Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

Who is with us, in this recursive heaven where time has been defeated? No one: the modern heaven is one of perfect isolation. We are not there either. The transcendental or sempiternal self bends over his screen, in correspondence with a forever-echoing past, leaving a present that is closed off, superfluous, from which (and this is the real meaning of the fantasy) we are exempted. That is our transcendence of death: to achieve a death-in-life, a stasis, a replacement of ourselves with a duplicate whose only function is to relay the past to the future; to conquer loss with a virtual repleteness, to extinguish the present by making ourselves comprehensively elsewhere.

After my father died, I found a cache of old family photographs in the apartment. There were hundreds of them, thousands even; I brought them back to Dublin and, whenever I had an hour free in the evening, began to archive them — feeding them into the scanner, transmuting them into digital form, though I could never decide whether this was to make it easier to look at them, or so I wouldn’t have to look at them again.

My father was a blacksmith — with a hammer, an anvil and a forge, just as you might find in a novel of Alexandre Dumas. When I look at his picture, I’m still surprised to see he was not a tall man, nor even especially brawny; close my eyes and he’s transformed instantly to the giant of my childhood, the black-browed ogre in his fiery cloud of sparks who thrilled and terrified me even when he was snoozing in his chair.

His father was a blacksmith, and his father before him. That was almost a century ago, when our town was a village and Paris still a murky chimera far beyond the horizon; by the time I was born, the forge lay quiet three days a week and my father had to supplement his income by teaching metalwork at the technical college nearby. He didn’t care; on the contrary, he took great pleasure in the idea of himself as a throwback, an obstacle, a misshapen stone jamming up the smooth machine of modernity. My father thrived on attrition. In his time he had been a Maoist, a Leninist and a Trotskyite, but this was only so much misdirection. What he believed in was dwarfed by what he didn’t believe in. Progress, improvement, the perfectibility of human nature — to him, these were the great myths of our time, used to dispossess the poor and the gullible just as religion had in the past.

Certainly in our town it was easy to disbelieve in progress. It was a ramshackle warren of building sites, warehouses, and shops in which everything seemed already old. The dominant landmark was a disintegrating magasin général , a huge concrete grain store overlooking the canal that had lain empty for decades and was now a magnet for taggers, who had transformed it into something iridescent and otherworldly. You could follow the canal all the way into the city, but we rarely did. Paris was the city of modernity, and the home of the greatest of my father’s many bêtes noires , Baron Haussmann. Before Haussmann came along, it sounded like people in Paris spent most of their time rioting; if they weren’t rioting, they were erecting barricades. ‘But how can you put a barricade across that?’ my father would lament, gesturing at the Boulevard de Sébastopol and its four lanes of traffic.

So we stayed where we were, my father in his smithy, waging his covert war against progress. Perhaps to a blacksmith, this seemed like a war you could win; after all, he spent the day bending things to his intention, taking obdurate, resistant matter and making it obey him; why couldn’t he take on the world in the same way, plunge reality itself into the white heat of his will and reform it? And if he couldn’t, if the bills mounted up and the bailiffs came, this was just more evidence that the world was biased against us; our poverty was proof of our rectitude, a sign that we were the good guys that those in control wanted to crush.

I, too, regularly found myself subjected to the blast of his will. He didn’t want me to be a blacksmith; he wanted me to go to college. This struck me, even as a boy, as a contradiction. Wouldn’t I just be lining up with the phonies and the fakes? Why couldn’t I stay here with him, learn the family trade? When he heard this he’d laugh, and say the family could only afford one piss artist. But when it came to school reports and parent — teacher meetings, he would not be laughing. There was no question that I would not go to college. By the time I was sixteen, if I so much as showed my face in the backyard he would bellow at me to get back to my studies. And I would dutifully return upstairs to my logarithms or supplementary English, though I wouldn’t read; instead I’d watch as he worked or read or played cards and talked about football with Yannick, the boy he hired on the rare occasions he had a backlog.

I knew we were headed for some kind of rupture — in the pictures it seems I can see it, an invisible crack behind the smiles. But I’d thought it would be philosophy that did it. I’d chosen to study it largely in a spirit of revenge: I was too cowardly to defy his wishes outright by refusing to take my college place, and philosophy — demonstrably impractical, infamously unemployable, the polar opposite of my father’s own materialist world — seemed the next best thing. As it turned out, though, my father was so proud of me for getting into university that he approved of anything and everything I did there. He dug up an ancient newspaper photograph that showed Texier, Deleuze et al. marching with union leaders in his beloved événements of 1968, and stuck it on the wall of his forge; I heard him tell the neighbours that philosophy was France’s greatest export.

Instead the rupture came when I took the job in the bank. Having spent a literal lifetime witnessing his anger, I don’t think I ever saw him as angry as he was that night. Even though the firm was prestigious, even though the position I’d been offered was lucrative, my father was mortally against the whole financial industry. He was old enough to remember the scandals that emerged after Liberation, the bankers who had collaborated with the Nazis in order to enrich themselves. He accused me of taking the job out of malice; he said I was sticking it to an old man by choosing a career that flew in the face of everything he believed.

I told him he didn’t believe in anything, so I didn’t see how that could be an issue. ‘Oh, you’re very clever,’ he said. ‘There are names for people like you.’

I was very clever. He had made me very clever. Now he was annoyed because his gingerbread boy had come to life and run off down the road — tant pis , I wasn’t coming back. Anyway, the world had changed, hadn’t I listened to him proclaim it for years? The money men were taking over, men for whom nothing was real except profits, who sourced their ironwork from China or just used knock-offs made of plastic. In college I could see it all around me: street by street, Paris the working city was being replaced by ‘Paris’ the stage-set, familiar from the movies, where everyone was perpetually in love and/or carrying a baguette. Hardware stores and laundromats were vanishing, expensive tea shops, sushi restaurants and boutiques of tiny baby clothes arriving to take their place. The Arabs, the Africans, were disappearing too, out past the city limits to the dreaded banlieues. Not even our dowdy town was left untouched: the building sites, which for as long as I could remember had been stagnant, began to show signs of activity; developers were throwing up hoardings within sight of the great monument to decay that was the magasin général .

Empires fall, that was what he had taught me; the world turns, and people, whole cultures, become obsolete. Progress might be a lie, but it was a lie that swept all before it and so the best tactic was to find high ground.