Simone Weil comes to Manchester in Lars Iyer’s latest campus novel
The new field of “Disaster Studies” is booming in Lars Iyer’s sixth novel, My Weil. It is a product of the philosophy department at Manchester’s fictional “All Saints Uni”, which, as police helicopters patrol the increasingly dysfunctional city, is home to academics on the make, busily turning “the end of the world into an academic fuel”. The coming apocalypse is full of promise and, if exploited correctly, might propel Disaster Studies students into academic jobs. The trouble is, as the narrator, Johnny, acknowledges of himself and his fellow PhD students, “we’re actually disastrous”.
Johnny and his peers are too busy keeping the “afternoon terrors” of the humanities at bay, by “day drinking” at “Ruin Bar” and filming re-enactments of scenes from Tarkovsky, to work on their dissertations. In their midst, meanwhile, Business Studies postgrads make “a mockery of the PhD student” with their focused, goal-orientated study. “Where’s their doom? Where’s their crushedness? Their diseases of the soul?” The Business Studies students seem oblivious to the fact that a PhD requires nothing short of “reinvent[ing] philosophy all by themselves, or whatever it is we’re doing”.
The arrival of a new student who wears nun shoes and calls herself “Simone Weil” does little to address their tormented procrastination. It does, however, add a new dimension to the day drinking, as Simone (who sticks to mineral water), with her unwavering belief in God and the triumph of good, provides a foil to the bleak outlook of the Disaster Studies cohort. The introduction of such a character is typical of Iyer, and My Weil completes a trilogy of sorts, following the author’s fourth novel, Wittgenstein Jr (2014), which features a young Cambridge Professor of Logic dubbed “Wittgenstein”, and his fifth, Nietzsche and the Burbs (TLS, February 7, 2020), with its suburban sixth-former nicknamed “Nietzsche” for his nihilism. If Iyer’s admixture of philosophy and fiction is not exactly subtle, it is nonetheless good fun, and no more so than when it exposes the disjunction between the life of the mind and the contemporary university. We are in the world of the “deep uni”, where figures such as “Professor Bollocks” deliver, to Johnny’s dismay, compulsory PhD lectures on topics such as time management:
TIME! MANAGEMENT! TIME! MANAGEMENT! Within the walls of a uni! As if Henri Bergson never existed! Nor Martin Heidegger! As if Deleuze had never formulated the three syntheses of time!
The grandiose posturing of Johnny and his fellow postgrads is often just as absurd as the conditions imposed by the bureaucracy and management speak of the modern university. It is never quite clear who is responsible for the most bollocks, and Iyer is at his sharpest – and My Weil at its funniest and most moving – when simultaneously lamenting and ridiculing the tragicomic plight of intellectual life in the contemporary world.