NEMANJA: SMIRENOUMLJE

REMAINDER



In Remainder, the extraordinary debut novel by author Tom McCarthy, the nameless victim of an unexplained accident uses compensation money to painstakingly reconstruct and re-enact his memories of a London apartment building. A darkly comic and unpredictable exploration of memory and identity, it was originally published by underground French publisher Metronome Press, and is now available to a wider readership courtesy of Alma Books.

Tom McCarthy’s non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature is published by Granta Books (also available from Raincoast), and Remainder will be published in North America by Vintage in 2007. Tom is also the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. He was born in 1969, and lives in London, England.

Raincoast Blog: Remainder has several incidental moments that appear significant but are ultimately unexplained. Do you know exactly what happens?

Tom McCarthy: If you mean do I know what exactly the ‘accident’ consisted of, no. It’s not Memento: it’s not important what the accident is, simply that it happened, that we’re in its aftermath. If you want to be literal about it, some bits of a satellite or plane falling on the hero’s head wouldn’t be a bad guess; if you want to be allegorical, you might think more along the lines that the ‘accident’ is history, time, being thrown into the world in the first place. All the other loose ends have their place and function at one level or another - short councillors, extra cups of coffee, even cordite…

RB: Is ambiguity a virtue?

TM: For sure. If you were simply communicating a message you were certain about it wouldn’t be any good as literature.

RB: So did you work out the precise details of the characters and plot first or did you just see where the initial idea would take you?

TM: The whole thing came in a flash, in half-an-hour of mad scribbling at a party after I’d seen a crack in the bathroom wall and had a moment of deja-vu, just like the hero. The rest was carpentry. Of course, details and whole sub-sequences came while I was developing and executing it, but essentially it was pretty much all there in the crack-moment.

RB: Is the apartment building in Remainder based on a real location?

TM: I went walking around Brixton (in South London) looking for a building corresponding to the one I had as a picture in my mind, just like the hero does. I found one that wasn’t exactly the same, but close enough to provide a base to work from, just like he does. It even had little roof-access cabins which I realised could be used for putting out the cats his vision requires to be slinking around (and which plummet to their deaths one after the other). The real building’s not called ‘Madlyn Mansions’ either: that’s a nod to Proust’s madeleine moment - and, of course, to madness.

RB: Do you think there is a unique London sensibility about the book? Will a North American audience read it differently to a British audience?

TM: It’s very integrated into the landscape of London, but I think that’s more incidental than fundamental. It’s by no means certain that the forthcoming movie will be set in London. Any big city that has dilapidated areas undergoing gentrification, coffee-shop chains and social hierarchies that break down along racial lines (and which big Western city doesn’t have all these?) could host its action. The only place it couldn’t be is LA, because then all its unreality and re-enactment scenes would play out as an allegory about the movies, which they’re not.

RB: I read in your fantastic Ready Steady Book interview with Mark Thwaite that you researched trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders for Remainder. Did you find that research interesting?

TM: It was absolutely fascinating. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, but PTSD is an extremely creative condition. It instils a propensity for repetition alongside a need to disguise the scene being repeated, i.e. to generate other scenes and contexts for the primal event to morph through. It also leaves you with a sense that everything is somehow artificial, secondary, fake. Andy Warhol said that from the moment he was shot for the rest of his life onwards he felt he was just watching TV. The only ‘real’ thing for PTSD sufferers is the traumatic moment itself, which remains outside of proper memory, hence outside of all narrative, all representation. Again, that’s why the ‘accident’ must remain unnamed.

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...

Raincoast Blog: Remainder has had an interesting route to publication. How did you end up at Metronome Press and how did Alma Books come into the picture?

Tom McCarthy: I finished Remainder in 2001, but the conglomerates wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole. To be fair, some editors pushed quite hard, but couldn’t get it past their marketing departments, acquisition boards, whatever they call the ones who actually call the shots. So I involved myself more with art projects for a while - art projects which were actually literary projects in disguise. The art world is very literate. Virtually no one I met in publishing in the UK had actually read much literature beyond contemporary middle-market stuff, but artists, curators, critics and so on are super-literate. Some of them were even doing work based on the writings of Beckett, Huysmans, Robbe-Grillet and so on. So I found a kind of refuge in that arena. And it was in that arena that I met Clementine Deliss, who set up Metronome Press with Thomas Boutoux. They’re both curators and critics, and they wanted to do a project around the legendary Olympia Press, which operated out of Paris in the 50s and 60s and published (in English) people who the conglomerates also wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole: Beckett, Burroughs, Trocchi, Nabokov, people like that. Olympia was very tied in with visual art, and with soft porn, and Metronome Press wanted to emulate that - re-enact it, you could say. So in late 2005 they published my book and three others, plus ‘Teasers’ that had erotic imagery from contemporary artists alongside excerpts from the books. They were determined that this was an art project, not a publishing one. So when Remainder was getting big press reviews and the UK chain stores were asking for it, they still only distributed it in art galleries and institutions. Then Alma came into the picture and produced a mass-market edition in 2006.

RB: Are you glad Remainder wasn’t taken up by a large publisher in the UK, or do you just think about the millions that you could’ve made?

TM: Funnily enough, as I was signing up to Alma after the good reviews and the general buzz, one of the biggest of the bigs, who’d rejected it on two separate occasions before, came running in trying to gazump them, offering my agent I don’t know how much. We were like: ‘It’s the same book now as it was then. F*** you.’ You’ve got to work with people who actually support what you want to do, or it’ll all go wrong a year or two down the line. I’ve signed with Vintage in the US, but that was because they came across it, tracked down Metronome (which wasn’t easy) and took it on their own initiative. The Editor-in-Chief, Marty Asher, said to me: ‘I don’t know if one hundred or one hundred thousand people will like it as much as I do, and I don’t care. It’s what I want to publish.’ And he can: he’s got the power. He’s like a fairy godmother. So’s Clementine Deliss. And Alma. I wonder how many other serious novels there are out there that haven’t found fairy godmothers yet. I’m lucky. Three years is nothing.

RB: What are you working on now?

TM: I’m editing the manuscript I wrote before Remainder, Men in Space, which Alma will bring out next spring. It’s a novel about disintegration set in Prague during the break-up of the former Eastern Bloc. And I’m working on a new novel called C, about technology and mourning.

RB: I came to your artwork relatively late. Could you explain the International Necronautical Society to me?

TM: The INS is a construct, a cultural fiction that gets played out in both virtual and real spaces. It’s got the bureaucracy of a Kafka novel (committees, sub-committees, sub-sub-committees), the political austerity of Stalinist governmental bodies (denouncing enemies and former members, issuing proclamations and so on), the cultural bombast of early twentieth century avant-gardes (it was launched with a manifesto very much modeled on the Futurist one of 1909), and the subversive viral energies of Burroughs and Debord (we infiltrated the BBC website a few years ago, inserting INS propaganda in its source code which only a network of a few hundred people could access). The INS is most visible when we hold Hearings, interrogating other artists and writers in front of press and public, publish reports or let public spaces such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London host our FM broadcasting units; but it’s operative all the time, everywhere. We are all necronauts - always, already.

RB: I get asked this all the time by people in the book industry, so I am going to ask you - were you tempting fate by calling the book ’Remainder‘?

TM: Remainder is the right title. It’s about aftermaths, residues, what’s left when everything else has been said, shown, repeated, taken away. In terms of the book industry it’s the right title too: it was left behind, but it’s still there.