Surplus Matter

“I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it. It’s like DJing.” On the evidence of C, McCarthy is quite possibly the remix the novel has been crying out for. “Here we are, rich inheritors of all this magnificent detritus,” he says. “How do we want to recombine it? I think it’s a good time to be a good writer, actually.”

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Robert Collins in the Sunday Times.

Tom McCarthy interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme about Double Take. He describes WMDs as “a good example of a MacGuffin”!

C is about the age of wireless: the roar of transmission, signals flung from towering masts, global reaches crackling out of earphones. And empire. And insects. And incest.

The Casual Optimist interviews Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy about the American jacket of C.

I’ve gone German of late, in a linguistic rather than national sense — i.e., including German-speaking Czechs and Austrians. I’ve been reading lots of Kafka, who is truly a momentous figure, and Mann and Musil and the beautifully psychotic Georg Trakl. Also Freud, whose case histories read like fantastic gothic fiction. One critic described “Remainder” as a French novel written in English; well, by that token, “C” is my German novel. What the next one will be is anyone’s guess. Swedish, maybe…

Tom McCarthy interviewed in the New York Times’s Paper Cuts blog.

Hergé war als Künstler ein Genie, das ein ganz eigenes Genre begründet hat. Auch wenn wir heute noch nicht wissen, in welche Schublade wir ihn stecken sollen: Comiczeichner, Comicerzähler, auf jeden Fall ist er der Shakespeare dieser neuen Form. In der Geschichte von Tim in Tibet steckt zum Beispiel die endlos weiße Leere, in die Hergé in seinen Albträumen fiel, aus denen er schreiend erwachte. Wegen dieser Träume suchte er einen Psychoanalytiker auf und er zeigte seine Angst verschlüsselt als Schnee.

An in-depth interview with Tom McCarthy focusing on his Tintin book in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin.

Fascinating videos of Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy at the Belgian premiere of Double Take at the Ghent Film Festival.

Another Dutch interview with Tom McCarthy.

Liberals. Liberal humanists. That would be the enemy, in all positions. This confessional, self-assertive tone that dominates publishing. Not what dominates contemporary art, despite the sentimental valorisations of someone like Tracy Emin - although even she actually takes this whole avant-garde tradition and overwrites it with self-confessional expression. But on the whole I think art is classically not that. What dominates mainstream media culture and literary culture is psychologising: the kind of discourse where the self is never put into question. There is a self who exists prior to anything who goes around emoting, experiencing and developing. This is what I hate.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Clodagh Kinsella in the July issue of Dossier.

I think DeLillo is taking a very nineteenth-century model of the writer — the kind of person who declares the way the world is and maybe changes it through that declaration. The writer is perhaps obsolete in that sense, and the terrorist is a good index of that obsolescence. But the twentieth-century modernists — like Beckett, for example, or Blanchot, or Alex Trocchi — recognize that obsolescence, and argue that the task for literature is now to accomplish its own dying, not to contain the world heroically and serve it up to itself, but to manage or mediate a kind of slipping away into silence.

Tom McCarthy and Johan Grimonprez are interviewed in the summer 2009 issue of Bidoun.

A Croatian interview with Tom McCarthy. The title translates as “All Art is Political”.