Becoming subject(s): of Part(s), Whole(s) and Multitude(s) in Contemporary British Fiction

Many theories of the novel have stressed the genre’s conflicted poetics and politics of totality. Philippe Hamon in his article “Un discours contraint” (1973) stressed the foundational metomymic relation of fragment and whole in the realist novel, as David Lodge did in The Modes of Modern Writing (1977). More than fifty years earlier, Georg Lukács, in Theory of the Novel (1920) offered an overarching theory of such complex gesturing towards totality in his definition of the novel as a lapsed form, underwritten by a historical sense of loss. In most readings of the part/whole relation engineered by the novel, the fashioning of a fictional sense of interiority and subjective depth is instrumental to the conjuring of a world via a partial – if metomymic – consciousness. But what becomes of such a relation, when the frontiers of subjectivity are open to other life forms, to other parts of the larger whole, parts that escape the grammar of humanist essentialism: things, physical phenomena, cellular mutations, androids, i.e. the “vibrant matter” explored by Jane Bennett? Focusing on recent experimentations with the representations of other life forms in the novels of Sam Byers, Harry Parker, Maddie Mortimer and Kazuo Ishiguro, the lecture will read these experimentations as revisiting the “becoming subject” at the heart of the novel and its capacity to imagine what Jean-Luc Nancy has defined as the “singular plural”, and thinkers like Paolo Virno as the becoming of a “multitude,” of an “among” that both defies and reconfigures representation itself.

References:

- Byers, Sam, Come Join our Diseases, London: Faber, 2021.

- Ishiguro, Kazuo, Klara and the Sun, London: Faber, 2021.

- Mortimer, Maddie, Maps of our Spectacular Bodies, London: Picador, 2022.

- Parker, Harry, Anatomy of a Soldier, London: Faber, 2016.