[…] TMCC: Aha: the formless. We’ve both raved in the past about Bataille’s notion of l’informe: matter which won’t be placed within some taxonomic system or Aufgehobt—lifted up, sublimated into refined concepts or objects of representation—but instead just gets itself squashed and messed everywhere. Similarly, in these paintings, the food is oozing beyond its taxonomic limit, it’s rotting across the plate. I was reading this Agamben passage, in The Coming Community, where he says that what is truly divine about things is precisely their refusal to transcend. He uses this weird Christian imagery: the fallenness of things ‘hangs about them like a halo.’

MG: I like fallenness, flaws. On all my images there are flaws . . .

TMCC: Glitches . . .

MG: Ruptures . . .

TMCC: But then I think in your paintings and photographs and drawings, and in my books, there’s also a kind of ecstasy, once that rupture has taken place: once the grand system has collapsed, once objects and people are released into this orgy of materiality.

MG: There is definitely an ecstasy—especially at the end of C, where there’s a literal orgy in a tomb, with body parts alive and dead all falling over Serge. A scenario for which I think Bataille still presents the most compelling conceptual model!

TMCC: The question of pornography arises here. In that same book, Agamben claims that if pornography, and the pornographic imagination, could be liberated from its containment by capitalism, then this would be a magnificent thing. He even says that the task, the aesthetic and erotic and political task of our generation, is to do that.

MG: Talking of our generation—I mean ours (we’re exactly the same age)—a real symptom of it, as this conversation is so aptly demonstrating, is that we keep referencing theory when we talk about our work. More than that: theory informs the making of it.

TMCC: But that’s always the case, even for people who claim not to ‘have’ theory. ‘Not’ having theory just means having crap theory, i.e. adhering to a humanism that has erased all traces of its own constructedness. […]

On Dodgem Jockeys: The Most Noble and Heroic Thing to Be in Life

“…I would suggest that the most noble and heroic thing to be in this life, or perhaps in any other, is the dodgem jockey. You know what I mean: those guys who work the bumper cars in fairgrounds. Not the fat, older one who sits in the control booth — Perec’s fantasy — but the lithe young things who cling to the backs of moving cars, hopping from one to the next.”

On 29 February 2012, The Believer Logger had published the following:

TINTIN IN THE LAND OF CHELSEA
by Hergé

Frederic Tuten and Tom McCarthy after McCarthy’s 192 Books appearance this past weekend. McCarthy, who received the Believer Book Award in 2007 for his novel Remainder, read his essay about dodgem jockeys, forthcoming in our May issue, to a crowd of snow-and-slurt-covered fans. Tuten — about whom Paul La Farge wrote in our May 2005 issue — is not being mocked by McCarthy for his pink camera case.

Tom McCarthy’s C (K in German) has been shortlisted for the German foreign fiction prize:

Internationaler Literaturpreis – Haus der Kulturen der Welt Shortlist 2012

Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt und die Stiftung Elementarteilchen vergeben 2012 zum vierten Mal den „Internationalen Literaturpreis – Haus der Kulturen der Welt“ für zeitgenössische Erzählliteratur in deutscher Erstübersetzung: 25.000 € gehen an den Autor oder die Autorin und 10.000 € an Übersetzer oder Übersetzerin.

Folgende Werke und Übersetzer wurden in 2012 für die Shortlist nominiert (in alphabetischer Reihenfolge):

Cabré, Jaume: Das Schweigen des Sammlers
Suhrkamp/Insel 2011, aus dem Katalanischen von Kirsten Brandt und Petra Zickmann
Jo confesso, Edicions Proa, Barcelona 2011
Mehr zu Autor, Übersetzerinnen und Buch…

Cărtărescu, Mircea: Der Körper
Paul Zsolnay Verlag 2011, aus dem Rumänischen von Gerhardt Csejka und Ferdinand Leopold
Orbitor II. Corpul, Humanitas, Bukarest 2002
Mehr zu Autor, Übersetzern und Buch…

Gürsel, Nedim: Allahs Töchter
Suhrkamp Verlag 2012, aus dem Türkischen von Barbara Yurtdas
Allah’ ιn Kιzlarι, Dogan Kitap, Istanbul 2008
Mehr zu Autor, Übersetzerin und Buch…

McCarthy, Tom: K
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 2012, aus dem Englischen von Bernhard Robben
C, Jonathan Cape, London 2010
Mehr zu Autor, Übersetzer und Buch…

Nádas, Péter: Parallelgeschichten
Rowohlt Verlag 2012, aus dem Ungarischen von Christina Viragh
Párhuzamos történetek, Jelenkor Kiadó, Pécs 2005
Mehr zu Autor, Übersetzerin und Buch…

Obreht, Téa: Die Tigerfrau
Rowohlt Berlin Verlag 2012, aus dem Englischen von Bettina Abarbanell
The Tiger’s Wife, Random House, New York 2011
Mehr zur Autorin, Übersetzerin und Buch…

There’s info about the book, the author and the translator here:

Mc Carthy, Tom: K

Roman, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 2012
Aus dem Englischen von Bernhard Robben
(C, Jonathan Cape, London 2010)

Das Buch
England vor der Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert: Serge Karrefax kommt mit einer Glückshaube zur Welt, was dem Jungen eine außergewöhnliche Zukunft verheißt. Und tatsächlich spiegelt sein Leben all die Wunder des soeben angebrochenen neuen Zeitalters. „K“ steht für Kommunikation: Begeistert von der neuen Funktechnologie verbringt Serge die Nächte mit der Suche nach Signalen im Äther. „K“ steht für Krieg: Im Ersten Weltkrieg wird er als Funker eingezogen, und er liebt es, in seiner Flugmaschine, Kokain im Blut, Hölderlin auf den Lippen, über die Verwüstungen hinwegzufliegen. „K“ steht aber auch für Krypta: Nach Séancen, Sex und Paranoia im Swinging London der Zwanziger verschlägt es Karrefax in das Ägypten Howard Carters. Bis sein Leben an jenem Tag, an dem er in eine der altägyptischen Grabkammern hinabsteigt, eine Wendung nimmt Tom McCarthy schildert mit faszinierender Präzision die große Ära, in der die Technologie das Licht der Welt erblickt, ihre Obsessionen, Ängste und Wahrheiten. Dies ist ein kühner Roman, von einem absoluten Kunstwillen getragen, der unsere globalisierte, hochtechnisierte Gegenwart widerhallen lässt

Der Autor
Tom McCarthy, Jahrgang 1969, studierte Englisch in Oxford, lebte in Prag und Amsterdam und arbeitet heute als Künstler und Schriftsteller in London. Er hat Erzählungen, Essays und Artikel über Literatur, Philosophie und Kunst veröffentlicht und unterrichtet an Universitäten. Außerdem ist er Generalsekretär der International Necronautical Society (INS), einem semifiktiven Avantgarde-Netzwerk. Sein Debütroman, „8 1/2 Millionen“ (2006, dt. 2009 ), erhielt u.a. den Believer Book Award und wird zurzeit verfilmt. Auf Deutsch erschien zudem sein Essay „Tim und Struppi und das Geheimnis der Literatur“ (2006, dt. 2010). „K“, McCarthys dritter Roman, verschaffte ihm den internationalen Durchbruch; er wurde ebenfalls ein großer Leser- und Kritikererfolg und u.a. 2010 für den Booker-Preis nominiert. Seine Romane sind in mehr als zwanzig Sprachen übersetzt. (Foto: Erinn Hartmann)

Der Übersetzer
Bernhard Robben, geboren 1955, studierte Germanistik, Philosophie und Geschichte in Freiburg. Er übersetzt seither aus dem Englischen u. a. Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Patricia Highsmith und Philip Roth. 2003 wurde er mit dem Übersetzerpreis der Stiftung Kunst und Kultur des Landes NRW ausgezeichnet. Er lebt in Brunne/Brandenburg. (Foto: privat)

Tom McCarthy’s brilliant essay, Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works, is published as a Vintage Books eBook Original on 22 May. Here’s an extract from the blurb:

“In his novels Remainder, C, and Men in Space, McCarthy explores the theme of signals and transmission. Now, he blows the concept wide open and identifies the signals that have been repeating since the dawn of literature. He takes us back to the Greeks and the origins of literary meaning to show that information, rather than being a natural or abstract phenomenon, is always based in artificial media—in ones and zeros, dots and dashes, signals and noise. He takes us through Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Joyce, Beckett and others to re-imagine the very idea of what a writer does, and what the act of writing is. Rather than praising individual creative genius, McCarthy re-tunes our ears to the crackle of information as it has passed through the feedback loop of literary culture.”

[Pic: Tom McCarthy, London, April 2012 by Andrew Gallix.]

Entitled Die Module spielen verrückt - Trauma und Technik bei Tom McCarthy. It lasts about 55 and revolves around a long interview with Tom in London. Michael Hillebrecht and Tom McCarthy also went to Greenwich Park and the Freud Museum in Hampstead Heath together. The programme is in German but most of Tom’s statements can be heard in English, too.

A live stream will be available here.

£5 / Free to ICA Members

Join Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy for a lunchtime talk around the issues raised by Critchley’s new book The Faith of the Faithless (Verso, 2012). Topics will include the relation between politics, religion and violence, and the possibility of a supreme fiction in relation to art, literature and philosophy.

Critchley and McCarthy have collaborated closely for the past 10 years in connection with their semi-fictitious organization, the International Necronautical Society (INS), and have written together on Joyce, Shakespeare and inauthenticity. A volume of their INS texts has just appeared in German with Diaphanes and is forthcoming in English from Sternberg Press.

Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder won the 2007 Believer Book Award and is currently being adapted for cinema by Film4. His most recent novel, C, was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Outside of his role in the INS, he has also made artworks including multimedia and interactive installations, and collaborated with Johan Grimonprez on the award-winning film Double Take. He has recently taught and lectured at the London Consortium and Columbia University, among others. He lives in London and New York.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. In additon to The Faith of the Faithless, he is author of many books including Very Little…Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007) and Impossible Objects (2011). He runs a philosophy column for The New York Times, called ‘The Stone’, where he is a frequent contributor.

Wednesday 14 March Hannover, Literarischer Salon, 8 pm with Barbara Wahlster and David Nathan

Thursday 15 March Berlin, Volksbuehne, Roter Salon, 8 pm with Bernhard Robben and Axel Wandtke

Friday 16 March Berlin, Soho House, 6 pm

Saturday 17 March Cologne, lit.Cologne, Brunosaal, 8 pm with Bernhard Robben and Ulrich Noethen

I don’t have a desktop image. It’s best to write against nothing, rather than something. Just having white, pure white, is seductive. Anyone who’s ever pissed on snow will understand this.

I must belong to the only generation of writers who’ve written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka’s obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw your fingers at and the keys would smash into the roller. It felt like a machine-gun or something. I do everything on the laptop now, although I print notes out and mark them up.

“Satin Island” is the provisional title of the next novel — hence “Research for SI” and “si world stuff”. It’s all about pollution and mutation. It’s going to have a leitmotif of a parachutist falling to earth, having realised that his parachute has been sabotaged: his relation to the landscape, death, technology. It’s only half-formed at the moment — less than half — that’s the ‘Parachutist stuff’ document.

The “Columbia talk” folder and presentation is a talk I gave to the students and faculty at Columbia University in New York. It’s called “Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works”. I trace the figure of Orpheus from Ovid through Rilke to Cocteau, looking in particular at the roles of transmission and reception. Rilke’s Orpheus is associated with a giant ear; Cocteau’s spends half his time listening to the radio. I think this has something vital to tell us about what the writer — any writer — is essentially doing.

The best definition of writing I could give would be “letting speak” — if that word “let” is understood in all its double and triple senses: to allow (something or someone else) to speak; to interrupt (hinder) the flow of speech, break language up, allowing for what’s unspoken to infiltrate its frequency; to underwrite or lease out speech. The one thing writing’s not is straight-up speaking.

I’m not on Twitter. I’m not interested in telling people that I’m stuck in a lift; nor would they be interested in hearing that. The International Necronautical Society has a Twitter feed, which our Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach puts out. When there’s no event or publication to announce, the feed defaults to the text of Moby Dick, 140 characters at a time.

The minimised “Sade” document in the dock is because I’ve been re-reading The 120 Days of Sodom for the first time in 20 years. It’s shocking how contemporary it is. He’s basically describing Abu Graib or Guantánamo. The first sentence goes something like: “It is in States’ interest to maintain an atmosphere of terror or sense of being under threat, so that they can suspend all democratic laws.” It could have been written by Giorgio Agamben or Naomi Klein six months ago! There’s nothing new: like Joyce says, “the same roturns“. In narrative terms, it’s amazing: all about replay and repetition: the libertines don’t really invent any of their depraved activities; they re-enact the ones these high-class courtesans describe to them. He wrote it in the Bastille, and the manuscript was lost when the prison was stormed; it didn’t re-emerge until the early 20th century. According to Georges Bataille, Sade himself caused the storming, by poking his chamber-pot pipe though the bars and, using it as a megaphone, announcing to the crowds that the authorities were executing the prisoners (which they weren’t). Supposedly the revolutionary leaders were so eager to find evidence of the ancien régime’s depravity that they exhibited a confiscated printing press they’d found there, a contraption with which no ordinary people would be familiar: “Here’s their instrument of torture!” The power of technology: it’s totem, taboo and the whole caboodle.

I contributed to an anthology called The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth. My piece was called “Why I want to Fuck Patty Hearst” — a tribute at once to the Sonic Youth song “Kool Thing“, in (one version of) which the heiress-turned-revolutionary is mentioned, and to Ballard’s early story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan“. I love Sonic Youth. I met Lee Ranaldo just the other week, and we were chatting about the book. It’s got some good pieces in it — a great one by Shelley Jackson, all about goo. The “Verb feed” document is a Burroughsian-style cut-up I did for the BBC radio programme The Verb a few months ago — mixing in the week’s headlines with phrases from Ovid and stuff.

Technology reveals us to ourselves as we always in fact were: networked, distributed, laced with code. I use the laptop for everything. I’m not even properly “awake” until it’s switched on. Word seems like the “natural” programme to write in now: the default, blank page 2.0. Before I got an iPhone, I used to do this daft thing of phoning myself up if I had a thought while out and about, and telling my home answering machine: “OK, write this down…” Now, you can just talk into the voice-memo app, with its retro oversize mic and quivering needle visual. The internet being just a click away is a blessing and a curse at once: you can find out instantly which year Egypt won independence or who Persephone’s mother was, but that essential solitude you need to write gets more and more elusive … While I was writing Remainder I listened to Rachmaninov a lot, just like the hero. And Gorecki and Paart. I like the voicelessness and quasi-repetition. I don’t own a Kindle. It’s strange: I like reading my own stuff on a screen, and other people’s on a page.

I was a guest at Trinity College Dublin recently, and there was a talk, the night before my own, on Darwin’s influence on Joyce, given by a “genetic critic”. These guys look at progressive handwritten draft phases of literary texts, how they change from one stage to the next, and correlate these with correspondence and notebooks and so on. So you can see exactly when Joyce read Darwin, and then how phrases like “ouragan of spaces” find their way into the Wake manuscript. It’s very interesting. Afterwards I was chatting with the speaker and cockily asked him: “So what are you going to do with me, then?” ie with my generation, given that there’ll be little or no paper trail. He said: “Dude, we have software that can reconstruct every keystroke you made since the beginning of time — MacBook, floppy discs, the lot.”

With its specialized scientific knowledge and intimations of endlessly connected networks, Tom McCarthy’s third novel, “C” (2010), saw him hailed — in Tom LeClair’s words — as a “young and British Thomas Pynchon.” In the wake of that success, McCarthy’s second novel, “Men in Space” (originally published in Britain in 2007), has now been released in the United States. But while “Men in Space” is also fascinated with codes and communication systems, its American template (if it has one) is as much William Gaddis’s midcentury masterwork, “The Recognitions,” as it is “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

Gaddis’s novel revolves around Wyatt Gwyon, an artist whose forgeries of old masters are so piously undertaken that he believes he’s a “painter in the Guild, in Flanders.” At the core of “Men in Space” we find Wyatt’s counterpart, Ivan Manasek, a bohemian painter who agrees to forge a stolen religious masterpiece. The painting shows a hovering saint — just one of the novel’s many “men in space” — and as Ivan copies the work, he finds (like Wyatt) that his sense of identity dissolves into the painting: “It’s not just a case of getting the curve right: it’s about stepping into the right rhythm and inhabiting it. . . . He pictures himself in the air again, gliding.” There’s a theory of art being outlined here, but “Men in Space” is a rich, encyclopedic text whose knowledge isn’t confined to aesthetics. As a physics-minded character in the book observes, “All systems have pivotal points: identify these and the whole structure will leap into focus,” and in a novel with no one protagonist, Ivan’s art provides the narrative system’s pivot that brings other stories into sharper resolution.

The novel is split into 36 sections, alternating among letters from a Dutch museum curator, reports from an isolated Interpol agent and a series of episodes involving seven central characters. This mosaic of viewpoints tells a story that in part ­traces Europe’s “transitional geographies”: we begin in Prague, in December 1992, and watch as Czechoslovakia becomes the Czech Republic, a redrawing of borders that coincides with Ivan’s death. But alongside the political account, Ivan’s forgery also allows McCarthy to cast light on the shadowy network of gangsters who underwrite the forgery, the police officers who try to recover the painting, the family of the middleman who brokers the deal, not to mention the score of younger characters at the narrative’s edges. If McCarthy’s first novel, “Remainder” (2006), “emptied out interiority entirely,” as Zadie Smith put it in an essay about the book’s treatment of psychological realism, “Men in Space” predominantly relies on a supple third-person narration that elastically establishes what the novel calls a “mixture of closeness and distance.” Shuttling between objective explanation and something close to a Joycean interior monologue (“Perform, then. Step into this silence and perform”), the flexible point of view lends a narrative weight that’s reinforced by the novel’s intricate structure.

[…] The novel is constructed in such a way that the text is not a single story, but rather a field of multiple resonances, and instead of invoking the icon’s geometry the meaning of any number of scenes might be similarly multiplied by invoking biology, mythology, cybernetics or literary theory. But the centrality of multiplicity in this sophisticated novel is also a model of the fabulating mind’s encounter with an ungraspable reality. In an important passage, McCarthy describes a traveler at the rear of a train:

“He loves riding the wake, leaning on the rail against the window watching the tracks appear from underneath as though the tram itself were plowing them, churning them up while the box on its roof trailed cable like a spider spinning thread above: making the world by moving through it.”

The moving train is like the mobile characters, whose minds make their own versions of the world from the partial data derived from comic misunderstandings and isolated encounters. But the train also parallels our experience as we work through this kaleidoscopic novel, catching different patterns of imagery that lead toward different levels of meaning. “Men in Space” is sometimes overly caught up in fine details, and occasionally characters are implausibly slow at reading the signals that surround them — but the novel is an intellectually voracious cross section of a historical moment, and a thrilling indication of the vitality of the contemporary British novel. It’s hard to understand why it had to wait five years to reach an American audience.

Stephen Burn’s “Conversations With David Foster Wallace” will be published in the spring. He teaches at Northern Michigan University.

A- 10 Philosophy after Simon Critchley
Thursday 1:30 PM − 3:00 PM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Seth Morton, Rice University

David M. Robinson, Oregon State University
“Simon Critchley, Wallace Stevens, and the ‘Failure’of Poetry”
Aleksandra Hernandez, University of Toronto
“Phenomenology and the Irrational in Wallace Stevens’ Later Poems”

B- 8 The 21st Century Novel And Tom McCarthy
Thursday 3:15 PM – 4:45 PM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Seth Morton, Rice University

James Duesterberg, University of Chicago
“Curated Autonomy in Remainder”
Rebecca Sánchez, Rochester Institute of Technology
“Signs and Scarabs: The Challenge of Communicating in Tom McCarthy’s C”
Paul Cohen, Texas State University-San Marcos
“Remainder as Theory of the Novel”

C- 7 The Unhumanities in Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy
Friday 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Seth Morton, Rice University

Kate Marshall, Notre Dame
“Narratology for the Nonhuman: McCarthy v. McCarthy”
Ron Broglio, Arizona State University
“Laugh Now, But One Day We’ll Be In Charge”
Seth Morton, Rice University
“On How to Live Finally: Some Notes on Ending, Transmission, and Cryptology in Critchley and McCarthy”

D- 5 McCarthy and Modernity
Friday 10:45 AM – 12:15 PM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Patrick O’Donnell, Michigan State University

Justus Nieland, Michigan State University
“Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Catastrophes of Modernism”
Leslie Johnson, Aigusta State University
“Ethics After People: On Tom McCarthy’s C”
Patrick O’Donnell, Michigan State University
“The Author as the Letter C: A Response to Justus Nieland and Keith Johnson”

I- 6 Systems and the Contemporary Novel: Joseph Heller, Tom McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy
Saturday 2:45 PM – 4:15 PM Room: Humanities 113
Chair:

Christopher R. Boss, University of Kentucky
“I Am the Supervisor: The Corporate Redemption of Masculinity in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened”
Brian Trapp, The University of Cincinnati
“Two Paths or a Maze: A response via Flaubert to Zadie Smith’s Two Paths for the Novel”