A corporate anthropologist contemplates the totality of contemporary existence in an ambitious avant-garde novel that fails to rob flightIn a characteristically erudite (learned or scholarly) essay in the London Review of Books last year,Tom McCarthy took aim at the current vogue for memoiristic fiction, singling out David Shields and Karl Ove Knausgaard (respectively the movement’s chief ideologue and most prominent practitioner) for mention. His ostensible target wasn’t the work itself so much as the way it had revived an outdated dispute, or setting “a realism which is realistic” against “an avant garde that isn’t. But the animus against the work was clear,and declared itself unmistakably when McCarthy scolded even one of his heroes, Michel Leiris, and for stooping to “candid confession and exposure of personal peccadillos … ie Oprah literature”.
As the author of the (to my intellect) certifiable masterpiece,Remainder – a fantastically imaginative tale of obsession that also happened to be a synthesis of neo-modernist techniques pioneered by JG Ballard, the “Oulipo” school and others – McCarthy could be relied on to provide a spirited defence of his own methods. But what gave the essay its peculiar frisson was the unusual spectacle of an avant gardist fighting a rearguard action, and a rather desperate one at that (you can sense the slight panic in that surprisingly cheap set aside-down,“Oprah literature”). Citing Balzac and Flaubert as well as Derrida and Nietzsche in support of his position, he concluded that the naive and uncritical realism dominating contemporary middlebrow fiction, and the doctrine of authenticity peddled by creative writing classes the world over”,were hopelessly “simple-minded”. What he seemed to forget was that literature isn’t science: that its disputes are never conclusively settled, however eminent one’s authorities may be, or that readers simply go wherever the life is at a given moment.
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Source: theguardian.com