Our Tragic Universe (41 page)

‘I don’t want to be controversial here,’ Tony said. ‘But isn’t it a bit misleading trying to reconstruct who these authors “really were” and what their great works “really meant”?’

‘Of course,’ Frank said, smiling. ‘Chekhov said that himself. It’s hardly a new idea. He would completely agree with what you just said. He was always being criticised for being too realistic. But he didn’t want to be read as a liberal, or a conservative – just someone who told the truth and wasn’t pretentious. He said it was up to the reader to judge, not the writer.’

‘But do we need an author’s permission to read their work how we like?’

‘Well, no, but …’

‘It’s not as simple as reading “how we like”, though, is it?’ I said. ‘There’s the affective fallacy to think about as well.’

‘So you do listen in lectures,’ Tony said to me.

‘Oh, I’ve heard that lecture,’ Vi said to Tony. ‘“The Death of the Author”, right? It’s pretty good, except for the bit about infinity and monkeys.’

‘How did you hear it?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I take tapes of other departments’ lectures on planes with me when I travel. Ever since I gave up reading detective fiction I’ve needed to find something else to do on long trips. I read Zen stories too,’ she said, ‘but they’re not very long. I mean, my reading pile is always taller than I am, but on plane journeys I just need something a bit dumb to help me switch off.’

‘Thanks,’ Tony said. ‘Nice to know my “dumb” lectures help you switch off.’

‘Don’t be offended,’ she said. ‘Yours are pretty good. Maybe I don’t exactly mean
dumb
. But you know those books that introduce a complicated subject for a general reader? There were more of them in the nineteenth century than there are now, which is a real shame. I’d like to be reading those books on a plane. Undergraduate lectures are the closest thing. I like the ones from the history of mathematics course as well. I’d like to listen to the actual maths ones, but they don’t tape them because it’s all done on a blackboard.’

‘Vi’s researching narrative theory,’ Frank said. ‘When she asked me whose lectures she should listen to from our department, I naturally suggested you.’

‘How does anthropology fit in with narrative theory?’ Tony said. ‘And, er,
maths
?’

‘Er, Claude Lévi-
Strauss
?’ Vi said.

‘Oh, of course.’ Tony shook his head. ‘And Vladimir Propp, I guess. All the folklorists and structuralists.’ He looked at me. ‘Did you come to my first-year lecture on structuralism?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t remember it.’

‘Lévi-Strauss thought that all stories could potentially be expressed as one single equation,’ Vi said. ‘The piece he writes about it is very moving. Having come up with a rough hypothetical “formula” for myths in general, he then says that because French anthropology is underfunded he can’t complete his research, because he’d need a technical team and a bigger workshop. He was summarising myths and isolating their mythemes on big pieces of card and simply ran out of physical space to do it in. He had none of what he called “IBM equipment”, although I can’t imagine how a computer would help. Mine can’t even hold a chapter of a book without wanting to die pathetically under the strain.’

‘We’ll come to Vladimir Propp on my course,’ Frank said to me. ‘He studied Russian folk tales and also came up with a “formula” for expressing them. He argued that they were all built from a finite number of story-elements, a bit like different recipes made from the same basic set of ingredients. For example, many folk tales begin with the hero being told not to do a certain thing, like look in a cupboard or pick an apple. In other words, an interdiction, which Propp gives the code Y1.’

‘And then the hero always does the thing he’s been told not to do?’ I said, although I knew the answer.

‘They always do,’ Frank said.

‘So all fiction is the same?’

‘No, no.’ Vi shook her head. ‘There are stories with no
formula, but they are a bit harder to find. Mathematically they are expressed differently. You’d need imaginary numbers – the square roots of negatives – to express those stories in equations. I’m working on a paper about this at the moment.’

Our pizzas arrived, so Vi didn’t say anything else about her paper.

‘So what’s wrong with my monkeys?’ Tony asked Vi, once we’d started eating.

‘Well, I liked what you said, up to a point, but I thought you misrepresented infinity. You said that if they were given an infinite amount of time, a million or more monkeys would eventually write Shakespeare, because of probability.’

He had, and then he’d asked us all to imagine we held a copy of
The Tempest
in our hands. In this thought-experiment, we did not know whether this was a text written by Shakespeare, or written randomly by monkeys. Did it make any difference which it was? Without intention behind them, would the words on the page still have meaning? I hadn’t really been sure that anything not written by a human would be readable, and that anything non-human, even probability, could create
The
Tempest
. But the argument had been logical enough, and we’d all concluded that it wouldn’t matter – or at least it wouldn’t make any difference to the meaning of the words on the page – whether the text had been written by Shakespeare, monkeys, a random word-generator or in any other way.

‘In an infinite amount of time,’ Frank said, ‘things still “never” happen. The monkeys could create an infinite amount of gibberish before they wrote Shakespeare. That’s assuming you could find monkeys that lived an infinitely long period of time as well, which seems unlikely.’

Vi laughed. ‘In an infinite amount of time, at least one infinite monkey would evolve to
be
Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘Imagine that. Also,’ she added, ‘I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure about your philosophical zombies.’

‘Oh,’ Tony said. ‘I thought they were good.’

‘Yes, I did too,’ Vi said, laughing. ‘I liked the idea that this being, the philosophical zombie, is purely hypothetical – that’s a good paradox in itself. A being that cannot “be”. I liked the way that this being could tell you it felt pain when it did not, and that you’d never be able to know either way. The idea that any one of us could be a philosophical zombie was quite chilling, and also very thought-provoking – well, assuming one is not a philosophical zombie. Because, of course, the point with philosophical zombies is that they have been programmed to respond as a human would, but they are not human. An outsider wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, sure; but the zombie would not actually feel, or think, or know anything. So that’s why I was wondering this: exactly how could a philosophical zombie write a novel?’

It was a good question. Tony had built a lot of his argument from this point that since you couldn’t even tell whether another being – a novelist, for example – was a philosophical zombie or not, you certainly could not tell what they ‘meant to say’ in their fiction, even if you asked them and they told you.

‘I guess’, Tony said, ‘a philosophical zombie
could
write a novel. I mean, if this is a being that’s programmed to respond exactly as a human would, then if it strung a lot of these utterances about feelings and so on together, then maybe that would make a novel. Perhaps it could use one of Lévi-Strauss’s equations, or Vladimir Propp’s schema. But …’

‘But what?’

‘You’re right. If you’re implying that it wouldn’t be much of a novel at all, then you’re right. I hadn’t exactly thought of that. So you’re saying that there has to be a human essence at the heart of every work of art?’

‘Yes,’ Vi said. ‘Although I’m not saying you can ever be sure about what it is. It’s not something you can put your finger on exactly, but, scientifically speaking, it has to be there. Ha! Like consciousness, and dark matter, and “culture”. The problem with you humanities people – if you don’t mind me saying so – is that when you dabble in science, you always get it wrong. Or mostly. But that’s OK. Scientists usually get science wrong too, but that’s their job: to prove things wrong. That’s all scientists ever do. Social scientists prove that society is wrong, probably. It’s impossible to prove anything is a hundred per cent right. Can you pass the olives again?’

When I woke up in Torcross on Wednesday morning the fire was still glowing in the grate as if it had been enchanted, so I added another log and once the flames had taken hold of it I made some rosehip tea and ate a mashed banana on toast. When I opened my laptop, I had an email from Oscar.
Are you
trying to give me a heart attack? Not only have you filed early, your copy
is actually very good. In fact, this is a triumph. It’s quite funny, and even
topical if one believes all the economists saying that Western capitalism is
in peril and we will soon need to make our own clothes because Chinese
sweatshops won’t exist any more (look at the News section on Sunday to
see what I mean). Paul wants to lead with it in the Arts supplement this
week. He’s talking about giving you a column. You’ve really touched him
with this 21st century hobby nonsense. He has a train set. Did you already
know that?

A column! That was the Holy Grail for any newspaper writer. But Oscar had done this before, I remembered. Whenever he really wanted me to do something I really didn’t want to do he would invoke this idea that Paul was thinking about giving me a column. I’d met Paul at someone’s launch party once. When I’d mentioned this column he’d looked at me as if I was mad. But this was different. I hadn’t asked for more time, or tried to cancel the assignment. I looked at the email again in case I’d missed Oscar asking me to completely re-write the piece by Thursday. But he wasn’t asking me to do anything. Perhaps that email would follow this one and the column would be explained away.

Whenever someone praised something I’d written I read the piece back to myself as if I was that person. It was the only time I ever relaxed and enjoyed my own work, and it happened very rarely. I’d begun by making the fairly obvious point that the self-help industry functions by making people feel bad about themselves. I’d then described some of the ridiculous ways in which people were encouraged to ‘fix’ their own imperfections and become attractive as lovers, business contacts or whatever. You could learn, from a book, how to snare someone with an ‘exclusive smile’, how to set the agenda for any conversation you wanted to have, how to be the ‘chooser’ rather than the ‘choosee’, how to become ‘magnetic’ and attract the people and objects you want, how to harness the power of ‘Screw you!’, how to read other people’s minds via their body language and also use your own body to communicate, and how to use ancient
secrets of creativity to give your PowerPoint presentations more ‘zing’.

If people couldn’t get their life right in this world, then there was the Otherworld of fairies and guardian spirits, or past lives or afterlives. In these books there was always some way for the individual to become a hero. No one was encouraged to be a monster or a dragon or a helper along the way. No one was encouraged to be a fool or a hermit. Whether you got to transcend to a thousand years of perfection or simply spend the rest of your mortal life being ‘perfect’ and giving the best PowerPoint presentations in the world, this self-perfection was assumed to be everyone’s goal. The whole of Western society seemed to be turning itself into a reality TV show in which everyone was supposed to want to be the most popular, the most talented, the biggest celebrity. I’d pastiched the self-help format in my feature, so that the feature itself offered tips for a life that looks outwards rather than inwards. I focused on the skills you might want to develop as an anti-hero, or, indeed, a fool, who does not desire riches and success and syrupy romance. I suggested that people who wanted to reject these ideas of perfection and individualistic heroism should get a pile of books that help them learn a new skill, or perhaps another language, not in order to become successful or fit in better, but just for the hell of it: to step over a cliff and see what happens. The anti-hero or fool could take up birdwatching or botany, fix something, translate something, embroider something or even knit a pair of socks. I said that unless we gave up on our addiction to the self-help industry – and the connected world of twenty-four-hour drama and entertainment – and reclaimed old skills and hobbies, we were in danger of turning ourselves into
fictional characters with no use beyond entertaining people and being emotionally, aesthetically and psychologically neat and tidy. We would become cultural King Midases: unfeeling and untouchable. We would desire only what was immediately useful and relevant to our plot-lines: a pair of shoes, a new sofa, a home gym. And if those didn’t work there were plenty of ways to buy our way out through box-sets, videogames and ready meals full of sugar and fat. We would become little more than character arcs, with nothing in our lives apart from getting to act two, and then act three and then dying. I wasn’t completely sure about my feature as I read it back to myself. Was I just offering another kind of easy answer of my own? But maybe that didn’t matter in a newspaper feature, and at least I’d got to mention some nice, little-known books. I started reading from the beginning again, this time not as someone who’d read it and liked it, but as my own harshest critic. I hadn’t mentioned any of my absurd but well-meaning books in the end; I’d gone for the soft targets. Was I as much of a fraud as everyone else? But perhaps Vi would read it and see that I was at least trying to be genuine.