Stella Maris

The outset of Stella Maris promptly introduces Alicia as an enigmatic figure, with the initial patient report portraying her as a doctoral candidate in mathematics and a “paranoid schizophrenic with a long-standing etiology of visual and auditory hallucinations” (3). Alicia’s visions, while ambiguous, are not entirely dismissed as fictitious products of her mental health condition. Various hints, to be discussed, suggest they reflect her retreat from the world—a theme that becomes increasingly apparent in her nihilistic, existential, pessimistic, and hopeless conversations with Dr. Cohen, her assigned psychologist.

Alicia turned to mathematics in her quest for the truth of the world, seeking proof that material reality exists. However, she instead discovers The Limits of Mathematics, learning that mathematics is merely a discipline of abstract and fabricated observations akin to verbal language. She discloses that the only thing that would make her indifferent to the existence of reality is having a child. Motherhood is envisioned as a savior that would keep her alive: “what I really wanted was a child. What I do really want. If I had a child, I would just go in at night and sit there. Quietly. I would listen to my child breathing. If I had a child, I wouldn’t care about reality” (13). It’s later revealed that her brother, with whom she has been in love all her life, fills a similar role in her psyche: Because love is an entirely subjective and interior phenomenon, it doesn’t need to be confirmed by external evidence. It has a self-contained reality that, like music, transcends the limitations of empirical evidence.

Her perspectives on the alien and unknowable nature of reality are shaped by her mentorship with philosophical mathematicians like Alexander Grothendieck, a pioneer of a new form of algebraic geometry and the father of topos theory—Alicia’s own specialization. She adopts a Gestalt view, conceiving mathematics as governed entirely by human perceptions, in contrast to the Platonist idea of mathematics as universal and unifying.

Alicia endeavors to rationalize the presence of her hallucinatory figures to Dr. Cohen, asserting that they are not supernatural but vividly alive in her perception: “each figure of which all but shimmers with reality. I can see the hairs in their nostrils, and I can see into their earholes, and I can see the knots in their shoelaces” (16). Simultaneously, she acknowledges their origin from within herself, functioning as walking dream projections of her unconscious, serving specific purposes and representing things she has repressed. She articulates,

If I had any fear of the eidolons, it was not their being or their appearance but what they had in mind. That’s what I had no understanding of. The only thing I actually understood about them was that they were trying to put a shape and a name to that which had none (22).

This communicative role aligns with Alicia’s theory of the unconscious, which she regards as a prelingual means of communication between brain and body. For Alicia, the unconscious communicates what cannot be expressed in words—a theory McCarthy himself articulates in his essay “The Kekulé Problem.”

Alicia perceives her mind as undergoing entropy, characterizing herself as “decaying.” She asserts that the world lacks inherent meaning or purpose, adopting an atheistic stance and dismissing spiritual explanations, arguing that “the notion that everything is just stuff doesn’t seem to do it for us” (36). However, she distances herself from materialism as well, rejecting any comprehensive explanation of the world and denying that reality can exist outside of human perception.

From Alicia’s perspective, the sole source of genuine meaning lies in music, which she admires for its self-sufficiency as a system that needs no other system to explain it and cannot be fully explained by any other system. She describes it as “completely self-referential and coherent in every part” and even “transcendental” (37). Upon acquiring the Amati, the renowned Italian violin, with her inheritance funds, she sheds tears over the instrument’s beauty. She contemplates the irony of using money earned by her father, who played a role in creating the atomic bomb that caused the deaths of thousands, to purchase such an exquisite object.

Her nihilistic worldview was shaped by reading Berkeley’s “Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision,” in which he argues that the world does not exist outside the visualizations of the human mind, imprinting meaning on external space. Alicia describes an era of darkness and meaninglessness, asserting that everything changed with the advent of humanity: “all of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory” (40).

In contrast to the Platonists, led by Gödel, who believe that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind, Alicia contends that mathematics is a “faith-based initiative,” and thus inherently uncertain. According to her, mathematics is merely a system for generating abstract explanations and operators, tools that would never exist outside the realm of the human mind. She points to numbers as a prime example of this phenomenon, being invented quantities. This realization prompts Alicia to renounce mathematics as a false source of truth.

The recurring dreams that Alicia experiences underscore her conviction in the fictitious nature of reality, depicting it as an unknowable space. In her view, if this reality were to cease to exist, there would be no eternal being to mourn or remember it. Alicia comprehends that her unconscious mind is attempting to impart this knowledge through these dreams. One of the most alarming scenarios involves a village of women and children being massacred by an invading army: “everything they’ve taught their children had been stricken from the world without a trace” (80), as if their existence had been erased. This thought evolves into a kind of fetish for Alicia, for whom the thought of Suicide and the Dissolution of the Self is finally the only remaining consolation.