TOM McCARTHY
[NOVELIST]
“EVERY FLIGHT PATH OF A SPARROW OR MOVEMENT OF AN ANT OVER A TUFT OF GROUND IS A MESSAGE.”
Writers who like encryption:
Thomas Pynchon
William S. Burroughs
James Joyce
Jean Cocteau

Tom McCarthy’s severely ambitious first novel, Remainder, is one of those books that blurs the gap between philosophy, fiction, and art happening (see the novel’s Believer Book Award in this issue for accolades and description). His recent book-length essay, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, follows the same hybridized suit, deconstructing the Belgian comic book series, literary-theory style. It investigates Tintin creator Hergé’s process of “encrypting” autobiographical material into The Adventures of Tintin, and then compares it to Balzac, Barthes, Bataille, and Derrida. His next two novels, C and the partly autobiographical Men in Space, will be published by Vintage in 2009-10.

McCarthy is also the general secretary of something called the International Necronautical Society (INS), a nebulous project he founded as a nod to all the great manifesto-based, turn-of-the-century, avant-garde art movements. Since 1999, he’s accreted a network of artists and writers with the vague purpose of “mapping out” death. He has described it as “a construct, just like the IMF or Catholic Church are constructs — and like all constructs, it involves both fictions and realities.” The society revolves around essays, meetings, grand proclamations, and “half-corporate, half-Soviet” events with names like the Second First Committee Hearings. They have hacked into the BBC website, converting it into a secret message board; they have held an event called “The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity,” which is rumored to never have happened; and in the near future, they will install a black box transmitter into Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art.

This conversation was conducted in November, 2007, at the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, by Mark Alizart, the museum’s curator. No one brought a recording device, so the interview had to be held in the auditorium, using the stage microphones. Except for the recording technician, there was no audience.

—Mark Alizart

I. “ FREUD, IF HE WAS ONE THING ONLY, WAS A GREAT GOTHIC NOVELIST.”

THE BELIEVER: Your work is so obsessed, in its own way, with crypts. I mean to say, you have written many books already, novels, callings (or hearings, sorry), and an essay on Tintin, called Tintin and the Secret of Literature, in which you explain that there is a secret behind Tintin, which is linked to this question of mourning and crypts. You even play on the word. A crypt is a place where you bury your dead, but also, you will find it in the words encryption and decipher.

TOM McCARTHY: Well, cryptos means hidden, anything buried.

BLVR: So this is the turning point between the actual object, the crypt, and the structure of encryption.

TM: Yeah, well, this merging — of what you might call the semiotic or linguistic, on one hand, and the architecture, on the other — I first came across this when, as General Secretary of the INS, I was holding hearings, and we interrogated the British artist Cerith Wyn Evans, who’d done a lot of work that involved, for example, Morse-code-encrypted passages of Georges Bataille and Merleau-Ponty being transmitted across from buildings with their lights going on-and-off across London. And during these hearings he used the term “crypt,” and I pulled him up on it. “What do you mean, ‘the crypt?’” He used it as a noun. And he started talking about these psychoanalytic writers, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who’d done research into Freud, into the case history of “the Wolf Man.” And, subsequently, I went and read them. And their work is absolutely fascinating.

Freud, if he was one thing only, was a great Gothic novelist. And The Wolf Man is a wonderfully rich account of this wealthy young Russian who has a childhood trauma involving incest and then sibling death — his sister dies. Later, this produces a kind of neurosis in his adult life. Freud compares his mental landscape to a kind of tomb, a pyramid, and Freud compares himself to an Egyptologist who, like Indiana Jones, has to go inside and decipher all of the inscriptions on the walls.

When Abraham and Torok revisit this case history they say, well, what Freud is really talking about is not a pyramid; it’s a crypt. And it’s a site — it’s a linguistic site of encryption. I mean, psychoanalysis is “the listening cure.” The psychoanalyst tunes in to the patient almost like a kind of radio ham tuning into some mysterious frequency, and what they find when they tune in, via Freud, to his patient, is this kind of double eavesdropping in this multilinguistic zone, ’cause the wolf man was first Russian, then spoke English and French, and is talking to Freud in German. They find this kind of polyglottal crackling zone of words, which contain images and memories and associations, kind of encrypting one another to produce this weird neurosis, almost like a linguistic tumor. And I found that very, very compelling.

After doing this research I actually set up a radio station at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which was conceived absolutely as a crypt and we transmitted enmeshed messages.

BLVR: Yeah, we’ve got to say a word on these radios, because they appear also in many of your essays. Mainly in Calling All Agents, which comes back to Cocteau’s invented radio.

TM: That’s right.

BLVR: And messages, encrypted messages as a crucial military strategic way of communicating to agents — from hell to earth, in Cocteau’s case — but which gave birth to a real technique used in the Second World War. So this is very, very important, not only in symbolic terms, but also in real—

TM: —in actual political-historical… I mean, the starting point was, I was fascinated with this moment in Jean Cocteau’s 1949/1950 film Orphée — his retelling of the Orpheus myth — where this dead poet, Cégeste, after he’s dead, he sets up almost like a pirate-radio transmitter, and he transmits these short lines of poetry, these urgent messages. Orphée, who’s alive, picks them up on his car radio between stations — it’s not a registered radio station. And he is completely compelled by these messages. They say things like, “Listen, the bird paints with his fingers, two times. I repeat…” and then it repeats. Or “Silence goes more quickly when played backward. Listen, two times.” And then there is a chain of numbers and general sound of static and things. And it seemed to me, when I saw the film, that Cocteau was onto something. He’d intuited some essential relationship between technology, poetry, and desire.

And when I looked into it further I found that Cocteau had kind of stolen the idea, if you like, or had gotten the idea from World War II, when the British Secret Services were transmitting into occupied France, these lines of poetry, just like in the movie. Ninety-nine out of every hundred meant absolutely nothing, but every hundredth or two-hundredth was code for, like, “Now, blow up the bridge.” “Now, assassinate the colonel.” So, of course, the Germans didn’t know which was which. So they’re listening to them, looking for patterns of recognition and trying to crack them.

That was the starting point for the project that I ended up doing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts: sending out these radio messages, trying to open up this kind of sub-official, subliminal frequency that was at once an aesthetic project and a political one, I guess.

BLVR: There has been a craze in England, and I believe in America, for secret-message books. I don’t know if you’ve seen these. There’s a very big book written on mathematics and codes that goes from the first alphabetical transmutations to Turing’s deciphering of ENIGMA. How do you explain this interest for the public, for wider readers, for secret messages and codes?

TM: I think it’s a populist manifestation of Calvinist culture, basically. For the Calvinists, we were living in a world of signs. As Francis Bacon said, “Nature is God’s second book.” It’s a text — it needs to be interpreted. I mean, you get it in the Greeks, in Virgil — every flight path of a sparrow or movement of an ant over a tuft of ground is a message. It is a sign — it needs interpretation. In more modern literature you get this sensibility very much in the work of Thomas Pynchon or William Burroughs, the sense that we are living in a world of signs, that there’s an order behind the visible that needs to be drawn out through interpretation.

And I guess this manifests itself in many ways, in more subcultural formats. Even in the paranoia of the Christian parents of America who want to listen to Iron Maiden records backward and find the Satanist messages in them. Of course, maybe one in every hundred chance “message” that emerges could be construed as Satanist — the others turn out to be things like “Give me a peppermint,” or “It smells of fish.”

BLVR: Does that mean there is a kind of global neurosis acting behind us? This is what Jameson says in his last book on paranoia and capitalism. You talked of Burroughs. This was something he was involved in a lot.

TM: Burroughs was a big influence on this ICA project, too. I mean, his idea of the cut-up and of viral media…. For him, cutting up text and cutting up newspapers and reordering them was not just in order to produce something nice or pretty. He genuinely believed that this was a not just politically, but a metaphysically subversive act. You know, God really exists for him, and he’s a fucker. He’s manifested through the CIA, the FBI, the corporations, the boards, the syndicates, the media outlets, Time-Warner, and so on, that control our planet. And to kill God, which has been the great aim of the avant-garde from the Lettrists onward, we need to cut up the media. We need to cut it up and rearrange it. And this will bring it crashing down, in a sort of short circuit. I think this is absolutely commendable.

BLVR: Your references are wide — Hergé, Nabokov, Burroughs, and others, but most of all, you tend to read lots of French authors from the ’60s. I mentioned structuralism — you feel close to this, I imagine. And how would you say this has evolved? Because these books, they’re not widely read any more.

TM: I’ve got a quite long-term view of cultural history. I mean, after 9/11, people were saying you should write directly about this. But I think, read the Oresteia by Aeschylus, it’s about this, it’s about power, terror, media, violence, and notions of justice and retribution. If you want to understand 9/11, read Greek tragedy.

II. “ENCRYPTION IS ACTUALLY AN ABSOLUTELY FUNDAMENTAL NECESSITY IN ORDER TO DO SOMETHING NEW, OTHERWISE WE’RE JUST ANNOTATING THE OLD STUFF.”

BLVR: You wrote Remainder two years ago.

TM: I wrote it and finished it in 2001. It took one year to write and three years to find a publisher.

BLVR: And it can be said to also be about encryption and the way something which is not known, a souvenir, a reminiscence, reactivates this history that the hero does not even know about, and makes him act in a way of himself, building his own crypt and encrypting this not-known memory inside different events, which lead him to a bank robbery. So I’d say there was the storyline, which is related to all we’ve said and talked about. And then I’ve got to ask you, as a novelist, have you encrypted things in your book? Do you have this vision of writing in-itself as a way of pursuing your questions?

TM: Yes. On a superficial level, there is a lot of literary encryption going on in Remainder. For example, the building that he constructs in order to replay his displaced trauma memories, or his constructed memories of a time before the trauma, is called Madlyn Mansions, which is kind of a reference to Proust and the madeleine, which is the memory trigger for him. And there are other things. There is a whole sequence that is almost exactly paralleling the rhetorical pattern of the opening of Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, when he’s talking about how he went about building the house.

But, in a way, that doesn’t matter, I mean that’s kind of cute if you want to notice it. And in fact, if it were conscious, were it really explicit, if the hero had been an intellectual and said, “Oh, this is a bit like Proust,” then the novel would be over then and there, and you don’t need to write it. So it’s quite important that whatever influence is going on there does get buried. In that respect, encryption is actually an absolutely fundamental necessity in order to do something new, otherwise we are just annotating the old stuff.

BLVR: But you don’t seem to be interested in things that interested that generation, which worked around encryption and language and symbols. I am thinking of Alain Robbe-Grillet. You’re not a nouveau romancier.

TM: No.

BLVR: You don’t transmute yourself, words, or letters, or cut-up, or fold-in your text. You write in a simple way.

TM: Absolutely.

BLVR: How do you feel reading someone like Mark Danielewski, for instance?

TM: Oh, I was just reading him today. I’ve been reading Only Revolutions. Here’s the thing, right, Finnegans Wake — Joyce thought it was the last novel. He thought this was the novel in which the destiny of literature would realize itself. It was the event that we have been waiting for all of these years. And he literally thought it would be the last novel. It would be (a) unnecessary and (b) impossible to write a novel, I mean a proper novel, a serious novel, after Finnegans Wake. Now, in a way, if you have this linear-progressive view of literary or cultural history, then it is quite hard to see that he wasn’t right. But I have tried to argue, in the past, that he was exactly, I mean exactly, wrong — that Finnegans Wake is actually the first book. It is the source code of the novel. It contains everything from the picaresque Spanish, to the Anglo-Saxon novel, through Shakespeare and everything else. It eviscerates them and lays them open, but doesn’t resolve anything.

So, I don’t buy into the idea of progress, that we need to go beyond Joyce in terms of form. I think there are other things to do. Once we’ve observed the big bang in physics we don’t all just dissolve into space. We do other stuff that’s enabled by that. This goes back to what you were asking about Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs, who are writers I have a huge, huge admiration for. And you know, in my early twenties I used to copy passages of Burroughs out and make diagrams of sequences of Robbe-Grillet. But I don’t just want to imitate them or take what is most superficial about them and add one to that. I would rather do something that makes sense at a more intuitive level.

III. THE CULT OF NEWNESS

BLVR: There is also something specific about your work: it is very closely linked to contemporary art and artists. Maybe you can say a word about this, because it doesn’t happen that often that writers are interested in contemporary art, and reciprocally. I wouldn’t know how to present you, if you’re a writer, or a philosopher, or if you’re an artist because you have been all of them at the same time, really.

TM: I mean, in the current climate in the UK, publishing is a very, very conservative field. Editorial decisions are taken by marketing boards. There isn’t really much room for something that isn’t middle-of-the-road. On the other hand, in the art world — you can’t help noticing if you mix, as I do, with one foot or one toe in the publishing world and nine toes in the art world — it’s the artists who are extremely literate. In the current climate, art has become the place where literary ideas are received, debated, and creatively transformed. You mentioned Robbe-Grillet — I know several artists that are doing works based on his novels. Most artists I know have read Beckett, have read Burroughs, have read Faulkner. For example, 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.

Look at all the people like Jeremy Deller, Rod Dickinson, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, whose work consists of staging reenactments, like a historical society, of events and showing an awareness of the kind of inauthenticity and mediation within that.

So, for example, Rod Dickinson had the Milgram experiment, the “obedience to authority” experiment from the ’60s, in which people were led to believe they were torturing other people to help them learn, but which was really a set-up to see how far normal people would go when someone in a white coat was giving them instructions. He had it reenacted in real time. It was actually a very boring piece of art, as he himself said. But it was brilliant. The original experiment was a fake, involving actors, so he had actors playing actors that were encrypting the Holocaust. Milgram devised the original experiment after reading Hannah Arendt’s account of the Nuremberg Trials, where all these Nazis said, “Well, I was only following orders.” So there is an extremely complex event structure going on there — a set of ripples encoding other ripples, replaying them, sort of navigating their own memorial landscape, their own media landscape.

And this is just an example, but that’s an artist who I’d say is absolutely aware of the kind of drivers that you find in the work of someone like Beckett or Faulkner and in a way that the contemporary middlebrow novel simply is not. The latter takes all that for granted. It’s not proper literature.

BLVR: Right.

TM: Maybe it is quite unusual now for a novelist to be very involved in contemporary art, and vice versa, but look back to the Futurists, for example, I mean what Marinetti did: regenerate writing by hurling it, dragging it into the whirling blades of cinema and mechanical reproduction. If you want to describe a machine gun, don’t just write about it, let it erupt across the page diagonally and in bold print. Or if you look at Mallarmé, you know that famous — I don’t know what to call it — poem/manifesto/proposition, Un Coup De Dés (A Throw of Dice) — it’s as much a painting as it is a narrative. And the blank spaces in it are as vital as the actual words. Or the Surrealists. This continual negotiation between image and words, and words and image. I think the formats need to keep going to one another in order not to ossify.

I think, probably the greatest living artist, at the moment, is David Lynch, and for me, his films are extremely novelistic, although he describes himself as a visual artist, not a filmmaker. So there’s a triangulation going on there, in which all the forms are flowing in and getting thrown up in the air. And that’s exactly what needs to happen.

BLVR: This question of reenactment, which is essential to contemporary art and to your writing, would maybe make us go toward very broad postmodern concepts like repetition, the fact that everything has already been done, authenticity, fakeness — but when I read your books, I don’t seem to be reading a Baudrillardian writing. There is something very different about the way that you relate with postmodernity. I don’t think you’re a postmodern writer, really.

TM: I mean, I am a traditionalist. I am quite conservative. I’ve read Baudrillard, but Plato said it all. The idea of the simulacra being a copy without an original, which is Baudrillard’s big selling point — it’s in the Sophist by Plato. Lots of people described Remainder as a very postmodern book, because there is this guy reenacting very stylized moments in a bid for authenticity, and in the postmodern era, they say, we don’t have authenticity. But I was thinking as much of Don Quixote, the first novel, or one of the first novels, which is exactly the same. It is about a guy feeling inauthentic in 1605 and in a bid to acquire, to accede to authenticity, he reenacts moments from penny novels, the kind of TV of its day. So I think you have to be a bit careful about this cult of newness, the idea that somehow, post-about-1962, we’re suddenly postmodern — It just ain’t so. There’s always a precedent.

Mark Alizart is associate director of the Palais de Tokyo. He has published three issues of Fresh Theorie, an annual collection of essays presenting young French thought, as well as a book on Stuart Hall. He also edited a catalogue, Traces du sacré, for the opening of an exhibition at the Pompidou Center on twentieth-century spiritual art.

Illustration by Tony Millionaire

[Tom McCarthy’s diagrams of Robbe-Grillet books appear in the summer 2008 issue of Artforum.]

“The Believer Book Award: Our Fourth Annual — Hereby Presented to Remainder By Tom McCarthy,” The Believer, June 2008 (vol. 6, No. 5)

“What’s the most intense, clear memory you have?” asks the narrator of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. “The one you can see even if you close your eyes — really see, clear as in a vision?” Dispensing with Proustian reminiscence, McCarthy brazenly assumes the role of conceptual artist and literally reconstructs moments of time. In the same way that Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy tells its story through architecture in book form, Remainder is an art installation disguised as a brilliant novel.

After enduring hospitalization due to an undisclosed falling “something,” the novel’s nameless narrator receives a massive corporate reparation, which gives his post-traumatic mind the opportunity to fund any bizarre project it imagines. In this case, that means physically realizing his memories and quasi-metaphysical visions, creating a fantasy world he can inhabit for the duration of the book.

On the surface, the narrator is concerned with uncomplicated things, such as “blue liquid gushing out of an air conditioning unit” or “taking a carrot in your right hand” — but as with William S. Burroughs or Raymond Roussel, there exists a remarkable system of intersecting ideas governing every detail of Remainder’s hermetic universe. McCarthy conjures miniature worlds and explores the fabric of time with the creative ambition usually reserved for science fiction authors. Every movement of every character is McCarthy’s way of asking his larger question: What does it means to be an authentic human being?

McCarthy wields all the literary essentials — neurosis, repression, subconscious desires, etc. — but wields them like newfangled weapons, aiming them into strange little pockets of life, such as déjà vu and nostalgia. He manipulates the what-would-you-do-with-a-million-dollars hypothetical to take free reign with his imagination, and bravely rethinks the way people act out their lives.

*

AN EXCERPT FROM REMAINDER

As far as positions and movements were concerned: I took care of these myself, as before. I showed the Michelin Man boy re-enactor where to stand and sway, and the other two how to kick his head between them. I made them kick it with their legs mechanically, like zombies or robots. The driver, the person re-enacting my role, had to get out slowly. Like the concierge, he wore a white ice-hockey goaltender’s mask, so as not to overrun my personality with his—or, more precisely, so as not to impose any personality at all. I just wanted the motions and the words, all deadpan, neutral—wanted the re-enactors to act out the motions without acting and to speak the words without feeling, in disinterested voices, as monotonous as my pianist. The oldest boy had to take the tyre from the boot, carry it over to the lathe and fix it; the middling one had to attempt to help him lift it and the oldest had to push his hand away; the youngest one had to come over and then lurk outside the door. I showed them where to step, to lift, to kick, to stand. Most of the time they only had to stand, completely static.

*

THE READER SURVEY
Remainder was chosen from a short list of novels (published in the last issue and accessible online here) selected by the editors of the Believer. We also asked our readers to fill out a survey card included with the March/April issue indicating what they thought were the three strongest works of fiction published in 2007.

[In the reader survey, Remainder ended up 27th out of 40 titles. Tom McCarthy is interviewed in the same issue.]

The deconstruction of a celebrated series of French comic books.

British writer Tom McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder, left American critics enthralled when it appeared here last year. In that novel, McCarthy creates a fun-house architecture that ultimately becomes a prison for protagonist and reader alike. Narrated in the first person, Remainder concerns a survivor of some odd, unexplained accident. With the settlement money, he sets out to choreograph meticulously detailed “reenactments” of recalled or imagined mundane events. The question of whether the re-creation can be more authentic than the original — whether the real fake can supersede the real thing — gets fuzzier and fuzzier as the mentally scrambled young man stages increasingly bizarre scenarios, with eventually disastrous results. Remainder is a remarkable and assured piece of writing, stuffed with philosophical import yet decidedly literary, drawing as it does on the avant-garde European tradition of such writers as Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. You might call McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature a curious follow-up, but in fact it reads in places like notes to Remainder.

Tintin and the Secret of Literature explores the life and work of Hergé, the Belgian writer and artist who launched the Tintin series of comics in Le Petit Vingtième, the children’s supplement to a Brussels newspaper, in 1929, sending his eponymous hero off to the USSR with his faithful dog Snowy to “report” the goings-on in the new Bolshevik state. This led, a year later, to the first of the Tintin books (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets). The series became wildly popular throughout Europe — the original drawing for the cover of Tintin in America (1931) fetched more than a million dollars earlier this year at auction in Paris — and Hergé churned out some two dozen Tintin books before his death in 1983 at age 75. The Pynchonesque derring-do of young Tintin and the rest of the recurring cast (Professor Calculus, the hard-of-hearing twins Thomson and Thompson, the velvet-voiced diva Bianca Castafiore) animated Hergé’s writing with a zany brio that would be the antithesis of, say, Charles Schulz’s matter-of-fact Peanuts.

In France in particular, Tintin became a cottage industry, his exploits fodder for philosophers, psychoanalysts and literary critics, all of whom McCarthy leans on in asking, “Is Tintin literature?” He notes the “huge irony . . . that the Tintin books remain both unrivaled in their complexity and depth and so simple, even after more than half a century, that a child can read them with the same involvement as an adult.” But the question of whether they’re literature is not as interesting now, given the ascendance of pop culture. McCarthy seems to admit as much when he tweaks his query slightly: “As soon as we ask if Tintin should be treated as literature, we raise another question: what is literature?”

Asking just what literature is propels McCarthy through a series of texts by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Henri Bergson et al. He draws especially heavily on Barthes’ wonderful book S/Z. As it happens, “Hergé” is a nom de plume, which the writer, Georges Remi, created by reversing his initials; R.G. is pronounced in French as err-jey. McCarthy slyly titles his opening chapter R/G.

S/Z, Barthes’ masterpiece of poststructuralist thought, examines the codes that, semi-self-consciously, labor like red ants under a novel’s surface. In it, Barthes provides an especially close reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine — a story within a story about a sculptor who creates the perfect female form, which later turns out to be the likeness of a eunuch. What makes Sarrasine a model for Barthes is the unraveling of a (not so little) secret about its unsexed subject. The many iterations of that plot in Hergé’s writing give McCarthy a slick entry into thinking not just about Tintin as literature but also about what goes on in any bit of storytelling. These are the big themes of literary analysis and criticism: patrimony and inheritance, artifice and counterfeits, encryption. Tintin’s adventures turn on crazy events, as he puzzles over various secrets, whether he’s facing a cryptic mummy in Egypt or trying to figure out what’s going on in a South American military coup. McCarthy shows, deftly and definitively, how the Tintin books exemplify an engagement with a profoundly literary set of ideas. His treatment of the comics isn’t “The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie” but a piece of writing that feels lovingly indebted to Hergé’s work even as it sets out on this ambitious bit of criticism.

There’s a secret written into the book’s very title. McCarthy is telling us less about, say, what literature is than what it isn’t. We come to a novel expecting it to tell us everything that it can, to be replete. McCarthy lifts the rug to show us that the more a story tells us, the more it hides. Channeling Barthes, McCarthy characterizes Tintin — whose exploits so often involve misread missives, misunderstood map coordinates, misconstruction of another character’s language — as standing “guardian . . . at the heart of a noise.” In all his adventures around the globe, Tintin is constantly trying to decode clues he’s been given, constantly finding himself mired in perils, from which he inevitably escapes, only to compulsively reboot the fiendish cycle again and again. All his labors turn out to be frustratingly like those of Sisyphus — unending. Whenever he figures out a particular enigma, it only unleashes more enigmas, sending him off on yet another quest. For McCarthy, as for Barthes, this is the “secret” of literature.

Tintin and the Secret of Literature requires a good-faith investment of your time, not least because of the Tintin series’ relative obscurity here. Nevertheless, McCarthy has given his American readers a savvy perspective on his sophisticated views of fiction, which we will (I hope!) continue to enjoy in coming years. In his introduction to S/Z, poet and literary critic Richard Howard mocked a snide review of the book that said it would profit anyone who had no “instinctive enjoyment of literature.” He sneered at the notion of “instinctive enjoyment” as naive and argued that we always need a poke in the ribs when we read a novel. McCarthy’s brainy dissection of Tintin hits us midpoint between the head and the heart.

Eric Banks is the former editor-in-chief of BookForum.

Silenci?, Televisio de Catalunya, 14 May 2008

La història d’un personatge que perd la memòria i es dedica de forma obsessiva a recrear situacions per no perdre una indemnització milionària s’ha convertit en un dels “best-sellers” de la literatura independent d’aquesta temporada. “Residuos” és la primera novel·la de Tom McCarthy, aclamada per la crítica i publicada al nostre país per l’editorial Lengua de Trapo.

The following day, on June 1st, Tom will appear at the Festarch literature/art festival in Cagliari, Sardinia. He will be discussing his novel Remainder onstage with festival curator Gianluigi Ricuperati. Tom writes: “Vito Acconci is appearing at exactly the same time in the next room, so you can also see him instead. I’m tempted to blow my gig out myself for that”.

On June 11th, Tom will be in conversation with philosopher Simon Critchley
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, to mark the publication of his latest work, The Book of Dead Philosophers.

The new Oneworld Classics edition of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy is out in June, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy. The introduction is also appearing in the June issue of Artforum, which is reprinting diagrams Tom made years ago “when trying to understand Robbe-Grillet’s work”.

The Believer are running an interview with Tom in their June issue. They will also be announcing the winner of The Believer Book Award 2007, for which Remainder is shortlisted.

The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth — which includes a story by Tom — will be published by Serpent’s Tail in June.

Remainder comes out in Italian (Deja Vu, Edizioni ISBN) and Korean (published by Minumsa) at the end of May. Tom will be doing a press event in Milan on June 3rd.

Tom also has a great new Wiki entry.

As the film version finally gets underway, Tom McCarthy looks at how Tintin lost his boy-scout image

March was an eventful month in Tintin Land. On the 21st Raymond Leblanc, founder of the magazine that brought out the cartoon adventures of Hergé’s tufted boy reporter in weekly instalments for three decades, died aged 92. The debonair, sport-loving publisher had played a vital role in Tintin’s destiny: a wartime Resistance hero, he had single-handedly rehabilitated after World War Two the career and reputation of Hergé the “incivile” — indeed, some would say “collaborator”.

To the fury of the Fondation Hergé, who trade on Tintin’s clean, boy scout-ish image, this story won’t play dead. It goes like this. When Germany invaded Hergé and Leblanc’s native Belgium in May 1940, most newspapers closed down immediately. Some, however, continued publishing in “stolen” form, as mouthpieces for the occupier. It was in one of these, Le Soir, that Hergé started publishing his work that same October. This decision led, after the liberation, to his arrest and the removal of his civil status, including his right to work — until the unimpeachable Leblanc’s intervention one year later.

Summarising the cartoonist’s wartime conduct in his Guardian obituary of Leblanc last week, Michael Farr argued that the fervently royalist Hergé was merely heeding King Leopold III’s call to keep the country working — and claimed, moreover, that he “realised the role Tintin could play in maintaining morale”. I would suggest that Farr, a friend of Hergé, was being much too kind. There’s a difference between stoking coal factories or baking bread (on the one hand) and (on the other) propagating race hatred, which is what Hergé did. Appearing alongside Nazi propaganda, the Le Soir Tintin instalments of The Shooting Star contained a grossly antisemitic portrait of a Jewish banker named Blumenstein and showed the gaberdined shopkeeper Isaac dancing for joy on hearing the announcement that the world will end — because, as he announces to his friend Solomon, “I owe 50,000 francs to my suppliers, and this way I won’t have to pay them.”

My principal interest in dragging all this up is not to condemn Hergé (although I find an eliding of the facts more than a little ethically distasteful). It is rather not to lose sight of the fascinating political trajectory the Tintin cartoons follow over the six decades of their production, from the 20s to the 70s.

To say that the adventures’ origins lie on the right would be an understatement. The editor of the newspaper whose children’s section first hosted them, Le Vingtième Siècle, kept a photograph of Mussolini on his desk. Tintin’s first missions, to the Soviet Union and Belgian Congo, see him beating up evil commies and cajoling lazy, backward Africans into doing their duty and building their colonial masters’ railways.

But no sooner has this right-wing strain got going than a left-wing one pops up to counteract it. The third adventure, Tintin in America, mounts scathing assaults on capitalist production (meat-packing plants that grind cats, dogs and even people in their machinery) and American racism: in the original version, a bank-clerk tells the police who show up after a heist that the townsfolk “immediately lynched seven negroes, but the culprit got away”. In the next-but-one story, The Blue Lotus, we see Tintin snap the cane with which an American oil magnate is beating a Chinese rickshaw driver in Shanghai, telling the bully: “You conduct is disgraceful, Sir!” By the final (complete) adventure, Tintin and the Picaros, the hero is sporting a CND sign on his moped helmet and plotting a revolution in South America.

For me, what’s ultimately telling is the way Hergé undermines all politics. In Russia, Tintin sneaks behind what seems to be a factory in the healthy throes of full production to discover two-dimensional stage-fronts and a man hammering a sheet of metal to produce sound effects; he also unearths the gramophone with which the regime scares its people by transmitting ghost noises. But then he avails himself of the very tricks that he himself exposes: in Africa, he bamboozles a technologically illiterate tribe into believing he has magic powers by playing a record and projecting cinematic images to them. Even as the narrative advocates colonial power, it also suggests that the whole thing’s a big scam.

Both left and right get treated to the same debunking. The Alcazar of the Picaros may look like Che Guevara, but Hergé takes great pains to let us know his politics are as artificial as the masks and decorations of the carnival during which his revolution takes place — or, indeed, as the fake walls and two-way mirrors of the hotel room in which Tintin spends half the book being photographed and recorded. Hergé’s whole world, it seems, is one that’s continually being emptied out, turned into simulation, into a film set.

In this respect, the other big item of Tintin news to emerge in March is fitting. As The Guardian announced last Friday, the Spielberg adaptation of the cartoons has been cast, with Thomas Sangster in the title role; it should be released in 2010. Spielberg tried to acquire the film rights to the books in the late 70s, but failed — then promptly went off and made the suspiciously Cigars of the Pharaoh-evoking Raiders of the Lost Ark (as one critic delicately put it, Indiana Jones “is basically a Tintin who fucks”). With Hergé out of the way and the Fondation in the driving seat, though, Hollywood’s money is good, and the project is back on.

I hold out little hope for Spielberg’s film. I suspect it will be sanitised and anodyne, devoid of the complexities that make Tintin so compelling. Hergé complained in his last years that his creation was killing him. The final sequence in the incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art shows, in what I’ve always seen as a cryptic cry of desperation on its author’s part, the hero being led off to have plaster poured on him and thus be turned into an artwork called “Reporter” — condemned, that is, to die inside his own simulacrum. This is dark stuff, Dorian Gray territory. If I had my way, the film would be directed by David Lynch.

The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity, announced by the International Necronautical Society (INS) for September 25, 2007, supposedly took place on that date at the Drawing Center in Manhattan. I was not there and could not have been. Not because I was somewhere else (although I was somewhere else), but because it never happened. Despite the insistence of people who say they attended the event, and despite the ingenuity of INS Department of Propaganda, the evidence, properly examined, contradicts them. But, were it actually to have taken place, The New York Declaration would have gone something like this:

INS founder Tom McCarthy and the organization’s chief philosopher, Simon Critchley, share a table at the front of a long, high hall set up with folding chairs in rows. The walls are covered with INS banners and with sketches, hundreds of them, tacked or taped up in exfoliating layers. These rattle violently like dry leaves in the wind each time the heavy leather-covered doors swing open to admit another member to the growing audience. Eventually, some sketches swing from one thumbtack; others fold over themselves with a crackle; one detaches from the wall entirely and lies rolled up in the left aisle, softly rocking; nobody moves it. People step delicately over it until the folding chairs are filled to capacity, and an expectant hush descends. Security staff hover in the background. The only light seems to be from the speakers’ desk lamps. At last, Critchley and McCarthy, or actors closely resembling them, read a prepared speech on inauthenticity; it is the latest in a series of manifestos, statements, reports, and proclamations issued by the International Necronautical Society.

The first test of authenticity is origin. The INS originated in 1999 in London, when the then-thirty-year-old novelist Tom McCarthy sat in a booth at what was billed as an “articultural fair,” passing out a manifesto for a fictitious art movement. McCarthy assumed the position of general secretary and named the First Committee of the INS (later purged, then replaced by new personnel). Art Monthly described the new organization as “replaying the avant-garde along the faultline of death”; indeed, the necronauts’ First Manifesto declared, “Death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.”

This dubious claim did not fail to spread confusion, along with suspicions of necrophilia, thus warming the welcome the organization received from the London art world. As invitations were extended by respected institutions, the INS developed its public program of lectures, hearings, and broadcasts, as well as an elaborate internal apparatus of committees and subcommittees, agents, sleepers, and moles. A series of projects was devised to mobilize a key set of literary and philosophical concepts for the exploration of death. As the necronauts advertise whenever possible, Maurice Blanchot’s concepts were pivotal for explicating death as a space beyond the human and underlying all representation, a space that necronauts cruise in whatever vehicles they can.

The general secretary’s first report to the INS, Calling All Agents (2003), outlined the theory and structure of the future INS Broadcasting Unit. The report analyzed the findings of the Second First Committee Hearings (London, 2002), in which artists, writers, and researchers, selected for their knowledge of or experience with radio, were lined up for interrogation by McCarthy, accompanied by INS chief of propaganda Anthony Auerbach and external assessor Zinovy Zinik. In the report, McCarthy developed the themes of encoding, encryption, entombment, transmission, subjectivity, and death. He proposed Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée as a necronautical model: Orphée must transcribe cryptic transmissions from the dead poet Cégeste picked up on his car radio between stations.

In the INS Transmission Room, installed at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2004, multiple streams of voice, text, and data were received, transcribed, and processed by the INS Communications and Encodings Subcommittee. Devices shamelessly plundered from classical prosody and William Burroughs’s closet were deployed. The resulting scripts, cut up and hastily pasted together, were hardly original but were nonetheless authorized for broadcast, read over the radio, and retransmitted all over the world.

An earlier project was the reconstruction or reenactment of a death scene: an assassination attempt on a Mafia boss in Amsterdam that was thwarted when his bodyguard threw himself into the path of the bullets. From an eyewitness account, the INS painstakingly reconstructed the movements of the witness, as well as those of the combatants, and reenacted them at the original site, again on a Muybridge grid, and again in a wind tunnel. That was in 2001.

McCarthy had recently finished his first novel, Remainder, though it lacked a publisher until 2005. (Its first was Metronome, a Paris-based art-publishing enterprise that itself reenacted Olympia Press.) Remainder tells the story of a man who, following an accident about which we are told nothing, receives an amazing amount of money in a legal settlement. The protagonist then devotes himself to meticulous, progressively more elaborate, and eventually fatal reconstructions and reenactments of scenes that he thinks he remembers, that he has happened to see, or that he has somehow heard about.

Now, it seems probable that The New York Declaration was also some kind of reenactment — I never said it was a hoax — and, consequently, my having been present would not lend my report authenticity. The Declaration was (supposedly) read from a prepared script and thus, like all readings, reenacted a text. But I am obliged to suspect more. The INS has so far refused to release the script and has promised only an “official transcript” at some future date; however, I’ve been able to obtain a print-out of an “Authorised” “Official Document” that the INS has refused to authorize. Meanwhile, the INS has warned that “unauthorised audio recordings circulating on the Internet” cannot be authenticated. These “pirate tapes” are of varying quality but are nonetheless consistent. Whether or not the INS Department of Propaganda was involved in the tapes’ circulation, we must entertain the possibility that the actors hired to deliver the Declaration were in fact lip-syncing to a recording. The evocative photographs published by the INS don’t settle the matter: While they appear to be video stills, no link exists between these images and the sound. Moreover, the “stills” are all close-ups that could have been taken anywhere, dispensing with the need for a fake audience.

Nonetheless, let us listen to the evidence. We hear two voices alternately reading a series of numbered theses. It is difficult to distinguish the voices. Indeed, as they explain, they are not individual but “dividual.” They insist “the self has no core but is an experience of division, of splitting.” The promise of mastery over one’s own self is a delusion, a last-ditch attempt to counter “the experience of failed transcendence, a failure that is at the core of the general secretary’s [McCarthy’s] novels and the chief philosopher’s [Critchley’s] tomes.” The voices elucidate this experience in terms of the opposition between form and matter: Classically, matter is imperfection, which form must transcend through a conceptual or spiritual striving. For necronauts, in contrast, it is matter that matters most: “What is most real for us is not form, or God, but matter, the brute materiality of the external world. We celebrate the imperfection of matter and somatize that imperfection on a daily basis.”

How is this done? By admitting that art and literature are material productions — or rather, reproductions. Art is traditionally praised as a process of giving form, but instead it is a necessarily inadequate attempt to reproduce in matter the artist’s concept. So inauthenticity is intrinsically bound up with art, which is “a repetitive mechanism that functions through theft, forgery, copying, and embedding.” According to the Declaration, there are two ways of reading art’s repetitive aspect. First, “art attempts to extinguish matter and achieve authenticity as a hypnotic, monotonous, endless recurrence of repetition. This produces the trancelike stasis and intense psychic tingling that we sometimes think of as aesthetic pleasure. At times, it almost feels real. Then again, so can masturbation.” Thus, the Declaration’s second reading of repetition: “Art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments that attempt to cover over the traumatic event of materiality.”

The INS is on the side of comedy, not tragedy. For, if art is a “repetitive mechanism,” we are reminded that the repetitive and the mechanical are also at the heart of Bergson’s theory of comedy — think of Wile E. Coyote, whose many deaths are not noble or meaningful, merely hilarious. The tragic hero meets the inevitability of matter with an acceptance that turns his death into an affirmation of self. He claims his own unique and excellent death and, with it, meaning. The comic hero, in contrast, dies badly: Wile E. Coyote’s deaths are neither chosen nor accepted with grace. He dies repeatedly: His is not the single luminous moment of a tragic death affirming the transcendence of self over matter. Rather, he endures a multiplicity of moments that continually undo the self, undoing as well that supposedly ultimate undoing, the fetishized death. And why is this funny? Because “humor is the highest expression of the principle of dividuation, of an ever-divided self-relation, of our essential lack of self-coincidence.” This lack is the fundamental trauma that gives rise to the repetition compulsion of Wile E. Coyote — and of art. Art may attempt to hide “the traumatic event of materiality,” but there is always “a remainder that remains: a shard, a leftover, a trace, a residual.” That remainder is the mark of inauthenticity. This The New York Declaration declares.

In the report that determined the design of the INS Transmission Room, McCarthy quoted Auden’s dictum that “poetry makes nothing happen,” calling it “an active construct in which ‘nothing’ designates an event, perhaps even a momentous one.” It appears that The New York Declaration was such an event, nothing if not momentous.

Crafted images provided by the INS Department of Propaganda purport to be video stills from the event held at the Drawing Center, New York, on September 25, 2007. Exploiting both the poor resolution and the coded indexicality of such stills, the pictures appear to be convincing documents placing McCarthy and Critchley at the scene. However, closer examination reveals a complete lack of any contextual detail. Moreover, the resemblance of the look-alike actors to the supposed protagonists is mainly a result of costume and lighting. Compare with photos of McCarthy and Critchley taken elsewhere.

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The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity (unauthorized)