Through the Looking Glass

On Tom McCarthy's 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯

“Reality is not always probable, or likely…”
—Jorge Luis Borges—

There is, as the novelist Tom McCarthy once wrote, no digital year zero for literature. Even the most current books in the age of Twitter and TikTok are something of an alloyed entity, born between eras, culling from classical traditions as well as the modern lingo of social media, marrying the esoteric to the meme-able—a union that is as ancient as it is present-tense. The advent of encyclopedic literature (of modern western literature) dates not from Gaddis or John Barth, or Musil and his mammoth The Man Without Qualities, or Joyce and his epiphanies, or even Melville, Browne, Burton, but, McCarthy opines, Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian who, in the beginning of his Oresteia trilogy, gives us a night watchman, as restless as a dog, staring at the roiling sea before him when he notices a fire burning in the distance, a beacon, shivering in darkness, proclaiming the fall of Troy. Aeschylus subsequently lays out the “information grid,” as McCarthy calls it. The assiduous detailing of minutiae, of the systems and the mechanisms that keep us in perpetual motion—or, perhaps, perpetual stasis—begins here, before any maundering through Dublin, before the skies were striated with screamings. Pynchon said it is all theater now. But the thing is, it always has been.

It’s an old story made new through recrudescence. People live in patterns, and everyone living in an information grid—that is to say, just about everyone—is, as McCarthy writes in his 2005 novel Remainder, always putting on a performance. Ours is a reality refracted through consciousness, a sequence of thoughts that, collectively and on their own, may seem absurd, but which present us as we really are. “Reality,” McCarthy once wrote for the London Review of Books, “isn’t there yet; it has to be brought forth or produced; and this is the duty and stake of writing.” He goes on: “Realism is a literary convention—no more, no less—and is therefore as laden with artifice as any other literary convention.” McCarthy, a realist in the Oulipo sense, has the astute observational skill of Georges Perec, on display in Remainder when our bored narrator, trying to regain (recreate) his humanity, watches gel-haired clubbers and the homeless swaddled in sleeping bags traipse about outside a coffee shop window, as well as in 2015’s Satin Island when that novel’s central character, the enigmatically named U., watches people in an airport and talks in micro-essay musings about the nature of watching—of whether a voyeur, or an anthropologist, can even observe anything without interrupting and influencing.

As McCarthy said, “Yeah I suppose almost all my work is to some extent a meditation on what it means to write and on the possibility or indeed the impossibility of writing within the contemporary moment.” To write is to look backwards, to see the past gleaming in the rearview mirror.

In The Making of Incarnation, McCarthy’s newest novel, things repeat, are reflected back at themselves so they form an endless hall of funhouse mirrors. Consider the chapter early on in which a young boy named Markie watches himself on replay on a security monitor in a museum after disturbing a painting. He observes his past on black-and-white splotchy videotape, watching something else gaze at him, seeing himself literally through a different lens. He is troubled and yet enticed by the image. Later, people will appear on a different kind of screen, hired lovers copulating for a study, with nipple-like sensors stuck all over them so their movements can be recorded by the technicians. It brings to mind DeLillo’s most photographed barn in America in White Noise, or Plato positing that simulacrum is a false or “corrupt” copy. To live in modernity is to live on innumerable screens, to be ogled by innumerable eyes that see more clearly than real eyes do. The past survives as a digital file.

Remainder’s narrator is compelled, beyond reason, by a sense of déjà vu, that ache of something twice seen, a malady that also appears in a chapter of The Making of Incarnation when a woman named Dean experiences “not the vague type” of déjà vu, but the “sharp, precise and instantly identifiable...” sort. It’s a photograph that stokes the sensation—an image, taken in the 1950s, showing seven “executive types” seated at three long tables set up in a U-shape. Photographs, cameras, sensors, the concept of people as performers, people who are living in a contrived scenario, images of images, gaze upon gaze. Discussing the Harlem Renaissance in an early chapter, McCarthy writes, “...a downtown Broadway maestro gets inquisitive, or brave, and ventures north of 120th Street; and his eyes jump from their sockets; and before you know it, the sequences have been incorporated in some musicals—whose producers copyright it. This pattern will continue in the entertainment world for decades…” People pilfering from others, a pattern of artistic plundering and repetition—nothing is original, and nothing is safe once it’s been viewed.

Like McCarthy’s previous novels, The Making of Incarnation defies elevator-pitch concision. Plotless (or, rather, replete with a number of semi-plots that don’t really have a final destination, in addition to countless characters who may or may not ever meet, like in Joseph McElroy’s crazy colossus Women and Men), the book sprawls with precision, careful yet not calculated, particular yet not persnickety. McCarthy isn’t interested in finished products; he’s interested in the processes that get us there. The book is, as so many great tomes are (think of McCarthy’s own C.), concerned with the interconnectedness of inherently inchoate lives—with communication, with movement and its manifestations, with all that bewitches us, with the role of technology and corporations in modern life, with the inability to ever really understand anything to a satisfactory degree. (“Things are connected to other things, which are connected to other things,” a character notes near the beginning of the novel.)

Whereas Satin Island is a slender yet densely-packed book, The Making of Incarnation is closer to being one of those massive encyclopedic novels replete with marginal and subsidiary musings on whatever. It includes, among many other oddities, a chapter positing the “10 Commandments of Depicting Space Travel in Movies,” which evolves into a lesson in positrons and electrons and kaons; another chapter is written almost entirely in computer/engineering jargon; and yet another is a prolonged lecture on copyrighting dance moves. (All of this in the first quarter of the novel.) McCarthy’s books have a sense of the absurd to them, a preoccupation with the ridiculousness of reality. The hyper-specificity and relentless details create not a sense of realism but surrealism, a Borges kind of thing. As with Satin Island and the man whose parachute fails, McCarthy can take any situation and make it blossom into a gallivanting meditation. With his dexterity of digression and punctiliousness of prose, his is a modernist sorta mode.

McCarthy doesn’t get enough credit for the deftness of his wordplay. To this end, The Making of Incarnation is McCarthy’s most elegant effort, the most demanding of our attention, with observations and details and meditations penned in elusive yet exact third-person. The attention to detail in some of the more puerile bits of humor (like, for instance, a girl puking on the school bus because she ate Pop Rocks candy, a very specific kind of useless fact) are redolent of Pynchon at his most playful, as is the fascination with machineries, systems, narrative machinations, and a sense of irreverence. In earlier books, McCarthy used language that is not quite obstructive as much as it is purposefully, precisely vague, e.g. this sentence from Remainder about a phone yanked from the wall: “It looked kind of disgusting, like something that’s come out of something.” Here he crafts a construction of obstructions, in a story about a character who does literal loops in the air by the end. Consider this sentence, pulled at random from Incarnation: “Below this towering monster, strewn about its feet like strips of food or half-spawned offspring, lie a series of long, flat hangars.” He has attained a more poetic kind of prose, his writing precise and fleeting. Another example: “High above them, from atop the Tate’s stone porcio, armed with flag and trident and flanked by her lion and unicorn, Britannia stares down like a disapproving headmistress.”

If Remainder flew right by because the language was compelled into dauntless forward motion (though its character creates for himself a life based on a pattern of perpetual repetition), then The Making of Incarnation is a much slower read, more byzantine, a work that knows it’s an opus. McCarthy still embeds all kinds of information into the text, like stitches holding together a quilt, but his prose here is more specific than Remainder, more verbose than Satin Island, the words swirling around and around some detour or deviation that proves just as ancillary as whatever point was begun and belatedly made, if indeed there even is a point. (And who says we need a point? Or a plot? Or any of the usual trappings of a novel?) From the perspective of a character named Dean, who is watching a factory of women distress hair brushes so that they can double as clothing brushes, McCarthy writes, “Phantom images, sediment left in Dean’s mind by childhood bookshelves full of harems, handmaidens and vestals, hover about the picture, transforming these drag factory girls into ladies-in-waiting tending to an empress, combing and re-combing untwined tresses, chaste and decorous through afternoons in the royal bedchamber, an enclave closed off from the world of men, of time, soft music drifting in from neighbouring rooms, from halls and ballrooms, foyers, cabinets, saloons…” That’s a longer, more serpentine sentence than we’ve seen from McCarthy before; a visual artist as well as a writer, he here conjures a cinematic image, all the meandering akin to a Steadicam shot that tracks past people and objects for a brief moment before moving on, toward some unhinted terminus. There are sundry sentences that wrap and wind and toss factoids and hyper-specific observations. It’s exhilarating, and sometimes exhausting.

Talking about Satin Island, McCarthy said, “I think the question of being human is ultimately a literary question, in the sense that it’s about fiction and certain processes of representation; the way we represent ourselves to ourselves and to others, the way that identity is formed around certain narratives, metaphors, symbolic operations.” He goes on: “The radical proposition Freud is making is that people are writing machines. We are surfaces on which things are written, which then themselves write, and repeat, and mutate, and this is an incredibly poetic process. I think to be human is to be subject to, or even a manifestation of, a certain type of scriptural technology. To be a space of traces and translations.” Though McCarthy is known for the philosophical bent of his work and his fascination with the gears that grind us down all day, every day, The Making of Incarnation taps into something more emotional, more human. Humanity’s ridiculousness can only be accurately measured by a breathing, feeling entity. Take, for instance, the opening of the novel, in which McCarthy writes especially well about children, a skill perhaps culled from his adoration for Tintin. A scene of two boys gawking at girls’ legs includes a little jingle:

Toreador on guard now,
Toreador! Toreador!
Mind well that when in danger thou shalt be,
Fond eyes gaze and adore,
And true love waits for thee,
Toreador,
And true love waits for thee!

In an interview with Frederic Tuten (another fervent fan of Tintin), McCarthy expounded on his idea of what a novel can do, using his beloved James Joyce as an example: “For me, Joyce is more than just a good, or great, writer; his writing is a seismic event that totally reshapes the landscape of literary possibility. It is to the late-modern period what Shakespeare is to the earlymodern: a ‘togethergush of stillandbutallyouknow’ (to quote the Wake) in which language and subjectivity are radically and irreversibly meshed with communication technology, postcolonial politics, new global cartographies—all these systems whose emergence we’re still, falteringly, coming to terms with now. Just as it took a century or more to work through Shakespeare (if, in fact, we ever stopped), so the Wake provides a set of codices and templates whose unraveling might map not only the field of literature’s potentiality and scope, but also that of our whole digital (or whatever you want to call it) era.”

Again, it comes down to an amalgamation of the old and the new, using classic kinds of experimentation to say something about modern society. Much as Joyce mashes together words to make ridiculous portmanteaus, McCarthy collates observations about modernity into one ridiculous thing. In Satin Island, U. is tasked by his corporate boss to create what they call the Great Report, an attempt at cataloguing and analyzing—well, everything. He looks at people and meditates on his own place within the innumerable systems about which he must write. It is, of course, an exhaustive endeavor, but it inspires so many observations—on language, on society and its various subcultures. U. is, he comes to realize, a redundant figure in a world where everything is saved on phones, on computers, in clouds. He looks only because it is his job, making him something of a corporate-funded flaneur. “We are all “suspended,” he says, “between two types of meaninglessness.” Which is to say, we are cut off from something—from everything. The characters of The Making of Incarnation all suffer some kind of loneliness, and the novel they inhabit is itself cut off from what is currently trendy in mainstream fiction (brevity; a conversational, agreeable tone; a certain kind of wokeness). McCarthy is not a trendy writer; he has no time for whatever’s in vogue. His is an old-fashioned form of experimentation, a present-day riff on Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Hergé, Michel de Certeau, Sterne, J. G. Ballard, Heidegger. As McCarthy, talking to Tuten, said, “…I think the novel is and always has been dead, and this is the very precondition of its perpetual regeneration.”

The novel, the living dead, lumbering forward, like a horror movie monster, never to be stopped.