Our Tragic Universe

  In order from 1 to 6, my cards were as follows: Ace of Cups; Prince of Cups (reversed); the Star; Three of Wands (reversed); Three of Pentacles; and Justice (reversed). This, when I interpreted it, suggested that I wanted to set out for a great truth, something very worth while, as expressed by the Ace of Cups, but at the end I didn't want to come to a final judgement. I was somehow rejecting the Justice card, which is why it was reversed. In order to come to this non-conclusion, I needed balance, not dishonesty. I wanted to ask a question, but not answer it. Perhaps I wanted to create a storyless story. How that would work in my feature I wasn't sure. But I did suddenly realise that all the self-help books I'd rejected for being offensive or stupid were offensive or stupid precisely because they would take the Fool, about to step off his cliff, and they would stop him. They would put him and his dog in therapy and turn him back towards the 'real world, with its winding roads with signs pointing only to love, money and success. Then the doorbell rang and all my furniture arrived.

  The delivery men took the flat-pack bed and mattress upstairs, but left the other boxes in the hallway. It took me half an hour to move them into the front room. Then I went back upstairs. The box of bed-parts was so heavy I couldn't move it. In the end I opened it haphazardly and about fifty pieces of pale wood fell on the floor, along with a bag containing a million billion screws and other metal objects, and a piece of paper with a picture of a bed on it. I couldn't even open the box properly; what chance was there that I would actually put all this stuff together? I tried sifting through the pieces and looking at the diagram, but it was no good; I didn't even know which way up anything went. I went downstairs and looked for Tim's number. I remembered that I needed to reply to Josh, not that I knew what to say. It was just like him to want to book a restaurant twelve days before an event.

  Tim was in the Yellow Pages, under 'Handymen. I rang the number. A woman—I assumed it was Heidi—answered.

  'Hello,' I said. 'Is Tim there?'

  'No, sorry,' she said. 'Who is this?'

  'It's Meg Carpenter. I'm working with him on his book; he's probably mentioned me. Although really I wanted some help with a flat-pack. I guess he's on Dartmoor already?'

  'What book?' said Heidi. 'Hello, by the way. I'm Heidi; Tim's wife.'

  'Gosh,' I said. 'Sorry if I've...'

  'He never said anything about a book. That's great.'

  'It is,' I said. 'It's very...'

  'God. How embarrassing.' She laughed. 'How stupid.'

  'Huh?'

  'How embarrassing and stupid to not know what your own husband is doing. Is it a good book?'

  'Yeah. Well, it's a proposal at the moment. It will be good, I'm sure.'

  'And you say he's on Dartmoor?'

  'Honestly, I wouldn't know,' I said. 'It was a guess. I...'

  Heidi laughed. 'I thought he was having an affair.'

  'Um...'

  'Sorry. I shouldn't tell you any of this. But I'm so glad he isn't having an affair. Isn't that pathetic? Unless, of course, you're his mistress and I'm making an even bigger fool of myself.' She sighed. 'What's he doing on Dartmoor?'

  'He's researching a Beast,' I said.

  'Not the one from the local paper? Oh, God.'

  'I'm sure it'll be OK.'

  'How can you say that? It's almost worse. I thought he was having an affair, and he's actually out there with some wild animal. Not that anyone feels safer inside, because apparently it finds ways into people's houses. Sorry—Meg, wasn't it? You've caught me at a strange moment, and I'm really rather embarrassed. I'm sorry.'

  'Don't be, please,' I said. 'But look, I'm sure he had a good reason. What did you mean about—'

  'You know, he accused me of having an affair once,' she said. 'Years ago, when we lived in London. I'd gone for dinner a couple of times with a colleague, and he thought that meant I must be sleeping with him. Now this. God.'

  While Heidi was talking I'd walked to my front door, opened it as quietly as I could and rung the doorbell.

  'Oh, sorry—Hang on! —Heidi, that's the door. I've got to go. Will you tell Tim I phoned? Sorry again. Got to go. Hope everything works out. Bye.'

  I went to the village shop and got a Phillips screwdriver, a flat-head screwdriver, some more lemons, some bubble bath and the local paper. Gill didn't say anything at all, but shook her head a couple of times as she searched for the price on the flat-head screwdriver. I looked again at the books on the display behind the counter.

  'It's Gill, isn't it?' I said to her.

  'Yes,' she said. 'And you're Meg?'

  I smiled. 'Yep. Sorry I keep buying such weird stuff.'

  'Don't worry,' she said. 'We sell quite "weird stuff".' She smiled too.

  'OK. Well, I need some more of those books. I'd like the one on embroidery, the one on building bat-houses, the one on watercolour painting and the one on birdwatching, please.'

  When I got in I made some notes on my feature, but I still wasn't sure how to make it work. Then I went upstairs and put all the pieces of the bed into piles, and read the instructions twice. I realised I needed an electric screwdriver as well as the two I'd bought from the shop, so I went to borrow one from Andrew. I stayed for a quick fish stew and a pint of Beast. Then I went home to get on with my feature. I'd just settled down on the sofa with the sack of self-help books and the new books I'd bought from the village shop when my phone vibrated. There was a message from Libby: I feel like a Stepford Wife. How are you? I've had sex three times today! Now I want to shoot myself.

  I added one more small log to the fire, and for a while it crackled in the fireplace, before settling into a kind of Wishhh noise, with the sea outside going Shushhh as the wind died down. I took out my Moleskine notebook and started writing, and the sound of my fountain pen on the thick pages was Hushhh. Wish, shush, hush. I wrote for two hours without stopping. Then I plugged in my laptop, made another cup of coffee and started typing, still surrounded by books with increasing numbers of Post-it notes stuck in them. When my feature was completely done and the fire had settled into a glow, I settled down to sleep with B on the sofa, thinking about what I'd written and hoping Oscar would publish it and Vi would read it, with the fire still wishing, and projecting its own shadowy stories onto the walls.

  I'd first met Vi on a drunken evening after a research seminar that Frank had given on Chekhov's letters and literary technique. One of my lecturers, Tony, was sitting next to an attractively weathered-looking woman I'd never seen before, who was wearing purple jeans, a Greenpeace T-shirt and big black DMs. She had the kind of tan you don't ever get in England, and several necklaces made from string and exotic-looking stones. After the seminar was over Frank invited everybody for a drink, but I was the only person who could make it apart from Tony and the mysterious woman, whom Frank then introduced as 'my other half: Violet Hayes, from anthropology'. Tony laughed at this, clapped Frank on the shoulder and said, 'Other half? Anthropology? How sweet.'

  A drink turned into dinner in an Italian place down a side-street, and we all smoked and drank red wine as if we were immortal. The only person who didn't smoke was Vi, but she threw back her wine just as fast as the rest of us.

  'Sometimes I yearn for a cigarette,' she said. 'Just one.'

  Tony laughed. 'Chekhov gave up smoking eventually, didn't he?' he said to Frank. 'Didn't he say it had stopped him being gloomy and nervous?'

  'Yeah,' Frank said. 'I hope that happens when I give up.'

  'He went off Tolstoy as a direct result of giving up smoking, too, didn't he?' Vi said. 'I remembered that because I kind of went off certain things when I gave up. Like bad detective novels, for example.' She grinned. 'Hardly Tolstoy, but.'

  Vi spoke English with the kind of accent that has evolved in a variety of different directions, like an adaptively radiated species. As I got to know her better I would begin to recognise or guess some of the origins of her different ways of constructing sentences. Using 'but' at the end of a sentence instead of 'though' was
Antipodean—I knew this from watching soap operas, and from listening to Frank, who was Australian.

  'Yeah,' said Frank. 'Sadly they didn't agree on the fundamental nature of existence. Tolstoy thought it was spiritual; Chekhov thought it was material. More or less.' He looked at me. 'Do you know Chekhov's letters, Meg?'

  'No. I mean, I didn't before today. I'll get the book out of the library now, though. The letters sound great. So why exactly did he go off Tolstoy? How could anyone go off Tolstoy?' We'd reached Tolstoy on Frank's course, but not Chekhov.

  'It was a class thing mainly,' Frank said. 'Chekhov was already making a distinction between his kind of writing and Tolstoy's in the letter I was talking about before, when he says Tolstoy and Turgenev are "fastidious" with their morals. Chekhov hated this. It wasn't just that he was a doctor. He came from a very poor background and most of his writing was done to make money to stop his family from starving. He supported them all throughout his life. His two older brothers were alcoholics, and didn't help much at all. He was very well acquainted with the lives of the lower classes: dirt, poverty—the "dung-heap" of life. He saw something too morally simplistic, or maybe naive, in Tolstoy—or at least he said he did before he met him properly. Chekhov valued progress. He said something like "There is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat." I've been intrigued by that remark ever since I read it. Tolstoy, being rich, thinks that living like a peasant is virtuous in its simplicity. But Chekhov's been there and done that. He's eaten goose soup so thin that he says the only substance in it is like the scum you get in a bath after fat market women have been in it. He has slept in troughs. He was thrilled to leave his parochial home town, Taganrog, and loved spending time in St Petersburg, where there were proper intellectuals and good food. He doesn't have any romantic ideas about peasants and the countryside. It's interesting to compare his story "Peasants" with the sections in Anna Karenina where Levin thinks he will become enlightened if he works hard, like a peasant. But in Chekhov's story peasant life is simply dull, boring and painful. He became close to Tolstoy, of course, and they got on very well. Chekhov always looked up to him in some ways.'

  'I don't want to be controversial here,' Tony said. 'But isn't it a bit misleading trying to reconstruct who these authors "really were" and what their great works "really meant"?'

  'Of course,' Frank said, smiling. 'Chekhov said that himself. It's hardly a new idea. He would completely agree with what you just said. He was always being criticised for being too realistic. But he didn't want to be read as a liberal, or a conservative—just someone who told the truth and wasn't pretentious. He said it was up to the reader to judge, not the writer.'

  'But do we need an author's permission to read their work how we like?'

  'Well, no, but...'

  'It's not as simple as reading "how we like", though, is it?' I said. 'There's the affective fallacy to think about as well.'

  'So you do listen in lectures,' Tony said to me.

  'Oh, I've heard that lecture,' Vi said to Tony. '"The Death of the Author", right? It's pretty good, except for the bit about infinity and monkeys.'

  'How did you hear it?' he asked.

  'Oh, I take tapes of other departments' lectures on planes with me when I travel. Ever since I gave up reading detective fiction I've needed to find something else to do on long trips. I read Zen stories too,' she said, 'but they're not very long. I mean, my reading pile is always taller than I am, but on plane journeys I just need something a bit dumb to help me switch off.'

  'Thanks,' Tony said. 'Nice to know my "dumb" lectures help you switch off.'

  'Don't be offended,' she said. 'Yours are pretty good. Maybe I don't exactly mean dumb. But you know those books that introduce a complicated subject for a general reader? There were more of them in the nineteenth century than there are now, which is a real shame. I'd like to be reading those books on a plane. Undergraduate lectures are the closest thing. I like the ones from the history of mathematics course as well. I'd like to listen to the actual maths ones, but they don't tape them because it's all done on a blackboard.'

  'Vi's researching narrative theory,' Frank said. 'When she asked me whose lectures she should listen to from our department, I naturally suggested you.'

  'How does anthropology fit in with narrative theory?' Tony said. 'And, er, maths?'

  'Er, Claude Lévi-Strauss?' Vi said.

  'Oh, of course.' Tony shook his head. 'And Vladimir Propp, I guess. All the folklorists and structuralists.' He looked at me. 'Did you come to my first-year lecture on structuralism?'

  I shook my head. 'I don't remember it.'

  'Lévi-Strauss thought that all stories could potentially be expressed as one single equation,' Vi said. 'The piece he writes about it is very moving. Having come up with a rough hypothetical "formula" for myths in general, he then says that because French anthropology is underfunded he can't complete his research, because he'd need a technical team and a bigger workshop. He was summarising myths and isolating their mythemes on big pieces of card and simply ran out of physical space to do it in. He had none of what he called "IBM equipment", although I can't imagine how a computer would help. Mine can't even hold a chapter of a book without wanting to die pathetically under the strain.'

  'We'll come to Vladimir Propp on my course,' Frank said to me. 'He studied Russian folk tales and also came up with a "formula" for expressing them. He argued that they were all built from a finite number of story-elements, a bit like different recipes made from the same basic set of ingredients. For example, many folk tales begin with the hero being told not to do a certain thing, like look in a cupboard or pick an apple. In other words, an interdiction, which Propp gives the code Y1.'

  'And then the hero always does the thing he's been told not to do?' I said, although I knew the answer.

  'They always do,' Frank said.

  'So all fiction is the same?'

  'No, no.' Vi shook her head. 'There are stories with no formula, but they are a bit harder to find. Mathematically they are expressed differently. You'd need imaginary numbers—the square roots of negatives—to express those stories in equations. I'm working on a paper about this at the moment.'

  Our pizzas arrived, so Vi didn't say anything else about her paper.

  'So what's wrong with my monkeys?' Tony asked Vi, once we'd started eating.

  'Well, I liked what you said, up to a point, but I thought you misrepresented infinity. You said that if they were given an infinite amount of time, a million or more monkeys would eventually write Shakespeare, because of probability.'

  He had, and then he'd asked us all to imagine we held a copy of The Tempest in our hands. In this thought-experiment, we did not know whether this was a text written by Shakespeare, or written randomly by monkeys. Did it make any difference which it was? Without intention behind them, would the words on the page still have meaning? I hadn't really been sure that anything not written by a human would be readable, and that anything non-human, even probability, could create The Tempest. But the argument had been logical enough, and we'd all concluded that it wouldn't matter—or at least it wouldn't make any difference to the meaning of the words on the page—whether the text had been written by Shakespeare, monkeys, a random word-generator or in any other way.

  'In an infinite amount of time,' Frank said, 'things still "never" happen. The monkeys could create an infinite amount of gibberish before they wrote Shakespeare. That's assuming you could find monkeys that lived an infinitely long period of time as well, which seems unlikely.'

  Vi laughed. 'In an infinite amount of time, at least one infinite monkey would evolve to be Shakespeare,' she said. 'Imagine that. Also,' she added, 'I wasn't a hundred per cent sure about your philosophical zombies.'

  'Oh,' Tony said. 'I thought they were good.'

  'Yes, I did too,' Vi said, laughing. 'I liked the idea that this being, the philosophical zombie, is purely hypothetical—that's a good para
dox in itself. A being that cannot "be". I liked the way that this being could tell you it felt pain when it did not, and that you'd never be able to know either way. The idea that any one of us could be a philosophical zombie was quite chilling, and also very thought-provoking—well, assuming one is not a philosophical zombie. Because, of course, the point with philosophical zombies is that they have been programmed to respond as a human would, but they are not human. An outsider wouldn't be able to tell the difference, sure; but the zombie would not actually feel, or think, or know anything. So that's why I was wondering this: exactly how could a philosophical zombie write a novel?'

  It was a good question. Tony had built a lot of his argument from this point that since you couldn't even tell whether another being—a novelist, for example—was a philosophical zombie or not, you certainly could not tell what they 'meant to say' in their fiction, even if you asked them and they told you.

  'I guess, Tony said, 'a philosophical zombie could write a novel. I mean, if this is a being that's programmed to respond exactly as a human would, then if it strung a lot of these utterances about feelings and so on together, then maybe that would make a novel. Perhaps it could use one of Levi-Strauss's equations, or Vladimir Propp's schema. But...'

  'But what?'

  'You're right. If you're implying that it wouldn't be much of a novel at all, then you're right. I hadn't exactly thought of that. So you're saying that there has to be a human essence at the heart of every work of art?'

  'Yes,' Vi said. 'Although I'm not saying you can ever be sure about what it is. It's not something you can put your finger on exactly, but, scientifically speaking, it has to be there. Ha! Like consciousness, and dark matter, and "culture". The problem with you humanities people—if you don't mind me saying so—is that when you dabble in science, you always get it wrong. Or mostly. But that's OK. Scientists usually get science wrong too, but that's their job: to prove things wrong. That's all scientists ever do. Social scientists prove that society is wrong, probably. It's impossible to prove anything is a hundred per cent right. Can you pass the olives again?'