Acknowledgements
The manuscript of Men in Space has had a long gestation. It started as a series of disjointed, semi-autobiographical sketches written in what seems like another era, and grew into one long, disjointed document from which a plot of sorts emerged from time to time to sniff the air before going to ground again. That it eventually found a kind of warped coherence as a novel about disjointedness and separation is to a large extent thanks to the intervention through the years of several people. They are, like the possessed man says, legion — but I’m particularly indebted to Mike Shaw and Hannah Griffiths, Alessandro Gallenzi and Mike Stocks, Jonny Pegg, Jane Lewty and Eva Stenram; also to Penny McCarthy, for her ancient-Greek techné.
Afterword
Everything Falls Back to Earth
Here is nothing, hold it tight.
Men in Space is the third of Tom McCarthy’s novels to appear in the United States. But it was the first book he wrote and provides the conceptual kernel of the project that emerges so powerfully in Remainder (2005) and C (2010). It remains my favorite among McCarthy’s books.
Epigraphs to novels are often overlooked or read too quickly, but can provide invaluable clues for mapping a book’s entire terrain. This is decidedly the case with Men in Space. The book opens with a quotation from Klárá Jelínková’s unpublished and seemingly obscure master’s dissertation on the murals of the Bačkovo Ossuary. Indeed, I think that Klárá is the key character in Men in Space, and her words can be read as a commentary on both the form and content of the novel that unfolds on the following pages.
What is at stake here is the question of line. Klárá talks about line as “the basic means of expression in the work of the Bačkovo masters.” These lines never permit themselves to become mere accessories to the expression of volume. That is, they do not “imply depth” or “confer realism.” Men in Space is artfully composed like a flat mural on a two-dimensional surface crisscrossed by multiple lines of narrative. These lines consist of what Jelínková calls “inverted perspective” and “multiple points of view,” which precisely describes the deliberately disjointed narrative structure of the book.
Men in Space is best thought of as a panel painting, a kind of polyptych that depicts a world, that is, in Klárá’s words, “flat, unreal and dematerialized.” Such flat unreality is McCarthy’s space of literature. And space is the key to understanding what McCarthy is up to in Men in Space and his subsequent novels. It is not that time and the temporal flow of narrative are absent from McCarthy’s fiction, but they are subordinated to questions of spatial organization and an almost geometrical concern with plotting points, lines, and figures on a flat, horizontal surface.
As such, McCarthy’s characters are not so much people as they are vectors, bearers of movement that form these lines, angles, and intersections. At a revealing moment in McCarthy’s C, the protagonist Serge is described as “seeing everything flat” and as being unable to understand perspective. In Remainder too, a general flatness pervades, and the unnamed protagonist is obsessed with the reenactment of temporal events as the re-creation of spaces. McCarthy’s is an art of navigation, both of the aviational space with which Remainder ends and the quasi-Melvillean maritime space that is plotted in C. The first time we encounter Nicholas Boardaman (Border-man, man at the border), the English protagonist of Men in Space, he is dreaming of ships.
The epigraph to Men in Space, and indeed Klárá’s unpublished master’s thesis, enters the action in a decisive scene later in the book when Klárá and the artist Ivan Maňásek are having a lazy, naked, postcoital conversation about the Byzantine icon that Ivan is being paid to copy. Art, as we’ve known since Warhol — and as McCarthy repeatedly reminds us — is copying and theft. The icon depicts an act of ascension, a floating saint, which at one moment is thought to be Simon, “because of the ships.” Klárá says, in what might be read as a summary of the basic conceit of Men in Space and of the relations between persons enacted in the book,
The men stare straight out from the painting. So do the strange birds. The floating saint too, come to that. Axonometric: there’s no variation in their distance from the viewer. Besides which, there’s a general lack of continuity between the figures. Rather than collaborating with one another to provide visual cohesion, they’re discontiguous, each occupying a zone of his own, each willfully oblivious to the presence of others.
As in the icon painting, each character in Men in Space seems to occupy his or her own zone of aloneness and pursues an idiosyncratic line of flight, which occasionally intersects with the zone of another. But then we come to the key passage in Klárá’s speech,
The strangest thing of all is this: God’s represented not by a circle but by an ellipse around the saint’s head.
That is, God is not iconographically depicted by a circular halo, which would denote a full transcendence, a plenitude or pleroma that from Parmenides to Hegel has always described the well-rounded circle of being — whether being is understood as nature or the divine or indeed the identity of the two, as in Spinoza. Rather, the divine is coded as an ellipse, the key word in Men in Space that reappears throughout the book, rewritten as ellipsis and even ellipsus and finally as the oval figure that is inserted into the signature of the increasingly deranged Dutch gallerist, Joost van Straten.
1
See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word. A Cryptonomy, trans. N. Rand (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986), p. 22.