by Hari Kunzru
“I haven’t seen you in the Communal Workspace,” he said.
“No.”
“Your station is untenanted, the bookshelves bare.”
He made an unlikely fluttering motion with his stubby fingers, as if the books had flown away like little birdies. The effect was horrific. I told him I preferred to write in my room.
“Protecting the sacred mysteries?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I nodded thoughtfully, as if acknowledging a cogent point. He tried again.
“Not wanting to show the class your workings?”
Laetitia summoned a wan smile. Beneath the lacy collar of her blouse, a tiny vein throbbed in her neck.
“You’re very daring,” she said to me.
Daring didn’t sound so good. Daring meant I’d made myself the object of gossip. Finding no suitable reply, I performed a sort of conversational lunge.
“What do you work on, Laetitia?”
Dutifully she began, in a quiet and rather circumspect way, to tell me. As she spoke, Edgar affected wolfish interest, dabbing his beard with his napkin and shifting in his chair, movements that made her flinch. Though nominally an archaeologist, she was essentially a textual scholar. Other people dug, she “merely interpreted the findings.” I couldn’t decide whether this modesty was genuine, or a plea to be allowed to slip back into silence, to remove herself from Edgar’s line of sight. The ancient Chinese aristocracy used ritual objects when making offerings to ancestral spirits. She was studying the inscriptions on these objects, mostly bronze vessels and bells. She was, she said, particularly interested in a group of artifacts that seemed to have come from the household of a royal functionary of the Western Zhou period.
“Which is?”
“Roughly the ninth century BC, Edgar.”
I see, he said, in the tone of a rich uncle bestowing a shiny penny on a young relative. The starter arrived, a little arrangement of smoked fish on a bed of salad. For a few blessed moments everyone concentrated on the food, but Edgar dispatched his portion in a few ruthless bites and resumed his interrogation.
“You say a royal functionary of—what was it?—the Western Zhou. You’ve never told me what function.”
“You’ve never asked. He was a shanfu. He transmitted the king’s commands.”
“I see.”
I couldn’t decide. Did Edgar not realize that Laetitia saw how transparently uninterested he was in her work, or did he just not care? He struck me as a man who might have trouble picking up on other people’s emotional cues. I could tell he was itching to turn the conversational spotlight on me. I was virgin territory, an unextracted natural resource. The dinner was already intolerable, more gruesome than I’d anticipated. I considered my options. Flight, the most attractive. I could be direct. Do it quick, like tearing off a plaster. How rude would it be just to push my chair back and leave the room? I hesitated too long. Cutting off Edgar’s half-uttered question (“and how about…” ) I hurriedly asked Laetitia more about her inscriptions. What kind of thing did they say? Were they extensive, or just a few words? I said fascinating a couple of times. The inscriptions sounded fascinating. The Western Zhou were fascinating. She gave me a pitying look. She understood that I was pleading.
“They usually describe the events that led to the vessel’s casting, a war, the rendering of some notable administrative service or the performance of a religious rite.”
“Fascinating.”
“And you? What about these hermetic scribblings of yours?” His blunt white fingers splayed on the table, Edgar had the bland but purposeful look of a farmer at the wheel of a tractor, surveying an unplowed field. “What aspect of the poetic oeuvre are you working on, up there in your attic?”
Irritated by the Frenchified sneer of “oeuvre,” I told him: lyric poetry, a textual technology for the organization of affective experience, a container in which modern selfhood had come to be formulated, and so on and so forth. I remember I said something about the tyranny of utility and something else about the relentless pressures of self-preservation. I tried to model my speech on Laetitia’s, speaking quietly, using a certain amount of jargon, making no wild claims. I hoped that Edgar would be bored enough to allow the conversation to move on elsewhere. Instead, to my dismay, he clapped his meaty palms together in glee. His scoff was physical, an ejection of air.
“Oho! We have a mystic on our hands!”
“I’m actually an atheist.”
“If you are, sir, I suspect you’re an atheist of a somewhat heretical stripe. I’m afraid I can’t give you a pass just because you say you’re not infected by the virus of religion. While I accept that there is a domain of literary language that uses words in, let’s say, a non-denotative way, I am a scientist, and as a man of science, I can’t allow anyone to plant weeds in the conceptual garden.”
“The what?”
I wanted to say to him, what are you talking about? I wanted to say, I’m not doing anything to your fucking garden. Instead, I stumbled on with my explanation. I tried to sound as technical as possible, defensively striving for a kind of ultra-rationality, the tone of a man speaking to another man out of the firm authority of his disciplinary manhood, but I could hear myself tripping up, giving garbled explanations of ideas that I usually found useful and clear.
Edgar called the waiter and had his wineglass refilled. He toasted me as he took a sip, a gesture that not only failed to be Falstaffian, but came across as actively prim.
“Why don’t we leave aside your use of the word technology. The idea of writing as a technology does have semantic content for me. But really, even if one accepts the continued cultural importance of poetry, as opposed to some mass medium, say television or social media, even radio, any of which would surely be more powerful and effective—if only in terms of reach, numbers participating—even then one has to ask about the mechanism by which poetry would do anything as powerful as, how did you put it, ‘reformatting contemporary selfhood’? I assume the use of a computer term is a metaphor, which I may discount?”
He appeared to be waiting for a yes or no. I nodded mutely, in the throes of a sudden physical crisis, a painful muscular spasm that was constricting my neck and shoulders. He took my silence as a sign that he’d already won the argument and could take his time to deliver the coup de grâce, allowing himself a few matadorial flourishes on the way.
“I could accept the possibility of a machine consisting of language, words assembled in a particular order which would act, perhaps via the dopamine system, to do measurable neurochemical work. I’m talking off the top of my head here, the exact mechanism is unimportant. But I wonder, wouldn’t the words be less a machine than a set of instructions for building one?”
Here, in the absence of some word or gesture from me, he inserted his own preference, doing a little dumb show of a person (presumably me) having a eureka moment.
“Now he gets it! The real machine would be the array of neurons in the brain! So we can rescue some meaningful thinking from what you said, but I’m sorry to say that for me the real problem starts much earlier. The ‘self’ is just a folk notion. I am not trying to humiliate, simply stating a fact. The self is what we might call the elephant in the room when it comes to discussing the value of your sort of, what would you call it, cultural study? Before one starts to make wild claims about how to reprogram something, one is forced to ask, what is it that we’re reprogramming? This self that, according to you, changes through history, and can be reconfigured by the unlikely means of poetry? To you, I mean, specifically. What do you imagine you are speaking about when you say the word self?”
I know people throw around the phrase “my worst nightmare,” but several years earlier I had actually suffered from a recurring anxiety dream about being at a thesis defense, with a panel of sarcastic hectoring men—men like Edgar—as the examiners. When y
ou’re angry, you’re at a disadvantage. You ought to be marshaling your materials, formulating your case, but you can’t concentrate because you’re vividly imagining your dinner companion swallowing bits of his wine glass. I spluttered something about Being, the quality I found in myself that was more than the sum of my parts. I used the word Gestalt. I couldn’t believe the garbage that was coming out of my mouth.
“So is it a little golden chap, sitting at the controls of that big mechanical body?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The self! Where is it? Where is it located?”
“Well, obviously when it comes to lyric poetry, it’s in the field of the poem. On the page.”
Edgar looked puzzled, and I congratulated myself on executing the postmodernist version of spraying mace in his eyes. Where is the self? What did he think I was going to say, the pineal gland? Recovering, he began to wonder aloud, in a tone that mixed pity and reproach, whether I understood that consciousness was essentially epiphenomenal, and my experience of having a self was perhaps not causal in the way I imagined. My “self” didn’t run things, Edgar told the table, like Poirot revealing that I was the one who did the murder. It was merely a sort of passenger, allowed occasionally to comment on the action. Experimental psychology and neuroscience had rather got ahead of the liberal arts, in Edgar’s opinion. My “lyric I” or whatever I wanted to call it, might, he granted, have value in the realm of intellectual history, but only as a poignant artifact of a period that was drawing to a close.
“HE’S AN UNBELIEVABLE ASSHOLE. I mean possibly the most arrogant man I’ve ever met. And talk about privilege. Unless you’re—well, unless you’re him, essentially, he acts as if he’s leading you through a difficult text in a seminar. It was a terrible mistake to come here. I’m trapped. I’m a prisoner in my room.”
Rei looked worried. “You didn’t start anything, did you? Were you rude to him?”
“God no. I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t even make it to dessert. I told them I had a conference call, and came up to phone you. Darling, I’ve had to lock the door. I’m irrationally afraid he’s outside in the corridor, waiting to carry on telling me about the pointlessness of my life.”
“A conference call?”
“I had to say something.”
“When do you ever have conference calls?”
“I’ve had conference calls. Enough, God, you’re supposed to be humoring me, not questioning my excuses.”
“Honey?”
“What?”
“You’re ranting.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s OK. It’s who you are. I’m at peace with it.”
I smiled at her. She smiled back. I felt a little less jumbled.
“So what’s been going on? You’re in the thick of it, with Nina and everything.”
“Don’t worry about me. All I want is for you to break through your—whatever. Your thing. Just make the most of your time. Write your book and come back to me happy.”
“But this guy is driving me crazy. And it’s not just me, you should see the others. They’re fucking wrecks, excuse my language. Nina’s not around, is she?”
“Paulette’s taken her to the library. Don’t worry about this Edgar person. Seriously. You’re fine. You’re going to be fine.”
After we ended the call I tried everything I could think of to get to sleep, but I was still too angry. I watched part of a durational Iranian movie, the kind of film that’s almost impossible to decipher on a laptop, ten-minute shots of a man walking up a path, long silences as people served and drank tea. When my eyes got tired, I switched to a file of pictures I kept on a thumb drive and masturbated. After a melancholy orgasm I was just as wired as before. I lay in bed, my back and shoulders knotted with undischarged fury, until eventually daylight began to filter into the room. So what if my conscious intention didn’t “cause” anything? The force, the will, came from me. I was still the one who wanted things, who thought and felt and experienced pain.
For a man who was full of sarcastic little images of what he called the “sovereign self” (“the princeling,” the “little golden man,” the “wizard behind the curtain” and so on), Edgar was heavily invested in one kind of sovereignty: his own. In theory he was a sanguine population of neurons and I was an uptight mystic clinging on to my childish folk beliefs about the soul. In practice, he was a bully. It wasn’t as if I’d even set out to challenge him. I’d been actively trying to mind my own business, keep my head down. Eventually I fell into fitful unconsciousness.
THE NEXT MORNING I went for a walk to clear my head, thinking I’d come back refreshed and write some notes in the Workspace, but although the day was bright and the lake more cheerful and welcoming than before, I couldn’t suppress unwelcome thoughts, chiefly the suspicion that I was only annoyed by Edgar because I knew he was right. This “lyric I,” this thing I was studying with such seriousness, didn’t really exist. Whenever I tried to focus my attention on it, on myself, to experience some version of the exquisite interiority out of which the great poets had forged their art, the fullness that I ought to have found was missing. All I uncovered was confusion. There were impressions, experiences, and there seemed to be a subject attached to them, someone or something to which they were happening. But there was no unity, no proof that this “I” to whom I was so slavishly devoted, who was, now I came to think of it, more or less my employer, the one on whom my livelihood depended, was present in any meaningful way at all.
What did I have to cling on to? There were constants. I always had neck pain. I knew the dates of Rei’s and Nina’s birthdays. Was that a sufficient foundation for a personality? I could bring my wife’s face vividly to mind. My daughter’s too. The faces might stop me floating away, but they couldn’t make me feel like a “self” with any force or power of action. How could an amorphous blob will anything into being? How could it love? I was a vapor, an incoherent jumble of events inside a sack of skin.
As I walked and fretted, I paid little attention to my surroundings, and was surprised to find myself at the Kleist grave. Someone had left flowers on the headstone. Small blue wildflowers, carefully tied with a ribbon. Nun, o Unsterblichkeit, bist du ganz mein! A flight of steps led from the marker to the water. I picked my way down it, wary of ice. Colonized by rowing clubs and villas, the view carried no information, nothing that made it any easier to understand the violence that had taken place there.
Kleist’s most famous story, or at least the only one I could remember in any detail, was The Marquise of O, which concerned an aristocratic young widow who scandalizes society by taking out an advertisement in a newspaper, inquiring after the identity of the father of her child. In 1808 its publication was a minor sensation, and didn’t endear Kleist to the morally rigid Prussian public. What kind of woman doesn’t know who she’s slept with? The Prussian public knew exactly what kind of woman. An aristocrat’s position depended on her name, on the public qualities—honor and reputation—that attached to it. What kind of aristocrat would publicize a shameful secret in a newspaper? The mental state of the Marquise was the story’s mystery, its black box. How could she not know such an intimate thing about herself? Was she a liar? An amnesiac? Was she raped? What kind of inner life do you have, if such an event can slip your mind?
I had an answer. Edgar’s answer. None. No one was there, no one inside the box. In the story, the Marquise’s mystery was resolved and her amnesia explained, I couldn’t exactly remember how, but in my mind she’d got wrapped up with a completely different story, the tale of Coppélia, the clockmaker’s wind-up doll. A young man falls in love with the doll, projecting his sexual longings onto her lifeless body. The Marquise was a figure like Coppélia, a void with an uncanny human outline.
I came back from my walk shivering, ready to take a hot shower, only to find a cleaner in my room, a sligh
t middle-aged woman whose pinched face was half-obscured by a feathery curtain of hair. We were both alarmed. Before I came in, she’d been near the door, and as I opened it, she was forced to step back. Startled by my entry, she put up an arm as if to ward off a blow and the sleeve of her housecoat rode up to expose a wrist densely inked with tattoos. I stepped aside, trying to look unthreatening, and she sort of melted away. One minute she was there, carrying a caddy of spray bottles, the next she’d vanished.
Her furtiveness was odd enough that I went into the closet and made a quick check on the folder where I kept cash and documents. Satisfied that everything was in place, I locked the door and examined the room. She had folded my clothes, straightened up the books on my desk and carefully lined up two half-drunk bottles of beer next to the sink, as if offering me the choice either to finish them or recycle them. I tried not to interpret this as passive-aggressive. It was oddly difficult for me just then to know that someone had been in my personal space, going through my things. I was entering a period when everything around me seemed to be encrusted in signs. Or more encrusted than usual. I tried to feel nothing in particular about the arrangement of the beer bottles on the counter, or about the housekeeper as an individual, a woman who was probably following a checklist of actions prescribed by her management. I lay down on the clean linen of my freshly made bed and fiddled around on the internet.