Author: Luoshu Zhang
In Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure, Dennis Broe traces the development of two competing philosophical concepts of seriality in critical history. The first is the Nietzschean concept of seriality as the “ever-repeating eternal return” where time does not advance but stays in a perpetual state of repetition and circulation (Broe 137). This persistent circulation defies any notions of beginning and end, inducing, instead, an “endless duration” in which meaning is canceled and replaced by time itself. The phenomenon of bingeing testifies to the addictive nature of such a seriality. The second concept of seriality derives from Hegel’s concept of totality. According to Broe, rather than focusing on the temporal aspects of seriality, this second conceptualization considers seriality through a more structural and spatial approach, seeing it as a way of revealing totality, as multiple elements accumulate and build to an understanding of a meaningful whole (138). In this conceptualization, seriality does not empty out meaning but reveals a deeper meaning by mapping out different and sometimes contradictory aspects of a totality, the whole picture of which is often too large and too multidimensional to be contained within a single work (Broe 138). For Broe, despite being highly differentiated, these two concepts of seriality often work in tandem in contemporary art and entertainment industry (142). Their collaboration reflects a struggle to balance between the need to engage an increasingly insatiable audience on the one hand, and the artistic ambition to capture truth and reality on the other.
In this paper, I argue that several of the novels we encountered in this course operate through a form of seriality that conforms neither to the concept of addictive eternal return, nor to that of revelatory totality, although they exhibit certain features of both. Like the serials of “ever-repeating eternal return,” the narrative of these novels is marked by the lack of a sense of progression or development, and an obscured idea of beginnings and ends. In Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, for example, the protagonist creates re-enactments of certain events and puts them on loop. These events have some common characteristics, yet they are ultimately separate incidents that bear no correlations among themselves. While the scale and complexity of the re-enactments increase, the later ones are not built on or developed from the previous ones. These events appear in the narrative in a serial form only because they triggered a particular sensation in the protagonist. However, throughout the novel, the mechanism behind their triggering effect on the protagonist is never explained. In this sense, their meaning is reduced to the sole purpose of re-enactment itself — a form of recurrence without signification, to appropriate Nietzsche’s words (Broe 139). Despite its non-progressiveness and cancelation of meaning, the seriality of these novels makes a fundamental departure from the seriality of the “addictive eternal return” that Broe theorizes in Birth of the Binge. That is, the addictive eternal return inevitably conceals or distracts the audience or the reader’s attention from its mechanism in order to prompt a continuous response that demands further consumption. Such is the condition of addiction.
However, in novels like Kafka on the Shore and Remainder, not only is the non-progressiveness of the narrative conspicuous, the inaccessibility of meaning is also established early in the narratives. Both novels open with an inexplicable event. In Kafka on the Shore, Nakata, the focus of the second narrative thread of the novel’s dual plotlines, loses his memory and higher cognitive functions in a mysterious accident in his childhood. The novel offers no clue to the cause of the accident and only hints at the reasons why Nakata was the only one damaged by the accident. Similarly, in Remainder, the unnamed narrator suffers memory loss and physical injuries from an accident about which all he can divulge is that “it involved something falling from the sky”. He admits that “it’s not that I’m being shy. It’s just that—well, for one, I don’t even remember the event” (McCarthy, Remainder 1). More importantly, while being inexplicable in themselves, these events have a defining impact on the narrative, for they altered the characters’ mind and psyche on a fundamental level, rendering their interiority completely inaccessible to the reader. Both novels adopt a form of a-subjective, a-psychological narration that stays on the surface most of the time, narrating only the material aspects of the characters’ actions without explaining the psychological motivations behind them. Consequently, rather than distracting the reader from the lack of signification in the narrative to make the reader immerse completely in the narrative, these novels frustrate the reader by foregrounding their own semantic impasse, causing the reader to frequently question the meaning of the events and of the characters’ actions in the novel. To some extent, Kafka on the Shore is self-reflexive on this characteristic of its narrative. In a discussion between Kafka and Oshima on Natsume Soseki’s novel The Miner, Kafka comments that he is bewildered by the lack of change and development in the protagonist’s character throughout the novel:
Those are life and death type experiences he goes through in the mines. Eventually he gets out and goes back to his old life. But nothing in the novel shows he learned anything from these experiences, that his life changed, that he thought deeply now about the meaning of life or started questioning society or anything. You don’t get any sense, either, that he has matured. You have a strange feeling after you finish the book. It’s like you wonder what Soseki was trying to say. It’s like not really knowing he’s getting at is the part that stays with you. (Murakami 89)
In this way, these novels disrupt the condition of addictive consumption, thus deviate from the ultimate goal of the form of seriality as “ever-repeating eternal return.”
While the seriality of these novels does not conform to the concept of seriality as “eternal return,” it challenges Broe’s second conceptualization of seriality as revelatory totality as well. In “Serial Aesthetics: Philosophical, Artistic, and Media Histories of Seriality/Hegel and Richard Kimble on the Trail of the One-Armed Man,” Broe highlights the significant potential of seriality to illuminate the plurality of and contradictions between different aspects of late-capitalist society, noting that “a primary way of knowing the totality was through its contradictions, its dialectical movement, with contradictions either resolving toward a higher unity or — under late-capitalism, in Adorno’s understanding of the negative dialectic — often not resolving at all” (143). Broe uses Zola’s serial novels on the Second Empire of Napoleon III as an example of seriality as revelatory totality, as opposed to seriality as ever-repeating eternal return. Broe argues that while Zola’s serialized novels focus on a single family, the Rougon-Macquart family, their seriality cannot be reduced to a genealogy. The novels are not linked together through a timeline that details the progression of the family’s life or the development of the characters. Each of these works has its own thematic focus and can be read as a self-contained, independent novel. Rather than tracing the family’s lineages in a chronological order, they assemble and map out cumulatively the totality of the particular socioeconomic milieu of the Second Empire by portraying different aspects of the Rougon-Macquart family members’ lives (152). The process of plot’s unfolding is also a process of fragmented pieces emerging and coming together to form a larger picture.
To some extent, Kafka on the Shore and Remainder show certain traits of such a seriality. It can be said that both novels operate through a process of mapping, emphasizing the characters’ movements and the space they create, occupy or investigate, instead of temporalities and the chronological order of the events. In other words, the structuring principal of these two novels seems to be more spatial than temporal. In Kafka on the Shore, the two main characters Kafka Tamura and Nakata travel through both actual landscapes of Japan and fictional spaces of dream and fantasy as they set forth on their parallel odysseys. They both have many strange encounters and novel experiences during their journeys, and these encounters and experiences are closely connected to the locations they are at. Nakata is “empty inside” like “a library without a single book,” as he describes to Hoshino (Murakami 329). In his journey, he follows his intuition and his intuition is often guided by geographical information alone. He does not know what to do, only knows that he needs to get to a specific place to know the next step. As the two plotlines unfold, the connections between Kafka and Nakata start to emerge, as it is revealed that the place that Nakata is drawn to, Shikoku, is also where Kafka is hiding. The novel thus resembles the structure of seriality as revelatory totality on a spatial level. The geographical information fits together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, revealing patterns that are previously unrecognizable. In Remainder, the ways in which the narrator navigates the space around him also reflects his obsession with circuits and pathways. His re-enactments map out different kinds of space, from the domestic space of an apartment room to the crime scene of a violent crime. They can also be seen as essentially attempts to overcome time and temporality through the manipulation of space, for what the narrator is trying to re-create are not actually an apartment building or a gas station, but moments, specific points in time that enable him to momentarily transcend his post-trauma condition and return to a state before the accident.
However, while the seriality of these novels is “revelatory” in some sense, rather than piecing together a narrative totality, they lay out events that do not add up and cumulate to a “meaningful whole.” There seems to be a sense of randomness or capriciousness in the way unrelated elements are strung together and certain aspects of an event are illuminated while others remain hidden and beyond our grasp. In other words, even when fragmented pieces of information fit together and reveal a pattern, it is still impossible to make sense out of that revelation. In Kafka on the Shore, while it becomes clear that there are connections between Kafka and Nakata, and that they have an impact on each other’s story, what exactly are their connections remains unclear. After Kafka finds the lyrics of the song Miss Saeki wrote for her lover, he notices that the lyrics contain a line about little fish raining down from the sky. Only a few days before, Nakata has made fish and leaches fall from the sky. The lyrics also mention “a knife that pierces your dreams”, which seems to allude to the strange night that deeply unsettled Kafka, from which he woke up with blood on his shirt without any memory of how it got there and soon afterwards learned from the news that his father has been murdered (245). Discussing these unsettling events with Oshima, Kafka mentions that “it feels like everything’s been decided in advance”, that he’s “following a path somebody else has already mapped out for [him]” (214). Oshima replies that, from his perspective, what he’s describing is the motif of fatalism that is frequently seen in Greek tragedies. Using Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as an example, he tries to convince Kafka that the bizarre, unusual events in these fatalist texts serve a thematic and metaphorical purpose: “everything in life is a metaphor. People don’t normally kill their father and sleep with their mother, right? In other words, we accept irony through a device called metaphor” (215). However, when Kafka asks him about whether the series of “strange, inexplicable events [that] are occurring one after the other” is also a metaphor, Oshima has to admit the limit of his theory: “Maybe … But sardines and mackerel and leeches falling from the sky? What kind of metaphor is that?”
Similarly, in Remainder, the repetitions and circulations do cumulate some information about the narrator. However, ultimately, they do not bring the reader closer to the narrator’s mind or interior world. As the story unfolds, it is not difficult to recognize that there are a few common characteristics among the events that trigger him and make him want to re-enact and set on loop: these events all create a sense of immediacy through their unexpectedness. They all in one way or another enable the protagonist to enter a state where he feels liberated from the confines of the physical matter of his body and achieves fluidity in his movements. Nevertheless, there is still a sense of ultimate unpredictability in the protagonist’ actions. While the narrative presents the psychological motivation behind some of his actions — he wants to recreate the building in Paris he remembered because inside this remembered building, “all [his] movements had been fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but natural” (McCarthy 67), there are also things that he does for which the narrative offers no explanation at all. For example, sitting in a coffee shop, the narrator watches a group of homeless people moving back and forth on the street. He then describes going up to one of them and inviting a homeless person to a meal, recording their interactions and conversations in details, only to reveal, a few pages later, that none of this has actually happened: “The truth is, I’ve been making all this up — the stuff about the homeless person. He existed all right, sitting camouflaged against the shop fronts and the dustbins — but I didn’t go across to him … Crap: total crap … I didn’t go and talk to him. I didn’t want to, didn’t have a thing to learn from him” (60). The novel offers no clue as to why the narrator decides to concoct this scene with the homeless person, and why he suddenly retracts from his fabulation. This scene remains a singular event in the novel — although, in foregrounding the narrator’s unreliability, it also makes us suspect its singularity.
These examples from the two novels show that neither of the texts is concerned with solving mysteries or presenting a “meaningful whole.” Instead, both novels foreground the loose ends in their narrative, performing a deliberate anti-revelatory or anti-resolutory tendency. In this way, they present a seriality that is decidedly different from the two types of seriality Broe theorizes. A crucial characteristic of this new form of seriality is that it is centrifugal, rather than circulative or centripetal.
In the third chapter of Birth of the Binge, “This is Your Brain, This Is Your Brain On Serial TV: Autism and Addiction as the (Psychoanalytic) Hyperindustrial Condition,” Broe draws on Roland Barthes’ reading of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine and his theory of the three types of codes that condition a reader’s response to analyze the strategies of contemporary television. These three types include the hermeneutic or enigma codes, the proairetic or action codes, and the semic or character codes, with the hermeneutic or enigma codes being the most essential one among the three. According to Broe, in Barthes’ theorization, the hermeneutic or enigma codes “structure the unfolding of the plot”, primarily through “a series of devices that suspend and retard the story by evading the truth (‘snares’), mixing truth and deliberate obfuscation (‘equivocations’), providing partial answers, and proclaiming the mystery or circumstance is unsolvable (‘jammings’)” (88). As Broe points out, for Barthes, the core of the narrative is precisely this “process of concealing the truth from the reader or viewer in an attempt to ‘arrest the enigma, to keep it open’ (Barthes 1974), with the enigma codes working at cross-purposes to the action codes to retard the narrative” (88). If what Barthes describes here is a typical centripetal narrative, where the continuity of the plot is sustained by persistently reaching towards yet never quite arriving at a hidden truth or enigma that constitutes the center of the narrative, Kafka on the Shore and Remainder present an opposite case. Both novels seem to have an implied yet invisible center. Yet rather than reaching towards this center in pursuit of a revelation or resolution, they present a post-enigma world, where the story no longer revolves around the enigma. Nevertheless, the narrative is still captured by the enigma’s impact. In this sense, these novels present a seriality that engage us in a new way. This new form of seriality could be understood in relation to the concept of the aftermath. In both Kafka on the Shore and Remainder, the story is already the aftermath of a previous traumatizing event that conditioned the characters in an irreparable way yet remains completely unknowable and unintelligible to them throughout the novel. The characters are therefore navigating a post-trauma world that is mediated, conditioned, and defined by that traumatic event. The series of events in the narrative are connected loosely together without constituting a meaningful whole because they are the effects of a cause that has become too distant and lost. In other words, both Kafka on the Shore and Remainder present a world that has been so severely mediated that it becomes impossible to retrace the process of that determining mediation itself.
In both novels, there is a sense of danger and malice beneath the surface of the narrative. The narrator’s gratuitous fabulation of the scene with the homeless person in Remainder could be seen as a manifestation of this underlying malicious affect. Although the nature of the incident that traumatized the narrator is never disclosed in the novel, the fact that it involved technology and the “bodies” responsible for the accident are willing to pay eight and a half million pounds to the narrator in exchange for him never discussing the nature and details of the incident with anyone is enough for us to detect the unusualness of the event, as well as the severity of its potential impact. On the surface, the incident only caused physical injuries and memory loss to the narrator. However, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes obvious that the narrator’s ability to experience emotions has also been severely damaged. At the beginning of the novel, when the narrator discusses with two friends what he should do with the compensation money he just received, one of the friends suggests that he could use the money to establish a resource fund for developmental projects in Africa. He tries to imagine what it would be like and tries to “feel some connection with these Africans,” yet he finds himself unable to do so: “I wanted to feel genuinely warm towards these Africans, but I couldn’t. Not that I felt cold or hostile. I just felt neutral” (McCarthy 37). However, this sense of neutrality or indifference gradually escalates into a complete disregard toward others. He is never concerned about objectifying the actors he employed to perform in his re-enactments and asks them to act exactly as he required even when he is not present to experience and participate the re-enactments. After learning that the black cats he ordered to be put on the rooftop of his apartment building keep dying from falling off the roof, he only asks his crew to find more black cats to replace the dead ones. His inability to register any feelings toward anyone and anything beyond their role as constituents of his re-enactments eventually leads to his final plan at the end of the novel, in which everyone who has worked with him and for his re-enactments, including himself, would be killed by a plane crush he arranges. The narrative therefore presents a seriality of the aftermath. While the narrative alludes to the presence of a “truth” that could explain the narrator’s actions, it does not move toward this “truth” but depicts the fragmented and inexplicable world of a person who no longer has the ability or interest to retrace to a center or find a meaningful totality.
In Kafka on the Shore, there is also an underlying sense of malice. Both Nakata’s and Kafka’s stories seem to originate in some form of violence. The “Rice Bowl Hill Incident” that caused Nakata’s disabilities happened during the Second World War. The only description of the potential cause of the incident is described as a “brilliant flash of silver” in the sky, which Nakata’s teacher assumed to be a B-29 plane. In Kafka’s storyline, Kafka learns that Miss Saeki, whom Kafka speculates to be his mother, once wrote a book about lightnings and recalls that his father has been struck by lightning before. Miss Saeki’s lover died in the student riots. The entrance of the timeless world which Kafka enters towards the end of the novel is guarded by two soldiers who tried to escape the war, yet eventually went missing in the forest. Whatever the truths behind these series of events maybe, the novel presents a world of their aftermath, in which it has become impossible to find a meaningful totality. Compared to Remainder, the mediations in Kafka on the Shore are more literal and more recognizable. The prophecy Kafka’s father made about him derives directly from Oedipus’ story. Kafka’s name certainly signals to another archetype. Even the figure of Kafka’s father is mediated by the figure of Johnnie Walker. Despite their apparent associations, the novel warns us about their dubious status as metaphors, for they could no longer be traced back to an original subject in the post-enigma world.
