The World Undone

BOOK REVIEW of The World Undone, by W. R. Turner, Big Muddy Press, 2024

This is a remarkable book that I recommend to any reader who cares about literature, history, philosophy, religion, and culture. It is beautifully written, wonderfully lyrical at times, profound at others, but always engaging throughout its different narrative frames right up to its gripping and shocking conclusion.  

The book tells a simple tale on the surface, but a tale with many hidden opposing tensions and tectonic fissures—like life and geography themselves. The tale is ostensibly about the prolonged volcanic eruptions of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique in the Eastern Caribbean that destroyed innumerable lives—and in fact it is about this cataclysmic undoing of the world, though in an unexpected key, since the infamous explosion itself is only represented as if it were in the lines of a play performed among actors in its penultimate phreatic scene before the novel goes on to show in darker magmatic form, as it were, its constant and continuing sequel. Despite many early warning signs that should have been detected by the authorities, no warning of the eruptions was, in fact, given.

The reader only gradually becomes aware of this—as if this were simply an accidental part of a larger ongoing narrative stitched together from different sources or ‘slants.’  The tale is, in other words, a complex set of perspectives stitched together from a patchwork of sources and characters: Adam More, the sailor and would-be writer of the disaster for some future newspaper, a figure whom the ‘I’ of the narrator gradually comes to fully embody; Juliette, the strange, clubfooted and burned, ‘heroine’ of the piece to whom the narrator is drawn—the sardonic, madame of a brothel as we only come to realize bit by bit, but also an incisive cultural-philosophical voice in her own right who flits effortlessly between French, English and Creole; then the other characters of their environment—among them Josephine, a prostitute who gives loving care to Adam; Samson, the inverse of his eponymous Biblical prootype and the only survivor of the explosion (“do you think this is possible, that this man, a nobody, no worse nor better than most, owed his escape to Providence while everyone and everything else was cremated? Was not Saint-Pierre Sodom and Gomorrah reincarnated?” (295-6); Leroy, Alonzo, Theopompus, etc.—and then, of course, all this motley underworld or semi-underworld crew live under the ever watchful and ruthless scrutiny of a hostile colonial Gendarmerie.

Here I shall pick out four striking characteristics of this unusual work. In the first instance, the novel tells a gripping and important story, but it is also intrinsically philosophical since the Caribbean world reflects, among many other things, a kind of master-slave dialectic or anti-dialectic, in reality, that resists resolution and yet also defies pigeonholing since the voice of Adam More, originally from Hartlepool, England who immigrates to the Canadian prairies of Saskatchewan after World War I, is also the voice of a stranger-sailor who finds himself thrown into a wayfaring world that he can never entirely understand or domesticate despite the instincts of empire, of mastery, and even of education that have somehow bred in him the instinct to listen, to attempt to befriend, to sympathize and listen—with whatever imponderable, indecipherable  motives, he might have, impulses that attempt to bridge, always uncomfortably, Empire and Colony, mastery and slavery—but manifest a kind of métissage or hybridization that pervades and yet unconsciously undermines any preferred or accepted stabilities.

A second feature that I found striking, is the idea of the world undone or perhaps in French Le Monde défait—the world ‘discombobulated’ or even decreated—that is, a world in which the forces of creation and decreation cannot easily be distinguished because they are part of the Heraclitean flux or the Chora or space (as in Plato’s Timaeus) of eternal coming-to-be in which pre-cosmic resistance to stable being and yet a form of bastard participation in intelligibility are simultaneously at play. Of course too, nothing is ever as it seems; what appears to be in process of formation is simultaneously being deformed, corrupted, since we live inextricably in a corrupt universe, as it were, from the beginning. Even in the epigraph this is implicitly thematized since we have an avowedly “corrupt translation” from Catullus that nonetheless bears something significant from the dead via ‘foreign coasts and waters, for the rites of your unworlding, namely, these last gifts of the living word, Vain sounds to silent ashes. Alas, my friend, You have been taken from me....” Notwithstanding, loss bequeaths some destiny—a living word or soul, despite or even because of loss.

Third, I am intrigued by the introduction of ‘Slants’, which is the word the author uses for the accounts by Adam More of his voyages, interleaved with the major line of narrative—these interludes or slants that eventually become fused in the overall work remind me forcefully of a famous poem by Emily Dickinson: “There's a certain Slant of light,/That oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes –/Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –?We can find no scar,/But internal difference –/Where the Meanings, are…/ None may teach it –“ It seems to me that in the absent traces of ‘scars,’ the novel is a profound meditation on this internal difference where ‘the meanings’ are. At some point in the novel, Juliette observes that the state of nature is best represented by a tropical island. Even so, this tantalizing glimpse into ‘the state of nature,’ an apparently idyllic Caribbean island, is only a disappearing glimpse of the monstrous sublime In an apparent somnambulist beauty.

Finally, one of the most pressing philosophical-ethical motifs of the novel emerges out of the casual amorality of ordinary human life or the more radical amorality espoused by ‘Captain M’ in several of Adam More’s Slants (mirroring views and figures represented in Plato’s dialogues such as Callicles and Thrasymachus, that justice is really pure amorality, that, in fact, might alone is right: ““So the strong become weak by virtue of virtue?” “That’s right, More!” “And insolent murderers deserve men’s praise?”). The book takes us to this unimaginable state of nature—to the brink of the impossible in the hunt of a penny writer for the ‘truth’ of the undoing of the world.

As the different texts speak more and more intimately with and to each other and as the narratives overlap and converge, we come closer to the cataclysmic event that lies at the heart of these perspectives and that also resides in the margins and questions of life—does the state of nature reside in a mythical time of stasis-peace or a violent yet creative underlay that is really the omnipresent unrealized condition of ordinary somnambulist life? Or does it lie in the demonic reveries of Captain M, Nietzsche, etc., in, for example, the meaningless slaughter by Captain M of three isolationalist refugees and innocent puppy seals? Or again is it really all about the casual and not so casual repressive violence of the Gendarmerie, Colonial rapists, and its minions? Or finally does it lie in ‘the soul’ unrecognized and unrecognizable in the world of Captain M? I leave these questions open-ended as does the author, but they are nonetheless part of the fabric of this provocative and engaging work that I recommend enthusiastically to the reader.

Kevin Corrigan

Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities

Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Associated in Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, Emory University