Author: Chad Heller
The contemporary global novel, as I will show, grapples with the collapse of subjective and objective worlds through the technique of prosthesis as a supplement to the self. This concept of prosthesis interrogates the novel as a prosthetic device for the human, a technology that dramatizes the changing relationship between subject and object. Similar to how Fredric Jameson in “The Aesthetics of Singularity” defines the concept of singularity through the collapse of the distinction between form and content, the notion of prosthesis embodies this collapse in the novel. As Peter Boxall observes in The Prosthetic Imagination, the prosthetic condition of narrative that produces the world and gives rise to it in the form of a prosthetic trace replaces the traditional Auerbachian model of narrative as mimesis, where narrative forms refer to the world. The novel through the Bildungsroman, then, becomes a technology of the self and a prosthetic device that dramatizes subject formation. Prosthesis in this respect functions as an extension or supplement to the self, where the novel produces as much as it records the self and is a compensatory act. Novels like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and Rachel Cusk’s Transit deal with the question of the subject in the novel and compensate for this change in subject formation through narrative prosthesis, dismantling the self-consciousness of its narrators and supplementing it through narrative technologies like curation; such narrative technologies, to echo Boxall’s conception of artificial life, work to make artificial supplements vital to being and life itself. The damaged narrator of Remainder stages re-enactments as a way to compensate for his lack of subjectivity and non-presence as narrative subject, ultimately resulting the temporality of singularity — an eternal reworked present; these re-enactments serve to make the subject an object and show how this relationship must constantly be updated in order to remain recognizable to the self. Reno in The Flamethrowers is displaced by technology to propel the narrative and Faye in Transit falls into the role of narrative curator, compensating for a narrative absence by collecting the narratives of others. These novels disturb the form of Bildungsroman as a teleological representation of subject formation and each ultimately function as a “damaged Bildungsroman,” where the subject is supplemented by narrative prosthetics that extend subjectivity beyond its traditional model and bring the mind into contact with the material; this in turn attacks as an attack on the Bildungsroman as a form, where the very form itself is turned into its content.
The Bildungsroman is a form that most explicitly examines and represents the process of subject formation. It is a form dictated by its teleological content: the subject becomes not only integrated into society at large but simultaneously into being itself. The Bildungsroman dramatizes this process, arranging and curating the events that prove to be essential for the development of its subject. In this way, the Bildungsroman can be read as a supplement to subjectivity and selfhood, a form in which the modern liberal subject is created and a selfhood is reified. The Bildungsroman is the form that brings the subject into being and acts as a prosthetic device. The case of the “damaged Bildungsroman” collapses this distinction between form and content, where the form itself is consumed as its content. The teleological development enabled by the traditional Bildungsroman is disturbed in this new formation, featuring subjects who are damaged and use supplementary devices and technologies. In particular, the damaged Bildungsroman interrogates the retrospective recollection of self-production, where the memory of its subjects does not link up with their developmental trajectory. It is through this mode that compensatory acts are made to supplement the representation of the self in the Bildungsroman, highlighting the prosthetic role that the novel form plays in producing the subject and notions of selfhood.
Beginning ex nihilo rather than in medias res, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a novel that explicitly renders memory as central in determining selfhood and subjectivity. Remainder begins where it also ends: aporia. The narrator’s memories, those which defined him as a subject and a self, are lost as a result of his accident, leaving him with “a blank: a white slate, a black hole” (3). This “no-space of complete oblivion” is something that becomes supplemented by the financial settlement surrounding his undefined accident, where it becomes a part of his mind and body alongside the medical apparatuses that keep him alive:
As I lay abject, supine, tractioned and trussed up, all sorts of tubes and wires pumping one thing into my body and sucking another out, electronic metronomes and bellows making this speed up and that slow down, their beeping and rasping playing me, running through my useless flesh and organs like sea water through a sponge — during the months I spend in the hospital, this word planted itself in me and grew. Settlement. It wormed its way into my coma. (4)
The very word “settlement” itself functions alongside his bodily motor functions, where in the process of relearning how to eat food, the act of pronunciation is fused with swallowing: “After I emerged from coma, come of the drip-feed and been put onto mushy solids, I’d think of the word’s middle bit, the -l-, each time I tried to swallow” (4). At work here is the logic of prosthesis, where the damaged mind of the narrator is supplemented through this financial settlement to the point that is operates in tandem with him. The settlement acts as financial supplement meant to replace the memory lost by the narrator and is presented as a “counterbalance to [his] no past, a moment that would make [him] better, whole, complete” (5). Even within the context of the narrator’s medical recovery from the accident, he is augmented by both medical and economic technology. Ultimately, the financial capital gained from his accident is what enables his subsequent pursuit to augment his damaged self; it is an attempt to gain access again to what was lost and in doing so, the novel dramatizes prosthesis as a compensatory logic that seeks to supplement the subject. The capital exhumed from the narrator’s loss of memory becomes the vehicle from which his “re-enactments” are enacted and thus the propulsion that sets the prosthetic devices and technology into place.
The prosthetic element in Remainder originates from a bodily and psychological lack, resulting in a damaged self. As the narrator explains, the brain damage from the accident required physiotherapy in the form of “rerouting:” “Rerouting is exactly what it sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along” (19). For the narrator, this rerouting begins with the motor functions of his body, where the act of visualizing precedes movement: “Every action is a complex operation, a system, and I had to learn them all. I’d understand them, then I’d emulate them” (22). This notion of emulation is expressed in terms of plasticity by the physiotherapist: “You’re learning … your muscles are still plastic … Rigid. It’s the opposite of flaccid. With time they’ll go flaccid: malleable, relaxed. Flaccid, good; plastic, bad” (22). In a sense, this functions as a remaking of the damaged self, an attempt to repair and fix what is made missing by the accident. This supposedly reparative act, however, is one that is mediated rather than natural. Rerouting functions to make the narrator conscious of his actions otherwise unconsidered or natural. As he describes it, “No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour” (22-23). At work here is the function of rerouting in the logic of prosthesis. This supposed return to the natural — identified by the narrator here as the “flaccid” — is mediated by the conscious action of understanding before doing. The subject is remade through eternal detour, where the mental constructions and processes that constituted selfhood are laid bare; the technologies and prosthetics that created the self are revealed to the narrator. In other words, prothesis functions as a supposed return to the natural that ultimately displaces the natural with something artificial. It is fitting, then, that the narrator’s loss of self is a result of falling technology, something that seemingly replaces what was never made missing.
In Remainder, the internal is made external through the narrator’s re-enactments. These first begin as a way to practice hypomensis—a way to recover lost memories from the accident via a technological reproduction. Following a revelatory Proustian moment in a bathroom, the narrator attempts to reconstruct his lost past through the mechanism of re-enactments. These are also enacted in order to feel a sense of reality, or as the narrator describes it, the ability to feel the “least unreal” (241). After learning about a shooting on his way to Brixton, the narrator reconstructs the crime scene for use in a re-enactment. This is the first re-enactment produced by the narrator that seemingly has no connection with his own memories. Musing on the attraction that the scene has for him, the narrator muses,
[T]his man had become a symbol of perfection. It may have been clumsy to fall from his bike, but in dying beside the bollards on the tarmac he’d done what I wanted to do: merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it until there was no distance between it and him — and merged, too, with his actions, merged to the extent of having no more consciousness of them. He’d stopped being separate, removed, imperfect. Cut out the detour. Then both mind and actions had resolved themselves into pure stasis. (197-98)
The narrator here expresses a desire for immediacy, one which he hopes can overcome his prosthetic condition—that idealization of convergence and melding with matter and the material world. The distance he wishes to overcome is compared with his rerouted motor functions, signaling the function of re-enactments as prosthetic compensations for his loss of memory. As he later explains, the re-enactments had the goal of allowing him “to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects” (240). This desire to meld mind with matter is a prosthetic one, a desire that reaches outside of the traditional conception of the human and highlights how the self is supplemented by technology in order to feel real. This feeling eventually leads the narrator to the looping plane ride at the end of the novel, ending with another aporia. In this sense, Remainder is a Bildungsroman predicated on static repetition, a closed loop; through this form, the novel exposes itself as a technology that prosthetically produces the self.
Rachel Cusk’s Transit presents another technology of prosthesis — that of writing and narrative itself. The narrator of Transit, the once-named Faye, seemingly has a spectral presence in the text. Faye’s narration primarily consists of listening to others, who also at points nest the narratives of other people into their own. The consequence of this in terms of Transit’s narrative is the elision of Faye herself, as she becomes a vessel for the stories of others and ostensibly maintains only a transparent selfhood; similar to the narrator of Remainder, Faye’s narrative in Transit disturbs the developmental logic of the bildungsroman and complicates the process of the retrospective recollection of self-production by constructing the self only through others. Alongside Faye being only named once in each book of the Outline trilogy, the fact that this is a trilogy that shows little continuity or development over its three installments further highlight this and is also a way to consider it an example of singularity. The stories and memories of others are the prosthetic device by which Faye constructs her selfhood and subjectivity, as they become part of her. The form of curating these stories thus becomes the content and gives further context to the novel’s place within the genre of autofiction, where the distinction between form and context collapses.
Transit begins with Faye receiving an email from an astrologer with clairvoyant information about Faye’s immediate future. The astrologist seemingly senses the fact that Faye has “lost [her] way in life, that [she] sometimes struggled to find meaning in [her] present circumstances and to feel hope for what was to come” (1). It is this invocation by the astrologist that establishes the damaged character of Faye, producing a damaged self that leads to Faye’s seemingly absent or empty narratorial presence, as Faye herself is aware that she “had suffered sufficiently to begin asking certain questions” (2). To Faye, the astrologist reads as unreal and immaterial as the email itself: “It seems possible that the same computer algorithm that had generated this email had also generated the astrologer herself: her phrases were too characterful, and the note of character was repeated too often; she was too obviously based on a human type to be, herself, human” (3). Fay then recalls an anecdote of a friend who, while in a deep depression following his divorce, feels a growing attachment and “something akin to love” for artificial, computer-generated voices, more than he ever felt for his wife. He explains how “it may have become the case that the faux-human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than from one’s fellow man. After all, the mechanised interface of the distillation not of one human but of many” (3). This notion of faux-humanity established here introduces the primary prosthetic logic at work in Transit — that being the distillation of many humans into a single narrative or output. The notion of humans creating and thus being representative of the faux-human mirrors the way in which Faye’s memories become part of her and embodied in the narrative itself. These memories are reincorporated and distilled into Faye’s narrative as it serves to construct her selfhood and subjectivity.
Many of Faye’s anecdotes and memories shared concern the process of representing selfhood in something external to the self. These collected and curated instances dramatize the prosthetic logic at work in the text, where the distance between subject and object collapses. In a conversation with the builder renovating her house, the builder explains how clients “after a week or two they forget you’re there, not in the sense that you become invisible – it’s hard to be invisible … when you’re knocking out partitions with a claw hammer – but that they forget you can see and hear them” (52). The builder explains further, “In a way … he felt his clients sometimes forgot he was a person: instead he became, in a sense, an extension of their own will. Often they would start asking him to do things, like people used to ask their servants” (53). The builder in this sense becomes an extension of the other’s will, a device that can manifest internal will into something material and external. During Faye’s hair appointment, her stylist Dale shares the peculiar habit of his friend, a plumber who would make sculptures in his spare time: “These sculptures were constructed entirely from the materials he used in his plumbing job: lengths of pipe, valves and washers, drains, waste traps, you name it. He had a sort of blowtorch he used to heat the metal and bend it into different shapes” (67). Notably, Dale explains how these sculptures would be crafted only in a fit of artistic ecstasy while the plumber was high on crystal meth: “He’ll wake up on his garage floor in the morning and there’ll be this thing beside him that he’s made and he’s got no memory at all of making it … It must be really strange … Like seeing a part of you that’s invisible” (68). This sort of reworking of physical material, especially materially associated with one’s profession, shows how Faye — and by extension Cusk herself — rearranges and curates the material of others to show that part of yourself that is invisible. This notion of invisibility highlights the apparent transparency of Faye as a narratorial presence, where we only learn about her through the stories and memories of others that she herself chooses. Rather than a kind of mimetic representation of the self, it is mediated and prosthetically extended through this act of curation, a compensatory act for a presence that feels absent.
Though Faye seemingly remains absent from the narrative, we can see how this prosthetic logic is at work in combing mind with matter. At one point, Faye is speaking with Jane, a student of hers. Jane reveals her obsession with the life of American painter Mardsen Hartley, an obsession that seemingly happens by coincidentally coming upon a retrospective of his work in an art museum. This fixation comes from the fact that she sees herself as a double of him: “He’s me, she said … we’re the same. I know it sounds a bit strange, she went on, but there’s actually no reason why people can’t be repeated” (134). Jane explains how Mardsen Hartley’s paintings appear to her like thoughts of her own: “They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else’s head that she could see. It was seeing them that had enabled her to recognize that those thoughts were her own” (134-35). Jane specifically notes, “Rather than mirroring the literal facts of her own life, Mardsen Hartlety was doing something much bigger and more significant: he was dramatising them” (137-8). Here, the mirroring of one’s own life in art — a mimetic act — is instead conceptualized as dramatization. Jane sees the representation of her thoughts in the art of another person entirely, yet it becomes internalized and made part of her. The art, then, functions as a prosthetic piece to augment the self and make it whole, much like the narration of Transit itself. Despite Faye’s absence as full presence in the text, it still bears her authorial and prosthetic mark. Jane recounts a memory of flipping through unopened and abandoned cookbooks from her parents, mesmerized by the “lurid pictures” of food with “colours alarming and bewilderingly unreal” (147). Jane further explains, “Sometimes a hand was visible in the photograph, appearing to execute a culinary manoevure: it was a white hand, small and clean and sexless, with scrubbed, well-clipped nails. It touched things without leaving a mark on them, or being marked in return: it remained clean, unbesmirched, even as it gutted a fish or skinned a tomato” (147-48). This almost transparent hand is representative of the prosthetic logic of Transit, wherein material that exists outside the self is remade to effectively construct it. The form of Transit and curatorial thus enacts the creation of content, where the hand represents the prosthetic trace in arranging the representation.
While the works of McCarthy and Cusk are concerned with acts to compensate for memory, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is principally a novel about a motorcycle. Reno as a narrator is displaced by the use of technology in the novel, where it is her motorcycle that drives the plot and augments her sense of self. The novel itself opens with a melding between man and machine in a flashback to World War I, where T.P. Valera kills a German soldier with a motorbike headlamp. This moment is subsequently juxtaposed with Reno riding across the Nevada desert on a Moto Valera; from the moment we are introduced to Reno, she figures as a background to the movement of a motorcycle: “I wasn’t in a hurry, under no time constraint. Speed doesn’t have to be an issue of time. On that day, riding a Moto Valera east from Reno, it was an issue of wanting to move across the map of Nevada that was taped to my gas tank as I moved across the actual state” (3). Reno the protagonist thus folds into Reno the city, and the prominent figure here is the motorcycle; this is further emphasized by the fact that Reno is the only name we know the protagonist by, a name that is merely a nickname adopted from the constant use of it by others. Indeed, we learn more about Valera’s motorcycles and tires than Reno herself, who is displaced by the technology in the novel, even becoming the extension of a camera by becoming a model for color-timing control strips.
In Reno’s life, this technology compensates for this narratorial lack of presence and depth. We see here how a love for the Moto Valera ultimately displaces the forthcoming love story between Reno and Sandro. Sandro too is a stand in for the machine he represents, as Reno herself first introduce him in full to the reader with his familial origins: “Sandro is Sandro Valera, of Valera Tires and Moto Valera motorcycles” (23). Later in the novel, Reno learns at the Valera Villa about the original last name of Talia Valera was Shrapnel: “She had changed it to Valera because she didn’t want the stigma of her great-great-great-grandfather’s invention, the shrapnel shell, a thing that was far more famous than the man it was named for. The shrapnel shell came before the name Shrapnel, and not the reverse” (254). At work here is the logic of prosthesis through displacement, where the human is replaced by the machine it makes. Reno’s own childhood fascination with the land speed record holder Flip Farmer takes upon this idea of displacement: “Young girls don’t entertain the idea of sex, their body and another’s together. That comes later, but there isn’t anything before it. There is an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl’s dreaming” (21). As Reno recalls the time she got her hand autographed by Flip, she describes him in terms of movement: “We weren’t individuals but a surface he moved over, smiling and remote … If he had returned my gaze, I probably would’ve washed his autograph from my hand” (21). For Reno, romance and sexual desire are figured as riding a vehicle, one which demands a displacement on her part; this non-presence becomes the most authentic form of existence for her, where the only true self for Reno is through the prosthetic extension of the technology she operates.
Reno’s augmentation with technology via the motorcycle is a feature that stretches back to her childhood. The motivation for Reno’s land art project originates in the drawings she did while skiing as a child, conceptualizing as a way to draw “in time:”
[W]hen drawing became a habit, a way of being, I always thought of skiing. When I began ski racing … it as if I were tracing lines that were already drawn, and the technical challenge that shadowed the primary one, to finish with a competitive time, was to stay perfectly in the lines, … to leave no trace, because the harder you set your skis’ metal edges, the bigger wedge of evidence you left, the more you slowed down. You wanted no snow spraying out behind you. You wanted to be traceless. (9)
This desire to be traceless informs not only Reno’s project, but also her relation to the motorcycle and desire for speed. By reaching such high speeds, she wants the motorcycle to leave no mark much in the same way she melds with the machine. When riding the Moto Valera around New York City, Reno as the rider becomes one with it, and they share an ontological orientation and plane: “It made my city a stage, my stage, while I was simply getting from one place to the next … It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being” (297). The simple act of movement propelled by the motorcycle unites her selfhood with the machine, literally taking her from one place to the next throughout The Flamethrowers. Even when she is not on the bike, it informs her sense of being: “I had the bike outside, unseen, but it had become a kind of mental armor” (302). The motorcycle becomes a prosthetic addition to the self, one which acts as an extension of her. Reno at one point finds herself leaning “over the railing periodically to be sure the Moto Valera was still there” (307), as if even in her separation from it her selfhood still depends upon it. Indeed, this too offers a way to read the interspersed histories of the Valera family, as if Reno’s story cannot be told without them; they provide a history of motorcycles and tires, which become part of Reno herself.
Remainder, Transit, and The Flamethrowers all dramatize the logic of prosthesis at work in the global novel, where selfhood itself cannot be represented without the augmentation of narrative itself. In this sense, we see how form becomes content, itself an echo of the logic of singularity. The logic of prosthesis in these novels complicate our understanding of the Bildungsroman as a form, as these novels dramatize how the novel form itself augments our conception of the modern liberal subject. By playing with the notion of a “damaged Bildungsroman,” these novels attack the form of the Bildungsroman itself and display the ways the novel displaces the natural with something artificial in an attempt to return to the natural, a logic that presents the inhuman as human and the human as inhuman.
