Marie Antoinette's Soup Tureen

 

"There was a silence, as if the fountain felt embarrassed or rebuffed. Then the fountain was suddenly a porcelain soup tureen, with frilled and ruffled edges. It just metamorphosed, even while she was continuously staring at it, the way an animation might transform - and Celine realised as she stared at it in amazement how disturbing she always thought soup was. Perhaps, she wondered, it was the way soup has no edges, or the way the elements which are contained in it are unprovable and undefined."

The legendary film director, Andrei Tarkovsky was obsessed by pools of water, particularly the almost limitless movement that is possible within them. 'Nothing is more beautiful than water.' 'It transmits movement, depth, changes'. The most thoroughgoing treatment of this observation may be in his film Nostalgia. With extraordinary composition of shot, Tarkovsky's obsession with water in buildings and confined spaces - particularly the sulphur pool - is plumbed to profound depths. Even if not formally symbolic it conveys the sense of the ineffable within limits. 

It may seem bathetic to compare Tarkovsky's pool and a soup tureen (which also happens to be on the moon) but there is a similar struggle with the ineffable at the heart of Adam Thirwell's The Future Future a phantasmagoric portrayal of a late 18th century that is heavily informed by 21st century tropes and mores and is fixated on the nature of language and communication and the cultural norms of a networked society.

The novel has a tricksy, evanescent quality and an aphoristic style which can feel deliberately frustrating, providing a fractured approach to the narrative and a strange alienation from the characters and the action giving them a strongly symbolic feel. However, the parallels between our time and that of the protagonist Celine and her compatriots are pretty clear given effect, in largely ludic manner, through abundant anachronism.

Language is crucial; writing and reading are the fulcrum for success or catastrophe. People in the novel can at times hardly comprehend the 'influence of words on a solid world'. We can take this as a reference to the significance of appearance and perception and who is saying what about which things. An influencer perhaps. 

The main mode of discourse is gossip. Gossip conveys ‘a world of neither appearance nor reality but something shimmering and melting’. Being talked about is the harbinger of death. Being talked about is the curse for Celine and her circle. Female notoriety, whether of the Queen herself or other figures, is paraded in the news sheets. We might describe these people as the main character. 

Whether by coincidence or design some of the central themes of the novel mirror recent historiography of the period before the French Revolution, specifically cultural history concerned with how the French in the second half of the 18th century sought to make sense of their world:

"If an explanation of the revolution emerges from Darnton’s sketches, it is rooted in the development of a vast, complex and multifaceted ‘information system’ that spread news but also emotions across Paris. A great deal of Darnton’s work has consisted in unravelling the various components of the Ancien Régime’s information system, from the circulation of censored books by librarians and peddlers to the communication of news by nouvellistes de bouche in the public space or by authors of popular nouvelles à la main."

This is the mental world in which the Revolution occurred. 

In the novel, the future is simultaneously vertiginous but also strangely flattened. The continuous present is constituted of 'museums and shopping'.  The future future by contrast is very different - well beyond the ordered present and reflective of a form of language characterised by transplantation and translation reaching for different ways to describe the world, for breaking out of the continuous present, for seeking greater honesty through a merging of the thing itself and the language which is used to describe it. That honesty being a critical component of a more fluid, disordered future. Indeed of the future future.

"André said he didn't exactly understand how this movement between different levels worked. But of course not, said Celine. The way of seeing the world that he liked, where he observed a world outside him, everything ordered and in categories, made it impossible to do the kinds of things that Catherine could do when she was thinking or talking. Catherine had metamorphosis. Whereas they just had literature."

It is metamorphosis that replaces literature and the old forms of language. 

So Celine's trip to the moon - which has clear references to the fabulist tales of the 17th and 18th centuries - is to a new world. In the real world, America is the new world and the novel suggests that translation from the indigenous inhabitants of the vast forests of that continent provide an indication of what is needed to mediate the unfolding of the future future; the more disordered future of the forest not the city; the forest into which true escape is possible; the location for metamorphosis. 

More generally though, even after a robust stand off with Napoleon himself as the embodiment of the ordered patriarchy, Celine observes an inability to think that wildly. 

We probably should not be surprised.