Author: Mike Kleynman
In “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” Fredric Jameson characterizes the late-capitalist or postmodern moment “by the displacement of time by space as a systemic dominant” (128) and a corresponding “reduction to the present or reduction to the body” (106). Contemporary aesthetic space becomes, then, a space of events, entities that exist and are consumed only in a present, since they occupy a space without occupying time. By their nature, these singularity-spaces deny the possibility of historicity or (true) futurity for aesthetic objects, without which these objects become forms, “pure present[s] without a past or future” (113). This in turn necessitates the presence of the curator, the figure who arranges for presentation various art objects so that they might create a novel aesthetic space — itself another form in the present. In the absence of an actually-existing temporality, the forms/arrangements of these objects and spaces becomes the content for which they are consumed. Jameson gives us the paradigmatic example of the flash mob: not a movement (which would imply temporality) but an event whose idea lies in its form, as an arrangement of bodies that occupies a space for a present instant. Taking this as an accurate symptomatic diagnosis, this leaves us with the question of how this singularity-space interacts with novels, which exist within this context and yet themselves produce particular relations of space to time, in content as in form.
To move from this diagnosis of the present cultural moment to an analysis of how novels operate within it requires us to go back to Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay on the chronotope, an essential concept if we are to talk about space in the novel. In “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin identifies a “chronotope” as the “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). This is, crucially, a way by which we can conceptualize the literary interaction of space and time, each of which (as the definition suggests) always implies the other. The chronotope appears in many forms, but each greatly affects the ways in which the novel can portray the action and the characters. Not only does the chronotope of a novel delimit the internal possibilities for subject formation, but it is also the means by which the novel mediates real experience: “a literary work’s artistic unity in relationship with an actual reality is defined by its chronotope” (243). Nor is a novel bound to one specific chronotope. Within a novel, one chronotope may abut another, or mix with it, or contain it — in other words, the novel operates as a complex arrangement of chronotopes. It is in this sense that we may think of the contemporary novel as itself exercising a curatorial function with respect to relations of time and space. The novel can thus engage with singularity-space without becoming merely another example of it. To understand literary space in the contemporary novel, then, it is not sufficient to understand the relationship of space/time in contemporary late-capitalist society — one does not reduce to the other, though the two are always linked. But by looking at what our novels do with space — what sorts of spaces they use, how they position these spaces temporally, what happens (or doesn’t) to subjects within those spaces — in the context of Bakhtin’s chronotope and Jameson’s singularity, we may be able to articulate an understanding of space that allows us to engage with the contemporary novel more fully.
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a novel in which a very particular relationship of space and time visibly structures the action. After being involved in a freak accident, the narrator develops an obsession with feeling “real,” a realness he construes as immediacy. As he remembers an old apartment he once lived in, he thinks of how he’d felt moving through that space: “Opening my fridge’s door, lighting a cigarette, even lifting a carrot to my mouth: these gestures had been seamless, perfect. I’d merged with them, run through them and let them run though me until there’d been no space between us. They’d been real; I’d been real— been without first understanding how to try to be: cut out the detour” (67).
Being “real” for this narrator means a lack of mediation between him and his actions: he wishes to exist and engage with the world around him without this chain of first understanding how to try to be; no more mediative “detour” between existing and acting. Interesting here is that just as the desire for “realness” slides into a desire for a specific kind of immediacy, so does that desire slide into one of eliminating distance, of merging with space. That begins to appear in these lines: he speaks of merging with his movements and of reaching a point when there is “no space” between him and then. But it becomes even more evident when we consider the context: what sets off this thinking about being “real” is his memory of a particular space. The sudden memory of that old apartment building where the narrator lived — he’s not quite sure when, or where — triggers his feeling of realness; i.e., it is only in the context of this specific space that he felt real. The narrator makes the same identification explicit in the next paragraph: “Right then I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my money. I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again.” His sense of realness (and so of that form of immediacy he describes) becomes inseparable from the space he identifies it with. “Feeling real again” becomes conditional on his being able to reconstruct “that” particular apartment building. This moment in many ways provides the impetus for the rest of the narrative’s action: his realization here leads him to contact Naz and to create his first reenactment, from which all the following enactments stem. And this driving impulse is rooted in a suggestive web of connections in which the narrator marries realness, the removal of mediation, and an actual space.
There remains an element of this impulse, however, that the text only reveals later. Just as Bakhtin tells us it’s impossible to truly separate space from time, so does the narrator, fittingly, add a temporal dimension to his spatial desire. He tells Naz, the logistics guru he hires, that the space must be filled with “re-enactors” who perform specific tasks whenever they’re “on” (86). These tasks are themselves repetitive: an old woman cooks liver “constantly,” a piano teacher makes mistakes in his songs and “repeats” them slowly, a motorbike enthusiast takes his bike apart and puts it back together again all day (88-89). At the narrator’s say-so, all the participants move like so many machines along their tracks, performing the same set of actions endlessly and without variation. As long as the building is “on,” which, we’re told, is from hours to days at a stretch (160), we enter a temporality different from those we traditionally associate with novels. We are neither in the flow of forward chronological narrative movement, nor in a world of disjointed flashbacks, nor in a fantasy realm of time travel. Instead, the narrator either sits in his room or wanders the apartment as the same actions play out, over and over, in the same location. These actions lead nowhere, come from nowhere: they are the present on loop. They are the most mundane actions, and we see them play out in the text for almost one hundred pages. Eventually, as the narrator constructs more reenactments, this temporal tendency reaches an apotheosis in the reenactment of the tire shop: there, we learn, rotating teams of actors have been performing the same scene non-stop for three weeks (236). The novel nods playfully at this temporal obsession via the name of Naz’s company: Time Control.
Given that this glossary entry began with Jameson’s essay, the parallels between the space-time of these reenactments in Remainder and Jameson’s singularity are difficult to ignore. What is more of a reduction to a spatial present than these reenactments, where the same event occurs endlessly in space? While Remainder’s peculiar chronotope does, undoubtedly, play with the logic of singularity, it complicates it in several key ways. The first one comes from its blending of realness, immediacy, and space. The narrator acts quite explicitly as a constructor of spaces via intermediary: “We hired an architect. We hired an interior designer. We hired a landscape gardener for the courtyard. We hire contractors, who hired builders, electricians and plumbers” (111). The list continues for a bit longer, and, before we see the reenactment in action, the novel shows us in detail what had to be done to that space before it could be used. There are countless alterations: large portions of the building are replaced, much of it is painted over (or dirtied up), fake damage is introduced — significantly, the person responsible for much of the interior work is a set designer for films. All of this happens, of course, on two levels: the narrator and his army are doing the construction within the narrative; at the same time, these spaces exist as settings within the novel — what we see is as much the novel’s creation of space as the narrator’s. Though Remainder avoids the classically postmodern move of explicit meta-referentiality, it does refer to the connections between these two levels of construction. Nearer the end of the novel, the narrator begins hallucinating the presence of a “short councilor” who often serves to question the actions of the narrative. On his first visit, he mentions the work that went into creating the five re-enactments that have composed the plot up to this point, before asking the narrator, “’for what purpose?’” When he gets no answer, he asks a more pointed question: “‘Does he, perhaps, consider himself to be some kind of artist?’” (237). The spaces (and temporalities) constructed by the narrator are here explicitly linked to those constructed by an “artist” — in other words, to the way by which a work mediates reality by representing it. This connection suggests that we should see the novel’s treatment of space here as a both a literary representation of physical space, and as a literary representation of literary space.
This becomes more important if we look at another way Remainder plays with its spaces frozen in time; namely, in their generation of intensities. Here is the narrator describing the first time he walks through his reenactment of the apartment building: “For a few seconds I felt weightless — or at least differently weighted: light but dense at the same time. My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it — gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water. It felt very good” (146). Shortly afterwards, as he reruns the reenactment, he describes the feeling again: “Here the sensation started returning: the same sense of zinging and intensity.” Elsewhere and most frequently, the narrator describes the feeling he has in these re-enactments as a “tingling.” We see this intensity synthesized with the narrator’s desire for immediacy/reality most clearly in the reenactment of the first shooting. Explaining his desire to reenact the man’s death, the narrator uses the same language we saw when he first articulated his desire to recreate the apartment building: “… 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” (197). When he recreates the man’s death, he again feels the “tingling” throughout his body, this time so intense that he loses consciousness. Whatever the exact nature of this intensity — sexual, spiritual, etc.— the narrator describes it always as a positive, as making him happy. And yet, this intensity always arises from what we might otherwise have been tempted to see as a closed system — a singularity. Somehow, in these spaces frozen in time, spaces in which often nothing profound happens, something real is produced. The time-stuck space in Remainder is charged, productive, anything but neutral. The novel does not quite show these singularity-spaces as having some sort of future, or as leading to something; instead, the novel presents these spaces as generating some excess quality or intensity — a remainder, as it were.
There is one more element of this novel’s treatment of space that should prove useful, and it has to do with a jump to the real. As we’ve seen, the spaces of reenactment in the novel are all artificial, carefully staged by the narrator (and by the narrative, of course). Yes, they generate intensity and create the feeling of realness the narrator craves, but these intensities and feelings are, ultimately, temporary. They are staged, after all. Indeed, when asked by the short councilor when he’d felt the most real, the narrator cites not one of his reenactments, but the moment when he’d stood on the street asking for change. But there remains one “reenactment” that we haven’t gotten to: the final (real) bank robbery. The reason he does this, the narrator tells us, is the much the same reason he’s done everything else: “to become fluent, natural to cut out the detour” (264). But the narrator also gives us something like a theoretical explanation for the shift between reenactment and true event. He tells us that it required,
a leap to another level, one that contained and swallowed all the levels I’d been operating on up to now […] Yes: lifting the reenactment out of its demarcated zone and slotting it back into the world, into an actual bank whose staff didn’t know it was a re-enactment: that would return my motions and my gestures to ground zero and hour zero, to the point at which the re-enactment merged with the event. (265)
This “leap” to a superior and subsuming level is, for the narrator, a move from his artificially constructed spaces to a “real” space. The contents of the bank robbery — the getaway car, the frightener, the bag of cash — are transmuted from stage play to real deal, to the “event” itself. Of course, it doesn’t translate perfectly: there is a kink (or a lack of a kink) and things go sideways when it comes to the bank robbery. Something is inevitably lost, or doesn’t quite carry over, in moving from the artificial space to the real one. And yet, the narrator sees that bank robbery, despite everything, as “a happy day,” with the tingling intensity he feels reaching a new peak — though something disappears in the move between the artificial and the real, something else is produced. The novel as a whole invites us to read this shift not only in terms of a literary depiction of the relationships between real spaces, but as a representation of the relationship between literary (taking the guise of the explicitly constructed spaces of the reenactments) and real space (represented in the novel by the actual bank).
To synthesize these spatial operations of Remainder somewhat, we can say that in many instances the novel depicts a literary space that conforms to a Jamesonian logic of singularity, but that these spaces inevitably serve as loci where an excess — of meaning, feeling, take your pick — can be produced. This excess is one that cannot be contained wholly within a purely literary space: it is always based in a connection to the real, though it never collapses into a mere reflection of it. This is, of course, another way of describing a mediating relationship between literary and real space, which this novel does by deploying these literary singularities only to, in its final moves, leap from them to the “real” thing. Thus is the narrator able to produce real intensities even within the artificial (literary) spaces, and to carry those intensities from those spaces into the real space of the bank and the plane where he ultimately finds himself, figure-eighting in the sky above the tarmac. Remainder, then, provides a particular understanding of the mediating work of literary space within and against the dominant chronotope.
Space plays a somewhat different role in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. Zombie novels (or novels with zombies, at any rate) always provoke spatial anxieties: throw up the barricades to keep zombies out, flee the overrun house, find the space where you can hold them off. Zone One is no different in this respect, and the main movement of the narrative action involves a clearing or reclaiming of space. Floor by floor, building by building, Zone by Zone (hypothetically), Mark Spitz and the other sweeper teams clear out infested spaces. One of the somewhat unusual elements of Zone One is that we find ourselves well past the Last Night, the moment when the first zombies appear and everything breaks down. Instead, much of the novel takes us through the process of rebuilding, a process which — barring a few hiccups like an early attack on Spitz — is not presented as particularly fraught or even dangerous. Our survivors are well armed and armored, and the elimination of the skels has become routine, bureaucratic. When Spitz talks of the purpose of the sweeping project, he says, “The city could be restored. When they finished, it could be something of what it had been. They would force a resemblance upon it …” (102). And elsewhere: “Why else were they in Manhattan but to transport the old ways across the violent passage of the calamity to the safety of the other side?” (48). The immediate implication is one of spatial progress, or at least return: unlike Remainder, where space existed largely trapped in time, here space appears to be the locus for something like a reversal of time, or rather a preservation of a specific, pre-crisis time. The goal can be seen as an attempt to subordinate time to space: there is no need to leave this space because they can simply restore it, can undo what time has done and return to the “old ways.”
In many ways, the existing society — the American Phoenix — already does just that, occupying the same space in the wrong time. There are two glaring (and quite funny) instantiations of this tendency. The first is that somehow, corporate branding and sponsorship survives. In the wake of the apocalypse, looting remains strictly illegal, we’re told, except when a corporate sponsor “pledges” their company’s goods, essentially saying that they’re up for grabs:
Buffalo created an entire division dedicated to pursuing official sponsors whenever a representative turned up, in exchange for tax breaks once the reaper laid down his scythe and things were up and running again. … There were understandable difficulties in tracking down survivors in positions of authority over, say, the biggest national pharmaceutical chain or bicycle manufacturer, but they strolled into camp from time to time, with the typical scars but eager to contribute. They generally put a price cap on their goods or specified a particular product line or family … (39)
On one level, it demonstrates an amusing depiction of the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — here we are, now that the world has actually ended, and still we have our corporate sponsors. On another, it exemplifies the tendency implied by the stated mission of the new America: the new society not only has the goal of returning a now-gone time to the same space, but it actually operates as if it already has. The second instantiation of this tendency plays out similarly when Mark Spitz runs into a representative from Buffalo, here in New York on official business. Ms. Macy of Buffalo asks Spitz to lend his “expertise” as she and a local bureaucrat inspect a boutique hotel. It’s unclear, for the reader as well as for Spitz, what exactly is going on: Ms. Macy first expresses disappointment that the front doors are damaged, then asks about the quality of the rooms, and, finally and bizarrely, begins commenting on the interior decorating. “Those will have to go,” she says in reference to some wall art, before going on:
“I’m thinking kids,” Ms. Macy said. She slashed a red marker across her mental wipe board: Let’s put our heads together, team. “Pictures of pheenie kids in the camps, cavorting and pitching in. Pressing seeds into the soil and sharpening machetes. No machetes — kid stuff. Smiling and laughing and doing kid stuff.” (167)
As Ms. Macy continues updating the aesthetics of a vacant hotel in a zombie-filled city, Spitz finally asks her why. She tells him that the government plans to host a summit there, and so it’s important that all those officials and representatives see that “New York City is the greatest city in the world” and that it’s been “brought back from the dead” (168). Again, the novel shows the new order operating with space as if time could be cancelled — note the present tense of “New York City is the greatest city,” as if NYC were still anything more than a few barricades and miles and miles of zombie-filled towers. Although the novel (up to this point) has shown us the largely successful efforts to remove the zombies — and so (re)create a sort of endless pre-crisis singularity time within a devastated space — these moments, by their sheer absurdity, suggest the impossibility of this operation.
The novel demonstrates in other, subtler ways the impossibility of eliminating or negating the past of these spaces. Though we see much optimistic language about the future, about the American Phoenix rising from its ashes to return these spaces to what they were, the novel shows us that the past always seeps in. Take Spitz’s squad mate Gary: Gary’s two brothers died on the Last Night, and, though he survived, he speaks only in the first-person plural, as if the two of them were still with him. There is also the phenomenon of PASD (Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder). Spitz first comes across it when he sees two soldiers, one of them curled in a fetal position and vomiting. He asks whether the soldier was hurt or bit: “‘No, it’s his past,’ he heard the comm operator say. The recruit moaned some more. ‘His past?’ ‘His P-A-S-D, man, his P-A-S-D. Give me a hand’” (55). The blurring (at least on the auditory level) of “past” with PASD lets us read the many textual references to PASD as acknowledging the futility of negating temporality: “Everyone suffered from PASD [past],” Spitz tells us. This carries over into the structure of the novel itself. While the main action — the sweeping of buildings, the attack on Gary, the eventual collapse — takes place over three consecutive days, much of the novel consists of Spitz’s flashbacks to earlier moments. Mark Spitz and the society he acts for spend the entirety of the novel meticulously erasing the vestiges of temporality from the spaces in the novel, always with the explicit end goal of returning those spaces to a specific point in time — “the end in abeyance” as Spitz tells us in one chapter. And yet the novel, in both content and form, consistently rejects the coherence of this operation, everywhere inserting the impossibility of recreating this singularity.
The novel ends, of course, with an utter rejection of these efforts: suddenly (or so it seems) everything falls apart. Settlements on the map are wiped out; Buffalo goes dark. Zone One, barricaded and armed against time, sees its spatial integrity give way as the wall is breached. The zombies are here framed in natural or oceanic terms: they are a “roiling torrent” against a dam, a “sea of the dead,” “a stream” with its “invisible current” (244, 258). The image of a rising tide overtaking a fortified place evokes the idea of time catching up with space — especially now when the imminent future of climate change is often discussed in terms of rising sea level. In any case, the text explicitly connects this dead sea with time. Just before the zombies breach the walls, Mark Spitz sees them as “an argument: I was here, I am here now, I have existed, I exist still. This is our town” (246). He sees this rising tide of the dead as an irrefutable temporal logic, an argument framed as the impossibility of cancelling the past in such a present. The logic operates by an affirmation of temporality that then bleeds over into space; the zombies articulate their past existence and their continuation into the present, and then claim the “town.” Eventually, the novel leaves us with almost nothing but the past and the dead: the spaces of survival are overrun, the survivors themselves are scattered or dead, and Mark Spitz steps willingly into the stream of the zombies.
But at least one thing survives; at least one space, in all its strangeness, retains some sort of legibility. We learn earlier in the novel that Spitz once worked on a wrecking crew, clearing the highways of vacant cars with a team of other survivors. One of these, The Quiet Storm, insisted seemingly without reason on grouping the vehicles in a particular way. As the novel comes to a close, Spitz explains why. When they flew over the interstate in a helicopter, he saw the arrangements from above: “Five jeeps lined up south by southwest” are “one volley of energy;” “ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east west were the fins of an eel … or a fletching on an arrow aimed at —what? Tomorrow? What readers?” The text, and Spitz with it, characterizes these arrangements in space as literary (elsewhere he talks of their “grammar”), as having “readers,” though those readers might be unknown or purely hypothetical. Spitz then contrasts the futurity of this literary space with the inevitable death of the spaces constructed by the Phoenix:
She wrote her way into the future. Buffalo huffed over its machinations and narratives of replenishment, and the wretched pheenies stabbed their bloody knees and elbows into the sand as they slunk toward their mirages. … Mark Spitz saw her mosaic, in its immense tonnage, outlasting all of Buffalo’s schemes, the operations under way and the ones yet to be articulated. What readership did she address? Gods and aliens, anyone who looks down at the right time, from the right perspective. (233)
Unlike the spaces of Buffalo — all characterized by a futile attempt to construct a space in an old temporality, to reject the truth that the singularity that was is no longer—this space projects “into the future.” For the second time, the novel emphasizes its literary nature, raising again the question of readership. The Quiet Storm’s text remains illegible for now, but not incoherent; it holds the promise of meaning for someone of the right time and perspective. What fundamentally separates the spaces of Buffalo, NYC, et al. from hers is their atavism, their being an attempt to articulate a space of a no-longer existing temporality. In a way, the text cautions us about the need to temporalize literary space and suggests that literary space (as Bakhtin also wrote) cannot be wholly separated from the dominant chronotope of the real world. At the same time, the novel embraces the possibility of a literary space that speaks with the future, a space that is of a particular moment but extends meaning far beyond it.
In exploring how Remainder and Zone One play with the notion of space (and literary space specifically), I don’t mean to say that they do quite the same thing. They are not just two examples of a particular chronotope; they are not just examples at all. Both novels engage in varying but overlapping ways with the function of literary space within the current moment, and both suggest the ways in which literary space retains the possibility to speak beyond that moment. Remainder constructed spaces that, while apparently following a Jamesonian logic of singularity, generated surplus intensities and meanings, ultimately retaining a mediating and not purely symptomatic relationship with “real” space.” In Zone One, the spaces of New York end up being not so different, though perhaps inverted: attempts to construct literary space that disregard the real and operate only via the logic of past or dead chronotopes fail, leaving no meaning or intensity behind. But: a genuine literary space remains a possibility here as in Remainder, incorporating (and so mediating) the existing real moment while at the same time allowing for signification above/beyond it. These novels suggest the ways in which the literary space of the contemporary novel can chronotopically mediate real lived conditions. In doing so, they do not present literary space as inevitably liberatory or radical. Yet the novels insist on these spaces’ liberatory potential, a potential that operates within, from, and yet against a dominant such as singularity-space.
