The word ellipsis has at least two meanings:
(i) The ellipsis was discovered by Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, whose name is decoded in an inscription later in Men in Space, “K-e-p …,” and who worked for Tycho Brahe in Prague, where much of the book is set. The Keplerian celestial model was the first to replace the figure of the circle with the oval — the geocentric plenitude of the movement of the spheres with the elliptical movement of the planets — which goes hand in hand with the post-Copernican de-centering of the Earth from the heart of the universe. It is a revolution, of course, in the understanding of space, which becomes infinite, vast, and empty.
(ii) But ellipsis also has an orthographic meaning, denoting an absence, the typographical dot-dot-dot: the marker of a blind spot, an omission. An ellipsis symbolizes all that’s left out.
The twin sense of ellipsis, as the name for a lost plenitude of meaning and the marker of an absence, can be interestingly linked to McCarthy’s activities with the International Necronautical Society (INS), the semifictional group that he conceived in 1999 and which was modeled, not without parody, on European avant-gardes such as the Futurists. The Declaration on Inauthenticity, given in New York in 2007, begins its opening thesis with the words,
We begin with the experience of failed transcendence.… Being is not full transcendence, the plenitude of the One or cosmic abundance, but rather an ellipsis, an absence, an incomprehensibly vast lack scattered with debris and detritus. Philosophy as the thinking of Being has to begin from the experience of disappointment that is at once religious (God is dead, the One is gone), epistemic (we know very little, almost nothing; all knowledge claims have to begin from the experience of limitation) and political (blood is being spilt in the streets as though it were champagne).
The second thesis of the same Declaration seems to refer explicitly to the scene in Men in Space between Klárá and Ivan just discussed,
For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence. We could even say, borrowing defunct religious terminology, that it produces icons of that failure. An icon is not an original, but a copy, the copy of another icon. Art is not about originality, but about the repetition of the copy. We’ll be coming back to this point repeatedly.
Men in Space is a quasi-geometrically ordered series of horizontal planes that has at its center, as its central conceit, a failed icon, an icon of failure. As Klárá says of the floating, unknown saint, who furthermore might very possibly be non-Christian,
He looks as though he were disappointed. As though there were no transcendence — and no pure spirit either, no God.
As I’ve said before, Men in Space depicts a flat, unreal, and dematerialized surface, a disappointed and elliptical cosmos littered with detritus.
* * * * *
To risk reducing matters to the seemingly literal, one might say that what is described in Men in Space are men in space, drifting through a nothingness in which all markers of certainty or anchors of meaning have disappeared. Here the obvious emblem is the figure of the cosmonaut, adrift without a Soviet Union to which to return.
A Soviet cosmonaut is stranded in his spaceship.… I mean really. This guy went up as a Soviet on a routine space mission, and then while he was up there the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now, no one wants to bring him down.
Like abandoned cosmonauts, the characters in Men in Space drift through the debris of an inauthentic world. Not even death has the ability to confer authentic, final meaning on a life. When Anton Markov is executed towards the end of the book, he doesn’t even realize it. Rather than a mighty fatal blow, he simply feels that “a twig’s prodding him from behind.” Death, like life, happens randomly, inadvertently.
Readers expecting some kind of reassurance in stories of supposed subjective depth where characters with whom we can “identify” move heroically from crisis to redemption will have been rightly disappointed by Men in Space. McCarthy’s fiction and nonfiction aim to skewer an ideology of authenticity that is fed and watered by a certain humanist conception of literature. His work is a critique of writing that conspires to create the illusion of realism. But — and here’s the rub — if character-driven realism is an illusion (the exposure of which is at least at old as Cervantes, and probably much older), then McCarthy’s “flat, unreal and dematerialized” surfaces are arguably more realistic than any purported realism.
In Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006), McCarthy’s only published book-length work of literary criticism, literature is described as rich trash to be recycled and adapted. McCarthy cites Paul de Man’s discussion of irony from “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” where he says that we, “can know inauthenticity, but never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level.”
This quote casts broad daylight on the terrain of Men in Space, but also on McCarthy’s best-known and bestselling novel, Remainder, which is not about the overcoming of in authenticity, but our increasing self-consciousness of its operations.
Remainder is a long hymn to inauthenticity that shows the fatal consequences of the desire for authenticity. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist decides that, “I’d always been inauthentic.” Recovering from the accident where he is hit by something, some unknown violent event very possibly involving an aircraft, he had to learn to walk, to talk, to perform every simple muscular and reflex action as if for the first time. He had to reenact being human.
The protagonist decides that everything about him is imperfect, “Even my fantasies were plastic, imperfect, unreal.” As a consequence, he decides that other people are “Just like me: completely second-hand.” The world is full of usurpers and frauds, the difference being that they don’t realize it. Prior to the revelation that comes with peering into a crack in a bathroom, where a whole forgotten and seemingly real world begins to announce itself, the protagonist becomes utterly bored by people, ideas, the world: everything.
As the spectral, virtual figure of the “short councilor” remarks about the protagonist much later in Remainder, “He wants to be authentic.” That is, he wants to act in such a way that he coincides with himself and his self coincides with the real. This requires a reenactment of the reality that he believes he lost prior to the accident, a repetition of what seems to be a lost, original, authentic experience. The closest he gets to contact with the real is the intense and serene tingling in his body, standing passive and prone, with palms turned upward, that occasionally accompanies the reenactment. The protagonist submits to the fantasy of authenticity, and it is a cold fantasy. The obsessional ordering of reenacted experience keeps all intimacy at a distance and the only pleasure it affords is a solipsistic tingling.
The short councilor asks of the protagonist, in the impersonal third person, “So when, recently, has he felt least inauthentic?” The goal of all the reenactments is the same: it is to be
fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating us — and nothing separating me from the experience I was having: no understanding, no learning first and emulating second-hand, no self-reflection, nothing: no detour.
The fantasy of authenticity is the coincidence of the self with itself and the real — to be oneself without lack, gap, distance, reflection, or remainder. The fantasy for the protagonist of Remainder is of a trancelike stasis, where repetition becomes the origin that it sought to reenact. Reenactment and action merge in a feeling of floating serenity.