Press - Interview with Zinovy Zinik, novelist and BBC Russian Service Broadcaster   Zinovy Zinik in Conversation with Tom McCarthy Mediator: Oliver Ready   The International Necronautical Society was launched in 1999 with a manifesto distributed at a London art fair. Since then it has enjoyed an ambivalent existence, drawing from the worlds of literature, art, philosophy and journalism but situating itself in none of these, attracting a mixture of attention and bewilderment. In March and April this year the society was appointed 'artist in residence' at London's Austrian Cultural Institute, and turned the gallery into an office in which their General Secretary, Tom McCarthy, received and interviewed some of Europe's leading cultural figures. The novelist Zinovy Zinik interviewed McCarthy shortly after the residency ended.   Zinik: What made you think about this subject? Has someone died recently in your family or among your friends?   McCarthy: Not at all. My background is in literature, and the project grew out of a consideration of the way that death functions in literature and particularly in tragedy. To take an example, in Antigone the whole of the political landscape is configured around death and the rites of burial. This runs all the way through to Beckett, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner.   Zinik: Do you think that our time is particularly obsessed with death rather than life - in literature, I mean?   McCarthy: In literature I would say that this is a perennial concern. Recently you've had Norman Mailer's and William Burroughs' reworkings of The Book of the Dead. Will Self, who I interviewed as part of this project last week, recently published his novel How the Dead Live. But this is a perennial concern.   Zinik: But Victorian writers like Dickens weren't wallowing in the notion of death. They would use it as a device to end the life of a finished, developed character, while in the 20th century something else is happening.   McCarthy: Great Expectations starts with a meditation on the identity of things. Let us recall where that takes place - in a graveyard. Pip's whole sense of himself comes through looking at the graves of everyone else: I am I because I am not dead.   Zinik: Since when do you think people started to regard life as a form of death?   McCarthy: Throughout literature and culture, the two are entwined in a very complex relationship. In philosophy, if you look at the work of Hegel, death is completely instrumental to the possibility of cognition: to think is to kill the things you think about. But there is a tension within that very process of cognition because death is resistant to the order of representation.   Zinik: But this view of life as a form of death is modern rather than classical, isn't it?   McCarthy: That's true. You see the greatest example of this in The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot where he writes of all the commuters going into work, 'I had not thought death had undone so many'. They're all dead in life. That line comes from Dante, but it's re-housed in a modern context. Industrialization and death are very closely linked.   Zinik: Why? Why this pessimism?   McCarthy: I don't know if pessimism is the right word. If we look to philosophy again, that's a Schopenhaurian term. Nietzsche takes it and makes something much more complex, a sort of jubilant, transforming disposition which is very much based on death and on the death of God. But what's he talking about when he talks about the death of God? It's not just the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it's the death of all those norms and absolutes that people set above life in order to fix meaning to it. This was a point made by the philosopher Simon Critchley, who I also interviewed last week.   Zinik: We've now more or less described the scope of the whole project, rather than give an analysis of it. Why did you call your society the International Necronautical Society? What were your basic ideas when you set up the project?   McCarthy: A few years ago I became interested in the art manifesto as a form. This is a dead media form par excellence whose era was in the early 20th century. I looked at the Surrealist manifesto, which isn't that interesting. But the Futurist one - bingo! It's aggressive, it's bombastic, it's absurd, extreme, violent, humorous. So I wrote a manifesto of Necronautism which was quite closely modelled on the Futurist one, and distributed it. Interestingly, it's been the art world that's hosted the various incarnations of the society. The first one was in the Lux Gallery. I appointed a committee and we had a set of depositions and hearings and reports. It was a half-corporate set-up and half-Soviet, like a second deposition to the third subcommittee of the fourth Soviet, with all the committee behind desks and using microphones. This latest incarnation was a two-week project in an office at the Austrian Cultural Institute art gallery.   Zinik: Is it accidental that Austria, with its history of collaboration with Nazism, decided to provide you with this space, this deadly space?   McCarthy: I'm very happy that it happened there. It's a very, very relevant place to do it. There's a back-history here. When the neo-fascists came into government in Austria last year, the Jewish art curator at the institute wasn't sure what to do: should he resign? Should he find a new place? Then he decided he wanted to bring in artists and groups that would engage with these issues, rather than running away from them.   Zinik: So what does the term Necronautism imply?   McCarthy: Necronautism means travelling into death. The manifesto declares that death is a type of space which we intend to map, enter, colonize and eventually inhabit. It declares that there is no beauty without death, that we shall sing death's beauty, ie. beauty, and that our ultimate goal will be the construction of a craft (which could be a vehicle or a set of practices) to convey us into death in such a way that we could at least persist. People ask us: is it a metaphor? Is it irony? Or is it art? Lots of people thought the office was an installation piece. I was very adamant that this is not an art project; I'm not an artist. It's not a clever, ironic joke. The office functioned as an office: I had a secretary who answered phones and made coffee while I interviewed various consultants.   Zinik: Could you give the most memorable examples of the connoisseurs you've interviewed?   McCarthy: They were all very memorable. I've conducted 17 interviews over this two-week period with writers, philosophers, artists, dancers, all of whose work resonated in some way with our themes and concerns. These are all currently being transcribed for the INS archive. Some of these people addressed death directly, many didn't. Take the two dancers, a group called Momentary Fusion - they're aerial dancers who always work off the ground. They'll spend months working in whatever space they're in, cloisters or old factories, climbing around it and hanging suspended, mapping it, mentally, codifying it into gestures they'll make. I interviewed them because we wanted to learn about mapping and inhabiting unusual spaces, as this is a central manifesto commitment.   Zinik: Did you find common ground in these interviews?   McCarthy: Very much so. In terms of reference points, it was amazing how many came up time and again, like Moby Dick, Ovid, the Holocaust. Beyond that, certain strategies repeated themselves: lots of the artists had arrived at their art forms, often very hybrid ones, through a dissatisfaction with more established ones - just like our organization.   Zinik: Among your guests was the prominent soi-disant hater of British life, Will Self. What did he have to say?   McCarthy: The session with Self was fascinating in the most unexpected way. He came to talk about his work, which he did in a formal way for twenty minutes. Then, when one of my committee members, the novelist Jim Flint who is the INS data engineer, started questioning him about the rather easy opposition that Self was making between Western closure and Eastern forms of openness, Self got extremely insecure and started insulting him. Self's position was that most of the other people in the room had bought some Western consumerist lie whereas his own pseudo-Eastern position was an enlightened one that had moved out of this opposition - it didn't really fly. But in his attack on Flint Self started enacting a sort of relation to death that was perhaps elevated into the social sphere, a creative or intellectual void carried into society by certain artists.   Zinik: Let's talk about this as writers. Shouldn't we all, as writers, welcome death?   McCarthy: Absolutely. I think it's impossible to think of writing without thinking about death. The one writer who has best articulated this is Maurice Blanchot. He sees literature and death as being completely inextricable, and the figure who most represents this for him is the poet Orpheus who, in descending to the underworld to get his wife Eurydice back, is not actually interested in recovering Eurydice but in beholding death, the other night, the night whose face is always turned away. He can only operate as a poet by failing to bring Eurydice back. The success of his poetry is due to a certain failure.   continues...   [Top]