Surplus Matter

PLEASURE: Because we have a grievous disagreement about this novel. You are impressed by its concept, and the execution of its thematic elements. Let me, if I can, state your side of things. You believe this story of an
unnamed narrator, the victim of a vague accident which has erased his memory of himself, is a brilliant examination of the nature of identity, and memory. You admire Tom McCarthy’s portrayal of this estranged person,
who has been left with a “settlement” of £8-million as a result of the accident, and who uses the wealth to begin trying to reconstruct a memory that comes over him with a “very strong” sense of déjà vu. And this memory becomes more and more specific, involving more and more people, and increasingly complex actions and reactions, enactors and re-enactors, men and women hired to perform by rote and with precision the aspects of a single memory. 

When this fails to provide the desired effect, still more complex and gradually more violent re-enactments lead to a moment where the speaker is gazing upon a spreading pool of blood from a real wound suffered by a man
who — of course, given the nature of the speaker’s inability to see beyond his obsession — is only a number. Correct me if I’m wrong.

INTELLECT: So far, you are not wrong. And you do agree that it’s brilliant.

PLEASURE: It’s plodding, minutely and excruciatingly concrete because the writer has jailed his sensibilities in the person of this emotionally dead narrator. He has fallen into The Fallacy of Imitative Form, and as such the novel is dull beyond the telling. I could feel my brain cells dying in the soup of weirdly flat details. The indefatigable attention to every tiny element of contextless memory makes for killing boredom — really, it’s only aimed at giving the speaker back some moment when he was
“authentic,” when his motions were not learned, or rehearsed, but it has no connection to anything other than its own idea. It’s an intellectual construct and as such, I’m not surprised that you like it. But we learn nothing of the character’s actual life, nothing of the world he’s so
obsessively trying to reconstruct. It’s like being privy to the deliberations of a city planner gone amok. You can do a lot of things in a novel, but I’m pretty certain you are not supposed to be boring.

INTELLECT: Your problem is you have no taste for irony. And you know very well that the Fallacy of Imitative Form is a critical term about which there is plenty of room for argument and disagreement. And there are honourable examples of writers using it to great effect. Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake comes to mind.

PLEASURE: Well, sure. But you can read that book aloud and get some music. Though I will admit it’s unfair to compare any book to something by Joyce. But you brought it up, and so for what it’s worth we can and will talk
about prose music. Just listen to this, from a passage where the nameless speaker is describing a search he’s making for the place the déjà vu experience brought forth from his memory:

“I . . . considered following a numerical system: starting from point zero, I’d turn down the first street on the right, then take the second left, the third right, fourth left and so on. The system could be much more complicated than that, of course: I could bring in fractions and algebra
and differentials . . . or I could apply numeric principles to
analphabetic process: start on a street that began with a, then advance along the alphabet by the same number of letters . . .”

This in order to find a place whose importance is in the obsessiveness of the search, but with no context from the life other than that moment of déjà vu. There are unrelieved pages of writing like this, describing the
most pedestrian actions and decisions. And as I said, the effect is mind-numbing. You turn the page with a foreboding that it’s going to continue in this vein, and by God, it does.

INTELLECT: Forgive me, but a sharp reader feels the disconnect. Experiences the estrangement, and the strangeness of this character. The absurdity of his quest is both sad and funny. And it is finally horrifying. All of that is certainly valid ground for a novel. The passage
you quote happens to be rather funny, actually. In fact, there is a lot of that kind of humour in the way this character sees things and responds to things. Look, this is a novel of ideas, a classically philosophical novel,
right there with Camus’s L’Étranger. The Accident has taken away the speaker’s sense of self, his very identity, and he makes a heroic, desperate and finally tragic attempt to re-construct the world — actually to put everything back together again.

PLEASURE: I got the concept. I didn’t need 286 pages to explore it. And on the subject of concepts, there is a whole developed scene between the speaker and a homeless man that ends with the speaker saying, “The truth
is, I’ve been making all this up — the stuff about the homeless person. He existed all right . . . but I didn’t go across to him.” This is very early in the novel, and of course one spends the next 40 pages waiting for
that to be announced as having never happened, and so the tactic divided my attention when I don’t think it should have.

INTELLECT: I laughed at it. You didn’t find it funny?

PLEASURE: I found that it just about destroyed my allegiance to the story, before the story really got under way.

INTELLECT: You’re being truculent, now. You’re not the right reader for this book. There has been a tide of good opinion about this book.

PLEASURE: I found it to be the most intractable work. And I liked the concept. I wanted to like the thing. But finally, there isn’t anything in it but the idea. And if I want the idea truly, I’ll go to Heidegger and get it at the source. That, for me, is better than plowing through the welter of indistinguishable details and flat reportage of process that
make up the bulk of this novel.

INTELLECT: You mean to tell me you didn’t feel the deepest horror at the moment when the speaker looks at the blood flowing from the dying man he calls number Four and whispers, “Beautiful.” Come on, P, you can’t tell me
that didn’t get you down deep. That’s as horrifying as anything I’ve read in a long time.

PLEASURE: I didn’t feel a thing except relief that it was finally coming to an end. I didn’t know who any of it all was happening to. You have to admit that’s got to be there. Right? Everything in this book is happening
or has happened to some phantom of a character that we haven’t been made to care about even slightly. Because we don’t really know one thing about him beyond his obsession with the reconstructed places and events.

INTELLECT: But look what he’s come to. All this from just trying to find himself, the true self, in the broken world.

PLEASURE: Would you reread it? What would you appreciate about it the second time through? The snappy dialogue where people keep uttering things and others keep asking them to repeat it? Or the long delineations of
minutiae and process?

INTELLECT: I would certainly reread it for the profound sense it provides of the elusiveness of being and memory, and identity, too, for that matter.