Why I Love H(A)PPY
“If you comprehend, it is not God”
Toward the end of H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker, ****, an agent of the dystopian System says, "The line between what is human and what is perfect is an intangible." This is one of my favorite lines ever. Barker doesn't really trust words, she doesn't really trust people, and she certainly doesn't trust people using words. Nevertheless she writes, pushing novels to places I've never experienced before.
I think of the line between what is human and what is perfect in terms of the mathematical concept of projection. Often in mathematics, you project a higher dimensional object into a lower dimensional space. Think of the blueprints for a house. A house is a three dimensional object. The blueprints are a representation of that same object in two dimensional space. You could make a three dimensional scale model of the house but detailed blueprints are typically enough to show what a house is like, and because most of our communication and writing happens in two dimensional space (i.e. paper, computer screens), projection allows us to represent higher dimensional objects in ways they can be easily communicated. Or more exotically, wormholes are usually depicted as:
This isn’t what wormholes are really like; it’s a projection of a four dimensional object onto two dimensional space. Even so, this representation in two dimensions gives us some idea of what wormholes are like that I can post on a website.
Our experiences, emotions, ideas, what is human, exist in our minds like three dimensional objects, and the challenge of communication is one of projection. Language is not our experience, emotions, or ideas and so it can only represent them in limited ways. We have to project from three dimensions to two dimensions. It’s like holding a cylinder and casting its shadow onto a piece of paper. The shadow could look like a circle, or a rectangle, or a rectangle with rounded edges, but it will never look like a cylinder, because cylinders have more dimensions than the shadow. Mira A, the heroine of H(A)PPY, lives in a world defined by projection, where the shadows are more important than what casts them.
Perfection in the dystopian world of the System (and maybe our own world) is efficiency, quantified by the Chart, which measures the emotional and physiological stability of all the members of the System, and the net stability of the System itself. All things must be in Balance as measured by the Chart. Everyone works, but not too hard. Everyone participates in group where they share an interest, but they don’t get too close. Emotions come, and they turn away from them. Everything is in Balance. Everyone lives in the moment. It’s mindfulness/wellness culture taken to the extreme.
Life in the System is a projection of what is human. Time is smoothed out from human experience. The past, with its triumphs and regrets, and the future, with it’s hope and dread, are not useful to the perfect efficiency of the System, and are thus ignored. The dimensionality of what is human is reduced, and those that live in the System, the Young, live flattened lives fixed on the shadows of the Chart.
But while for the System, that which is human is sub-perfect, for Mira A that which is perfect is subhuman. Mira A recognize that the fullness of herself, the fullness of life and experience, are crushed by the perfect efficiency of the System. Instead of a simple cylinder, she holds an entire cathedral in her mind, which she is unable to express in the two dimensional world of the System. She knows perfection and humanity that the Chart can’t quantify. Perfection not just in efficiency but also in flaws and the terrible discipline it takes to master an incredible challenge. She sees perfection in the gaps between notes, and in the wonder of the inexpressible cathedral in her mind. Ultimately, perfection is in and from the mysterious being worshiped in that cathedral. Mira A is unwilling to let her humanity be confined by the godless efficiency of the System, and the System, needing the compliance of all the Young to stay in Balance, fights back.
At the same time, Nicola Barker, the author, is fighting a system of her own: the conventions of literature, the formatting of books, and the restraints of language to convey all of life. Barker isn't content to let emotion, voice, and tone only be expressed through black and white marks on a page. H(A)PPY is alive with color, showing emotions, and changes in emotion, and the slippery ambiguity present in every interaction.
The book spirals out of control as the System loses its grip on Mira A and different fonts, colors, sizes, equations, and emptiness fill the pages.
Neither Barker nor Mira A is satisfied with a System of language and expression that restricts their full humanity. Neither is able to remake the Systems they fight against, but Mira A pushes the System until it breaks and Barker pushes the novel until it breaks. And yet they know. They know a different perfection. And know this knowing this can never be projected to lower dimensions. So instead of fighting, in the very end of the novel they are reconciled to the stillness, the gaps, and the rests, and they softly embrace silence.
...Yet Nicola Barker has a follow up novella, I AM SOVEREIGN. After embracing silence, she still writes, but with reservation, “The Author has been prey to ‘mixed feelings’ about the novel, as a form, ever since completing her last work (H(A)PPY) which - to all intents and purposes - destroyed the novel (as a form) for the Author.” I understand these mixed feelings. Barker is an author and I, too, aspire to write, but at the same time, neither of us believe in the capacity of language to convey what is truly important. Mira A’s search for the cathedral is one for God, but as Saint Augustine says, “if you comprehend, it is not God.” The Apostle Paul writes that the ways of God are inscrutable.
So why write? Why write if what we want to say is both unknowable and incommunicable? Well, for one, it’s fun. But also, while we can’t always communicate exactly what is, we can point and direct toward the silence where we hear the still, small voice of God.
