Changing My Mind (13 page)

The clubbers, the scene gays, the old boys heading to their drinking clubs—all formatted. Then suddenly he notices a group of homeless people, the way they take messages up and down the street to each other, with a sense of purpose, really seeming to
own
the street, interacting with it genuinely. He makes contact with one of them. He takes him to a local restaurant, buys him a meal. He wants to ask the boy something, but he can’t get it out. Then the wine spills:

Because, in fact, the homeless are just like everyone else:

Large breasts. Small. The narrative has a nervous breakdown. It’s the final MacGuffin, the end of the beginning, as if the novel were saying:
Satisfied? Can I write this novel my way now? Remainder
’s way turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical materialism—it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel. A few days after the fake homeless epiphany, at a party, while in the host’s bathroom, the Enactor sees a crack in the plaster in the wall. It reminds him of another crack, in the wall of “his” apartment in a very specific six-story building he has yet no memory of ever living in or seeing. In this building many people lived doing many things—cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike. And there were cats on the roof! It all comes back to him, though it was never there in the first place. And now
Remainder really
begins, in the mission to rebuild this building, to place reenactors in it reenacting those actions he wants them to enact (cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike), doing them over and over till it feels real, while he, in his apartment, fluidly closes and reopens a fridge door, just like De Niro. Eight and a half a million quid should cover this, especially as he has entrusted his money to a man much like Hans van den Broek—a stock trader—who makes money for the Reenactor (for that’s what he is now) almost as quickly as he can spend it. To facilitate his reenactment, the Reenactor hires Nazrul Ram Vyas, an Indian “from a high-caste family” who works as a facilitator for a company dedicated to personal inauthenticity: Time Control UK. It takes people’s lives and manages them for them. Nazrul is no more a character (in realism’s sense of the word) than I am a chair, but he is the most exquisite facilitator, and it is through him that every detail of the reenactment is processed. He thinks of everything. In place of the pleasure of the rich adjective we have an imagined world in which logistical details and logical consequences are pursued with care and precision: if you were to rebuild an entire house and fill it with people reenacting actions you have chosen for them, this is exactly how it would play out. Every detail is attended to except the one we’ve come to think of as the only one that matters in a novel: how it
feels.
The Reenactor in
Remainder
only ever has one feeling—the tingling—which occurs whenever his reenactments are going particularly well. The feeling is addictive; the enactments escalate, in a fascinating direction. A black man is shot by two other black men near the Reenactor’s house. The Reenactor at once asks Naz to “lay the ground for the re-enactment of the black man’s death. I think I’d have gone mad otherwise, so strong was my compulsion to re-enact it.” In this reenactment, the Reenactor himself assumes the role of the “dead black man” (who is everywhere referred to like this). His tingling goes off the charts. It’s so good, he begins to fall into trances. It’s impossible not to note here that the nonwhite subject is still the bad conscience of the contemporary novel, obviously so in the realist tradition, but also more subtly here in the avant-garde. Why is the greatest facilitator of inauthenticity Asian? Why is the closest thing to epiphany a dead black man? Because
Remainder,
too, wants to destroy the myth of cultural authenticity—though for purer reasons than
Netherland.
If your project is to rid the self of its sacredness, to flatten selfhood out, it’s philosophical hypocrisy to let any selves escape, whatever color they may be. The nameless “dead black man” is a deliberate provocation on McCarthy’s part, and in its lack of coy sentiment there is a genuine transgressive thrill. Still, it does seem rather hard to have to give up on subjectivity when you’ve only recently gotten free of objectification. I suppose history only goes in one direction. But to
Remainder’s
provocation it’s tempting to answer with another: that beneath the conscious ideas of this novel, a subconscious trace remains, revealing a faint racial antipathy that is psychological and social rather than theoretical. (If
Netherland
can be read against its own grain, which is to say, theoretically, why not read
Remainder
psychologically?) For though these novels seem far apart, their authors are curiously similar. Similar age; similar class; one went to Oxford, the other, Cambridge; both are by now a part of the publishing mainstream, share a fondness for cricket and are subject to a typically British class/race anxiety that has left its residue. A flashback-inclined Freudian might conjure up the image of two brilliant young men, straight out of college, both eager to write the Novel of the Future, who discover, to their great dismay, that the authenticity baton (which is, of course, entirely phony) has been passed on. Passed to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far off, war-torn places. . . . The frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!

Aspects of this constructive frustration were aired publicly at the Drawing Center in New York, on September 25, 2007, when two men, Tom McCarthy and the philosopher Simon Critchley, sat at a table in semidarkness and took turns reading “The Joint Statement of Inauthenticity,” latest manifesto of the International Necronautical Society (INS). The men identified themselves only as the society’s general secretary and chief philosopher. Their voices were flat, nasal, utterly British; they placed sudden emphasis on certain words. It was like listening to a Smiths song.

“We begin,” announced the general secretary, “with the experience of failed transcendence, a failure that is at the core of the general secretary’s novels
⁵⁷
and the chief philosopher’s tomes.
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—” and here the general secretary tripped over his tongue, corrected himself and continued, “—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 if it were champagne).” On the scratchy live recording,
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the audience coughs nervously and is silent: there is not much else to be done when someone’s reading a manifesto at you. The INS members continue: through the brief (by now traditional) faux demolition of the Greek idealists, specifically Plato and Aristotle, who believed form and essence to be more real than anything else, and therefore perfect. “But if form is perfect,” asks the general secretary, “if it is perfection itself, then how does one explain the obvious imperfection of the world, for the world is not perfect? This is where matter, our undoing, enters into the picture. For the Greeks, the principle of imperfection was matter. Matter was the source of the corruption of form.”

Necronauts, as you might guess from the name, feel differently. They are “modern lovers of debris,” and what is most real for them is not form or God but “the brute materiality of the external world . . . In short, against idealism in philosophy, and idealists or transcendent conceptions of art—of art as pure perfect form—we set a doctrine of materialism. . . .” So, while Dorian Gray projects his perfect image into the world, Necronauts keep faith with the “rotting flesh assemblage hanging up in his attic”; as Ernest Shackleton forces his dominance fantasy onto the indifferent polar expanse, Necronauts concern themselves with the “blackened, frost-bitten toes he and his crew were forced to chop from their own feet, cook on their stove and eat.” And so on. Like Chuck Ramkissoon, they have a motto: “We are all Necronauts, always, already,” which is recycled Derrida (as “blood like champagne” is recycled Dostoyevsky). That is to say, we are all death-marked creatures, defined by matter—though most of us most of the time pretend not to be.

In
Remainder,
the INS general secretary puts his theoretical ideas to lively yet unobtrusive use. For the Reenactor himself does not realize he is a Necro naut; he is simply a bloke, and with Naz facilitating at his side he hopes, like the rest of us, to dominate matter, the better to disembody it. To demonstrate the folly of this, in the middle of the novel
Remainder
allows itself a stripped-down allegory on religion, staged in an auto shop where the Reenactor has gone to fix a flat tire. While there, he remembers his windshield wiper fluid reservoir is empty and asks for a fill-up. Two liters of blue liquid are poured into the reservoir, but when he presses the “spurter button” nothing spurts. The two liters haven’t leaked, but neither do they appear to be in the reservoir:

A few minutes later, the engine catches, matter has its inevitable revenge (“It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin”) and transubstantiation shows itself for what it is: the beautiful pretense of the disappeared remainder. In the later reenactment of this scene (which Naz restages in an empty hangar at Heathrow, running it on a loop for weeks) the liquid really disappears, sprayed upward into an invisible, fine mist by the Reenactor’s hired technicians.

McCarthy and his Necronauts are interested in tracing the history of the disappeared remainder through art and literature, marking the fundamental division between those who want to extinguish matter and elevate it to form (“They try and ingest all of reality into a system of thought, to eat it up, to penetrate and possess it. . . . This is what Hegel and the Marquis de Sade have in common”) and those who want to let matter
matter
:

That “failing” there is very important. It’s what makes a book like
Remainder
—which is, after all, not simply a list of proper nouns—possible. Of course, it’s not unusual for avant-garde fiction writers to aspire to the concrete quality of poetry. Listening to the general secretary annunciate his list, emphasizing its clarity and unloveliness, I thought of Wislawa Szymborska, in particular the opening of “The End and The Beginning”:

Even those who are allergic to literary theory will recognize the literary sensibility, echoed in this poem, of which the INS forms an extreme, yet comprehensible, part. The connection: a perverse acknowledgment of limitations. One does not seek the secret, authentic heart of things. One believes—as Naipaul had it—that the world is what it is and, moreover, that all our relations with it are necessarily inauthentic. As a consequence, such an attitude is often mistaken for linguistic or philosophical nihilism, but its true strength comes from a rigorous attention to the damaged and the partial, the absent and the unspeakable.
Remainder
reserves its finest quality of attention for the well-worn street surface where the black man dies, its “muddy, pock-marked ridges,” the chewing gum and bottle tops, the “tarmac, stone, dirt, water, mud,” all of which form, in the mind of narrator, an almost overwhelming narration (“
There’s too much here, too much process, just too much
”) that is yet a narration defined by absence, by partial knowledge, for we can only know it by the marks it has left.
Remainder
recognizes, with Szymborska’s poem, that we know, in the end, “less than little/And finally as little as nothing,” and so tries always to acknowledge the void that is not ours, the messy remainder we can’t understand or control—the ultimate marker of which is Death itself. We need not ever read a word of Heidegger to step in these murky waters. They flow through the “mainstream” of our canon. Through the negations of Beckett. The paradoxical concrete abstractions of Kafka. The scatological thingy-ness of Joyce at his most antic. The most famous line of Auden (“Poetry makes nothing happen”).
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