The Affective Turn in Contemporary Fiction

About two hundred years have passed, as Benedict Anderson tells the story, since novels featuring protagonists that mirrored their readers’ norms and values first began to elicit sympathy from mass readerships in one nation after another. Given this impressive record, why would any novelist abandon the one formal component of the novel that would seem to guarantee its popular reception? Yet a number of contemporary novelists have done exactly that. Rather than representative men or women, the novelists I have in mind offer us protagonists that might more accurately be called human “extremophiles,” a term for biological life-forms that survive under conditions thought incapable of sustaining biological life. Melinda Cooper uses this term to explain how, in rethinking the limits against which such life was previously defined, the biosciences have also rethought its law of evolution as more innovative than adaptive.¹ I see such anomalous protagonists as J. M. Coetzee’s Michael K, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Kathy H., W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Indra Sinha’s Animal, and Lauren Beukes’s Zinzi December rising to challenge capitalism’s buoyant appropriation of biological evolution, as they confront us with forms of human life so innovative as to make it next to impossible for us to recognize ourselves in them. In view of their international popularity, the absolute singularity of the protagonists currently being fashioned indicates nothing short of a disconcerting sea change in the traditional subject of fiction, thus in what György Lukács calls the novel’s biographical form.

The implications of this formal transformation are compounded by a major trend that cuts across several disciplines in a comprehensive effort to rethink the source and operations of human emotion, specifically those feelings with which our conscious faculties are as far out of touch as their readers are with the invisible people from whom Ishiguro, Coetzee, Sebald, Sinha, and others have drawn their most memorable characters.² I’d like to contribute to the interdisciplinary conversation on affect by showing how novels featuring an apparently damaged, subhuman, or insufficiently individuated human being prepare us to attempt the kind of sympathetic identification that novels have traditionally offered readers. They do so in order to turn a critical eye on all such person-toperson relationships. In refuting Martha Nussbaum’s claim that literary studies and the humanities in general make us more empathic people, Anne Whitehead turns to Ishiguro in this spirit: “Empathy… is not unambiguously beneficial [in Never Let Me Go], and it can lead as readily to exploitation and suffering as to more altruistic behaviors” (57). What Whitehead says of Ishiguro holds true for other contemporary novels that demand something well beyond the limits of our emotional repertoire for dealing with both people and fictional characters. In saying this, I am thinking of the novel as a means for modern societies to describe themselves, not from outside or above, but from within a system of social relationships of which the novel is a component part.³

I take as a given that the novels that provide most of the subject matter for our classroom teaching, scholarship, and leisure reading succeed in convincing readers that a line can and should be drawn indicating exactly where culture confronts nature and makes instinct bow to the interests of community. No matter how and exactly where a novel does so, it must set such a limit in order for us to feel our way in and through the experiential world of its protagonist. As a result, the novelist who wants to mount a sustained objection to the principle of normativity itself will necessarily break the circuit of attraction and self-recognition in which we want to participate whenever we pick up a novel. Franz Kafka so tampered with this circuit that he came to be known for having written not novels so much as fables, parables, or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have identified as a “minor literature.” Among contemporary authors, Coetzee most resembles Kafka in this respect. Coetzee, however, is only the most prominent among an increasing number of Anglophone novelists to make us...