Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'This is what I wanted to talk to you about,' he said. 'I wanted to run my tragedy theory past you. Do you mind if I do it now? It looks like we're stuck here for a while, and there's no one else to really talk to about this.'

  Not even Lise? I thought. But this wasn't really a surprise, since no one seemed to talk to their long-term partners about the things they were really interested in. Bob knew nothing about Libby's knitting; she barely knew how many strings a guitar had. Whenever Taz finished a painting, my mother would say it was very beautiful but far too complicated for her to properly understand. It seemed to be one of the small sadnesses of contemporary life that there was always someone in the office, or down the road, or across the river who understood your inner soul better than your partner did, not that I had any such person. Christopher had seemed to understand my inner soul once, I remembered, but he was well out of date on that score now. I wasn't even sure he knew how many books I'd published. But who was I kidding? Lise might not know about the Titanic, but she would know everything else that was important about Rowan: his favourite colour, his middle name, how he liked his tea, whether or not he snored, why they'd never had children. The list could go on for ever. And Rowan couldn't have been that desperate to talk to me. He still hadn't emailed me after all.

  'I don't mind,' I said. 'I'm thinking of putting something about the Titanic in my novel. I thought I might start with the Hardy poem, or include it somehow. So talking to you is research for me too. It's also an interesting conversation to have while we wait to drown.'

  Rowan pulled himself up on the safety rail and leaned over the edge of the ferry. For a moment I thought he might fall in the river. His feet were no longer on the deck. He turned himself around and hoisted himself up further so that he was now sitting on the safety rail, with nothing behind him but air, and below that, water.

  'OK, so the whole book—my book—is about disaster. Obviously it's around shipwrecks and disasters at sea, but I wanted to theorise it partly through ideas of affect, but also around the structuring of disaster. I wanted to look at whether disasters "just happen" and then people become unhappy, or whether there's more to it than that. Perhaps the narrative runs the other way: people become unhappy, and then there is disaster. When I started the Titanic chapter I thought I was arguing that there's no way to tell the difference between a fictionalised disaster and a real one, using the philosopher Baudrillard. My plan at first with this chapter was to suggest that the cultural premonitions were the simulations, a bit like shipwreck-themed Disneylands, that existed to cover up the fact that these disasters are real and inevitable.'

  'I've come across Baudrillard,' I said. 'The Matrix was supposedly a dramatisation of his ideas, but he said it didn't work because he was more or less saying that when everything becomes signs referring to other signs, then there's no way out, and in The Matrix there is a way out. I think that's it.'

  'That's right. He talks about things like the map that becomes so detailed that it turns into the thing it was supposed to represent. It's about how you represent the real, and whether this affects the real in some way. If you fictionalise everything, does everything become fictional, for example? If you organise a fake holdup, how do you keep it "fake" when the people who are frightened by it and believe it to be real are feeling actual fear? For me this was an unfamiliar way of thinking about familiar things, but very useful. Then I started reading Paul Virilio on disaster, and found that he suggests disaster is built into every man-made system, so then I started thinking that we can expect not just disasters, but premonitions of disasters, around every piece of technology, and that's why they're inevitable. Something similar to, but a bit more complicated than, a self-fulfilling prophecy.'

  I ate a piece of my tangerine. 'Sounds very interesting. Are you throwing yourself overboard?'

  Rowan looked as if he'd forgotten he was sitting on the rail. He looked over his shoulder and then back at me. His hands gripped the rail more tightly and the wooden bracelet he always wore—made from pieces of the shipwreck that left his grandfather stranded on the Galápagos Islands—shifted and then settled on his wrist. He smiled. 'Wouldn't be a bad idea.'

  'But that really would be a disaster,' I said, quietly.

  He shrugged. 'Maybe it's true that disaster is built into everything. Anyway, it's OK. I'm holding on.'

  'So how does tragedy come into all this?' I asked.

  'Virilio makes a distinction between artificial accidents and natural ones. He says whenever you build something like an unsinkable ship you have to invent, along with the ship, the possibility of it sinking. I'm arguing that premonition then becomes entirely reasonable and rational because people are simply reading technology as tragic. People somehow know that technology is always doomed. All that hubris. Anything "unsinkable" is destined to sink eventually.'

  'That's probably true,' I said. 'So in act one you have something big and shiny and vainglorious. You're right. By act three it has to be sunk, or whatever, otherwise the narrative wouldn't work.'

  'But why exactly is that?' Rowan said.

  I shrugged. 'Because narrative is about change. All stories of success begin with failure, and the reverse. Love stories begin with loneliness; loneliness stories begin with love.'

  'But is life the same as narrative?'

  If it was, then was I in a love story, a loneliness story or both?

  I laughed. 'Well, by definition, no. But also by definition, yes.'

  'Because...?'

  'Well, all narrative is simulation, as you say. Narrative is representation, or imitation, or mimesis—it stands in for something that it is not. Your Titanic premonitions are narratives that seem to chime with a "real" narrative. But even a "true story" isn't life, by definition. Life is life. But on the other hand all we know about it is what exists as narrative. As Plato says, there are true stories and there are false stories. The only difference, presumably, between a premonition story about the Titanic and a real account of it is the timing and perhaps some detail, for us, since I'm guessing that neither of us has ever seen the Titanic or met anyone who was on board. For us, the Titanic is also a story, because everything we know about it comes through narrative and not through experience. Sorry; I'm brainstorming out loud. I think what I'm saying is that narrative has to have patterns, otherwise it wouldn't be narrative, and while life doesn't have to have patterns, the minute we express it as narrative it does have to have patterns; it has to make sense. Therefore we impose patterns on life in order that we can express it as narrative. Whenever something good happens, for example, we start anticipating its end.'

  'What about poems, or sculptures? They're not narratives, but they still tell us about life. Life doesn't only have to be made sense of by narrative, does it?'

  'I still think there's a narrative implied in poems and sculptures. You get a "fragment" or a "moment" and you then try to put it into some sort of whole. It's like trying to solve a puzzle. Warhol's Brillo Pad boxes, for example, only work when you reconstruct a narrative to go with them from the clues that you have. When you look at them close up, you see that although they seem to represent or imitate mass-produced items, they are clearly not mass-produced, because each one's different and obviously hand-painted. So you ask yourself, "Why has someone bothered to do this? Why has someone obviously taken time over this crap?" And this poses a dramatic question, where you're part of the story, because it's only in realising that you are examining these boxes that you also realise that you wouldn't bother if they were mass-produced, and that you think about the labour of an artist differently than you think about the labour of a factory worker. You also realise how many things you don't bother to examine closely. The packaging of every object tells a story, but we take those stories for granted and forget to defamiliarise them. The setting of a problem is always the beginning of a narrative. It's a knot that exists to be untied ... God, sorry. I never get to talk about this stuff either, unless I'm teaching, and even then I can't say what I reall
y want. I'm wittering on.'

  'No; it's interesting. So you're saying that in narrative, and therefore in life, every moment can be read as part of a bigger narrative in which anything successful is doomed to failure, and anything big and shiny is doomed to crash and burn, and all rags will eventually turn to riches, which must therefore turn back to rags again, and so on?'

  'Yes. More or less. But not necessarily all in the same story.'

  'So in that case it's probably true, then: premonitions are people predicting narrative, rather than events. Telling tragic stories about things where tragedy appears to be inevitable. And then when the stories are compared—the "fictional" story and the "true" story—they are similar because they are stories.'

  'I bet almost all stories with ships in them have some kind of disaster at sea, just like all stories with animals in them put the animals in peril. In narrative any equilibrium must become a disequilibrium. All narrative involves change from one state to another: happy to sad, or sad to happy usually. But it can be alive to dead, broken to fixed, confused to comprehensible, separate to together—anything.'

  'Every ship is a shipwreck waiting to happen.'

  'Yeah. After all, every ship is destroyed in the end, even if it's on purpose, at the end of its useful life. But the reason tragedy is so mysterious is because it isn't exactly predictable. There's always a moment in tragedy where disaster can be avoided, and what's interesting is looking at why the hero or heroine doesn't take this course of action. It's not a simple formula. Also, people probably get a feeling that an unsinkable ship will sink, because that seems like a good narrative formula, but plenty of people go on unsinkable ships. People don't only believe in formula and nothing else.'

  He looked as if he might cry again, although maybe that was the effect of the cloud that had just obscured the weak sun.

  'So the premonitions exist and don't exist at the same time?'

  'Maybe. Mind you, and I don't know if it's relevant, but I did once read about a study of train crashes. Some researcher found that trains that crashed had fewer people on them than other trains. He thought this was because people "sensed" the impending accident. Also, the most badly damaged carriages had fewer people in them, suggesting, apparently, the same thing. But who knows how that study was done. It's a narrative itself.'

  'Sounds worth following up, though,' Rowan said. 'Where did you read it?'

  'Just some silly book on ESP from the seventies,' I said. 'Probably not a good source.'

  'Oh. That's a shame. Can you give me the title anyway?'

  'I think I've forgotten it. I can look it up, though.' I finished eating my tangerine and then threw the peel in the river. 'I'll email you.'

  'No, don't go to any trouble,' he said quickly. 'Just tell me next time I see you. Next time we're in a shipwreck together.'

  I shrugged. 'OK.'

  'Did I tell you about the spiritualist on board the Titanic?' Rowan said. I shook my head, and he continued. 'W. T. Stead. He'd apparently drawn pictures of ocean liners, and his own death by drowning, years before. He'd also written about shipwrecks. Apparently he helped women and children into lifeboats, then went into the first-class smoking lounge, started reading a book and waited to drown. Although I don't know how anyone actually knows that. I wonder what book he was reading.'

  The ferry lurched slightly, and someone said, 'Oh, God.' Rowan got down off the safety rail, half pushed off by the movement of the boat. If it had lurched in the other direction he probably would have fallen in the river. I wanted to take his arm, or his hand, but I didn't.

  'Do you think the other people left on the Titanic were having conversations about great shipwrecks and disaster theory as it went down?' I said.

  Rowan laughed. 'We're very brave.'

  Then there was a shudder, and the sound of the engines starting, and one of the ferry men came around saying, 'Crisis over, folks.' Then everyone got back in their cars. Rowan and I were the last to go. I almost said something about my ship in a bottle, and I suddenly wanted to arrange to take it to show Rowan one day soon, but I wasn't sure I could explain it properly in the few seconds it took to get to our cars. Instead, just before Rowan got in his car, and before I'd stopped to think about what I was doing, I slightly breathlessly asked him if he wanted to have lunch again one day soon. He turned and looked up from reading something on his mobile phone.

  'I don't think that would be such a good idea at the moment,' he said, his eyes not meeting mine. 'Sorry.'

  I had a long list of things to do that day, including beginning my new draft of my novel, but I could barely concentrate on anything for hours. I had my notebook out, and, perhaps fittingly for someone planning to re-fictionalise herself, I was scribbling in it as if I'd gone crazy; as if I'd been given one of those terrible 'automatic writing' exercises. There were pages of this stuff in the end. Protagonist feels rejected by Love Interest. Need to get a sense of this as an actual, tangible, PAINFUL feeling. Show with action? What action? She can hardly sit in the library and cry all day. Also—there is a kind of hope in his rejection, because he obviously feels something for her. Otherwise, of course, there'd be no harm in lunch. So what would she do in response to this? Maybe just write in her notebook. (Ha, ha! Is this project in danger of becoming too meta-metafictional?) Protagonist writes a long list of reasons as to why he is unsuitable as a Love Interest for her, including his age, his gloominess, the fact that he is in a relationship. She can't believe that he has rejected her. Can he afford to reject her like this? Will he get any other chances? Maybe women throw themselves at him all the time. Maybe he'll never split up with his actual partner, even though he obviously doesn't love her. Or maybe he will leave her and end up going on country walks with grey-haired, arty widows from singles ads because the protagonist is TOO YOUNG. But also need some sense of this connection between them, despite the age difference, and what he does to her with his eyes and all the possibilities of his body and ... At this point I stopped writing. I just couldn't imagine him with anything other than black hair and strong forearms, standing there in his knackered old jeans. Maybe I wouldn't include a physical description of him in the novel. It probably wasn't the kind of thing someone would write in a notebook, especially if they had a partner who might read it at any time.

  Before lunch, I checked my Orb Books email account, and found nothing from Vi, as usual. Perhaps she'd written to my other address; or maybe not. Anyway, there was plenty to read from Orb Books. At our last editorial board meeting we'd ended up brainstorming a rough character outline for Zeb Ross, so that we could better think about how to present him online. Claudia had finally typed up the profile and I was reminded that we'd decided that Zeb should be a mysterious recluse, who can go on the Internet, but never appear in magazines or in person. His vague profile on his various web pages would say that he has dark hair and blue eyes, a medium build, and dresses mainly in jeans and T-shirts. He had gone to a boys' grammar school in Nottingham, where he was a loner who enjoyed science and English. His parents were suburban drones, who wanted him to go into finance or insurance, but Zeb had other ideas. While working in a bookshop, he decided that he could easily write a novel himself, and so he did. At the end of this Claudia had asked people for further ideas. Why is Zeb a recluse? Is he disfigured in some way and, if so, how? Could we invent an accident for him? Let's make Zeb less bland! Ideas, please, people!

  Over a salad, sandwich, some soup and another tangerine, I spent almost all of lunchtime disfiguring Zeb. I imagined him falling in a vat of acid, crashing his sports car, being attacked by men with knives, cutting the wrong wire when trying to defuse a bomb, running through a pane of glass or, indeed, being one of the few people who chooses to sit in a train carriage that is destined to derail and tumble over and over down an embankment until it eventually catches fire and the only way out is by smashing a window with a little hammer. I imagined him lost at sea, drowning. But drowning is total. You can't half-drown, and come back with the scars
to prove it; not really. I imagined Zeb shipwrecked, and then I wondered why the word 'shipwrecked, applied to a person, implies a survivor: someone marooned and alone but alive.

  After lunch I opened up the remains of the last draft of my novel to see what could be saved. There it all was: just over 30,000 words that were as familiar and boring to me as my own pallid face on winter mornings. I must have read my opening paragraph more than a thousand times; I could certainly repeat it by heart. It hadn't changed in two years, but now it was time for it to go. I created a new file with all the same styling as the old one, and typed NOTEBOOK at the top of the first page. The idea was that I would copy-and-paste anything usable into this file, and then construct notebook entries around it, perhaps even including the one I'd written this morning. After an hour I hadn't found anything I wanted to keep. This worried me, so I started a list instead in a new file: Problems with this novel (again). The items on it were: It is boring; it has no focus; it is self-indulgent; I hate the central character; it's too depressing; no one wants anything; no one does anything; there are no questions to be resolved; there is too much narration. Then I thought this would make a nice opening to Notebook, so I pasted the whole list onto the first page. I smiled at my own audacity. Surely no one, not even the most metafictional and post-modern of writers, had ever begun a novel with a list of its own faults?

  My word-count for the novel was now 43, and it felt like I'd just had an enema. I spent the next hour or so reading over my real notebook, wondering how it would look in print. Then I realised that what I'd written this morning had some narrative drive, so I typed it up under the list of Problems with this novel (again). I looked at what I had. So far my new draft was a cheesy romance with some confusing metafiction. I deleted the bit about the love-interest and copied it into a new file called Further Bits. I checked the word-count again; it was back to a manageable 43. Then I didn't know what to do next, so I decided I may as well ditch the library and go to pick up my post from the PO box in Totnes, since this had turned out to be the new arrangement with Christopher. Forty-three words must be a record low for a day's writing, unmatched by even the most ponderous modernists. I wondered whether Zeb's disfigurement could have been the result of some early writer's block, before he found himself miraculously able to write four novels a year. Perhaps he poked out both his eyes with the same pencil.