Surplus Matter

Tom McCarthy talks about his Black Box Transmitter exhibit and about the art/writing interface.

A short video clip in which Tom McCarthy talks about Georg Trakl.

One of the real structural understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event. It’s not something that you can contain and narrate, but it’s like this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward. Contemporary novelists don’t really understand that, but contemporary artists do.

Tom McCarthy interviewed in the June 2008 issue of The Believer.

A very entertaining feature on Tom McCarthy courtesy of Spanish TV.

Our problem with death is that we can’t describe it, and I think that’s why Catholics have got it sorted: they just have it for tea.

Margarita Gluzberg interviewed by Tom McCarthy back in 2001.

Londoner Tom McCarthy is interviewed by novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer. The two met halfway in cyber-space to talk about, well, space. What is literature? How does thought recreate in art? What is art? Why is art? They had fun, and we hope you will, too.

Tom McCarthy argues that “Matter is what makes us alive” and explains how the narrator of Remainder starts off as a disciple of Hegel and ends up on the side of Bataille.

Bat Segundo Show interview by Ed Champion.

To a large extent, Men in Space is an allegory of failed transcendence, as is Remainder: this is what the two books really have in common deep down. Transcendence fails - but some radical transformation takes place. I wouldn’t call my disposition in them ‘optimistic’, and, to borrow a great line from Lacan, I never speak of freedom - but in both books disintegration induces dynamic and exhilarating states, sends people somewhere extreme: to the limits of the self, the world, the whole symbolic order. That’s where literature should take you, its proper territory.

Tom McCarthy interviewed on Canadian publisher Raincoast Books‘ blog.

Tom McCarthy was interviewed on the Leonard Lopate Show in NYC on 21 September 2007.

I’m interested in people’s readings of the books. A novel doesn’t end when it’s written; in a way, that’s just the beginning: the ‘meaning’ isn’t enclosed within it but emerges from its meeting with other texts, other moments — all textbook deconstruction stuff, I know, but no less true for that. Having said that, some readings are much more productive than others. Ones that interpret Remainder, for example, as a straight allegory or ‘solve’ it by suggesting that the hero’s dead but doesn’t know it yet are interesting but limited. The critic Andrew Gibson, who’s just put out a book on Beckett and Badiou, told me that my work is about ‘the radical death of the world,’ adding that this is the theme of twenty-first century philosophy. I’m not sure I understand what he means but it sounds really good.

Mark Thwaite interviews Tom McCarthy in ReadySteadyBook.