What is the writer Tom McCarthy

English critics compare this author with James Joyce and Thomas Pincon. His cultural essays are published by London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and other leading intellectual publications. They almost do not talk about him in Russia. Samizdat continues the cycle of short profiles of writers: this time the literary critic Igor Kirienkov talks about Tom McCarthy, a contemporary artist, art theorist and an outstanding novelist.

On February 25, 2000, the article Susan Sontag, which became one of its most cited texts, was published in TLS. This was a review of the "dizziness" of Vinfrid Zebald - the last at that time the novel of the German prose writer at the peak of intravital glory. Before moving on to the description of the book, Sontag asked herself and readers: "Is literary greatness possible?" If so, who today can be called an ambitious revolutionary of the form, who is not satisfied with “Standard Topic Topics”?

Sontag died in 2004, without waiting for new names: Zebald, who died in 2001, remained the last great writer for her. And there is some monstrous injustice that the Great American critic spread with one of the most strange and exciting novels of the last decades, which the author could not print for almost five years-until 2005. We can only guess what she would write about Remainer (in the Russian translation “when I was real”) Tom McCarthy, but for some reason there is a suspicion that the book could change its ideas about modern literature-at least the one that exists in the experimental field, continuing the tradition of European modernism.

Portrait of the artist in obscurity

And what about McCarthy himself? In the early 2000s, he is an artist for thirty with Oxford diploma. He lived in Prague, then in Berlin. He worked as a model in an art school. Pour drinks in the Irish pub. I wore plates in a restaurant. Another move is to Amsterdam: here McCarthy got a job as a Time Out editor. Literature took free time (it was abroad that two of its first novels were written - Men in Space and RemacAinder) and the International Necromotics Society - a playful organization that they came up with the philosopher Simon Kricli, inspired by the circles of the surrealists.

In 2001, McCarthy tried to publish his books in large British publishers, but nothing came out for him. It’s not that the editors did not like his texts - they probably simply did not know how to classify them: it was at the same time traditional - with a plot and psychology - novels and theoretical constructions; So immediately you can’t say which shelf to put on - with fiction, philosophy or art criticism.

As a result, in 2005, the Paris Publishing House Metronome Press released 750 copies of Remader’s novel, which initially spread under museums. In a professional environment, they started talking about the book, many with enthusiasm. With any impressive circulation, Remader was released a year later in the Alma Books London and two later in the New York Vintage. Yesterday's unsuccessful writer began a completely different life: now - in the status of the competent heir to avant -garde and post -structuralists, who accepted the baton with Samuel Bekket and Jean Bodriyar.

Roman as an art object

These are the names that are completely non -accident in this context - and not even because McCarthy refers to these authors in his interviews and articles. Like idols, he maximally expands the concept of the novel and discovers that elements of scientific disciplines are freely placed in it, and simulation can become the theme of the book and the main stylistic technique.

The search for authenticity, endless and more and more ambitious attempts to reproduce reality and is dedicated to Remader. The main character of the novel, without a name and age, but with a calm voice of a very educated and very tired man falls into a strange accident. He, of course, does not remember details. Having received a huge compensation, the narrator spends money on a detailed reconstruction of scenes and experiences - the smell of a liver from a neighboring apartment, a cat on a hot roof - with the participation of professional actors and a complex props. The directorial appetites are growing, and now he is already putting a bloody robbery, completely regardless of the fact that detailed, straight-as-in-life, reconstruction cannot do without casualties.

The idea of ​​the novel is to show how a strange way the individual person seeks to overcome alienation from the world; How he is captured by a “boring”, full of useless, seemingly details reality, when he takes it to restore it; And - the most, perhaps, the main thing - what these attempts lead to. McCarthy, however, does not judge anyone: he is more likely an engineer who controls the story from somewhere in the forests, so the verdict is the verdict to pass or not to pass the audience. This immorality (ostentatious or quite sincere) brings the writer closer to “diagnostic artists”: they are more occupied by symptoms, vivid and painful manifestations of human individuality, and not abstract issues of morality. Such prose acquires the self -sufficiency of the museum exhibit and the analyticity of scientific labor - and this is probably the highest degree of confidence in the reader.
It is interesting to read

Critic as an artist

After the success of Remader, McCarthy wrote two more novels, C (2010) and Satin Island (2015), which decorated Buker short lists, composed a great work about comics about the Tintin reporter with Freud and Delez quotes and released several dozens of essays, the best of which were included in the TRANSMISSISSION AND THE CHAST Individual Remix (2012) and Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017).

Apparently, the taste for pure theory and thinking with manifesto-not so much the continuation of the game in the avant-garde group, but the organic property of the character of McCarthy, the continuation of its literary activities. So, for example, he discusses how, in the context of total digitalization, the role of the writer changes: in his opinion, the author of the Joyce talent would now work on Google or another corporation, interested in employees with rich imagination and powerful lexical resources.

Like any experienced storyteller, McCarthy has his own set of favorite stories - from the device of Lawrence Stern’s novel “Life and the opinions of Tristram Shendi” to Kafka’s short story. Another thing is that he expands them all the time: in addition to quotes from Aristotle and Bart, in his texts you can find references to MC Hammer or discussing the head of the football player Zinedine Zidan. A fan of anthropologist Claude Levy-Strass, McCarthy carefully monitors what excites his own tribe-the Western civilization of the era of late capitalism. This creative strategy involves constant work in the field: to lock it up in construction from the ivory, simulating the behavior of Flaubert and Nabokov (with all the sympathy for them), he certainly does not plan.

Lost classic

McCarthy has been writing for twenty years, but only two of his books have been published in Russia-back in the early 2010s they were released by Ad Marginem. REMAINDER translated by Anna Aslanyan into “when I was real”; Work about the artist Erzhe - everything is already literally - became a "tintin and secret literature." They did not cause a splash: maybe that is why the legendary Moscow publishing house has not published prose since then - even such exquisite.

At the same time, as if specifically for McCarthy, there is a term Readable Avant-Garde: expanding the novel conventions, it does not knock out the soil from under the feet of an unprepared reader. From his books you can enjoy if you just follow an always twisted plot. In addition, a fiction frame allows you to get acquainted with modern philosophy, freed from the darkness of style, which is only aggravated by translation (usually from French).

Here you can ask the questions: does such an avant -garde of the fathers of the fathers easily converted to entertainment? Is McCarthy pretending to be loving his Blanchs and Bataev to look smarter and have symbolic dividends from this - invitations to conference and relentless attention of the press? In general, is he not a fraudster, falling asleep with loud surnames and completely not owning the topic?

It seems that there is still no: for such an intellectual scam, McCarthy is too boring. A scientist-scientist lives in it, who is constantly drawn to put some experience. For example, to cross a pseudo -historical romance with Burrozovskaya Mazyna - S. came out of this task or write a serious essay about the significance of excrement in Ulysses for the venerable Joyicated publication of the HyperMedia Joyce Studies. And if this is also a simulation, then what is the literature in general?