Reading Note:
No One Is Responsible
13 October 2014
Kathleen has always claimed that, of all the rocky times that she has been through — and she has had more than her fair share — one of the very worst was the first semester of law school. She could not overcome the impression that her brain was being invaded and undermined by aliens infected with a strange and horrifying view of the universe; in fact, her innocence about the way things work in our Anglophone world was being crushed. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker were disappearing behind murky frontiers of liability, not only for meats, loaves, and lighting equipment but for the condition of the sidewalks in front of their shops and for the actions of their employees. There was nothing for which someone, somewhere was not responsible, and the whole purpose of practicing law, it seemed, was to make sure that your client was not, to the extent possible, that someone. Kathleen insists that she never recovered.
She ought to read The Dog, the long-awaited but generally disappointing successor to Joseph O’Neill’s critically admired Netherland. I myself was not disappointed by The Dog, but I have to admit that I was determined to like it. This turned out to be easy for me, but I could see that the novel would not appeal to everyone. In fact, it seemed unlikely to appeal to anyone who — who couldn’t remember what law school was like. I almost said, “to anyone who wasn’t a lawyer,” but I suspect that many lawyers, especially successful ones who have put law-school traumas far behind them, would find The Dog irritating if not boring. The fellow does go on so — and nothing happens. Nothing happens, and yet the menace of disaster looms ever blacker and taller. The Dog recapitulates the agony of law school.
The Dog is set in Dubai, which is almost as remote from life-as-most-of-us-know-it as law school. Aside from the native population, it is filled with fellow ex-pats, Westerners who, like X, the otherwise unnamed narrator of The Dog, are taking time out from “real life” to make a lot of money. That’s something like law school, too. The money in law school is entirely prospective, of course, but there is a curious resemblance between the summary de-personalization that can befall anyone who runs afoul of Emirati protocol, on the one hand, and failure to pass the bar exam (particularly the New York State bar exam), on the other. In both cases, there is an immense risk of losing all for nothing.
Daily life in Dubai, like daily life in law school, consists of stretches of “work” punctuated by evenings of dissipation. While the carousings of law students rarely involve jeroboams of Veuve Clicquot, the idea is the same, and needs no glossing here. It’s the “work” that bemuses. What is this work? If X is any guide, work is an endless, fruitless attempt to limit liability. X is the “agent” of several family trusts controlled by a wealthy Lebanese family. X authorizes transactions that come to his desk for authorization, some of them documented in languages that X cannot read. He does his job: he signs off. (If he has questions, they go unanswered by his employers.) But he is understandably uncomfortable about the implications of his authorizations. He seeks to narrow the scope of his responsibility, and to trumpet the “pro-forma” nature of his signature, by stamping his paperwork with seals that refer to a Web site in which the fine print of X’s claimed freedom from liability is spelled out. The madness of his enterprise will be immediately apparent to any attorney who has read so much as a page of Kafka. Like Kafka, X talks a fine game, but all he’s really saying is, and I quote,
PLEASE DON’T HURT ME BECAUSE I’M SIGNING THIS.
A lot of good it does.
The absurdity of X’s situation is not philosophical. It does not involve questions about the meaning of life or the nature of existence. X is not troubled — or troubled only as a diversion — by doubts about how we know what we know. But he is as preoccupied by the moral futility of human life as any existentialist. Unlike the existentialist, however, he resists rather than embracing this uncertainty. He tries to ward it off, using the magical powers of legal reasoning. On a few occasions, the reasoning is formal and pedantic, and almost certain to repel lay (non-lawyer) readers, just as all legal documents repel normal people. Mostly, though, X’s reasoning is a kind of low-grade, unstoppable viral frenzy. He is especially unable to resist post-mortems of his very unhappy relationship with a colleague in New York, where he once worked for a large law firm. These attempts to explain What Went Wrong With Jenn are devoid of romantic poignance; rather, they seem to describe the gestation of a still-born contract. One might easily wonder, on the basis of The Dog, whether it is really possible for two young associates working at the same law firm to fall in love. I myself have always doubted it.
Looking back at the opening passages of the novel for early signs of X’s ratiocinative tics, I found them on the first page, but the following paragraph seemed most pregnant:
The striking thing about him was his American accent. Few Americans move here, the usual explanation being that we must pay federal taxes on worldwide income and will benefit relatively little from the fiscal advantages the United Arab Emirates offers its denizens. This theory is, I think, only partly right. A further fraction of the answer [fraction!] must be that the typical American candidate for expatriation to the gulf, who might without disparagement be described as the mediocre office worker, has little instinct for emigration. To put it another way, a person usually needs a special incentive to be here — or, perhaps more accurately, to not be elsewhere — and surely this is all the more true for the American who, rather than trying his luck in California or Texas or New York, chooses to come to this strange desert metropolis. Either way, fortune will play its expected role. I suppose I say all this from personal experience.
By the end of The Dog, this habit of mind luxuriates in hair-splitting kudzu that drains the life from everything it touches, leaving only ghostly giggles:
(The Jenn Rule provides: It is wrong to Google a person who does not want to be Googled by you. As the name implies, the Rule was promulgated by me to me, in response to my incessant Googling of Jenn, an exhausting but irrepressible habit that did nothing to advance my understanding of how she was doing, if that was in fact my purpose. It dawned on me, after about a year of banging my head against a rigid superficies of data, that Jenn would not want me peering into and sniffing around her life; and it followed that I shouldn’t. I would not want her to shadow me online, that’s for sure. Once I had established, or discovered, the Jenn Rule, I saw no valid reason to limit its scope to Jenn. Thus, it applied to Mrs Wilson because she would likewise not want me to Google her. (Note, however, that the Rule does not apply to cases where A, the searcher, is unknown to B, the searchee, who by definition cannot want not to be Googled by A. (Confession: my observation of the Jenn Rule is not really attributable to any uprightness in my character. I broke the J-Rule many times. It was only when a “Jennifer Horschel” search consistently yielded only third party Jennifer Horschels (a few do exist) and it came to me that my Jenn had become unsearchable by me — it was only then that I stopped Googling her and found myself in compliance with the Rule. (I was of course terrified by Jenn’s sudden virtual absence, but I calmed down when I saw that nothing online or anywhere else pointed to her death. I could and can only conclude that she broke her own rule against getting married and in the process completely shed her maiden name, of which she also had no great fondness. (I did briefly re-break the Rule in order to track her down under her new identity, and I found out, by checking out the relevant photographs, that no Jennifer still working at my old firm was Jenn. Clearly she had also made a professional move. (I stopped my prying thtere, which again was hardly laudable. To refrain from making tricky investigative phone calls is not exactly a triumph of abnegation. (Is Jenn a mother now? I hope so. I she she happy? I hope so.))))))
Now you know why I’ve never been amused by nerds and geeks. First, they’re re-needlessly reinventing the galaxy of inter-referential epicycles that is already spinning so proudly at the heart of our legal system, and, second, they lack the rich vocabulary, the terms of art, and the gnomic afflatus of Law French that give lawyers their air of sophistication and bon ton. Computer trolls seem like unwashed children by comparison, members of a club in which comfortable seating is not to be found.
In the end, The Dog is a rigorous but drily hilarious fable about the overgrowth in modern affairs of a yearning to escape responsibility for everything. We see it all around us, in disclaimers nailed to every wall, and we can read about it in every day’s newspaper. (Today’s doozy is a story about a company that produces dangerous guard rails for American highways.) But a leisured, attentive study of The Dog will concentrate the mind upon the problem. In the past forty or fifty years, elites of all kind have paid lawyers to relieve them of the liabilities that they naturally incur and that they can shoulder far more robustly than the poor and uneducated upon whom so much “responsibility,” in the form of bad luck, now devolves. We shake off responsibility without thinking about it: it’s what everybody we know is doing. Not just the dogs.
I almost forgot. Joseph O’Neill started out as a lawyer, at one point working out of chambers in the Temple. You can read all about it, if you can get your hands on Granta 72, in his essay (clearly of great importance to the background of Netherland), “The Ascent of Man.”