Every night, thousands of monks and nuns remember the faithful departed as they pray the De Profundis, Psalm 130: “Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice.” Death reaches us at our depths, and our only response is a cry to the one beyond death who attends to the words of our supplication. The great American novelist, Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023), is now numbered among those who have passed through that great mystery, and he is now named among those whom we hope this prayer benefits. This psalm, though, is not simply relevant in a general way to McCarthy. In a real sense, his entire corpus could be described as an echo of the De Profundis.

In an age of cheap entertainment and philosophical superficiality, McCarthy stood — and through the memory of his work, still stands — as the novelist of America’s depths. At bottom, what is the human person? At bottom, what is reality? The polyphony of possible responses to these questions sounds throughout McCarthy’s work. His most (in?)famous symphony of our depths is Blood Meridian (1985). After four somewhat Faulknerian novels, McCarthy gave the world his distinctive voice and themes as he plumbed the depths of American history and there found violence and blood. Described by some as the pornography of violence, the brutal tale sets in motion the Nietzschean will to power in the cruel cycle of the meaningless infliction of suffering. Brutal death after brutal death in an English as beautiful as that of King James Version. This is certainly the person at his lowest, but is this really what lies at the heart of it all?

Outside literary circles and young existentialists, though, McCarthy is best known (and will probably be best remembered) for his post-apocalyptic novel, The Road (2006). Here we find a much different response to the fundamental questions. Like Blood Meridian, in the post-nuclear landscape we find meaningless violence and the repetition of bloody cruelty, but through the protagonists, we also see that a different answer is possible. At our depths, at the bottom of reality, there flickers hope. Between the father and the son and the fire between, we see that love and hope might be even deeper realities than the violence and despair which are their perversion. If you were to read one McCarthy novel, this is the one I’d recommend.

After the masterpiece of The Road, McCarthy was virtually silent for sixteen years — spending his time in conversation with the scientists and thinkers of the Santa Fe Institute. In 2017, he penned an interesting essay on the problem of language and consciousness, but many thought McCarthy’s novel career was over. At the end of 2022, though — just a half a year before he was to depart from this earth — Cormac McCarthy published a pair of novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. At the age of 89, McCarthy impressed the world with his continued literary artistry and philosophical profundity as he again fathomed the foundation of the person and reality.

With The Passenger (and Stella Maris as its psychological-philosophical-literary addendum), the novelist of America’s depths goes to the very bottom — to the question of the ground of being itself. Is there a foundation at all of the person and reality? The investigation is less viscerally disturbing than his early work: we don’t find corpses piling up in the Southwestern desert or the bleak aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Instead we follow a sister (Alicia Western) and a brother (Bobby Western), with a narrative distance of about 10 years between them, as they search for the possibility of meaning and hope. Just so that everyone knows that it is indeed Cormac McCarthy writing and not some optimistic imposter, he begins the novel with a beautiful description of a snowy forest in which a hunter finds the hanging corpse of the sister. From this point and within this frame of suicide as one definitive option and stance towards reality, the novel then splits into two. In the first half of each of the chapters of The Passenger, we are taken back in time to Alicia’s conversations with fully formed characters (‘the horts’) which the psychologists have characterized as schizophrenic fragments of her imagination. The motley crew is led by the Thalidomide Kid (usually just The Kid) who is a bald, dwarf-like figure with flippers for hands and a French absurdist philosopher for a mind. The Kid is hilarious but blasphemous (though I do think his repeated naming of Jesus may have a mysterious significance), and he is restlessly in motion trying to distract Alicia from her philosophical and psychological despair. Alicia (whose name seems to be an obvious gesture towards the absurdity of Wonderland) is a mathematical girl genius with only one or two living peers. Her one love in the world was her brother Bobby, and he is currently in a coma from a European racing accident. She is left alone with her mathematical musings touching upon the structure of reality itself, and without a foothold, she is left falling into nothingness. Her only hope seems to be these passengers from who-knows-where which appear to her whenever she is not taking medicine, but the clock of their effectiveness is ticking fast and running out.

In the second half of the chapters, we are taken forward in time to Bobby in the wake of his sister’s death. He has awakened from his coma and come back to America where he makes his living as a salvage diver. While Alicia plumbs the depths of reality with the fragments of her psyche, Bobby plumbs the physical depths. In his opening scene of the novel, he is on a dive where he finds a very peculiar situation: a plane fully intact with a few specific contents and one passenger missing. For the rest of the novel, Bobby is haunted by vague government and other nondescript authorities who insist that Bobby is hiding something. For his halves of the chapters, we are taken in his 1973 Maserati Bora across the South as he flees authority and meets with a whole host of lovable and highly intelligent profligates and misfits. Throughout most of the novel, Bobby is called by his last name, Western, and the allusion would almost be too heavy-handed if his characterization were not so simultaneously real as it was obvious. Diving to the depths and haunted by what he finds while facing the guilt of his father (who worked on the atomic bomb, of course) and mourning his one love lost, Western is searching throughout the entire novel to see if the psalmist’s prayer has an answer. Out of the depths, we cry, but is there one to hear our voice?

The religious question is not incidental to McCarthy’s work in general, and it is certainly not imposed upon his final two novels. His work tends toward the ultimate questions which specifically take shape here as a search for that which constitutes the fundamental structure of reality or even for the existence thereof. There is nothing else of much interest to McCarthy in the majority of work, and any remnant of superficiality is stripped away in this final diptych. His final works are a search for the Logos, the meaning and fundamental structure of reality. At the smallest level of reality beyond the quantum realm, Alicia has found the existence of numbers, but she is left without their cipher. All she can see is darkness, and her only conversation partner is the absurd. In a characteristic dialogue, the Kid brings up one of her diary entries: ‘She knelt in her nightshift at the feet of the Logos itself, he said. And begged for light or darkness but not this endless nothing.’ This endless nothing is almost broken in my favorite passage in the works: the Logos is very close to breaking through. In Stella Maris as she converses with her psychologist, Alicia tells the story of how she spent her inheritance. She buys one of the world’s nicest violins, takes it home and plays Bach’s Chaconne. Amid the darkness and hopelessness of her soul, beauty sneaks in to knock at the door. She sits to play the piece but can’t finish because she’s weeping: “I kept thinking,” she says, “of the lines: ‘What a piece of work is a man.’ I couldn't stop crying. And I remember saying: What are we? Sitting there on the bed holding the Amati [violin], which was so beautiful it hardly seemed real. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I couldn't understand how such a thing could even be possible.” What are we? She almost finds out. Is there a Logos which structures reality and gives it foundation? Sitting, weeping, playing one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written on one of the most beautiful instruments ever made, he almost broke through to her.

The almost-turned-no, however, isn’t the only stance towards being taken in these novels. As The Passenger begins with one stance towards the ultimate — Alicia’s suicide, the stance of despair — so it ends with a contraposition. The novel concludes (spoiler alert!) with Western’s desire to pray. The stance is not fully formed, and it is certainly not expressed with dogmatic conviction, but it is his one hope left, and he’s taking it. An old friend finds him at a cafe in Ibiza, and we hear how Western is spending his days: “I live in a windmill. I light candles for the dead and I’m trying to learn how to pray.” It’s not much of a hope, but out of all the passengers of the novel both real and imagined, it is this one at the novel’s end who will prove the most welcome guest. It is this one who hears the psalmist’s prayer. And we pray that it is this one too who will receive Cormac and grant him rest.

In the end, I can’t recommend these novels. The physical violence of his earlier work has been muted, but these works disturb at a unique level. However, if you do read them (and really, is there any greater impetus to read than a word of disapproval?), at least you will find in them a lively examination of the depths of the human person and reality. Even though the hint of the answer has yet to take any definitive shape, at least the cry is heard loud and clear. Amid the philosophical and scientific musings of quite a cast of characters, we see that the questions of the ultimate — of religion — will not go away. And I, for one, am sad that Cormac is no longer with us to seek the answer who came to us with a human face.

Fr. Jacob, Cincinnati, OH