Our Tragic Universe (48 page)

‘It’s going to blow you away,’ he said. ‘It’s a theory of the anti-hero. The last part of it fell into place when I read that piece in the paper at the weekend by Vi Hayes. The second-last part happened when I read your feature. I think Vi Hayes might have read your feature too; she sort of replies to it. I brought her piece along with me in case you didn’t see it. Here.’ He took a print-out of the online version of the article out of his leather briefcase and gave it to me. I hadn’t seen it. I’d been too busy finishing my first sock and getting over my trip to London for my last-ever editorial board meeting.

As he got up to go to the bar, I realised he was wearing aftershave: it smelled like Ceylon tea and cinnamon. I looked at my phone. I hadn’t heard anything from Rowan since I saw him at my place, and there was still nothing. Then I looked at Vi’s piece. It was what she’d been talking about for such a long time: her theory of the ‘storyless story’. She argued that, although she had named and analysed it, the storyless story was not new. However, it had almost been forgotten in the West in recent years. The whole point of a storyless story, she said, is the subtle rejection of story within its own structure. In this sense, the storyless story is almost what we would recognise as metafiction, but more delicate. Rather than being similar to a snake swallowing its own tail (or tale) the storyless story is closer to a snake letting go of itself. Vi had written a manifesto for the storyless story that suggested that the author of the storyless story would usually be a Trickster, as would his or her
characters. The storyless story has no moral centre. It is not something from which a reader should strive to learn something, but rather a puzzle or a paradox with no ‘answer’ or ‘solution’, except for false ones. The reader is not encouraged to ‘get into’ the storyless story but to stay outside. One of the items on the manifesto was this:
A story about a hermit making jam
could be as interesting as a story about a hero overcoming a dragon, except
that it would be likely that the writer would make the hermit overcome the
jam in the same way the hero overcomes the dragon. The storyless story
shows the hermit making the jam while the hero overcomes the dragon, and
then the hermit giving remedies and aid – and jam – to both the hero and
the dragon before going to bed with a book
.

Why jam? The only person Vi knew who made jam was me. As I read on I realised that Josh was right and she had read my feature from the week before. I smiled. Characters in storyless stories, she said, didn’t worry about what they wore or said or did. They were Fools stepping over the edge of the cliff on all our behalves, so that we can also step out of the restrictive frame of contemporary Western narrative. Surely, she argued, we should have stories not to tell us how to live and turn our lives into copies of stories, but to
prevent
us from having to fictionalise ourselves. Maui is a Trickster who shows us the non-sense of the world. Perhaps Tricksters, the characters you’re not supposed to identify with, are in the end much more interesting role models than the princes and princesses of fairy tales, and the characters in American sitcoms that only exist in order to make us feel that we should be perfect, like them. Towards the end of the piece she recounted a Chinese fairy story about a tiger who catches a fox. The fox tells the tiger that he can’t eat him, because he, the fox, is revered as the most important animal
in the world. ‘Walk behind me for a while,’ the fox says, ‘and you’ll see the way the other animals respect me.’ The tiger agrees, and they set off. The other animals, seeing the fierce tiger walking behind the fox, decide that he must indeed be the most important animal in the world and flee. The tiger, impressed, then lets the fox go on his way.

At the end of the article Vi said she was putting the finishing touches on a book that covered not just the storyless story, which was her theory of folklore and fairy tales, but also the historyless history, the fictionless fiction, the romanceless romance, the unproven proof and the uncertain certainty. The idea of the whole book was the rejection of what she called ‘totalitarian’ structures in science and the humanities, and the acceptance of paradox in all disciplines. Fictionless fiction, I realised, was what all realist writers, including me, wanted to create: something super-authentic and with so much emotional truth that none of it seems like a story at all. I remembered Chekhov saying that a writer should practise ‘total objectivity’. At the time I hadn’t understood how that could be possible. But fictionless fiction would be totally objective; it would have to be.

‘What’s the news?’ Josh said when he came back.

I put the print-out down on the table.

‘It’s good news, I think. You are now officially Zeb Ross.’

‘Wow! That’s amazing. Thank you. Have I got a disability?’

‘Yes. You’ve got a disability. I hope this doesn’t freak you out too much, but your “disability”, not that I should probably call it that, is OCD. This was a complete coincidence. They’d already decided that this was something “romantic” and “cool” that might nevertheless stop Zeb appearing in public. I have to say
it helped when I said that you really had it. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t think I do. Will you be my boss?’

‘No. No, in fact I’ve left Orb Books, as of Friday. You’re on your own. Do feel free to turn them down if you want to. But it’s a pretty good job, and the pay’s OK.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘I want to spend some proper time on my novel. My’ – I glanced down at the print-out of Vi’s article – ‘“fictionless fiction”. I’ve also got some more work at the paper, which means I can leave genre writing behind completely for a while. I think it’ll be good for me. Unlike Kelsey Newman I don’t think we’re immortal beings and I want to try to do something worthwhile while I’m still alive. Not to get to some other dimension, but because this is probably my only chance. I’m not doing down Zeb Ross, and I think you’ll have fun being him, but I think I’ve had enough for a while.’

‘No more narrative arcs in Torquay for you, then?’

‘I guess not.’

‘Are you abandoning the three-act structure as well?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ I sighed and then sipped my wine. ‘You know, I really don’t understand why Vi blurbed Kelsey Newman’s book, when she’s obviously so against it. It’s a puzzle.’

‘One that may well be solved later. Or now, if you like.’

‘Huh?’

‘Vi Hayes is coming to Kelsey Newman’s talk. She’s going to confront him about it.’

‘Confront him about what? And how do you know this?’

‘I Googled her. I’ve been reading and re-reading
Second World
since you gave it to me. Her quote has been staring at me the
whole time. So when I saw her piece in the paper, and it said the opposite of what Kelsey Newman had said, I emailed her to ask why she’d given such a good quote to his book when she’d mentioned it in her piece as an example of bad narrative theory. I said I knew you; I hope you don’t mind. She emailed back and told me that her quote had been taken out of context.’ Josh pulled another piece of paper from his briefcase. ‘What she’d actually written to the publishers was this: “No doubt many people will think this provides a blueprint for living based on what we have learned from the most well-loved fiction. But we don’t need blueprints for living, and all we learn from the most well-loved fiction is that the moral high ground protects you from almost anything, and the way you get on in this world is to go out and kill anything monstrous, other or different because you don’t like it, and that if you do this you end up with treasure and a princess – money and sex. I have studied forms of fiction for the last thirty-five years, on Pacific islands, in Russia, in South America and even in the kitchen of a nursing home in Brighton, and I have discovered that the Hero’s Journey is not as universal as Joseph Campbell and now Kelsey Newman have suggested. The Hero’s Journey is actually the colonial journey. It’s the journey of the American Dream. There are many different types of story-pattern all over the world that don’t show a hero going to good fortune from bad fortune through overcoming. Of course, at the moment, the loudest voices do tell these hero-myths, and claim that this has been so since the beginning of time. In fact, the abundance of this story-type at this point in history is a cultural, not an essential, fact. It’s an interesting word,
Overcoming
. Newman uses it all the time in his book and each
time it occurs I read it as a verb applied to a man who ejaculates too much, also in every sense. He comes onto everything. There are enough moralising neo-liberal forces in the world without Kelsey Newman adding a cosmic version, and therefore making the logic of globalisation universal.”’

I was giggling by the end. ‘Go, Vi,’ I said.

‘She’s pretty cool. I wonder what she’ll think of my theory of everything.’

I smiled. ‘Go on, then. Tell me how your universe works.’

‘Well, it might cheer you up to realise we are immortal after all.’

‘It might not.’

‘We’ll see. So I know you’re into the Periodic Table of Elements, but you’re not so into Jung and archetypes. So maybe I’ll leave those bits out.’

‘I can take it,’ I said. ‘I know even more about archetypes now, because of you.’

‘Why because of me?’

‘Because of you I reviewed the wrong book. Because of that I got a new commission that meant I got sent not one, not two, but seven Tarot sets. They’re full of archetypes, and all come with books that are in some way about Jung. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but it’s still your fault.’ I’d actually been sent six Tarot sets, but I thought this might disturb him.

‘Ah. Well, my theory may also explain why everything is my fault.’

‘I should hope so if it’s a theory of everything.’

‘All right. Here goes. OK. Well, last time we talked about it you were right. It is a creepy idea that we have to keep being re-born into the Second World to have adventures until we get
one of them right, and then we get sucked into the Omega Point to live on for all eternity in this, this …’

‘Hell? Vacuum of morals?’

‘Yes. Well, sort of, except it’s not enough of a vacuum. There are some logical flaws in Newman’s argument right from the start, the main one being that if the Omega Point is an infinite moment of pure love and total omniscience, then why would it put us through all this shit? OK, I accept that this is the usual question people ask about God, and in a sense it’s proof either of the non-existence of God, or of God’s knowledge that we are going to go to heaven after we die and everything will be OK. So I started thinking again about other ideas of the afterlife and reincarnation, and most of them take you into a void, a nothingness: some deeply cosmic and mysterious non-place. But Newman and Tipler’s Omega Point keeps you trapped for ever at the entrance to this void: the end of time and the beginning of nothingness. This, I thought, can’t be right, like you said.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘I’m sure you did. Or something like it. Another thing that struck me was that Newman said that people were constantly becoming heroic enough to be enlightened and then being transported off to the Road to Perfection. Remember that only pizza-guzzlers would remain? I wondered how this squared with an increasing population, if indeed this is supposed to be the Second World. After all, this is a system where people are leaving or coming back, but not actually being generated. All “possible” humans have already been generated by the Omega Point at the end of time, so after that there are not any more humans left that you could possibly generate. And then it came to me.
Remember I was, when I set out, also trying to solve this problem of why some people can do magic and others can’t, and also why some people are wise and other people are stupid, which has always bugged me. So I’m just going to tell you this from the beginning of time, and you can see what you think. I don’t think there are many logical flaws left.’

Our pizzas came. ‘From the beginning of time?’ I said. ‘Wow.’

‘Don’t mock. You’ll see. So you’ll know, presumably, that the first element in the universe was hydrogen, which is why it is the first thing on the Periodic Table and has atomic number 1. Everything is made from the void, as the Taoists tell us, but everything is also made from hydrogen. It is the one atom on which all others are based.’

‘Could you not say that everything is based on quarks?’

‘Well, yes. It doesn’t matter, because this is a sort of metaphor. It doesn’t matter exactly how the chemical world was formed. Well, obviously it does, but all we need to know is that it was formed, from one essential piece, from which all the other essential pieces, or elements, were also formed. These elements in combination form basically everything in the universe. There can seem to be more or fewer “things”, but there’s always the same amount of matter in the universe. And matter changes its form all the time. The cheese on my pizza was once partly grass, in a sense. What I’m proposing is that this also happened with spirit, and this is how people’s souls were formed. There was one great spirit, which was split up into many spirits – but all still essential. These are the archetypes. It’s really interesting that so many disciplines recognise archetypes, or elemental spirits. In homoeopathy archetypes are often connected with elements. So the Mother, for example, is linked with Natrum
Muriaticum, or sea salt, and her essence is the sea. She is the vast ocean from which we all emerge. The Wise Old Man is sulphur. The Trickster is mercury. And so on. But it’s hard to find people who are pure archetypes. Most people have bits of this and bits of that in them. In Hindu philosophy, the universe is seen to be a cosmic dance where everything gets worse and worse until Shiva simultaneously destroys and re-creates it for the dance to begin again. The idea is that people also get worse and worse. How could this be? Well, think back to our example of original human spirits as pure elements. What if they start to combine and form molecules, and these molecules combine and form compounds and so forth? Fundamental spirit, while there in essence, as a memory or a component of being, becomes reduced further and further and you can’t then isolate the original spirit very easily. It would end up spread all over the place. The pizza-guzzlers that Newman talks about are these highly diluted spirits: people with only long-lost memories of the pure form they once were. The most fucked-up people are the most diluted spirits.’