The world is comprised of resonances. In one scene from Tom McCarthy’s novel C, characters discuss a theory that sound is never truly lost. The theory suggests that, like atoms, sounds never truly disappear but are simply reconfigured or dispersed beyond detection. They believe that, given advanced enough technology, we’d be able to hear every sound that ever transpired: every bomb in every war, the original performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, every whisper between lovers. All of human history could be decoded.
Oddly enough, I’d set aside a partially finished C for months before picking it up and then within a day or two, a non-fiction audiobook I’m reading referenced that same theory. The resonance transcended texts. The resonances, though, don’t end there. It occurrs to me that the precocious children of the novel who invent a kind of life-sized chess-like game on their school-for-the-deaf-slash-home have a very similar dynamic to Nabokovian characters like Ada and Van. More than anything, though, C reads as a reminder of Remainder, McCarthy’s first novel.
Even the most diligent of devotees will be unlikely to remember the premise of Remainder outlined in a review from 2021, so it is, in brief, this: a man wins a huge settlement following an accident that left him permanently disabled. He spends that wealth recreating moments he bore witness to with an increasingly insidious bent, “recreating” moments that hadn’t actually happened and leading towards a horrific conclusion of people and matter being disintegrated into nothingness.
C takes a different approach, largely focusing on auditory replication. Each phase of the novel, in some ways approaches the question from a slightly different angle. In the first section, for instance, the central characters, Serge and Sophia, live with their father, who runs a school for deaf children. He teaches the students to emulate sounds, well enough to perform plays that have some amusing misinterpretations and malapropisms. In the second part, Serge goes to war and works underground digging and following tunnels, many of which carry messages via wire to between locales. Eventually, Serge goes to a few seances where the medium interprets the spectral and speaks as someone deceased (well, sort of—more on that later) and ultimately works in Egypt as a dignitary of sorts amid spies acting like average people tracing etchings off of ancient monuments. At every stage, the novel explores the idea of replication and resonance.
In that respect, the novel is incredibly consistent and it is those existential, posthumanist simulacra and threads in McCarthy’s work that I find compelling. In terms of the narrative structure, I found the pacing to be much less consistent. At times, the novel seemed to drag on (like the war sections—yawn!) while others accelerated, sometimes straight past their most compelling elements. To draw an example from the less compelling war scenes, what does stand out is this idea of Serge not as an individual human but as something more transcendental—particularly becomes it seems to emerge concordantly with violence. In one scene, Serge is making love with a woman and he imagines himself being shot, “imagines the bullet piercing the jacket’s leather and travelling onwards through both the observer and Cecile, then, broken, down into a million particles, lodging in him not only harmlessly but also beneficially, as though he were both its and the other two’s final destinations, the natural conclusion of a process whose trajectory conjoined them all” (165). It’s moments like that I find so uncomfortable in McCarthy’s work; there’s a sense of bliss in being joined with everything else in the world, but it seems to come at the expense of visceral destruction—it would be worth revisiting Remainder in that respect, but the ending of C has a similar ethos: Serge becomes a container for all the threads of the world, a kind of convergence point between all the different lines and shapes and figures in his life. The tragedy, if it can be called that, is that Serge only feels that sense of unity as he succumbs to a fever that a medical professional deems unrecoverable. These passages are often compelling in their descriptive nature and their existential considerations. In another passage, Serge imagines his plane going down and the pleasure of burning to death and having his skin melt into the metal. McCarthy does not shy away from the potential of posthumanism to replace an unsatisfactory existence with an assemblage more mechanistic. McCarthy recounts the “hollow” men of war who are all “terrified of becoming carboneezay, flamers. [...] the ‘orange death’ that stalks them in the sky to catch up with them even on the ground: paraffin lamps have been replaced by electric bulbs inside the mess; even sparking up cigarettes causes the men to shudder as they flip the lighter’s lid shut with a kind of angry vehemence” (164). This terror impacts all the pilots, so prone to fiery deaths in World War I, but “Serge alone remains unharmed by the prospect of a fiery airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards, brain and connecting rod merging to form one, ultra-intelligent organ, his back quivering in pleasure as pumps and pistons plunge into it, heat and liver being spliced with valve and filter to create a whole new, streamlined mechanism” (164). The sense of transcendence is obvious and “Sometimes he dreams he’s growing wings and, waking up, prods at his breastbone, trying to discern an outward swelling in it; each rib feels like a strut. He shakes after flights just like the others, but he doesn’t mind: the vibrations make him feel alive” (164). There’s a gruesomeness to the posthumanizing process. The visuals in the passage are viscerally revolting, despite their existential potential of having an “ultra-intelligent organ” that is both man and machine.
There are at least two important caveats that I should acknowledge lest ye dismiss wholesale the idea of assemblage for fear of its destructive implications. One moment feels particularly resonant with the fantasy of fusing with the destroyed airplane but is played much differently. Serge picks up a woman and brings her back to his place. The narrator recounts that “during sex, her gasps have the same high and squeaky pitch as her voice during conversation, as though arousal, for her, were a heightened form of indignation. Kneeling behind her, he watches the flushes move from her neck down her spine and along her rib-lines” (262). While not without its painful tinge (her indignation), the change to the body is given a more positive spin. While earlier Serge described his spine and ribs being melded with burning steel, here the evocation of bones being filled with an animated flush emerge alongside sexual pleasure. At the same time, the flush is personified as though spreading through her body like an infection, as though her body is not fixed to her own identity or experience.
Earlier, the assemblage takes a more collective form. Serge finds himself fascinated by a jazz band because “they look like machine parts too, extensions of their instruments, the stoppers, valves and tubes. Their bodies twitch and quiver with eclectic agitation. So do the bodies of the dancers. One girl, gyrating with another, lets a shriek out: it’s a shriek of joy that manages to carry on its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal. The music carries signals too: Serge’s eyes glaze over as he tunes into them. There are several, gathering within the noise only to lose their shape again and slip away” (212). Each individual is reduced to its component parts—but notably not destroyed. Instead, there is an overtone of joyful celebration—and yet, “its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal”, as though even pleasure and suffering are inseparable experience. I’d also like to briefly identify that music carries signals, but only in the sense that I’ll return to the idea of signals and codes later.
As a character, Serge is less compelling as the novel progresses. The highlight was seeing his friendship develop with his sister and their tenuous alliances amidst a strain of secrets. The pair humanized one another—in the way that we might consider humanizing—in a way that gets lost over time as Serge becomes a kind of ‘central character figure’ drifting through the novel. Thematically, the move is consistent with the idea of his diffusion into space and function. When Serge develops an addiction to morphine, the drugs take over his body and he spends afternoons watching the setting merge together: “Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gore curls around his forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more than a stuffed dummy” (185). The emptiness at the core of Serge is a double-edged sword. It enhances the cerebral experience of the novel to see what unity between entities can look like: lichen in our lungs and whatnot. The downside is that, narratively speaking, I found it difficult to really find myself rooting for Serge as a character. His goals and passions recede so thoroughly into the landscape it’s almost as though he is a stuffed dummy out in the field. In the narrator’s own words, Serge lets the echo of words “echo from him as though he were some kind of sounding box, hollow and resonant” (189). It continues on to say that “The question of who ‘me’ is, or what time the ‘still’ refers to, is no longer irksome: the dispersed, exterior mi previously held captive by the air, carried within its grain and texture, has joined with the interior one, their union then expanding to become a general condition, until “me” is every name in history; all times have fused into a now” (189). The passage goes on with increasing elaborate strangeness, but ultimately it is a passage about the diffusion of the individual into a universal and the necessary erasure that involves. The moments that stand out for Serge are rooted in moments of choice or personal loss. His discovery of Sophia’s death is as shocking to us as it is to him. Another moment of significant choice and intrigue is the seance that I alluded to earlier. In brief, Serge discovers that the medium and her team are faking receiving messages from beyond the grave (as with Remainder — the simulacra is never completely satisfactory). They are using a secret set-up involving a radio transmitter and Serge decides to take over the method to expose their fraud, resulting in the distress of his girlfriend, who relied on the hope she received from receiving vague messages. I loved the tension of the scene, which came across as both comic and tragic. Seeing Serge make decisions was a reminder that he was more than just a vehicle for the plot, but also a character.
The novel, though, is most engaging in its broad conceptual strokes. I find it to be such a compelling puzzle to figure out McCarthy’s overall vision. His style fosters a sense of paranoia. In my Master’s, I looked at paranoid reading and, briefly, reparative reading. McCarthy is definitely rooted in the former camp. Remember earlier that the music seemed to be carrying secret signals. The novel fosters promotes and proliferates a sense of paranoid reading as Serge seeks out his drugs. He “learns other passwords too [....] by announcing himself favourable to liquorice, then purchasing either a flask of perfume or a box of sweetmeats. Serge is able to procure much more than he ostensibly requests; at an antique dealer’s out in Kensington, the code works the other way, one or other (sometimes both) of two Oriental objets d’art, calligraphic watercolours bearing (originally, at least, quite accidentally, Serge imagines) the likenesses of the Wester letters C and H, appearing in the window to indicate the availability of various stock. He starts seeing all of London’s surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors’ stalls and sandwich boards, snatches of conversations heard in passing, the arrangements of flowers on windowsills or clothes on washing lines” (211). Through Serge, McCarthy initiates us into a world of secret connections. It’s difficult to resist the allure of an interconnected web of secrets and codes. Moreover, Serge being able to recognize the symbols draws him into relationship with others: “he also comes to realise just how many of his fellow citizens are subject to the same vices as him. He picks up the tell-tale signals all over town [...] Sometimes a look passes between him and a chance companion on the bus, or in a queue, or someone brushed past in a doorway, a look of mutual recognition of the type that members of a secret sect might give each other” (211). McCarthy illuminates how the structure of a secret relies on its exclusivity and yet it has a force that draws people together. In this case, there’s also a parallel that the landscape bleeds into human behaviours and vice versa. Later on in the novel, one of Serge’s associates explains how half of the people in the region are spies and if they’re not spies they’re suspected of being spies, effectively making them part of the “whole maddening caboodle as if they had been” (265). The idea of authenticity is no longer relevant. People are cast into a post-factual role, which adds another layer to simulacra: one need not be the Thing in order to be the thing.
The process involves simultaneous creation and erasure, which McCarthy highlights in an Egyptian tomb. Serge gets excited at the number of scarabs with words and sequences of words carved into their undersides. Laura explains that the scarabs are “the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience” (290). She continues that “what’s engraved on them are spells to censor all these secrets, so they won’t come out at judgment and weigh down the heart” and Serge is amazed: “So the scarab withholds the vital information even as it records it? Even as it prints?” (290). It’s reminiscent of Derrida’s discussion of Plato’s pharmakon: writing is both the poison and the antidote, both memory and forgetting. We write to remember what we could otherwise forget. Carlisle, earlier in the novel, says that “Painting’s painting, writing writing. Never the twain. It’s all wrong, aesthetically speaking: all the depth and texture of a summer countryside steam-rollered into a flat page” (147). In typically strange fashion, Serge responds, “That’s what I like about it” (147). To return to the topic of spying, the cycle means that “if we appear to take something seriously, well, they take it seriously too” (265). After a specifically auditory-based malapropism, the character corrects the term for this effect from ‘feedback’ to ‘bleedback.’ (265). The messages come back “mutated but still recognisable” (265). To me, the statement reads as a statement on McCarthy’s work itself. C is a mutated but still recognisable Remainder. The same kinds of themes emerge in this strange pursuit of that which is more-than-authentic. This inversion is what makes the novel so compelling. Stylistically, I think writing in the present tense really works to McCarthy’s advantage: it gives a purported immediacy and truth to a narrative that is replete with insincerity. The whole thing reads as backwards, like in a scene where people are digging and “it occurs to Serge that, far from removing earth between them and the outside world, they’re adding it around them: digging themselves in, not out” (183). In that same scene, Serge reflects that he likes being in the tunnels because it’s the only chance for him to masturbate. There’s a kind of hedonism in solitude, which we can hold up against the destruction of interconnectedness.elsewhere in the book. Certainly, rereading Freud’s work on the death drive and Beyond the Pleasure Principle—-even Civilization and its Discontents—could certainly prove illuminating here.
There’s also a Kafkaesque resonance. In particular, Kafka’s story “The Burrow” stands out in that respect. In Kafka’s story, a burrowing animal feels itself safe in its burrow, but feels increasingly paranoid about being attacked. In turn, it digs more tunnels to increase its escape routes, but as it proliferates its exits, so too its entrances—and hence the number of potential trackers. McCarthy has a similar scene wherein Serge is fascinated by the tunnellers and moles listening to “netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermining the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it—until earth gave over to a molten core, or bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight” (167?).
The ending of the novel was also oddly resonant, as if a collage of moments. It could have been lifted from a version of Heart of Darkness from Kurtz’ perspective, but with a feverish “the horror! the horror!” twisted into “the ecstasy! the ecstasy!” In Serge’s descent, everything merges into a singularity. Meanwhile, the final passage of the book refers to the wake “etched out across the water’s surface; then it fades as well, although no one is there to see it go” (310). It’s hard not to see a parallel to The Great Gatsby where “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Here we have no boat, just the wake, the residue of an imitation, a mere suggestion of a boat. Moreover, there’s nobody even to see it. There’s a melancholic absence, partially mitigated by Serge’s sense of wholeness with the world.
Ultimately, C did not produce the same emotional impact on me as Remainder. I actually took a significant break from the book and struggled to pick it up again. Remainder made me feel much more personally invested because it tapped in so effectively to my sense of jouissance as well as visceral disgust at my lack of thoughtfulness. C explored similar ideas in all kinds of fun-house-mirror-ways, orbiting around ideas of interconnectedness and the transcendent. Yet, it felt less human, perhaps because it was less individualistic in nature.
This is a book that will linger with me. If nothing else, it’s certainly provocative.
Happy reading!
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