Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish… and Women
Written in the wake of post-history and post-theory, McCarthy’s essays think through the ways–and this is going to sound very old-fashioned–we might re-inject meaning and a sense of shape to many of the movements and writers that postmodernism has written off. If catastrophic event-scenes like 9/11 reintroduced the Real into an intellectual landscape where it seemed to have been extinguished in the void of non-history, then the works of McCarthy and, though their lines of approach are various and toggle through various genres, Deborah Levy, McKenzie Wark, Will Self, and Rachel Kushner, do a strange turnabout, gazing back at the super-structures of Modernism–fragmentation, alienation, temporal dislocation–that the postmodernists thought they had ironized out of meaning.
Nicholas Rombes reviews Bombs, Typewriters, Jellyfish by Tom McCarthy.