Once you’ve written a book and look back at the process, it’s like the build-up to a goal. You wouldn’t change anything, even the missed passes and accidental ricochets, because they led to what turned out to be the thing.
Tom McCarthy interviewed about C (now out in paperback) in The Guardian.
In this video interview in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, part of a series commemorating “10 years of terror”, Tom McCarthy talks about Bernard Noël’s Le Château de Cène (1969), which he describes as an “obscure pornographic allegory” of the war in Algeria. He goes on to say that “With the Abu Ghraib photos, you don’t need a Bernard Noël to do it. The soldiers themselves are enacting those scenes” that reveal “the poetic truth of the overall neoliberal military project”.
A link to The Guardian’s video interview with Tom McCarthy at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
We want to go to the heavens as heroes, but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves.
Tom McCarthy in Simon Critchley’s Impossible Objects.
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, authentic, and individual. This is completely wrong. Literature is a continuous embedding and encrypting; it is the interment, disinterment, and re-interment of other literature.
A few extracts from Tom Vandeputte’s interview with Tom McCarthy in Supplement Material.
Read. Read, read, read. That would be the thing. Because, ultimately, it’s not about having something to say. It’s what Kafka said, “I write in order to affirm and re-affirm that I have nothing to say.” Writing is not about having something to say. It’s about an intense relationship with the symbolic. Which means being completely immersed in literature, which means in other literature, but also in the world and all its mediations. So, maybe that would be the advice: Go and get immersed.
Tom McCarthy talks about his well misspent youth in The Days of Yore.
Defoe is buried two streets away from me, in Bunhill Fields, right next to Blake. The two poles of English literature: psychotic visionary and systems novelist, side by side.
Tom McCarthy on re-reading Robinson Crusoe.
About ten years ago, I was very interested in the art manifesto as a literary form. It’s a wonderful form and it belongs to a particular era. It’s the early twentieth century really – a time of revolution, where political and aesthetic radicalism were going hand in hand. But I was interested in how the art manifesto might play out now. It seems like nowadays you could only have an inauthentic or an ironic version. So I wrote this pastiche-manifesto, which the art world picked up quite quickly, and that led to exhibitions, residencies and the like. I appointed INS committees and subcommittees. The INS became a structure. I call it a ‘fiction’ – not that it isn’t real, but because it’s a construct that not only references but also cannibalises a whole bunch of other cultural moments – the avant-garde, the bureaucracy of Kafka, the secret networks of Burroughs.
A short extract from Tom McCarthy’s interview in the first issue of The White Review.
That review was quite funny, though: it perfectly captured the red-faced, vein-popping fury of Little England once the values on which it bases its entire identity are ever-so-slightly “solicited”, as Derrida would say. English takes on Tintin always present Hergé as a ’satirist’ and only that: a self-sufficient, rational subject who uses words and images as tools to tell us something he knows because he’s worked it out, rationally, you see. That’s the empirical line on literature tout court: the rational expression of a self-sufficient subject — as though we weren’t constantly made and unmade within language, desire, history, symbolic networks and so on. It’s as moronic as crediting a surfer with creating the wave which carries him and allows him to ply his craft — and back into which he’s eventually going to sink.
3:AM Magazine’s classic 2006 interview revisited.
If your house was on fire, which three books would you save from the flames?
My copy of Finnegans Wake; my diary from when I was eight (best thing I’ve ever written); my copy of The Sound and the Fury.
A short interview from Alma Books‘ website.
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