Our Tragic Universe (20 page)

‘No,’ he said. ‘She only moved to Greenway after she had married Max Mallowan, the archaeologist.’ He put his glasses back on and leaned against the safety rail, facing me. ‘Apparently on sat-nav the Higher Ferry shows up as a B-road.’

‘I heard that some sat-navs really freak out when you cross the river. I don’t know if it’s an urban myth or not. One of Libby’s out-of-town friends claims that when she drove onto the Lower Ferry the sat-nav started saying, “Turn back now! You are in danger! You have driven into a river.” Or something like that.’ I looked at his car. ‘You’ve got sat-nav in there, presumably?’

‘Yeah, Lise had it installed,’ he said. ‘But I keep it switched off. I think I know where I’m going, most of the time.’ He looked over the side of the ferry again. ‘Where are these cables, do you think?’

I went and stood next to him, and we both hung over the rail. Our arms were separated by at least four layers of clothing and about two inches of air.

‘Underneath, I guess. They must run across the river bed.’

‘Apparently one time when it sank a herd of cows were on board, and they had to swim to safety.’ He paused. ‘Didn’t you tell me that?’

‘Yeah. And there was that time in the eighties when the cables snapped and the ferry was swept downriver. It was like what happened last year, but worse. It mowed down something like twelve yachts. It also had an ambulance on it, carrying a woman to hospital, and she died. Some people say that on stormy nights you can see the faint outline of an ambulance on the ferry, and hear her weakening cries.’

Rowan went pale. ‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s awful.’

‘Yeah. Well, I’m sure most of it isn’t true.’

He turned and faced upriver, but I wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

‘How’s the chapter going?’ I asked.

‘Oh. Probably too much research, not enough writing.’

‘You mentioned cultural premonitions before,’ I said. ‘I meant to look up some examples, because I was intrigued. But I forgot.’

‘Well, the most famous one is from 1898, fourteen years before the
Titanic
sank, when a writer called Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called
The Wreck of the Titan
, all about a supposedly unsinkable ship that is sunk by an iceberg on its maiden
voyage. The two and a half thousand passengers drown because there aren’t enough lifeboats, just like on the actual
Titanic
. They don’t bother to have them because the ship is apparently indestructible.’

‘But you don’t think this was a real premonition?’

‘No, of course not. In the chapter, I’m arguing that if you were a novelist writing about an unsinkable ship, and you wanted to name it, you’d presumably be in the same mindset as someone naming a real ship.
Titan, Titanic
: it’s plausible that both the novelist and the person naming the real ship would think along the same lines. It’s not as if the word “Titanic” wasn’t used frequently before the boat came along, and it’s always used to describe some great thing that is eventually overthrown. Byron used it to describe Rome before it fell. “In the same dust and blackness, and we pass / The skeleton of her Titanic form, / Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.” And when it comes down to it, if a boat like that sinks, people will usually drown because the authorities, believing the ship is unsinkable, don’t take sufficient precautions, and don’t install enough lifeboats. None of it’s that far-fetched. So it’s not so much a supernatural premonition of the future, but a different kind of premonition, or prediction, based on cultural factors and things people would reasonably know, or guess.’

I started peeling a tangerine from my anorak pocket. ‘It’s interesting that whoever named the real
Titanic
called it that. I’d never thought about it before. It’s almost as if they wanted it to sink, or they knew it would. I mean, the Titans were defeated by the Olympians, weren’t they, and the word “Titanic” has a sense of tragedy and doom before you even start. It goes with the vaingloriousness that Hardy writes about: “Dim
moon-eyed fishes near / Gaze at the gilded gear / And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’”’

‘This is what I wanted to talk to you about,’ he said. ‘I wanted to run my tragedy theory past you. Do you mind if I do it now? It looks like we’re stuck here for a while, and there’s no one else to really talk to about this.’

Not even Lise?
I thought. But this wasn’t really a surprise, since no one seemed to talk to their long-term partners about the things they were really interested in. Bob knew nothing about Libby’s knitting; she barely knew how many strings a guitar had. Whenever Taz finished a painting, my mother would say it was very beautiful but far too complicated for her to properly understand. It seemed to be one of the small sadnesses of contemporary life that there was always someone in the office, or down the road, or across the river who understood your inner soul better than your partner did, not that I had any such person. Christopher had seemed to understand my inner soul once, I remembered, but he was well out of date on that score now. I wasn’t even sure he knew how many books I’d published. But who was I kidding? Lise might not know about the
Titanic
, but she would know everything else that was important about Rowan: his favourite colour, his middle name, how he liked his tea, whether or not he snored, why they’d never had children. The list could go on for ever. And Rowan couldn’t have been that desperate to talk to me. He still hadn’t emailed me after all.

‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking of putting something about the
Titanic
in my novel. I thought I might start with the Hardy poem, or include it somehow. So talking to you is research for me too. It’s also an interesting conversation to have while we wait to drown.’

Rowan pulled himself up on the safety rail and leaned over the edge of the ferry. For a moment I thought he might fall in the river. His feet were no longer on the deck. He turned himself around and hoisted himself up further so that he was now sitting on the safety rail, with nothing behind him but air, and below that, water.

‘OK, so the whole book – my book – is about disaster. Obviously it’s around shipwrecks and disasters at sea, but I wanted to theorise it partly through ideas of
affect
, but also around the structuring of disaster. I wanted to look at whether disasters “just happen” and then people become unhappy, or whether there’s more to it than that. Perhaps the narrative runs the other way: people become unhappy, and then there is disaster. When I started the
Titanic
chapter I thought I was arguing that there’s no way to tell the difference between a fictionalised disaster and a real one, using the philosopher Baudrillard. My plan at first with this chapter was to suggest that the cultural premonitions were the simulations, a bit like shipwreck-themed Disneylands, that existed to cover up the fact that these disasters are real and inevitable.’

‘I’ve come across Baudrillard,’ I said. ‘
The Matrix
was supposedly a dramatisation of his ideas, but he said it didn’t work because he was more or less saying that when everything becomes signs referring to other signs, then there’s no way out, and in
The Matrix
there is a way out. I think that’s it.’

‘That’s right. He talks about things like the map that becomes so detailed that it turns into the thing it was supposed to represent. It’s about how you represent the real, and whether this affects the real in some way. If you fictionalise everything, does everything become fictional, for example? If you organise
a fake holdup, how do you keep it “fake” when the people who are frightened by it and believe it to be real are feeling actual fear? For me this was an unfamiliar way of thinking about familiar things, but very useful. Then I started reading Paul Virilio on disaster, and found that he suggests disaster is built into every man-made system, so then I started thinking that we can expect not just disasters, but premonitions of disasters, around every piece of technology, and that’s
why
they’re inevitable. Something similar to, but a bit more complicated than, a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

I ate a piece of my tangerine. ‘Sounds very interesting. Are you throwing yourself overboard?’

Rowan looked as if he’d forgotten he was sitting on the rail. He looked over his shoulder and then back at me. His hands gripped the rail more tightly and the wooden bracelet he always wore – made from pieces of the shipwreck that left his grandfather stranded on the Galápagos Islands – shifted and then settled on his wrist. He smiled. ‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea.’

‘But that really would be a disaster,’ I said, quietly.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s true that disaster is built into everything. Anyway, it’s OK. I’m holding on.’

‘So how does tragedy come into all this?’ I asked.

‘Virilio makes a distinction between artificial accidents and natural ones. He says whenever you build something like an unsinkable ship you have to invent, along with the ship, the possibility of it sinking. I’m arguing that premonition then becomes entirely reasonable and rational because people are simply reading technology as tragic. People somehow know that technology is always doomed. All that hubris. Anything “unsinkable” is destined to sink eventually.’

‘That’s probably true,’ I said. ‘So in act one you have something big and shiny and vainglorious. You’re right. By act three it has to be sunk, or whatever, otherwise the narrative wouldn’t work.’

‘But why exactly is that?’ Rowan said.

I shrugged. ‘Because narrative is about change. All stories of success begin with failure, and the reverse. Love stories begin with loneliness; loneliness stories begin with love.’

‘But is life the same as narrative?’

If it was, then was I in a love story, a loneliness story or both?

I laughed. ‘Well, by definition, no. But also by definition, yes.’

‘Because … ?’

‘Well, all narrative is simulation, as you say. Narrative is representation, or imitation, or mimesis – it stands in for something that it is not. Your
Titanic
premonitions are narratives that seem to chime with a “real” narrative. But even a “true story” isn’t life, by definition. Life is life. But on the other hand all we know about it is what exists as narrative. As Plato says, there are true stories and there are false stories. The only difference, presumably, between a premonition story about the
Titanic
and a real account of it is the timing and perhaps some detail, for us, since I’m guessing that neither of us has ever seen the
Titanic
or met anyone who was on board. For us, the
Titanic
is also a story, because everything we know about it comes through narrative and not through experience. Sorry; I’m brainstorming out loud. I think what I’m saying is that narrative has to have patterns, otherwise it wouldn’t be narrative, and while life doesn’t have to have patterns, the minute we express it as narrative it does have to have patterns; it has to make sense. Therefore we impose patterns on life in order that we can express it as narrative.
Whenever something good happens, for example, we start anticipating its end.’

‘What about poems, or sculptures? They’re not narratives, but they still tell us about life. Life doesn’t only have to be made sense of by narrative, does it?’

‘I still think there’s a narrative implied in poems and sculptures. You get a “fragment” or a “moment” and you then try to put it into some sort of whole. It’s like trying to solve a puzzle. Warhol’s Brillo Pad boxes, for example, only work when you reconstruct a narrative to go with them from the clues that you have. When you look at them close up, you see that although they seem to represent or imitate mass-produced items, they are clearly not mass-produced, because each one’s different and obviously hand-painted. So you ask yourself, “Why has someone bothered to do this? Why has someone obviously taken time over this crap?” And this poses a dramatic question, where you’re part of the story, because it’s only in realising that you are examining these boxes that you also realise that you wouldn’t bother if they were mass-produced, and that you think about the labour of an artist differently than you think about the labour of a factory worker. You also realise how many things you don’t bother to examine closely. The packaging of every object tells a story, but we take those stories for granted and forget to defamiliarise them. The setting of a problem is always the beginning of a narrative. It’s a knot that exists to be untied … God, sorry. I never get to talk about this stuff either, unless I’m teaching, and even then I can’t say what I really want. I’m wittering on.’

‘No; it’s interesting. So you’re saying that in narrative, and therefore in life, every moment can be read as part of a bigger
narrative in which anything successful is doomed to failure, and anything big and shiny is doomed to crash and burn, and all rags will eventually turn to riches, which must therefore turn back to rags again, and so on?’

‘Yes. More or less. But not necessarily all in the same story.’

‘So in that case it’s probably true, then: premonitions are people predicting narrative, rather than events. Telling tragic stories about things where tragedy appears to be inevitable. And then when the stories are compared – the “fictional” story and the “true” story – they are similar because they are stories.’

‘I bet almost all stories with ships in them have some kind of disaster at sea, just like all stories with animals in them put the animals in peril. In narrative any equilibrium must become a disequilibrium. All narrative involves change from one state to another: happy to sad, or sad to happy usually. But it can be alive to dead, broken to fixed, confused to comprehensible, separate to together – anything.’

‘Every ship is a shipwreck waiting to happen.’

‘Yeah. After all, every ship is destroyed in the end, even if it’s on purpose, at the end of its useful life. But the reason tragedy is so mysterious is because it isn’t exactly predictable. There’s always a moment in tragedy where disaster can be avoided, and what’s interesting is looking at why the hero or heroine doesn’t take this course of action. It’s not a simple formula. Also, people probably get a feeling that an unsinkable ship will sink, because that seems like a good narrative formula, but plenty of people go on unsinkable ships. People don’t only believe in formula and nothing else.’