Tom McCarthy talks to Lee Rourke about C

Tom McCarthy on his novel C: "There's that Kraftwerk song, "I am the receiver and you are the transmitter", or however it goes. One way of thinking about art, or the novel, is that the writer is the transmitter, the originator: I have something to say about the world and I'm going to transmit it. But this isn't how I see it, I see it as exactly the inverse: the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there. The task of the writer is to filter it, to sample it and remix it – not in some random way, but conscientiously and attentively. This is what Heidegger says about poets: to be a poet is to listen before speaking; it's first and foremost a listening and not a speaking. Kafka said it as well: "I write in order to affirm and reaffirm that I have absolutely nothing to say." Writing, or art, is not about having something to say; it's about aspiring to a heightened state of hearing. It's why C is a totally acoustic novel and a receptive novel. The hero, Serge, sits there for hours trawling the aether waves, absorbing, listening to ship-to-shore transmissions, stock market prices, sports results, writing them all down. In a way, if you could see Serge's transcript it would probably read like an Ezra Pound canto." [More...]