Satin Island Review

1 "The world is all that is the case."
1.1 "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
1.2 Those quotes, I'm sure you'll recognize, come from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, its first and last sequentially numbered propositions.
1.3 Tom McCarthy's new novel, Satin Island, is similarly sequentially numbered.
1.4 (I love a book that makes me pull my battered copies of Wittgenstein off the shelf.)
1.5 (Those of you who follow me (langame) on Twitter (@140xLangame) or who've located my email address on this page (langame[dot]wow@gmail[dot]com) will note that the handle of my online persona is drawn from his Philosophical Investigations (and has been since at least the early '90s). Language game —> Langame.)
1.6 There is the world, what we can say about it, and language. "The rest is silence." (Hamlet's last words.)
1.7 The early Wittgenstein (of the Tractatus) believed that in articulating the structure of the propositional logic he would reveal the true structure of the world. Call it metaphysical Realism.
1.8 The later Wittgenstein (of the Investigations) rejected the possibility of such a foundation. Call it metaphysical Anti-Realism.

2 Serious novels tend to try to solve one of two problems: the labyrinth of the human heart or the conundrum of the greater world.
2.1 The best tend to frame the collision of the two.
2.2 Tom McCarthy's first novel, Remainder, explored the manic arena of the former and found no center and no exit, merely neurotic repetition. His second, C., attempted to take the reader over and under and through the latter with all its fatalistic implications, and discovered hints of meaning but, ultimately, no solution.
2.2 In his new novel, Satin Island, the writer steps back from the abyss where the two worlds, the inner and the outer, approach (however asymptotically).
2.3 Satin Island begins with its protagonist, U., recalling being stranded with tons of other people in the Turin airport, a hub facility, because European airspace was at a standstill.
2.4 Here's a quote:

"People need foundation myths, some imprint of year zero, a bolt that secures the scaffolding that in turn holds fast the entire architecture of reality, of time: memory-chambers and oblivion-cellars, walls between eras, hallways that sweep us on towards the end-days and the coming whatever-it-is. We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that's discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming, even if it isn't really, if it's all just ink-blots." (SI, 3-4)

2.5 Satin Island ends with U. in another transit hub silently declining to board a crowded ferry to Staten Island, NY.
2.6 Here's a quote:

"I was, as I mentioned, jet-lagged: disoriented, undirected. I'd travelled down to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal to take the ferry and not taken it, or perhaps just traveled down there to not take the ferry. I'd been standing in the same spot for some time now. So, too, had the plain-clothes security personnel, and the MTA man. As the concourse filled up with incoming passengers, our arrangement, its sculpted geometry, which had impresed itself upon me with such clarity and (at the same time) mystery for a few minutes, faded back into the general mass of bodies. It was still there, though, camouflaged or buried: none of us had moved. The homeless guy was still there, too, going slowly down the row of payphones, searching for forgotten change caught in their mechanism. In his attempt to trigger its release, he lifted each receiver from its cradle and held it up for a few seconds, waiting for coins to drop. None did. I looked out at the harbour once again. The dazzle on the water now was all-consuming, overexposed, blinding: the departed ferry, Staten Island, all the other landmarks and most of the sky had disappeared in a great holocaust of light, whose retinal after-effects, in turn, made th terminal's interior too dark when I turned back to it. It took a few more seconds for the levels to adjust. I found myself still looking at the homeless guy. He was still holding a receiver away from his ear, making no attempt to listen to or talk into it. He looked all wrong; anachronistic. Who uses payphones these days? I wondered if these one even worked. I stared at him; our eyes met for a while; then I, uncomfortable, broke off the contact and started walking, past the growing stream of people, out of the terminal and back into the city." (SI, 188-89)

2.7 Shapeless plasma takes on form like a fish approaching through murky water. The departing ferry and everything around it dissolves into a dazzling holocaust of light on water. The rest is silence.
2.8 Beautiful.

3 In his Acknowlegements, McCarthy rather cheekily challenges his readers: "Satin Island, like all books, contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, remixes and straight repetitions. To list them all would take up as much space as the text itself. The critical reader can entertain him- or herself tracking some of them down, if he or she is that way inclined."
3.1 Wittgenstein is clearly a presiding force here. As is the wavering Hamlet. I will venture two more before I tire.
3.2 In my 2010 review of C., I wrote the following: "Pynchon in GR [Gravity's Rainbow] 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."
3.3 My somewhat flippant remark that, thematically, C., based on a bit of visual symbolic logic, felt like a WWI prequel to Gravity's Rainbow's WWII now seems prescient. As if to confirm this, McCarthy names his protagonist in Satin Island 'U.', a further flipping of our visual arc. An upside down Gravity's Rainbow would be one in which there are no structures of meaning determining every aspect of our lives, but rather the meaning of the world is only what we can impose upon it, and, at the end, the world is too vast (too fast) for us to impose any real and lasting meaning on it.
3.4 (The fact that Melanie Jackson, Mr. Pynchon's wife, is McCarthy's U.S. agent does nothing to counter this observation. But I digress.)
3.4 (Now I digress further. Does this mean McCarthy's next novel will flip the visual symbol of the arc a further quarter turn so that it will somehow involve the logical symbol for material implication, the 'if-then' operator, the conditional: ⊃ ?
3.5 How about this? Motif: Causality, the principle at work in the greater world though not necessarily the human heart. Theme: This is how you know the world is real, you can do things that cause other things to happen in it. Tom?
3.6 Just saying. ;-))
3.7 In David Haglund's New Yorker piece about Satin Island, he recalls Zadie Smith's critical essay comparing Remainder with Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and points out the sly irony of McCarthy's ending Satin Island at the Staten Island Ferry terminal while Netherland ends on the ferry itself.
3.7 I won't go over that ground again mainly because Satin Island calls to mind another novel where the protagonist flees a situation he doesn't fully comprehend and winds up on a ferry: Emmanuel Carrère's The Mustache. (If you don't know it, find a copy now and read it. There is also a movie directed by the author which you can find on the Web (if you know how to look). See it, too.)
3.8 Short synopsis: One day the hero decides to shave off his mustache. No one notices. He becomes increasingly suspicious of a conspiracy against him. He feels his identity slipping, and his paranoia grows until his sanity seems at stake. He flees Paris for, ultimately, Hong Kong where he winds up riding the Kowloon Ferry back and forth across the harbor over and over again.
3.9 Enough.

4 U., McCarthy's protagonist, is an academic, an anthropologist, who works for a London consulting firm. A big picture kind of guy. He seems to know little, however, about the company he works for and doesn't seem to have a particularly clear sense of his remit within it. He is put on a project—of which his company has a small piece—he does not fully comprehend. He doesn't even know quite how his own contribution fits into the overall scheme of his firm's aspect of the project, but he has some hearsay evidence that the greater project will somehow affect 'everything'.
4.1 His mercurial, enigmatic boss encourages U. to pursue his intellectual passion (when he's not otherwise occupied) which is a Present Tense Anthropology or an Anthropology of the Now, aka the "Great Report" (GR, anybody?). Something we are led to believe cannot be accomplished. A fool's errand.
4.2 U. has a colleague with an equally obscure, vague job description. They are 'big picture' guys stuck in the basement of a corporate consulting culture, presumably there to provide context for the company's clients.
4.3 U. also has a girlfriend (of sorts) and a dying friend.
4.4 U. travels to business conferences where he meets with mixed reactions to his vague ideas. He pursues random thoughts and, importantly, images down the rabbit-holes of research and the internet: e.g., the deaths of parachutists, oil slicks.
4.5 There is a randomness to his life, a disorientation.
4.5 It's almost as if McCarthy is saying that the way into the world isn't some systematic foray, it's serendipitous. Higglety-pigglety. Write everything, no matter how seemingly insignificant, down—the mantra of U.'s anthropologist (that dying 'science') heroes Claude Lévi-Strauss and Bronislaw Malinowski—then try to figure it out later.
4.6 Unfortunately, as Wittgenstein and systematic logic teaches us, the only way to make sense of it all is outside of the system you are trying to observe and describe. In the human case 'after' means after life; it means dying first: meta-physics, if you will.
4.7  (And, apparently, U. is not yet ready or willing to take that next step—as evidenced by his unwillingness to flow with the faceless crowd onto the (Stygian?) ferry. He accepts his life with all its anxiety and disorientation, and he determines to go on, to live with his discomfort—a true Beckettian anti-hero.)
4.8 And McCarthy does have some trenchant criticism for the Christian view of things, which is one historical attempt at an extra-systemic (or metaphysical) explanation of things. The minister at his friend's funeral tries to console those gathered with the standard platitudes and bromides, but "everything that was said about Petr was wrong. I don't mean that it was wrongly nuanced or beside the point or missing the essence of his character or anything like that. I mean that it was simply, in a factual sense, false. ... I just sat there, seething with quiet fury that this act of personal and cosmic fraudulence would never be requited." (SI, 152)
4.9 Also for the 'ever-popular tortured artist effect:' McCarthy gives himself, the writer/artist no quarter. His girlfriend, Madison, lets U. know she was stuck once in the same Turin airport where U. begins the novel but is cagey about telling him the circumstances. Eventually he wangles her story out of her: she was subjected to some very real physical and psycho-sexual torture due to her protest at a global capital summit; this in stark contrast to U.'s existential angst over his Great Report.

5 The central image—in a book full of images (always a strength of McCarthy's!)—is that of U.'s dream of Satin Island.
5.1 Here it is:

"I was flying...over a harbour by a city. It was a great, imperial city, the world's greatest—all of them, from all periods: Carthage, London, Alexandria, Vienna, Byzantium and New York, all superimposed on one another the way things are in dreams. We'd left the city and were flying above the harbour. This was full of bustle: tug-boats, steams, yachts, you name it, bobbing and crisscrossing in water whose ridges and wave-troughs glinted in the sun, though it was nighttime. Out in the harbour—some way out, separated from the city by swathes of this choppy water—was an excrescence, a protuberance, a lump: an island. Was it man-made? Possibly. Its sides rose steeply from the sea; they were constructed of cement, or old bricks. The island was dark in hue; yet, like the sea, it seemed somehow lit up. As we approached it—flying quite low, parallel to the water—the building on it loomed larger and larger. These buildings—huge, derelict factories whose outer walls and rafters, barely intact, recalled the shells of bombed cathedrals—ran one into the next to form a single giant, half-ruined complex that covered the island's entire surface area. Inside this complex, rubbish was being burnt: it was a trash-incinerating plant. Giant mountains of the stuff were piled up in its great, empty halls, rising in places almost to where the ceiling would have been. They were being burnt slowly, from th inside, with a smoulder, rather than roaring, fire. Whence the glow: like embers when you poke them, the mounds' surfaces, where cracked or worn through by the heat, were oozing a vermilion shade of yellow. It was this glowing ooze, which hinted at a deeper, almost infinite reserve of yet-more-glowing ooze inside the trash-mountain's main body, that made the scene so rich and vivid, filled it with a splendour that was regal. Yes, regal—that was the strange thing: if the city was the capital, the seat of empire, then this island was the exact opposite, the inverse—the other place, the feeder, filterer, overflow-manager, the dirty, secreted-away appendix without which the body-proper couldn't function; yet it seemed it its very degradation, more weirdly opulent than the capital it served. We were homing right in on it now: descending in our chopper through the factory-cathedral's shell, skimming the rubbish-piles as walls and rafters towered above us, gazing in awe and fascination at the glowing ooze, its colours as they morphed from vermilion yellow to mercurial silver, then on to purple, umber, burnt sienna, the foil-like flashing of its folds and gashes as light flowed across them. And, as we skimmed and veered and marvelled, a voice—the helicopter pilot's maybe, or some kind of commentator, or perhaps, as before with the roller-blader half-dream, just my own—announced clearly and concisely: Satin Island." (SI, 141-43)

5.2 Try this on for size: The heart is a smoldering dreamscape over which the self floats, the great world's ruined garbage dump: Satin Island. Its objective correlative, Staten Island, can only be approached at one's peril, for as one does the world (of the self) dissolves into a silent, pixellated tin flash of sun dazzle.
5.3 (Want more literary trash talk: have some Eliot, Pynchon, Gass, DeLillo, Beckett, and Ammons (from 2008)).
5.3 U. is not on some internal quest to find himself, as was the nameless narrator of Remainder. Nor is he on some pilgrimage to find the meaning of the world, as was C. He, his identity, is assumed, given; his Being is bracketed, in Heidegger-speak, and U. is seeking the tantalizing but elusive name of the world.
----------
À propos of nothing, Query: How does one pronounce U.'s boss's name, Peyman? Is it "Pie-man", as in 'Simple Simon met a ...'? or is it "Pay-man", as in ...? Well, you get the picture.

Call Me Infidel

Satin Island, the new novel by Tom McCarthy, is required reading. I'm pretty sure I'll have more to say about it after I re-read it—and it demands re-reading—as I have his previous novels Remainder and C.. Here, though, in the meantime, is a video taste from Johan Grimonprez:



The imagery of skydiving, with its implication of faith, is one of the threads McCarthy weaves through the book. If it takes faith to skydive, readers of WoW will readily remember my own lack of same. In 2009, in what has turned out to be my longest serial post I indicted myself as incapable of making the necessary Kierkegaardian leap.

Here's the link to my essay, memoir, whatever you want to call it: Thyraphobia, or Purity of Heart is to Fear One Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Not Do Again. (Because it's a blog, you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the long page to read the first post, then scroll up. Sorry. Maybe one day I'll put the whole thing together, update, edit, and submit for traditional publication. But for now, it's still in the eternal digital ether.) [Spoiler Alert: maybe it's a good thing I didn't jump! {But see, Coda}]

re: Calling All Active Agents

The International Necronautical Society's 'Declaration on the Notion of "The Future"' appears briefly in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Believer magazine. [But see "Feeling the Future"] Though agnostic myself, I supply a soundtrack.















Then, of course, there's nostalgia for past futures, which, in certain ways, advances the ball:



"Turning and turning in the widening gyre..." [c'mon, you know it]

More About: C

The Comedian as the Letter C

by Wallace Stevens

I

The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea
Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.
An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,
Berries of villages, a barber's eye,
An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,
Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung
On porpoises, instead of apricots,
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha.
It was not so much the lost terrestrial,
The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,
That century of wind in a single puff.
What counted was mythology of self,
Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,
The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,
The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak
Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw
Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,
And general lexicographer of mute
And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,
A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
Crispin was washed away by magnitude.
The whole of life that still remained in him
Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,
Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,
Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,
The old age of a watery realist,
Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes
Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age
That whispered to the sun's compassion, made
A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,
And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon
Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that
Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,
Except in faint, memorial gesturings,
That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,
Here, something in the rise and fall of wind
That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,
A sunken voice, both of remembering
And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.
Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.
The valet in the tempest was annulled.
Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,
And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.
Crispin, merest minuscule in the gates,
Dejected his manner to the turbulence.
The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,
The dead brine melted in him like a dew
Of winter, until nothing of himself
Remained, except some starker, barer self
In a starker, barer world, in which the sun
Was not the sun because it never shone
With bland complaisance on pale parasols,
Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.
Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried
Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin
Became an introspective voyager.

Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,
Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,
But with a speech belched out of hoary darks
Noway resembling his, a visible thing,
And excepting negligible Triton, free
From the unavoidable shadow of himself
That lay elsewhere around him. Severance
Was clear. The last distortion of romance
Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves.
Here was no help before reality.
Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.
The imagination, here, could not evade,
In poems of plums, the strict austerity
Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.
The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.
What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?
Out of what swift destruction did it spring?
It was caparison of mind and cloud
And something given to make whole among
The ruses that were shattered by the large.

II

Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers
Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,
In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan
And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,
As if raspberry tanagers in palms,
High up in orange air, were barbarous.
But Crispin was too destitute to find
In any commonplace the sought-for aid.
He was a man made vivid by the sea,
A man come out of luminous traversing,
Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,
Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,
To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.
Into a savage color he went on.

How greatly had he grown in his demesne,
This auditor of insects! He that saw
The stride of vanishing autumn in a park
By way of decorous melancholy; he
That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,
As dissertation of profound delight,
Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,
Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged
His apprehension, made him intricate
In moody rucks, and difficult and strange
In all desires, his destitution's mark.
He was in this as other freemen are,
Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.
His violence was for aggrandizement
And not for stupor, such as music makes
For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived
That coolness for his heat came suddenly,
And only, in the fables that he scrawled
With his own quill, in its indigenous dew,
Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,
Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,
Green barbarism turning paradigm.
Crispin foresaw a curious promenade
Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,
And elemental potencies and pangs,
And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,
Making the most of savagery of palms,
Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom
That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread.
The fabulous and its intrinsic verse
Came like two spirits parlaying, adorned
In radiance from the Atlantic coign,
For Crispin and his quill to catechize.
But they came parlaying of such an earth,
So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,
So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled
Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,
Scenting the jungle in their refuges,
So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red
In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,
That earth was like a jostling festival
Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,
Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth.
So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found
A new reality in parrot-squawks.
Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd
Discoverer walked through the harbor streets
Inspecting the cabildo, the façade
Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard
A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,
Approaching like a gasconade of drums.
The white cabildo darkened, the façade,
As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up
In swift, successive shadows, dolefully.
The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Gesticulating lightning, mystical,
Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.
An annotator has his scruples, too.
He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,
This connoisseur of elemental fate,
Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one
Of many proclamations of the kind,
Proclaiming something harsher than he learned
From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights
Or seeing the midsummer artifice
Of heat upon his pane. This was the span
Of force, the quintessential fact, the note
Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,
The thing that makes him envious in phrase.

And while the torrent on the roof still droned
He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free
And more than free, elate, intent, profound
And studious of a self possessing him,
That was not in him in the crusty town
From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay
The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,
In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,
Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,
For Crispin to vociferate again.

III

Approaching Carolina

The book of moonlight is not written yet
Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room
For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,
Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage
Through sweating changes, never could forget
That wakefulness or meditating sleep,
In which the sulky strophes willingly
Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.
Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book
For the legendary moonlight that once burned
In Crispin's mind above a continent.
America was always north to him,
A northern west or western north, but north,
And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled
And lank, rising and slumping from a sea
Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread
In endless ledges, glittering, submerged
And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.
The spring came there in clinking pannicles
Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,
If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,
Before the winter's vacancy returned.
The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,
Was like a glacial pink upon the air.
The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice
Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,
Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself
In his observant progress, lesser things
Than the relentless contact he desired;
How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds
He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,
Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;
And what descants, he sent to banishment!
Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave
The liaison, the blissful liaison,
Between himself and his environment,
Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,
For him, and not for him alone. It seemed
Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,
Wrong as a divagation to Peking,
To him that postulated as his theme
The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,
A passionately niggling nightingale.
Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,
A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

Thus he conceived his voyaging to be
An up and down between two elements,
A fluctuating between sun and moon,
A sally into gold and crimson forms,
As on this voyage, out of goblinry,
And then retirement like a turning back
And sinking down to the indulgences
That in the moonlight have their habitude.
But let these backward lapses, if they would,
Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew
It was a flourishing tropic he required
For his refreshment, an abundant zone,
Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious
Yet with a harmony not rarefied
Nor fined for the inhibited instruments
Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed
Between a Carolina of old time,
A little juvenile, an ancient whim,
And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn
From what he saw across his vessel's prow.

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
Although contending featly in its veils,
Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
He savored rankness like a sensualist.
He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore.
It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.
He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.

IV

The Idea of a Colony

Nota: his soil is man's intelligence.
That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find.
Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare
His cloudy drift and planned a colony.
Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
Rex and principium, exit the whole
Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose
More exquisite than any tumbling verse:
A still new continent in which to dwell.
What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind,
If not, when all is said, to drive away
The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
And, from their stale intelligence released,
To make a new intelligence prevail?
Hence the reverberations in the words
Of his first central hymns, the celebrants
Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength
Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,
The more invidious, the more desired.
The florist asking aid from cabbages,
The rich man going bare, the paladin
Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,
The appointed power unwielded from disdain.
His western voyage ended and began.
The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,
Another, still more bellicose, came on.
He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,
And, being full of the caprice, inscribed
Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.
He made a singular collation. Thus:
The natives of the rain are rainy men.
Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,
And April hillsides wooded white and pink,
Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white
And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.
And in their music showering sounds intone.
On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,
What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,
What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,
That streaking gold should speak in him
Or bask within his images and words?
If these rude instances impeach themselves
By force of rudeness, let the principle
Be plain. For application Crispin strove,
Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute
As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

Upon these premises propounding, he
Projected a colony that should extend
To the dusk of a whistling south below the south.
A comprehensive island hemisphere.
The man in Georgia waking among pines
Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,
Planting his pristine cores in Florida,
Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,
But on the banjo's categorical gut,
Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.
Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal,
Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,
Should make the intricate Sierra scan.
And dark Brazilians in their cafés,
Musing immaculate, pampean dits,
Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,
To be their latest, lucent paramour.
These are the broadest instances. Crispin,
Progenitor of such extensive scope,
Was not indifferent to smart detail.
The melon should have apposite ritual,
Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,
When its black branches came to bud, belle day,
Should have an incantation. And again,
When piled on salvers its aroma steeped
The summer, it should have a sacrament
And celebration. Shrewd novitiates
Should be the clerks of our experience.

These bland excursions into time to come,
Related in romance to backward flights,
However prodigal, however proud,
Contained in their afflatus the reproach
That first drove Crispin to his wandering.
He could not be content with counterfeit,
With masquerade of thought, with hapless words
That must belie the racking masquerade,
With fictive flourishes that preordained
His passion's permit, hang of coat, degree
Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash
Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.
It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,
Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.
There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth.
The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed
Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.
All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.
But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,
With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?
No, no: veracious page on page, exact.

V

A Nice Shady Home

Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,
Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent
Had kept him still the pricking realist,
Choosing his element from droll confect
Of was and is and shall or ought to be,
Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far
Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come
To colonize his polar planterdom
And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.
But his emprize to that idea soon sped.
Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there
Slid from his continent by slow recess
To things within his actual eye, alert
To the difficulty of rebellious thought
When the sky is blue. The blue infected will.
It may be that the yarrow in his fields
Sealed pensive purple under its concern.
But day by day, now this thing and now that
Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned,
Little by little, as if the suzerain soil
Abashed him by carouse to humble yet
Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement.
He first, as realist, admitted that
Whoever hunts a matinal continent
May, after all, stop short before a plum
And be content and still be realist.
The words of things entangle and confuse.
The plum survives its poems. It may hang
In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground
Obliquities of those who pass beneath,
Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved
In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,
Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.
So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,
For him, of shall or ought to be in is.

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass
Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?
Was he to company vastest things defunct
With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?
Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong
His active force in an inactive dirge,
Which, let the tall musicians call and call,
Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen
Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?
Because he built a cabin who once planned
Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?
Because he turned to salad-beds again?
Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?
Should he lay by the personal and make
Of his own fate an instance of all fate?
What is one man among so many men?
What are so many men in such a world?
Can one man think one thing and think it long?
Can one man be one thing and be it long?
The very man despising honest quilts
Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.
For realists, what is is what should be.
And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,
His trees were planted, his duenna brought
Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,
The curtains flittered and the door was closed.
Crispin, magister of a single room,
Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down
It was as if the solitude concealed
And covered him and his congenial sleep.
So deep a sound fell down it grew to be
A long soothsaying silence down and down.
The crickets beat their tambours in the wind,
Marching a motionless march, custodians.

In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,
Each day, still curious, but in a round
Less prickly and much more condign than that
He once thought necessary. Like Candide,
Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,
And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,
A blonde to tip the silver and to taste
The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be
Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries!
Yet the quotidian saps philosophers
And men like Crispin like them in intent,
If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.
But the quotidian composed as his,
Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,
The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,
Although the rose was not the noble thorn
Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,
Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung
Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights
In which those frail custodians watched,
Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,
While he poured out upon the lips of her
That lay beside him, the quotidian
Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.
For all it takes it gives a humped return
Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.

VI

And Daughters with Curls

Portentous enunciation, syllable
To blessed syllable affined, and sound
Bubbling felicity in cantilene,
Prolific and tormenting tenderness
Of music, as it comes to unison,
Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last
Deduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur
His grand pronunciamento and devise.

The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,
Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,
Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,
Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.
The return to social nature, once begun,
Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,
Involved him in midwifery so dense
His cabin counted as phylactery,
Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt
Of children nibbling at the sugared void,
Infants yet eminently old, then dome
And halidom for the unbraided femes,
Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,
Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,
True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.
All this with many mulctings of the man,
Effective colonizer sharply stopped
In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.
But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs
Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints
Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex
The stopper to indulgent fatalist
Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon
His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,
She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,
So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,
Attentive to a coronal of things
Secret and singular. Second, upon
A second similar counterpart, a maid
Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake
Excepting to the motherly footstep, but
Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.
Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,
A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,
Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,
All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.
A few years more and the vermeil capuchin
Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,
The dulcet omen fit for such a house.
The second sister dallying was shy
To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself
Out of her botches, hot embosomer.
The third one gaping at the orioles
Lettered herself demurely as became
A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.
The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.
Four daughters in a world too intricate
In the beginning, four blithe instruments
Of differing struts, four voices several
In couch, four more personæ, intimate
As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue
That should be silver, four accustomed seeds
Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights
That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,
Four questioners and four sure answerers.

Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.
The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,
Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out
Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,
And sown again by the stiffest realist,
Came reproduced in purple, family font,
The same insoluble lump. The fatalist
Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,
Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote
Invented for its pith, not doctrinal
In form though in design, as Crispin willed,
Disguised pronunciamento, summary,
Autumn's compendium, strident in itself
But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved
In those portentous accents, syllables,
And sounds of music coming to accord
Upon his law, like their inherent sphere,
Seraphic proclamations of the pure
Delivered with a deluging onwardness.
Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote
Is false, if Crispin is a profitless
Philosopher, beginning with green brag,
Concluding fadedly, if as a man
Prone to distemper he abates in taste,
Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,
Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,
Illuminating, from a fancy gorged
By apparition, plain and common things,
Sequestering the fluster from the year,
Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,
And so distorting, proving what he proves
Is nothing, what can all this matter since
The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

So may the relation of each man be clipped.

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)

Ur-story: No Stranger to the Joys of Darkness

Where were we before our brief cultural meanderings? Right, we were looking at Beckett's Malone Dies—we cannot escape its orbit.

In Malone, we found traces of the lingering religious bias in literature in its assumption of a soul, something beyond thought, beyond physical suffering. Something that may or may not endure. No such religious atavism in Remainder, however. All traces of religious influence have been effaced, deferred, distanced; the most prominent occurring spectacularly at the end with the haunting, magisterial image of the plane flying a figure eight (the symbol for infinity), almost like a prayer, in the sky:

"I looked out of the window again. I felt really happy. We passed through a small cloud. The cloud, seen from the inside like this, was gritty, like spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set for ever—burn out, pop, extinguish—and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end. Then there'd be no more music, no more loops. Or maybe, before that, we'd just run out of fuel. For now, though, the clouds tilted and weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again."

Malone attempts to distanciate himself from his dying by telling stories, something he refers to as play:

"This time I know where I am going, it is no longer the ancient night, the recent night. No it is a game, I am going to play. I never knew how to play, till now. I longed to, but I knew it was impossible. And yet I often tried. I turned on all the lights, I took a good look all round, I began to play with what I saw. People and things ask nothing better than to play, certain animals too ... I shall never do anything any more from now on but play. No, I must not begin with an exaggeration. But I shall play a great part of the time from now on, the greater part, if I can. ... I must have thought about my time-table during the night. I think I shall be able to tell myself four stories, each on on a different theme. One about a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing and finally one about an animal, a bird probably." (180-81)

There is some initial confusion in Malone Dies as to whether Malone is telling his stories verbally or writing them down with his nib of a pencil in his exercise book. Beckett doesn't really distinguish between the two, though he does indicate: "At first I did not write, I just said the thing. Then I forgot what I had said. A minimum of memory is indispensible, if one is to live really." (207)

The first story he tells involves the young Saposcat. As everyone knows, the name is a combination of Sapiens and scat, or "I know shit." [Macmann-'son of man'; Malone-'evil one'; Lambert-'unit of light'; Lemuel-'belonging to god'; Moll-'prostitute', nickname for Mary; blah, blah, blah]. This story-within-a-story feels like it might have been a story once written by the younger Beckett and wrangled into the context of Malone's telling. It is a traditionally realist story..."What tedium," interjects Malone into the telling. How telling!

"What tedium. And I call that playing. I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject? I feel the old dark gathering, the solitude preparing, by which I know myself, and the call of that ignorance which might be noble and is mere poltroonery. Already I forget what I have said. That is not how to play...." (189)

[Poltroon=coward] Even though it is his own story, Malone seems to have little control over it—at least ostensibly. He doesn't understand why Sapo isn't expelled from school for an infraction over a stick. This lends credence, in my mind at least, that this happened to Malone and he doesn't understand the grace or human kindness that spared him punishment for his sin: "I shall make him live as though he had been punished according to his deserts." (190) So, he treats Sapo as if he had been expelled. This feels like remorse by Malone, wishing he hadn't sinned—though it is quite opaque in the story how Sapo relates to Malone. Fact is, it doesn't matter, though it makes for fun speculation.

Beckett qua Malone continually interrupts and comments on the ordinariness of his story: "Sapo loved nature, took an interest This is awful." (191) Yet he continues with the story of Sapo/Macmann. Malone doesn't like his own writing. We are lead to ask whether this is Beckett commenting on his own writing style, or, more broadly, on traditional modes of storytelling. It is a good question. So, leave it to Beckett to answer his own question:

"We are getting on. Nothing is less like me than this patient, reasonable child, struggling all alone for years to shed a little light upon himself, avid of the least gleam, a stranger to the joys of darkness. Here truly is the air I needed, a lively tenuous air, far from the nourishing murk that is killing me. I shall never go back into this carcass except to find out its time." (193)

How reliable is this comment? Who knows.

Throughout the novel, there is Beckett's trademark, marvelous humor. For example, the story about the Lambert's dead mule: "Together they dragged the mule by the legs to the edge of the hole and heaved it in, on its back. The forelegs, pointing towards heaven, projected above the level of the ground. Old Lambert banged them down with his spade." (212)

That's good, old-fashioned slapstick. Could've been in a Monty Python film.

Then there's Beckett's perverse side:

"When the meal was over Edmund went up to bed, so as to masturbate in peace and comfort before his sister joined him, for they shared the same room. Not that he was restrained by modesty, when his sister was there. Nor was she, when her brother was there. Their quarters were cramped, certain refinements were not possible. Edmund then went up to bed, for no particular reason. He would have gladly slept with his sister, the father too. I mean the father would have gladly slept with his daughter, the time was long past and gone when he would have gladly slept with his sister. But something held them back. And she did not seem eager. But she was still young. Incest then was in the air. Mrs. Lambert, the only member of the household who had no desire to sleep with anybody, saw it coming with indifference. ... What tedium." (215-16)

This is classic, realist narrative with that perverse Beckettian twist. It extends the form, but does not [transcend] it. What tedium. It is not enough for the artist.

Neither is the naturalist, mimetic beauty of Beckett's prose:

"Then Mrs. Lambert was alone in the kitchen. She sat down by the window and turned down the wick of the lamp, as she always did before blowing it out, for she did not like to blow out a lamp that was still hot. When she thought the chimney and shade had cooled sufficiently she got got [sic] up and blew down the chimney. She stood a moment irresolute, bowed forward with her hands on the table, before she sat down again. Her day of toil over, day dawned on other toils within her, on the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains. Sitting, moving about, she bore them better than in bed. From the well of this unending weariness her sigh went up unendingly, for day when it was night, for night when it was day, and day and night, for the light she had been told about, and told she could never understand, because it was not like those she knew, not like the summer dawn she knew would come again, to her waiting in the kitchen, sitting up straight on the chair, or bowed down over the table, with little sleep, little rest, but more than in her bed. ... " (216-17)

Such lyrical beauty; this could easily be the description of a still life by a Dutch master: the dying light, the posture, the face, the sadness. Yet, to Beckett qua Malone: "Mortal tedium." (217)

Still, tedious or not, writing is crucial to remembrance: Malone drops his pencil and cannot find it for forty-eight hours. "I have spent two unforgettable days," he tells us, "of which nothing will ever be known..." (222)

What is to be done? Malone reverts, as he promised, from storytelling to describing his 'present state'—a standard novelistic move. Malone, like Ivan Ilych, feels himself dying gradually, feels his body distancing itself from him:"

But this sensation of dilation is hard to resist. All strains towards the nearest deeps, and notably my feet, which even in the ordinary way are so much further from me than all the rest, from my head I mean, for that is where I am fled, my feet are leagues away. And to call them in, to be cleaned for example, would I think take me over a month, exclusive of the time required to locate them. Strange, I don't feel my feet any more, my feet feel nothing any more, and a mercy it is. And yet I feel they are beyond the range of the most powerful telescope. Is that what is known as having a foot in the grave? And similarly for the rest. For a mere local phenomenon is something I would not have noticed, having been nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life, without any result. But my fingers too write in other latitudes and the air that breathes through my pages and turns them without my knowing, when I doze off, so that the subject falls far from the verb and the object lands somewhere in the void, is not the air of this second-last abode, and a mercy it is." (234)

Frantically, Malone reverts to storytelling: There is some wallowing and squirming in the mud. There are possessions, lost, found, and lost. There is a hat on Macmann and one on an ass. There are sticks and bloody clubs. And Macmann comes/goes to the asylum. There is sex with his keeper, Moll. There is a tooth carved in the shape of a crucifix. There is murderous rage and a murder. There is the theft of bacon from the 'excursion soup' by the unscrupulous keeper, Lemuel. And there is the inmates' murderous excursion to the island with the asylum's benefactor, Lady Pedal.

Then, again, Malone's dying:

"A few lines to remind me that I too subsist. He has not come back. How long ago is it now? I don't know. Long. And I? Indubitably going, that's all that matters. Whence this assurance? Try and think. I can't. Grandiose suffering. I am swelling. What if I should burst? The ceiling rises and falls, rises and falls, rhythmically, as when I was a foetus. Also to be mentioned a noise of rushing water, phenomenon mutatis mutandis perhaps analogous to that of the mirage, in the desert. The window. I shall not see it again. Why? Because, to my grief, I cannot turn my head. Leaden light again, thick, eddying riddled with little tunnels through to brightness, perhaps I should say air, sucking air. All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favourable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die. Haul in your hands. I can't. The render rent. My story ended I'll be living yet. Promising lag. That is the end of me. I shall say no more." (283)

Malone fails at his projects. He does not complete his stories—and what he completes is tedium, mortal tedium—though he scribbles furiously and unconsciously. His possessions seem to take on a life of their own, refusing inventory, wandering off, returning mysteriously. And his present state, well his present state dwindles into a homunculus inside his head and, after the rest of his body, is extinguished into a terrible darkness.

Such is Beckett's stark vision of the inner life of the dying Malone. Trying to avoid himself, he finds himself. Trying to escape his fate, he dies. We watch him, in that most memorable phrase, "being given...birth to into death."

In terms of the Ur-story theme we've been pursuing, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych was pure porn, a literary snuff piece, if you will, much like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was pretty much a pornographic, snuff film: the level of the storytelling is intense, direct, realistic; trapped within its own form. Beckett tries to escape the ambit of 19th Century realism by commenting—derisively we might add—on his own storytelling. In the face of the Ur-story, Beckett seems to be showing us, straight-on storytelling simply will not suffice. Tom McCarthy has absorbed this lesson. Remainder (and with it, Synecdoche, New York) is, indeed, the child of Malone Dies.

Ur-story: No Light But Reflected Gleams

Somewhere on a continuum between Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Tom McCarthy's Remainder lies Samuel Beckett's short novel, Malone Dies. Let me explain.

In the Tolstoy, for the first time, we saw the novelist attempting to portray the consciousness of a dying character from the inside, i.e., the dying man's point of view. He faced the same problem as those fundamentalists who claim Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, to wit: how could Moses in the thirty-fouth chapter of Deuteronomy have written about his own burial? (NB: These, of course, are the moderate fundamentalists. For the truly die hard, the entire Bible was dictated word-by-word by their god. In fact, when I worked in the library at an evangelical seminary where they used to shelve the books by author, the joke was that we needed to shelve the Bible under 'S' for 'Spirit, Holy'.) Ilych dies in the last sentence on the last page of the last chapter. The artifice is evident, especially given the first chapter which is written in a more omniscient, third-person POV-type free indirect style.

At the end of McCarthy's book, we found the unnamed protagonist circling (figure-eighting, to be precise) in a hijacked private jet waiting, presumably, for it to run out of fuel and plummet from the sky. This would have re-enacted the incident which changed his life, but from the point of view of the inciting object. In the meantime, he had spent his considerable fortune re-creating and re-enacting scenes from his life. At first the scenes he sought to reproduce had happened directly to him and he tried to re-create his direct sensory sensations—the sight and feel of a crack in the wall, the smell of liver cooking, a pianist rehearsing, the sight of black cats on red roofs, etc. As the story progressed the scenes grew farther and farther away from his direct experience until, at the end, he pre-enacts a scene he wants to see happen in the future. The distance of alienation increases with each re-enactment, but the themes of unexpected windfall and unknown object falling from the sky somehow persist.

Where, then, does the Beckett lie? In Malone Dies, Beckett's protagonist, like Ivan Ilich, is dying. The first line of the book reads: "I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all." Malone sounds almost relieved, his life has been miserable. Unlike Tolstoy, Beckett does not give us the straight inner consciousness of the protagonist. "I shall not watch myself die," Malone baldly states on the first page. Instead, he defers it. Malone tries, in a sense, to escape death by trying to think about something else, or, in the language of criticism, alienating his consciousness of what is happening to him. How does he accomplish this? By writing!

Is this, then, meta-fiction? Is this an allegory of the artist's struggle? Good questions, best left to be resolved by evidence in the text. "While waiting I shall tell myself stories, if I can. ... I have also decided to remind myself briefly of my present state before embarking on my stories. I think this is a mistake. It is a weakness. But I shall indulge in it." He proposes to divide the time he has remaining (as best as he can predict it) into five projects: "Present state, three stories, inventory, there. An occasional interlude is to be feared. A full programme, I shall not deviate from it any further than I must. So much for that. I feel I am making a great mistake. No matter."

Here Beckett gives us his thesis statement in the guise of Malone laying out the project for the rest of his life. Each, we discover, is problematic: Malone's present state is unknowable: he is confined to bed and cannot explore the room he finds himself in much less the world he can spy beyond the frame of his window. His stories keep getting interrupted by his own sufferings and intrusions. The inventory, likewise, is problematic for Malone is unsure what he has—as opposed to what he once had and lost or what he thinks he has—and keeps losing things he imagines he has. The whole program is, we infer, uncertain at best, and, more likely, doomed to failure. Indeed, "a great mistake." Yet it is all that Malone is capable of doing.

Malone is, ostensibly, an old man living out his final days of bedridden isolation in a small room in some sort of care-giving institution—a hospital, an asylum, a prison, it is never entirely clear to him or to us.

"A few words about myself perhaps. My body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impotent. There is nothing it can do. Sometimes I miss not being able to crawl around any more. But I am not much given to nostalgia. My arms, once they are in position, can exert a certain force. But I find it hard to guide them. Perhaps the red nucleus has faded. I tremble a little, but only a little. The groaning of the bedstead is part of my life, I would not like it to cease, I mean I would not like it to decrease. It is on my back, that is to say prostrate, no, supine, that I feel best, least bony. I lie on my back, my cheek is on the pillow. I have only to open my eyes to have them begin again, the sky and smoke of mankind. My sight and hearing are very bad, on the vast main no light but reflected gleams. All my senses are trained full on me, me. Dark and silent and stale, I am no prey for them. I am far from the sounds of blood and breath, immured. I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cannot be quiet. On others let it wreak its dying rage, and leave me in peace. Such would seem to be my present state."

Malone here is the direct descendant of Ilych—sans, say, any sentimental nostalgia or, its obverse, regret or, importantly, insight. In fact, Malone claims he will not indulge any complaining about his symptoms or sufferings (contra Ilich). He proposes to hide from any revelation about his condition, whereas Ilich was radically open to his ethical epiphanic experience. Profoundly, Malone asserts he himself, his authentic self, his essence, is something more than the sum of his sufferings, something untouchable. Something unnamable perhaps?

How does Malone propose to evade his present state? He tells stories. The first is about a young man named Saposcat a/k/a Sapo. Sapo eventually morphs, in the second story, into Macmann: "For Sapo—no, I can't call him that any more, and I even wonder how I was able to stomach such a name till now. So then for, let me see, for Macmann, that's not much better but there is no time to lose, for Macmann might be stark staring naked under this surtout for all anyone would be any the wiser." And Macmann embodies all "the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones" we have come to know from Beckett's fiction.

The stories are problematic for the characters keep morphing with Malone. It is, nevertheless, safe to say the stories Malone attempts to tell to avoid thinking about his own dying are, in fact, self-reflexive. They are stories about himself—deferred one degree. There is some experiential truth in them.

I simply believe I can say nothing that is not true, I mean that has not happened, it's not the same thing but no matter. Yes, that's what I like about me, at least one of the things, that I can say, Up the Republic!, for example, or, Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder if I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said something else. Yes, no reflection is needed, before or after, I have only to open my mouth for it to testify to the old story, my old story, and to the long silence that has silenced me, so that all is silent. And if I ever stop talking it will be because there is nothing more to be said, even though all has not been said, even though nothing has been said. But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise, in two or three days if I remember rightly. Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave. But sufficient unto the day, let us first defunge, then we'll see. How many have I killed, hitting them on the head or setting fire to them? Off-hand I can only think of four, all unknowns, I never knew anyone. A sudden wish, I have a sudden wish to see, as sometimes in the old days, something, anything, no matter what, something I could no have imagined. There was the old butler too, in London I think, there's London again, I cut his throat with his razor, that makes five.(236)

This dark passage reveals so much. Whatever it is that exists beyond the suffering of the human body (for convenience's sake, let's call it a soul), Beckett seems to be saying, we cannot know in this life whether it exists beyond the grave. We must defunge first! In Italian, defungere means "to die". Thus, before we can know if the soul lives on beyond the grave, we must die. Fungere, though, means to act as or in place of another. Maybe, then, immortality lies in the creation of fictions, of art. No matter. The truth is there, somewhere. It is also interesting to note that, like Lemuel, Malone is a multiple murderer; their stories, too, coalesce in Malone's dying. Again, there is no escape from the experiential truth of the self, despite one's fictions.

In this, the remainder of the book becomes the precursor of the McCarthy, whose protagonist attempts to re-enact a significant experience of his life to recapture a feeling of deja vu he experienced. Subsequently, he tries to re-enact a moment in a complete stranger's life to capture the feelings that person felt when he experienced his own murder. There is an "other minds" argument going on in Remainder that is absent in the Beckett. Finally, McCarthy's hero attempts to create an experience he has never known—thus, definitively, taking it beyond the Beckett.

The irony is that no matter how hard Malone tries to escape his situation by frantically scribbling stories and inventories, he keeps returning to himself. The same holds in the McCarthy: the protagonist wants to recapture the one true 'authentic' moment he had begging for money in front of his stock broker's offices after he had won a settlement for the accident. He figures a bank heist might do the trick in an exaggerated sort of way. Indeed, he receives a sack of money but things go wrong and he winds up about to fall from the sky just like the mysterious object that clocked him, knocked him into a coma, and nearly killed him. The message is the same in both the Beckett and the McCarthy: no matter how much one attempts to defer one's self, no matter how much one resists, no matter how much one projects, no matter how much one scribbles one's fictions (or, in the Beckett, describes one's realities), one cannot really escape one's self. It is "immured", one might say imprisoned, in our "stupid flesh." The eternal return (to borrow Nietzsche's formulation) of the true self—whether in story or in the act of creation—is inescapable: the ineluctable modality (to borrow Joyce's) of the self. [More to follow]