Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy in conversation:
Lee Rourke: Talking of dividuality, ruptures and networks, the protagonist of C, Serge Carrefax, this doomed, crazed kind of modernist hero – he’s also blocked and ruptured within a strange network of codes, transmission and signals. You get the feeling when reading C that not only is there a spanner in the workings of Serge himself but in the structure of the whole novel, too. As though the rug is being pulled from under us. It’s the only novel on the shortlist which questions the status of literature within culture, for instance. I’m thinking that, combined with your collaborative work as a conceptual artist, your manifestos and declarations with the INS and your essays and so on, it’s all part of some grand scheme.
Tom McCarthy: Yeah: it’s what my friend Margarita Glutzberg calls a Gesamtcuntwerk! I suppose you could view what I do as a kind of grand anti-humanist manifesto. But it’s not like I set out to write an anti-humanist manifesto. All I set out to do is make good art. It’s really simple.
LR: You’ve said in the past that all art is repetition.
TMcC: Yeah: Joyce’s “commodius vicus of recirculation” . . . Or Mark E Smith’s three Rs: repetition, repetition and repetition . . .
LR: I’ll drink to that. It’s like a never-ending transmission that can’t be switched off.
TMcC: The transmission thing is important. There’s that Kraftwerk song, “I am the receiver and you are the transmitter”, or however it goes. One way of thinking about art, or the novel, is that the writer is the transmitter, the originator: I have something to say about the world and I’m going to transmit it. But this isn’t how I see it, I see it as exactly the inverse: the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there. The task of the writer is to filter it, to sample it and remix it – not in some random way, but conscientiously and attentively. This is what Heidegger says about poets: to be a poet is to listen before speaking; it’s first and foremost a listening and not a speaking. Kafka said it as well: “I write in order to affirm and reaffirm that I have absolutely nothing to say.” Writing, or art, is not about having something to say; it’s about aspiring to a heightened state of hearing. It’s why C is a totally acoustic novel and a receptive novel. The hero, Serge, sits there for hours trawling the aether waves, absorbing, listening to ship-to-shore transmissions, stock market prices, sports results, writing them all down. In a way, if you could see Serge’s transcript it would probably read like an Ezra Pound canto.
