Recessional- Or, the Time of the Hammer

by Tom McCarthy

  Tom McCarthy

  Recessional—Or,

  the Time of the Hammer

  Edited by Elisabeth Bronfen

  diaphanes

  Series THINK ART of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith) – Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) – University of Zurich

  ISBN (ePub) 978-3-03734-615-0

  ISBN (Mobipocket) 978-3-03734-616-7

  © diaphanes, Zurich-Berlin 2016

  All rights reserved.

  Layout: 2edit, Zurich

  www.diaphanes.com

  Contents

  Recessional—Or,

  the Time of the Hammer

  “Obsessed with buffering”

  Questions to Tom McCarthy

  “Something that is not nothing”

  Zurich seminar

  Editorial Note

  Tom McCarthy

  Recessional—Or,

  the Time of the Hammer

  Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant metropolis, a “factory-state” in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on elevator-cables: a conurbation Pynchon calls the “City of the Future” or “Raketen-Stadt.” The raid’s target, though, is not a building; nor is it a person; it is, rather, time. Slothrop has been dispatched to rescue “the Radiant Hour,” which associates of a villain known only as “the Father” have “abstracted from the day’s 24.” As Slothrop, suiting up and setting out, is handed a note informing him, in matinee adventure style: “The Radiant Hour is being held captive, if you want to see her …,” the bullets zinging past his head “conveniently” give over to a clock face, drifting, like the airships, through the sky.

  How do we digest or get a bearing on this bizarre episode? The fact that one of the “Floundering Four” commandos is a “very serious-looking French refugee kid” named Marcel, “a mechanical chess-player dating back to the Second Empire” given to long-winded monologues, might point us towards Proust, inviting us to view Slothrop’s escapade as a reworking of that other raid on lost (or misappropriated) time, stage-managed by a writer who has put something extra in his madeleines. The intention was probably there on Pynchon’s part—yet as I re-read the sequence a few weeks ago, my mind kept drifting (maybe it was the Franco-Germanic mix of Marcel and Raketen-Stadt, the general elevation of the setting) to another scene, another half-occluded precedent; one that plays out, like this evening’s talk, in Switzerland.

  Thomas Mann’s equally-mammoth work The Magic Mountain announces, right from the outset, an obsession with time. As Hans Castorp (another ingénue protagonist) winds his way up through mountains to the Davos sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin, the space through which his train chuffs starts to take on “the powers we generally ascribe to time.” Numerous temporal meditations follow—on duration, on persistence, continuity, recurrence. As though foreseeing that Davos would become the seat of the World Economic Forum, Mann has one of Hans’s teachers, Naphta, explain the global financial market to him as a temporally-grounded system, a mechanism for “receiving a premium for the passage of time—interest, in other words.” At the outset of a chapter titled “By the Ocean of Time,” the form and very possibility of the book we are reading become similarly index-linked to time, “For time is the medium of narration.” “Can one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?” Mann wonders. No: “That would surely be an absurd undertaking.” Yet he concedes that any narrative contains two kinds of time: that of its actual time, the time it takes to iterate itself; and that of its content, which is “extremely relative,” such that a narrative that concerned itself with the events of five minutes might take up hundreds of hours, and, conversely, the contents of a moment’s iteration might expand beyond “the extreme limit of man’s temporal capacity for experience.” The latter, expansive instances, he claims, are possessed of “a morbid element” and are akin to opium dreams in which “something had been taken away” from the brain of the sleeper, “like the spring from a broken watch.”

  Hans plans to stay at the sanatorium for three weeks; but, himself diagnosed with TB on arrival, is held up there for seven years. His illness not only forces an extended delay, time off from his work as an engineer, a general time-out from his life; it also imposes its own temporality. When you are ill in bed, Mann writes,

  All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself—or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness—such words as these would better convey the idea. They bring you your midday broth, as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow; and it comes over you—but whence or how you do not know, it makes you quite giddy to see the broth coming in—that you are losing a sense of the demarcation of time, that its units are running together, disappearing; and what is being revealed to you as the true content of time is merely a dimensionless present in which they eternally bring you the broth.

  Colored by shades of eternity and entropy or run-down, illness-time is time that is drifting towards death. But it is also, in classic Freudian fashion, time that is homing in on pleasure. Illness “makes men more physical,” Mann notes; racking women’s frames, consumption brings about a “heightening and accentuation” of their curves and outlines, turns them into beings “exaggerated by disease and rendered twice over body.” “Phthisis and concupiscence go together,” remarks Dr. Behrens, while his colleague Dr. Krokowski talks of love, forced underground by “fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure,” re-emerging “in the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”

  These lines of thought play out dramatically (as those of you who have read the book will know) in the relation between Hans and fellow patient Claudia Chauchat (her name, beside denoting femininity and lust, is also that of a make of machine-gun). Hans experiences his desire for her as an extension and intensification of his illness. In a gesture that redeems a romantic cliché by literalizing it, Mann has Hans’s temperature, constantly thermometer-gauged, rise two notches every time he sees her; and, in a similar materialization of chivalric code, he makes him carry around an X-ray of her lungs, pressed tight against his chest: thus she becomes, like Pynchon’s stolen hour, both radiant and negative, abstracted. Though she remains beyond his reach for virtually the whole novel, he mounts a seduction in the book’s central episode, which takes place on Walpurgis Night—a festival or holiday abstracted even from the abstracted life of the sanatorium, time out of the time-out (“almost,” as Hans puts it, “outside the calendar, intercalated, so to speak, a twenty-ninth of February”). The seduction sequence begins with him re-enacting (unbeknown to Claudia) another episode that shaped his childhood when, aged thirteen, he borrowed a pencil from a boy on whom he had a crush. Recalling the childhood incident earlier in the novel has already caused him to be rapt back into the past “so strongly, so resistlessly” that his present body has seemed like that of a cadaver “while the actual Hans Castorp moved in that far-away time and place”; replaying it on Walpurgis Night as he asks Claudia for her pencil places him, once more, “on the tiled court of the schoolyard.”

  Thus a complex, spring-like structure opens up, stretching and contracting such that quite separate moments touch or get embe
dded one within the other, with a synecdoche or marker for the act of writing (the pencil) running through it all. Lavishing praise on Claudia’s flesh “destinée pour l’anatomie du tombeau,” Hans asks to die with his lips pressed to hers. Most commentaries on The Magic Mountain interpret the fact that Claudia leaves the party at this point as a rebuff; yet her words in the doorway—“N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon”—Hans’s pointedly late return to his own room, and Mann’s mention of more words exchanged between them that night at “a later interval, wordless to our ears, during which we have elected to intermit the flow of our story along the stream of time, and let time flow on pure and free of any content whatever” strongly suggest the opposite. If it is the writing implement that opens the approach to death-like pleasure up, though, it is the same one that, in Mann’s hands, places its consummation in a blind spot. Either way, content-time kicks back in the next day, and Claudia leaves, returning much later as the companion of the older Mynheer Peeperkorn, who, standing between Hans and her, becomes one more of Hans’s surrogate fathers. Peeperkorn will commit suicide, while Hans, discharged, is sent off to the front of World War One, as the novel’s ironic ending sees the long, intimate, death-like intermission of the sanatorium give over to the wholesale mechanized slaughter of historical progression.

  *

  Hans Castorp, of course, isn’t the only literary hero with TB. We could all probably name a handful of writers who succumbed to it, and scores more characters. One of this second group whose story doesn’t get discussed so much these days, not least because of the racist epithet in its title, is the hero of Joseph Conrad’s novella The Nigger of the Narcissus. The setting (for those of you who need reminding) is a British Merchant vessel sailing back to London from Bombay—a little world, just like Mann’s sanatorium, with its hierarchies and operational rhythms, isolated from the larger one it micro-mirrors, set this time at a degree zero of elevation, on a literal ocean. As the first mate calls the roster prior to casting off, and notes that they are one man short (there is an extra name written down there, but he can’t make it out; it is smudged), he is about to dismiss the crew when a voice calls out: “Wait!” The mate, incensed by the insubordination, demands to know who dared to tell him to wait—whereupon a black man steps out of the shadows, a West Indian sailor named James Wait.

  No sooner has Wait announced his presence than a cough leaps from him, “metallic, hollow, and tremendously loud; it resounded like two explosions in a vault; the dome of the sky ran to it, and the iron plates of the ship’s bulwarks seemed to vibrate in unison.” He will spend most of the trip laid up with his coughing; on the rare occasions when he steps out on deck, “a black mist emanated from him … something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil.” Conrad heaps funereal symbols (corpses, coffins, shrouds) upon Wait; and Wait welcomes the association, telling the crew he is dying at every opportunity, even seeming “to take a pride in that death.” “He would,” writes Conrad, “talk of that coming death as though it had been already there, as if it had been walking the deck outside, as if it would presently come in to sleep in the only empty bunk; as if it had sat by his side at every meal.” The effect on the crew is complex. Wait’s morbidity fills them with trepidation, while his black face repulses them. At the same time, his plight awakens their humanity. They indulge him; cover for him; bring him meals, even plunder the ship’s supplies to pander to him. Before long, they become loyal yet dread-filled servants, “the base courtiers of a hated prince.” The forecastle in which they lodge him turns into a “church” where men, entering, speak only “in low tones”—or, in more pagan shades, a “shrine where a black idol, reclining stiffly under a blanket, blinked its weary eyes and received our homage.” “He had the secret of life, that confounded dying man, and he made himself master of every moment of our existence.”

  But is he genuine? In an exchange with his fellow crewmember Donkin, a work-shy syndicalist whose shirking has nothing of the metaphysical about it (Conrad’s novella is decidedly not tailored to a liberal readership), Wait admits to “shamming” his sickness in order to obtain an easy passage. And yet even as he speaks the words, more coughs rattle his by-now skeletal frame. When the captain accuses him of shamming too (as it turns out, from compassion—he, like the rest of them, can see that Wait is doomed), Wait claims to have recovered; the captain confines him to his forecastle, and the crew almost mutiny. Yet the stand-off seems more philosophical than political: Wait’s “steadfastness to his untruthful attitude” (a double-edged term, since Wait is lying twice over: lying about being well, and lying about lying in the first place) “in the face of the inevitable truth had,” writes Conrad, “the proportions of a colossal enigma.” The whole ship teeters on the edge of an abysmal ambiguity; “nothing in her was real.” It drifts into the doldrums, which (since it is sail-powered) delays its onward passage—a hiatus that seems to affirm that “The universe conspired with James Wait,” since he, too, as he drifts deathwards, is borne into “regions of memory that know nothing of time.” “There was,” writes Conrad, “something of the immutable quality of eternity in the slow moments of his complete restfulness.” And, as in The Magic Mountain, lurking somewhere in the depths of this un-clockworked death-space is a half-buried scene of sexual pleasure: in his delirium, Wait mumbles about a “Canton Street girl … She chucked a third engineer of a Rennie boat … for me. Cooks oysters just as I like …”

  After he finally dies and disappears, canvas-wrapped, into the sea, the wind picks up and the Narcissus speeds onwards to London. The last scene sees the crew collect their pay (Wait’s own salary, since he has no claimants, is put aside, retained) in the shipping company’s office just beside the Royal Mint—for a merchant ship’s passage is, after and above all, a move in the great monetary game of industry and trade. Yet, under the name of Wait, a dark aporia has opened up somewhere inside the game-space; a suspension or negation of its logic; a threat, or at least the kernel of one, to its very continuation.

  *

  As I wrote this lecture, I kept hearing a tune playing in my head, as you do. It was a particular tune, repeating over and over again: MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” You know the one: it is built around a single four-beat musical phrase that loops round and round, while MC Hammer overlays the verbal phrases “U Can’t Touch this” and “Stop! Hammertime.” How logical is the Unconscious. This was no random, meaningless distraction: the song couldn’t have been more germane to the thoughts I was trying to piece together—for doesn’t it, like Conrad’s novella, feature a black man who tells us to wait? A little detective work, the kind you can easily do on Wikipedia, reveals the repeating tune to already be a repetition: MC Hammer has sampled it from Rick James’s “Superfreak,” removing James’s lyrics (“She’s a very kinky girl/The kind you don’t take home to mother”) and inserting his refrain “U Can’t touch this” in the little pause, the suspended beat that opens just before the tune loops round again. We get this opening refrain three times; then, in the “break-down” coda separating one verse from the next, its rejoinder: “Stop! Hammertime”—as though, just like Wait, Hammer were baptizing the hiatus with his own name.

  Conrad’s novella was first published, in 1897, with a preface that is generally taken as the author’s overriding literary manifesto. Drawing an analogy between the manual laborer and the writer, Conrad calls the latter a “worker in prose”—but, counterintuitively, links the great literary work not to a labor’s successful completion, but rather to its suspension. “To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve.” Arrest and pause are the key terms here; also reserved, which conveys the sense of some great bounty o
r reward that, like Wait’s salary (or Claudia, or the Radiant Hour), has been withheld, removed to a location beyond normal reach. Conrad’s preface, for all its talk of pauses and arrests, is equally spatial: the writer “descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal.” That the descent into and re-emergence from this dark region “binds the dead to the living” by holding up a “rescued fragment” of truth to the light gives it a thoroughly Orphic character—and turns the entire preface, for me, into a kind of dry-run for that seminal twentieth-century literary manifesto that Maurice Blanchot would publish 50 years later under the title “The Gaze of Orpheus.” I have written about this at some length elsewhere, so will confine myself to noting here that Blanchot carries Conrad’s motifs of arrest and incompletion one step further: what’s remarkable about Orpheus, he points out, is not that he manages to rescue the lost radiant object, but that (in looking back) he interrupts and vandalizes even his own labor, bringing back to the light not Eurydice’s presence but rather her absence.

  This logic of the negative pervades all Blanchot’s work. As though also thinking of “hands busy about the work of the earth,” he writes: “Take the trouble to listen to a single word: in that word, nothingness is struggling and toiling away, it digs tirelessly, doing its best to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it”—this in an essay called “Literature and the Right to Death.” No writer is more death-obsessed than Blanchot; and, for him, death is intimately tied in with the question of time. His short novella Death Sentence, also utterly Orphic, narrates an encounter between a man and his dead female friend whose corpse he visits, during which visit, despite remaining quite dead, she sits up and chats casually with him—for a while. Its original French title, L’Arrêt de Mort, contains the double sense of a condemnation and a temporary reprieve or suspension (an arrête), as though the judge’s hammer hovered in mid-air above its block. His later, autobiographical essay L’Instant de ma Mort recounts his experience of facing a firing squad during the Second World War—feeling, despite everything, a rush of joy as the soldiers, “in an immobility that arrested time,” pointed their guns at him; then, when the actual shooting inexplicably failed to happen (he would live another sixty years), a perpetual sense of carrying “the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance”—L’instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance. Writing of death elsewhere, he distinguishes le mort, death itself, from mourir, dy-ing: where the first would be a thing that one could grasp, experience, consume (an unrealizable fantasy—yet one that underlies the entire tragic and Romantic literary traditions), the second is a neutral, uncontainable, un-masterable drifting, a movement of absenting. Thus, for the Blanchot of The Writing of the Disaster, dying is the opposite of death: it is “the incessant imminence whereby life lasts, desiring.”