Men in Space

Afterword

Men in Space is the third of Tom McCarthy’s novels to appear in the United States. But it was the first book he wrote and provides the conceptual kernel of the project that emerges so powerfully in Remainder (2005) and C (2010). It remains my favorite among McCarthy’s books.

Epigraphs to novels are often overlooked or read too quickly, but can provide invaluable clues for mapping a book’s entire terrain. This is decidedly the case with Men in Space. The book opens with a quotation from Klárá Jelínková’s unpublished and seemingly obscure master’s dissertation on the murals of the Bačkovo Ossuary. Indeed, I think that Klárá is the key character in Men in Space, and her words can be read as a commentary on both the form and content of the novel that unfolds on the following pages.

What is at stake here is the question of line. Klárá talks about line as “the basic means of expression in the work of the Bačkovo masters.” These lines never permit themselves to become mere accessories to the expression of volume. That is, they do not “imply depth” or “confer realism.” Men in Space is artfully composed like a flat mural on a two-dimensional surface crisscrossed by multiple lines of narrative. These lines consist of what Jelínková calls “inverted perspective” and “multiple points of view,” which precisely describes the deliberately disjointed narrative structure of the book.

Men in Space is best thought of as a panel painting, a kind of polyptych that depicts a world, that is, in Klárá’s words, “flat, unreal and dematerialized.” Such flat unreality is McCarthy’s space of literature. And space is the key to understanding what McCarthy is up to in Men in Space and his subsequent novels. It is not that time and the temporal flow of narrative are absent from McCarthy’s fiction, but they are subordinated to questions of spatial organization and an almost geometrical concern with plotting points, lines, and figures on a flat, horizontal surface.

As such, McCarthy’s characters are not so much people as they are vectors, bearers of movement that form these lines, angles, and intersections. At a revealing moment in McCarthy’s C, the protagonist Serge is described as “seeing everything flat” and as being unable to understand perspective. In Remainder too, a general flatness pervades, and the unnamed protagonist is obsessed with the reenactment of temporal events as the re-creation of spaces. McCarthy’s is an art of navigation, both of the aviational space with which Remainder ends and the quasi-Melvillean maritime space that is plotted in C. The first time we encounter Nicholas Boardaman (Border-man, man at the border), the English protagonist of Men in Space, he is dreaming of ships.

The epigraph to Men in Space, and indeed Klárá’s unpublished master’s thesis, enters the action in a decisive scene later in the book when Klárá and the artist Ivan Maňásek are having a lazy, naked, postcoital conversation about the Byzantine icon that Ivan is being paid to copy. Art, as we’ve known since Warhol — and as McCarthy repeatedly reminds us — is copying and theft. The icon depicts an act of ascension, a floating saint, which at one moment is thought to be Simon, “because of the ships.” Klárá says, in what might be read as a summary of the basic conceit of Men in Space and of the relations between persons enacted in the book,

The men stare straight out from the painting. So do the strange birds. The floating saint too, come to that. Axonometric: there’s no variation in their distance from the viewer. Besides which, there’s a general lack of continuity between the figures. Rather than collaborating with one another to provide visual cohesion, they’re discontiguous, each occupying a zone of his own, each willfully oblivious to the presence of others.

As in the icon painting, each character in Men in Space seems to occupy his or her own zone of aloneness and pursues an idiosyncratic line of flight, which occasionally intersects with the zone of another. But then we come to the key passage in Klárá’s speech,

The strangest thing of all is this: God’s represented not by a circle but by an ellipse around the saint’s head.

That is, God is not iconographically depicted by a circular halo, which would denote a full transcendence, a plenitude or pleroma that from Parmenides to Hegel has always described the well-rounded circle of being — whether being is understood as nature or the divine or indeed the identity of the two, as in Spinoza. Rather, the divine is coded as an ellipse, the key word in Men in Space that reappears throughout the book, rewritten as ellipsis and even ellipsus and finally as the oval figure that is inserted into the signature of the increasingly deranged Dutch gallerist, Joost van Straten.

The word ellipsis has at least two meanings:

(i) The ellipsis was discovered by Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, whose name is decoded in an inscription later in Men in Space, “K-e-p …,” and who worked for Tycho Brahe in Prague, where much of the book is set. The Keplerian celestial model was the first to replace the figure of the circle with the oval — the geocentric plenitude of the movement of the spheres with the elliptical movement of the planets — which goes hand in hand with the post-Copernican de-centering of the Earth from the heart of the universe. It is a revolution, of course, in the understanding of space, which becomes infinite, vast, and empty.

(ii) But ellipsis also has an orthographic meaning, denoting an absence, the typographical dot-dot-dot: the marker of a blind spot, an omission. An ellipsis symbolizes all that’s left out.

The twin sense of ellipsis, as the name for a lost plenitude of meaning and the marker of an absence, can be interestingly linked to McCarthy’s activities with the International Necronautical Society (INS), the semifictional group that he conceived in 1999 and which was modeled, not without parody, on European avant-gardes such as the Futurists. The Declaration on Inauthenticity, given in New York in 2007, begins its opening thesis with the words,

We begin with the experience of failed transcendence.… 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 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 though it were champagne).

The second thesis of the same Declaration seems to refer explicitly to the scene in Men in Space between Klárá and Ivan just discussed,

For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence. We could even say, borrowing defunct religious terminology, that it produces icons of that failure. An icon is not an original, but a copy, the copy of another icon. Art is not about originality, but about the repetition of the copy. We’ll be coming back to this point repeatedly.

Men in Space is a quasi-geometrically ordered series of horizontal planes that has at its center, as its central conceit, a failed icon, an icon of failure. As Klárá says of the floating, unknown saint, who furthermore might very possibly be non-Christian,

He looks as though he were disappointed. As though there were no transcendence — and no pure spirit either, no God.

As I’ve said before, Men in Space depicts a flat, unreal, and dematerialized surface, a disappointed and elliptical cosmos littered with detritus.

* * * * *

To risk reducing matters to the seemingly literal, one might say that what is described in Men in Space are men in space, drifting through a nothingness in which all markers of certainty or anchors of meaning have disappeared. Here the obvious emblem is the figure of the cosmonaut, adrift without a Soviet Union to which to return.

A Soviet cosmonaut is stranded in his spaceship.… I mean really. This guy went up as a Soviet on a routine space mission, and then while he was up there the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now, no one wants to bring him down.

Like abandoned cosmonauts, the characters in Men in Space drift through the debris of an inauthentic world. Not even death has the ability to confer authentic, final meaning on a life. When Anton Markov is executed towards the end of the book, he doesn’t even realize it. Rather than a mighty fatal blow, he simply feels that “a twig’s prodding him from behind.” Death, like life, happens randomly, inadvertently.

Readers expecting some kind of reassurance in stories of supposed subjective depth where characters with whom we can “identify” move heroically from crisis to redemption will have been rightly disappointed by Men in Space. McCarthy’s fiction and nonfiction aim to skewer an ideology of authenticity that is fed and watered by a certain humanist conception of literature. His work is a critique of writing that conspires to create the illusion of realism. But — and here’s the rub — if character-driven realism is an illusion (the exposure of which is at least at old as Cervantes, and probably much older), then McCarthy’s “flat, unreal and dematerialized” surfaces are arguably more realistic than any purported realism.

In Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006), McCarthy’s only published book-length work of literary criticism, literature is described as rich trash to be recycled and adapted. McCarthy cites Paul de Man’s discussion of irony from “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” where he says that we, “can know inauthenticity, but never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level.”

This quote casts broad daylight on the terrain of Men in Space, but also on McCarthy’s best-known and bestselling novel, Remainder, which is not about the overcoming of in authenticity, but our increasing self-consciousness of its operations.

Remainder is a long hymn to inauthenticity that shows the fatal consequences of the desire for authenticity. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist decides that, “I’d always been inauthentic.” Recovering from the accident where he is hit by something, some unknown violent event very possibly involving an aircraft, he had to learn to walk, to talk, to perform every simple muscular and reflex action as if for the first time. He had to reenact being human.

The protagonist decides that everything about him is imperfect, “Even my fantasies were plastic, imperfect, unreal.” As a consequence, he decides that other people are “Just like me: completely second-hand.” The world is full of usurpers and frauds, the difference being that they don’t realize it. Prior to the revelation that comes with peering into a crack in a bathroom, where a whole forgotten and seemingly real world begins to announce itself, the protagonist becomes utterly bored by people, ideas, the world: everything.

As the spectral, virtual figure of the “short councilor” remarks about the protagonist much later in Remainder, “He wants to be authentic.” That is, he wants to act in such a way that he coincides with himself and his self coincides with the real. This requires a reenactment of the reality that he believes he lost prior to the accident, a repetition of what seems to be a lost, original, authentic experience. The closest he gets to contact with the real is the intense and serene tingling in his body, standing passive and prone, with palms turned upward, that occasionally accompanies the reenactment. The protagonist submits to the fantasy of authenticity, and it is a cold fantasy. The obsessional ordering of reenacted experience keeps all intimacy at a distance and the only pleasure it affords is a solipsistic tingling.

The short councilor asks of the protagonist, in the impersonal third person, “So when, recently, has he felt least inauthentic?” The goal of all the reenactments is the same: it is to be

fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating us — and nothing separating me from the experience I was having: no understanding, no learning first and emulating second-hand, no self-reflection, nothing: no detour.

The fantasy of authenticity is the coincidence of the self with itself and the real — to be oneself without lack, gap, distance, reflection, or remainder. The fantasy for the protagonist of Remainder is of a trancelike stasis, where repetition becomes the origin that it sought to reenact. Reenactment and action merge in a feeling of floating serenity.

But do the protagonists in Remainder or Men in Space achieve union with reality? Not at all. The question in Remainder becomes instead, “When had I felt least unreal?” The undoing of the entire fantasy of authenticity, where action would coincide with reality, is matter. What the protagonist in Remainder desires is the disappearance of matter into the form of the reenacted event, where antifreeze miraculously transubstantiates itself in a Brixton street and all the witnesses to the bank heist disappear into the sky after their plane explodes. But matter ineluctably takes its revenge, the blue goop of antifreeze deposits itself into the protagonist’s lap and if the plane explodes at the end of Remainder (it is not clear whether it does), then its debris will scatter across the ground. “Perhaps a bit of debris might even fall on someone,” the protagonist ponders, “and leave me an heir.” The only possibility of procreation in this inauthentic universe is through a violent trauma, a mechanical accident.

The moral of Remainder — knowing that it is the wrong word — is that there is always a remainder that remains: a shard, a leftover, a trace, a residual, a mark. Everything must leave some kind of mark. The attempt to coincide with reality is always undone by the material mark of an event, an accident of which we remember “very little … almost nothing,” as we read in the very first words of Remainder.

* * * * *

Inauthenticity is not just an existential or individual affair; it is a political matter. Men in Space might be read as political allegory about what is at stake in the transition from forms of what was all-too-easily called “totalitarianism” to what was even-more-glibly called “liberal democracy.” The novel’s background is the collapse of the former Warsaw Pact from 1989 onwards through to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The division of the former Czechoslovakia led to the declaration of the Czech Republic on January 1, 1993, which is a framing part of the action of Men in Space. And here, once again, the significance of that Byzantine icon becomes apparent. Men in Space is a fable of the end of empire whose historical precedent is the collapse of Byzantium or Constantinople in 1453. As the key character of the unnamed spy/secret policeman/radio hack revealingly remarks, “People are not afraid of us any more. We have, in effect, suffered the same fate as Byzantium.”

The Byzantine icon suggests an image of political space as well as aesthetic space. In “totalitarian” political systems like the former Czechoslovakia’s, legitimacy and authenticity were anchored in the fake will of the people and their supposed identity with the party, the politburo, and the glorious leader or general secretary. After the removal of this regime, there was the brief, delicious enthusiasm of the revolution, velvet or otherwise — what Václav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic, called “living in truth.” But then came the awful realization of the vertigo and disorientation of a new political situation without the old, false markers of certitude: Democracy can be immensely disappointing and marked by an experience of profound anomie. The flip side of individual, liberal freedom is the randomly inauthentic drift and emptiness of the discontiguous characters in Men in Space.

But the political allegory in Men in Space morphs into something more speculative. The radio hack/secret policeman/spy who listens in and initially faithfully transcribes his findings is eventually consumed by a cacophonous deafness that rings in his ears. His series of extraordinary and increasingly unhinged soliloquies culminate in a kind ecstasy of total hearing:

It is as though I could hear everything, and all at once: traffic, human voices, sounds of crowds in bars and squares, in football stadiums and auditoria of concert halls, the crackle of radios and television sets. I seem to hear the noises given out by neon signs, fluorescent lights, power lines and power substations, atmospheric noise produced by lightning discharged during thunderstorms, galactic noise caused by disturbances originating outside the ionosphere. But it’s all noise: I’ve lost the signal. All I pick up now is interference.

This obsession with radio, noise, signal, and transmission in Men in Space obviously prefigures the action of C, which begins with the invention of radio and whose protagonist, Serge Carrefax, becomes an obsessive radio hack. McCarthy also explores the idea, highly fashionable in the early twentieth century, that radio was the privileged medium for communication with the dead — the spirit medium, the noise of the cosmos. Although the séances of the Spiritualist Society in C are highly ridiculed, there is something more at stake here for McCarthy. One thinks of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) — a longtime obsession of McCarthy’s — in which the car radio becomes the medium for the transmission of cryptic signals from the dead to the living: “L’oiseau chante avec les doigts, une fois, je repete, / L’oiseau chante avec les doigts, deux fois, je repete.” (“The bird sings with its fingers, one time, I repeat, /The bird sings with its fingers, two times, I repeat.”)

There is the suggestion in C, which is anticipated in Men in Space, of radio static as the sound and movement of thought itself, “its hum and rush.” This is not individual or even collective thought, but somehow the thinking of the cosmos itself. The noise of radio signals is a register, the aural marker of a cosmic emptiness, an experience of the void, what we might call an experience of atheist transcendence.

* * * * *

True to the spirit of Hergé’s boy sleuth, Tintin (a name which is also — curiously — a noise; it sounds like tinnitus), all of McCarthy’s books are obsessed with cryptograms and the decoding of secret messages. This culminates at the end of C with the death of Serge Carrefax, following the decoding of an inscription in an Egyptian crypt. But it is prefigured throughout Men in Space.

The cryptogram appears to Nick Boardaman in various garbled guises throughout Men in Space, first in his dreams and subsequently in telegraphic forms seemingly keyed into Nick’s unconscious: “I gape in sympathy towards Eramia,” or “Agape in symphony towards Erania,” or “A gaping symphony … Urania, Estania,” or even “A Cape Town Symphony,” and “A Cape in sympathy … Estania …” The message that Nick is somehow telepathically picking up takes us back, one last time, to the Byzantine icon. There is some lettering, apparently indecipherable, on the icon, which Helena Markov decodes as mirror-written Attic Greek. The inscription reads: agape, sympatheia, erémia, tes, eis. Agape means love, sympatheia means understanding, and erémia is solitude. But how to interpret the grammar of the Greek terms tes (“of the,” genitive singular) and eis (preposition meaning “towards” or “into”). Helena runs through various possible renderings: Love of the understanding towards solitude, love of understanding leading into solitude, or solitary is he who understands love. Unable to decide among the alternatives, Helena gazes into space and says to herself, not knowing at that point that her husband, Anton, has been executed in the woods,

Love, understanding, solitude. Of the three, only solitude is certain: each in our separate sphere, or bloc, or oval — partitioned, alone.

If there is a moment of epiphany in McCarthy’s work, it is not the ecstasy of fusion with nature or the other, but the sensibility of solitude and apartness.

Perhaps this is the truth that the icon has been hermetically trying to tell us throughout Men in Space. The elliptical saint, floating upwards, merges not with God but only with solitude, leaving a world of disappointment and debris behind him. It is this figure of erémia, solitude, the root of our notions of hermit and hermitage, that interests me here. Men in Space is a panel crisscrossed with lines that make up a place that is eremos, lonely, desolate and desertlike, a kind of wilderness-world, a space that is radically abandoned, destitute. This is a hermit world, a space of waste and desolation, in Latin vastitas, an extensive lowland plain on a planetary surface, whether the Vastitas Borealis on Mars or the orderly flatness of the Netherlands, where the action of the novel ends. Men in Space is a novel of solitude in a world of vast waste. This is the “zone of aloneness” that Nick feels at the end of the book when he hangs, trapped at the top of a house in Amsterdam, before he spins to his death (if indeed he does die at the end of the book). Like an abandoned cosmonaut or a floating saint, looking down on the flattened landmasses of planet Earth, Nick looks down on an Amsterdam square reduced to a series of geometrical figures. A general horizontalization pervades Men in Space. Everything falls back to Earth.

— SC, Tilburg, The Netherlands, October 2011