Surplus Matter

People wanting to engage seriously in literature will have to look to other arenas: the art world and its publication networks, for example — at least until their work has found a large enough audience to make it commercially attractive to bigger houses. While this may be bad news for writers’ bank balances, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for literature, which has always “deterritorialised” itself, had to detour beyond its own boundaries, in order to be reinvigorated. The internet has produced some excellent criticism and debate around literature, but I’ve yet to see any good “primary” writing on there.

Tom McCarthy ponders the impact the recession may have on literature in the Independent.

A few years ago I was invited to a dinner for young British novelists at the ICA. The other guests were for the most part successful published writers — unlike myself back then. The talk was of lucrative three-book deals with major publishers, review coverage, agents — anything, in fact, but literature.

Tom McCarthy argues in The Times that the British art world is more literate than publishing.

Clara is a flower par excellence. Again and again Mirbeau writes of her ‘bust, swollen like the calyx of a flower drunk with pollen’ or her feet which poke out from ‘the perfumed calyx of her skirts’. She is, he tells us, ‘a flower of intoxication and the tasty fruit of eternal desire’; she herself, when she hears that as many as twenty males can pollinate one female flower, declares: ‘I’d like to be a flower’. Within the idealist-versus-materialist axis of the novel, Clara is the narrator’s (and hence Europe’s) soul, the sublimation of his thoughts and aspirations; and yet her soul is a ‘mass of putrefied flesh’. She is his soul ‘materialised in the form of sin’: sublime debasement, sublimation as debasement.

Read Tom McCarthy’s introduction to the Bookkake edition of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden.

Infinite Jest, along with Whatever, was the best novel of the nineties.

Tom McCarthy pays homage to the late, great David Foster Wallace.

Listen to Tom reading “Kool Thing, Or Why I want to Fuck Patty Hearst” at Foyles on 5 April 2008.

I hold out little hope for Spielberg’s film. I suspect it will be sanitised and anodyne, devoid of the complexities that make Tintin so compelling. Hergé complained in his last years that his creation was killing him. The final sequence in the incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art shows, in what I’ve always seen as a cryptic cry of desperation on its author’s part, the hero being led off to have plaster poured on him and thus be turned into an artwork called “Reporter” — condemned, that is, to die inside his own simulacrum. This is dark stuff, Dorian Gray territory. If I had my way, the film would be directed by David Lynch.

Tom McCarthy on the political trajectory of the Tintin cartoons and Spielberg’s forthcoming movie.

This is textbook post-traumatic territory, and textbook literary alienation. The necessity — and impossibility — of watching yourself from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead — and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well.

Tom McCarthy reviews Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts in the London Review of Books.

If this was a Wednesday Top Ten I’d probably choose ten different books entirely, and another ten on Thursday.

Tom McCarthy’s Top Ten novels in The Book Depository.

He places his copies next to the original, one on each side. They’re both perfect. When they’re waxed all three should look exactly the same. He’ll phone Anton, then sleep, then varnish the paintings and collect his money. The phone’s been unplugged from its socket and placed in the room’s corner, by the plant. Did he do that? He should move over and phone Anton. But he doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to take his eyes off the three images – four if you count the mirror in which he’s framed, standing, wrapped in a sheet stained the same crimson as the saint’s robe, with his grooved, waxed hair, his gaping mouth.

Read the exclusive extract from Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space published by 3:AM Magazine

Tom lists his favourites at Pulp.net