Ur-Story: Dash Dot Dash Dot, Pt. 5

(cont'd from previous posts)

The action of the Tom McCarthy's new novel, C, is realistic; causality is treated respectfully. I can imagine everything that happens in the book happening in real life—unlike, say, Kafka's A Country Doctor or Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. That does not mean there aren't fantastical elements. Near the end, for example, Serge declares that, indeed, mirages are real. Similarly, the Egyptian Book of the Dead comes to hallucinatory life.

McCarthy's language has the precision, the clarity, the rigor of a philosopher such as, say, the early Wittgentstein. The writer relies on an abundance of detail to adorn his canvas (unlike his previous effort, Remainder), steering away from the lyrical realism (aka psychological realism) that presents the inner states (the emotions and thoughts and attitudes) of the characters as as real as their actions and as significant as the world they inhabit. That is to say, character—especially that of Serge Carrefax, the protagonist—is pursued in depth and across a lifetime, while personality tends to get short shrift. This is not to say that Serge is a Romantic hero, the traditional form of novelistic character. He is a Modernist hero, one for whom "the world is too much with us."

The form of the novel is the picaresque, but it is epic in scope. It is less derivative than it is a conscious election of its forebears, its chosen tradition.

Its themes often overrun the narrative, but in the end unify it in a dense web of connections both overt and covert which trap the reader in mazes of signification.

The imagery is thick, the symbolism at times oppressive. But I was particularly by struck how, toward the end, McCarthy brings things together around the leitmotif of the beetle. Few modern novelists have mastered the art of the ending. Endings are harder, I believe, than beginnings—and every writer worth his salt I know of writes his openings time and time and time again; and, once he's finished, writes them yet over and over again and still never feels he's gotten them just right. One thinks, of course, of Thomas Pynchon and especially his inability to draw his masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, to a satisfactory close around Tyrone Slothrop. On this score, it seems no coincidence Pynchon penned such a heartfelt review in The New York Times of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel whose symphonically magisterial closure is so beautiful it brings tears to one's eyes. McCarthy, in my opinion, nails the dismount.

On that score, I'll leave off with a couple of telling quotes from the near the end of McCarthy's novel:

"'Look at all these scarabs!' Serge exclaims excitedly. There must be twenty or more of them. Their shapes, sizes and patterns are as varied as those of the ones he came across in the museum or the market—on top of which there's a detail that he hasn't seen before: two or three have, carved into their underside, not images or patterns, but whole sequences of words.

'Secrets of the heart,' Laura, noticing him peering in bemusement at the hieroglyphic phrases. 'In New Kingdom burials, the deceased's unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience were confided to these things.'

'And that's what's written on them, to be printed out after his death?' he asks.

'It's more complex than that,' she answers. 'What's engraved on them are spells to censor these secrets, so they won't come out at judgement and weight down the heart. It had to weigh less than a feather, or the soul was doomed.'

'So the scarab withholds the vital information even as it records it? Even as it prints?'

'Exactly. They were often placed in the heart-cavity…'" (290-91)

"He kisses her neck; she wraps her hand around his head, and pulls it down across her shoulders. He starts taking off her clothes, then his. Peeling away his sock, he's aware of a small tickling sensation on his ankle. Then he's in her…" (297)

[It's not clear here whether this is a beetle or a spider, but let's assume for coherence's sake (for Isis's sake, that is) that it's a blister beetle which some have argued caused several of the biblical Egyptian plagues.]

Serge develops a cyst (sister, again) where he's bitten. He's taken to a ship to return home and falls ill.

"When he falls properly asleep, he dreams of insects moving around a chessboard that may or may not be the sea. At times it seems more like a gridded carpet than a chessboard. The insects stagger about ponderously, stupidly, reacting with aggression towards other insects when these cross their paths: rearing up, waving their tentacles threateningly as antennae quire and contract, and so on. Despite the unintelligent, blind nature of the creatures' movement, there's a will at work behind them, calculating and announcing moves, dictating their trajectories across the board. The presence of this will gives the whole scene an air of ritual. …he falls straight back into a lucid dream, once more of insects—only this time, all the insects have combined into a single, giant one from whose perspective, and from within whose body, he surveys this new dream's landscape. In effect, he is the insect [emphasis in the original; Metamorphosis anyone?]. His gangly, mutinous limbs have grown into long feelers that jab and scrape at the air. What's more, the air presents back to these feelers surfaces with which contact is to be made, ones that solicit contact: plates, sockets, holes. As parts of him alight on and plug into these, space itself starts to jolt and crackle into action, and Serge finds himself connected to everywhere, to all imaginable places. Signals hurtle through the sky, through time, like particles or flecks of matter, visible and solid. Each of his feelers has now found its corresponding touch-point, and the overall shape formed by this coupling, its architecture, has become apparent: it's a giant, tentacular wireless set, an insect-radio mounted on a plinth or altar. Serge is the votary kneeling down before it, arms stretched out to touch it; he's also the set itself—he's both." (300-01)

UPDATE: One technical issue—the sort of issue some writers (namely me, natch) obsess over when deciding how to shape their work: C employs the present tense. Action happens now. Serge flies... Laura digs..., etc. The narrative follows the protagonist, Serge, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his proposed death in a close third person point of view. The problem for the writer is that Serge can not narrate his own birth from a present-tense point of view. Nor can he participate in detailing the circumstances of his death. It's the same problem faced by Biblical literalists who claim inter alia that Moses is the author of the first five books of the Old Testament. The Torah, or Pentateuch, narrates the details of Moses's death, thus rendering their claims of literalism facially absurd. In other words, the writer must leave the limits of close perspective he has chosen for himself in order to tell his story. It's a small detail, but one of those insider-baseball issues we writers worry over. It should not and does not detract from the essential power of the McCarthy's remarkable Ur-story novel, C.

Ur-Story: Dash Dot Dash Dot, Pt. 4

(cont'd from previous posts)

Now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at C, the new novel by Tom McCarthy, itself.

C is divided into four parts: 'Caul', 'Chute', 'Crash', 'Call'.

The plot, let's call it, goes something like this (be forewarned, Spoilers this way lie): Serge Carrefax, like David Copperfield and Hamlet (and my youngest, Wesdom, I might add) is born with a caul. In Western superstition the caul is a sign of good luck; in ancient Egypt it destines the child for the cult of Isis (which factors into the novel's end). It's a good thing, too! Poor Serge needs all the luck he can get because McCarthy keeps trying to kill him.

Serge grows up on the grounds of Versoie, an isolated country estate in early 20th Century England. His family manufactures silk, and his father tries to teach deaf children to communicate by means other than sign language when he is not obsessing about newfangled forms of wireless communication. As a toddler, Serge nearly drowns in a stream while his drug-addled mother lolls uselessly nearby, saved only at the last instant by the childrens' maid/nanny. Serge loves then loses his beloved, volatile dynamo of a sister, Sophie, a brilliant naturalist, who becomes pregnant by the childrens' tutor (and quite possibly Serge's true father (267)), one Widsun who, incidentally presides over Serge's destiny throughout like a distant god. Sophie and Serge miraculously survive a chemical explosion, and, with Serge, we see her fluttering around the grounds of their estate like a disembodied spirit before she poisons herself in shame. She is not so lucky to survive McCarthy's ravages.

Serge then travels to an Eastern European sanitarium to find healing for a nervous condition—clouded vision and coughing up black bile, or melancholy—no one seems to understand. He survives the quacks there and their 'cures'. He discovers sex with his scoliotic masseuse and his vision is restored, but he rejects what could've been, if he'd been psychologically capable of accepting it, an advantageous match with a woman of his own class. Air travel and rumors of war loom.

His vision restored, Serge joins the Royal Flying Corps, predecessor of the Royal Air Force, as an "Art-Obs", a forward airborne artillery observer, and proto-tailgunner. He survives flight training in early rattletrap flying machines that kill nearly as many as they pass. He rubs cocaine on his eyeballs to sharpen his vision. He flies perilously close to an artillery shell as it arcs toward its target. And after freezing during an attack by, presumably, Lt. Paul Friedrich Kempf, a German tri-plane ace coming in from the blind spot of his gun, his plane is shot down and careens into the caul of a parachute of a German balloon observer. Forced down alive behind enemy lines, he is captured and sent to an officer's POW camp where he relishes the fine art of tunneling. He escapes with ease and seemingly miraculously avoids execution as a spy just as the war absurdly ends.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Versoie is in disrepair, its mulberry trees dying from blight. Serge moves to London and half-assedly pursues an education in architecture; survives a bout as a drug fiend, alternating between 'H' (heroin, or sister) and 'C' (cocaine); falls in with and betrays his lover, an actress named Audrey; ingeniously debunks a fraudulent medium, Miss Dobai, and survives the ensuing riot; and overdoses and wrecks his father's car for reasons he cannot quite fathom:

"He's angry at Miss Dobai and her gang, at people for being credulous, at himself for his cruelty to Audrey. He gravitates, naturally, to the Triangle, spends some time in Mrs. Fox's, then stops off at Wooldridge's, then at the taxidermist's. Needing a place to ingest his by-now-considerable haul, and not wanting to return home or retreat to some dingy toilet [N.B.: Remainder, anyone?], he heads for the Holborn basement where his father's car is garaged (he's had the loan of it again for the last two weeks). Retrieving the key from an attendant whose uniform it strikes him in passing, is very similar to that of the Empire ushers, he sits in the front seat and, in the dark and columned vault, injects and sniffs and sniffs and injects, more and more, to try to make the anger go away. It doesn't: it bears down on him from all sides. He decides he's got to make things move.

He starts the car up…" (235)

He survives yet again and upon recuperating at the estate, he is called upon by Widsun to go Egypt to spy, essentially, on competing efforts to link up the declining European empires by means of wireless communication. As part of his job, he ventures up the Nile and back in time, discovering a lovely convergence between modern and ancient pylons. He hooks up with a beautiful archaeologist in the uncharted bowels of an ancient tomb excavation under the mystical spell of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is bitten by an asp or beetle, and dies, we are led to believe, like a great, mythic Northern warrior aboard ship at sea.

(to be continued)

Ur-Story: Dash Dot Dash Dot, Pt. 3

(cont'd from previous posts)

We Americans like our heroes Romantic—with a capital 'R'. First of all, they must be heroic. They must be sympathetic. Their emotional lives must be readily accessible. Through the sheer dint of their will, they must rise above their circumstances and confront obstacles we readers can comprehend from our own experience. And, ultimately, they must prevail against the odds stacked against them.

This helps me make some sense of Michiko Kakutani's review of Tom McCarthy's C in a recent The New York Times. She says: "The hero of this novel, one Serge Carrefax, is another flat character, who sees the world in emotionally uninflected, purely materialist terms…"; and he is "a bizarrely detached character with a forensic attitude toward life: someone who can’t feel any grief over his teenage sister’s sudden death and who sees soldiers getting tangled in their parachutes and thinks of wriggling 'flies caught in spiders’ webs.'”

The reaction was pretty much the same among amazon.com readers (I paraphrase): "I just couldn't bring myself to like the main character"; "He was not sympathetic"; "He seemed aloof and cold"; "I didn't care deeply for the character or form a strong enough connection with him"; "The protagonist and his plight didn't engage me sufficiently". 'What does that even mean?' I wondered as I read these reviews from people who actually, supposedly, read the same book I did.

It was shocking to me to read these reactions to C, a book I found to be utterly brilliant. I was mesmerized by it. I felt so strongly about it I wanted to write it up for my blog. I simply couldn't understand how we could have read the same book.

Poor Serge Carrefax, he seems to be none of those Romantic things we Americans demand from our novel heroes. Kakutani and her readerly ilk will never forgive McCarthy for allowing a taint of determinism into his work, nay, into his character's story. And she reminds us of this by running down the remarkable Remainder, McCarthy's ground-breaking first novel.

Interestingly, Kakutani correctly locates one source of inspiration for C—let's call it the tradition C inherits, though she misses the Nabokovian Ada extension—in Gravity's Rainbow, but she misses the precise import of the Pynchon. Tyrone Slothrop's entire struggle was to escape the psychological, behavioral, conditioning (i.e., the determinism) that motivated his descent into the Zone; to do so, he must disappear, essentially, de-individualize, dis-integrate, if you will. As Jonathan Dee points out in his review of C in Harper's Magazine, another, deeper, more personal and insidious form of determinism is at work in the character of Serge Carrefax: he finds himself bound up in a self-styled cocoon of Freudian dimensions.

How a serious protagonist spending an entire lifetime struggling to come to terms with a grief so stultifyingly powerful it defies his comprehension and motivates practically everything he does from that point on (including making him physically ill) makes for a 'flat' character, or makes a good [advisedly] reader feel the characterization is 'flat', baffles me. Maybe Serge just doesn't gush enough about how he's feeling (or what his attitude is toward Prada, or what he thinks about his boss). This 'bizarre detachment' condemns McCarthy's novel in the eyes of much of the American reading public, particularly those in the thrall of the conventional (dare I say shallow) emotional preconceptions that animate Kakutani's disgust.

This struggle, to the contrary, elevates C to the realm of something I've taken to calling the Ur-story. Look to the Gilgamesh, THE Ur-story, and how its hero reacts to Enkidu's, his boon companion's, death. Yes, he wails and moans his grief—and Kakutani gets that part, the emotional outpouring of the protagonist. But what she fails to comprehend is the significance of the resulting quest for Utnapishtim and immortality—the quest, in other words, to join the mourned love one in death—the epic quest that truly defines character.

(to be continued)

Ur-Story: Dash Dot Dash Dot, Pt. 2

(cont'd from previous post)

In terms of world historical events, our civilization witnessed the last dying gasps of the Industrial Age in the fevered jungles and dismal swamps of Vietnam. It was replaced by the rise of what we now call the Information Age.

Where, Tom McCarthy asks in his new novel C, was this Information Age birthed? To hear him tell it, it might as well have been at some place like the fictional British country estate, Versoie, an incestuous silk-manufactory cum school for the deaf where one Serge Carrefax, C's roving protagonist, and his sister, Sophie, too, come of age.

If there is an overriding metaphorical schema to Tom McCarthy's C (and that is a mighty big 'IF', but go with me here), it has to do with the truly important metric of the Information Age—namely something like the signal-to-noise ratio. Oversimplistically stated: life is all signal and death is all noise (or static or white noise) [or, vice versa as the case may be. {Is there a difference?} I'd be open to a free-wheeling debate over a few or more pints about which of these is the correct formulation. Tom? Anybody?]

Serge's struggle is to decipher the plethora of signals his world throws up at him. To make sense of it all. To discover, as it were, its coherence. And, against that backdrop, to find or define himself.

McCarthy's work is nothing if not coherent. But this doesn't mean Carrefax's life is. Nor does it mean Serge is successful in his struggles—either of them.

Nor does it mean C is about something. It is an artwork. It has its ontological status as such. Again, oversimplistically, the world, let's call it X (the sum of all events, let's call them A, B, ... ∞, at a given point in time), is everything that is the case before the novel, let's call it C, comes into existence; but once the novel comes into existence, the world is ineluctably changed: X + C.

This is why it really doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to try to determine what the 'C' of the title stands for—though, acute readers may chuckle at the stab I made at it in the previous post in this series. It, the title, like the vast welter of details of our existence and McCarthy's novel, is woefully overdetermined.

Now, those of you who read WoW know that I strive, however imperfectly, to produce a high signal-to-noise ratio here. Self-reference is not mere vanity or post-modern gimmick; it is an effort to achieve consistency of statement. Coherence. That does not mean WoW is above frippery or pop culture or aggregation or exploring new or even un-understood ideas whose relevance is not presently apparent but which may, in the faint hope of completeness, shed some light down the road. It isn't.

But enough about me. ["Yeah, right," say my inveterate readers, and in all probability rightly. "Yeah, right."] Let's get back to C.



(to be cont'd)

Ur-Story: Dash Dot Dash Dot

As you may recall, I was an ardent admirer of Tom McCarthy's Remainder. If, as I noted, Samuel Beckett was the presiding spirit over that novel, the Vladimir Nabokov of Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle presides over the early goings-on of his new novel, C—and I have that on the best authority. But Ada and Van Veen are not the only fictional ghosts haunting this text; James Bigglesworth and T.E. Lawrence (advisedly) and Gregor Samsa are merely some of the more obvious ones.

But if there is one overarching spirit (pun intended [you'll see]), it would have to be the Thomas Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow. Full stop.

Pynchon in GR portrays the demise of the individual in the rise of the paranoid style of politics. GR confirmed the suspicions of a generation of Luddites that the incursion of technology in human affairs, historically sited in the WWII "Zone", betokened the rise of a culture of death. The love of technology is the lust for death. Our hopes and aspirations for our creations, artistic and scientific and technological, ascend along the arc of the rainbow, reach their natural apogee and then, under the weight of gravity, come screaming across the sky and crash explosively back to earth.

Now, think visually for a second: turn the finite rainbow arc on its side and what do you have? The letter C! Topple the letter C and what do you have? The arc of the rainbow. Coincidence? I think not.

Thematically, C reads like a WWI prequel to GR. The new technologies of communication, wireless and telephonic, were thought by many at the time to be opportunities to connect up with the spirits of the dead. As deaf as we are to the finite reality of our human situation, there was at the time of the novel still open-ended hope for our eternal aspirations—hopes Pynchon dashes with a sardonic laugh and McCarthy has Serge Carrefax ultimately fall prey to.

Remainder was linguistically terse, stylistically minimalist, and structurally recursive. The prose of C, by contrast, is detailed, the style generous, the structure episodic. Much, again, like its inspiration, GR.

(to be continued)