In the second part of the interview, author Tom McCarthy (Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature) discusses ideas of authenticity, technology and the work of J G Ballard.
(Read the first part of the interview)
Raincoast Blog: Authenticity is a recurrent theme in Remainder and yet a lot of contemporary culture strives to be arch, or ironic. As an artist/author, is authenticity something important to you in your own work? What makes something authentic? Is authenticity possible through repetition? Are irony and authenticity mutually exclusive?
Tom McCarthy: These are complex questions, and to even begin grappling with them we’d have to go back to Plato, the notion of the simulacrum, and so on. Art’s whole currency and mode is inauthenticity, and yet it strives to be ‘truer’ than, say, propaganda, science, journalism - in fact, than all other mediums. Paul de Man wrote a brilliant essay on irony and inauthenticity called ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’. I hadn’t read it when I wrote Remainder but it could be describing the book. He says that to recognise your own inauthenticity doesn’t mean you become authentic: you just repeat inauthenticity at more and more self-conscious levels, and that double, triple, quadruple language is called irony. Having said that, there’s ‘sincere’ irony and pat, smug irony, like you get in the worst one-liner, get-it-got-it kind of art. In Remainder I wanted to deal with the whole question of inauthenticity authentically, if that makes any sense.
RB: Remainder starts with the narrator describing being knocked unconscious by an unexplained lump of technological hardware, and in his subsequent quest for authenticity he has an aversion to using technology during his re-enactments. Do you have reservations about technology? (I appreciate it’s kind of ridiculous to be asking you this on email!)
TM: I’m not sure he’s averse to technology. He doesn’t want any cameras present during his re-enactments, but that’s largely because that would collapse the whole book into a Baudrillard-style meditation on media and the image, which I really didn’t want. He invests the huge sum of money which he gets as compensation for the accident in technology stocks. I’m fascinated by technology, or by the theme, at least. Techne means showing, revealing, and technology is the gauze through which the world reveals itself to us - and behind which it retreats. It’s the veil.
RB: Do you own a mobile phone?
TM: My god, yes. I’d rather leave home naked than without my phone.
RB: What will the future look like?
TM: Who on earth knows? I don’t even know what the present looks like! [J G]Ballard says we’ve collapsed the future into the present and we’re surrounded by fictions and fantasies from which we can pick at will. He says that the writer’s job is to invent the reality. I like that, that’s very good.
RB: It’s interesting that Remainder has been compared to J G Ballard, the author of Crash. Ballard seems to have this fascination with technology, and both Crash and Remainder have this clinical air of unease.
TM: Crash was a big influence. It’s more the repetition side of things than the technology. Ballard’s hero Vaughan re-enacts car crashes of the rich and famous. He’s also obsessed with becoming authentic, as is Ballard-the-character-in-the-book. He keeps saying things like ‘the car crash was the first real thing that had happened to me’. The heroes of both Crash and Remainder use re-enactment and stylised violence as a portal towards the real - and fail spectacularly, excessively, luxuriously.
RB: Are you a fan of Ballard?
TM: Ballard is fascinating because he’s a great writer without even being a good one. I don’t mean this negatively: I’m a huge fan. But he doesn’t care about polished prose (compare his sentences to Nabokov or Updike and they look like pulp) or depth of character. Having said that, Crash has an intense lyricism that comes from its almost incantatory, modulated repetition of technological and sociological terms, and Vaughan is a much truer presence for me than, say, some boring ‘rounded’ figure out of Jane Austen. That’s the great thing about Ballard: he’s got a vision, he’s a visionary, that makes him great, and the niceties he doesn’t bother with. He knows exactly where he stands in this respect. I talked to him once and told him my theory that Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote, whose hero also re-enacts stylised violent moments on the public highways in a bid for ‘authenticity’, and also fails fabulously - and he answered: ‘Your theory is great, but I’ve never read Don Quixote. I don’t really read proper books, I’m very low-brow.’ Genius.
RB: Who are your literary inspirations?
TM: I’m very un-Ballard in this respect. I went through a phase of worshipping Joyce, and read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake inside out. And before that, Conrad: I’d copy out whole passages from Heart of Darkness. Burroughs, Pynchon, Melville, Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury is the best book ever written in my opinion. I read lots, and try to work out how they do it. If you wanted to be really good at football you’d watch videos of Pele and Zidane and try to emulate their moves, then take them somewhere else. I like the French a lot: Genet, Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge. I like Shakespeare, and the Greeks. I’m really traditional I’m afraid. But then I’ve just published a book about how brilliant the Tintin books are from a literary viewpoint, so maybe I’m not all canonical…
The final part of the interview will appear tomorrow
Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.
