Remainder’s way turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical materialism-it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel. A few days after the fake homeless epiphany, at a party, while in the host’s bathroom, the Enactor sees a crack in the plaster in the wall. It reminds him of another crack, in the wall of “his” apartment in a very specific six-story building he has yet no memory of ever living in or seeing. In this building many people lived doing many things-cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike. And there were cats on the roof! It all comes back to him, though it was never there in the first place. And now Remainder really begins, in the mission to rebuild this building, to place reenactors in it reenacting those actions he wants them to enact (cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike), doing them over and over till it feels real, while he, in his apartment, fluidly closes and reopens a fridge door, just like De Niro....To facilitate his reenactment, the Reenactor hires Nazrul Ram Vyas, an Indian “from a high-caste family” who works as a facilitator for a company dedicated to personal inauthenticity: Time Control UK. It takes people’s lives and manages them for them. Nazrul is no more a character (in realism’s sense of the word) than I am a chair, but he is the most exquisite facilitator, and it is through him that every detail of the reenactment is processed. He thinks of everything. In place of the pleasure of the rich adjective we have an imagined world in which logistical details and logical consequences are pursued with care and precision: if you were to rebuild an entire house and fill it with people reenacting actions you have chosen for them, this is exactly how it would play out. Every detail is attended to except the one we’ve come to think of as the only one that matters in a novel: how it feels. The Reenactor in Remainder only ever has one feeling-the tingling-which occurs whenever his reenactments are going particularly well. The feeling is addictive; the enactments escalate, in a fascinating direction.--Zadie Smith in "Two Directions for the Novel," in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, pp. 86 (First published in 2008 in NYRB as "Two Paths for the Novel").
After (recall) I wrote about Tom McCarthy's Satin Island the distinguished literature scholar, Jonathan Kramnick, mentioned to me he thought McCarthy's Remainder one of the most important novels of this our comparatively new century (having almost passed a fifth of its projected years, it's still fresh). Chapter six of Kramnick's collection of essays, Paper Minds, taught me that he, in turn, was echoing the judgment of "Zadie Smith, in an influential essay in the New York Review of Books, [touted Remainder] as both the most significant novel of its decade and the direction Anglophone fiction should follow into the new millennium." (130) As it happens, I was familiar with Smith's essay, but somehow had remembered mainly the devastating criticism of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which has discouraged me from reading the book (life is short!), and the subtle use of a poem by Szymborska.
In re-reading Smith's essay I was reminded of her comic description of the International Necronautical Society (INS). In its manifesto, the INS assumes, with the logicians of old, the necessity of death and commits itself to reinventing death in rigorous ways. In the new logic, if we can make it (recall this post on Regina Rini), death will be a violent possibility.
But somehow, I had completely forgotten that Smith treated the seven year path (and presumably many rejections of) Remainder to publication as exemplary of "our ailing literary culture." (71) This culture represents unhealty times. In healthy days literature has multiple, possible futures. This (in 2008) is now denied. The opposition between Netherland and Remainder is a form of prophecy in order to re-open paths (and also recall the American metafiction -- "Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, David Foster Wallace" [I would add Fran Ross's Oreo]-- now languishing in a safe corner of literary history (73)). Since that very literature culture has rewarded Smith greatly, one cannot help avoid sensing some ambivalence (she uses "violence") in these remarks.
As Smith's description reveals, Remainder presents a character, a reenactor, who is very much a part inside Leibniz's Mill argument:
[W]e must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes, size, and motions. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception.
But the novel suggests that Leibniz is inviting us to look in the wrong place. Perception is co-constituted by the body moving in space, the body's interaction with its umwelt, and repetition with (to echo Deleuze) occasional variation. Kramnick expertly connects Remainder to recent developments in enactive philosophy of mind (although understates the significance of repetition). Strikingly, the only feeling that occurs inside the reenactor, occurs when a pattern is recognized as, and thereby projected, as having occurred before. This constitutes a reenaction as going well.
The reenactor is a person who suffered an accident. His experience of recovering motor-control, which the able bodied ordinarily take for granted, reveals that the only person with truly fluid movement is a fake (De Niro's screen character). There is no what it's like of that. Once our behavior is (now quoting Kramnick) "slowed down and made unfamiliar, the experience in each does not layer on top of the [body-]motion. It is, rather, identical to it." (135) This claim is made visible (I almost wrote felt) by a kind of stripping away, that is, abstraction.
Both Smith and Kramnick note that Remainder's aesthetic is fully (ahh, I almost wrote self-conscious) present in the art. I quote Kramnick's description before I close with a comment:
“In school, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art,” the reenactor begins one chapter; “I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus” (90). What follows is a revealing meditation on the making of art as its own type of perceptual activity. “For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel, and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable—a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us—right in the block that we were chiseling away at” (91). The art object is already there, only requiring a certain kind of physical motion—the lifting of one’s arm and hammering—for it to come into its own. The action is a deliberately plain shucking away of what is not art; thus, the reenactor can “not be any good at it” while also standing as the form-giving example in McCarthy’s ordinary sentence. “‘Your task isn’t to create the sculpture,’ he said; ‘it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter.’ ” The reenactor takes this as a lesson on how to create his building (“chiseling away at surplus matter” will “scare my building out” [96]), and we are in turn supposed to take both as an account of how to see form as a kind of matter, the novel as a thing in the world rather than the world’s representation. Creative engagement merely strips away the surplus matter of what is neither experience nor art. (137)
One part of the (serious) joke here is that the teacher echoes (with a non-trivial difference) Vasari's definition of the nature of sculpture:* "Sculpture is an art which by removing all that is superfluous from the material and reduces it to that form designed in the artist's mind." Of course, the joke is that the traditional artist and his design has been removed from the (perhaps mis-remembered) teaching; there is now -- as Leibniz feared -- only motion and rough pattern recognition.
That would have been the best end to this long digression. But the other or same part of the joke is, of course, that one encounters the reenactor and his teacher through the words of McCarthy and (ahh) one's imaginary participation with these...and just then one recognizes the looming regress.
And so I close with gratitude to Kramnick with Swift:
*On the internet the remark is often attributed to Michelangelo. This is not all wrong because Michelangelo said something similar in a 1549 letter to Varchi. See the long note on by G. Baldwin Brown in Vasari on Technique, translated by Louisa S. Maclehose (pp. 179-180). My translation is taken from p. 143 (with modest modification).
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