THE TIME SPIRAL AND IRREVERSIBILITY IN TOM MCCARTHY’S NOVELS

The article examines the work of the contemporary English writer Tom McCarthy in the framework of the original author’s concept of time and space. Based on observations about the consonance of McCarthy’s postmodern novels “Remainder” (2005), “C” (2010), and “Satin Island”(2015) and the entropy systems theory, as well as certain philosophical concepts of postmodernism (“Mobius strip”, ellipse, ruin), the conclusion is made about the conjugation of the personal and the cosmic. The cyclical nature of the plot episodes in McCarthy’s novels is associated with the idea of the character’s involvement in the processes of world disintegration and total irreversibility, being in a loop, in atemporal space, in the entropy funnel of time. The traumatized “Self” of the main character symbolizes the universal trauma of infinite non-anthropological time. McCarthy’s work significantly develops images, compositional and narrative tools, associated with non-linearity and fragmentation, which are characteristic for modernist and postmodernist writing (Joyce, Faulkner, Rob-Grillet, Pynchon). Cyclicity in McCarthy’s postmodern art is no longer associated with absolute mythological time and “everyday cyclic time” (Bakhtin), but with the “temporality of the accelerated cycle” (Baudrillard), with some loss, disintegration, “ellipse” (Derrida), with an endless spiral like a shell. The McCarthy’s cyclicity appears as a repetition, which cuts off the road to the future.