Tom McCarthy has been one of my favorite authors for years, ever since I found a copy of his novel Remainder in (I’m afraid) a remainder pile. This was before his work was justly recognized by the publishing industry. The art world was ahead, at least this time: his ’semi-fictitious network’ the International Necronautical Society has been in operation since 2000, and they have exhibited and conducted events at the Tate and ICA in London. McCarthy’s work now receives more of the attention it deserves, and his novel C was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

The INS once expelled a member “for the crime of not being dead”, only to reinstate him when he contracted cancer, “demanded restitution to his post and then died”. Most recently, they created something between a Burroughsian cut-up and a numbers station, broadcast from a gallery in Berlin.

Remainder is the best evocation of the process of art-making I have yet read. Its traumatized, amnesiac protagonist is propelled by a monumental impulse to reconstruct a scene: a place he has never been, but nevertheless remembers in an experience akin to deja vu. He expends great sums of money towards this uncertain end. Accomplishing his goal brings him no satisfaction; it only seems to damage him further, as he is driven to pursue his obsession to greater and greater heights. (Here’s a great interview with McCarthy about the novel.)

I didn’t realize that McCarthy was in New York, so I was really excited to hear that he was speaking at Pratt this month. His talk “Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works” elucidated some of the repeated themes of his novels and projects, including death, technology, repetition, broadcast and the radio. It traced a lineage from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus to Cocteau’s film Orphée, with stops for Freud, Joyce and Kraftwerk…

Referencing Rilke’s like “you built a temple deep inside their hearing”, McCarthy said: “The tall tree has become a pylon; the ear, a dish.” Moving on to Freud, he read from “Civilization and its Discontents” which famously describes technologically-enhanced humans as “prosthetic Gods”. “If you’ve got an artifical body part”, he said, “you’re an amputee. Like Orpheus, you’ve had your limbs ripped off.”

While I have read copious amounts on the linkages between photography and death, I hadn’t thought as much about similar connections with sound. Apparently, Alexander Graham Bell and his brother had a pact that whoever survived would build a machine to receive messages from the afterlife. Although his brother never called Alexander on the telephone, “the desire was there.” (Artist Laurent Montaron recently exhibited a piece dealing with the invention of the phonograph, which Edison famously suggested could be “a machine to record the last thoughts of the dying.”) He also described how middle-class parents at the turn of the century would record their children’s voices on a plate or roll. This was before penicillin, when child mortality was tragically high, and, he says, “the record plates themselves became crypts”. Citing Laurence Rickels’ text Aberrations of Mourning, he argues that although we may think of technology to record sound or vision as a defence against death, paradoxically “we end up building tombs”.

The talk touched on a number of other topics, including EVP, David Foster Wallace, Antigone, Burroughs, Quixote, Beckett, Nabokov, and some cutting and hilarious criticisms of the state of contemporary writing. I wish I could have taken McCarthy’s course on Catastrophe at the London Consortium. Failing that, I plan to keep the Brooklyn Public Library busy with inter-library loans for some time…