The Passenger
thoughts (brief) on Cormac McCarthy's swan song
[Note: in light of the semi-recent Cormac McCarthy news, I went back and re-read The Passenger. It was better than I remembered. I hold a handful of books close to my heart. This is one.
Anyway. I wrote a very short thing on The Passenger as part of a recent assignment. This is that.]
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The easy summary of Cormac McCarthy’s final (or penultimate, depending upon who you ask) novel, The Passenger, is that it is a book about death. In its opening pages, the novel’s protagonist, Bobby Western, completes a salvage dive to find a sunken plane with a missing passenger. The identity of this passenger—the obvious hook, were this novel anything except itself—matters to McCarthy little. What counts is the crack this passenger’s absence opens in Western’s life: the deaths, past and present, that it invokes.
Because soon enough Western is fleeing a cabal of black-suited agents interested in locating this passenger. One by one, those closest to Western are either disappearing or dying. And yet McCarthy never seeks to get the reader’s heart racing. Instead he has Western think back to his father’s work on the atomic bomb. Of the immolation of Hiroshima, where, in the aftermath, “[t]he living walked about but there was no place to go” (116). He puppets Western among a motley cast: Debussy, a transgender woman in love with Western; Long John, an itinerant who delivers profundities in a medieval register; Kline, a professional in the business of granting a person a new identity. Any function each of these characters has in advancing or complicating the plot is minor and soon forgotten. Where The Passenger instead finds its drive is in the magnification of Western’s grief via the lenses of their griefs. “You think the void is just the void but it aint,” says Western’s senile grandfather at the conclusion of Western’s mid-novel sheltering at his grandparents’ farm. “It goes on” (179).
In the hands of a lesser writer such continuous, polyphonic philosophizing becomes stunty, contrived. But McCarthy shepherds Western on his wandering with surety and grace. He is a master at the top of his game and the end of his life. He trusts us to follow him, to listen to whatever truths he’s arrived at in his eighty-odd years, and we do.
After all, The Passenger is not, in fact, a novel about death. Not firstly. What McCarthy wants instead is to talk about regret, and grief, and how a person moves—or doesn’t—from the former to the latter state. About a third of the way in, Long John tells Western this:
Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget” (140).
In The Passenger, when plot fails to motivate us to turn the page—and almost always it does—Western’s movement from a state of regret to one of grief does not. We read because we want to see him in the clear, able at last to purely mourn. We read also because we sense, somehow, that McCarthy is in part talking about himself. This is—we know, and he knows we know—his last novel. Any regret and grief belong also to him. He is offering to us his final say on life as he knows it. Death, too. And the other stuff. Love and loss, et al.
And I guess this is what I’m trying to write. I guess that’s my take on McCarthy’s final novel. I want to write a thing that looks like a thing—pure horror, the Platonic thriller—that becomes a quieter, smaller, stranger thing. I don’t want the whole end-of-life thing, but I too want that honesty, that grace. I want to write something a lot like this:
I know that the characters in the story can be either real or imaginary and that after they are all dead it wont make any difference. If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that’s not what’s at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale (298).
I want to tell the truth, I guess. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do.
