“Maybe it'll be like this when it comes,” he finds himself saying to nobody, not knowing what he means.
Shell shock
Tom McCarthy's C is not the first modern novel, nor will it be the last, which features a protagonist walking more dazed than confused through times both confusing and dazing. It is a popular angle to take these days, a way to deal with the overflowing stimuli, the bludgeoning of words, words and more words, of thoughts turning into words, of thoughts and words turning into a propaganda made flesh, into a world of things supposedly meaning something.
It's hard not to think of Tyrone Slothrop, the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, when faced with all this. They are complementary, in a way: Slothrop involuntarily helped shape his war, the Second World War, his stray erections plotting future bombings on a map of Europe, while McCarthy's Serge Carrefax is the object to Slothrop's subject: he is tuned in to the disaster of his war, the First World War, a receiver into which everything collects and flows. His journey in C is one from this role of receiver to medium; from being a final stop to being an intermediary, a wire through which data flows.
I am tempted to term this way of stumbling through a war “shellshocked,” but McCarthy seems to have anticipated this, and rebuts it. Serge, post-war, “doesn't buy the line, much peddled by the newspapers, that tens of thousands of men his age are wandering around with ‘shell shock’.
It's like a city of the living dead, only a few of whose denizens could proffer the excuse of having had shells constantly rattling their flesh and shaking their nerves. No, the shock's source was there already: deeper, older, more embedded…
These emanations Serge feels – deeper, older and more embedded – are there throughout the whole book. They are the point that McCarthy is making. They are the equivalent of radio waves, which preoccupy Serge's father at the very moment he is born, and will dominate the family for ever on. You get the sense that the book itself becomes more heavy, groaning under the weight of all the books before it, of history as we are aware of it. In a sense, to McCarthy, all the complicated dance steps of our forefathers are still swerving through the ether, combining and splitting into even more complicated patterns to shape our present and future. Serge's father makes this idea literal at one point:
Just imagine: if every exciting or painful event in history has discharged waves of similar detectability into the ether – why, we could pick up the Battle of Hastings, or observe the distress of the assassinated Caesar, or the anguish of Saint Anthony during his great temptation. These things could still be happening right now, around us.
Perhaps these are the ravings of an old man, too immersed in his paradigms and formulas to understand the difference between what he sees as a scientist and what is there. Perhaps it is a metaphor for the rest of the book. These are things still happening around us right now and they inform us. This must be why Serge gets so angry when a girlfriend takes him to a séance, and he discovers the whole thing is a set-up. In spite of his belief in science, he was almost ready to buy into it – but ultimately there are no hoaxes necessary in Serge's world view to keep history around.
Touching from a distance
This is why he strolls through the war jejunely, as if the killings and the horrors were nothing but an abstract. McCarthy taps into a modern sentiment, of American soldiers piloting drone airplanes in the Middle East from their safe bases in the US; fighting a war, but from a distance, through a screen, it is hard to imagine the consequences of this mediated war are real. We pretend this is something new, but Serge's experience a century ago rings similar. He is an observer, flying over the battlefield, touching from a distance, further all the time. The commands he signals down to his comrades below ground help detonate a bomb somewhere, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with him. Moreover, he only hangs out with soldiers either high above or far below the ground. No one around him is fighting a direct, honest war. When the reality of what he is doing is pointed out to him over and over, he recoils time and again.
What he means is that he doesn't think of what he's doing as a deadening. Quite the opposite: it's a quickening, a bringing to life. He feels this viscerally, not just intellectually, every time his tapping finger draws shells up into their arcs, or sends instructions buzzing through the woods to kick-start piano wires for whirring cameras, or causes the ground's scars and wrinkles to shift and contort from one photo to another: it's an awakening, a setting into motion.
He cannot think of things as a deadening because to Serge, nothing ever dies. Every action adds to the treasury of the world, every intent expressed is a supplement to something. Time passing is static adding up and thickening, like a mist through which the living become figments of themselves.
He is actually angry when the war ends, because war more than any other situation has this incremental function. It doesn't repeat everyday life inanely, but vivifies it, creates the world anew in its image. Serge, here, is already becoming more the medium than the receiver, this incremental current running through him keeping him interested in a world in which everything is already rippling through the air. When he returns home after the war, it is this uneventfulness that wreaks him:
Versoie seems smaller, and the world seems smaller, seems like a model of the world. It's not just that the distance between, say, here and Lydium has shrunk (and done so almost exponentially thanks to the motor car his father's purchased and now lets him drive whenever he feels like an outing), but, beyond that, that the inventory of potential experiences – situations in which he might find himself, conversations and interactions he might undergo – has dwindled so low that they could be itemised on a single sheet of paper. The exchanges he has in shops or in the post office, the movements and gestures these involve, seem so limited, so mapped out in advance, as to be predetermined – as though they'd already happened and were simply being re-enacted by two or more people who'd agreed to maintain the farcical presence that this was something new and exciting.
It is therefore only fitting that he ends up in Egypt, where at the start of the 20th century, the past is made visible the way his father thought it was. Burial chambers are being dug up in endless concatenations under the ground. The dimension of space here has turned into the dimension of time:
Later dynasties buried their dead lower. Then still-later ones built beside, around, through and all over these earlier-later ones, and so on almost endlessly. This place is a giant warren.
Here, too, the whole of history is still available – mixed, muddled and mediated somehow, an endless dark labyrinth beneath the earth into which Serge at one point descends into a fever dream from which he afterwards ceases to escape. In reality, though, he had always been there, had from the day he was born been kept in its mediation. Like the waves of static that he listened to as a young boy alone in his room, all he had ever tuned into, had ever received, were messages from an inexorable history. In his final, febrile visions, he has become the medium through which the world seeps. Not just his life, but things beyond and before it pass through him. Nothing remains within, and he has finally found the peace that had always eluded him. He has become what he wished to be during the war: “a fixed point in a world of motion.”
