Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,39

and is silent: there is not much else to be done when someone’s reading a manifesto at you. The INS members continue: through the brief (by now traditional) faux demolition of the Greek idealists, specifically Plato and Aristotle, who believed form and essence to be more real than anything else, and therefore perfect. “But if form is perfect,” asks the general secretary, “if it is perfection itself, then how does one explain the obvious imperfection of the world, for the world is not perfect? This is where matter, our undoing, enters into the picture. For the Greeks, the principle of imperfection was matter. Matter was the source of the corruption of form.”

Necronauts, as you might guess from the name, feel differently. They are “modern lovers of debris,” and what is most real for them is not form or God but “the brute materiality of the external world . . . In short, against idealism in philosophy, and idealists or transcendent conceptions of art—of art as pure perfect form—we set a doctrine of materialism. . . .” So, while Dorian Gray projects his perfect image into the world, Necronauts keep faith with the “rotting flesh assemblage hanging up in his attic”; as Ernest Shackleton forces his dominance fantasy onto the indifferent polar expanse, Necronauts concern themselves with the “blackened, frost-bitten toes he and his crew were forced to chop from their own feet, cook on their stove and eat.” And so on. Like Chuck Ramkissoon, they have a motto: “We are all Necronauts, always, already,” which is recycled Derrida (as “blood like champagne” is recycled Dostoyevsky). That is to say, we are all death-marked creatures, defined by matter—though most of us most of the time pretend not to be.

In Remainder, the INS general secretary puts his theoretical ideas to lively yet unobtrusive use. For the Reenactor himself does not realize he is a Necro naut; he is simply a bloke, and with Naz facilitating at his side he hopes, like the rest of us, to dominate matter, the better to disembody it. To demonstrate the folly of this, in the middle of the novel Remainder allows itself a stripped-down allegory on religion, staged in an auto shop where the Reenactor has gone to fix a flat tire. While there, he remembers his windshield wiper fluid reservoir is empty and asks for a fill-up. Two liters of blue liquid are poured into the reservoir, but when he presses the “spurter button” nothing spurts. The two liters haven’t leaked, but neither do they appear to be in the reservoir:They’d vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don’t ask me why: it just did. It was as though I’d just witnessed a miracle: matter—these two litres of liquid—becoming un-matter—not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated.

A few minutes later, the engine catches, matter has its inevitable revenge (“It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin”) and transubstantiation shows itself for what it is: the beautiful pretense of the disappeared remainder. In the later reenactment of this scene (which Naz restages in an empty hangar at Heathrow, running it on a loop for weeks) the liquid really disappears, sprayed upward into an invisible, fine mist by the Reenactor’s hired technicians.

McCarthy and his Necronauts are interested in tracing the history of the disappeared remainder through art and literature, marking the fundamental division between those who want to extinguish matter and elevate it to form (“They try and ingest all of reality into a system of thought, to eat it up, to penetrate and possess it. . . . This is what Hegel and the Marquis de Sade have in common”) and those who want to let matter matter:To let the orange orange and the flower flower. . . . We take the side of things and try to evoke their nocturnal, mineral quality. This is for us the essence of poetry, as it is expressed in Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, Ril ke’s Duino Elegies, and some of the personae of Pessoa . . . of trying, and failing, to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing. Of saying “Jug. Bridge. Cigarette. Oyster. Fruitbat. Windowsill. Sponge.”

That “failing” there is very important. It’s what makes a book like Remainder—which is, after all, not simply a list of proper nouns—possible. Of course, it’s not unusual for avant-garde fiction writers to aspire to the concrete quality of poetry. Listening to the general secretary annunciate his list,