Tom McCarthy (writer)
Encyclopedia
Life and work
Tom McCarthy is a writer and conceptual artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in central London. McCarthy grew up in GreenwichGreenwich
Greenwich is a district of south London, England, located in the London Borough of Greenwich.Greenwich is best known for its maritime history and for giving its name to the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time...
, south London and was educated at Dulwich College
Dulwich College
Dulwich College is an independent school for boys in Dulwich, southeast London, England. The college was founded in 1619 by Edward Alleyn, a successful Elizabethan actor, with the original purpose of educating 12 poor scholars as the foundation of "God's Gift". It currently has about 1,600 boys,...
(1978 to 1986) and later New College, Oxford
New College, Oxford
New College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.- Overview :The College's official name, College of St Mary, is the same as that of the older Oriel College; hence, it has been referred to as the "New College of St Mary", and is now almost always...
, where he studied English literature. He lived in Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam in the early nineties before settling back in his native London. McCarthy's time in Prague would form the basis for his novel "Men in space"."Tom McCarthy: How he became one of the brightest new prospects in British fiction" The Independent" 21 September 2007 McCarthy has also worked as a television script editor, co-editing Mute magazine. Prior to his success he lived and wrote in a tower block on the Golden Lane Estate
Golden Lane Estate
The Golden Lane Estate is a 1950s council housing complex in the City of London. It was built on the northern edge of the City, in an area devastated by bombing during World War II.-Origins:...
beside the Barbican
Barbican Estate
The Barbican Estate is a residential estate built during the 1960s and the 1970s in the City of London, in an area once devastated by World War II bombings and today densely populated by financial institutions...
.
McCarthy's debut novel Remainder initially made no impact on larger UK publishers. It was eventually published in November 2005 by small Paris-based art publisher Metronome Press
Metronome Press
Metronome is an artists' and writers' organ founded in 1996 by Clémentine Deliss.It acts as alternative art publishing, because it has not a fixed editorial team and a fixed location...
and distributed through gallery and museum shops, but not in chain bookstores and then received widespread critical attention in the literary and mainstream press. The London Review of Books called it "a very good novel indeed" and The Independent claimed that "its minatory brilliance calls for classic status". The novel was re-published in a much larger UK print-run by the more conventional English publisher Alma Books (2006), and in the US by Vintage (2007), where it ranked as an Amazon top one-hundred seller and entered the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. On its American publication the New York Times dedicated the front cover of its book section to the novel, calling the book "a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny". In 2008 Remainder won the fourth annual Believer Book Award
Believer Book Award
Believer Book Award is an American literary award presented yearly by The Believer magazine to novels and story collections the magazine's editors thought were the "strongest and most under-appreciated" of the year. A shortlist and longlist are announced, along with reader's favorites, then a final...
. Zadie Smith wrote in the New York Review of Books that it was "one of the great English novels of the last ten years", suggesting it showed a future path that the novel "might, with difficulty, follow". It has since been translated into fourteen languages, and an adaptation for cinema by Film4 Productions
Film4 Productions
Film4 Productions is a British film production company owned by Channel 4. The company has been responsible for backing a large number of films made in the United Kingdom. The company's first production was Walter, directed by Stephen Frears, which was released in 1982.- History :Before 1998, the...
was begun in 2008. Since the success, several big publishing houses who had turned it down originally returned to him with enthusiastic offers, which McCarthy rejected, commenting that "it's the same book as it was two years ago."
A work of literary criticism by McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006, with French (Hachette Littératures), Spanish (El Tercer Nombre), Italian (Piemme) and American editions (Counterpoint) following in 2007-8. The book, which attempted a reading of Hergé's Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist , who wrote under the pen name of Hergé...
books through the prism of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory divided reviewers, with some critics reacting adversely to the book's unabashed celebration of divisive literary figures such as Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
and Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
. McCarthy commented: "Granta asked if I wanted to write a book on Freud or Derrida or someone like that, and I said: 'Well, if I write about Hergé I can write about Freud, Derrida and whole bunch of other people, plus it'll be much more fun.' It was received well for the most part. There were one or two hilarious English reviews in which you could virtually see the reviewer's veins bursting with little-England rage at the book's continental bent." Killian Fox in The Observer praised "its author's obsessive approach, his breathtaking grasp of the oeuvre and the sheer exuberance with which he tackles his subject". However, in The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes criticized its methodology and style: "McCarthy's text has that pleased-with-itself smirk that was so characteristic of the early 90s, when journalists started purloining critical theory from the academy, liking the way it made them feel clever".
In 2007, Alma Books published his second novel, Men in Space, much of which was written prior to Remainder. It has since been published in many languages including Greek and French. McCarthy has also published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, Artforum and The New York Times, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press), The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press) and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail). In 2004 he published an essay on excrement in the work of James Joyce in the online literary journal Hypermedia Joyce Studies. In 2008 an essay by McCarthy on Alain Robbe-Grillet, an author he has often expressed an admiration for, was published in the new Oneworld Classics English edition of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy. McCarthy's novel Satin Island will be released in Spring 2012 from the Knopf Publishing Group.
Art and The International Necronautical Society (INS)
With no formal training in the visual arts, McCarthy stated that he became an artist by accident after he handed out his International Necronautical SocietyInternational Necronautical Society
The International Necronautical Society is a semi-fictional organization closely modeled on European avant-gardes of the early 20th century. It replays, not without parody, the politically-inflected structures of these avant-gardes, with their manifestoes, committees, splinter groups and purges...
or INS manifestos at a mock art fair organized by artist Gavin Turk
Gavin Turk
Gavin Turk is a British artist and one of the Young British Artists . He often uses his own image in life-size sculptures of famous people.-Life and work:...
. He claimed that although his first love is literature, "art has one advantage in that it provides an active space, a space of becoming-active. You can actually do the thing rather than just represent it." Since 1999 McCarthy has operated as 'General Secretary' of a 'semi-fictitious organisation' called the International Necronautical Society (INS) "devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex". The INS operates through publications, live events, media interventions and more conventional art exhibitions. In a 2007 interview with the website Bookninja, McCarthy explained the circumstances that led to the formation of the INS: "I was quite well integrated into the art world in London by the late nineties, and on top of that I’d for some time had an interest in the modes and procedures of early twentieth century avant-gardes like the Futurists and Surrealists: their semi-corporate, semi-political structures of committees and subcommittees, their use of manifestos, proclamations and denunciations". Despite his initial claim that the INS was 'not an art project', McCarthy has accepted invitations to show work in his capacity as INS General Secretary at art institutions around the world, including Tate Britain and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Drawing Center New York, Kunstwerke Berlin, Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, and Substation Gallery Singapore.
The INS has been described by Art Monthly as "a platform for fantastically mobile thinking." In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
website and inserted propaganda into its source code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
from which more than forty assistants generated non-stop "poem-codes" which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world. In 2008 a more mechanical version of this piece was displayed at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, in which an aeroplane Black Box transmitter sent out a stream of similar messages. In 2007, after McCarthy and INS Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political...
had delivered the 'INS Declaration on Inauthenticity' at New York's Drawing Center, the critic Peter Schwenger alleged in Triple Canopy (online magazine)
Triple Canopy (online magazine)
Triple Canopy is an online magazine, which was first published in 2008. In an effort to "slow down the Internet," the magazine curates and facilitates new media projects, which engage with the formal possibilities of the web. Its content ranges from art and literature to essays and critical theory...
that the two men who appeared in the gallery were not in fact Critchley and McCarthy. Taking his claim as an inspiration, McCarthy and Critchley did indeed replace themselves with actors when delivering the Declaration one year later at Tate Britain. When invited to deliver the Declaration a third time at the 2009 Athens Biennial, they announced that the Declaration would henceforth be outsourced to any institution who wanted it, and commissioned a Greek translation, which was subsequently delivered by Greek actors in Athens.
McCarthy has also made artworks outside of his role as INS General Secretary. In 2005 he exhibited, at The Western Front Gallery, Vancouver, the multimedia installation piece 'Greenwich Degree Zero', produced in collaboration with artist Rod Dickinson, which (in a tribute to Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
's 1907 novel The Secret Agent), depicted the Greenwich Observatory burning the ground. The piece was subsequently purchased by the Arts Council England's permanent collection. In 2006 he collaborated with French artist Loris Gréaud to produce an 'Ontic Helpline' for a fictitious 'Thanatalogical Corporation' - a black telephone that transfers callers through an endless loop of pre-recorded messages. The telephone was displayed in the FiAC collection in Paris, and purchased by gallerists/collectors Solene Guillier and Nathalie Boutin. McCarthy wrote the script for Johan Grimonprez's feature film Double Take (2009). The script consists of a short story, loosely based on Borges's 'August 25, 1983', in which Hitchcock meets his double on the set of one of his films. The film won the Black Pearl award (MEIFF, Abu Dhabi) in 2009. McCarthy has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
, London Consortium
London Consortium
The London Consortium is a graduate school in the UK offering multidisciplinary Masters and Doctoral programs in the humanities and cultural studies at the University of London. It is administered by Birkbeck, University of London, one of the constituent colleges of the University of London, and...
and Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
.
Remainder
Remainder tells the story of an unnamed hero traumatized by an accident which “involved something falling from the sky”. Eight and a half million pounds richer due to a compensation settlement but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, Remainder’s protagonist spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past, such as a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, or lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off them. These re-enactments are driven by a need to inhabit the world "authentically" rather than in the "second-hand" manner that his traumatic situation has bequeathed him. When the recreation of mundane events fails to quench this thirst for authenticity, he starts re-enacting more and more violent events, including shoot-outs and a bank heist.Men in Space
Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond. The icon's melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters' ellipses and near-misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space, be it physical, political, emotional or metaphysical. McCarthy uses these settings to present a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.C
Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world. After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful—and perhaps fateful—climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb . . .McCarthy's novel C was released in late 2010 - in the US with Knopf, in the UK with Jonathan Cape. McCarthy has described this novel in previous interviews as dealing with technology and mourning. The book was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize
Man Booker Prize
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...
.
Leo Robson in the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
review describes the book as "full of familiar delights and familiar tedium", with "Protracted descriptions of a pageant and a seance [that] drain the reader's will to live." It continues "After a certain point, most sentences go something like this (not a parody): "Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays.""
Repetition and Duplication
One of the main themes pervading McCarthy’s work is that of repetition and duplication. The novelist himself has discussed the importance of this subject in an interview. The repetition in Remainder takes the form of re-enactments of events carried out by the wealthy post-traumatic hero in a process that some critics (such as Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books ) have seen as allegory for art itself. In Men in Space it takes the form of duplication of an artwork, and a set of patterns repeating over several centuries. In McCarthy’s art projects it has taken the form of repeating sets of messages over radio in the style of Jean CocteauJean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
’s Orphée http://www.necronauts.org/caa.htm. Boyd Tonkin, in his Independent profile on McCarthy, picks up on the notion that literature itself is a series of repetitions and duplications.
Failed Transcendence
Several critics have noted the centrality of failed transcendence to McCarthy's work, particularly when discussing Men in Space. McCarthy himself has used this term in interviews to describe the collapse of the idealist project in philosophy, art and literature. The notion of failed transcendence also forms a central tenet of 'The New York Declaration on Inauthenticity', an INS talk delivered in the style of a propaganda statement by McCarthy and the philosopher Simon CritchleySimon Critchley
Simon Critchley is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political...
in 2007 in the Drawing Center
Drawing Center
The Drawing Center is a SoHo museum and the only nonprofit exhibition space in the United States to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.- Location and activities :...
, New York.
Matter
In relation to failed transcendence, the notion of matter seems to play a central role in McCarthy’s work. Remainders hero is obsessed with “surplus matter”: the residues and traces of events. In his INS publication 'Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art', McCarthy discusses figures such as Dorian GrayDorian Gray
Dorian Gray is the main character of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.It may also refer to:* Dorian Gray , an Italian film starring Helmut Berger...
, whose image becomes material (so much so that it rots), the work of Francis Ponge
Francis Ponge
Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
(which is preoccupied with the materiality of messy objects such as oranges and oysters), and most importantly the fat, blubbery whale of Moby Dick, who frustrates Ahab's idealistic attempt at self-projection. In a discussion with the artist Margarita Gluzberg, held in 2001 in London's Austrian Cultural Forum
Austrian Cultural Forum
An Austrian Cultural Forum is an agency of the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, whose task consists of the cultural and scientific dialogue with artists and scientists of each particular host country....
, McCarthy cites Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
's description of matter as “that non-logical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law”. In a lecture delivered to the International James Joyce Symposium in 2004 in Dublin, McCarthy again cites Bataille, drawing on his notion of “base materialism” to throw light on the scatological sensibility displayed in Joyce's novels.
Transmission
Another recurring theme in McCarthy’s work is that of transmission. The detective in Men in Space clearly embodies this concern: he is a radio surveillance operative who starts out boasting he “can always get a strong signal”, but ends up losing the signal and then becoming deaf, cut off from all communication. In one interview, McCarthy has discussed this character’s similarity to Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...
's Harry Caul in The Conversation
The Conversation
The Conversation is a 1974 American psychological thriller film written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman...
.
Transmission is also central to Cocteau's Orphée, around which McCarthy created an art project at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
in London in 2004, which consisted of forty assistants cutting up text, projecting it onto the walls and then re-assembling it into cryptic messages which were transmitted around London and the world by FM and internet. This project was indebted to William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
's notions of viral media and to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok
Maria Torok
Maria Torok was a Hungarian-French psychoanalyst, a student of Sandor Ferenczi.Torok is best known for her idiosyncratic contributions to psychoanalytic theory, developed in the wake of first Freud, then Ferenczi, and also the critical study of Husserl, and often coauthored with Nicolas Abraham...
's notions of the "crypt", a space both of burial and encryption. The art-piece Black Box, originally displayed in Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2008, also involved constant radio transmissions. McCarthy has insisted that radio technology can be regarded as a metaphor for writing, comparing T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" to a radio programme.
External links
- Interview, Untitled Books. Retrieved 2010-12-28
- SurplusMatter.com McCarthy resource site. Retrieved 2010-12-28
- Vintage, McCarthy's US publisher. Works detail. Retrieved 2010-12-28
- Charlie Kaufman on Remainder and Synecdoche, NY. Retrieved 2010-12-28
- A Review of Remainder from InDigestInDigestInDigest is a literary journal founded in 2007 by editors and David Doody. It is an online quarterly literary magazine, as well as a reading series, podcast, and publishing house located in New York City and Minneapolis, MN.-The Magazine:...
Magazine. Retrieved 2010-12-28 - Interview with McCarthy on The Marketplace of Ideas (Audio, 35 mins). Retrieved 2010-12-28
- Zadie Smith: "Two Paths for the Novel". Essay on Remainder. 20 November 2008 The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2010-12-28
- Interview Dossier Journal. Retrieved 2010-12-28
- Reading from his novel C 9 September 2010 Guardian. (Audio, 17 mis). Retrieved 2010-12-28