All Souls 
by 

Javier Marías, 

 

Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

 

The Uses of Absurdity

All Souls College is a real place. At least I think it's a real place. It might be a film set. Like most Oxford people I have never been inside it. I know it has no students, only fellows. And I know that Hillaire Belloc was refused such a fellowship, probably because of his fetishistic Catholicism. Oh, and it has a library, The Codrington, which is particularly known for is history collection. And that's it.



In fact, Marias's All Souls has relatively little to do with All Souls College, but with an issue contained in many of its ancient volumes. The problem of 'other minds' is a perennial flower in the philosophical garden, one of particular importance ever since that awkward Frenchman Rene Descartes threw his tuppence of fertiliser into it in the 17th century. His 'I think therefore I am' notably lacks a way to get to 'You think too, and therefore are as well.' 

Philosophy has moved on from Descartes's solipsistic world, but not very far. As one of Marias's characters confides to his diary, "Life is still so medieval." We may be fairly certain that other people do think. But finding out what they think is something else. This sort of functional solipsism, virtually total uncertainty about what's actually going on in other people's heads, is what All Souls is about. It's not unlike Oxford and All Souls College really: we know it’s there but what goes on is a mystery better left alone.

This condition is fundamental to the structure of our world. From international politics to sexual politics, it dominates our lives. As Marias's unnamed protagonist sums it up: "Family resemblances notwithstanding, no man has ever known for certain that he was the father of his children. Between married couples, neither partner answers questions they don't want to answer, and so they ask each other very few." The porter at the Taylorian who lives in a different year every day, of which year no one else is entirely certain, serves as a theme for the entire book.

Other minds are mysterious, but the behaviour of others is more obvious and often just comical. Anyone who has read C. P. Snow's The Masters, or Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue or even Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited knows that the manners and rituals of Oxbridge life are not just quaint remnants of outmoded tradition but also serious rules for distinguishing 'members' from others and for keeping these others permanently off-balance. 

Marias's wonderful vignettes of college servants, donnish types, classes, tutorials, and dinners at high table shows another reason for the persistence of Oxford rituals: they compensate for the impenetrability of other minds by providing a definiteness to social interaction. This is why they are often so hilarious. Otherwise detestable people can be accommodated with a fluidity and ease that is probably rare even in the best of foreign embassies. Raised voices, much less fist fights rarely break out even among sworn adversaries.

There is a one word description that I think captures Marias's brilliance in coupling a philosophical problem with an essentially comedic situation: absurd. One example: The fellows of All Souls College, atheists though they may largely be, are required to attend periodic services for the repose of the eternal souls of their benefactors. Wonderfully, divinely absurd one might say. All Souls is a fiction of the absurd told with a straight face. Not a small achievement.