Haldane’s Demand: On Zain Khalid's "Brother Alive"
Zain Khalid | Brother Alive | Grove Press | 2022 | 352 Pages
1
We’re in someone’s kitchen; a kid is sitting on the floor. Presumably theirs. Whoever they are, they’re not here. The kid can’t see us, not now; but in the future, he knows we’re here, for he, narrating, has brought us in. (Later, we learn that the kid’s name is Youssef.) We’re in a mosque, in the kitchen. Or near a mosque, at least; and the Imam is there. Night. It feels like night; the words tumble over each other like night. “Time unwinds and winds.” And with Youssef lurks a still-shadowed presence—first a beetle, then a child, but still somehow neither—which Youssef later names “Brother.” Whatever it, or he, is, this Brother is certainly significant: His name is Youssef’s first word, and this, in turn, is the first thing he has chosen to tell us, here, before the first chapter. It is already clear that Brother will be with him for the rest of his life.
Thus begins novelist Zain Khalid’s debut, Brother Alive, a smooth interleaving of science-fiction with high-resolution realism and hallucinatory phantasmagoria. Now, firstly, it’s a good book—released this summer, it’s yet too early to say great or not; for me, at least, that type of judgement becomes possible only on second read. But I will say, even now, in the novel’s infancy, that it’s one of those books that appear only seldomly and bellow, from the first page, from the first line, that they require, beyond the valence-judgements expected of a review, earnest, laborious exploration.
From here on, then, I will say no more of what the book does well or badly. Rather, I am concerned exclusively with what on earth Khalid is doing, in terms of his book’s interventions within interwoven scientific and philosophical traditions. For it does intervene in both, in ways at once original and potentially impactful, with the right reception; but like any attribution of “originality,” this one will require me to chart the history with which Khalid converses. This exploration, then, begins with an excavation.
2
“An artist must understand his subject matter.” This seemingly banal demand, from speculatively inclined biochemist J.B.S. Haldane in his 1923 lecture to the Cambridge Heretics, modestly titled “Daedalus of Science and the Future.” After an aside on ferroconcrete architecture, Haldane clarifies: “we must see that possible poets are instructed, as their masters [Milton and Shelley] were, in science and economics.” Haldane, master of the loaded phrase—at the tip of his pen, a recommendation that writers receive education in the sciences does not simply mean that they should take science courses.
Rather, this recommendation is the capstone atop seven pages of lead-up, in which Haldane describes what he views as a paradigm shift in the sciences: Now that Einstein’s relativity theories have demonstrated that “space, time, and matter are shadows of the fifth dimension,” and his friend Kurt Gödel has proven that no logical system can be both consistent and complete, the naïve, optimistic materialism that has ruled scientific praxis since Newton can no longer be maintained. “In consequence,” Haldane predicts, “Kantian idealism will become the banal working hypothesis of the physicist and finally of all the educated men.”
And so, to follow Haldane through his ever-morphing words, an education “in science and economics,” one that will allow real understanding of the newly industrialized and relativized world, now means that writers must become adepts of Immanuel Kant’s metaphysical anxiety, in which the world we can see and measure—in Kant’s terms, “phenomena”—is but the surface expression of a whole other world that we cannot see and cannot contact, the world of “noumena.”
This is an H-bomb of a proposition; Kant’s friends didn’t call him “the All-Destroyer” [der Allzermalmende] for nothing. And Kant recognized what he’d done from the very beginning of his critical project: In the first sentence of the preface of the 1787 first edition of his first Critique, he bluntly states that his philosophy is a response to humans’ irresistible lust to investigate questions they can’t hope to answer—although, by careful reason, we can find the right divisions of concepts to allow us, at least, to ask those unanswerable questions.
Kant immediately realized his misstep, and by the second edition, this first sentence had disappeared. But the cat that portends thought’s Armageddon had already incinerated its bag, and his philosophy adhered to the impetus of this fateful first sentence even after it was stricken from publication, and so “reason” came to mean a hopeless, endlessly categorizing grasp toward the unknowable.
This categorizing impulse, tending toward the creation of smaller and smaller divisions of objects and concepts, created a situation in which what is could not be defined with enough certainty to decide what ought to be done about it, and the once-so-obvious division between description and ethics crumbled. Friedrich Nietzsche, a devoted reader of Kant, felt the dissolution of this boundary more acutely than any philosopher before, and in response, he collapsed description and ethics into one huge object. And so he wrote that everyone must love their fate, that the only “good” things are those which affirm life rather than deny it, and that his prophesied Übermensch would reach death and yell, “Again!”, because, in Nietzsche’s view, Kant had removed any possibility of an ethics that did not say, “If it exists, then it’s good, without exception.”
It took the harder sciences a while to come to such a destabilized point, but Kurt Gödel carried them there only a few years after Haldane’s lecture to the Cambridge Heretics. The classic explanation of his incompleteness theorems begins, in the spirit of Kant’s first Critique, with an unanswerable but necessary question: “If the Barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself, who shaves the Barber?” If he shaves himself, he doesn’t; if he doesn’t, then he must. And so any logical system in which this question can be answered is inconsistent. Where it can’t be asked, the system is incomplete. (A simplification, of course, of Gödel’s legendary method, which involved the “Gödelization” of propositions into prime numbers—a method around which I, regrettably, have not wrapped my head and which I cannot explain.)
If we adopt Haldane’s frame of mind, then this is what writers in the 21st Century have to wrestle with, if they are to “understand [their] subject matter.” Immanuel Kant’s philosophy has blown a swath of self-deconstructing rubble into the future of critical philosophy, and science and math after Einstein and Gödel have followed suit.
To boil all this down: We have reached a point in history in which, because of fundamental destabilizations of the powers of philosophical and scientific description, there can be no consensus reality in which to ground a story, so novels can swerve one of two ways: They can root themselves in the ideologically overcoded realm of “lived experience.” This is by far the easier route; hence the dominance, at least in the mainstream fiction market, of autofiction. Or they can engage in extensive world-building, to endow their narratives, in the absence of a stable standard, with proprietary realities.
3
Science-fiction authors and readers are used to the necessity of world-building; those genres have worked that way since their inceptions. But literary fiction is relatively new to this game, having been dominated by realism, or formal innovations within a realist paradigm—with some trailblazing exceptions like William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Percival Everett—for several generations. So when a writer like Khalid emerges, combining extensive physical and philosophical world-building with realist aesthetics, criticism must realize it’s dealing with, if not a new, at least a very young, still pupating beast. That of, say, Haldanian literature.
“I unwittingly concocted alternate realities and retained my inventions over the objective, documented, dull truth,” admits Khalid’s protagonist and narrator, Youssef, near the beginning of the novel, recalling his adolescence. Though he recognizes that his “brain’s forgeries didn’t even make sense half the time,” Youssef is plagued by an ailment prophesied by Nietzsche and, some fifty years later, Haldane: Rather than any philosophical objection to truth, Youssef can’t recognize the boundary between an implied, independent reality and that skewed by his own strange physiology.
As Nietzsche predicted that the “new philosopher” after him would be a physiologist, and Haldane foresees that the shift from materialism to Kantianism creates a situation in which “physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics,” Khalid delivers his Youssef into the future they heralded. Having been born with a mysterious, prion-based neurological illness, Youssef plays host to a parasitic entity which he calls, simply, “Brother.” Without stable physical form and invisible to all but Youssef, Brother takes an unlimited range of shapes and eats, rather than physical food, whatever scraps of knowledge Youssef chooses to feed him—books, feelings, memories—so that Youssef experiences the world as a shaky collection of fragments onto which he cannot impose a complete and consistent order.
Physiology, that is, has invaded and destroyed mathematical physics and all the rest of reason’s seemingly objective attempts to create a totalized vision of the world. For Youssef, Brother is “a near-constant proof, no different from the irrationality of the number zero, that in our world the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.” As Kant required in that fatal first sentence of his first Critique’s preface, and as Nietzsche, then Gödel, confirmed, Youssef’s world is split into such infinitesimally complex configurations of reachable and unreachable pieces, unpatternable by any single logical system, that he must begin at this seemingly final point: There is no truth. But at this moment in the novel, he’s not yet a sophomore in high school.
And so it becomes clear that Khalid does not mean to allegorize or demonstrate the philosophical and scientific currents which Haldane requires writers to master; Brother Alive actually makes a substantive intervention in those traditions. Youssef, through Khalid, has had to grasp the destabilizations of truth that Kant and Gödel introduced by the age of fourteen—and he treks further into that uncharted, unchartable territory for another three hundred pages.
Now, this is not to say that Khalid has intended to make these moves within philosophical and scientific history—nor that it matters what his intention might be. Rather, as Khalid himself tells the New York Times, Brother Alive is “not an answer to anything, I simply want to give voice to the reality.” And so, precisely as Haldane recommends, he has gobbled up all of that reality that he can reach, and he has fed it into his Brother as Youssef feeds his Brother.
4
Hence the misreading, at the end of Kirkus Reviews’ otherwise fairly nuanced, though scarcely above blurb-length review, that Khalid’s novel “gets lost in the details.” To the contrary, Khalid is quite plainly aware that a contemporary novelist, regardless their genre or purview, is obliged to build their novel’s world, or, if not, to reject pointedly such a construction project—whether in favor of the ideological authority of “lived experience,” or to pursue a Beckett-like hyperminimalism. A choice, say, between science-fiction and fantasy. To “give voice to the reality” is to realize that reality isn’t simply given, and then to build it from scratch.
Thus Khalid’s book brims with detailed references pop-cultural and arcane, spiritual and neurological, citation lists and scientific exposés. A globe-spanning role-call of the novelists Youssef feeds to Brother might appear directly before a still-wider syllabus of the readings required of Youssef and his two human brothers, Dayo and Iseul, by their adopted guardian, Imam Salim; and then, mere pages later, Youssef might find himself slamming IPAs in a sports bar and watching the Knicks while Brother, now shaped like Crash Bandicoot, begs cartoonishly to be fed a juicy memory.
But, rather than giving his readers any solid ground, Khalid builds his world so thoroughly that he destabilizes it in precisely the way that, according to a strict interpretation of Haldane’s demand, a writer must: As the novel progresses, Youssef builds toward a worldview that allows him to live and function without believing in any sort of immutable truth—to live, that is, in earnest acceptance of the insights of Einstein, Gödel, Kant and his children (though Youssef does not narrate his endeavor in these terms). His first major step: “The past is illusory, but essential. If you don’t participate in its constant rewriting, you drown in its inevitability.” Thus he finally allows himself to search for his own past—for information about his unknown parents and the provenance of his companion-illness, Brother. This liberation, on Youssef’s part, opens the novel’s world to more open discussion of Khalid’s central invention: Brother, and psychic parasites like him.
Khalid divulges early on that an Imam and businessman named Ibrahim had attempted, when Imam Salim was still a young man, to develop a neurologic compound that would make nonbelievers into devout Muslims. And some relation to Ibrahim—Khalid withholds precise explanation of the events for later—has left Salim, Youssef, and an unknown number of others ill with a permanent, parasitic double. Their respective Brothers feed on their thoughts and experiences—first those that they offer, then those that they don’t.
Imam Salim leaves a hint as to the infectiousness of Youssef’s illness when he’s a young teenager: As Youssef becomes infatuated with a visiting Imam from Dubai, Salim cautions him that he can’t love in the same way as other people, and that he suffers from an ailment spread by “intentional intimacy.” Indeed, Imam Salim’s own clandestine lover is afflicted by a disintegration of memory similar to that of the Imam himself.
Khalid, though, does not halt his exploration of the pluralizing effects of intimacy at this speculative medical point: Later, Youssef remarks that his brother Iseul’s girlfriend seems to have become somehow plural. As his sibling-disease has somehow pluralized Youssef, so that he shares a mind with Brother, love in whatever form pluralizes its erstwhile singular participants, so that physiological illness may be spread, not simply “from a simple touch,” but by “giving of yourself, being understood.” And Khalid goes still further: The air near a cold character is “ten degrees colder than the surrounding air.” A man with a dark past seems to darken the sun when present. When a character with a shadowed past walks into a room, it seems that all history’s mysteries swirl in the gases around him.
That is, Khalid has written a world in which the once-firm categories of description have destabilized to such a degree that physiology does not stop at an individual’s skin. Neuroscience, aided by Karl Friston and his free-energy principle, has only recently—largely within the past decade—come upon this insight. Philosophy approached it with the 19th section of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, which proclaims that the individual will is the product of the combination and competition of various sensations and environmental impulses—a “society of souls.” A body’s physiology, then, incorporates both that biological body and its surroundings, including other bodies. “It’s almost like the traditional taxonomy,” Khalid explains to the Times, “isn’t really applicable.”
Accordingly, Khalid’s characters swim into and out of each other, and each is singular and plural at once, and, at another level, the novel’s words perform several sets of similar movements. Phrases said or written by one character appear in the mouth of another, then another, sometimes hundreds of pages apart, tying them together by their not-quite-proprietary written throats and typographic tongues.
At a still more metatextual level, labyrinthine wordplay unites spoken and unspoken layers of plot and swirls disparate tones in the holes left by its perforation of the lexicon—for example, the word “abortorium,” clearly used to describe an arboretum, would seem like a simple typo if a child hadn’t died a few pages prior. Yet still the word evokes the feeling of reading a typo, calling attention to the destabilizing elements implicitly present in the confidence readers must have in editors and proofreaders. Khalid plants hints at his own writing method and even his name in descriptions of his novel’s various Imams, implying that he has pluralized himself in order to learn how to pluralize his written creations. “For me, the boundary between art and myself,” he admits to the Times, “it’s not healthy.”
Thus Khalid has charted a novelist’s route out of the central problem of Kant’s critical philosophy, the mind’s irresistible need to question things it can’t possibly know. By accepting, with Gödel, that none of his characters, in the literary logic that constructs them, can be consistent and complete, and that they must oscillate between overlapping, at times conflicting states of singularity and plurality, Khalid has responded to Kant by reversing his central impulse. Where Kant systematically divides conceptual categories in search of precision in thought, Khalid declares the porousness and constant mutability of those divisions, allowing him to write psychological and physical relationships with dynamics little-explored outside the more adventurous segments of contemporary neuroscience and philosophy.
5
J.B.S. Haldane knew he had set literature a monstrous task when he demanded that its practitioners become experts, not only in the bare facts of the sciences, but in their ever-developing Kantian underpinnings, which destabilize the bareness of those very facts. He prefaces his lecture with a description of two images which, he explains, have invaded his vision as he has sat to write: In the first, a group of soldiers in the background of a battle scene, 1915, are engulfed by ravenous masses of smoke. In the second, also during the war, three Europeans stand outside a building in India, staring up at an exploding star in the Milky Way. Inside the building is a dance. Though no one knew the cause of that giant burst of light, Haldane speculates, “perhaps…what we were watching that evening was the detonation of a world on which too many men came out to look at the stars when they should have been dancing.”
That is, each image represents, for Haldane, a piece of “the case against science.” But he is less interested in this type of ethical judgement than in the more immediate question of how to react to the changing nature of scientific practice. Regardless of what he expects from scientists themselves, though, he demands with blunt precision that artists understand the world in which they live and, whether what they see fills them with pessimism or optimism, to render that world beautiful to those with whom they share it.
Often, in those who follow his directives—consciously or not—this division between understanding and rendering beautiful takes the shape of a division between content and expression: Imagine Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s gorgeous descriptions of absolutely bleak countryside Armageddons, Chris Abani’s masterful poetics of torture and war.
In Khalid, the expression is the content, and vice versa, and each reveals the beauty of its utterly cynical understanding with tightly braided relentlessness. Brother is Brother. He is its prose and its body, and still the two are separate, and each gorges itself on its observed world with equal ravenousness, only to regurgitate those observations with the desperate poetics of a parasite which must convince its host that the infection is, after all, worth its symptoms.