McCarthy’s The Passenger, thoughts.
I finished Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Passenger just two nights ago. I’ve never had a book affect me like this. Still can’t exactly put my finger on what this feeling is, but it’s quite the solidification of some fragments which have been roaming around for a while now.
I adore McCarthy. In fact, if I had to pick such a thing, I would say he is my favorite author. But The Passenger landed differently. Many other of McCarthy’s books are filled to the brim with his exquisite, mythical prose. Served up with his acerbic and absurd humor with everything landing together in a balanced manner. The Passenger lands perfectly – as per usual – and, ironically, it’s full of jokes. I say ironically because none of the jokes are funny. They should be, but they aren’t. Nothing about the book is funny. I lost my sense of humor for a while, and I think it’s because McCarthy has done something quite unimaginable, something I wouldn’t dare state if it was any other author.
McCarthy has managed to go beyond Nietzsche. Not explicitly and not necessarily clearly or positively, but The Passenger addresses the death of God in a wholly new dim light. The death of God as that grand statement of philosophy. The ‘modern crisis’ as it’s known is usually tackled via its own language, narrative, and semiotics, tangling itself up back into the same structure the problem originally was built from. But McCarthy enters into the dialogue from the point of view of the crisis itself, the minutiae of modern existence cry out as the beyond of nihilism itself. What is beyond nihilism is simply what we have right now. Not a Sisyphean tragedy, not a vitalist soaring, not an acceleration, not an apocalypse or collapse, not a suicide, but simply a continuation into a world where any ongoing search for mystery has already been thwarted. Anyone who seeks to lean into the ‘mystery of life’ now is a priori not listening or looking.
There are plenty of passengers in The Passenger. The narrative itself is a passenger to its own already-impotent purpose. The tongue-in-cheek plotline is a passenger to the dead-comedy of its existence as a red herring. The conspiracy and absurdity are a passenger to nothingness. Everything is carried and yet ends up precisely nowhere. Nothing is figured out in The Passenger precisely because nothing was actually asked in the first place. The reader is a passenger of their own hopes for an extension of mortality, and the book simply takes in the same way post-Nietzschean life takes. Not with or without remorse, but solely because that’s the only thing this life can now do…take. The novel takes the common solutions to contemporary human meaning and purpose to court quickly and abruptly. God, quantum physics, materialism, consumerism, and family are brought up, not listened to, and fall away in a matter of pages and we’re left once again only with life itself and the words which seem to keep going.
McCarthy’s style is reduced to a razor-sharp edge which often lands which a horrid thud or creak, purged of all needless vitality and romance the words slide away into nihil as if coming from nihil. The book ain’t putting forward a question really, at least not one I can clearly see. I guess books come forward as if what they have to say is worth listening to. With The Passenger one enters into a discussion already underway, that you weren’t invited to and it doesn’t care to fill you in because it doesn’t really know you’re there. Reminds me of early John Barth, The Floating Opera, an opera which is happening on a barge that floats on by as you watch it from the riverside. At times you can hear it and not see it, sometimes you can see it and not hear it, and so when it passes you by you only have a certain amount of information and have to fill in the blanks. With McCarthy we aren’t asked to fill in the blanks, the blanks don’t care about us. Here you go, you decided to pick this up and read it, ain’t up to the book to help you.