British author Tom McCarthy’s new novel, C, will be published in August in England, and the following month in the U.S. But before that happens, McCarthy’s activities as the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society will be laid bare by Triple Canopy in Berlin—which the INS has declared “the World Capital of Death.” On July 29, as part of its Sender, Carrier, Receiver program, Triple Canopy will present inteligence related to the INS’s efforts to “map, enter, colonize, and eventually inhabit the space of death.” The INS’s activities have long been a concern of Triple Canopy: In the first issue of the magazine Peter Schwenger’s "The State of Inauthenticity" investigated the INS’s “Statement on Inauthenticity,” and ultimately revealed the New York presentation of that document to be a reenactment of an event that probably never occurred. (Sources suggest that Schwenger’s claim inspired the INS to replace its members with actors in future reenactments.)
McCarthy recently wrote the script of Johan Grimonprez’s film Double Take, which is largely composed of archival footage dealing with Cold War paranoia and a Hitchcock look-a-like contest, among other acts of doubling. (“Hitchcock gets eliminated in the first round,” McCarthy notes in an interview with Triple Canopy editor Alexander Provan last year.) For McCarthy, doubling is an act of repetition analogous to death itself, one embodied by the form of cinema; the reel is destined to return to the same terminus each time it is played, but is nevertheless wound and played again and again. How might we confront this fate? “If you meet your double,” Double Take advises, “you should kill him.”
Or, see George Gallo's 2001 ontological comedy, the eponymous double of Grimonprez and McCarthy’s Double Take—itself based on a 1957 film adapted from Graham Greene’s Across the Bridge. In it, Orlando Jones plays a fugitive who steals Eddie Griffin’s passport...only to discover that Griffin is also a criminal, at which point the two inexplicably trade identities. In Greene’s story Griffin’s character is a dog; Jones’s character dies while trying to save the dog’s life. The narrator observes: “Death doesn’t change comedy to tragedy.”