Tom Mccarthy and Metamodernism, an Uneasy Dialogue
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TOM MCCARTHY AND METAMODERNISM, AN UNEASY DIALOGUE. AN ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL C AND ITS RELATION TO THE METAMODERN FRAMEWORK. Rodolfo Alpizar Carracedo Stamnummer: 015002362 Promotor: Prof. dr. Birgit Van Puymbroeck Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels Academiejaar: 2016 - 2017 Acknowledgements ‘No man is an island’1 is the first thing that comes to mind when looking at the completed form of this dissertation. As I wait for Alexandra to finish her relentless proofreading of my final draft, I think of all the people and conditions that allowed for this moment to happen. In what now seems like a decade ago, I was lucky to have a conversation with dr. Birgit van Puymbroeck where the idea to write a dissertation about Tom McCarthy’s work was born. I was interested in those places where literature and philosophy meet, and dr. Van Puymbroeck came up with the suggestion of working with this contemporary enfant terrible. His novel C has all the ingredients of what I was looking for: commitment, challenge, wit and mischief. However, I must admit that in diving into the world that lies under its pages, I would feel at moments like Alice falling down a rabbit hole of infinite doors, with mixture of excitement and anxiety. I must express my deepest gratitude to my promotor dr. Van Puymbroeck for her constant encouragement, and for steadily guiding my research along its many turns. Only a strongly supportive network of family and friends have kept me from losing all traces of sanity along this road. On the one hand, I am most indebted to my Greek-Belgian family, my wife’s parents and brothers for having accepted me as one of their own, for the care and the interest on my work and for the generous help with the big and small practicalities of life, which granted me enough physical and mental space for my studies. It is also with the emotional support of my parents, sister, her husband and my incredible nephew that I have been able to navigate the writing of this thesis. Above all, I express my gratitude to Alexandra, my wife and best friend, for being actively present at all the stages of this road; for coping with the roles of partner and mother of our child and still being able to find the time to be a patient listener and a candid contributor to the ramblings of her obsessive husband; first and foremost, for keeping me human. 1 John Donne, MEDITATION XVII. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. 1624 1 Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Chapter I. Charting Metamodernism. Oscillation and Modernism Inhabited from the Present.................. 8 Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problems of Periodization.......................................................... 8 Metamodernism .................................................................................................................................. 13 Metamodernism in literature ............................................................................................................. 23 Criticism .............................................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter II. C by Tom McCarthy, a black box of literary ideas ..................................................................... 29 Engaging with the mythos of the avant-garde ........................................................................................ 30 A Trojan Horse ......................................................................................................................................... 31 Transmission and media .......................................................................................................................... 36 A Wolf Man and a crypt. All code is burial ............................................................................................... 37 Technology and the Death Drive ............................................................................................................. 41 Death as space ........................................................................................................................................ 44 Failure ...................................................................................................................................................... 46 Conclusions ................................................................................................................................................. 49 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 52 20727 words 2 Introduction By the time the novel C by made its way into the bookstores, its author Tom McCarthy was already familiar with being the subject of much heated discussion. Being the founder and General Secretary of an art collective that intended to colonize death as a type of space (INS Founding Manifesto, 1999), and after having published a work of high-flown literary criticism on pop-culture icon Tintin (McCarthy, 2006), it would not come as a surprise that this novel carried within enough thorny ingredients as to polarize its readership. C resists categorization, it plays with genre expectations as it hints to encoded meanings under its many layers. However, at its time of publication it gathered enough recognition as to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. McCarthy’s previous novel Remainder had a long tortuous story of finding its way into mainstream publishers. After several rejections, it had been picked up by an obscure art press and distributed at art exhibitions before it eventually caught the attention of the critics. A turning point in its recognition would be the exceptional praise it received from Zadie Smith in an article for The New York Review of Books. Smith labelled Remainder ‘one of the great English novels of the past ten years, [which] clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward’ (Smith, 2008). Among other characteristics, she celebrated Reminder’s full consciousness of the ideas that underpin it, its artistical and theoretical antecedents, together with the rejection of ‘lyrical realism’ (Smith, 2008). Above all, she acknowledged the way Remainder is aware of and attempts to negotiate the limitations of language as a means of representation; its attention ‘to the damaged and the partial, the absent and the unspeakable’ (Smith, 2008). Such high praise raised brought much attention to McCarthy’s work, but it also set a high standard for his following work of fiction to match. C, nevertheless, is a bold way to meet those expectations. For instead of reproducing a style that proved for him to be successful, he decided to deliver a completely different type of text, that nonetheless follows the same conceptual premises that originated Reminder, namely that literature can only be inauthentic (McCarthy, 2012). It is worth noting that since its publication, C has been either praised for its literary relevance and contribution, or disavowed as a fruitless waste of narrative energy. Its nod to the defamiliarizing practices of the avant-garde and its subtle but ever-present experimental nature renders it inaccessible for a specific kind of reader that may look for deep subjectivity or effortless emotional engagement. From this 3 side of the spectrum, critical accusations have come in many guises2; however, other commentators consider C, and McCarthy’s work in general, as prominent items within the wide range of narrative voices in contemporary English Literature. Among the many instances of this perspective it is worth mentioning Tom McCarthy’s inclusion in the critical study Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices by scholar Daniel Lea (2016); the inclusion of his work in literary-philosophical studies such as The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium by German scholar Wolfgang Funk (2015); the seminar "Calling All Agents: A Symposium on the Work of Tom McCarthy," ‘the first academic conference devoted to McCarthy's work, held at Birkbeck in July 2011’ (Nieland, 2012); and in general, the growing body of research that is being conducted on his work. C is Tom McCarthy’s third work of fiction3, and far from the obscurity of Remainder’s early days, C’s shortlisting for the Booker Prize is evidence of the recognition this author has gathered already in the literary world. As mentioned before, it is a novel that transgresses the boundaries of genre expectations. On the outside, it mimics the structure of bildungsroman by following the life of its hero from his birth in the last decades of the nineteenth-century until his premature death in the first ones of the twentieth- century. However, C offers a protagonist devoid of depth, both physically, for he is unable to see perspective, and metaphorically, for his presence in the narrative is only rendered on its surface. It also disguises itself with a Victorian style as it provides lengthy and detailed accounts of the current technology of the time-span it inhabits. Set against the background of the hightide of European modernism its pages are populated by allusions to personalities and works of the era, as well as it recreates countless modernist motifs. Thus,