‘Only Connect’: Textual Space as Coherer in Tom McCarthy’s C

Abstract

This paper deals with the way in which Tom McCarthy engages with the representation of flat landscapes in his recent novel C. Serge, the protagonist, sees the world from a plane, without perspective. Landscape turns into soundscape, the dissemination of sound and static, radio signals and telegraphic messages. The text itself becomes a switchboard, a patchwork of quotations and echoes, a crypt. Serge is, like the book itself, a coherer, a radio transmitter. Bearing in mind McCarthy’s experiments as an artist (the recreation of the Greenwich bombing, the Black Box project), we will study the enmeshing of motifs, paradigmatic repetition and variation, as a way of revisiting postmodern melancholy as a form of passage, but also technological death-drive.

Keywords

• crypting
• crypt
• blurring
• death drive
• Great War
• intertexts