Bookninja - In The Magazine

KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER: Hi, Tom. I’m going to dig right in. Remainder focuses on an unnamed narrator who has amnesia, or selective amnesia, due to undisclosed debris (airplane, satellite, construction, we never know) falling on his head. He is awarded a large sum of money from the company responsible for this falling detritus, and he sets out, in his strangely obsessive way, to reconstruct various mnemonics—first to rebuild a wall crack and then an entire apartment block, to reconstruct a strange gas station episode he witnesses, and finally a bank heist—in a surreal, misguided attempt to gain what seemed to me less the actual past, and more the euphoria of recollection.

Men in Space centers, post-Cold War, on the replication of an ancient religious icon: A band of Bulgarian thieves have paid a Czech painter to copy the painting so that they can buy themselves time smuggling the original out of the country. There are myriad echoes of this replication in the lives and deaths of the various characters, but not only that, the painting is mimicked not once but twice, its ellipse, its floating man, and its strange script indecipherable to everyone who comes in contact with it. Men in Space plays with the espionage genre, and even here and there references Remainder (things falling), making it a larger, puzzling adjunct to the first book, as if they are sister stories. I’m curious to hear what you have to say about these fascinations with infinite regress, with replication, and with the way physical space in your work pertains to mental space.

TOM McCARTHY: Hi Kathryn. First of all, I should point out that I wrote the first draft of Men in Space before writing Remainder, then re-worked it afterwards. The two books are indeed dialoguing with one another, but the relation between them is strangely circular rather than linear. Certainly, both are concerned with replication: in the case of Men in Space, the replication of a work of art; in the case of Remainder, of the entire world, and of time. The icon in Men in Space is a version of the world as well, of course, a miniature, regressively embedded one, and the events depicted in it (disintegration, death and floating) play out in the ‘real’ world of the main narrative, repeated in, for example, the figure of the Soviet cosmonaut who floats abandoned above his disintegrating country, or the many characters suspended in the book’s political and geographical spaces, caught in limbo as the world around them falls apart. Space, or at least the space of the novel, is always simultaneously real, figurative, psychological, political and symbolic. And yes, I’m interested in replication, for a million reasons, both intuitive and conceptual ones.

KK: The unresolved issue of the Soviet cosmonaut in Men in Space is a lovely dig at, well, nationalism and responsibility, as well as being a delightful, almost painterly image. I will return to it. But first, I very much want to hear about that interest in replication; for instance, what is the novelistic purpose of using infinite regress as a literary technique? What larger purpose did you have conceptually? I ask because I found the echoes fascinating, and because the concept has always intrigued me. (Incidentally, you may know that infinite regress is also called the Droste effect – named after the Dutch cocoa company that features an infinite regress image on its tins, and mention all this because it nicely dovetails with the fact that Amsterdam is largely featured in the second half of Men in Space.)

TM: I never heard it called the Droste Effect. I always thought of it as the Quaker Porridge Thing, or the Chopsticks Thing – two types of commercial packaging which used infinite regress when I was little. In literary parlance it’s called ‘mise en abime’. You get it loads in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet: a soldier walking into a room and looking at a photograph of streets which lead up to a room in which a soldier looks at a photograph of streets etc. I guess its main use is to set up a whole architecture of correspondence and repetition, like in a piece of music: it’s seductive and assuring at the same time. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Marlow goes into the manager’s office in the middle of the jungle (and the middle of the novella) and sees a painting on its wall showing a blindfolded woman carrying a lighted torch through darkness, and the effect on her face is sinister: that’s the essence of the novella in a nutshell, Europe going blindfolded going through Africa and the reader slowly coming to see how dark Europe itself is. So the mise-en-abime there contains not just the formal features of the larger narrative, but also its thematic core, replicated allegorically. Men in Space is similar, full of repetitions embedded in the narrative. So the floating saint with the Plexiglas-like halo around his head doubles the abandoned cosmonaut, and both these double the condition of most of the characters, suspended in some kind of space that they can’t really navigate. What’s vital is that the embedded repetitions, the micro-iterations, somehow throw light on the macro-ones without explaining them away, resolving them. It has to remain frustrating ultimately. In Remainder the repetition is of a different order: more compulsive, post-traumatic.

KK: Why does it have to remain frustrating? I mean that’s a very provocative thing to say, Tom. I wonder, too, if there isn’t an almost spiritual endgame, even though both books are largely godless (even the icon feels weirdly secular) but the deaths of your characters are treated with such particular empathy as if at the moment of death one would enter the charm of a dream or, perhaps more aptly, an aestheticism.

TM: Literature has to remain frustrating – to withhold something, remain incomplete – or it’s not literature anymore, but rather entertainment, edification or interpretation. That’s literature’s USP: staying unresolved, keeping its most vital messages unspoken, creating a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time. My books are most definitely godless, utterly atheistic. In a way, Men in Space is about confronting that absolute absence, the ellipse where there should be a full circle. Remainder, too, begins with the heavens falling to the ground. In religious, or post-religious terms, they turn around the death of God I suppose. But there’s no ‘spirituality’ in them; that’s a word I’d never use. When people die, what they experience is not transcendence but an intimacy with matter, with the world. So Anton in Men in Space sees the ground from closer and closer: the layers of moss, the beetles in them, the specks of earth. And the drug dealer whose death the hero of Remainder re-enacts has a similar experience (the hero imagines): looking at the cigarette butt, the texture of the pavement, the letters on a cab-company’s window reflected in a puddle. These things are beautiful, and affirm the world even as it’s being taken leave of. And yes, it does have the charm of a dream; but it’s a dream of here-and-now, the here-and-now revealing what it is. That’s one hundred percent materialism: a material, not spiritual, endgame. It’s what poetry at its best gives us: Wallace Stevens, Francis Ponge – the sheer and ecstatic there-ness of existence. By the way, in neither of the passages you quote above does the character die in my opinion – although it’s left ambiguous, open to interpretation.

KK: Yes, I agree with you. Literature separates itself from fiction (there used to be different sections in bookstores in Canada for fiction and for literature) by its expectation that the reader will come at least half way to build the thing. Your work reminds me of the sorts of books that made me want to write: I am thinking Celine, Gide, here. Flannery O’Connor has written, “When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.” Remainder engaged me on this larger thematic level.

It worked for me at the level of language, too, as the sentences piece by piece are fine indeed, but also in its concern for minutiae. Both books are very finely tuned; almost every move taken is described. In Remainder, the narrator’s obsession became my obsession, and even though in my normal day-to-day life I might have no interest in what is essentially the banal recreation of another person’s imagined life, his perfectionism spoke to me, his yearning for that created a yearning in me for him to have that. In Men in Space the attention to detail becomes almost like a fine Dutch landscape painting, only modern; I mean if I went to Prague or Amsterdam, I swear I could use this novel in place of a road map, and have no trouble at all. Does this detailing of the material have to do with the idea of ‘intimacy of matter’ as well?

And on the topic of road maps, I have another, I think related, question. Men in Space is criss-crossed with lines. There are the intersecting streets, the lines skaters leave on the ice, there are the contrails of passing airplanes, there are the stars, there are the surveillance lines of the gradually effaced spy, there are also various lines of communication — art collector, Joost van Straten (whose name translates to Joost of the streets) sends letters to his boyfriend Han, various people make telephone calls from a mysterious Prague phone booth where all calls are free. It feels to me as if it ought to all connect up somehow with this poor stranded cosmonaut. Does it?

TM: That’s really interesting that Canadian stores used to have separate sections for ‘fiction’ and ‘literature’. If they had that here, the ‘literature’ shelves would be almost devoid of anything written recently – or published recently, at any rate. Although, paradoxically, authors of the most blatantly middle-brow fiction often fall over themselves to claim ‘literature’ status for their work, avowing how much they’ve been influenced by, for example, Nabokov when it’s obvious from their books that there’s no real influence there at all: they maybe read ‘Lolita’ once and thought it was pretty cool or whatever.

With the road-map thing: funnily enough, I once gave a friend who was going to Dublin a map of Dublin I drew based entirely on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – I’d never been there. We agreed he’d walk around with it and see if it worked. It did a bit: Phoenix Park, Finn’s Hotel, Sandymount Strand, the brothel in Nighttown where the ruin of all space happens, etc – but after a while my friend had a meeting to actually get to in a specific place and time, so he got a real map out. But to answer your question, your first one about the detailing of material: yes, absolutely. Both books could be called 'Men in Space', in the most literal, phenomenological sense: they’re both about how we inhabit space and its geometries, the circuits we cut through it, the way it inhabits us and repeats itself in us, and how we repeat ourselves in it. I’m a phenomenologist, ultimately. Space is ‘that for which room has been made’ like Heidegger says, the founding ground that allows something to begin. Space is where world worlds. And art is where space spaces, world worlds and all those other marvelous formulations he uses. My books let that happen, again and again. That’s all there is to it really: they certainly don’t have a message to deliver, or a ‘point’ to make about contemporary society.

To answer your second question: yes again, Men in Space is crisscrossed with lines, grids, vectors. In the first draft I had a whole chapter of Nick following the grid-square of the studio in which the art students draw him, the grids on their papers and so on. And then there are the marks on the ice, which reprise for Joost the spatial calculations Manasek has sketched out on his wood when copying the icon. Joost ends up disappearing into space itself, looking for a horizon: he walks across the patterns on the ice and dies. Nick, too, at the end, is trapped in formal space: the spokes of the bicycle wheel above his head which cut the sky up into arcs and tangents, like a set of geometrical exercises. And at that moment he feels that he’s like an abandoned cosmonaut. The thing is, everyone is like the cosmonaut: the cosmonaut, not just in my book, but in general too, is a perfect symbol of man’s place (or to use a phenomenological term, thrown-ness) in space.

And yes, you’re right to pick up on all the wires and connections. After Joost is dead and Han is seeing him in dreams, Nick has a vision of the wires connecting the living to the dead, the drowned. With the phone-booth scene you mention, I was thinking directly of Stephen Daedalus on the beach in Ulysses, when he ponders how the umbilical cords of everyone must lead back somewhere and imagines using his belly-button to dial up Eve in Eden. Cosmonauts, of course, have techno-umbilical cords too, keeping them alive and in communication with the earth (the NASA terminology for their free-floating, by the way, is EVA: Extra-Vehicular Activity). So, again, my cosmonaut embodies all of this. But at the same time he’s been cut loose – and so has everyone else. At the heart of all the connectedness is a radical disconnect. All the wires get crossed, messages lost, signals taken over by noise – most noticeably in the case of the audio surveillance operative who ends up deaf. He, too, is like an abandoned cosmonaut at the end, eating dried food from packets, waiting to be recalled: to be called, summoned back, embraced into the presence of a home – and beginning to slowly realize that he won’t be, ever.

KK: That’s interesting these lines mooring humanity to one another, and the suggestion of home especially in light of the particular sensuality of your characters’s deaths, or projected possible deaths. It is as if at these most profound moments, there is an erasure of self, so that the lines witnessed become less objective, more personally accessible. The lines become materially useful. I am thinking of Joost in Men in Space apprehending the horizon, the edge, and Manesek somehow becoming the painting he is so meticulously recreating, disappearing into it in a sense, and then disappearing out of the novel. I’m also picturing the figure eight or infinity symbol that the narrator in Remainder orchestrates the aircraft to loop in the final scene; can you enter infinity by defining, with your body, the symbol infinity? I’ve read here and there that the books are about failed transcendence and disappointment. I can’t agree with much of this. There is something transcendent about the text, in the accumulation of detail, the way the repetitions bounce around the brain, and how the brain manipulates the puzzle.

I would like to go outside the work a bit here, though I don’t think much, really. There is a space created inside the work, as you say, and, like it or not, one created outside the work, once it’s published. And then there is you. You with your work, and the space that creates. So, you. You are a Londoner, with two novels, and a book of non-fiction (Tintin and the Secret of Literature) and then this: General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society. I have been reading whatever Roberto Bolano I can get my hands on lately. His recently translated The Savage Detectives centres around a group of poets calling themselves the Visceral Realists. Bolano himself founded a poetic movement called The Infrarealist Poetry Movement. This idea of the detective writer might resonate with you. I’m curious about the code of the INS, your involvement, its level of seriousness/playfulness, and how that ‘thing’ may or may not be recreated in your writing work. Will you speak about this?

TM: I do agree with the failed transcendence line, not least because it was me who fed it to most of the critics who used it. You’re right in everything you say about Manasek becoming the painting, Joost merging with space, the hero of Remainder becoming a figure-of-eight in his movements and so on. But in these instances the world is not transcended; rather, it radiates, like radioactive matter radiating through the boundaries of people, objects, everything. The hero of Remainder uses precisely that metaphor as he descends the staircase of his meticulously reconstructed building, and feels the flecked particles of the granite emitting a charge, potent as natural radiation.

Anyway, the INS, yes. That came out of lots of the same concerns that are at play in the novels. 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. For me, it mirrored the fictions of Kafka, Conrad, Burroughs, Dostoevsky, people like that. And I saw an opportunity to play that out through the humorous-but-serious environment of art: using galleries, magazines, institutions and so on to elaborate a network of associates, to create and extrapolate a structure that would start out as a fiction and become increasingly real. I launched the INS in 1999, and by 2004 we had forty assistants running an INS radio broadcasting unit out of the Institute of Contemporary Arts for a week, reading out cryptic messages over the radio, and various stations around the world re-transmitting them. You start with fiction, simulation, repetition, and you end up with the real: it’s the same in the novels or with the INS, as you suggested.

KK: Tom, there is a certain coolness to the way you handle character. And then there is the American character Heidi in Men in Space, who particularly stands out with a kind of naïve/neurotic effervescence. Will you speak about this character and how she fits into the wider concepts, especially how her exit from the narrative is meant to be taken? Forgive me, but it hard not to see her as a symbol of hope or the future, though that feels way too trite a reading, all things considered.

I need to clarify something I said earlier about the work being transcendent; what I meant was not an immaterial or out-of-this-world sort of transcendence but the word used in the sense of the work exceeding itself (in the best possible way). I was trying to describe how I apprehend art as an object that creates an emotional, or intellectual response beyond itself, or how the best stories can send the mind hurtling back lining up the clues, and so open up the mind. Since you have this involvement with art and artists, and have written these books that have much in common with conceptual art, I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.

I want to go back to something you said about the UK writing scene, regarding fiction/literature; I am not sure much is different here, by the way. I know that Remainder had a convoluted journey to its now critically acclaimed status. There is much talk about the death of the novel; can this be translated into a perceived death of literature and, if so, doesn’t the situation with Remainder almost suggest that it is precisely literature that readers want?

And finally, Tom, what five living novelists should we be reading?

TM: Okay, I agree completely with your notion of the world exceeding itself. That’s a very good way to put it. At the end of Remainder, the ‘replicated’ van (i.e. the real one which replicates the replicated one) seems almost unbearably real: the narrator talks about there being something overwhelming about its sheer presence. Ditto the pavement, sunlight, everything: excessive. And yes, I’d agree with your suggestion that this excessiveness lies at the core of art. Art’s essence is poetry. It’s all poetry: that’s the central mechanism that lies behind all the arts. I don’t mean nice words, but rather the base drive of it all: sending the world back to itself with double the force.

With Heidi, yes I suppose there’s hope for the future in the fact of her pregnancy, or at least an intuition of a future, beyond the arrest of the square in Amsterdam and the spinning-repeating wheel of history. She’s got a little man in space inside her (and by the way, the real title should technically have been ‘Men and Women in Space’, but it’s a bit lame and besides there is a distinction between the genders in the novel). Heidi gets what she wants in the book: her whole trajectory is about becoming ‘authentic’, which for her, rather absurdly, boils down to using this Czech phrase about breakfast in a genuine context, which she ends up doing. In a way she embodies the desire that fuels the hero of Remainder. Whether her child will be a good person or a jerk isn’t decided at this point, though, so I wouldn’t call it ‘hope’ for the future: just future.

The literature question. I don’t think literature’s ever dead – or, rather, I think it’s eternally dead, dying, and that’s the precondition for its self-perpetuation. Think of Don Quixote: the whole assumption there is that literature’s over, it doesn’t work. The hero’s read loads of books, runs around trying to play their codes out in the real world and it falls completely flat, collapses – and that systemic failure is what generates the remarkable and complex landscape of Cervantes’ novel, which is more or less the first novel to boot. So the first novel is saying ‘The novel doesn’t work.’ And so are Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury – all the really good novels at some level. Burroughs, Trocchi, Claude Simon – we could go on all night. As Blanchot articulated so well, literature has an intimate relationship with death, and a paradoxical one, best understood by recourse to myths like Orpheus and Eurydice, or Odysseus and the Sirens. It’s only possible because it’s impossible. Mainstream middle-brow fiction doesn’t understand this relationship, pretends you can just go ahead and write without addressing the whole issue of impossibility and failure, and so, paradoxically, produces genuinely dead novels.

Five living novelists? Alain Robbe-Grillet would have to be my number one. Ballard would be next: he’s great without even being good – by which I mean he’s a visionary who sees the world as one big warped novel, and therefore doesn’t bother himself with the niceties of fine prose or whatever. The Atrocity Exhibition, in particular, is stunning: a manual for catastrophe and trauma, and therefore for modern life. I suppose Pynchon has to be in there too: Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the great books of culture and technology, along with Frankenstein. And The Crying of Lot 49 is wonderful too, even if he later disavowed it. I’m trying to get my head round his new one. Then – and I know this is very conventional, but still – I’d have to recommend Updike, for his Rabbit tetralogy: there’s an oeuvre about how we occupy space and space us if ever there was one. Moving down a generation or two, the work of Stewart Home really interests me. He’s a dreadful prosodist and storyteller, but that’s not what he’s about: with his work, which crosses from literature to art, theory to music to public pranks and political activism, the whole history of the avant-garde is working itself out – or, to put it another way, dying a million deaths as it surges back to life.