On McCarthy - Christian Lorentzen in LRB, in 2023:

“I doubt that McCarthy has ever been to therapy, which here takes the form of an eccentric genius being questioned on her intellectual development, her theories of reality, her correspondence with famous mathematicians – and the implications of all this on her psychic life and her visitations by supposedly non-existent personages. There are moments of real human interaction. ‘For all the bleakness of your views,’ Cohen tells Alicia late in the novel, ‘you really don’t present as clinically depressed.’ ‘I know,’ she replies. ‘You said. My cup runneth over.’ Alicia asks Cohen about his life: he is remarried to an Italian woman called Edwina who once divorced him, and they have two children. When the subject of her own love life comes up, she describes a sexual awakening she experienced in the hallway of her high school.”

(…)

“For decades, McCarthy has been affiliated with the Sante Fe Institute, a research centre devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. In 2016 he published his only work of non-fiction, ‘The Kekulé Problem’, an essay on the origins of language and the unconscious. The unconscious, he wrote, ‘is a machine for operating an animal’. Alicia says the same thing in Stella Maris: Psychiatrists have trouble dealing with the unconscious in a straightforward way. But the unconscious is a purely biological system, not a magical one. It’s a biological system because that’s all there is for it to be. People arent happy talking about the unconscious unless there’s a certain amount of hokum involved. But there isn’t. The unconscious is simply a machine for operating an animal. What else could it be? Most of what we do is unconscious. Turning chores over to the conscious mind is a risky business. Whales and dolphins have to time their breathing to their surfacing. So of course when they were first anaesthetised for surgery they simply died. Which should have been predictable. The unconscious evolves along with the species to meet its needs and if there’s anything spooky about it it’s that it sometimes seems to anticipate those needs. It cant afford surprises. It’s one of the things that troubled Darwin. But the souldoctors dont get any of this. They’re Cartesian to the bone.”

(…)

“Some have their fun actually burning down the world, others write novels.”

Read the review here.

I was fascinated by Stella Marris, yes most probably most therapy sessions don’t follow this rather awkward scheme, but there is a chance that once in a while such a therapy sessions place, and that’s what matter.

What’s believable and what’s not says more about the reader than the writer.

And the unconscious as a machine for operating an animal is utterly believable, to express this more appropriately, this animal named man.

But then, what’s the difference between conscious and unconscious?

The unconscious is a part of the self that for ‘biological reasons’ remains hidden from yourself.