Tom McCarthy: Kafka for the Google Age
The Oxford Kafka Research Centre is delighted to welcome twice Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist and artist Tom McCarthy for an evening of conversation and reading hosted by Ian Ellison as part of the AHRC-funded Kafka’s Transformative Communities project and introduced by Peter Boxall, Goldsmith’s Professor of English at Oxford.
Attendance is free, but please register in advance so that we can keep track of numbers.
Online booking: Tom McCarthy: Kafka for the Google Age
In-person booking: link coming soon!
Described by the Daily Telegraph as “a Kafka for the Google age”, McCarthy has returned throughout his fiction and criticism to strikingly Kafka-esque questions of bureaucratic systems, technological networks, and corporate machinery organising modern life while quietly entrapping, alienating and observing individuals moving through them. In his writing on Kafka, McCarthy has described a world where technology and writing are intimately entangled: machines that transmit, record, and inscribe promise access to hidden systems even as they withhold their meaning.
This conversation will explore Kafka’s influence on McCarthy’s fiction and thought, and range across some of the questions that have preoccupied his work: what realism can mean in an age saturated by mediation; whether literature reflects reality or actively produces it; and what happens when systems of representation encounter something they cannot fully absorb. In his essay “Writing Machines: On Realism and the Real”, McCarthy argues that realism is itself an artificial literary convention rather than a transparent window onto the world, taking up J. G. Ballard’s proposition that the writer’s task is not simply to discover reality but to invent it. For McCarthy, “the real” emerges most forcefully at moments of rupture, trauma, and catastrophe, where structures through which we make meaning begin to break down. These concerns run directly into McCarthy’s fascination with writing machines, signals, networks, and noise. From Kafka’s telephones, offices, and inscrutable mechanisms to the communications systems of the present, literature becomes less the expression of an autonomous self than a field of transmissions passing through technological and cultural networks. As McCarthy has put it elsewhere, what we encounter in a novel today may be “not selves, but networks”.
McCarthy will also read from and discuss his new novel, The Rhyl Poster. Entrusted with drafting an epochal legal ruling, its protagonist Benjamin Stanton, a decorated Gulf War veteran and star legal theorist in Europe’s highest court, instead begins work on a vast, sprawling “confession” composed of patterns, markings and encoded revelations, a text capable of undoing the world he and those around him have constructed. Hallucinatory and unsettling, The Rhyl Poster brings together law, war, drugs, guilt, information and revelation in a landscape where systems proliferate, meanings loop and recur, and catastrophe is always waiting beneath the surface.
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Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His novels C and Satin Island were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. He is also the author of Remainder, Men in Space, and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin, in a house formerly occupied by Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was twice engaged.
Ian Ellison is Departmental Lecturer and Tutor in German at Jesus College in the University of Oxford, where he was formerly the postdoctoral research associate on the AHRC-funded Kafka’s Transformative Communities Project and a Visiting Fellow at Wadham College. He is the author of Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium and his next book The Trial: Biography of a Novel is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.
