What We Can’t Know

I’ve been wandering in cities, unlocking the secrets of metros, funiculars, tipping expectations, museums, and ride-sharing services in languages that, despite several years of study, I know will never reveal the finer brocades and stitches of cultural subtleties reserved for the natives. The gestalt that lingers over Portugal and now Barcelona (Malta soon enough) is of palimpsests in crush and stone, accumulated over the centuries in a barely-controlled layering. There is an incompleteness to the spaces where boarded facades in gothic quarter alleyways carry neat signs promising renovations beside “Free Palestine” graffiti arcing imperfectly above the work of an artist with a careful touch. Banksy has imitators and challengers. I blended into a crowd this morning surrounding and cheering a socialist politician demanding support for “pensionistes” due to some meticulous failure of the current regime.

Maybe.

There is all this that I can’t know with any precision. Foggy barriers of time, space, language, culture, and even pulsing jet lag keep me from having the instant recognitions of motives and the occasional capacity to irony and winking humor that I drift along with in American culture.

I travel very light these days (“Eu sou minimalista” as I constructed and then confirmed via Google Translate) with just a 16 liter sling bag. Three shirts, three underwear, three pair socks, one pair pants…Everything in merino wool except the pants, which are in capable technical materials. I have a charger bag and a small toiletries kit. I have my phone and an iPad Pro with keyboard. I do laundry in my bathroom sink every other day or so, rolling clothes in my bath towel and then hanging to dry overnight.

And on those devices I just finished Ian McEwan’s newest novel, What We Can Know, read on planes and trains, at cafe tables, and in the crepuscular uncertainty before I am forced into the night for dinner.

I was particularly drawn to this book by the title and a brief review I read concerning the core conceit of the book as a historical reflection looking back with a scholar’s eye towards our era from a future of global climate destruction and nuclear war. The title invoked the epistemic shadows that dance on the cave walls of historical investigation. What can we really know?

I’ve labored in this arena, myself, with Signals and Noise asking how conspiracies emerge and manifest on the internet by entangling them in a dream state with the book’s protagonist. I also explored the interpretation of mythology by future beings (aliens even) in my initial drafts of Against Superheroes. A kindly editor suggested there was enough to publish without the overhanging deconstructive edifice and that I might save that for a second edition. I hate myself for being swayed by that now, but I just couldn’t know. In ¡Reconquista!, I initially interwove a story of a explorer mission into Baja California that traveled routes similar to those in the book itself and commingled with the original story of the origin of the name of California, drawn as it was from fiction.

Ian’s book tells the story of a famous poet from our era who wrote an exotic kind of poem to his wife for her birthday. He wrote it on vellum and destroyed all his notes. The poem’s structure is that of a corona, which are sonnets tied each to the next by having the next stanza start with the last line of the previous. Then, to complete the “crown,” the final line of the final stanza is the first line of the first.

Scholars of the future are obsessed with this little harmonious cycle that appears lost to time even though they have archives of journals and notes and emails and the detritus of detail for many of the important players in the life of the poet. Coastal lands were inundated, America is in a persistent civil unrest ruled by warlords. Nigeria keeps the internet and some technology alive. And, sadly, the liberal arts are in as much of a slouch towards irrelevance as many fear they are in today’s world.

I found myself thinking of the analyses of the limitations of historical scholarship that surround us, from the Prolegomena of the Study of Greek Religion that deconstructed classicist assumptions about Greek religious practice to the History of Private Life collection that invigorates our understanding of everyone’s bathroom habits. The details are piled up like a palimpsest in pottery and stone.

I like What We Can Know except in one key respect. It is too well-crafted. Every character is so self-aware and their thoughts are so perfectly rendered into prose that there is none of the sense of uncertainty that comes with ordinary life. There is no languishing in the salons of possible actions or interpreting and reinterpreting possibilities with friends, lovers, confidants, information sources, and even one’s own transforming and growing intellect and ego. Ian is always stone-cold precise, sentence upon sentence, and every character is in his image, erudite and transparent in the rendition of their motives. Everyone’s also horny as hell. Let’s hear it for the Oxford set!

In opposition to a kind of unreliable narration, with What We Can Know we get perfect reliability, just filtered through three separate sieves, beginning with the scholarly future analysis and completed with the discovered memoir of Vivien. A third sieve—perhaps more a reflection—I add since it was both a plot point of significance and interplays with the theme itself: the wrecking of our sense of self by mental decline.

In the modernist deconstruction of the novel and its reinvention as form alone we lost something admirable about writing as a force for intellectual and moral assessment. But there remain these universal themes of imponderables and the crisis of dealing with them that still have some energy left. In this, What We Can Know adds to the culture and the craft of elaborately controlled writing.