The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy

The Making of Incarnation
by Tom McCarthy
Knopf, 2021

“Action!” the director shouts. You may have been waiting, tired of characters in novels sitting around mulling bruised childhoods and recounting current microaggressions. Maybe you yearn for a fiction with people like pioneers moving across new spaces, a book like the hyperactive science fiction movie Incarnation being shot and edited in The Making of Incarnation. “Life is motion,” Faulkner pronounced, and Tom McCarthy, who reveres The Sound and the Fury, is obsessed with every kind of motion, from dancing photons to disintegrating spaceships. Eleven years ago McCarthy published an essay about the novel and Futurism, the mostly Italian art movement privileging movement. Now he has composed with impressive ingenuity a Futuristic and partly futuristic work that should add to his reputation as one of England’s most inventive authors.

Incarnation is a space opera with a hokey romance plot and characters as round as those in Star Trek, so the director needs some very special special effects for, ironically, the unmaking of Sidereal, the movie’s ill-fated spaceship. The CGI or pixel “rendering” job is farmed out to a company called Degree Zero that in turn hires the motion-capture firm Pantarey that takes its name from Heraclitus’ assertion that everything flows (πάντα ῥεῖ) A mid-level male employee with a Greek name—Phocan--is tasked with investigating and contacting various sub-specialists needed to create the effects.

What begins as a complicated job for Phocan turns into a complex quest as his new findings cause him to be as obsessed with motion as McCarthy the Futurist is. Fascinated by research into the work of one Lillian Gilbreth (a real and early time-and-motion theorist), Phocan eventually seeks out her (invented) collaborator, an aged Latvian physicist Phocan believes may have discovered the Platonic (or Heraclitian) Ideal Form of all motion.

Since Remainder, McCarthy’s first novel, he has been criticized for characters who lack interior lives. In this new novel unmaking ideas and inverting conventions, McCarthy initially gives little psychological development to his characters—though, ironically, we immediately know a lot about the motives and needs of the stereotypical movie characters. Following a motion-capture technique—“Faces are added later”--McCarthy in the second half of The Making of Incarnation does incarnate his characters, gives them physical qualities and desires and intimate relations. Phocan may fall in love in Latvia. An old spook named Pilkington, who is caring for a wife with advanced Parkinson’s, spends many pages admitting a costly error in the experimental deconstruction of an airplane. The aged Latvian scientist loves birds and has an aviary.

But one doesn’t come to McCarthy for love stories, any more than one comes to Pynchon for romance. McCarthy has said Gravity’s Rainbow is the novel writers must measure themselves against. The Making of Incarnation is an updated and slimmed down and more plotted version of Pynchon’s encyclopedia of motion, his rockets rushing across the skies and numerous characters chasing the secret of rocket 00000. McCarthy’s spaceship Sidereal is, after all, a glorified, inhabitable rocket. The Latvian’s presumed secret of all motion may exist in a missing archive box labeled 808—with the 8’s tipped over to suggest infinity on either side of the Pynchonian zero.

Like a Pynchon novel, The Making of Incarnation skips across European borders, shifts from one seemingly minor character to another, and jumps from one item of probably arcane (and possibly fabricated) information to the next. But in a short “Prolegomenon” that describes a technician in control of a chaotic wave propagation tank in Germany, McCarthy seems to assure readers that he is master of all the non-linear perturbations that follow. He is even, again like Pynchon, an occasionally chatty narrator who directly addresses his readers.

Phocan’s progress begins with watching how young lovers are nippled up (studded with light sensors) to have sex in as many positions as they can manage (this for the zero gravity intercourse scene in Incarnation). He visits a gait laboratory where a boy with cerebral palsy is treated, goes to a German wind tunnel testing bobsledders, and travels to Bern to watch acrobatic aerialists perform in sensors. From his boss, he learns about Gilbreth after a lawyer visits her archive in Indiana. At a sports conference in Rome, Phocan is contacted by a man Phocan fears may be on the same Latvian quest—one seeded by international politics.

Phocan loses sleep trying to connect all that he has come to know, and readers who expected to be moviegoer passive could lose patience with the effort needed to see how McCarthy’s disparate disciplines and data patterns do connect. If you wanted action, to process this novel your mind will need to be active—except when reading a précis of Incarnation about which everything is explained in both a send-up of sci-fi and the easy-reading realistic novel.

In McCarthy’s previous novel, Satin Island, an anthropologist is attempting to write the “Great Report” that would articulate the “master-pattern” of contemporary culture. He fails. In The Making of Incarnation, the single master-pattern of motion eludes characters, but McCarthy does no less than redefine what a human is, not a sidereal Cartesian cogito but—like the many athletes observed in the novel--a flowing participant in multiple systems of movement. A human is also not a closed mechanism trapped in a global cybernetic machine, as some critics of McCarthy say he believes, but rather a human is what the father of cybernetics--Norbert Wiener (discussed at length in the book)-- would call an open system. The sophisticated machines in The Making of Incarnation reveal just how athletic and unpredictable humans can be.

For some years, I have been praising what I called the “systems novel” represented by Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, McElroy, and, more recently, Wallace, Powers, Evan Dara, and Joshua Cohen. The Making of Incarnation is perhaps even more explicitly systemic than their works, McCarthy standing on the shoulders of giants and seeing the future in which ever more powerful technologies of recording motion and analyzing its patterns break down boundaries between the human and the other-than-human. Or, put more positively, to answer Yeats’s hundred-year-old question: “How do we know the dancer from the dance?”

In Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White, he has her say: “I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear.” There are many words in The Making of Incarnation that you will have never heard, specialized scientific and technical terminologies that not even Pynchon has heard. For readers who desire action presented in the seemingly transparent language of traditional realism (think Franzen), McCarthy’s numerous lingos will be an impediment . . . unless you realize they are the realism of the now and future. You don’t need to understand all the discourses if you’re willing to believe McCarthy does and if you also believe that linguistic special effects are necessary for scientists—and novelists--to describe and communicate processes far beyond the capacities of what Wittgenstein called “ordinary language.”

I hesitate to provide an example of McCarthy’s prose lest it scare you off from reading the most profound—that is, deep-drilling—novel that I have read in many a year. But here is an only moderately technical passage about Gilbreth that describes her presumed belief and Phocan’s hope:

There’s something abstract—almost devotional—about it all. She [Gilbreth] seems to come to believe that there exists, somewhere, hidden from our view, a perfect shape for every act—essential, almost preordained. And beyond even that, that there might be a kind of absolutely perfect motion-circuit hovering concealed behind even the perfect ones—the kingdom, as it were, containing all the phylums; sum of their possibilities, their infinite- and zero-point alpha and omega….

This desire for the singular ultimate, a unified theory of motion, activates McCarthy’s plot, but he knows better. Quite early, Phocan explains to an assistant what they are looking for on a video screen:

“It’s not so much the skeleton we want as the whole circuit of force and counterforce, balance and its limits. Here the root’s neither bone nor muscle, but something else, something more systemic.”

Systemic wisdom is incarnated in the body. With this novel, McCarthy scales up and out and around and back this wisdom in an intricate work of collaborating and conflicting information, action of a cognitive kind on every page. As my inclusion of other novelists suggests, The Making of Incarnation is a grand—yet compact, like the body—open and active system of systems, literary and scientific.

—Tom LeClair. His fifth and final "Passing" novel--Passing Again--will be published in March.