Tom McCarthy and the Secret of New Modern Fiction

Tom McCarthy is an English writer and artist and a leading figure within contemporary British culture. He has published three novels and an extended essay on literary criticism, all of them well received by both public and critics. He is also the general secretary of a “semi-fictitious” avant-garde movement, the “International Necronautical Society” (INS). Numerous articles have been written on him and his work, and many authoritative figures in the British literary world have argued that he is one of the best contemporary British writers and that he represents one possible path for the future of the novel in Britain. Nevertheless, other critics tend to place McCarthy in the literary fields of modernism or post-modernism and confine his work to a past literary context. This dissertation aims to demonstrate that McCarthy’s fiction actually constitutes a brand new contribution within contemporary British literature and that its innovative import is directly linked to his modernist influences. In order to show this, it is necessary to outline the figure of both the writer and the artist and detect the revolutionary aspects of his literary ideas, which will then be reconsidered in the context of an analysis of McCarthy’s main works.

The first chapter aims to detect the main points in McCarthy’s thought, giving some biographical highlights, then analysing his work for the “International Necronautical Society” and finally giving an account of his artistic ideas and output.
The second step will involve McCarthy’s conception of literature as expressed in numerous articles and essays, but most of all in his critical study Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006).
This will be followed by an examination of the impact of modernist and post-modernist ideas and principles on McCarthy’s work. Each one of the last three chapters analyses the main themes and narrative techniques of McCarthy’s three published novels, respectively: Remainder (2005), Men in Space (2007) and C (2010). This analysis will be also comparative, so it will show the main analogies and differences between the three novels.
An interview with the author himself is attached as an appendix to this dissertation. All the analysed aspects of McCarthy’s thought involve a new interpretation of particular modernist and post-modernist values, which are represented in his novels and generate what can be called a “new modern fiction”.