Surplus Matter

Tom McCarthy in conversation with Lee Rourke at the LRB Bookshop, 6 September 2010 (podcasts).

[W]hat we find in technology and networks is desire. Which doesn’t mean the desiring individual; it means desiring consciousness itself. That’s why I wanted Serge Carrefax to be more than an individual; if he was a circuit he’d be over-charged. The surge is too much, it blows. It’s about the desire for impossibility. Giorgio Agamben, when describing melancholia (which Serge has in spades), says that the condition isn’t at all a detachment from the world, even though it may seem like it; in fact it’s an investment in the world so much that the desire for the world exceeds its own limit. The melancholic wants what is impossible; he wants impossibility itself — to experience it and to merge with it. To surge towards it. That’s why the melancholic is the ultimate rebel.

Lee Rourke in conversation with Tom McCarthy in the Guardian.

In this interview, Tom McCarthy rejects the common description of C as an “experimental” novel. This is, he says, “a lazy label used by lazy journalists to sideline a type of writing that doesn’t conform to a certain model of sentimental humanism which is the default mode in publishing and in our culture at large“. He points out that every significant novel from Tristram Shandy to Ulysses could be described as an “anti-novel”: “Any interesting art is conducting some kind of experiment, otherwise it’s just genre“.

Check out Sarah Crown’s fascinating interview with Tom McCarthy (podcast) on the Guardian’s website.

Walter Benjamin says that the angel of history faces backwards. I think it’s the same for literature: you’ve got to look back in order to move forwards. It’s not just the foundations of contemporary technology that are being laid in the early 20th century (the code radio bugs used exactly anticipated text speak, just as lots of their output anticipated Twitter), but also literature’s period of high modernism that’s coming to a head. Not for nothing does the novel end in 1922: it’s the year that Ulysses and The Waste Land came out. The task for the contemporary writer (sadly, one which many writers of today are shirking) is to work through that period’s legacy — dynamically and radically, but attentively too.

Andrew Gallix interviews Tom McCarthy in the September issue of Dazed & Confused.

I’ve been reading Ada – I think it’s his masterpiece, the best book by a long, long way. Strangely, a lot of Nabokovians don’t like it… Anyway, it’s all about encryption of some kind or another. Telephony is key – even though it is the one thing completely banned in the book. Again, this is by the same token as sex has been banned in Remainder. That book was all about sex, of course, so having it there in any explicit form would have diluted the message.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Anna Aslanyan in 3:AM Magazine.

Don Quixote and Finnegans Wake are both surveys, in the archaeological sense, of previous literature, and they both, by paying such attention to the past, manage to do something radically new. Also, they both enact a kind of system-failure: literature doesn’t work, and that, ultra-paradoxically, is the condition of its possibility. Every ten minutes, it seems, some schmuck or other announces the death of the novel — and of course, they’re right: the novel has been living out its own death from before its birth.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Steve Finbow in Bookmunch.

“For me, this [the BT Tower] is the most sacred building in London,” he says. “If you were an alien terrologist and you came down to study us, you would see St Paul’s and imagine that it might have had some relevance when God existed. But since he doesn’t any more” — this said with a mischievous smile — “and signals do, this is now the hub of London. This is where meaning is projected around the city.”

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Tim Robey in the Daily Telegraph.

I love the bread and butter of plot. Literature is, after all, an engagement with the real. That doesn’t mean that it’s mimetic, but somehow fiction has to get messy and constitute the real — whether that be an object, a speech pattern, a smell, or whatever. Commentators and critics seem to want fiction either to be blatantly avant-garde and postmodern, or to be realist and 19th century; but really most literature is neither nor.

Stuart Evers interviews Tom McCarthy in the New Statesman.

“I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it. It’s like DJing.” On the evidence of C, McCarthy is quite possibly the remix the novel has been crying out for. “Here we are, rich inheritors of all this magnificent detritus,” he says. “How do we want to recombine it? I think it’s a good time to be a good writer, actually.”

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Robert Collins in the Sunday Times.

Tom McCarthy interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme about Double Take. He describes WMDs as “a good example of a MacGuffin”!