Anti-Matter

by Ben Jeffery

  With this reference, Houellebecq implies more than just antipathy to the Symposium ’s vision of love. The Platonic dialogues are intertwined with the figure of Socrates, Plato’s real-life teacher and principal dramatic character. In Socratic philosophy the physical world is only an imperfect copy of what is most real, which is an eternal, supreme heaven of forms and ideas. Knowledge of this heaven makes the soul just, and the man with a just soul cannot be harmed, said Socrates, because he can perceive that material suffering is unreal. It may be the most positive thought of all: the truth will make us safe. The crux of Houellebecqian dejection is that the truth does no such thing. There is nothing above us. It is humanism with a monstrous face.

  The exception to Houellebecq’s standard-template for protagonists is Michel Djerzinski, Bruno’s half-brother. A scientist of genius, Michel has little in the way of normal human appetites. His work shows, ‘on the basis of irrefutable thermodynamic arguments, that the chromosomal separation at the moment of meosis can create haploid gametes, in themselves a source of structural instability. In other words, all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal.’ The solution to this essential fallibility is to remake human material – the epilogue of Atomised tracks an epoch-shifting transformation as Djerzinski’s genetic research lights the way to the creation of a race of sexless, benevolent, ‘neo-human’ immortals. The book ends with a tribute to humanity: a species that finally learned enough to be able and willing to engineer its own extinction.

  2

  What Good are Books?

  I was certain Whatever would provoke social change. Now I think it was megalomania… A novel won’t ever change the world.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Part of the mythology of literature is that a great novel exists as a weather-vane to the age, informed by and informing the mood of the times, simultaneously symptomatic and diagnostic, reflecting the particular concerns of its spot in history, which, in turn, inform the deeper concerns of human life. The ‘conceptual’ difficulty for modern fiction, so to speak, might as well be termed the difficulty of realism. Since at least 1919, when Virginia Woolf published ‘Modern Fiction’, there has been a loose but persistent consensus among ‘serious’ writers that the world has changed in ways that makes Jane Austen-type classic realism inappropriate, so that if you really wanted to be realistic you would paradoxically find best expression in science-fiction or a postmodernist aesthetic, denying the possibility of realism as an achievable or desirable aim (cf. the critic Jerome Klinkowitz: ‘If the world is absurd, and what passes for reality distressingly unreal, why spend time representing it?’) The reasons for this steady, though now itself almost retro, shift in feeling are much-discussed but stubborn. Indeed one of the most striking things there is to notice reading popular criticism from the last half-century is how ghoulishly unaltered certain issues remain. Consider these three quotations:

  ‘the principle of redundancy… is the principal affliction of modern life. … Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life – its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness – conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.’

  ‘for a writer of fiction to feel that he does not really live in his own country – as represented by Life or by what he sees when he steps out the front door – must seem a serious occupational hazard.’

  ‘The task of the modern artist, as of the modern man, is to find something he can be sincere and serious in; something he can mean. And he may not at all.’

  The first is from Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’, the second from Philip Roth’s ‘Writing American Fiction’, and the third from Stanley Cavell’s ‘Music Discomposed’ – essays published in 1964, 1961, and 1967, respectively. They are three good examples of worries that, in their essence if not their particulars (in the second quote, you could replace ‘ Life magazine’ with ‘Google’ and delete the need to leave the home), are as relevant today as when they were when they were written. Each of them speaks to a feeling of disorientation – of not knowing where to look, or what’s important; a lack of clarity; lostness. The challenge for the modern writer is still, most urgently, one of finding her bearings. A similar point, if inflected, could be applied to many of the arts.

  It is perfectly fair – and what’s more, manifestly accurate – to say that Western social and cultural conditions are antithetical in lots of ways to creating literature that makes an impression on people in whatever way we mean when we say that it is ‘engaged’ or ‘resonant’. A familiar way of putting it is to evoke a nefarious alliance of massively multiplied information sources and stimuli with a clustered and distracting mass-culture, and the corresponding shrinkage of the average person’s attention-span and their willingness to isolate themselves with a book. The writer is caught in a double-bind: in order to properly capture the feel of a kinetic, overloaded world she must pack more, and more varied, material into her work, but does so for an audience that has less and less inclination to engage with it. Alternatively, the author simplifies and straightens her work in order to win readers, but at the expense of representing the world as she truly perceives it to be (i.e. selling-out). There is a concern that literature is simply unable to harmonise with an era where the written word has been so heavily marginalised by sound and image. Maybe the form is exhausted. Since there are only so many different ways to stick words together into a coherent whole, only so many styles to adopt, tones to take etc., might the last x-hundred years of cultural activity not have burnt up our artistic resources? These worries are all valid enough, and compounded by the fact that there has never been a moment where the novel was a pure and uncomplicatedly meaningful thing. Doubt about the efficacy of literature must be as old as the art itself. Redundancy, meaning joblessness or irrelevance, is a writer’s special problem. Speaking generally, what literature aims to do is to convey or impose meaning, and this is what redundancy undermines, precisely why irrelevance is one of writing’s natural terrors. Because literature is rooted in illusion and make-believe (basic fraudulence, in other words) and because asking what art is for is akin to asking what life is for (which is to say: have your pick of answer, good luck finding any proof), it is also a terror that is insoluble. For a neat expression of the awful sense of uselessness that anyone with a commitment to the written word must feel from time to time, Philip Larkin’s immortal phrase would be hard to better: ‘Books are a load of crap’. To devote even a part of your life to words is, inevitably, to wonder why you bothered.

  However, the death of the novel has been declared so many times it would be meaningless to keep insisting on it. In any case, whatever ‘the death of the novel’ was supposed to stand for, it clearly wasn’t the end of books, which continue to be published and consumed in large numbers. Perhaps it would be more useful to speak of the deadening of the novel, or of its un-death – à la some horror movie zombie – in which the industry rolls on, literature is still written and read, but some vital essence has been sucked away. At one stage, through sheer lack of competition, the novel was a premier source of social data: Dostoyevsky could be used to discover what life was like in prison, Dickens for life inside a workhouse, E.M. Forster for a picture of India, and so on. Now, television, radio, the internet, films, academia, research groups, major newspapers etc. all do a far superior job of collecting and spreading information, and so it would be stupid for people to choose fiction as a medium for news. Nor are prosperity and social comfort straightforward blessings for writers. In a 1996 Harper’s essay about social novels, ‘Perchance to Dream’ (republished as ‘Why Bother?’ in his collection How to be Alone), Jonathan Franzen speculated that since so few terrible things have happened to America as a country, art has always had a tenuo
us purchase on the American imagination. ‘The one genuine tragedy to befall us was slavery,’ he remarked, ‘and it’s probably no accident that the tradition of Southern literature has been strikingly rich and productive of geniuses. (Compare the literature of the sunny, fertile, peaceful West Coast.)’ As any beginner’s creative writing class will tell you, conflict is what makes narrative go. Accordingly, cultural wounds are priceless bits of material for any novelist trying to tap into her society’s secret desires and fears. But, superficially at least, the recent history of the West matches right up to Franzen’s guess about America: the last twenty years have been characterised by a near-total absence of immediate trauma, dominated by events that are difficult to ‘see’ from street-level, such as climate change, or the spread of cyberspace, or the War on Terror (fought – with a few exceptions – entirely beyond Western borders), or even the banking crisis, a recession that might have been conjured out of air for all that the untrained eye was able to discern. There are other trends whose problematic character is partly constituted by vagueness about whether they are internal or external issues, and the extent to which they belong to us – e.g. immigration and globalisation. It makes sense that ex-colonial and multiethnic work, drawing on the antagonisms of migration and cultural melding, should be such a rich seam of English-language literature since the Sixties. It has blood and sweat to work with.

  In a different respect, the felt reality of the West is overwhelmingly huge. If you were forced on pain of injury to try and say what is characteristic of the present moment, one serviceable answer would be: we know more. Our collective awareness is tremendous. It increases. ‘The pain of consciousness, the pain of knowing, grows apace’, in Franzen’s words. The sum total of human knowledge has long outstripped the capacities of any individual, however brilliant they might be (it being said that the last person to know everything there was to know was Leibniz, which isn’t true, but would be bad enough even if it were – he died in 1716). As a thought experiment, consider any subject (e.g. cooking) that you could claim some knowledge of. Now consider how many people in the world could claim greater knowledge of that subject, how much expertise you lack. Broaden your thought to cover all the fields of science, sport, art, language, mathematics, commerce, engineering, philosophy, history, law, geography, medicine, technology, etc. Try to imagine how much you don’t know, that is known. It is dizzying.

  The expanse of human activity and enterprise, and our consciousness of that expanse, are vital ingredients for the modern novelist’s stew. The problem being that this enormous weight of collected data – or, more accurately, the fact that we are ever-more aware that this gigantic weight of data is sitting out there, collected – has awkward consequences for writing novels. The first, most obvious one is this: there is so much stuff! Far too much to fit into any book, too much for any single talent: how could any lone novelist capture what the world feels like when she has such flimsy snares at her disposal? But the days when there was any clear distinction between the local and the exotic seem gone, and so the pressure mounts on the novelist to pack her work full of data and colour, to take her books globetrotting, evoke the sensation that there is more going on in the world faster and everywhere; the interconnected, networked, speeding, modern kaleidoscope. However, the actual breadth of the world – the diversity of character and locale that you could encounter just by spending an evening channel-hopping or browsing the internet – humbles the imagination, and it seems impossible to do it justice. The present isn’t so much a moving target as a multitude of twisting slipping bodies that refuse to remain targets long enough to take aim.

  A massive proportion of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is a reaction to the feeling of overload. But for literature the issue isn’t simply one of scale, as though in principle, and with enough imagination and effort, one could amass a large enough quantity of information plus character and put it all inside one long book. It is also a matter of fit. In some plain respects novels just seem like the wrong way to depict life in the information age. A linear narrative without explicit audio/visual accompaniment doesn’t rest easily in the job of conveying a time and place animated by flickering bangs and whizzes. It not just the problem already sketched, i.e. the need to compete with all sorts of other, extremely colourful, forms of entertainment for an audience with less attention to give or the desire to give it. It is that literature aiming to be ‘realistic’ would have to depict all the up-to-the-minute parts of the twenty-first century which make it difficult for novels to be that. As though the timely, twenty-first century novel would have to somehow internalise those elements that make novels seem irrelevant and out of step – that is, represent (in a novel) a form of life that novels do not seem to be representative of; like pushing square pegs against round holes. What would a long story be like where the hero worked all day and then spent all his spare time on the internet? Possibly very interesting, but also hard to imagine; as a rule of thumb, novels struggle to capture information-age paraphernalia, and very often seem wooden when they try.4 The problem of fit is more serious by far than the problem of scale, it’s the difference between having a long and arduous job on your hands and having a job you are wrong for. Any novelist who feels their medium to be out of tune with the world around them is obvious prey for the fear of irrelevance. It’s a big deal. It’s what Roth meant by describing the feeling of un-belonging as a serious occupational hazard for the author. And of course it doesn’t take a genius to join the dots and conclude that the really characteristic detail of information-age culture is the aforementioned failure of retention; the transience and slipperiness of data – the attention-deficit. Except that taking this as the subject of your fiction is to risk falling down the worst, most barren sort of rabbit-hole, wherein either the novelist tries to feed the good word to an audience numbed to stimuli, or she’s preaching irony to the choir; satirising forgetfulness and insubstantiality in ways that will end up being as entirely flimsy and disposable as their targets. Here again is the dilemma: we live with realities that are maddeningly difficult to write about, but fiction that doesn’t engage with them isn’t literature that’s about what it’s like, especially, to live at the moment.

  David Shields is surely correct when he says, in Reality Hunger (2010), that no artist ever aims to be unrealistic, even when they deny realism. ‘Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what an artist thinks is reality into the work of art.’ The most abrasive and fantastic art is still designed to show something true. (Lovecraft’s monsters do this, working as mirrors to human insignificance.) But artists are equally aware, perhaps writers most of all, that what they do is irreparably false. There’s a shudderingly powerful fact of existence beyond, and before, all words. The feebleness of writing in comparison to this fact is so obvious. The novelist hopes that she’s wrong (although she knows she isn’t). She tries, with a pessimism born of desperate need, to believe that there is some unique value in writing, which can be cultivated and transferred back to actual lived-life (although she can never prove this). The cycles of self-doubt spin around. It should be easy to see how living in the information age makes it so much worse. The terrors of redundancy are part and parcel of the enterprise of fiction writing. What modern life does is amplify them. It has never been easier to feel anonymous, as an artist or a person. Michel Houellebecq’s books, which don’t take a massive amount of interest in the world buzzing around them, manage to convey this atmosphere extremely well: the gap between real life and life-as-advertised, and how the sense of disappointment it generates has perversely become a bit of a cultural norm. ‘There are some authors who employ their talent in the delicate description of varying states of soul, character traits, etc’ expounds the narrator of Whatever:

  All that accumulation of realistic detail, with clearly differentiated characters hogging the limelight, has always seemed like pure bullshit to me… The world is b
ecoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death’s countenance appears in all its glory.

  ***

  In a 1958 interview with The Paris Review, Ernest Hemmingway said that there is a part of writing it does no good to talk about. This is a perfectly sensible thought. It’s impossible to entirely convey what a piece of art means to you, just as it’s impossible to convey consciousness whole. But our inarticulacy is also the fundamental reason why deep attachment to art can seem so stupid, why it gets so frustrating to try to explain what the ‘real’ worth of art is (even to oneself). What is there in literature beyond entertainment? If the answer is that literature is ‘ennobling’, ‘a higher pleasure’, ‘food for the soul’, ‘a spiritual good’, then the problem isn’t hard to appreciate. Even if you took these phrases seriously, they don’t really explain things so much as mark a limit of the ability to explain. You have to trust people to know what you mean.

  The difficulty handling the concept of a soul (for an atheist or an agnostic) is illustrative of the general problem. ‘Soul’ is extremely attractive shorthand for all sorts of things: essential personhood; aspects receptive to and capable of artistic beauty, deep feeling, moral claims, integrity; the idea there is something inherently precious about each human life; and so forth – there is no secular term that works as a clean substitute. Perhaps ‘humanity’ is the nearest to equivalence, although at the very least it seems flatly unsuited for conveying the power and nuance of certain figures of speech (e.g. ‘a lost soul’, ‘soulful’, ‘touching the soul’). Nonetheless, there is obviously, unavoidably, a sense in which ‘soul’ is compromised by its etymology, i.e. its religiousness. The suspicion must be that it is an embellishment, that though soul and its variations make nice turns of phrase they are not strictly accurate ways of speaking – merely allusive, symbolic. But of course there is tension in thinking of the soul as ‘merely’ allusive or symbolic, as though one doesn’t really mean it, when it is used to describe states that people generally find extremely meaningful. In a theology lecture I once attended the speaker (a priest) began by taking a poll of the students: ‘How many of you would describe yourself as religious?’ About a third of the students put their hands up. Then: ‘How many of you would describe yourself as spiritual?’ Three-quarters of the audience raised their hands. The lecturer thought this demonstrated the enduring relevance of religious thought. Be that as it may, perhaps all it indicated was that many people instinctively reach for religious (or religiously-tinged) ways of speaking about themselves even when they consciously reject religion, a muddled desire that emerges in relatively noncommittal terms like ‘spiritual’. I doubt that many of the students who raised their hands the second time could have given much of an explanation of what they meant by it; not because they were stupid or inconsiderate, but because the concept of spirituality is essentially murky, and it is hard to say what is serious about it if it is not a sort of comfort-blanket. ‘Soul’ is a particularly vivid example just because it shows its supernatural colour whilst being deeply embedded in our habits of speech. It seems to signify, or at least gesture toward, something very important – one feels as though it must mean something – and also to appear weirdly insubstantial, as though there is nothing behind it to make it real. A religious mindset might accommodate a more opaque notion of explanation, giving the impenetrability of certain concepts a positive charge by subsuming them to the greater mystery of the supernatural. In a sense, the mystery is the explanation: the soul is explained by God, and God is beyond human comprehension (for example). Outside such a context, the idea of something being meaningfully unexplained becomes far less stable, but still a term like ‘humanity’ that might be used as a secular alternative to ‘soul’ is in all important respects no less impenetrable.