Tom McCarthy’s latest novel is The Making of Incarnation.
Our movements through the urban environment are recorded and archived by closed-circuit cameras, our location tracked by those miniature recording boxes we carry in our pockets, our iPhones. Online, every keystroke and click is registered, indexed and correlated with others we have made, so that future clicks may be predicted or even determined. We live, one could say, inside a giant black box.
In the introduction to the 1995 reissue of his 1973 masterpiece Crash, J.G. Ballard discusses ‘the balance between fiction and reality’. ‘We live,’ he writes, ‘in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there.
How do you write after Ulysses? It isn’t just that Joyce writes better than anyone else (although he does), it’s the sense that Ulysses’s publication represents a kind of rapture for literature, an event that’s both ecstatic and catastrophic, perhaps even apocalyptic. A certain naive realism is no longer possible after it, and every alternative, every avant-garde...
In 2004, after I gave an artist’s talk in a gallery in Berlin, a group of people strode up to speak to me. They were, they told me, followers of the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, members of his entourage – or, to give it its semi-official name, the Kittlerjugend. They used this last term not without irony; but it was the type of irony that masks seriousness, in the way that Hamlet’s pretending to be mad acts as a cover for him actually being mad. The shoulders of the lead delegate, a charismatic Russian émigrée named Joulia Strauss, were wrapped in a hand-woven silk shawl bearing a large reproduction of al-Jazeera’s test pattern. My art project, they informed me (it involved a narrative of radio transmission and network infiltration), met with their approval – that is, with the approval of the man himself, or at least (and perhaps equally importantly) of his aura.
For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’.
By the end of the 1980s, two formerly arcane disciplines with roots in the French 1940s were readily available to British aspirants. One was post-structuralism, which not many years earlier...
For the final part of this novel’s first movement, our young hero, Serge Carrefax, travels to Kloděbrady’, a presumably Austro-Hungarian spa town, to take a cure. It’s 1913,...
Some people won’t read novels. I understand. I’m close to not wanting to read novels myself: they’re trying, and often seem the same. But one thing all fiction guarantees is...
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