Possible Precariousnesses

In a recent review, Stephanie Merritt picks out a line from Javier Marias's Poison, Shadow and Farewell, the third part of his Your Face Tomorrow series. Bertram Tupra, a member of MI6, explains to a recent recruit, Spanish academic Jacques Deza, his view of death: ""We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last for ever," he tells Deza. "We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword.""

Now, my eyes and ears opened and pricked up at this, because that sounds a lot like precariousness. What's more, it is a particularly contemporary view that is both being attacked and being put forward. The idea being attacked is the contemporary desire to extend life, to make it more solid, to protect ourselves against threats. You may wonder exactly how contemporary that is - surely it's human nature? - but I think what Marias is getting at is the particular fetishisation of permanence that an increasingly decadent capitalism creates. The equally contemporary idea being put forward by Tupra - who has just attacked a young diplomat with the aforementioned sword - is a reaction to these capitalist certainties, an embrace of the precarious which is in Tupra's case both a reactionary turning back of the clock to an age both more primitive and in touch with death as well as a more positive embrace of life in that seemingly solid capitalism which works on a valorisation of solidity whilst simultaneously destablising everyone and everything.

Another recent potential precariousness is Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, a book composed entirely of questions - how much more precarious can you get? The question itself, as a concept, is precarious - it pitches something out into the ether, the dark, the unknown, without any guarantee of it coming back in the form of an answer. It is a leap of faith, it is uncertain and unstable. Here is a quick snippet of Powell reading from it. It sounds really funny if nothing else!: