Cormac McCarthy’s Tragic Coda ‘Stella Maris’ Doubles As A Philosophic Seminar

(REVIEW) In the same way professors have taught classes about the historical events laid out in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” particularly existential teachers could develop intensive curriculum based on the names and theories discussed in Cormac McCarthy’s “Stella Maris.”

The novel, released on Dec. 6, serves as a coda to the stories of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, though it takes place before sister novel “The Passenger” began.

A much shorter read than the first, “Stella Maris” is exclusively dialogue between Alicia and her psychiatrist Dr. Cohen at the Stella Maris psychiatric care center in the days before her suicide. 

READ: Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Passenger’ Asks One Important Question: Do You Believe In God?

Alicia is 20 years old, and Bobby is 26, though he’s absent from the novel as a racing accident has left him in a coma in Italy. Bobby will eventually recover from this coma, but at the time it’s looking unlikely, and it’s one of Alicia’s primary motivations for checking herself into Stella Maris. 

Good dialogue is one of my favorite parts of any novel, so I found “Stella Maris” to be a compelling page-turner with fascinating characters and an emotionally devastating ending. 

However, I can’t emphasize enough that this view is based on personal preference. That isn’t to say that McCarthy has lost any skill. But couple his aversion to quotation marks with this style and add in a graduate-level knowledge of mathematics, physics, psychology and more, and it’s entirely within reason to view this book as a difficult, dense manuscript.

These are a few among the myriad of things “Stella Maris” discusses: Kant, Gödel, platonism, God, Satan, atheism, Jewish women, Jung, Chesterton, Darwin and music theory.  

If dense, these things are equally interesting, and they don’t take a graduate-level understanding to grasp the way these concepts shape the character of a young woman readers will otherwise learn very little about. 

Alicia is a regular Ophelia, a lovelorn heroine whose death is assured — and she’s wonderful. 

She has no interest in being properly treated by tried psychiatric methods; she refuses all medicine and in the past treated various clinical tests like they were games. “In the end I was trying to qualify as a possibly homicidal lunatic,” she says of one test. 

There’s never any illusion that Alicia will change or heal in any way; she and Dr. Cohen understand the inevitability of her suicide like the audience does. 

Early in the novel, Alicia recalls her primary philosophical influence: George Berkeley’s “A New Theory of Vision,” which was the first thing she read upon arriving at high school at 12 years old. 

“By the time I got up off the floor of the library I was another person,” she says. It’s telling of her mind and her fate. 

Alicia explains Berkeley’s theory in slight detail, though her way is in the language of someone who was reading primary philosophy at 12. In short, Berkeley argues that everything in the world is filtered through the individual perception of the mind. He claims that everything in the physical world — grass, a table and chairs, human bodies and far beyond — is just an idea. Nothing can be truly known or experienced because it all takes place in the mind.

Berkeley was the Bishop of Cloyne in the Church of Ireland from 1734 to 1753, and he was working in the era when atheism was on the rise. As such, some of his work took the function of Christian apologetics. In a book published after “A New Theory of Vision,” he argues that God is the being responsible for man’s ideas, explaining why people see the permanent fixtures of the natural world — like the sun and sky — without choosing to.  

This philosophy is called subjective idealism, and Berkeley is credited with originating it in the West. It’s an interesting philosophy, no doubt, but the primary criticism of it is why it isn’t a very common one. 

Dr. Cohen explains it best when he’s talking to Alicia about it: “I have to say that you must be aware that other people get through this same realization as to where the visual world actually occurs — in the visual cortex as opposed to out there in the world — without losing the reality of the world over it.”

It’s a platonic philosophy of perception and reality elevated to a level most can’t believe. 

The fact that Alicia does believe it is the biggest reason why “cohorts” the Thalidomide Kid and other hallucinations appear just as real to Alicia as anything else. She isn’t scared of them, they don’t give her instructions or seem to have sinister intentions; past doctors who have worked with Alicia have even accused her of pretending she has hallucinations because her experience is so different from other patients. 

Alicia also knows she has no proper place in the world because of this belief. She’s in love with her brother, she’s regularly visited by a man just over 3 feet tall with flippers for hands and has neither the desire nor will to change either of those things. 

McCarthy likes his outsiders, remember? 

Alicia tells Dr. Cohen that she once imagined drowning herself in Lake Tahoe, but then she thought through the physiology of drowning. She describes it in gruesome detail: lungs shriveling, eardrums bursting and bleeding, shock from the cold. 

“I think we’re talking about an agony that is simply off the scale,” she says. “No one’s ever said. And it’s forever. Your forever.”

Alicia’s impending death contains small tragedies both to Alicia and the audience. She’s in all likelihood one of the 10 best mathematicians in the world but works on mathematical problems in a way that’s nonsensical and meaningless. She could have been a great violinist, if she cared to be one, but she only ever cared to be a mathematician. 

But the real tragedy of this story isn’t anything about wasted potential. Instead, it’s the acknowledgement that Alicia — or anyone — will never solve the “problem of problems,” as she calls it. This problem is the fundamental question of humankind: How did we get here, and why are we here?

Alicia has pursued math to its rational end and discovered there is no knowable answer.  

“Mathematics is ultimately a faith-based initiative,” she says. “And faith is an uncertain business.”   

Jillian Cheney is a contributing culture writer for Religion Unplugged. She also writes on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity and was Religion Unplugged’s 2020-21 Poynter-Koch fellow. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.