A familiar cliché holds that philosophy deals with thinking about thinking, a metacognition that appears to be signally lacking in L, the provincial English university philosopher who narrates Spurious. The irony of course is that a man paid to teach self-reflexive thought is shown to be incapable of even rudimentary self-reflection (a bit like Jack Gladney, the Hitler scholar who can’t speak a word of German).
L’s blindness to self-experience seems to pervade every aspect of his life. In the book’s opening pages we meet W, the man condemned to serve as L’s eternal interlocutor, reproaching him for his inability to experience shame in the appropriate fashion: L feels shame, W complains, but is not ashamed of this shame.
W doesn’t so much correct L as help narrate his experience of the world. L plays the ape, W jokes about it, though the joke seems to be on him; ‘what do I get out of it’, he asks himself constantly. W dreams of seriousness, but his life appears to consist in endlessly escaping the pretentions of seriousness to find the nearest pub, where he sits and amuses himself with L’s apishness. He is an admirer of Continental Europe, a fetishised place of gentle manners and civility, but most of his trips there seem to end in the gutters with L, drunk. He once heard something about a stupid messiah, but he can’t remember exactly what it was he heard, or where he heard it. He is sure it was at an academic event though, which means that, even if it’s not true, the messiah is invested with the type of seriousness he clings to.
If W resembles the superfluous man of Lermontov then L resembles bicameral man of Jaynes, operating through right brained whisperings in which he fails to recognise his own voice. Troubled by their shortcomings, W and L set out in search of a leader who might dictate the great project of their lives. Unfortunately the leaders they find offer only trite sound bites (‘I’m not interesting’ one of them says, ‘but my thoughts are interesting’, the kind of thing a stock character in a Woody Allen film might say).
At one point W laments that their fates matter to no one, not even to themselves, confirmation that the apocalyptic visions and the desperate search for a leader belong to the same void; the phalanx is formed, it just needs to be told where to march. W’s superfluous man is a token representing an age where even the relative comforts of university lecturer can’t prevent the onset of despair.
When L pays a visit W ‘opens a bottle of Chablis . . unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats’ along with olives and home-made bread. A more solidly middle-class existence could not be conceived (L is less comfortable and seems to be plagued by a mysterious damp that welcomes him home, a perverse contrast with the friendly dog W has invents for his own book.) Yet as their evenings together unfold both are plagued by a lack of purpose.
Conversations swing wildly from the opiate to the amphetamine, from indulging a self-consciously stupid lassitude to a panicked febricity. L plans to become a scholar of Sanskrit one week, of music the next, a frantic search for the final score that will consume his life. At the same time however he can’t be bothered to read W’s book properly, and generally his ambitions collapse into yet more wasted time.
W is less desultory in this respect, and is able to remain focused on Talmudic philosophy, though things don’t seem to work out any better for him; his volumes of Rosenweig are annotated with question marks, he ploughs through Cohen but admits he may as well be reading it in Dutch.
This then is the paradox of their lives: they are able to sit at ease, wasting whole stretches of the night staring at ceilings or TVs, yet they do so in the grip of a mania that tells them they are trapped. But if their apocalyptic premonitions are true, wouldn’t the academic leader’s stuffy seriousness be the height of stupidity? And if that’s true then wouldn’t L’s ethereal persona bear the mark of Messianic genius? And wouldn’t their conspicuous incongruity with this world means they themselves are the very leaders they seek?
Their second false-dawn messiah tells them pompously of ‘the interlacing of his life and thought’, an interlacing L & W seem to pull off later in the book when, in contrast to the off-the-peg existentialism of sleek black conference wear, they sit ‘fat and blousy’ at the bar. Mercifully their leaders abandon them. Mercifully W never finds serious conversation and L never tries to think about why he is interesting. Mercifully they do manage to find a pub, and we get to hear about it.
James Wood, Not the Booker review
