Ethics of “Serious Culture”: On Greg Jackson’s “The Dimensions of a Cave”
Greg Jackson | The Dimensions of a Cave | FSG | October 2023 | 464 Pages
A strange shadow haunts our efforts to change the script. We protest environmental catastrophe, but to live in the modern state is to depend on, and frequently benefit from, the products of despoliation. Protesting the state, in turn, does little more than to sanctify its violence by voicing the conscience in the machine. Slavoj Žižek struck at the problem in 2007: “Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’” The problem has gotten immeasurably worse: over the last seventeen years, the iPhone has mechanized our time and social relations with ruthless efficiency. In his excellent and unnerving book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, the critic Jonathan Crary argues that by accepting a forced regime of technology that we’re told we freely choose, we submit to a self-perpetuating nightmare:
Every new product or service presents itself as essential for the bureaucratic organization of one’s life, and there is an ever-growing number of routines and needs that constitute this life that no one has actually chosen…In actuality there is an imposed and inescapable uniformity to our compulsory labor of self-management. The illusion of choice and autonomy is one of the foundations of this global system of auto-regulation.
Are we as mollified as the system would like us to be? We must believe in an ability to engage ethically and critically with a world whose institutions and technologies seem to have always already circumscribed the borders of thought and movement. Where is the site of true resistance?
Because Greg Jackson is a serious romantic and a rare kind of diligent aesthete, the answer his debut novel The Dimensions of a Cave poses to this question is: art. Not that the novel presents art as a quick catalyst for radical change. Rather, art—the paintings in a gallery, a war lord’s traditional Afghani garments, the elaborately crafted metanovel—allows characters to glimpse ineffable depths beneath the deceptive surfaces of digital technologies and the facts printed in newspapers. One narrative can only blinker reality. But several embedded layers of narrative—a war lord’s story within a journalist’s within the protagonist’s within the frame narrative, for example—constitute not partial representations of reality, but an abstraction that renders, however fleetingly, an Archimedean point from which to apprehend the entire machinery.
Early in the novel, the protagonist’s quasi-ex-girlfriend, the gallery owner Cy, offers her theory of art:
Cy thought most theories of art had it wrong. Art was a kind of research into ourselves, the purest because the least practically concerned. Everything profitable to some interest got snatched up as a business model or technique…And if you wanted to know anything then about what it meant to be human beyond persisting—multiplying, enduring, metastasizing—it was to art that you had to turn, the record of what was, at once, worthless and most valuable.
It’s a beautifully idealistic philosophy, and all the more so because it is in fact Jackson’s own theory. In his 2021 essay “Sources of Life,” he writes that the category of “serious” culture aimed at truth and beauty, rather than politics or mere entertainment,
may seem trivial, even gratuitous, to some in light of our present crises, but our crises have flowered in the soil of its trivialization….Serious culture…is a realm of serious experience with ourselves—with our own minds and latent capacities—and therefore a main area of life in which we learn to take seriously and respect ourselves.
And if our present crises or daily lives were in fact part of a massive simulation, would there be any way to know it? Would we have a nagging feeling of déjà vu? Would we confuse dreams with memories that we could not possibly have? Art, not light entertainment, allows us to confront those questions. The Dimensions of a Cave masterfully stages this ethics of “serious culture.”
The novel presents a series of characters who, in one way or another, become trapped in false representations: a Platonic cave, as it were. In the first chapter, for example, we learn of Ismail Kamari, a detainee in the kind of opaque government facility that performs vanishing acts on due process by conjuring the word “terrorism.” Incredibly, Kamari conspires with two other internees, escapes, and makes it halfway around the world, having freed himself from the grip of the American imperial state and the alternate reality that unfolds in closed-door torture programs—or so it seems.
In fact, Kamari is the test case of a top-secret program, SIMITAR (Soft Interrogation Managed in Totally Artificial Reality). Kamari’s detention conspirators were feds who had been planted to whisper the idea of escaping in the first place; his getaway was choreographed to make him believe that he had masterminded it. Once out, in other words, he’s still in: the program’s engineers constructed a version of reality that “would keep him moving within precisely delineated grooves while maintaining the illusion of his autonomy. Every consequential individual he spoke to was a plant. The devices he touched—phones, computers—were carefully monitored and diverted to fake websites, fake contacts.” Pitched as a humane, torture-free method of extracting truth from dangerous adversaries, SIMITAR raises larger questions about what we might call epistemic torture. “Did human beings have a right not just to avoid pain but also to stand on truth’s firm ground? To know, in a minimal sense, that our lives were real?” This is a founding inquiry of the book, one which Jackson pursues with indefatigable rigor as the novel descends its rungs of embedded narratives and nested realities.
Our protagonist, the hard-boiled journalist Quentin Jones, breaks the SIMITAR story, but soon realizes that SIMITAR is merely the predecessor to the inestimably more powerful and mysterious VIRTUE (Very Immersive Real-Time User Environments). VIRTUE is the kind of VR technology which the recent, comically lame debut of Apple Vision Pro makes clear is still the domain of sci-fi: a reality indistinguishable from our own “real” reality, which can support and even create life. But there’s a catch. In order to furnish VIRTUE, the engineers had to design it so that, like dreams, it conforms to users’ desires. The longer someone stays inside, the more it bends to that person’s will, which becomes a problem when one of the beta users refuses to come out: Quentin’s long-disappeared, former protégé Bruce Willrich.
If Jackson’s slim but astonishing oeuvre thus far boasts a leitmotif, it’s the (often male) doubles who embody some iteration of the dichotomy of the radical and the bourgeois—the guy who goes all in for life and love, and the guy who hedges his bets. He gave us the painfully earnest painter Jonah Valente and the indecisive sell-out Jack Francis in the 2021 story “The Hollow.” From his brilliant story collection Prodigals (2016), there was Lyric and Hara in “Epithalamium,” and Tanner and Jonah in “Tanner’s Sisters,” in which, for example, after Tanner describes to Jonah his world-shattering journey to the depths of the soul, Jonah can’t or won’t acknowledge how fake, by contrast, are the social and professional games we mistake for something more meaningful: “Tanner looked at me sadly, seeing, I guess, that I did not understand or couldn’t say aloud how much I did, that this is what it meant to playact, to have bought in or sold out—never acknowledging how much you understood.”
Like Conrad’s Kurtz and Marlow, after whom Jackson’s characters are loosely modeled, Bruce and Quentin are also pawns in a vast game of colonial domination. The territory, however, is no longer the interiors of continents but digital real estate, virtual republics which all the predictable actors are scheming to develop, militarize, and monetize. Recklessly eager to hold power to account, Bruce lights out for a rogue justice mission in the Middle East, inadvertently repeating the violent folly of centuries of white men before him. The invisible determinants of good intentions only become apparent in the aftermath of catastrophe.
Through Quentin and Bruce, the novel poses two oppositional modes of confronting the world’s totalizing and thus barely detectable coercive powers. When Quentin discovers that his investigation into VIRTUE—seemingly the deepest and most meaningful of his career—turns out to be an elaborate set-up, a bespoke mystery plot that leads him further and further from reality, he is nearly driven mad. Afterward, he’s forced to live with the knowledge that most of us must blithely disavow in order to retain some notion of agency and hope: that real power abstracts itself too well in the global movement of capital, the alphabet soups of government agencies and subcontractors, and tyrannical technologies to ever be truly held to account. In Jackson’s world, a journalist can only ever repackage justifications for desert wars, even or especially when justification takes the form of criticism. This is the disturbing, prophetic truth Quentin receives from a French radical lecturing on ideology critique inside VIRTUE—a kind of Žižek figure, if Žižek were French and mainlined heroin during impromptu seminars: “You believe that since you expose the secrets of the powerful and the merciless, if indeed you do, you are an insurgent at the root of power,” he tells Quentin. But this is a convenient illusion:
The facts are a technology…And you, doing the best you can, I am sorry to say, you can only reinforce this regency of fact—its sovereignty and tyranny—until one day the forces of despotism come and seize power from you, the very power you have helped build up.
As always, the technology we think we wield to our own ends in fact dictates the terms.
Are we all, in other words, Ismael Kamari? The best Quentin can do with these facts, like Conrad’s Marlow, is to recount his narrative as a warning in the novel’s frame story, which, like a Greek chorus, a trio of newspaper editors report to the reader. But Bruce can’t live with this necessary lie. He can’t abandon the childish wish to impose his notion of justice on the world, which drives him to resent everyone who can. Instead, he renounces life and real relationships, choosing to live in a VR program that bends to his desires. The long-awaited confrontation between the two men is some of the darkest and most ingenious contemporary literature I’ve read. To make a point about the essential monstrosity of man, Bruce coolly narrates for thirty pages the entire history of humans committing atrocities against one another: ancient Dayak tribes of Borneo whose mourning rituals entailed the elaborate torture of slaves, systematic cannibalism of the Aztecs, the Middle Passage, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb. How can we conceive of the pain of hundreds of millions without reducing it to numb abstraction? “Think of your own life and its centrality to everything you are, and consider, in imagining this, that each individual in these nameless hordes of the slaughtered felt the exact same way you do, touched in quiet moments by the delicate marvel of being.” But he misses the point of his own exercise: his will to empathy becomes a vain and lonely martyrdom.
Despite its conceptual brilliance and gorgeous prose, Jackson’s novel is undoubtedly less fun than Prodigals. Unlike the stories, there’s no room for things to just happen—for an erotically charged spitting contest to punctuate a discussion about the hermeneutics of suspicion, for a stoned bathroom masturbation scene to mount toward a sublime paroxysm of existential dread and wonder. There’s no room for a side character’s meth-fuelled prose-poem on the human soul that has absolutely no bearing on the plot, as in “Metanarrative Breakdown,” the collection’s pièce de résistance. There’s no contingency. On the one hand, this is precisely the book’s point: things don’t just happen—the algorithms and abstractions we’ve manifested in order to grasp at some control of our unruly world have always predetermined the outcomes. On the other hand, this is an anti-humanist perspective that we must reject. The odd thing is that Jackson rejects it in Prodigals, and he rejects it in his essays, so why does the novel demand a perfection and narrative tautness that seals it, on a formal level, from the liberatory prospect of chance and resistance? Upon re-reading it, I understood how perfectly every clue was planted, and its perfection holds us at a distance, side-eyes us from the other side of the cave. I should perhaps be more embarrassed than I am to admit how much Prodigals spoke to me. I return to those stories in the masochistic way you return to a competitive friendship; we size each other up each time we meet, discover new if minor shames, and we’ve shown each other too much about ourselves to ever separate permanently. I doubt I could have that relationship with The Dimensions of a Cave. It refuses to let its guard down; it’s complete on its own. It needs nothing from me.