Men in Space (37 page)

The short councilor asks of the protagonist, in the impersonal third person, “So when, recently, has he felt least inauthentic?” The goal of all the reenactments is the same: it is to be

The fantasy of authenticity is the coincidence of the self with itself and the real – to be oneself without lack, gap, distance, reflection, or remainder. The fantasy for the protagonist of
Remainder
is of a trancelike stasis, where repetition becomes the origin that it sought to reenact. Reenactment and action merge in a feeling of floating serenity.

But do the protagonists in
Remainder
or
Men in Space
achieve union with reality? Not at all. The question in
Remainder
becomes instead, “When had I felt least unreal?” The undoing of the entire fantasy of authenticity, where action would coincide with reality, is
matter
. What the protagonist in
Remainder
desires is the disappearance of matter into the form of the reenacted event, where antifreeze miraculously transubstantiates itself in a Brixton street and all the witnesses to the bank heist disappear into the sky after their plane explodes. But matter ineluctably takes its revenge, the blue goop of antifreeze deposits itself into the protagonist’s
lap and if the plane explodes at the end of
Remainder
(it is not clear whether it does), then its debris will scatter across the ground. “Perhaps a bit of debris might even fall on someone,” the protagonist ponders, “and leave me an heir.” The only possibility of procreation in this inauthentic universe is through a violent trauma, a mechanical accident.

The moral of
Remainder
– knowing that it is the wrong word – is that there is always a remainder that remains: a shard, a leftover, a trace, a residual, a mark. Everything must leave some kind of mark. The attempt to coincide with reality is always undone by the material mark of an event, an accident of which we remember “very little … almost nothing,” as we read in the very first words of
Remainder
.

* * * * *

Inauthenticity is not just an existential or individual affair; it is a
political
matter.
Men in Space
might be read as political allegory about what is at stake in the transition from forms of what was all-too-easily called “totalitarianism” to what was even-more-glibly called “liberal democracy.” The novel’s background is the collapse of the former Warsaw Pact from 1989 onwards through to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The division of the former Czechoslovakia led to the declaration of the Czech Republic on January 1, 1993, which is a framing part of the action of
Men in Space
. And here, once again, the significance of that Byzantine icon becomes apparent.
Men in Space
is a fable of the end of empire whose historical precedent is the collapse of Byzantium or Constantinople in 1453. As the key character of the unnamed spy/secret policeman/radio hack revealingly remarks, “People are not afraid of us any more. We have, in effect, suffered the same fate as Byzantium.”

The Byzantine icon suggests an image of political space as well as aesthetic space. In “totalitarian” political systems
like the former Czechoslovakia’s, legitimacy and authenticity were anchored in the fake will of the people and their supposed identity with the party, the politburo, and the glorious leader or general secretary. After the removal of this regime, there was the brief, delicious enthusiasm of the revolution, velvet or otherwise – what Václav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic, called “living in truth.” But then came the awful realization of the vertigo and disorientation of a new political situation without the old, false markers of certitude: Democracy can be immensely disappointing and marked by an experience of profound
anomie
. The flip side of individual, liberal freedom is the randomly inauthentic drift and emptiness of the discontiguous characters in
Men in Space
.

But the political allegory in
Men in Space
morphs into something more speculative. The radio hack/secret policeman/spy who listens in and initially faithfully transcribes his findings is eventually consumed by a cacophonous deafness that rings in his ears. His series of extraordinary and increasingly unhinged soliloquies culminate in a kind ecstasy of
total
hearing:

This obsession with radio, noise, signal, and transmission in
Men in Space
obviously prefigures the action of
C
, which begins with the invention of radio and whose protagonist, Serge Carrefax, becomes an obsessive radio hack. McCarthy
also explores the idea, highly fashionable in the early twentieth century, that radio was the privileged medium for communication with the dead – the spirit medium, the noise of the cosmos. Although the séances of the Spiritualist Society in
C
are highly ridiculed, there is something more at stake here for McCarthy. One thinks of Jean Cocteau’s
Orphée
(1950) – a longtime obsession of McCarthy’s – in which the car radio becomes the medium for the transmission of cryptic signals from the dead to the living: “
L’oiseau chante avec les doigts, une fois, je repete, / L’oiseau chante avec les doigts, deux fois, je repete.”
(“The bird sings with its fingers, one time, I repeat, /The bird sings with its fingers, two times, I repeat.”)

There is the suggestion in
C
, which is anticipated in
Men in Space
, of radio static as the sound and movement of thought itself, “its hum and rush.” This is not individual or even collective thought, but somehow the thinking of the cosmos itself. The noise of radio signals is a register, the aural marker of a cosmic emptiness, an experience of the void, what we might call an experience of atheist transcendence.

* * * * *

True to the spirit of Hergé’s boy sleuth, Tintin (a name which is also – curiously – a noise; it sounds like tinnitus), all of McCarthy’s books are obsessed with cryptograms and the decoding of secret messages. This culminates at the end of
C
with the death of Serge Carrefax, following the decoding of an inscription in an Egyptian crypt. But it is prefigured throughout
Men in Space
.

The cryptogram appears to Nick Boardaman in various garbled guises throughout
Men in Space
, first in his dreams and subsequently in telegraphic forms seemingly keyed into Nick’s unconscious: “I gape in sympathy towards Eramia,” or “Agape in symphony towards Erania,” or “A gaping
symphony … Urania, Estania,” or even “A Cape Town Symphony,” and “A Cape in sympathy … Estania …” The message that Nick is somehow telepathically picking up takes us back, one last time, to the Byzantine icon. There is some lettering, apparently indecipherable, on the icon, which Helena Markov decodes as mirror-written Attic Greek. The inscription reads:
agape, sympatheia, erémia, tes, eis. Agape
means love,
sympatheia
means understanding, and
erémia
is solitude. But how to interpret the grammar of the Greek terms
tes
(“of the,” genitive singular) and
eis
(preposition meaning “towards” or “into”). Helena runs through various possible renderings:
Love of the understanding towards solitude, love of understanding leading into solitude
, or
solitary is he who understands love
. Unable to decide among the alternatives, Helena gazes into space and says to herself, not knowing at that point that her husband, Anton, has been executed in the woods,

If there is a moment of epiphany in McCarthy’s work, it is not the ecstasy of fusion with nature or the other, but the sensibility of solitude and apartness.

Perhaps this is the truth that the icon has been hermetically trying to tell us throughout
Men in Space
. The elliptical saint, floating upwards, merges not with God but only with solitude, leaving a world of disappointment and debris behind him. It is this figure of
erémia
, solitude, the root of our notions of hermit and hermitage, that interests me here.
Men in Space
is a panel crisscrossed with lines that make up a place that is
eremos
, lonely, desolate and desertlike, a kind of wilderness-world, a space that is radically abandoned, destitute. This is a hermit world, a space of waste
and desolation, in Latin
vastitas
, an extensive lowland plain on a planetary surface, whether the
Vastitas Borealis
on Mars or the orderly flatness of the Netherlands, where the action of the novel ends.
Men in Space
is a novel of solitude in a world of vast waste. This is the “zone of aloneness” that Nick feels at the end of the book when he hangs, trapped at the top of a house in Amsterdam, before he spins to his death (if indeed he does die at the end of the book). Like an abandoned cosmonaut or a floating saint, looking down on the flattened landmasses of planet Earth, Nick looks down on an Amsterdam square reduced to a series of geometrical figures. A general horizontalization pervades
Men in Space
. Everything falls back to Earth.

– SC, Tilburg, The Netherlands, October 2011