Surplus Matter

Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.

Tom McCarthy, in the Guardian, on the links between technology and the novel.

A video of Tom McCarthy’s March 2010 talk at the AA School of Architecture. The author discusses the relationship between film and literature with reference to Greenwich Degree Zero, Remainder, Double Take and C.

What this aesthetic shares with its uncomic nouveau roman forebears is an anti-naturalist, anti-humanist bent: we’re being given access not to a fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings as he travels through a naturalistic world, emoting, developing and so on — but rather to an encounter with structure. In a wonderful sequence in Camera, Toussaint sets up a scene of dialogue in a restaurant and, having placed a bowl of olives on the table (as a naturalist writer would do to provide background verisimilitude), suppresses the scene’s dialogue entirely, and describes exclusively the movement of hands as they reach towards the bowl, the trajectory of fruit from hand to mouth, the ergonomics of pit-transfers from mouth to tablecloth and, most striking of all, the regularly spaced imprints made by the back of a fork’s tines across the skin of the lone olive the narrator toys with before stabbing it. We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.

Tom McCarthy on Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the London Review of Books.

Two brief field surveys, carried out to / walk upon the beach / accumulated rainfall and runoff pollution which / snotgreen, bluesilver, rust / where U is wind and T is days / have modulated on the lyre of / drainage flow-rates for / the mermaids singing, each to / the ‘first-flush effect’, as visible in Fig. 3 / forehead is still red from the Queen’s kiss

Tom McCarthy has written a story to illustrate a mermaid figurine for Significant Objects. Both the figurine and story are up for auction on eBay. All proceeds go to 826 National.

There is another way to think about prosthesis - as a form of puppetry. In his 1810 story-cum-essay “On the Marionette Theatre”, the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist recounts a meeting, at a fairground, with a choreographer who, watching marionettes being manipulated, marvelled at the way in which dance “could be entirely transferred to the realm of mechanical forces” and “controlled by a crank”. “Have you heard,” the choreographer asks the narrator, “of the artificial legs designed by English craftsmen for those unfortunates who have lost their limbs?” The implication is clear: prosthetic-clad man is like a puppet - which invites the question: who’s the puppeteer?

Tom McCarthy on David Lynch in the New Statesman.

Tom McCarthy lists the books that have influenced him in Frieze Magazine.

A Frieze Foundation podcast of a talk between Alasdair Gray and Tom McCarthy which took place on Friday 17 October 2008.

Tom McCarthy’s Agamemnon - a Play in Two Acts appears in Everyday Genius courtesy of Lee Rourke who is curating the site throughout October 2009.

The British premiere of Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, written by Tom McCarthy, takes place at the BFI London Film Festival (15, 16 and 19 October).

Tom McCarthy will give a talk on David Lynch’s work at Tate Modern on Halloween.