 In McCarthy's art projects it has taken the form of repeating sets of messages over radio in a homage to Jean Cocteau's "Orphée".Boyd Tonkin, in his "Independent" profile on McCarthy, picks up on the notion that literature itself is a series of repetitions and duplications.At least one critic has connected McCarthy's work to "failed transcendence", and McCarthy has used the term failed transcendence in interviews to describe the collapse of the idealist project in philosophy, art and literature.