Tom McCarthy
speaker
238 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Tom McCarthy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Talk of disease, like the way you might see bodies and antibodies kind of fighting within cells.
I mean, so Dorothea is nothing but a cluster of relationality between the pools of, you know, patriarchal marriage and the inheritance system on the one hand and a kind of, you know, early modern feminism on the other between desire and duty.
between the various claims of ancient archives and modern art, which themselves are a kind of a cluster of relationality, etc., etc.
So, you know, there are no kind of discrete bodies.
Every body is like a kind of, is made up of shards and fragments of the other bodies, all pulling and pushing and orbiting each other like in some kind of orrery.
Absolutely.
We're part of a Spinozan web.
And I think, you know, you mentioned Joyce.
I mean, absolutely, I agree with you.
I think it's really interesting how this relationality works.
operates across every stratum of the novel, kind of horizontal, vertical.
So you get this almost kind of Joycean recursive structure where major themes in one strand are repeated as tiny motifs or details elsewhere in the kind of tapestry.
So for example, Cazorbon's grand but incomprehensible writing project
is reprised in this tiny kind of throwaway, unimportant scene where Fred is having a writing lesson.
But Caleb Garth says, what's the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?
It's just a little trivial threat, but it reprises, you know, which also reprises this vital plot strand around the status of this document, very important to the plot.
Featherstone's codicil to his will and whether that's going to be read or not.
And this is kind of reprised elsewhere by authorial kind of interpolations where Eliot meditates on, you know, when will writing ever be read?
Will a stone unturned after centuries reveal an ancient inscription?
Which Joyce exactly reprises in Ulysses in chapter three, by the way.
Showing 81–100 of 238 · page 5 of 12
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