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

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

Anyone read this: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n12/tom-mccarthy/ulysses-and-its-wake

I started..

yeah I got half a page in

down with tom mccarthy

does anyone have online access who might conceivably pastebin that or suchlike

http://pastebin.com/cfSuQfB7

http://i.imgur.com/A1Mnk5f.gif

article seemed a bit pointless (tho again I didn't make it all the way thru, that sums me up right now).

but I'm still looking forward to the book - first third of C was superb, tho I thought it fell apart badly after that. and he still feels likely to do something interesting, wants to use European models, go into untracked spaces. I'm p excited.

the essay is worth reading in full, there are some interesting paragraphs and some paragraphs that seem to have been written by k-punk circa 2006

picked this up again on your recommendation - thanks nakh - and because i found it still folded over where I'd left it in the mess of papers on my desk. worth doing. i'd stopped towards the end of the description of Ulysses, which felt like oldish ground - language, shit; you can see how engaged i was when i read it initially - reconfigured by McCarthy's interests: the black stain of ink and celluloid, the transformation through death of flesh (I mentioned this with regard to C in the first post: that for McCarthy 'substance holds the key to existence, not spirit, that what lives after death is not the soul, but the body").

but i was wondering 'how is this about what?'

if i'd read a bit further, i'd've seen him reclassify déclassé into the notion of a sort of mundane alkahest, describe the notion of speculative systems that require the deferral of expression, and a vision of the importance of understanding material reality as information. these are fine as riffs on Ulysses, but as or more interesting to me as the articulation of McCarthy's creative mechanics. I was going to mention in the post above, after 'European [sic] models' and 'untracked spaces', the way he'll apply non-adjacent sets of information to each other, which at a very simplified level can be described as taking Continental theoretical models and applying them to a Brixton road junction, or theories of transformation of information to pre-WW1 radio.

I've been about to take down again, as I was writing a long thing on Dartmoor, which I visited a few weeks ago and which was originally intended for the Real England thread, but has become too long, too not about Real England, heavily weighed down by a laborious groping towards half-understood Spinozan monism. but amidst that there was something about the practical expression of science and Dartmoor, which is undoubtedly a thing for that landscape (peculiarly underexpressed, but where expressed vividly expressed). And whenever i started thinking about it, I started thinking about C again, because the excellence of the first third or so is least in part the particular flavour of the application of a French theoretical scalpel to that Edwardian landscape of Kipling. The flavour is curious because in fact Kipling is not so far from the dishumanised abstraction of people into material information.

It's that hacking of literary register to find a single plane where close impossibilities forge a landscape. The alkahest is the code of information, variously understood and manipulated via fantasy into something that looks very like materially embodied reality.

It hardly needs saying that I love all this stuff.

I'm assuming from the cover that the new book is designed to put close registers of different types of literary work or exposition next to each other, but I must admit I'm slightly uneasy about the tone of this sort of venture, tho also pathologically drawn to the false essay, the fake testament, the synthetic historical artefact etc.

still, yes, EXCITED.

day off today, thank xt, wish i had more of these things as tend to plunge headfirst into all sorts of stuff i haven't got time for at the moment with the inevitable result that my efforts peter our into incoherence.

I always like Fizzles, online and in person, and admire and appreciate his posts greatly, but on this one occasion I didn't understand much of what he just said.

thanks pinefox, and I always see you as one of the great policers of literary sense (in a manner that I realise is infuriating to many, but which I find congenial and amusing I have to say)

so I went back and checked and really I can see that I just splurged some disconnected thoughts into a post - always seem to be rushing these days, and I was aware if I spent any more time typing I'd miss this train I've got to catch. I'll try and unpack into sensible language when I'm on the train.

right, let's try this again:

1st. thanks to nakh for getting me to finish off the essay which, as it turns out, I hadn't really engaged with the finer details of properly anyway.

2nd. my first impression had been of an essay that claimed to be talking about a specific problem - the problem of how and what to write after Ulysses - but which nevertheless fairly immediately went into a critical description of Ulysses, much of which I had heard before, in different forms. Loosely described - a dangerous enterprise with the pinefox, particular when it comes to Ulysses, but necessary for the sake of emphasis and brevity - loosely described, I say, it was an approach to Ulysses which emphasised its bodily aspects, particularly the baser types, and its totally transformative use of language as a central subject and mechanism. These approaches tend, if I'm remembering rightly, to emphasise how Ulysses stands in distinction to modernism as much as (if not more than) being a part of it. I appreciate that almost any critical evaluation could hardly avoid either of these, particularly the element of language. My synopsis was glib to indicate my original rather uninspired reading of McCarthy's essay.

3. Even in that first, somewhat descriptive part of the essay, McCarthy's approach contains elements of his aesthetic. He dwells somewhat on ink and celluloid stains - I can't remember in what context i am now on the train - which reminded me of C. He also talks about the way mundane materials are persistently transformed in terms of their excresence, and that there is a sense of morbidity about this - he quotes Joyce describing cheese as the corpse of milk. This reminded me of C as well, as I seemed to recollect that something I had thought distinctive about that novel was that it considered death to be a productively transforming process. I had a look at my first impressions, at the top of this thread, and was pleased to find a handy statement I had made in respect of this subject, that for McCarthy in C, "substance holds the key to existence, not spirit, that what lives after death is not the soul, but the body". I felt mildly pleased that my intuition from reading C was to a certain extent born out by McCarthy's essay. One of the notions that McCarthy uses to examine these processes is of things becoming déclassé - a term used by Bataille to mean here 'sinking in essential status', a de-grading of mundane materials.

4. I gave up reading because I couldn't really see what the whole point of McCarthy's essay was. I flippantly described this as 'wondering "how is this about what?"'. This was deliberately but unhelpfully cryptic.

5. On reading further, I discovered that soon after the point I'd given up (intending to return of course) McCarthy did start talking about the problem of writing after Ulysses. I'll add here that he doesn't do so in that fatuous 'all literature is impossible after this point' but by looking at what such a total approach to language (language as character, language as mechanism, language as motivating force) means for those, including Joyce, wishing to write after Ulysses.

6. He approaches this main theme by reconfiguring déclassé to mean something which is able to declassify concepts and things, in other words removing their boundaries, so that they are able to exist next to each other and communicate with each other (in my mind I may have used the simplifying phrase 'conceptual collage'). He likes this to hacking via a phrase from A Hacker's Manifesto:

to hack is

to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation

'to open grounds of possibility for the new creative event' he adds.

(Incidentally this bit caused me to raise my eyebrow somewhat.'lol McCarthy' was what *that* meant - why bring hacking into it? It's the sort of gimmick you allow a writer because it's typical of them, tho here there is perhaps a *little* too much rhetorical weight on this lightly deployed association with 'hacking'. nm.)

To reprise, by removing the categories of material, it enables the creative artist to have them jostle fruitfully next to each other. Here things get *very* confusing, because I start describing this declassification, which McCarthy also typically calls 'decoding', in terms of 'information'. I did this because I feel that is indeed McCarthy's universal solvent - the mechanic by which he achieves declassification. I use the unhelpful term 'alkahest' tho not before checking that, according to Philalethes, alkahest dissolves only composed material into their constituent, elemental parts, which was appropriate. That was from Wikipedia. Still, the term was unhelpful. I admit I wanted to use an alchemical term. They're fun.

7. There's a bit here about applying 'nonadjacent sets of information' to each other. This was *extremely* unhelpful. What I meant on a quite simple level is that he'll apply concepts to scenarios not traditionally associated with those concepts and that this is part of his significant appeal. That is to say, he'll take Continental philosophy, which outside Ballard has not traditionally been part of the aesthetic approach of UK writers, and apply it to typically English scenes (I'm talking about Remainder and C here. However, I also wanted to frame that in terms of that transformative decoding/declassification mechanism he talks about. This was partly because I had in mind his new book, Satin Island, which suggests on its cover that its going to play with the boundary categorisation of different literary forms. I feel this is a difficult thing to do because I feel the closer in nature the things are (here different types of writing, distinguished by register) the more difficult it is to play successfully with destroying their boundaries. It was also because I'm still trying to assess what I like about the early parts of C. I think part of its peculiar flavour comes from the fact that the two elements that are combined (a mid-to-late 20thC understanding of coding and information & pre-WW1 20thC writing, particularly Kipling) are deliberately not too far from one another in some ways. His recoding-to-combine with things that are actually already quite close is perhaps partly embodied by the quote from Timon about how gold solders 'close impossibilities' (another theme in theessay is how the 'economic register' is itself a system or plane in or on which things can be encoded so they uncharacterisitically combine). It's possible to understand the notion of 'close impossibilities' in broader terms - close theories are often incompatible because they may disagree over shared details, but wildly divergent or distant theories can be compatible.

8. I've been thinking about C quite a bit because its presentation of how quite organic or spiritual transitions as from life to death, can also be understood in terms of the encoding and decoding of information in a scientific sense, and this seemed to me to apply somewhat to something I was trying to put together about a visit to Dartmoor. Then I burble on a bit about why I was having difficulty completing it, somewhat disingenuously as the truth is I haven't had time to spend on it.

Hope that's a bit clearer?

Thanks for your efforts Fizzles.

I hope that you are enjoying this latest intellectual adventure.

I will read the TM essay and then I will have a better idea of what he says and whether I like it.

Your use of the recondite word 'alkahest' was one of the things that confused me most, in the first instance.

Fizzles - on your account I read TM's LRB article last night. I disliked it greatly. I could say more but perhaps that is more than enough.

ah. have you read any of his novels?

I'm a frayed knot.

Aren't you the same piece of string who tried to post here yesterday?

sure he's part of a number of threads tbh.

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.