‘At the Edge of the Intactile Dark’: Gothic Minimalism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022) cement a reliance on Gothic literary minimalism. Although minimalism and the Gothic are traditionally positioned as aesthetic opposites, with the former orientated toward stylistic sparsity and the latter an art of excess, I examine how both converge in these interconnected novels to further an affective atmosphere of lessness and loss. Recalling McCarthy’s prior affiliation with both aesthetic contexts, I argue that these novels consider the emptiness of genre and event via a pre-established aesthetic of Gothic minimalism borrowed from postwar American literary traditions to expose societal structures of exhaustion. Through a reading of McCarthy’s duology alongside key minimalists from the twentieth century including Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, I suggest that this attenuation of the Gothic is symptomatic of a significant but unacknowledged affective tonality underpinning American minimalist writing.