Daemonic Muses: A Review of Harold Bloom’s and Cormac McCarthy’s Final Works

Harold Bloom | Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death | Yale University Press | 2020 | 663 Pages

Cormac McCarthy | The Passenger | Knopf | 2022 | 383 Pages

---. | Stella Maris | Knopf | 2022 | 190 Pages

1.

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) composed in his last years Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death, a voluminous commentary on the poetry the critic loved best. Here, “composed” means murmured to various amanuenses, Bloom’s failing health having precluded his wielding a pen. Barring publication of the extant pages of a work exploring notions of immortality and the afterlife Bloom was composing in his last months, Take Arms will remain Bloom’s final book. Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) typed out the final drafts of his last novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris (cited hereafter as P and SM, respectively), when not engaging in discussion with scientists and scholars at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute, where he was a Lifetime Trustee and Senior Fellow.

     Take Arms begins with a prelude and an introduction sounding the book’s revision of Bloom’s enduring concerns: sublimity, imagination, and poetry. The chapters start with Shakespeare and Milton and then focus on some of Bloom’s favorite post-Miltonic English-language poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, Yeats, Lawrence, and Crane. Next comes a chapter on Freud, and then the final chapter compares Dante and Shakespeare. To give a sense of the book, I will focus on the chapters concerning Shakespeare and Milton since, in their concern with imagination as a daemonic fire coursing from muse to poet, these chapters most speak to The Passenger and Stella Maris.

McCarthy’s novels form a diptych portraying the romantic entanglement and agonized parataxis of protagonists and orphans Robert Western (born in late 1944 or early 1945) and his sister Alicia (born December 26, 1951), whose parents worked on the Manhattan Project, their mother at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge uranium enrichment plant, where she met their father, and the father at New Mexico’s Los Alamos, site of the Trinity test detonation. Their mother died of cancer when Alicia was twelve and Robert nineteen. Their father died of cancer four years later. In The Passenger, Robert denies his relationship with Alicia was consummated, as does Alicia in Stella Maris regarding her relationship with Robert. Their personal backstory is of his troubled hesitancy in confronting her ardent pursuit. The Passenger is set in the southern US, primarily New Orleans. Robert, who goes by Bobby, is strong in math and physics yet dropped out from the Cal Tech physics program. His narrative strand begins in 1980, unfolding about a decade after Alicia’s self-murder. Alicia’s embrace of suicide’s mirage of deliverance occurred when Robert languished in a seemingly irreversible coma after crashing his Formula 2 car during a race in Europe. He arose from his coma to find Alicia gone. Alternating with the chapters plumbing the mysteries Robert encounters in his work as a salvage diver and in his mourning of Alicia are chapters (entirely in italics) jumping into the past to sketch Alicia’s parleys in her Chicago apartment with the Thalidomide Kid, whom a psychiatrist would consider a hallucination symptomatic of schizophrenia. Math prodigy Alicia was in Chicago to pursue a mathematics PhD at the University of Chicago. The Passenger opens with a one-page vignette in italics of a hunter discovering Alicia frozen and hanging from a forest tree on Christmas morning, December 25, 1972, a day short of her twenty-first birthday. Stella Maris begins about two months earlier, in late October 1972, when Alicia checks herself into the novel’s eponymous psychiatric care facility. Entirely dialog, Stella Maris presents the transcripts of Alicia’s interviews with the psychiatrist assigned to her case.

2.

Both Bloom’s critical study and McCarthy’s entwined novels explore inspiration as arriving from a daemonic muse. The early Greek thinker Heraclitus declared, ethos anthropoi daimon, often translated as “character is fate.” In Homer’s Iliad, Heraclitus’s fragment might imply, Athena becomes Achilles’ daemon, guiding Achilles away from acts violating his warrior ethos and toward his fate exalting that ethos: for Achilles to kill the Trojan champion Hector yet himself die soon thereafter. In Works and Days, Hesiod narrates how thirty thousand of the first or golden generation die only as falling asleep to become through Zeus’ intervention daemones who serve as mortals’ immortal guardians (Robinson 159). In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima explains to Socrates how Eros is a formidable daemon and how daemons mediate between earthbound mortals and the immortals atop Olympus (43). Continuing with Greek-language works, The New Testament generally abjects the daemonic, especially in The Gospel of John. John’s claims that the Logos, Christ Jesus, is the only mediator between mortals below and the immortal Father above and that this son is the Father’s sole child render all other daemonic agents Satanic and erase Wisdom, Yahweh’s daughter and muse: she was with Yahweh in the beginning, inspiring him in his letting the creation burgeon into existence (Proverbs 8.22–31).

What about Heraclitus’ term “ethos”? Ethos implies parameters separating the proper from the improper and so the place where those upholding a given ethos gather, locating their daemon in that common place, even if so extensive a location as the cosmos depicted on the shield of Achilles, with its seasonal rounds of plowing and harvesting, reproduction of societal institutions (exemplified by a marriage ceremony and a law case), and alternations of peace and war, all under the wheeling constellations and surrounded by the circularly flowing ocean. Were the daemon only ever a question of ethos, then Achilles might find himself at home within the cosmos and at the siege of Troy among his fellow Achaean combatants. To gather with those adhering to and occupying an ethos cultivates stasis in the common place.

Yet Achilles separates himself from his comrades for most of the epic, and the Iliad begins, “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” (1.1), suggesting a revision of Heraclitus: pathos anthropoi daimon. Rather than merely locatable in the cosmic shield, Achilles dons that shield to step out into confronting the acosmic, ecstatic moment of his killing Hector, a moment of Achilles’ possession by Athena, the warrior’s daemonic muse. Achilles to Hector: “Athena will kill you with my spear” (22.319). Hector is “struck down at Achilles’ hands by blazing-eyed Athena” (22.524). Though the Trojans attempt to domesticate Athena in a common place of worship, Zeus’ glorious daughter (“Athena first in glory” [4.597]), fan of wild chariot rides careening into battle and exponent of ignoring even the rules she sets for herself, will have none of it. The tamer goddess Iris stammers in exasperation at Athena, “You, / You insolent brazen bitch” (8.485–86). To inspire a warrior, Athena will “set the man ablaze, his shield and helmet flaming” (5.4). Base jumping down from Olympus, Athena possesses Achilles with a daemonic fire, driving him ecstatically to his fate.

3.

“O for a muse of fire [!]”

            --Shakespeare, Henry V (1.1.1)

[T]hy head flames thick and fast

Threw forth, till on the left side op’ning wide,

Likest to thee in shape and count’nance bright,

Then shining heav’nly fair, a goddess armed,

Out of thy head I sprung.

            --Sin to Satan, Milton, Paradise Lost (2.754–58)

Take Arms imagines imagination as fire. Bloom suggests that for his friend the literary critic Angus Fletcher “the imagination was a holy fire, from which sages emerged to be the singing-masters of our souls” (Take Arms 2). Fire brings pain. For Bloom the memorable in poetry comes from the pain a poem memorializes and solicits. This pain registers the poet-to-be’s birth into the abyss of the poet’s inwardness, where imagination may ignite. Given the deathless solitude, boundless finitude, and fathomless silence poetic incarnation discloses, Bloom asserts that while Dante “fought with courage as a cavalryman in the Battle of Campaldino,” the poet “showed even more courage when he entered into the abyss of himself and thus conceived the Commedia” (611). The poet in the abyss of self may engender a “heterocosm” (5).  For Bloom, English-language poets learn such generative poetic incarnation from Falstaff, Hamlet, Cleopatra, Macbeth, Lear: “the greatest Shakespearian personalities […] at last wither gloriously in the air of an inward solitude” (The Western Canon, 126).

When Sin births from the left side of Satan’s head, Athena’s fire is evident. Bloom’s pyric imagery for the imagination recalls the lake of fire Milton’s Satan and his legions fall to from heaven: “Poetic imagination at its limits in Dante and in Shakespeare performs like a burning lake or a horizon on fire. Is that trope or is it something else?” (Take Arms 4). Is the fire merely figurative or is it also performative in the strong sense of a speech act that in saying something does something? Poetic imagination as fire “performs” by burning away any blockage to the poet’s vision. In abyssal solitude, the poet learns if the poet’s own fire, be it the merest spark, is enough burningly to reveal a heterocosm from the inmost center to the farthest horizon. Bloom recalls a passage from the notebooks of the Victorian author Samuel Butler: “Man must always be a consuming fire, or be consumed. As for Hell, we are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives—for what is life but a process of combustion?” (qtd. in Take Arms 76).

About this combustion, consider Bloom’s 1979 novel The Flight to Lucifer. “Lucifer” is a planet of imagination, goal of the gnostic seeker Perscors. Severely wounded yet victorious in his final battle, Perscors exalts in his demise by flame, his final moment of intensest life, fulfilling his quest: “When he realized that it was indeed his own fire, he smiled in contentment. Triumph was his final thought as his head became the fire” (231). In this burning, Perscors completes his irreversible flight to Lucifer. The triumph entails the ignition of Perscors’ own imagination, “his own fire,” a moment of poetic sublimity. Life’s combustion entails the necessity of dying, yet, for Bloom, to imagine such combustion as culminating in death is to fail imagination.

In Take Arms, Bloom cites a letter of Epicurus dismissing death via the logic: where I am, my death is not; where my death is, I am not. “So death,” Epicurus writes, “the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us […] It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more” (qtd. in Take Arms 1). Among the phenomena of living, of dying, death, being “nothing to us,” is nowhere found, ever. Any figuration of “death” thus becomes a catachresis, an aberration marking a poet’s confusion of something for nothing, nothing for something. A poet exhibits weakness when a rival poet, a prior poet, comes to figure death. In such a catachresis, a poet fails to stay with the poet’s own revisionary fire, to give the self wholly to the fire. In taking the precursor work as a simple negation of the poet’s aspiration rather than another occasion for revision, and so excluding from the revisionary process an element of the precursor’s work, the poet fails to stay with the anxiety of influence and make something of the precursor’s work. Consider the Bloomian imagination a lucifer match. A safety match only ignites when struck on the rough surface on a matchbox. But a lucifer match will self-ignite when struck on any surface. Rather than a safety match, the capable imagination resembles a lucifer match, ready to self-ignite from any strike, however all-engulfing the resulting conflagration may become.

Bloom explores Milton’s relation to Shakespeare as a case of balking before imagination’s fire. Bloom asks of Paradise Lost, “Why does the strongest English epic exclude all mention of Lucifer, Satan’s name before he fell, and of the altogether relevant myth of Prometheus?” (Take Arms 38). Milton does open himself to the influence of Shakespeare: “Ultimately all of Paradise Lost is John Milton’s vast soliloquy, wounded to wonder by Hamlet and Macbeth. Paradise Lost is a dream of firstness, of the regained earliness of epic poetry. Satan dreams Milton into Adamic being, and Eve awakens Milton to the real” (50). Milton excels at revising a host of poetic antecedents from traditions of literature in numerous languages, yet there is an element of Shakespeare Milton excludes from his revisionary process, before which Milton’s imagination turns safety match: “Hamlet is the Promethean Lucifer, who was not permitted by Milton to enter Paradise Lost. […] Something in [Milton] may have wanted light without fire. He certainly desired a myth excluding both Lucifer and Prometheus” (72, 102). Milton found his unbearable Promethean Lucifer in Hamlet. So, in his invocation to “holy Light” opening Paradise Lost’s third book, where Milton “intends to transume” the opening of John’s Gospel and “succeeds,” “[t]his invocation is certainly Milton at his most personal, most poignant, and least Satanic, that is to say least Shakespearean” (84).

Milton praises light as holy but blames fire as unholy, as with Sin’s fiery birth. Another Athena, Sin emerges “shining heav’nly fair” yet from a head, Satan’s, that “flames thick and fast / Threw forth.” Milton can associate his imagination with the “holy Light” yet not with the Satanic fire. In Dante and Shakespeare, Bloom finds imagination a “holy fire,” “a burning lake or a horizon on fire,” yet Milton entertains the cloven fiction of the holy light versus Satanic fire’s darkness. In Paradise Lost, having fallen, Satan finds himself in a “dungeon horrible” that “on all sides round / As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible” (1.61–63).

This cleaving of holy light from what is then hell’s dark fire extends into the situation of muses in Paradise Lost. Milton’s “Heav’nly Muse” (1.6), Urania, the muse of astronomy, the poet contrasts to the muse of epic poetry, Calliope, mother of Orpheus, who, failing to “defend / Her son” from being torn apart by the followers of Bacchus, reveals herself a mere phantasm (7.37–38): “So fail not thou, who thee implores: / For thou art heav’nly, she an empty dream” (7.38–39). The holy light is with the heavenly Urania, but the daemonic energy is with Sin, Satan’s fiery Athena. Beyond Milton’s “dread of an Orphic ripping apart,” writes Bloom, “I find even darker Milton’s dismissal of the Muse as an empty dream” (Take Arms 92). The blind Milton of Paradise Lost finds himself encircled by “solitude; yet not alone, while thou [Urania] / Visit’st my slumbers nightly” (7.28–29). Yet what about the final slumber, wonders Bloom, recalling Hamlet’s concern as to “what dreams may come” in the “sleep of death” (Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.67). Bloom asks, “If the Muse be only an empty dream, what will be the fate of the poet Milton in an afterlife,” if only the endless wander toward the undiscovered country dying finally is (Take Arms 92)? Despite Milton’s confidence in Urania, the “dread of unknown and unknowable thoughts to come,” the “feeling-tone of Hamlet’s voice” in the to be or not to be soliloquy, “never quite abandons the voice of Milton in [his] invocations” to his muse (92).

In the chapters of Take Arms on Milton, Bloom seeks to join and to extend the tradition of William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who all in their distinct ways find Milton to lavish the energy and strength of his imagination on his Satan, as Bloom recounts. But Bloom also revises that tradition severely in claiming that Milton, in failing to transume Hamlet into a Promethean Lucifer, gave way on the sublimest range of imaginative energy and strength he could otherwise have attained: “The mind of John Milton has few limits until it touches the contingency of human otherness. It is there that Milton falls far short of Chaucer and Shakespeare” (108). Bloom continues: “We know what we mean when we speak of the personality of the Wife of Bath or of Sir John Falstaff. There are no personalities in Milton’s poetry. Adam, Eve, Satan are something more and less than personalities” (108). Milton’s friend the poet Andrew Marvell, in his poem “On Paradise Lost,” mock-anxiously writes, “the argument / Held me a while misdoubting his intent, / That he would ruin (for I saw him strong) / The sacred truths to fable and old song” (5–8). Bloom implies that, had Milton brought forth a Promethean Lucifer, the poet might indeed have burned everything down.

Bloom attributes his insight into Milton’s blockage of a Promethean Lucifer to his learning to agree with his Yale colleague Geoffrey Hartman’s claim in his 1975 The Fate of Reading “that [Bloom’s] preference of Milton to Shakespeare is prejudicial, and reflects a swerve from the haunting image of female Generation into the Gnostic view that Regeneration (or all true creativity) is a second birth, ‘of the Father’” (qtd. in Take Arms 89–90). In 1973’s The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom had put forward Milton’s Satan as the paradigm of the poet struggling to attain the sublime. In Take Arms, Bloom seeks to “substitute Shakespeare for Milton as the ineluctable ‘beginning’ for a theory of poetic influence” (90). “John Milton,” Bloom avers, “did believe that Regeneration had to be a second birth ‘of the Father,’” for example, as his Son in the Gospel of John, entailing the erasure of the daughter, Wisdom, and motivating the abjection of the daemonic Athena in Milton’s Sin (90; emphasis added). In 1 Corinthians 1.17–3.23, Paul seeks to spirit Wisdom away as Christ’s prefiguration, subordinating the feminine in deference to the Son’s being at one with the Father (Oventile 67–81): “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthian 11.3). In Paradise Lost, describing Adam and Eve, Milton the narrator closely follows Paul: “He for God only, she for God in him,” and the angel Raphael picks up Paul’s “head” metaphor in telling Adam that Eve “will acknowledge thee her head” (4.299, 8.574). But, for Bloom, Milton’s “Eve, like Milton and Satan, rebels against […] belatedness,” allowing Bloom’s rejoinder to Paul and to Paradise Lost’s often Pauline narrator: “Pragmatically her own spirit says: She for herself only / He for the goddess in her” (Take Arms 96, 106).

After the Shakespeare and Milton chapters, Take Arms surges along, with some of the highlights being a chapter on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, and the convergences but mostly divergences between their poetry, a chapter newly examining Bloom’s most loved poet, Hart Crane, and the before-mentioned quite moving and startling chapter on Freud, completed, apparently, given the date mentioned in the text, on “October 12, 2019” (559), less than forty-eight hours before the critic’s departure for the undiscovered country on October 14, 2019. I mention this to underscore how Take Arms is a work Bloom pursued quite far into the endless, aporetic asymptote between living and dying, both empirically in terms of the vicissitudes of day-to-day existence but also imaginatively in terms of Bloom’s extravagant persistence with and in imagination’s fire.

4.

Bloom opens Take Arms with a question: Might a deep engagement with poetry render the event we aberrantly call “death” only another sojourn with the muse (1)? An answer arrives to readers only in their crossing a limit past which they cease being communicant entirely. By the close of The Passenger, Robert has retreated to a windmill on Formentera, the southernmost of the Pityusic Islands located off Spain’s Mediterranean coast. There he writes letters to the long-gone Alicia. The novel ends with Robert’s implicit speculation as to Bloom’s question:

Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue. (P 383)

Why is Robert “the last pagan”? Thinking of his father’s attempts to understand Alicia, Robert remembers a phrase referring to her: “Fräulein Gottestochter,” Miss God’s daughter (P 368). Of which god is Alicia imaginatively the daughter? If Zeus, then Alicia would recall Athena. Paul’s and John’s Platonizing reading habits tend to outcast and somewhat paganize Yahweh, so Alicia may embody Wisdom. Or might Alicia reprise Milton’s Sin, a combination of Athena and Wisdom’s double, Folly (Proverbs 9.1–18)? In which “unknown tongue” will his vision of Alicia inspire the dying Robert to sing? A candidate would be the German Alicia was fluent in and Robert is trying to learn (“He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp” [P, 383]). German would be appropriate, Robert and Alicia being an American Georg and Grete Trakl, doomed WWI-era Austrian siblings and prodigies (Georg in poetry, Grete in music) who perhaps were lovers. Grete was certainly a muse to Georg, as his poetry testifies.  

Alicia asks the Thalidomide Kid, “Why dont I have a muse?” (P 191). One answer would be because Alicia is a muse for her brother, yet another answer would be, yes, she does have a muse: J. Robert Oppenheimer. Alicia has blue eyes, and Oppenheimer’s “eyes were a striking blue” (P 115). Oppenheimer had a prodigious gift for math (P 370–71), as does Alicia. Alicia and Robert’s parents were divorced. Among the reasons may have been that Oppenheimer fathered Alicia. At a Berkeley hospital, Robert visits his father who is mortally ill with cancer: “Oppenheimer, he said. It would be Oppenheimer” (P 370). Alicia grew up in Los Alamos, living there until her mother died. Alicia’s chief memory of her Los Alamos years is of listening in on her parents and their party guests, presumably often including Oppenheimer, talking into the small hours of the morning. Evidently Oppenheimer threw parties too. Alicia relates how her father found Oppenheimer an “excellent party host” but a “bit frightening” because her father “thought that Oppenheimer’s intelligence was not entirely contained. That he was capable of making bad decisions” (SM 35). When her psychiatrist asks Alicia if she believes Oppenheimer was “Satanic,” she replies: “That would be a stretch” (SM 35). By her last stay at Stella Maris Alicia is a devotee of topology, yoga for geometric shapes, in which stretching shapes yields startling results even as the shape retains defining properties. Alicia: “Can you really stretch a surface any way you like? What if you stretched it to infinity?” (SM 131–32). Alicia saying Oppenheimer being Satanic is a stretch suggests some topological yoga might show him to be so and yet still himself.

        In detonating his gadget, was Oppenheimer Satanic? Robert Western’s father “spoke little […] of Trinity” (P 368), but from reading about the event, and from Yeats’s apocalyptic sonnet “The Second Coming,” Robert gleans a daemonic vision:

Two. One. Zero. Then the sudden whited meridian. Out there the rock dissolving into a slag that pooled over the melting sands of the desert. Small creatures crouched aghast in that sudden and unholy day and then were no more. What appeared to be some vast violet colored creature rising up out of the earth where it had thought to sleep its deathless sleep and wait its hour of hours. (P 368)

The sky’s dome becomes a whited sepulcher. There is no Miltonic separation of holy light from daemonic fire, only fire and light together creating an “unholy day,” with the atomic blast’s boiling conflagration rearing up from stony sleep as a daemonic rough beast. Alicia tells her psychiatrist, “People who knew Einstein […] said that [Oppenheimer] was the smartest man they’d ever met” (SM 35). In a church contemplating his father having been with Oppenheimer at Trinity, Robert ponders: “A lot of very smart people thought [Oppenheimer] was possibly the smartest man God ever made. Odd chap, that God” (P 115). Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Western: at Stella Maris, when she first meets her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, Alicia says, “You’re not the Dr Cohen I was expecting,” to which the assigned Dr. Cohen replies, “Sorry about that. That would be Dr Robert Cohen.” Alicia: “Yes” (SM 5). Perhaps the Drs. Cohen conferred and thought better of assigning Alicia a psychiatrist named Robert.

       Alicia is attracted to intelligence, especially mathematical intelligence, yet her understanding of math entangles with her understanding of the daemonic. She reveals to Dr. Cohen that she has developed a skepticism about math. Dr. Cohen suggests she “feel[s] disappointed” in math, but Alicia states her feeling as follows:

Well. In this case it was led by a group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of its creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike. (SM 10)

When did this overlap between math and the daemonic begin for Alicia? She tells Dr. Cohen that she first encountered the Thalidomide Kid soon after her mother died and while living with her maternal grandmother (SM 20). The Kid reminds Alicia that when he first appeared to her he found her “a young girl on tiptoes peering through a high aperture infrequently reported upon in the archives” (P 8). In a “waking dream,” which she “realized […] was neither waking nor a dream” (SM 105), she saw through this aperture a “figure at the gate” (P 8). This visionary experience first brought the idea of suicide to her as the only possible escape from what her vision disclosed: sentinels at the gate and “beyond the gate” “something terrible,” a “being,” a “presence”: “I called it the Archatron” (SM 105, 106). Her vision of the gate, with its infernal sentinels and the Archatron beyond, leads Alicia to conclude that there has always been “an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world […] That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium” (SM 152). Her brother does not have this knowledge, Alicia contends (SM 152).

       The knowledge Robert runs from and toward is that Alicia was indeed his one and only love, his fate, his daemon, his muse, and so finally his inspiration to write in his windmill tower marking the boundary of his undiscovered country. Robert’s journey alternates between scenes of farewell with his coworkers, his friends, and his maternal grandmother and forays into solitude: during perilous dives, on an eerily deserted ocean oil drilling platform, occupying an abandoned house in rural Idaho, and on a desolate beach living in a shack as an isolate hobo subsisting on roadkill. At this beach, the spectral Kid visits Robert before his decision to become irreversibly a pagan anchorite, votary to his muse. The Passenger’s subplot of Robert and his dive partner finding one passenger missing on a private jet sunk off the Mississippi coast, and the subsequent pursuit of Robert by shadowy government agents wanting to investigate Robert’s involvement in this incident, serves largely as what the Russian Formalist critics called “motivation of the device”: the device of the “missing passenger” motivates Robert’s plot-pattern of cutting ties, fleeing New Orleans, wandering the US southwest, securing a fake identity, and finally going into solitary exile on Formentera.

       Before his exile, visiting his mother’s home state of Tennessee, Robert thinks of “the installation at Oak Ridge for enriching uranium” and of how his father came to that installation and met his mother due to the US effort to beat Nazi Germany to the atomic bomb: “Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West” (P 165). Here, the novel attempts to refer to history yet knowingly in the attempt invokes a phrase, “sister events,” entangled with the novel’s figuration of the energy of imagination a muse inspires. In his personal history, the passional sister event Alicia seals Robert’s fate, as a daemon does, pathos anthropoi daimon, though during her lifetime Robert evidently stepped back from her fervent energy. What is the implication of calling “Auschwitz and Hiroshima” “sister events” fateful and so daemonic for “the West”? Alicia tells Dr. Cohen, “I’ve never seen Satan. That doesnt mean he might not show up,” say through a topographical stretch as the Satanically intelligent, thus seductive, Oppenheimer (SM 36). Alicia notes that “intelligence is a basic component of evil”: “What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge” (SM 69). Dr Cohen in response: “Beauty in mathematics [?]” Alicia: “Yes” (SM 69). Understandably, Robert finds the atomic fire of the Trinity detonation “unholy.” Yet as with Bloom’s reading of Milton, perhaps The Passenger and Stella Maris entail or confront an ambivalence toward the embrace of imagination, its energy, its fire, in relation to the daemonic.

       To imagine Paradise Lost written with a full embrace of a Promethean Lucifer is difficult. Would the epic be recognizable as Milton’s? As a school science project, Robert at sixteen completed a survey of the life forms in a local pond, taking him “to the finals of the State Science Fair” and winning him “scholarship offers in biology but by then he was deep into mathematics and pond ecosystems were little more than a childhood enthusiasm” (P 164). Imagine The Passenger and Stella Maris set one short generation later, with Robert and Alicia’s parents working and meeting at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. There they encounter James Lovelock, who formulated the Gaia Hypothesis: life establishes and maintains the conditions necessary for life, on a planetary scale. Robert could pursue biology. Alicia could be a daemonic genius in emergent earth system science, which entails at least as sublime terrors and wonders, and at least as profound philosophical conundrums, as do contemporary mathematics and physics. Global warming could be the novels’ background event. Robert could be hounded into anonymous exile by the menacing agents of fossil fuel corporations. Without implying that “the West” has left the shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima behind, this scenario for the novels would allow for a full exploration of daemonic imagination and its energies with less need (or even none) to import metaphysical evil into the plot. Perhaps here Hannah Arendt should have a say: “evil is never ‘radical,’ […] only extreme, […] and possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension” (471). But would this hypothetical The Passenger and Stella Maris be recognizable as written by Cormac McCarthy?

5.

A brother and sister in love, the siblings’ adventures underwritten by antique gold coins relatives provide, the sister entranced by a musical instrument, the sister spending time in an insane asylum, the brother troubled by his incestuous passion, revelatory moments illuminated by heat lightning: all these elements are to be found in both Herman Melville’s Pierre and Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris. As Moby-Dick is to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, so Pierre is to The Passenger and Stella Maris. Scholars will certainly undertake considerable labor to trace the influence of Melville’s novel on McCarthy’s diptych and to unravel McCarthy’s engagement in the two novels with mathematics and physics. I plan to join the many readers who will return to Take Arms, The Passenger, and Stella Maris for the intense pleasures and provocations to thought abundant in these works.

Works Cited

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Schocken, 2007.

The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.

Bloom, Harold. The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy. New York: Farrar, 1979.

---. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Marvell, Andrew. “On Paradise Lost.” Introduction. Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. By John Milton. Ed.

Scott Elledge. New York: Norton, 1993. 4–5.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: Norton, 1993.

Oventile, Robert Savino. Satan’s Secret Daughters: The Muse as Daemon. Aurora, CO: Davies,

2014.

Plato. Symposium. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

Robinson, Thomas More, ed. and trans. Heraclitus: Fragments. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Norton, 2011.

---. Henry V. Ed. T. N. R. Rogers. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.