Tom McCarthy: Remainder

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is an ambitious, philosophically-informed novel about trauma, repetition, and inauthenticity. At the novel’s beginning, McCarthy’s unnamed narrator has just recovered from an enigmatic accident. He doesn’t remember the incident, which to him is “a blank: a white slate, a black hole,” though he admits it “involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits.” The narrator is unable to speak about the event, which left him severely injured and traumatized, because he didn’t actually experience it. In a clever move, McCarthy completely bans the event from being named within the narrative by adding legal motives for the narrator’s silence on the subject. In exchange for 8.5 million pounds, the narrator has signed a legal agreement not to speak publicly about “the nature and/or details of the accident.” In the period immediately following the accident, he had to relearn how to move by teaching his brain how to “reroute” the circuits that controlled his actions. He accomplished this task through a kind of Taylorization of movement: “Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them.” As a result, he lost all immediacy in his actions. “No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.” His movements are all copies of movements, copies that are perfected through repetition. However, he soon realizes that his movements have always been artificial, “secondhand,” that his being-in-the-world has never really been authentic. Watching the film Taxi Driver, he envies how De Niro “seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between. . . . He doesn’t have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand.” He adds, “It’s about just being. De Niro was just being; I can never do that now.” But a friend helps convince him that, largely because of the mass media, such inauthenticity is universal today, that everyone’s actions are secondhand, often self-aware, repetitions. He states, “I’d always been inauthentic. . . . I wasn’t unusual: I was more usual than most.” But when he has an epiphany at a friend’s party, he is led to embrace repetition as a way of becoming real. In the bathroom at his friend’s home he sees a crack in the wall that elicits from him elusive memories of a building that he can’t recall ever having been in. What he does know, however, is that “in these spaces, all my movements had been fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but natural. . . . They’d been real; I’d been real.” He immediately decides how he will use his legal settlement: “I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again.” He buys a building (named “Madlyn Mansions,” no subtle reference to Proust’s madeleine) and hires individuals (“re-enactors”) to live there and always be on call for “re-enactments” of his memories. This re-enactment leads to others, including the re-enactment of a murder on the street where it occurred. This series of re-enactments reaches its bloody peak when he attempts to make a re-enactment of a bank heist become real. The narrator, who is selfish and demanding, bursting out in rage when those he hires don’t perfectly follow his orders, is obsessed with small objective details (McCarthy’s appreciation of Robbe-Grillet is apparent at these moments, though McCarthy pushes the latter’s style towards a kind of bland realism). The novel’s title is reference to the “surplus matter” that persistently troubles the narrator. These “remainders” include the tiny splinter left in his leg after the accident, the smelly liver fat that accumulates in the building’s vents, the black grease from a subway ticket machine that gets on his fingers, and the flesh protruding from the wounds of a corpse. The narrator would like to carry out his re-enactments so perfectly that they leave no such traces, and he even starts to invest his fortune on the stock market in “logistics,” an industry aimed precisely at realizing the dream of seamlessly carried out operations. But he eventually realizes, “Everything must leave some kind of mark.” That is, “matter’s what makes us alive—the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world’s very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril.”