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aths an originally un original event becoming even more un original and hence even more fascinating mccarthy has maintained the ins alongside long term collaborator philosopher simon critchley who published his own debut novel memory theatre last year the ins is commissioned for installations and presentations at galleries around the world and the two have on occasion sent actors in their places mccarthy won an inaugural 2013 windham campbell literature prize awarded by yale that appears to be for real a new novel from tom mccarthy is certainly an event it might not send ripples backwards and forwards through the continuum of history in the way that the event as theorised by alain badiou does but it does register with newsnight satin island is narrated by u a corporate anthropologist working for a company that is engaged at the bleeding edge of the contemporary u made his name by going native in the club culture of the 1990s this is a very pleasing detail there were ethnographers who did just that recognising the tribal nature of a culture that rapidly factionalised jungle drum n bass intelligent drum n bass techstep hardstep drill n bass droll n bass and evidenced ritualistic behaviour in its use of holy sacraments and gatherings of mass communion it happened it doesn t seem real in fact it seems like a parody of something that might have happened like so much that is actual today but it did happen it was real it left documents u is attempting to write a report his brief is broad the contemporary he follows his obsessions like the narrator of remainder he researches the deaths of parachutists whose chutes have failed to open the ins researched the deaths of surfers in shark attacks he relates anecdotes from a canonical work of french structural anthropology claude lévi strauss s tristes tropiques he has a girlfriend called madison with whom he has sex a colleague called daniel who projects quasi anthropological films onto the walls of his office and a friend called petr who develops a cancerous growth and dies his boss is called peyman and he occasionally sounds like bruno latour insisting that objects are systems of relations or maybe he sounds like paul rabinow who is name checked in the acknowledgements or any of a number of theorists i haven t read but perhaps you have peyman s name indicates that he fulfils the magical function of making the money appear in this sense this is mccarthy s second novel in the fantastic tradition in which he magics up the narrative cash to enable his protagonists to do what they want vanishing pecuniary concerns like this feels both terribly mundane and entirely radical they d simply get in the way of the business at hand and what is that well it s not characterisation if by that you assume characters who communicate to the reader the rich range of their emotions u doesn t feel a lot in fact he doesn t feel anything he thinks becomes obsessed with topics of thought loses interest in them and thinks some more events don t really connect with him petr s funeral registers only because it seems as if the presiding vicar has no idea who the deceased really was an experience that may well be familiar to readers who ve been to more than one funeral this is typical of a mccarthy protagonist c s serge was the same the things that do register are more difficult to pin down they re abstract but material taffy parachutes growths caoutchouc islands of waste lumps of matter in abstracted form i m tempted to think of these as unforms stuff that represents that which is beyond thought we might want to route direct to the ins s primary research area here these forms profoundly affect u i d stood rooted to the pavement in front of a candy store window in which taffy was being pulled transfixed by the contortions of the huge unmanageable lump what child could eat all that as the machine s arms plied it it s endless metamorphoses in which despite the regular repeating movements that stretched and folded stretched and slapped the taffy through the same shapes over and over again i knew even then that no part of it no molecule would ever occupy the same spot in the overall formation twice stylistically there is more that recognisably coheres with the first two novels than with c in which the author s native style was suppressed in the service of intensely cryptic signification there s an attitude that i want to call punk but is possibly more aptly post punk fizzing intelligent spiky and built on a kind of reconstructed groove he re animates theory making it sound dangerous and sexy again then defuses it with a throwaway y knowwaddamean this cataclysm levi strauss says is the true face of our culture the one that s turned away from us at least the order and the harmony of the west the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being cooked up demand the emission of masses of noxious by products what the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization s perimeter fence is no more than its effluvia its toxic fallout the first thing we see as we travel around the world is our own filth thrown into mankind s face the writing is sharp funny and while not perhaps as obscurely signifying as in c makes abstract ideas readily accessible this alone is no mean feat of authorship perhaps the greatest departure from the preceding works is that the philosophers and literary theorists who so inform mccarthy s project have now broken cover and are named and referenced in the text previously while mccarthy would delight in turning to barthes or blanchot in his interviews and essays and paid tribute to post structuralist literary criticism through his reading of herge in tintin and the secret of literature the novels have subsumed their theory sure it s there if you re so minded to see it but you can read them perfectly happily without it the open references to lacan et al in satin island are sure to be divisive broadly speaking literary fiction publishers have tended to be somewhat squeamish about the wacky french stuff that so dominated the eng lit academy in the eighties and early nineties the reading public even more so j g ballard perhaps the british novelist who shared the most intellectual territory with the enfants terrible across the channel put some distance between himself and baudrillard when critics compared them though that never quite rang true and sure enough dig a little deeper and you ll find ballard recommending baudrillard later in his career turns out you can t always take these novelists at their word kathy acker and stewart home were plagiarising marx and the situationists in the early nineties but they didn t enjoy the crossover success mccarthy has it can feel as if there s been something like a collective sigh of relief in literary publishing that the academy has since tended towards the new historicism that rose in the 1990s now we can get back to our ian fleming reboots and our life affirming tales of bien pensant liberal existence without having to ignore the elephant in the room this is evidently a reductive account of a complex field but for the most part so it has gone it will be fascinating to see how satin island s theoretical swagger is received there are a number of superb set piece scenes that lighten the texture of satin island two stand out in my mind in the first u describes an extended daydream in which he gives a rapturously received conference paper it s a bravura piece of comic writing almost classical in rhetorical construction that reminded me of jean phillipe toussaint s television another book about an academic struggling to write a book once that realisation took hold i thought this is his toussaint book but it wasn t long before i came to the next set piece when madison describes her torture at the hands of italian police following the 2001 g8 demonstrations in genoa this time i thought the atrocity exhibition it s ballard at other points you might think pynchon or delillo there s an obvious melville lift plentiful direct inter textual references to the likes of deleuze and indeed the author s own body of work the plane that causes delays at torino caselle airport is behaving erratically in airspace above london doubtlessly flying in a figure of eight holding pattern as at the end of remainder these intra corporal references come thick and fast in the final chapter giving a sense of satin island as a kind of summary report of the author s work to date this also prompts the broader realisation that we re always engaged in mccarthy s game of source spotting indeed he explicitly invites us to engage in this game in the acknowledgements satin island like all books contains hundreds of borrowings echoes re mixes and straight repetitions to list them all would take up as much space as the text itself the critical reader can entertain him or herself tracking some of them down if he or she is that way inclined so what does it mean to send readers to chase down these inter textual references is it a quintessentially post modernist move in the manner of alasdair gray s index of plagiarisms running as a sidebar to the epilogue of lanark are we to feel the rug pulled from under our feet to be drawn into undeniable realisation of the material object in our hands and its relation to other such material objects mccarthy has written recently in the london review of books about the relationships between the vexed convention of literary realism and various philosophical approaches to the real he s keenly aware of the mimetic limits of the novel form and just as interested in the limits of perception and reason when it comes to the extra textual real source spotting surely is a game but it is also an enactment of the broader concerns of the project and a model for a very contemporary relationship with texts back in the late sixties if you read cortzar or the atrocity exhibition you were probably in a minority those of us who grew in in the 80s with ian livingstone s fighting fantasy make your own adventure books had a presentiment of how things might play out albeit still anchored in the wood pulp based form we re all hypertext readers now madison s story leaps out as what we might think of following the master text for this section as a module she s being instructed to strike poses for a man according to signals he appears to be receiving from some kind of oscillator she follows commands and the operator achieves moments of transcendent aesthetic pleasure that he registers with non sexual moans and groans and eventually sobs he even begins to mimic her movements with his own madison thinks she can discern children s voices in amongst the tones emitted by the oscillator but when the machine comes to rest she realises that the children s voices are noises off coming from outside the room mccarthy s work is particularly focused on an informational reading of literature informed by the post structuralist canon but hybridised with media theory he wrote a short obituary piece for the lrb on the death of friedrich kittler expressing a genuine surprise and joy that kittler had recognised his work drawing on such informational thinking in this tableau we might see madison as the reader and the policeman as the novelist the reader reads both signal the sources and references drawn on by the novelist and noise her own field of reference and makes sense of the resulting melange the novelist attempts to manipulate his own signal making machine in contract with the reader and sometimes they strike a balance of form and communion it s all a stylised dance with a terrible absence at its origin in this instance the absence of a traumatic real that is merely suspended an electric shock from a cattle prod reading this chapter a story that might be providing a structural model of the reciprocal relationship between reader and author you experience a rush of revelation and then you realise that your revelation is just like one you read u experiencing some thirty pages previously you ve been manipulated into your eureka moment the rush fades just as u s did it s all bullshit and so on turtles all the way down this is of course just one possible reading of the tableau we could re arrange it so that the structure provides something else it s ambiguous a structure that invites interpretation in a text that provides too many answers another reviewer will surely examine a different passage and yield different results that s the game we re playing the dance on which we re being led break out your own moves spasmodic angular ian curtis twitches perhaps and you may yet see them mirrored back at you but so will the woman over there doing spins like she s at a northern soul all nighter and that guy lost in his classical ballet this is reader reception theory routed through informational redundancy the dance alone might be interesting it s certainly led with great skill but would it be enough there are of course those who don t like dancing to any tune but y know their loss a straight repetition of the nouveau roman or classic pynchon would not be as interesting as mccarthy s dictum claims and he knows it what makes mccarthy s work so exciting is that it does indeed push beyond the texts that it identifies as its sources unlike the academy mccarthy is plunging headlong back into deconstruction with the aim of emerging on the other side or perhaps bouncing back again how can you acknowledge the fallibility of language multiplicities of readings and reclaim the inauthenticity of literature within the body of literature itself right at the heart of the narrative there s a story from tristes tropiques about lévi strauss leaving a tribe he understands too well and landing at another he can t get any purchase on at all but maybe just maybe he reasons somewhere in between two extremes in between understanding so completely that an object s robbed of its allure on the one hand and on the other one not understanding anything at all there might be some ambiguous instances in which the balance is just right this is perhaps satin island s response develop the ambiguity incorporate the stuff the goo the warping and wefting residue the children s voices throw up so much noise surrounding the signal set up your own feedback loops and fields of distortion get the balance just right and we dance together to postpone the cattle prod satin island enacts its theory it s cunning it s terrific fun and it s very serious i felt like one of the vanuatans who so interest u pioneers of bungee jumping and productive mis interpreters of signal and noise i almost hit the ground but i bounced right back up invigorated by a mediated brush with the field of the contemporary and ready to jump again tagged satin island tom mccarthy dec 17 2014 leave a comment links tom mccarthy on realism a must read from mccarthy in the london review of books tagged alexander trocchi realism tom mccarthy older 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