Cormac McCarthy’s “Truth That Would Silence Poetry a Thousand Years”: The Atomic Bomb and the Fate of the West in <i>The Passenger</i> and <i>Stella Maris</i>

ABSTRACT This article asks why, for Cormac McCarthy’s 2022 duology, the United States’ 1945 deployment of the atomic bomb “sealed forever” the West’s fate. To answer that question, the article revisits a foundational argument that runs not just through McCarthy’s last novels, but rather his entire oeuvre: whether the human person’s generative or analytical capacity possesses priority. McCarthy frames this distinction as one between “poetry” and “number.” What the bombing of Hiroshima should have taught us, he contends, is that while the “poetry” we share and live does indeed possess primacy, the negative potential of humankind’s intellection—the destructiveness of “number”—is so vast that it can end poetry altogether. For McCarthy, moreover, the atomic bombing already has ended the “poem” that was Western civilization.