A- 10 Philosophy after Simon Critchley
Thursday 1:30 PM − 3:00 PM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Seth Morton, Rice University

David M. Robinson, Oregon State University
“Simon Critchley, Wallace Stevens, and the ‘Failure’of Poetry”
Aleksandra Hernandez, University of Toronto
“Phenomenology and the Irrational in Wallace Stevens’ Later Poems”

B- 8 The 21st Century Novel And Tom McCarthy
Thursday 3:15 PM – 4:45 PM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Seth Morton, Rice University

James Duesterberg, University of Chicago
“Curated Autonomy in Remainder”
Rebecca Sánchez, Rochester Institute of Technology
“Signs and Scarabs: The Challenge of Communicating in Tom McCarthy’s C”
Paul Cohen, Texas State University-San Marcos
“Remainder as Theory of the Novel”

C- 7 The Unhumanities in Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy
Friday 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Seth Morton, Rice University

Kate Marshall, Notre Dame
“Narratology for the Nonhuman: McCarthy v. McCarthy”
Ron Broglio, Arizona State University
“Laugh Now, But One Day We’ll Be In Charge”
Seth Morton, Rice University
“On How to Live Finally: Some Notes on Ending, Transmission, and Cryptology in Critchley and McCarthy”

D- 5 McCarthy and Modernity
Friday 10:45 AM – 12:15 PM Room: Humanities 221
Chair: Patrick O’Donnell, Michigan State University

Justus Nieland, Michigan State University
“Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Catastrophes of Modernism”
Leslie Johnson, Aigusta State University
“Ethics After People: On Tom McCarthy’s C”
Patrick O’Donnell, Michigan State University
“The Author as the Letter C: A Response to Justus Nieland and Keith Johnson”

I- 6 Systems and the Contemporary Novel: Joseph Heller, Tom McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy
Saturday 2:45 PM – 4:15 PM Room: Humanities 113
Chair:

Christopher R. Boss, University of Kentucky
“I Am the Supervisor: The Corporate Redemption of Masculinity in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened”
Brian Trapp, The University of Cincinnati
“Two Paths or a Maze: A response via Flaubert to Zadie Smith’s Two Paths for the Novel”

Tom McCarthy
MEN IN SPACE
(Vintage, 2012)
Saturday, February 25th, 7PM
The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy — acclaimed author of Remainder and C — Men in Space is set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the fall of Communism. It follows an oddball cast of characters — dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut — as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. The icon’s melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters’ ellipses and near misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space: physical, political, emotional and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.

“McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories.”- The Observer (London)

“I think it means rather to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward… one of the great English novels of the past ten years.”- Zadie Smith on Remainder in The New York Review of Books

[…] Kittler’s aura seemed to hover over the whole city; by the end of my stay there I wondered whether taxi drivers and Imbiss-stand operators might be protégés or associates as well. He seemed to lurk, invisible, beneath the intersection-points between the worlds of art, philosophy and politics, his bodily presence transmuted into riffs that multiplied like echoes across exhibition catalogue essays and club fliers and general public banter. Whenever I heard someone mention Ovid and feedback loops or Hölderlin and binary code in the same sentence, I knew that I was listening to the master’s voice piped down a hotline from the inner sanctuary at Humboldt where, like Hegel two centuries before him, he’d established his HQ.

[…] While I was writing C, friends kept telling me I had to check out Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. But I held off, not wanting to cloud my primary research on technology and melancholia with academic ‘takes’ on the subject. I read it as soon as I’d finished though, and boy was it good:

What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather… their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility.

This was not just the new Hegel: even better, it was the anti-Hegel, deliriously following through on his avowal to chase Spirit (Geist) out of the Humanities (Geistliche Wissenschaften), to celebrate the poetry of materiality and the materiality of poetry. Here was someone who — at last! — had charted the genealogy, or transmission lines, of writing’s interface with bodies, from Sade to Kafka, Marinetti to Pynchon. Most exciting of all, he lucidly and irrefutably articulated something I’d been trying ineptly to persuade people of for years: that Dracula is a book about the Dictaphone. […]

I entered the plush Leicester Square auditorium for a screening of The Adventures of Tintin with low expectations and 3D glasses. Donning the latter and suppressing the former, I thought for a few pleasant minutes that my forbearance might be rewarded: the opening credit sequence, a zappy graphic medley in which cityscapes, crime scenes and villains morph into and out of one another, was excellent; and so was the first scene, which wittily showed Hergé himself (Tintin’s creator, in case you didn’t know) eking out a living by drawing caricatures in a flea-market, the array of his past clients featuring characters from all the Tintin books. From then on, though, it was downhill, and then some. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation is not just a failure; it is an assault on a great body of art so thuggishly moronic as to make one genuinely depressed.

Make no mistake: the Tintin albums are great art. We could argue until the cows come home about what type of art they represent (narrative? Visual? Sub-cinematic?), but their greatness brooks no querying. Their characters, from melancholic and explosive Captain Haddock to proud and fiery General Alcazar to the vain and affected opera diva Bianca Castafiore, rival any dreamt up by Flaubert or Dickens for sheer strength and depth of personality. Their recurrent themes and symbols — the downfall of noble houses, host-guest encounters gone drastically wrong, tombs and their secrets, water, forgery, the Sun (to name but a few) — are entirely classical, the same found in Aeschylus or Shakespeare or Faulkner. They are eminently political, depicting, first from a rightwing perspective, then, increasingly, a leftist one, a 20th century characterised, just like the present era, by conflict over Middle Eastern oil, the perpetually unsettled Balkans, galloping technological progress, profiteering multinationals and arms traders who have one foot in the president’s office. Best of all, they yield to a casual reader of seven the same amount of joy and wonder as they do to the most diligent adult scholar.

Here’s a telling anecdote: after the premiere of a previous, equally doomed attempt in 1960 to adapt the albums for cinema, Hergé asked a boy leaving the auditorium if he’d liked it. No, the boy replied. Why not, inquired the crestfallen author? “Because Captain Haddock didn’t have the same voice as he does in the books,” the boy explained. His apparently naive take was in fact incisive, since Tintin was always premised on a set of implicit borrowings and relocations from one medium to another. Hergé’s earliest strip-cartoons were billed as “movies” on paper; creatively, he was as indebted to the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd as to the novels of Jules Verne or the illustrated poems of Benjamin Rabier (which, long forgotten now, featured a tuft-headed boy called Tintin-Lutin and his dog). Hergé’s remarkable achievement with the Tintin series was to pluck all these elements from their original contexts and join them together, holding them in perfect equilibrium, in a new, hybrid format whose conventions (speech-bubbles joined with left-to-right action, for example) he established in the very act of assembly.

…But worst of all is the violence perpetrated against the core impulses of Hergé’s work. The deep and disturbing power of the Tintin books lies in the way that they immerse the reader in an inauthentic universe, a world whose veneers are constantly being peeled back to reveal inner emptiness. This begins right back in 1929 with the very first adventure, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, in which the commie-bashing hero, noticing visiting English Marxists gushing over Soviet factories, sneaks behind the buildings (and, by extension, the belief system they underpin) to discover that they’re wooden façades: the smoke is made by burning hay; the clangs by a single man banging a piece of metal. It continues, with increasing complexity, through the figure of Haddock, who is posited between the lines as the illegitimate descendant of Louis XIV (the Sun King): the latter’s gift to Haddock’s ancestor Sir Francis of a château, Marlinspike, adheres to a well-established 17th-century convention whereby monarchs bequeathed property in lieu of recognition to their bastard offspring (the house even has a dauphin crest, symbol of royal filiation, carved above its doorway). The name “Haddock” means (in its French form, aigrefin) “phoney”, “counterfeiter” — and, anyway, it’s not his real one.

Neither, it transpires, is the author’s. Not only is “Hergé” a nom-de-plume, but the same story of false identity and illegitimate royal descent turns out to haunt his family, too: his grandmother, a maid in a château, was impregnated by a visitor she never named but gave to understand may well have been the Belgian king (who was indeed a frequent guest at the château). Hurriedly “white-married” to the house’s gardener, she gave birth to twin boys (Hergé’s father and uncle), who grew up to sport moustaches and wear bowler hats. The Tintin books replay this covert family history again and again, whether through moustached and bowler-hatted twin detectives, or though the aria from Gounod’s Faust repeatedly performed by Bianca Castafiore, which tells — once more — of a lowly maid made pregnant by a noble cad. And as they do so, their casts are dragged more and more into the vertiginous and hollow backstage zone where names, personae and the world itself are robbed of their semantic value. By the final album, Tintin and the Alph-Art, Haddock is left contemplating a giant “H”, repeating to himself the nihilist mantra “None of it means anything!”

But Spielberg casts aside all that inconvenient content. Not only does he follow the English translation’s mistake of substituting Charles II for Louis XIV as Sir Francis Haddock’s benefactor (forgivable in the translation, since when it first appeared no one had drawn out the adventures’ glaring subtext, nor had Hergé’s own family secret been made public; unforgivable now that both have been discussed for two decades); he also slaps on, by the trowel-load, all this earnest rhetoric of authenticity. “Only a true Haddock can understand”, “Be true to yourself”, “Listen to your inner truth”: lines such as these are repeated manically, as though we have wandered into a self-empowerment seminar — a seminar on monetisation through self-empowerment, to be precise.

In the books, money both stands for genealogical fakeness and is fake itself (a brilliant scene in The Crab with the Golden Claws shows Thompson and Thomson tricked into passing off the very counterfeit coins they’ve been charged with tracking down: a doubling of illegitimate faces and false “metal”); in the film it literally pours down, in one scene, from the skies, Haddock’s reward for being “true to himself”. Thus Hollywood’s idiotic “message” is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction. It’s like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian, or of Gandhi as a trigger-happy Rambo blasting his way through the Raj.

Perhaps this movie will be studied, in years to come, as a Žižekian example of a dominant ideology’s capacity to recuperate its own negation, or something along those lines. For now, we just have to wonder how Spielberg went so wrong, or if he was in fact involved at all: so badly put together is this film that it’s easier, and perhaps more comforting, to imagine a semi-simian marketing committee writing and producing it under the banner of his name. If your children love the Tintin books — or, more to the point, if they have an ounce of intelligence or imagination in their bodies — don’t take them to see this truly execrable offering.

A few extracts:

In 2003, Gerhard Richter made several paintings with the same title: Silicate. Large oil-on-canvas pieces, these show latticed rows of light- and dark-grey blobs whose shapes quasi-repeat as they race across the frame, their angle modulating from painting to painting. When angled horizontally, they suggest strips of film bearing identical (or near-identical) sequences but running at different speeds, all of them too fast for any image-content to be made out; when angled askew, they suggest out-of-focus close-ups of a bathmat or worn carpet — or, perhaps, aerial views, similarly out-of-focus, of a gridded city.

In fact, what they’re actually depicting is a photo, plucked from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, of a computer-generated simulacrum of reflections from the silicon dioxide found in insects’ shells. The compound is a prime ingredient of window glass and fibre-optic cable; a semi-conductor, it’s also a mainstay of computer chips. The article accompanying the source photo described research being conducted into structural colours — that is, colours that result from surface textures that refract, rather than contain, pigment. What seems, at first glance, an op art abstraction thus turns out, when unpacked, to contain an entire disquisition on the meshing of the “natural” world (insects) with its synthetic reproductions both inherent (shell-reflections) and exterior (scientific visual modelling); on the surfaces through which we look (windows) and vectors along which we relay or broadcast information (cables); on digital technology; and on colour and its spectrum — which, of course, means both on painting and on light itself, the very ground and possibility of vision.

There’s a tendency to discuss the art of the past hundred years in terms of binary oppositions: abstract versus figurative; conceptual versus craft-based; painting versus photography; and so on. Richter, who since the 1970s has been almost universally acknowledged as a late-modern master, reduces these binaries to rubble. Here’s a painter whose work is inseparable from photography; a man so devoted to craft that he reportedly makes his students construct their own pallet-trolleys before allowing them to raise a brush in anger, yet indulges in Joseph Beuys-style performances in which he lounges on a staircase grasping a wire (as in the 1968 piece Cable Energy), or Debordian critiques of consumer culture in which he installs himself on pedestal-mounted furniture amid a soundscape of advertising slogans (as in the 1963 piece Living with Pop: A Demonstration of Capitalist Realism); who exhibits colour-charts alongside pastoral landscapes; places mirrors around his paintings; photographs a single grey brushstroke from 128 different angles and lays these out in a large grid; or projects a yellow one, massively enlarged, on to fresh canvas and repaints it as a giant 20-metre streak … I could go on and on: his versatility and scope are stunning.

[…] The piece that he himself presents as his first “proper” one, though, painted in 1962, depicts, in sober tones and utterly representational mode, a plain white table — or, rather, would depict this if it weren’t for the large blur sitting at the picture’s centre. The unlikely combination is pure Richter: a preoccupation with the everyday and unadorned (a favourite expression of his, repeated in numerous correspondence, is Es ist wie’s ist: “it is what it is”), married to a sense of some kinetic violence lurking either at the heart of these or at the interface between them and the viewer. Subsequent paintings — of toilet-roll holders, or of promotional pictures of new makes of car, or holidaying families posing for a snapshot, or statesmen blinking in the flashbulb glare of public scrutiny, or tribesmen doing the same before National Geographic’s gaze — would repeatedly involve some form of blurring: it quickly became Richter’s trademark.

What is a blur? It’s a corruption of an image, an assault upon its clarity, one that turns transparent lenses into opaque shower curtains, gauzy veils. Richter painted a lot of curtains; he had a curtain-painting hanging in his Düsseldorf studio, beside the curtain. He had left his own past behind an iron one; many of the blurred snapshot-scenes he produced in the 60s were of relatives he’d never see again, childhood locations become inaccessible. Beyond reflecting his own situation, the blur serves as a perfect general metaphor for memory, its degradation, for the Ozymandian corrosion wrought by time. One blurred Richter painting reproduces badly taken tourist snaps of Egypt, in which pyramids and temples lose their shapes and scale and grandeur. “I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant,” he explained.

Flashbulbs, snapshots, reportage: above all else, the blur recalls camera movement and errors of printing. The vast majority of Richter’s paintings aren’t directly “of” the thing they purport to show, but rather of magazine or photo-album reproductions of it. He’ll often hammer this point home by including surrounding text: captions and advertising copy, scrapbook annotations — which, of course, blur too. What Richter is at pains to foreground is the fact of mediation, the presence, at the very origin and base of every piece, of technologies of mass-production, of repetition. He not only overwrites our perceptual relation to the world by rerouting it through its glitch-ridden mediating screens; he also brings this logic to bear on the history of art. He remakes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, not only hazing it up but also, vitally, replacing the letter the original figure holds in her fingers — a unique, hand-written article with one addressee — with a newspaper: an impersonal, mass-produced media object. Blurring up Titian’s Annunciation, he turns the image into what, for 99% of its viewers, it already was: a reproduction of a reproduction, a third-generation bootleg.

That Richter homes in on the annunciation is doubly significant, since Titian’s masterpiece concerns itself with divine revelation, with the act of making known. Throughout Richter’s oeuvre, a double-play is going on, a struggle being fought within each work between showing and hiding, with the result that each work performs a logic-defying feat of hiding-in-the-act-of-showing, of revealing hiddenness itself. In a recent interview with Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, Richter waxes all Heideggerean — or, in fact, Rumsfeldian — when Serota asks him: “Do you think painting is about discovering the unknown or the known?” The “known,” he answers, “which we see and experience, which effects us and we have to react to … that is the most important thing” — but then, in an immediate volte-face, he goes on to claim that when a subject “turns into the unknown, into what it was, that has an excitement all of its own”. Painting, he concludes, has to retain “something incomprehensible”.

[…] There’s always violence lurking within Richter’s images. When, in 1968, he painted aerial views of cities, the series was automatically framed by the bomber-planes he’d painted five years earlier. In Townscape Paris, buildings and monuments melt and implode in a series of streaks and smears. Is this paint smudging, or is he picturing the city being nuked? The ambiguity is deliberate: destruction is absorbed into the very act of representing; painting and bombing become one and the same gesture. No sooner had he finished this series than he turned his attention to mountain ranges, blasting their peaks to ruins through the formal modulations to which he subjected them.

A later series, from 1975, is so blurred that it will strike most viewers as entirely abstract — until the two main words in all the works’ titles, “tourist” and “lion”, prompt them to squint and pick out the safari-goer being ripped apart. Again, form and subject matter merge completely in the veiled divulgence of a ferocious primal scene: the paint becomes the lion, devouring figuration in a frenzy of power and movement. By the 80s Richter was dragging squeegees across paintings’ surfaces, smearing (over the next two decades) everything from Venice to a forest to his third wife and newborn child in an astonishing annihilation of the difference between marking and erasing, revealing and obscuring, creating and destroying.

Richter’s most famous series is October 18, 1977. Painted 11 years after the events they address, the 15 works — grey, small and undramatic — show members of the Baader-Meinhof group: a youthful picture; a post-capture mugshot; the record-player in which a gun was smuggled into prison and so on. Derived from press and police photographs that Richter, naturally, has blurred, the images are remarkable for the dual pull they exert towards, on the one hand, monumentality and, on the other, monochrome monotony. In another recent interview, Richter uses the term ansehnlich (”considerable”) to describe the effect of rescuing an image from the endless rush of media and paying it the attention — the devotion, we could say — of crafting it into a unique work of art. The Baader-Meinhof paintings are ansehnlich, to be sure — but they’re neither heroic nor condemnatory nor in any way resolved. “Their horror,” Richter says, “is the horror of the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion.” The pictures, ultra-loaded as they are, reject any attempt to bring their subject matter into focus along perspectival lines of ideology or pathos or transcendence. They represent, as Richter puts it, “a leave-taking from any specific doctrine of salvation”. History is not there to be redeemed and held up in divine synthesis, least of all through art: rather, like a chair, or toilet-roll holder, or gramophone, Es ist wie’s ist.

Since 1972, Richter has intermittently exhibited, under the title Atlas, the vast, ever-expanding collection of source-images from which his work is drawn (he’s also published it in book form with the same title). Atlas, perhaps, is Richter’s greatest work, because it contains all the others. Flipping through it is like picking through the entrails — or, perhaps more fittingly, the source-code — of not only Richter’s work but also the 20th century and, perhaps, of western art in its entirety. Here are bombs, fridges, hard-core porn, the surface of the moon; here’s a cruise ship, an electric light, a waterfall, a diver frozen in mid-somersault, the image over-gridded; here’s a warship, a suburban street, stags on a mountain, heaps of bodies in an Auschwitz yard. Here are the Baader-Meinhof photos; here’s that hapless tourist with his lions; here’s one of Richter’s own doodles.

The pictures are ordered by their formal qualities — colour-gradations, shapes and angles — rather than thematically, which sets up a visual taxonomy in which all subjects are both reduced to equal terms and augmented by their juxtaposition with the others. He intervenes in many of the images, sticking lines of tape on urban sprawls to identify their axes, or extrapolating the pattern of a tower block’s stacked-up balconies, repeating this in the next image as pure abstract geometry, then morphing it back into a sketch of plinths for an imaginary exhibition of his work. It’s as though, like some symbolic safe-cracker, he were running through all possible combinations and all modulations of the world’s image-bank; or, like some ancient gnostic monk or rabbi, reeling off the mutating names of God in an incantatory votive list with neither origin nor end — the vital difference being that Richter’s universe is godless. This, perversely, makes it all the more revelatory, in the sense that the philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses the term: profane without redemption, just irreparably thus.

[…] Like virtually all German artists of his generation, Richter at times conducts a dialogue with Romanticism. But road signs replace church spires in his landscapes; waves and clouds are fragmented, isolated, collaged and inverted; icebergs are laid out in multiplying rows, as in school geography textbooks. The fascination is retained – but it’s a fascination voided of sublimity, wedded instead to repetition, reproduction, an interrogation of the act of looking and the technologies through which this act takes place.

Here, as everywhere in Richter’s work, the gaze — of the artist, of the viewer — has been purged of sentimentality, of ideologies of “naturalness”. This is what sets him head and shoulders above his contemporaries Beuys and Anselm Kiefer — who, for all their brilliance, fall into the trap of uncritically reiterating the Romantic aesthetic that segued so seamlessy, with its fetishes of blood and earth, its sentimentalising of history, into Nazism and finds its contemporary expression in vague cultural notions of authenticity and “spirituality”. To make the leap beyond such consoling and reactionary banalities — and to do this without getting snared in that other trap, the one so much of Britart made its home in, namely irony — that is the aesthetic challenge of our era. […]

In this programme (”Tom McCarthy and Poet Leontia Flynn”), Tom — presented as a “prose shape-shifter” and “a verby kind of man”, read a new text in which he argues that the “most noble and heroic” calling in this life is that of the dodgem jockey: “They were there at your conception and the universe’s, when circulating atoms deviated and collided”. He goes on to discuss the essay with presenter Ian McMillan.

[Tom McCarthy. Photograph: Murdo Macleod]

How did you come to write C?

I was doing an art project at the ICA in 2004 that involved setting up a radio broadcasting unit in the gallery. It was based on Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, in which Orpheus picks up coded messages from a dead poet on his car radio. So I was thinking about death and mourning, and researching the history of wireless, ie thinking about crypts and encryption, and the idea for the novel came to me.

What was most difficult about it?

Same as always: getting to the point where you can believe in the book’s world as a viable reality. I don’t mean a “realistic” one — just one that’s carried by its own momentum. Once you get past that point of critical velocity or whatever, the whole project flies — but it’s a fucker to get there.

What did you most enjoy?

Reading about first world war pilots and early radio buffs and 1920s drug-fiends. C is absolutely not a “historical novel” (it’s about new media and empire — ie about now), but all the same it’s set during that period and the research was real fun.

How long did it take?

About four years. I was writing other things too, though, during that time.

What has changed for you since it was first published?

I get a lot more media attention, and sell more books. That’s it though — that stuff doesn’t help you to write any better!

Who’s your favourite writer?

Jimmy J.

What are your other inspirations?

The films of David Lynch exhilarate me totally, and so does a lot of contemporary visual art.

Give us a writing tip.

William Burroughs said “Learn to type”. Alex Trocchi said “Spend a year playing pinball”. I’d say those are both good tips.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting the book again?

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.

What are you working on now?

A new novel, provisionally titled “Satin Island”. It’s about pollution and mutation and the folly of grand projects. It starts with a giant oil-spill. But it’s not environmentalist: the narrator loves the oil spill, and compares oil staining snowy coastlines to ink flowing onto pages. It’s about the beauty of corruption — something like that.

The contemporary relevance of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 days of Sodom in relation to US soldiers’ treatment of Iraqi prisoners

In this video interview, 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”.

I want to make four claims.

The first is that Freud should be seen, alongside Marx and Darwin, as the towering intellectual figure behind what, for lack of space, I’ll call ‘modernity’. The claim is hardly new: it’s been made numerous times, not least by Freud himself. But it still needs to be re-stated. The work of Freud did so much more than found the set of disciplines that fly the convenience flag of psychoanalysis. It entailed a seismic shift in human thought comparable (as one of Freud’s most ardent followers, Jacques Lacan, points out) to the one wrought by Copernicus: where, before Freud, we understood reason and knowledge to be the base and anchor of all consciousness, the dual hemispheres of the planet around which everything else turns, after him we’re forced to see these as no more than bits of flotsam bobbing on a vast sea of desire, dreams, language and, above all, the Unknown.

Yet, whereas no astronomer now would claim that sun and stars revolve around the earth; whereas no economist, whatever their political shade, would query Marx’s basic assertion about the primacy of economics in shaping most areas of life; whereas no naturalist would deny that we’re descended from apes — it’s deemed quite acceptable, even among psychologists, to state that Freud has been ‘discredited’. We’re not talking about ‘correctives’ made to some of his more dogmatic or contentious tenets (the doctrines of penis envy or anal eroticism, for example); we’re talking about wholesale rejection (or, to use a Freudian term, resistance) of the very premise underlying his project. This is what worries me. There are no two ways about it: either the sun revolves around the earth or it doesn’t; either God created the world in seven days or He didn’t. It seems that, within the psycho-semantic vector of modernity, earth-centrists’ and Creationists’ fellow travellers command alarming amounts of respectability and influence.

As a writer, I’m in love with Freud. I can’t imagine any serious writer not being. Freud, ultimately, concerned himself not with the mind, nor with the individual, but with the question of meaning’s emergence in the world, and of the mechanisms through which this emergence takes place. What, according to him, are these mechanisms? Why, they’re substitution and elision, condensation and displacement, metaphor, metonymy — in short, the very mechanisms at work in a poem or a novel. For Freud, if you want to understand mental and social life you don’t take a biopsy of a murderer’s brain or observe groups of people in a room: you study Antigone and Hamlet. That’s why his case-histories read like Gothic novels. It’s why his best patients are fictional characters like Jensen’s Norbert and Goethe’s Werther. And it’s why his preferred model for memory is a mystic writing pad.

Which leads me to my second claim: that Freud’s legacy has little or nothing to do with psychology. If this claim seems to fly in the face of reason, then so be it. Psychology, with its overwhelmingly rationalist and positivist demeanour, is a minor offshoot of the Freudian revolution, one that has, to a large extent,mutated to assume a counter-revolutionary character. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, sets its sights much higher, lays the scope and range of its ambitions so much wider. Emerging at a time when the borders between medicine, hypnosis, mesmerism, magic, cabaret and art were porous to say the least, Freud’s vision applied itself to everything from dreams to tribal ritual, Egyptology to photosynthesis in jellyfish. What runs through all these fields, binding them together, is a concern for structure and pattern, for the way events unfold along trajectories of drive and prohibition, totem and taboo.

Which, in turn, leads me to my third claim: that literature, rightly understood, has little or nothing to do with psychology either. As Gabriel Josipovici has recently pointed out so lucidly, the real hero of the Oresteia is not an individual person, with their thoughts and fears and so on — but rather a house: its secrets, repetition cycles, shored-up traumas, playing out over generation after generation. This is as true of Faulkner as of Aeschylus: what we’re encountering in The Sound and the Fury is the drama of space and time, cached fetishes and unpardonable transgressions unfolding across landscapes that morph from the domestic to the public, navigating their boundaries, pockets, kinks. It’s even true of that most supposedly ‘personality’-centred nineteenth-century novelist Dickens. Forget the BBC adaptation: go and actually read the opening passage of Great Expectations. It’s about the rites of patrilineal name-passing and the failure of speech (’My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing…’). It’s about the dense, muddy insistence of terrain (’marsh country… the dark flat wilderness… the low leaden line beyond…’). It’s about inscriptions carved in tombstones. It’s about ‘the identity of things.’ In short, it’s about subjectivity finding its assignations within material space and transmitted (or occluded) history, experience being dragged and catapulted along their ineluctably death-driven arcs.

Literature, in short, is not made up of ‘characters’: it understands that existence, whether individual or collective, is formed and unformed within networks of language and ceremony, spread across topographies whose axes, or gravitational force-fields, are law, pleasure and mortality, subject to the exigencies of topography itself. As such, it offers, at its deepest, neither commentary nor entertainment; rather, it is the very source-code of our being, index of its contingencies. Freud understands this too, of course, and directly articulates it more brilliantly and systematically than anyone before or since. Which is why psychoanalysis, and not psychology, can lay claim to an intense, perhaps even an incestuous, relationship with literature.

But the false kinship claim that’s laid on literature by (or in the name of) psychology is minor when measured against the more recent one being made by (or, again, in the name of) neuroscience. My fourth and final claim is that, while neuroscientists might have valuable things to tell us (or our doctors) about (for example) brain injury, the glib, wholesale transferral of the logic of neuroscience to the realm of culture is one of the great follies of our age. If I had a tenner for each time I’ve been invited to take part in a ‘cross-disciplinary project’ that MRI-scans writers so as to ‘understand’ their work, I’d be a rich man. It’s a straight category error: Hamlet may explain mental life, but analyzing Shakespeare’s brain would shed no light on Hamlet — for that, you’d need to read The Spanish Tragedy, and Ovid, and Lucretius, and to look at mechanisms of control in the Elizabethan court, the censorship laws governing its media, mutations in the cultural figure of the wise-cracking gravedigger, and so on. Meaning takes place in the symbolic exchanges of the world; it is constantly negotiated within discourse, through the dynamism of conceit and allegory; it is structured by power, gender and, of course, desire. This process is open, ongoing and — most importantly — contestable. That’s why we have art in the first place.

To think otherwise is not only a category error: it is deeply reactionary. When positivist ‘future-casters’ gleefully envision complete and objective neuroscientific ‘mappings’ not just of the imagination but also of individual subjects (their propinquities, delinquencies and so on), this not only strikes me as an blind denial of contingency; it also reminds me of eugenics. Literature, and culture in general, needs to militate against such worrying tendencies. And no one makes for a better field-general — or, if you like, dead father–figure for the waging of such battles than Freud.

Tom McCarthy

NOISE, SIGNAL AND WORD: HOW WRITING WORKS

Saturday 13 August
7:00pm - 8:00pm
ScottishPower Studio Theatre
£10.00, £8.00

Tom McCarthy’s novel C set the literary world’s collective pulse racing last year and that novel’s central ideas form the basis for this new multimedia talk on what McCarthy thinks writing essentially is — or should be. It revolves around the figure of Orpheus, as this plays out in Ovid, Rilke and Cocteau, and includes clips of Cocteau’s Orpheus film, a video by Kraftwerk and plenty more besides.