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Literature's Blind Spot: Event and Remainder in Tom McCarthy's Fiction
Tom McCarthy writes against a mode of humanist realism that dominates contemporary fiction, which he calls “as laden with artifice as any other literary convention” (Typewriters 59). He rejects realism's claim to “objectively reflect, capture or report on historical events and mental activity” (McCa...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Department of English Language and Literature
2024
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| Summary: | Tom McCarthy writes against a mode of humanist realism that dominates contemporary fiction, which he calls “as laden with artifice as any other literary convention” (Typewriters 59). He rejects realism's claim to “objectively reflect, capture or report on historical events and mental activity” (McCarthy, Typewriters 59). This thesis explores the question of the blind spot in his work, the way in which his fiction, in contrast to this mode of realism, focuses not on content or narrative but on what cannot be represented. McCarthy's novels obsessively attempt to write the impossible—a facet of his work that critics consistently neglect. What is most compelling in literature, he maintains, is what “does not happen” (Typewriters 178). His fictional work is an endeavour to rethink the relation between literature and the event. The thesis demonstrates that McCarthy's novels C, Remainder, and Satin Island undermine realist narrative techniques by reimagining the notion of the event. In C, language is linked to death and disaster through the way in which the novel enacts language's contingency and dispersal. Remainder shows disaster, and thus trauma, as a fundamental ontological condition and marks the impossibility of any authentic event, such as death. The novel decentres the human subject and instead privileges brute materiality— much like the nouveau roman, it constitutes an “encounter with structure” (McCarthy, Typewriters 185). Matter, which the novel posits as a force of originary inauthenticity and links to disaster, is both unavoidable and impossible to understand. Satin Island, in its fragmentary meditations, approaches the question of the nature of the literary work: the work as such is always in abeyance; the novel probes the idea that literature necessarily requires reference to an unreachable outside that defines it. McCarthy's thinking of the event is read alongside thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Remainder, for instance, enacts Blanchot's idea of the disaster, as well as Derridean concepts such as the trace, and the analysis of Satin Island draws on the aesthetics of Blanchot and Stéphane Mallarmé. McCarthy's fiction reveals that at the core of literature is a kind of disaster, an aesthetic and representational failure. His writings for the International Necronautical Society suggest that contending with this disaster is an aesthetic imperative: art, the group writes, is “the consequence and experience of failed transcendence” (McCarthy, Critchley et al., “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” 223). Hence, art emerges as the remainder of catastrophe. |
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