Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays by Tom McCarthy (review)

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays collects literary essays from the contemporary novelist Tom McCarthy written between 2002 and 2016. Just to state the obvious, McCarthy is #TeamJoyce. He has given papers at James Joyce conferences, and Joyce plays a prominent role in several of the inclusions in this highly engaging book. The items identified in the title—typewriters, bombs, and jellyfish—are totems for the book. They are also some of the things McCarthy finds interesting besides Joyce: the three items, wordplay, media theory, and bumper cars (known to Brits as dodgems as a footnote helpfully clarifies—203). Before engaging in his take on Joyce or any of the other names on his reading list, it is worth noting the shift in emphasis from persons to things flagged by the title—smashed writing machines, heavy ordinance, and rampant invertebrate lifeforms. McCarthy is on the side of the matter that matters, for better or worse, to borrow a slogan from the International Necronautical Society, the quasi-parodic, avant-garde initiative he helped to found.¹

Some other things that are evergreen for McCarthy include Ulysses; Finnegans Wake—all of Joyce, really, who "writes better than anyone else" (23)—Joseph Conrad; Franz Kafka; visual artists like On Kawara and Edward Ruscha; Kim Gordon from the band Sonic Youth; The Waste Land; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Watchmen (the graphic novel by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins); and e-flux—a "publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise" founded around the time McCarthy began his literary career—an expanded understanding of modernism's multiple legacies.² The description of e-flux—a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise—could be an effective way to describe McCarthy's ideal concept of an author's function, if not to say the author-function, in Michel Foucault's sense.³

Dodgem cars, Joyce, Ruscha, e-flux, and other elementary particles collide in these essays, and McCarthy hovers over them all like an expert dodgem conductor, the uncanny intermediary-functionary-attendant whose job it is to keep the traffic moving, unstick the cars, and "ensure that heaven's work is carried out uninterruptedly on earth, nudging things along, sorting out blockages" (205). "[T]he writer's task is to record events in time; to bring into sharp focus the trajectories of human lives, both singularly and in all their crowded multiplicity," he writes, and he cites other author responsibilities:

the contingencies—be these of chance or design—of a hundred, or a thousand, or a million comings-together, transfers and leave-takings; to intuit and communicate their overall rhythm; and, beyond even that, to peer beneath their surface and reveal the fabric holding the whole thing together, unpick and reconstruct its very weft and warp.

(203-04)

Included in this consummate smash-up is a litany of a great many authors, thinkers, and artists. Their names provide an inventory of McCarthy's interests and a roll call of the expanded modernist influences and references that inform them. Careening through the traffic of bumper cars, flying typewriters, sloshing invertebrates, and what-have-you are Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett, J. G. Ballard, Joseph Beuys, Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs, Maurice Blanchot, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Gustave Flaubert, Donna Haraway, Martin Heidegger, Scott Lynch, Paul Klee, Friedrich Kittler, Stéphane Mallarmé, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, Conrad Richter, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Phillipe Toussaint, Alexander Trocchi, and… Zinedine Zidane. Do not let Zidane's presence in this pocket pantheon fool you; the French-Algerian footballer is not meant to signal banal populism but rather to signify a principle of pure negative genius, one that exemplifies the anti-identitarian inauthenticity of "[t]he fundamental situation of being mediated, being-in-media" (232). McCarthy finds this impulse of making-space and space-making in many of the interlocutors in this archive. And, to state the obvious...