Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel

Creature, Affect, Form

P. Vermeulen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137414526
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137414533
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and to figure intractable forms of life and affect.

1

Persistent Affect (Tom McCarthy, David Shields, Lars Iyer)

I wonder about those who proclaim cities, authors, theoretical approaches, bands, history over. Does it make the pain stop?

—@NeinQuarterly

Burying the novel

Declaring the end of the novel has proven to be a productive gesture in modern literary culture. Consigning old literary forms to the dustbin of history is often the rhetorical flip side of the inauguration of new literary dispensations, and the novel’s popular and middlebrow success has made it an obvious target for such declarations of redundancy.¹ Especially modernist statements of the death of the novel tend to function as “deck-clearing statements,” stating “the irrelevance or imminent demolition of an old form in favor of some particular alternative within sight” (Greif 12n2). Take, as an example of such a double-sided performance, T.S. Eliot’s famous delayed review of Joyce’s Ulysses. While “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) applauds Ulysses for imagining an alternative to the novel, it locates the diagnosis of the novel’s deformities somewhere else:

the novel is a form which will no longer serve [...] the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. Mr. Joyce has written one novel—The Portrait; Mr. Wyndham Lewis has written one novel—Tarr. I do not suppose that either of them will ever write another “novel.” The novel ended with Flaubert and with James. It is, I think, because Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lewis, being “in advance” of their time, felt a conscious or probably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who are unaware of its obsolescence. (Eliot 177)

The novel form has become obsolete because the conditions for its continued “service” have disappeared: it could only “serve” in an age that still had form. Only Lewis and Joyce “felt” the insufficiency of the novel form in a formless age, and articulated their intuitions by writing a “more formless” novel—effectively demoting the novel to the status of an anachronism that only survives, in Eliot’s review, between quotation marks.

Joyce’s Portrait and Lewis’s Tarr play a curious role in Eliot’s argument. Both are written after the novel is said to have ended “with Flaubert and with James,” yet the fact that they express a feeling of dissatisfaction with it still somehow indicates that their authors are “in advance” of their time. If Flaubert and James thought they had killed the novel, Lewis and the early Joyce prove that the victim has survived and is as yet merely undead. In this book, I will mainly be interested in the ways in which contemporary novels address the awkward persistence of the novel; I will read novels that do what Eliot has The Portrait and Tarr do. We can begin to appreciate the differences between the present moment and Eliot’s confident modernism when we recall that The Portrait plays a merely diagnostic role in Eliot’s essay; it is only Ulysses that will deliver a cure for the defects of the novel that The Portrait had expressed. If the novels of Lewis and the early Joyce are credited with the power to voice a feeling of dissatisfaction, this feeling is hygienically separated from a very different one: a feeling for “the need of something stricter.” Eliot’s essay famously identifies this “something stricter” as a different literary approach: Joyce’s (and Yeats’s, and, obviously, also Eliot’s own) “mythical method” (Eliot 178). Unlike Lewis’s and the early Joyce’s diminished novels, this new and stricter method need not occupy itself with registering dissatisfaction; instead, it can be dedicated to the momentous task of “making the modern world possible for art” (Eliot 178).

Eliot’s intervention relies on a neat division of labor between the novel, which can do nothing more radical than record dissatisfaction, and the mythic method, which gives shape to an alternative “order and form” (Eliot 178). Significantly, Eliot does not classify Ulysses, in which he finds the mythic method on display, as a novel, and instead consistently refers to it as a “book.” Eliot’s own career as a poet–critic is enabled by a comparable generic division of labor: the demise of the novel form is registered in a critical essay, whereas his pursuit of a stricter poetics takes shape in the genre of epic poetry (The Waste Land was published eight months after Ulysses). Eliot’s critical endeavor hardly affects his creative one, and this means that the dialectic of poetic individuation, in which “the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot 39), can run its course in Eliot’s poetical project.

Eliot’s poetry need not occupy itself with the awkward persistence of a form that James and Flaubert have, it seems, failed to end once and for all. Importantly, this generic logic is only possible because poetry, for Eliot, holds sufficient symbolic capital to enable the overcoming of the novel, and to decisively move beyond the hesitations and frictions reflected in Tarr and The Portrait. The contemporary declarations of the end of the novel that I am interested in lack confidence in a radical alternative to the novel; unable to imagine a creative space that is not affected by the novel, they are inevitably afflicted by its uneasy persistence. Both in Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2005) and David Shields’ book-length manifesto Reality Hunger (2010), dissatisfaction with the novel feeds into an imagined alternative, yet that alternative is still shaped by the strictures of the novel. If Eliot can bury the remains of the novel outside the domain of poetry, McCarthy and Shields, in their very different ways, only have those remains to bury the novel with; the decidedly compromised result is, in McCarthy’s words (borrowed from Laurence Rickels), an “improper burial” (“Technology”). Of course, McCarthy is not only one of our most vitriolic critics of middlebrow fiction; he is himself an increasingly celebrated novelist, whose third novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His debut novel Remainder is an attempt to embody a clean break with “the middle-brow commercial novel” (McCarthy, Transmission), and especially with its most recent incarnation: the trauma novel. As my reading shows, Remainder converts McCarthy’s programmatic declarations of the end of the novel into something much less heroic: a protracted attempt to bury the novel that cannot help but reanimate it, and that ends up transmitting weak, dysphoric, and uneasy affects. Remainder conveys a range of affects that can neither be conflated with the traditional emotional repertoire of the novel nor with the studied affectlessness of McCarthy’s high-minded programmatic declarations.

On the strength of my analysis of Remainder, I turn to David Shields’ manifesto Reality Hunger, which has become an almost compulsory point of reference in discussions of contemporary literature. The occasion for much pre-publication hype and post-publication online debate in 2010, Shields’ book confidently presents itself as “the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media [...] who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work” (3). The urgency of this self-assigned task derives from Shields’ impatience with the form of the novel, whose moves he finds “unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless” (118). A combination of confession and collage, Reality Hunger practices what it preaches: the double need to “smuggle more of [...] reality into the work of art” (3) and to sound the death knell of the novel form. But as is the case for Remainder, Reality Hunger’s death knell cannot avoid sounding a lot like a novel; indeed, the “novelistic” shape (200-odd pages sustained by one confessional voice) of Shields’ self-designated manifesto belies the clarity of its programmatic intent, and ends up reanimating the form it intends to bury. My reading shows that Shields’ text can only achieve the reality-effect it aims for by extending its gesture of dismissing the novel until its very last page. The real interest of the text lies in the unpredictable affects produced by its imperfect and protracted attempt to move beyond the novel, rather than in the alternative artistic practice that it officially proposes. A testimony to the difficulty of making a clean break with an inadequate form, Reality Hunger ends up playing the role of Joyce’s Portrait and Lewis’s Tarr in Eliot’s essay on Ulysses, and discovering that there is, as yet, no radical alternative to embrace.

What do we make of the continued solicitation of a form that refuses to be buried? Even if Shields believes he has an alternative for the novel—a form he calls the lyric essay—he is, like McCarthy, drawn back to the remains of the novel as part of a literary project that is, again like that of McCarthy, dedicated to a retrieval of reality, which the conventionality of novelistic realism is supposed to have obscured. At the very least, this situation points to a mode of survival that is not marked by self-determination, self-control, or emotional composure, but that is instead awkward, dependent, and compromised. While this diminished form of (after)life lacks both the heroic decisiveness of Eliot and the significant and transformative emotional experiences customarily associated with the novel, it points to the contemporary novel’s surprising relevance as a catalyst for imagining new forms of affect and life. One such form, which I call “creatural life,” takes center stage in my reading of J.M. Coetzee in the next chapter; in the last section of this chapter, I anticipate that mode of life by extending my reading of contemporary intimations of the end of the novel into a discussion of the work of the British novelist Lars Iyer. Iyer’s 2011 “Literary Manifesto after the End of Literature and Manifestos” differs from the work of Shields and McCarthy in that it refuses fantasies of decisive change and embraces the reality of belatedness. Iyer does not declare the end of the novel; for him, we are witnessing the end of the whole regime of literature. Such untimeliness does not call for an illusory move beyond literature, but rather for the more minimal task of finding “ways to address this lateness” (“Hot Tub”). Removed from its traditional position of authority, literature can now dedicate itself to an exploration of the unheroic and pathetic dimensions of life—what Iyer calls “gloomy, farcical” life. In his own trilogy of short novels, Iyer mercilessly stages the farcical life that breaks through the threadbare remains of literature; as my next chapter shows, this aesthetic program has clear affinities with the late work of J.M. Coetzee. If Remainder and Reality Hunger testify to the persistence of affect beyond the end of the novel, Iyer and Coetzee give shape to the diminished modes of life that correspond to those affects.

Tom McCarthy and the traumatization of fiction

In the last few years, Tom McCarthy has established himself as a fixture in the British literary scene. The author of three novels—Remainder from 2005, Men in Space from 2007, and C from 2010—McCarthy is also a successful conceptual artist, an accomplished literary theorist (his book Tintin and the Secret of Literature from 2006 is both an original exploration of the work of Hergé and a meditation on some of the major figures in the French Theory canon), the founder and General Secretary of the half-serious and semi-fictitious International Necronautical Society, and an almost unavoidable interviewee. McCarthy has consistently used his public appearances to recall the world of contemporary literature to the legacies of artistic and literary modernism, and to dismiss what he calls “liberal” or “sentimental” humanism (qtd. in Rourke), as well as the form that has historically sustained that humanism: the novel. His own fictions attempt to do without the elements that are often assumed to make up a novel: readerly empathy, plot and character, social vision, and psychological depth.

In keeping with McCarthy’s ambition to break with “the contemporary cult of the individual, the absolute authentic self who is measured through his or her absolutely authentic feeling” (qtd. in Rourke), his two most recent novels refrain from developing a single privileged psychological perspective, and instead opt for a decentered network of characters (in Men in Space) or for a main character whose subjectivity constitutes only a moment of crystallization in a network of transmissions (in C). Both of these novels can be understood as efforts to map the paradoxical remainder of the novel form after everything novelistic has been subtracted from it. In Remainder, this subtraction is not yet achieved: the excision of psychology, which the later works take for granted, is what the book aims to carry out in its bid to critique the humanist tradition of middlebrow fiction. It challenges this tradition’s reliance on psychological depth and significant feeling by taking on what it identifies as the most recent instance of that tradition: Remainder is an attempt to debunk the customary pieties of trauma fiction. The book borrows the “grammar” of post-trauma, which thrives on “repetition and reenactment” (qtd. in Orwell 1), while it remains conspicuously indifferent to the ethical dimensions of artistic engagements with the extreme violence and the psychological suffering that characterize trauma.²

Yet in spite of this studied indifference, a careful reading of Remainder shows that its attempt to elide sentiment and psychology does not lead to a neutral and affectless text; instead, McCarthy’s project ends up replacing the strong feelings and identifications it finds in the retrograde humanism of middlebrow fiction with what can be analyzed as intractable and asignifying affects. The novel generates non-subjective affects in the very place where middlebrow fiction has taught readers to expect emotionally significant encounters with fleshed-out characters. This is, of course, the very emotive scenario that this study traces through contemporary fiction and that delivers a more tentative and muted kind of innovation than the one McCarthy’s public pronouncements seem to promise. By focusing on this scenario, and by tracing the novel’s move from psychological depth to an asignifying affective remainder, we can appreciate how it contributes to our understanding of the literature of trauma in at least two ways. First, by departing from the habituated routines of trauma fiction, it shows that much trauma fiction remains in thrall to the conventions of psychological realism, and to the belief that formal features can represent psychological events. Second, the novel’s shift from subjective depth to non-subjective affect renders the structure of traumatization in a way that escapes the mimetic constraints of psychological realism. Remainder shows that the novel is less a form that represents the after-effects of trauma than a form that transmits the “after-affects” that the traumatized subject leaves in its wake.

From its very first paragraph, Remainder presents itself as a challenge to trauma fiction: the sudden event that triggers the novel’s plot is described as “involv[ing] something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, Bits” (5). Remainder does not pause to assess the psychological damage the accident inflicts on its nameless narrator, nor does it qualify its representation of the traumatized mind by registering its awareness of the ethical stakes involved in the rendering of others’ injury and pain.³ The narrator notes that he “can say very little” about “the accident itself”: “It’s not that I’m being shy. It’s just that—well, for one, I don’t even remember the event. It’s a blank: a white slate, a black hole” (5). Instead, the novel is made up of the depthless, a-psychological registration of the narrator’s meticulously plotted and elaborately designed reenactments of particular scenes from his life, and later on from other people’s lives. These reenactments are financed by “the Settlement,” a vast sum of money the narrator receives from an anonymous party in compensation for the accident, and which, the narrator notes, “was held up to [him] as a future strong enough to counterbalance [his] no-past, a moment that would make [him] better, whole, complete” (6). Predictably, this chimeral completeness is never restored, and the novel unfolds as the deliberately repetitive account of the failure of such restoration. Trauma, far from registering as a psychologically significant event, is merely mobilized as a device that triggers and structures the plot: it furnishes a lack that the novel’s development can (impossibly) attempt to fill, and through the settlement that follows from it, it provides its protagonist with the funds he needs to finance his elaborate reenactments; trauma, in other words, by indirectly funding the events that make up the novel’s plot, provides the novel with the narrative capital it needs to keep going for some 280 pages.

Roger Luckhurst has remarked that, even if trauma is routinely theorized as an event “that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge” (Trauma Question 81), its refusal to make immediate sense has, in the last few decades, paradoxically made it a fertile literary resource. Contemporary culture, Luckhurst notes, “is saturated with stories that see trauma not as a blockage but a positive spur to narrative” (83). From its very first pages, Remainder makes this productive role of trauma explicit. What qualifies the novel as a provocation to conventional trauma fictions is that it never stops to register the tension between the productivity of trauma and the equally prevalent notion that trauma should, on ethical or therapeutic grounds, be acknowledged as something that resists integration, development, and understanding. McCarthy’s studied depthlessness serves as a deliberate affront to the customary pieties of trauma fiction.⁴

Remainder’s critical afterlife has focused less on its disparaging of trauma than on its critique of the middlebrow novel. This afterlife was inaugurated by a widely noted review essay by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books. Pairing Remainder with Joseph O’Neill’s rather conventional post-9/11 novel Netherland from 2008, Smith hails Remainder as “the strong refusal” of the tradition that O’Neill’s novel (albeit anxiously) perpetuates. She calls this tradition “lyrical realism”: a realism that invests in “the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: After-Affects
• 1 Persistent Affect (Tom McCarthy, David Shields, Lars Iyer)
• 2 Abandoned Creatures ( J.M. Coetzee)
• 3 Cosmopolitan Dissociation (Teju Cole)
• 4 Epic Failures (Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru, Russell Banks)
• Coda: The Descent of the Novel ( James Meek)
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index