Ten years ago, I wrote a review of Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature, in which the author applied the lens of Derridean/Freudian/Lacanian (etc) theory to Hergé’s famous cartoon character and came up with an extraordinary conclusion. At the time, while praising the usefulness and justice of McCarthy’s insights, I distanced myself somewhat, even airing the idea that the whole book was a kind of situationist gag.
We now know a lot more about McCarthy, and also that his book on Tintin was no gag. A few years later, McCarthy was patted on the head by the literary establishment when his 2010 novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize; but his whoop of delight when Howard Jacobson won was sincere. Winning such a prize would have posed a problem for someone who prefers to operate on the periphery, with a roguish, anarchic twinkle in his eye, and a twist in the smile that can be mistaken for a smirk.
So to this collection of essays. The astute will have worked out already that anyone wishing to be enlightened about typewriters, bombs or jellyfish will be disappointed (although they will learn, in a piece about Kathy Acker, that there are two collective nouns for jellyfish: bloom and smack). They are mentioned only in passing: the typewriter appears as scattered wreckage thrown from a moving car in Ed Ruscha’s 1967 art book Royal Road Test; bombs come up in a discussion of Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre; and jellyfish appear in the introduction (he describes the essays themselves as jellyfish), the piece on Acker and also in “Get Real”, from a Freudian metaphor for the unconscious.
McCarthy’s heart lies in the avant-garde project, or, more accurately, in the modernist projects of Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, whose roots can be found in Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet and Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, both works that in seeming to eschew traditional realism turn out to be a lot closer to reality than more conventional narratives. McCarthy addresses this last point at length in the essay “Get Real”; in others he writes about Robbe-Grillet (in particular, his novel Jealousy, in which the details of an affair occur on the margins of a description of a banana plantation), or Ulysses and Tristram Shandy themselves.
I would particularly recommend the last two essays to those who might be suspicious of McCarthy’s very un-Anglo-Saxon agenda. They are masterpieces of exegesis and interpretation that will expand anyone’s understanding of those two great genre-bending works. “Why Ulysses Matters” addresses not only the novel’s place in Joyce’s oeuvre as part of a continuum between Dubliners and Finnegans Wake, but also its meditations on and connections between the body’s excreta, money and literature. “Tristram Shandy” is the best précis conceivable of a novel that deliberately defies paraphrase. “Error is everywhere in Tristram Shandy,” McCarthy writes. “It’s the most glitch-ridden book imaginable – it’s all glitch.”
McCarthy can transmit extremely complex ideas in straightforward and clear prose, as if he has filtered the sometimes muddy works of the (mainly) French theorists he admires into something pure and nourishing – even to the conventional palate. He is one of the few writers who not only illuminates his subject matter but also takes our understanding down new paths. There is an enormously wide frame of reference here, from Aristotle to MC Hammer, and it never feels forced. I am proud that the valedictory appearance of this weekly column is devoted to this book.
• Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays is published by NYRB. To order a copy for £10.19 (RRP £11.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
