Recessional, or, the Time of the hammer -- Obsessed with buffering: questions to Tom McCarthy -- Something that is not nothing: Zürich seminar -- Editorial note.
Summary:
In this essay, based on a talk he gave in Zürich, award-winning British novelist Tom McCarthy unearths a pattern, a rationale that is working both in and against the canon of modern(ist) literature, of authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and William Faulkner. McCarthy tackles a specific obsession with time that haunts their works; a time that is marked by arrest, pause, suspension, interval, eternal moments, tool-downage, waiting. Recessional time, as it were. Time-out-of-time. this is precisely that time (or tense) of fiction that is central to Tom McCarthy's own writing. This essay is followed by a conversation with the author in which he discusses his own practice of writing.
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