Surplus Matter

You can now watch a video of Tom McCarthy’s “How Marinetti Taught Me to Write” talk delivered at the Futurism and the Avant-Garde symposium at Tate Modern on 27 June 2009.

We begin by congratulating the Obama Administration on commissioning this report from the INS. Turning to an organization whose thinking is steeped in literature, philosophy, and the arts in the hope of acquiring insight into the economic recession and suggestions as to how this hardship might be overcome may to some smack of desperation. Yet the INS commends the administration’s decision to do so as both courageous and enlightened. In (implicitly) acknowledging the critical role played by art in creating (and subverting) value, President Obama has, symbolically at least, righted the wrong done to the poet Seanchan in W. B. Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold.

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy’s “Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics” from the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Tom McCarthy will be talking about Futurism at Tate Modern next Saturday, as part of a day-long symposium (”Futurism and the Avant Garde”) to coincide with their new exhibition. Tom will wonder “what characteristics a genuinely Marinettian contemporary literature might have”. Be there or be Cubist!

The novel is a good, pacey and ultimately unchallenging read. Why couldn’t they just say that on the cover? “Entertaining, zippy and unchallenging — X, author of Y.” The reason they don’t, of course, is that, as with the whiskey-soused prospective purchaser, there’s a bigger sale being made: we’re being asked to buy into the notion that lively storytelling and more-than-adequate craftsmanship constitute great, “classic” literature. I’m not so sure. To bastardize the Latin, emptors need to sober up and exercise a little caveating over that one. I suspect that real, high-karat literature, with its complexity and ambiguity, its general slipperiness, is sitting in another box, one opening to a dimension that How to Sell doesn’t breach (and, to both its and its author’s credit, doesn’t itself actually claim to) — or, to use a fittingly ur-geological metaphor, that it’s lying buried in a rock-seam that this book walks comfortably over the top of but leaves unmined.

Tom McCarthy reviews Clancy Martin’s How to Sell in the New York Times.

I’d talked to Iain and Jane before about the status of the copy both in art and in experience, and its relation to the notion of authenticity. We’d agreed that copies never reproduce originals completely. ‘The shortfall is where the real emerges,’ they had said, ‘where understanding can begin,’ demonstrating a perfect comprehension of the secret all real artists come to know: that good art always, at some level, fails.

Tom McCarthy on Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 2004 Cramps gig re-enactment.

In moments like this, Toussaint closes in on the essence of literature as practiced by Francis Ponge or Wallace Stevens. For him as for them, writing enacts a head-on collision with the material realm, a struggle with brute facticity. Ponge and Stevens also use fruit as their battleground: Ponge’s orange, “expressed,” leaves sticky residue across the hands; Stevens’s plum “survives its poems.” It seems that Toussaint’s fruit might prevail too — as Camera progresses there’s a sense that reality, not the hero, will end up on top. In an interview reproduced at the novel’s end, Toussaint cites Kafka: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

Tom McCarthy reviews Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Camera for the New York Times.

People wanting to engage seriously in literature will have to look to other arenas: the art world and its publication networks, for example — at least until their work has found a large enough audience to make it commercially attractive to bigger houses. While this may be bad news for writers’ bank balances, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for literature, which has always “deterritorialised” itself, had to detour beyond its own boundaries, in order to be reinvigorated. The internet has produced some excellent criticism and debate around literature, but I’ve yet to see any good “primary” writing on there.

Tom McCarthy ponders the impact the recession may have on literature in the Independent.

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.

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.

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

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