Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘It is true,’ Igor concurs in a voice gravelly with regret. ‘When I marry my wife, she is filthiest lap dancer in all of Transnistrian Autonomous Region. There are criminals who come out of her stall weeping with shame at the things she has do to them in there. When she choose me, I am joyous as priest in orphanage. But the day we are married, it is like someone steal her away and replace her with her mother. Shoutings, hittings me with rolling pin. Meeting other womens to form terror gangs of feminism. Last time I see her she tell me she want to have breast reduction surgery. I ask her, “Are you mad? God and plastic surgeon have give you best boobs in former Soviet Union, why do you flout this gift?” She will not listen. I cannot bear to see this tragedy, so I come here to begin new life.’ He gazes bleakly into his glass. ‘She must be fifteen now,’ he says.

‘What we’re offering you here is freedom from that,’ Paul says, brandishing the laptop again. ‘Don’t you understand, that’s what Hotwaitress is . A way to stay inside the story for ever.’

I understand what he’s offering me: a chance to keep paying him a retainer indefinitely. But I am tired of being his mark. ‘I think this is goodbye,’ I say.

Scowling, he puts the laptop away, takes his coat from the back of the chair.

‘Why don’t you stay inside the story,’ I challenge him, ‘if everything is better there?’

‘It’s too late for me,’ he says. ‘I have a wife, remember?’

‘You have an hourglass you’re chained to,’ I say. ‘You’ve already abandoned your career. If you don’t love your wife any more, why don’t you leave her too?’

‘You really don’t understand anything, do you?’ he says. ‘I read somewhere that money kills your ability to empathize.’

I flinch. He opens the door. ‘I do love her,’ he says. ‘That’s the whole problem.’ He turns away, repeating to himself, ‘That’s the whole problem.’

It’s true, Texier said some harsh things about the banks; this, in fact, was putting it mildly. He saw the financial market, with its obsessive will to quantification, as the perfect instance of his totalizing system, his ‘eutrophication’ or ‘veil of Maya’ — a web of abstraction so complicated that it asphyxiated what it was supposed to explain before collapsing inevitably under its own weight. The artificial, the less-than-real , was once conceived as a kind of hell, he wrote. Yet today the less-than-real is prized more than gold, and the quaint stuff of the tangible — the underlying, as it has become known — exists only as raw material for new and lucrative abstractions. The financial corporation has become a machine for producing unreality ; why do we desire this unreality? Why do we model ourselves on this machine?

We know that what we call the corporation (Texier wrote) first appeared in Europe’s Middle Ages, signed into law by the Pope in AD 1250. It was conceived as a legal persona ficta — a ‘fictive person’ that had many of the attributes of a real person. It was capable of owning property, for example, of suing and being sued; at the same time, it was bodiless, invisible, free from human infirmity and the ravages of time. Conceived as such, the corporation was almost identical to contemporary ideas of angels. According to medieval religious doctrine, angels too were immaterial, ageless, capable of acting like human beings but bound by neither substance nor time; the corporation, an entity which we imagine as a uniquely secular creation, a paragon of reason and common sense, in fact began its life as an offshoot of a Christian myth.

Today, though we no longer believe in angels, we still regard the corporation as a higher order of being. It is composed of ordinary people, but it transcends them; semi-divine, it floats above our messy and contingent reality. Of all the corporations, it is the bank, which produces nothing tangible, which trades only ever in the virtual, that remains closest to pure spirit, and thus sits at the top of the hierarchy, equivalent to the Thrones and Dominions. Whatever it does, we are ready to forgive; or rather we assume that what we see as sins are instead mystical transactions beyond our understanding. We have an instinctive feeling that these dark angels, of us and yet above us, must be protected and appeased — to the extent that we allow them to predate on the material world, feed vampirically off our very reality, leaving us to live among their detritus. We do this because we want to be like them, because we ourselves aspire to the condition of persona ficta : free from reality’s contingencies and humiliations, insubstantial, unchanging, inviolable, endlessly apart.

Yet how does a person become a persona ficta ? How can one simultaneously turn fully inwards and make oneself abstract? Perhaps these two operations are less exclusive than we might think. Humans have always used stories to order reality. Now, however, technology allows unprecedented quantities of reality to be turned into story. Reality thereby becomes secondary; just as the banks use the underlying only for what can be derived from it, life becomes merely raw material for our own narratives.

The building block of these narratives is the image. The image operates by delimiting reality, placing boundaries around it, removing its connections and context; in short, by enslaving it. It presents the results, however, as a concentration or apotheosis of reality. The image is the derivative of the self; can it be mere chance that the rise of financial capitalism has coincided with the proliferation and incorporation of the camera into almost every facet of the Western world? The camera’s promise is that the moment can be subordinated — deferred, stored, experienced at our leisure. Life and the living of it have, for the first time in history, become separate. In recording our own reality — that is, in simultaneously experiencing and deferring experience — we pass from the actual into the virtual.

Every age dreams of defeating death: this is our chosen method. By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode — what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta . He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is the culmination of our experiences in a way that we — biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions — can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself, just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction.