Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“It shall be argued that this selfhood is made manifest in the form of ritualised repetition, which is a stronger version of the repetition of any signification practice. The concept of the ritual will be further defined and specified below, but even a rather plain explanation secures its relevance for Remainder . The OED stipulates that ritual is “[a] ritual act or ceremonial observance” but “[a]lso in later use: an action or series of actions regularly or habitually repeated” ( OED Online S.v.: “Ritual”). As we shall see, both of these wordings fit the re-enactments displayed in McCarthy’s novel. Ritual makes manifest the identity of the protagonist over and against the sacred object of the ritual that is present in its absence. The argument below will first explain and establish the relevance of the generative anthropologist Eric Gans’s primary and secondary hypotheses, and then go on to claim that the narrator’s re-enactments may be regarded as rituals in which the sacred as absence attracts and provokes the protagonist to the degree that he feels an urge to reify it. That reification is then argued to be fatal in that it leads to the collapse of representation and thereby the move symbolically obliterates the foundation of human culture. This trajectory is mirrored in the protagonist’s obsession throughout the narrative. Eric Gans’s theory about the originary scene of representation is attractive in its minimalist precision.”

— Eric Gans, The Phenomenology of Representation, Ritual, and the Sacred in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder · Spring 2017 · Anthropoetics