In Plain Sight… Stella Maris
2023 Year of Song and Verse No.10
…I hid it in plain sight …
~ Alicia Western in Stella Maris
I read Stella Maris and then listened it to it on Audio Book. While reading the novel it I felt it was very dialog heavy in fact it was all dialog between two people and no context or narrative paragraphs. It is completely dialog. I also kept thinking of the Sunset Limit, and its sparseness and theme.
When I listened to the audio book it was clear that Stella Maris is simply a play disguised as a novel, it is structured as a play and it is enhance by performance. The actors who read the audio book were giving a theatrical performance, it was written with beats and verbal exchanges that are suited for the stage. Stella Maris could easily be staged, its staging would be simple to people in an office having a discussion around a table. The topic is about one person who does not want to live and one trying to figure out why, it all hinges on the discussion, this is a variation on the Sunset Limited. McCarthy has the characters discuss hiding something in plain sight and no one understanding what is hidden. McCarthy has hidden in the Coda of The Passenger, a master’s variation on one of his plays. He has hidden it as a novel. He tempts us with the reference to hidden in plain sight. I think it would have been hard to sell that he wanted to revisit the ideas of the Sunset Limited so he melded it into his final novel and novella.
I was surprised when the obvious scales fell from my eyes. I adore the Sunset Limited, and seeing McCarthy change the characters sex, degree of social separation, intelligence, religious positions in such a way while holding to the similar beats of the original play are stunning. It is like the remarkable beginning and ending of 2666 where Bolano plants two grand jokes one that haunts the novel and one that hinges on the entire novel. It reminds me of Borges Man on the Pink Corner followed years later A story from Rosendo Juarez where the same tale is retold in different manners or the book the Aleph where Borges varies common ideas across a series of stories.
So read both the Sunset Limited and Stella Maris and see the movie of Sunset Limited and listen to the wonderful radio play that is Stella Maris on Audio Book. I will say that both these performance are labors of love by the author and the actors.
