Tom McCarthy has provided a blurb for Tony O’Neill’s Sick City, which comes out in July 2010:

“I fucking loved it — the piss-soaked floors, the vomit-impastoed car interiors, the groans and grunts from every room. It’s like some weirdly loveable purgatory.”

Tom McCarthy will be giving a talk about his work in Parveen Adams’s series of ‘Artists’ Talks’ at the Architectural Association on Friday 12th March. He will be talking specifically about his writing in relation to film, which is the main theme of the series:

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist who lives in London. He won the 2008 Believer Book award for his novel, Remainder. He has also published Men in Space and C, to appear later this year. The discussion will focus on the relation between literature and film – Remainder is being made in to a film and C contains a big film-strand.

Friday, 6.30pm at the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

Object No. 50 of 50 — Significant Objects v2. PHOTO: Adrian Kinloch

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Tom McCarthy, here. Part of a special collaboration with Underwater New York, this object’s story will ship rolled into a vintage bottle found on the beach of Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn. Proceeds from this auction go to 826 National.]

1. Pollution of coastal waters can have / the black sun of melancholy / signature of all things I am here to / test for indicator organisms such as / Love or Phoebus, Lusignan or Biron / based on weekly or fortnightly water sampling

2. The beach zone is modeled as / the grotto where the siren / (see Fig. 1) / wind-generated surface advection and / have lingered in / with parameter estimation / limit of the diaphane / with uniform pollution concentration

3. Wild sea money / dc and dt: decay and mixing / language tide and wind have silted / to a build-up of pollutants during / the night of the tombs, you who consoled me / (see Fig. 2)

4. The coastline is roughly aligned with / the sighs of the Saint and the cries of / prevailing wind positions at this / lolled on bladderwrack / in the chambers of / pollution forecasting, modeled by / the grid where vine and rose enmesh

5. 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

PHOTO: Nura Qureshi

The significance of this object has been invented by the author; see the project description for details.

About the author:

Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder, won the Believer Book Award in 2008. His avant-garde art “organisation” the International Necronautical Society (which may or may not actually exist) surfaces through publications, proclamations and denunciations, live events and conventional art exhibitions at institutions. McCarthy is also author of the non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature. His new novel C will be published by Knopf in 2010.

David Lynch’s films are hymns to bodily mutilation and dysfunction, in which prosthetic props threaten the very being of peculiar heroes.

There’s an early David Lynch film called The Amputee (1974). Two films, in fact: he made it twice, with the same script, same shots, same everything. Explaining the duplication years later, he told an interviewer that the American Film Foundation wanted to test two types of video stock, so he used the opportunity to produce a short, recording it on both types for comparison. He did this not without misgivings: that the American Film Foundation should be consorting with a format that might turn out to be film’s nemesis “gave me a sadness”.

In the film itself, a woman with two stumps instead of legs is seen writing a letter, while a voice-over renders the content of this silent process. The content itself is pretty conventional, involving some interpersonal psychological entanglement or other. But this is relegated to the background. The film’s prime action, what we actually see, is a nurse dressing the stumps: unravelling bandages, pumping liquid over mounds of malformed scar tissue, letting it drain and dribble out of cavities and craters. It’s pure Lynch already, a ghoulish fascination with traumatised flesh and its contortions, set against a backdrop of anxiety about the medium, the very material, in which the drama is being rendered. Try to count the instances of deformity in Lynch’s work, or of people being deformed on camera, and you’ll lose count pretty quickly.

To interpret his repeated featuring of disability as a liberal, “equal opportunity”-type gesture would be wildly wide of the mark; yet seeing it as a kind of shorthand for moral perversity, like Richard III’s hunched back in Shakespeare’s play, would be just as mistaken. Deformity, for Lynch, is not simply thematic: it is instrumental. In his films, what the continual, almost systematic replacement of body parts and faculties by instruments - crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids and ever weirder apparatuses sometimes as large as rooms - produces is a whole prosthetic order, a world of which prosthesis is not just a feature, but a fundamental term, an ontological condition. And the implications of this world, this order, are, as Lynch himself might put it, big.

For Freud, prosthesis is the essence of technology. “With all his tools,” he writes in Civilisation and its Discontents, “man improves his own organs, both motor and sensory, or clears away the barriers to their functioning.” Ships, aeroplanes, telescopes and cameras, gramophones and telephones - all these afford man the omnipotence and omniscience he attributes to his gods, thus making him “ein Prothesengott”, a kind of god with artificial limbs, a prosthetic god. “When he puts on all his aux­iliary organs he is truly magnificent,” Freud writes, “but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Man’s technological appendages both enhance and diminish him. It’s what Hal Foster, in his book Prosthetic Gods, calls “the double logic of the prosthesis”: an addition that threatens, or marks, a subtraction.

This double logic is writ large in Lynch’s films. That the father of Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), the central character in Blue Velvet (1986), is strapped up, astronaut-like, to apparatuses of the highest order is due not to some heroic cosmic voyaging, but rather to having been struck down by a heart attack, immobilised, made pathetic; meeting Jeffrey’s gaze with his, all he can do is cry. As Jeffrey returns from visiting him in hospital, this same logic is expanded to provide the film’s inciting incident - his discovery, in an open field, of a severed ear heralds the onset of a world of amplified, recorded and transmitted sound, where Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) sings into trademark Lynchean microphones, Frank (Dennis Hopper) and his entourage mime to tape cassettes and crackling walkie-talkies hold the key to life and death. This world is both exhilarating and threatening. And it has been present in Lynch’s oeuvre since the opening seconds of Eraserhead (1977), where, to the sound of loudspeaker static and industrial noise, we see a sweaty, tar-coated figure “operating” the abject hero, Henry (Jack Nance), by cranking a lever in a signal box.

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?

This question is a central one for Lynch. His films abound in instances of control, in scenes in which control itself is dramatised. “I can make him do anything I please!” Frank boasts after he has captured Jeffrey. His other captive, Dorothy, he manipulates night after night, telling her: “Sit down!”; “Open your legs!”; “Don’t look at me!” Dorothy then does the same to Jeffrey, holding a knife to his throat and hissing at him “Undress!” or, later, “Hit me!” - both of which he does.

In The Elephant Man (1980) - which, like Kleist’s text, opens in a 19th-century fairground where puppets are displayed - John Merrick (John Hurt) is alternately bullied into standing up and turning round to order for the paying public, and more kindly but no less decisively prompted to perform the same manoeuvres by his doctor, who then teaches him to speak and tells him what to say.

Telling people what to say or how to move their body is part and parcel of making films, but there’s a metaphysical dimension to it, too. For Kleist, puppetry lays bare a complex process through which man, robbed of the pure, naive grace of a puppet by self-consciousness, might regain it by advancing so far into knowledge that he re-emerges on the other side to “appear most pure in that human form which either has no consciousness at all or possesses infinite consciousness - that is, either in a marionette or in a god” - an event, the choreographer informs the narrator, that would constitute “the last chapter in the history of the world”.

Likewise, the network of control in Wild at Heart (1990), in which Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lulu (Laura Dern) flee Lulu’s overbearing mother (Diane Ladd), also has a metaphysical dimension: divine and supernatural forces, voo­doo priestesses and witches. The mother, summoning her diabolical cohorts on the telephone, watches the progress of Cage and Dern in her glass ball, as though she were Athena gazing down on Odysseus’s troubled journey home.

Wild at Heart’s main template is the ultimate cinematic fable of divinity and puppetry: the Wizard of Oz, who controls everything and can make all things happen, turns out, at the end of the Technicolor rainbow, to be no more than a feeble man cranking a crappy, low-tech, fairground-type contraption. Incredibly, mainstream commercial cinema managed to enact in 1939 the subversive fantasy that William Burroughs would spend decades toiling in the underground and avant-garde to formulate - the fantasy that the Control Room or Reality Studio that maintains the illusion that in turn conserves repressive order can be revealed for what it is, rumbled and blown open. For Burroughs, this day, when it arrives, will not only prompt panicked cries that “the director is on set”, but also herald the end of the film - the end of time, perhaps, and certainly the death of God (who, after all, is no more than a hack director, a degenerate crank-operator whose power over us makes “ventriloquist dummies” of us). Here, again, we come back to prosthesis: for Burroughs, God is like an irksome and unnecessary limb or organ.

With all this in mind, consider the trium­virate of what, if Lynch receives his full critical due in future years, will probably come to be referred to, à la Shakespeare, as his “problem films”: the ones that, lacking a stable reality field, are fraught with ontological discrepancies - seemingly unconnected plot-lines, characters who switch from one persona to another, settings that shift from house to house, continent to continent, era to era.

The first of these, Lost Highway (1997), is an orgy of deformity and bodily shutdown. Fred (Bill Pullman), the central character of the first half, doesn’t simply murder his wife, he dismembers her; Richard Pryor makes a final film appearance, all decrepit in his wheelchair; and there’s the dwarfish Mystery Man (Robert Blake) with his telephone, another big prosthetic ear. The Mystery Man, with his illuminated face, is also a kind of angel: here, too, human beings mix with gods - and do so through a technologically enabled interface of videos and sound equipment, fine-tuned (and not so fine-tuned) car engines, and wireless sets. Lost Highway’s supernatural realm of technology is blighted, too, glitch-ridden: burglar alarms disabled, tapes peppered with white noise, radios prone to interference from the other channel.

What’s this film about? The same as all of Lynch’s films: the outsourcing of the self and of reality to their prostheses - and the outsourcing of what is at once the triumph and catastrophe of God’s death to the prosthetic realm as well. God dies in Lost Highway, make no mistake: Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia), the patriarchal gangster who makes porno movies running on a loop in the control room of desire, is butchered gruesomely in front of the Mystery Man’s camera. Time, at this point, reaches the end of its reel, comes full circle, and the film ends with the same Nietzschean announcement that it began with: “Dick Laurent is dead.”

The same state of affairs persists in Mulholland Drive (2001). Beginning with a car crash, it loops round on itself just like Lost Highway, seeding confusion as it progresses. People who try to work out what’s “really” going on in it are wasting their time, as the whole drama of the film is that of a reality field trying to hold itself together after its sovereign guarantor (in this case, not the Godlike father figure, but rather the female object of obsessive love, played by Laura Harring) has been assassinated. It tries to do this through the medium of film - the narratives, scripts and personae of Hollywood. Only the reel is real. The man in the Control Room this time - Mr Roque (Michael J Anderson), who listens in on studio meetings by audio relay and dispenses his commands via intercom - is almost pure prosthesis, his already tiny, crippled body dwarfed yet further by the spacious, hi-tech chamber from which he calls the shots.

By Inland Empire (2006), it’s no longer even tiny human beings occupying the central chamber, but rabbits, moving robotically to canned laughter. In the Control Room, the marionettes: the puppets operate us. Opening with a close-up of speeding gramophone grooves overlaid with a crackling announcement for a radio play, then cutting straight to closed-circuit images of people with blanked-out faces, then to a woman watching television, the film announces from the outset that its subject will be mediation itself. What follows is all glitch, all interference, as lines, situations and identities morph into and out of one another. “There’s a vast network,” says one character, “an ocean of possibilities.”

It is this network that Nikki (Laura Dern again) navigates as she rushes through a series of quasi-connected rooms, streets, film sets and screens, encountering an architecture that is best understood as “digital” - in the strict computing sense of information storage, relay and configuration. Like a gamer, she must find her way towards the inner chamber, negotiating levels that regress and embed each other; like a hacker, she must crack its source code, break the game’s own system, bring it crashing down.

To put it in Kleist’s terms, she must come to the point where no consciousness and infinite consciousness coincide, gods and marionettes become one, the world’s last chapter. It is not only the logic that’s digital; so is the medium in which it takes place, the very matter on which Lynch shot it. What’s been amputated, cut, removed from this film is the film itself, replaced not by video, but by virtual technology.

The world’s last chapter, cinema’s prosthesis. This, perhaps, is what we are witnessing at the end of Inland Empire. Against the agonised, apocalyptic ecstasy of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman”, a song that tells of what happens at time’s end, “all on them day”, a girl who, with a car-stick for a leg, embodies all the amputees and car-crash victims, all the dwarves, puppets and freaks in Lynch’s oeuvre, hobbles on to a stage on which all the film’s players, revels ended, are gathered - and, surveying the scene with a smile, she murmurs: “Sweet.”

This is an edited version of “The Prosthetic Imagination of David Lynch”, a talk given during the recent conference on Lynch’s films at Tate Modern

Tom McCarthy’s third novel, “C”, will be published by Jonathan Cape in August

The novelist will also be talking (alongside AS Byatt and Aleksander Hemon) about how European fiction has influenced English fiction in general as well as his own work in particular at the South Bank Centre on 18th January.

Finally, he will be appearing at the Grand Palais in Paris (”L’OuLiPo et le monde de Christian Boltanski”) on 29th January, with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Jacques Roubaud. This is how Tom is presented:

Tom McCarthy est écrivain et artiste. Son premier roman Remainder (Et ce sont les chats qui tombèrent, Hachette, 2007), qui aborde les sujets du trauma et de la reconstitution, a été traduit dans plus de dix langues et est actuellement adapté au cinéma par Film4. En 2008, l’écrivain a reçu le prix Believer Book Award. Son organisation artistique avant-gardiste, l’International Necronautical Society (laquelle existe ou peut-être n’existe pas) fait surface à travers des publications, proclamations et dénonciations, événements « en live », expositions d’art conventionnelles dans des institutions, comme par exemple ces dernières années la Tate Britain et au Moderna Museet de Stockhom. McCarthy est aussi l’auteur de l’œuvre non fictionnelle Tintin and the Secret of Literature et de nombreux essais publiés dans The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s et Artforum. Son nouveau roman C, qui explore le lien entre technologie et deuil, sera publié par Jonathan Cape en 2010.

Here’s the relevant extract:

Best debut
It opened with a Tempest reference, borrowed acronyms from Pynchon and jokes from both Amises, dreamed up a riot of characters and loved them all equally, and hid a novel almost Victorian in its concern for families, religion, race, and class behind lightshow prose. Zadie Smith was 24 years old when White Teeth (2000) was published—”the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing ten-year-old,” she’d later admit—and On Beauty (2005), her third novel, was even better. But by then we were already taking her for granted. She’s this decade’s undisputed debut novelist, with apologies to Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai, 2000), Tom McCarthy (Remainder, 2007), Benjamin Kunkel (Indecision, 2005), Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End, 2007), et al.

Mark Medley, “The National Post’s Best Books of the Decade,” National Post 2 January 2010 [Canada]

Remainder is included in the National Post’s Top 10 books of the decade:

1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Simon & Schuster, 2000, U.S.)

Dave Eggers turned the most devastating of tragedies, the loss of both of his parents to cancer in the span of a month, into one of the most affecting literary debuts anywhere. The critically praised and commercially successful memoir helped launch Eggers’ career, and his later work on McSweeney’s and the 826 writing centres quickly made him one of the most important literary voices in the English language. Ron Nurwisah, National Post

2. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, U.S.)

Published on Sept. 11, 2001, The Corrections serves as a fin de siècle document for an America that changed at the very moment of its publication. It’s a time capsule, and a largely unflattering mirror. Robert Wiersema, author of Before I Wake

I actually hated the first 25 pages of The Corrections, like it was a guy I’d just met at a bar who was trying to impress me with how sharp-witted and complex he was when really he was an utter tool. But something made me keep reading, and after a few chapters it became one of those books that my brain gets obsessed with and my body resents me for — a book that makes me stop working, eating, sleeping and socializing because it’s so damn amazing. For the next month, all I wanted to talk about with anyone was The Corrections, and I still look upon people with a bit of disdain if they haven’t read it. Vanessa Farquharson, National Post

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon (Random House, 2000, U.S.)

Two cousins — amateur escape artist Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman, the son of a vaudeville strongman — find fame and (mis)fortune after creating a popular comic book character called The Escapist in Michael Chabon’s epic love letter to the Golden Age of comics. It is, in my opinion, the best book of the decade. Mark Medley, National Post

4. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, 2006, U.S.)

5. Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin, 2002, U.S.)

One of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and one of the most heartbreaking. How Foer is able so elegantly to marry the two is dumbfoundingly impossible. It pains me to put this here because the one time I met him he was a bit of a dick. But perhaps it’s a testament to the book’s quality that I’m unable to deny its place. Nathan Sellyn, author of Indigenous Beasts

6. Platform, by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Frank Wynne (Knopf, 2001, France)

Forget Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul. If you like your novels with a side of provocation and public outrage, Houellebecq’s your man. He offends just about everyone, including his mother, whom he affectionately refers to as “that old c—.” Stephen Myers, Penguin Canada

I have returned to this book many times, in the way I return to restaurants because I’ve had good meals there, or I like the staff, the décor, where eventually the relationship deepens, achieves the kind of overtone I look for in all things. Platform is not a perfect novel. As in most of Houellebecq’s poorly written fictions we meet a misanthrope who accepts the market as the arbiter of all human relations, be they economic, social or personal. If there is hope in this book it lies in the reader’s potential to recognize the relationship between the author’s crippled syntax and his narrator’s equally crippled subjectivity. Whether Houellebecq writes “badly” on purpose (or whether he behaves badly in person) is irrelevant. The book works in part because the form (the author’s prose) relates to the content (an alienated narrator). Michel Houellebecq is the only writer I know who writes about the world from the top down. Michael Turner, author of 8×10

7. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber and Faber, 2005, U.K.)

8. Remainder, by Tom McCarthy (Metronome Press, 2005, U.K.)

If only for a fleeting moment, Remainder, a dark and spare novel about personal authenticity and murderous re-enactment, seemed to offer a creative alternative to the cul-de-sac of overwrought and twee novels emanating from Brooklyn (and creative writing classes everywhere). Sadly, the bloated and banal seem to have made a decided comeback (if they ever went away), but even so, the unashamedly intellectual Remainder stands out, perfectly capturing the fears and anxieties of the decade. Dan Wagstaff, Raincoast Books

9. The Master, by Colm Tóibín (Picador, 2004, Ireland)

A suspenseful meditation on what it means to write: how an artist strains life and experience through the mysterious sieve of art to achieve something more than himself. Marina Endicott, author of Good to a Fault

10. No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July (Simon & Schuster, 2007, U.S.)

Chronic City (Faber) is a searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped up in their own delusions, desires and lies. Into the cloistered life of Chase Insteadman, handsome but inoffensive fixture on the social scene, comes Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic, whose countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw them into another Manhattan, as they attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: truth. Lethem, the author of seven novels, including Fortress of Solitude, will be in conversation with the novelist Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Men in Space.

Der britische Schriftsteller Tom McCarthy schafft mit «81/2 Millionen» das Paradox eines postmodernen Realismus

Der 1969 geborene Tom McCarthy betrat die literarische Bühne vor vier Jahren mit einem aufsehenerregenden Buch. Der Roman «Remainder», eine virtuose Mischung aus poststrukturalistischem Bewusstsein und scharfem Realitätssinn, liegt nun in deutscher Übersetzung vor.

Milo RauMilo Rau lebt als freischaffender Publizist in Berlin.

Alle paar Jahre einmal tut sich in der literarischen Produktion eine Lücke auf, und vor uns liegt ein Roman, kalt, klar und geschliffen wie ein Talisman. Alle Obsessionen einer Epoche kommen in ihm zum Ausdruck, ihre ungesagten Ängste und Freuden, ihre banalsten Wahrheiten und ihre verwickeltsten Theorien. Zugleich klassisch und avantgardistisch, machen diese Romane kein Hehl aus ihren Vorgängern. Gewissermassen Blaupausen der grossen traditionellen Themen, eignen sie sich diese so selbstbewusst und nonchalant an, dass uns alles neu und notwendig vorkommt. Es ist, als hätte eine Epoche jenen Aggregatszustand erreicht, in dem endlich sagbar wird, was vorher nur geahnt, nur angedeutet, nur umständlich verpackt zum Ausdruck gebracht werden konnte. Ein solcher Roman – philosophisch hochkomplex und doch so einfach geplottet wie ein Comic, verliebt in jede Abschweifung und doch erzähltechnisch immer auf dem Punkt – ist der Roman «Remainder» des Engländers Tom McCarthy, der dieses Jahr unter dem Titel «81/2 Millionen» im Diaphanes-Verlag auf Deutsch erschienen ist.

Es sei gleich zu Anfang gesagt: Das meiste, wovon uns «81/2 Millionen» erzählt, war schon einmal da. Es sind die altbekannten Themen des existenzialistischen Romans, für die sich McCarthy interessiert – Entfremdung, Inauthentizität, exzessive Selbsterfahrung. Wie einst Sartres «Ekel» oder Camus’ «Fremder» handelt «81/2 Millionen» von der schlagartigen Erkenntnis, in einer in ihrer schieren Materialität völlig fremden Welt zu leben. Und wie in Bret Easton Ellis’ «American Psycho» oder in J. G. Ballards «Crash» ist auch für McCarthy der einzige Ausweg aus dieser abhandengekommenen, in popkulturellen Secondhand-Gesten versteinerten Welt der acte gratuit, der perfekt inszenierte Dandy-Exzess.

Leben, auswendig gelernt
Doch setzt McCarthy, anders als diese Grossmeister des Absurden und der exzessiven Selbsterforschung, seinen Trigger am einfachsten möglichen Punkt an – im Hirn des Protagonisten. Seinem namenlosen Erzähler kommt bereits in den ersten Zeilen bei einem mysteriösen Unfall das Universum des traditionellen Romans, das Gedächtnis abhanden. Wie nach einem Hirnschlag muss er alles neu, alles von Grund auf lernen: die Hand zu bewegen, eine Karotte zu essen, die Strasse zu überqueren. Die Rehabilitation gelingt, und nach und nach kehren auch die Erinnerungen zu ihm zurück. Doch was nicht wiederkehrt, ist das Gefühl der Präsenz. Jene unbeschreibliche Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der man eine Kühlschranktür öffnet oder eine Zigarette anzündet.

Jede Bewegung ist fortan inauthentisch, gleichsam auswendig gelernt: «Der ganze Genesungsprozess hatte die Distanz zwischen mir und den Dingen, die ich tat, noch mehr vergrössert. Ich war nicht normal, ich war noch normaler als die anderen.» Alles ist formatiert, alles ist nur noch schale Wiederholung. Bewusstsein verhindert Anmut: Wie in Kleists berühmter Parabel «Über das Marionettentheater» zappelt McCarthys Protagonist an den Schnüren der eigenen Reflexion und der kulturellen Klischees. Geboren, oder vielmehr wiedergeboren ist der postmoderne Jedermann.

Doch wie macht man aus diesem Trigger einen Roman? Wie schreibt man das heute: eine reflexionskritische Parabel? Denn der eigentliche Skandal von McCarthys «81/2 Millionen» ist nicht der auf den ersten sechzig Seiten genauso ironisch wie naturalistisch erzählte kulturpessimistische Common Sense: dass wir alle inauthentisch sind, dass wir gefangen sind in den kulturellen Simulationen, deren innerste und komplexeste eben wir selbst sind. Die bekannten Selbsterfahrungs-Posen – Sex, Alkohol, wildes Partyleben und Verbrüderung mit den Obdachlosen – werden en passant durchgespielt. Auch der phänomenologische, der hellwache und gleichzeitig unbedarfte Blick von McCarthys Helden auf London könnte noch als erzähltechnischer Trick im Gefolge Camus’ durchgehen. Nein, das Einzigartige und Unerhörte dieses Romans ist, dass McCarthy mit fast cartesianischer Unerbittlichkeit auf Gewissheit, auf dem Realkontakt mit der materiellen Welt beharrt. Er hält nichts vom Absurden, er ruht sich nicht aus auf seiner Entfremdung. Die bald aggressive, bald zynische Flaneurs-Melancholie, wie man sie aus so vielen postmodernen Romanen kennt, hat sich für ihn nach sechzig Seiten erschöpft. Denn er will nicht bloss Gast sein im Haus der Wirklichkeit und der kulturellen Codes, er will nicht frei und obdachlos sein. Nein, er will es tatsächlich besitzen.

Und so setzt denn die eigentliche Romanhandlung ein, als McCarthys Erzähler auf einer Party – sinnfällig verortet in der Londoner «Plato Road» – ein Déjà-vu-Erlebnis hat. Im Badezimmer sieht er einen Riss in der Wand, den er zu kennen glaubt. Ein immenses Glücksgefühl überkommt ihn: Da war einmal ein identischer Riss, und um ihn herum hatte es einen Alltag gegeben, ein Haus, Gerüche, Klänge, zufällige Begegnungen, eine ganze Welt. Dieser Moment einer Epiphanie – ein autobiografisches Erlebnis McCarthys und eigentlicher Schreibanlass für «81/2 Millionen» – ist der Nukleus der Romanhandlung. Hier beginnt die philosophische Auslegeordnung der ersten Kapitel Tempo aufzunehmen, hier setzt sich die obsessive Imaginationsmaschinerie in Gang, und mit ihr die narrativen Wucherungen: «Es wuchs von Minute zu Minute, dieses erinnerte Gebäude; es breitete sich, vom Riss ausgehend, immer weiter aus.»

Das Gebäude der Erinnerung
McCarthys Protagonist heuert Architekten und Ausstatter an, die er sein Déjà-vu mit gigantischem logistischem Aufwand nachbauen lässt. Der Riss in der Wand, das Badezimmer, das ganze Mietshaus; eine Frau mit Mülltüten auf der Treppe, ein junger Mann, der im Hof an seinem Motorrad bastelt; der Geruch von gebratener Leber, fehlerhafte Pianomusik und Katzen, die übers Dach schleichen und in die Tiefe fallen: An jedem Detail wird gefeilt, jede Geste der «Hausbewohner», jeder Lichteinfall, jeder Fleck muss an seinem Ort sein. Denn wenn das Leben ohnehin aus Wiederholungen besteht, aus unbewussten Formatierungen und momenthaften Reminiszenzen – was liegt dann näher, als nach der perfekten, der vollständigen und damit unhintergehbaren Wiederholung zu suchen? Was liegt näher, als das Haus der Wirklichkeit tatsächlich nachzubauen, es wieder begehbar zu machen? Geld hat McCarthys Held jedenfalls genug. Denn die Abfindung, jene 81/2 Millionen Pfund des deutschen Romantitels, die ihm eine obskure Firma nach seinem Unfall gezahlt hat, hat sich mittlerweile bei Aktienspekulationen vervielfacht.

Und so steht es schliesslich fertig da und funktioniert: das perfekte Ballett der Marionetten, die monumentale Nachstellung eines Déjà-vu, der bewohnbare Ort einer verlorenen Vergangenheit. «Es war Arbeit – sehr viel Arbeit», so fasst der Erzähler die erste seiner zahllosen Wiederholungsorgien zusammen, mit denen er in den folgenden Kapiteln die Schauspieler und Requisiteure quält. «Aber meine Bewegungen waren anders gewesen. Hatten sich anders angefühlt. Mein Gemütszustand auch, mein ganzes Bewusstsein. Anders, besser.» – Präsenz durch Präzision: Bei aller essayistischen Gewandtheit und Lockerheit, die «81/2 Millionen» so lesbar macht, geht etwas Kaltes, Zwanghaftes, fast Dogmatisches von dem Buch aus. McCarthy ist kein postmoderner Bricoleur, sondern ein minuziöser Szenograph des Realen, dessen Bühnenbilder sich auf genau halber Distanz zwischen dokumentarischer und existenzieller Wahrheit ansiedeln. Wie soll man auch wissen, was die Erinnerung braucht, um zu funktionieren – und was wirklich geschehen ist? Und was macht es schon für einen Unterschied?

«81/2 Millionen», diese nach Robbe-Grillets «La Jalousie» präziseste literarische Topografie eines Hauses, entstand in zwei getrennten Arbeitsschritten: zuerst unterwegs in London, mit dem Diktafon in der Hand, dann in mehrjähriger literarischer Verarbeitung der gesammelten Fakten. Jedes Detail stimmt, alles ist beobachtet – und doch ist es erst das szenische Zusammenspiel der materiellen und gestischen Details, das idealistische Korsett, das sie, wie McCarthys Protagonist sagen würde, «echt» macht. Die alte mystische Obsession der Realpräsenz hat hier nichts Romantisches, sondern eher etwas Sherlock-Holmes-Haftes. «Die Kriminaltechnik ist nichts Geringeres als eine Kunstform», philosophiert der Erzähler, «nein, ich würde sogar noch weiter gehen: Sie steht höher, ist verfeinerter als irgendeine Kunstform. Warum? Weil sie echt ist.»

Seiltanz zwischen Kunstformen
«Everything must leave some kind of mark», ein Zitat aus «Remainder», steht denn auch als philosophisches Diktum über McCarthys Homepage, die eine ans Renaissancehafte grenzende Fülle von Tätigkeiten versammelt. Neben seiner Arbeit als Romanautor und – seit dem gewaltigen Erfolg von «81/2 Millionen» in England, den USA und Frankreich – als Vortragsreisender leitet Tom McCarthy das semifiktive Avantgarde-Netzwerk «International Necronautical Society». In dieser Funktion hat er unter anderem einen imaginären anarchistischen Anschlag auf das Greenwicher Observatorium als frühmodernes Medienereignis re-inszeniert: wie all seine Arbeiten zugleich absolut detailversessen und völlig phantastisch, mit «historischen» Zeitungsberichten und einem geisterhaften Stummfilm, der das brennende Observatorium zeigt.

Doch damit nicht genug: Einige der schönsten Kunstkritiken der letzten zehn Jahre stammen von McCarthy, und sein literaturtheoretischer Essay «Tintin and the Secret of Literature» wird im Frühling im Blumenbar-Verlag auf Deutsch erscheinen. Sein Nachdenken über Medientheorie hat er gerade zu einem historischen Roman verarbeitet, «C», der ebenfalls bereits ins Deutsche übersetzt wird. Theorie, Literatur, Installations- und Medienkunst: McCarthy wechselt entspannt zwischen den verschiedenen Disziplinen hin und her, schafft bildende Kunst, die Geschichten erzählt, und Erzählungen, die funktionieren wie begehbare Themenparks. Man könnte «81/2 Millionen» als aufwendig inszenierte Folge von Tableaux vivants beschreiben, und tatsächlich hat McCarthy seine Allegorie nur deshalb als Roman angelegt, weil es als Installation zu teuer geworden wäre.

Die wiedereroberte Wirklichkeit
Ohnehin aber hätte die Ökonomie der Installationskunst nicht ausgereicht, denn «81/2 Millionen» ist die Geschichte einer Wahrnehmungs-Krankheit, einer existenziellen Obsession. Und wie jede wirkliche Krankheit, wie jedes kraftvolle Virus gleitet das Wiederholungsexperiment zuletzt dem Experimentator selbst aus den Händen. «81/2 Millionen» endet mit der genauso absurden wie desaströsen Re-Inszenierung eines Banküberfalls und einer filmreifen Flucht im gecharterten Privatjet – unnötig zu erwähnen, dass das Buch tatsächlich gerade verfilmt wird.

Comic und Tiefsinn, Pedanterie und Metaphysik, Beschreibungsfanatismus und selbstreferenzielle Verspieltheit: Mit Tom McCarthys «81/2 Millionen» treffen sich zwei Linien der Literatur wieder, die die Postmoderne endgültig voneinander getrennt zu haben schien. Hier beginnt eine neue realistische Literatur, die durch alle Fegefeuer kulturpessimistischer Selbstzweifel gegangen ist. Die uralte Suche nach Präsenz und das genauso alte Schwelgen in Kopien, Doubles, Avatars und Scheinrealitäten verschwistern sich, als hätten sie von jeher zusammengehört. «81/2 Millionen» ist ein Paradoxon, es ist, wie McCarthy selbst in einem Begleittext zu einer berühmten Re-Inszenierung seines Freundes Rod Dickinson («The Milgram Reenactment») geschrieben hat, ein «mönchischer Gesang in einer Welt ohne Gott». Es ist eine fast mittelalterlich anmutende Anrufung der Materie, vorgetragen von einem Poststrukturalisten, kurzum: «81/2 Millionen» ist eigentlich eine Unmöglichkeit. Es ist ein Buch, das uns daran erinnert, dass ein Text eben nicht nur ein Text ist, sondern viel mehr. Ein Erlebnis, eine Bewusstseinserhellung, eine Weltsicht – jene völlig künstliche, minuziös konstruierte Brille, durch die uns bereits Proust auf die wiedereroberte Wirklichkeit blicken lassen wollte, so als hätten wir sie niemals aus den Augen verloren.

Statistiken zeigen, dass der durchschnittliche westeuropäische Bürger einen Roman pro Jahr liest. Bitte lesen Sie diesen.

Tom McCarthy: 81/2 Millionen. Übersetzt von Astrid Sommer. Diaphanes-Verlag, Zürich 2009. 302 S., Fr. 35.90.
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Ideal Syllabus

In an ongoing series, frieze asks an artist, curator or writer to list the books that have influenced them

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist who lives in London, UK. His novel Remainder (first published by Metronome Press in 2005 and by Alma Books in 2006) won the 2007 Believer Book Award and is currently being adapted for cinema by Film4. The activities of his (perhaps fictitious, perhaps not) avant-garde art ‘organization’ the International Necronautical Society take the form of publications, declarations, exhibitions and events. His new novel, C, which he describes as ‘being about technology and mourning’, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2010.

William Shakespeare
Macbeth (The Arden Shakespeare, London, 2003; first published in 1623)

When my mother told me the story of Macbeth, she made it clear that it was written by Shakespeare. So he became a character as well, over and above Macbeth. And I thought: ‘That’s who I want to be — Shakespeare.’ So I borrowed a neighbour’s typewriter and started writing Macbeth, by Tom McCarthy.’ Unfortunately the manuscript hasn’t survived.

Thomas Mann
Tonio Kröger (Published in one volume with Tristan and Death in Venice, Penguin Books, London, 1955; first published 1903)
Mann’s novella made me understand the Macbeth-era fissure between character and writer all over again as a teenager. You’ve got Tonio’s contemporaries, traversing the surface of events unplagued by self-awareness; then Tonio, who longs for that naivety denied him by his writerly Erkenntnis, his consciousness of the symbolic structures that frame everything.

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness (Penguin Books, London, 1995; first published 1902)

I must have known a third of this book by heart at one point. Nothing was ever the same again after it.

Maurice Sendak
Where the Wild Things Are (Harper & Row, New York, 1963)
Essentially Heart of Darkness done as a children’s book. It’s got near-identical sequences: Max becoming King of the Wild Things/Kurtz, ‘taking a high seat among the devils of the land’; the Wild Rumpus/‘unspeakable rites’; the anguished cry of the dark mistress as Max/Kurtz leaves to return to European ‘civilization’.

James Joyce
Finnegans Wake (Faber and Faber, London, 1939)
The source-code of the novel, of all novels — the matrix of their possibility laid bare. Presents the same challenge to any serious writer as Kazimir Malevich’s White on White from 1918 does to painters.

Hergé
The Castafiore Emerald (Methuen, London, 1963)

I probably learnt more about narrative structure from Hergé than from any other writer — and he’s not even a ‘proper’ writer! This book performs every narrative manoeuvre, every trick of misdirection, jamming, splitting, doubling, skidding and so on, to perfection, and does this at a Wake-like degree-zero of writing: nothing happens in it.

Thomas Pynchon
Gravity’s Rainbow (Vintage, London, 2000; first published 1973)

I read this at 19 or so and just thought, like, fuck, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel.

William Burroughs
Nova Express (Panther Books, London, 1964)

Burroughs is like a long-form poet: he makes prose do what usually only verse can. Cut language up and the world leaps out, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘like shining from shook foil’.

Jacques Derrida
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987)

Philosophy as a long open (if encrypted) letter sent from Socrates to Freud and back again; writing as technology, as transmission; and transmission as love.

William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury (Penguin Modern Classics, London, 1976; first published 1931)

The single best novel ever written.

Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Voyeur (One World Classics, Richmond, 2009: first published 1958)

Structure, geometry, repetition — and at the heart of all of these, psychosis. Genius.

Herman Melville
Moby-Dick (Vintage, London, 2007; first published 1851)

I could say the same thing about this as about The Voyeur — the difference being that Moby-Dick occupies the opposite end of the spectrum, as the ultimate maximalist novel. I love the way lots of the chapters start out explaining some boring technical point about maritime law and work themselves up into wild, lyrical visions about history, desire and human frailty.

Maurice Blanchot
The Gaze of Orpheus (Station Hill Press, Barrytown, 1981)
To say what literature essentially is or isn’t is a doomed undertaking. But Blanchot feels his way better than anyone else around the outlines of what it might be: a space (of disappearance), a mode (of being-towards-death), a demand (impossible to satisfy) and a seduction.

Based on an original idea by Jerry Saltz, An Ideal Syllabus was published by frieze in 1998.