Get Out

Latour tells us in After Lockdown that there’s no escape. The great lesson of the lockdowns that accompanied the Covid pandemic of 2020-2021 is that nothing we do is discretely ours, not a single breath, since ‘everything conspires in our breathing.’ We are ‘billions of overlapping, interlaced, interdependent agencies’, our every cell kept alive by an immense staff of microbes. We are borderless to a submicroscopic level, and as such can do nothing without being responsible for the lives of unseen populations. It’s a superstition to call ourselves ‘I’, and one that gets us in trouble when it lets us exempt ourselves from any rightly collective responsibility or supports any fantasy of escape; and escape is always a fantasy. Borderless as we are, there is nothing definite to separate us from the ground we tread on; and because there is no outside to ‘us’, there can be no going away, whether to Greece or into the garden: no getting out. There is no ‘heaven’, he informs us dramatically in the opening paragraph of chapter six – perhaps significantly, not quite chapter seven with its promise of consummation – reminding us that even for the most devout, heaven has only ever been a metaphor anyway. His challenge to us now is that we part even with our mental utopias.

I have been trying to figure out why I find all this so disheartening and disconcerting. In a way Latour means it to be, just as the literary mascot for his new worldview, Kafka’s man-turned-beetle is meant to provoke a gloomy meditation on the plight of the powerless citizen. Latour attempts to persuade us that the beetle could be happy if he were to see himself as the only enlightened member of his family: the one who knows there is no ‘outside.’ Latour reminds us of Camus’s injunction in his absurdist treatise, The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘we must imagine Sisyphus happy’, and tries to sell us on the joys of wallowing in what he calls our ‘ordinary depths.’ My trouble is that I somehow can’t budge from seeing Kafka’s upturned beetle as a tragic case – unless by putting him on his feet (incidentally, it’s a wonderful thing to put a beetle back on its feet), or by recalling Nabokov’s rebuttal to Kafka, that beetles have wings that just about let them fly. When Camus tells me to ‘imagine Sisyphus happy’ I imagine him dreaming of a weekend on Algeria’s Moroccan border, wandering through a vineyard with a glass of Grenache, smugly recalling how Tantalus can’t reach the grapes.

The more I think about what might be necessary for my happiness the more convinced I become that it involves at least the illusion of an exit. Perhaps what is most upsetting to me about Latour’s ban on heaven is its implication that there is no getting out of this life. Latour says cheerfully at one point that because of our endless, edgeless multiplicity as ‘holobionts’– ecological hubs for the collaboration of billions of organisms – there is a sense in which we all live forever, and I know my response to this particular presumed selling point is a resounding no thanks. The literary critic Eric Griffiths offers, as a neat rebuke to the old idea that we want to live forever, that no one would be likely to choose immortality for any single one of their experiences. If there were no exit to our pleasures they would cease to be pleasures. Keats sees the paradox of wanting immortality for our most pleasurable moments as a wish that threatens to kill a wish, since for him, fundamentally, our greatest joys are made out of their brevity. Thinking in particular of his lover’s bosom swelling on the pillow next to him, an event inextricable in its charm from her imminent waking up and his appreciative swoon (with which the poem ends), Keats consciously chooses a memory (or fictional memory) replete with exit signs into new plot developments. Another less lofty example of intrinsically transient pleasure to be filed alongside the breasts might be the giant chocolate cake served to Roald Dahl’s character Bruce Bogtrotter in his children’s story Matilda, which in spite of Bogtrotter’s cake lust almost proves to be too much for him. His eyes dart across the assembly hall looking for an exit. Maybe when we say we want things to last what we secretly want is to rehearse in fantasy a type of experience that is quintessentially fleeting. Maybe what we want is to make ourselves bring back, with an intensity akin to the feeling that once overwhelmed us, the best exitable fun to be had in a mortal life.

My first memory of wanting desperately to get away is also my first memory of wanting desperately to write. Strictly speaking, I wanted to get out of getting out: I was nine and it was playtime. During playtime I developed a habit of sneaking back through the school gates, down the tiled corridor, up the stone stairs to our top floor class, and returning to my grey plastic drawer with the felt-tipped name ‘Beci’ on it. In the drawer was a thickish A5 exercise book, and in the book was a story I was writing in pencil about a shipwrecked man swimming to the shore of a gorgeously summery island somewhere nameless. Upon reaching the beach, in the story, he stands up, and slowly becomes aware of the presence of sand between his toes. And despite weeks of on-site truancy on my own in the empty classroom, I never got further than the sand. I filled three exercise books with all the words I could think of for how good the heat and velvet of it felt. I quite literally never got off the ground, but my hero had arrived, and I suppose I’d arrived too in the sense that I was where I wanted to be: outside. My teacher, on parents’ evening, treated the massive unfinished story as an important testament to my relationship with endings. It seemed to him that I hated exits; the truth was that I loved them.

Following Covid, I had my first brush with feeling locked in a piece of writing, unable to solve its puzzle. In late November 2022 I got an email from the editor of a journal issue I was contributing to asking me to look over a piece I’d written for him five years ago, pre-Covid, in another life. I fondly remembered the piece as an old favourite: ‘Waugh’s Hemingway’, about Evelyn Waugh’s earnest and sweetly absurd self-identification with a much cooler, hotter writer across the Atlantic. Yet when I returned to the Word document, determined to do no more than tinker, I found my argument impossibly trite, and was compelled to beg the editor for more time. November was coming to an end, December was approaching; the first week of December was crunchtime. I worked around the clock. I was trying to reconcile the footloose Holborn-based me of 2017 with the me who had endured two UK lockdowns. In early December, two years previously, I had rushed home from Exeter to my family home in Pontypridd while threats of new adhoc lockdowns and frozen transport services filled the news; and in early December 2022, here I was rushing to resuscitate an essay that glibly imagined two authors crossing the Atlantic simply by sounding like each other. Latour writes: ‘we won’t go outside again!’, meaning on one level that we will never go back to thinking as we did before lockdown; and in a sense he is right: in late 2022, I showed I had never left 2020.

However, the way I fixed my essay was to let Waugh and Hemingway out of an elevator. I reminded my reader of two scenarios: an episode from Waugh’s novel Scoop in which the hero William Boot is stuck in a coffin-like lift with a man who looks like a skull, and a funny anecdote from an interview between Hemingway and New Yorker journalist Lilian Ross in which a comically oversized Hemingway finds himself in a comically slim New York elevator with a woman whose stare spells her horror at his untrimmed, vividly white beard. Boot wants to explode with laughter and Hemingway explodes with an invective: ‘Christ!’ Both authors crave oxygen. Both authors, crossing 3000 nautical miles to be on the same page, are desperate to get out.