By THIRSTY
Will Eaves is
the author of five novels and two poetry collections. His work has appeared
in The Guardian, The New Yorker and The Yale Review and
has been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Encore
Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Wellcome Book Prize and the James Tait Black Prize,
and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. His new novel, Murmur, was awarded the Republic of
Consciousness Prize. Previously the Arts Editor of The Times
Literary Supplement, Eaves
now teaches writing at the University of Warwick and lives in London where Stay
Thirsty Magazine visited with him for these Five Questions.
STAY THIRSTY: In
your latest novel, Murmur, you draw inspiration from the life of Alan
Turing, the father of artificial intelligence. What motivated you to explore
Turing’s history and then confront your protagonist with many of the same
challenges?
WILL EAVES: I didn’t start writing with Turing in mind, which is
a way of admitting that for this writer novels don’t have one genesis. They
tend to accrete, like clouds of gas falling in on themselves. I was
thinking about the inner life (a relationship had just ended) and taking some
consolation in the way certain writers use appearance and behaviour to deepen
character. Perhaps, in reading as in life, one gets more interested in people
who are inaccessible, or whose surface activity acts as a kind of inscrutable protection
for the unconscious which – if one thinks about it – can’t be brought to the surface if it is to remain unconscious.
The
idea of articulating the unconscious is a logical paradox, isn’t it? Once I had
that in mind, I began to think more deeply about hidden processes, and to read
more widely about paradox and self-reference, which led me to meta-mathematics,
Kurt Gödel and Erwin Schrödinger (a beautiful writer), true statements that
can’t be proved, and finally Turing. I conceived the idea of a book about a
Turing avatar trying to access the inaccessible (dreams and unconscious
processes) to make sense of a terrible change in personal circumstances: see
below. It also occurred to me that, in the future, a conscious machine would
have to grapple with the nature of the unconscious. We tend to treat AI as a
sort of stand-in for many fears about automation and mechanical capacity. We don’t
think as carefully about the limits real consciousness would impose on that
capacity.
STAY THIRSTY: Why
does homosexuality play such an important role in your novel?
WILL
EAVES: Turing was gay, and he was tortured for having sex
with a man. He’d “done the state some service” in the Second World War and this
is how he was rewarded. The decryption of the German naval Enigma code at
Bletchley Park was a complex team effort building on earlier work by Polish
mathematicians, but Turing was crucial in the early scaling-up stages. Those
cryptanalysts at Bletchley enabled us to locate the German U-boats and keep the
Atlantic shipping lanes open. Without those ships, Britain would have starved. Six
years after the end of the war, Turing picked up a young man in Manchester in 1951,
had a brief affair with him, got caught, convicted of Gross Indecency, and was
sentenced to “organotherapy”: a punitive hormonal regimen of oestrogen
injections that humiliated him physically and mentally. He was a fit, healthy, contented
male homosexual. Two years later, he was dead.
Homosexuality was illegal
until 1967 in Britain. Its expression until then depended on an uneasy commerce
between official proscription (outlawed behaviour) and unofficial knowledge
(covert assignations, euphemisms, unspoken awareness): codes, if you like. So, being
homosexual is built into the Turing story at both the biographical and
conceptual-logical levels. Sexuality is also, of course, what Turing would have
called a variable. Different values attach to it according to circumstances.
The most dangerous of those values tend to come from religious literalists
whose conservatism is a projection into the neurotic age of ancient tribal
taboos. They are terrified of sex and mortality, because both are facts beyond
the reach of proof. Ask Othello, or indeed Jesus.
I’ve been asked if I’m angry about what happened to Turing. Personally,
no – because I’m not surprised. Ordinary people can do the most appalling
things to other people if they feel they’ve been given permission to do them.
This is what we’re facing now. Does anger
about what happened to Turing go along with a still-extant fear of homosexuality? Yes. Both are fears of the possible, the
evident but inadmissible, the true. Could his tragedy happen again? Of course.
Scratch the surface of liberal advances in human rights, and you’ll find out
how vulnerable we are. Because the advances we’ve made are all predicated on socio-economic
stability, which crumbles easily. Remember the men but lately thrown from tall
buildings by ISIS – a fundamentalist insurgency shaped in a power vacuum for
which we, in the West, bear a great deal of responsibility. Take away our own
socio-economic stability, and you will find that the civilising tendencies of
the post-war settlement – hard-won gay rights, women’s rights, minority
rights, international development policy – will disappear as mist in the
morning sun.
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| Will Eaves |
STAY THIRSTY: How
do you use memory and consciousness to flesh out your story and your
characters?
WILL EAVES: In the AI field, Turing is still best known for the
Turing Test, a thought experiment which crops up in “Computing Machinery and
Intelligence”, written in 1951 for the psychology journal Mind. The Turing Test pairs a powerful computer with a human being
and runs a blind interrogation of both. You ask the computer and the person the
same set of questions, and if you can’t tell from the responses which is the
computer and which is the person, then you may, if you choose, assign to the
computer human-level intelligence. The trouble is that you’re assigning
intelligence to witnessed behaviour (behaviour that requires a conscious interpreter to make sense of
it). Which means that you don’t necessarily know what’s going on inside the
computer itself, and behaviour on its own, one realises, can’t tell you if
there’s an inner life at work or if you’re just dealing with a well-designed
zombie. And I think someone like Turing, succumbing to his treatment, must have
thought: “there’s something missing from my world-picture”. Which would be the
inner life. A further question then arises: “Where do I find room for it?”
The answer Murmur gives is a
sequence of dreams and letters, framed by two extracts from a fictional
journal. The dreams or hallucinations brought on by the drug are revisitings of
key moments and relationships in Alec Pryor’s life. (Alec is an avatar of
Turing and not the man himself because Turing was a genius. I didn’t want to be
attributing to a genius thoughts and words he’s not around to repudiate.) Alec
relives his Platonic relationship with a schoolfriend who died of TB, his
wrangling with the formal limits of mathematics, Cambridge before the Second
World War, and the experience of torture. At the same time, he speculates on
the future of thinking machines and his own likely fate. There’s a
correspondence in the book between Alec and the woman he met at Bletchley Park
– a version of the real-life Joan Clarke – and together Alec and June try to
break the code of his dreams. The letters are a sort of cri-de-coeur, but also a cry of victory for personal integrity.
Meanwhile the dreams seem to move towards their own life and reality. They
treat memory like a paradoxical jigsaw-puzzle in which the remembered image or
incident changes as you try to put it back together. There’s a key sequence in
the book which imagines this in personal terms: Pryor visits his mother, who has
turned into the Wicked Queen from Snow
White and the Seven Dwarves. She’s a cartoon, but she goes off-script,
because she has developed agency. She is not a locked-in memory. She is “an
idea with ideas of her own”.
STAY THIRSTY: What
role does love play in your writing?
WILL EAVES: Two thoughts. One is about general practice: I tend always
to write to someone. Often, a friend
I love very much. That sense of address helps me think of the book (or the
poem) as something I need to write or to say. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t
bother. The wider world doesn’t need
any more books by me. I don’t have to
write anything. Who cares?
The
second thought (about this novel) is simply that Murmur is all about love, and about how even the briefest taste of
it can send a life in one direction rather than another, or change that
direction and transform the “rules” of behaviour. Love is an encounter with the
fact of another person, who is someone else. Someone not obliged to confirm
anything about you. That sense of being shut out from the beloved is, finally,
the way back to them. June
in the book is distressed by Alec’s pain not because she feels it herself, but
because she can’t feel it. The situation is intimate because it’s remote. You
may be able to tell that I take an unfashionable view of sympathy, which is
that it’s a dangerous error: you can’t be in someone else’s shoes. (I’m
touching on something called the problem of other minds.) But the fact you
can’t get at what other people are feeling is the interesting part of human
encounters. Because it’s the “not quite” that matters.
STAY THIRSTY: As
a novelist, what key thoughts and feelings do you want your readers to be left
with after they finish reading Murmur?
WILL EAVES: Paradoxically,
an enlarged sense of sympathy. What it really
is. Which is: distance, understanding that doesn’t demand corroborating
experience, imagination, and trust.
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