On Literary Criticism

The Coda to my Novella

I’m just a brain in a vat; I should have said so earlier. When I say location might be real, I mean only this: if I am human, and you are human, and this isn’t some cosmic joke, then electrons might be exactly somewhere. The physicists can’t say where because their tools vibrate, but that hardly matters. What do tiny vibrations matter when the whole thing could be a trick the physicists are playing on vats?

Whether or not I’m a brain in a vat—and whether Phil and Jesse Orosco and UNCUCK are hallucinations inflicted by physicists or AI—I know with absolute certainty that I exist, and that causation is bullshit. There are infinitely many ways Phil Mason might not have been born, might not have loved Kara or killed the ferret or sponsored the Whole Head Guillotine Act. Any midwit too lazy to study correlation can invent all the causation fictions he needs.

What the Whole Head Guillotine “caused” depends on what that midwit typed about what didn’t happen, which depends on the electrons in his brain, and the neurons that conduct them—and the snake eats itself, and causation is bullshit.

But this is my book, even though I’m just a brain in a vat, so I get to say what happened, and what caused what, and which regressions real literary critics—those who can tell their F-statistics from their asses—may run. Maybe if I could burn all the other books, causation would become as real as location. But I’m mostly liberal and can’t, or won’t, burn the other books, especially not the ones that reject causation.

Those are my certainties. My probablies are simpler. Electrons—and bigger things too, but mainly electrons—probably have exact locations, and whole-head guillotines probably save lives. Everything I’ve touched or seen seemed to be exactly somewhere. Six centuries of natural selection by judicial hanging sculpted Plantagenet mayhem into Victorian calm. Ergo: the Whole Head Guillotine probably works.

There’s another problem with my book. I can no more see behind or beyond my own experience than Jesse Orosco could thrive beneath the Whole Head Guillotine. He was fucked by location; I was fucked by language. I can’t write a real book in English. French or German or Swahili wouldn’t help. The great American novel will have to be written in math—but its first sentence would stretch to the sun and back, and no one would read it.

Phil Mason saw clearly enough. This has been his life. He found it worth living and would gladly live it again, if the chance were offered him.