#mark mcgurl

[zielenna]

For Jameson, the rise of realism in the novel is to be explained in terms of an unresolved and possibly unresolvable struggle between, on the one hand, an original “narrative impulse” at work in any storytelling form, and, on the other, a new registration, beginning in the nineteenth century, of what he calls the “body’s present,” or affect, usually in the form of the closely described novelistic scene or setting. The first disposes events in chronological order, sampling the raw material of human life and delineating meaningful destinies within it. Almost always operating in the past tense, it speaks of events completed and packaged as any one of the many kinds of story. The second produces a kind of pause in the march of time, a quality of being there in a richly embodied and distended present. Of the two fundamental components of the novel, narration and affect, the latter is for him the more historically eventful— indeed more novel. It is part of what distinguishes the genre from the narrative forms that preceded it, enabling it to project fictional worlds at once visceral and virtual because centered in the human sensorium. It makes its most unmistakable appearance in literary naturalism, in the work of Émile Zola, and is embedded thereafter both in the intensity of modernist narrative experimentation and in genre fiction. Naturalism announces the revolutionary arrival of affect in literary history but is also inevitably the beginning of what, echoing Luhmann, Jameson calls its “codification.” It occasions both the deep dive into the embodied psyche we find in James Joyce and serves “as a standard for the practice of mass culture and the best seller up to our own time and all over the world.” And it’s true, genre fiction, no less than the high realist or naturalist or modernist novel, is geared to set a scene, and to encourage the reader’s visceral participation in the fiction. At its extremes, it produces what Linda Williams has evocatively called “body genres”—genres associated, in the reading (or in her case, viewing), with the excretion of one or another human juice. In that light, we can now see how much the contemporary romance novel owes to the arrival of literary naturalism, without necessarily being mistakable for an instance of it.

Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021)

[stargir1z]

mark mcgurl quoted in "neoliberalism and the time of the novel" by mathias nilges

[sharpened--edges]

There are lots of interesting things to be seen on the internet, and equally many things to be said about them, but “the internet” itself and as a whole has become predictable, a cliché machine. To talk about it is like talking about the weather—which, in a way, is what it is: the weather of our emotional lives, the informational air we breathe, the media environment from which we extract the nutrients of our everyday existence as social, economic, and political beings. A quarter century or more after the internet’s arrival on the world stage, the things we say about it are beset with a deflating sense of déjà vu, of a rightness that is no match for overfamiliarity. I blame the internet for this problem, naturally. With its multiplication and acceleration of the quintessentially modern phenomenon of public commentary on this, that, and everything, observations about the internet drawn forth from its humble individual users long ago ceased to gain meaningful interpretive leverage on it.

Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021), p. 1.

[zielenna]

mark mcgurl on the romance novel

The romance novel, that most generic of genres, is all about the forging of the small world of marriage as a space apart from the alienations of the modern life. ... While epic is the vehicle of capitalist totality, romance is the means by which we imagine the suturing of our individuality thereto. If the corporate epic addresses the largest possible vision of the social in all its diversity, then the romance works to construct the smallest possible world, a nation of two. The novel in its classic form - but especially in its au courant "lyric" or autofictional form - can then be seen as allowing individuals to find accommodation between these two scales of socialization ... Notwithstanding their differences, all these genre forms and their respective social identifications are resistant to the formation of more militant collectivities, like unions.

What do we see when we center our view of the literary field on romance rather than on literary fiction? We see the inescapable identity of the novel as a generic commodity, to be sure, but also some of the surprising complexity of its engagement with the realities of consumer culture. While the characters and events of romance are not always “realistic” on the level of representational verisimilitude, they, by their nature, continually reflect upon the economic and otherwise crudely material bases of modern love and life in general, the world not as it might be built anew in some science fiction novel but as it already impinges on everything.

... the modern “codification of intimacy,” as Niklas Luhmann calls it. For Luhmann, this term gets at how, beginning in the seventeenth century, what had generally been thought the essential madness of romantic love was made functional in the routine task of social reproduction. In his account, faced with an increasingly differentiated and contingent modern social reality, chivalric forms heretofore centered on aristocratic extramarital relations (think Lancelot and Guinevere) were updated for use in the imaginative construction of reassuringly small and mutually self-confirming bourgeois worlds. Consuming the romance, that is, readers were systematically instructed in the pursuit of the intensive pseudo-totality of the marriage bond newly conceived as a source of deep emotional satisfaction to individuals rather than as an alliance between families. Structured as a quest for the One True Love as marriage partner, it was and remains an ironically generic pursuit, driven by an “emotion preformed, and indeed prescribed, in literature, and no longer directed by social institutions such as the family and religion.” For Luhmann, modern love “seems to come from nowhere, arises with the aid of copied patterns, copied emotions, copied existences and may perhaps create a conscious awareness of this secondhand character in its failure.” It makes sense that the engine of these secondhand emotions, reading, would on occasion see its own reflection, as it were, in print.

... we can now see how much the contemporary romance novel owes to the arrival of literary naturalism, without necessarily being mistakable for an instance of it ... in proximity to the so-called alpha male—a term borrowed from ethology, the study of animal pack behavior —love becomes visible as a matter of “chemistry,” a matter of instinct triumphing over artificial social impediments such as rules against sexual harassment.* So, too, the genre’s lexicon of falling—helplessly—madly in love; its detailing of the insatiable hunger of body for body: looked at in a certain light, it can seem eerily similar to something we might find in a Jack London story, only moving it indoors. Both are what Jennifer Fleissner has taught us to think of as discourses of compulsion, where natural forces work not at the behest of but through the human, dragging us along in repetitive action. At a minimum, then, we might speak of the historical co-emergence of “high” literary naturalism-cum-modernism and “trashy” romance.

* cf. "One of the field guides in Yarros’s Fourth Wing describes the bond between two dragons as a force that “goes beyond the depth of human love or adoration to a primal, undeniable requirement for proximity.” Lovers do not match so much as mate — but more on mating later. Suffice it to say, for now, that the search is for a sexual impulse that has not had to pass through society on its way to your body. No heterofatalism here: just an innate, unmediated, innocent lust," in the drift mag piece on romantasy from november.

Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021): 'Preface: Bezos as Novelist'; 'Introduction: Retail Therapy'; 'Generic Love, or, The Realism of Romance.'

[sharpened--edges]

Whatever else we mean by the “internet” now, we mean, by way of the rise of social media, a certain shared climate of feeling, an animated and sped-up hubbub of the discourse of human interest. By turns soothing and bruising, it is the very medium of what Lauren Berlant, correcting a long-standing tendency to think of emotions as internal and private, has described instead as public feelings. They are the affective substance of political life, the very thing, even more than political ideas, to which online citizenship has become attuned and by which it is increasingly deranged. […] While the tenor of our online exchanges runs the gamut from deepest sympathy to savage snark, one of the internet’s signature speech genres is surely the rant, the hyped-up rhetorical expression of mockingly contemptuous dismay.

Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021), p. 70.

[thelonguepuree]

Even more than self-expression, [Nabokov’s] fiction could be described as an act of programmatic self-establishment, an elaborately performative “I am.” Using his own preferred idiom of fairy tale and romance, it could be described as a way for a king-in-exile to recover his country and reassert his rule on a linguistic-aesthetic plane. Nabokov’s lifelong attraction— sometimes ironic, sometimes not—to the traditional romance motif of unrecognized royalty is fabulously evident in Pale Fire, where the deranged editor Kinbote has (at least in his own mind) been chased from the throne of the nation of Zembla to his ignominious dwelling at Wordsmith College, U.S.A. As the descendant of Russian nobility cut off from the vast country estate he roamed as a child, and from the language, Russian, in which he first made his name as a novelist, Nabokov had a more plausible biographical claim to a fantasy of royal restoration-in-language than most. But even for him this was essentially metaphorical, a way of imagining a life of uncompromised and exalted individuality. Certainly the fantasy is transposable to the inhabitants of the democratic United States, the immigrant nation where, as it has been well and untruly said, “every man is a king.” And it certainly fits quite snugly into the progressive school’s commitment to enhancing students’ self-esteem. It’s good to be king (or queen); and to recover one’s throne in the enchanted realm of one’s own writing is to bend the arrow of personal experience around until it reattaches to its origin like a golden Möbius band. Instead of testifying to a permanent condition of disadvantage in the face of physical necessity, or to the relentless humiliations exacted by social institutions, or to a perpetual process of wounding at the hands of history, “personal experience” is redeemed in this manner as a proud and vibrantly reflexive textual presence. That anyway is the idea. Of course, in practice, time marches on and nothing really comes full circle. And when we pull back from the therapeutic enchantments of literary experience to a wider angle of vision, we see something slightly less mystical than a golden Möbius band: a world in which the category of “personal experience” has over the course of the twentieth century, and in the postwar period in particular, achieved a functional centrality in the postindustrial economies of the developed world. These economies in turn inhabit what Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and others have described as a “reflexive modernity.” The utility of this concept for understanding the metafictional impulse in postwar writing leaps off the page, suggesting that literary practices might partake in a larger, multivalent social dynamic of self-observation. This would extend from the self-observation of society as a whole in the social sciences, media, and the arts, to the “reflexive accumulation” of corporations which pay more and more attention to their own management practices and organizational structures, down to the self-monitoring of individuals who understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists. It would be absurd to deny the large payoff to individuals living in the inherently pluralistic conditions of reflexive modernity, who are vested with a thrilling panoply of choices about how they will live their lives. But it would be equally wrong to deny the degree to which, as Beck puts it, modern people “are condemned to individualization.” To be subject to reflexive modernity is to feel a “compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging” of a biography and, indeed, for the obsessive “reading” of that biography even as it is being written. And in this project there are a host of agencies, including schools, waiting to help.

Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), pp. 11-12

[mumblingsage]

Now, it goes almost without saying that we might bring the idea of opportunity cost to bear on the everyday economy of literature, but it is worth pausing to consider the way it frames the relation of individual readers to that economy. There is, first of all, the book you can't afford to buy because you bought the one you did. Next is the book you can't "afford" to read in another sense, because you don't have the time. In the age of Amazon, a very long book can often be acquired for very little money, but the opportunity cost of reading a long book, say Infinite Jest, can seem well-nigh infinite in its own right.... Now, finally, as uncopyrighted e-text widely available on the internet, [classics] are approaching the status of a gift of Nature. And yet the existential opportunity cost of reading the classic remains as high as it has ever been, arguably higher, inasmuch as the number of books we are not reading while we read it has, in this time a literary hyper abundance, soared.

...The overstuffed Kindle e-reader or iPad is at once a world-historically powerful condensation of potential literary experience and a little tombstone prophesying the rapidly approaching day of our death.

from Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, Mark McGurl

[sharpened--edges]

It has been said ad nauseum, as a testament to the failure of the contemporary utopian imagination, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it has always seemed to me that this formula gives short shrift to the way the genre of apocalypse indeed imagines the end of capitalism at least in the version we know it. Neither is it entirely bereft of the ability to imagine alternatives thereto.

Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021), p. 225.