RSS“Mise en Abîme”: Tom McCarthy interviewed by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Bookninja, 17 December 2007
Surplus Matter wasn’t granted permisssion to reproduce the entire interview, so here are a couple of extracts:
“Literature has to remain frustrating — to withhold something, remain incomplete — or it’s not literature anymore, but rather entertainment, edification or interpretation. That’s literature’s USP: staying unresolved, keeping its most vital messages unspoken, creating a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time. My books are most definitely godless, utterly atheistic. In a way, Men in Space is about confronting that absolute absence, the ellipse where there should be a full circle. Remainder, too, begins with the heavens falling to the ground. In religious, or post-religious terms, they turn around the death of God I suppose. But there’s no ‘spirituality’ in them; that’s a word I’d never use. When people die, what they experience is not transcendence but an intimacy with matter, with the world. So Anton in Men in Space sees the ground from closer and closer: the layers of moss, the beetles in them, the specks of earth. And the drug dealer whose death the hero of Remainder re-enacts has a similar experience (the hero imagines): looking at the cigarette butt, the texture of the pavement, the letters on a cab-company’s window reflected in a puddle. These things are beautiful, and affirm the world even as it’s being taken leave of. And yes, it does have the charm of a dream; but it’s a dream of here-and-now, the here-and-now revealing what it is. That’s one hundred percent materialism: a material, not spiritual, endgame. It’s what poetry at its best gives us: Wallace Stevens, Francis Ponge — the sheer and ecstatic there-ness of existence.”
“The literature question. I don’t think literature’s ever dead — or, rather, I think it’s eternally dead, dying, and that’s the precondition for its self-perpetuation. Think of Don Quixote: the whole assumption there is that literature’s over, it doesn’t work. The hero’s read loads of books, runs around trying to play their codes out in the real world and it falls completely flat, collapses — and that systemic failure is what generates the remarkable and complex landscape of Cervantes’ novel, which is more or less the first novel to boot. So the first novel is saying ‘The novel doesn’t work.’ And so are Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury — all the really good novels at some level. Burroughs, Trocchi, Claude Simon — we could go on all night. As Blanchot articulated so well, literature has an intimate relationship with death, and a paradoxical one, best understood by recourse to myths like Orpheus and Eurydice, or Odysseus and the Sirens. It’s only possible because it’s impossible. Mainstream middle-brow fiction doesn’t understand this relationship, pretends you can just go ahead and write without addressing the whole issue of impossibility and failure, and so, paradoxically, produces genuinely dead novels.”