D’ALEMBERT’S PRINCIPLE. By Andrew Crumey. Sawtry: Dedalus, Original Fiction in Paperback. 1996. pp. 203 ISBN 1873 982 321

Addressing the question of individual identity at a time when it seemed particularly vexed, John Locke quoted at length an account of a Brazilian parrot which was reputed to converse rationally with its interlocutors. Would a race of such rational parrots be regarded as men, wonders the philosopher, before concluding, rather tamely, that no, a parrot, no matter how articulate, could never be mistaken for a man, however dull.

His deliberations are less remarkable for the sobriety of this conclusion than the fact that Locke, the great empiricist, should have felt compelled to mention such a parrot at all. In effect Locke’s parrot belongs to a vast menagerie of fabulous creatures and curious exempla that swarm in the margins of the classic texts of the Enlightenment and which seem to have been bred solely to provide exercise for the philosophical imagination.

Readers of Andrew Crumey’s first two novels will already know him as a connoisseur of such creatures, for Crumey is above all a writer who delights in the absurdities and paradoxes which lurk in the dusty recesses of the Age of Reason. In the Saltire prize-wining Music, in a Foreign Language and in Pfitz he has established himself as a hugely entertaining guide to that murky area where philosophy shades into fantasy and gives birth to metafiction. It comes as no surprise therefore to discover that Locke’s rational parrot, or one of its ilk, puts in a brief appearance in Crumey’s third novel, D’Alembert’s Principle, where it is introduced by Pfitz, the eponymous hero of his second novel, by way of illustrating the impossibility of communicating with extra terrestrail puddles of slime (Pfitz, we remember, having started life as a misreading of Pfutze, or ‘puddle’ in German).

Such intertextual fun and games apart, the reappearance of the rational parrot is indicative of Crumey’s continuing desire to re-examine issues last given an airing in the heady days of the eighteenth century . In D’Alembert’s Principle he returns us to a time, the age of the philosophe, when the productive relationship between reason and imagination had yet to be severed; when philosophy could still serve as the engine of fiction. Like Locke, and like Diderot – the arch philosopher-fantasist and a palimpsestic presence throughout this novel – Crumey is much concerned with the problems of individual identity: of why we think of things as one, rather than many and with what happens to such reliable old concepts as person, place and authorship when we don’t.

The unity of D’Alembert’s Principle, and by extension the novel in general, is itself a case in point. Taking its cue from D’Alembert’s categorisation of human knowledge in the Encyclopedia, it comprises three sections, Memory, Reason, and Imagination, whose interrelationship is more fugal and thematic than conventionally novelistic. The first section – a reprise of Diderot’s exercise in scandalous materialism, D’Alembert’s Dream — establishes an elegant counterpoint between the narrative through which a dying D’Alembert tries to make sense of a life wasted on the love of a faithless woman, and the narrative of Justine his maidservant, and of her attempts to steal a glimpse into a world of forbidden learning. Given D’Alembert’s obsession with discovering the mathematical principle of his own life, and his dismissal of words as mere ‘tokens of exchange’, we might expect Crumey to follow Diderot in setting the famous materialist up for a fall. After all, Crumey knows what Diderot didn’t, and the cruel comedy of a man who has based his life on the pursuit of knowledge discovering the infidelity of his mistress only after her death, would seem irresistible. However, in Crumey’s version, D’Alembert thus emerges as both a parable of reductive rationalism and at the same time as a moving and poignant human figure.

Magnus Ferguson, D’Alembert’s great phiosophical rival and the subject of the second section of the novel, is a rather more shadowy figure. An exiled Scottish Jacobite who may or may not be the author of a Cosmography which describes a Gulliveresque journey around the solar system, Ferguson is a sceptic who, after a drunken brawl in the streets of Edinburgh, discovers that the soul is a kind of sense which can be subject to physical damage, and consequently invents a character, William MacDade, who is literally ‘`blind’ to his own identity’. Crumey has done solipsism before, most memorably in Schenk’s assault on his landlady in Pfitz, but in MacDade and the Cosmogarphy he tests the possibilities of physical and fictional weightlessness to their extremes. The Cosmography begins with its narrator embarking for Denmark and arriving instead, following the intercession of a violent storm, upon the moon. The subsequent dream of interplanetary travel is also a journey through the different modes of linguistic and physical being which is in turn set off against the conversation of two characters who both refuse to acknowledge the reality of the other’s existence. Ferguson, and his creation MacDade, belong to the great tradition of Scottish scepticism – the Cosmography is supposed to have been dedicated to Hume – and at several points Crumey slyly suggests some causal link between the course of Scottish history and Scottish philosophy: ‘He told me I was in Scotland; I knew that this could not be the case. And yet he also told me that the world around me was without substance, and on this I was forced to agree’. A Jacobite having survived the defeat of his political dreams might well be more prone to solipsism and the denial of the ontological status quo than his Hannoverian neighbours.

The third section returns us to the rather more corporeal concerns of Pfitz. Last seen guiding his master through the stacks of the celestial library, his subsequent fortunes appear to have been mixed. Pfitz has climbed the ontological ladder from a character invented by a character, to a character in his own right, but at the same time he has descended the social ladder from faithful servant to importunate beggar. As such, although masterless, his existence remains unrecognised by the officials of Rreinnstadt, and where once he told stories ‘to pass the time’, he is now forced to sell them to ‘survive’.

The exigencies of life in the economic margins of a paper city have clearly had a baleful influence upon Pfitz’s aesthetic. When asked by Goldman, a disgruntled customer, if there is any moral to his stories he replies, ‘I prefer to do without morals … they only get in the way’. This new, masterless Pfitz, takes an unabashed delight in the exploitation of expectations and feels responsibility neither to his characters nor to his listeners. Instead he revels in the story-teller’s powers to reverse the social order: to make the master dependent on the servant, the bourgeois on the beggar. He is, moreover, a shameless plagiarist with no respect for intellectual property; ‘Ah Sir,’ he exclaims, having been caught in the act of recycling one of his own tales from an earlier novel, ‘I am found out. Please don’t think ill of me – I am no malicious deceiver. My own father told me the story … By retelling it, I’m simply following family tradition’. By this count, Pfitz’s family is huge and includes Jacques the Fatalist, Sancho Panza, Scherezade and every other picaresque narrator for whom tale-telling is a means of securing the temporary indulgence of an otherwise hostile world. Finally revealed as ‘a spirit … invoked by malicious and unconstrained story telling’, in his latest incarnation Pfitz has come to represent the essence of Story as the subversive counter to the proprieties of person, place and author enshrined in the nineteenth-century novel. He is less a character than the mouthpiece for some narratological grammar woven out of half-remembered folktales and our ever-present expectations of what makes a story good.

In this respect, Pfitz seems himself to resemble a rational parrot, a repeater rather than a teller of tales. The same might be said of his alter ego, Andrew Crumey, for in this, as in the earlier novels, Ctrumey’s debts to Calvino, Borges, and what one blurb calls the ‘postmodern Euro-novel’ are clear. It is, for example, safe to say that if you enjoyed Our Ancestors or Invisible Cities, you will enjoy D’Alembert’s Principle. However, in this novel Crumey does more than ape continental modes: rather, he takes us back to the roots of that tradition in Diderot and Sterne and in an unadulterated delight in story-telling for its own sake which was repressed with the nineteenth century novel’s turn to ‘realism’ and verisimilitude. Moreover, he demonstrates that the concerns which distinguish postmodernity have much in common with those of the radical Enlightenment: that in the age of mad cows and species barriers, even a figure as improbable as a a rational parrot might prove to be of help in furthering the course of human understanding.

Niall Martin, Amsterdam, 1996