The Mark and the Void (24 page)

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.

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.

I took the job, sure that he would come around in time. Why did I think that? This was a man who had chosen, in the 1980s, to pursue the trade of blacksmith. Pig-headed defiance was his
métier
. He loved difficulty, loved it more than he loved me.

And so we played out that first conversation over and over again. Sometimes he would lure me into it, pretending to have a question about the nature of, for example, derivatives, in order to harangue me about the inequities of the global financial system – ‘… so if you wanted to cover yourself, you could then buy what’s called an
option
–’ ‘Which is nothing, am I right? You are trying to sell me thin air?’ ‘It’s not nothing, I am selling you the
choice
to buy something for a specific price at a specific point in the –’ ‘Why do I need you to sell me the
choice
? Don’t I have the choice myself?’ ‘Well, not in terms of –’ ‘I’m a free man, last time I looked! Your crowd
hasn’t managed to sell us all down the river yet!’ ‘No, but I’m saying, if you wait, the price could –’ ‘Down with the
collabos
! Vive la France!
Vive la France!
’ – and so on, until Maman came in, and told him he must take his medicine.

More usually, though, he launched straight into his jeremiad, calling me a criminal, a parasite, taking me to task for the sins not only of my own profession but those of countless others – of the developers uprooting the city, of the American neoconservative movement, of ‘Rat Man’, as he termed our president, and of Rat Man’s brother Olivier (who was, in fact, a banker). He seemed to enjoy making himself angry – that was the only pleasure either of us found in my visits.

‘What does he want me to do?’ I said to Maman in the kitchen. ‘Become an anarchist and live in a squat?’

‘He is old, Claude,’ she would sigh. ‘He is old and he cannot bear it.’

Eventually I stopped visiting. I told myself I blamed my father for coming between my mother and me; in truth, it suited me rather well. I was busy at work, and there were more enjoyable ways to spend my few hours of leisure. I’d started seeing a girl, a model with a degree in art history from the Sorbonne. I didn’t go home for six months. As a result, I didn’t find out my mother was sick until she’d been admitted to hospital.

I found my father at her bedside; all the fury I felt at him disappeared in an instant. He sat there, waxy hand on hers; his eyes, blinking uncomprehendingly at me across the white wastes of the hospital sheets, reminded me of the horses that would be brought into his shop to be re-shod, the ones the cabbies drove around and around the Bois de Boulogne for the benefit of tourists – expressive of both resignation and a kind of glacial panic, one that unfolded slowly, over years.

After she died I thought things might be different. I made an effort to see him; for a time I even considered asking him to move into my apartment in Auteuil. But as the shock of her death wore
off and bitterness took over, he became more and more impossible. He complained constantly about petty or imaginary things: the postman was opening his mail, the greengrocer overcharged him. He would not eat what I cooked for him; he made racist remarks about the proprietor of the
tabac
; whenever we went for a walk he would light on some new act of gentrification, some cutesy new patisserie or
macaron
shop festooned with love-hearts, and start on a tirade. He discovered plans were afoot to turn the beautiful, collapsing
magasin général
into a hotel. In the artist’s rendering online, it had gondolas floating in front of it on the canal. ‘Gondolas!’ my father spluttered hoarsely. ‘
Gondolas!
’ When the headhunter called me with the offer of a position in Dublin, I didn’t have to consider it for long.

I palliated my guilt about leaving by hiring an expensive live-in nurse; and surprisingly quickly, guilt ceased to be an issue. Ariadne was right: Dublin during the boom was custom-made for forgetting.

The past, the present, the sins of individuals and multinationals alike, everything dissolved in money and cocaethylene and was borne away by the river. When the crash came, that was better still: the streets were deserted, it was easier than ever to imagine that only the market existed, the numbers that concatenated night and day, and always, always, good times and bad, held within them some means of making money.

I didn’t speak to my father often; most of my contact with him came in the form of Skyped complaints from the nurses about his behaviour, or Skyped interviews with their replacements when they quit. It was nurse no. 5, a sweet girl from Martinique, who called me that morning to say he’d passed away overnight; ‘like switching off a light’, she said approvingly, a good death. Beside me the radio was babbling the market news; through the window I could hear the tram-bell ring. It was six in the morning, I was dressed for the gym. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. It was all I could think of.

The line manager arranged for two weeks’ compassionate leave. I stayed at the old apartment; I spent most of my time tidying, as if he and she were about to arrive home after a trip away even though I knew that everything would very soon have to be boxed up and taken from the building. I put fresh flowers in the vase on the table; I topped up the bird feeder on the balcony, stood at the door, listening to the whirr of the tiny sparrows’ wings, like the riffling of the pages of a book. I kept being surprised by my reflection, the way you might by some minor self-portrait in a neglected corner of the Louvre, having lost your way between masterpieces: tie half-done around my neck, shirt a spectral white that gave my skin a greenish tinge, eyes like those islands of discarded plastic found floating in the middle of the ocean, opaque, polymerized, indestructible.

My father had lost the lease on the yard ten years ago; more apartments had been built on the site of his forge. In a cupboard, I found a trunk filled with old equipment – a heat-mask, various lengths of rubber tubing; at the back of this trunk, thrown there with an appearance of carelessness, I discovered the cache of photographs. It was funny, I couldn’t remember him taking them; yet here I was beginning school, here was Maman in a new dress, here were the three of us, visiting my aunt in her little house in Normandy, Maman and me again, at my college graduation; our lives, our family, bound up together in a way that I had never recognized the first time around. I sat on the ancient couch they had never replaced, and went through the pictures over and over. I laid them out in patterns on the coffee table, little coloured squares of time, as if I were playing solitaire, as if there were some perfect configuration that would win the game, retrieve the past in its totality.

Yet the more I tried to retrieve it, the more it shimmered, like a tesseract, into being, the lonelier I felt – as if I were viewing some marvellous planet from a bleak satellite suspended above it. At his funeral, I’d read a line of poetry:
No one is truly dead, until
they are no longer loved
; it was from Théophile Gautier, a writer my mother had adored, and initially I found the thought consoling. Now, however, I began to wonder if the reverse also held. If nobody loved you, could you still say you were alive? The few relatives were long gone; I sat there turning over pictures that I didn’t even see; I felt a freezing cold, of an order I had never experienced before, as if I were somehow locked outside of the very moment I inhabited, a derivative of something that had ceased to be, and therefore about to disappear too – ‘triple witching hour’, they call it in banking, when stock index futures, stock index options, options on futures all expire together in a hiss of unbeing …