Men in Space (36 page)
Authors: Tom McCarthy
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Literary, #Post-Communism - Europe; Eastern, #Art Thefts
The manuscript of
Men in Space
has had a long gestation. It started as a series of disjointed, semi-autobiographical sketches written in what seems like another era, and grew into one long, disjointed document from which a plot of sorts emerged from time to time to sniff the air before going to ground again. That it eventually found a kind of warped coherence as a novel about disjointedness and separation is to a large extent thanks to the intervention through the years of several people. They are, like the possessed man says, legion – but I’m particularly indebted to Mike Shaw and Hannah Griffiths, Alessandro Gallenzi and Mike Stocks, Jonny Pegg, Jane Lewty and Eva Stenram; also to Penny McCarthy, for her ancient-Greek
techné
.
Everything Falls Back to Earth
Simon Critchley
Here is nothing, hold it tight
.
– Freud’s Wolf Man to Freud
*
Men in Space
is the third of Tom McCarthy’s novels to appear in the United States. But it was the first book he wrote and provides the conceptual kernel of the project that emerges so powerfully in
Remainder
(2005) and
C
(2010). It remains my favorite among McCarthy’s books.
Epigraphs to novels are often overlooked or read too quickly, but can provide invaluable clues for mapping a book’s entire terrain. This is decidedly the case with
Men in Space
. The book opens with a quotation from Klárá Jelínková’s unpublished and seemingly obscure master’s dissertation on the murals of the Bačkovo Ossuary. Indeed, I think that Klárá is the key character in
Men in Space
, and her words can be read as a commentary on both the form and content of the novel that unfolds on the following pages.
What is at stake here is the question of line. Klárá talks about line as “the basic means of expression in the work of
the Bačkovo masters.” These lines never permit themselves to become mere accessories to the expression of volume. That is, they do not “imply depth” or “confer realism.”
Men in Space
is artfully composed like a flat mural on a two-dimensional surface crisscrossed by multiple lines of narrative. These lines consist of what Jelínková calls “inverted perspective” and “multiple points of view,” which precisely describes the deliberately disjointed narrative structure of the book.
Men in Space
is best thought of as a panel painting, a kind of polyptych that depicts a world, that is, in Klárá’s words, “flat, unreal and dematerialized.” Such flat unreality is McCarthy’s space of literature. And space is the key to understanding what McCarthy is up to in
Men in Space
and his subsequent novels. It is not that time and the temporal flow of narrative are absent from McCarthy’s fiction, but they are subordinated to questions of spatial organization and an almost geometrical concern with plotting points, lines, and figures on a flat, horizontal surface.
As such, McCarthy’s characters are not so much people as they are
vectors
, bearers of movement that form these lines, angles, and intersections. At a revealing moment in McCarthy’s
C
, the protagonist Serge is described as “seeing everything flat” and as being unable to understand perspective. In
Remainder
too, a general flatness pervades, and the unnamed protagonist is obsessed with the reenactment of temporal events as the re-creation of spaces. McCarthy’s is an art of navigation, both of the aviational space with which
Remainder
ends and the quasi-Melvillean maritime space that is plotted in
C
. The first time we encounter Nicholas Boardaman (Border-man, man at the border), the English protagonist of
Men in Space
, he is dreaming of ships.
The epigraph to
Men in Space
, and indeed Klárá’s unpublished master’s thesis, enters the action in a decisive scene
later in the book when Klárá and the artist Ivan Maňásek are having a lazy, naked, postcoital conversation about the Byzantine icon that Ivan is being paid to copy. Art, as we’ve known since Warhol – and as McCarthy repeatedly reminds us – is copying and theft. The icon depicts an act of ascension, a floating saint, which at one moment is thought to be Simon, “because of the ships.” Klárá says, in what might be read as a summary of the basic conceit of
Men in Space
and of the relations between persons enacted in the book,
The men stare straight out from the painting. So do the strange birds. The floating saint too, come to that. Axonometric: there’s no variation in their distance from the viewer. Besides which, there’s a general lack of continuity between the figures. Rather than collaborating with one another to provide visual cohesion, they’re discontiguous, each occupying a zone of his own, each willfully oblivious to the presence of others.
As in the icon painting, each character in
Men in Space
seems to occupy his or her own zone of aloneness and pursues an idiosyncratic line of flight, which occasionally intersects with the zone of another. But then we come to the key passage in Klárá’s speech,
The strangest thing of all is this: God’s represented not by a circle but by an ellipse around the saint’s head.
That is, God is not iconographically depicted by a circular halo, which would denote a full transcendence, a plenitude or pleroma that from Parmenides to Hegel has always described the well-rounded circle of being – whether being is understood as nature or the divine or indeed the identity of the two, as in Spinoza. Rather, the divine is coded as an
ellipse
, the key word in
Men in Space
that reappears throughout
the book, rewritten as ellipsis and even
ellipsus
and finally as the oval figure that is inserted into the signature of the increasingly deranged Dutch gallerist, Joost van Straten.
The word
ellipsis
has at least two meanings:
(i) The ellipsis was discovered by Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, whose name is decoded in an inscription later in
Men in Space
, “K-e-p …,” and who worked for Tycho Brahe in Prague, where much of the book is set. The Keplerian celestial model was the first to replace the figure of the circle with the oval – the geocentric plenitude of the movement of the spheres with the elliptical movement of the planets – which goes hand in hand with the post-Copernican de-centering of the Earth from the heart of the universe. It is a revolution, of course, in the understanding of space, which becomes infinite, vast, and empty.
(ii) But
ellipsis
also has an orthographic meaning, denoting an absence, the typographical dot-dot-dot: the marker of a blind spot, an omission. An ellipsis symbolizes all that’s left out.
The twin sense of ellipsis, as the name for a lost plenitude of meaning and the marker of an absence, can be interestingly linked to McCarthy’s activities with the International Necronautical Society (INS), the semifictional group that he conceived in 1999 and which was modeled, not without parody, on European avant-gardes such as the Futurists. The
Declaration on Inauthenticity
, given in New York in 2007, begins its opening thesis with the words,
We begin with the experience of failed transcendence.… Being is not full transcendence, the plenitude of the One or cosmic abundance, but rather an ellipsis, an absence, an incomprehensibly vast lack scattered with debris and detritus. Philosophy as the thinking of Being has to begin from the experience of disappointment that is at once religious (God is dead, the One is gone), epistemic (we know very little, almost nothing; all knowledge claims have to begin from the experience of limitation) and political (blood is being spilt in the streets as though it were champagne).
The second thesis of the same
Declaration
seems to refer explicitly to the scene in
Men in Space
between Klárá and Ivan just discussed,
For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence. We could even say, borrowing defunct religious terminology, that it produces icons of that failure. An icon is not an original, but a copy, the copy of another icon. Art is not about originality, but about the repetition of the copy. We’ll be coming back to this point repeatedly.
Men in Space
is a quasi-geometrically ordered series of horizontal planes that has at its center, as its central conceit, a failed icon, an icon of failure. As Klárá says of the floating, unknown saint, who furthermore might very possibly be non-Christian,
He looks as though he were disappointed. As though there
were
no transcendence – and no pure spirit either, no God.
As I’ve said before,
Men in Space
depicts a flat, unreal, and dematerialized surface, a disappointed and elliptical cosmos littered with detritus.
* * * * *
To risk reducing matters to the seemingly literal, one might say that what is described in
Men in Space
are
men in space
, drifting through a nothingness in which all markers of certainty or anchors of meaning have disappeared. Here the obvious emblem is the figure of the cosmonaut, adrift without a Soviet Union to which to return.
A Soviet cosmonaut is stranded in his spaceship.… I mean really. This guy went up as a Soviet on a routine space mission, and then while he was up there the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now, no one wants to bring him down.
Like abandoned cosmonauts, the characters in
Men in Space
drift through the debris of an inauthentic world. Not even death has the ability to confer authentic, final meaning on a life. When Anton Markov is executed towards the end of the book, he doesn’t even realize it. Rather than a mighty fatal blow, he simply feels that “a twig’s prodding him from behind.” Death, like life, happens randomly, inadvertently.
Readers expecting some kind of reassurance in stories of supposed subjective depth where characters with whom we can “identify” move heroically from crisis to redemption will have been rightly disappointed by
Men in Space
. McCarthy’s fiction and nonfiction aim to skewer an ideology of authenticity that is fed and watered by a certain humanist conception of literature. His work is a critique of writing that conspires to create the illusion of realism. But – and here’s the rub – if character-driven realism is an illusion (the exposure of which is at least at old as Cervantes, and probably much older), then McCarthy’s “flat, unreal and dematerialized” surfaces are arguably more realistic than any purported realism.
In
Tintin and the Secret of Literature
(2006), McCarthy’s
only published book-length work of literary criticism, literature is described as rich trash to be recycled and adapted. McCarthy cites Paul de Man’s discussion of irony from “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” where he says that we, “can know inauthenticity, but never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level.”
This quote casts broad daylight on the terrain of
Men in Space
, but also on McCarthy’s best-known and bestselling novel,
Remainder
, which is not about the overcoming of in authenticity, but our increasing self-consciousness of its operations.
Remainder
is a long hymn to inauthenticity that shows the fatal consequences of the desire for authenticity. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist decides that, “I’d always been inauthentic.” Recovering from the accident where he is hit by something, some unknown violent event very possibly involving an aircraft, he had to learn to walk, to talk, to perform every simple muscular and reflex action as if for the first time. He had to reenact being human.
The protagonist decides that everything about him is imperfect, “Even my fantasies were plastic, imperfect, unreal.” As a consequence, he decides that other people are “Just like me: completely second-hand.” The world is full of usurpers and frauds, the difference being that they don’t realize it. Prior to the revelation that comes with peering into a crack in a bathroom, where a whole forgotten and seemingly real world begins to announce itself, the protagonist becomes utterly bored by people, ideas, the world: everything.
As the spectral, virtual figure of the “short councilor” remarks about the protagonist much later in
Remainder
, “He wants to be authentic.” That is, he wants to act in such a way that he coincides with himself and his self coincides with the real. This requires a reenactment of the reality that he believes he lost prior to the accident, a repetition of what seems to be a lost, original, authentic experience. The closest he
gets to contact with the real is the intense and serene tingling in his body, standing passive and prone, with palms turned upward, that occasionally accompanies the reenactment. The protagonist submits to the fantasy of authenticity, and it is a cold fantasy. The obsessional ordering of reenacted experience keeps all intimacy at a distance and the only pleasure it affords is a solipsistic tingling.