a kind of simulation but better than the real thing ever was - the Tom McCarthy thread

btw i liked it. i liked the authorial perverseness-- the way that people never seemed to be described (except i guess the nurse at the spa and that for obv reasons) while places might be excessively (the description of the house right at the beginning pissed me off tbh but thankfully that seemed restricted to learmont-pov); the way that all these modernist symbols are written of with such unmodernist style. The allusions and repetitions didn't feel belaboured, either, you registered them and kept moving rather than having to sit through an explanation. There was a lack of hysteria that I liked. When you're calling up the ghost of Wyndham Lewis or Marinetti or Blavatsky (or even even Evelyn Waugh who is secretly there in all writing abt the 20s even if only in my heart) it is hugely refreshing to have something that does not use hysteria as a tool.

i had a 'wait is that a quote from something' moment

well chosen phrase for thread imo. i spent a long time convinced it was somewhere in 'remainder' even though i had read remainder and it is not to be found in there

xpost

yeah i had assumed it was a ref to remainder, because all i've read about remainder (yes yes i need to read remainder, i know) suggests toward it. but no!

glad people like the quote - chose it as a connecting point between Remainder and C.

in some ways think the obsession with that which is residual in 'reality', that which remains after the simulation and is issimulable, is more of a connecting obsession, (rather'n it being 'better than the real thing') but also ended up liking the quote as a sort of McCarthian definition of fiction/art.

also glad you liked C, c#m - find myself getting a bit tired of feeling defensive about the book, cos although it's not a masterpiece I do think it's quite interesting (in a good way - like cricket ahem - rather than as a euphemism for 'dull'), and I'm not sure any sort of it's great!/it's crap! conversation serves it v well.

writing this in the pub, Probs not making much sense.

xpost

i just finished C, which came out in paperback last week.

i really liked it! which is probably to be expected.

its hard to talk about it without thinking of pynchon: the deadpan comedy (tho pynchon's much funnier), the "world war adventures," the thematic obsessions with communication, translation, mapping, modeling, 'modernism,' etc.

hes much colder than pynchon tho, and less of a show-off; pynchon's novels are mostly shaggy-dog stories, late-night dorm-room "whatever happens happens" kinds of bullshit sessions; this is more mechanical and plotted. you dont get the sense that mccarthy writes 1/3 of the book stoned the way you do with pynchon.

i havent heard the egan thing that lamp talks about in the second post (and i need some more time to marinate on the book) but i wonder if she's not getting at what i liked about it--the kind laying-bare of mccarthys elaborately fashioned network of ideas.

i suppose for some people it might even be too "obvious"? or "trying too hard"? i didnt much care; it was trying at things im interested in.

and yes i agree with everyone that the first half is much stronger than the second, and even if it picked up a bit in the egypt section it was starting to get very on the nose at that point.

now read remainder

hi, i did

read it again

and again

i think the most interesting thing about 'remainder' is that its become such a cultural touchstone

it has?

burn

*shrugs*

?

it probably has attained some sort of afterlife that 'c', or perhaps anything else he writes, is unlikely to

this is p empty-headed and flimsy but i guess i feel like its becoming/has become 'the infinite jest of the oughts' with all that implies about its critical status/readership/'importance'

you think really? we hang out in different crowds

lamp do you work in publishing? or are you retired or what? i can never remember

carbonizay

i have no idea what that means?

max, yeah, i feel like thats true, or at least becoming true. i think zadie smith's essay about 'remainder' and 'netherland' was p impt in helping to develop its reputation as a novel thats capital-i important but i also think the whole backstory to it, the types of ppl i know who have read and really admire it, idk, i just think its sorta slotting into that 'space' in the discourse.

i think nabisco and pinefox touch on this a little itt where they/we discuss that zadie smith essay btw

do you have a link to that thread? one reason i am/was skeptical of 'remainder' being the 'infinite jest of the aughts' is that (id thought) ilx hadnt discussed it very much! the thing is i dont hang out with many people who are 'into' literature/literary culture so i guess it wouldnt surprise me if i had just missed out on the remainder phenom

btw one reason it baffles me to hear you say that (and one reason i am baffled by ZS's contention that remainder is/was "the future of the novel") is that it seems so pointed _not_ avant-garde. arguably its theoretical concerns are "post-modern" (but even those specific concerns are like 30-80 years old [thinking here of, sorry to drop names, baudrillard and deleuze and before him even heidegger, at least in the case of remainder]) but its tone and style are so... modernist! it feels like hunger or one of the other thousands of novels about a loner slowly going mad, but, set in 2001! or something

same thing with C, which similarly isnt doing anything "new" or "avant-garde" stylistically, technically, thematically, philosophically. arguably.

whereas, sorry, didnt infinite jest (also arguably) set a "tone" for a whole generation of writers, v. that maud newtorn nyt mag piece from a few weeks ago?

to me its less about what 'remainder' actually accomplishes or even aims to accomplish and more the critical or popular narrative around it which marks it out as especially idiosyncratic and ambitious and 'difficult'. like read some of the early reviews for 'C' and youll see what i mean, this sense that mccarthy is potentially the standard-bearer for this 'non-narrative' tradition & for the '21st c. mind' or s.thing

again i dont theres really anything remarkably contemporary in the way 'remainder' grapples with ennui or lack of identity/rootlessness or w/e in the same way that dfw taps into new ways of writing 'being/thinking/understanding' w/ infinite jest and maybe ppl like egan or smith wld say that im misinterpreting their praise for the novel. i do think that there in order to develop a kind of cult of influence some time in the wilderness helps, its too early to say whether mccarthy will have much influence. i mean hes less imitable (and distinctive) than dfw, certainly

As far as I can tell it's the clear and vocal engagement with Continental modernism and criticism that makes him marketably distinct.

As I think woof said upthread many critics noted, after Remainder, how conventional C felt. People were expecting him to go one way and he didn't.

If you believe in the search for an authorial voice, then I think the assurance of Remainder, which was the consequence of having a strong idea, led people to believe he had a strong voice that wd persist in future works.

C showed that he's still searching for it. He's clearly interested in continental thought and writing, but in C this wasn't represented with a single strong idea but in engagement with a number of ideas. The voice as a consequence became more diffuse - occasionally felt like it was the victim of its content in fact. This was confusing, partly because he was still talking about Freud, Blanchot - he is still the same! - and partly maybe because of the pre-modernism setting, with its wafts of Kipling (as I said elsewhere, everyone who reads C should read Kipling's short story Wireless). Getting nommed for the Booker, presumably on the basis of Remainder, possibly confused things further.

I think - I hope - the search will be interesting, because it feels good to have someone interested in these things on the block and being creative, but I think he might end up a very different sort of writer than using Remainder as a compass might suggest.

the notion that a concern for the great writers of the last dozen or so decades from the rest of europe is enough to make an english writer distinct is infinitely dispiriting and probably true

I guess I am sort of skeptical of the claim that McCarthy is more clearly or vocally engaging w/ "Continental modernism"/post-structuralism/what have you than--say--Kundera, Ballard, Murakami, Eco, Sam Delaney, etc. (And that's without getting into "postmodern" Americans like Pynchon & DeLillo, who are surely influenced by French thought though maybe in a more diffuse and indirect way.)

I'm not sure that either of you are necessarily making the claim I'm disputing here, though, so maybe this thread isn't the place to argue it.

I do agree with what's being said about C feeling less unique or special than Remainder (though no less smart)--as you allude to he's best (so it seems) when he can really bear down on a single, fairly narrow concept and wring it for all it's worth; C ends up being this gorgeous patchwork of ideas but in the end you miss out on the kind of gripping, k-hole focus of Remainder.

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3716/gbg1.jpg

re-read Lamp's post and want to rephrase what I said slightly. It's Remainder that made him marketably distinct, the voice of Continental philosophy in the Great British Lit Media came after, then despite the Booker thing, the marketability of Remainder didn't carry on into C so all that's left is voice of Cont. Phil. in GBLM.

continental philosophy is carrying too much weight here possibly, but it's what drives his writing away from Lit. Fic. realist tradition and gives it its distinctive tang/æsthetic.

Suspect you're right, nakh, and if my rephrasing is more accurate in terms of reduced profile marketability on the back of the confusing C even that my be overstating the case.

max - I think Ballard is a good call - or was, crucially. But his role as science fiction writer and his dreams of futurity possibly allowed critics to approach him or for him to be assimilated in a slightly different way. JGB's non-fic prose important here.

The other authors I'm foggier on tbh, but none of them quite feel right in this role - tho I admit that may be because of the focus on Eng writers in Eng media here. Don't quite get the desire for hardcore stylistic experimentation (Beckett influence?). DFW probably close here, but I've only read some of IF and too many people here are too good on him for it to feel anything other than fatuous passing comment.

Yeah, I don't really know what I'm arguing at this point since I'm admittedly not very up on American literary culture let alone British literary culture, and it seems to me that an author could occupy a certain "role" without being the first or only author to do the things necessary to assume that role.

(Also I was kind of fudging it with Kundera and Murakami who are clearly well-versed in continental philosophy but don't approach in the same kind of direct way as McCarthy [I remember kind of raising my eyebrows at McCarthy's use of a couple formulations that are common ways of translating Heideggerian concepts--he cals radio a "gathering-together" for example]; rather, they're kind of... "existentialist" authors? I can't think of a better way to put it. But as you point out nominating non-British or non English-language authors is maybe missing the point.)

nakh_gamaliel otm - part of Remainder's unusualness is that it didn't feel like anything else in the British literary scene - partly the continental theory, partly that 'k-hole focus'.

You definitely can put together a list of British novelists who like or fit with continental theory in a various ways - Ballard, maybe Christopher Priest, and quite a few more from the SF scene; old-school experimental world (Christine Brooke Rose?); and a grab-bag of marginal names (Stewart Home) - but Remainder has a focus that's like early Ballard or Priest, with no genre taint (literary!) + a flat realist front (accessible!).

also on his reception here: he understands establishment game (good school + New College) & can play it better than hard undergrounders I think. and that presentability is outside the work, but a factor – brit lit scene always reassured by having a well-educated serious white male somewhere about the place.

nakh_gamaliel otm

seem to have created hybrid poster, nultifications of le queux novels ahoy.

I guess I am sort of skeptical of the claim that McCarthy is more clearly or vocally engaging w/ "Continental modernism"/post-structuralism/what have you than--say--Kundera, Ballard, Murakami, Eco, Sam Delaney, etc.

Yes I think as others have said its really unusual for any British writers to say something like 'french writing isn't gobbledygook REALLY' w/out getting laughed out of town and getting buried in their underground bunker, so he gets the token experimental guy treatment instead.

Don't know how comparable he is to BS Johnson (?)

Gilbert Adair. He should be on the list of British french-difficult-things-likers too.

I think as others have said its really unusual for any British writers to say something like 'french writing isn't gobbledygook REALLY'

would add that another approach, increasingly common, is a kind of defanging/habilitation, ie 'they're saying something quite nice and sensible really'. Might be as theorists become historical figures (no-one's angry at Barthes any more, right?), might be just the the literary caste all got comfortable with cont phil at uni.

actually I stopped and thought about it and it isn't really the theory that makes remainder odd, more the plain voice & descriptive intensity - finds a technique to manage the ideas without declamation, namedropping etc.

Not the best example of the defanging approach – because it's so confused – but this rotten essay by Edward Docx does it a bit.

eugh that essay. should've stopped at this sentence

Thus, if modernists like Picasso and Cézanne focused on design, hierarchy, mastery, the one-off, then postmodernists, such as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, were concerned with collage, chance, anarchy, repetition.

I think one thing that's striking about Remainder is the way it fuses this (at this point) ancient modernist one-man's-slow-descent-into-madness trope with "postmodern" ideas.

jaw agape, just finished Remainder

the first part of the book, it comes across as a more ideas-heavy take on Chris Morris' Blue Jam monologues

then the dream-home reenactment gave me a terrifying loathing of all that lay around me, even as I luxuriated in its discovery, its oh-so-nearly perfect discovery of the authentic, the repeatable. a fever-dream of disappointment in the mutabilitie of life. at this stage I wasn't even sure I liked the book, even though I was aware of its brilliance

and then the spell was broken in the last third. from the moment he reenacts the tyre-change, he emerges as not the dismal by-product of an atomised age whose attempts to find integrity are characterised by the impossible demand of stasis, but as the will to truth, the one who will conquer the imperfections, the one who will transcend, who will leave the mark that cannot be erased, who will repeat forever

of course, once the short councillor figure appears (as if to confirm this by mirroring its doubts back and thus allowing them to be dismissed), the novel enters a new pitch of brilliance. the final 2 or 3 chapters are astonishing, just astonishing. mccarthy's writing actually reaches this zone of perfection that it hadn't even attempted to manifest earlier on. it climaxes, soars and leaves me...well, numb and tingling, mostly

and jaw agape

the ultimate failure of naz's logistics - the scarab's death - is beautifully-drawn and necessary too - the narrator's triumph is not that of logistics - it is the opposite of logistics - the unplanned state of authenticity - whose being is unmade, quite unmade, by logistics (and vice versa)

those last three chapters

anybody read his bk abt Tintin?

yes, i really adored it but you probably have to be a "theory person" or at least theory-curious

anybody read his bk abt Tintin?

Big chunks of it; fun - dude wields his jargon with a deft and loving touch.

Olly Kendall ‏@OllyKendall Apr 22
Loughborough Junction host to second day of filming of BFI-funded feature, based on the Tom McCarthy novel, Remainder pic.twitter.com/7G0tw5JwTs

aw, they've even got the location right

new book satin island:

http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2014/06/23/tom-mccarthys-next-book-will-likely-resist-easy-classification/

colour me unexcited

lol proofing, christ.

Thanks, Fizzles, for your extended thoughts.

I'm afraid your comments about objects in space lost me. I don't understand why this is an issue of interest. The motion-capture issue may be another matter. I know nothing about it.

though I would ask what it is in Beckett (or even possibly the Ithaca section in Ulysses), where the relentless depiction of objects, their relation and interrelation, is of interest?

This looks a worryingly hefty challenge. I think my short answer is that the relation of objects in space is not, as such, what's interesting about those texts, to me.

Most of us admire Beckett, but for me what counts about him would be other matters, like his grasp of finitude, mortality, death, and also his incredible control of language, including in black humour. The Beckett who makes diagrams of A, B, C and D moving around -- is not for me.

'Ithaca' is one of the best things I've ever read, and I concede that it has something to do with standing far back and seeing people 'in space' (even interstellar space) more than the rest of the book - an aesthetic effect, yes, but again, that doesn't seem to me the most interesting aspect of the episode, which is crammed with vast amounts of detail - historical, comic, poignant, poetic.

We strongly agree about the GLC graffiti issue. I think I might as a reader have just passed over it, whereas, as with Lanchester, you're very good at noticing things that are off. But with this, I might have picked up on it too. I was there at the time of the GLC, and this doesn't ring true at all.

i agree on the 'relation of objects in space' observations. i think it can be seen as a comic mode - the spasticity of the human body and the slapstick interrelation of things feel like a beckettian comic style, with an existential edge. And yes, the Ithaca section is much more than that - I mentioned it as I understand it was quite influential on Beckett, but you'll know more than me on that.

The McCarthy book itself has settled into a fairly adequate rhythm. It's really just a series of technical analyses, described in a fairly mediocre literary style. Lilian Gilbreth and here time and motion wireframes are a major theme:

https://miro.medium.com/max/638/1*ebDVK7NB8CVQocw23FFSrA.jpeg

He's beginning to suggest some sort of revelatory moment beyond these graphical reproductions and reconstructions of motion, but it's not clear if this is a major through line that will be resolved or speculation.

A lot of it reads like essays put into literary language. Still, he's expanding spaces and pushing at boundaries. It's just they're boundaries and spaces that have been described and pushed at elsewhere. There's an army drone-flying vet, who's never left the warehouse in his home country, retiring from the warzone with PTSD. One of the characters expresses surprise - 'warzone?' This way drone warfare causes problematises the notion of the 'theatre of war' has already been well explored.

Similarly, the rather feeble drone display in one section only sends you to youtube, and the remarkable light shows that have been a staple of Chinese light spectacles for a while and are being seen more elsewhere too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44KvHwRHb3A

The points when he plugs some emotional state into what's happening are better - characters fall into fugue states watching the analysis of motion taking place, so that they start throwing adjectives and metaphorical fancies at what they're seeing. Well, it's better than the v plain and stilted interactions between characters that feel almost transcribed.

Occasionally it works. Two of the characters are using skeletal analysis to try and assess the impact of non-progressive cerebral palsy on a child's motion. They go through the analysis, which starts getting processed, and McCarthy describes the machines winding 'their way back to dark secretes, mysteries of origin, her child's sad incunabula.'

'sad incunabula'. a book written before any level of analysable medicine is available. Something intrinsic, ancient and not available for processing. It's a reach, but I quite liked it. The fans of an aerodynamic testing tunnel starting up at a high pitch, 'soprano, an urgent and indefinitely long *fermata*, drawn from the fraught diaphragm of some mechanical Rhinemaiden' not so much.

It's all very odd, the book does seem to be tending towards some sort of alteration of the ideas its treating, and i'll be interested to see how that comes out. but frankly if McCarthy had submitted this to me i'd've said that it was all very interesting, but he should go away and rewrite it entirely, unrecognisable. At the moment it feels like a set of half-digested LRB essays.

If something like this is going to succeeded he needs to go madder, go stranger. Ada, or Adour or Against the Day, wildly unsatisfactory as they are in many ways, are models here.

A minor solecism, but irritating all the same: In a not-as-bad-as-it-sounds extended sequence looking at the wind-tunnel test of a bobsleigh there is that old literary cliche. A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into German. It's the old Poirot trick, where they are unable to translate the easiest phrases and words in their language, but speak fluent English for the rest, a recurrent tic in fiction, completely the opposite of real world behaviour, which while sort of understandable, is always irritating when you notice it.

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article23246907.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200c/0_New-Years-celebrations.jpg

loooooool

'a kind of simulation but just embarrassing dogshit' - a thread of Captain Tom McCarthy walking round his front garden.

Fizzles: I don't understand your final point about the solecism.

I think I would not comprehend this book and not enjoy it.

sorry pinefox, it was a bit compressed. in agatha christie’s poirot books, to take an example, poirot is asked a question and will respond “ah, non, but the lady is not his wife, evidement?” etc. it’s only the commonest words and forms that he seems unable to speak in english. this is of course to give a flavour of the french, in words that many english speaking people will understand, but considered in terms of the character themselves it’s rather ridiculous.

This is like a weird cultural litmus test, he contextualises it as Poirot, I immediately think of Saison Marguerite.

certainly v common, and tbh im not sure i’m not thinking of the poirot tv adaptations rather than the books.

A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into German.

So did this mean:

A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into English.

?

he's got you there

Zugzwanged!

The latter. He is conversing in English generally in the section, to speakers of other languages.

oh and i picked up murder on the orient express last night and yes poirot does this all the time.

t-mac’s word order makes for some seriously gammy sentences. try this for size:

“if a crew member tries obsequiously to return her to her quarters…”

painfuly evading the splint infinitive leads to some serious mashing of the gears. just write “if an obsequious crew member tries to return her to her quarters” ffs. or at least if for some reason you feel some nuance is being lost (it’s not) put “obsequiously tries”. it really doesn’t matter. just not what you did put.

after the long section about the bobsleigh in the wind tunnel (not as bad as it sounds tho perhaps that is a v low bar), there is a long section where he describes what’s happening in the film. this is worse than it sounds even if that is also a low bar. the film seems not v good. and it’s made worse by little linguistic innovations mccarthy throws in to show science fiction is happening. a drink they’re transporting is called kwavit and he talks about them frolicking in their childhood in the *gzhiardini*. *do you see*. do more of it, to an extreme, or do much less of it, none at all in fact.

having to force my way through this bit. it’s utter drivel.

keen followers of this thread during its recent updates will be interested to know that i almost threw this book down in boredom and irritation but then thought of those who needed me to continue and so, shackleton like, i go on.

I'm glad to hear that it's bad.

on the last leg shackleton of his big anarctic journey shackleton encountered (a) an unbelievably vast rogue sea-wave which his little boat nevertheless weathered bcz they were master seamen and (b) this guy:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

(or so the famous footnotes claim, but imo they're a misdirection: it's obviously actually a reference to COUNT MAGNUS)

lol imagine the first sentence is written properly

keen followers of this thread during its recent updates will be interested to know that i almost threw this book down in boredom and irritation but then thought of those who needed me to continue and so, shackleton like, i go on.

TLS review has it about right:

The passage, like the novel that contains it, requires maximal engagement for minimal returns,

i’m gradually reaching the end of my desire to read this. it’s that point where you realise the possibility of redeeming some of the ideas presented is not likely to happen before the pages run out.

pinefox, i agree i do not think you would like this book.