The Two Paths to Incest: Wondrous Admiration and Anti-Oedipal Revolt in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy’s last novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, form an inseparable dyad in terms of narrative content, featuring, as protagonists, incestuous siblings Bobby and Alicia Western. Both novels address issues of nuclearism, familial, and historical-political trauma. This paper sets out to explore the theme of incest in McCarthy’s last works with an emphasis on the main characters’ distinct stance towards consanguinity and trauma. The two key theories which will be implemented in the analysis concern Luce Irigaray’s reading of the Cartesian notion of wonder in An Ethics of Sexual Difference and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reading of schizophrenia as anti-oedipal revolt in Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism. As McCarthy warns, “[t]he horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation” (The Passenger 143). A key concern of this paper is whether Bobby’s wondrous admiration for Alicia and his sister’s schizophrenic suicide form a background of enlightening hope against a world’s careening towards darkness, in the context of familial and historical-political horror.