Anti-Matter

by Ben Jeffery

  The principle Kołakowski employs here is simple enough: if ‘accepting’ or ‘redeeming’ your existence means anything, it’s only if there’s something beyond your existence to measure it against. Yet in spite of what he says about religion, the same argument could be put in less devout terms. ‘Sacred’ might stand for any sort of transcendent category – Love, Justice, Beauty, Truth, Goodness – whatever there is cutting across the contingent facts of our bodies and circumstantial ways of life; the ‘extra-something’ on top of material reality. The problem of how we justify art re-emerges here. The idea that art is the closest thing secular consciousness has to religious expression isn’t uncommon, and it flatters artists. But obviously religion is never purely aesthetic, because it involves a truth-claim about the reality of the supernatural. In Pascal’s thinking, art that isn’t dedicated to God is merely another form of diversion, not serving truth but seeking to disguise it. However, if the truth is that there’s nothing out there, no God and nothing sacred (however we understand the term), then it seems as though all that art could be is a diversion; a lie – and hence contemptible. A different way of putting the same point is that if an activity so clearly impractical as writing had any true justification, it would need to be something above practical concern, whether this was a supernatural God or an abstract ideal or something else. Since these things are immaterial, we can never be sure of them in the way we can be sure of physical reality, and so talking about them can easily seem empty or deluded. But for all that it isn’t trivial. Although not everybody reads literature or even cares that fiction exists, the endless difficulty writers have justifying their work is more important than it might look, because it’s essentially a route towards much deeper questions about the reality of ideals. There are good reasons for being shy about asking these sorts of questions. Still, the dilemma Kołakowski describes does not go away, and Houellebecq illustrates its horns well: if there is no greater good to serve (whatever it may be), the options seem to be either the unsustainable treadmill of hedonism, or a life wrapped up inside craven fantasies. In which case the general contempt Houellebecq sprays at existence is really just an orderly consequence of his materialism.

  Rehearse all of the bile depressive realism aims at literature: aesthetic pleasure is pathetically fragile, wrecked by pain, hunger, lack of sleep, sexual frustration, or any other variety of basic bodily want, none of which it is capable of alleviating. Fiction does not fill bellies or raise roofs. Producing it barely pays bills. To write a novel, even quite a good novel, must seem absurdly trivial set against the manifest violence, injustice and suffering of the world. And even if creating literature could be defined as a social good of sorts (which maybe it can’t), still it is hard to see how the bulk of time spent writing or reading couldn’t be better invested in medicine or public organisation or something else practical, if social good is what is desired. How could anyone deny any of this? In particular, how could anyone deny that worrying about books is shamelessly decadent compared to, for example, appalling Third World hunger and poverty? So that to persist with writing in the face of the facts looks like a ridiculous article of faith (‘I know perfectly well that writing is useless and self-indulgent, and yet nonetheless…’). You might construct an argument, following Žižek, to say the value of literature is illusory set against all the world’s ills – but an illusion with power, a ‘good lie’. That is still to call it a lie.

  But it ought to be remembered that the injunction to forget about ideas and focus on ‘real’ problems invariably has something false about it, too. It is a way of hiding from the pain of not knowing what to think. For most of us, most of the time, that pain is not sharp – but when it is it is horrible and hard, and not abstract in the slightest. ‘In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death,’ wrote Philip Roth. Ordinarily, it’s only every so often we encounter this second inner person and ‘the state of madness’ they live in. But we can’t avoid them completely. There are terrible things that happen in the world, and alongside them is the terror of our own death, and (equally inevitable) the deaths of everybody we care about. What could possibly be the ‘right’ thing to believe, in the face of such dreadful facts? Perhaps some form of faith is indispensable, but its indispensability might not be a refutation of depressive realism so much as an awesomely bleak punch-line to the whole business. Because in a sense pessimism remains perfectly correct: there is no way to protect yourself from the world, finally; and the ultimate indifference of the universe makes whatever beliefs we have about it seem completely irrelevant. Yet we can’t help but believe. Henry Miller said life needs to be given meaning, because it so obviously has none. And this is just it: the core joke or paradox or calamity, or however you choose to see it, is that we go on – need to go on – projecting meaning onto what might very well be meaningless. This, too, is a writer’s anxiety generalised: the worry that our stories are ‘nothing but’ stories, and that when we talk about ethics or ideals we are not saying anything true but things that only sound true; charming, empty fictions.

  Kant admitted one of the difficulties in his moral philosophy was that, although it’s possible to deduce using abstract reason that there is genuinely such a thing as moral duty, from the individual’s limited perspective it’s never possible to be certain that you are acting for the sake of your duty, even when you act in accordance with it. In other words, it is impossible to tell whether your intentions are pure, or whether you’re really acting for the sake of some concealed, base desire, e.g. to flatter your vanity, or to impress your peers, or because being moral happens to serve your own selfish interests. If we’re inclined to examine our behaviour honestly, it must very often seem this way – that our motivations are typically rather weak and petty, and our ends generally nothing better than pleasure and comfort. But Žižek puts an interesting spin on Kant’s dilemma. He claims the tendency to read a selfish motivation into every idealistic act is itself a defence mechanism, a ruse to cover up the truly distressing idea that we might after all be acting ‘for nothing’: for the sake of high-flown values we are not even sure exist. In which case, the only genuinely ethical stance is to try and identify the worthiest things to belief in, and embrace them in their uncertainty. Similarly, Wallace suggested in one of his essays that literature ought to always exhibit a concern with ‘what it is to be a human being – that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal’. It is not a platitude. The point is that the very things which define human life – our values and principles – are also things we are left agonisingly uncertain about. The consequence is that to be an actual person is to be a very strange kind of creature, something undecided by nature.

  ‘The truth is scandalous, but without it nothing has any value’, wrote Houellebecq in a manifesto on the vocation of poetry (‘To Stay Alive – A Method’). In the service of his art, he said, the poet must delve ‘into the subjects that no one wants to hear about. … Insist upon sickness, agony, ugliness. Speak of death, and of oblivion. Of jealousy, of indifference, of frustration, of the absence of love. Be abject, and you will be true.’ Beneath these words is a deeply moral thought: the vital thing is not to be against happiness, but against unthinking happiness; optimism that edits out the parts of living no one wants to hear about. That is the task – to stay awake to the world, without despair. It may be impossible, but (thankfully) there is no way of knowing. ‘You cannot love the truth and the world’, claims Houellebecq in the same essay. Yet his advice to poets is also a subtle rebuke to depressive realism, whether he intended it or not. ‘A dead poet does not write. Hence the importance of remaining alive.’ Why stay alive for the sake of poetry? The answer Houellebecq gives is striking – not because he suddenly finds a way to make life seem acceptable, but because he affirms the idea that honesty can take us to places far stranger than pessimism. The writer’s c
alling may seem ‘painfully pointless’ sometimes:

  To this, only one reply: ultimately, you know nothing about it. … You will never really know this part of yourself which compels you to write. You will know it only through contradictory forms which merely approach it. Egotism or devotion? Cruelty or compassion? Any of these possibilities could be argued for. Proof that, ultimately, you know nothing about it; thus, do not behave as if you did. Before your own ignorance, before this mysterious part of yourself, remain honest and humble.

  That life is not an inevitable defeat is not a claim that can be defended in good faith. Not everyone is happy, or healthy, or loved – but everyone is caged in their own body, and in the deepest sense helpless over what happens to them, and everybody dies. In a certain state of mind that feels very like lucidity, the bad things appear so much more pertinent and insoluble and unutterably real that the idea of being sanguine or reasonable or ‘intelligent’ about them is almost hideous. But what’s real is never really so clear. It is incredibly hard to bear this in mind. The great difficulty thinking about pessimism is that you reach a point where you become aware of how thoroughly empty or pretentious any appeals to moral abstractions can sound, but also (as Kołakowski says) that there is a sense in which we unmistakably need something ‘sacred’ to be true if we’re not to feel contemptible. How you reconcile this demand with the equally important need to believe you aren’t deluded is, finally, a matter for individual judgment, but at the very least it helps to be reminded (through art, or other means) that faith, worship and unjustified belief are always and already part of our lives. The most reliable defence against pessimism is the knowledge that pessimism, too, is unsure. ‘Before your own ignorance, before this mysterious part of yourself, remain honest and humble.’ In the end there is no theory, and this is also a sort of gift.

  Notes

  1 Although as often as not (and there are one or two big exceptions) interviews report that Houellebecq is charming in person, something that seems incongruous at first but makes a sort of sense when you think about it – it’s like the inverse of the cliché comedian who’s completely wretched and horrible whenever he isn’t on stage.

  2 Interestingly, that judgment was part of Wallace’s 1997 review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time in the New York Observer; the same John Updike who disapprovingly quoted Houellebecq’s bit about all energy being sexual energy in the slightly pious notice he gave of The Possibility of an Island in the New Yorker in 2006.

  3 In 2001, French courts agreed to hear a formal case brought against Houellebecq by four French Muslim organisations on the charge of racism, after he was quoted (inaccurately, he claims) in an interview promoting Platform saying that Islam was ‘the most stupid of all religions’. The case was eventually dismissed, but in between the publication of Platform and his appearance in court two planes smashed into the World Trade Center, which obviously made Houellebecq’s eye for subject-matter seem like an uncannily sharp one, whatever else.

  4 For one minor example: hip-hop, a decidedly modern music. Hip-hop never seems right reproduced in a novel. Part of this, I think, is that a novel that reproduces a rap verse invariably writes the words out line-by-line, which is fine but palpably not how the music (which is, on the face of it, one of the most ‘articulate’ or ‘wordy’ types there is) makes itself felt – often the rhythm of a rap song pulls you along in spite of the fact that you usually can’t really separate or understand many of the words if you aren’t already familiar with the verse. This pull isn’t there on the page, although it is there on the radio, television, street corner, coming out of car-windows, i.e. all the everyday circumstances where one has the opportunity to hear rap music and compare it unfavourably to how it comes across inside a novel. Further minor example: Speaking personally, I find email exchanges written out in a novel almost unfailingly clunky and awkward, e.g. pp 497–502 of Franzen’s The Corrections (2001). Is it that email, too, simply feels wrong and not-at-home on the printed page?

  5 A personal example: when I’m out listening to music on my headphones, it’s often hard to avoid the sensation that I’m the middle of a sound-tracked video.

  6 ‘It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.” The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting – which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff – can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, PoMo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important.’ –David Foster Wallace, interview with Salon, March 8th, 1996.

  7 As mentioned, ‘E Unibus Pluram’ was written in 1990. It’s still extremely relevant, which attests to how immobile the problems it talks about are, but there are a couple of then-and-now changes worth noting. One of these is to do with advertising trends, and perhaps helps to illuminate Fisher’s idea of ‘precorporation’. In 1990, the sort of advert that concerned Wallace was exemplified by Burger King’s ‘Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules’ pitch for onion rings, i.e. a kind of ultra-commodified ‘rebellion’ that seems to totally defeat (while ironically mocking) any possibility of actually undermining the system. Compare that to Mastercard’s ingenious ‘For Everything Else There’s Mastercard’ campaign of more recent years, where the price of products (plane ticket/video camera/child’s bicycle) is directly juxtaposed with the more profound, ‘priceless’ joys they facilitate (flying home in time to record your son’s very first bicycle ride/experiencing the true meaning of Christmas). The conceit was brilliant: the adverts were catchy, witty, charmingly self-deprecating, and, on the face of it, also expounding some pretty admirable values about the relative worth of money and material trappings to things like community and human warmth. So what is there to dislike? Well, there’s still the standard commercial desire to try and induce a kind of anxiously compelling self-consciousness in the target audience (viz, am I spending the money the right way? Do my purchases facilitate the important things in life as best they might? How much of my life corresponds to the admirable human ideals depicted by the concerned people at Mastercard?), which adds a faint but still unpleasantly competitive edge to the whole enterprise of finding personal meaning and fulfilment, plus it’s still fantastic and unrealistic in the way of all advertising – but basically the issue is that, however nice and agreeable the advert is, fundamentally it does not have your best interests at heart. Its reason for being is to get you to give Mastercard money, and whether or not this helps you to experience happiness and self-worth is an irrelevance. The fact that such worthy goals are used in a sales pitch is – even just on a very slight, subconscious level – hurtful and depressing.

  Point being, just as the laudable desire to rebel against what’s fake can be twisted around to sell onion rings, the (good, true) belief that you shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about comparatively unimportant things like adverts can be hijacked to sell credit cards. In a way, the difficulty is how much we agree with the values on show. (A similar thing is true of ‘green’ capitalism.) The feeling it inspires, speaking personally, is almost paradoxical, something like being caught between the need to recognise that certain values are good even if advertising says they’re good, and the need to recognise that what’s importantly worthwhile and truly valuable just in some fundamental sense cannot be what advertising says it is.

  8 Possibly this is the reason artists and intellectuals, people who spend a higher proportion of time everyday inside their heads, are more than averagely prone to hypochondria – a disease of the imagination, after all.

  9 For a
sign of how tired Houellebecq’s bile is at this point, consider Daniel25’s observation that the chief of the human tribe is wearing an ‘Ibiza Beach’ T-shirt while he presides over a grotesque, blood-soaked carnival – not only thumping the reader over the head with an unbelievably crude metaphor, but asking us to believe that this Ibiza T-shirt was able to survive the two thousand years between the apocalypse and Daniel25’s journey in order to arrive at such a richly symbolic position.

  10 In fairness to Wallace, he never intended for the Kenyon address to be published – it only appeared in print after his death in 2008 – and it’s necessarily a very simplified expression of his thinking. Zadie Smith’s comment about the speech (in Changing My Mind, 2009) is worth bearing in mind. She said that it’s ‘hard to think of a less appropriate portrait of [Wallace] than as a dispenser of convenient pearls of wisdom, placed in your palm, so that you needn’t go through any struggle yourself. …the real worth of that speech… is as a diving board into his fiction, his fiction being his truest response to the difficulty of staying conscious and alive, day in and day out.’