Tom McCarthy Interview

T O M M C C A R T H Y

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Contemporary Literature 54, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/13/0004-0657! 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

an interview with

T O M M C C A R T H Y

Conducted by Matthew Hart and Aaron Jaffe, withJonathan Eburne

Born in London in 1969, Tom McCarthy is a well-knownoperator in the world of conceptual and performanceart and, most famously, the author of three novels:Remainder (Metronome, 2005), Men in Space (Alma,

2007), and C (Cape, 2010). He has also written a nonfiction book,Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Granta, 2006), the title of whichcombines a fans homage to Herge with the suggestion that itwill unlock the dark truth of the literary enterprise. This is atypical McCarthy gesture. Happily obsessed with the notion thatliterature, like all forms of transmission or communication, isinherently occulted and cryptographic, his writings combine bigideas with a Beckettian senserepeated often by his philosopherfriend and collaborator Simon Critchleythat, in the end, artisticmeaning amounts to very little, almost nothing.

Consider the Booker Prizenominated C, which begins at theend of the nineteenth century, amid the invention of radio, andends in the 1920s, with the death of its protagonist, Serge Carre-fax, from an insect bite suffered inside an ancient Egyptian tomb.Serge has journeyed to Egypt so as to help build the EmpireWireless Chain of radio transmitters. His fate is sealed duringhis journey into a rubbish-filled grave in which [e]verythingswritten on: pottery, bandages, even the walls themselves (296).As McCarthy discusses in our interview, Serges story yokestogether a Victorian bildungsroman narrative of maturation witha Marinetti-inspired smashup through the future ruins of theearly twentieth century. Telecommunications, pageant plays,

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spiritualism, aerial warfarelet a thousand modernist studiesdissertations bloom. The crucial thing, as McCarthy explains, isthat for all its debt to the novel of development and the mastertropes of modernity, Serges trajectory is resolutely antiprogres-sive. His birth and death crash together the newest and the mostancient technologies of transmission. Although the creature thatbites his ankle and infects his blood is only implied, never seen,we cannot help but think of the scarabs Serge earlier sees in aNew Kingdom tomb, stone beetles to which the living wouldconfess their secrets before dyingso that they wont come outat judgement and weigh down the heart (290)but which arecarved with spells that censor the very information with whichthey have been encoded. Spoken into being by the living in antic-ipation of their own death, simultaneously recording andobscuring the truth of a human heart, the scarabs embodyMcCarthys sense that language and literature resist the verycommunicative function by which they are nevertheless defined.If this is a novel of and about modernity, then it is one that, asMcCarthy and Critchley wrote in a 2009 declaration, is inter-ested in the way that the modern has always, and very self-consciously, been devoted to failure (The Tate Declaration:Joint Statement on Inauthenticity).

C is therefore poised between two apparently contradictorynotions of how literature worksa phrase we place in quo-tation marks because it serves as the subtitle to McCarthys shorte-book, Transmission and the Individual Remix (Vintage, 2012).There is the idea of literature as a radio network, a technologythat helps us listen to a set of signals that have been repeating,pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, playin their lines, between them and around themsince each ofthese forms began. And then there is literature as crypt, anoccult zone within which, as Nicolas Abram and Maria Torokargued in The Wolf Mans Magic Word (1976), inadmissible orunsayable losses are encoded and preserved.

Transmission and entombment. Broadcast and burial. Theseseeming antinomies come together because, for McCarthy, thecrypt is not so much a space of silence as it is the deathly non-place in which meaning is mutilated and, therefore, made

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what he calls a hidden fold or enclave from which coded trans-missions come but that itself remains out of earshot (TheMattering of Matter 179). Likewise, the radio network is no figurefor pure communicability. When Cs Serge plugs himself intothe vast sea of transmission, his first experience is of the sheermateriality of radio static, which he feels in his body as thesound of thought itself (63). The radio ether is filled with jargon,acronyms, codes; the networks sounds and signals are shapedand interrupted by the weather, by the physics of Serges anten-nae, and by astronomical events. Serge imagines sound as matter,its ripples snaking through the sky, pleats in its fabric, joinspulsing as they make their way down corridors of air and mois-ture (66). The radio heavens are, like an Egyptian crypt, filledwith death and language: Serge listens to the distress calls ofsinking ships; the air is full of Prufrockian [w]ireless ghosts[that] come and go (67).

C is not, then, just any novel about technology and mourn-ingthe terse phrase that McCarthy used to describe it in aninterview the year before publication (almabooks.com). Its a novelof ideas that inhabits the genre of historical fiction (it was short-listed for the 2011 Walter Scott Prize) so as to argue that, in thewords of a manifesto we shall return to shortly, there is nobeautyno literature, no meaningwithout death.

This is a sentiment that readers might recognize from authorssuch as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, or Francis Pongefrequentreference points in McCarthys essays. It is also highly redolentof the heterogeneous but broadly anti-Platonic brand of thoughtassociated with the likes of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot,and Jacques Derrida. Most particularly, it draws on the basematerialism of Georges Bataille, for whom idealist philosophiesof being and meaning always trip up on the non-logical differ-ence embodied in physical things, especially in the obstinatefact of human mortality (Mattering 72). McCarthy is not botheredabout his debt to Bataille and company. Building on T. S. Eliotsdismissal of the literary value of personality, McCarthydeclares in Transmission and the Individual Remix that no seriouswriter has anything to say. Scornful of anti-intellectualism, heflaunts his deep investment in that body of speculative thought


often identified by the dread label theory. Tintin and the Secretof Literature began, he told an interviewer, with an editor atGranta inviting him to write a book on Freud or Derrida orsomeone like that, and the realization that if I write aboutHerge I can [also] write about Freud, Derrida and whole bunchof other peopleplus itll be much more fun. Here is an exam-plepervasive in McCarthys writing and talkof what he calls,with evident distaste for English insularity, his continentalbent (viewfromheremagazine.com). Here, also, is an example of thehumor and playfulness that have helped this uncompromisinglyphilosophical novelist achieve a level of renown that seemedunlikely when Remainder, completed in 2001 but long ignored bycommissioning editors, was first published by the Parisian artpress Metronome.

Following enthusiastic reviews online and in print, Remainderwas republished by Alma Books in the U.K. (2006) and Vintagein the U.S. (2007). From circulating as an occult classic distributedonly to art gallery and museum bookshops, it secured a covetedspot on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, wonThe Believer magazines 2008 book award, and served as a centralexample in Zadie Smiths influential New York Review of Booksessay Two Paths for the Novel (2008), in which Smith cele-brates that fact that Remainders theoretical foundations proveno obstacle to the expression of a perverse, self-ridiculing humor.In fact, the closer it adheres to its own principles, the funnier itis.

Because thats the thing about reading McCarthyand, wediscovered, talking to him. He can be severe about the aestheticof self-expression he associates with commercial middle-brow novels (biblioklept.org). Hes sincere in his love of theoryand generally highbrow even in his popular cultural choices.(Herges Tintin, not Rene Goscinnys Asterix; Lewis Carroll, notCharles Kingsley; Kraftwerk, not Jean Michel Jarre.) But he isneither pious nor priggish. Even his critique of philosophicalidealism is, as might also be said of Beckett, tribute to an essen-tially comic vision of the universe. We want to go up to theheavens as heroes, he says in an interview with Critchley, butwe trip over our shoelaces and piss ourselves (Mattering 73).

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McCarthy doesnt see this as a tragedy; its the slapstick of every-day life.

Humans die and fail and make a mess. In C, the pages ofrhapsodic meditation on radio we quoted from earlier are inter-rupted by the notion, expressed in good free indirect style, thatone of Serges farts might also carry signals, odour-messagesfrom distant, unseen bowels (66). The novel is suffused withtoilet humor, with the result (as in Joyce) that it sometimes risksbathos. Men in Spacethe earliest of McCarthys novels,although the second publishedcontains a great conceptual jokeabout the cosmonaut as cosmic waste product. Already in orbitbefore the collapse of the Soviet Union and having left the secondworld, he splash-lands on a world (supposedly) without historyaltogether. Above all, McCarthys comic vision underlinesRemainder. This novels narrator is an unnamed young man who,some time before the story begins, is hit on the head by a fallingobject. He takes months to recover, the resulting brain injuryhaving forced him to relearn such basic tasks as eating and walk-ing. As the novel begins, however, his major problem is not somuch physical as existential: he feels inauthentic, as if all hisactions are secondhand. Remainder narrates his attempts to tran-scend this sense of inauthenticity, which our hero soon realizesis less the consequence of his accident than a condition of beingitself. Hes not unusual, just more usual than most (25). Whenhe is awarded millions of pounds in compensation for his injury,he suddenly has the means to attempt to become seamless, per-fect (67). He tries, impossibly, to escape [his] undoing: matter(17).

Smith isolates one of Remainders many instances of deadpanverbal wit, pointing out how characteristic it is of a novel thatcan sound pompous in paraphrase. More than that, Remainder isconstructed around the basic narrative irony that the herosanswer to his feeling of inauthenticity is to re-enact, in pro-gressively more ambitious and antisocial ways, events that he atfirst thinks he remembers but which, we soon realize, most oftennever happened to him at all. From such modest beginnings asa compulsion to repeat his walk across an ordinary stretch ofSouth London, the narrative action encompasses the purchase


and redevelopment of a whole apartment block in Brixton; thehiring of multiple co-reenactors, on call 24/7, who perform suchacts as tinkering with motorcycles, frying liver, and playing thepiano; the recruitment of a professional logistics manager, Naz,whose mania for systems and data matches the heros longingto transcend materiality; and the expansion of the reenactmentproject into cordoned-off streets, into a vast industrial space, andfinallyviolentlyinto the real world. By the end of the novel,weve moved from a first-person novel of existential crisis intothe narrative terrain of the action thriller. Its an absurd plot tra-jectory in every sense of the word. Its bizarre and darkly hilar-ious yet carriesnot always lightly, but never less than enthrall-inglythe weight of its philosophical argument.

That Remainder should operate in this way would have sur-prised no one familiar with McCarthys art projects, which sharehis novels mordant wit and tendency to inhabit, or haunt, dif-ferent genres and media. Prior to Remainders publication,McCarthy had already made a name for himself as a facilitatorand provocateur within the London art scene. His central artisticvehicle was, and continues to be, the International NecronauticalSociety (INS), within which he occupies the post of general sec-retary. The INS was announced in 1999 by the publication of theINS Founding Manifesto, a series of four numbered para-graphs (and one footnote) that begins by declaring, death is atype of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonize, and,eventually, inhabit (Mattering 53). The INS is, on one level,deadly serious. The manifestos commitment to bring death outinto the world and chart all its forms and media is consistentwith the themes and formal practices of McCarthys writing. TheMattering of Matter (Sternberg, 2012), contains over 250 pages oflearned essays, interviews, and polemics by McCarthy and hiscollaborators, including Critchley (INS chief philosopher) andthe artist Anthony Auerbach (INS chief of propaganda). The vol-ume is introduced by the eminent French art theorist and curatorNicolas Bourriaud and documents an impressive body ofworksimultaneously aesthetic and speculative, often takingplace at major institutions such as Londons Institute of Contem-

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porary Artsabout what the founding manifesto dubs thebeauty and immanence of death.

Still, one cannot leave it at that. After all, the INS is oftendescribed as a semi-fictitious avant-garde organization. Itsinvocation of the technologies of the historical avant-garde (man-ifestos, polemics, byzantine internal politics, occasional purges)doesnt attempt to escape irony. The INS is semifictitious becausenobody more than half-believes in the avant-garde these days.Its semifictitious because, like the original Vorticists, the INS ismore brand than movement. The INS is not, however, mere par-ody; its no burlesque. As Bourriaud argues in his introduction,the fictional quality of the INS should be read not in oppositionto truth but as the current form of the modernist claim ofautonomy, the will to not depend on a social context (Mattering47). Just as C is poised between the modernity of transmissionand the occult censorship of the crypt, so do the projects andpublications of the INS depend upon maintaining an exquisitebalance between high seriousness and evacuation. And whyshouldnt it be thus? In the INS Declaration on the Notion ofthe Future: Admonitions and Exhortations for the Cultural Pro-ducers of the Early-to-Mid-Twenty-First Century, the generalsecretary (if we can trust that it was him) intoned to his audienceat the Royal College of Art, It is this organizations strong con-tention that our current agocall it modernity, late capitalism,or the seventh phase of pre-thetan consciousness, according toyour dispositionhas to be understood through the lens ofcatastrophe (Mattering 269). What better vehicle for an investi-gation of catastrophe than an avant-garde network that existssomewhere between fact and fiction, solemnity and comedy, util-ity and futility, life and death?

We interviewed Tom McCarthy in New York City on the after-noon of December 11, 2012. Our friend and colleague JonathanEburne joined us in conversation. We edited the interview tran-script and then emailed it to McCarthy for revision and approval.We thank Tom McCarthy for his enthusiasm, hard work, andpatience. Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.


Q. You just spent several months in New York. Specific citiesLondon, Paris, Amsterdam, Sofia, Prague, Cairooften come upin your work. Has your time in New York been useful to yourwriting?

A. I dont know if I have anything to say about any one city. Icant really say any particular sociological thing about London,for example, where Ive lived for most of my life. There will bea scene in my next novel that takes place in New York; butwhether it presents some kind of revelatory vision of the city,Im much less certain.

Q. It seems that you approach the city not as a settinga spe-cific kind of novelistic spacebut as a space for navigation, atrope that runs through a lot of your work. Could Remainder takeplace in any other city?

A. It could easily take place in another city. The main thing thatcharacterizes the London of that novel is gentrification: Seattle-themed coffee outlets, black areas becoming more white, and soon. You could find this in any major Western city. People likeAndy Warhol and J. G. Ballard understood that cities are thesame: every city is the Terminal City. The Infinite City. Its onegiant thing.

Q. So the investigation of space gets separated from setting?

A. Totally. When I think about space I think much more phe-nomenologically. Heideggers definition of space is that forwhich room has been made. You have a perimeter. The peras[boundary line] is not where something ends; its where some-thing begins its presencing. Space is not some sort of naturalexpression of the soul of a location; instead, its a formal quantity,best represented or embodied by a baseball field, a cricket pitch.In Remainder, the narrator continually constructs space not as anexpression of London but as an almost Platonic idea of whatspace might be, and as a springboard or matrix for eventsoreven, maybe, the event.

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Q. If space is just another medium among othersthe water inthe tank, in a sensewhy focus on the medium rather than thecartography or the navigation?

A. Space as a medium or field is really important for me. I thinkof time as being, in a literary sense, embedded within space.Theres a brilliant conceit in Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! whereQuentin says, Maybe nothing ever happens once and is fin-ished. And he goes on to describe happen as being like rip-ples moving across the surface of a pool thats connected toanother pool by a little umbilical water cordand there could,in theory, be a third pool and so on. The pebble that caused theripples in the first place didnt drop in the pool that we actuallysee; it dropped in another pool lying further backbut the rip-ples are moving through all pools with the same ineradicablerhythm. This is Quentins way of thinking about generationaltime. Its totally topographic. Georges Perec does much the samein An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris. He sits observinga square and there are buses going to and coming from otherplacesMontmartre, Gare du Nord, or wherever. He can onlysee the ones passing across the square, but he understands thatif one is full, another somewhere else must correspondingly beempty and vice versa. He invokes the theory of communicatingvesselsanother water analogy, just like Faulkner.

Q. Is there any particularity to cities as spaces for your work?Do you draw a distinction between space and what Marc Augewould call nonplaces?

A. Not really. The novel Im working on now opens in an air-port lounge, I suppose. But I am interested in spaces degreezeros. I made an art piece with Rod Dickinson thats showing inboth Pittsburgh and the Hayward Gallery in London right nowcalled Greenwich Degree Zero. Its an installation piece in whichwe depict the 1894 attempt to blow up the Greenwich Obser-vatory that gave rise to Joseph Conrads The Secret Agent. Therewas a real attempta guy blew himself up ten feet away fromthe Observatory, and it was almost certain that he was trying todestroy this building, which is the degree zero of time. I grew


up in Greenwich. This is a very significant place for me. I usedto skateboard across the prime meridian every day. The line usedto be in Paris until the 1880s, then it was wrested away to Londonat an international conferencethere was a lot of politicking. Itsnot like the equator, which has to be where it is, because thatswhere the Earth hinges: the longitudinal zero-line is entirely arbi-trary. In fact, you can even say its a fiction. Its literally written:there is a line carved into the ground. Its an act of writing. Andthe appeal of this poor, dead anarchistto meis the sheerpoetry of his endeavor. You know, he tried to blow up time byattacking this bit of space, and he blew up himself instead! Hebecame Orpheus: he disintegrated at the limit point. Now, inRemainder the hero becomes obsessed with this drug dealersdeath in his neighborhood. He goes to the exact spot where theguy was shot. He doesnt duplicate the location (I think its theone time in the whole book that he doesnt replicate a spaceelsewhere): he goes to the actual spot where the guy died andreenacts this death with an almost religious devotion. This is theHill of Calvary for him, this phone box where this guy got shotand the puddle that his blood flowed into. Its the ground zeroof a traumatic event. So, I suppose, in that sense, specific loca-tions are important to me, despite what I said earlier.

Q. Im drawn to the parts of Remainder that foreground spaceas a field of repetition and rehearsal, such as when the bankrobber Samuels is there rehearsing the bank heist with theunnamed narrator and you write that the bank robbers aim isto carve out enough time for yourself to get in, out, and awayagain.

A. Yes, to make a bit of space within time . . .

Q. Right. And the language you use there is very suggestive:you write of how robbers use violence and shock to create alittle enclave, a defile within time.

A. The defile, exactly. Well, earlier the narrator has contem-plated sports people. Hes watching footballamateur foot-balland the coach is saying, create space for yourself to move

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in. He understands that this is a temporal thing. The man orwoman who can run 100 meters faster than anyone else is simplyexpanding every second so that they can cover more ground init; or the boxer who can do the same so that he can read whatscoming at him and prepare a countermove. Muhammad Ali saysthis in When We Were Kings: For me a second is like 20 seconds.Its bigger. So time becomes a field that you can manipulate.Another image that the hero of Remainder keeps using is that ofelasticity. Time is stretching like elastic. Again, time becomes atopographic surface in which he can find cracks and partitionsand enclaves and defiles.

Q. So, then, to link this to the narrators project of becomingauthentic, becoming identical with himself, at this point his fan-tasy takes the form of thinking, if I can just fill space withenough time?

A. Thats right. Except that it never leaves him the authenticityhe seeks. What hes encountering are endless other lacunae andgaps and cracks. More and more inauthenticity, if you like.

Q. Athletes think spatially in a lot of interesting ways. Imthinking of David Winners Brilliant Orange and its discussion offootballers such as Johan Cruyff and Dennis Bergkamp whoknow how to make space on the pitch. The Footballer God islength, width, height, and depth. Theres a lot of sport in Remain-der, right from the start.

A. The hero keeps coming back to cricket, which is all aboutrepetition and replay. In Test cricket, for the last ten or fifteenyears, they have these big screens in the stadium, and in betweeneach ball they replay the previous ball in slow motion, and oftenthe batsman will reenactin tandem with the replaythe shothes just played, maybe modifying it slightly. The idea being thathes thinking, I should have done it more like that, or that.That is, Revisiting this moment in this way will help meimprove. But I think its really pure aesthetics, or ontology. Thebatsman wants to reinhabit this moment endlessly, in a kind of


Beckettian waysomeone else, incidentally, who was intocricket.

Q. This connects to something that the hero of Remainder reallyresiststhe presence of cameras. Hell only allow one camerainto his house and thats the set designers Polaroid. Thats it. Soas theyre recording and perfecting the reenactments, they haveall these situations where there are telescopes and nautical pat-terns of communication . . .

A. Walkie-talkie radios . . .

Q. But the thing that the hero resists is the possibility that thesereenactments will eventually turn into cinema.

A. Yes. I mean, hes taking his cue from cinema. The hero hasthis obsession with Robert De Nirosas he sees itperfectauthenticity in Mean Streets, in a movie. And thats already ridic-ulous. My hero wants to be in some kind of movie withoutthere being a movie. So he has an obsessive and paradoxical rela-tionship to media and mediationas does Serge in C. You know,one thing I really had in mind as a template while I was writingRemainder was the character of Don Quixote, who has this similarobsession with media. For him its the penny romances, the chi-valric pulp fiction of his time, that he wants to emulate. Theresan incredible scene when Don Quixote sets out on his first, effec-tively, reenactment (we can call it that), which, like my guy, hedoes in order to feel real rather than inauthentic. And then hestarts saying, When the novel comes to be written of thismoment, its going to begin like thisand he starts writing thenovel in his head. You know, Scarce had Phoebus spread herfeathery fingers oer the earth, and those soft minstrels of thegrove, the pretty birds, begun their song, than noble Don Qixoteset out . . .that kind of thing. In order to experience, in asupposedly unsecondhand way, the nowness of his presentmoment, he has to divert it through its putative future media-tion. Its an astonishing situationbecause hes more mediatedthen than ever.

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Q. Thinking about rules in space, your great piece in The Guard-ian on Steven Spielbergs Tintin not only critiques the ideologyof his version but also dismantles that long CGI action sequencein which all these amazing things happen but somehow the rulesare all wrong. By contrast, your novels orchestrate the events thathappen in fictional space exquisitely, so that for all their exper-imental, avant-garde qualities, the events have a kind of densityand weight.

A. Aristotle says that plausible impossibilities are better thanimplausible possibilities. Theres a level of basic consistency thatany piece of writing, whatever its mode, must have. If youlike, there are game rules that have to be adhered to.

Q. Within constraints?

A. Within the repertory of moves the game allows for.

Q. Is the problem, then, how Spielberg composes in this strangedigital medium?

A. No, not at all: Lynch does that in Inland Empire and its bril-liant. Spielbergs film is a crock of shit because its basically amanifesto for a sentimental type of authenticity: be yourself, betrue to yourself. The wonderful thing about Herges Tintin is thatthe books enter these labyrinths of inauthenticitycounterfeitcoins, counterfeit identities, counterfeit worldsthat multiplyand replicate and become virtually unnavigable. This is a pointthat I try to make in Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by readingTintin via De Man and Derridathat this is to a large extent whatliterature is all about. Its a labyrinthine entry into a realm ofinauthenticity; or, if you like, a surrender to a fact of being alwaysinauthentic.

Q. Can we talk about space in the context of C? When Serge isin the Army Air Corps he says he sees space in terms of surfacesand lines and the odd blind spot. So Serge has this capacity tounderstand things in a simplified geometry.

A. Geometry is the vital word here.


Q. To put a bright line under this, is it two-dimensional geom-etry? Pushing away from perspectivism and all the attendantideologies about subjectivity, Cartesianism, and depth?

A. Exactly. Its a rethinking of personality, character, and so on,as a set of surfaces and planes. Like how Deleuze thinks in termsof planes, plateaus, or vectors. Or a bunch of other philosopherswe could mention. In C, I guess the idea came to me because Idbeen thinking about Egyptian aesthetics, which is utterly flat,two-dimensional, everything in profile, and then about cinema,which is also about sequences crossing a flat surface. I was read-ing Laurence Rickels, who writes about technology and psycho-analysis: his work helped hone or focus a bunch of things I wastrying to think about. In Aberrations of Mourning, Rickels makesthe same link between Egyptian funerary arts and cinema. Andhe kind of says that with the advent of cinema we finally areback where we should be: weve found our way back, after sev-eral centuries of annoying humanism and perspectivism, to per-fect flatness.

Q. Thats the point you make in C about the filmstrip the armyuses to locate artillery batteries by showing the time-lapsesbetween their soundsthat it doesnt know the differencebetween time and space.

A. Thats right, were back to Faulkners communicating pools:time is space. In C, the mechanism that location-finds the Ger-man artillery is a set of harp strings, a kind of Orphic lyre. Theshell explodes, which makes the strings kick, and thats capturedon a strip of film on which you can judge distance in relay. Itsall surfaces, and lines and arcs on surfaces. Any depth in C isarchaeological depth, like layers of Troy, or layers of acetateyou know, those transparencies you used to put on overheadprojectors. You could stack seven layers up, but each one wasstill a two-dimensional surface, and the image they produced onthe screen was two-dimensional, too.

Q. How does your notion of archaeological depth relate toaffect?

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A. Its a nonhumanist type of depth. A Foucauldian type ofdepth. An archaeology of the present moment which goes backinto the past through a series of interconnecting surfaces.

Q. In other words, this Necronaut does not navigate depth orvolume but plunges through a series of different layers?

A. Exactly right.

Q. Its not a secret return to the human behind the veil . . .

A. No. Whats behind the veil in C is a scarab. [Laughter.] ButSerge is doing, in a blundering, druggy, sex-fueled way, anarchaeology of the present moment. Its an intellectual enter-prise. In Egypt hes quite discursive: hes learning stuff about theorigins of writing. And by the way, it all does come down towriting; even as an archaeology of new media and transmission,it comes down to the primal act of making a mark. In Remainderas well, the mark-making is the fundamental thing. The herokeeps saying, Everything must leave some kind of mark. Andthe Greenwich art piece: its about a line cut on the surface ofthe Earth, which is the literal meaning of geography.

Q. May I ask a genre question? Isnt C drawing on the traditionof the modernist Bildungsroman, the novel of development? YetSerge is a brute materialist; he repeats and changes but doesntgrow as such. You just crash him through that series of planes.

A. Sure. Serge is born with a caul like Charles Dickenss DavidCopperfield, and C has an obvious tribute to Thomas MannsMagic Mountain in the middle of it. But theres no sense of devel-opment. In fact, its the opposite; Im interested in regression. Astime goes on, Serge regressesby the end, hes just this fetal,quivering insect. In epochs, too: he starts with modernity, in thetwentieth century, and ends up in Egyptian antiquity. He startswith the invention of radio and ends up with the origin of writ-ing at the end of the second millennium b.c. Similarly, in Remain-der theres a set of regressions. In Men in Space, too. We start withthe birth of Europes future in 1989 with the fall of the Iron Cur-


tain, and we end up with some pre-Christian saint. Its totallyregressive. In my twenties I got really into Becketts plays, andthats what you get there: things dont progress, they regress. Inthe first act of Happy Days, we see Winnie half-emerging fromthe sand, and in the second act, far from fully emerging andgoing on to do other stuff, shes sunk right down to her neck: itgoes backwards, gets worse. You could say the same thing aboutKing Lear regressing from the throne to the cave, I suppose.

Q. The co-articulation of the rise of the novel and the rise ofsubjectivity often goes without saying these days, but your deepinterest in Beckettor Aeschyluss Oresteia, for that matterpoints to a sense that crucial countertraditions might be wiredinto literature. My question here is about the afterlives of literarysaints shot through so much of your workwhich is to say, allthe literary-philosophical names. When I teach your stuff in myclasses, some of my students always remark how much you seemto want them to read. Might we think of your swath of referencesas a kind of literary remainder?

A. I suppose we could think of those as remainders. HaroldBloom writes about influence being Oedipal; you off the fathersand take the crown. But if were going to look at a psychoanalyticmodel for how influence works in literature, then Id be muchmore drawn toward Abraham and Toroks idea of a crypt andits attendant motifs of encryption and coding, so other writersare becoming encrypted in ones own work and leaking outlike zombies. Its a kind of haunting.

Q. Blooms model of influence as killing the literary fatherworks by avoidance, but you make no secret about name checks,names you think people should be reading.

A. For me, the best model for thinking about this is radio trans-mission. Think of literature as a set of billowing transmissionspicked up and warped and mutated into something else. Calibanin The Tempest talks about the isle being full of noises and soundsand sweet airs and thousands of twangling instrumentstrans-mitted by an Ariel, no less! He could be describing radio three

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hundred years early. But Caliban is not unlike Serge in C, sittingat his radio picking up a thousand voices. And though Serge isnot a writerhes just some teenage kidthat moment for meis a kind of mise en abyme; its a manifesto, almost, of what it isto be a writer. Hes not originating the signals. Hes receivingand tuning and refining and transcribing and reworking. If youcould read what Serge is actually writing at that point, his tran-script would probably read like one of Ezra Pounds cantosamixture of world news, stock market prices, sports results, andeverything else.

Q. The work of the writer is that tuning?

A. Exactly, that tuning and refining.

Q. Pound has a line about the writer being the antenna of therace.

A. Yeah, if you removed the race stuff . . .

Q. Okay, Pounds got problems [laughter]but, generously, hemeant the human race, right?

A. Sure. For me, this is why radio is more interesting for think-ing about this stuff than more Kittlerean kinds of propsrecordplayers or magnetic tape. These are fixed objects; but radio isbillowingfluidalthough no less material. It turns everythinginto a material plane that gets inhabited and then, within thatbillowing, there are moments of crystallization, constellation. Imno expert in Walter Benjamin, but Im really taken with his ideaof constellationsudden moments of clarity that work acrosstime. The way that would work for me in terms of your questionis that, as a writer, there are moments of clarity when a wholeset of literary genealogies and transmissions gets constellatedinto some pattern that is rich and vivid. This is the way writersare working. Its not merely about name-checking or reference.

Q. Theres an interesting longing in thata melancholy. Imthinking about Sophie as a character created by that same


method. Whats striking about Sophie is that at a basic levelthe level of bad humanist lit crit, perhapsshe has to work as acharacter in space so as to make this longing real.

A. Sophie almost literally becomes a radio transmitter. The wayshe stands planted in the garden, repeating all these fragmentsof phrases, as shes going mad, is explicitly compared to the waya radio receiver works. After shes dead, she becomes a signaldispersed. Shes always doing the same thing, either poisoningSerge or seducing him. Thats how she operates as a character. Ithink Jean-Francois Lyotard says that character is just a nodewithin a network, an intersection point of certain trajectories.This is what a literary character has always been. The strongestcharacters are precisely the ones that command the strongestnodes or points of intersection.

Q. Lets bracket your take on character and go more directlyinto the question of media. Id like to explore something KateMarshall reminded me about. A better translation from the Ger-man title of Friedrich Kittlers Discourse Networks is RecordingSystems. Storage systems, in effect. With all the concern withremix and transmission and broadcast media in your worktheway they resonate in our own rapidly changing media systemwhat happens to the problems Kittler underscores about record-ing systems?

A. Yes, there are traces, marks, and stainsthings that remain.Amidst all the billowing transmissions of C, Serge still ends uphunting down the central archive, crypt, or chamber where itsall written downstored or recorded, as youre suggesting. Ilove Freuds notion of the mystic writing pad, where the topsurface is constantly getting erased and rewritten, but the baselayer retains everythingthats his model for memory. But per-haps there isnt such a fundamental, categoric differencebetween transmission and storage. Towards the end of C, Sergesfather expounds his theory that every transmission ever, fromMarconis first S-es to yesterdays weather report, are still float-ing around the etherand, scientifically, hes right. There arealiens listening to 1930s radio shows as we speak. The air is one

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giant storage system. For me, Kittlers work and all its implica-tions for thinking about new media today find their place andresonate within the framework of the fundamental propositionthats set out so forcefully and brilliantly by Derridathat itsall writing, everything.

Q. Thinking about your accounts of the literary pastand theEliotic homage you do in your recent e-book essay Transmissionand the Individual Remixcan you say something about yourrelation to modernism? Not so much modernism as a period, butas a longer, more broadly construed interface of artwork andtheoretical experiment. Isnt there a mainstream consensus, how-ever bogus, that readers today are not interested in the antimi-metic, antihumanist side of things?

A. There may be, but its a dumb one. The problem with themainstream is that its gone off into some kind of naturalist,head-in-the-sand, ostrichlike hidey-holesome kind of residual,consoling, retro-humanist fantasy of saying, No, its all aboutself-expression: you bring the truth to language, as if the truthwerent being continually made and unmade in language.

Q. Doesnt that leave something out? The options are not justmodernistic transmission or humanistic naturalism. Arent thereother alternatives?

A. Im not saying that every writer needs to allegorize trans-mission and archiving endlessly and write characters like mySerge or Becketts Krapp. There are many routes to go down, butI think that the naturalist route is simply a false trail. Its falseconsciousness. I dont think its a genuine possibility that opensup in our world.

Q. One of the unusual things about you as a writer is that somany of your collaborators are artists and philosophers. Do youhave a sense of a literary peer group, the writers of your owngeneration whom you see as doing work that is consistent withyours?


A. To some extent. There are people whose work Im excitedby. Shelley Jackson I like a lot. I wrote recently on Jean-PhilippeToussaint; hes a bit older but I think a very interesting writer. Icould name a few other people, but your point is true: I guessthe most dynamic area of contemporary culture, for me, is theart world. And this has been the case for the last ten or fifteenyears. The art world has become a very expanded place wherelots of different modes or practices can enter and find a platform.For example, C came out of this art project that my InternationalNecronautical Society did at the Institute of Contemporary Artsin London. We had a radio transmission unit that looked like aJames Bond villains HQ, with all these assistants harvestingphrases from other media (newspapers, Internet, telephone con-versations, or whatever) and projecting them onto the walls; thena central desk would reconfigure the phrases into new ones(sometimes in sonnet or sestina form, or just blank verse), andthe scripts would go up to a transmission booth and be read outover FM radio. This was a totally literary exercisea kind ofBurroughs cut-up. But art is the only place where you can actu-ally do that. Its the only cultural arena where you can turn upand say that you need forty grands worth of equipment and aradio license and thirty assistants; and although the end producthas no value, and you cant sell it to a collector, it still somehowneeds to be done. There are people and institutions in the artworld who will go, Yes, youre right. It should be done. Letsdo it.

Q. Lets get more thoughts on how the institutions of the artworld support a type of experiment that interests you. And howis that missing from the writing world?

A. Well, this ties in with the humanism/antihumanism discus-sion. The art world has properly inherited the legacy not just ofmodernism but of centuries of culture that have been telling usagain and again (and in an accelerated way in the twentieth cen-tury) that to be human is not to be some kind of abstract, free,spiritual essence that then gets expressed; on the contrary,it is to be enmeshed within language and history and to be boundup in a set of relationships with the Law and desire and all the

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rest. The art world has inherited that understanding in a waythat is productive. Artists work from the moment they come outof art school at self-consciously negotiating the symbolic struc-tures of their day, and at self-consciously negotiating their rela-tionships with dead ancestorsreferencing other work, sam-pling other stuff from the past or the present. Theres anoperational logic there that is basically the right one. Overall, theliterary world, the world represented by todays publishingworld and its attendant institutions and media, has got thewrong operational manual. Its got a kind of humanistic, idealistone that is just no good. Its not going to produce anything inter-esting. Its become a branch of the entertainment industry.

Q. This connects to your work with the philosopher SimonCritchley. I wonder how you think the possibility for a certainkind of experiment or play within the institutional rules is par-ticularly linked to conceptual work: I think the formula thatrecurs most in the INS is navigation as a way of thinking. Asyou point out, the institutions of the publishing world seem notto be as friendly to that kind of thinking in fiction. But is there abridge to be made between the art world and the theory world?Those are two institutional homes that are not your homes butthat you like to engage with.

A. Sure. But the gazes of the art world and the theory worldare both firmly focused on literature. This is the paradox. Almostall of what we call theory comes out of some brilliant readingsby Derridaand Heidegger before himof Holderlin, Rilke,Ponge, and Joyce. So literature is the feeder, the sounding boardfor theoryand, by extension, given the strong influence of the-ory on contemporary artists, for art; and yet oddly, paradoxically,perversely, its the hardest current space to actually operate in inthe type of way that people like me want to.

But the relations between literature, art, and philosophy arecomplex. I met Vito Acconci a few years ago, the seminal 1960sartist who became famous with that Seedbed piece where he mas-turbates beneath the gallery floor. He was tied in with the wholeFluxus/Yoko Ono moment in contemporary art. When I met himhe told me, Oh yeah, a writer, huh? I was in the first intake in


the Iowa writing program. This is a program thats now syn-onymous with a kind of sub-Carver-style realism. And he tellsme that he was getting along fine there until he read Mallarmehe read A Throw of the Diceand he realized that its just notenough to write stories anymore; the key thing is the experienceof space and distance, splattering language across the void andso on. After he read Mallarme, he started to physically movearound his studio, his work space, iterating stuff. Lots of hisartworks from the 1960s and 1970s are precisely this: he movesaround a space, shouting and repeating and going up and downstairs and so on. Now, hes an architect. His trajectory has takenhim from literature, to visual or performance art, to architecture.Theres a set of migrations thats very difficult to map or fix. Butbasically, they tie art and literature and philosophy together end-lesslyand always will.

Q. In his introduction to The Mattering of Matter, Nicolas Bor-riaud claims that there are two dominant tendencies in twenti-eth-century artistic production, documentation and appropria-tion. Then comes (as you mentioned) Fluxus, conceptual andperformance art, and you get a third, reenactmentwhich, ofcourse, chimes with the story you just told. Could we describeyour novels as an attempt to think through reenactment withinthe novel form?

A. I think we could. But when Remainder first came out, one ofthe earliest reviews of it said: Oh, its an allegory of contem-porary art. This guy reenacts stuff. So I said to my friend RobDickinson, with whom I did the Greenwich projecthis art hasoften been about reenactment (he famously reenacted the Mil-gram experiment and the Jonestown sermons, and hes friendswith Jeremy Deller, who did the reenactment of the Battle ofOrgreave, and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who also do reen-actments of Cramps concerts; theres a whole movement)any-how, I said to Rod: What do you think of this? Do you thinkthis critic is right? And he said: No, hes absolutely wrong.Because if Remainder is an allegory of being an artist, then it

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would just describe a day at the office! At one point a myste-rious short councilor appears in the book and proposes to thehero that he might be some kind of artist, and the hero is ada-mant that no, what hes doing has nothing to do with art. Thewhole point is that there is no category that can contain, or legit-imate, what hes doing. At one point he says that he and hisentourage were like followers of a cult that hasnt been inventedyet. The messiah hasnt reappeared; he hasnt even appeared inthe first place. So theyre enacting all the pathologies and all thepatterns that could be associated with performance art or reli-gion or a certain type of political activity or criminal activityPatty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army or what-everbut without the structure in place that would redeem it,make it useful.

Q. I recommended Remainder to my cousin, whos a neurosur-geon. He took it absolutely straight and said, This is all correct.Its exactly what happens with certain brain injuries. The stuffabout reteaching yourself to hold a carrot and so on. He took itas absolutely realhyperreal even. I told him that you knewyour stuff, but I didnt come to Remainder that way at all. Ithought of it as an experimental novela thought-experimentabout a real-modernist remainder, even. Youre so clearly inter-ested in the real, in matterin letting matter matter, to allude tothe title of your INS book. But as a novelist, you want to exploreother ways of getting to the real besides realism.

A. To track back to one of the things we were talking aboutearlier, the literary landscape sometimes gets laid outby intel-ligent peoplein terms of a Scylla and Charybdis landscape: onthe one hand, theres this middlebrow realism; and on the otherhand, theres the avant-garde. We need to be really suspicious ofthis schematic. Realism, as a literary convention as full of artificeas any other, has no more purchase on the real than anythingelse. When William Burroughs was asked about his cut-up tech-nique and how weird it was, he just said, No, life is like that.And hes right: just walking down the street youre inhabiting acut-up. So theres that on one side. On the other side of this


opposition that Im trying to unpick here is this term avant-garde.Obviously, Im fascinated with the historical avant-garde, andthe INS comes out of a playful engagement with certainmoments of that. But I think theres another kind of trap thatsome well-meaning people fall into, whereby they think, Okay,well the only thing to do now, after Cage has done 4.5 minutesof silence, is to do 5.5 minutes of silence! Or I love Marinetti,so lets do some even more typographically extreme shit splayedacross the page! I think this is wrong, too. For a start, its tiedup with a bogus narrative of progress, an Enlightenment, linearsense of what cultural time issomething that progresses, evenfrom extreme to more extreme. But I dont think that aping oreven upgrading the mannerisms of a previous vanguardmoment is that interesting. Im also suspicious of the idea offinding a middle way between two already-dodgy landmarks.Im not really interested in middle ways. The task, as I see it, isto be genuinely radical. It means pushing experience right upagainst language, and against the fact of its embedding withinlanguage, and affirming the primacy of desire, and putting desireand the Law on collision courses, again and again and again,and affirming the death drive, and a whole bunch of other stuffthat we could talk about. But to answer, finally, your question:to approach the Real, which would not be some empirical, pos-itivist, or preexisting real but would be precisely what MichelLeiris calls the Bulls Hornthe point of the Bulls Horn thatthreatens to tear and rip and rupture a certain harmony of acrafted plane . . . Wallace Stevens talks about the real thatwrenches. Thats a disruptive real. To be radical would be tocome near thatbut this cant be reduced to writing styles.

Q. Its interesting that with this realist/avant-garde schematheres an idea of some continuum thats also an opposition. Yourworkall three novelshas this duck-rabbit quality. You cantake Men in Space as a narrative about the dislocations of post1989 Europe, Remainder as a novel about brain injury, C as his-torical fictionif you want to.

A. Yes. I mean, C was on the Booker Prize short-list. Someonemust have read it as a kind of historical novel.

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Q. Right, but then one kind of reader just resists. Thats what Imeant by bringing in Wittgensteins duck-rabbit; both alterna-tives exist, but you can never be captured by both at once.

A. As Zadie Smith said in her essay about my work and JosephONeills, there are some people whom both camps try to claimas their own. She gives Nabokov as an example, which is a goodone. But then I was rereading Great Expectations recently. Dickensis meant to be the apogee of realist, character-filled writing, butthe first passages of Great Expectations are totally deconstruction-ist. Pip is in this Bataillean, murky mud-plane kneeling in frontof a tombstone running his finger along the incisions, the carv-ings in its surfacenames which are his familysand meditat-ing on the identity of things and looking at the horizon. Its com-pletely conceptual, modernist, structural writing. This is DeMans point, isnt it? With the really good stuff, its not liketheres deconstruction-compatible writing and humanist-com-patible writing. Its always already deconstructed in itself. Wejust dont know how to read it properly.

Q. Radical literature isnt simply about putting on the rightgeneric outfit. One of the things my students said about Remain-der is how very readable it is. I sold it to them as a novel of highconcept, and they were surprised by the sheer enjoyment of fol-lowing this unlikely hero through an increasingly absurd andwild and ultimately, on some level, pathos-filled series of inven-tions. The same is true of C, though Serge provokes strongerreactions.

A. C is an adventure story! At Columbia I have my studentsread John Updikes Rabbit books, which I rate highly. I dont likeall that perfectly crafted but ultimately banal stuff that he wrotefor The New Yorker year after year, but I do rate Rabbit. But I makethe students read the Rabbit books after reading Mallarme andBlanchotwhich Updike read, tooand its kind of interestingbecause in the first book, Rabbit, Run, theres this almost knowingnod toward Mallarme, when he talks about stars and constella-tions scrolling across the space of a car windscreen. Then in thesecond book, Rabbit Redux, the hero has become a typographic


spacer. Hes a typesetter at a printing plant. He realizes his wifeis having an affair when he sees her and her lover in a booth ina restaurant and theres not enough space between them; thescene, and its accompanying revelation, is rendered typograph-ically. The point is, I agree with you about the ducks and rabbits.In Updike at his best you see certain literary backstories workingthemselves out in a way that is not recognizably avant-garde. Isuppose it is recognizably realist. But when you start picking atit a bit, when you look beneath the hood, you see all of theseother histories at play there. Again the issue is not writing oneway or the other, but navigating a set of histories and possibili-ties.

Documents

Tom McCarthy Interview