5
Preface
Tom McCarthy is an English writer and artist and a leading figure within
contemporary British culture. He has published three novels and an extended essay
on literary criticism, all of them well received by both public and critics. He is also the
general secretary of a “semi-fictitious” avant-garde movement, the “International
Necronautical Society” (INS). Numerous articles have been written on him and his
work, and many authoritative figures in the British literary world have argued that he
is one of the best contemporary British writers and that he represents one possible
path for the future of the novel in Britain. Nevertheless, other critics tend to place
McCarthy in the literary fields of modernism or post-modernism and confine his work
to a past literary context.
This dissertation aims to demonstrate that McCarthy’s fiction actually constitutes a
brand new contribution within contemporary British literature and that its innovative
import is directly linked to his modernist influences. In order to show this, it is
necessary to outline the figure of both the writer and the artist and detect the
revolutionary aspects of his literary ideas, which will then be reconsidered in the
context of an analysis of McCarthy’s main works.
The first chapter aims to detect the main points in McCarthy’s thought, giving
some biographical highlights, then analysing his work for the “International
Necronautical Society” and finally giving an account of his artistic ideas and output.
The second step will involve McCarthy’s conception of literature as expressed in
numerous articles and essays, but most of all in his critical study Tintin and the Secret
6
of Literature (2006). This will be followed by an examination of the impact of
modernist and post-modernist ideas and principles on McCarthy’s work. Each one of
the last three chapters analyses the main themes and narrative techniques of
McCarthy’s three published novels, respectively: Remainder (2005), Men in Space
(2007) and C (2010). This analysis will be also comparative, so it will show the main
analogies and differences between the three novels. An interview with the author
himself is attached as an appendix to this dissertation.
All the analysed aspects of McCarthy’s thought involve a new interpretation of
particular modernist and post-modernist values, which are represented in his novels
and generate what can be called a “new modern fiction”.
7
1.TOM McCARTHY: SOME COORDINATES
Tom McCarthy has been defined in many ways. First of all, as a “writer and artist”,
as in the biography in his unofficial fan-site “Surplus Matter”. “Novelist”, “literary
theorist”, “essayist”, “conceptual artist” and “conceptual provocateur” are some of
the other definitions he has been given in the numerous articles about him and his
work. These have appeared in famous literary magazines such as The Times Literary
Supplement, The Literary Review, London Review of Books and important newspapers
such as The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times. McCarthy
fits all of these definitions and this first chapter is an attempt to demonstrate this
through the reconstruction of his literary and artistic career and the analysis of the
theories and themes that constitute his thought.
1.1. Biography
Tom McCarthy was born in London in 1969 and studied English Literature at New
College, Oxford.
1
After graduation he lived in Prague for two years, from 1991 to
1993, just after the Velvet Revolution which marked the end of Soviet control over
Czechoslovakia, and just after the election of Václav Havel, a playwright, essayist and
poet as the President of Czechoslovakia. Those were exciting and inspiring years for
the author, as he was living a unique moment in history: a nation was being governed
by artists
2
. In that period, as McCarthy explains in many interviews, everything,
1
Astri von Arbin Ahlander, “Tom McCarthy”, The Days of Yore, June 2011,
http://www.thedaysofyore.com/tom-mccarthy/ (last access: 1/3/2012).
2
Boyd Tonkin, “Tom McCarthy: How He Became One of the Brightest New Prospects in British Fiction”,
The Independent, 21 September 2007, http://surplusmatter.com/news/the-philosophical-prankster/
(last access: 1/3/2012).
8
including the parliament, was filled with art and there was something magical in all
this post-revolutionary excitement. He says: “The city was also a magnet for young
would-be Bohemians from all over the world, and there were parties that went on for
days”
3
. He often refers to and writes about this experience in interviews and articles,
describing this atmosphere of total excitement with a kind of enthusiastic irony:
“You’d go to a gig in some club, and the drummer in the band, with the big spliff in his
mouth and five earrings, was the Minister of Culture”.
4
Later on, the author
transformed this experience into literature, describing Prague and its inhabitants in
his novel Men in Space (2007); he had the perception that he had been “lucky enough
to live through something important and wanted to write about it”
5
. This novel also
recounts another of McCarthy’s experiences abroad, his time in Amsterdam where he
worked as literary editor of the local Time Out.
After writing (but not publishing) Men in Space, he published The Remainder with
the Paris art house press Metronome in 2005. This was McCarthy’s debut book, and
survived despite widespread initial indifference on the part of UK publisher. It was
first published in a “tiny edition”
6
, which was however soon followed by a second one
by Alma Books in London. It then arrived in the US, published by Vintage. Finally it
aroused the interest of some of the big publishers that had at first rejected it. It
became a “cult hit” and put McCarthy in the spotlight as “one of the brightest new
3
Mark Thwaite, “Tom McCarthy interview, Part 1”, ReadySteadyBook, 17 September 2007,
http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?permalink=20070917072530 (last access: 1/3/2012).
4
Boyd Tonkin, op. cit.
5
Mark Thwaite, op.cit.
6
Boyd Tonkin, op.cit.
9
prospects in British fiction”
7
. Remainder was translated into more than ten languages,
including Italian (Déjà-vu, 2007), French (Et ce Sont les Chats qui Tombèrent, 2007),
Spanish (Residuos, 2007) and German (8 1/2 Millionen, 2009). Remainder is soon to
be made into a film, directed by Pavel Pavlikowski and with a screenplay by John
Hodge
8
.
Even before the success of Remainder, the author was already well known in both
the British and the international cultural world as the General Secretary and co-
founder of the INS, the “International Necronautical Society”. Their first manifesto,
inspired by the avant-garde manifesto, was published in The Times on 14 December
1999. The Necronautical Society claimed not to belong to any particular field, but
merely declared their conception of death and their intention to make it the subject
of their work: “Death is a type of space which we intend to map, enter, colonise and,
eventually, inhabit”
9
. Subsequently, it became increasingly clear that the INS was
involved in literature, art, philosophy or journalism, as the first committee
interviewed writers, philosophers and artists, published various essays and
declarations and carried out conceptual artistic experiments which it followed by
detailed reports. The Philosopher Simon Critchley was interviewed and invited to be
the chief philosopher of the INS; he accepted. To this day, however the INS remains
enshrouded in both mystery and irony, and can be defined as a “semi-fictitious avant-
7
Ivi.
8
Clodagh Kinsella, “The Radical Ambiguity of Tom McCarthy”, Dossier, 22 July 2009,
http://dossierjournal.com/read/interviews/the-radical-ambiguity-of-tom-mccarthy/ (last access:
1/3/2012).
9
Tom McCarthy, “INS Founding Manifesto, 1999”, INS Official Site,
http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html (last access: 1/3/2012).
10
garde network”
10
. This, at least, is the definition that journalists and reviewers tend to
use.
In 2006 McCarthy published Tintin and the Secret of Literature, his first book of
literary criticism or an extended essay, as he himself calls it
11
. The most appropriate
description of this work is probably from an article in The Independent, quoted on the
back cover of the Granta edition of the book: “A work that challenges the status of
literature by asking whether it can encompass a comic strip”
12
. Only one year after
the successful publication of Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which almost
immediately conquered French and US markets, McCarthy published his second novel
Men in Space. This autobiographical work was enthusiastically reviewed by the press
and confirmed McCarthy’s talent as a novelist: “McCarthy writes with devastating
charm and lucidity ̶ there's scarcely a loose sentence in the book”
13
. For Men in
Space, like Remainder, there are more than ten translations worldwide: in Italian
Uomini nello Spazio (2009), in French Les Cosmonautes au Paradis (2009), in Spanish
Los Hombres en el Espacio (2009) and so on.
During the years in which he has become a well-known novelist, McCarthy has
continued to work with the INS and has also published / written short stories,
10
Lee Rourke, “In conversation: Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy”, The Guardian, 18
September 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/18/tom-mccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation (last access:
15/12/2011).
11
Andrew Gallix, “Illicit Frequencies, or All Literature Is Pirated: an Interview with Tom McCarthy”,
3amMagazine, 13
July 2006, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/illicit-frequencies-or-all-literature-
is-pirated-an-interview-with-tom-mccarthy/. (last access: 1/3/2012).
12
Peter Carty, “Tintin and the Secret of Literature, Review”, Independent, 8 June 2006,
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/article332606.ece (last access:
1/3/2012).
13
Alfred Hickling , “Hot air and icons”, The Guardian, 15 September 2007,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/sep/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview18 (last access:
15/12/2011).
11
including Agamemnon, a Play in Two Acts, published in the Contemporary Magazine
in 2004 and then in Everyday Genius in 2009, and “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck
Patty Hearst” in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth
14
in 2008. He has
also published essays such as “Meteomedia; or Why London’s Weather is in the
Middle of Everything”
15
, in the anthology London: from Punk to Blair (2003). He has
also published numerous articles on literature, philosophy and art and reviewed
contemporary novels and essays for newspapers.
So far Tom McCarthy has been actively involved in literature, philosophy and art,
but his interest in contemporary culture has also extended to cinema. In 2005, shortly
after the publication of Remainder, McCarthy met the artist Johan Grimonprez at the
screening of his film essay “Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”. This fortunate encounter marked the
beginning of their collaboration for the film documentary “Double Take”, written and
directed by Johan Grimonprez and based on a story by McCarthy
16
. “Double Take”
premiered in 2009 at BFI London Film Festival after being released in Berlin, Paris,
New York, Moscow, Abu Dhabi and Tokyo
17
. It was praised by The New York Times as
“the most intellectually agile of this year’s films”
18
and acclaimed by the British press
as “wonderfully mischievous”
19
and “not to be missed”
20
. It is safe to say that
14
Tom McCarthy, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired
by Sonic Youth, ed. Peter Wild, Profile Books, 2008, p. 143.
15
Tom Mccarthy “Meteomedia; or Why London’s Weather is in the Middle of Everything” in London
from Punk to Blair, ed. Joe Kerr, Andrew Gibson, 2003, p. 273.
16
Alexander Provan, “If You See Yourself, Kill Him,” Bidoun 18, Summer 2009,
http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/18-interviews/if-you-see-yourself-kill-him-johan-grimonprez-tom-
mccarthy-interviewed-by-alexander-provan/ (last access: 1/3/2012).
17
Ivi.
18
A. O. Scott, “Recasting the Cold War as the Hitchcock Years”, The New York Times, 1
June 2010,
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/movies/02double.html (last access: 1/3/2012).
19
Johnathan Romney, "The master of suspense and his doppelgänger offer twice the fun", The
Independent, 4 April 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/double-
take-johan-grimonprez-80-mins-12a-1935109.html (last access: 1/3/2012).
12
McCarthy’s tendency to extend his areas of interest is completely successful.
But his intense work in these different cultural fields has not diverted his attention
from the activity for which he is most popular and acclaimed, novel-writing. In 2010 C
was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Alfred A. Knopf in the US. It was
shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize
21
and enthusiastically reviewed by numerous
newspapers and literary magazines. For example, for The Sunday Times, C constitutes
“quite possibly the remix the novel has been crying out for”
22
. C is the first of the two
books that Tom McCarthy agreed to publish with Jonathan Cape, in a two book deal
between Alex Bowler, Jonathan Cape’s editor and Jonathan Pegg, McCarthy’s literary
agent, in 2009. The second novel to be published by Cape under the agreement is to
be Satin Island, which McCarthy is currently working on
23
. At the present time,
McCarthy is writing an essay for Jonathan Cape entitled Transmission and Individual
Remix, “a kind of joke on Eliot’s Tradition and Individual Talent”, a critical
examination of the concept of transmission in literary tradition
24
.
McCarthy’s work as a novelist is recognised as having remarkable importance in
contemporary literature. It has also recognised academically. The first symposium on
20
Peter BradShaw, "Double Take - Alfred Hitchcock meets himself in this disturbing fantasy", The
Guardian, 1 April 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/apr/01/double-take-review (last access:
1/3/2012).
21
The Man Booker Prize, Press release, The Man Booker Prize, 7 September 2010,
http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/release/1428/ (last access: 1/3/2012).
22
Robert Collins, “The Novel: Rewound and Remixed,” The Sunday Times, 4 July 2010,
http://surplusmatter.com/interviews/interviews-with/the-remix-the-novel-has-been-crying-out-for/
(last access: 1/3/2012).
23
Victoria Gallagher, “Jonathan Cape acquires McCarthy’s Novels”, 6 August 2009,
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/jonathan-cape-acquires-mccarthy-novels.html (last access:
1/3/2012).
24
“Interview with Tom McCarthy”, Appendix, p. 152.
13
his work, “Calling All Agents”, recently took place at Birkbeck College in London. The
symposium featured papers on his three novels, Remainder (2005), Men in Space
(2007) and C (2010), his essay Tintin and the Secret of Literature as well as his work
as General Secretary of the “International Necronautical Society”.
1.2. The Necronaut
Presenting McCarthy from the intellectual point of view in a few pages is a
daunting task. It is however necessary to introduce some of the main themes and
characteristics of his thought in order to lay the foundations for a close analysis of his
novels. The best way to approach McCarthy’s intellectual and philosophical world is
probably through the most mysterious aspect of his work: the “International
Necronautical Society”. The INS, referred to by the press as an “obscure group”
25
, or a
“nebulous project”,
26
is intentionally unclear in offering definitions of itself
27
. The
main points in the short definition of the INS official site necronauts.org are: they are
a semi-fake organisation and their sphere of action includes different “forms” and
“moments”. These forms include art, fiction, philosophy and media, while the
“moments” range “from the defunct avant-gardes of the last century to the political,
corporate and conspiratorial organisations they mimicked”
28
. Death is the subject of
the INS’s activities and this is clarified in its First Manifesto, downloadable from the
website. In this founding manifesto, the First Committee states that “death is a type
25
Alexander Provan, op. cit.
26
Mark Alizart , “Every Flight Path of a Sparrow or Movement of an Ant over a Tuft of Ground is a
Message”, The Believer June 2008,
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200806/?read=interview_mccarthy (last access: 1/3/2012).
27
Tom McCarthy, "INS: In a Word", INS Official Site,
http://www.necronauts.net/bulletin/in_a_word.html (last access: 1/3/2012).
28
Ivi.
14
of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit”
29
. This
statement implies that death is a human condition that occurs eventually but that is
manifested not only at the moment of death; it is not merely a matter of time, but a
matter of space, non-static space, for “in the quotidian, to no smaller a degree, death
moves”
30
. This conception of death is implied in McCarthy’s term “necronautism”,
which he explains in an interview with Zinovy Zinik, novelist and BBC Russian Service
Broadcaster, published on the INS official site: “Necronautism” means “travelling into
death”
31
. Human beings are “necronauts” constantly travelling not only “towards
death”
32
but also into death, while they are still alive, life being just a form of death
33
.
This is the meaning of one of the key statements of the First Manifesto: “We are all
necronauts, always, already”
34
. McCarthy denies this is a pessimistic view. Instead, he
sees it as being about interest and curiosity. He explains this concept by recalling the
Ancient Greeks and in particular Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of the myth of
Orpheus
35
expressed in his story “Thomas l’obscure” (1941), emblematic of human
curiosity about death. Blanchot’s Orpheus, Thomas, does not break his agreement
with Persephone and Pluto by turning back to see Eurydice because of his impatience.
He does not want to see her as a person, as the object of his love. Rather he cannot
resist seeing her “in the darkness of her non-formation”. In other words, Blanchot’s
29
Tom McCarthy, “INS Founding Manifesto, 1999”, op. cit.
30
Ivi.
31
Oliver Ready, “Zinovy Zinik in Conversation with Tom McCarthy”, INS Official Site, 20
April 2001,
http://www.necronauts.org/press_zz.htm (last access: 1/3/2012).
32
Tom McCarthy, “INS Founding Manifesto, 1999”, op. cit.
33
Oliver Ready, op. cit.
34
Tom McCarthy, "INS: In a Word", op. cit.
35
Oliver Ready, op. cit.
15
Orpheus wants to see death, “to have access to the secret of all knowledge”
36
.
McCarthy also rejects the adjective “gloomy” to describe his own work with the INS,
and contrasts its idea of death to what he considers to be a really gloomy idea, the
Victorian one. Ostensibly optimistic, the Victorian attitude was nothing but
hypocritical, generated by the denial of “diabolical social circumstances”.
37
In other
words, an optimistic view of death aimed at hiding a dramatic social situation is truly
gloomy, but a genuine intellectual study of the “cultural parameters of death”
38
is
not. , Agreeing with Zinovy Zinik, in the same interview, McCarthy argues that INS’s
view of death is rooted in modern philosophy, in particular in the concept of life being
a form of death and in Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God. According to McCarthy,
the death of God is “the death of all those norms and absolutes that people set above
life in order to fix meaning to it”
39
. When McCarthy , discussed this issue in an
interview with Simon Critchley, the philosopher replied that what is important in the
death of God is that “It raises the question of the meaning of life”
40
. So it would be
wrong to assume that the INS’s study of death is aimed at a better understanding of
death itself. In fact it seems to be more specifically aimed to understand, or see life
through death. In this respect, it is worth noting that all McCarthy’s fiction production
is about people whose lives are surrounded by death and, above all, delivered to
36
Salama, Mohammad Ramadan, “The Interruption of Myth: A Nancian Reading of Blanchot and al-
Bayati” Journal of Arabic Literature, 33 (2002), pp. 248-86, EBSCOhost,
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2004420370&lang=it&site=ehost-
live (last access: 1/3/2012).
37
Oliver Ready, op. cit.
38
Tom McCarthy, “Straight to the Multiplex,” London Review of Books, 1 November 2007,
http://surplusmatter.com/reviews/straight-to-the-multiplex/ (last access: 1/3/2012).
39
Oliver Ready, op. cit.
40
Tom McCarthy “Interview with Simon Critchley”, 29
March 2001, INS Official Site,
http://www.necronauts.org/interviews_simon.htm (last access: 1/3/2012).
16
death. This will be further discussed within the analysis of the novels.
The incipit of his last novel C is emblematic, representing a strong association
between life and death. Indeed, the first section -“Caul”- is about the protagonist’s
birth and childhood, but the title focuses on the very first dead thing in the novel,
which recalls the image of burial, the membrane surrounding Serge’s head when he
was born
41
. Death is present from the very first pages of the book, enveloping life like
“a veil *...+ a kind of web”
42
.
In McCarthy’s work, symbolism is often accompanied by the absurd. For
example, in his short story “City of Cards”
43
, in which the protagonist seems to be the
only one taking himself and his situation seriously, the city of the title eventually
turns out to be the “City of death”. This is the name of a mysterious group of people
nonchalantly playing cards when talking about death in front of the upset and
confused protagonist. After a first moment of desperation, when he is totally ignored
by the card-players, he understands that all that these people, the “Death people”,
can do for him is to kill him, and he invites them to do so. At this point, the absurd is
inevitably accompanied by irony, and culminates in a scene where one of the card-
players grabs a knife to slice a salami and thus begins a rational explanation of what
death really is and why it cannot be simply “wanted”.
44
The parallel between the
“Death people” and the INS is evident and made unequivocal by the reference to a
41
Tom McCarthy, C, Jonathan Cape, London 2010, p.10.
42
Ibid., p. 13.
43
Tom McCarthy, “City of Cards”, Mediamatic, 29 January 2006,
http://www.mediamatic.net/10021/en/city-of-cards (last access: 1/3/2012).
44
Tom McCarthy, “City of Cards”, op. cit.
17
“statement on the internet thing”
45
which recalls the First Manifesto published on the
INS official site. A few lines later, in answer to the protagonist’s question “If you don’t
kill, what do you do?”, the Death people simply answer “wait”
46
. , Through the
parallel with the INS, McCarthy recalls the concept of non-applicability of
Necronautism, which is exactly what makes Necronautism itself interesting for him
and is thus what ultimately justifies its existence as a “Movement”
47
. This apparent
contradiction can be explained by way of what McCarthy believes to be the “central
event in the history of philosophy”: the phone conversation between Jacques Derrida
and Martin Heidegger’s ghost. The French philosopher reports this event in his La
carte postale. De Socrate à Freud et au-delà, (1980). Derrida explains that, while he
was working on the manuscript of his book, the telephone rang and the operator
asked him to take an intercontinental call from Martin Heidegger, who had died three
years previously. Derrida of course did not accept, and tells his reader that it was
evidently a joke, aimed at testing his reaction. Nevertheless, he claims that this does
not mean that no phone connection had been made between Heidegger’s ghost and
himself. McCarthy explains Derrida’s story in an essay on death and communication,
“Dead Letters Sent” using the concept of acceptance: Derrida did not accept the
crank call, but he accepted the connection and this made it real. Acceptance made
the connection between life and death, or that between past and present, possible.
48
This idea is at the basis of the non-applicability of Necronautism, which cannot be
45
Ivi.
46
Ivi.
47
Oliver Ready, op. cit.
48
Tom McCarthy, “Dead Letters Sent: Communication Breakdown in Film, Literature and Philosophy”,
in Incommunicado, Hayward Gallery Publishing, London, 2003,
http://surplusmatter.com/writings/dead-letters-sent/, (last access: 1/3/2012).
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