Tom McCarthy’s severely ambitious first novel, Remainder, is one of those books that blurs the gap between philosophy, fiction, and art happening (see the novel’s Believer Book Award in this issue for accolades and description). His recent book-length essay, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, follows the same hybridized suit, deconstructing the Belgian comic book series, literary-theory style. It investigates Tintin creator Hergé’s process of “encrypting” autobiographical material into The Adventures of Tintin, and then compares it to Balzac, Barthes, Bataille, and Derrida. His next two novels, C and the partly autobiographical Men in Space, will be published by Vintage in 2009-10.

McCarthy is also the general secretary of something called the International Necronautical Society (INS), a nebulous project he founded as a nod to all the great manifesto-based, turn-of-the-century, avant-garde art movements. Since 1999, he’s accreted a network of artists and writers with the vague purpose of “mapping out” death. He has described it as “a construct, just like the IMF or Catholic Church are constructs—and like all constructs, it involves both fictions and realities.” The society revolves around essays, meetings, grand proclamations, and “half-corporate, half-Soviet” events with names like the Second First Committee Hearings. They have hacked into the BBC website, converting it into a secret message board; they have held an event called “The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity,” which is rumored to never have happened; and in the near future, they will install a black box transmitter into Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art.

This conversation was conducted in November, 2007, at the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, by Mark Alizart, the museum’s curator. No one brought a recording device, so the interview had to be held in the auditorium, using the stage microphones. Except for the recording technician, there was no audience.

—Mark Alizart

I. “ FREUD, IF HE WAS ONE THING ONLY, WAS A GREAT GOTHIC NOVELIST.”

THE BELIEVER: Your work is so obsessed, in its own way, with crypts. I mean to say, you have written many books already, novels, callings (or hearings, sorry), and an essay on Tintin, called Tintin and the Secret of Literature, in which you explain that there is a secret behind Tintin, which is linked to this question of mourning and crypts. You even play on the word. A crypt is a place where you bury your dead, but also, you will find it in the words encryption and decipher.

TOM McCARTHY: Well, cryptos means hidden, anything buried.

BLVR: So this is the turning point between the actual object, the crypt, and the structure of...