Continuing my chat with British author Tom McCarthy (click here for Part One), the conversation turned to recurrent themes in Tom’s work…

WARNING: The conversation contains adult themes and references to post-modernism and at least one Belgian deconstructionist!

Part Two

DW: Disintegration and death predominate in MEN IN SPACE, and they’re central in your other work. What attracts you to these themes? 

TM: They’re core themes for literature. This is true from literature’s ‘highest’ form, tragedy, to its ‘lowest’, comedy - which, as everyone who’s best thought it through points out (I’m thinking of Baudelaire in The Essence of Laughter or [Paul] de Man in The Rhetoric of Temporality), is to do with breaking and falling, the end-point of all gravity being the grave. Men in Space is a tragi-comedy, and the comedy part of it is very much in the Baudelaire-de Man vein: its characters are held in gravitational force-fields, orbiting around death.

DW: Despite all the disintegration and death, there is a certain optimism in your novels too. They’re not bleak. There’s not a lot of despair. Do you see creative freedom, opportunity, possibility or even hope in disintegration?

TM: To bowdlerise Yeats: when things fall apart, some revelation is at hand. When the world shatters and falls away, transcendence becomes a possibility. To a large extent, Men in Space is an allegory of failed transcendence, as is Remainder: this is what the two books really have in common deep down. Transcendence fails - but some radical transformation takes place. I wouldn’t call my disposition in them ‘optimistic’, and, to borrow a great line from Lacan, I never speak of freedom - but in both books disintegration induces dynamic and exhilarating states, sends people somewhere extreme: to the limits of the self, the world, the whole symbolic order. That’s where literature should take you, its proper territory.

DW: Repetition, authenticity and absurdity are recurrent themes in your previous work, and they appear again in MEN IN SPACE. All these themes - death, disintegration, repetition, authenticity, the absurd - are characteristic of 20th century Modernism. Do you feel a particular affinity with the Modernist ‘project’?

TM: My god yes. That’s where we’re at - or at least the legacy we have to deal with. Modernism (which in reality isn’t a single project but rather a whole wave of interlinked events - wave upon wave, a giant tsunami) is as seminal an event as the Renaissance was, and the shock-waves of something that big take centuries to play themselves out. In the ‘geological’ time of the arts, Finnegans Wake happened a few seconds ago: we’ve hardly even realised that it’s happened, let alone set up a coordinated response. The really good artists have realised and are responding: look at David Lynch’s films, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels - but most of the players in the mainstream cultural industries are trying to pretend it didn’t happen, or doesn’t matter; and they’ll be washed away, forgotten, as a result. And then the half-ass response, that we’ve moved on into ‘post-modernism’, is just ignorant, a misuse of the term: as the man who put the word into circulation, Jean-Francois Lyotard, points out: ‘postmodernism’ isn’t some thing that comes after Modernism. Rather, it’s ‘an attitude of incredulity towards grand narratives’: that is, the tendency within the modern towards rupture and fragmentation.

Click here for Part One

Part Three Tomorrow…