Tom Mccarthy: Men in Space

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

See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word. A Cryptonomy, trans. N. Rand (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986), p. 22.