Surplus Matter

Avant-Garde

Tom McCarthy interviewed (along with Stewart Home and Hari Kunzru) on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme.

What’s Left Behind

I think this guy genuinely is a hero. And I think where this really comes out is the scene where he re-enacts the death of a drug dealer who’s been shot by another drug dealer in Brixton. He stumbles across the original shooting, which is all cordoned off like some sacred space by police tape, and he bribes people to find out what happened. Then he hires the stretch of street two weeks later, as though for a film set (although there’ll be no filming) and has it re-enacted. I think what horrifies him is forgetting — that within an hour of a life being taken the blood can be cleared away, the forensics will have done their job and the street can just be reopened to traffic and commerce as though nothing had happened. And this is what he refuses. He keeps re-iterating this mantra: ‘everything must leave some kind of mark.’ It’s a very Derridean thing, the idea of marks and traces.

Roger Orwell interviews Tom McCarthy in Static, the website of the London Consortium.

The Literary Equivalent of Athena Posters

A few years ago I was invited to a dinner for young British novelists at the ICA. The other guests were for the most part successful published writers — unlike myself back then. The talk was of lucrative three-book deals with major publishers, review coverage, agents — anything, in fact, but literature.

Tom McCarthy argues in The Times that the British art world is more literate than publishing.

Sublimation As Debasement

Clara is a flower par excellence. Again and again Mirbeau writes of her ‘bust, swollen like the calyx of a flower drunk with pollen’ or her feet which poke out from ‘the perfumed calyx of her skirts’. She is, he tells us, ‘a flower of intoxication and the tasty fruit of eternal desire’; she herself, when she hears that as many as twenty males can pollinate one female flower, declares: ‘I’d like to be a flower’. Within the idealist-versus-materialist axis of the novel, Clara is the narrator’s (and hence Europe’s) soul, the sublimation of his thoughts and aspirations; and yet her soul is a ‘mass of putrefied flesh’. She is his soul ‘materialised in the form of sin’: sublime debasement, sublimation as debasement.

Read Tom McCarthy’s introduction to the Bookkake edition of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden.

DFW’s Demapping

Infinite Jest, along with Whatever, was the best novel of the nineties.

Tom McCarthy pays homage to the late, great David Foster Wallace.

Surplus Matters

Here is the picture I took of Tom McCarthy at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) back in February 2007 which now appears in the special anniversary issue of The New York Review of Books.

The Return of Religion and Other Myths

Tom McCarthy and Rod Dickinson’s mixed-media installation Greenwich Degree Zero appears in a Dutch exhibition entitled The Return of Religion and Other Myths.

Art Without Morality

The narrator’s form of therapy, in other words, is nostalgia, a way to reach back to a time when his life still felt whole and authentic. Yet as the narrator grows more and more obsessed with living only in these flawless moments, Remainder suggests that our fixation with authenticity may be itself a trauma. It describes the truth of representations and stars a man who erects his memories as gigantic art pieces and finds himself frustrated by how simulations can only stand-in for reality.

Ken Chen reviews Remainder in Rain Taxi.

The Narrative’s Nervous Breakdown

In its brutal excision of psychology it is easy to feel that Remainder comes to literature as an assassin, to kill the novel stone dead. I think it means rather to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward. We could call this constructive deconstruction, a quality that, for me, marks Remainder as one of the great English novels of the past ten years.

Zadie Smith reviews Remainder in the New York Review of Books.

Manifesto Marathon

Tom McCarthy at the Serpentine Gallery’s Manifesto Marathon 2008 in Dazed Digital.