57

In conversation with

TOM McCARTHY

London
Friday 11 June 2010

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist based in Lon-

don. His recent novel C was shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize and his debut Remainder was described
by Zadie Smith as ‘one of the great English novels of
the last ten years’. In 1999, McCarthy founded the
‘International Necronautical Society’, with which
he has worked on a series of art projects. His liter-
ary and artistic work amongst others engages with
issues of mourning, (cultural) memory and the tech-
nologies sustaining it.

Tom Vandeputte: Monuments, and more pre-

cisely crypts, occupy an important position in
C. Some of the spaces in which the narrative is
situated are literally defined by the presence
of monumental tombs: the family estate in the
58 IN CONVERSATION WITH

first part of the text is for example dominated

by a crypt where all the ancestors are buried.
Yet also in a more abstract sense, processes
of burial and encryption reappear frequently
throughout the novel.

Tom McCarthy: I suppose that the discussion

of the concept of the crypt by Nicolas Abraham
and Maria Torok has been important for me.
I encountered their work while I was doing
research for an art project. It builds on Freud’s
history of the Wolf Man, which is about a
wealthy, young, Russian man who loses his
sister and goes through a protracted process
of mourning. Because this man never properly
mourns his sister, she inhabits him like some
kind of ghost for the rest of his life, dictating
his compulsive behaviour. Freud compares
his mind to a set of hieroglyphic overlays: he
describes it as a space of code, of burial, and
ultimately of the failure to bury. Abraham and
Torok argue that Freud should have called
it a crypt: a funereal monument, but also a
site of encryption in a linguistic sense – the
Greek kruptos means ‘buried’ but also ‘hidden’.
They argue that the fundamental structure of
neurosis is cryptological: its architecture is a
labyrinth with a void at its heart. In case of
the Wolf Man, this void is occupied by a dead
person who is not properly there, who escapes
yet still remains there; and I suppose the same
 TOM McCARTHY 59

can be said about Serge Carrefax, the protago-

nist of C, after his sister commits suicide. In
linguistic terms, the concept of encryption also
has to do with transmission. Freud, of course,
understands neurosis completely linguisti-
cally: in terms of word-associations, changes
of language and translation. Abraham and
Torok describe this as an encrypted transmis-
sion: the compulsive behaviour of the Wolf
Man re-transmits the crypt’s signal onwards
and onwards.

Wireless transmission figures prominently in

C. The novel is situated amidst the tumultu-
ous developments of early twentieth-century
modernity, with technology making the world
smaller and more ‘knowable’. Serge Carrefax
is born to the ticking and humming of an
experimental radio station – and when he vis-
its Egypt towards the end of the novel, he sighs
that it’s not a distant, exotic ‘there’ anymore.

Yes, the disenchantment. The experience that

‘there’ is only ‘here’ and that ‘here’ has become
everywhere. The last part of the novel takes
place in Egypt of the 1920s. When people went
there back then, they had read Herodotus, or
perhaps Gérard de Nerval, and thought of the
Orient as this kind of creative space. Only when
they arrived, they realised they were just on a
package tour, and that it was all fake. I have
60 IN CONVERSATION WITH

read accounts of early tour-guides putting a

mummy somewhere for you to discover. There
is a great part in Flaubert, who writes that he
is going down the river and says he feels like
nothing of it is real – it is just like a panorama,
the kind of installation you would encounter
on a fairground. But in the earlier passages
of C, it is paradoxically enough precisely tech-
nology that makes the world fantastical. As a
teenager, Serge is eavesdropping on the world
by tuning in to all kinds of signals in the ether
and seeing what he is able to capture. Start-
ing from his bedroom, he first intercepts local
traffic, then Liverpool ships, Atlantic ships,
fragmented messages from Gibraltar, and then
finally this intergalactic noise of meteorites
and star deaths. It is essentially a huge open-
ing out. You find something similar in Kafka.
There is a really good passage in The Castle:
when K. phones the castle, he is always put on
hold. He describes hearing a kind of static on
the line, which is like children’s voices, sing-
ing at a distance or just beyond the range of
proper hearing. The phone never lets you to
the castle; it just makes it more concealed.
In these passages, technology is not bringing
things near but it is expanding the here into
an infinite space.

The atmosphere of C is densely filled with all

kinds of transmissions, codes and signals, of
 TOM McCARTHY 61

which radio is only one. At times they seem to

become almost palpable.

I absolutely think of messages as material

phenomena. When Serge is eavesdropping on
all the ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship trans-
missions, I’ve tried to emphasise the fact that
these are pulses coming physically through the
air – he almost feels them against his skin.
Later, this accumulates and accumulates. By
the time he is in London and he encounters the
code-rich drugs underworld and is taking her-
oin all the time, which slows everything down,
it is almost as if he is underwater: he is seeing
ripples moving through the air and movements
as if they are filmed in motion capture delay.

Several years ago you have also set up a radio

station yourself. How did this come about?

I was doing an art project at the Institute of

Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, which
was based on Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée – the
bits where the dead poet Cégeste transmits
messages over the radio and Orphée picks them
up. I have always thought these are beautiful
scenes, and beautiful lines of poetry, but there
is also something else to them: they establish
a relation between technology, death and poli-
tics. Cocteau based these transmissions on the
résistance in France during the Second World
62 IN CONVERSATION WITH

War, which used similar encrypted messages to

communicate with London. The film is situated
in a landscape of war, occupation and resist-
ance, but also one of desire. The messages in
the film are being transmitted because death,
the Princess, wants to seduce Orphée, and she
knows that they will draw him into the under-
world. I was interested in this triangulation,
and I guess it also appears as such in C. In the
ICA we reprised Cocteau’s set-up: we started
a radio station, transmitting messages around
London from within the gallery space.

You’ve said that you started writing C from

the idea that archaeology and radio are two
facets of the same thing. Archaeology also
seems to play an important role in your previ-
ous novel Remainder.

The two novels definitely overlap at this point.

In a key scene of Remainder, the main char-
acter looks at the surface of the road, a mate-
rial surface with all kinds of marks and paint
stains, and understands it is also a palimps-
est, layers and layers of messages of what has
happened there. He realises, like Freud, that
he is only looking at the surface. In the street,
there are all these holes, the electricity and the
plumbing, leading to other places. I suppose
that the last section of C almost literalises that
metaphor. Here, the main character, Serge, is
 TOM McCARTHY 63

on an Egyptological dig, going through end-

less layers of stuff, some of which are Lipton
teabags left there five months ago, other stuff
is five thousand years old. But it has all just
mulched together and, no matter how deep he
goes, there is still more and more.

You also use these technologies as a metaphor

for your view on literature. In a recent lecture
you said that ‘writing is like radio’.

The year in which C ends, 1922, is the year

in which the BBC was founded, Tutankhamen
was disinterred and Egypt got its independ-
ence. But it is also the year in which James
Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land were both published. This is for me
most important: it is the great year of liter-
ary modernism. I like to think of The Waste
Land, in particular, as some kind of radio
programme, which gathers voices from differ-
ent places. Towards the end of the poem, Eliot
writes: ‘these fragments I have shored against
my ruins’. He is gathering together bits and
remainders, and tries to make them re-ema-
nate something new: something which is new
precisely because it is old.

I noticed that many parts of C are borrowed

from existing texts. The protagonist’s observa-
tions on the particular aesthetics of a battlefield
64 IN CONVERSATION WITH

when viewed from an airplane for instance

repeat those of the Futurist poet Marinetti.

There is definitely a lot of embedding in C. You

can see it as a response to mainstream culture’s
inability to talk about literature. A writer is
supposed to have and express thoughts and
feelings which are absolutely unique, authen-
tic, and individual. This is completely wrong.
Literature is a continuous embedding and
encrypting; it is the interment, disinterment,
and re-interment of other literature. In C I
wanted to take that logic very far. The climax
to the section of the novel called ‘Crash’ is more
or less a reprise of Marinetti’s well-known
crash into a ditch as it is described in the
Futurist Manifesto. Also the autobiographical
account by French writer Maurice Blanchot
of the moment he is almost executed is in the
novel. Besides that, many of the characters of
C reprise historical figures whose biographies
I had looked at when I was doing my research,
with completely recognisable phrases and
scenes. Writing C was almost like soldering,
meshing and crushing these things together.

What are you currently working on?

I’ve started to work on a new book, which is

all about pollution. In fact, I have just been
in Stockholm for two months on a residency,
 TOM McCARTHY 65

where I’ve been writing on this book that has

been in my head for years. It is weird: I always
wanted it to begin with an oil spill – I knew
that would be the first scene. In Stockholm, I
was reading about oil spills, looking at images
of them, and then this spill actually took place
in the Gulf of Mexico. The novel is going to be
called Satin Island. Some time ago, I woke up
in the middle of a night from this dream which
was full of oil and rubbish – a bit like Staten
Island in New York, but perhaps more like a
Satin Island: full of pollutants and rubbish,
like an incinerator being burned, but kind of
rich and beautiful. I knew I wanted my next
novel to be thought outwards from that image.
Caspar Frenken and Tom Vandeputte (eds.)

SUPPLEMENT MATERIAL
Conversations on New Concepts of Monumentality

Perhaps (Perhaps) London

Autumn/Winter 2010
ISBN 978-1-4466-5636-5

Copy edited by Ross Adams and Jules Schoonman

Manufactured in the U.S.A. by Lulu.com
Distributed by perhapsperhaps.org
This publication is made possible by the generous
support of the City of Rotterdam, Art and Culture

© 2010 by the authors. All rights reserved.

ANTHONY AUERBACH p.35-49

TOM MCCARTHY p.57-65
MIHNEA MIRCAN p.21-33
HENK OOSTERLING p.51-56
JONAS STAAL p.3-11
DANIEL VAN DER VELDEN p.13-20

Supplement Material is an expanding series of con-

versations on new concepts of monumentality, which
responds to the monument’s recent appearance as a
central motif in cultural practices within a variety
of disciplinary contexts – an appearance which is
remarkable in and of itself, as the previous century
has seen the irreversible discredit of traditional
forms of monumentality as a valid device for mak-
ing sense of history and collective identity. The six

(continued on back)
six conversations included are attempts to examine
how each of the involved practices complicates and
recontextualises prevalent definitions of the monu-
ment and puts forward alternative concepts of monu-
mentality with a renewed contemporary relevance.
Alongside the format of the publication, a juxtaposi-
tion of dialogues, the print-on-demand production of
this book allows it to be read as the platform for a
gradually expanding, open-ended conversation that
potentially incorporating future comments, revi-
sions, and contestations.

The title of this project refers to the common ground

shared by the six contributors to this edition: the
notion that monuments themselves function as mate-
rial supplements – whether it is to assist, sustain and
ultimately constitute collective memory, or to provide
a tangible counterpoint for the abstract ideas, politi-
cal bodies and organisations represented by them.

Special thanks here to all those who have been gen-

erous with their time and involvement in the project:
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Henk Oosterling, Nanne de Ru,
Daniel van der Velden, Mihnea Mircan, Anthony
Auerbach, Tom McCarthy, Matthijs van Muijen,
Ross Adams, and, finally and especially, Annemarie
van den Berg and Jules Schoonman for helping this
project to come to fruition.

ISBN 978-1-4466-5636-5
90000

9 781446 656365