RSSClodagh Kinsella, “The Radical Ambiguity of Tom McCarthy*,” Dossier 22 July 2009
If Zadie Smith is to be believed, the future of the avant-garde lies in the hands of artist and writer Tom McCarthy. Through his novels and the parodic/splenetic interventions of the INS [International Necronautical Society], he ceaselessly returns to questions of death and space-poaching in the fissures of the symbolic and political like an agitprop pathologist. Having once before paced the “epistemic disaster zone” with Tom as a student of his Catastrophe course, a curious desire for repetition drew me back to the brutalist confines of London’s Barbican.
Let’s ease into things gently and talk about something nice: death. Here in the Barbican’s “concrete island” I can’t help thinking about Ballard and his recent demise, something he had of course rehearsed many times. How did he influence you and did you ever meet him?
R.I.P. I went to a talk and asked him a question. That doesn’t really count as meeting him, I suppose. I think the guy was a genius. He was the only contemporary British writer that interested me or had any kind of influence on my work. The thing about Ballard is that he’s a great writer without being a good writer. I mean he’s not Nabokov or Updike. He doesn’t care about prose and texture of narrative. He’s almost a conceptual artist and in fact The Atrocity Exhibition was originally a catalogue for a show at the ICA. That overlap between visual art and literature is something that I’ve experienced a lot in my own work.
There’s also a big similarity in the forensic interest.
Crash was a huge influence on Remainder: that totally traumatic logic. For Freud and everyone else, trauma is intimately linked with repetition and Ballard gets this. Not just Vaughn [the anti-hero] but every character in every novel of his just does the same thing again and again. He’s like the painter Morandi or Warhol, where the repetition becomes the subject. Even at the level of prose, I imagine writing Crash he had a car manual in one hand and a medical dictionary in the other, both open at the index page and he was going down the list-”His spleen was splattered over the… windscreen wiper and his gallbladder was wrapped around the…”
Binnacle!
And on and on: this incantatory state of repetition. Vaughn does re-enactments of car crashes of the rich and famous and his big goal is to do the über-crash that would be a transcendent new combination. Vitally he gets it wrong so the one genuine event in that book – an event and not just a re-enactment – is this accident. So it’s got that brilliant first sentence: “Vaughn died in a car crash today. He’d had a million crashes but this was his first accident.”
That structure is in Remainder too, when one of the re-enactors finally trips over a non-existent kink in the carpet.
Yes, during the bank robbery. I was thinking directly of that. It’s the only event in the book, apart from the disaster that started it-you never know what that is. The script going wrong produces the genuine event, not just a repetition. When I “met” Ballard, he’d given this talk and I shot my hand up at the Q&A session and said that I thought Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote. This guy goes out on the highway and re-enacts moments from the tv of the day-trash, twopenny novels. He says “I’m going to do that bit in Don Belianis of Crete, page 94, where…” Ballard was really charming. He said, “That’s a wonderful theory and makes complete sense. I’ve never read Cervantes. I don’t read proper literature.” That’s not true-he’s obviously read Conrad really carefully, for example.
But it’s nice to think that the avant-garde is in the hands of people who don’t care about it.
Yeah but it’s always a bit disingenuous isn’t it? Joyce said he never read any of Freud, which is nonsense-Nabokov too. They’re covering it up when clearly they’ve both read “The Wolfman” [Freud’s famous long-running case file]: they’re very indebted to that.
I went to the Freud Museum recently and was interested to see in turn that some of the Wolfman’s white wolf paintings are themselves hidden behind a flat screen tv.
How dumb. How weird. How… appropriate!
In contrast one could say your role as an artist and a writer is to conduct a sort of “unveiling” that brings to mind semiology. Are you into Roland Barthes?
When I was 18 or 19 he was my total hero and in the book I wrote about Tintin [Tintin and The Secret of Literature] his S/Z is the main codex. I love the whole cross-disciplinary side of Roland Barthes, Derrida and so on. These are people who a century earlier would just have become novelists-would have been Balzac and Flaubert. At the time when they were coming up in France this philosophy/ anthropology/ politics had become the most exciting place to do your discourse and although I always just wanted to be a novelist, I’ve always been excited by other modes like visual art and philosophy. I wanted to find an arena that manages to combine all those and coming of age in London in the mid-90s, art had become that. It’s so broad and it’s not just about drawing or painting. Remainder was first published by Metronome, which is an art press. None of the main ones would touch it.
Related to that I wanted to ask you about your writing versus the INS. I know the latter has very strict rules. I was wondering if it had ever occurred to you to eject yourself since after Metronome you signed a pact with Film Four and Vintage?
Ha! No, because the people that were ejected were not ejected for publishing with the big companies. My next two books are coming out with Cape and Remainder is with Vintage [»Random House»German Conglomerate] in America. It wasn’t that they signed to them, but that they wrote the books those people told them to write and became copywriters. Anyhow that wasn’t me that was the executive council, to whom I’m not entirely answerable, so…
I think you should. Because anyway it’s full of quotations, the INS, it’s almost autonomous.
Yes maybe there will come a point where I will be ejected. The council could evict us all: no one knows who’s actually running it anymore. These things tend to schism. There was this guy “Richard Essex” who kick-started the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) in the ’80s. He wanted to get splits going really quickly so he announced that the different parts of his personality were splitting. He had the Nashist wing and the Debordist wing and his own schizophrenia was a schism within his one-man movement. I thought that was good. His arm would go off in one direction…
Stewart Home was involved with that, wasn’t he?
Yeah. Stewart’s very interesting. He was writing manifestos and starting movements way before me. With the INS, in about ‘94 I lived in Berlin and the NSK [Neue Slowenische Kunst] came to town. They were an alliance out of Ljubljana, Slovenia and they had Slavok Zizek, Laibach and some other artists who configured themselves as a formal avant-garde. They had their official philosopher and their official rock group-everything was dogmatic and they were very reactionary in their demeanour. They had a 3-day event, but it wasn’t billed as a festival. They declared a state. At the time when Slovenia didn’t exist as a state, you had to go in advance and get a visa and your passport stamped with these jackbooted, uniformed people checking you on the way in. There was a press conference and all the German journalists were saying “Are you left or right?” and they were going “Well that’s a stupid question.”
Yes. It seems to me the INS cherry picks the best elements from both left and right. It’s got the fascistic element, but then you also learn from your mistakes.
They dovetail anyhow. When we were doing the “transmission, death, technology” hearings at Cubitt that set up the ICA radio station show we looked at the McCarthy Un-American Activities Committee photos because we wanted the room to function in a certain way. Then we looked at the Stalinist show trials and it’s the same! If you look at a figure like Marinetti, in order for him to move from being an ultra-leftist to a fascist, he doesn’t have to change anything. He’s already both. In a way there’s a bigger question about politics in art in general. I find art that just declares a position and advances that is always really banal and really bad. Art is good because it enables what Claude Lefort calls “radical ambiguity”.
That might itself be the manifesto of postmodernism. Like yours - which implodes because it contradicts itself. Political manifestos are more one-sided. But actually even Marinetti and the futurists had clear enemies: the symbolists, the Venetians, the English. Barthes hated the bourgeoisie. Who do you think your enemy is? Haven’t we all learnt about ambiguity by now?
Liberals. Liberal humanists. That would be the enemy, in all positions. This confessional, self-assertive tone that dominates publishing. Not what dominates contemporary art, despite the sentimental valorisations of someone like Tracy Emin - although even she actually takes this whole avant-garde tradition and overwrites it with self-confessional expression. But on the whole I think art is classically not that. What dominates mainstream media culture and literary culture is psychologising: the kind of discourse where the self is never put into question. There is a self who exists prior to anything who goes around emoting, experiencing and developing. This is what I hate.
Your novels eschew mainstream, “psychologically” rounded characters. There’s obviously that influence of the Nouveau Roman.
Or they start with the world. First there is the world, and language and structure and technology. Actually I don’t think that’s necessarily an avant-garde thing. I think that’s what proper literature has always understood. That’s what Shakespeare is about or the Greeks; Oedipus and Antigone experience their subjectivity as a kind of trajectory through space, networks and legal systems.
Of course the nameless “everyman” narrator is also a literary type-the anonymous voice which can’t find its subjectivity. Would you be afraid to have “proper” characters?
No, in the new book that’s out next year, “C“, there’s a main character and the book is all about him. His name is Serge and he’s not some postmodern construct, he’s a person. We follow him from birth to death. Again what drives that book is technology, so while he’s being born his dad is trying to invent radio, trying to get the patent before Marconi. It’s all about communication systems and stuff so his whole subjectivity hovers around mediation-or the experience of his own experience. That’s what the book’s about, and that’s what life’s about: we are all mediated!
Okay! The difficulty of being authentic in Remainder is precisely that of living quotation. The narrator is living other people’s gestures and not even doing them as well.
So’s everyone else! That’s what he realizes when he watches the cool kids in Soho, striking their poses. He just knows it and has endless money to work through the implications.
That state of being too self-conscious to act is one of your tropes: being unable to have an existential crisis because you’re laughing at yourself for having an existential crisis. It reminds me of Jean-Phillippe Toussaint.
I’m writing a long piece on him right now-he’s brilliant. I read The Bathroom when I was 25 and then never re-read it. At the Forum for European Philosophy I read a bit of Remainder and someone in the audience said “Have you read The Bathroom? You know there’s a crack on the wall…” and I remembered.
Exactly: and one that he obsesses over. That crack actually has a literary pedigree. It’s in Sartre and it’s also the crushed centipede trace in “La Jalousie”. So it’s literary déjà-vu and not just déjà-vu?
Yes, I was really conscious of it. That whole building [in the novel] is called Madeleine Mansions, like the madeleine in Proust and the house setting is like Huysmans’ Against Nature. Even more I was thinking of Ionesco’s only novel, Le Solitaire. This guy gets loads of money, holes up in a flat and just watches the world explode while he’s still on the same glass of expensive wine. Or in Grabinoulor by Pierre-Albert Birot there’s this really good scene where the hero notices a clock on his mantelpiece that’s not quite straight and when he tries to straighten it, he realizes it’s not the clock but the mantelpiece. He tries to straighten that, but realizes it’s the floorboards, then the foundations of the house. He tries to dig up the street. By the end he realizes the earth is not right: it’s magnetic. He’s causing earthquakes and tsunamis. There’s this escalation from one tiny detail.
The ripple effect.
Yes. If you start with a crack on the wall you only take four escalations before you’re killing people and stuff. There were a million things I was thinking of-Hamlet for example. He can’t experience authentic emotion, he’s too aware of the mediations and all the precedents. He even re-enacts his father’s death scene at one point. I was very aware of those things and folding them in, but at the same time I didn’t want it just to be a set of references. You don’t have to have read any of that.
The Madeleine thing must surely also be Hitchcock and Vertigo, to which re-enactment is completely central.
Totally. I’ve just finished working on a film with Johann Grimonprez called Double Take about Hitchcock. Johann uses a story Borges wrote twice about meeting his own double as a window on the Cold War. He got me to adapt that with Hitchcock instead, which becomes the film’s monologue. Hitchcock is a genius. I watched all his films in my early ’20s, and especially Vertigo: he [James Stewart] becomes aware of the repetition, but that doesn’t stop it happening.
It also leads to the fatal ending, which is what happens in your work, whether matter gets in the way, or whatever. It’s the attempt at mastery that goes wrong that interests you.
It’s got to go wrong otherwise it’s real fascism! There has to be a fray in the tapestry or you’ve just got the police state.
Because it seems that the people that are scared of non-being and obsessed with it at the same time are fundamentalists! Like in Conrad’s Secret Agent.
Yeah. I grew up in Greenwich and I used to skateboard around the Observatory [the setting of the novel’s terrorist attack]. About four years ago I did this art project about it with Rod Dickinson [Greenwich Degree Zero]. We reconstructed that explosion but we made it a success! The interesting thing is that there are endless newspaper reports about the actual event, but they all get the details slightly differently. It’s so contemporary because the guy that did it-Marshal Bourdin-was a French Jew, an asylum seeker and a refugee. All the newspapers afterwards could be yesterday’s Daily Mail if you just replaced “Jew” with “Muslim”. They’re all saying “We’re a tolerant liberal society but if people come here and start bombing us then…” We just remade all the newspapers but we changed one word here or there. We made a film with a really old crank camera and got a guy to dress up as a policeman and another a Georgian gent and run towards the building. It was post-produced in Soho to be on fire. The Hayward bought it-it’s in their permanent collection, but not on display.
It’s in the crypt corroding everything else!
In the crypt or behind the tv screen. It turns out that the day after that explosion the Lumière brothers premiered cinema. There’s this link between them. In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the first rocket bomb falls on the meridian in Greenwich Park. And it’s got a piece of porn inside. Verloc in The Secret Agent runs a porn shop, that’s his cover. Pynchon was obviously plugging into that, remixing it.
Speaking of porn, have you heard about Nabokov’s son Dmitri inventing a vision to ratify his decision to sell his father’s last novel to Playboy?
I didn’t hear about the vision! “Don’t worry son, it’s what I want!” Apparently when Kubrick’s Lolita was being cast, Dmitri claimed to be the casting director and just screwed loads of young actresses on the casting couch. It’s appropriate. And the title-The Original of Laura-makes me think about how actually the whole of Lolita is a trauma re-enactment, because she has an original: the 12 year-old girl who dies when they have unconsummated sex. The whole book is an attempt to get the hit he never got and she’s like Madeleine in Hitchcock: the substitute.
Can we talk for a second about catastrophe, one of your fetish subjects? I’m interested in how the course you taught went wrong towards the end when you attempted to make the students draw up a manifesto. I thought perhaps the problem was one of meta-language and symbolism. Occasionally you’d get a voice saying “But remember how many people died!” and there’s that aporia between the real event and its symbolic mapping, which particularly interests you. Is there a gap for you? A disaster, it seems to me, is a “real” disaster and a symbolic disaster.
That bit in Remainder when he wants to re-enact the drug dealer’s death is where he tries to close that gap. Society’s way of dealing with it is for the police to come, take forensic photographs, clear away the blood-erase everything. The hero says “No, that’s not enough. It needs more attention than that. It’s ethical, despite his psychopathic thing.” He’s committed to the event. I hadn’t read Levinas then, I read it after. But I thought yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Levinas talks about the death of the Other as being an absolute command. Your own subjectivity is breached open by that ethical encounter. You have to return to it, can’t resolve it or move on. You don’t have to solve it, because it’s unsolvable. I suppose in the book one could say the whole machinery of re-enactment is his symbolic order. But he’s just lying on the street looking at cigarette butts, wondering did the victim see it from this angle, what did he think about? The thoughts become less concrete and he slips in and out of consciousness. That’s an attempt to close that gap. It’s important. People’s death isn’t only significant in what it “means”.
But with disaster, there’s a real resistance to discussing these kinds of questions in anything other than a humanist manner.
But humanism is the problem in the first place! I went on the Today programme to talk about Marinetti and they had a Labour minister in before and their first question was “But wasn’t he a fascist?” I thought well it’s not dodgy Italian artists torturing people in Guantánamo, in Abu Ghraib! I think in a more abstract, philosophical sense, to put the human and the self at the centre of an ontology is deeply problematic. It’s why I love the whole continental tradition through Levinas and Derrida who just turn that on its head.
It might be going out of fashion though, that passivity in Levinas and so on. Zizek and Badiou for example are looking for something else, something more pro-active. They toy with things like God and Communism as a structure rather than as content. Death is that too for you isn’t it, a structure?
Yes it’s a framework to talk about other stuff. I set up the INS because I wanted to have what the German critic Enzensberger calls a post-historical avant-garde. A slightly ironic, dysfunctional or reactionary group is more interesting than an original one perhaps, especially now. And then I was reading the stuff we’ve been talking about. It seemed to make sense. You have to fetishize something right? Marinetti fetishizes technology, Freud dreams and so on. Death is the main thing that runs through the philosophers that I admire so why not make that the fetish subject? It’s ridiculous as well.
The absurd is obviously a massive part of what you do. Your novels are funny although they’re about all this stuff.
They’re really silly, which is something I like. Another influence on the absurd thing in the INS was the AAA [Association of Autonomous Astronauts]. They were brilliant, their whole thing was serious-”Why are we taking the whole military-industrial complex into space? Why is it all about Nasa? Why don’t we take imagination, artists? Why don’t we have sex in space?” They would release all this stuff that looked scientific but was obviously totally bogus, about sex experiments and stuff. One of their mottos was “Only those who demand the impossible will realize the absurd”.
In “Men In Space” you take Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism with Václav Havel [playwright; first Czech president] who is obviously a very symbolic figure for the weird union of art and politics. Beckett dedicated his play “Catastrophe” to Havel and Havel in turn talked about how Czechoslovakia under Communism had been in a mode of waiting for Godot. You went there didn’t you?
I lived there for two years, from ‘91 to ‘93, just after college. Artists were running the country: it was amazing.
Situationism was really fashionable then…
Totally fashionable, but they were playing catch-up. All their artists were trying to be Warhol, the Situationists or Yoko when she was good in the ’60s, doing happenings, tipping paint over themselves and climbing up buildings naked. And again it totally failed. They thought they were going to get something genuinely new and autonomous and they got Starbucks like everywhere else. Now it’s sad, it’s basically a puke bucket for Ryanair stag parties.
One thing I think unites you and Situationism is the accent on tactics, on a sporting use of space and time.
Oh sport is a huge thing. Phenomenologically-speaking, I think there’s three modes in which being in the world, being towards death and so on is most intensely staged and I’d say that’s war, sport and poetry. There’s all that stuff in Remainder about cricket, watching it, re-enacting, reading it. I’m a big cricket fan.
It’s a literary thing! There’s Beckett, and Harold Pinter.
I never got into Pinter, he’s a bit Beckett-lite, a bit Little-England. Beckett’s writing about death, time and being and Pinter’s talking about family. I don’t want to badmouth Pinter. It is really literary, cricket. It’s about repetition and citation, archives, time and geometry. So are football and tennis. Nabokov was into tennis. He was a tennis coach for a while.
Teaching nymphettes?
That’s right, teaching fourteen-year old girls to pick up the ball.
Most writers who write about sport are in the CLR James tradition. They use it as a metaphor for politics and post-colonialism, which it is. But what interests me is the kinetic aspect. Zadie Smith was good on that in her article in the New York Review of Books. I haven’t read that other book she was talking about, but I’ve got it-Neverland. Have you?
No! It certainly looks confessional. It is interesting though that there are these two novels, doubling each other but coming at questions of space, identity and so on from radically different perspectives: a symbolic conflict for literary space. Where one comes to a conclusion, the other drifts endlessly in circles in the sky. That trope is familiar from quite a bit of recent literature.
The end of Infinite Jest [David Foster Wallace’s satire of North America] is unresolved like that; someone with his head stuck to the window, trapped, and watching the disaster happen. I was really influenced by that for Men in Space: the endless loop of unresolved stuff is more interesting than an ending. Toussaint wrote this really interesting piece that’s 7 pages long, but Minuit or Gallimard published it as a book. It’s called La mélancholie de Zidane.
It must be an influence on the film [Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait]?
I wonder. Toussaint’s whole thing about that red card and the headbutt in the World Cup is that it was the fear of finitude. Zidane had said “At the end of these ninety minutes I will never play again. This is it.” He didn’t want the end to come, so he tripped it, short-circuited it by getting himself sent off, which is brilliant. He also says the card wasn’t red it was black, for melancholy. Really interestingly, Toussaint was in the stadium and says like everyone else he didn’t see that episode because they were all watching the ball. It slows down and a whistle blows and nobody seems to understand why it’s stopped. They’re running back to something in the other half, conferring with the linesman and the red card comes out. There’s a scream in the stadium, when they saw what we all watched on tv, the headbutt. The whole stadium gasped in horror when they watched it back. Even in the stadium it’s about the repetition, it’s interesting that the great event, you don’t see, even if you’re there.
Speaking of which, what happened to the film of Remainder? Has it been credit crunched?
It’s going into production later this year. It’ll be directed by Pavel Pavlikowski [My Summer of Love]. The screenplay is by John Hodge who did Trainspotting and all those Danny Boyle things.
Choose death…
Choose repetition! I’ve read the screenplay, it’s really very good. The first meeting I had with them they said “Who would you like to see directing it?” I said “David Lynch! Harmony Korine!” They said “Absolutely not!” They want to make an intelligent mainstream film, a Fight Club or Donnie Darko. There’s a certain vocabulary you have to have in a mainstream film. So the American girl now is a major character.
Oh no, not a Love Interest!
Yes! She says “Stop this re-enactment madness!” and so on. It’s what you have to do; I got their logic. They don’t want to make a low budget art film that 4000 people at the ICA will see who’ve already read the book. They said “We want to make a big film. Popcorn. All that! Millions of people will see it and they’ll go and buy your book Tom!” If I were directing it, it would be the trip-an hour and a half version of the tripping on the invisible kink. They have done good things though, scenes where you see a re-enactment happening and the camera pulls back to show the people with walkie-talkies and clipboards and keeps on going back for as much CGI as their budget can manage. The only demand I had was that I have to be an extra: I’d like to hold the clipboard.
Houellebecq and Hitchcock have done that, been extras in their own films.
Houellebecq’s first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte was brilliant. It seems to have gone a bit downhill from there.
He’s into cults now-they feature in both Atomized and The Possibility of an Island. Doesn’t that appeal to you? I mean it’s just on the other side of repulsion with the materiality of the world right?
Cults are really interesting. The guy I did the Greenwich project with looked at cults a lot. He did re-enactments of Jim Jones’ sermons, the Jonestown Massacre guy. It had the miracle cure in it. He would always call someone forward and say “You’ve got cancer.” He would bring it out of their body-a chicken liver or whatever. He did it in the ICA to an invited audience, editing together 10 hours of transcript of Jim Jones’ speeches. There was a bit where Jones is going “You are selected. You are the chosen people. You understand the meaning” which are the original words, but it becomes about art-what you’re willing to believe. Cults are good…
Maybe for the next novel?
Actually my new novel is going to be called Satin Island, like a mispronunciation of Staten. It’ll be about like illness and creaking matter. I think it’ll start with an oil slick. Nature is totally boring until it has oil poured over it-the condition of beauty being loss. When you see those birds covered in oil, they’re like statues. I like the idea of vinyl and protozaic slime, covering, wrapping things and the whole Tarkovsky thing [Stalker] about the polluted zone being the place of magical transformation. It couldn’t happen outside of that. The one I just finished, C, is going to come out next year. I haven’t started this new one yet. It’ll have zombie parades in it.
You’ve just done a talk about parades. What is it about them?
In Remainder the narrator talks about going to a demonstration and joining in. He can’t remember what the demonstration was about. It comes from Yeats’ Meditations In Time of Civil War where he’s watching this parade go by and they’re shouting “Vengeance for Jacques Molay!” and he joins in even though he doesn’t know who that is. Zombie things started in 2001 or so. My brother lived in Paris and there were these rollerblading things.
They got 10 000 people. The Mairie had to create a new type of event, which they called an MSP - a “Manifestation sans Plainte” [A Point-less Demonstration] which is brilliant. Demonstrating, but not for or against anything: no complaint. I think it started in Toronto, where someone decided to have a zombie parade and march around the streets. There were about 200 people, then the next year 5000, then 10 000. Now it’s franchised to 20 different cities. That seems to be the logical extension of the MSP because zombiedom is just re-enactment without content.
* The novelist Tom McCarthy, not to be confused with the filmmaker and star of The Wire or motivational speaker of the same name. They are of no interest to us here: they are too literal.
