Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy
2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00295132-9353820
ISSN1945-8509
Autores Tópico(s)Crime and Detective Fiction Studies
ResumoThe editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Stig Abell, recently remarked: "I'm just dreading . . . a great British novelist—Ian McEwan springs ineluctably to mind—doing his lockdown novel where three families across the country, each experiencing lockdown differently, learn something about the human condition . . . a sort of state-of-the-nation novel" (The TLS Podcast). Abell's interviewee, the novelist Will Eaves, conceded that "there are obviously people who like to write very close to the grain of events and to do it . . . very consciously" (TLS). The coronavirus crisis has prompted many readers to turn to literary texts for insights, with Defoe's A Journal of a Plague Year and Camus's The Plague flying off the shelves (TLS). Abell and Eaves's comments also refer to the peculiarly overt—you might even say artless—ways in which recent novelists have recorded "the grain of events."One of the dominant literary strategies for addressing contemporary crises is the speedily written and quickly published novel. Howard Jacobson wrote Pussy: A Novel (2017) in "a fury of disbelief" after Donald Trump's election, with the book coming out a scant five months later (Scholes). Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (2008) chronicles the summer and autumn of 2007 and was published a mere six months after the last event it depicts. This article focusses on Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) and Olivia Laing's Crudo: A Novel (2018), both of which were written and published with unusual speed to make them feel as contemporary as possible. Situating these novelistic experiments in the context of growing fears about the novel's diminishing cultural power in the age of instant communication, my readings of Autumn and Crudo consider how Smith's and Laing's aesthetics of immediacy bring age-old questions about contemporaneity and temporality to the fore.The new proclivity for quickly written novels focuses particular questions about the writing we call contemporary fiction. How close to the present does a novel have to be in order to be considered contemporary? Is the novel still a contemporary form? Can anything written in such an off-the-cuff way as Autumn and Crudo be considered a novel at all? After all, three of the four books named above assert their status as novels in their titles, as if there was some doubt. The speedily written novels of the late 2000s and 2010s emerged in the context of prevalent anxieties in the literary press about the apparent outdatedness of the novel. The genre was once about newness, about novelty, but with the advent of the internet and its new modes of instant communication and publication, many commentators seem to feel that the novel's time has passed. In response, Smith's and Laing's up-to-the-minute representations of contemporary life, bristling with tweets and current affairs, bring the genre's original connotation of newness to the fore. As we shall see, both authors have described their works as attempts to render twenty-first-century modernity's accelerated temporality in novelistic form. Matthias Nilges, on the other hand, has objected that the contemporary experience of "immediacy" is produced by neoliberalism (362), so novels that "simply replicate" this experience are "not only bad at dealing with neoliberalism," but "bad at being novels" (361).1I propose that neither the authors' rationales nor Nilges's argument offer sufficient accounts of Autumn and Crudo. Rather, to read these texts is to experience the impossibility of temporal, communicative, and representational immediacy. The authors argue that their novels attempt to replicate the feeling of an eternal instantaneity, an oversaturated now. However, my readings will show that these attempts are bound to fail. Rather than successfully rendering immediacy, the novels stage writing's inherent failure to be immediate. They foreground the fact that all writing, communication, and experience are structured by a kind of gap or spacing. This is just as true of apparently instantaneous media such as tweets and blogs as it is of the novel. The novel, as a kind of writing in which this non-immediacy is simply more obvious, therefore reemerges as a peculiarly relevant form for thinking about the illusoriness of contemporary immediacy. Smith's and Laing's fictions of immediacy, then, are about the fictionality of immediacy.Autumn begins: "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again" (Smith 3). Rewriting the first passage of A Tale of Two Cities, Smith makes a broad-brush characterisation of her historical moment—but, like Dickens, she ironizes such statements. The object of Dickens's facetiousness is the kind of pat epochal thinking that results in generalisations like "it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair" (1). Smith's version overbalances the cadence of Dickens's oppositions by forcing the repetition of "worst," substitutes meaningless tautology in place of his rhetorical contrasts, and punctures any notion of historical exception or specificity with that eye-rolling "again." Autumn's opening lines, then, announce the novel's preference for capturing atmosphere and mood rather than undertaking historical analysis. They also point to the difficulty of such analysis when the "times" are so chaotic.Smith wrote Autumn over the course of a few months in 2016, and her publisher agreed to bring it out almost as soon as she delivered her manuscript, with the publication date falling in October of that year. Smith says, "I knew now it was possible, after Hamish Hamilton made such a beautiful finished book-form for How to Be Both in a matter of weeks (!), to turn a book around quite speedily compared to the usual time it takes, and this excited me about how closely to contemporaneousness a finished book might be able to be in the world, and yet how it could also be, all through, very much about stratified, cyclic time" (Anderson). Smith's experiment to discover "how closely to contemporaneousness a finished book might be able to be in the world" recalls the original meaning of the designation "novel"; as Smith notes, "the name we've given to the novel form also means new, something new, something so new it's news" (Anderson). Autumn is a response, a riposte, to the feeling registered by "death of the novel" polemics that the novel has become exhausted and outmoded (Vermeulen 1).By framing the possibility of Autumn in terms of her publisher's capacity to physically produce the "book-form" of her texts in short order, Smith hints at one of the key reasons for the apparently waning cultural relevance of the genre of the novel. The internet allows for the instantaneous publication and dissemination of texts; the capacity for these writings to capture and respond to the moment puts them in contention for what was formerly the novel's status as the genre of the new. As a result, the novel is increasingly imagined as a slow and lumbering genre; for example, when introducing Smith on a BBC radio program about topicality in literature, cultural historian Matthew Sweet argued that the digital and news media were now facing "competition from more literary forms of writing, forms that have not always been known for their agility and topicality: the novel, the poem, the play" ("Writing Real Life"). There is an irony here, of course: Sweet's wording slightly glosses over the fact that the novel's apparently newfound topicality is in fact a return to its original animating spirit.Crudo is born of a similar impulse. The fabric of Laing's novel is woven from Kathy Acker citations, tweets, current affairs, and autobiographical material—hence the title, which refers to a style of raw cuisine: these are found materials, put together quickly and without editing. In conversation with Smith, Laing said of writing Crudo that "the now pours onto you day by day, and I just wanted to write down what it feels like to be wrenched under it" ("Crudo: Olivia Laing and Ali Smith"). Her process was designed to reflect this feeling: "I was writing down everything that came my way, everything that happened went in, so if Trump tweeted something about the troops or nuclear war it went in in his own words, nothing's in quote marks" ("Crudo"). Recalling David Shields's description in Reality Hunger of works that incorporate "larger and larger chunks of reality," Crudo is made up of the stuff of the now (3).2Smith's and Laing's experiments also bring to mind the historical precedent of Samuel Richardson's "writing to the moment" (Dale 57), which he describes in his preface to Clarissa as "letters . . . written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects . . . abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections. . . . Much more lively and affecting" (qtd. in Dale 57). Like the letters in Clarissa—and like the originally serialized chapters of A Tale of Two Cities—Smith's and Laing's texts have the feeling of installments, dispatches. Both novels are the first in a proposed quartet, with Smith's "Seasonal" project now completed, though it is unclear if Laing will follow suit (Briggs). We are waiting to see what happens next, both in life and in these novel series. As with Richardson's theory of "writing to the moment," so an aesthetics of the "instantaneous" or immediate is central to Autumn and Crudo.Both novels formally mimic the internet's apparently immediate dissemination of texts. They represent a contemporary sense of speeded-up, disordered time, emphasizing the ways in which rolling news, mobile phones, and the internet seem to accelerate experience to the point of absolute simultaneity, with everything happening at once and news reaching us through our phones as soon as it occurs. Elisabeth, the protagonist of Autumn, reflects: "Someone killed an MP. . . . But it's old news now. Once it would have been a year's worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff" (Smith 38). Crudo's Kathy "missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn't like living in the permanent present of the id" (Laing 43). The "permanent present" is associated with the infantile demand for immediacy, the closing of the gap between desire and gratification, because the id is the part of the psyche that demands the instant realisation of desire. It is the ego which manages the necessities of waiting for fulfilment and tolerating disappointment. Laing's use of psychoanalytic vocabulary points to the widespread fear (which I will discuss more fully later on) that the immediacy of the internet allows cognitive and psychic resources like attention and patience to wane, causing both personal and cultural regression.Reflecting the contemporary experience of a "permanent present" in their writerly processes, Smith and Laing both frame twenty-first-century temporality as an oversaturated now. My readings of these texts ultimately suggest that, in fact, their representations of this temporality cannot help but foreground the philosophical impossibility of immediacy. However, since there is no question that the novels do also mimic the feeling of an accelerated, disordered temporality, I first want to establish both what this putative experience of immediacy feels like and how it has been conceptualized in public discourse and literary theory. Peter Boxall describes this experience and its potential consequences for fiction as follows: "The increasingly frictionless synchronisation of global culture, rather than delivering an increasingly secure sense of location, of homeliness in our space and time, has delivered us to a condition in which time, as in Hamlet's Denmark, is out of joint, in which the narrative forms we have available seem no longer to be well adapted to articulating our experience of passing time" (21). This is, for Boxall, a particularly twenty-first-century habitus. However, as Boxall also notes, Giorgio Agamben argues that contemporaneity always involves a certain anachrony: "Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time" (Agamben 40). As such, while our present sense of out-of-jointness is exacerbated by modern technology, it can also be seen as a general truth about the experience of the contemporary, which necessarily entails a disjointed relation with the present.While contemporaneity is always paradoxically untimely, there is a widespread belief that we inhabitants of the twenty-first century suffer from a particularly disordered experience of temporality. Following David Harvey, Mark Currie calls this the narrative of "time-space compression," which apparently "extends the span of the present to encompass places once thought to be at a considerable spatial, and therefore temporal, distance" (9). Another purported aspect of contemporary experience, in Currie's view, is "accelerated recontextualization," wherein the gap between the first instance and the citation of a style "becomes increasingly, if not infinitely, short, so that the temporal distance between an original and its recontextualisation is abolished altogether" (10). Currie also groups what Jacques Derrida calls "archive fever" with these phenomena; this is his name for "the frenzied archiving and recording of contemporary social life which transforms the present into the past by anticipating its memory" (11). Currie is very clear that these are narratives about the contemporary, and that they are premised on basic assumptions about temporality that are unavoidably structured by an age-old philosophical difficulty with thinking the present (12). Working from Derrida's critiques of phenomenology, Currie argues that attempts to describe the disordered time of modernity privilege the experience of the temporal present and the ontological framing of being as presence (12). By contrast, I will be using Currie's descriptions as he intended them: not to reify, but to identify, these narratives where they appear in the contemporary discourse of the death of the novel.As Boxall notes, the widespread feeling that something has gone haywire in our relation to time has consequences for literary or narrative form. Various critics have addressed a growing sense that the temporality of the novel is out of step with contemporary experience. In his article on the effects of Amazon on literary culture, Mark McGurl argues that "what makes the novel so interesting as a 'neoliberal' commodity is its partial temporal disjunction from the real-time regime" (465). McGurl juxtaposes this regime with the notion of "quality time," which the novel renders in its "narrative dilation of human intimacy and intrigue" (465). Yet the disjunction is only partial: in fact, "the original real-time medium is sensory perception, the relation of subject to object, experience itself," which is susceptible to monetization (466). The novel's limited capacity to oppose neoliberalism proceeds from its distinctively slow temporality, but the time of the novel could yet be subsumed by the accelerated "real-time regime" that Amazon's business practices exemplify. This raises the question of whether the novel really must adapt to the new accelerated reality in order to adequately represent the contemporary world, or whether its power of critique proceeds from its autonomy—its disjunction—from the rhythms and speeds of everyday life.Another concern is that the instantaneous communication and dissemination of texts online will institute new models of textuality that will outcompete the novel. Will Self uses Marshall McLuhan's concept of a "Gutenberg mind"—a mind organized by or orientated toward information presented in a "codex"—to argue that, as we shift from mostly presenting information in books to mostly presenting it online, we will lose the desire or ability to read novels. As a consequence, Self argues, "if you accept that [in 20 years' time] the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web," then "the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth." Self's argument rests on two assumptions: first, that the internet radically reorganises existing ways of structuring and disseminating texts; second, that readers will automatically prefer the new textual model to that of the novel.Similarly, Tim Parks argues that "the state of constant distraction we live in" due to the internet will inevitably deplete "the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction." Parks thinks the forms of cultural production suited to the internet will train us poorly for the novel; as a result, he feels called to pronounce: I will go out on a limb with a prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable.Again, Parks's argument is underpinned by the assumption that the internet offers a seductive and qualitatively different model of textuality, one that is certain to supplant that of the novel. Paradoxically, however, his description of the "larger popular novel" could almost as easily apply to Dickens's serialized novels as to the literature of Parks's imagined technological dystopia. Smith's nod to A Tale of Two Cities at the beginning of Autumn marks the fact that her quickly written series is simultaneously an innovation and a reference to an earlier novelistic tradition. Perhaps the changes Parks envisions, then, are not as new or as inherently pernicious for the novel as he imagines.Indeed, Joe Moran has challenged the very sort of arguments that Self and Parks make on the basis that fears that new technologies will supersede certain cultural forms are premised on "an 'innovation-centric' understanding of historical progress": This fallacy assumes that technological change happens inexorably and in one direction, so older forms like dead-tree literature are seen as lagging behind newer, more virtual media—when in fact these older technologies tend to be fairly resilient and can co-exist creatively with new ones. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have given the name "endism" to this flawed logic that new technologies like the Internet will simply do away with older ones, like real-time television or printed books. (1285)As Moran argues, there is reason to doubt the suggestion that the internet will reorganise reading to the extent that the codex or the novel will go extinct. For one thing, the internet reading experience is already organized by analogies with the printed book: page, scroll, bookmark, tab, index. This suggests that certain possibilities of reading opened up by the internet already inhered in our existing models of textuality, even if it was not possible to realize them all until the advent of digital technologies.Similarly, Jonathan Crary argues against the "implicit assumption" that the salient feature of new media is "a new technological/discursive paradigm or regime" thought to be "derivable from the actual devices, networks, apparatuses, codes, and global architectures now in place" (38). The most important change brought about by the internet and mobile phones, he argues, is not structural but experiential: "the rhythms, speeds and formats of accelerated and intensified consumption are reshaping experience and perception" (39). While "a 24/7 world produces an apparent equivalence between what is immediately available . . . and what exists," this is only an appearance (19). As I argue below, technology produces not structural immediacy but an experience of immediacy, of acceleration.Alice Bennett is also sceptical about the moral panic over the internet's potential effects on the novel. She observes that "reading and attention have, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, become part of a fraught collection of concerns about subjectivity and self-management manifested as a discourse of crisis surrounding readers' capacity for attention" (1). In other words, these anxieties are not necessarily reflective of a new, genuine problem with attention and reading so much as they are symptomatic of wider maladies. The way Bennett links these concerns to discourses of "self-management" already begins to suggest that they perhaps have more to do with ideologies of productivity and efficiency than they do with literature.Meanwhile, various contributors to Novel's "Forum: Futures of the Novel" have identified deficiencies in death-of-the-novel narratives. Timothy Bewes, for example, argues that "questions about the future, history, prospects, end, or limits of the novel posit a unity to the form that is at odds with the fundamental 'disunity' that Georg Lukács, in The Theory of the Novel, finds to be peculiar to it" (17). If the novel seems blessed with a remarkable power to persist beyond its contemporary dissolution, that is because it was never a monolithic genre. Accordingly, Nancy Armstrong's contribution to the forum traces the new novelistic energies released in the wake of the "obsolescence of the traditional family," an institution that once shaped the genre of the novel (8). Narratives of the novel's decline fail to take into account the very malleability that defines it and enables it to persist. Nevertheless, the specter of the novel's obsolescence persists in the age of instantaneous communication to provide the context necessary for understanding Smith's and Laing's experiments with speed and immediacy in novel writing.Indeed, Autumn and Crudo intimate an awareness of contemporary debates about the supposed outdatedness of the novel. In Autumn, when Elisabeth visits the elderly Daniel at his care home, she imagines his response to her reading material: What you reading? he'd say.Elisabeth would hold it up.Brave New World, she'd say.Oh, that old thing, he'd say.It's new to me, she'd say. (Smith 31)When Daniel calls the book "that old thing," he hints at the very real possibility that Huxley's dystopia might be a premonition of the future that has gone out of date. Any such projection of the future is always susceptible to failure: while Brave New World was supposed to warn us where we were headed, we may have gone there already, or somewhere else entirely. Either way, the warning becomes redundant. A dystopia is also a satire or commentary on its contemporary moment, but Daniel's remark reminds us that it can go out of date by no longer being contemporary with the things it was satirising. In this way, Autumn raises the question of the continued relevance of novels beyond their contemporary moment. The novel, as a literary form that is supposed to remain relevant and stay in circulation long after publication—unlike newspaper reports or tweets—is particularly susceptible to this kind of questioning.Elisabeth's riposte, on the other hand, echoes the kind of pronouncement often made about Brave New World: it is as relevant today as it was in its own time. This notion that a novel can be ahead of its time and therefore exactly the right thing for its time (or not appreciated until much later, when it finally becomes contemporary) recalls Agamben's observation that "true" contemporaneity is always also a disjuncture. Smith wrestled with this anachronistic relation to the present when she had nearly completed her state-of-the-nation book and the EU referendum happened: "I was right up against my promised deadline for Hamish Hamilton, so I asked my publisher, Simon, if I could have an extra month, because I knew the book had to (and I had to, too) square up to what was happening if the notions of contemporaneousness in it were to mean anything at all" (Anderson). Had the novel come out just after the referendum with no mention of the vote, it would have already been out of date; conversely, in purposefully delaying in order to address a new development, Smith compromised the immediacy of her project. This quandary owes to one of the philosophical difficulties with the present alluded to above. The present is "a crossed structure of retentions and protentions": it both contains the past and anticipates the future (Currie 12). Because the present is structured by this openness to the future, any notation of the present is always incomplete; this is why Smith had to delay publication to follow the drama of the present moment as it unfolded. Smith's "Seasonal" quartet responds to fears about the novel becoming outdated by marking the general and unavoidable anachrony that inheres in the idea of immediacy itself. If the novel is susceptible to becoming outdated, then this is only because of a general truth about contemporaneity, and not a particular fault of the novel form.Laing also reflects on the cultural relevance of the novel, "that hopeless apparatus of guesswork and supposition, with which Kathy liked to have as little traffic as possible" (84). The historical Acker appropriated her materials, and Laing in turn appropriates her name and collage technique: She wrote fiction, sure, but she populated it with the already extant, the pre-packaged and ready-made. She was in many ways Warhol's daughter, niece at least, a grave-robber, a bandit, happy to snatch what she needed but also morally invested in the cause: that there was no need to invent, you could make anything from out of the overflowing midden of the already-done, the as Beckett put it nothing new, it was economic also stylish to help yourself to the grab-bag of the actual. (Laing 84)While the novel and fiction are unwieldy and vague, the stuff of life is already available for appropriation. This helps one cut right to the chase: it is "economic." But if collage gives us better access to the "actual," this raises the question of why Laing bills Crudo as a novel. At the very least, this decision suggests that the novel continues to be a useful form even as—or perhaps because—its cultural power continues to diminish.This sense of the novel's waning influence is central to twenty-first-century novelistic aesthetics. Pieter Vermeulen argues that as the regimes of subjectivity, individualism, nationhood, and empire associated with the novel lose traction, the genre itself has begun to pursue "explorations of different forms of affect and life" and "interrogations of the ethics and politics of form" (3). Novels "exploit [their] formal licence by departing from a particular, and partly fictional, conception of the novel as a homogenous, clearly codified genre in order to explore what forms of life and affect emerge after the dissolution of that genre" (Vermeulen 3–4). Retaining the marker "novel" despite its reflections on the genre's cultural and descriptive powerlessness, Crudo exemplifies Vermeulen's description of texts that interest themselves in the formal decomposition of the contemporary novel.As Self's and Parks's columns show, anxieties about the contemporary death of the novel are most often framed in terms of changes to the dominant technological modes of communication and publication. Autumn and Crudo thematise prevalent cultural concerns about what the new technologies of dissemination are doing to our experience of the present and the consequences of this for the novel, portraying the ways in which we are constantly overwhelmed by instantaneously published material, from posts on social media to fake news. Parks's and Self's articles exemplify how this experience is often thought to pose an existential threat to the novel. I want to suggest that Smith's and Laing's texts show, to the contrary, that the novel as a specifically fictional form is actually surprisingly well placed to reflect on the illusoriness of the contemporary experience of immediacy.At first glance, Autumn and Crudo might seem to buy into two premises that I am problematizing. First, they seem to take seriously the narrative of the internet's threat to the novel, because they have responded by adapting the genre's narrative handling of time and its publication process to mimic internet forms more closely. Secondly, the novels seem to privilege formally the very speed and immediacy that their protagonists find so worrying. Kathy explicitly voices this ambivalence about the temporality of twenty-first-century communications, gesturing toward the difficulty of distancing oneself from the experience of immediacy when it manifests as debased cultural consumption: "The speed of the news cycle, the hyper-acceleration of the story, she was hip to those pleasures, queasy as they were" (Laing 87). Yet while Crudo and Autumn are centrally concerned with the appearance of communicative and representational immediacy in contemporary life, I plan to show how these novels stage various failures of immediacy. In doing so, as I will suggest, they foreground the fact that all writing, communication, and experience is structured by what Derrida called "spacing" ("Signature" 317).Smith's and Laing's accounts of their writing processes imply that their novels are attempts to mimetically replicate the contemporary experience of accelerated temporality and communicative immediacy. If this is true, then—as Nilges argues—it leaves the novels open to political critique. On the other hand, we must consider the possibility that Smith and L
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