I’m at a loss, and that’s probably a good thing. Seen above during the ferry ride to Staten Island, Satin Island is, by my reckoning, the 1000th book I’ve read since I started keeping track around when I turned 18—and I have no idea where to start with reviewing Tom McCarthy’s novel, which I would encourage you to take as a good sign.
By its own admission, Satin Island is a story with almost no events. Rather, the novel is a compilation of observations and analyses conducted by U, an anthropologist hired by a vague corporation to work on a vague project by composing the Great Work that will define the age. U has dossiers on a plethora of phenomena, unsure of whether they will be imbued with meaning before every possible piece of knowledge is synthesized into a complete network—”the answer [...] would become clear once all the dossiers hove into alignment” (37).
I was riveted by Satin Island’s juxtapositions, which cohere in a resonant network of their own. The way McCarthy links oil spills to failed parachutes to buffering videos to the shroud of Turin is just impeccable. He follows all of these threads across time and place to give, actually, a solid account of some of our contemporary zeitgeist. Yet, I suspect the joke is on me; the futility of U’s project is clearly identified—The Anthropology of the Present is doomed. Moreover, in McCarthy’s novel Remainder, the main character’s project is seductive before turning sinister and I suspect something similar is afoot here.
But here I am, still seduced.
The novel opens with a discussion of the shroud of Turin. McCarthy explains that “the image isn’t really visible on the bare linen. It only emerged in the late nineteenth century, when some amateur photographer looked at the negative of a short he’d taken of the thing, and saw the figure—pale and faded, but there nonetheless” (3). The notion of finding a positive through a negative will return shortly, specifically the fact that it happens on fabric, and the idea that the meaning of the shroud has been deferred will recur again in discussions of buffering. As McCarthy continues the description, he notes that “Only in the negative: the negative became a positive, which means that the shroud itself was, in effect, a negative already” (3). Given that the shroud is disproved as evidence, one might expect that it would shake the faith of the faithful. Not so. McCarthy then extrapolates that “People need foundation myths, some imprint of year zero, a bolt that secures the scaffolding that in turn holds fast the entire architecture of reality, of time: memory-chambers and oblivion-cellars, walls between eras, hallways that sweep us on towards the end-days and the coming whatever-it-is. We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen” (3). Throughout the novel, U appears to be striving after the kinds of foundation myths that can hold reality in place, despite their unlikely connections. In brief, Satin Island is one of those occasions where rereading the first page or chapter of a book serves as a map for the entire project.
I think I noticed this, too, with respect to McCarthy’s book C: he is an author of angles and velocities. The opening chapter of Satin Island reflects that, as well, in at least two of its core images. For one, the flight paths of the planes are established as criss-crosses; “via the series of switches and transfers and reroutings that had been put in place to deal with the whole situation, had spread a huge delay-cloud over Europe” (4). He describes the various opposing hallways of the airport, how U was “meandering along corridors of trivia” (4) online in response, and so on. U then is taken to the spokes in his bicycle. All of the fragments of sound in the airport (there’s a lovely list, but I won’t cite it here), a memory comes: “It wasn’t a specific memory of riding down the hill on such-and-such a day: more a generic one in which hundreds of hill-descents, accumulated over two or three years, had all merged together” (5). Essentially, McCarthy is exploring the intersection of different phenomena and how they converge into something eternal.
If he is a writer of space, McCarthy is so, too, of time. The two are united in the image of U’s bicycle, since “where [his] first bike had had a footbrake, activated by the pedal, this one, fitted with a handbrake instead, allowed backpedalling” (5). He continues to note, “This struck me, I remembered, as nothing short of miraculous. That you could move one way while rotating the crank in the opposite direction contravened my fledgling understanding not only of motion but also of time—as though this, too, could be laced with a contraflow lodged right inside its core” (5-6). This opposition of forces is so clearly evident throughout the text as a central motif. In trying to account for a society anthropologically demands a distillation of the moment, yet this is impossible because time is always disorientingly out of sync.
This motif is encapsulated in the discussions of modern technology. While stuck in the airport (time must be frozen there, too), U is on a video call with his girlfriend, Madison, whose video keeps freezing while her audio goes on or vice versa. Later, U is watching a video that continues to buffer. He examines the line at the bottom of the screen, “that bar that slowly fills itself in—twice: once in bold red and, at the same time, running ahead of that, in fainter grey; the fainter section, of course, has to remain in advance of the bold section” (74). It’s interesting that even our means of assessing time and progress is subdivided into two times out of sync with one another. McCarthy writes that “if the cursor and the red section catch up, then buffering sets in again” (74) and U has the following revelation: “it dawned on me that what I was actually watching was nothing less than the skeleton, laid bare, of time or memory itself. Not our computers’ time and memory, but our own. This was its structure. We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to [...] narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events” (74). To this Kierkegaardian turn (life can only be lived forwards but only be understood backward, etc.), McCarthy adds a capitalistic-era mindset: experience must always be fed. It’s when “occurrences and situations don’t replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain, when, no matter how fast they regenerate, they’re instantly devoured by a mouth too voracious to let anything gather or accrue unconsumed before it, then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it” (74-75). It’s a bleak outlook of insatiable desire but I find it so inspiring that McCarthy can mine such depth from such a surface-level well. Ultimately U concludes, “Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything” before promptly establishing a dossier on buffering.
U struggles to anthropologize, in part, due to his uncertain relationship with time. He conceives of anthropology as a way of extracting meaning from the world (his hero is Levi-Strauss). Yet, he also notes the alternate possibility that “in fact, things were precisely the other way round: that my job was to put meaning in the world, not take it from it” (34). One of the things that McCarthy does tastefully is offer a critique of anthropology as a discipline in short bursts. Here, he reframes anthropology not as an interpretive force but as a productive one, and especially in the hands of capitalism. He outlines his role as “Divining, for the benefit of a breakfast-cereal manufacturer, the social or symbolic role of breakfast (what fasting represents, the significance of breaking it); establishing for them some of the primary axes shaping the way in which the practice of living is, or might be, carried out; and watching the manufacturer then feed that information back into their product and its packaging as they upgraded and refined these, I understood the end-result to be not simply better-tasting cereal or bigger profits for the manufacturer, but rather meaning, amplified and sharpened, for the millions of risers lifting cereal boxes over breakfast tables, tipping out and ingesting their contents” (34). It’s in these passages that I’m most tempted to see U as a satirization (which might make some of his later, more subversive claims, more ridiculous). This notion of creating meaning, though, interacts with a disconnected sense of time when you realize that knowledge cannot exist outside of time. U then notes that “the world functioned, each day, because I’d put meaning back into it the day before. You didn’t notice that I put it there because it was there; but if I’d stopped, you’d soon have known it” (35). Conceptually, the idea is a compelling one—that meaning is provided retroactively but had to have already been created in order to function. Even the structure of the sentence implies the relation by drawing on a variety of different verb tenses, including future-tense conditional.
Alongside these indeterminate origins of time and meaning is a motif of Schröedinger’s cat, which is explicitly identified at one point. One of the only real storylines (don’t worry, it goes unresolved) is a parachutist’s death. Initially seen as an accident, it becomes a murder mystery—someone cut all of the ropes: his diving partner? His wife, whom U imagines was having an affair with his diving partner? A whole Russian-roulette parachute party spanning months or even years? The event sparks U’s fascination and he finds himself wondering about the moment of the murder. He decides the location of the murder was the sky, but “he hadn’t actually been killed until the moment of his impact” (60). He tries to trace a linear system for when the murder happened because the parachutist had “been murdered without realizing it” for hours or days (60). Once again, McCarthy links to the idea of temporal delays: “his awareness of himself, his whole reality—mere side effects of a technical delay, a pause, an interval; an interval comparable, perhaps, to the ones you get down phone-lines when you speak long distance or on Skype: just the hiatus created by the passage of a command down a chain, the sequence of its parts; the interim between an action and its motion, like those paralytic lags that come in hideous dreams” (60). As an aside, the description McCarthy gives of the parachute with its cut strings billowing of its own accord like a jellyfish is one of the gloriously poetic passages in the text that prove McCarthy not only cerebral but tender.
In a more subversive turn, McCarthy explores time through the symbolism of oil. Oil permeates the text. After watching a huge oil spill on television and noting how many of them occur all the time, U cannot help but take a contrarian approach towards oil. As I mentioned earlier, much of the logic can be seductive, but then the unsavoury side rears its head. In a fantasy of himself at a conference discussing the nature of oil. Indeed, he suggests that oil is the core of nature’s essence. When an imaginary participant objects to U aestheticizing the oil spoil, U he reverses the charge to the admiration of the other imaginary participants but with dubious effect on this actual reader. U criticizes the aestheticizing of oil spills as a tragedy, suggesting that people are “misguided and ignorant” (116). In a lengthy passage, he offers his counterpoint:
“They dislike the oil spill for the way it makes the coastline look “not right,” prevents it from illustrating the vision of nature that’s been handed down from theologians to romantic poets to explorers, tourists, television viewers: as sublime, virginal and pure. Kitsch, I tell you (here I’d thump my fist onto the podium, three times in quick succession): kitsch, kitsch, kitsch! And wrong: for what is oil but nature? Rock-filtered organic compounds—animal, vegetable and mineral—broken down and concentrated by the planet’s very crust: what could be purer than that? When oil spatters a coastline, Earth wells back up and reveals itself; nature’s hidden nature gushes forth. The man who brings this gushing-forth about---the drunk ship’s captain, oversightful engineer or negligent safety officer, or, behind these, the oil magnate, or, behind even him, the collective man whose body, faceless and compound as oil itself, is the corporation—he should be considered a true environmentalist: nature’s more honest intermediary, its loyaler servant. The cheers, at this point, grew quite deafening; the argument was won; and my foe would be evicted from the building, whimpering as blows rained down on him” (116).
Honestly, I’m not sure on McCarthy’s true position. It reads satirically here, particularly given U’s self-aggrandizement, but the criticism does seem to offer an acceptable reading of oil as an anthropological fetish. He says that “To genuinely contemplate [...] even the smallest drop—to attend to it faithfully, exhaustively—would be to let time expand beyond its Ordovician and Precambrian borders, till it overflowed all measurable limits. When oil spills, Earth opens its archives. That it takes the form of vinyl when it hardens is no chance occurrence; what those men in body-suits on beaches should be doing is not brushing it away but lowering a needle to its furrows and replaying it all, and amplifying it all the while to boot; up and up, exponentially, until from littoral to plain to mountain, land to sky and back to sea again, the destiny of every trilobite resounds” (118). It’s an alternative reading that is hard to resist in its poignancy. The idea that all of time is distilled in oil, that time all melts into oil as the most natural unit, does instill in it a kind of beauty. It’s our repugnance to oil as a destructive force that prevents us from developing alternative readings of history and anthropology. As a brief aside, it reminds me of an essay wherein Laurie Shannon et. al. offer a recataloguing of literature in terms of the dominant mode of energy production in which it was produced. Oil, literally, underlies everything.
The novel itself presents itself, somewhat, like an anthropological text that deconstructs the various fetishes of our cultures—but I’m not sure how much is satirical. U evokes Deleuze and Badiou only to appropriate their ideas and sanitize their leftist politics, for example. McCarthy, in a deconstruction of anthropological study, notes the impossibility of its purity and calls authenticity into question. Let us assume, for a moment, that U is an anthropologist and we are part of the civilization under consideration. U outlines the anthropological stance of “approaching the familiar as a stranger, of behaving—even to yourself—as if you didn’t understand the situations that in fact you do, is an obvious contrivance” (25). He then outlines that you have to “pretend you’re being and doing what you really are being and doing—in brief, since all this shit entails a constant shifting of identities, a blurring of positions and perspectives, you end up lost in a kaleidoscope of masquerades, roles, general make-believe” (25-26). I can’t help but feel that U is in that position of masquerading as a contrarian and gets lots along the way. At one point, U suggests that he will wreck the corporation’s project on purpose, sensing it has some nefarious aim. Everyone recognizes that it will change every aspect of our lives and thus is suspect—although, elsewhere in the book, U notes that something being everywhere is the same as it being nowhere, so perhaps this applies here—if it affects everything, it affects nothing. In any case, the distinction of pretending-being collapses, leading to a concerning ethic underneath it all.
As I mentioned, U appropriates from all kinds of deconstructionist thinkers by severing them from their context. In a Barthesian mythology, U “got really into creases” (32). Leaping from Claude Lévi-Strauss, U’s anthropologist hero, he goes to Levi Strauss, manufacturer of blue jeans. Building a dossier on jeans, U outlines all the types of crease-types, “each of which has slightly different innuendoes” (32). He catalogues the meaning of the different types of crease, borrowing “le pli, or fold” from Deluze, describing “the way we swallow the exterior world, invert it and then flip it back outwards again, and, in so doing, form our own identity” (33). For Badiou, there is “a rip, a sudden temporal rupture” (33) that he applies to “tears worn in jeans, which [he] presented as the birth-scars of their wearer’s singularity, testaments to the individual’s break with general history, to the successful institution of a personal time” (33). I can’t help but feel titillated by the descriptions, but there’s a lack of sincerity in U’s MO: “feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine. The machine could swallow everything, incorporate it seamlessly, like a giant loom that reweaves all fabric, no matter how recalcitrant and jarring its raw form, into what my hero would have called a master-pattern—or, if not that, then maybe just the pattern of the master” (33). I have to admit, these turns of phrase have a sense of levity and read as whimsical, despite their dark undertones. Note, for example, the pun that the machine incorporates things “seamlessly” (no creases!, meaning is erased) and the chiasmus of “master-pattern” or “pattern of the master” gives it that biting edge of a good satire.
McCarthy’s approach to all these connections are encapsulated in the symbolism of the ventilation system at U’s workplace. U suggests that the ventilation system “deserves a book all of its own” (16). He then offers a lengthy description of “a series of grey boxes joined to one another like parts of a mechanical elephant, a sheet-metal supply-duct curling upwards from the front box forming its raised trunk” (16). He then describes the “constant hum and rattle that permeated the whole floor, mutating in pitch and frequency as the sound negotiated corners, bounced off walls, was sponged up and squeezed out again by carpets” (16). Revisiting the discussion of sound from C, McCarthy envisions this ventilation system as a kind of secret network of messages. I won’t quote the lengthy passage of all the ways the sound travels before it is “re-filtered, re-damped, re-coiled, then trumpeted back out into the building once again” (16). It is, however, reminiscent of the ghost noises from C, where McCarthy explored the theory that sound, once released, is never fully gone and could be, with sufficient equipment, be measured years later. In U’s case, he starts to hear the voices of people on a higher floor, and if not voices, then “at least patterns, with their ridges and their troughs, their repetition frequencies, their cadences and codas” (16). In fact, there’s a recurring motif of these not-quite-intelligible sounds, whether it’s U at the airport, or listening to the ventilation system, or later when Madison recounts hearing not-quite-intelligible children’s voices being transmitted through a radio-like device when she was arrested.
I need to set aside for now the geometry of sound that U identifies. He notes that the patterns of sound “took on visual forms” and that eighteenth-century scientists observed “geometric and symmetrical” designs produced by “acoustic stimuli” (17). Between time, velocity, and sound, McCarthy notes that these patterns “betray a universal structure lurking beneath nature’s surface, only now beginning to seep through” (17)—remember that oil is nature escaping to the surface. U gives a poetic description of the sound’s effect—actually, the book is full of beautifully poetic lines—and suggests that these sound patterns are “the whole caboodle” (17). I think it’s worth noting that his office is at the point of convergence for these disparate sounds, and when he fears promotion within the corporation, he notes that a higher office would separate him from this intersection of sound.
The ventilation system serves as a hub of connections, and the connections continue, or potentially continue, between McCarthy’s projects. It will be a minor spoiler for Remainder to tell you that it ends with the main character doing loops in a plane, refusing to be grounded. I suspect it’s a cheeky reference that Satin Island begins with U stuck in the Turin airport because “a rogue aeroplane, some kind of private jet [...] ignoring all instructions, was flying in idiosyncratic patterns over Souther England and the Channel; which meant that no other planes could penetrate that swath of airspace” (4). In any other book, this would be a funny little reference, but given that Satin Island is a book about finding unlikely connections, I can’t help but feel the allusion is training readers—or seducing them—into the same epistemological mode.
Satin Island, for all its strange digressions, is internally coherent in a way that is hard to replicate.
By way of events, McCarthy is right to warn the audience that not much happens. There are a few notable events—the death of one of his colleagues, a memory Madison describes of being arrested following a G7 protest in Genoa, and a murdered parachutist. Beyond that, most of what happens happens internally; U invents theories or has fantasies of what might happen (most notably the crowd cheering for him at a conference as he expounds on oil and the Anthropology of the Present). Character-wise, the book also doesn’t have quite the same heart as Remainder, but even without these core elements of most novels, I find Satin Island compelling in a kind of posthumanist exploration of space and time in the vein of a more comprehensible Samuel Beckett. Of my recent reads, the book likely alongside Hannah Bervoets’ We Had To Remove This Post or even David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King—a vision of corporate culture as subsuming individuals and meaning.
I am fascinated by Tom McCarthy as a writer and thinker. Many contemporary novelists shy away from explicit discussion of philosophy in favour of character-driven stories that are more ‘human’ in their approach. McCarthy’s work has a poetic eye—just to read the final pages, where the sunset pixelates the water, for example—but I think what keeps me coming back to his novels are their uneasy suppositions. There’s an ethical-cerebral angle that I struggle with. For all the joy his books have inspired in me so far, they don’t present any easy answers. Satin Island has a motif of flipping premises (there’s at least three or four times when U offers a statement followed by its flip and an explicit statement that he flipped it) and, taking that here, it’s as though the flip side of joy is terror. In another universe, I read this book and incorporated it into my academic work on paranoia: what if there is no meaning underneath it all? U ultimately scraps his theory of the Russian roulette parachute party, drops his intention to create an Anthropology of the Present, and so on. As for Madison, her strange arrest narrative—given a chapter of its own, as if a short story—has all kinds of unresolved details. Perhaps everything is just a parachute with cut strings. Perhaps everything is just buffering. Perhaps we’ll never see the oil for the beach.
While 1000 documented reads may be an arbitrary with depressing implications (I’ll be almost 50 by the time I hit the next 1000), I nonetheless wish you happy reading. I don’t think Tom McCarthy is getting enough attention in Canada (or even the states, probably), but I really recommend reading Satin Island. It does what the best books do: it lingers.
We buffer.
