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Scarlett Thomas: Thought experiments

08.06.07

It all starts with a book. Wayward postgrad Ariel Manto, juggling her PhD on thought experiments and a desultory affair with a married man, is astonished to locate in a secondhand bookshop a rare copy of The End of Mr Y by obscure Victorian writer Thomas E Lumas. The book, it is rumoured, is cursed—but, of course, that will not stop Ariel avidly reading it, though you would have thought she would know better given that her supervisor, also a Lumas fan, disappeared without explanation several months before.

This is the starting point for Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y (Canongate, July), an original fantasy adventure that propels Ariel into a parallel universe; it is also a thought experiment of its own, which debates the relationship between language, thought and matter in the vein of Derrida and Baudrillard.

"Mr Y is very much an adventure story," Thomas says. "I want people to be turning the pages, going: 'Oh my God, are they going to catch her?' At the university [she teaches creative writing at Kent], I always say to students that the key thing is to write about what is important to you, but you don't have to do it in a boring way. The toughest thing when I'm writing novels is to create a genuinely cause and effect-based, page-turning novel—it's like a puzzle. A lot of fiction is about getting from A to B in a plausible manner, but with this novel I was sitting in my office at the university, going: 'So Ariel has to time travel now. How the hell am I going to get her from B to A in a plausible manner?'"

Thomas also draws on theories from Stanislavsky, founder of method acting, for her characters, such as the intellectually ambitious, sexually promiscuous Ariel. "What Stanislavsky says is that we all want one overall thing, a 'superobjective'--it might be comfort, or security, or love, or freedom. Once you understand that about a character, you realise that people drive differently, wear different things in bed, and walk the dog differently, depending on what their superobjective is.

"Ariel's much more sexual than any character I've written before, and you could write about a character who has slightly degrading sex and it could be very negative, because they don’t care about themselves. But with Ariel, she's trying to transcend her body and live in the mind, so she doesn't really care about her body and she acts accordingly. I didn't feel sorry for her because I felt she had a higher aim. Ariel's superobjective is: 'I wish to know everything.'"

It's an ambition her author says she shares. "I'm very much someone who wants to work out the answers. I want to know what's outside the universe, what's at the end of time, and is there a God? But I think fiction's great for that--it's very close to philosophy."

Absorbed in the world of ideas is where she is often at her happiest: "At the moment the philosophy department [at Kent] has got a reading group and we've just started On Grammatology [by Derrida], so I'm re-reading that. The best day I had recently was when I switched off my email, sat down to read the chapter I had to read before 8 p.m. that evening, put some dissonant music on the stereo in my office and just read and thought, read and thought, completely lost in the world of the chapter: 'So, if deconstruction is like being in a house you're destroying while you're inside it, what would that mean?' It was wonderful."

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