Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) was an American novelist whose 12 novels, three short stories, two plays, and five screenplays explore humanity’s darker facets, marked by themes of violence, decay, perversion, selfishness, death, and inhumane brutality. Departing from his usual exploration of the Western and apocalyptic fiction genres, McCarthy’s novel Stella Maris stands out as a work of psychological fiction with his first female protagonist, Alicia Western.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy spent most of his childhood and early adulthood in Tennessee, and Southern Appalachia later became the setting for many of his early novels, including Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree. After graduating from the University of Tennessee, where he studied liberal arts, he briefly joined the US Air Force before delving into writing in 1953. After completing his studies, McCarthy adopted the name Cormac, a familial nickname from Irish aunts bestowed upon his father, Charles. In 1961, McCarthy married, and the couple moved to a humble shack in the Smoky Mountains. However, the union later dissolved, primarily due to his wife’s inability to reconcile with his burgeoning writing career.

McCarthy’s literary journey commenced with his debut novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), unveiling the recurring theme of family dynamics, especially the intricate relationships between fathers and sons. This theme later transforms into the complex father-daughter relationship in Stella Maris, where Alicia’s Oppenheimer-inspired father figure serves as both an inspiration and a neglectful force.

After spending time writing in Europe, McCarthy returned to Louisville, Tennessee, where he and his new wife endured abject poverty in a dairy barn. He published several lesser known yet equally twisted and bloodthirsty novels. However, it was his magnum opus, Blood Meridian (1985), that solidified his reputation and global fame as one of the great American 20th-century novelists. This epic historical novel, set in the American frontier with a character known as the Kid, depicts monstrous depravities against Indigenous people. The Kid resurfaces in a markedly perverse guise, transformed into an unsightly dwarf with flipper-like hands within Stella Maris, serving as one of Alicia’s hallucinations designed to divert her from melancholic reflections.

Despite McCarthy’s literary prowess, by the 1990s, he faced commercial challenges, with fewer than 5,000 hard copies sold. Despite being recognized as “the best unknown novelist in America,” his fame did not translate into widespread book sales. His subsequent publications, All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998), the so-called Border Trilogy, solidified him as a Western author, and with No Country for Old Men (2005), frontier fiction became his recognized genre.

The feelings of existential despair, dread, and self-destruction described by Alicia in Stella Maris originated from McCarthy’s departure from the Western genre into the realm of eco-dystopian catastrophe with his novel The Road (2006). This work, which earned McCarthy the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, centers on a father and son journeying across a postapocalyptic America, pursued by cannibals.

Yet, arguably one of the most potent intertexts for Stella Maris is McCarthy’s first nonfiction piece, the essay “The Kekulé Problem” (2017). Published by the Santa Fe Institute in 2017, the essay explores the unconscious mind and the genesis of language. McCarthy formulates theories about the intrinsic essence of the unconscious mind, describing it as “a machine for operating an animal”—a phrase that is repeated in Stella Maris. Additionally, he posits that language is solely a human cultural creation, disconnecting it from being a predetermined phenomenon, and as an invading force that completely restructures how people communicate and see the world.

McCarthy’s passing in 2023 closely followed the publication of his final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, both departures from his earlier bloodthirsty frontier tales and apocalyptic visions. In these works, he shifts toward profound existential, spiritual, and cosmological reflections, offering insights into the author’s own contemplations. This turn also signifies McCarthy’s exploration of mathematical and scientific concepts concerning the meaning of life, albeit from a perspective deeply rooted in nihilistic reflection on the corrupt nature of humanity and the inherent indifference and suffering in life.