Tom McCarthy’s C is the kind of novel that can be read and reflected upon and responded to in myriad ways, which is a handy way of excusing myself for writing an idiosyncratic response instead of some attempt at comprehensive review. It’s a novel of cyphers and codes and vast networks visible and otherwise, and it’s a historical novel that is also (at least in the ways I want to think about it right now) very much about the present. “Information” and its ascendency, its total technological penetration, is so much a factor of contemporary everyday life that if it wasn’t so important it would be cliché. And C, despite ending decades before even ARPANET’s arrival challenges the idea that ours are the first generations to live in a world woven of easily — often willfully — overlooked webs of data. It’s a demonstration that we have always been online, or else that we are now incapable of looking back at the past without projecting the condition of a networked world onto every historical moment.
Early in the novel a character experiments with wireless communications in a garden workshop on his estate, and a visitor initially mistakes the wires for vines then later realizes his error:
The purple of the irises seems stronger, more intense than it did yesterday. The passageway formed by the hedges and trellis seems more closed-in, more laced-over. The wiry, light-brown vines that split from the poisonberries and run off towards the stables seem to have multiplied. When he arrives beneath them he sees that they’re not vines at all: they’re strands of copper wire, and more have been strung up since yesterday. The coils that came with him in Hudson and Dean’s trap are spilling unravelled from the stables’ entrances.
Later, in a silk weaving shop elsewhere on the estate,
Another rhythmic noise mingles with this: the repetitive whirring and clanking of a machine in the next room, laced with the higher, shriller sound of birdsong.
It’s next nature, the natural and the industrial at once, the rootedness of flora and the rootless intangibility of radio waves woven together, technology as ubiquitous as iPhones and RFID. Those mergers happen throughout C, when a the reeling of a film’s projection rattles together with the chirping of crickets into a hybrid of ancient and modern communications, or when two bodies are observed having sex in silhouette behind a screen and life becomes cinema becomes life. It’s an indictment of the notion that only in the age of the internet are we as enmeshed as struggling flies in fine, flexible webs of technology and history — so it’s also an indictment of the notion that there’s such a thing as “pure,” unmediated knowledge or experience, whether that experience is lived or literary, and it belies the notion that the “realism” of novels C first appears to mimic (and which are still being praised for adhering to the 19th Century, or lazily dismissed for refusing) is anything close to real. Because in a world full of competing, conflicting signals all we can do is pick the ones we’ll pay attention to most, making our attentions and understanding simultaneously “exuberant and deficient,” as José Ortega y Gasset put it.
Serge Carrefax, C’s protagonist, moves from his family’s estate through a German spa and an airwar, through the chaos of London nightlife and on to the pyramids and relics of ancient (but imperial) Egypt and Alexandria, a city where
There seem to be three different names for every street and square in town: English, French and Arabic — beside which a controversy is raging over whether Arabic names should be translated into French or English on official street maps and, beyond this, which of three English systems, each backed by a rival government department, should be used.
Serge spirals closer and closer to the source from whence political power, history, and communications seem to emanate, but in the end it’s Yeats’ unholdable center, no more real or solid than the supposed foundational truth of a realist novel. Britain’s physical empire is en route to collapse, to revolution, but an empire of the airwaves — a web of language, and the reinvention of history through retransmission — is ever expanding. C’s Alexandria section reminded me of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, a novel that makes Alexandria physically, literally the center of the novel and also discovers that there is no truth to be found there, only competing signals and allegiances to choose from as a way of making transient, insensible sense. As in Gray’s novel, that discovery of a hollow center in the classical world merges woman and machine in a breakdown of language and speech, as Serge’s companion is overcome by the amount of information she has to transmit:
Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth — constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise.
Serge’s own breakdown inevitably follows, and we’re left with disembodiment, lives and souls rendered lighter than air, like radio waves and the scarabs to which, in the ancient world,
“Secrets of the heart,” says Laura, noticing him peering in bemusement at the hieroglyphic phrases. “In New Kingdom burials, the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience were confided to these things.”
“And that’s what written on them, to be printed out after his death?” he asks.
“It’s more complex than that,” she answers. “What’s engraved on them are spells to censor all these secrets, so they won’t come out at judgement and weigh down the heart. It had to weigh less than a feather, or the soul was doomed.”
So even as the ancient predicts the modern, the invisible broadcasts of souls via copper-wound scarabs pointing the way toward radio and — later still — the web, and in an age when how easily we connect is of more concern than what we connect to, when we have access to everything recorded from anywhere, all the time, we aren’t necessarily able to know anything about it because we’re always listening (and reading) from within our own narrow bubble of the few signals we haven’t been trained to ignore. C accomplishes what McCarthy wrote recently of the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint:
we’re being given access not to a fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings as he travels through a naturalistic world, emoting, developing and so on – but rather to an encounter with structure.
And of course he’s also writing about his own work, transmitting from deep within the signals of C, as my attempt to make sense of all this is inevitably bound in the thin wires of my own reductive, redactive obsession with reading fiction in search of nature and technology growing entangled.