The Critique of Trauma and the Afterlife of the Novel in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

In the last few years, Tom Mcarthy has launched a sustained campaign against the pieties of the traditional British novel. His debut novel Remainder sets out to debunk the conventions of trauma fiction, that, despite its emphasis on fragmentation, repetition, and temporal dislocation, often continues to rely on the conventions of psychological realism. In Remainder, trauma emerges not as a psychological event, but rather as an intractable, dysphoric, subjectless affect. Showing how trauma operates across the domains of the social, the somatic, and the psychological, the novel inaugurates a different account of the linkage of literature and trauma.