Modernism and Close Reading

Tom McCarthy's fiction is a gift to academic critics. His five novels, Men in Space, Remainder, C, Satin Island, and The Making of Incarnation, abound in allusions, more or less overt, to other works of literature, to the visual arts and music, and to the theories of Continental – mostly French – philosophers. They engage with a number of the issues that we literary critics and theorists like to talk about, such as the impossibility of authenticity, the aftermath of trauma, the omnipresence of signification, the ubiquity of communication networks, and the corporate capture of progressive thought. They are structured by means of complex relays of repetition and cross-reference. And they further challenge the norms of the conventional novel by presenting characters lacking depth and plots in which narrative tension and personal development are not paramount. In all these ways, they provide a seductive invitation to today's professional critics to deploy the latest instruments of academic interpretation, including allusion tracking, influence detection, theoretical extrapolation, cultural analysis, and cryptographic decoding, and they allow us to enlist McCarthy as a heroic partisan under the flag of fiction that, keeping alive the radicalism of the modernists of the early twentieth century, resists the mainstream of ‘humanist’ or ‘lyrical’ or ‘liberal’ realism.

McCarthy, moreover, unlike those writers who shy away from commenting on their own work, has no hesitation in talking about his novels, and has given numerous interviews in which he suggests interpretations, identifies allusions, adduces influences, and explains his assault on the ubiquitous ‘middlebrow’ novel and the publishers who solicit and promote it. His collection of essays, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, entertainingly sets out some of the founding principles of his fiction: the first essay, for instance, titled ‘Get Real’, skewers unexamined views of ‘realism’ and the ‘real’. McCarthy has also written an e-book in which he expounds his view of the writer as a transmitter rather than an originator of verbal material, a study of Herge's Tintin that uncovers many of his favourite thematic webs in the amazing adventures of that young hero, and a piece on anthropology and writing in The Guardian that sets out some of the underpinning of Satin Island.