Tom Mccarthy: Men in Space

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,