Existential Ponderings: A Review of Infinite Regress
Writing in the early 1950’s in Man Against Mass Society, philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel proclaimed, “If we want to understand the kind of crisis which has overtaken the relationship between the older and the younger generation, we have to take note of the fact that life is being less and less felt as a gift to be handed on, and more and more felt as a kind of incomprehensible calamity, like a flood, against which we ought to build dykes.” Such a view—from a Frenchman no less—was perhaps understandable considering Europe’s experience of the first half of the twentieth century. A century that began with unfettered promise was, only fifty years later, littered with millions of corpses.
But Marcel cautioned that this view could only end in despair, for if life is not a gift, but a burden, then how “could death appear as anything else than the flinging on the scrap heap of a being that has ceased to be of service-and that no longer is anything, the moment it is no longer of any use?”
I was reminded of Marcel’s words recently reading Joshua Hren’s new novel Infinite Regress. Americans in the 50s would have perhaps scratched their heads at Marcel. Moody intellectual. Despairing European. Americans were “winners” of WWII, fat, prosperous, and content. But now? Twenty percent of the way through the twenty-first century, something seems to have gone wrong. Real or imagined, the general consensus is that the world is getting worse. We might ask ourselves, is life a gift to be handed on? Or an incomprehensible calamity to be avoided?
Hren meditates on this question at length through three generations of male Yourricks: Grandpa Gene Yourrick, Father Garrett Yourrick, and Son Blake Yourrick. The name Yourrick (i.e., “Yorick,” Shakespeare’s “fellow of infinite jest” from Hamlet) ought to give a hint of what Hren is up to. To be or not to be, that is the question.
Each male Yourrick grapples deeply not only with the meaning of human existence, but with existence itself. They can be read as a twenty-first century analogue to Herman Broch’s three generation masterpiece, The Sleepwalkers. Like Broch before him, Hren asks: what happens when the Old World values have been discarded? When God Himself has been abandoned? What, if anything, gives life meaning? What, if anything, gives ethical direction to one’s life?
Grandpa Yourrick, a savant computing whiz lacking interpersonal skills, decides with his wife to have no children. But Garrett is born due to his wife’s “accident” (she is raped), and Grandpa Gene therefore learns “how pathetic I am in ways that, had I been childless, I’d never ever have noticed.” Pathetic, because he does not show his son any true love or affection.
Garrett Yourrick is plagued both by a brilliant mind and the question of nothingness. He is tormented by existence, by the question of why there is anything at all. As a twelve year old boy, he stands up in an auditorium of people and asks the notorious Fr. Theo Hape (more on him later), “Why is there something rather than nothing?” For if there was once nothing, there might be nothing again. And if the future ends in nothingness, what sort of meaning can this life offer?
Garrett is also tormented by grief and shame at the death of his wife, Catherine, a woman of deep Catholic faith. On her deathbed, in a moment of weakness, Catherine tells her husband that maybe her father was right about him. Meaning, Garrett had perhaps ruined her life. Garrett also is aware of Catherine’s last letters to her sister, describing Garrett’s bitterness at life, his “academic skepticism,” and a “real cranial kind of theorizing that poisoned our family.” Unrepentant and unreconciled with Catherine before her death, Garrett lives in his head and inebriated, failing (as his father before him) to provide the love and affection his son, Blake, needs.
Then there’s Blake. Like Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, he is tempted to believe there are no fixed limits. And if morality is mutable, then anything goes—any action is permissible. His temptation takes the incarnate form of defrocked Fr. Hape (perhaps a descendant of Balzac’s Abbé Carlos Herrera). Hape promises to pay Blake $50,000 (the approximate sum of Blake’s defaulted student loans) if he will consent to an act of sodomy. Hape claims the act is not merely for the sake of sexual pleasure, but to put theory into practice. The theory being that “gender is nothing essential, is a set of manipulating and manipulated codes, is a symbol or a signal rather than a body, ergo all uses of what we happen to call ‘sexual organs’ should be permitted and even championed.” Morality, in effect, constrained to consent.
Although Blake believes Hape’s teachings, he does not immediately accept the offer, thinking “how could he ever do something like that if he couldn’t even come home and ask his dad for money that should have been his anyhow.” Although Blake cannot go home to his father, he does write him a letter, revealing his inner torment. He tells his dad that “if I could believe love was a real thing I’d say I love you,” but also that they “never really could speak of anything that touched our hearts,” could only “get lost in ideas … the inheritance you gave me.” He calls himself “a child waiting to be fed again,” and pleads “Help me. Give me something to see by.” Otherwise, he reveals he is tempted either to accept Hape’s offer and “do that unmentionable, decide there are no differences,” or follow his mother “to sleep forever. Sleep—to escape mankind.”
Unlike the Prodigal Father, Garrett does not run to meet his son. He remains stuck in his head, mired in grief and shame, drowned in drink.
After trying various means of paying off his debt, including working in the Bakken oil fields and serving as a cemetery security guard, and receiving no response from his father, Blake succumbs to Hape’s temptation.
But in turning to Hape, Blake does not feel the relief he hopes to experience from both his debt and from the tyranny of morality. Almost immediately upon receiving the $50,000 in his bank account, Blake does a Judas about-face and returns the money. Why? If everything is permitted, why this inner turmoil? This struggle of conscience? This struggle of the soul when there is no soul?
Blake hoped that consenting to Hape’s offer would “save himself from the hangover fairy tale of his mother’s faith—to trespass the tired and desperate moralities (with their phobic protections against ambiguity) and… to wake the next morning, still living for all his supposed sins.” He trusted that having transgressed his mother’s fairy-tale faith he would find “nothing, finally, that needed forgiveness.” But what he actually experiences is more than ever the need for mercy and reconciliation. Not believing in fairy-tale stories of redemption, however, he, again like Raskolnikov, is tempted to end his life.
Who can win a battle against existence itself? To believe that life is a calamity is to step off the ledge into the great darkness of nothingness. Such a leap—the flinging on the scrap heap of a being—can only end in despair.
But Garrett and Blake do not end in despair. Why? It has to do with debt and inheritance. An opening up to gift. The gift of being. The gift of self that has the power to keep despair at bay.
Debt and inheritance are two main themes of the novel. Garrett is perpetually plagued by debt, his sole inheritance from his wealthy father an old Milwaukee house, which he is ever on the brink of losing to the bank. Blake is likewise beleaguered by student loan debt, his inheritance from his father limited to a fear of love and an obsession with abstract ideas.
Garrett’s and Blake’s monetary debt signal another kind of indebtedness. What does one owe for one’s existence? We come to be without any willfulness on our part. Is there, therefore, a debt owed for being itself?
From Garrett and Blake’s point of view, debt is an oppressive burden. Indeed, their existence itself seems a burden. While they deny God’s existence and are therefore (seemingly) unencumbered and free, their lives are miserable. They are not free. They do not (cannot) give or receive love. Both need mercy and reconciliation, with Catherine, with each other, and with that fairy-tale God Himself.
In Colossians 2:13-14, Paul writes, “And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond [debt] which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”
Forgiveness. The cancelation of debt. A fairy tale? But isn’t this the great longing of the human heart? Reconciliation, reunion, and life renewed and made whole.
What seemed forever lost can be found again. Catherine’s former spiritual counselor, Fr. Marto, visits Garrett, who is drunk, brooding, and confrontational. As is their pattern, they go through the motions of arguing about God’s existence. But then in a fit of passion, Fr. Marto proclaims, “Enough. You need to give your children something to owe you beside the accidental tics they’ve inherited. You used to, I know. Make them go into debt to you more, more, and so mimic the good God. … Find your son who you have lost. Dare to make God your debtor!”
Angered, Garrett throws Fr. Marto out of his house. But he is finally moved to act to get out of his head, to mimic the good God, and, like the Prodigal Father, go and look for his lost and wayward son, Blake.
He finds him in the graveyard where Catherine lies buried. Blake is digging a grave beside his mother’s, singing an old Shakespearean tune “cudgel thy brains no longer,” his temptation “to sleep forever,” rising to an apex as he leaps into the grave. Garrett walks to the grave, looks inside, and sees what appears to be an “an infinite void.” But when he enters the grave, he finds his son on the bottom, where Blake says,
“I needed you. When I needed you there was nothing, Dad. No answer. Sick silence. Fucking nothing.”
“…”
“Nothing.”
“I know it too well. Too well. If I think of it too much I might just stay down here and never leave. I’m… forgive me.”
Unable to express adequate words, Blake reaches over and grabs his father’s hand and “squeezed it, feeling the knuckle where the blue vein pulsed visibly, with a strange vitality.”
Reconciliation. Forgiveness. New life strangely pulsing and vital. Catherine’s fairy tale invigorated by the compassionate touch of father and son.
Is life a gift? Or a calamity? Is existence to be affirmed, or avoided? The answer to those questions may very well depend on what you think about the possibility of forgiveness. Hren gives us his answer, revealing that the greatest affirmation of being may begin in the most unlikely of places: in the graveyard of our sins through new life in reconciliation and forgiveness.
Jeffrey Wald writes from the Twin Cities.