In the small years of the nineteenth century, the traveling cloth broker and self-taught utopian Charles Fourier surveyed the state of the French working classes and decided that humans were, by and large, worse off than animals. After all, he reasoned, “beavers, bees, wasps, ants… are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia,” yet they busily erect dams and collect pollen because “God has provided them with a social mechanism which… causes happiness to be found in industry.” With humans exhibiting no such zeal for their labors, Fourier was forced to wonder why God could not have “accorded us the same favor as these animals?”
Fourier’s answer was, predictably, social rather than theological. Civilization, in his view, had damned workers to lives of travail by promoting an unthinking “social mechanism.” In response, he developed a system of “attractive labor” in which workers would be paid dividends on profit rather than wages and would labor alongside friends in workshops that sported all “the allurements of elegance and cleanliness.” Workers’ tasks would also rotate eight times a day—“it being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labor.” Several Fourier acolytes set up short-lived communities in the United States, but later thinkers approached him with bemused skepticism. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin devoted an entire “konvolut” of his Arcades Project to Fourier but nonetheless conceded, “Only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only under its sun, can one conceive of Fourier’s fantasy materialized.”
Benjamin’s tender dismissal seems to provide, with uncanny precision, the conceit for Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys, which follows the inventor and philosopher J. A. Etzler in his fateful attempt to establish an ideal community in sun-scorched Trinidad, during that summery mid-century decade of the 1840s.
Like Fourier, the fictitious Etzler mixes strident moralizing with a cocksure belief in the redemptive power of rationality. “Zee problem wiss men since antiquity,” we hear him declare in his cartoony German accent, “is zat zey do not reason. Zey do not sink.” But Etzler, we learn, has something more than reason and sinking at his disposal. He claims to have developed an apparatus called the Satellite, a sort of perpetual-motion machine that draws its power from “Mother Nature” by utilizing “only the most rudimentary” of scientific principles. Once transported across the Atlantic, the Satellite promises to obviate the need for men and women to suffer the usual drudgeries of tropical settlement, such as clearing land and crystallizing sugar cane.
Etzler’s machines are demonstrated several times during the novel; each trial is a farcical failure. Nonetheless, he manages to attract a reasonably committed band of followers and investors in a London-based joint-stock company called the Tropical Emigration Society, and they set off for Trinidad.
One of the families along for the ride is the third-class Tucker clan, whose “papee” has assisted with Etzler’s engineering projects, and whose fifteen-year-old son Willy narrates most of the story. Earnest, gangly, and besotted by hummingbirds, Willy is mildly “mongoosed” by Etzler along with everyone else, but the mute, lucid, and darkly beautiful Marguerite Whitechurch—niece of prominent Society members—quickly disabuses him of his enthusiasm. “There’s no infinity when it comes to mechanical function,” she reminds him, “for the simple fact of friction.”
Soon, whatever interest Willy retains in his family’s tropical emigration depends on his passion for Marguerite, and perhaps on the glimmer of messianic egalitarianism embedded within the Society’s utopian vision. Their trysts down in the hold occasion both candlelit encomia to Marguerite’s bone structure (“the crimson pools of light spilt out over the ridges of her clavicles”) and redistributions of Catalonian ham to steerage passengers.
In seeing through Etzler’s bogus mechanics, Marguerite appears to have succeeded with simple arithmetic where many others, some presumably with professional training, have failed. Willy’s father also knows the score, true, but all he’s looking for is a ticket out—“The only important thing is that we have something to believe in.” If all this taxes the reader’s credulity, it’s only because Etzler lacks the magnetism that might explain his followers’ ovine acquiescence. He comes off as a bumbling Teutonic charlatan, wanting for charm, resourcefulness, and subtlety. Benjamin may have been right about that heady mid-nineteenth century, but absent a compelling leader the novel’s cult conceit feels like a nonstarter.
Etzler’s sketchy and unpersuasive depiction is a symptom, alas, of a bigger stylistic issue. In his previous novels and stories Antoni has channeled his plots through the voices of colorful raconteurs to dazzling effect (My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales is a particularly radiant example). Here, however, the deputized narrator smothers the story. Delivered decades later to his adolescent son as they sail back to England for a series of hummingbird taxidermy lectures (and to call on the lost Margeurite), Willy’s account reads like a forced march of already-tired clichés. Corridors are invariably recorded as “dingy hallways”; the mob is always a “boisterous crowd”; the train comes to a ”screeching halt.” And, to add inconsistency to injury, every now and then Willy wades into a morass of haute literary limning: we are assured that “dusty leaves were stirring gentle in the breeze, and with the dim light of the unseen moon they cast mottled shadows cross the ground.”
Perhaps all this banality is supposed to offset the more arresting side of the novel’s form—namely, the postmodern interspersing of racy emails between one Robert Antoni, American author, and a Miss Ramsol, the imperious head archivist of Trinidad and Tobago. The character Antoni has come to Trinidad in the late 2000s to do research on his family’s emigration there (yes, the Tuckers), and on the shadowy inventor with whom they crossed the Atlantic. This story-of-the-story’s-making provides some tickling vignettes about Antoni’s lustful and unscrupulous attempts to use Miss Ramsol’s off-limits photocopier, but their value as comic recitative wanes as the joke goes on (and on).
Still other flourishes await. Miss Ramsol supplies Antoni with some historical newspaper articles she finds in the archives, and these are used to fill in parts of Willy’s story. Then there are the letters, the maps and doodles supposedly taken from Willy’s father’s notebook that depict the Society’s doomed beachhead in Trinidad, and then too there are the intriguing asterisks that lead to endnotes that lead—drumroll—to a web site containing a film, a script of a play by Etzler, and other literary doodads.
And what, prithee, does all this multimedia flag-planting do for the novel? By the time Willy and his family arrive in Trinidad and disaster befalls their tiny settlement, the answer is clear: not a whole lot. The syrupy romance at the heart of the story doesn’t seem self-conscious enough to cohere with the maximalist hijinks, and the novel ends up feeling baggy. As Flies to Whatless Boys is at its best when it dares to inspect that Benjaminian sunniness, the madness that haunts the precincts of rationalism. To do this it needs neither tangential videos nor ribald emails, only good storytelling and characters who won’t vanish when viewed from the side. If Antoni seeks to bring the obsolescent print novel into the terra nova of digital transmedia, then he would do well to heed the lesson of his ill-fated dupes in the Tropical Emigration Society: if you forsake home and hearth for the undiscovered country, you better have a damn good reason.
