Surplus Matter

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.

Magnus Haglund interviews Tom McCarthy in the Göteborgs-Posten.

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.

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.