A Haunting

“Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same.”

-Annie Ernaux, The Years

There is no future for the Western world. This is the conclusion reached at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, one part of a duology which was to be its author’s final published work. With its sister narrative, Stella Maris, McCarthy offers a characteristically pessimistic take on the 20th century.  

The two novels mirror the central relationship of the prose: the dyadic Alicia and Bobby Western. The former is the younger sister of the latter and together they make a single system which collapses into a miserable sort of dwarf star. To help us understand their unhappy fate we will need to perform an act of schizoanalysis, as introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus

In that book D&G put forward a theory of social and psychic repression that operates from a position which holds that “There is only desire and the social and nothing else.” The concept of “desire” here is a productive force, and a subject is a construct made of numerous differential desires overlapping at a keystone point. That overlapping coheres to produce the subject in a determinate social setting. For them desire isn’t something that assumes a subject which lacks something and wants it in order to fill that void; nor does it assume a normative social arrangement to which the subject would need to adapt in order to survive. Instead, the book attempts to explain the way in which desire produces the social, which affects desire and coheres it into the subject. 

However, this is not a conception of the social without politics. D&G instead explicitly politicize this social construction of subjects, and furthermore wants to ask why they seem to go out of their way to maintain themselves in that state and to sustain the social arrangements that subject them. They ask: 

“Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: “More taxes! Less bread!”? As [Wilhelm] Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?

In other words, what makes subjects want to keep hitting themselves? (And no, people aren’t just being fooled. In certain circumstances they enjoy the blows.)

D&G argue that the operation which traps desire and makes it desire its own repression is the psychoanalytic Oedipal complex. Traditional Freudian theory supposes that a child must work through a sexual desire for their opposite-sex parent and hatred for their same-sex parent. They reach a healthy state if they can overcome those initial feelings and learn to identify with their same-sex parent, leading them to take an opposite-sex partner of their own and form a monogamous family. D&G, however, see this condition as contingent on the needs of the capitalist form of political economy. It serves a role in the reproduction of capitalist relations by attempting to create subjects or “private individuals” in a segregated family unit which allows for the inheritance of private property and the privatization of reproductive labor. Those private individuals may then be grouped into classes whose conflict over the ownership of property sustains the capitalist mode of production.

My present analysis will focus on Bobby and will attempt “to show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression….” Alicia deserves her own study, perhaps conducted by the light of Elisabeth von Samsonow’s Anti-Electra. I’ve not yet read that work so for now I’ll just gesture towards it as a future avenue of research.

The Western siblings are born to a renowned physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and a woman working as a processor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The couple eventually splits up and Alice and Bobby are raised by their maternal grandmother in Tennessee. 

Both children are prodigies. Bobby goes to study physics at CalTech, dropping out when he realizes he’ll never be one of the greats of the field. Instead he becomes a racecar driver in Europe, but an accident just before Stella Maris puts him in a coma with dim prospects of waking. Alicia is an order of magnitude greater than Bobby, for better and worse. She becomes a mathematician on a par with Grothendieck, a world-class violinist, and is drop-dead gorgeous to boot. She also experiences unexplained visions from an early age (she’s described as schizophrenic) and is totally alienated from society due to her grandiose narcissism. She checks in and out of several psychiatric hospitals throughout her short life. 

They are also in an unconsummated incestuous relationship. Alicia checks herself into the Stella Maris mental hospital and undergoes treatment with the psychiatrist Dr. Cohen in the wake of Bobby’s accident. After some months she hangs herself, presumably because she can’t bear to live without Bobby. He eventually recovers and returns to the US, attempting to live on. 

It’s here that we can begin to explore the intertwining of the familial and social dynamics of the novels. The figure of their father looms large in the siblings’ lives, just as the Bomb he helped produce hangs over the world. The Great Depression and WWII massively reshaped American society in the form of Big Government programs like the New Deal and Big Science programs the Manhattan Project. The State imposed itself in people’s lives in numerous ways, wiping out established social relations. In the novels this is literally brought home by the work done to construct Oak Ridge: the Clinton Engineer Works displaced many, including the Western siblings’ maternal line, by forcing them to sell their land. Losing their farmstead and primary means of subsistence proletarianized the family and forced their mother to take a job at Oak Ridge. There she caught the eye of their father.

In generational terms this means that the siblings are Boomers. They are raised to be good, post-war consumers and, thanks to buried treasure left to them by their paternal grandmother, they spend magnificently. But the knowledge of their origin tortures them. The twinned figure of the Father and Bomb tyrannize all that come after them: He is the standard against which Bobby compares himself as a physicist, and the oppressor against whom Alicia rebels; the Bomb frames their world.

Bobby was heir-apparent to that legacy. Like so many others of that era he could have completed his degree and gone to work in government or industry, simultaneously loving and hating his life. So one might expect him to be an Oedipalized subject ready to play his part in the mid-20th-century capitalist social machine.

But something went haywire. Despite having all the makings of the classic Daddy-Mommy-Me triangle which D&G say are necessary, Bobby isn’t all that invested in money. Sure, he gets a kick out of fast cars and good food. But his prized possessions are mementos from his sister. What gives?

The Passenger begins 8 years after his sister’s suicide, and Bobby lives a spartan life in New Orleans working as a marine salvager. The main plot of The Passenger and the referent of its title appear to be a missing passenger on a crashed plane. The novel opens with Bobby and some coworkers checking out the remains off the coast, providing a MacGuffin which haunts the rest of the book. Their time on the scene draws the federal government’s attention to Bobby. They suspect he’s nefariously involved in spiriting away the missing person and otherwise sabotaging the plane and their investigation. They put the squeeze on him, which consists of everything from ransacking his room and letting his pet cat get loose to seizing his assets. That pressure provides the extrinsic motivation of the plot.

Over the course of the novel Bobby’s ties to the world are progressively severed. There’s a certain sense in which Bobby is forced to cut ties. The government leaves him few options but to adopt the life of a drifter. He’s buffeted by forces above, below, and alongside himself, and worn down over time by it all. But that’s only part of the story.

As federal agents progressively throw his life out of whack, Bobby takes a trip to visit his grandmother in Tennessee. While he’s there, a flashback reveals that as a teenager he fell madly in love with his sister one night. It’s this event which prevents the Oedipal trap from closing properly. She becomes the center of his world—the object towards whom the socially constructed desire for a monogamous romantic partner is directed.

But there’s a problem: now she’s dead and he can’t get over her. So there’s a correlated intrinsic motive force to The Passenger: Bobby’s enduring love of his sister.

This lets us see a flip side to Bobby’s severed ties: his pining for her leads him to strip himself of other connections. In spite of the affection and aid he receives from allies like his coworkers at the salvage business, John Sheddan, his grandmother, or Kline, he can’t bring himself to move on. Not even the lovely Debussy Fields, a woman anyone would be lucky to have, can get him to give up the ghost. One by one Bobby’s attachments cease. He becomes something like the thought experiment one encounters in a high school physics class: “Imagine a ball on a frictionless plane…” 

The “plot” of The Passenger then is Bobby’s transformation into an apparition. The death of his sister gradually turns Bobby from an individualized person into a figure who haunts a dark, abandoned tower. A specter merely passing through life.

The only way to avoid this fate would be to let go of his sister. But he’s inhibited.

Why can’t he do that? Alicia provides the singular point which he needs to rigorously define himself as an individual. As a not-quite-but-still-pretty-well-Oedipalized person, he can’t see any other options of how he might be.

In mathematics, singularities are special points at which a given system undergoes a differentiation or phase transition. They may indicate the point at which a continuous curve changes from a positive sign to a negative, or signify the spot at which a manifold breaks, or some other form of discontinuous change occurs. With that being said, the concept of a singularity implies that they are necessary to determine the normal or stable behavior of the associated system because they serve as its boundary. Systems can only be well understood because of their defining singularities, and they burst their bounds when they hit that point. Singularities, as relations with the external world, are crucial to making something what it is.

If we apply this to a person, this means that a singularity is pre-personal. They are necessary but not sufficient for someone to be who they are. Only by being really embedded in the world through relationships can a person truly be said to come to be. So Bobby is who he is as a subject, is defined by his relationship with his sister. She is his “North Star,” who allows him to orient himself in the world and to take coherent actions on that basis. 

That’s what it means to say that she captured his desire and serves as that keystone mentioned previously. His love for her enabled him to do things like leave his degree program, and later her memory comforts him in times of distress. But he also can’t bring himself to let go of her. That loss creates a gaping hole in him through which everything distinctive about him evacuates. He has a severe case of melancholia.

As the novel closes, Bobby has fled to the coast of Spain. He lives alone and continues to gradually fade away with only the memories of his sister to sustain him. He is an unfortunate character, but not because he fulfilled his desire à la Oedipus. Rather it is because he can’t overcome his partially self-imposed subjectification. In this he is rather like Plato reminiscing about Socrates or Dante waiting for the sweet release of death and reunion with his Beatrice—a spectral figure stewing in ressentiment.

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Matthew 6:26-34