You Shall Know Our Velocity has a strange history: Meant as a fictional memoir, it was released in 2002, with an apparently strangely textured hardcover and the opening paragraph, announcing the author's untimely death, printed on the front. In May of 2003, the book was renamed Sacrament and an extra chapter -- supposedly written by the dead author's friend at a later time to rebut details of the original book -- was inserted two thirds of the way through. In September of 2003, the book was again retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! (note the exclamation mark) for the paperback edition (the one I read), complete with the extra chapter and a note on the cover that states, "This paperback edition includes significant changes and additions". Anyone who has read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius knows that Dave Eggers has a quirky sense of style, so it begs the question: Is You Shall Know Our Velocity! an innovative comment on the nature of memoir or a self-indulgent art piece?
As I often do, I read some old newspaper reviews of this book after finishing it and it was interesting to me that critics were mostly underwhelmed by the original version, but since I haven't found a review of the "complete" version, their critique seems nearly irrelevant. One thing I did find interesting: Writing in Salon, Peter Kurth notes of the two main characters, "Will (Thought) has a friend called Hand (Action)". I hadn't noticed that, but again, is that truly clever or fatally ironic?
In Hand's rebuttal chapter, in which he lists all of the parts that Will had made up, he writes:
I realize how difficult the world makes it for those who want to lead and talk about unusual lives in a candid way, in a first-person way. I understand that to sublimate a life in fictions, to spread the ashes of one's life over a number of stories and books, is considerably better-accepted, and protects one greatly from certain perils -- notably, the rousing of anger or scorn of all the bitches of the world (more often male than female). But then again, I don't know -- maybe he wasn't afraid of that sort of thing. Maybe he just wanted to fictionalize for his own entertainment. Maybe he found it artful.
As this was Eggers' first novel, coming on the heels of his debut tragic memoir, I have to believe that this is a comment on the author's own experience -- so did he write this book as an example of how he could have sublimated and fictionalised his own losses if he had wanted to, or did he mean it to be "artful"? Is this an example of meta-ironic hipsterism, or did Eggers purposefully capture that flannel-and-beard ethos?
Maybe the only solution is to consider You Shall Know Our Velocity! on its own terms, and so far as that goes, it's an interesting enough story: After Will and Hand's friend Jack dies in a car accident, the two friends decide to spend a week flying around the world and giving away $32k (all that Will has left of an $80k windfall). Problems with weather and visas and flight schedules force them to scale back the scope of the trip (in the end they only make it to Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia) and giving away the money doesn't fulfill them as they had hoped. That's the book that the reviewers initially read, but the information that Hand later inserts throws the entire venture into a different light: Hand states that they never had a friend named Jack, so of course, the foundational concept of the book -- a trip born of grief -- is a lie; while Will blames Hand for a severe beating he received from three men (that has lingering neurological and physical effects, not to mention the grotesqueness of his face that impacts how everyone they meet interacts with Will), the beating didn't happen; Will's mother, who he calls several times during the trip, had died years earlier; Will never had a brother, someone he refers to a few times; Will still has the remainder of the $80k to go home to, undermining the secondary conceit of the plot; and since Hand points out that a ghostwriter had added the first paragraph of the original edition, describing how Will and his mother died in a ferry accident, he casts doubt on the authorship of the entire book. The writing -- especially the conversations -- was clever and I was interested in the story…but this wasn't great until I started thinking about everything off the page; everything I've written about here. But, of course, what I'm thinking about is what Eggers wanted me to think about, so does that make it great?
In the end, I still don't know if this was art or just a guy with a bag on his head.
Here are some passages I liked that didn't fit in the review:
Out my portal the plane wing was silver and shining like it would have fifty years earlier, carrying happier and simpler people. All of them smoking and speaking loudly -- musically barking every last word -- and wearing expensive hats.
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Quantum physics is saying that atoms aren't so hard-and-fast, just sitting there like fake fruit or something touchable and solid. They're mercurial, on a sub-atomic level. They come and go. They appear and disappear. They occupy different places at once. They can be teleported. Scientists have actually done this...So if these atoms can exist in different places at once -- and I don't think any physicists argue about this -- this guy Deutsch argues that everything exists in a bunch of places at once. We're all made of the same electrons and protons, right, so if they exit in many places at once, and can be teleported, then there's gotta be multiple us's, and multiple worlds, simultaneously.
I like that ^^ passage both because I always like passages about quantum mechanics and because earlier on the same day I read it I had this facebook conversation with Delight after she posted this link:
We didn't solve anything there, but isn't a chat about quantum mechanics over your morning coffee a totally non-hipster moment?
I am here to express the opinion, no one's but mine -- not Will's, not this publisher's, not the wretched ghostwriter's -- that those who prefer fiction to nonfiction prefer game shows to the news. It's a decadent mind, a mind that has known ennui and passed through it to something more dangerous, that wants fictional contraptions over more difficult -- sometimes more obvious and clear, other times utterly incomprehensible -- truth of fact. But this is the opinion of a man who knows nothing, and it's an opinion that I throw at you to make you angry.
_____
Lord God, don't you think I could use these things against you? Don't you know that what you can do, I can do? Don't you know that I can summon your own winds, move the plates of this earth, just as you do? This earth is not yours; it's ours. Why do you play with us when you know I will do the same, and worse, to you? I will bring the winds of your world to bear against you. I will take your winds and twist them and throw them to you. I will mix them with your oceans, I will wrench them together and send them up to you and watch you drown in screaming waters of the blood and bones of your favorites. Look at you. Look at you! You all hairless and white and burning black and red -- what makes you so sure I won't hurt you the same way? What makes you so sure? I can take your skies and rip them in great swaths and crumple them, swallow them, turn them to fire. What makes you think I won't stalk you to the corners of the earth and make you pay for this? What makes you so sure that I won't bring it all back to you? I shall have waters of blood cast you away! I will sit upon the mount and send judgement down upon you. You shall cleave to my house. Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not be able to pull it off; and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know! And what shall ye say in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from below? To whom will ye flee for help? And where will ye have your glory? --
Oh Lord I am spinning and wet -- I will forgive you everything before if you allow us this, if you allow us this. If you should allow us this, if you should invest us with the necessary strength and then clear our path, so shall I honor thee and praise thee across the earth. But if thee shall take him away I will know vengeance --
^^That sounds like a totally unironic rant from someone who has bargained with God, and in a way, it redeems the cleverness.
I don't know what that was, all that dancing -- what we're allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do. What are we allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do?
And on a final final note, the only other Dave Eggers I've read is What is the What, a fictionalised memoir of a Sudanese refugee who Eggers had met. This notion of the relationship between memoir and fiction is obviously an important one to Eggers and it has made for some interesting thinking for me.
