font and presented as an actual letter, in which respect it takes the form of an autonomous object within the novel.

Dear Squire,

This comes to you from the veteran’s hospital in Johnson City where the news is not good. The horseman it would seem has chalked my door and by the time this reaches you—assuming that it does—I may be well on my way to shuffling off this mortal coil. Together with any attendant condensers, transformers, and capacitors. Hepatitis C, with complications stemming from a mostly dysfunctional liver together with various inroads upon other organs traceable to age, alcohol, and a lengthy and eclectic menu of pharmaceuticals over the many years. Dykes has been up to see me several times. Believe me when I tell you there was no line to stand in. He commented to a mutual friend that I was going to find myself consigned to such deeps of the netherworld that you couldnt find me with an asbestos bloodhound. I think he plans an elaborate obituary for the Knoxville rag he scribbles for. Something he’s only done before for one of Gene White’s hunting dogs. I’d thought to give my body to science but obviously they draw the line somewhere. Dykes is on record that there can be no burial without an environmental impact study. One might think cremation an option but there is the danger of the toxins taking out their scrubbers and leaving a swath of death and disease among dogs and children downwind for an unforeseeable distance.

Several acquaintances have remarked upon my sangfroid at this turn of events but in all truth I cant see what the fuss is about. Wherever you debark was the train’s destination all along. I’ve studied much and learned little. I think that at the least one might reasonably wish for a friendly face. Someone at your bedside who does not wish you in hell.

More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place. Enough. I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife—and I pray most fervently that there is not—I can only hope that they wont sing. Be of good cheer, Squire. This was the ongoing adjuration of the early Christians and in this at least they were right. You know that I’ve always thought your history unnecessarily embittered. Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice. Thank you for your friendship. In twenty years I dont recall a word of criticism and for this alone deep blessings be upon you. If we should meet again I hope there will be something in the way of a wateringhole where I can stand you a round. Perhaps show you about the place. Look for a tall and somewhat raffish looking chap in a tailored robe.

Always

John (347-348)

44The examination of the many entanglements of McCarthy’s late style is a difficult task due to the mere density of his last two novels, their boundless sense of formal freedom, their inventiveness, their gravity, their silencing beauty. It is even more difficult to write anything after this farewell letter—a character’s, a writer’s—to a friend and to the world. As remarked by Bell, “[w]riting about McCarthy is an oddly embarrassing project because one is always saying either more or less than needs to be said, and always, in any case, in a version of the language that by comparison with McCarthy’s seems poignantly inept” (2023). McCarthy’s late style is as humbling as the body of his work, perhaps even more so, as it reinvents its own familiar tropes, asserts its place in the canon, voices unexplored concerns, ponders over the ephemerality of life and suggests, if we are ready to listen, ways of “shuffling off this mortal coil.” And yet, as epitomized by the way Sheddan takes his leave, even when McCarthy writes about sickness and death, he is likely to do so with vivacity and inventiveness—“[e]ven as [he] writes in old age about death, he continues to do so from a state of rude literary health” (Dix).

45In this respect, McCarthy’s late style is in keeping with Edward Said’s approach to late style as a potential “renewed, almost youthful energy”: “But what of artistic lateness,” he asks, “not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?” (3). When in 1981 McCarthy, then forty-eight, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called genius grant—that really started his career as a writer, Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee, is said to have exclaimed over his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences” (quoted in Woodward). As exemplified by the voice of Sheddan—and that of the Kid, for that matter—, McCarthy’s last style accomplishes the feat of giving life and dealing death at the same time. John Sheddan’s letter in The Passenger doubtless contains the final words of an aging writer who was aware that his own time would soon be up, and they reveal that he was ready to pass on the fire. But above all, it urges us readers to remember his singular floridness, his sharpness, his humor and the beauty of being alive.