That such a reminder should be necessary is one of the more remarkable facts of twentieth-century cultural history. Beckett, after all, risked his life to work for the French Resistance, even though he was a citizen of a neutral country, Ireland. The astonishing works with which he revolutionized both the theater and the novel—Waiting for Godot and the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—were written immediately after World War II and the Holocaust. Vladimir’s question in Godot, “Where are all these corpses from?,” and its answer, “A charnel-house! A charnel-house!,” hang over much of his writing. Torture, enslavement, hunger, displacement, incarceration, and subjection to arbitrary power are the common fates of Beckett’s characters.
Yet there is a long tradition of seeing him as not merely apolitical but antipolitical.
But what if the nature of the economic puzzles that corporations evolved to solve have shifted? Thanks to software, the internet and artificial intelligence, the expenses that Coase identified can now be reduced just as well with tools from outside the company as they can from within it. Finding freelance workers via online marketplaces can be less costly, less risky and quicker than recruiting full-time employees. Collaboration tools are opening up space for manager-free forms of work. And contracting costs are likely to fall markedly thanks to the advent of blockchain protocols – algorithms that replace trusted third parties, and instead automatically verify transactions using a huge digital ledger, spread across multiple computers. As a result of these innovations, a new way of working is emerging: a series of interactions that are open, skills-based and software-optimised. Where once we had the ‘corporation’, instead we are witnessing the ascendancy of the ‘platform’. The question is: should we see this as a promise, or a threat?
One of my clearest childhood memories is of my father washing his face. He did so in a most particular way, with a vigor and thoroughness that made me feel somehow cleaner for simply having watched him. In the mornings, while he got ready for the workday, I’d sit on the toilet seat brushing my teeth as he went through the various stages of his ablutions. This was in the early nineteen-seventies, when we lived in a low-end red brick rental complex near the Sound in New Rochelle. Our second-floor apartment was a small two-bedroom with a living-dining area and a worn galley kitchen. It had one cramped bathroom, its dulled chrome fixtures speckled with rust and the tiles coming loose in spots, but even my mother wasn’t fretting too much. We were just a couple of years landed in the country, and this was as suitable a place as any. My kid sister and I loved the playground and grassy field that the apartment overlooked—you could check who was out there and sprint down in a breath—and my mother appreciated the southeast-facing windows, as drafty as they were, for the brightness they let in. My father was settling into his first doctoring position, as a staff psychiatrist at the Bronx V.A. hospital, and although extra money was scarce, our family was moving up in the world.
The stories in “Some Trick” return often to this artistic drama; in them, painters, writers, and musicians attempt to preserve their genius in the face of a hostile world run by vulgar businessmen, mercantile agents, and idiot fashion designers. An aesthetic category clearly of interest to DeWitt (as it is to Sheila Heti in her novel “How Should a Person Be?”) is the ugly work of art, the difficult artifact that cannot be easily assimilated. In “Trevor,” a very early story (dated “Oxford, 1985”), a man and a woman debate the proposition that “a painting of a beautiful subject is almost invariably a rotten picture. Guaranteed kitsch, in fact . . .” To accompany and embody the debate, DeWitt’s own prose turns deliberately kitsch and ingratiating, all faux-Jamesian mink: “For his own stream of remarks had been gurgling and chattering in the sunlight briskly on, and had just been coursing down a little cascade of cheery murmurs about tea, so that the abrupt cessation of the agreeable warm undercurrent of consent”—and so on. It’s a slight text, interesting now because it could be a work by the Liberace of “The Last Samurai.”
The result is unnerving; for the reader, it’s like trying to walk on ice. Resistance, however, is futile. The only possible thing to do is to submit to this sense of disorientation, even of queasiness – and, perhaps, to take comfort in the artist’s marvellously inky drawings, whose thick lines bring to mind both woodcuts and the movies of Hitchcock in his 60s heyday (also, Victorian funeral cards).
As with all of Thomson’s elegant and troubling novels, Never Anyone But You exerts a menacing – but never histrionic – power. Like the revenant ghost that Cahun eventually becomes to Moore, this quietly passionate coupling of Eros and history lingers on to haunt the darkest recesses of the reader’s mind.