The Structure of Scientific Recantations: Cormac McCarthy and the Literary Tradition of Scientific Regret

Abstract

Abstract:This essay situates Cormac McCarthy’s twinned last novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, alongside a literary tradition that treats the subject of scientific regret after 1945. At turns suspicious and sympathetic, this tradition weighs “pure science” in a moral calculus, often with didactic ends. The historical inflection of this tradition is clear. Less so, however, is its alignment with a literary form defined by the avowal of wrong and the attempt to set it right: the palinode. Broadly understood, the palinode is a revisionary, self-correcting, even self-thwarting mode. It seeks not to erase the objective happenings of the past but to imagine their moral consequence. The scientific palinode thus compensates for what is felt but not said, or said but not felt. In certain cases, it approximates to the subjective experience of the individual scientist; in others, to the aggregated judgment of history.