“The coming darkness”: Romantic Tragedy, Shakespeare, and Nahua Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy has stated that tragedy is central to human experience and that “the core of literature is the idea of tragedy.” Furthermore, he maintains that the tragic genre probes how humans “deal with” the bad things that happen to them. McCarthy’s duology, The Passenger and Stella Maris, locates its main narrative concerning Alicia and Bobby Western’s taboo love within the framework of romantic tragedy. Incest has been a much-revisited topic within Western tragedy. Consider the dramas of Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, John Webster, John Ford, Henrik Ibsen, and Eugene O’Neill. In McCarthy’s treatment, incest is an impediment to reciprocal love. This tragic fatedness crosses any expectations Alicia and Bobby court of mutual happiness and fulfillment. The duology explores the siblings’ ways of dealing with their tragic condition, the romantic Alicia’s all-or-nothing, self-destructive passion and the ascetic Bobby’s attitude of self-denial and endurance. Two tragic antecedents further inform McCarthy’s examination of forbidden love: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597) and the Nahua myth of the warrior Popocatépetl and the princess Iztaccíhuatl. The article concludes by proposing that, despite the duology’s preoccupation with the tragic human condition, the narrative tentatively gestures to a state of being that might, perhaps, lie beyond tragedy.