By Peter Carty.
Tom McCarthy, The Threshold and the Ledger (Notting Hill Editions, 2025)
First, a caveat. This review of Tom McCarthy’s essay is, essentially, an essay about an essay. And given the richness of the associations he brings to bear upon his subject matter, it is a doubly reductive exercise.
McCarthy’s essays are always enjoyable and illuminating displays of intellectual pyrotechnics. He’s a champion for contemporary art (indeed he’s an artist himself, as well as a writer) and his essay writing technique has parallels within the visual arts. He maps and moulds the ideas and perspectives of one philosopher or artist after another onto his chosen subject matter, demonstrating how they follow his chosen threads and themes.
It is a haptic approach and there’s a double effect here too. His essays are a literary analogue of performance art; the end result is like an installation, an aggregation of fresh perspectives and radical reappraisals. In The Threshold and The Ledger he brings to bear concepts from artists and thinkers – to select a bare handful from a bushel of them – including Aeschylus, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Joyce, Shakespeare and filmmaker David Lynch.
He deploys them all to deconstruct key parts of a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, a celebrated modernist Austrian poet, novelist and thinker from the mid-twentieth century. She has a high profile within Germanophone culture, less so outside of it – McCarthy’s essay will surely make a difference there.
Bachmann’s works appeared some time after the apogee of modernism, in the period after the second world war when – famously – the question was raised of whether art was possible any more. Her works provide a clear affirmative, despite emphatically dwelling in the melancholic and traumatised cultural landscape that followed the war and the Holocaust.
McCarthy’s chosen poem is ‘Salt and Bread’ (published in 1953, in the collection Borrowed Time; it is also handily reprinted in an appendix to the essay). It is short, and heavily allusive and elusive, though turmoil, guilt and anguish do break surface:
We know
that we’ll remain the continent’s captives,
and again we’ll succumb to its troubled ills,
But to nail the poem’s context so directly is to miss so much of it. McCarthy’s chosen themes of threshold and ledger in turn resonate with others he segues onto soon enough. The notion of threshold, he tells us, is tied up with passage across a threshold, which is so often the threshold to a house, and thence with the ideas of arrival and departure. The poem’s title refers to the German custom of friends and neighbours welcoming people into a new home with salt and bread – Bachman reverses this to ‘Brot und Salz’; parts of her poem appear to reference moving out as well as in.
Early on, McCarthy juxtaposes ideas about homes and houses from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and the filmmaker David Lynch. Bachelard offers a conception of the house as a place for integrating the thoughts and memories of humankind. Lynch’s perspective is less positive. McCarthy offers a comment Lynch made during an interview which can stand as a premise for much of his work: ‘The house is a place where things can go wrong.’
That is also a premise, McCarthy reminds us, for much of ancient Greek tragedy. Accordingly he zeroes in on The Oresteia and its blurrings of the physical house with family histories – so often dark – together with associated, crucial passages back and forth across thresholds.
McCarthy has written his own idiosyncratic version of Agamemnon, partly inspired by contemporary artist Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, a lengthy slow-motion homage to Alfred Hitchcock. The main feature of McCarthy’s play is a doorsill, across which Agamemnon trips in slow motion. It is a drama which has the unusual distinction of being reviewed in the London Review of Books without ever having been performed (it is also reprinted in the essay appendices).
The threshold is not so far away as a concept, McCarthy shows us, from psychosis or ecstasy. For the former he draws upon David Lynch’s Lost Highway and the way in which its plot of incidents in and around the protagonist’s home can only be understood if its central character is delusional. As well as physical passages, Lynch’s film features psychological passages, therefore, back and forth across the threshold of the sane, integrated self. Psychosis in this sense is not so far from ecstasy, which leads McCarthy onto Twelfth Night and the nature of Viola’s transitions from one persona to another.
His treatment of his other key concept, of the ledger, and of its allied notions of accounting and book-keeping, involve further close readings of the poem. When Bachmann departs from home, she leaves her household’s accounting for someone else, a mysterious ‘rain man’ who will:
[…] lengthen
the lines of the ledger which I drew up
since I stayed less often
The poem’s final couplet reads:
We share bread with the rain;
bread, a debt, and a house
McCarthy reminds us that in German ‘debt’ can also mean ‘guilt’ – which means these lines vary between different translations of the poem. In conjunction with Bachmann’s choice of the word ‘schuldbuch’ for ‘ledger’, the poem can be seen, he explains, as a ledger that is ‘an index of guilt’.
As an extended coda to the main part of the essay, he shows us how in this way (as well as others) ‘Salt and Bread’ can be seen as a blueprint for what many regard as Bachmann’s masterpiece, her autofictional novel Malina. Much of the novel is preoccupied with passages back and forth across the threshold of the writer’s house, which can also stand in for the bigger house of Austria, saturated with guilt over its role in the war.
In homage to Joyce, Malina is also preoccupied with the polyphony of modern life. Its text includes urban glossolalia, ranging from snatches of adverts from broadcast media and the flows of mail through the post. The ledger features in both Malina and Ulysses. McCarthy reminds us of Bloom’s rigorous final accounting for his financial income and expenditure back at home in the company of Stephen Dedalus, as that tumultuous day in Dublin draws to a close.
McCarthy’s essay ends, appropriately, with a moving intellectual epiphany. Malina resembles Ulysses in another, crucial respect. Both novels contain autofiction about a writer poised on the threshold of producing a masterpiece. In this way McCarthy’s essay itself becomes a work, in and of itself, about the possibility of producing a great literary work and, in turn, about the premise for and possibility of all literature.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Peter Carty is a novelist, as well as a writer and book reviewer for publications including the Financial Times, Guardian, Economist, Spectator and Independent. The Times Literary Supplement said of his novel Art: “There are hints of The Great Gatsby and whiffs of Trainspotting, with a deliciously strong, bitter aftertaste”. His short fiction is on English literature syllabuses.
