Contemporary Fictions of Attention: Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century 9781474282611, 9781474282604, 9781474282635

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Fictions of Attention
2 ‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)
3 Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)
4 The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)
5 Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)
6 Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)
7 Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Also published by Bloomsbury: Forgetting, Francis O’Gorman Global Wallace, Lucas Thompson Literature and the Experience of Globalization, Svend Erik Larsen Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror, Susana Araújo

Contemporary Fictions of Attention Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century Alice Bennett

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Alice Bennett, 2018 Alice Bennett has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Anna Berzovan Cover image © Anna Berzovan (using Photoshop brushes © Kyle T. Webster) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bennett, Alice, 1982– author. Title: Contemporary fictions of attention: reading and distraction in the twenty-first century / Alice Bennett. Other titles: Reading and distraction in the twenty-first century Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002422 (print) | LCCN 2018011773 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474282635 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474282628 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781474282611 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Fiction–21st century–History and criticism. | American fiction–21st century–History and criticism. | English fiction–21st century–History and criticism. | Distraction (Psychology) | Attention. | Books and reading–Psychological aspects. | Literature and technology. Classification: LCC PN3504 (ebook) | LCC PN3504 .B46 2018 (print) | DDC 809.3/051–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002422 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8261-1 PB: 978-1-3501-5084-3 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8263-5 eBook: 978-1-4742-8262-8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fictions of Attention ‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace) Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen) The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith) Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy) Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith) Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

Notes Works Cited Index

vi 1 25 49 71 93 115 135 159 185 205

Acknowledgements Enormous thanks to Bill Blazek and Peter Sloane for careful and sympathetic reading of draft chapters. Thanks too to the anonymous reviewers and to Clara Herberg, David Avital, Mark Richardson and Ben Doyle at Bloomsbury for all their guidance and advice. Thanks also to my colleagues at Liverpool Hope for your support always. Also to everyone at ITFF. And thank you Leon Rocha. Excerpts from ‘Angle of Yaw’ from Angle of Yaw, copyright 2006 by Ben Lerner, and from ‘Mean Free Path’ from Mean Free Path, copyright 2010 by Ben Lerner, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press (www.coppercanyonpress.org).

1

Fictions of Attention

The first thing that reading asks of you is that you attend to something in front of you. Attending to these words on a page or a screen should, right now, be diminishing your awareness of your immediate surroundings, which could mean disregarding alerts from your phone or email inbox, forgetting the stranger beside you on the train, not looking at the view from the window, or perhaps even losing track of time, forgetting your physical embodiment and, in the end, ceding control of your own thoughts in order to replace them – just for a while – with mine. This ideal reading, in which attention narrows to a spotlight focus, is parodied in the famous first paragraph of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), in which the text orders the reader, ‘Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade’ (3).1 Part of the joke of Calvino’s opening lines is that, of course, you have already begun to read by the time you are ordered to relax and concentrate, so this metafictional conceit punctures rather than promotes absorbed attention. When addressed directly in this manner, concentration ruptures or drifts away. As John Ashbery writes in ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, the ‘balloon pops’ and attention turns ‘dully away’ (190). When attention is turned to attention itself, the balloon doesn’t withstand rough handling or the scrutiny of a pointed gaze. The purpose of this book is to identify exactly what happens when contemporary fiction attempts to handle attention and to ask readers to take hold of it too. While an ideal form of reading might allow the world around you to fade as you relax and concentrate, there is a growing anxiety in contemporary culture that the absorbed attention that a book once easily elicited is now only possible through a labour of disciplined focus. Reading and attention have, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, become part of a fraught collection of concerns about subjectivity and self-management manifested as a discourse of crisis surrounding readers’ capacity for attention. Books such as Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011), David L.  Ulin’s The

2

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time (2010) and Maggie Jackson’s slightly more catastrophically titled Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (2008) address this nexus of reading and distraction. Landmarks within a broader discussion of contemporary reading, such as Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows:  How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (2010),2 have also shaped the discourse surrounding distraction to take in the history and future of the book and the cognitive science and evolutionary psychology of reading.3 In newspaper articles, authors including Will Self, Tim Parks, Jonathan Safran Foer and Philip Roth have also contributed to this eulogy for attentive reading.4 Parks’s much-shared New York Review of Books piece, ‘Reading: The Struggle’ (2014), is fairly representative of a contemporary variety of personal essay that presents reading as something beleaguered, but also functions as a mode of self-criticism on the part of the writer. The essay’s argument about future decline is illustrated with an anecdote about someone from the younger generation – a smart young PhD student – who has even gone far than the author himself, but Parks’s focus is his own story of dwindling concentration. This first-person exploration of deteriorating reading is a recurring feature of the distraction-crisis commentary: David L. Ulin, for instance, writes of ‘the moment I became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read’ (33); Michael Harris, in The End of Absence (2014), reports his symptoms: ‘I have a distinct feeling that I’ve lost some ability to remain attentive to a book or given task’ (15); Nicholas Carr begins with the confessional realization, ‘I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article . . . The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle’ (5–6).5 It is clear that the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a popular discourse which conceives of attention in crisis, with difficulty reading its primary symptom. The discourse of crisis surrounding reading and distraction is not necessarily new, but the self-examining, confessional form of the examples above does seem different from those examples of prophetic warnings about the death of reading that were a feature of the last decades of the twentieth century, such as Geoffrey Hartman’s The Fate of Reading (1975), George Steiner’s ‘Books in an Age of Post-Literacy’ (1985) or Alvin Kernan’s The Death of Literature (1992). Hartman, for instance, diagnoses ‘our own mal de siècle’ but does not seem to include himself among the group who ‘now experience and read scanningly’, in spite of using the first-person plural (251). Kernan, in The Death of Literature, and Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), both worry most about

Fictions of Attention

3

their own students and their limited capacity for reading since, as Birkerts observes, these nineties’ teenagers are so occupied with ‘music, TV, and videos’ that they have trouble ‘slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density’ (19). By the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is much more common to read first-person examples of the struggle, suggesting that this ‘distraction crisis’ has begun to affect even the most dedicated readers – writers, book critics, professors of literature. Arthur Krystal’s ‘Closing the Books:  A Once Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story’, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1996, is an important transitional example in which Krystal, a critic and writer, explains why he is no longer interested in reading. The piece prompted a substantial outcry in letters to the editor, as Krystal reports in the introduction to his subsequent book, Agitations:  Essays on Life and Literature (2002). Krystal’s reflections on non-reading are intriguing because, while the 1996 essay was framed as a lament for his own lost reading, he blames this loss mostly on the quality of contemporary writing, with some reference to TV culture’s emotional incontinence, but emphatically not on his own distraction. By the essay’s reproduction in his 2002 book, it is introduced with comments on ‘electronic media and the computer’ and their effects, as these new technologies brand themselves on young people’s ‘emotional retinas’ (Agitation xiii). By 2002, then, this essay had been reframed to fit a newly emergent discourse about the dangers of digital distraction for reading, although this distraction is still presented as a danger for readers other than Krystal himself. Sven Birkerts’s response to Krystal’s original essay identifies it, in rather catastrophic terms, as the beginning of a new, but predictable, phenomenon: ‘When I first came upon Mr. Krystal’s essay I felt as confirmed and unnerved as might the meteorologist who weighs a set of climatological factors and predicts – correctly – a hurricane, and then looks more closely and sees that it is bearing down on his own home city’ (‘The Time of Reading’). Published in Harper’s in 1996, just a month after Krystal’s essay, and a few weeks before the lecture that would become Birkerts’s ‘The Time of Reading’, Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Perchance to Dream’ could be considered another window-rattling gust that portends Birkerts’s hurricane. In this piece, Franzen describes watching an increasing amount of television and worrying that nobody else is paying attention to books, before asking, ‘If you’re a novelist and even you don’t feel like reading, how can you expect anyone else to read your books?’ (40).6 Rather than the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, we might take 1996 as the starting point of this new era of distractioncrisis discourse, when the hurricane touches down in the book-lovers’ ‘home city’. Contemporary Fictions of Attention begins with this cultural moment and

4

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

with this self-reflexive anxiety about a certain kind of reading: fiction-reading. This reading  – its interiority, its duration, its emotional responsiveness, its immersion – is perceived to be under threat from television and from the internet and the things they have done to our attention. The chapters that follow in this book make the argument that in the period from the late 1990s onwards, fiction itself has become a site for investigating the attention that reading invokes. As we shall see, these investigations in fiction are much more conceptually diverse than the journalism, essays and books that have made up this broader cultural conversation about distraction and reading. Where commentators have tended to take up the position of ‘lament maker’ (20) – a position Sven Birkerts ruefully assigns to himself in his 2015 essay collection, Changing the Subject:  Art and Attention in the Digital Age – fiction’s responses have ranged from a celebration of certain forms of distraction, mind-wandering and partial attention, to delicate attempts to induce the self-conscious recognition of attention in their readers. Rather than presenting an incapacitating blow to literary fiction, I argue that the distractions of the digital age have become the spur for new writing that is freshly alert to attention’s vagaries and fragility. Pieter Vermeulen argues along these lines in Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (2015) that the idea of the novel under threat of death, or at its end, has been a key source of creative potential in contemporary fiction. Similarly, as Katherine Fitzpatrick puts it in the title of her study of the American novel in ‘the age of television’, the form is suffering from the ‘anxiety of obsolescence’; this is an anxiety that is generative – as Bloom’s anxiety of influence was – producing new work that treats the newly marginal position of print as a source of creative energy.7 Just as anxieties about the obsolescence of the print book and the always-running commentary on the death the novel have been responsible for new writing, so too have concerns about the perceived threat to readers’ attention prompted new literary objects. It does not seem unreasonable that, as with every other threat that the novel has faced since the eighteenth century, the threat from distracted readers (and distracted writers) will simply offer some new feeding ground for the novel, as it rapaciously turns all its greatest threats into fodder for its survival.

Reading and attention Reading, within the narrative of distraction-crisis that I have been unfolding so far, is imagined not just as the casualty of mass distraction, but also as a possible cure. Proponents of ‘slow reading’, for instance, suggest that this practice, when

Fictions of Attention

5

implemented properly, can be a corrective to a broader cultural preference for acceleration that contributes to distracted obliviousness and carelessness.8 Sven Birkerts, as a proponent of ‘deep reading’, ends The Gutenberg Elegies by laying out the temptation of a digital future and then offering his instinctive advice: ‘Refuse it’ (211). If ‘retooling for the electronic millennium’ has already altered ‘our cognitive apparatus’ at the price of ‘the stillness and concentration and will’ that is necessary for reading James, Conrad or Woolf (to give Birkerts’s own examples), then refusing means returning to that deep reading to shore up the cognitive apparatus (191). Nicholas Dames, in his introduction to The Physiology of the Novel (2007), responds to Birkerts’s faith in the power of reading to correct maladies of modern attention, noting that these arguments have ‘filtered down into our default alibis’ for teaching classic novels, as we claim that we are giving students ‘a cognitive skill set that will enhance their ability to act responsibly (ie. attentively, immersively) in a democratic society’ (19).9 By instrumentalizing reading in this way, teachers of literature therefore also bear some responsibility for turning books into a training ground for attention. More recently, N. Katherine Hayles has begun, like Birkerts, from principles of neuroplasticity to argue that ‘cognitive styles’ are formed by the environment in which they develop, and that those cognitive styles could change again in the future (‘Hyper and Deep Attention’ 187).10 Hayles argues for the benefits of flexible and expansive cognitive styles, rather than for Birkerts’s advice to ‘refuse’ further changes to one’s cognitive apparatus. The two modes of hyper and deep attention, Hayles takes pains to note, are adaptive for different demands, and a (learned) preference for one does not have to mean rejection of the other. For Hayles, deep attention is ‘the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities’, but is not any better or worse than hyper attention (187). Nicholas Carr, like Hayles, draws on neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and is also careful to avoid making too many value judgements about deep attention (which he calls linear attention) and observes that, for most of human history, a highly vigilant and distractible state would have been more evolutionarily advantageous, while the linear attention we privilege today is, in many ways, an aberration: ‘to read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object’ (64). There are some logical problems with this account: if we are constructing justso stories about attention, we should probably note that modes of sustained, unbroken attention probably did not first begin to develop in response to reading, but to listening. Nevertheless, a key purpose served by invoking evolutionary psychology is to remove some of the privilege surrounding the ‘naturalness’ of

6

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

deep or linear attention. Carr, though, still worries that forms of shallow attention might outcompete the deep forms by rewiring the brain to its own patterns (or, rather, reverting the brain back to its ancestral mode of attention), meaning that deep attention can only survive if it is exercised and trained. For Hayles, on the other hand, learning to read attentively is less a cure for distraction and more a corrective that can balance out an increasingly dominant culture of hyper attention and offer more possibilities for cognitive engagement. Hayles’s later essay on the topic of reading, ‘How We Read:  Close, Hyper, Machine’ (2010), makes explicit what this diversity of attentions might look like in the context of literary studies. Hayles proceeds by taking readers through a history of close reading and the dispute around what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have dubbed ‘symptomatic reading’.11 The alternatives to symptomatic reading which, as Hayles explains, prefer the surface and focus on ‘affect, pleasure, and cultural value’ (65) are also marked by a broad rejection of the idea of critique. In addition to the alternatives of close, symptomatic and surface reading, Hayles offers ‘hyper’ and ‘machine’: the first inspired by James Sosnoki’s filtering, searching, hyperlinked ‘hyperreading’, to which Hayles adds multitabbed juxtaposition and surface scanning (‘How We Read’ 66), and the second describing Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘distant reading’, which draws back from the privileged canonical text to consider corpora or big data sets of information with the assistance of a computer. Through this history of scholarly reading  – from close to symptomatic, surface, hyper, distant, machine – it is worth emphasizing the place of attention within the history of reading in literary studies. Literary studies has, of course, historically celebrated close and attentive reading and turned it into a totem that both represents and defines the discipline.12 Close reading, the beginning of the story of academic reading in an institutional context, is defined by a particular kind of attention – a way of focusing, of noticing and of discerning meaning.13 Barbara Johnson explains that attentive reading teaches scholars ‘how to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard’ (204), while for Annette Federico, close reading means learning ‘the work of mindfulness applied to our language, to our feelings, and to our situation as moral agents in the world’ (25). And what is most important about this pattern of noticing and mindfulness is that it is something that can be taught and whose ‘skills’ are assessable and transferable. Close reading is, to some substantial extent, responsible for how we understand today’s ‘distraction crisis’. If literary scholars had not suggested that the habit of literary reading ought to improve our attention and (circularly) that we need to cultivate our attention in order to be

Fictions of Attention

7

good readers, then we would not hold some of the anxieties and beliefs about attention that I have been outlining here so far. At the same time, close reading’s specific mode of attention led directly to its most profound critiques from historical, political and biographical readers. As Terry Eagleton’s authoritative account of the rise of English has it, close reading means something more than to ‘insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else’ (38) – that ‘something else’ including, among many other things, historical context, the political implications of all forms of interpretation and the subject positions of different identities. Close reading’s conflicts are therefore disputes about the breadth and focus of attention. In the move in contemporary criticism towards what Best and Marcus term ‘surface reading’, questions of attention arise again in another form. The form of reading that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously dubbed ‘paranoid reading’ is hypervigilant and always watchful for nasty surprises but, in contrast, her alternative of ‘reparative reading’ offers another form of attention: as care, love or expressions of fondness and affection for the cultural objects which sustain individuals and communities, propelled by acts of noticing that take in what is there as surface presentation. Reparative reading is ‘no less acute’ in its careful observation and analysis, but charges those acts of acute noticing and interpretation with ‘a different range of affects, ambitions and risks’ (Touching Feeling 150).14 Picking up Sedgwick’s questions about suspicion, Rita Felski identifies the same problem with anxious, paranoid vigilance in contemporary critical reading: We are called on to adopt poses of analytical detachment, critical vigilance, guarded suspicion; humanities scholars suffer from a terminal case of irony, driven by the uncontrollable urge to put everything in scare quotes. Problematizing, interrogating, and subverting are the default options, the deeply grooved patterns of contemporary thought. ‘Critical reading’ is the holy grail of literary studies, endlessly invoked in mission statements, graduation speeches, and conversations with deans, a slogan that peremptorily assigns all value to the act of reading and none to the objects read. (Uses of Literature 3)

Both close reading and critical reading represent a mode of disciplining the attention and shaping concentration and focus into an instrument that can pierce the textual surface and uncover those things that belie surface forms. At the same time, that use of attention also takes a student’s capacity for concentration and instrumentalizes it by turning it into a transferable skill that justifies the discipline of literary studies’ existence. Felski goes on to diagnose

8

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

literary studies with a ‘single-minded fixation on the merits of irony, ambiguity and indeterminacy’ (21) – an attention that is perhaps too focused in its singlemindedness, and not expansive or flexible enough to acknowledge other ways of reading. In this expansiveness there could be a way to read that acknowledges both the critical and affective – the vigilant and the absorbed – expanding the discourse of literary interpretation to develop ‘a lexicon more attuned to the affective and absorbing aspects of reading’ (Uses of Literature 62).15 It is clear from all these examples that these different interpretative stances activate different forms of attention:  vigilance, noticing, absorption, a broad or narrow focus, ‘single-minded fixation’, or expansive flexibility, and so on. These forms of literary reading, to a large extent, evolved symbiotically with the literature of their own time. Close reading famously developed alongside both modernity’s distractions and modernist literature’s expansive difficulty, opacity and depth. Paranoid reading’s hypervigilance emerged alongside the twentieth century’s politics of identity, amid the demand for a form of reading that broadened its focus out politically. Surface reading, which glances off textual surfaces and back to the reader’s own embodied experience of affective states, finds sympathetic echoes in contemporary writing which turns the reading experience out to include the reader’s own affective engagement. The fiction discussed in this book develops what I  will call an aesthetic of inward attention  – a variety of meta-attention that deflects part of readers’ attention back from the book and onto the texture or fluctuation of reading attention itself. Inward attention is an indirect encounter with the attention that occurs as an epiphenomenon of reading, and which is fragile enough that it can only be approached through this oblique route. If attention is a bubble or a balloon, piercing its surface with critical focus will destroy it. Inward attention also, for me, invokes a glancing, light and fleeting recognition that cannot be held or fixed in place. Attention’s etymological root in the Latin attendere means a stretching towards or holding in tension, which fixes objects under its gaze and is therefore somewhat at odds with inward attention’s glancing, shifting form of unconcentrated noticing. In this way, inward attention differs from the personal, self-scrutinizing accounts of distracted, failed reading this chapter has already catalogued. What interests me about the change from expressions of social concern about the decline of (other people’s) reading to personal accounts of distraction is that, rather than a prognostic identification of a social ill, these more recent testimonies about the ‘struggle’ for reading now primarily take up a position of self-diagnosis. Contemporary writers therefore inhabit a culture that encourages them to reflect on their own failures of attention above deploring

Fictions of Attention

9

the failures of a non-reading public. When Zadie Smith acknowledged her web-blocker at the end of a novel; when Joshua Cohen, in a video interview, advocated ‘killing your distractions’  – including, of course, the distraction of making a video to tell you to kill your distractions (‘Joshua Cohen on the Writing Process’); when David Foster Wallace described how he was incapable of owning a television: when all of these writers made reference to their own need to manage or discipline their concentration (or to fail to do so), they were participating directly in a broader culture of scrutinizing their own attention and, more often than not, finding it insufficient. This book argues that the group of literary examples that I have gathered under the heading of ‘contemporary fictions of attention’ are involved in a practice of turning attention back onto itself. Given the context of self-criticism and anxiety surrounding distraction, we might expect reflexive attention to be self-critical or self-improving  – as though readers should be working on their attention, cultivating it or managing it through reading – but that is not the case. Instead, the inward attention these texts encourage in their readers marks and notices attention’s fluctuations as a by-product of attention turned to the text, without necessarily setting out an imperative of self-development or improvement. Brief examples from two very different contemporary reading experiences might help to illustrate what this inward attention involves. Like Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, novels which are discussed in this book’s final chapter, Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013) sets out a mass of overlapping attentions and gets the reader to pick through them, as one character pays attention to another’s attention and to his own attention, opening a space for readers to do the same. In the closing paragraph of the novel, after 250 pages of distraction, bored reading of the internet, drug-taking and worries about his place in the universe, the protagonist, Paul, comes out of the bathroom to the following concluding scene: He wanted to move backward and close the door and be alone again, in the bathroom, but Erin had already noticed him and, after a pause, distracted by her attention, he reciprocated her approach. They hugged a little, near the centre of the room, then he turned around and moved toward the kitchen – dimly aware of the existence of other places, on Earth, where he could go – and was surprised when he heard himself, looking at his feet stepping into black sandals, say that he ‘felt grateful to be alive’. (248)

This is a poetry of hyper-aware social awkwardness and banal overdescription which some reviewers read as reflective of social media oversharing and Lin’s

10

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

own attention-seeking behaviour.16 The novel finds Paul thinking about his own distraction, aimlessness and boredom. Sometimes there is pleasure in recognition of Paul’s attention – who hasn’t ‘absently looked at the internet’ for a few hours, as Paul does (54), and wondered what could have possibly held their attention for so long? – followed by the jolting realization that the book’s empty, eventless rhythms are soothing and compulsive in almost the same way as scrolling through webpages. Reading this book feels just like looking at the internet. Paul’s close attention to his own states of distraction, obliviousness and hyper-vigilant social anxiety all leak out into the reading experience of the book, leaving readers attending to both the text and, in imitation of Paul, their own attention. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels could not be more different from Taipei, and yet they also place their characters’ attention in a central place and, in significant moments, channel readers’ attention back on itself. Ferrante’s female friends are, like Zadie Smith’s characters in NW and in Swing Time, characters who develop side by side, and whose relationship is eventually shaped around their sidelong attention; Lenú’s fantasy is that they might have been educated together ‘elbow to elbow’ and worked ‘shoulder to shoulder’ (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay 354). For many readers, what is most powerful about the novel is that it asks readers to examine their own friendships with women who grew up alongside them, enacting a version of the same sidelong glance at a friend who was – or might have been – ‘elbow to elbow’ in the classroom. In the final book of the series (The Story of the Lost Child, published in Italian in 2014 and in its English translation in 2015), during the Naples earthquake and at virtually the only point when Lenú is able to break Lila’s composure, Lila reveals her life’s central horror, a fear which takes in formlessness, the body’s abjection and, significantly, distraction: She wanted me to understand what the dissolution of boundaries meant, and how much it frightened her . . . For her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and poured into another, into a solution of heterogeneous materials . . . She muttered that she mustn’t ever be distracted: if she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her . . . And so if she didn’t stay alert, if she didn’t pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber. (176)

It is this realization about attention as the propellant of form and coherence that shapes the formal properties of the whole book, with its overwhelming material

Fictions of Attention

11

detail and emotional force. Lenú’s attention to Lila, and Lila’s iron control of her own focused concentration inwards, leaves a space for the reader to replicate both their patterns of concern with sidelong and inward attention. There are, then, in these examples, three features which are common to the texts this book discusses. First – and most obviously – meaningful representations of attention. Narrative fiction, with its long-standing conventions for depicting interior states, is almost uniquely placed among artforms in its ability to convey the complexities of characters’ attention. Second, use of the conventions of narrative to orchestrate or influence readers’ attention; Ferrante’s novels, for instance, are notoriously compelling reading, with cliffhangers to rival the nineteenth-century serial novel (she has said that she uses ‘all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity’ and ‘make the page as easy as possible to turn’ [Frantumaglia 269]). Like all literary objects, fictions of attention arrange reading’s rhythms and intensity. Finally, in the feature that I have been referring to as ‘inward attention’, these fictions also channel readers’ attention back to themselves in a refracted, oblique way which we might imagine as backwash, echo or soft recoil. The processes which enable this inward attention arise both through how attention is represented (as in the depictions of Paul’s or Lila’s attention above) and in how readers’ attention is orchestrated by narrative features such as pace, descriptive detail, characterization, plotting, deixis of place and time, and so on. The formal features of narrative which demand selection or choosing, attention to one thing rather than another, create the climate in which readers’ inward attention to their own attention can flourish.

Attention histories This book is not a contribution to the narrative of crisis about distraction and the death of reading. Nor is it an attempt to trace a cultural history of either this perceived decline in reading – closely related as it is to the perpetual death notices for the novel that have haunted the form since its inception  – or of attention itself. Instead, it examines how attention has become a formative and structural force in twenty-first-century fiction. The examples of contemporary fiction that make up the case studies in the body of this book represent a new appetite for attention to attention itself, but also an interest in uncovering and exploring a detailed habitat of attentions that goes beyond the dominant cultural narrative of a lost age of attentive reading. As the preceding account of contemporary discourse surrounding the perceived reading and distraction crises has shown,

12

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

the kind of attention that long narrative fiction demands is supposedly being overcome by a tsunami of high-volume, high-intensity digital content. What we might expect would be for contemporary fiction to either try to maintain the pull of its those slow, deep attentive tides conventionally associated with literary reading against these new, quick, distracted, shallow, hyper attentions. Instead, as I will argue, we see contemporary writers identifying minor eddies, backwashes and countercurrents of attention and suggesting that reading’s attention is something much more complex and shifting than popular discourse gives it credit for. Attention is an idea that both reaches much farther into contemporary cultural life and is much more intricately entangled in current debates about the future of fiction than the idea of digital distraction would initially suggest. It surfaces in areas of culture as diverse as the commodification of mindfulness, the celebration of the experience of flow, the valorization of willpower as a virtue, anxiety about the growth of diagnoses of both attention-deficit disorder and autism, and almost everything to do with the internet:  clickbait and pop-up ads; awareness-raising and slacktivism; trolling and attention-whoring; pageviews and clickthroughs; ‘likes’, retweets and upvotes; procrastination, life-hacking and the use of web-blockers, both personal and institutional. Attention is also associated quite profoundly with a growing awareness of and responsibility for a globalized world; the ethical awareness that Kwame Anthony Appiah and others have theorized under the term cosmopolitanism is shot through with ideas about attention’s span as something spatial as well as temporal.17 Concern about ‘filter bubbles’ which mean that technology reinforces a blinkered preference for familiarity, similarity and proximity echoes this preoccupation with the limits of attention. Elsewhere, machine attention, in the form of surveillance and data interpretation, has the potential to significantly destabilize any sense of attention that places human subjectivity at its centre. On the other hand, attention, manifested as curiosity and interest, or care, patience and love, is also closely connected to a subgroup of significant affective states which seem to reaffirm something powerfully human. Attention, in all these forms, therefore appears across a hugely varied field of concerns, many of which are distinctively contemporary. Attention and distraction’s history are also important as ways of questioning the narrative of crisis that conceives of present-day attention as something uniquely degraded which reading can cure. If we imagine ourselves as an age with a deficit of attention, Natalie M. Phillips argues, we must imagine an age of surplus attention elsewhere:  ‘Whatever came before  – be it childhood, our

Fictions of Attention

13

parent’s generation, or the Enlightenment  – must have been, according to popular mantra, a more attentive age’ (Distraction 1). Nostalgic recollections of blissful childhood reading and an idealized picture of the past’s attention therefore go hand in hand. The second problem with understanding reading as a way of correcting degraded concentration is that it is difficult to justify the idea that literature is a machine for holding and stretching out attention. In his contribution to the reading and distraction genre, Andrew Piper writes, ‘Books, like hands, hold our attention’ (7). I am not convinced this is wholly true and think it is more useful to think of the book as a constantly interrupted object, and one which acknowledged and accommodated  – and even encouraged  – those interruptions with the material qualities of books and traditional book paraphernalia:  footnotes, cross-references, indexes, margins, chapter breaks, subheadings, page numbers, bookmarks. All these are mechanisms for managing books’ requirement for attention and, of course, for acknowledging that reading is never undividedly attentive and always somewhat shifting, disrupted and unfocused. Unlike in the cinema, the theatre or the concert hall, the lights are not dimmed in the library, and so attention is never forced into just one place by external conditions. Contemporary digital reading, backlit as it might be by the glow of an electronic device, is also inherently open to distraction – the temptation of reading that rather than this, extended across the possibilities of the whole internet. Moreover, unlike the collective experiences of performed artworks, we can drop the book whenever we like. Reading, therefore, is something that has a dynamic mixture of attention and distraction built in from the beginning.18 Recent studies of the cultural manifestations of attention and distraction that focus on specific historical periods have made efforts to correct the assumption that there is something exceptionally chaotic about attention in our own age. Margaret Koehler and Natalie M. Phillips have established the eighteenth century as a period characterized by extensive distraction, while Lily Gurton-Wachter identifies the turn of the nineteenth century to be a ‘particularly troubled and rich moment for attention’ (2). These studies of attention in the eighteenth century all engage with the legacy of Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (1999), which pinpoints late nineteenth-century modernity as the origin point for a new cultural anxiety surrounding attention. Studies of the eighteenth century offer a longer view of this history, placing disorderly attention’s origins further back in time, a view which is shared by Katherine E. Ellison, who traces the early eighteenth century’s ‘information overload’ back to an expanding public discourse.19 The effect of all these examples is to reinforce the idea that

14

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

anxiety about attention (manifested as attempts to martial and control it) is not something which is new. These examples of the cultural history of attention lay out the enormous variety of stances that artworks have taken to their own times’ attitudes to attention. Koehler’s Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (2013), for instance, argues for eighteenth-century poetry’s expansiveness and ability to contain and to mould the attentions of its readers, offering ‘a collective model for assiduous reading and supple, wide-ranging attention’ (4). In contrast, Phillips’s Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2015) argues that eighteenth-century writers ‘increasingly sought to forge literary structures meant to work with, rather than reform, distracted readers’, thereby creating a new aesthetic of distraction (3). Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality (1980) opposes absorbed self-forgetting with theatrical self-consciousness in eighteenth-century painting, suggesting the two modes of attention are mutually exclusive. Nicholas Dames’s The Physiology of the Novel (2007) lays out the case for a theory of reading in the nineteenth century which emphasized the physiological effects of texts on the body, finding that Victorian fiction inscribes this same concern with sensation as novelists ‘constructed their fictions in more or less overt ways around the topics that the Victorian physiology of reading was concurrently exploring’ (6). As all of these examples demonstrate, cultural responses to attention have moved with and against the current of particular periods and their pre-occupations with attention; there is no reason that today’s cultural responses should be any different. In two of the most recent interventions into the ongoing field of study of attention cultures, David Letzler and Andrew Epstein have considered two groups of texts congruent to my own, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century and running through to the present day. David Letzler, in The Cruft of Fiction (2017), argues that the twentieth-century mega-novel (as written by Pynchon, DeLillo, Danielewski and Wallace) ‘helps us develop our abilities to modulate attention’, with its imposing length and overwhelming mass of pointless detail (16). Rather than simply improving the reader’s attention span, Letzler argues that very long books help readers to filter out what is important and develop skills in choosing, filtering and prioritizing in a world of information overload. In a study of American poetry over the same period, Andrew Epstein’s Attention Equals Life (2016) finds the poetry of writers such as Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler and Ron Silliman and, closer to the present, Kenneth Goldsmith and Claudia Rankine to be responding to increasing demands upon attention. Poetry is associated with a specific intensity of concentration, Epstein argues,

Fictions of Attention

15

which makes it the perfect medium for inscribing the importance of attention to the everyday and its materialities. As Epstein’s book pushes on further into the twenty-first century, it is able to isolate some of the effects of digital culture as intensification and as transformation of the twentieth century’s TV cultures of spectacle, mass entertainment and information overload. Both Letzler and Epstein suggest that contemporary literature has responded to a newly heightened sense of the importance of attention. A set of common themes around information overload and a changing media landscape emerge in Letzler and Epstein’s work, as well as a thread of connection back to the modernists (particularly Gertrude Stein) in both cases. Letzler’s attention is primarily a filter, which becomes finer and more discerning through the practice of reading very long novels full of extraneous material. Epstein’s attention is more like a polished lens, cleared by poetry to notice the materiality of ordinary things. Letzler’s analysis of fictional cruft leaves off, for the most part, at the moment at the turn of the twenty-first century when my textual examples begin. We can therefore understand these earlier examples of filtering attention from writers such as Pynchon, Rushdie and Gaddis as the work of an age slightly before our own. Contemporary Fictions of Attention does consider the period after most of these other works of cultural history. The first argument that I am interested in constructing across this book’s chapters is that the culture of the early twentyfirst century has produced a particular set of complex attitudes towards and anxieties about attention, which can be seen in this book’s sample of fiction from the last two decades. Some parts of this attitude to attention are more or less new: the experiences and subjectivities engendered by digital technology; the growth of the information economy and the associated ‘attention economy’; the new diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder (ADD) and the metaphorical associations attached to that diagnosis. Other aspects of modern attention, though, are expanded or accelerated versions of established practices or patterns of thought. For instance, the kinds of regulated attention that are representative of the modern workplace  – regulated by technology, by piecework payments and freelance employment, and by an always-on work culture  – are a natural reiteration of the logic of capitalism and the employment practices of the last 200  years. In another area, the rise of contemporary discourse surrounding personal effectiveness and self-management  – which takes in practices of mindfulness, but also willpower and habit formation  – is cognate to a much older tradition of administering attention (and, indirectly, the subject) in ways that can be spiritual, moral or therapeutic. Another historical trajectory follows attention as an ethical act, seeing attention as caring-for or waiting-on,

16

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

so that the attention that one gives to the other therefore becomes an act of ethical decision-making. In a contemporary context of global cosmopolitanism, intensified by mass telecommunications, staying alert – in the form of raising awareness, becoming conscious or staying woke – could become an end in itself. Attention’s complicated relationship with technology – from the printing press to the cinema to the mobile phone – is therefore another contemporary concern with a long history. The second argument this book makes is that there is something distinctive about the way that prose fiction in general understands attention and that prose forms embed ideas about attention into their workings in ways that tell us something about narrative fiction. Attention, like reading, is a temporal process, happening in and through time. The forms of prose fiction that are demarcated by their length and duration  – the novel and the short story  – have very specific relationships with attention. As Andrew Bennett writes, ‘the literaryaesthetic value of the novel in particular has to do not only with the fixing of one’s attention but also with the degree to which that attention is also and at the same time challenged, turned away, risked’ (78). Conversely, the short story’s single-sitting form could be said to be moulded around attention’s one-shot duration. The model for prose fiction that this book adopts is one that does not ask for fixed and focused attention, but one that instead responds to attention that is vagrant or impatient, fluctuating, glancing and divided. Fiction’s history is inseparable from realistic narratives that, as part of their verisimilitude, are sometimes long-winded or rambling; it has space for tangential flights of fancy, and developed techniques to accommodate the undirected associations of the stream of consciousness; it is always interested in the speculative, the digressive and the iterative; it is, in itself, a distraction. Not only has reading always been inattentive, but the play of attention and distraction is part of the structure of narrative itself.

What we talk about when we talk about attention In 1890, William James observed, ‘Everyone knows what attention is’ (1: 381). As Joshua Cohen observes in his book Attention! A  (Short) History (2013)  – which is the subject of Chapter 3 – this is a good first line because of the way it ‘arrests your attention, then lets it loose’ (1). It isn’t, though, where James rests, because this initial observation about attention is both an invitation to attend more closely and to turn away – if everyone knows what attention is, then what

Fictions of Attention

17

do we gain from considering it? To use an image from Tom McCarthy’s work, which Chapter 5 will return to in more detail, attention is a kind of blind spot; it is impossible to perceive directly, but is also the means for perceiving at all. There is, then, an uncertainty at the heart of what we mean when we talk about attention, and that uncertainty is instructive: attention is somehow profoundly unavailable to our attention. It is blindingly obvious, inasmuch as it is so centrally part of the apparatus that it becomes impossible to include it in our analysis, but, at the same time, it is so obvious that it does not need analysis at all. Nevertheless, James’s Principles of Psychology presents an attentive account of attention, which begins from inside, with a phenomenological effort to consider what it actually feels like to concentrate or to be distracted. James’s description of attention, which has been so formative of psychological accounts of focus and concentration, imagines attention as a faculty which chooses, filters and fixes its objects, and is worth quoting in full: Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German. We all know this latter state, even in its extreme degree. Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until – also without reason that we can discover – an energy is given, something – we know not what – enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the backgroundideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again. (1: 381)

Attention can be captured, involuntarily, and yet James also thinks of attention as a variety of willpower.20 The legacy of this association between attention

18

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

and willpower (often signified by the word ‘focus’) trails across most of the texts discussed in this book, from David Foster Wallace’s ‘Granola Cruncher’ from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (discussed in Chapter  2), who wards off a sexual assault through the power of her quasi-spiritual ‘focus’, to Keisha’s ‘celebrated will and focus’ which, in Zadie Smith’s NW, is the agent behind her social mobility (see Chapter  6). James’s understanding of the power to focus attention as concentration and to keep difficult objects in mind is a reminder of the continual association between attention and intention, or will. Jonathan Crary’s work, from his first book, Techniques of the Observer (1990), onwards, has consistently placed attention in a historical context and seen that context as constructing perception and attention as faculties that are shaped by disciplinary forces. These forces therefore rely on the idea that attention (as will or intention) is always in danger of drifting off into distraction. Crary’s argument about the disciplining of attention is at its fullest in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (1999) and at its most pithy, politicized and relevant to the present day in his 2013 book, 24/7: Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. As a whole, his work offers a genealogy of attention from the visual culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the office work of the present day. Attention, in Crary’s account, is something that can be managed, regulated and directed, with those processes – like all other modes of Foucauldian discipline – ultimately becoming internalized and self-administered. Crary’s Suspensions of Perception finds that attention, as the concept developed at the end of the nineteenth century, contained within it its own dissolution into states of ‘distraction, reverie, dissociation and trance’ (46). Attention and its others therefore existed on a continuum that could, in fact, double back on itself, with a dissociative trance coming very close to a state of utterly rapt, enthralled attention. Paul North, in contrast, in The Problem of Distraction (2011), begins with the objection that thinking about distraction has tended to erase it by deeming that ‘distraction is diversion and diversion is a version of attention’ (5). Where Crary sees disciplinary attempts to maintain attention always trailing off into distraction, North establishes a way of approaching a definition and intellectual history of distraction separate from that of attention. Even the slightly more complex definition of distraction that arises when we realize that we also think about distraction as divided, diverted, misdirected, inadvertent attention still sees the two terms as dependent on each other. One of the most common ways of conceptualizing attention has begun by treating attention in economic terms and so ‘paying’ attention becomes a concretized metaphor in the context of the twentieth and twenty-first

Fictions of Attention

19

centuries.21 Herbert Simon, a contender for the father of the attention economy, saw the scarcity of attention as a counterpart to the ‘information overload’ of the twentieth century: In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else:  a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious:  it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (40–1)

In the twenty-first-century economy of the internet, attention seems to hold an intrinsic value of its own. Free apps and websites are able to function by commodifying the attention of their users. Mere attention does, therefore, produce value – but that value only aggregates one way, rather than circulating through a system in any meaningful exchange. Jaron Lanier’s work, for instance, uncovers the true inequalities behind web success stories such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, in which users’ digital content, data and attention are monetized by an ever smaller group of profit-makers:  ‘The clamor for online attention only turns into money for a token minority of ordinary people’ (Who Owns the Future? 3). As Jonathan Beller observes, in work on cinema and the attention economy, ‘to look is to labor’ (The Cinematic Mode of Production 2). One of the questions that interests me is where fiction falls within this attention economy. It would be naïve to imagine that the attention a book demands should be excluded from a growing awareness that eyes-on-screens are generators of value, especially when I could very easily be reading a novel on the same screen I use to browse Facebook. In contrast with these historicized accounts of attention, Bernard Stiegler’s influential arguments about the faculty of attention, transmitted from parent to child, explains attention as a product of education and enculturation which has accreted through centuries of interaction with technology. In a predicted trilogy, Prendre Soin, the first part of which was published in 2008 and in English translation as Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Stiegler argues that concentration has become damaged because the technology of reading has failed to form attention as it used to, as a result of the prevalence of other kinds of media, which Stiegler condemns as commodified ‘psychotechnologies’.22 The corrective in this instance is pedagogical, and would involve the older generation modelling attention for the younger by teaching them to read and write. Unlike Hayles’s account of a generation gap in attention which treats both hyper attention

20

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

and deep attention even-handedly, Stiegler finds the latter to be the mark of the mature, rational thinker and argues that there is no possibility of mediating or mode-switching between Hayles’s two attentions (73–9). While some aspects of Stiegler’s work are troubling and reductive – particularly his treatment of ADD as a metaphor for contemporary culture more broadly23 – his emphasis on attention as a form of caring is provocative and powerful. Stiegler’s attention is a Foucauldian care of the self as a first principle which then becomes a caring responsibility that is transgenerational. The final strand which runs across this book’s interest in attention, then, begins in attention and ends in care for the self and for others. One important methodological path that this book has not followed involves a focus on neuroaesthetics or cognitive narratology. This is, at least in part, because it is not a line of enquiry that the authors I am considering seem to find especially interesting. Indeed, some of them, such as Tom McCarthy, are deeply antagonistic to neuroscience and its export into literary culture. As he puts it, in conversation with Simon Critchley: It’s idiocy. Neuroscience is one of the biggest follies of our era, or the idea that you can transfer neuroscience to the cultural arena. It’s a category mistake. We don’t think in our brains, we think in language and culture . . . If you take a bit of Joyce’s brain and put it under a microscope, it’s not going to explain Finnegans Wake. It’s absolute idiocy, but an idiocy that has a lot of currency simply because people don’t want to think. (Critchley and Cederstrom, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying 117–8)

While I am not as hostile as McCarthy to neuroscientific research, and have found work on the neuroscience of reading and attention particularly interesting,24 this book is more exercised by the texture of internal experiences and the ways in which they are mediated, structured and represented by language. As Hayles notes in her evaluation of Nicholas Carr’s summaries of neuroscientific research from The Shallows, the evidence of neuroimaging is really only supplementary to the experiences that we have ourselves of what it means to turn from a book to a screen and back again, or to turn rapt attention away from an immersive video game to answer a text message. Fiction is able to bring a different perspective on, in James’s words, ‘what attention is’ because, first, it is able to orchestrate different forms of attention (since not all fiction incites deep, slow, sustained linear attention); second, it offers us examples of characters’ or a narrators’ internal experiences through a set of unique conventions for depicting consciousness. For these reasons, fiction could be the most powerful tool that we have for understanding attention as it is experienced.

Fictions of Attention

21

With its formulae honed to catch and spool out just enough material to keep a reader’s attention hooked – from the thriller’s cliffhanger to the detective novel’s ability to lead us through distracting blind alleys – there is also the case to be made that popular literatures are both a site of significant potential for exploring literary attention and perceived as a threat to literary fiction’s claims that reading has a very special relationship with concentration.25 We should also consider the argument that the main threat to the ‘serious’ or ‘literary’ novel today is, as it has been since the time of the modernists, from popular fiction. If the novel is dead, the traditional ‘leading suspect’ for its murder, as Mark McGurl puts it, is popular genre fiction, (‘The Zombie Renaissance’). Dominic Head argues that the death of the novel debate has simply transformed into a dumbing-down of the novel debate in the twenty-first century, with the ‘serious literary novel’ in terminal decline (12). Head’s novelist of choice for dealing with this debate is Ian McEwan, whose commitment to grabbing and holding the reader’s attention with the techniques of genre fiction is well recognized, and whose work has been condemned as, Head notes, shamelessly middlebrow (99–111). Apparent in varied ways in the texts considered in this book, the attentive demands of difficulty and the concerning non-demands of entertainment emblematize the problems faced by twenty-first-century writing as it plots a course through the wreckage of the middlebrow, the experimental and those aspects of the postmodern that are most in thrall to popular culture. Each of the chapters in this book considers the work of one contemporary fiction writer and investigates their depiction of a different aspect of attention, as well as those literary techniques which encourage the reader to deflect some attention back from the text, through inward attention. Nevertheless, the textual examples that I have chosen for this book come from a broader field of interest in attention that can be registered across the work of a much greater number of contemporary writers. One strand of this interest tends to be associated with the experimental possibilities of form and the relationship between technology and contemporary attention, as well as the possibility of creating literary texts that test conventional reading practices with boredom, distraction, information overload and attentive self-monitoring. This field of writers and works could have included Stewart Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007); Lee Rourke’s The Canal (2010); Will Self ’s trilogy of novels, Umbrella (2012), Shark (2014) and Phone (2017); Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! (2012); Jennifer Egan’s Black Box (2012); and Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY (2017), as well as other writers who reflect on contemporary attention and technology through fiction of a formally experimental kind. The second strand of interest might be represented by writers who are deeply committed

22

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

to noticing and depicting the everyday. Writers as diverse as Jon McGregor, Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole and Maggie Gee mark out some of the varieties of this close attention to the fine detail of the ordinary that opens up into the transnational contexts of a globalized world. It is apparent that an interest in attention does shape and animate some significant currents in contemporary fiction. This is the starting point for this book  – that as distraction has become a matter of some anxiety in our broader culture, contemporary fiction has also become interested in attention. However, in the particular textual examples that I consider in detail in the chapters that follow, the attention that becomes a matter of particular concern is the attentive stance ascribed to reading itself. The first of these chapters starts by charting current critical opinion on the relationship between David Foster Wallace’s fiction and attention: this opinion holds that Wallace suggests we live in a culture of overwhelming ‘total noise’ and reading teaches us to perform the ‘work of choosing’ that finds meaning from information overload. I propose that Wallace’s assertion of the power of ‘the work of choosing’ is not simply dramatized in his fiction. Instead, in his unfinished final novel, The Pale King (2011), and in short stories from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion: Stories (2004), Wallace traces a much more ambivalent set of ideas about attention’s choosing and its power. This chapter identifies these contradictions and ambiguities by emphasizing those aspects of Wallace’s work that register the emotional cost of this ‘work of choosing’ and the ways in which a culture that disciplines its members into concentration – ‘Focus, people!’  – can be restrictive, or even brutalizing. The final part of the argument concerns Gilbert Ryle’s assertions about the ‘unwittnessable’ nature of other minds – including their attention. Through discussion of Wallace’s story, ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’, this chapter argues for the story’s descriptions of ‘unwitting’ hostages as an enquiry into the ‘unwittnessable’ property of others’ attention, and into fiction’s techniques for depicting that otherwise unwitnessable phenomenon. Chapter 3 pursues the topic of capitalism’s demand for productive attention by considering the history of ‘presence of mind’ as a virtue, undermined by workers’ presenteeism and procrastination. Through a study of Joshua Cohen’s fiction  – with the short story ‘McDonald’s’ from his collection Four New Messages (2012) as a central example – the chapter considers attention’s qualities of ‘present-mindedness’ as a way into thinking about the relationship between attention, the contemporary and narrative temporality. Cohen’s work of nonfiction, Attention! A (Short) History (2013), takes up the history of reading and

Fictions of Attention

23

writing technologies and, in this chapter, is read in dialogue with his fiction. Drawing on the ways in which attention has been theorized co-extensively with temporality by Jonathan Crary and, conversely, the relationship between time and narrative, as explored by Paul Ricoeur and others, this chapter considers narrative temporality as a tool for giving readers a sense of their own reading attention’s disjointedness and fragility. The fourth chapter considers Ali Smith’s novel How to Be Both (2014) which, published in two versions, with two possible reading orders, could be said to work on the principle of promoting readerly distraction. The novel describes various forms of split attention, multi-tasking and distraction as part of its exploration of ‘how to be both’. The chapter begins by building on approaches to attention that associate it with care, such as Bernard Stiegler’s ‘taking care’ or Teresa Brennan’s ‘living attention’. The discussion of Smith’s work goes on to develop two ideas about attention and care in her work:  first, to consider attention without care, through consideration of Smith’s recurrent interest in surveillance cameras and machine attention; second, to think about how distraction might be part of care, intimacy or affection. The chapter concludes by extending Chapter 3’s exploration of temporality and attention and seeks to describe the queer temporality of distraction in Smith’s fiction. Chapter 5 understands Tom McCarthy’s approach to attention through the metaphor – after Freud and McLuhan – of the prosthesis. For McCarthy, what is amputated in order to graft on the prostheses of digital media technology is ‘attention’. What remains is a residual or remainder, terms which resonate across McCarthy’s writing, alongside ideas about the material traces of matter in the everyday. By drawing on McCarthy’s long-standing collaboration with the philosopher Simon Critchley, this chapter argues that attention has implications for an understanding of the subject, through Critchley’s concept of the ‘dividual’, and suggests that McCarthy develops a mode of characterization that reflects this divided and interrupted subject. Through reading of his novels Remainder (2005) and Satin Island (2015), this chapter also adopts and develops McCarthy’s use of the metaphor of the ‘blind spot’ to think through how readers’ attention is turned back, impossibly, to its own source or origin. The sixth chapter identifies Zadie Smith’s novel NW (2012) and novella The Embassy of Cambodia (2013) as expressing a concern with ethics, attention and the subject. As one of Smith’s characters asks, should we draw ‘a circle around our attention’ to avoid being overwhelmed by our responsibility to others? Cosmopolitanism’s balanced ethical pragmatism, as expressed by Kwame Anthony Appiah, would say yes, but Emmanuel Levinas would demur, and

24

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

suggest that the self is constructed by the appeal of these ethical demands from the other  – an idea articulated by Smith when she asks in her essay ‘Man vs. Corpse’ how to ‘begin to mind’, how to become more mindful, ‘Of ourselves, of others? For others?’ NW weighs up these two possibilities for ethical attention or mindfulness. The chapter ultimately develops an argument about Smith’s ‘circle of attention’ as a way of thinking about literary voice and fiction’s formal imperative to exclude. The final chapter considers Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014) in dialogue with the concept of absorption, developed through Rita Felski’s use of the term in her exploration of the aesthetic category of enchantment in Uses of Literature. This final chapter returns to the questions asked about reading in this introduction and seeks to identify how contemporary fiction might demand a shift in reading practices because of its persistent interest in affective states – including those of absorption, interest and curiosity. Lerner’s work repeatedly stages encounters involving different attentive responses to works of art, and he uses the novel as a form of testing ground for these responses. His work’s use of ekphrasis echoes that of many of the other fictions considered in the book, and the final chapter develops a consideration of this technique as a way of demarcating what is most distinctive about fictional representations and narrative fiction’s orchestration of attention.

2

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

Among the pieces in David Foster Wallace’s posthumous non-fiction collection, Both Flesh and Not, are his entries for the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Included among these ‘Twenty-Four Word Notes’ is the following: Focus Focus is now the noun of choice for expressing what people used to mean by concentration (‘Sampras’s on-court focus was phenomenal’) and priority (‘Our focus is on serving the needs of our customers’). As an adj., it seems often to serve as an approving synonym for driven or monomaniacal: ‘He’s the most focused warehouse manager we’ve ever had.’ As a verb, it seems isomorphic with the older to concentrate: ‘Focus, people!’; ‘The Democrats hope that the campaign will focus on the economy’; ‘We need to focus on finding solutions instead of blaming each other,’ etc. . . . Given the speed with which to focus has supplanted to concentrate, it’s a little surprising that nobody objects to its somewhat jargony New Age feel – but nobody seems to. Maybe it’s because the word is only one of many film and drama terms that have entered mainstream usage in the last decade, e.g., to foreground (= to feature, to give top priority to); to background (= to downplay, to relegate to the back burner); scenario (= an outline of some hypothetical sequence of events), and so on. (272–3)

Wallace’s note on ‘focus’ indicates a view of attention as historically situated, suggesting that changes in how we talk about attention are worthy of notice. In the present, Wallace suggests, to concentrate has become to focus and the two words have slightly different connotations: focus has a ‘somewhat jargony New Age feel’ that seems partly associated with corporate-speak (as in Wallace’s second example, ‘Our focus is on serving the needs of our customers’) and with a New Age blend of pop psychology and spirituality that emphasizes selfcultivation and the self-management of workplace success, as when ‘focus’ becomes an ‘approving synonym for driven or monomaniacal’. Most of the other entries in Wallace’s ‘word notes’ are examples of terminology from spheres of communication which play language games by their own rules: privilege (used as

26

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

a verb) as an example of ‘cloistered, insecure or stupid’ academese, unique as an example of ‘Advertising English’, even medical terms (noma, dysphesia) that could migrate into wider discourse (267, 269, 277, 268). The list of associations for focus pinpoints an intersecting set of demands faced by the modern individual, with discourse leaking out from spheres of communication including self-help, spirituality and management discourse, all enabled by a distancing technological metaphor of optical focus. Through this attention to language, Wallace is able to suggest that concentration, when it is named as focus, is put under pressure to achieve a set of productive goals. Wallace’s comments on the word focus therefore look like a mild critique not just of the word but of the demand that attention should be shaped in the instrumentalized, disciplined way represented by the command, ‘Focus, people!’. It is this suspicion towards the term ‘focus’ and Wallace’s recognition of the term’s novelty that this chapter takes as its central interest. Given that Wallace’s writing has been regularly enlisted on the side of the distraction-crisis literature catalogued in this book’s opening chapter, my interest in Wallace’s critique of ‘focus’ is perhaps a slightly contrarian one. It is particularly his address at the Kenyon College Commencement ceremony in 2005, published as the chapbook, This Is Water (2009), that is often cited in these contexts, described in laudatory terms and framed by ideas about habit, empathy and mindfulness.1 This Is Water begins with an anecdote of a wise old fish awakening his younger schoolmates into paying attention to the water in which they are swimming and ultimately develops into broader (although caveated and ironized) life advice about imagining the lives of the people around you, as a way of dealing with traffic jams, supermarket queues and the other enraging moments of modern life. From here, famously Wallace advocates a self-monitoring ‘attention to what’s going on inside me’ that, in the end, transforms narcissistic self-centredness into the ‘really important kind of freedom that involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people, and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day’ (49, 120). Wallace sums up this effort of consciousness with the phrase, ‘the work of choosing’ (76): what is being chosen is what to dwell on and what to ignore. This Is Water therefore turns selective attention into the life-saving rope that lets you climb out of the abyss of your own head, suggesting that everyday habits of solipsism can be transcended through the control of conscious attention. While the speech is a lovely thing for a crowd of hopeful young people at a commencement ceremony, it probably does need to be read in exactly that

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

27

context and, as a result, has been the subject of some substantial critique.2 Matthew Crawford, for instance, reads This Is Water as an example of the individual disciplining themselves to tolerate systemic problems rather than actually doing anything to change them. By this account, the examples that Wallace gives of regulating one’s attention so as to tolerate a parent abusing their child in the supermarket, or the existence of hateful bumper stickers and gasguzzling cars would all be better resolved by action rather than simply taking on the work of choosing to ignore them:  ‘Wallace’s therapy,’ Crawford writes, ‘Is offered in the spirit of virtual reality’ (The World Beyond Your Head 173). As in the corporate adoption of the discourse of mindfulness, or productivity ‘lifehacking’, the message becomes one of the individual choosing to regulate and discipline their own thoughts rather than being able to challenge or transform the impossible demands of contemporary existence. By this measure, when Wallace talks about ‘the work of choosing’ in This Is Water we are in the realm of the work of neoliberal choice, the work which sees the individual as the agent who ought to have control over their inner world, rather than altering the conditions in which they live. I  agree with Matthew Crawford that it is remarkable that Wallace seems to ignore this possibility for overcoming the isolation of ‘our tiny skull-sized kingdoms’ (117) through forming collectives or communities; he does not suggest that one might chat to the other people in the supermarket queue and find out their stories rather than make up a story about them, for instance. For this reason, I am not convinced that a reading like David Turnbull’s, which places This Is Water within a legacy of ethical thinking that engages with the ‘importance of the direction of attention’ by fiction, quite gets to the heart of the piece (209). This Is Water does not make the standard literaryethical move advanced by Martha Nussbaum and others that by imagining ourselves into fictional characters’ situations we might behave more ethically towards real people; Wallace instead seems to advocate treating the real people around us  – all these distracted ‘spacey people and . . . ADHD kids’ (This Is Water 70) as fodder for our own personal fictions. Turnbull begins his piece by suggesting that Wallace inherits a legacy of ethical thinking about attention and imagination, and it is really the latter that ends up being the dominant feature of This Is Water. Wallace’s philosophy of attention, as it is laid out in This Is Water, appears to understand the work of choosing as a way of reclaiming the boundaries of one’s own mind, rather than a political or even properly ethical gesture that turns out towards change through others. This is essentially individualistic work, presented as a form of vital self-care, which limits attention to others to protect

28

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

the self. What we might expect, then, would be for his fiction to exactly mirror these instructions for the discipline of self-monitored attention, especially since Wallace argues that a liberal arts education teaches students how to think in discriminating and conscious ways, how to perform the ‘work of choosing’. This stance is not, however, reflective of the more complex and much less consolatory account of attention in Wallace’s fiction, hinted at in the suspicions displayed in the focus word note. This Is Water is not a manifesto: I find that Wallace’s fiction displays a more hesitant step around the question of choosing and the regulation of attention than This Is Water’s confident stride. This chapter therefore cleaves most closely to those places where Wallace’s approach to attention becomes ambivalent, conflicted and unsatisfactory, to argue for Wallace’s fictions of attention as fictions that are much less didactic and confident in their support for ‘the work of choosing’ than the popularity of This Is Water would imply. Between Wallace’s critique of focus and the instructed ‘the work of choosing’ is a scattered array of engagements with attention in his fiction.

Beyond the work of choosing Wallace’s writing is a good starting point for an exploration of attention in contemporary fiction because it pieces together an account of the relationship between media technologies, education, political responsibility and interest in cognition that is reflective of some of the contemporary distraction-crisis discourse described in the previous chapter. It is also true that the prevailing culture of contemporary attention is, as I have established, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, and Wallace’s work also discursively enacts many of these tensions. For these reasons, I begin this analysis of Wallace’s fiction with a brief summary of attention in Wallace’s work as it developed across his career, since I will argue that his ideas about attention change from the early to the later work. Of the authors considered in this book, Wallace’s work of course has the most extensive scholarship and I’ve intended this section of the book to be a record of the scholarly work on this topic as well as a summary from which my own argument develops. Criticism of Wallace’s earlier work  – by which I  mean The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996) and the early stories of Girl with Curious Hair (1999) – recognized the place of those fictions within the same media landscape that framed the distraction-crisis work of the mid-1990s. These interpretations are aided by readings of Wallace’s essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’ as a manifesto for the

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

29

pre-2000 writing. In this essay, Wallace explicitly engages with the metaphor of the attention economy as a way of thinking about the prevailing affective stance of the 1990s: Indifference is actually just the 90’s version of frugality, for U.S.  young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it. (64)

This awareness of attention as a commodity is the natural counterpart of focus:  that instrumentalized attention that makes profit from concentration. The two also seem to have emerged in the same historical moment, according to Wallace’s chronology. At the same time, as Wallace said in the David Lipsky interviews, published as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), entertainment’s ‘chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise’ (79); entertainment promises complete absorption, ‘vacation from myself for a while’ (80). Wallace’s observations about fun and pleasure emerge from an existing debate about the seductive, narcotizing power of entertainment that runs from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), through Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, and back to the work of the Frankfurt School. Wallace, however, finds eventually that the central pleasure of the troubling entertainments of mass culture are in removing the responsibility for making choices; a trip on a cruise ship, for instance, is pleasurable because of its implicit promise that your ‘troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction and despair will be removed from the equation’ (‘A Supposedly Fun Thing’ 267). What is anxiety-provoking about entertainment, then, is that it seductively compels and absorbs, and gives us the pleasure of passivity by removing the difficult work of choosing. The most obvious manifestation of this power appears in the Entertainment, the video McGuffin at the heart of Infinite Jest, ‘a media object that completely absorbs and reifies its viewers’ (Fest 140). Both Wallace in ‘E Unibus Pluram’ and Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death are clear that this total absorption is the hallmark of dangerous entertainment culture. Postman argues, for instance, that while television precludes reasoned argument, the book, by contrast, requires attention that is fluctuating, variable and nimble, able to imagine a counterargument, pause to extrapolate, or judiciously ignore some irrelevant information. Wallace does consistently connect entertainment with childishness and irresponsibility in the early part of his career by, for instance, associating it with compulsive, impulsive eating of confectionary (Although of Course 79, 84).

30

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Philip Sayers observes that a relationship between certain varieties of Wallace’s attention and childishness is enriched by a reading of Roland Barthes’s ‘Upon Leaving the Movie Theater’, a piece in which Barthes observes audiences ‘riveted to the representation’ and, in a Lacanian mode, childishly and narcissistically misidentifying with the characters on screen (Sayers 109). As Sayers observes, the Entertainment in Infinite Jest encourages the same childish rapt attention through the use of a lens that recreates the ‘infantile visual field’ (Infinite Jest 940), but this is not wholly negative; while infantile rapt attention is what makes viewers vulnerable to the Entertainment, it is also their very vulnerability to it that makes them human (Sayers 109). There is a key ambiguity here, in which the childishness which makes viewers susceptible to the Entertainment (and, indeed, to all mass entertainment, to addictions, to advertising, and so on) is an innocent vulnerability to whole-hearted absorption that we might want to cherish and preserve. Childish absorption can be associated with the innocent emotional responses of old-fashioned sincerity, while ironists  – jaded and ‘frugal’ with their attention, as Wallace describes in the passage from ‘E Unibus Pluram’ quoted above – withdraw their full attention to take up an antagonistic position of selfconscious indifference.3 Adam Kelly’s influential account of Wallace’s attempts at finding a route back to ‘single-entendre principles’ through the interplay of irony and sincerity therefore begins also to look like a problem related to these two attentive postures that emerge out of a particular contemporary milieu.4 As Kelly notes, in ‘the age of advertising’ the fear is that all communication is inherently narcissistic and self-directed, focused only on drawing attention to ourselves (‘New Sincerity’ 137). The challenge for Wallace’s fiction, as he described it, was to find a way of allowing for the value of two readerly responses at once:  the childish closeness of absorption and rapt attention, and the chilly distance of analytical scepticism. If whole-hearted absorption is childish, and jaded, indifferent irony is somehow adolescent, then the fiction from the first half of Wallace’s career associates maturity with being able to pay attention and resist the boredom that is inherent in adult responsibilities, particularly adult political responsibilities.5 Evidence for the thread of association that links attentive alertness and political awakening in Wallace’s work runs from the early stories  – in ‘Lyndon’, for instance, the titular senator advises the narrator, ‘Don’t just sit there with your mind in neutral, boy’ (82) – to the non-fiction, such as Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s run in the Republican primaries in 2000, ‘Up, Simba’, which ends with the advice to the politically minded reader, ‘Try to stay awake’ (234). The

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

31

association between political engagement, paying attention, and maturity is there also in Infinite Jest, in Marathe and Steeply’s long dialogue about choosing. Here again it is entertainment that diverts and pacifies, giving people what Marathe calls ‘the pleasure of not choosing’, ‘choosing death by pleasure’ (319); as Marathe asks, ‘How to choose anything but a child’s greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose?’ (320). In the later work, too, Wallace’s sense of attention is closely associated with political responsibility and, most of all, with the kinds of maturity are required for democracy to function. As Wallace wrote in his introduction to the Best American Essays volume in 2007 (an essay later collected in Both Flesh and Not as ‘Deciderization 2007’), his impression of the media ecology of the United States was of ‘a kind of Total Noise’: A culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I  know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb . . . Such basic absorption, organization and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen – at least that’s what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different. (‘Deciderization 2007’ 301)

Wallace lays out here the problem (‘volume of info’) and the traditional solution (the educated adult’s capacity to weigh, filter and organize that information), which has broken down in the face of these new demands, and concludes ‘there is no way that 2004’s re-election could have taken place . . . if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way’ (313).6 The adult knows when to pay attention and when to filter out excess; he or she can perform information triage. The adult acts on that information to perform the work of choosing, rather than taking an apathetic, ironic or distracted stance. In the fullest and most persuasive account of the reading of Wallace’s fiction that sees it as teaching readers to perform the ‘work of choosing’, David Letzler’s book, The Cruft of Fiction, considers Infinite Jest as one of its examples of the ‘mega-novel’ which teaches readers to filter out the ‘cruft’ of information – cruft being the programming term adopted by Wikipedia for trivial or irrelevant content in the encyclopedia’s entries. Letzler is not the first to argue for Infinite Jest’s encyclopedic qualities, but he finds that this encyclopedism encourages a particular mode of attention.7 Letzler identifies Wallace’s inclusion of irrelevant material as training for the reader in skipping, skimming or selective attention with Infinite Jest’s notes requiring, because of their mix of ‘pointless’ and important material, the ‘modulation of the rhythm of one’s own reading between focused attention and different levels of skimming’ (88). Long novels

32

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

with passages of dubious relevance require us to ‘develop our abilities to filter information to their maximum capacities’ (92). In this chapter I want to make the case for interests in attention in the short work too, suggesting that the ‘work of choosing’ that the long novel seems to require might only be one part of the poetics of attention in Wallace’s fiction. I  find that the short works are also a place where Wallace exercises criticism of the instrumental forms of attention that I have been associating with the term ‘focus’ and, indeed, with the novel’s participation in encouraging the ‘work of choosing’ through demonstrating the modulated rhythms of reading that Letzler identifies. In this and the following chapter I  have considered two mega-novelists (Wallace and Joshua Cohen) and – perhaps rather perversely – made the decision to give more attention to their short work than their most famous long works. It seems to me that it is outside the longest novels that they are unfolding something that runs rather counter to the idea that literary writing is about giving readers practice in cultivating habits of attention. In Wallace’s later works we see a novelist who, like the character described by one of the interviewees in Brief Interviews, is in that category of individuals who are ‘used to high levels of people’s attention, and need to feel that they control it, always trying to control the precise type and degree of your attention instead of simply trusting that you are paying the appropriate degree of attention’ (‘B.I. #20’ 296). Rather than helping readers practise the filtering ‘work of choosing’ that we might find encouraged by the longer fiction’s rhythms of reading, Wallace’s shorter works are where guilt and anxiety about controlling ‘the precise type and degree of your attention’ seems to surface particularly strongly in the short story’s relatively compact form. My point is this: Wallace’s later works, after the mega-novel Infinite Jest, are where he most overtly questions the idea that art should hone attention, and seems to worry about his own role as manipulator, modulator, or orchestrator of attention – that figure yelling, ‘Focus, people!’ In writing a novel as outrageously long as Infinite Jest, Wallace observed that the book, like all serious art, needed some of the absorbing power of entertainment so that it could ‘seduce you into paying attention to stuff in a way that’s hard to pay attention to’ (Although of Course 199). For an author fascinated by the compelling power of television and advertising, the anxiety about his own role as maker of seductive and attentiongrabbing objects seems inevitable. Another perspective on the author’s role as orchestrator of attention can be found in Stephen Burn’s essay, ‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’, in which he quotes from an account of R.  D. Laing’s of a patient with schizophrenia who explains his symptoms as a way of calling on the doctors to attend to and

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

33

care for him. Presented as a way of thinking about Infinite Jest’s information overload, Burn quotes the patient’s explanation: ‘schizophrenics say and do a lot of stuff that is unimportant, and then we mix important things in with all this to see if the doctor cares enough to see them and feel them’ (Laing in Burn 76). Marking the vulnerability of the patient/text in this analogy we might ask, what if Wallace’s long books aren’t didactically teaching us to be better at paying attention, but seeing if we care enough about them to read the things and notice them? The obverse of this position  – that Infinite Jest is at best attention-seeking posturing and at worst an example of fuck-you contempt for the reader’s loving and careful attention – is represented most notoriously in the final chapter of Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now, in which she makes the case for not wasting her limited time and attention on Wallace’s novels.8 Hungerford performs her own ‘work of choosing’, and refuses to read him. If this is the gamble that Wallace is taking, surely it is important that some readers do refuse to read his work? When Zadie Smith writes of Wallace’s work as a ‘difficult gift’ which ‘merits the equally difficult gift of our close attention and effort’ (‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’ 261), it’s because the reward or the pay-off does not always return the attention invested – even if it sometimes exceeds it too. The short works avoid some of these problems – indeed, Hungerford writes that she has read some of Wallace’s short stories – precisely because of the smaller demand they make on time, attention, and effort.

From focus to flow We have established that Wallace’s work identifies the ways in which contemporary society issues that call to attention, ‘Focus, people!’, and have begun to entertain the idea that Wallace’s fiction also becomes increasingly concerned about its own power not just to absorb but to manipulate the attention of its readers. Attention, in the form of the ‘work of choosing’ becomes a badge of maturity, sobriety, civic responsibility and, more existentially, free will or agency. There is, however, also pleasure to be found in complete absorption, which comes in two forms: first, the easy pleasure of entertainment (which for Wallace is bad, like candy or narcotics) and second, what Wallace identifies in his final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, as ‘bliss’, found on ‘the other side of crushing, crushing boredom’ (548). This is a form of pleasure that comes to dominate the later part of his work.

34

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

This positive, deeply satisfying bliss has been analysed most clearly by Andrew Bennett, who identifies how Wallace’s philosophy of attention shows the influence of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. Flow is that unselfconscious state in which attention is completely absorbed by an activity, and is most often marked by losing track of time, a lack of thought or evaluation, effortlessness, satisfaction, and forgetting other worries (Csikszentmihalyi 49). Bennett suggests that narrative fiction has formal properties that are deeply associated with pleasurable flow states; quoting Monroe Beardsley, whose descriptions of the properties of literary objects identify their capacity to evoke ‘a sense of liberation from distractions’ and ‘a sense of liberation and wholeness’, which Bennett observes are wholly consonant with Csikszentmihalyi’s descriptions of flow (78). At the same time, Bennett’s explanation also takes in Roland Barthes’ description of literary texts as objects that defer pleasure, even to the point where that deferral causes boredom and discomfort. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as emerging between boredom and anxiety, since anxiety would be a state of overwhelming arousal and boredom a state in which stimuli fall below the threshold of interest required for attention (74).9 Bennett finds support for his opposition between the two states of boredom and flow in Jonathan Franzen’s posited explanation that Wallace ‘died of boredom and in despair about his future novels’ (‘Farther Away’); for me, it is just as significant that, in the same piece, Franzen emphasizes his friend’s hyperattentive social anxiety, noting his ‘rather laborious hyperconsiderateness’ – overattentive, overcaring, worried and masking doubts about his own ability to engage, care, love (‘Farther Away’). For Wallace, then, it is clear that anxiety  – the other side of flow  – is just as important as boredom. What is most powerful about flow is its curbing of selfconsciousness, which means that it mutes the self-doubting meta-commentary of anxiety. Wallace describes taking pleasure in writing when it was going well, but to do this he had to somehow overcome the ‘terrible fear of rejection’ that appears when writing turns into attention-seeking ‘showing off ’ (‘The Nature of the Fun’ 197). Notably, in the same way as he describes finding a way back to pleasure on ‘the other side’ of boredom in The Pale King, ‘The Nature of the Fun’ also describes how to ‘work your way somehow back’ from anxiety to pleasure (198).10 At the end of ‘The Nature of the Fun’ he describes that return of fun and flow in ways which seem to undercut the logic of ‘paying’ attention, of attention as a resource that can be invested and managed; instead, the return of fun is ‘a gift, a kind of miracle’ (199).11 What we are beginning to see here, then, is a way of thinking about reading and writing as something less transactional and less focused on either entertaining fun or virtuous self-improvement.

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

35

Wallace’s copy of Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, seems to have only held his attention up to page  77, when his annotations stop, but Bennett notes that Wallace’s underlinings and annotations suggest that he was reading carefully until this point, with marginal comments that include the note ‘Attention  =  Control of Consciousness’ (‘Inside David Foster Wallace’s Head’ 76).12 This is the model that Wallace adopts in The Pale King, to the extent that controlling one’s consciousness to withstand crippling boredom is the only way to survive in the contemporary workplace: ‘The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable’ (440). My suggestion, then, is that Wallace’s fiction regularly embeds the concern that, while of course it’s both necessary and possible to control consciousness and to do the ‘work of choosing’ that would make intolerable things (boring or anxiety-inducing things) bearable, there’s also something deeply dehumanizing about conditions that force us to ‘breathe, so to speak, without air’ (440). If flow, this ‘gift’ or ‘miracle’ appears, this is pleasurable and meaningful, but is it worth the pain or crushing boredom or excruciating anxiety? If This Is Water offers the solution of changing your head rather than changing the world, The Pale King seems to suggest something even more destructive: that the work of choosing, of changing your head, might be so painful and self-destructive and borderline intolerable that it could destroy everything meaningful about you. Is a job with the IRS, however noble the calling to collect and administer taxes, worth this sacrifice? Does The Pale King really instruct us to prioritize work over our own survival? Notes that Wallace left for The Pale King include a description of the novel’s two main arcs, the first of which reads: ‘Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs’ (547). Across the whole novel, unfinished as it is, the plot emerges of a group of individuals, ‘immersives’, who have the capacity to concentrate at superhuman levels, and who are being gathered to work at the IRS office in Peoria as a way of avoiding computers replacing the human tax inspectors. In contrast, David Wallace, the journalistic narratorial voice who introduces himself as the author, is distinguished by his very ordinary capacity for concentration: he spent his childhood thinking there was something wrong with him because he spent most of his time, when sitting at a desk, in fidgeting and self-distraction (295, 295n.). While David Wallace the character has come to terms with his ordinary distractability, the characters recruited by the IRS have developed their superhuman powers of concentration through traumatic histories, and it is therefore possible to read the novel as offering a

36

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

compromised and yet potentially resistant model of workplace attention. Rather than simply praising the immersives’ capacity for the discriminating ‘work of choosing’, there is enough evidence of horror in their origin stories to offer a critique of the demands of the modern work environment. Robert C. Hamilton argues that Wallace’s treatment of boredom as a positive feature is ‘idiosyncratic’ and at odds with a literary culture that values interest as an unqualified good (170). This is true in literature (who celebrates a boring book?), but not in life: we believe it is healthy for children to learn to be bored and that, as so many of the distraction-crisis pieces discussed in the previous chapter asserted, doing less stimulating ‘slow’ or ‘deep’ activities is good for the brain. Rather than a message about the transcendent power of paying attention, I  want to look at The Pale King in a different way. In this novel, the way to develop powers of perfect attention is almost always through the curtailment or mutilation of the fullest parts of our humanity, to ‘breathe, so to speak, without air’ (440). Rather than a panacea – as it’s presented in This Is Water – control of one’s own attention can also be read as the manifestation of the enormous human cost of contemporary working practices, the modern media environment, the education system, among other things. The notes on Shane Drinion, for instance, which close with a reiteration of flow’s ‘bliss in every atom’, begin with an emphasis on his happiness that cannot help but indicate incredulity: ‘Drinion is happy’ (548). There might be some situations in which this boredom – chosen and sought – could be a useful experience that promotes insight and growth. However, it seems a different proposition to ask people to experience this state every day for a lifetime as the price for survival. Drinion might be happy, but Drinion is not normal and, like many of the other characters in The Pale King (such as Toni Ware and Claude Sylvanshine) his pleasurable flow experiences seem to have emerged from trauma and struggle. Bliss might be on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom, but to get there means pain, and pain that might be too much to ask ordinary people to commit to for the majority of their everyday lives.

The unwitnessable performance of attention One figure who informs Wallace’s depiction of the inward states and outward manifestations of attention  – mostly as a highly provocative antagonist  – is Gilbert Ryle, whose ideas of ‘minding’ or ‘heed concepts’ are developed in the 1949 work, The Concept of Mind. Wallace and Ryle are very much invested in

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

37

the same tradition of ordinary language philosophy and Stephen Burn suggests that, given the influence of Wittgenstein on Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, ‘it is not surprising that his next work refers to Gilbert Ryle’ (Reader’s Guide 71–5). The references to Ryle in Infinite Jest are fairly sparse: Burn lists the deliberate inversion of Ryle’s famous epigram about consciousness, the ‘ghost in the machine’, and a reference to a (real) Cambridge, MA pub called Ryle’s Jazz Bar. Burn suggests that Ryle’s argument from The Concept of Mind – which aims to dissolve the myth of Cartesian mind–body dualism – is ‘embedded’ in Infinite Jest (72). However, his influence seems to me to have a long reach over Wallace’s later work, beyond Infinite Jest and into the later short stories in Oblivion and the final work on The Pale King. From my reading of Ryle, there are certainly some features of The Concept of Mind that seem to have exercised Wallace, but they are less centrally related to Ryle’s fundamental critique of Cartesian mind–body dualism and more to Ryle’s fascination with attention because of its apparent potential to undermine his materialist, non-dualist commitment to behaviourism. Ryle’s concept of ‘minding’ forms the basis of his work on attention, and is associated with a set of ‘heed concepts’, which include ‘noticing, taking care, attending, applying one’s mind, concentrating, putting one’s heart into something, thinking about what one is doing, alertness, interest, intentness, studying and trying’ (130).13 Second, and most importantly, minding seems to lack observable behaviours and this is potentially a challenge to Ryle’s essentially behaviourist philosophy. We might attempt to observe someone’s dedicated concentration by a furrowed brow, a rapt gaze or a cocked ear, these can be easily simulated, and are not conclusive (133); Ryle worries, therefore, that minding – or paying attention – may be ‘unwitnessable’ (133). Ryle’s account of minding removes consciousness from the equation, relegating it to the myth of the ghost in the machine. He deals with the problem of the unknowability of other minds and the problem of the will by rooting both in the body, refusing to separate out actions and thoughts into two groupings as a surface effect and a root cause. Minding therefore has implications for thinking about fiction in general, and particularly about fiction that inherits the legacy of modernism, influenced of course by William James’s account of consciousness, with its historical connection to the stream of consciousness technique and its privileging of attention as a way of filtering and holding objects before the mind.14 The unique capacity that fiction has for exploring internal states – what Dorrit Cohn identifies as the odd ‘life-likeness’ that depends on ‘what writers and readers know least in life:  how another mind thinks, how another body feels’ (114)  – expresses a preoccupation with minding, but these depictions

38

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

obviously run counter to our actual experience of other people. Elsewhere in The Concept of Mind, Ryle explicitly dismisses fiction’s interest in internal states and landscapes and scorns the fictional project of attempting to represent a consciousness underlying overt physical gesture, words and actions, scoffing that ‘only a James Joyce’ would be interested in attempting to imagine outward, physical performances to be ‘clues to the workings of minds’ below the surface (57). Wallace’s later work shares Ryle’s interest in the possibility that attention can be easily feigned or performed. What is ‘unwitnessable’ about attention is what makes it such a fascinating topic for fiction’s capacity to depict other minds and bodies, but also opens up some possibilities of resistance to demands that we regulate our attention in response to the demand emblematized by the call, ‘Focus, people!’. One useful way of conceiving of this demand is through the lens of emotional labour, most famously articulated in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (1983). The Managed Heart offered a sociological study of the labour of administering feelings that provides the foundational model for approaching the affective aspects of work. Through this lens, the call to ‘focus’ is a specific kind of labour which involves actions undertaken by the individual to manage not just their cognitive functions, but their own affective presentation  – with a particular interest in how they might be required to perform or present focus, concentration, and attention. Presenting the witnessable performance of attentive labour is a form of affective labour; it’s giving the pretence of care, interest and attention to something that doesn’t merit it. Rather than actually experiencing flow (and being happy, like Drinion), most workers in the same environment are made to perform a hollow simulacrum of absorbed attention, made all the worse because they are faking something that should be deeply satisfying and pleasurable. Unwitnessable attention can be a pretence of affective labour that only fiction, with its ability to depict internal states, could uncover. A character from elsewhere in Wallace’s fiction who illustrates the idea that the affective performance of attention comes at a huge cost, and who clarifies some of the aspects of emotional labour in the administration of attention is the ‘Granola Cruncher’ of ‘B.I. #20’. Initially, it might be possible to read the Granola Cruncher as a heroine of consciousness-control who, as her story is reported by the interviewee, is able to save herself from death through the power of her own focused concentration, by managing to ‘focus her way into the sort of profound soul connection’ that could prevent her murder by a sexually motivated attacker (252). Her ‘focus’, which the interviewee-narrator thinks of as a mode of prayer (with echoes of the ‘somewhat jargony New Age feel’ of Wallace note on ‘focus’),

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

39

also translates into her own mode of storytelling, in which she is notably ‘open to attention but not solicitous’ (253), a stance very much reminiscent of the balance Wallace himself tries to find between fearing rejection and showing off in ‘The Nature of the Fun’. The story presents extremes of ‘incorrect’ or mismanaged attention in a way which is notable for its gendered language: does the Granola Cruncher lose her head in ‘hysterical fear’ and become inattentive, or does she stay focused? On the other hand, does she solicit too much attention (is she an attention whore?) or calmly receive it when it is offered by the man listening? Both giving and receiving attention – or, the performed affective labour of both of those acts – are highly gendered in the story. As in all the Brief Interviews, the voice of the hideous interviewee buries the female subject under layers of interpretation and constriction which reflect social expectations of gender. Readings of the Granola Cruncher are, consequently, a little ambivalent. Mary K.  Holland identifies the Granola Cruncher’s powerlessness through the narration, since, while it might appear that the Granola Cruncher has succeeded in protecting herself and awakening something empathetic in both her attacker and the hideous interviewee, the narrative makes it clear through its closing verbal attack on the (female) interviewer and its ironic italicization of terms such as ‘love’ and ‘brutal sexslaying’ that the narrator has not been reformed by the story of the Granola Cruncher’s ministering attentions (119). By this measure, focus, however finely honed, is not an answer to deeply ingrained misogyny. For Holland, the brief interviews are all failed conversations, limited by narcissism that language is too limited to surpass, and ‘B.I. #20’ is no exception. Clare Hayes-Brady, on the other hand, emphasizes the Cruncher’s power, her ‘silent potency’ (‘. . .’ 136), which is only increased by the retelling of her story. For Hayes-Brady, this silence is part of a pattern of female muteness throughout Wallace’s fiction, which she associates with a subversive decision to let female characters’ silence do the work of resistance to patriarchal discourse (The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace 175–7). In support of Hayes-Brady’s reading, we might also note the extent to which the story manages to remind us that the Granola Cruncher’s attention is just a more targeted variant of the emotional labour that women do regularly to keep themselves safe; her focus and regulation of the attention of her attacker comes from the same place as her ability to tell the story that keeps the interviewee from hating her, finding her ‘annoying’, ‘dull’, childish or stupid (253); he acknowledges that he stops feeling contempt for her not because of the content of the story but because of her apparent sincerity and focus on him as a listener.

40

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

The (mostly male) IRS employees in The Pale King, who find their jobs stultifyingly boring, but who have to present a manly and stoical face, seem to suffer through another manifestation of gendered emotional labour. One of the unincorporated draft sections sees a direct address from a narrator describing his story as a ‘story for boys’ about ‘men of action’ and how their work is opposed to ‘the life of the mind’ (554–6).15 There is a substantial portion of human tragedy in this, too – the wasted potential of our special capacity for absorption – which appears most prominently in The Pale King in the two ghosts who haunt the IRS office at Peoria. Blumquist and Garrity are both men who died on the job: Blumquist was an IRS examiner so ‘focused and diligent’ that none of his co-workers noticed he had suffered a coronary and died at his desk (30), while Garrity was a line inspector for a mirror manufacturer who hanged himself from some factory pipe-work after suffering from the stress of his constant workplace vigilance (316–8). Although these men have done the self-sacrificing and noble work of attention, there was a damaging cost, not deep bliss or satisfaction. In both the examples of the stoical IRS operatives and the Granola Cruncher’s focus, it is difficult to see the characters’ superhuman concentration as anything more than a damaged and damaging reaction to unbearable experiences. If we consider the affinities between Drinion’s penetrating ‘single point concentration’ (293) in The Pale King – honed by dull things to bore a hole in existence – and the ‘single sharp point’ of the Granola Cruncher’s attention (56), we can see this focus as attention weaponized, sharpened to a point for self-defence.16 If anything, all that these examples call up is that this prodigious concentration is pathological, a response to unendurable situations, rather than a product of self-improvement. Control of consciousness is therefore a coping mechanism, not a lifehack. If we regard the work of regulating attention as a coping mechanism, it is a necessity rather than a choice. In ‘B.I. #46’ Wallace directly addresses this question of choice in extremity in ways which would seem to inform an analysis of the control of consciousness as a protective measure rather than productivity advice. In ‘B.I. #46’, the interviewee wants to expound his reading of Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. In this piece, the interviewee suggests that traumatized people (in Frankl’s book, Holocaust survivors; in the interviewee’s example a person – perhaps his wife, perhaps himself – who survived a violent sexual assault) are able to ‘choose to be more’ as a result of their experiences (104). The interviewee describes his wife’s recovery from an attack spent ‘trying to like structure her mind around it’ (103), with the knowledge that ‘it’s always a choice, that it’s you that is making yourself up second by second from now on’

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

41

(104). If, in Wallace’s fiction, survivors of sexual violence, of genocide, of torture are the models for the ‘work of choosing’ that college students are encouraged to emulate just to survive regular jobs, then surely there is something a bit monstrous in that motivational message? The other feature of ‘B.I. #46’ that also bears upon a connection between trauma and focus is in its description of dissociation, and specifically depersonalization. In ‘B.I. #46’, the interviewee imagines being able to ‘split yourself off and like float up to the ceiling’ (103) while being attacked. Depersonalization also seems to be a feature of the child’s response to the scalding accident in ‘Incarnations of Burnt Children’, one of the stories in Oblivion that David Hering has identified as part of the cut material from The Pale King and possibly an origin story for Drinion’s uncanny concentration (David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form 132). Both of these examples seem to focus on consciousness somehow absenting itself from the body, leaving something vacant or oblivious behind. Dissociation, depersonalization and catatonia are all symptoms experienced by Toni Ware’s mother in The Pale King, symptoms which she learns to emulate, at first as a game and later as a survival tactic. The novel describes her ‘playing dead’ (66, 442), pretending to be catatonic and absent from her body, forcing her eyes open into an empty stare; Toni Ware’s stare sees her pretending to be unaware. However, in a move which recalls Ryle’s problem of ‘unwitnessable’ minding, to the external observer, the girl pretending to be catatonic (or dead) looks just as oblivious as the girl who is really catatonic. Another section in The Pale King articulates this problem much more explicitly, with one of the interviewees explaining the idiom of ‘being in a stare’ (118–9). As it’s described in the novel, being ‘in a stare’ is almost a parody of deep, rapt attention: ‘You, in truth, are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration’ (118). In the context of the IRS, the stare is a problem because, ‘from outside the examiner, there was no guarantee that anyone could distinguish the difference between doing the job well and being in . . . the stare, staring at returns files but not engaged by them, not truly paying attention’ (119). We see Gilbert Ryle’s problem of ‘unwitnessable’ minding surfacing again in ‘the stare’. However, in this context it becomes a way for the IRS examiners to subvert the purpose of their own jobs; their profession is attentive looking – examining  – but there was no way of finding out if their scrutiny is genuine or an absent-minded performance of attention.17 The second notable feature of being ‘in a stare’, according to the examiner being interviewed, is that it can be caused by being at the extremity of distraction, boredom or over-tiredness. We see, though, from Toni Ware and her creepy stare (‘at your eyes rather than into

42

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

them’, 443) that the same blank gaze can also be a symptom of trauma. The stare is therefore the converse of a state of flow: like flow, it emerges from the other side of boredom and the other side of anxiety and fear, and like flow it seems to halt self-consciousness and the awareness of time, yet it does not share flow’s qualities of deep satisfaction and pleasure. From outside though, the difference is unwitnessable. As I  have suggested above, what is truly distinctive about fiction is its capacity for depicting internal states, and therefore for immediately offering us the answer to whether someone is attending or in a stare:  dead, catatonic or aware. In real life, in the movies, in paintings, at the theatre, there is no way to tell if other people have checked out. Fiction allows us the fantasy that we can gauge others’ concentration and for that reason the pairing of fiction and attention will always produce effects impossible in any other artform.

Unwitting, unwitnessable, inwit ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’, the second story in Wallace’s final collection, Oblivion (2004), also invokes the idea of unwitnessable minding, as well as returning to the assemblage of youth, reading, and the disciplined management of attention – or the presentation of that attention – that has surfaced in various forms already in this chapter. We should, in the light of the importance of attention in Wallace’s work, read the title of the collection as a gesture towards the opposite of attention:  obliviousness, inattention or careless disregard. Indeed, sometimes oblivion is welcome – as the slogan puts it in ‘The Suffering Channel’, ‘CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE’S NIGHTMARE’ (282).18 Oblivion, then, finds Wallace exploring the attractions and consequences of that-which-isnot-attention, not conscious, perhaps not reading. The stories at the beginning of the collection offer a group of meditations on obliviousness as inattention. The first story, ‘Mister Squishy’, centres around – of all things – a focus group, while a potentially attention-grabbing stunt unfolds outside the window. Wallace, of course, has made extensive use of support groups and interviews as narrative tropes in his work, and the focus group seems an extension of that interest in interpersonal dynamics. In the context of sociological research, the focus group is to group therapy as the individual interview is to the classical therapeutic encounter, placing ‘Mister Squishy’s’ focus group in a matrix with the support group in Infinite Jest, the individual interviewees in Brief Interviews, and the depictions of therapy sessions in stories such as ‘The Depressed Person’ and ‘Good Old Neon’. In the context of the first stories in Oblivion, it seems

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

43

important that we move from focus group in ‘Mister Squishy’ to the classroom in ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’, with each setting representing transidividual, social attention and, in the case of ‘Smithy’ an extended meditation on attention and education. Rather than attention as exchanged between two individuals (which Wallace tracked through its complexities in Brief Interviews) the focus group allows for paying attention to how others attend to someone else. ‘Smithy’ is narrated by an adult, recalling his childhood as a distracted schoolboy in a mid-century classroom who, while absorbed in a long daydream about a dog, is an ‘unwitting hostage’ during a substitute teacher’s mental breakdown (67). The story therefore revolves around this inattentive child, and the question of whether or not he is a ‘full witness’ to the events in the classroom (85). At first, this story seems entirely amenable to a reading that valorizes attention as the work of choosing and the responsibility of the civic-minded adult, who uses attention to filter out irrelevant stimuli, weigh information, and focus on goals and priorities. The story’s adult narrator, diagnosed as a child by the school as a slow or deficient learner, notes that, ‘In testing, many children labelled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pay attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what they pay attention to’ (97). The story demonstrates the child’s intense attention to his imagined fiction, at the expense not just of his Civics lesson, but of the unfolding hostage situation in his peripheral vision. However, it is the child’s evident absorption that throw things out of focus in the story: he is so pleasurably absorbed in his daydream that he misses the narrative’s main events. ‘Smithy’ is a long short story which uses elements of split attention (between the daydream and the events in the classroom; between the plain text and some all caps interjections) in ways not all that dissimilar to the double narrative of Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, discussed in Chapter 4. There are a few details here which are particularly meaningful in the light of the story’s relationship with The Pale King and to Wallace’s affirmed interest in the relationship between attention and maturity: first, the setting in a Civics lesson, given the importance of civic virtues in The Pale King and the extended discussion of the decline of the teaching of Civics in the novel’s elevator section (132–51); second, the historical setting, in the late 1950s or early 1960s (back in the time when Civics was still taught, according to the characters in that discussion). This period is also particularly significant in the history of the diagnosis of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders. Matthew Smith argues that the backdrop of the Cold War meant that Soviet education in science and technology was perceived to be rapidly outstripping that of the United States

44

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

in the later 1950s, and this prompted a change in teaching methodologies from Dewey-inspired, child-centred learning to something more standardized and formally academic (Hyperactivity 54–70). Represented by the National Education Defense Act of 1958 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, American education responded to ‘Sputnik panic’ by expressing its concern not, as it had previously, with those children who were weak and delicate or shy and withdrawn, but those who were boisterous, impulsive or inattentive. Impulsecontrol and self-control, Smith finds, became the qualities that the American education system desired to foster (63). Wallace’s story, set at the moment when learning disabilities such as hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder emerged as diagnoses in the United States, seems to engage with an the social context of what are now medicalized disorders. The narrator of ‘Smithy’ had a childhood reading disorder which led to him counting the words on the page rather than understanding their meaning (72). In a similar scenario to the characters ‘in a stare’ in The Pale King, the child can appear to attend to a page of the civics textbook but not ‘in any strictly accepted sense, read’ (72). In the child’s reading problem we are presented with a child whose attention has become a matter of social concern but whose development seems always to be framed by failure of the adults around him to attend to him:  he is improperly categorized as a ‘slow reader’; the substitute teacher’s mental breakdown consists of standing ‘with his back to the room . . . with his head again cocked to the side as if he were having trouble hearing or understanding something’ (87); even the local newspaper ignores the children and blames the hostage incident on their flawed concentration, lacking the ‘presence of mind’ to flee (67). Severs sees in the story a foreshadowing of the Vietnam War and its ‘destroyed communal bonds’ between adults and youth (176), and this breakdown between the generations is certainly amenable to reading in dialogue with Bernard Stiegler’s argument about the social project of attention and education, and particularly the task of learning to read. The starting point of Taking Care of Youth and the Generations is in the link that Steigler argues occurs between a blurring of childhood and adulthood – in both the new responsibilities that are expected of minors and also of the lack of responsibility that is accorded to those who have reached the age of majority – and a collapse in contemporary attention. Notably, the most important vector through which adult attention is delivered to the child is in the teaching of reading. Most compellingly, Stiegler argues for a potentially very powerful sense of attention as transindividual. If the attention of the parent to the child (or the older generation to the younger, in general) is what produces attention, through the process of education, then the social aspect of attention

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

45

is as significant as the psychic. Moreover, this model of transindividual, social attention is markedly at odds with the disciplinary sense of attention as willpower, focus and concentration that is demanded by the prevailing discourse about attention and self-efficacy – what I have been identifying in this chapter with the idea of ‘focus’. However, what is notable about ‘Smithy’ is that the child’s attention is not presented as an imperfect or pathologized other to adult attention. In The Problem of Distraction, one of the critiques that Paul North makes of Stiegler’s work is that it implies that adults should nurture children’s attention because there is something wrong with children’s attention in the first place:  Stiegler’s account ‘prefers adults over children, collection over dispersal, preservation over wearing away’ (188n.). Wallace’s talk of our solipsistic ‘default settings’ in This Is Water would seem to share the same view, but ‘Smithy’ takes a different stance by refusing to prefer adult attention over childish distraction. In this way, it seems at odds with the way that other strands of Wallace’s work apparently champion the ‘work of choosing’ as the celebrated mark of the mature mind. ‘Smithy’ also contains a powerful representation of performed, ‘unwitnessable’ attention in the boy’s recurring vision of men working in an office – a vision that fills him with terror and dread. It becomes clear that what is horrific about these men working intently in a windowless room is that they are performing a gross parody of attentive reading – only going through the motions of being riveted and enthralled – signified by the men who, rather than being closely absorbed, look like they are reading papers ‘as if they were at some terrible height and the documents were the ground far below’ (108). Rather than the completely absorbed attention that should allow them to vanish entirely into the activity in a state of flow, they have the worst of both ends of the spectrum of boredom and anxiety; the story describes them as ‘somehow at once stuperous and anxious, enervated and keyed up’ (109). The men’s faces are described in the same terms as being ‘in a stare’, with their features vacant, ‘like the way someone’s face can go flaccid and loose when he seems to be staring at something without really seeing it’ (108). The men in the story are performing a forced, grotesque version of the kind of attention that should, when it’s authentic, be an almost spiritual experience. The vision is terrifying because the boy can tell – with the power of a dream – that something is compelling them to pretend that they are in this state of flow or rapt attention. Chris Fogle, in The Pale King, shares both the reading impairment and the vision of men in an office with the child in ‘Smithy’ and his dream proceeds along similar lines, with the ‘blankly avid’ faces of office workers, filled with the ‘placid hopelessness of adulthood’ (255) compared with the children in school

46

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

who are already ‘locked tight inside themselves and an institutional tedium they couldn’t name but had already lost their hearts to’ (257). In the case of the child in ‘Smithy’, both the reading problem and the troubling visions resolve themselves spontaneously around the child’s tenth birthday, suggesting some underlying connection between the two. This connection, I  believe, is specifically related to the quality of ‘unwitnessable’ attention that is manifested in both: they both involve reading that is not really reading, and performed or feigned attention, as though the boy is working through an understanding that adult life will mean a long pretence about the matter of his own concentration. ‘Smithy’ is more strange and more powerful than its analogous sections in Chris Fogle’s narrative in The Pale King. Rather than offering a redemption narrative – from distraction to industrious attention  – as Fogle’s narrative undoubtedly is  – ‘Smithy’ is a much more ambiguous piece, informed by the backwash of Wallace’s interest in attention as something secretive and unwitnessable, rather than the main tide of attention’s productive, mature responsibility as ‘the work of choosing’. Unlike Chris Fogle in The Pale King, the boy’s vision in ‘Smithy’ happens during what he calls the ‘featherfall into sleep’ when he ‘had been in bed for a time and was beginning to fall asleep but only partway there’ (53). After daydreaming in class during the time when he should have been learning to pay attention, this bedtime vision is qualitatively different: ‘not quite a nightmare proper, but neither was it daydream nor fancy’ (53). This is an important distinction, and one which we might use to start to imagine the child in ‘Smithy’ as a hero, resisting some of the pull of the adult dynamics of the regulation of attention. To draw out some of what the boy’s vision between waking and sleeping might signify, I want to turn to Jonathan Crary, who, in his classic work on the science and culture of perception at the end of the nineteenth century, Suspensions of Perception, and his most recent book about always-on work culture, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, singles out the moment between wakefulness and sleep as a particularly significant one for the cultural history of both attention and work. In Suspensions of Perception, he argues that hypnagogic visions  – the things that our minds generate without any sensory input from outside as we’re falling asleep – are an example of a kind of contentless perception, an attention that is just attention. Moreover, in his recent book, 24/7, Crary identifies how these moments before sleep offer a unique way of thinking that is a counter to the regulated attention of waking time. He writes: Modern sleep includes the interval before sleep  – the lying awake in quasidarkness, waiting indefinitely for the desired loss of consciousness. During this

‘Focus, People!’ (David Foster Wallace)

47

suspended time, there is a recovery of perceptual capacities that are nullified or disregarded during the day . . . One follows an uneven succession of groundless points of temporary focus and shifting alertness, as well as the wavering onset of hypnagogic events. (127)

The perceptual capacities that come alive during the period between waking and sleep are the result of undirected attention, with fleeting and unstable perception, rather than regulated and fixed attention. Both the daydream and the hypnagogic vision before sleep (and, I would add, being ‘in a stare’) are part of states in which perception is suspended, all of which are associated with Crary’s counterhistory to the dominance of willed attentiveness and productivity. Their very existence is a challenge to the idea that we should have control over our attention and rise to a call to ‘focus’. In ‘Smithy’, from the beginning, the narrator reflects on his childhood daydreaming as an act of resistance to the classroom’s disciplining of attention; he observes that he concentrated just as hard on his daydreaming, but this work was ‘just not the work dictated by the administration’ (77). The title of the story, ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’, also registers some of this interest in resistance to reshaping attention through education. When Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait of the Artist declares, ‘I go forth to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’, we see a process of artistic re-creation of a whole culture. Of course, both consciousness and conscience are yoked together by Joyce in the lovely Ulysses-word ‘inwit’, a word which echoes through its opposite in ‘Smithy’, in ‘The Unwitting 4’ – those who are oblivious, who are not attentive. The story, through the character’s attention to his own attention, also activates readers’ ‘inwit’, or inward attention. In the context that ‘Smithy’ imagines, forging the conscience and consciousness of the race happens in the classroom and in the office cubicle, where neural circuitry gets plastically reshaped to tolerate intolerable boredom. As Catherine Malabou reminds us in What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008), the discourse of neuroplasticity is notably close to the discourse of neoliberalism (flexibility, constant reorganization of structures, decentralization and so on). Malabou notes, however, that plastic can also be explosive, and that it is in the process of reshaping our neural pathways that we have the potential to blow a hole right through social structures to make something that is more amenable to how we wish to live (5). One reason the soul is not a smithy is that the work of beating a malleable consciousness into shape  – through formal schooling, through working in a job that bores you utterly, through the emotional labour of

48

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

performing polite attentiveness towards people who don’t respect you – might be an unreasonable demand to place upon you, like requiring you to ‘breathe, so to speak, without air’, as The Pale King, has it (440). ‘Focus, people!’ therefore becomes at times a compulsory, even threatening, command to perform a pantomime of concentration, rather than an invitation to take mastery of your own unruly attentive faculties. And what is distinctive about narrative fiction, Wallace identifies, is its capacity to take us under that pantomime façade, to witness the unwitnessable properties of the inwit. The disruptive features that I have traced in ‘Smithy’, then, run against the prevailing trajectory of Wallace’s work in at least three ways. First, in setting childish daydream and the power of the ‘unwitting’ against his work’s celebration elsewhere of the power of the mature ‘work of choosing’. Second, by imagining the workplace’s compelled performance of absorbed attention or flow not as a noble exemplum of the hard work of adult life, but as something monstrous and life-denying. Finally, as a short story, ‘Smithy’ does not participate in the instructive lessons about (or unreasonable demands upon) reader’s attention that the novel’s long form demands and, instead, its form enacts split attention and distraction on the surface of the page itself. The Pale King was, of course, an unfinished novel so, while it is true that ‘Smithy’ runs against the direction of that novel’s celebration of transcendent boredom, there are still elements of The Pale King that continue to undermine and complicate that message, and the text is notably unfixed, provisional and incomplete. As I  will aim to show in the chapters that follow, Wallace is not alone among contemporary writers in fashioning new forms through which to communicate varieties of contemporary attention. And through these new forms, as contemporary fiction articulates attention’s relationship to modern work, education, intergenerational relationships and a broader social field, it is the ability of fiction to communicate those ‘unwitnessable’ qualities of affective experience and of perception that make it the primary vehicle for the investigation of attention.

3

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

When read as ‘present-mindedness’, attention provokes a set of questions about focusing on the present day that are central to the aims of this project as a study of contemporary fiction. The introduction to this book sought to examine the sense of contemporary crisis in recent accounts of readers’ attention. Many of these accounts are predicated on a look backward that projects an imagined histories of past attention and contrasts it with diagnoses of the scatter-brained present: the present is hyperactive and cannot get a grip on itself; it is distractible and lacks executive function so it cannot monitor its own behaviour. If we persistently imagine the present as absent-minded and lacking the capacity for self-reflection, what would it mean to take up this metaphor of presentmindedness as a way of conceptualizing the contemporary? Of course, there is also evidence that many ages have felt their own to be one of failing attention; Jonathan Crary’s case for the late nineteenth century, for instance, finds that the period could be characterized by a ‘crisis of attentiveness, in which the changing configurations of capitalism continually push[ed] attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds’ (14). Lily Gurton-Wachter suggests that attention was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, believed to be ‘exceptionally undisciplined’, and explicitly argues that Crary’s work, in locating the beginning of ‘our’ modern struggle with attention later in the nineteenth century, has distorted an understanding of attentiveness in earlier periods (2–3). The questions raised by these works is therefore as much about periodization and when we believe our own time to begin as about changing attitudes to attention. It is also true that there is a common impression of disjointed temporality at the heart of the contemporary.1 Recent studies of contemporary fiction have also expressed discomfort with the close – even shortsighted – focus on the present that the field apparently requires.2 Peter Boxall, in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2013), remarks that ‘the time we are living through is very difficult to bring into focus’ (1), before going on to provide a metaphor from Jean-Paul Sartre,

50

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

which compares experience to looking backwards from a speeding vehicle, in which everything to other side looks like a blur and objects at a distance resolve themselves into something coherent. It is clear, then, that this problematic relationship with the present is imagined as a relationship of proximity that prevents engagement or familiarity:  close can be too close. Boxall also makes the argument that our own age, because of ‘material and cultural forces’ peculiar to it, is one in which time is perhaps uniquely out of joint (3).3 This sense of a time that is not in agreement with itself is also present in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks’ description of ‘the difference at the heart of the “now” ’, which they establish as, ‘a constitutive and productive heterogeneity, a circulation of multiple times within the single instant’ (3). If the ‘now’ is multiple and shifting, the possibility of holding and fixing the present with single-minded concentration seems increasingly impossible. This impression of a time not quite in time with itself is also identified by what Paul Rabinow has identified as ‘marking time’, in his commentary on the anthropology of the contemporary. For Rabinow, the metaphor of ‘marking time’ is associated with a conductor marking out a rhythm with a baton, or with other forms of formal temporal ordering. Rabinow explains that the term has two other meanings, however, both which are tangled up with attention: first, the sense of marking time as waiting, pausing or ‘treading between goal-directed actions’, which is closely allied with a break or interruption in one activity in favour of another – or even with distraction; second, ‘marking’ as noticing or observing, which is the mode practised by the ‘anthropologist of the contemporary’ (vii). Rabinow’s influence appears prominently and explicitly in Tom McCarthy’s recent writing and an understanding of the present as a pause or a moment of noticing between other moments that are taken up by ‘goal-directed action’ is one which could apply to many of the novels considered in this book, from the action of Zadie Smith’s NW, which seems to play out in the pause in a friendship between its two main characters, to Ben Lerner’s 10:04, which unfolds in the period between contracting a work of fiction and its publication.4 ‘Marking time’ frames the contemporary by an act of marking – or noticing – that fits into a broader discontinuous and disrupted temporality of the present. The kind of present-mindedness that we would need to mark the contemporary with focus and precision is always sloping off elsewhere, shifting away from our concentrated gaze. It is like attention itself: a fragile balloon that pops under critical scrutiny. What form, then, would ‘present-mindedness’ take, and how might it be connected with the virtue of presence of mind? Presence of mind is a prized quality; not just the opposite of absent-mindedness, but embodying both

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

51

calm composure and the ability to take action, or to seize the moment. Max Horkheimer suggests that presence of mind  – Geistesgegenwart, the ability to respond readily and immediately  – is the chief attribute of the subject under capitalism. Horkheimer writes that, ‘without dream or history’ the worker is primed like a machine, ‘always watchful and ready’ (38). With a temporality distorted by instantaneity and flexibility, modern individuals are defined by an ideal of alert presence of mind: The individual no longer has any future to care for, he has only to be ready to adapt himself, to follow orders, to pull levers, to perform ever different things which are ever the same. The social unit is no longer the family but the atomic individual . . . Contemporary individuals, however, need presence of mind more than muscles; the ready response is what counts, affinity to every kind of machine, technical, athletic, political. (38)

The flexibility of individual labour and its ability to adapt to present circumstances connects together attention and the present for Horkheimer, but this adaptation to the present comes at the cost of the future. If the mind is wholly present and dedicated to the task at hand, and there is no future to wait or care for, then what possibilities could there ever be for social change? Walter Benjamin offers a more hopeful prospect, suggesting that presence of mind is ‘a natural gift of humanity, one which, directed toward the highest objects, elevates the human being beyond himself ’ (The Arcades Project 513)5. It offers an alertness that could grab those moments of messianic potential that unexpectedly appear in the ordinary run of time; it is the watchfulness of a vigil. In Benjamin’s description above, he is observing this redemptive watchfulness in its debased form, in the presence of mind of a gambler who concentrates his attention on winning money rather than redeeming time. Presence of mind in its elevated form is nevertheless a politically engaged state that could potentially grasp the moment for transformative action. Benjamin quotes from Turgot to illustrate presence of mind as a form of attentiveness to political possibility: ‘Presence of mind as a political category comes magnificently to life in these words of Turgot: “Before we have learned to deal with things in a given position, they have already changed several times. Thus, we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present” ’ (477–8). Benjamin’s ‘natural gift’ of presence of mind offers a way of seizing and transforming the present moment – jetztzeit – but only if we are somehow able to foresee it. Foreseeing the present returns us to the same terrain of the untimeliness of the contemporary, as the present constantly slips away from our grasp.

52

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

At the same time as imagining the dimensions of presence of mind, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School were also concerned that even those times outside of working hours – when presence of mind might be able to turn towards political change – found their attentiveness restyled by habitual leisure activities. In a wellknown passage from ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, for instance, Benjamin describes the ‘reception . . . in a state of distraction’ of the ‘absent-minded’ film audience (232, 234), implying that this form of response to the new cultural object of the age blunts those forms of alertness that might be vigilant for moments of transformation. Benjamin’s investigation of distraction (Zerstreuung) yokes together two meanings of the word in both German and English: first, inattention, and second, those diverting past-times or amusements that fill leisure hours. The construction of leisure time associated with the latter co-evolved with the new kinds of working practices emergent with capitalist modernity, as Theodor Adorno argues, by commodifying ‘free time’ as well as the paid time of work. In Adorno’s account, free time is ‘shackled to its opposite’: the time of labour (187). It is therefore unsurprising that the kinds of work that modernity has required involving vigilance and disciplined attention should be matched by leisure distractions which preoccupy absent minds. However, as Jonathan Crary describes it in Suspensions of Perception, the value that modernity has placed on ‘presence of mind’ shows how much it is desired, but also how rare it is. Attentiveness, Crary argues, was both a manifestation of a desire for presence and plenitude in perception, but also a substitute that covered its absence: the ‘immense social remaking of the observer in the nineteenth century proceeds on the general assumption that perception cannot be thought of in terms of immediacy, presence, punctuality’ (4). Crary suggests that this presence of mind – manifested as ‘immediacy, presence, punctuality’ – is, in fact, modernity’s fantasy rather than its reality and that it is a fantasy that masks a perceived deficit. Modernity valorizes presence of mind because it is not possible. Minds are untimely, and trail off into memory and anticipation, daydream and distraction. The possibility of presence of mind is a kind of fiction of attention, around which a whole culture has been shaped.

Attention! A (Short) History So, presence of mind, this quality that both defines modern individuals and holds the key to their liberation, is understood through the same paradigm of untimeliness as the contemporary. It is within this terrain that Joshua Cohen’s

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

53

fiction seeks to organize a cluster of ideas about attention and the present. Cohen’s book-length essay, Attention! A (Short) History (2014), is a short history of attention, but also of reading, writing, writing implements and writing as labour, from monk-copyists to clerks and scriveners to twentieth-century typists. Indeed, one of the intriguing threads in Cohen’s book is the repeated commentary on mark-making, points and pricking, from the meditative focus on the dot of the diacritical dagesh in Hebrew (24), to the transformation of the Greek stilus (a mark or the verb ‘to mark’) into the Latin stimulus (to goad or prick) – a transformation that marks a prodding into alertness (30). Recall Rabinow’s ‘marking time’: marking the contemporary means prodding oneself into alertness to record the present. Attention! is itself a record of the techniques that books use to compel, orchestrate and exhaust attention. Chapters are alternately numbered and lettered; there is a test at the end (to check you have been concentrating, of course); the book opens with a playful and attention-grabbing exercise in page layout that instructs the reader to ‘READ THE SMALL FONT FIRST’ in spite of the larger text’s insistent all caps.6 The long sentence that opens the book, addressed to the reader in the second person, makes its own self-referential attention-testing explicit, by explaining that it is ‘just another weary technique to compel/exhaust your continued . . . mindfulness’ (10). Consider the craftiness of that opening instruction: READ THE SMALL FONT FIRST. By the time the reader has received this instruction, of course, she has already read the LARGE FONT first. The strange thing about instructions that direct attention is that they must always, in the first instance, draw attention to themselves. As Cohen writes, ‘ “Attention” is the pretext – attention, no quotes, the text itself ’ (13). ‘Attention!’, ‘Focus, people!’:  these are calls to attention that makes reading start before it really begins. This is the same peculiar temporality that afflicts the opening pages of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (discussed in this book’s first chapter) in which the words on the page seem slightly out of step with the reading present: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel’ (2). ‘You’ start attending before ‘you’ start reading, and so a title, a contents page, a first line, an incipit is always a call to attention. You are reading the words on this page, now, at this moment, because your attention has already been apprehended. There is, therefore, a narrative problem surrounding attention and its strange temporality that emerges in this description of reading. As well as the temporal oddities that Cohen uncovers as he thinks about attention and reading, he also suggests that attention as an object of understanding might be something that slips out of our grasp in the present. As I have already suggested, the fiction of the twenty-first

54

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

century has been interested in the ways in which attention can be turned back upon itself, by way of what I  have been terming inward attention. Cohen’s history of attention and its pairing, in his fiction, with attempts to seek a method for attending to the present, enact the same gesture: the challenges of attention attending to itself are of the same order as those of the present attending to itself. The starting point for Cohen’s history of attention is, therefore, that we have a blind spot that emerges when we try to focus on attention. Beginning with William James’s declaration in The Principles of Psychology that ‘everyone knows what attention is’, Cohen goes on to make the statement’s focus on the selfevident definition of attention into the book’s central problem. Even if everyone knows, first-hand, their own phenomenological experience of attention, does this experience hold true for knowing other people and their attention? And even if we can say what attention is today, can we say the same about attention in the past? And even when we try, as James did, to attend to our own attention, why is there still something so untimely and ungraspable about it? As Cohen phrases it, ‘when attention is stimulated (addressed directly), its only hope of survival is to respond as something else  – in historical terms, as something expectant, memorious’ (182). Attention, when we concentrate on it or press on it, vanishes from the present and emerges as the expectation or memory of attention. Any instruction to pay attention is always pitched beyond itself, at what will follow, and any recognition of our own attending is retrospective, ‘memorious’. Attention responds as something else, and that response displaces the present mind into anticipation or memory. Scholarly work on the history of attention dutifully acknowledges the same difficulty: attention is ‘an elusive, elastic concept’ (Marno 135), it ‘again and again evades definition and categorization’ (Gurton-Wachter 3), although, on the other hand, ‘Who can say they understand distraction?’ (North 3). Jonathan Crary gives a full account of modern psychology’s failure to satisfactorily model attention, from his quotation of Hermann Ebbinghaus’s 1905 conclusion, ‘Attention is a real embarrassment to psychology’, to contemporary debates about whether attention can be traced to specific cognitive architecture, or whether it is the by-product of a whole range of sensory processes (Suspensions of Perception 34). As Crary concludes, ‘the more one investigated, the more attention was shown to contain within itself the conditions for its own undoing’ (45). Rather than yielding graspable attention, investigating attention causes it to fall off rapidly into scatter-brained states of absent-mindedness. Pressing on attention in the most programmatic and objectively scientific ways only made it more elusive, less inclined to present itself.

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

55

Cohen’s Attention! also suggests that when we attempt to put pressure on attention with a spirit of philosophical enquiry, it becomes even more elusive. His solution is to try and address the problem of understanding attention by using fictional case studies. He writes, ‘what I  find I’m lacking most of all, in this book as in the others [about attention], is a true or just tractive account of how previous eras actually, really attended’ (181–2). For Cohen, the problem of how other people’s attention worked can only be broached through the work of imagination that fiction allows, and the book culminates in a series of case studies that offer snapshots of what attention might have been at different points in history. All these case studies are written in the second person, in which ‘you’ have to acclimatize your attention to modernist artworks, the type-writer and the production line, and they demonstrate the particular attentions fashioned by new scientific theories, from psychoanalysis’s awakenings, to theories of vigilance, filtration and attenuation. As Cohen requests of the reader, we should ‘consider [his] inhabitation of other periods more of a habitation of this one’ (182), implying that this attention to the past is only ever in the service of attention to the present. In his focus on historical attention, Cohen asserts that not only is the present day’s attention markedly different from the attention of the past, but that the difference is not just down to technology. Instead, Cohen asserts, attention has become reified through ideas about its potential value: [People in the past] didn’t feel their attention had been threatened, perhaps, because they hadn’t been conditioned to regard their attention resourcefully. Meaning (‘resource’), they hadn’t been conditioned to regard their attention as both a property – with intrinsic worth as a good and a service, with valuta (exchange value) – and as a function of valuta between stimulus and response. But when attention is stimulated (addressed directly), its only hope of survival is to respond as something else – in historical terms, as something expectant, memorious. When stimulated by capital, attention converts itself and responds as commodity (its property element surviving as product or capital, its function element as the process of exchange). Any expectation or memory remaining regards all ostensible decrements or declines in this commodity as lapses, not restructurings vital for recovery and growth. (182)

This explanation associates capitalism’s relentless focus on the present with attention’s strange slippages off into expectation and memory, framed as failures, as distraction. Attention takes on the shape of stimulus and response – a transactional model – but when it is stimulated or addressed directly it can only preserve itself by responding out of time and off schedule. In exploring the

56

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

relationship between contemporary temporalities and attention in 24/7, Crary suggests that a 24-hour economy substitutes an inhuman, always-on vigilance for human attention. More than this, it also suggests an attitude to extracting value from every moment of time that extends the reach of capitalism to new areas. 24/7 capitalism, Crary suggests, ‘is not just a continuous or sequential capture of attention, but also a dense layering of time, in which multiple operations or attractions can be attended to in near simultaneity, regardless of where one is or whatever else one might be doing’ (84). Television and other technologies create a habitual practice of attention through their relentless monotony. He describes these situations invoking ‘a diffuse attentiveness and a semi-automatism’, which is also notable for leaving one temporally adrift  – ‘dispossessed of time’ (88). Contemporary capitalism, temporality, and attention are therefore deeply implicated in reshaping each other. It is this odd and wrong-footed temporality of attention – always too early or too late, awakened by stimuli in advance of itself, always shifting off into memory or anticipation and therefore into distraction  – that manifests itself in Cohen’s Attention! as a new way of thinking through old questions about narrative temporality. As I have already suggested, Cohen conceives of attention as always moving off into memory and anticipation. This formulation of temporal structures, particularly in the context of storytelling, resonates with Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative temporality and the much longer heritage of his ideas, stemming from Augustine’s Confessions. Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative sets out a logic for narrative that finds a complex structure of anticipation and recollection at work in reading which ultimately undermines the prominence of the narrative present. Cohen’s Attention! starts down a similar line of argument in his summary of attention’s etymology, which Cohen interprets as the manifestation of a desire to fix objects and ideas in the present: ‘Attention’ . . . derives from the Latin attentio which itself is a development of ad tentio, ‘to reach out,’ the opposite of in tentio, ‘to reach in’. The Latin calques the Greek prosochē / pro sochē. Both attentio and prosochē are nouns, but while the Latin verb attendo emerged coevally with the noun form, the Greek verb prosochô is considerably older . . . It is a term indicating grasping, gripping, steering a ship, enlisting the wind to get you to port even if the wind is against you. The nouning of verbs, the stilling of their motion – their ultimate definition – is a function of the written word, the page. (40)

This older etymology from the Greek yields a definition of attention that connotes holding, grabbing, pinning, stopping:  buttonholing someone tell

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

57

them something, hailing them in the street, catching them by the wrist so they can’t leave. Attention is an arrest that halts movement for the present moment. As Cohen also identifies, the Latin ad tentio indicates outwardness – ‘to reach out’  – with that act of reaching also encoded as stretching, tension or being held in suspense.7 Cohen’s instinct is to immediately pair ad tentio with its apparent opposites:  in tentio and later distentio, glossed by Cohen as ‘a thing tautened too far, because spread too widely, to snapping, slackness’ (41). Where attention is a reaching out, in tension, into the world, intention is introspective self-examination, which leads him into a discussion of spiritual practices of introspection and, most significantly, St Augustine’s examination of his own processes of reading and attention in his Confessions. Cohen’s account of Augustine’s Confessions finds that Augustine’s reading is interrupted by doubting, thinking and disputing. It is therefore distracted reading that leads Augustine to his conversion and on to his prototypical first-person self-reflexive narrative (47). Augustine famously describes St Ambrose reading silently and uninterrupted, and intense, interior reading that only reaches inwards (as in tentio), rather than outwards (as ad tentio) therefore marks out the examination of the soul. Augustine’s own understanding of temporality places attention at its centre, offering it as the defining frame around the present, as a sort of filter through which the future turns into the past: ‘The mind expects, attends, and remembers, so that what it expects passes by way of what it attends to into what it remembers’ (Confessions 361). Memories are, then, made of the things that are attended to and everything unnoticed is disregarded from your personal stream of time. As Augustine goes on to clarify, ‘My attention is present all the while, for the future is being channeled through it to become the past’ (Confessions 361). Attention, always and only the present, is the means by which the future becomes the past. To advance outwards from Cohen’s reading of Augustine, we should pursue these ideas through the Confessions and onward into some more recent interpretations of ideas about narrative and temporality. Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, which begins by placing Augustine’s philosophy of time in dialogue with Aristotle’s Poetics, sees narrative as a way of making order out of the chaotic scattering of time. For Ricoeur, Aristotle’s concept of emplotment, muthos, is the force that brings together the dispersed elements of past and future, constructing a pattern that makes a coherent and stable meaning out of temporality in a narrative.8 Using Augustine’s work on the mental processes involved in temporality, Ricoeur is able to suggest that narrative also brings together the mind that is scattered across memory, attention and anticipation.

58

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Ricouer argues that Augustine’s concept of the distentio animi – the distended soul (which we can read, alternatively, as the distracted mind) stretched out across the extended times of recollected past and anticipated future – is drawn together by the focusing processes of narrative (1.31). The distentio animi runs across our temporal experience, and is a product of flawed, fallen human time, in contrast with the divine perfection of eternity. Lived experience of time means that the mind is torn and scattered across different moments, but art that unfolds in time, as narrative does, can put those pieces back together. A  story, then, might be the only way to become present-minded. Narrative theories that have followed Ricoeur have re-emphasized the present in his model of narrative temporality. For instance, Mark Currie’s About Time (2007) begins with a history of the ‘vanishing and banishing of the present’ within the phenomenological tradition in which Ricoeur sits (12). Husserl, Heidegger and, latterly, Derrida, all find that the present is always undermined, either by the twin imperatives of memory and expectation (for Husserl, as for Augustine) or by a forward-directed being-towards-death in Heidegger’s case, which inflects the present towards the future. In his similarly end-directed analysis of narrative temporality in Reading for the Plot (1984), Peter Brooks notes, ‘If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to already be in place, already in wait for us to reach it’ (23). Currie’s reframing of the same temporal processing emphasizes the central role of the present in reading:  ‘When we read a novel we make present events that are in the past, and when we live life we often do the opposite: we live the present as if it were already in the past’ (30). Currie’s work argues more broadly for a twenty-first-century milieu that is characterized by a new set of attitudes towards the present. Some of these attitudes come from poststructuralism and its suspicion of the metaphysics of presence, some from twentieth-century attempts to analyse the conditions of temporality under capitalism, some from more disparate sources such as the anticipatory temporality of newsworthy events (73), but all offer a sort of colonization of the present by the past or the future.9 My interest in these examples is directed towards thinking about why, within narrative theory, the present seems to be a concept that is always vanishing, even when scholars try to approach it directly. Ways of thinking about attention are therefore also ways of thinking about narrative temporality, particularly through understanding their relationship with the present. If we return to Ricoeur briefly, there are some tantalizing asides in his work that hint at the possibility of a place for attention in his theory of narrative and

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

59

temporality. In a note in volume one of Time and Narrative, he wonders about narrative unity, and quotes from Hayden White as part of a thought about the properties of the narrator in binding together the unity of a narrative. As White puts it, ‘We might say then that a narrative is any literary form in which the voice of the narrator rises against a background of ignorance, incomprehension, or forgetfulness to direct our attention, purposefully, to a segment of experience organized in a particular way’ (White, qtd in Ricoeur 258n.). This is a thread that Ricoeur began to explore earlier, in Freedom and Nature (1966), when in a discussion of choice and attention he proposes a connection between time as succession, the voice, and attention: imagining ‘that silence in which all voices echo’, Ricoeur concludes by suggesting, ‘It is always attention that creates time, wins time, so that all these voices speak distinctly, that is to say, in a succession’ (163). Narrative is what makes time meaningful, according to Ricoeur, and attention is what makes time narrative. Narrative places those voices in succession by placing them in time and therefore makes then distinct and intelligible. Returning again (at last) to Joshua Cohen, this argument about the status of the narrator is well illustrated by a conversation from a 2012 interview about what it might mean to ‘write the internet’ (‘Joshua Cohen’, Full Stop). The interviewer asserts that ‘the standard seems to be either the obsessive, schizophrenic, or distracted experience of being online. These are qualities of attention that are affected by internet use’ but Cohen responds with an alternative perspective, that sees the attending mind itself as an agent of emplotment, making concordance out of discordance, in Ricoeur’s terms: If someone were to look at your internet history for the past week, you’d be diagnosed as a schizophrenic. You’d be looking at your email, you’d be looking at porn, you’d be refreshing some social networking thing, you’d be searching up a recipe or restaurant, then a map to some monument in another nonsensical country. What you’re missing is the flesh that ties it all together, the mind that binds, which is to say, psychology – whatever it is that’s responsible for whatever we attend or hearken to, as Heidegger would say. (‘Joshua Cohen’, Full Stop)

The ‘mind that binds’ is what fixes the scattered and distended, ‘schizophrenic’ experience into something that has meaning and shape and direction. Through reading, the ‘mind can mind itself ’, Cohen writes in Attention! (53), but only by projecting a consciousness that will put together the pieces of experience into a whole. In narrative, according to Hayden White, the means of organizing those pieces of experience is a narrator.

60

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Ultimately, Ricoeur finds that temporality is an aporia that theorizing cannot tackle. Instead, that impossible gap that resists philosophy can only be replied to obliquely or glancingly by narrative, and this is where Aristotle’s Poetics and the idea of emplotment is used to bind together and to order the distracted, distended elements of the human experience of time. As Ricoeur writes, ‘speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination to which narrative activity alone can respond’ (6). We see the same turn towards the artistic work of narrative in Cohen’s Attention!, when he finds that the only way to think about psychology  – ‘the mind that binds’ – is to write fictional narratives of attending minds at different points in history. Attention! is, in part, a history of the technologies that have been used to regulate attention, particularly in the workplace. The book’s short case studies in chapters k and 12 are the sections in which it most approaches fictional narrative, and they ask the reader to imagine being a female typist who is paid by the page, unlike the old male clerks; a factory worker, injured because he wasn’t alert enough on a newly accelerated assembly line; a bomber pilot, vigilantly observing the radar; an engineer in a modern office building that is ‘automated to capacity’ (170), leaving one human attendant as a strange supplement to the machine-run information economy. In all of these examples, technology instigates a new form of attention, but the technology is also only implementing something that is implicit within the working conditions already. Narrative is able to provide a ‘mind that binds’ the temporal experience of attention, presented in these short case studies. Narrative is therefore the only way to seek a resolution to the difficulties of reflecting on attention and the present. As Cohen notes, ‘the mind can mind itself ’ (53), but that process involves not just present-minded attentiveness, but also being able to ‘skip and jump, rush ahead and fall behind, both in the text it’s reading (earlier pages remembered, later pages expected), and in the text that is itself (memories and expectations)’ (53). A  reader’s mind can mind itself, but through narrative’s analogous temporality of memory, attention and expectation. Approached indirectly and glancingly, via narrative, this form of inward attention has the qualities of a religious experience – a religious experience that, in the example of Augustine, Cohen describes as requiring attention without parsing, noticing without reading (like the LARGE TEXT of the book’s opening page): The penitent must live in a perpetual attention to miracle; a religious life being a vigilant life – one in which attention is sustained, and sustaining, not parsed. To become aware of revelation is to lose revelation; to become conscious of the present is to gain only past. (56)

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

61

Maybe your writer’s afraid of the present? Cohen’s Attention! was published in 2014, between two famously lengthy novels (Witz in 2010 and Book of Numbers in 2015). Cohen also published a collection of short stories, Four New Messages (2012), during this period, and it is one of these stories, ‘McDonald’s’ that I want to read alongside the convergence of presence and attention that this chapter has established so far. Four New Messages covers a set of present-day preoccupations including online pornography, the real effects of anonymous internet discourse, and, in ‘McDonald’s’, the effects of digital distraction and the workplace’s demand for presence of mind. Cohen’s fiction has, in general, often imagined the present moment in ways that feel ahead of its time, and has thus manifested some of those untimely features of contemporaneity I  have identified already, as well as reflecting on the present-mindedness of contemporary attention. His 2015 novel, Book of Numbers, addressed a set of ideas about online exposure, leaking and living in public that are shared by Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (2015) and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), and the novel, like Franzen’s and Eggers’s, reflects on the culture of highly charismatic individuals behind the internet’s mass participation. Like Cohen’s third novel, Witz, Book of Numbers is also notable for being very, very long (Witz is an 800-odd pager; Book of Numbers fewer), and this length creates reading effects that the discussion of David Foster Wallace’s work in the last chapter began to anticipate.10 Very long books provoke a set of affective responses that cluster around, on one side, boredom (or at least the threat of boredom) but also, on the other side, a self-engulfing absorption in a world that reshapes life around it for days or weeks at a time. Reviews of Book of Numbers have reflected explicitly on this reading experience; in Jenny Hendrix’s review for Slate, for instance, she frames an affective response to the novel’s form: Perhaps this is a good time to note that I found the book largely unbearable to read. Not because is ‘difficult’ – though it is that, at times, dragging along for hundreds of pages, and then flashing through technically complex terms and processes as it continues to burnish its author’s already-gleaming bona fides – but because it succeeds too well in making distraction and proliferation its game. (‘The Original Online: Trapped in the web of Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers’)

Hendrix’s ‘unbearable’ reading experience is a complaint, in part, about the attention-seeking flashy prose style, but also because the novel seems to place the local pleasures of distraction over the meaningful construction of a whole. Unlike the very long novels considered by studies of the form from the 1970s to

62

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

the 1990s, Cohen’s Book of Numbers is clearly operating in a different context, in which access to information, via the internet, has changed profoundly.11 As Cohen explains in a 2015 interview, attempts to manage information by finding patterns or secret truths below the surface – as in the paranoid mindset encouraged in Pynchon’s or DeLillo’s or Burroughs’ expansive fictions – have been shown to be ineffective. Cohen says, ‘All their secret cabals have come to light, have come to nothing, online’, since everything can be leaked or placed in public view. As Cohen goes on to explain, ‘That ’70s generation asked, “Is this true?” Novelists now have to ask, “Can we live with it?” ’ (‘Joshua Cohen’, Full Stop). In this sense, reading and writing become less about winnowing out patterns and evaluating them, and more about marking what it feels like to experience information and asking if it is possible to survive amidst its consequences. Reading Cohen, as Hendrix’s review records, is not about identifying knowable things that we can verify (asking, ‘Is this true?’), but instead becomes about local or minor pleasures of ‘distraction and proliferation’  – such as an excruciating pun, a brilliantly rhythmic sentence, an obscure joke about the Torah, and so on. Unlike those paranoid, conspiracy-theorizing fictions that Tom LeClair famously identified as ‘systems novels’, Witz and Book of Numbers are both more meaningful at the page or sentence levels than at the level of the whole book. The short story, as a form, acts differently on attention. The stories in Four New Messages are long stories – approaching novellas, even – and Cohen situates them within the category of the cautionary tale, describing them as: A set of exemplary tales. A set of cautionary tales hearkening back to the oldest literature, which is an inscription or proscription saying, ‘stop!’ or ‘don’t do this!’ I had the idea that it’d be interesting to write a series of fables, but not necessarily in a fabular style, about life online. (‘Joshua Cohen’, Full Stop)

A cautionary tale uses its narrative structure to demonstrate the consequences of behaviour, showing cause and effect and warning its audience to pay attention to their own actions. The genre of the cautionary tale demands vigilance and attention not just to the tale but to the audience’s future behaviour. Another definition of a cautionary tale:  a fiction of attention. Cohen also identifies the stories as ‘exemplary tales’ and it’s notable that both modes  – exemplary and cautionary  – have featured in the history of writing about attention and distraction. From the exemplary story of the tenth-century monk St Dunstan, who fought off Satan with a pair of tongs after the devil distracted him from his work, to Heinrich Hoffman’s cautionary tale of Johnny-Head-in-Air, who has an unfortunate accident in a canal after wandering absent-mindedly

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

63

through the streets, story-telling’s cautionary or exemplary purpose emerges very obviously through its narrative qualities of cause and effect. It is also significant that Cohen seems to acknowledge the oral heritage of story-telling in his emphasis on his stories as fables that take us back to the ‘oldest literature’. Cohen’s previous engagements with Hebrew scripture in Witz and The Heaven of Others also frames the prohibitions of these oldest literatures (don’t eat the fruit, don’t look back at the cities of the plain, etc.) with a broader religious heritage. The warnings and prohibitions are imagined by Cohen as an intervention in the present moment: ‘ “stop!” or “don’t do this!” ’. The cautionary tale therefore exhibits presence of mind; it is the arm that reaches out to grab you before you step out into traffic, or the shout that tells you to duck before you’re hit by a football. ‘McDonald’s’, pivots around a central description of its narrator, underemployed and working as a careless copywriter for a pharmaceutical company, reading the notes and warnings on an attention-deficit drug, while thinking about how to finish the story of ‘Ronald Ray’ (and about his lunch): I was having difficulty . . . paying attention myself (which is ‘the cognitive process of selectively concentrating,’ according to the collaborative website I  edited when I should have been otherwise editing, anything but changing that entry to read: ‘the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on what happened to that shawarma stand on 10th?’). Misprints slipped by, slopping my copy. I was warned, I who typically issued the warnings (that’s all my copy was): do this, don’t do that, if you experience nausea or upset stomach, with Ronald Ray dromomaniacal. The dictionary definition for dromomania linked to a thesaurus, which suggested (advised/broached/commended) drapetomania (that quack syndrome that caused slaves to flee captivity). I searched that up, left a page on my screen when I wandered to pee, was reprimanded for my (the subtext was racist) violation of corporate IUP (Internet Usage Policy). (71)

The story’s thicket of parentheses, marking out digression and interruption, make it difficult to quote anything less than a paragraph. Just as the character’s work is interrupted by his body  – wanting lunch, getting up to go to the bathroom  – and by his distraction-seeking mind, sentences are steered off course, waylaid by asides and laden with excess clarification. The narrator of the story is just as ‘dromomaniacal’ – compulsively wandering – as Ronald Ray, the character in the story he is writing, and this dromomania is contagious, interrupting our own reading (to look up the word dromomanical? To think about lunch? To consider leaving to go to the bathroom?) in favour of mindwandering. Cohen’s character uncovers an uncomfortable truth about the

64

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

distracting effects of attending, inwardly, to one’s own attention: like realizing you can see your own nose in the centre of your vision or taste the cutlery whenever you eat, attention to attention itself is a source of endless distraction. It terminates any hope of unselfconscious absorption in a task: reading about distraction makes reading a struggle. ‘McDonald’s’ give us the story of this blocked writer, trying to explain to his mother and father what is wrong with his story. At the same time, he is keeping from them the humiliation of his daytime work as a proof-reader – a Bartlebian copyist, whose work inevitably mimics and mocks his night-time writing. He passes himself off as a writer, but is never really writing. Procrastinating selfsabotage, hyper attentive tracking through the internet, the bleeding together of work and leisure’s gestures and technologies on the ‘homecomputer’ and ‘workcomputer’ (72) – the story captures these modes of inattention that seem particularly contemporary. From the character’s recognizably pointless editing of the collaborative encyclopedia in preference to his paid editing work, to the corporate Internet Usage Policy intended to regulate the pull of the web in the workplace, the passage above is full of the ways in which – as the previous chapter of this book anticipated – modern work demands that we manage our concentration, and many of us fail to do so. At night, the narrator of ‘McDonald’s’ spends his time in the procrastinatory torment of writers’ block, ‘searching search engines for “what’s wrong with my story?” ’ when he should be writing (58). His daytime distraction is therefore a double distraction from both the work that he should be doing at work and the work that he cannot do on his blocked story – blocked because he cannot bring himself to write a particular word:  McDonald’s.12 Even as the writer in the story seems to focus in on his own distraction, the unmonitored parts of his consciousness start leaking the repressed title word into his embedded story: everything from the characters’ names – he is ‘Mac, Dick, Mick, Ray Ronald’ and she is ‘Patty’ because her face is ‘like an underdone hamburger patty’ – to descriptions – a ‘clownface . . . kind of greasily melting’ (60). The story presents, in one and the same figure, the agonies of the distracted, self-employed procrastinator and the diversion-seeking of the bored office worker. The mode of ‘McDonald’s’ is diagnostic, but diagnostic of spurious illnesses, of which the ‘quack syndrome’ drapetomania is exemplary. It is just one of the category of culture-specific illnesses that emerge as one symptom of the malady of a moment. Inevitably, and troublingly, the story implies the same suspicions about attention deficit disorder, suggesting that, like the other examples of culturespecific illnesses, it is the product of a specific set of contextual circumstances.

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

65

As Matthew Smith writes in his book, Hyperactive, what is endlessly fascinating about ADHD is that we seem drawn to thinking about this disorder, against all evidence to the contrary, as a metaphor for our own age. It is imagined, Smith writes, as a problem with time: a ‘symptom of a culture addicted to speed, unable to cope with real time’ (17). Hyperactivity wants time to move faster, to be out of the present and off into the future; distractibility, on the other hand, desires an escape from the present into some imagined other time of memory or fantasy. ADHD is the disorder we have fetishized as our primary metaphor for contemporary cultural diagnosis and, as such, it is a commentary on the contemporary in itself. In ‘McDonald’s’, ADHD is invoked by the imagined drug which promises that it ‘focuses your attention and helps you lose weight, which gives the attention of others something better to look at, someone slimmer on which to focus their own personal doses’ (72). The drug treats the present day’s twin diseases of the will: distractibility and obesity.13 The diagnostic imperative runs through ‘McDonald’s’, eventually uncovering a strange intimacy between attention and the present itself. The writer asks himself why he is so anxious about simply writing the word ‘McDonald’s’, only to answer himself with yet another bogus diagnosis: Maybe your writer’s afraid of the present? of the genre of the present (ephemeraphobia)? maybe he doesn’t want to date his story? Stories should be timeless – anachronistic? The dilemma being that even the slightest details . . . serve to date and place a text, fix it in history and geography. (77)

Cohen’s narrator therefore finds himself with a time disorder, ‘afraid of the present’, and wishing, distractedly, to inhabit some other time. In a story which racks up the count of culture-specific illnesses, ephemeraphobia is the cultural diagnosis that should replace our attachment to analysis of contemporary culture that uses attention deficit disorder as a metaphor, when what we really mean is fear of the present and our culture’s inability to cope with ‘real time’, as Matthew Smith puts it (17). Sketched out in the story is the affiliation between presence and attention that Cohen establishes in Attention!, and the idea of distraction as a fear of the present that finds absent minds fleeing from it. Absent-mindedness, not being fully present:  these are also the marks of the ephemeraphobia that sees Cohen’s writer-protagonist distracted from the tasks at hand, as something of a defence against the present.14 ‘McDonald’s’ therefore uses narrative to unite these scattered interests in attention, the present, and the contemporary, in the same way as Cohen’s fictional case studies in Attention! used narrative as a way to understand time with time’s tools.

66

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Presenteeism and procrastination One of the minor motifs in ‘McDonald’s’ is the medicalization of sadness, poor sleep and, of course, deficits of attention, but only to the extent of their impact on working life. Sickness, in the context of modern labour, means the inability to work. In ‘McDonald’s’ drugs that the narrator works on are intended to allow work to continue, even when an ‘officeperson’ might retreat to cry in ‘handicapped toiletstalls and service stairwells’ (66). The concept of presenteeism, defined broadly by Gary Johns as the phenomenon of workers who are ‘at work but not working’ (520), was conceived in opposition to absenteeism, and would include these office people and their workplace weeping.15 A broader definition of presenteeism does not just mean coming to work while ill, but could also take in workers who stay late in the office to look as though they are working long hours, or workers who come into work but have low productivity while they are there because they are doing other things on the job. The main character’s distracted working in ‘McDonald’s’ gives us a route into thinking about contemporary working practices in ways that are resonant with potential for understanding the connection between attention and presence. If, as I  have suggested already, ‘presence of mind’ is the trait most highly valued in a modern work environment, then presenteeism, with its absence of mind, is the concept that haunts it. In their book Dead Man Working (2012), Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming diagnose workplace presenteeism as the greatest fear of contemporary capitalism: that workers might be present in body, but not attending in spirit  – like zombies. Modern work demands the commitment of body, mind and soul, they argue:  for ‘every fiber of your organism to be always switched on’ (6). The emotional labour that this attentive, ‘switched on’, working culture requires is undermined by presenteeism, which asserts the physical presence of the body as the only enforceable standard of requirement. Like Wallace’s IRS workers with their performance of otherwise ‘unwitnessable’ attention, presenteeism is a parody of presence of mind. What, exactly, is the presence of mind that contemporary work culture is asking of us, in that case?16 Cederström and Fleming note that the boss’s desired alternative to presenteeism is, of course, not absenteeism, but neither is it whole-hearted and obedient commitment to the job in hand. They quote from Slavoj Žižek’s observations that the authentic spirit that the modern corporation demands also asks for the preservation of personal idiosyncrasies and transgressions: as Žižek writes, ‘I become useless for [the corporation] the moment I  start losing this “imp of perversity”, the moment I start losing my “countercultural” subversive

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

67

edge and start to behave like a “normal” mature subject’ (qtd in Cederström and Fleming 40). An ironic detachment, a sparky resistance to work, a playfully subversive attitude that resists just enough – this is the lifelikeness that modern work demands from its subjects. Rather than total presence of mind, the twentyfirst-century workplace values productive daydreaming, imagination, and play, and enforces these states as much as focused concentration. In Cohen’s accounts of his own working habits, he describes himself as anything but a distracted and procrastinating presentee worker, suggesting that he has inherited a tendency to work ‘compulsively’ and ‘obsessively’, as well as feeling pressure towards productivity because of working as a journalist rather than getting an MFA (‘Joshua Cohen’, Full Stop). As a prodigiously young and prodigiously productive writer, he is a figure who stands against the cultural concern about the ‘distraction crisis’ that I laid out in this book’s introduction. Cohen has staged his own attentively productive writing as a form of performance art, with the ‘real-time serial novel’, PCKWCK, whose writing was live-streamed over the internet in the second week of October 2015. The stunt-writing of PCKWCK was an ostentatious display of productivity (River Donaghy, writing for Vice, complained that ‘just to drive home the point that he can dash out brilliance in the time it takes for the rest of us to slog through a single season of Treme, Cohen has decided to pen a serialized novel called Pckwck online, in real time, over the course of five days’), as well as allowing readers to interact with and comment on the work in progress. Speaking of PCKWCK as a comment on digital publishing and content production – a reflection of ‘the rate of production that the internet demands’ (‘An Experiment in Anxiety’) – Cohen frames writing itself as labour that is comparable to other forms of contemporary working practices by providing himself with a crowd of overseers to monitor his focus and productivity. Cohen’s story also underscores a new type of labour and a new type of attention that goes with that labour:  the attentive labour of the precariat and the self-regulated labour of the freelancer, for whom daydreaming and reverie, procrastination and low-level time-wasting are not a minor act of resistance, but a kind of self harm. As ‘a copyeditor, the lowliest of editors, a reader not even a writer’ (65), the narrator is a modern-day Bartleby, but Bartleby’s refusal is not an option for the narrator. All of his procrastination is just a delaying tactic, not an exit strategy. Copying is another strand that emerges from ‘McDonald’s’ as an analogue to monitoring workplace attention and productivity. Somewhere between reading and writing, copying has an important place in literary thought, from Melville’s Bartleby to Borges’ Pierre Menard. Copying has an illusory status

68

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

as an example of close and attentive reading:  what better way to prove that someone has read a text than to see their copy? Yet Cohen’s description of this ‘literary diligence’ (68) seems to frame it as a dogged but empty engagement, a careful attention without insight that comes to ape both reading and writing without ever fully reaching the attentive heights of either. Described as an ‘underemployee’, the narrator of ‘McDonald’s’ is in the recognizable position of having extra time to fill at work and a side gig for his creative work that relies on his own self-motivated attention. In both cases, his distracted non-productivity only harms him. If procrastination is a delay rather than a refusal, it seems that the closural escape of death – the end point of Bartleby’s passive inaction – is also impossible. As Cederström and Fleming argue, the ‘living death’ of contemporary working life makes suicide an impossible escape, when the conditions of the ‘dead man working’ have bled over into all aspects of existence. For Cederström and Fleming, those conditions that had previously been the preserve of suicidal, suffering artists – self-regulated working hours, lack of job security, low pay, the need to make one’s personality a product – are now general features of a flexible labour market (61). Clerks, copyists, copyeditors and scriveners, as well as today’s web editors, content providers, graphic designers, social media managers (and so on) are all mimicking the working conditions of last century’s writers. Suicide, however, for many modern workers is ‘for the most part superfluous, because death has already arrived in a more profound, more inescapable form’ (63):  the ‘living death’ of work itself. Cederström and Fleming go on to map Alan O. Hirschman’s catalogue of the three responses to the corporation (loyalty, voicing protest, and exit – resigning or withdrawing from the relationship) onto Žižek’s three Lacanian modes of suicide: Hirschman’s loyalty to the corporation is analogous to the suicide of the Real, in which the violence against the self correlates exactly with the logic of one’s own working conditions (Cederström and Fleming give the example of the banker who jumps off a building when the economy tanks); Hirschman’s ‘voice’ corresponds to the suicide of the imaginary, which is a projected gesture of protest, to be unravelled after death; and finally Hirschman’s exit, which is closest to the symbolic suicide, in which the subject withdraws utterly from the symbolic network that had supplied the subject’s identity. Cohen’s narrator therefore spends the whole story procrastinating on the verge of the symbolic, unable to put either his story or his job title into words in the face of his parents’ imagined disapproval. His procrastination prevents him ever making a clear break with the corporation that employs him, even as he sits in a McDonald’s restaurant at the end of the story, making a noose from

Present-Mindedness (Joshua Cohen)

69

the straws on the table and successfully writing the word ‘McDonald’s’ on a pad of paper. In registering the intensities of modern work and ways in which it frames attention as presence, Cohen’s fiction offers an alternative set of temporal rhythms for the contemporary – a way of thinking about procrastination and presenteeism as disruptions to the temporal rhythm of present-mindedness. As Tracey Potts puts it, ‘Focusing upon the procrastinating body as a finely calibrated instrument of contemporary digital rhythm – in Lefebvre’s terms, as a metronome – introduces an element of static into the communication circuitry, static which can be figured as a productive brake upon the strategic imaginary of information as continuous, unimpeded flow’ (33). Procrastination is the delay that throws off the rhythmic beat of the everyday, it is the pause – marking time, in Rabinow’s terms  – or Benjamin’s jetztzeit, when another form of presence of mind can seize the moment out of the flow of time and leap with it into the future. Thus far in this book I have sought to trace the emergence of a new alignment between modern working practices that attempt to extend the disciplining of attention – through the regulation of affective presentation, through reordered temporality – into new spheres of experience. Taking our cue from Paul Ricoeur, we might begin to consider all narrative a mediation between anticipation and retrospection  – a kind of managed distraction from the present. To read the present, then, requires a sort of absent-minded procrastination which can imagine a future elsewhere, and for which narrative’s temporality helps us to prepare.

4

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

In the middle/at the end of Ali Smith’s double-narrative novel How to Be Both (2014), one of the two main characters goes to the National Gallery to look at the work of the other. The first character, a teenage girl called George, looks at the painting – the real Francesco del Cossa’s painting of Saint Vincent Ferrer1 – and, at first, finds nothing remarkable about it: And when George first looked at the painting herself she’d thought it wasn’t anything much. You could easily walk past it and glance at it and think you’d seen all you wanted to. Most people, most days, as George has seen day after day, do. It is not what you’d call an immediately prepossessing picture. It had taken a bit of looking to get past her own surface reaction to it. (338/152)2

Looking at the painting, George becomes ‘more and more interested in spite of herself ’ (343/155) and the novel gives an account of the things she notices. As she returns day after day, George wonders whether it’s something particularly interesting in this painting, or whether it is just that she ‘has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at’ (342/156). Initially, we might emphasize the effort that goes into this looking, the commitment of ‘proper time’ that reveals something more meaningful about this work of art. This is an encounter that champions of slowness could take as a heartening reminder of the benefits of devoting time and sustained attention to works of art which, in turn, have had that same time and sustained attention put into their making.3 Attention appreciates, it pays off, it is rewarding. At the same time, though, George’s attention is not unified and fixed: she goes away and comes back to the painting; she looks at it while thinking about the schoolwork she is missing and about the other gallery patrons and their attention, wondering if she should ‘form a statistical study of attention spans and art’ (345/159), and comparing the painting favourably with others in the room. Moreover, her

72

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

concentration on the painting mostly reveals its peculiar discontinuities and disjunctions:  Jesus looks a bit like a ‘weirdly old’ tramp, but then also like a baby in the womb; a longer look at the benevolent-seeming angels at the top of the painting reveals them to be holding instruments of torture, but then, on reflection, they look more theatrical than threatening; figures in the background are small because of perspective but ‘at the same time’ they make the main subject look like a giant (341–3/156–8). What George’s careful looking reveals is that this artwork always does two things at once: it is both ‘real-looking’ and theatrical, both dull and interesting, compelling and unprepossessing. The painting is therefore an exercise in ‘how to be both’. It demands that George looks several times  – with a second and third glance  – and with a gaze that takes in contradiction and inconsistency across parts of the painting that can’t be contained in a single-minded attentive posture. Attention is a recurrent concern in How to Be Both, and was mentioned repeatedly in reviews of the novel.4 At the beginning of Cossa’s section of the book, which tells the story of her decision to present herself as a man to work as an artist, she throws a stone to attract her mother’s attention and her mother comments on two new words she seems to have learnt: ‘Preoccupied’ and ‘Attention’ (17–8, 203–4). Everything that follows falls into a pattern of orchestration between distracted preoccupation and attentive absorption. It is clear, then, that the novel sets out a complexly textured sense of aesthetic attention and its framing and effects. This is more than simply suggesting that great art draws the eye, commands attention, or rewards close focus. Instead, the novel lays out how a work of art can provoke and reward both attention and distraction. The form of How to Be Both enacts this same structure of both-ness, with its variant editions, of which half the print run contained Cossa’s story printed first and half George’s. The gallery scene comes at the end of George’s half of the book (so, either the middle or the end of the novel), bringing the two halves of the book into one – a form which the novel imagines with metaphors of a DNA double helix or a twisted two-strand rope. This twisted or plied structure is, of course, another way of being both one thing and another thing at the same time. Both parts of How to Be Both are headed ‘One’, so both assert a kind of primacy, and some awareness of the other possible reading order. In the e-book edition, there is a contents page that presents the reader with an explicit textual choice between the two orderings and therefore the knowledge of the two variant editions from the outset.5 Neither part of the story has priority, then, and the two halves of the novel seem to switch places, like an optical illusion in which relationships

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

73

between figure and ground are always undergoing cognitive reorganization. The distraction of both – in the form of split attention – is therefore manifested in the form of the whole novel, and the reader is invited to consider how fiction’s conventional linearity might usually imply priority and prominence. If George’s section is second, meaning the scene in front of St Vincent Ferrer is almost at the end of the novel, do I attribute more importance to this climactic scene when I take account of the whole? If I read Cossa’s story second – a historical narrative in which Smith imagines the fifteenth-century fresco painter was, in fact, a woman disguised as a man – does this retrospectively change my understanding of George’s section of the novel, in which she looks at Cossa’s paintings and tries to imagine ‘his’ life? Where a painting, with its foreground and background, might seem to encourage attention to those things at the front, a longer duration of looking seems to uncover an attention which is split or distracted, moving back and forth between both background and foreground. How to Be Both organizes a narrative structure that invites comparison with that vacillating, visual mode of attention, which sets both stories alongside each other. The scene in which George and her mother go to see Cossa’s frescoes at the Villa Schifanoia offers another affirmation of the ways in which Smith’s novel creates an aesthetic of distraction, with attention split between more than one part of an art object:6 Things happen at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are separate details, like that man with the duck. They’re all also happening on their own terms. The picture makes you look at both – the close up happenings and the bigger picture. (239/53)

Like a fresco that divides attention between foreground and background, a novel also has to make you look at both ‘the close up happenings and the bigger picture’. In a novel and painting (but not a photograph) backgrounds matter: they are meant. As James Elkins puts it, in a painting ‘backgrounds are put in mark by mark and are therefore always noticed, always intended’, in contrast with the photograph in which the things surrounding the subject are largely overlooked and inconsequential (117). One of the things which paintings and novels have in common with each other (and which film and photography tend not to share with them) is an interest in background. From the perspective of the reader, who must ‘always notice’ it, the background description of space and setting is, according to David James, a pivotal part of engaging the reader and

74

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

catching the reader’s attention. It is, however, always partnered by other features which demand we attend to style, embellishment and the formal properties of language (Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space 1–19). Literary language, therefore, seems to establish a structure of necessary distraction; in interview, Smith has suggested that ‘sometimes language asks for more attention’ (‘Conversations with the Undead’), by way of an explanation for what the interviewer calls her ‘complicated stories’. In this interview she goes on to restage a tension between interest in language and form on one side and realist mimesis and transparent, descriptive language on the other. The implication is that in experimental or innovative fiction, language demands attention. It becomes a necessary distraction from a straight flight through to the other side of the medium – perhaps like a sticker on a windowpane that stops pigeons flying into the glass.7 Perhaps the most important feature of that first scene at the National Gallery is what it reveals about affection and attention. George goes to the gallery and seeks out a painting that is not ‘immediately prepossessing’, a painting that most people do not give a second glance, because of what the artist’s work represented to people she cared about. This scene comes at the end of George’s story, in the course of which she has lost her mother and fallen in love with her best friend, Helena, only to find that Helena is moving to another country. She has shared significant encounters with Cossa’s work with both of them: visiting the frescoes at the Villa Schifanoia with her mother before she died and looking at a reproduction of Cossa’s Portrait of a Man with a Ring with Helena. What George finds compelling about the painting of St Vincent Ferrer seems to be as much about her love for her mother and her friend as the painting itself. The novel shows George experiencing the same affectively charged attention when she listens to the pop songs that Helena has recommended to her (and to which they rewrite the lyrics in cod Latin, with Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ a stand-out example). George finds that pop songs, ‘the kind that play everywhere’, which are just ambient noise and shouldn’t merit attention, become something else ‘when you listen properly’ (355/169). Charged up with the attention that someone else is paying to you, with the curation and selection process of making a playlist, the songs are transformed from empty ambient sound to something worthy of attention: ‘Even more strange and fine is the fact that someone has wanted her to hear them, and not just someone, but Helena Fisker’ (355/169). Loving attention transforms background noise into an object of foreground focus. Smith presents love as a particular species of attention elsewhere in How to Be Both, particularly in the way she depicts the relationship between George’s

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

75

mother, Carol Martineau, and the mysterious woman, Lisa Goliard, whom she meets some months before her death. Carol believes Lisa Goliard may have somehow planned to catch and manipulate her attention as a way of entering her life and monitoring her activities: ‘It’s as if someone had looked at my life and calculated exactly how to attract me, then how to fool me once my attention was caught’ (307/121). All of Carol’s feelings towards Lisa Goliard are inflected by this same sense of being noticed and attended to: ‘She was attentive,’ Carol tells George, ‘I liked how she paid attention to me, to my life’ (305/119). At the end of George’s part of the story, in the National Gallery, the narration moves into the future tense, when she will see Lisa Goliard come into the gallery to look at St Vincent Ferrer, and will track her through the gallery and back to her house.8 It is therefore the feelings that encircle the painting that bring these strands of the plot together and reinforce a deep association between affection and attention. ‘To be noticed is to be loved’ (62), muses one of the characters from Smith’s There but for The (2012) and, in How to Be Both, noticing plies together the two strands of the novel – in tension, by attention – into a whole that includes both. It is George’s careful attention to the painting, touched as it is by her love for her mother and for Helena, that wrenches Cossa out of a posthumous limbo, ‘fast as a / fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook’ (3/189).9 It seems George’s loving attention has misfired, hooking Cossa back to the living rather than George’s mother; as George jokes, sending a dead renaissance painter back from the dead in her place would be ‘exactly the kind of stunt her mother would pull’ (325/139) to teach her an important life lesson. How to Be Both, then, as with other examples that I will return to in Zadie Smith’s and Ben Lerner’s fiction, expresses the need to imagine a relationship between noticing and loving and to consider how the caring attention of noticing might operate across the various absences incurred through physical distance, digital mediation and even, in Ali Smith’s example, death. The work by all of these writers, with its bid to understand attention as affection, accords with other contemporary theorizations of feeling and attention. Bernard Stiegler’s account of attention in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, for instance, expresses concern that the psychotechnologies of modern media have broken down not just that attentive regard which corresponds to the care of the self (which Stiegler calls ‘savoir-vivre’) but also the bonds of social energy that Stiegler identifies as civility – taking care of others.10 Teresa Brennan also finds that ‘living attention’ transmits the positive regard and love of one person for another (The Transmission of Affect 32), and finds that attention, as love, has affective properties, at the same time as being associated with cognition,

76

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

as ‘intellectual concentration’ (36).11 Attention is both thinking and feeling; as Brennan puts it, ‘reason and love are both names for aspects of living attention’ (41). Brennan theorizes that the transmission of affect may itself have gone under the radar because Western philosophy is uncomfortable with the idea that we might not be in rational control of feelings, and that the subject might not be a self-contained whole. The capacity of attention to challenge the selfcontained nature of the subject – and to be a vector for ‘transmission of affect’, to use Brennan’s term – is an idea that will run across the second half of this book, from the discussion of Tom McCarthy’s adoption of the concept of the dividual (rather than the individual), through Zadie Smith’s investigation of the limits of a Levinasian ethics of attention, to the final chapter’s investigations of the transmitted affects of reading. This chapter will take a different direction, however, by investigating distraction and inattention in Smith’s fiction.

Machine inattention There are two features of Ali Smith’s fiction which trouble my initial attempts establish the dimensions of attention in her work as primarily affective. The first is the positive value she places on distraction, which the second half of this chapter will investigate more closely. Second, the problem of how to explain the prevalence of uncaring but nevertheless close attention in her fiction. By this, I mean the monitoring machine attention that proliferates across Smith’s writing in the form of CCTV, surveillance and security cameras. I will pursue this second question for now, before returning later to the problem of caring distraction in Smith’s fiction. At the beginning of this chapter I quoted from There but for The to articulate Smith’s connection between attention and affective power:  as one of the characters in that novel asserts, ‘To be noticed is to be loved’. The full quotation from the novel reads: ‘To be noticed is to be loved. Who was it who’d said that, again? A novelist from the last century. Anna could spot, without even trying, three CCTV camera points’ (62). Anna, the main character of this part of There but for The, notices the CCTV but it does not seem to notice her, and the novel ultimately frames the machine attention of this watchful but unnoticing gaze in opposition to the human care of noticing. This care is provocative for Anna, who works processing asylum applications with careful attention to the length of the forms but not, according to her supervisor’s instructions, to the applicants themselves.

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

77

Instances of surveillance and monitoring are common in Smith’s work. In Hotel World, for instance, the hotel is monitored by security cameras which fail to record the death of the novel’s protagonist in a fall from a dumb waiter; Gemma López Sánchez identifies the blind spot where the character dies as one of the ‘loopholes to panoptive control’ which escapes the disciplinary corporate attention of the novel’s Global Hotel (49). In The Accidental, two of the characters attempt to go through a town centre filming all the security cameras before Amber, the novel’s disruptive interloper, throws the filming camera off an overpass (a location where, as in Hotel World, there are no surveillance cameras).12 Emily Horton interprets this commentary on security monitoring as a reflection of post-9/11 surveillance culture (‘Everything You Ever Dreamed’ 647), a response to contemporary geopolitics which is reflected in the excruciating dinner-party conversation in There but for The, in which one of the guests drones on about the benefits of surveillance drones.13 It is significant, of course, that the image which heads George’s part of the story in How to Be Both is a drawing of a surveillance camera paired, at the beginning of Cossa’s section, with a plant that has grown eyes. The plant is a detail from Cossa’s painting of St Lucy, now at the National Gallery of Art at Washington, DC. In the novel, Cossa’s assistant wants to know whether St Lucy’s eyes are ‘both seeing and blind’ (162/348), and the same description could also apply to the ‘both seeing and blind’ surveillance camera that both overlooks and oversees George’s half of the story. The equivalent of the plant-eyes in George’s part of the narrative occurs as she travels to the National Gallery in London to see the painting of Saint Vincent Ferrer, when she cycles ‘below surveillance cameras like people in novels from the past used to pass below the leaves or bare branches of trees and the eyes and wings of birds’ (339/153). In another instance from Artful, the narrator encounters a boy at bus stop wearing a t-shirt reading, ‘I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention’ (95). Primed for thinking about the economic metaphors of attention vs. the contrasting idea of attention as care (how could you care so little that you couldn’t even pay attention?), the narrator looks up at the sky, which is ‘regardless’ and uncaring: ‘It had no eyes for anything but itself ’ (96). Where once we might have imagined sky or trees or birds bending in animistic care towards us, today’s surveillance, watched over by machines, is empty and uncaring. The novel finds the strange attention of CCTV in both the constant threat of panoptical, disciplinary attention and, on the other hand, what Kirsten Veel has called ‘calm surveillance’, a concept indebted to Weiser and Brown’s broader concept of ‘calm technology’ – that technology which inhabits the periphery of attention and explicitly avoids making constant demands on

78

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

focus or vigilance (122). Calm technology is absently present on the periphery of awareness, like sky or trees or the background in a painting. At worst, however, surveillance cameras represent the erotic pursuit of an obsessive:  as Smith describes them in an interview, the experience of being watched by surveillance cameras is ‘like being stalked by some mad jealous person’ (‘An Interview with Ali Smith’). The surveillance camera represents both the regardless looking of an unnoticing machine and the heightened, threatening and unwelcome attention of stalking and monitoring. The security camera is therefore an object which is imbued with two contradictory modes of attention: the hyper attentive and hypererotic pursuit of the ‘mad jealous’ stalker, and the calm surveillance of the unobtrusive, unloving machine. Monitoring and surveillance is a theme that How to Be Both develops through George’s discovery of the ambiguous relationship between her mother and a stranger, Lisa Goliard. The end of George’s story sees her descending into paranoia and obsessive surveillance of the house of Lisa Goliard  – who she believes had been monitoring her mother before she died. George’s fear that someone might be monitoring her with the obsessive attention of a stalker is also a version of excessive attention, which sees patterns and meaning where there may only be chance and coincidence. This interest in finding patterns that aren’t there is something that we might associate with over-interpretation, or a defective excess of attention. If, like George, we have faith that ‘there’s always more to see, if you look’ (328/142), and advocate extended attention to artworks in the promise that this concentration will improve other areas of life, what are the consequences for real life, in which there may not be meaningful patterns that are worth noticing? George is only saved from her paranoid obsession when Helena and a neighbour help her paint a set of watchful eyes outside the house to take her place (183/369). This part of the story only appears through Cossa’s narrative, and it is only when the eyes have been painted – fresco-style – that the painter’s spirit can pass on out of the ‘purgatorium’ of the narrative. Daniel Lea reads George’s story as an indication that it is her mother’s education in looking that allows George to find her way out of the ‘labyrinth of grief ’ and complete a process of mourning by following Lisa Goliard (and turning Lisa’s stalkerish surveillance back on her, much like Amber in The Accidental filming CCTV cameras). Carol has taught George that art ‘is about the focusing of attention’ but also ‘about being made to see in particular ways, and [George] is thus artfully empowered in the dual sense of artistic and the more suspicious sense of manipulative’ (Lea 68). Artful things have power not because they focus attention on just one thing, but because they awaken an awareness of the artful

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

79

bothness of art: of foreground and background, form and content, and of real. Like one of Pynchon’s paranoids, George has attempted to read her life with the close and careful, pattern-identifying attention she would give to work of art, and this has not been sustainable. The way out of paranoid pattern recognition, then, is an understanding of the difference between the attention demanded by art and life. The other aspect of human, caring attention which is opposed to machine attention in Smith’s work appears as a recurrent association between attention and responsibility. Witnessing (noticing as loving, as a political act of care and responsibility) is opposed, throughout her work, to voyeurism (attention as inherently damaging and exploitative). In The Accidental, one of the characters ponders the hideous pull of the Abu Ghraib photographs when, faced with ‘the body bag and grinning girl soldier’ she doesn’t know ‘what to do about the looking, whether to keep on looking or to stop looking’ (286). In Artful, Smith makes reference to a very similar description in Woolf ’s Three Guineas, in which descriptions of looking at photographs of casualties from the Spanish Civil War evoke a sense of ‘vacillation’ between distancing and intimacy and, ultimately, complicity. The clearest manifestation of this compulsive viewing of atrocities at a distance (and therefore of a glimpse of what is distinctive about attention’s strange mix of rubbernecking exploitation and profound empathy) appears in How to Be Both, when George feels compelled to watch a degrading porn clip repeatedly as a kind of recompense or tribute to the girl in the film. Watching the clip changes ‘something in the structures of George’s brain and heart and certainly her eyes’ (220/34), and the girl haunts George, with her face lodged underneath every YouTube music clip and cat video, under Facebook and every news site, so that she is compelled to go back and watch the video every day, to witness and remember and to somehow redress the balance of all those other views which reinscribe the girl’s assault afresh:  when she doesn’t watch, she apologizes to the girl for ‘having been inattentive’ (222/36). This, again, is too much care, and George has to pull back from committing her total attention to something abject and horrifying. In these cases, there is a point where George’s grief has energized her attention with care and feelings of responsibility but, channelled through the iPad screen  – like Woolf in the face of the Spanish Civil War photographs  – she can only pour her attention helplessly into this media object. Where machine attention can be both blithely inattentive and obsessively threatening, the extensions of attention that happen through media technologies, from the photograph to the iPad, can result in attention feeling like guilt or complicity in damaging voyeurism.

80

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

And/and/and If we take seriously the relationship between attention and care, how can we also account for the positive regard that Smith’s fiction shows for distraction? Surely, if attention means care then distraction should mean carelessness or even callousness? Like many of the other writers considered in this book, Smith expresses a deep ambivalence about the hierarchy of attentions which places productive (and, by implication, unified and fixed) focus at the top and distraction beneath. Across all her fiction Smith has returned to a set of tropes related to interruption and to shifting perspectives or unfixed identities which celebrate, or perhaps even attempt to redeem, some aspects of distraction. The first, and perhaps the most well-known of these recurrent features of Smith’s work, is her interest in incursion or intrusion as a narrative device. The figure of the intruder or stranger who effectively interrupts domestic spaces appears often in Smith’s fiction.14 From a ghost to a dinner party guest who occupies a bedroom, to a stranger who gate-crashes a Norfolk holiday, Smith’s novels often start with an interruption of domestic life by someone who shouldn’t be there. That interruption sets her fiction into motion, implying an affinity between distraction born of interruption and Smith’s novels themselves. This poetics of interruption celebrates the transformations that are catalysed by a shift of attention out of a closed domestic unit or static situation into something less focused and more ambiguous. As one of the characters in There but for The observes, the word ‘but’ is intriguing because ‘it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting’ (175).15 Grammatically, ‘but’ is the interruption that alters the predictable direction of travel and ‘takes you off ’ to somewhere more interesting. In essence, ‘but’ represents distraction from a boring situation. How to Be Both shares with many of Smith’s fictions an interest in identities that not only shift from one position to another, but which self-consciously inhabit the border territory between two positions. Cossa’s historical narrative of gender transformation is just one instance of ‘being both’ one identity and another. With identities conceived of ‘not as fixed but fluid and unstable’ (Germanà and Horton 3), Smith’s work imagines metamorphoses everywhere: the narrator of ‘The Beholder’ is part-human, part-rosebush; a character on the verge of death in Autumn dreams he is turning into a tree; in Girl Meets Boy (Smith’s reworking of Ovid’s story of Iphis for the Canongate myths series) the novel’s interrupting stranger is ‘as meaty as a girl . . . as graceful as a boy’ (84). And perhaps most of

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

81

all, the fictions are full of precocious adolescents who inhabit a position with one foot always in both camps of adulthood and childhood. This diffuse adolescent identity is marked by a peculiar attentive stance: George, for instance, is ‘waspish and yet vulnerable, catholic and yet focused’ (Lea 64). These liminal, transitional, contradictory identities therefore operate in the same register as diversion of ‘but’ or the distraction of ‘both’. Distracted identities and interrupted domestic scenes have characterized Smith’s fiction as a whole, but her more recent work has developed a celebration of distraction into a clearly articulated ethical and political position, which conceives of the world as fractured by attempts to prioritize and hierarchize, to focus on some people over others. Smith’s There but for The is the novel in which she most fully elaborates this idea through a character, Anna, who works in border control and is required to evaluate and refuse asylum applications. Some of the same preoccupations also appear in Smith’s ‘post-Brexit’ novel Autumn (2016). Reflecting, in an interview, on the aftermath of the 2016 referendum to leave the EU, Smith observed that national borders had become a way of avoiding responsibilities and, by implication, of filtering and focusing our attention: ‘How can we live in the world and not put our hand across the divide?’ she asks, ‘How can we live with ourselves? It isn’t either/or. It’s and/and/and. That’s what life is’ (‘Ali Smith’). Now, this disavowal of ‘either/or’ is the strongest rejection of the values of attention as an economy – what Chapter 2 discussed in the context of David Foster Wallace’s writing as the ‘work of choosing’. Smith forms an alternative affiliation with ‘and/and/and’, which this chapter identifies with the ‘distraction of both’ by being both one thing and another. In Paul North’s words, ‘attention’s conjunction is “or”, not “and” ’ (3), leaving ‘and/and/ and’ firmly in the realm of distraction. Smith takes up a position that refuses to choose, and refuses to reproduce an economics of scarcity in the arena of caring attention. North imagines the potential of distraction as a not-thinking other to philosophy and as a source of political energy and potential which resonates strongly with Smith’s work.16 The sense of attention as choosing, filtering, holding in tension leads North to understand it as inevitably grasping, egotistical and acquisitive: attention ‘holds greedily onto greed’, it is ‘’a name for a will to possession’ (3). Distraction, on the other hand, ‘is not even greedy about its own tendencies; it shifts, undervalues itself, gives itself away’ (3). Smith’s work returns repeatedly to the anti-economy of the gift, and it seems clear that distraction that ‘gives itself away’ falls into the category of the radical gift, as opposed to attention’s carefully managed economy.

82

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Damon Young rehearses the same argument about attention as a limited resource in his book, Distraction (2008): ‘To commit to this job, this spouse, this leisure, this gadget is to withdraw time, energy and wherewithal from another possibility’ (3–4).17 Perhaps the most interesting part of this argument is that the need to avoid distraction stems from an awareness of mortality, the awareness of finite time, and a fear of missing out. We must make the most of our time by directing our attention to our most pressing goals and avoiding distraction and dissipation. In the context of an idea of distraction that frames attention as a positive commitment to ‘this job, this spouse, this leisure, this gadget’, How to Be Both’s investigation of the possibilities of ‘and’ (‘how to be both x and y’) rather than ‘or’ starts to look like an act of resistance to this constrained life narrative. This interpretation becomes more convincing when read with one, distracted, eye on Smith’s earlier novels, which also seem to be highly resistant to singleminded productive use of a life’s limited time. In Hotel World, the memento mori motto, ‘Remember you must die’ is rewritten as ‘Remember you must live’; in The Accidental, one character’s fictional life-stories attempt to impose industrious lives on premature wartime deaths, and it is only the chance arrival of the novel’s diverting and accidental stranger, Amber, that reveals the grotesquery of the project. Even the title of There but for The (and the same observation could also apply to How to Be Both) has been read by Nicholas Royle as part of a general trend towards diverted, off-course veering and the potential for the queering of that veering, to which I will return in a moment (‘Even the Title’ 3).18 It seems, then, that ‘being both’ means refusing to choose and disavowing a life structure around goals of productivity or profitable use of time. Distraction, by some accounts, therefore has the potential to appear as a source of political energy and direction. Dominic Pettman’s Infinite Distraction (2015), for instance, concludes with a question about whether there might be some way for social media to use its inherently distracted nature in the service of political transformation. Rather than switching off, or even guiltily filtering or disciplining ourselves, Pettman imagines the possibility of ‘fostering a centripetal form of distraction (ie., as something more enmeshed than sheer dispersal, allowing a self-reflexive type of engagement which avoids the overdetermined mode of experience known as attention)’ (134). Distraction is a way of configuring groups together and imagining possibilities that have not yet quite come into view. As the previous chapter suggested, distractions from tedious, pointless, bullshit jobs that require a highly self-administered and regulated attention are not necessarily a bad thing when time for collective daydreaming and dropping out might be the only way of summoning an alternative. Paul

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

83

North also identifies distraction as suggesting ‘not just the possibility but the existence of an infinitely exclusive collective without the need to count out its members or represent itself ’ (183). This collective is ‘neither revolutionary nor utopian. It refuses the time signatures of both these dreams’ (183). Rather than an imaginatively unified collective that participates in coherent and continuous time, distraction offers a loosely disjunctive agglomeration of agents, dropping in and out of themselves and of engagement in the potential political event. This isn’t a single-minded, straight and teleological path to revolution, it’s a weird, offbeat, centripetal whirligig of distracted participants. In How to Be Both, the political potential of distraction emerges most prominently through George’s mother, Carol Martineau, whose obituary describes her as an ‘Economist Journalist Internet Guerrilla Interventionist’ (206/20). Carol’s art movement, the Subvert interventionists, provides satirical political commentary that uses the distractions of digital media against itself. As George explains it to her grief counsellor, her mother created layered, distracting commentaries on webpages: ‘by using really early pop-up technology pretty much before anyone else was, they’d been able to make things appear on whatever page someone accessed like adverts do now all the time. Except, a Subvert took the form of a random visual or a piece of information’ (255/69). Before the pop-up ad begat the pop-up blocker, Subverts were able to take over the foreground of the screen and create the ‘and/and/and’ distraction of both that Smith finds so powerful. The novel’s form gleefully acts out the structure of the subvert as a meaningful political gesture, suggesting that there is some potential in these strategies for diversion, if not a full realization of Pettman’s ‘centripetal distraction’ or North’s radical ‘primal distraction’. In Smith’s work, distraction therefore represents a disavowal of the unified self and of the continuity of the social order and political change. It is clear that the latter, particularly, has affinities with the temporality of presenteeism and procrastination developed in the previous chapter on Cohen’s fiction. Like Cohen’s fiction, Smith’s has proved rich in implications for critiquing conventional notions of historical time, and emphasizing inconsistencies and breaking points in temporality, from The Accidental’s interest in the possibility of beginnings that spring from nowhere to Hotel World’s supplementary afterlife.19 The temporality of distraction should be associated with the pause, break, interruption or ellipsis. Distraction is out of step with time; we only know that we have been distracted once we come back to thinking and back to ourselves. Distraction therefore exposes ‘the fiction of a historical continuum’, as it ‘breaks the contract between thought and time’ (North 183).

84

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

M. T. Calhoun Shafer puts North’s ideas about the temporality of distraction to work in the service of queer temporality and historiography. By investigating the discontinuities of the distracted self extended through time, Shafer is able to identify a quality of porousness in the subject that speaks to other ideas from recent queer theories of temporality such as Valerie Rohy’s Anachronism and Its Others (2009), Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (2010) and Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004). In Schafer’s analysis, these ideas offer a model of temporal disjointedness that belies insistent temporal narratives about (heteronormative) productivity, development and futurity. Distraction can be compared to Valerie Rohy’s assertion of the need for ‘strategic anachronism’ as a reminder that ‘the continuity of the past with the present cannot be assumed’ (Schafer 125–6). A  flow from past to present to future is interrupted and disrupted by these strategic anachronisms, one example of which Schafer argues is the distracted state that breaks the apparent sequence of thought and of temporality, effectively queering a version of time that had previously looked straight. Distraction therefore provides access to an alternative, queered, historical narrative that emphasizes discontinuity and non-sequentiality. Smith’s earlier novels have been read with reference to Edelman’s and Freeman’s work,20 and a reading of How to Be Both that makes use of the queer temporality of distraction emerges naturally from the structure of the novel as a whole. Its two narratives are, of course, historically discontinuous, with a break between Cossa’s and George’s narratives of three hundred years. More than this, though, the text is also insistent that the chronology of its own narrative discourse is indeterminate – there are two orderings of these events at the level of discourse, and the text enacts a sort of strategic, distracted anachronism through its structure. Rather than a conventional historical novel, Smith instead creates a text that emphasizes breakage and rupture, and a mode of comparison between its two stories, rather than a continuity of historical change or development. The distraction of both, with its ‘and/and/and’ therefore becomes a way of avoiding a teleological ‘before and after’ as well as an alternative to attention’s ‘or’. It is also possible to see some aspects of narrative fiction itself staging conflicts about distraction and, at the level of form, drawing readers into divided, multidirectional states of distraction, which question the extent to which it is appropriate to think of novels as attention-fixing objects. There is, of course, a venerable history of literary texts that deal in diversion and digression,21 and Smith herself has considered just how digressive the novel’s structure can be. In Artful, she maintains the modernist position that the short story ‘emphasises the momentousness of the moment’, but that, because of the demands of the

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

85

novel’s form, Clarissa Dalloway’s ‘wanderings’ must be ‘held within the matrix of a single day’ (29). The novel’s length, perhaps, risks distraction’s wandering running out of control, and must be fixed into the rigidity of form. Nevertheless, How to Be Both exists with two different possible reading orders, maintaining to the furthest possible extent a commitment to both narratives equally, rather than relegating one to digression or a deviation from the main path of the narrative. Unlike books in a box such as B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates or Cortazar’s Hopscotch, or other dual-narrative novels such as Carol Shields’s Happenstance, the print version of How to Be Both is fixed in its reading order – although, of course, it’s possible to be a bit deliberately perverse and read against the printed order of your copy. In reviews of the novel – the place, of course, where the novel’s readers would find out about the two-version print-run – it’s possible to see how the different orderings framed different interpretations. In the Guardian, for instance, Elizabeth Day (whose version began with George’s story) wondered whether Cossa’s narrative was the product of George’s school project on empathy; in the New York Times, Christopher Benfey began his version with Cossa’s story, and read the painter as a ghost trapped in some sort of purgatory, who is able to haunt and observe George’s part of the story (a technique that Smith has used before in Hotel World). With Cossa first, the painter becomes the quasi-narrator of George’s section; with George first, she becomes the frame narrator of Cossa’s. The novel’s structure emphasizes ‘being both’ rather than being first or second, primary or secondary, foreground or background, main narrative and digression, plot and subplot. Of course, this aspect of the novel only really functions paratextually, with the knowledge that the other published ordering exists. The form of the novel itself therefore becomes another site for the celebration of the distraction of both, the ‘and/and/and’ which, for Smith, is ‘what life is’.

Photobomb and time-shift Smith’s hallmark domestic scenes of family life interrupted by intruders from outside can therefore be regarded as a metaphor for an interrupted and distracted temporality. The final stage of this chapter’s argument seeks to establish what the role of new digital media might be in these modes of distraction; an argument whose momentum should also take us on into the next chapter on the novels of Tom McCarthy. In Ali Smith’s recent work, her domestic interruptions have expanded to include incursions from the digital realm. ‘After Life’, a sweet and funny story

86

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

from Public Library and Other Stories (2015), describes a man who finds out that his death has been announced in his local paper for the second time in a decade. He recalls his previous ‘death’, in which the family had sat at the table and celebrated his life with friends and watched television together. Now, ten years on, his multi-screen household can barely hold a conversation because they are too busy looking up bike gear systems and joining Michael Ball fansites. This could be an anecdote from Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, in which a family fails to connect because of the intrusion of digital media into their lives. The same tone of affectionate recognition dominates the way that How to Be Both represents ambivalence towards the digital distractions in the domestic sphere, and their mediating role in modern intimacy. The novel lays out a perfect tableau of technology and distraction, as George watches a TV programme about trains: It is a Sunday evening. George is watching a programme about the Flying Scotsman, a train from the past, on TV. But because George came in halfway through this programme and missed the beginning, and because it is an interesting programme, she is simultaneously watching it from the start on catch-up on her laptop. On one screen the train has just broken the hundred-mile-an-hour record. On the other screen the train has just been superseded by cars. At the same time George is looking up photobombs on her phone. There are some very brilliant and funny ones. There are some you can’t believe haven’t been digitally enhanced, or look like they must have been set up but the people who took them swear they haven’t. You, her mother says watching her, are a migrant of your own existence. (226–7/40–1)

The scene offers a parable of contemporary attention of the kind that N. Katherine Hayles depicts in her work on hyper attention and deep attention, with the teenager multi-tasking and someone of the older generation bemused by her lack of commitment to single-minded focus. This looks like a standard example of a millennial’s multi-tasking: George watches the programme twice, simultaneously, because it’s ‘an interesting programme’ but her interest seems to lead to her dividing her attention in the process of intensifying it; she looks at photobombs on a third screen and, in another representation of splitting attention, the interest in these images is the way that the attention is diverted from the subject of the photograph by an interruptive figure (a squirrel, a tourist, Benedict Cumberbatch) in the background or foreground. George’s multi-screening is not presented in the novel as damaging or isolating – this is

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

87

a fond memory of joking with her mother – but forms part of a set of positive representations of distracted or inattentive digital experiences in the novel.22 George’s developing relationship with Helena, in which they only develop a language for their feelings by texting song lyrics to each other in Latin, is another instance of how ‘calm technology’ – with its undemanding, peripheral and sporadic qualities– can enable an alternative mode of intimacy. In Lauren Berlant’s words, digital connections can operate in a spirit of ‘lightness and play’, rather than bearing the weight of more serious emotional intimacy (‘Faceless Book’). In spite of the scenes that opened this chapter, which praise attention of long duration and depth, Smith refuses to take up an antagonistic stance to digital technology or to distraction by setting the supposedly deep and slow attention that the novel requires against the fleeting and ephemeral attention of digital media. Instead, How to Be Both stays faithful to its spirit of embracing contraries, and takes the affective pull of lightness, fleeting contact and lowpressure intimacy into its aesthetic too. A passage in which George and Helena look at Cossa’s Portrait of a Man with a Ring in a book, holds a similar sense of lightness and play, when they discover that the painting’s penis-shaped rock and open cave in the background, once seen, can’t be unseen: ‘It is both blatant and invisible . . . But only if you notice. If you notice, it changes everything about the picture’ (328/142). The result of paying close attention might not be anything transcendent or epiphanic: it might just be a penis joke.23 When George watches the documentary on television and time-shifted on her laptop, and looks at photobombs on her phone, her distraction enacts exactly the distracted attention that is required to read How to Be Both. The foreground and background of the photobomb echo the novel’s two halves, but the two screens of railway documentary represent something slightly different: this is the same thing twice, intensified but delayed, rather than the two different objects of the photobomb. The rest of this chapter is dedicated to a consideration of what the intensified repetition of these dual screens might signify. When George’s mother asks her, ‘wouldn’t you rather simplify and read a book?’ (227/41), the joke is that this book, the book we’re reading, has exactly the same structure as George’s arrangement of screens. The intensified, overlaid repetition of two moments from the same story appears through the time-shifted narration of George’s part of the book, while the competitive shifting of attention between foreground and background in the photobomb evokes the technique of Cossa’s frescoes from the other half of the novel. How to Be Both is therefore exactly as complicated as George’s multi-screen digital viewing.

88

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

The time-shifting of George’s documentary-watching mirrors precisely the strange tense structure of her part of the narrative. Narrated by a third-person narrator, in the present tense, we see indexes of time slipping and shifting under the weight of the narrative. For instance, in one sentence of present-tense description, George is responding to her mother’s conversation, while in the next sentence George is mourning her mother’s death: At least they’ve used an apostrophe, the George from before her mother died says. I do not give a fuck about whether some site on the internet attends to grammatical correctness, the George from after says. That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. (191/5)

And again: Okay, I’m imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song. (191–2/5–6)

This is as close as narrative fiction can get to the effect of split attention on the part of the narrator, who has the whole of George’s timeline available ‘on demand’, like a time-shifted TV show. The effect of the narration parallels George’s secondscreen time-shifted viewing of the Flying Scotsman programme, with George from before and George from after, George in the passenger seat and George at home, ‘at exactly the same time’ (192, 6): these are time-shifted versions of the same story. Time-shifting began with video recorders, but has become more and more prevalent with digital recording devices (such as Sky+ or TiVo) and TV streaming services (such as Hulu, BBC iPlayer, or Netflix). Time-shifted services allow viewers to watch live TV at other times, after the broadcast date. Dominic Pettman analyses the implications of time-shifted media such as catch-up or on-demand services in Infinite Distraction, beginning with Bernard Stiegler’s argument about an increased ‘hypersynchronization’ of contemporary culture, which suggests that technology has reconfigured what we understand as collectivity. Pettman quotes from Stiegler’s The Lost Spirit of Capitalism the observation that to become hypersynchronized is ‘to become herd-like’ (qtd in Pettman 29). Pettman wonders about the apparent disruption that time-shifted media presents to a landscape that emphasizes the hypersynchronization of experience – surely a family, all watching different shows at different times, is the opposite of hypersynchronization? In an attention-grabbing metaphor,

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

89

Pettman writes, ‘Now we are scooped up by individual butterfly nets, rather than the one big rat trap of TV’ (92). However, looking more closely, Pettman suggests that what appears to be a set of separate and individual experiences, ultimately feeds back into the same larger pool of experience: ‘While we may seem to all be distracted by different shows, sites, programs and devices, this is in fact a mirage, since we are all plugged into the same circuits, the same logic, the same imperatives, and the same ideological apparatuses’ (92). Even if a group of schoolgirls have spent a week on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Hulu at different times, they have still been able to use a catch-up service to keep up with the Kardashians. Pettman’s broader point is that time-shift or on-demand services enact a dynamic between ‘focusing and dispersal’, between ‘synchronizing and modulating’ (93). Beneath the differences, a common hypersynchronized set of actions emerges. One way of understanding timeshifting, Pettman suggests, is a sort of spatialization of media experiences that were previously punctual and temporal, giving an anachronistic sensibility to the way that media are consumed, unmoored from a schedule or programme. It is therefore possible to connect these forms of anachronism to the other aspects of Smith’s time  – perhaps informed by the queer temporalities of strategic anachronism and interruption – that the earlier part of this chapter laid out. Another way of understanding the time-shift in How to Be Both surfaces in Smith’s descriptions of the genesis of the novel, which she identified with frescoes’ layered structure of painted surface and underdrawings below, revealed in Florence after flooding: I’d liked the notion that those first drawings had been there, unseen all along under the wall surface, which is, after all, what fresco is, an actual physical part of the wall. I’d been wondering if it might be possible to write a book consisting of something like this structure of layer and underlayer, something that could do both. (‘He Looked Like the Finest Man Who Ever Lived’)

The fresco, as ‘an actual physical part of the wall’ reminds us that dwelling in goes hand in hand with dwelling on, carefully considering or focusing on. In shaping the architecture of our spaces we are also shaping the attention that they draw from us; as Malcolm McCulloch observes in Ambient Commons, we are surrounded by ‘ambient information’ – background music, print advertising, spam, health and safety warnings, superfluous instructions  – which are built into the very architecture of contemporary spaces. More importantly, however, the second feature that Smith emphasizes in her description of the frescoes – the ‘structure of layer and underlayer’ – mirrors the structure of time-shift in George’s narrative. Where the two halves of the novel make the most sense when

90

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

understood as the foreground and background of the finished work (with each of the two narratives shifting places depending upon the reading), the strange tenses and temporality of George’s narration is more closely associated with the layer and underlayer, which are two moments in the history of the same artwork: the sketch and the paint. The contemporary media phenomena of the photo-bomb and of time-shifting therefore represent these two aspects of How to Be Both exactly. Given this narrative structure, and the influence of the visual arts on the novel, the essential aesthetic problem that How to Be Both wrestles with is one of simultaneity: how to attend to both this and that at the same time. Smith’s Artful makes reference to Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft, which deals with a similar problem of how to narrate three concurrent events, while giving the reader the impression of their simultaneity. As Saramago observes, it is impossible to write, ‘in the same tense, two events which have occurred simultaneously’ (qtd in Artful 33). While it might be possible to divide a page into columns, this will not solve the problem of reading order. The problem is the linearity of reading, as well as the linearity of writing; the metaphor that Saramago’s narrator uses to express the ideal for this mode of narration is the voices in an opera, which use simultaneity to create harmony. Taking this idea of simultaneity to its limit, George engages in a thought experiment to imagine a structure for a book that would link together past and present in ways that are impossible in real life but, she realizes, also impossible in the space of a page. She thinks that ‘if things really did happen simultaneously it’d be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of text have been overprinted, like each page is actually two pages but with one superimposed on the other to make it unreadable’ (196, 10). The imagined overprinted words – like those actually printed in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – eventually make the page unreadable and gesture towards the obliteration of meaning entirely, or an end point for writing as communication. Smith’s overlayer, in this instance, obliterates, but the same feature can also reiterate. In another example from elsewhere in the novel, the ‘overlayer’ of a shouting boy reiterates, by amplification and intensification, the words of his master: Raise my voice, the Falcon said. RAISE MY VOICE, the dipping boy said. In this way the Falcon let us know us what would be expected of us. The walls will be THE WALLS WILL BE. Divided from left to right DIVIDED FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. Except here and here EXCEPT HERE AND HERE.

The Distraction of Both (Ali Smith)

91

Where there’ll be WHERE THERE’LL BE. Gracious city scenes GRACIOUS CITY SCENES. (107, 293)

Printed on the page, the all caps ‘overlayer’ repeats and traces over the lines of the sentence case ‘underlayer’. As the words are repeated between lowercase and all caps, this typography is more reiteration than obliteration – an overlayer and underlayer that retraces, amplifies and intensifies an earlier moment. Jeffrey Nealon, in his work on post-postmodernism, argues, after Fredric Jameson, that the cultural logic of our own period is one of intensification: postmodernism, only more so. Intensification, Nealon argues, is about, as he puts it, ‘more of the same’ (30) since ‘it’s hard to understand today as anything other than an intensified version of yesterday’ (8). That stuttery repetition of the post-postmodern is an intensification by way of redoubling: its premise is same-same. After everything is capital, intensification is the only way of adding value. Markets that are more saturated, experiences that colonize more of the spaces of subjectivity – going inwards, rather than expanding outwards into new markets – and working conditions that demand more of the workers’ subjectivity, of their attention. The second screen watching on catch-up is therefore thinkable as a metaphor of intensification and amplification through Nealon’s stuttery, repetitive logic of more of the same. Significantly, in Smith’s novel, George connects the memory of her own TV watching in the Flying Scotsman episode with contrasting memories of her parents’ control over the television: her parents watch by ‘flicking channels before giving in and putting it off ’ (226/40) and later, after her mother’s death, her father ‘switche[s] the channel over without even looking at George’ (226/40). In the early nineties, Brian McHale analysed TV channel hopping as ‘zapping’ in Constructing Postmodernism (1992), with examples from DeLillo, Rushdie and, most notably, Pynchon, which helped to form his definition of literary postmodernism. For McHale, television became the perfect image of postmodernism’s multichannel flatness, emulating the tone of Jameson’s flat affects and Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra in the flow of semi-attentive channel-flicking (132–41). If, as Nealon argues, intensification characterizes this post-postmodern moment, and intensity is more of the same, then watching multiple, simultaneous versions of the same programme seems an apt metaphor for post-postmodern intensity, in the same way as ‘zapping’ was representative of postmodernism. The generation gap in the novel therefore differentiates cultural moments through their structures of attention and distraction. McHale, in the same analysis of ‘zapping’ and television as a synecdoche for the failure of the revolutionary dream of the

92

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

1960s, also implicates distraction in his analysis: in Pynchon’s work particularly, attention appears ‘as a positive value term. In this context, anything that promotes inattention can only be negative’ (123).24 In contrast with Pynchon – and indeed with David Foster Wallace, as I  discussed in Chapter  2  – Smith’s attitude to new media distraction is far more openly positive. She takes pains to redeem distraction’s political aspects, seeing it not as an anaesthetizing force, but one which can throw the expected path of time off course or put a twist in a tale to queer, transform, or subvert it. I am suggesting, then, that time-shifted second-screen viewing of media has metaphorical affinities with aspects of contemporary cultural analysis that emphasize reiteration, overlaying, intensification, and hypersynchronization. This aspect of Smith’s novel involves repetition of the same. Time-shift, as a metaphor, has most affinities with the Nealon’s description of the postpostmodern (with its stutteringly intensified repetition actually serving as a reinforcement of an already dominant paradigm). In contrast, the photobomb, the other media phenomena that takes a prominent place in How to Be Both, emphasizes the overlaying of foreground and background, the vacillation between the substantial image and its silly undercutting, a play of deliberate artifice and authentic accident which is perhaps much more reminiscent of the features ascribed to contemporary culture by metamodernism, as it is described in an influential essay by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. Vermeulen and van den Akker identify metamodernism as a sensibility that moves with, between and beyond modernism and postmodernism (2). Smith’s work has often been associated with a return to modernism and a reconfiguration of postmodernism, both by critics and by Smith herself.25 The structure of the metamodern, however, uncovers something in the idea of ‘both’ that is also a structure of refusal  – of neither; Vermeulen and van den Akker suggest that the ontological and epistemological dynamic of the metamodern is ‘both-neither’ (6).26 They distinguish the ‘both-neither’ from the postmodern in-between (identified as a ‘neither-nor’ [10]); where postmodern apathy leads to an uncommitted neither-nor, metamodernism’s enthusiastic desire leads to a whole-hearted embrace of both-neither.27 If distraction is both it is a doubling of information, possibilities, excess, information overload. But, then it is also neither – a vacancy or refusal. The challenge that Smith’s work shoulders, then, is to craft a form that marks the limits and edge cases of narrative fiction by identifying the places where it cannot divide or reiterate distraction as both/ neither any further. In doing so, it engages with the history of fiction from modernism, through postmodernism and beyond.

5

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

In an interview in the Guardian from 2010, Tom McCarthy asks himself a question about distraction and writing: ‘Following Freud’s logic of technology as prosthesis, what’s been amputated from the writer in order to create the newest hard- and software?’ (‘How Technology Rewrites Literature’). The answer that McCarthy gives to his question is ‘attention’. If we accept the analogy of technology as prosthesis that we find in Civilization and Its Discontents, McCarthy suggests, we must also allow that these prosthetic instruments have been strapped on to some site of amputation, some excised organ or severed limb that has been lopped off, leaving behind a stump or residual. Imagining attention amputated, McCarthy concedes that something must be lost in order to gain access to technology, but refuses to commit wholly to the idea that this loss is something new; that the present’s attention has been uniquely mutilated when compared to an idealized past. In the same interview, McCarthy acknowledges the seductiveness of the claim that modern technology has destroyed contemporary attention uniquely, but at the same time warns against it: You have to be wary of presuming that the advent of the internet creates some new-media ‘Year Zero’ for the writer. Western literature begins with an account of a signal crossing space, in the Oresteia: a technologically-broadcast message whose reception, repetition and interpretation lay out the condition of the whole drama that follows. The hardware changes over time, but the base situation doesn’t. (‘How Technology Rewrites Literature’)

The internet is therefore only the latest of many technological objects to be buckled on to our amputated faculties, and the history of western culture is, for McCarthy, the history of this repetitious interface with technology. As he observes, the age of the internet is not the originator of distracting messages from far-off places, and literature in particular has always been conscious of the interruptive and disruptive force of messages broadcast into the here and now of our present attention. It has to be: these are the mechanisms of its own transmission.

94

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

McCarthy’s focus on the writer as the amputee is also telling, in that it implicitly connects the identity of the writer to the ‘base situation’ of picking up signals through a technological prosthesis. As he writes in Transmission and the Individual Remix (2012),writers and readers must live by the motto of the lyrics of Kraftwerk’s ‘Antenna’, in which reception and transmission repeatedly trade positions; we are ‘aerials first thirstily soaking up incoming signals, then spewing these back out’ (42).1 Discussing this same idea in another context, McCarthy explains that ‘the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there. The task of the writer is to filter it, to sample it and remix it – not in some random way, but conscientiously and attentively’ (‘In Conversation’). Writers are attentive antenna whose use of the technology of reading and writing means receiving and transmitting signals. Moreover, it is their attentiveness that allows them to filter content and select particular signals to pass on. The writer’s attention is vital, but it is an amputated, modified and prosthetically supplemented form of attention, in which messages from other times and places – transmitted by beacon, by writing, by the internet – interrupt and rupture the present. McCarthy’s allusion to the transmitted message – by beacon in the Oresteia, or by his preferred metaphor of the aerial or antenna transmitting and receiving radio signals – is also pertinent to his repetition of this metaphor of amputated attention, a metaphor which has been transmitted and received across the twentieth century, and has been a productive one for imagining the interface between human faculties or bodies and technology. McCarthy’s reference is to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, whose well-known passage on prostheses inaugurates a twin interest in both the artificiality of ‘auxiliary organs’ and their potential. Freud writes: Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times. (738)

These unnatural, supplementary organs are a source of discomfort and difficulty, but also the thing which allows us to extend ourselves towards some peculiar divinity beyond the human. In other ventures into theorizing the prosthetic, Marshall McLuhan’s descriptions of media ‘extensions of man’ forges on with the same analogy of technology as augmentation, but at the same time sees this augmentation as accompanied by the imperative to blunt or curtail excessive stimulation through the phenomenon of ‘auto-amputation’. McLuhan explains that ‘amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception’ (43). Rather than amputating first, in order to attach

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

95

an auxiliary prosthesis to the site of amputation, McLuhan argues that autoamputation and extension go together; auto-amputation is a defence mechanism that comes about to balance out extended faculties:  ‘We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed,’ he writes, ‘or we will die’ (47). Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter offers parts of a counter-argument to McLuhan’s theories of extension and auto-amputation, by seeing the human sublimated into the machine, rather than being extended by it. In McCarthy’s piece in praise of Kittler for the London Review of Books, ‘Kittler and the Sirens’ (2011), he claims to have avoided reading Gramophone, Film, Typewriter until after he had finished writing C (and the book’s title is, of course, remixed in McCarthy’s 2017 essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish).2 In the same blogpost, McCarthy recounts Kittler’s presence at the launch of the German edition of Remainder and acknowledges that he had probably picked up Kittler’s ideas, even before having read his work: Kittler nodded approvingly when I mumbled, in response to a question about my novel’s pairing of trauma and repetition, something about Freud having a mechanical conception of our psychic apparatus  – a point he’d made twenty years previously.

This specific example returns us to Freud and to amputated attention, to consider whether the possibility of adding a prosthesis to the apparatus of our attention reveals our understanding of attention as ‘mechanical’ from the outset. Other pertinent takes on the prosthetic that we might add here would include the legacy of Derrida’s emphasis on writing as prosthesis – particularly in Bernard Stiegler’s work on technics – and various posthuman positions which understand the body as ‘the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate’ (Hayles 3). The discourse of the prosthetic therefore has a resonance that takes us beyond Freud’s initial observations and into terrain which we can find in many forms in McCarthy’s work. This chapter picks through the aftermath of imagining attention as an amputated residual, the remainder of an organ. We should think of this residual attention, following McCarthy’s long-term collaborator Simon Critchley, as evidence of the self as ‘dividual’ rather than individual  – a self that is always divided, always amputated, never whole.3 McCarthy has placed Critchley’s idea of the dividual into its intellectual context in an interview from 2010: Simon Critchley . . . has argued in the past for the concept of the dividual, not the individual: the self who is split, ruptured, dispersed and interrupted. In a way the concept just summarises an alternative and much astuter history of thinking: people like Derrida and, dare I say it, even Marx. (‘In Conversation’)

96

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

The dividual is the ‘self who is split, ruptured, dispersed and interrupted’, implying that an interruption that causes attention to disintegrate or fall away into distraction is also a rupture in the self. This idea of the dividual manifests itself in a number of ways in McCarthy’s work, from the physically damaged narrator of Remainder (2005) to the machinery and men coupled together in Men in Space (2007) to the interest in swarm- and cloud-identities in C (2010) to U’s self-erasure in Satin Island (2015). Ivan Callus also raises the question of the dividual in Satin Island in an interview with McCarthy, commenting that ‘it’s almost like Ulrich decides that he must divest himself of his very humanity, his distinctiveness and distinction’ (McCarthy, Corby and Callus, ‘The CounterText Interview’).4 This selferasure is something that is quite specific to how Critchley explains the intellectual grounding of the term dividual, particularly in the context of his debt to Simone Weil and her philosophy of attention, as I will return to below. In his interviews and essays and in the manifestos produced by the International Necronautical Society (INS), McCarthy has frequently protested against the idea that literature should give us access to a ‘fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings’ (‘Stabbing the Olive’). Under the heading of ‘liberal humanism’, many of McCarthy’s interviews also see the same complaint about the philosophical-aesthetic project of literary realism. Through the manifestoes of the INS and through interviews, McCarthy has mounted a critique of ‘middlebrow’, ‘realist’ and ‘humanist’ novel-writing and the creed of individual authenticity that goes along with it.5 Taking their cues from these interviews and McCarthy’s non-fiction writings  – which are full of solemn (and mock-solemn) dictums about the novel and its future  – many other readers of McCarthy’s work have commented on his fiction’s interest in these twin problems of character and the human.6 In Zadie Smith’s much-cited ‘Two Paths for the Novel’ review, one of the earliest critical responses to Remainder, she implicitly opposes McCarthy’s work to a ‘lyrical realism’ whose key aims are the depiction of ‘the essential fullness and continuity of the self ’ (reprinted in Changing My Mind as ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ 71, 81). In keeping with the amputation metaphor we have been pursuing, it is worth noting Smith’s description of McCarthy’s characterization as ‘a brutal excision of psychology’ (93) which eventually develops into ‘a rigorous attention to the damaged and the partial’ (91). In spite of McCarthy’s own rejection of the posthuman (he and Critchley agree in the latter’s interview in How to Stop Living and Start Worrying that the INS is both anti-humanist and anti-posthumanism [116]), the premises of posthumanism have been a useful starting point for some investigation of a disrupted consciousness in his work (see, for instance, Lavery 2016; Billenburg Wurth and van de Ven 2014). The

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

97

final way that we should consider the disrupted subject in McCarthy’s work is through trauma and his novels’ uncomfortable relations with the traumatic paradigm. McCarthy’s Remainder is a novel of ‘peritraumatic dissociation’ rather than a ‘post-traumatic scenario’ (Byatt 2); it uses its form to ‘transmit the “after-affects” that a traumatized subject leaves in its wake’ (Vermeulen 24); the Booker-nominated C demonstrates how its protagonist experiences the trauma of war, incest and bereavement, but ‘fails to register any of them as traumatic’ (Claybaugh). The concern with representing a subjectivity that is interrupted or amputated therefore finds sympathetic echoes in other, related discourses of trauma and the posthuman, and opens into a set of questions about the adequacy of fictional characterization to depict these ruptured subjects. This chapter takes the dividual, whose subjectivity has been constituted by amputation, rupture and interruption, as its presiding figure, in order to try and conceptualize what manner of organ attention might be, and what sort of residual might remain after its amputation. Ultimately, I want to argue that readers of McCarthy’s work are repeatedly encouraged into a turn to inward attention which imagines their own attention as a kind of blind spot in the subject, as that origin point or rupture in the surface of a sensory organ that makes its function possible.

Blind spot McCarthy’s novels Remainder and Satin Island offer two riffs on technology and subjectivity that function in concert with the metaphor of amputated attention. Remainder is the novel that has received the most critical attention of McCarthy’s career so far.7 Reading this novel with one eye on the metaphor of amputated attention offers a story of a man who is injured by a falling object that is framed technologically from the beginning; what falls on the narrator is ‘Technology. Parts, bits’ (2), excised or severed pieces wrenched from interface with another system. The novel, as it proceeds, continues to emphasize the raw surfaces where technologies join, as though these sites of connection are analogous to sites of amputation. For instance, early on in the novel, the nameless narrator pulls his telephone line out of the wall, leaving exposed its wires, in a description that is full of body horror: the internal wiring is ‘all dotted and flecked with crumbly, fleshy bits of plaster’, and looks ‘kind of disgusting, like something that’s just come out of something’ (9). From the beginning of the novel, in other words, we are forced to confront the places where technology is grafted together, evoking the locations where bodies and technologies meet. This emphasis on

98

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

sites of interface also accords with McCarthy’s reference points in Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud emphasizes the uncomfortable fit between man and his ‘auxiliary organs’ that ‘still give him much trouble at times’ (738). The trouble that emerges between the prosthetic technology and the residual organ is Freud’s focus, and McCarthy’s raw wires, parts and bits of technology remind us of that trouble by projecting a transfer of that amputation wound from body to technology. My second contention about Remainder is that the main character’s key symptom is damaged or even amputated attention.8 Following the accident that precedes the novel, the narrator is no longer able to experience the kind of pleasurable, absorbed state of flow that Mikhail Cziksentmihalyi’s positive psychology has described in transcendent terms and which Chapter 2 identifies as an almost sacred pursuit in David Foster Wallace’s work. Always selfconscious, never absorbed in the present, the narrator of Remainder begins his physical rehabilitation by repeating movements, relaying the neural circuitry for his physical responses, and reflecting on the new necessity for self-consciousness behind all of his actions. He thinks through this new self-consciousness – or, as he puts it, ‘No doing without thinking’ – by comparing himself, unfavourably, with Robert De Niro in Mean Streets: De Niro is ‘natural when he does things. Not artificial, like me . . . He flows into his movements, even the most basic ones. Opening fridge doors, lighting cigarettes. He doesn’t have to think about them, or understand them first’ (23, my italics). Flow, for the narrator, signifies natural, un–self-conscious action: relaxed, malleable, unthinking, perfect, real, as opposed to artificial, fake, second-hand. De Niro’s (acted) movements are original and unimitative, where the narrator’s are a repetition, a remainder of real action. Flow therefore becomes a signifier of the fantasy of undivided, present, attentive absorption that the narrator finds highly desirable but only achievable through repetitive (and therefore divided) imitation. Later on, when the narrator has an epiphanic moment in a friend’s bathroom, he experiences the intense and apparently sourceless memory of an apartment building, which provokes the therapeutic re-enactments that give him tingling and gliding feelings of pleasure for the rest of the novel.9 As the narrative unfolds, the close attention of filmic zooming, slo-mo and action replay are the vocabulary of a new kind of self-medication by concentration that emerges after his accident. After sitting all night ‘remembering’ this originless memory, his thoughts conclude with a zoom into the geometric patterns of the hall floor in this imagined or recollected building:

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

99

It was a black pattern on white – repetitive, faded. I couldn’t quite make it out exactly, but I got the general sense of it. The way it flowed. I let my mind flow over it, floating above it – sinking into it too, being absorbed by it as though by a worn, patterned sponge. I fell asleep into the building. (67–8)

The flow of the patterned surface absorbs his attention, as it moves over this black-on-white, page-like surface, in imitation of reading. The attentive mind runs over the surface, reading it, interpreting it, getting the ‘general sense’ of it before becoming absorbed. The metaphor transfers imprecisely between the narrator’s mind and the object; the pattern on the floor flows, his mind flows, the pattern absorbs his attention like a sponge. Later still, the narrator decides to stage a re-enactment of the murder of a man in the street who fascinates him because of his perfect un–self-consciousness (185).10 The dead man has ‘merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it’ (185). Like the description of the narrator’s own attention ‘sinking into’ his imagined building that absorbs it like a sponge, he imagines the dead man’s consciousness flowing into the matter around him: ‘It had to go somewhere: it couldn’t just vaporize – it must have gushed, trickled, or dripped on to some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark’ (185). The liquid consciousness flows out and becomes a remainder or surplus matter that must leave some kind of trace. In the novel’s final scenes, at the rehearsal (or pre-enactment) of the bank heist that forms the plot’s denouement, the narrator’s attention keeps being drawn to a mark on the ground, which he asks his assistants to try and remove: ‘This dark patch kept snagging my attention’ (248), he says, feeling certain that this is the trace of an event, where something must have occurred ‘to have left this mark’ (257). When he looks at the dark patch more closely, he realizes that ‘it’s like a sponge’ with ‘little pores . . . Flesh. Bits’ (257). In all of these examples, matter is a sponge that sucks in attention in its liquid, flowing form. Elsewhere, in McCarthy’s publications with the International Necronautical Society, there are quotations from Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony, in which we witness a desire to ‘flow like water, vibrate like sound, gleam like light, to curl myself into every shape, to penetrate each atom, to get down to the depth of matter, to be matter’ (‘Joint Statement on Inauthenticity’ 225). Immediately before this, the Necronauts assert the importance of material things: To let things thing, to let matter matter, to let the orange orange and the flower flower . . . This is, for us, the essence of poetry . . . of trying (and failing) to speak

100

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing, of saying ‘jug, bridge, cigarette, oyster, fruitbat, windowsill, sponge’. (7.3) Sponge. (7.4) Sponge. (224)

Critchley and McCarthy gloss this passage by explaining that this mattery sponge is the opposite of purely spiritual transcendence (How to Stop Living 104–8). Drawing on Blanchot’s two slopes in Literature and the Right to Death, they commit themselves to the second slope of failed transcendence and the reassertion of matter in which, as Critchley puts it, ‘objects always win’, rather than Hegelian sublation or transcendence (105). For McCarthy, debris falling down from the sky (as in Remainder) and stranded cosmonauts (as in Men in Space) both fall into the category of failed transcendence, the shortfall as matter refuses to ‘disappear upwards. Become sky’ (Remainder 169). The awareness that flows ‘like water’ and becomes absorbed in matter’s sponge is committed to ‘taking the side of things’, in the phrase from Francis Ponge that McCarthy and Critchley have quoted often. These Pongey ‘things’ are sponges; they are a matter for absorption, for sucking in the flow of attention. As well as recording the spongey matter sucking in our attention, McCarthy’s novels find that we too are sponges that suck up the world around us. For example, Remainder’s narrator reports, ‘I was right inside the pattern, merging . . . I drank it all up, absorbing it like blotting paper or like ultrasensitive film, letting it cut right through me, into me till I became the surface on which it emerged’ (265). The narrator has become the sponge that soaks up the world around him. Attention becomes flow and matter becomes permeable and spongey, then everything reverses and matter becomes liquid and attention becomes the spongey blotting paper that absorbs it. Another version of this weirdly transferable blotting paper metaphor occurs in Satin Island, when U, the novel’s anthropologist narrator, describes himself ‘occupying this moment, or, more to the point, allowing it to occupy me, to blot and soak me up’ (77). The same unstable reference between subject and object occurs in this example, too: is U occupying the moment and blotting it all up, or is it really the moment occupying him and blotting him up? In both of these examples, being attentive means we are absorbed by the world’s spongey things, but find reciprocal recognition of our own materiality as spongey, absorbent things in the same gesture. As well as the repetition of the blotting paper metaphor, McCarthy has also returned to the image of the stain or mark that absorbs attention in Satin Island. Remainder’s small stains and spills have their literary heritage

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

101

in Robbe-Grillet’s caterpillar-smear in Jealousy and perhaps even in Virginia Woolf ’s curious leaf/nail/snail in ‘The Mark on the Wall’.11 However, in Satin Island these small, attention-snagging marks become spectacular oil spills. The events of the novel begin with an industrial oil spill, and the broadcast images of the spreading spill keep the narrator ‘utterly engrossed’ and watching with ‘rapt attention’ (10–11). Attention’s fluid, seeping and leaking qualities, hypertrophied grossly into the attention-leeching pull of a catastrophic event, spread across the novel’s pages. U spends days ‘immersed in’ images of oil spills (36) but goes on to imagine himself giving a lecture in which he attempts to theorize the oil spill as ‘a function of or symbol for’ (102), cutting off, full stop, before pinning down any sort of meaning. In the acknowledgements of the novel, McCarthy describes the time that he spent as part of an artists’ residency ‘projecting images of oil spills onto huge white walls and gazing at them for days on end’ (177). Gazing at the oil spill involves exactly the same rapt attention as that demanded by Remainder’s absorbing, spongy stains, but it also seems to dramatize an absence of interpretation, as though it is sufficient to simply pay attention, inwardly, to the process of attending itself. Just as U won’t identify what the spills are ‘a function of or symbol for’, Remainder’s narrator acts out a process of recording the signifying properties of all marks – ‘gathering data: sketching, measuring, transcribing’ (160) and then sticking all these sketches to the wall  – without any conclusions about their meaning.12 We see similar non-interpretation paired with hyperattention in other places in McCarthy’s work, always marked by papers fixed to a wall. In C, for instance, Serge’s sister, Sophie, creates a ‘strange associative web’ of newspaper clippings on a wall connected by crayoned lines (70), but which produces no interpretation. What the novels describe, then, is the gazing, the rapt attention, the immersion, the engrossed fascination, rather than any concluding decryption of these signs.13 McCarthy’s statement of purpose at the beginning of Transmission and the Individual Remix is instructive at this juncture, as we try to establish what the implications of this hyperattentive non-interpretation might be: My aim here, in this essay, is not to tell you something, but to make you listen:  not to me, nor Beckett and Kafka, but to a set of signals . . . I  want to make you listen to them, in the hope not that they’ll deliver up some hidden and decisive message, but rather that they’ll help attune your ear to the very pitch and frequency of its own activity  – in other words, that they’ll enable you to listen in on listening itself. (52)

102

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

To attune to the ‘very pitch and frequency’ of your own perception implies that reading becomes an exercise in attending to attention itself. Rather than trying to decrypt the ‘hidden and decisive message’ being sent, McCarthy’s work offers us a set of technological metaphors (or even prostheses) for considering the perceptual process of receiving that message: film that registers light, blotting paper that absorbs ink, radio receivers that pick up signals. We are invited to turn inward and attend to the rich gradations of immersion, fascination, rapt or engrossed or fixed attention as a strategy ‘to listen in on listening itself ’: to look at looking, to attend to attention. Considering yourself or turning perception back to the self can, however, be prevented by the body’s own architecture. The eye’s blind spot, which is the source of vision but also what obscures it, just leaves a blank or a blind spot. The blind spot is a fertile metaphor for McCarthy: in his reading of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, at the heart of the story, where ‘its gaze [is] directed back towards our own’ is the ‘blind spot’ of the novel’s protagonist (‘The Geometry of the Pressant’ 392); in his book on Hergé’s Tintin, he finds that the Tintin stories turn again and again to ‘blind spots’ where signals can’t be received, and wonders if these might be site either of Barthes’ degree-zero of meaning or of the ‘vanishing point’ of a reserve of unexpressed secrets (Tintin and the Secret of Literature 29); in his explanation of Blanchot’s account of the impossibility of an origin for writing, McCarthy explains that this point will ‘always lie within this blind spot off the map and out of time – a spot whose retrieval is both impossible and the sole true task of any good writer’ (Transmission and the Individual Remix). The blind spot recurs as an image of seeking a source for messages, transmissions, and meanings, but finding a fugitive blank instead. It is the flaw at the source of vision and the dominant metaphor for an inward attention that attempts to ‘listen in on listening itself ’.

Everyday matter This chapter has been arguing for a reading of Remainder and Satin Island as fictions of attention in which attentiveness and attempts to attune readers to their own attention are matched by a recognition of that project’s impossibility. As with any search for origins, that degree-zero or vanishing point is also a blind spot, and therefore impossible to address directly. McCarthy’s second strategy is therefore to isolate attention itself from attention to something else, to ‘enable you to listen in to listening itself ’. One way to achieve this is through depictions and

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

103

evocations of boredom. Boredom allows for the isolation of attention, because to find something tedious is to identify the stirrings of an affective response that involves attention. To find something boring means that my boredom, my wavering attention, is more interesting to me than the object that bores me. McCarthy has consistently championed writing that celebrates the power of dull things. He published a list of his favourite ‘books about nothing’, and in these examples – including Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Joyce – waiting, duration, the everyday, the absence of eventfulness, and a disdain for the conventions of plot are all features worthy of celebration (‘Tom McCarthy’s 6 Favorite Books about Nothing’).14 In the writings published under the mantle of the INS, too, McCarthy quotes from J. G. Ballard to upend the whole history of the avantgarde manifesto and assert, ‘The future is boring’ (‘INS Declaration on the Notion of “The Future” ’ 276). In McCarthy’s fiction, meanwhile, his characters are in love with tedious things: waiting, gazing at nothing, repeating the same scenarios over and over again. One of Satin Island’s best moments of commentary on contemporary life (in a book which is justifiably suspicious of the category of the contemporary) is the description of buffering, when internet traffic consumes too much bandwidth and users have to wait for their data as the shout of ‘Fucking buffering!’ goes up around the room (67). U, however, loves to watch the buffering circle on his screen – ‘losing [him]self in it’ (68) – and theorizes that buffering is a model ‘of time or memory itself ’ (69).15 Watching nothing happening on the screen gives him a feeling of ‘bliss’, peace and gratitude clearly comparable to the pleasurable feelings that Remainder’s narrator gets from setting his enactments into motion and these sensations are also comparable to the ‘bliss’ associated with flow. Feelings of ‘vertigo’ followed by ‘tingling’, ‘gliding’ and ‘buzzing’ come over Remainder’s protagonist when he engages in repetitive, (mostly) predictable and dull behaviours, like watching his enactments or contemplating the black and white hallway floor tiles. It seems clear that in these descriptions that boredom is pleasurable and is an experience that is rooted in sensations of the whole body. If we read the narrator’s story through his desire only to feel and not think – to ‘cut out the detour’, to become an unexaminable blind spot – then he achieves that desire by letting his body feel those tingles, buzzes and vibrations, without the verbalization that would turn them from a feeling into an emotion. Moreover, if we continue down the road directed by the INS and their commitment to ‘letting matter matter’, then the body and its sensations become part of a bigger field of matter. As Henri Bergson puts it in Matter and Memory, ‘If you abolish my consciousness . . . matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all

104

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

bound up with each other and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body’ (208).16 It is worthwhile pursuing, at least briefly, how boredom might be connected to McCarthy’s broader claims for the novel. David Foster Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch identified his novels, with their lists, data and information overload, as being ‘almost the opposite of how fiction works’, since fiction’s project should be ‘leaving out the things that are not of much interest’ (qtd in D.  T. Max, ‘The Unfinished’). Remainder and McCarthy’s other novels have also refused to leave out this surplus or overflow of ‘things that are not of much interest’. Instead, they repeat and reiterate these things to redundancy and back round into signification again. McCarthy’s work takes on a task, which is almost the opposite of how fiction works, of reversing the polarity between those things which are exciting and eventful, and those things that are tedious and dull. This is perhaps best illustrated by an example that the narratologist David Herman uses to describe how narratives deal with ‘tellable’ events – that is, those which are worthy of being contained within a story. As he explains it (using, coincidentally, the same events as McCarthy recycles from his own intertextual sources), ‘the facts surrounding a bank robbery are likely to be deemed more tellable than the facts connected with the gradual movement of a shadow across the ground over the course of a day  – although some postmodernist writers have tried to teach readers otherwise’ (100).17 In Remainder, McCarthy drains the eventful tellability out of his bank robbery by staging and restaging it and, in homage to Robbe-Grillet, repeating that lesson about the fascinations of a shadow passing over the ground. If the kind of writing that McCarthy would call ‘humanist realism’ emphasizes well-formed and interesting stories that conform to patterns of naturalistic tellability, then his commitment to the avant-garde is affirmed by pledging himself to that excessive remainder of trivial things that refuse to become eventful. The relationship between boredom, attention and the artwork can be articulated through a paradigm of endurance, such as Beckett’s waiting or Marina Abramovic’s durational aesthetics of presence in The Artist Is Present. Conversely, practitioners of other durational art forms have repeatedly emphasized the interest that emerges out of the other side of boredom. John Cage summarizes a piece of Zen teaching, also applicable to his own musical works and their association with boredom, endurance and attention: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all but very interesting’ (93). In a similar vein, Andrei Tarkovsky: ‘If the regular length of a

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

105

shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention’ (qtd in Nathan Dunne 188). Anything dull, considered with close enough attention for a long enough duration, will become interesting again. In all these forms of durational artworks the interest in long attention seems inevitable, but is this necessarily true of the novel? Unlike the cinema or theatre or music or performance art, the novel is an intensely private form and our struggles to attend to dull books are private ones. This is part of the reason why books are at the forefront of the fears of dissipated attention within the discourse of distraction-crisis. Part of McCarthy’s commitment to boring things is as a way of pledging allegiance to the avant-garde and the need to ‘navigate the wreckage’ of modernism (‘Tom McCarthy’). Recent scholarship in modernist studies has shown interest in mapping the extent to which boredom itself is an affect predominantly associated with modernity.18 Bryony Randall’s account of ‘everyday attention’ in Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (2007), for example, draws on Jonathan Crary’s work and on accounts of the everyday to consider the intersection of attention and temporality in the work of modernist writers; the strange patterning of the iterative day and its dull dailiness, set against moments of interruption or revelation. McCarthy’s work, I think, revisits some of these modernist temporal assemblages – only, of course, both the repetitive everyday and the interruption of the new are disrupted by another layer of boredom, with their ‘wreckage’ being picked over a century later. One of the ways that McCarthy’s boring things navigate modernism’s wrecked temporality  – scattered between the everyday and moments of epiphany, revelation or affirmation  – is by repeating and retransmitting aspects of both. Moreover, McCarthy refuses to participate in the trope that Andrew Epstein has identified as the finding of ‘transcendence in the ordinary’ (2), which finds revelations in the everyday that take us beyond it, thereby demoting and instrumentalizing the ordinary itself. As Epstein puts it in his account of post-war American poetry and its resolute attention to ordinary things, Attention Equals Life (2016), the alternative to the transcendence model is another experimental tradition that is ‘suspicious of the aestheticizing and sacramentalizing of the everyday’ and prefers to celebrate ‘the ordinariness of the ordinary’ (3). This certainly resonates with McCarthy, Critchley and the INS’s aims to ‘let matter matter’, and their ideas share influences and reference points (in the work of poets such as Francis Ponge and Wallace Stevens) with the more recent poetry which Epstein examines.19 McCarthy’s work refuses transcendence, meaning that boring things stay boring. In this sense, his work

106

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

runs counter to David Foster Wallace’s most explicit statements about finding bliss through transcending boredom. This possibility of transcendence on the other side of tedium is never realized through boredom and boring things in McCarthy’s fiction – even those pleasurable tinglings are determinedly material. The ordinary is marked by ‘failed transcendence’:  as Critchley would have it, ‘objects always win’ (How to Stop Living 105). Michael Sheringham explicitly connects attention and the everyday, noting at the very end of his book, Everyday Life (2009) that ‘one should associate the quotidien, above all perhaps, with the act and process of attention’ (398). McCarthy’s analysis of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy offers a template for reading his own work with an emphasis on ordinary events, the quotidian, attention, and attention’s blind spot. For McCarthy, Robbe-Grillet’s work consistently records accounts of ‘space and matter inscribing themselves on consciousness’ (‘The Geometry of the Pressant’), a rendering which seems to accord with his regular image of blotting paper impressions, as discussed above. However, even as matter marks us, any close attention to these processes of perception leads inevitably to an encounter with a ‘blind spot’ in their centre: in the case of Jealousy, the narrator who never attends to himself. Taking his cue from Joyce’s term ‘the pressant’, which combines the marks or impressions made by the matter of everyday life and a vivid sense of the oppressive temporality of the present, McCarthy reads Robbe-Grillet’s novel as an attempt to escape the grip of the pressant. The ‘only escape route from this pressant’ McCarthy suggests, is an act of violence that would force a disruption in the habitual, tedious repetition of quotidian events. ‘The pressant’ is the suffocating present moment, with its overwhelming material details and dull routine, into which an interruption – a violent rupture – is a kind of transcendence that never arrives. Being stuck with the impressions of the pressant connects together the matter of dull, ordinary events with the oppressive temporality of what we might term – with one eye back to the material on Joshua Cohen’s work in Chapter 3 – ‘present-mindedness’. Lars Svendsen has argued that boredom is a response to an excess of information and concomitant lack of meaning (29–32).20 This, I think is the missing piece in the account of McCarthy’s model of attention, boredom and the everyday: the everyday goes hand in hand with an overflow of information. Boredom is the only possible response to the overload of our capacity for attention. McCarthy has written about a contemporary ‘tipping point’ of ‘data saturation’ as a unique challenge for the contemporary writer, whose status as creator of messages seems surplus to requirements against this overwhelming rush of information (‘The Death of Writing’).21 What is there to absorb when everything is already

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

107

saturated with messages? In this piece, he reads Michel De Certeau’s work on the everyday as a way of understanding how to plot the connections between information overload and the everyday and, ultimately, how to write when overshadowed by all the internet’s information. He also invokes Joyce as his model for dealing with modern data (‘If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google’), an observation with is explained by Joyce’s status as McCarthy’s exemplary writer of overflowing, indomitable matter. Joyce is, in a piece McCarthy wrote for the LRB, a ‘base materialist’ whose work is full to the daily overflow of ‘whatever is excessive, leaking, trailing, dragging’ (‘Ulysses and Its Wake’). McCarthy uses the image of the overflow of matter in both Remainder and Satin Island in ways which call up the idea of the remainder or surplus. In Remainder, overflow appears most prominently at the end of the novel, when the final re-enactment (of the bank heist) is in progress. The narrator imagines money, blood and light, all as liquids, before feeling himself ‘overwhelmed with sunlight’; ‘It was spilling everywhere, overflowing, just too much, too much to absorb’ (272). This is the same liquid metaphor as McCarthy invokes when he imagines contemporary ‘data saturation’ in ‘The Death of Writing’. Too much sensory information finds the narrator saturated to overflowing. This might seem to evoke the idea of attention as the valve that controls the flow of data – or the filter that allows for meaningful information to pass through and other data to be left to one side. This is Herbert Simon’s already familiar model of the attention economy, which arises to manage information overload. Sebastian Groes, in his work on the representation of information overload in contemporary fiction, argues that novels from the second half of the twentieth century celebrated technology in an attitude of utopian, poststructuralism-inflected play, without a care to the dire state of cognitive changes that resulted. In contrast, he suggests, the novels of the age of the internet respond to the threat of information overload in two ways: ‘traditional, mainstream literature that aligns itself with the humanist legacy’ attempts to use the novel as a device for ordering and making sense of overwhelming information; experimental writing (of which McCarthy’s work is an example) create ‘forms of literature that mimic informational streams and accelerate chaos in order to investigate the effects of interference and distraction upon the human mind’ (6). While I agree with Groes’s analysis of McCarthy’s use of accelerationist forms that repeat the effects of overwhelming (but dull) data, I  am not convinced by the reading of Remainder’s narrator as suffering from ‘sensory overload’, manifested only metaphorically through his accident (20). If anything, the characters in C, Remainder and Satin Island seem to experience

108

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

overload as the same sublime, utopian mode as the postmodernists. What is different, though, about McCarthy’s representation of overload and overflow is how material they are: always disgusting and excessive, rather than mimicking the aseptic virtuality of data. This sense of the filthy materiality of overflow is developed further in Satin Island when U dreams of the island of the title, a trash-processing facility, where all of a city’s rubbish is burnt into glowing ooze: ‘If the city was the capital, the seat of empire, then this island was the exact opposite, the inverse – the other place, the feeder, the filter, overflow-manager, the dirty secreted-away appendix without which the body proper couldn’t function’ (131). Should we read attention as the choosing and filtering organ that removes the trash and crap of extraneous data; the ‘overflow-manager’ of information overload? Attention, is ‘the other place’, not the capital, not the head, but the ‘dirty-secreted away appendix’; the filtering organ that manages overflow, but also the cognitive equivalent of an evolutionary dead end, always supplemental and ready for surgical removal. By a very circuitous route, then, we’ve found ourselves back at the site of amputation. Not part of the ‘body proper’, attention as overflow manager is Satin Island. It is the appendix; the extraneous part that can be removed. And, finally, where does U find to escape the ‘overload and noise’ of a corporate office? A  ‘blind spot’ where he can click his fingers and experience a feeling of ‘timelessness’ (48). The blind spot – established elsewhere as ‘attention to attention itself ’ – is established as the timeless alternative to the crushing overload of the quotidian pressant, without succumbing to any attempts to redeem or transcend ordinary, material things.

Dividual/residual In the International Necronautical Society’s summary of their ‘Joint Statement on Inauthenticity’, they explain that they plot a course ‘from the individual, to the dividual . . ., thence to the residual, ‘a remainder that remains:  a shard, a leftover, a trace’ . . ., and further to the risidual, a laughable doubling’ (‘The New York Declaration’). The final part of this chapter takes up two parts of this voyage through the subject, under the headings of the dividual and the residual. The ‘residual’, identified by the INS as ‘the remainder that remains’, is the medical term for the stump or incomplete organ left behind after amputation. After surgery, the residual is the site where any prosthetic additions are attached. If we imagine attention as an excessive or supplementary appendix that is defined by

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

109

the possibility of its removal – as in Satin Island’s overflow manager – we might begin to think through the status of attention as residual. The term ‘residual’ appears in Remainder as a word that, from the outset, demands definition. The narrator asks Naz, his fixer, to define the word: Just then his phone beeped. He scrolled through his menu and read: ‘Of or pertaining to that which is left – e.g. in mathematics.’ ‘Left over like the half,’ I said. ‘A shard.’ (269)

The definition, however, is not enough for the narrator, who insists that the word is a noun, not an adjective, and should be spelled ‘recidual’. Naz finds definitions for the closest word, ‘recision’, which he defines as ‘the act of rescinding, taking away (limb, act of parliament, etc)’ (272). The recision of a limb, which this definition gives as its first example, associates both the residual and the recidual with amputation. If recision is the act of amputating the limb, the recidual should be that part that is taken away by excision or incision, while the residual is the stump that remains. In the account of the body that we saw, metaphorically, in Satin Island’s waste processing facility, the centre was displaced from the head, the capital, to the filtering appendix. In a similar image, the INS’s ‘Joint Statement on Inauthenticity’ finds its heroism ‘not the imperial dreams in the head of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton but rather his blackened, frostbitten toes’, the toes which ‘he and his crew were forced to chop from their own feet, cook on their stove and eat’ (225). The recidual is Shackleton’s amputated toe, the place where body becomes meat and matter, reasserting its position above the capital’s imperialist head. In addition to Naz’s definitions, the narrator of Remainder is insistent that ‘recidual’ is a musical term, and quizzes his pianist to extract possible similar terms such as recital, recitatif, and so on. One musical term he doesn’t come to is ‘recessional’, the word that McCarthy takes from Faulkner as the title of Recessional  – Or, the Time of the Hammer, with one definition offered being a ‘recessional hymn’ (21). In this piece, McCarthy expounds his theory of the recessional, the retreat or pause, outside the onward acceleration of daily life, which is marked by imperatives such as ‘wait’ and ‘stop’ (the time of the hammer is, of course, M. C. Hammer’s time, but also a pause in labour – setting the hammer down).22 The recessional therefore marks a pause or interruption, which is also a distraction (just as ‘wait’ and ‘stop’ call workers away from their labour in McCarthy’s formulation). This exchange about the residual can be seen an example of the novel’s ‘intrusions of textual matter’, a reminder of the ‘text itself as stuff ’ (Huehls

110

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

157–8). In the interpretation of Remainder’s materials, Huehls argues, the reader must participate in ‘a certain kind of immersion’ involving ‘heightened attention, not going with the flow’; instead, a process of attentive selection or filtering, ‘a certain culling’, is required to produce the assemblage of the text (156–7). If Remainder dramatizes the problems faced by an overloaded consciousness with ‘too much to process’ (Remainder 202), Naz’s conversation with the narrator about the residual is a case in point. While looking up definitions on his phone, Naz is repeatedly interrupted and distracted, frantically attempting to plan out the last stages of the evacuation (or elimination) of the enactors who have been working in the narrator’s bank heist, while the narrator demands his attention with non-existent words. The narrator has heard the word first as a kind of diagnosis or interpretation of his actions from the mysterious ‘short councillor’ (whose therapeutic identity might also lie in a mishearing  – couldn’t he just as well be a short counsellor?):  ‘His ultimate goal, of course, being to  – how shall we put it? To attain – no, to accede to – a kind of authenticity through this strange pointless residual’ (259). Could this be a mishearing of ‘recidual’? Is the narrator’s project the recidul blackened toes that were chopped off or the residual stump left behind? Alternatively, perhaps the narrator is in quest of both, he ‘is after a residual that is also a recidual; that is, a residual that is annulled and repeated’ (Slote 124). The term’s surplus of meaning re-enacts the whole novel’s preoccupation with overloading matter and the impossibility of filtering it all to create a finished work. So far in this chapter, I  have been arguing that McCarthy’s novels contain elements of a theory of the attending subject, and imagine what that might mean for the writer and reader as figures who inevitably have to engage, selfreflexively, with their own attention. ‘Attention is not just what you consider, but what you consider yourself to be’, as Joshua Cohen puts it (Attention! 103). However, it is only by placing McCarthy’s work in dialogue with that of his colleague and collaborator, Simon Critchley, that it is possible to develop this idea of the attending subject most fully. We have already seen that Critchley and McCarthy associate the residual and the dividual in the INS Joint Statement on Inauthenticity, and have also noted McCarthy’s acknowledgement of Critchley’s work on the dividual in interviews, in which he described the dividual as ‘the self who is split, ruptured, dispersed and interrupted’ (‘In Conversation’). The dividual, as McCarthy describes it, is the alternative to the smooth and coherent rational individual who participates in the market and manifests their authentic self through art. The dividual is instead associated with the pause of the recessional and the amputated remainder of the recidual. McCarthy’s consistent

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

111

assault on conventional ideas about character is anchored, philosophically, in the belief that realist fiction props up the idea of the individual – the unruptured, whole and present self – by representing these individuals as a novel’s characters. Conventionally, attention itself has inevitably been associated with presence (as the examination of Joshua Cohen’s work in Chapter 3 laid out), and with a valorization of the possibility of being ‘fully present’ and being ‘in the moment’. Critchley, in How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, opposes the dividual  – and indeed philosophy itself – to the promises of the self-help genre (promises like wholeness, individuality, authenticity, self-realization, being present in the moment, flow, and so on). The central place of both repetition and rupture in McCarthy’s work therefore undermines the concept of the presence of events and of characters as fully present individuals, and refuses to participate in the same regime of what McCarthy would identify as ‘sentimental humanism’ that runs across the self-help genre and contemporary novelistic realism. In this sense, he is using the legacy of conventional fictional characterization against itself, transmitting out from ‘the lifeless crypt where the traditional novel has taught us to look for fleshed out individuals’ (Vermeulen 37). It is, therefore, fictional character that is dealt the blows of McCarthy’s assault on the individual. Critchley’s work on the dividual and dividualism takes us from his early book, Infinitely Demanding (2007) – which sees the divided subject as split by the ethical appeal of the other on the conscience – to the mystical anarchism explored in Faith of the Faithless (2012).23 In the latter, the teachings of Margeurite Porete, a fourteenth-century heretical mystic, give a tellingly physical insight into the status of the dividual; Critchley identifies Porete’s mystical practice as a process of self-annihilation, an attempt to ‘hew and hack away at oneself in order to make a space that’s large enough for love to enter’ (152) or ‘boring a hole in oneself so that love might enter’ (131). While, for McCarthy, Critchley’s dividual is a retransmission of others’ insights (he cites Marx and Derrida in the interview above), I’d argue that its resonances and vibrations are quite distinctive, particularly in the ways that it has developed after the initial exploration of the political potential of dividualism in Infinitely Demanding. For my purposes, what makes Critchley’s exploration of the dividual in Faith of the Faithless so potent is the tradition of female mysticism through which he traces the idea and the connection this opens up to a spiritual tradition of attention. Margeurite Porete’s physical opening up to love – divine love – is part of a heritage that takes in Julian of Norwich and, more recently, Simone Weil. Weil is a significant figure here, since what Critchley identifies as her commitment to the ‘decreation of the self ’ is framed principally through attention. Weil writes of attention as a mode

112

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

of prayer, particularly as a way of opening up to the divine but, at the same time, necessarily erasing the self. As she writes in Gravity and Grace, ‘Attention alone – that attention which is so full that the “I” disappears – is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call “I” of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived’ (118). This self-forgetting attention is described by Weil as ‘decreation’. Critchley uses this term too, taking as his main reference point Anne Carson’s essay, ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Margeurite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’. In this essay, Carson describes Weil as ‘a person who wanted to get herself out of the way so as to arrive at God’ (194). Porete, like Weil, Carson notes, ‘felt herself to be an obstacle to herself ’ (194). Some of this sense of the self as obstacle is familiar from the tradition of postmodern metafiction and personal self-consciousness that David Foster Wallace deals in during the course of his early work. His story ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, for instance, uses the image of an arrow pointed at a target in which the aim will never be true because ‘the bow gets in the way’ (294). Wallace’s image is a deliberate echo of John Barth’s description, in ‘Lost in the Funhouse’, of the impossibility of seeing a double mirror reflection to infinity because ‘no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way’ (85). In the context of both these fictional projects, then, there is the problem of the attending self as an obstacle, which seems to echo the mystical tradition on which Critchley draws. We might say the same thing about McCarthy’s recurrent figure of the blind spot: it is the self as obstacle to itself, the head that gets in the way. However, this analogy does not account for those many examples in McCarthy’s work in which we are encouraged to ‘listen in on listening itself ’, to get interested in our own boredom or examine, inwardly, the modes of our own attention. Is it really plausible to read his work as championing a self-annihilating dividual at the same time as his writing seems to encourage this minute concentration directed at the self? The alternative route that McCarthy has taken into the split and violently hacked and hewed dividual is psychoanalysis, and his observations in this area uncover some ways of bringing this apparent contradiction into clearer view. In Tintin and the Secret of Literature, for instance, he summarizes Abraham and Torok’s work on the crypt by explaining their interpretation of the case history of the Wolf Man, Sergei (whose history is also, of course, shared by McCarthy’s Serge in C): ‘the trauma in Sergei’s past coupled with his failure to mourn his sister has opened up a space within him which is not his own, a chink through which “the stranger enters the ego, lodged there like a cyst” ’ (79). Quoting Abraham and Torok’s explanation, McCarthy goes on to gloss their concept of the crypt:  ‘their crypt encrypts . . . The crypt’s walls are broken:  it oozes, it

Amputated Attention (Tom McCarthy)

113

transmits’ (82–3). The division, rupture or interruption in the self is not just the receiver for messages – like the blind spot at the eye’s optic nerve – but is a cryptic transmitter of messages too. In another context, McCarthy has identified the ‘two-way movement’ at the heart of radio technology: A coherer names the key part of the earliest radio sets. Metal filings lay loose, scattered, in a tube or capsule; when charged by an electric signal, they drew suddenly together and conducted current for as long or short as the remote signaller made them, thereby producing dots and dashes. Thus, the sending out (in German, ‘transmission’ is Sendung), the dispatch, loss, or scattering of signal and identity (when I sit at a transmitter, both my words and I dissolve into the aether) also brought about, contained, entailed, a coming back together. There’s, a two-way movement, inscribed right at the material core of wireless. (Transmission and the Individual Remix n.p.)

This is one way to reconcile the decreation and recreation of the dividual by way of this transmitting/receiving mechanism, which coheres even as it scatters. As I’ve been arguing in this chapter, attention directed outwards also surges back inwards, into a recognition of the dividual and residual subject. By this logic, McCarthy’s model of the writer as filter, modulator, retransmitter and remixer also involves both the coming together and the disintegration of the self. The final residual in this process is not the message that is transmitted or received, however, but something much more fleeting. In his essay on ‘data oversaturation’ and the everyday, ‘The Death of Writing’, McCarthy quotes the last words from some of De Certeau’s reflections on writing, to assert that its ultimate effect is to transform the attention of the reader: The writer is also a dying man who is trying to speak. But in the death that his footsteps inscribe on a black (and not blank) page, he knows and he can express the desire that expects from the other the marvellous and ephemeral excess of surviving through an attention that it alters. (De Certeau 198)

Writing’s residual, then, is the attention that it alters. And out of attending to that alteration – its scattering, its focusing – comes a way of thinking through fiction’s characters as dividuals.

6

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

In a scene in McCarthy’s Remainder, one of the characters tries to convince the narrator to donate the money from his settlement to international development charities rather than building a house-size re-enactment fantasy: ‘Markets are all global; why shouldn’t our conscience be?’ (33). This question is a closed road for McCarthy’s novel, which quite overtly prefers not to pursue its metaphors of connection, networks and attention into this realm of cosmopolitan ethics and responsibility. Instead, as the previous chapter has argued, McCarthy’s work uses attention as a way of cracking open divisions in the concept of the individual subject and the representation of that subject in fictional characterization. So far in this book, I have suggested that twenty-first-century fiction, in its attempts to handle attention, consistently repeats the same gesture:  a partial return of readerly concentration back to its source, in a gesture that I have been calling inward attention. In Zadie Smith’s recent work, this inward attention back to the self is shown to be impossible to separate from an expansive outward attentiveness that is both caring and ethical. As we have already established, thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler and Teresa Brennan have made an overt connection between the act of caring for and the act of attending to, turning attention into a transformative act of loving. The work of this chapter is to consider how Smith’s work extrapolates from attention’s affective properties into an ethics of attention. If the most basic ethical act begins with turning our attention, as care, to other people, then this chapter seeks to trace the forms which that ethical attention might take. In a well-known early essay, published in 2003, Zadie Smith set out her position on ethics and fiction with reference to Martha Nussbaum and Gilbert Ryle, explaining that both these philosophers think of literature’s ethical engagement as something which comes about through storytelling (‘Love, Actually’). In Smith’s description of the literary landscape at the beginning of

116

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

the twenty-first century, she makes it clear that it was only recently thinkable to make the case for the novel as an object of ethical worth: Rather bravely, [Nussbaum] climbed the disputed mountain of literary theory and planted her philosophical flag firmly in the dirt. Her flag said: ‘Great novels show us the worth and richness of plural qualitative thinking and engender in their readers a richly qualitative way of seeing.’ (‘Love, Actually’)

Nussbaum, for Smith, stakes a fresh claim for the value of understanding different minds and the possibility of learning a way of thinking and perceiving that would also apply outside of fiction.1 Learning to read therefore means learning to see the world in a different, ‘richly qualitative’ way. In 2003, then, Smith was tentatively flying her flag at a slightly lower elevation than Martha Nussbaum’s: My flag is rather weak in comparison. It says: ‘When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good).’ (‘Love, Actually’)

‘Finding yourself caring’ about other people suggests something only half-willed and semi-conscious, but implies that caring comes along with attending closely to fiction. It is when we read ‘with fine attention’ that we extend care, without really intending it, to other people. These other people might be fictional, but Smith’s assertion – shared by other writers at the turn of the twenty-first century – is that the attention to the text itself is the beginning of an unintentional care for others. The qualifier of ‘fine’ attention is notable, and one that seems to riff on Nussbaum’s analysis of Henry James. Here is Martha Nussbaum, commenting on James’s readers, who are, as James wrote, ‘participators by a fond attention’, in the lives of his characters: ‘the conception of moral attention implies that the moral/ aesthetic analogy is also more than analogy. For (as James frequently reminds us by his use of the author/reader “we”) our own attention to his characters will itself, if we read well, be a high case of moral attention’ (162). Nussbaum is arguing that the attention that readers pay to literary characters – and it is a certain kind of attention, based on an affective connection, on fondness – is a model of the relations we should have with other people. Attentive reading is a tool in the service of attentive morality. Giving another quotation from James (which, as the next chapter discusses, also exercised Ben Lerner) Nussbaum writes that ‘our highest and hardest task is to make ourselves people “on whom nothing is lost” ’ (148). Inattentiveness therefore becomes a form of moral obtuseness, while the attentive are those who do the hard and noble work of noticing. When Smith transmutes ‘fond attention’ into ‘fine attention’ for her own statement of intent

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

117

she removes the initial affective aspects of James’s approach; the attention just has to be close and detailed, and we will ‘find ourselves caring’. By the time of Smith’s 2009 essay on David Foster Wallace, she still inhabits the same position: The ends of great fiction do not change, much. But the means do. A hundred years earlier, another great American writer, Henry James, wanted his readers ‘finely aware so as to become richly responsible.’ His syntactically tortuous sentences, like Wallace’s, are intended to make you aware, to break the rhythm that excludes thinking. Wallace was from that same tradition – but, a hundred years on, the ante had been raised. In 1999, it felt harder to be alive and conscious than ever. (‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’ 267–8)

Taking their cues from Henry James, Nussbaum and Smith therefore both explore the analogy between the moral attention that is invoked through the interpretation (and creation) of a work of literature and the moral attention that is necessary for living a good life. In a more recent piece from 2014, which reviews Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Lin’s Taipei, Smith frames some similar questions about reading, attention, and ethics, but this time using the language of mindfulness. In the context of an examination of questions of ethical responsibility and distance from others’ death – or corpsification – she asks: Would the premature corpsification of others concern us more if we were mindful of what it is to be a living human? That question is, for the sentimental humanist, the point at which aesthetics sidles up to politics. (If you believe they meet at all. Many people don’t.) Concern over the premature corpsification of various types of beings – the poor, women, people of color, homosexuals, animals – although consecrated in the legal sphere, usually emerges in the imaginary realm. First we become mindful – then we begin to mind. Of our mindlessness, meanwhile, we hear a lot these days; it’s an accusation we constantly throw at each other and at ourselves. It’s claimed that Americans viewed twelve times as many Web pages about Miley Cyrus as about the gas attack in Syria. I read plenty about Miley Cyrus, on my iPhone, late at night. And you wake up and you hate yourself. My ‘struggle’! The overweening absurdity of Karl Ove’s title is a bad joke that keeps coming back to you as you try to construct a life worthy of an adult. How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others? (‘Man vs. Corpse’)

There is a telling slippage in the word ‘mindful’ in this passage: does it mean conscious of ourselves, fully present in the moment, in control of our attention so we can push out intrusive thoughts and interruptions (‘more present,

118

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

more mindful’)? Or does mindful simply mean aware  – like ‘conscious’ or ‘woke’  – aware of others politically and ethically in a way that opens us up from solipsism and self-consciousness (‘Of ourselves, of others? For others?’)? This slippery expansiveness of the term ‘mindfulness’ is part of the concept’s contemporary appeal. The originator of mindfulness-based stress reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn, defines mindfulness in his 1990 bestseller Full Catastrophe Living as, ‘a moment-to-moment awareness’ that is ‘cultivated by purposefully paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment’s thought to’ (2). The onward-march of mindfulness in the twenty-first century means that the term has become a catch-all for therapeutic practices of paying attention (to both internal and external worlds). Jeff Wilson, in his cultural history of mindfulness, Mindful America, offers an account of the ways in which meditation practices became medicalized, commercialized, and presented as a panacea for every area of life, from addiction and stress, to sports, parenting, cleaning, budgeting and weight loss.2 Mindfulness, Wilson argues, was able be removed from its historical Buddhist roots and embedded into contemporary therapeutic, spiritual, and commercial practices through a set of sustained efforts, and this has involved institutions such as hospitals, schools, prisons, and corporations. At the same time, critiques of mindfulness have emphasized the ways in which a culture of mindfulness promotes changing minds rather than changing social structures and conditions.3 Why practice mindfulness stress reduction rather than simply removing those pressures and practices that cause intolerable stress? Mindfulness has therefore become part of a broader contemporary discourse surrounding attention, like the focus and flow that this book’s earlier chapter on Wallace identified as products of selfhelp books from figures such as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eckhart Tolle. Smith’s questions  – ‘How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others?’ – immediately turn mindfulness out towards a social conscience rather than remaining limited to the optimization or control of the individual’s mental processes. The forms of distraction associated with technology are, as usual, placed in opposition to the discourse of attentive mindfulness, and Smith acknowledges the clichés of self-reproach about contemporary mindlessness. Whereas, in 2003, Smith wrote that through reading with ‘fine attention . . . we find ourselves caring about people’, in 2014 she cannot stop with the causal formulation ‘first we become mindful, then we begin to mind’. It is not enough to suggest that attending in general will make us more attentive to others. Beginning to mind represents the acknowledgement that mindfulness cannot be an end in

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

119

itself, that it always has to be opened outwards for others. What interests me about this change is that the act of becoming mindful (noticing, attending to one’s own attention) is mindfulness ‘for others’, suggesting that our selves and others are muddled up together in a way which raises questions about the selfcontained individual that Tom McCarthy’s work anticipated in the previous chapter. Between the 2003 essay about Nussbaum and the 2014 essay that uses the language of mindfulness to think about being mindful ‘of ourselves, of others’, Smith has become more interested in the ways in which the self and the other are connected. She moves from a model of imagination and readerly empathy similar to the one Ian McEwan championed in the wake of 9/114, or which Nussbaum advances in Love’s Knowledge, to something which experiments with a more interdependent relationship between the attentive self and the imagined other. This is articulated most fully in Smith’s 2012 novel NW, as she begins to find problems with the idea that readerly empathy through attention relies on the reader coming to the text self-contained and fully formed, just observing characters, feeling with them and learning from them, without any sense of an assault on the foundations of the self. Where Chapter 3 of this book considered the association between attention and the present with a temporal bent, this chapter is more interested in thinking about the ethics of distance and proximity, and the ways in which being ‘more present’, in Smith’s words, might raise questions about how to attend to others to an increasingly globalized, cosmopolitan world. Building on the ideas about the attention and the dividual that the last chapter developed through Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley’s work, the rest of this chapter will seek to consider Smith’s development of ideas about ethics and attention in her recent fiction as a way of tracing out an alternative account of ethics, reading and attention that is informed by cosmopolitanism on one side and on the other by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, as Smith uses fiction to establish the extent to which we begin to mind ‘for others’.

‘Drawing a circle around our attention’ In a central conversation from the 2013 novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, which was written alongside NW, Smith’s protagonist Fatou talks with her church friend about suffering. The content of the conversation, about whether it is possible to really care for strangers from far-away places, or for every one of the millions killed by genocide, is central to the story’s interest in ethics and

120

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

the span of attention. The narrator phrases what seems to be the story’s central question: The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in the world – in its dramatic as well as its quiet times – we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be? (23–4)

How large should the circle be that structures our attention and our ethical responsibilities to others? The conversation between Fatou and her friend in Smith’s story brings together three concerns that accrue substantial weight within contemporary fiction:  attention, ethics, and the responsibilities to others that emerge from debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Among definitions of globalization, it is possible to argue the term signifies a change in perception or forms of awareness or attention as much as a change in social or economic structures.5 Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, registers directly an altered awareness and hierarchy of prioritization, represented most clearly by the first of the values of cosmopolitanism named by Kwame Anthony Appiah:  ‘universal concern’. Universal concern, for Appiah, means that we have ‘obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship’ (xv). Appiah’s universal concern is, of course, bounded by ‘respect for legitimate difference’, which means an attempt at imposing some reasonable limits on that universal concern (xv)  – an attempt to draw a circle around attention.6 In a reading of The Embassy of Cambodia in terms of contemporary literature’s ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ (47), David James suggests that the story asks readers to ‘reflect on the range of our own sympathetic involvement’ with Fatou’s life (‘Worlded Localisms’ 59). The terms of this interpretation are set out by James in a quotation from the novelist Philip Hensher, who writes that fiction ‘asks us to examine the scale of our own compassion and interest’ (qtd in James 47). These questions of scale are best represented, James suggests, through the interplay of the local and the global. Fiction, as Hensher’s observation indicates, has developed a longstanding set of techniques that make it uniquely placed to invite readers to consider the distances their sympathy, compassion or attention will span.7 Smith’s work therefore takes up the challenge for fiction to examine the scale of our compassion for other people in the image of the ‘circle around our attention’. That scale, in contemporary thought, is often conceived of as

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

121

spatial and geographical, and there is a connection of long standing between the narrowness of local vision and an ethical attention that is framed by global breadth. In an instructive example, Edward Said’s classic reading of Mansfield Park makes Fanny Price’s return to her narrow house in Portsmouth central to his exploration of the narrowness of imperial vision: ‘In too small a space, you cannot see clearly, you cannot think clearly, you cannot have regulation or attention of the proper sort’ (Culture and Imperialism 105–6). More broadly, then, the challenge of cosmopolitanism is a challenge of attention, and that attention is a specifically ethical attention. The description in The Embassy of Cambodia is only the latest of Smith’s questions about whether the life that fiction instructs must involve ‘drawing a circle around our attention’. In On Beauty (2005), for instance, Smith famously transposed E. M. Foster’s liberal concerns about the limits of class responsibility onto issues of race. Inevitably, and drawing on Smith’s discussion of her own work, many critics have read On Beauty as an intervention into debates about the association between ethics and aesthetics.8 Through these critical readings, it becomes possible to interpret On Beauty’s depiction of Haiti as an offshore and offstage location that is beyond the novel’s own circle of attention, but which persistently finds its people, its politics and its art returning from the periphery. From this position, The Embassy of Cambodia becomes another manifestation of Smith’s ongoing concern with the limits of aesthetic forms  – the ways in which fiction must, deictically, create a sense of presence in the narrative that prioritizes ‘here’ over ‘there’ – and the limits of privileged attention. The Embassy of Cambodia’s ‘here’ is Willesden, but its ‘there’ is Fatou’s remembered journey from Ivory Coast to Ghana, Libya and Italy and, of course, the peripheral presence of Cambodia. The circle of attention, then, is an image both for artistic forms, like the round jar in Wallace Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, but also for an attentiveness that is bound up with responsibility to the other. It is this dual movement between a circle of formal attention and a circle of ethical attention that also allows Smith to raise questions about the ultimate purpose of a reader’s attention to the text. Part of her claims for the novel and its tradition have long been that it is the close attention it brings to its characters – other people whose lives we can see into for a matter of pages – which embeds an ethics into its form.9 In her more recent work, Smith develops an interlinked exploration of attention, ethics and the construction of subjectivity which adds further complexity to her ideas about the ethics of literature. Against the backdrop of internet slacktivism that so easily equates page views and clickthroughs and likes and retweets – the

122

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

digital markers of attention – with meaningful action, any possibility of an ethics of attention is in danger of being amalgamated into the idea of an attention economy. However, as Smith suggests in The Embassy of Cambodia and, as I will argue, asserts most fully in NW, it is possible to slightly reconsider the nexus of attention, information and responsibility through an exploration of subjectivity that is informed by a Levinasian sense of ethics. Kristian Shaw, in his reading of NW as a move from White Teeth’s postcolonial and multicultural concerns to an exploration of cosmopolitan ethics, mentions Derrida’s notion of cosmopolitan hospitality, but not the Levinasian ethics that underpins it (71–97). Levinas helps to bring together the threads in Smith’s work from cosmopolitanism, ethics, and the consequences of her semi-manifesto for the future of the novel in ‘Two Directions for the Novel’. The crucial idea that I want to take from Levinas is that, rather than an Aristotelian account of ethics in which the self develops as a free moral agent and then answers appeals from the other, the way that the self develops is through the appeal from the other – an appeal that is foundational to the self. As Levinas puts it (in ways that will be significant for Smith’s play with the classic poststructuralist categories of the host and hospitality in NW), the self is ‘hostage’ to the other. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes: Why does the other concern me? What is Hecuba to me? . . . These questions have meaning only if one has already supposed the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself. In this hypothesis, it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute outside-of-me, the other, would concern me. But in the ‘prehistory’ of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility, the self through and through is a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. (117)10

In NW, Smith experiments with imagining the construction of the self as hostage to the other, and a model of attention that reinforces this turn towards the ‘absolute outside-of-me’. When, in the review of Knausgaard and Lin that began this chapter, Smith suggests that beginning to mind means becoming mindful ‘for others’, the implication is that the mindful mind is not only self-consciously present to itself; instead, it is only by becoming concerned with and attentive to the other that the self is constituted. As in Tom McCarthy’s work, inward attention returns attention back to the attending subject and this movement exposes breaks or discontinuities or a blind spot in that subject. As McCarthy puts it, ‘Levinas has a vision of ethics, which is completely tied in with trauma, and completely tied in with repetition, and it’s not about a self-sufficient subject being moral. It’s about subjectivity being endlessly ruptured and interrupted

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

123

by the demand of the other, to which you have to respond’ (in Critchley, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying 121). Smith registers McCarthy’s interest in this aspect of the subject in ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, when she praises McCarthy’s confidence in identifying those aspects of ‘lyrical realism’ – including her own writing – that fail to reflect on discontinuities in the self:  Netherland, the novel which represents the direction not taken by Remainder, ‘wants to offer us the authentic story of a self ’ but, wonders Smith, ‘is this really what having a self feels like?’ (81).11 Where Netherland ‘wants to comfort us, to assure us of our beautiful plentitude’, Remainder presents a subjectivity that, as we have already seen, is interrupted, discomfited, never full and present for itself (80–1). Smith’s recent fiction tests the bounds of a self formed by the ethical appeal of the other, as a kind of rupture or interruption that structures the self, within the form of lyrical realism’s modes of characterization.

Proximity and distance NW, in its story of four main characters, offers a set of people moving through a city whose relationships with each other are defined by proximity (the same postcode) and distance (the distance of class boundaries, of gender, of race). Keisha, Leah, Nathan, and Felix notice each other in the street and compare themselves and think about how their lives might have been different. NW is a novel that mediates between the local and the global and, in contrast with the characters of Smith’s early work, such as the older generation of White Teeth who ‘continue a tradition of postcolonial displacement, characterised by a lack of agency and belonging’, the characters in NW ‘enjoy a more bounded and abiding relationship with the spaces of their locality’ (Shaw 69). The boundedness of this experience of the local is fraught with as much conflict as the ethical problem of the ‘circle of attention’, however, and the local is never unquestioningly privileged in the novel. Smith’s next novel Swing Time (2016) continues to pursue concerns about the ethical circle of attention to the global and the local, with its multimillionaire character (with echoes of Madonna or the Jolie-Pitts) adopting a child from a West African country. NW exhibits the same dynamic of distance and proximity that is evoked by the idea of the cosmopolitan balance of ‘circle of attention’ in The Embassy of Cambodia. NW is a city novel named for a postcode and committed to the texture of local experience, but is also faithful in recording the paradoxes of contemporary connectedness and globalization. It begins on the planeless days when flights

124

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

were suspended following the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud in 2010, and the planes missing from the sky bear the trace of the empty flightpaths in the days immediately after 9/11, reiterating an impression of shared geopolitical responsibilities. As the local shops in NW find themselves without planetransported fruit and vegetables, Leah and her husband go to the supermarket, where they fail to buy ‘ethical things’ and none of the purchasing decisions match up with Leah’s good intentions:  they find themselves shopping ‘with new bags though they should take old bags, leaving with broccoli from Kenya and tomatoes from Chile and unfair coffee and sugary crap and the wrong newspaper’ (80). The characters are aware of the proximity of all of these ethical appeals, in spite of the physical distance involved in the globalized production of broccoli, tomatoes or coffee. In his early work, Levinas grounds his formulation of the ethical responsibility to the other in the face-to-face encounter, and this too can be considered through the lens of proximity and attention. The experience of the face, when the other calls up the self into responsibility, is asserted by proximity: as Levinas writes in ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, ‘the proximity of the other is the face’s meaning’ (83). We can interpret proximity as meaning present inside our circle of attention, and therefore awakening responsibility. This proximity does not, of course, have to be physical or geographical, and so the model of attention or awareness is an apt one. As the circle of attention is supplemented and extended, the appeals of the local and global threaten to be overwhelming. Vanessa Guignery, in an article that discusses NW using images of crossing (the title of the fourth part of the novel is ‘crossings’), offers a brief reading of the novel through Levinas’s work, concluded by an explanation of how the novel’s most impoverished and marginalized characters ‘are very rarely the recipient of any human warmth, generosity or ethical sharing . . . and deprived of any face-to-face relation’ (‘Zadie Smith’s NW or the Art of Line-Crossing’). She notes that Nathan, the homeless young addict who had been a school friend of Leah and Keisha’s, always wears a hoodie, blocking his face, and even comments on the way that people’s attention glances over him:  ‘People don’t chat to me no more. Look at me like they don’t know me’ (271). In Guignery’s argument, the act of crossing the street to avoid Nathan is part of a significant pattern of crossings, a physical action that demonstrates deliberate disregard and inattention. NW does also register experiences of urban proximity that rely upon inattention in positive ways. As Lauren Elkin points out, movement through the city in NW exhibits many examples of ‘civil inattention’, a phrase coined by Erving Goffman in his account of urban behaviour, in which ignoring people is

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

125

the politest and most considerate thing to do. Controlling one’s attention means being self-contained and not making demands on others by making eye contact or acknowledging them – let alone harassing them with unwanted attentions. Attention, in some contexts, is threatening and it is significant that when this civil inattention breaks down in the novel  – in Felix’s confrontation with the young men with their feet on the seats on the Tube, for instance  – violence follows. In contrast with accounts of the modern city such as Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ which present the modern’s tough cynicism and unaffected ‘blasé attitude’ as an adaptive, but pathological, lack of concern for others, ‘civil inattention’ suggests that others might actually welcome my disregard. NW therefore dramatizes those instances when inattention or indifference might be necessary, self-protective, or even just polite. In this way, the associations between closeness and care are troubled and disordered in the novel, just like its association between proximity and responsibility. At the heart of the novel is the friendship between Keisha and Leah, both born in Willesden, but whose lives have taken very different paths in adulthood. Keisha reinvents herself in adolescence as Natalie and is characterized, primarily, by her ‘celebrated will and focus’ (185) which takes her from a council estate and comprehensive school to university in Bristol and then on to middle-class success as a lawyer. Keisha’s focus, her ‘mutated will’, means she can ‘sit in one place for longer than other children, be bored for hours without complaint’ (178) and is the engine behind her dramatic social mobility. It is only by limiting her focus and staying still that Keisha/Natalie can move on her socially mobile trajectory. David Marcus, who reads NW as an investigation of the limits that post–2008-crash austerity reveals within the neoliberal promise of freedom, sees Keisha as an apparent ‘exemplar of self-making and self-improvement’ whose downfall in the later part of the novel undermines the claims of social mobility. Keisha represents the potential for attention instrumentalized as ‘will and focus’ to become wrapped up in a discourse of self-improvement in an economic sense. At the same time, the language of mindfulness that Smith has brought to bear on ethical questions is also associated with self-improvement as self-help – and particularly inflected with the popularization of ‘life-hacking’ which is driven by increasingly precarious employment. Attention indexes drive, ambition, self-control, and productivity in this context  – all the quasi-moral goods that make up a work ethic – and NW knocks them down in Natalie’s abject dive into self-destruction. If Keisha’s early success is the result of her complete and perfect power over her attention, then Leah is a character who is, in contrast, distracted by her desire for

126

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

connection with other people, as she ‘befriend[s] everyone without distinction or boundary’ (180). Lynn Wells notes that Leah’s focus on other people is often nebulous and uncommitted – she goes through phases of activism, radicalism and political engagement  – while Keisha ‘becomes more focused on her own material well-being, virtually ignoring contemporary crises such as the Bosnian conflict’ (107). The comparison between the two characters, between Leah’s ‘generosity of spirit’ and Keisha’s ‘cerebral wilfulness’ (Wells 180), therefore posits the two women as archetypes of too-limited and too-diffuse attention. Leah’s ‘circle of attention’ is too large and without boundary; Keisha’s is drawn in too close. At the same time, though, Leah’s commitment is presented as wholeheartedly local (she is ‘as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their families, or their countries’ [5]), while Keisha’s broadened outlook is globalized and international. The circle of attention, then, is no longer a simple binary between distance and proximity.

‘I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me’ When the novel first introduces Leah, it is in a scene marked by distraction and interruption. She is trying to claim control over her own attention as her neighbour ‘screams Anglo-Saxon at nobody’ from a nearby flat’s balcony (3). Leah tries to focus on a phrase she has heard on the radio (‘I am the sole . . . I am the sole author . . . I am the . . . the sole’ [3]) but the neighbour’s voice intrudes, and we read Leah’s thoughts in stream-of-consciousness style: ‘Nothing else to listen to but this bloody girl. At least with eyes closed there is something else to see. Viscous black specks. Darting water boatmen, zigzagging. Zig. Zag. Red river? Molten lake in hell?’ (4). The narrative follows Leah’s attention narrowing down to the inside of her own eyes and, in a moment reminiscent of Woolf ’s short story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, in which the narrator makes fictions from alternately close and hazy attention to the coals of a fire and the titular mark, Leah begins to make fictions out the play of light and blood through her own eyelids. The next chapter begins, ‘Doorbell!’, and Leah is interrupted again, this time by a woman appearing at her front door and asking for money. Smith has commented in interview about this starting point for the book: What inspired this novel? . . . About eight years ago a girl in distress came to my door, a stranger, and asked me for help. Said she needed money – so I gave it to her. Later I found out that it was probably a scam of some sort. A lot of

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

127

questions followed from this in my mind. Was the girl really desperate? Was I a fool to give her the money? But wouldn’t you have to be really desperate to come up with such a scam? The episode, tiny as it was, stayed with me. It became a fruitful sort of problem – connecting with ideas I’d had for a long time about class and desperation and ethics – and eight years later a whole novel sprang from it. (‘Zadie Smith on NW – Guardian Book Club’)

At the threshold of the novel is an episode that happens on a doorstep and which represents a demand on credibility (‘Was the girl really desperate?’). The same episode in NW is an appeal to Leah’s attention (the interrupting doorbell) but also an ethical appeal, to which she responds without hesitation. The novel begins, then, with an implicit association between interrupted attention and the ethical appeal from the other. Shar, the girl who arrives on the doorstep with an unlikely story about her mother’s hospitalization, disturbs Leah when she is at home and sleeping. As Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, the other is ‘the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself ’ (39). The other interrupts and disrupts the self when it is at its most comfortable, most homely and self-contained. The stranger is a disturbance or a distraction  – a knock on the door that attracts our attention and requests that we open up. Using the terms of Smith’s ‘Man vs. Corpse’ essay, the interrupting other asks that we ‘begin to mind’ – to mind out, or pay attention. Even when we think that the self is comfortably walled in and self-contained, the self is constituted by this ethical encounter at the threshold, after the disruption or distraction of the knock on the door. If the threshold is also the model of the division between the self and the world, then attention is what troubles that boundary. Moreover, if attention is under our control, then it is also an agent for feeling at a distance, outside of the walls of the self. And if it is determined by stimuli beyond us (a door bell, a neighbour shouting into her phone) then our attention betrays us – it is part of the outside inside us. Part of the fantasy of contemporary productivity is that we have complete regulatory power over our attention. By an act of ‘will and focus’, as the novel says of Keisha, we are able to wall ourselves off against distraction, diversion and procrastination. Smith’s acknowledgement, at the end of NW, of the web-blockers ‘Freedom’ and ‘Self Control’ can therefore be interpreted as a paratextual comment on the novel’s dealings with distraction and the regulation of attention. But what could be more subversive of the idea of the self-made individual whose ‘celebrated will and focus’ are the engine behind her social mobility than the need to outsource one’s self-control to a browser add-on?

128

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

The novel takes care to problematize an unbroken, self-contained identity from the very first paragraph. Sitting in her garden hammock, Leah hears the phrase ‘I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me’ on the radio, and thinks, ‘A good line – write it out on the back of a magazine’ (3). However, as she tries, unsuccessfully, to make her own mark on the back of a pre-printed page too slippery to hold the pencil, it becomes clear that she does not have sole authorship of herself. As she tries to concentrate and keep the words in her head, the phrase is repeated in fragments during the opening paragraphs of the book. The narration of Leah’s thoughts is the first indication that she is not the ‘sole author’ of the dictionary of herself: she hears the phrase on the radio, suggesting that she is the receiver for transmitted identities, rather than being their sole creator; she is divided, with origins everywhere and nowhere, rather than being a self-contained individual. The phrase, ‘I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me’ appears in both Keisha and Leah’s minds, spookily, almost telepathically, as well as in the paratextual material of the section titles. Two of the headings in the novel’s ‘host’ section are titled ‘The sole author’: number 37, in which Keisha (now Natalie Blake) is ‘crazy busy with self-invention’ (209) – the sole author of her own newminted character – and number 96, in which Natalie’s future husband rejects her interpretation of his background and effectively tries to claim authorship of his own life.12 The story of Leah and Keisha’s early friendship is a story about interrelationships, and the ways in which, in spite of Keisha’s self-contained will and steely focus and attempts to rename and redefine herself, neither of them are the sole authors of themselves. Keisha’s early studies show that a word, like a person, is never self-sufficient: Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary  – in search of something like ‘completion’ – and every book led to another book, a process of course which could never be completed. (155)

Meaning will always threaten to slip away elsewhere, with an etymology, a cross-reference or an alternative definition. The dictionary is an example of incomplete, sliding signification, not of closed and definitive meanings. In the context of the novel, the political focus of the text and its attention to class and to society and its structures, show the idea of a ‘sole author’ of the self to be a fantasy. As David Marcus writes, the opening ‘sole author’ passage ‘is not a freewheeling stream of consciousness about the mobilities of self-invention but the painful immobilities of class’. Moreover, this opening passage is also heavily freighted with Leah’s weighty awareness of her own body and biology. She has

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

129

just discovered an unwanted pregnancy and her attempts to convince herself that she is the ‘sole author’ of her own dictionary are a reminder of a slippage away from her self-contained identity, and evidence of other thoughts, ideas – even bodies – inside her own. Going back to my original premise and reading NW as a novel about beginning to mind ‘for others’ supplies another reason for the prominence of the ‘sole author’ passage at the beginning of NW, and the way in which self-sufficient self-authoring is undermined in the novel. If we follow the argument back to Levinas, it is possible to trace this critique of the sole-authoring, self-creating self to his concept of the foundational place of the other in constructing the self. As well as a host to the other ‘the self through and through is a hostage’ – built around the other from the outset (Otherwise than Being 117). Beginning to mind, as a process, forms the self through the interruption of the other.

‘The limited circle is pure’ Zadie Smith’s recent work has set in motion two models of ethics and attention:  the first is most in accord with Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, which attempts to balance the demands of near and far, local and global, and is best represented by the problem of the ‘circle of attention’ and its dilemma of resource allocation, comparable to the concept of the ‘attention economy’; the second is closer to the cosmopolitanism of Derrida’s hospitality, informed as it is by the legacy of Levinas’s ethics. In Levinas and Derrida’s thinking, the self-authorship of the individual is always fictional and the host and the guest are deeply implicated in each other (as marked by Smith’s ‘guest’ and ‘host’ section titles in NW). As Derrida explains, hospitality requires not a balance of demands, but an unreasonable and excessive demand from the other: ‘absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give place not only to the foreigner, . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I let them come, let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names’ (Of Hospitality 25). The demand of this pure and radical hospitality is impossible, but it is the point that Leah starts from at the beginning of the novel when she chooses to accept Shar’s story, welcome her into her home and give her money, without expecting reciprocity. So how does fiction allow for an exploration of these two models of ethical ‘beginning to mind’? Smith’s earlier work certainly made use of narrative as

130

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

a form of thought experiment  – a tool for illustrating or dramatizing ethical lessons. David James, for example, calls Smith’s homage to Forster in On Beauty ‘a parable of ethical consequence’ (‘The New Purism’), while Peter Childs and James Green find that Smith’s understanding of the novel in general is as a ‘theatre’ whose processes ‘both show and tell the reader’ how to feel (56). The distinction that I want to make in discussing some of Smith’s subsequent work comes from Robert Eaglestone’s Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1997) in which he – using terms from Denis Donaghue  – identifies Martha Nussbaum as an epireader and, in contrast, J. Hillis Miller as a graphi-reader (3–8). Nussbaum, as Eaglestone explains, reads through literary examples as though they were a pane of glass, and looks to the (implicitly mimetic) playing out of moral quandaries as parables on the space behind them. Miller is a graphi-reader; his focus on the text itself makes it impossible for him to untangle questions about ethics from questions about language. Levinas emerges from Eaglestone’s account as a reader who manages to get out of this dichotomy and express a way of thinking about reading that attends to language as ethics. Significantly, the association emerges through the concept of interruption: philosophy’s interruption, Levinas writes, is its ‘only possible end’ and books, he suggests, ‘are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said’ (Otherwise than Being 171). Books, Eaglestone notes in response, are interrupted by the world and by other books (164). Like Keisha’s and Leah’s dictionaries, which will continually open out to cross-references, all language will resist closure or conclusion through the interruption of interpretation. Literature is therefore bound up with the ethical because it is in language. Literature becomes an interrupted or distracted way of doing philosophy. One of the ways in which Smith’s most recent work has enacted a concern with ethically interrupted language is in the ways that it begins to take apart one of her most effective tools (and the one through which she has demonstrated the most perfect control of any contemporary fiction writer):  the omniscient narrator. Reviews of NW noted this stylistic change as a prominent feature: Ruth Franklin in The New Republic saw the book creating a ‘parody of the omniscient nineteenth-century narrator’; Christian Lorentzen in the LRB described the novel as an attempt to answer Smith’s self-examining question, ‘Why have I been such a conventional writer?’. Leah’s section, the first section of the novel, is the one which uses Joycean dashes to introduce speech, which makes it look like every utterance is a resumption of someone else’s thought, as though this quasiauthor is not the sole author of this text and is, instead, interrupted by voices from elsewhere. The Embassy of Cambodia moves through a similar issue with

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

131

its narrative voice, as the first-person plural narrator begins to question their right to tell a story narrated by ‘we, the people of Willesden’ (1): ‘I have been chosen to speak for them, though they did not choose me and must wonder what gives me the right’ (40). The residents of Willesden answer back, ‘We are not one people and no one can speak for us’ (40). At the same time as Smith has worried about the limits of ethical responsibility to others and the inseparability of the self from others, she is also suspicious of the techniques that one writer can use for representing a mass of people, however dialogic the style’s ambitions. What substantially shapes Smith’s most recent work, then, is a sense of language itself as interrupted, as opened up to the demand of the other. David James has suggested that what most forms the style of NW is the awareness that literary realism has ‘retained the wound’ of Joyce’s experiments, as Smith notes in ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ (Smith 79). James asks whether Smith’s attentive description of inconsequential, everyday details in ways that do not automatically lead on to wise authorial commentary might be part of a ‘new ethical manoeuvre’ for her work (56). Description certainly does seem to speak very strongly for itself in NW, and the text is consistently attentive to ordinary things (bus stops, signage, the quirks in the language of small nonprofit organizations). James also describes a narrator who ‘no longer relies on the convenience of stylish aphorisms’ (57).13 ‘I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me’ is that kind of aphorism, ripe for the underlining, which Smith constructs so perfectly in her earlier work (and sometimes, as in On Beauty, borrows from her husband’s poetry  – who could hope to be the sole author of her own aphorisms, anyway?). NW shows these words in the process of being marked and noted for later quotation by Leah, with the text exhibiting a questioning self-consciousness about this aphoristic mode from its very first page. In ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, Smith noted that it was the accretative, repetitive structure of Remainder that so resisted quotation and there is something at work in NW’s questioning of the notable phrase that seems interested in drawing attention to this aspect of the reading experience. Rather than simply marking these attention-grabbing, aphoristic phrases ourselves, instead we are witnessing a character’s attention caught, with a glancing look inward at our own reading process.14 A quotation from Kafka, part of which Smith used as the title of a lecture given in 2003, also illustrates some of the problems that arise for the novelist in thinking through the relationship between ethics and literary form. In the published form of the lecture, Smith quotes from Kafka’s diaries:  ‘In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle

132

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

is pure’ (‘The Limited Circle Is Pure’). This early essay considers Kafka as a challenge to novelists and a kind of limit case for what the novel is able to do in its engagement with other people through characterization. Kafka’s ‘limited circle’ is one of deliberate exclusion, maintained as a mode of self-preservation, in the same vein as Fatou’s projected ‘circle of attention’ in The Embassy of Cambodia: as the passage Smith quotes continues, ‘visitors make me feel almost as though I were maliciously being attacked’: the circle of Kafka’s attention will, therefore, not broach interruptions from outside. Smith goes on to gloss Kafka’s words through an explanation that draws together ideas about ethics, attention and the forms of literature itself: What is this literature of Kafka’s that is so absolute that it exists as the opposite of life and other people? It is a limited circle, to be sure, and it is pure – but can it contain a novel?

Smith proceeds onwards, to try and explain Kafka’s position on the other side of the novel: Most novelists ask you to pay sustained attention to something outside of yourself, something in the world on which they have placed value. Frequently this is ‘other people,’ in all their shameful, worldly vulgarity. But Kafka directs your attention inward, momentarily and with great force – as Emerson did, as Kierkegaard did, as some poets frequently do – in search of a kind of pure being for which the world has no precise name. (‘The Limited Circle Is Pure’)

This sharp inward turn is, for Smith, best represented by the ‘focused jolt of spiritual attention’ invoked by the form of the parable, in contrast with the scope and scale of the novel. However, the parable is not treated here as a worked example of ethical behaviour; instead, the parable is a literary form that is defined by its focused effect on attentive processes. The novel involves ‘sustained attention’ outwards  – in Smith’s example, Jane Austen is the ‘consummate novelist’ who locates her ethics ‘always within the social’  – while the parable provokes a sharp turn of attention inwards. If On Beauty was the novel in which Smith’s novelistic techniques were at their height in asking readers to take up an ethical stance that involved ‘sustained attention to something outside of yourself ’, then NW is a much more ambiguous object. The novel’s style disavows the wry mediation of the narrator of On Beauty, or the hyperbolic expansiveness of White Teeth and the narration of both NW and The Embassy of Cambodia, as we have seen, uses language to register the interruption of the narratorial voice by other voices. Between the broad, novelistic request for the reader to

Beginning to Mind (Zadie Smith)

133

‘pay sustained attention to something outside of yourself ’ and Kafka’s command that the reader turn their attention ‘inward, momentarily and with great force’, something else begins to emerge in NW: that background awareness of our own attention that Smith identifies as mindfulness and which is very much at odds with the revelatory ‘force’ of Kafka’s inward attention. Soft and even ambient, the inward turn of this attention registers without revelation, and depends upon the novel’s defining interest in other people. At the same time, however, that attention outwards is shown to reveal a chink in the surface of the self that reveals an inward disruption. Kafka’s inward turn to a ‘pure being’ is impossible, if that mindful inward attention to the self is prompted by the demand to be mindful not just of others but ‘for others’. I have been arguing here that NW hesitates between two notions of ethical attention: the pragmatic boundedness of Appiah’s cosmopolitan concern, which is enclosed by a reasonable ‘circle of attention’, and the radical ethical position represented in Levinas’s work, in which to become mindful of others is to ‘begin to mind’ the self, and vice versa. In presenting this hesitation, NW also attempts to find a form that shows these disturbances between self and other not just through characterization, as McCarthy does, but through narration. Attention seems, in one light, to be naturally associated with temporality, especially in the sense of attention’s span, and the first three chapters of this book all spent time considering the temporal patterning of attentiveness and distraction. But Smith instead investigates fiction’s capacity to imagine space and place in laying out the span, scope or breadth of that attention, which at the same time implicates the unstable sense of self that we have seen emerging throughout this book so far. In the context of twenty-first-century fiction and its broader turn towards the ethics of the cosmopolitan, Smith’s work therefore involves the reader in examining how broadly or narrowly we might draw the circle of our own attention.

7

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

In the early pages of Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, the protagonist finds himself putting together a shoebox diorama about brontosauruses. His collaborator is an 8-year-old boy, Roberto, who is ‘intelligent and sociable, but even more susceptible to distraction than the average child’ and whose after-school project work with the narrator is meant to ‘trick him into, or at least model for him, modes of concentration’ (11). The narrator, ‘Ben’, has been newly diagnosed with a heart problem and, at least at first, the hours he spends with Roberto allow him to forget his physical malady: ‘the time I spent trying to coax Roberto into focusing on the mythology of the kraken or recently discovered prehistoric shark remains was the only time in which I myself was distracted from the potentially fatal swelling at my sinus of Valsalva’ (12). Ben can forget his heart because of the attention that he pays to Roberto’s attention, as he tries to ‘coax [him] into focusing’. However, more often, Ben’s visits to Roberto are dominated by thoughts about his own inadequacy as an attentive carer:  Roberto can only be drawn away from investigating the carcass of a huge water bug with his peers by Ben’s promises to let him play with his iPhone, and they print dinosaur images from the internet for their diorama, but Ben ‘hadn’t the patience’ to check the geological periods were correct (12); later in the novel, Ben even experiences the gut-knotting consequences of a moment of inattentive negligence when he loses sight of Roberto in a museum. Inattentive everywhere, Ben sits through a screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, checking the time on his phone and noting the absurdity of this ‘habit of distraction’ in an artwork that’s about nothing but the time (53).1 Why should we be surprised that Ben is a poor model for concentration? The feature that qualifies him to work with Roberto is that he is a ‘published author’, and it is this that seems to have established him as a paragon of attentive responsibility: With a sinking feeling, I realized that, if I were [Roberto’s mother], I might well have declined to entrust my child to my care. But then, Aaron had vouched for me: I was a published author. (144)

136

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Ben’s care – his ability to attend to a child – is, however ironically, set alongside his identity as a writer, and it seems that care, attention, concentration, the ability to model and coax out focus in other people are what underlay the value placed on his profession. Focused through this pedagogical moment of the brontosaurus diorama we might wonder what ‘modes of concentration’ the novel and its narrator-author hybrid are able to trick or coax us into, or ‘at least’ model for us; given Ben’s doubts about his own competence, why would we trust this man to school us in attention? This chapter considers Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), as an entrance into a final set of questions about why contemporary culture might be so committed to the idea that the ‘published author’ and his books should be the one to educate us in attention. This book’s first chapter identified the tendency to ascribe to books the power to correct or balance out the damage we have done to our capacity for attentiveness because we spend too much time on the internet. Are we, Lerner’s readers, all just Robertos, who need the ‘published author’ to give us remedial tutoring in concentration because we would rather be playing with an iPhone? And, if reading is meant to rescue our wayward concentration, what hope is there for us if our author-tutor can’t even keep himself from being distracted by his phone? In the texts I have been considering in this book, there have certainly been attempts, through literary form, to model or coax out certain kinds of attentive responses from readers, and narrative fiction still remains a prime tool for orchestrating the dips and swells of attention’s fluctuation over time. Another prominent theme among contemporary fictions of attention, however, is self-questioning about the kinds of attention that writers of fiction (and, by extension, fiction itself) can be expected to model. On one side, writers acknowledge the shortcomings in their own attention, and refuse to be recruited as champions of perfect focus (Zadie Smith’s thanks to her web-blocker and Wallace’s confession of TV addiction would fall into this category); on the other side, contemporary fiction finds many things to recommend in the light and uncommitted qualities of inattention and the secret, unwitnessable rebellion of distracted daydreaming, as well as identifying the ways in which fiction, narrative, writing, and reading all depend upon forms of inattentiveness. The novel, in particular, has been associated from its earliest days with unproductive distraction and this noble history of useless activity should not be ceded to digital media without a fight: wasting time is not just for the internet. One of the things that Kenneth Goldsmith uncovers in Wasting Time on the Internet (2016), his account of teaching his course of the same name at the University of Pennsylvania, is that distraction has become something that

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

137

we practise (in the sense of developing and improving it) every day and yet we only seem to understand it as something shameful. He argues that we spent too much time guiltily self-flagellating about the time we spend on the internet and not enough time theorizing or making sense of what that activity might involve and what its potential might be: as Goldsmith writes, ‘I think it’s time to drop the simplistic guilt about wasting time on the Internet and instead begin to explore – and perhaps even celebrate – the complex possibilities that lie before us’ (27). The same move in reverse would be to do less celebrating of ‘focused’ literary reading as superior to other forms of attention and more theorizing of the precise forms of attention that books do activate. This book’s contribution to that exploration has been to identify inward attention as an aesthetic feature in contemporary fiction which encourages readers to recognize the texture of their own reading: a dynamic texture of disciplined focus, pleasurable flow, selfconscious mindfulness, split attention and distraction, and, as this chapter will identify, absorption.

‘A susceptibility to absorption and enchantment’ If contemporary authors, for the most part, refuse to allow themselves to be models of disciplined concentration then, instead, they must claim a space among that anxious ‘we’ who wonder what ‘we’ are doing to our brains, why ‘we’ are so distracted, why ‘we’ don’t read any more. While, as the previous chapter mentioned, Henry James’s ideal for the author might have been a person ‘on whom nothing is lost’, the authors considered in this book tend to refuse this role. Ben Lerner comments directly on James’s dictum, suggesting that an attention that notices everything ultimately involves a distracted distancing from experience: The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable. (‘Ben Lerner’)

Reminding yourself to pay attention is a distraction, and the ideal of the author’s receptive attention is undermined by the parallel imperative to depresentify experience by processing it into narrative. As Lerner writes, ‘I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling’ (‘Ben Lerner’).2 Lerner gives an account of the absolute end point of the novelist as receptive attender in his review of Knausgaard’s memoirs, in which he notes

138

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Knausgaard’s unrelenting and untextured attention, that refuses to pick out some details as more important than others; the ‘strange evenness’ of Knausgaard’s attention is something Lerner finds similar to a childish ‘susceptibility to absorption and enchantment’ (‘Each Cornflake’ 21). Where Zadie Smith in ‘Man vs Corpse’ finds Knausgaard’s writing as addictive as crack (and, in the same essay, implies that it is also as addictive as her new iPhone), Lerner suggests that it is that same compellingly receptive but undiscriminating attention that also dissolves literary form. By being a person on whom nothing is lost, but then refusing to impose a form or emphasis on any of the elements of experience, Knausgaard runs James’s model of authorial attention to its bitter end and produces a ‘farewell to literature’ because of his work’s refusal to participate in the shaping, selecting, and emphasizing work of form (22). It is all very well being a person on whom nothing is lost – open to immersion, enchantment and absorption – but literary writing requires form, which is an art of losing. There are two noteworthy moves that Lerner makes that resonate in the other works of fiction considered in this book. One is to reject the position of authoras-attender, the person ‘on whom nothing is lost’. The second is to emphasize those aspects of fiction which require something other of the writer than an impressionable subjectivity which can absorb the world’s phenomena. The interplay between absorbed and undiscriminating attention and the selection involved in the formal choices of literary writing have appeared as metaphors of selective attention in many examples in this book: in Wallace’s work, we saw the obliviousness of childish daydreaming weighed against the responsible information triage of the ‘work of choosing’; in McCarthy’s novels, the image of the absorbent sponge is set alongside the filtering appendix or waste treatment plant; in Zadie Smith’s work, the radical expansiveness of the ethical response to the other’s appeal invites comparison with the measured responses of the ‘limited circle’ of formal purity and of bounded care and responsibility. Conversely, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both uses its form to refuse to choose, to seek to ‘be both’ and to celebrate distraction’s ‘and’ rather than attentiveness’s selective ‘or’. What, then, of readers? Is all that we can say of the books that we read that they mould or cajole our concentration into something more profitable or personally fulfilling than it was before? And what would that newly improved concentration like? Would it produce absorbed readers, carried away with rapt attention? Or discerning readers with a more focused and sharp-eyed perception of what to mark and what to disregard? I  have been arguing that contemporary fiction seeks to emphasize those aspects of literature which do not work to cultivate or discipline attention, as much as those which do. These works

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

139

apprehend attention as a sponge as well as a filter. Inward attention, by which readers attend to their own attentiveness, therefore becomes a way for readers to note how fiction relies on fluctuating dynamics of attention rather than a singlenote deep, close, durational focus. Inward attention – that attention that turns inward, glancingly and obliquely, when deflected from an object – seems, on the face of it, impossibly at odds with the forms of rapt attention that Lerner identifies with childish ‘susceptibility to absorption and enchantment’ and other readers have found transmitted to their own reading of Knausgaard’s work. At the same time, the classic mode of close or critical reading which focuses acutely on the text has, historically, never allowed much room for a reader’s responses – particularly those affective responses that might register absorption, curiosity, boredom, distraction or mind-wandering. As a first move towards an answer to some of the questions about reading that were raised in the introduction to this book, this chapter will seek to identify some of the implications of that absorbed and enchanted attention, in dialogue with Ben Lerner’s work. I  began this book by laying out some of the ways in which contemporary debates about reading activate a range of different forms of attention, from the narrow focus of close reading to the vigilance of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of paranoid reading and, in contrast, the care and affection demonstrated by reparative reading. This chapter considers Rita Felski’s desire for ‘a lexicon more attuned to the affective and absorbing aspects of reading’ (Uses of Literature 62) by identifying how Ben Lerner’s work invites readers to witness absorption and, tentatively, feel it for themselves. Lerner’s work walks readers through the quandary of how to respond to an art object whose claims we recognize to be affective, overwhelming, or somehow beyond the bounds of critical discourse, while at the same time acknowledging a prevailing cultural norm which responds to art only through the discourse of critique. The opening scene of Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, takes place in the Prado and offers a dramatic set piece which stages an aesthetic encounter with responses that fall between the absorbed and the critically distant. The main character, Adam, arrives at the Prado to take up his customary position in front of van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross and, uncannily, finds another man in his place, seemingly enthralled by a profound aesthetic experience. In a mode of scepticism that will become familiar in his later attitudes to genuinely affecting aesthetic experiences, Adam recounts the man’s ‘rapture, if that’s what it was’ (10) in front of the painting. After the man moves on to Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and ‘totally los[es] his shit’ (9), he is trailed around the museum by the guards, followed by Adam himself.

140

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Adam eventually finds something genuinely profound in the encounter by imagining the crying museum patron to be a performance artist. The man’s tears can’t have been real, Adam reasons, he can only be an artist, performing to reveal the paradoxes of a museum as a place where paintings must be both sedately preserved and acknowledged as items of devastating emotional power. While Adam has this revelation, his fellow museum-goers notice nothing; they are ‘deep in their audio tours and oblivious to the scene unfolding’ in the room (9) as ‘this man, this great artist’ (10) stages his performance. Readers are therefore invited to witness a tableau of attention around the art work: first the stranger (rapt, apparently in transports of emotion); then Adam (who usually only stands before the painting waiting for his caffeine and pills to kick in); the gallery’s inattentive attendants who are only ‘startled . . . into alertness’ (9)  by the man’s sobbing; the other, oblivious visitors; and then ourselves, the readers, attending to the whole scene only through Adam’s narration. Adam’s experience of seeing the man, ‘as if beholding myself beholding the painting’ (8) lays out the pantomime of identification that the reader might follow to experience something like the same effect. Rebecca Walkowitz observes of this opening scene that ‘readers are asked to think of themselves as the objects of the novel’s attention, or at least as objects of Adam’s attention’ (Born Translated 42), as they look at an in-text reproduction of a detail from the van der Weyden painting named in the novel. Even if we do not necessarily think of ourselves as objects of Adam’s attention, we are certainly invited to turn our own attention to how we respond to this image  – are we absorbed and tearful like the man in the novel, or are we distant and cynical like Adam? At the same time, the potential recursivity of this moment is also quite neatly short-circuited by the reproduced image itself. The image is a detail of Joseph of Arimathea’s transfixed, weeping face as he lowers Christ’s body from the cross, so we have zoomed in, more attentively, on a particular part of the canvas. The weeping face implies an initial comparison with the face of the man in the gallery who, in front of the painting, ‘broke suddenly into tears’ (8) but the first-person caption on the image (‘I thought of the great artist for a while’ [11]) implies some identification between Adam and the face in the picture: he is the one doing the thinking and, by implication, the crying. The reproduced image comes at the end of the passage, immediately after Adam has finally referred to the crying man as ‘this great artist’ (10). The art that this man has created has been a vector by which Adam has unearthed some understanding of how aesthetic attention is orchestrated, through the curated space of the museum and then, by implication, in other forms and media too. The novel, as a fiction

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

141

of attention, frames and directs the reader’s attention to an aesthetic experience, through an aesthetic experience which flickers in and out of view:  we look at the detail of the painting, but are also encouraged to attend to Adam’s attention, the man’s attention, our own attention. And what we discover is a dynamic between critical, cynical distance and affective response. The story is funny, but the painting (even in a black and white reproduction) is still beautiful and a bit moving. The thing that inward attention does, and which Lerner’s fiction encourages in the reader, is a way of registering, first, absorption or distraction or curiosity or other affective responses, but at the same time a self-conscious awareness, however waveringly or obliquely, of that affective response. Lerner’s work leaves open a space for readers to note – by way of inward attention – their own affective or absorbed responses. Of course, in the case of the latter, this returns us to Lerner’s own problem of self-consciousness when he responded to James’s instruction to be a person ‘on whom nothing is lost’. Are our affective responses undermined if we are self-consciously attentive to them? I want to resist the pull of the critical that would drag this self-conscious awareness towards metafiction, particularly the mode of understanding metafiction that understands it to be a ‘border discourse’ between the literary and critical, or a kind of writing that anticipates its own critical reading (Currie, Metafiction 2). As Michael Warner suggests, the prevailing consensus about ‘critical reading’ sucks everything into its own orbit, reframing modes of uncritical reading  – ‘identification, self-forgetfulness, reverie, sentimentality, enthusiasm, literalism, aversion, distraction’ – as interrogative, subversive and, ultimately, critical (‘Uncritical Reading’ 15). To subsume readers’ awareness of their own attentive processes into metafiction would be to discount those aspects which activate these aspects of uncritical reading:  inward attention is what lets me recognize those times when I have forgotten myself to reading, and to recognize when I have been distracted or daydreaming. Inward attention is different from metafiction because, rather than breaking the frame of the literary object’s potential for absorption or denying reading’s affective power, those things remain undamaged. Unlike the famous early passage of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, with which I opened this book, the fictions of attention I have been reading do not enact a turn to the reader’s attention as a way of rupturing the textual surface. Instead, they hold the bubble of attention intact through a refractive play of attention from characters, narrators and readers. What the activation of inward attention is not, however, is a drastic recoil from metafiction into complete self-forgetting absorption. This is a trajectory

142

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

that some have outlined for contemporary culture, particularly as a result of interaction with digital media. Alan Kirby, in his attempts to identify a replacement for postmodernism, first in ‘pseudo-modernism’ and then in ‘digimodernism’ has theorized outwards from some supposedly distinctly contemporary styles of attention towards a theory of culture. In his early essay on pseudo-modernism Kirby describes the interaction with digital technology as promoting ‘an emotional state, radically superseding the hyperconsciousness of irony’ which he identifies instead with the trance: ‘the state of being swallowed up by your activity’ (‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’ 59). Moreover, Kirby specifically goes on to associate this trance state with a form of pleasurable hyperfocus: In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded. (59)

Setting aside the problematic illness-as-metaphor usage of ‘autism’ alongside narcissism and neurosis, Kirby’s interpretation is pessimistic, but not all that different from Walter Benjamin’s concern about cinema audiences in the early twentieth century and their ‘reception in a state of distraction’ or Marshall McLuhan’s emphasis on the inevitable changes that result from new media technologies. It is notable that Kirby sees this focused trance as being the verso of interactivity; it is only because ‘you’ are clicking and punching keys that ‘you’ are so absorbed. He writes elsewhere that ‘much digimodernist text may actually induce a sense of monotony’ so that readers are riveted by soothing boredom rather than avid interest (Digimodernism 148). There is a meditative, even mindful, pleasure in this focus only on the proxies of attentiveness (choosing, clicking, looking) and Kirby’s observations about how different this soothing hyperfocus is from the hyperconsciousness of irony seem to register some important distinctions between postmodernism and what has come after it. Nevertheless, this still seems to me to be less than half of the story for the fictions of inward attention considered in this book. To explain this in a different way, I  will return to Felski’s second aesthetic category in Uses of Literature: the category of enchantment, which involves being intensely absorbed and which is associated with the appreciation of beauty. As Felski describes it, enchantment activates two varieties of attention: ‘One form of attention is micro, paying fastidious attention to the luminous aesthetic detail;

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

143

the other is macro, involving an all-embracing sense of being swept up into another world’ (53–4). Attention is therefore deeply implicated in the aesthetic appreciation of beauty in this modern form of enchantment. Enchantment involves ‘trance states’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘possession’ and ‘rapture’, Felski suggests, all of which are associated with the language of supernatural influence over the subject. On this language, she quotes from Edgar Morin on magic and the culture of modernity: ‘what comes back once again . . . is the word magic, surrounded by a cortege of bubble words – marvellous, unreal, and so on – that burst and evaporate as soon as we try to handle them . . . They are passwords for what cannot be articulated’ (qtd in Felski 69). Like magic or enchantment, attention is a bubble word that disappears when you try to handle it. It is a blind spot that never allows you to focus on it directly, it is something best caught out of the corner of your eye. This bubble, which bursts or evaporates on handling, is also reminiscent of the image from John Ashbery’s ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ with which this book began. Depicting the end of self-forgetting, enchanted absorption, Ashbery writes, ‘The balloon pops’ and attention turns ‘dully away’ (190). Attention pops when self-consciousness returns and when self-conscious attention is turned upon it. Felski goes on to argue that enchantment is not only absorbed and self-forgetting attention but, instead, this form of immersion requires a ‘mental balancing act’, a kind of double vision, ‘a state of double consciousness’ (74)  – even a new variety of negative capability  – in the way that it demands both absorption and arm’s length appreciation. Rather than a developmental narrative that takes us from childishly unthinking and immature absorption to sophisticated and adult analysis, Felski argues for a shifting and dynamic pattern of both analysis and absorption in imagining the modern experience of enchantment. As she goes on to explain, ‘Modern enchantments are those in which we are immersed but not submerged, bewitched but not beguiled, suspensions of disbelief that do not lose sight of the fictiveness of those fictions that enthrall us’ (75). The enchantment stays intact, even while we are alive to our own affective responses: ‘even as we are enchanted we remain aware of our condition of enchantment, without such knowledge diminishing or diluting the intensity of our involvement’ (74). By encouraging readers to attend specifically to their own attentiveness, the fiction considered in this book encourages readers to respond in this mode of ‘modern enchantment’. Rather than a relentless process of unveiling or disenchantment that we might find in postmodern metafiction, the inward attention of contemporary writing constructs experiences in which we are ‘immersed but not submerged’, with our awareness still keeping the affective experience itself intact.

144

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

‘This attention to the quality of my own attention’ As both a poet and a writer of fiction, Ben Lerner’s work delineates with particular care the attention activated by different forms, genres, and media, and his work is a useful closing case study for considering the ways in which the texts I have been calling ‘fictions of attention’ might map out a territory either distinct from or overlapping with poetry, painting or film. This part of the argument picks up some of the ideas explored in Chapter 3, which examined how a specifically narrative temporality might be inflected by attention’s association with presence. While Lerner’s writing intersects with the work of others considered in this book in its interest in modes of embedding and enacting processes of attention in fiction, his broader concern with the visual arts and with poetry make his work distinctive. His explorations of the reading processes involved in prose and poetry are notably intricate and speculative, and suggest some important clarifications in how we might think about attention and reading in poetry and in prose. Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station takes its ironically autobiographical American narrator, Adam Gordon, to Madrid in 2004 at the time of the train station bombing. Like Lerner himself, Gordon is a young poet who has been awarded a fellowship on the basis of his early promise. Taken at face value, this looks very much like a metafictional setup that will continue to reveal the novel’s artificiality through a process of puncturing disenchantment. In the course of the novel, Adam’s experiences of aesthetic attention  – at the Prado, at poetry readings, listening to music, in his apartment with a book  – are depicted in ways that invite readers to consider the texture of his attention. Adam’s attention tends towards those distanced, critical and cynical forms of irony and frugal attention that Wallace identified with the adolescent. The novel also rehearses a debate about the nature of responses to artworks, the attention they require, and the consequences of distraction and detachment that appears to be thrown into sharp relief by the significant event of the train bombings.3 Leaving the Atocha Station, then, finds Adam confronted with the incursion of the real in the form of political, historical violence. Some readers have found that Lerner’s work lends itself to paradigms that oppose and then complicate ideas about the real and it certainly seems to be the case that the language of fraudulence and inauthenticity haunts the way that Adam represents aesthetic experience in the book.4 Lerner uses the language of absorption most often in the novel to indicate those responses to art that Adam assumes are essentially phoney. He is aloof

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

145

and inadequate in his own responses, regularly struggling to compose facial responses that are appropriately attentive to performances of live music and mediocre poetry (entertainingly awkward for a celebrated young poet in a new city). Listening to live music for, instance, he feels deep suspicion of the ‘faces that displayed an absorption I refused to believe was felt’ (27); he is only able to bear the disgust of hearing a clichéd poem by looking at the audience at the reading and imagining that ‘people felt the pressure to perform absorption’ in spite of their awareness of the hackneyed form and medium (38). Other people’s responses are too whole-heartedly absorbed, rapt, and attentive and Adam can only respond to them as performances of attention, rather than with absorbed attentiveness of his own. The novel’s approach to art is therefore framed through a dynamic between absorption and a slightly sneering, but frustrated, critical distance. From this description, Adam might sound a lot like one of David Foster Wallace’s characters – Neal of ‘Good Old Neon’, maybe, or Infinite Jest’s Hal – or any number of other paralysingly self-absorbed characters (from Hamlet to Prufrock) whose self-conscious awkwardness prevents them from entering into the fullness of human experience. Lerner takes a different route out of this self-absorbed dead end, though, and one which does not rely on Adam taking an entirely self-forgetting plunge into aesthetic experience, or into political engagement, ethical action, or erotic relationships with other people, or any other demands from the real. Instead, his work restages a series of aesthetic encounters and tries to pick out a path somewhere between absorption and self-absorption, in ways which echo Felski’s description of readers who are ‘immersed but not submerged, bewitched but not beguiled’ (75). The most explicit articulation of this problem with absorption appears in the novel in the context of Adam’s struggles with Spanish.5 The experience of reading in a foreign language, when a sentence remains ‘so many particles, never a wave’ (19), is the novel’s first expression of a variety of attention that is much more dramatically theorized by Adam’s reading of poetry. Early in the novel, his failure to understand Spanish leaves his reading particulate and dispersed, denying him access to prose’s ‘sheer directionality’, its ability to capture ‘the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine’ (19).6 The ‘white machine’ of churning onward time is most associated, in this novel, with being absorbed by prose. In contrast, Adam finds that poetry tends to rebuff his attentive readings: Poetry actively repelled my attention, it was opaque and thingly and refused to absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between the words as you

146

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

tried to link them up; and yet by refusing to absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy. (20)

Poetry, in its ‘opaque and thingly’ forms, remains too much as words on a page rather than as meaning or feeling. Later in the novel, Adam comes back to ‘life’s white machine’ and the kinds of writing that manage to absorb his attention, through his reading of John Ashbery’s poetry, the poet whom Lerner has called ‘one of the greatest artists of “life’s white machine” ’ (‘An Interview with Ben Lerner’). In this later episode, ‘the strange experience of reading’, when form and meaning intersect, aligns the writing on the page and Adam’s reading experience, and this only occurs for Adam in his readings of Ashbery (90). He goes beyond the repelled attention of most of his poetic reading, and is able to break through into something else: It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. (91)

Ashbery’s work turns reading in on itself so that the poem no longer refers to something  – ‘his poems refer to how their reference evanesces’, Adam thinks (91)  – but, instead, reflect back reading’s attention to the reader. The reader, in this action and its ‘strange kind of presence’, is the inverse of the notreally-present, distracted author that Lerner imagines as the person on whom ‘experience is lost’ where, more specifically, what’s lost is ‘some kind of presence’ (‘Ben Lerner’). While reference ‘evanesces’, what remains is the reader’s inward attention, the contemplation of their own concentration. Later on in the novel, Adam finds himself failing to listen to an emotional story, told by Isobel, one of the women he has been pursuing in Spain; his Spanish comprehension has improved and he is congratulating himself on understanding more, but finds that ‘this attention to the quality of my own attention crowded out Isobel’s meaning’, and consequently he becomes lost in ‘self-absorption’ (96). Applied to this intimate story of the loss of Isobel’s brother, Adam’s attention to attention can only fall short; self-absorption is the outcome of attending to attention alone in a context outside the aesthetic. The poem that opaquely repels attention, the prose that absorbs it, the self-absorbed attention only to one’s own attention that ‘crowds out’ meaning: somewhere among these examples is where we might try to locate what is distinctive about Adam’s reading of Ashbery and which allows for a reading that is both absorbed and analytical. Ashbery’s

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

147

poetry works by ‘reflecting your reading’, Adam thinks, but without tipping into ‘self-absorption’. Adam’s observations in the passage about the Ashbery poem come almost directly from Lerner’s own essay on Ashbery from 2010, the year before the novel’s publication.7 In his essay, Lerner describes how Ashbery’s most successful work ‘makes us read about our reading in real time’ allowing us to ‘attend to our attention’ (‘The Future Continuous’ 206). Reading Ashbery’s ‘Clepsydra’, Adam imagines the ‘virtual possibilities of poetry’ intact behind the reading (91). These sections of Leaving the Atocha Station also have affinities with his recent essay, The Hatred of Poetry (2016), in which, as in the passage on Ashbery, he describes poetry as always gesturing towards an impossible, virtual poem, somewhere behind or beyond the reading surface. In an arresting reversal of some of the conventions of critical reading, Lerner complains that, too often, some responses to poetry too quickly reach for an affective register. He complains, for instance, about descriptions of Keats’ poetry as inducing a ‘trance’ in the reader: ‘for all my admiration for Keats, I can’t experience the trance these critics are talking about (and also have some trouble believing they’ve experienced it, since I’ve never seen any critic in a trancelike state)’ (45). However, what Keats’ poem can do, Lerner suggests, is imagine entrancement through moments of ekphrastic description. When Adam describes his feeling that poems hold out ‘the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy’, he is offering the outlines of the idea of the virtual poem which encourages the reader to imagine this absorbed or entranced attention.8 Aesthetic attention that turns back and forth between the art object and its effects recurs across Lerner’s work, mostly through carefully staged encounters with works of art: the scene in the Prado, Adam’s minute recording of the experience of reading Ashbery, the visit to see Marclay’s The Clock in 10:04. Reflecting upon this aspect of his work, Lerner has explained that he is interested in how he can ‘embed artworks’ in his fiction ‘in order to test how one’s response is altered’ (‘An Interview with Ben Lerner’, Contemporary Literature 228). In this interview and elsewhere Lerner has talked of his role as being ‘curatorial’, bringing together pieces in the space of his fiction (which could include bits of poetry by himself and others, reproductions of paintings, descriptions of film and conceptual work, sections of his critical writing, and so on) in order to ‘stage encounters’ with them in his novels (‘Time Is a Flat Circle’). Below the surface of this idea is the etymology of curation as care, and the role of the curator as overseer or attendant, watching over the collection as well as shaping it as a series of encounters for the attention of its visitors.

148

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

In an essay in Frieze, Lerner elaborates on the idea of fiction as a location for stagings of aesthetic experience itself, by identifying the ‘absorptiveness and virtuality of the novel’ as the features that make it an appropriate ‘testing ground for aesthetic experiment and response’ (‘The Actual World’). Virtuality is the term that presides over The Hatred of Poetry (and which Lerner credits to Allen Grossman’s The Long Schoolroom), but ‘absorptiveness’ seems a concept that is harder to pin down. In the passage from Leaving the Atocha Station quoted above, we see Adam reflecting on the ways in which poetry – in contrast with prose fiction – refuses to absorb him, but also holds out the virtual possibility of a ‘higher form of absorption’. The advantage of long prose fiction in the form of the novel is, for Lerner, ‘absorptiveness’, which I  take to mean something close to Felski’s enchantment, particularly in its capacity for invoking two forms of attention: the micro attention of the ‘the luminous aesthetic detail’ and the macro attention of ‘an all-embracing sense of being swept up into another world’ (75). The novel, then, is Lerner’s necessary container for these framed aesthetic experiences because it has the potential to absorb us so absolutely, to wash us along by replicating the wave of ‘life’s white machine’ but also, by its virtuality, to keep us as a distance and deflect back some of our attention. In this way, it requires a double motion of attention, both into the text and back to the reader. Lerner’s work registers a variety of glancing, deflective semi-attentions marked in Leaving the Atocha Station by a sidelong glance which registers the art object itself but also the beholder’s inward awareness of their own attention and of others’ processes of beholding, as in the moment at the beginning of the novel when Adam stands in the Prado looking at the paintings ‘while looking sidelong’ at the other man in the room (10). It is this posture of sidelong glancing that I want to take forward as a way of understanding Lerner’s development of these ideas about aesthetic attention in 10:04.

The parallel gaze The title of ‘published author’ that Ben holds so uncomfortably in 10:04 is something that he has in common with Adam, and the two books share a set of tropes and concerns that conform to the genre that Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan have identified as that of the ‘novel of commission’. The novel of commission emphasizes the writing process (of a ‘commissioned’ novel) through engagement with the social, economic and institutional forces that shape the novel’s production. Ben, whose concerns are shaped by the advance he is given

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

149

for his second novel, seems to be an older version of Adam, whose experience of travelling to Spain on a poetry fellowship is shaped by the apparent excess or redundancy of his own art form.9 Both characters are therefore notable for their relationship with institutions of literary production. These features of 10:04 that place it within Buurma and Heffernan’s category of the novel of commission are read by both Ben de Bruyn and Pieter Vermeulen as emblematizing broader and ambivalent interests in futurity.10 Where a writer with an advance must look to the future to complete the contracted book, 10:04 as a whole takes up a sometimes silly and sometimes serious attitude towards the future (represented by the novel’s two attending angels:  Marty McFly and Walter Benjamin’s angel of history). With this in mind, we should read the narrator’s persistent distraction through the lens of the absent-mindedness that stands in opposition to the present – as Chapter 3’s discussion of Joshua Cohen’s work explored – or the sorts of distraction that are a refusal of future-oriented productivity (an idea that 10:04 takes to mean both reproductive fertility and the work of artistic production), as examined through Ali Smith’s work in Chapter 4. The cultivation of Roberto’s concentration is Ben’s first expression of quasi-paternal in a novel that comes to be about fatherhood – poetic, genetic, psychic – and an altered relationship with the future. The book’s interest in the future is a meditation on Ben’s hesitation on the threshold of what is to come and his turn away from that future. The reason, it turns out, that Ben has his back to the future (like Marty McFly, like the angel of history) is because he is distracted. As this book has already established, the narrative of distraction-crisis has been framed as a breakdown between the generations and, on the face of it, Lerner’s 10:04 presents an episode of tutoring in concentration that has affinities with the account of caring, intergenerational attention offered as a corrective to the maladies of distraction in Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. For Steigler, the attention bestowed on young people (by their parents, and then by society as a whole) is what instructs them into mature attention; something that we, as a modern society, have failed to do. ‘What does it mean to play with one’s daughter or grandson?’ Stiegler asks, ‘It means to laugh and to ‘forget about time’ with them  – to give them one’s time, and to give it not merely to their brains but to the nascent formation of their attention by concentrating one’s adult attention on their juvenility  – as imagination’ (14). Ben and Roberto’s encounter departs from this perspective in two ways. The first is to do with time: where Stiegler’s description places forgetting time at the heart of its flowinflected attention, Ben’s experience of his time with Roberto seems marked by proliferating anachronisms that are far more unsettling than pleasurable: their

150

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

diorama is constructed, ‘no doubt anachronistically’, because they’ve neglected to check the dinosaurs’ correct eras; they visit the Natural History Museum, where the exhibits are ‘at once dated and futuristic’ (152); the book they eventually write together about the history of brontosaurus (entitled ‘To the Future’ [225]) culminates in the observation that ‘science is always on the move with its face to the future’ (229) – unlike Ben’s stance, by implication, with his back to the future. Rather than forgetting about time, Ben’s hours with Roberto ultimately seem to reinforce his preoccupation with worries for the future, from his own health to the state of the planet. The second way in which 10:04 could be said to challenge Stiegler’s scene of intergenerational attention appears because Ben’s relationship with Roberto is emphatically not parental, and is in fact part of Ben’s eventual commitment to overcoming solipsistic ‘caring for your own genetic material’ (98). Some more evidence for this ‘kin not kids’ reading of the novel comes about through the recurrence of the word ‘coconstruct’ at two key moments in the text. Ben introduces his and Roberto’s activity of ‘coconstructing a shoebox diorama’ at the beginning of the novel (11) and the word appears again in his articulation of a set of ideas about responsibility and political transformation, after letting an Occupy protestor use his bathroom. Ben gives himself an encouraging talk about love for his fellow humans: What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and coconstruct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit. (47)

Coconstructing a brontosaurus diorama or a new social order requires this action occurring ‘horizontally’, ‘in the present’, rather than forward – by offspring or by profit – into the future. Letting love ‘branch out horizontally’ to those who share this moment with you takes in not just Roberto and the Occupy protestor, but is also a feature of Ben’s relationship with his best friend Alex, in which their closest moments take place in a parallel stance, their gazes ‘straight ahead’ (8). They look together at Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc and Alex asks Ben to donate sperm so she can have a child; later, they sit in Marclay’s The Clock, where Ben looks over to see that Alex has fallen asleep. Their orientation – in parallel, side by side – indexes a specific form of attention; they have a relationship that is at its most intimate when it’s conducted out of the corner of the eye. Looking forward, but picking up some secondary effect through a sideways glance, this is a dramatization of how attention to the future can ‘branch out horizontally’

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

151

instead. It’s a way of redeeming time from a forward-oriented productivity and, in ways that invite parallels with Ali Smith’s queer commitment to the ‘both’ of background and foreground (as discussed in Chapter  4), a way of preferring split attention over focus. Furthermore, this is a position that is not specific to Ben and Alex; this chapter has already established that it is the attitude that’s most characteristic of Adam’s early stance in Leaving the Atocha Station when he spends his time in the opening scene at the Prado pretending to look at the paintings, ‘while looking sidelong’ at the other man (9). Lerner has also considered other postures associated with attention  – specifically, in this case, related to reading  – as summarized in the quotation from Walter Benjamin’s ‘One Way Street’, which precedes Angle of Yaw: Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. (‘One Way Street’ 456)

Where 10:04’s postures tend to operate with reference to the coronal plane (placing most importance on the awareness of front vs back), Benjamin’s observation is more concerned with the transverse plane, which describes our sensations of up and down (or head and feet).11 Parts of Angle of Yaw do toy with giving credence to Benjamin’s ideas about the power of the ‘dictatorial perpendicular’, or the dangers of the vertical plane. For instance, one of the pieces in ‘Angle of Yaw’ suggests that text raised vertically fails to construct ‘the humility a common life requires’, while text on a flat surface coaxes readers into gestures of shame and modesty, with a bowed head (39). The alternative, in both ‘Angle of Yaw’ and 10:04, is narcissism or self-love; a failure that manifests itself as self-absorption. To structure a ‘common life’ or, as 10:04 would have it, ‘coconstruct a world’, begins with noticing one’s own posture. This emphasis on posture and position explains why the octopus – a creature that lacks proprioception and is therefore unable to register its own body’s orientation  – recurs as such an important a symbolic presence in 10:04.12 The octopus can move and orient itself, but it’s not aware of where its body is. What is lacking is the self-reflexive consciousness of the body, not the ability to take up a posture at all. Through the use of these

152

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

metaphors, Lerner reasserts the embodied physicality of his readers’ reading, and therefore of their attention. Suddenly, and very weirdly, some of that self-forgetting attention that had been absorbed by reading is deflected back, partially, onto the body itself. In a significant interview that Lerner gave to Wave Composition in 2011, at the time of the publication of Leaving the Atocha Station, he refers to Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality, in which Fried which interprets eighteenthcentury paintings that depict subjects absorbed in activity and suggests that the alternative to absorption is theatricality, in which scenes in a painting are staged with an apparently self-conscious awareness that they will be observed. Fried argues that the depictions of absorption in eighteenth-century French paintings are evidence of an attempt to ‘find a way to neutralize or negate the beholder’s presence’ (108). In Lerner’s work, as I have been arguing, his characters’ nonabsorption activates the beholder and the processes of beholding, without rupturing or puncturing our own absorption. As Lerner explains it, the paintings of absorption Fried describes are ‘defeating their objecthood’ by ‘defeating theatricality’ (‘An Interview with Ben Lerner’). The novel needs, therefore, to retain its capacity for ‘absorptiveness and virtuality’, as Lerner puts it in the Frieze interview, but also refuses to dissolve the novel’s objecthood by staging unproblematic absorption. Rather than Fried’s theatricality, the term that we might take from Lerner as an alternative to absorption – and an addition to virtuality – is ‘deflection’. In Lerner’s third book of poetry, Mean Free Path (2010), the word appears as a way of expressing the shortcomings of writing, expressing a desire for an ‘easier way’ to achieve the poem’s work, ‘without writing, without echoes / Arising from focusing surfaces’ (40). These echoes, offering the ‘hope of deflecting / In the hope of hearing the deflection of music / As music’ (40), present the difficulties of writing as the orchestration of effects or epiphenomena, dependent upon ricocheting deflections. Of course, in a medium that relies on writing as a ‘focusing surface’ this hope is impossible, but it expresses the same ‘hatred of poetry’ in favour of the imagined virtual poem that Lerner develops elsewhere. These echoes and deflections are how writing works and, as Lerner’s fiction and poetry show, writing engineers deflections that project the virtual poem, return to the reader, and ‘allow you to attend to your attention’ (Atocha 91). The structure of the poems that make up Mean Free Path are full of deflected, bending or veering trajectories in which the eye moves constantly between and across lines, picking up the path of fragmented phrases across line breaks. Where absorption seems to provoke a static, riveted posture – Rita Felski describes Fried’s states

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

153

of absorption as making viewers ‘transfixed and immobilized by the work and rendered unable to frame, contextualize or judge’ (57) – deflection, in the service of the virtual poem, must look to the side, back and forth, through and beyond. In this way deflected, sidelong attention offers a modification to both transfixed absorption and arms-length critical distance.

‘I would like to draw your attention’ ‘Angle of Yaw’ contains a little piece of dialogue that identifies the elusiveness of what we mean when we talk about attention: I would like to draw your attention. Like a pistol? In the sense of a sketch? Both, she said, emphasising nothing, if not emphasis. (33)

To point your attention at something (like a pistol), to depict your attention (in the sense of a sketch), and to do both of those things with equal emphasis: this is the task of the writer of a fiction of attention. Fictions of attention represent different states and even styles of attentiveness and distraction in their characters – drawn ‘in the sense of a sketch’ – but, because they use language as their medium, fictions of attention also draw readers’ attention ‘like a pistol’. Language points attention on to something beyond itself, indexically, towards something imagined or projected, like Lerner’s concept of the ‘virtual poem’. The problem of emphasis, too, is one that we have seen to be part of contemporary fiction’s concern with attention: what to attend to and therefore to emphasize? Attention’s filtering, choosing and prioritizing aspects are necessarily activated in fiction which, no matter how novels such as How to Be Both test the form’s boundaries, must always unfold one sentence at a time. Language’s capacity to point onwards, its indexicality, also appears as a significant feature in which  – through ekphrastic descriptions of visual artworks – writing asserts its dominance (or so Lerner suggests) over other art forms. In an interview in the New Yorker, he describes how, in the example of famous description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad: The verbal, while pretending to give life to the visual, often transcends it: words can describe a shield we can’t actually make, can’t even effectively paint . . . What the narrator [of Lerner’s story ‘The Polish Rider’] ends up celebrating is the power of literature’s comparative immateriality – how you can describe works that can’t be made or haven’t yet been made, for instance. (‘Ben Lerner on Art, Language and Uber’)

154

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

Immateriality is also the virtue of the virtual poem, to which attention is drawn, like a pistol, pointing at something that can’t be made. Ekphrasis offers a final way of considering those things which narrative fiction can bring, uniquely, to an understanding of attention since, by describing attention to visual art works, writers are implicitly identifying those things which their own art form does differently. The chapters of this book have identified certain experiences that are particular to reading such its often taking place in solitude, in environments not dedicated to maintaining your concentration, in contrast with other aesthetic experiences (such as visiting a gallery or a cinema or a concert hall) in which you share the experience with others and the artwork unfolds whether you pay attention or not. I am thinking particularly of durational art such as Marclay’s Clock, extended performances of Satie’s Vexations, or even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which all make the collection experience of extended time, irritated impatience or waiting – and tested or waning attention – part of their aesthetic purpose. Second, each of the chapters in this book has identified narrative conventions and techniques which are distinctive to short stories and novels and identified their role in shaping readers’ attention:  in Wallace’s fiction, the key narrative feature that I dwelt upon was the depiction of other minds, as a counter to Ryle’s assertions about the ‘unwitnessable’ quality of attention; in the chapter on Cohen’s work, temporality came to the fore, and allowed for an exploration of the notion of presence and the present in narrative; Chapter 4’s discussion of Ali Smith also reflected upon narrative temporality and the limitations of storytelling which must unfold one event after another in time, rather than the spatial arrangement of the visual arts that allows for multiple objects to be presented to the attention at once; my interest in McCarthy’s work included the ways in which attention’s disruptive potential reveals ruptures in the subject and in conventional notions of fictional character; the consequences of Zadie Smith’s engagement with attention could also be said to surface in a suspicion of character but, more strongly, in questioning of the style of omniscient narration – a trajectory which has, in Swing Time, emerged as her first venture into writing a first-person novel. On the evidence of this list, it is clear that the forms and conventions peculiar to narrative fiction allow writers to delve into attention in from a perspective that no other art form can access in quite the same way. In many of these fictions, which seem so alert to the potential of their own literary techniques for charting attention’s detail, there also runs a healthy interest in the techniques of representation that belong to other art forms. Ekphrasis is, therefore, also a recurring theme in the work of the writers that this book has considered. Wallace’s Infinite Jest is almost a parable of ekphrastic potential, in fact,

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

155

with the whole novel circulating around the virtual, deflected description of the Entertainment, which is so absorbing that it cannot be viewed directly.13 Cohen’s Four New Messages closes with a story, ‘Sent’, that starts as a long description of the carving of a wooden headboard (‘Better to just show the bed!’ [133]) and becomes a description of a porn clip. Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, in which the main character wonders whether ‘every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at’ (342/156) is, of course, organized by acts of attention to visual artworks described in the text, including another example of ekphrastic description of pornography (although, of course, with a very different tone from Cohen’s). Remainder, on the other hand, began life as an idea for an art installation and then became a novel instead when McCarthy realized he needed to depict the life around the enactment as well as the enactment itself.14 Preceded by On Beauty, one of the most heavily ekphrastic novels of the twenty-first century so far, it is perhaps not surprising that Zadie Smith’s subsequent work was less interested in aesthetic attention. On Beauty is almost a taxonomy of absorbed and affective responses to works of art, presented alongside distancing and critical responses. This opposition is enacted as brilliant social comedy in the scene in Howard Belsey’s art history seminar, depicted through the eyes of one of the students who has found herself profoundly moved by Rembrandt’s work, only to attend class and find the whole seminar conducted in posturing, combative theory-speak (250–5). Why then, should ekphrasis be such a common feature in the work of these writers? One explanation could be that ekphrasis is also associated with properties of absorbed enchantment. In his study of the role of visual artworks in modern fiction, Allan Hepburn identifies ‘enchantment’ as a key feature of visual artworks that writers have claimed for their own by describing art in their fiction. Enchantment takes in not just beauty but ‘the aesthetics of detail, ornament, fragility and ugliness manifest in material objects’ (15). Moreover, Hepburn goes on to argue that ‘enchanted objects appeal to those who are capable of acts of attention’ (15), arguing particularly for detail as a property which arrests attention outside of temporal ordering.15 This sense of enchantment seems, then, to be associated with rapt attention – that spell-binding and enthralling interest that grips an audience and which Rita Felski associates with complete absorption. However, what is notable about many of the textual examples I have considered, is that their viewers are often distracted or inattentive, looking elsewhere, rather than arrested with rapt attention. An alternative purpose identified for ekphrasis is that it offers a guide or hermeneutic method, in miniature, of the literary text itself. This certainly seems

156

Contemporary Fictions of Attention

to be one purpose for the gallery scenes in Lerner’s work: a way of staging forms of attention that readers should emulate in their own attention to the framing text. The same could also be said of the second-screen, time-shift, photo-bomb and fresco elements of How to Be Both which, in Chapter 4, I argued reproduce precisely the form of the whole novel. The methods of interpretation required for a narrative work do, of course, also differ from those required by a painting. A.  S. Byatt, in her short story ‘Crocodile Tears’ (1999), asks a key question about attention, the visual arts and narrative that emphasizes difference over similarity: ‘How do you decide when to stop looking at something? It is not like a book, page after page, page after page, end. You give it your attention or you don’t’ (3). There is, therefore, a duration which is measured out by pagination, a measure of the attention that a text might require and, on the surface at least, an end at which the book may be reasonably closed and the attention terminated. The question of when to stop looking at a book can be more easily accounted for than the question of when to stop looking at a painting. By contrast, then, a painting is an aesthetic experience that is open-ended, and does not unfold in the temporally closed way of a novel or short story. The highly extended, durational and variable attention that reading requires is therefore marked by its distinction from forms of visual art by its involvement with temporality. Ekphrasis therefore imagines other art forms and invites comparisons with their ‘drawing’ of attention, as Lerner puts it. The broader question that ekphrasis opens up is about the discourse of description: not just how to stop looking, but how to stop describing, and indeed how to stop at all. A literary description could, in theory, go on forever, testing the attention of the reader or, indeed, drawing it out, pleasurably, with rich detail and luxurious minutiae. Mieke Bal has observed, ‘Descriptions are endless and they betoken the endlessness of the novel’ (137). Ekphrastic descriptions therefore index those ways in which narrative must draw out and then bring an end to attention. Description asks the reader to emulate its rapt, detailed, and potentially endless hyperfocus while narrative’s events require the sorts of depresentification that find the attention turning to recollections, anticipation, counterfactuals or hypotheticals that will only fall into place through the sense of an ending. There is, therefore, palpable tension between the kinds of temporality that are evoked by description (endless, verging on eternity) and the teleological imperatives (Byatt’s ‘page after page, page after page, end’) of narrative. Moreover, reading ends and texts give a signal for attention to end too. There is a point when you will note a thinning number of pages ahead or sight a

Reading Absorption (Ben Lerner)

157

final paragraph and the balloon of your attention will, rather than pop, perhaps begin to drift or even deflate. As we have seen, the peculiar status of literary narrative as bearer of many of our culture’s beliefs about attention is a recurrent concern in contemporary fiction. Fictions of attention are therefore as much the stories that we tell ourselves about attention as artistic attempts to ‘draw’ attention. These stories extend from the mechanics of our understanding of distraction and split attention, focus and absorbed states of flow, through to a broader set of cultural contexts surrounding modern work, temporality, the ethics of a globalized world, and our everchanging relationship with technology. The general argument of this book has returned repeatedly to the idea that reading is associated in the contemporary consciousness with the control and conditioning of attention. Inasmuch as this book has sought to identify those literary techniques that contemporary writers use to investigate and depict attention, it has also attempted to show the ways that the critical conventions we use to analyse literature are dependent upon a set of assumptions about reading and attention. Hence, contemporary fictions of attention are a provocation to literary studies to reflect on its own status as a discipline of attention. The importance of the study of attention for literary scholars lies in its potential to turn our own attention inward on our disciplinary reading practices; those distinctive techniques which mark out the territory of our subject. Insistently drawing and dispersing attention, literary writing is remarkable for its ability to recognize and respond to the fictions of attention that surround it, while reframing our understanding of the forms of attention we pay both to and during reading.

Notes Chapter 1 1 In the original Italian: ‘Rilassati. Raccogliti. Allontana da te ogni altro pensiero. Lascia che il mondo che ti circonda sfumi nell’indistinto’ (4). The verb ‘raccogliti’ implies gathering together (an equivalent English idiom might be ‘gather your thoughts’, as opposed to the scatter-brained dispersion of distraction) rather than the intensification that is implied by ‘concentrate’, but the narrowing of focus is the same. 2 The original US subtitle of The Shallows was ‘What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains’, but the British title captures its place within the distraction-crisis subgenre more accurately. 3 The titles listed represent a cluster of recent works that straddle the divide between academic and popular non-fiction. A slightly fuller list might also include studies that focus mostly on the history/future of the book as part of an investigation of imperilled reading, such as Andrew Piper’s Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (2012) or Jeff Gomez’s Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age (2009). For a corrective, see Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (2009). 4 ‘The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence,’ Roth laments ‘all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people’s reach anymore’ (‘Philip Roth Reflects on Novel’s Decline and Nemesis’). Reading, Self acknowledges, is still taking place, but is a struggle for those who, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, are still ‘Gutenberg-minded’ and have to shut out the chatter around them (‘The Novel Is Dead’); in another article, six months later, Self suggested that ‘deep reading – the kind of reading that serious books demand’ is on the way to extinction (‘Will Self ’). Foer, on the other hand, worries that people today might actually prefer the ‘diminished substitutes’ of digital connection for the value that books offer, and suggests the twenty-first century is a historical moment in which the novel is uniquely embattled: ‘The novel has never stood in such stark opposition to the culture that surrounds it. A book is the opposite of Facebook: it requires us to be less connected . . . Screens offer a seemingly endless supply of information, but the true value of the page is not what it allows us to know, but how it allows us to be known’. (‘Jonathan Safran Foer’). Tim Parks’s struggle is against ‘the state of constant distraction we live in’ which ‘affects the very special energies required

160

Notes

for tackling a substantial work of fiction’, and which militates against the acts of synthesis, memory and episodic attention required for reading writers such as Faulkner or Dickens (‘Reading’). One of the things that is most interesting about Parks’s argument is that he acknowledges that reading has always been episodic and sporadic (rather than just absorption over a single, long duration), but still believes concentration is in decline. 5 Within these non-fiction books and essays that I am identifying as part of the distraction-crisis genre, there are a few similar structural features which go beyond the trope of soul-searching self-scrutiny about distraction, and which include anecdotes about the author as a young man (he usually is a young man); anecdotes about the author’s children, either learning to read as a pre-schooler (Birkerts’s daughter) or failing to read as a teenager (Ulin’s son). Jeff Gomez, in Print Is Dead, begins by telling the reader that it was only through books that he ‘experienced things that informed how [he] thought and felt about everything: life, love, death, etc.’ (5); Andrew Piper’s Book Was Here reminds the reader that self-reported childhood reading is often slightly exaggerated, but he goes on to frame his own, comparatively sparse, juvenile book consumption as limited by ‘all those electronic gadgets vying for my attention’ (viii). Another notable trope is the look back to the coming of new transport technology and its representation in fiction (in Gomez it’s the automobile; in Birkerts the train) as a way of thinking about reading and social change. This slightly formulaic structure is why I think of these books as forming a genre; they do not just have a topic in common, but a method too. They are orthogonally related to reading memoirs, such as Francis Spufford’s The Child That Books Built (2002), and to books for self-improvement, such as Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (2009). 6 According to an interview with Time, by 2010 Franzen had found some form of solution to his distraction problem, which involved uninstalling Hearts and Solitaire from his computer and gluing up his Ethernet port (‘Jonathan Franzen’). A substantially altered version of ‘Perchance to Dream’ was published as ‘Why Bother?’ in Franzen’s 2002 essay collection, How to Be Alone. The broad interest of all the essays in the collection is, as Franzen explains, the ‘problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone’ (‘A Word about This Book’ 6). 7 Fitzpatrick closes The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (2006) with a look forward to the coming generation of writers after DeLillo and Pynchon, whose work will be saturated in the influence of television. Drawing conclusions from David Foster Wallace’s ‘E Unibus Pluram’, she observes that the danger for the next generation of writers is ‘not that television will make their work obsolete, not that television will dehumanize or distract or deindividualize the potential audience for the novel, making it impossible for

Notes

161

them to read with passion or conviction’, instead, the threat is to the author and his ‘protracted serious attention’ (212). For more on new media and its combined threat and benefit to the contemporary novel, see Daniel Punday’s Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology (2012). Punday fine-tunes the notion of an ‘ecology’ in which the novel can play a responsive role to other media and construct complex inter-relationships with it (such as including multimedia elements within its own form). 8 David Mikics in Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (2013), for instance, worries that readers have substituted ‘flipping’, ‘glancing’ and ‘checking’ for the sustained attention of real reading experiences and aims to offer a toolkit for reading that brings joy and pleasure to its audience, which includes advice about noticing, paying attention and being ‘suspicious’ or vigilant about a text’s meaning. For an alternative (and more critical and reflective) account of slow reading that places it as a counter to modes of thought that instrumentally seek out knowledge, see Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution (2016), which argues that haste and efficiency prevent the forms of waiting, dwelling on and patience that philosophy requires. 9 To be more precise, Dames specifically says that Birkerts and other writers (including Geoffrey Hartman and Alvin Kernan) ascribe the development of this ‘cognitive skill set’ to the Victorian novel. This charge is less accurate for this group (who all also make the same arguments for the modernist novel) but highly accurate for his subsequent critique of Martha Nussbaum’s work on empathy. At the end of the passage on ethical criticism, Dames makes the observation that the ‘equally lengthy and detail-rich eighteenth-century novel is never brought forward in these contemporary ethical philosophies of reading’ (17), suggesting that the current age is merely rehearsing the eighteenth-century suspicion of the novel and the nineteenth-century fetishization of literary study as schooling in secular morality. 10 Hayles’s two modes are defined as follows: hyper attention, ‘characterized by switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom’; deep attention, ‘characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times’ (187). These are fuzzy categories, expressed as preferences rather than rules, but this also suggests that they are self-reinforcing; the preference for certain stimuli reinforces the cognitive style, in a positive feedback loop. Nicholas Carr makes a similar observation in The Shallows: ‘Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the

162

11

12 13

14

15

16

17

Notes faster the better’ (219).The transformation from the linear mind to the ‘new kind of mind’ is therefore one of attention, but is also a self-reinforcing one; the calm, focused, linear mind both generated and was generated by cultural objects that demanded this same attention. Best and Marcus’s introduction to a special issue of Reparations on ‘The Way We Read Now’ summarizes a range of different positions which all broadly resist the tendency of Marxist or psychoanalytic ‘symptomatic reading’ they identify. In ‘Surface Reading’, Best and Marcus catalogue, among many others, Bruno Latour’s move from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ (in ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’); Timothy Bewes’s reading ‘with the grain’; Marcus’s own commitment to ‘just reading’; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘reparative reading’. See Jane Gallop’s ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading’ for more on the ways in which close reading defines literary studies. I. A. Richards, for instance, in an essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote that poets who are able to ‘compel slow reading’ might find themselves more well received because ‘the effort, the heightened attention, may brace the reader’ (‘Gerard Hopkins’ 140). For more on the relationship between early close reading and attention, see Annette Federico’s Engagements with Close Reading (2015). Heather Love, in her essay on reading Sedgwick’s reparative reading in a paranoid mode, observes that reparative reading’s weak theory ‘stays local, gives up on hypervigilance for attentiveness; instead of powerful reductions, it prefers acts of noticing, being affected, taking joy, and making whole’ (238). Noticing, therefore, implies taking in those things that are there on the surface, rather than unveiling or unearthing hidden things. For another way of thinking about the opposition between vigilant and absorbed reading, see John Guillory’s ‘The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading’. For Guillory, ‘professional reading’ is, among other features, vigilant, while ‘lay reading’ is immersive. The overlap between Felski and Sedgwick’s affective criticism and Guillory’s ‘lay reading’ is an obvious result of literary studies’ institutional commitment to the practices of paranoid and vigilant critique. Ian Sansom reviewed Taipei in The Guardian as perhaps ‘the first truly social media novel, in so far as it resembles a piece of social media. A massive discharge of waste matter. Overspill. Underwritten’, with Lin himself as a ‘consummate self-publicist’ (‘Taipei by Tao Lin – Review’); Chuck Leung in Slate describes Lin’s detractors ascribing to him ‘millennial narcissism’ and finding his work ‘gimmicky and needlessly attention-grabbing’. See also Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style (2006), which frames its argument about cosmopolitanism specifically in the language of attention (particularly in the chapter on Joyce), identifying a ‘promiscuous attention’ (64) that finds diversions in the trivial and is consistently wavering and unsteady.

Notes

163

18 For more on how literary conventions tell us which parts of a text are most worthy of attention, see Peter Rabinowitz’s work on the ‘Rules of Notice’ in Before Reading (1987). This sentiment about reading’s fluctuating rhythm is most famously expressed by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text: ‘we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading . . . our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or skip certain passages (anticipated as “boring”)’ (10). 19 The labour of managing information overload, particularly that engendered by new technologies, is a theme in a number of histories of information and attention. In Ellison’s The Fatal News (2006), she suggests that it is not helpful to read the contemporary ‘information age’ back into the eighteenth century at the expense of the period’s own particularity. See also Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know (2010) for an analysis of the history of managing too much information with book reviews, annotation, encyclopedias and other organizational tools. 20 James explores the attention as a form of self-control more explicitly in the second book of The Principles of Psychology: ‘Attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most “voluntary”, is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind . . . Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before the mind with ease. This strain of attention is the fundamental act of will’ (2: 1168). Of course, the other implication of this position is that this form of attention is unnatural, and that if we did not strive for voluntary control of attention, our natural state is one of relaxed drifting. 21 For an overview of the concept of the attention economy from a business and marketing perspective, see Davenport and Beck’s The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (2001). Faris Yakob’s Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World (2015) – particularly its introduction – identifies the enormous changes brought about by the growth of the internet and the apparent evolution of the attention economy into a newly intensified phase. Most recently, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants (2016) has traced the consequences of the digital market in attention. See also the work of Robert William Albanese who, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation from the University of Iowa, has aggregated a thorough collection of resources on the metaphor of ‘paying’ attention and gives an impressive critical history of the idea of the attention economy. 22 For more on psychotechnologies and their relationship with psychopower – the concept that Stiegler develops from Foucault’s biopower, and which he defines as ‘the systematic organisation of the capture of attention made possible by psychotechnologies’ (What Makes Life Worth Living 81) – see also ch. 8 of Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, ‘Biopower, Psychopower and Grammatization’.

164

Notes

For Stiegler, all psychotechnology – including reading and writing – is a pharmakon, which gives some hope of a way out of the psychotechnological prison we have made for ourselves. 23 The use of ADD (and indeed autism) as metaphors or cultural bellwethers is worryingly prevalent in the commentary on contemporary culture and attention. The reasons that this is troubling are twofold: one, it makes developmental disorders into fads, trends or symptoms of a passing cultural malaise. Even if there are cultural factors that might shape the diagnosis and treatment (and even the aetiology) of these disorders, treating them as the diagnostic tip of a cultural iceberg means that they are framed as mostly a product of environment, or even as culture-bound syndromes. Second, the rhetorical move that sees the rise in diagnoses of, say, ADD as somehow symptomatic of a broader cultural ‘failure’ in attention makes some assumptions that are difficult to defend. If anything, a rise in diagnoses of disorders of attention would suggest that contemporary culture generally expects to regulate and control attention even more than it ever has before. See Matthew Smith’s Hyperactive (2012) for a cultural history of hyperactivity and the development of the diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in context. 24 See, for instance, the Coda to Natalie M. Phillips’s Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature for an engrossing example of neuroscientific techniques used for literary analysis, as Phillips reports on her findings when using an fMRI scanner on participants reading Austen’s Mansfield Park. 25 Parks and Self both recognize that some aspects of the novel are healthier than ever, for instance: genre fiction is still alive and well represented for Self by ‘the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy’ (‘The Novel Is Dead’) and for Parks by ‘the interminable Lord of the Rings and all the fantasy box sets that now fill our adolescent children’s bookshelves’.

Chapter 2 1 For instance, Carr’s The Shallows invokes Wallace to illustrate the point that what separates us from animals is our capacity to command our own attention (63); This Is Water is also quoted in Alan Jacob’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction in order to support his entreaties to put the gadgets aside and make the choice to read a book (84–5). Both these examples emphasize the power of choosing in their appeal to This Is Water. The piece has also become something of a mainstay of business and management books, motivational speeches and life-hacking advice, as revealed by a brief Google Books search of titles from the last five years or so: This Is Water is mentioned anecdotally in Reversing the Senses: Increasing

Notes

165

Your Internal Capacity to Lead and Achieve by Martin Hubbard (a book for highachieving professionals plagued by self-doubt); How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery by Kevin Ashton (a book for makers and creators who have lost touch with creativity); Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen (the title, I think, is self-explanatory). 2 Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, for instance, in their bestseller, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, worry that Wallace lacks ‘gratitude’ for the sacred moments of existence he begins to notice in This Is Water, and his perspective is inherently nihilistic and anthropocentric (48). Adam Miller’s afterword to The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace (2016) offers a considered rebuttal of Dreyfus and Kelly’s criticism. 3 See the following for representative engagements with irony in Wallace’s writing: Lee Konstantinou ‘No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironical Belief ’; Allard Den Dulk, ‘Boredom, Anxiety and Irony: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self ’; Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (particularly chs 1 and 4). It’s also possible to connect distant, ironic detachment with resistance to choosing and a rejection of political commitment and responsibility. Allard den Dulk frames this association via Kierkegaard’s concept of the aesthete, who is self-absorbed and self-regarding and who, like many of Wallace’s characters – from Chris Fogle with his ‘hip pose’ (The Pale King 225) to Hal Incandenza with his ‘masks of ennui and jaded irony’ (Infinite Jest 694) – are caught up in their own reflective processes, and therefore suffer ‘analysis paralysis’ (203). Postmodern ironic detachment is described by Wallace in interview as having ‘a certain schizophrenia about it’ (qtd in ‘David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction’ 134) and this split mind can certainly be opposed to the whole-heartedness of the most innocent sense of single-entendre writing. The final chapter of this book returns to the dynamic between a postmodern commitment to irony and the metafictional exposure of literary techniques vs. childish absorption and enchantment. 4 Building on Kelly’s emphasis on dialogue and communication and emphasizing the recurrence of failure and incompleteness in Wallace’s work, Hayes-Brady finds that ‘a continuing process of engagement and attention’ is at the heart of Wallace’s creative project, which avoids closure and completeness (195). It is only by keeping attention as a perpetually open channel that real, other-directed communication can occur and remove us from a self-enclosed infantile (in all senses speechless) narcissism. Hayes-Brady also suggests that Wallace’s work emphasizes the possibility of connectedness that is ‘frustrated by narcissism, entertainment and the entanglements of language’ (xii) and, on the other hand, attempts to create an ‘overarching creative project’ to ‘foster attention and engagement in his readers’ (6).

166

Notes

5 For more on Wallace, adult and political responsibilities see, for instance, Kiki Benzon, ‘David Foster Wallace and Millennial America’ and Ralph Clare, ‘The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King’. 6 In an interview in The Believer Wallace reiterates the childish/grown up view of political attentiveness by noting that, while many political questions are both complex and dull (‘not sexy’ – the same language as This Is Water), reducing them to us and them ideologies is ‘childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community’. Childishness is associated with narcissistic isolation, and the community of grown-ups can only function through paying attention and competently handling information (‘David Foster Wallace’). 7 Some other examples of this interest in encyclopedic organization and the attentional demands of information overload in Wallace’s work: Stephen Burn in Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (2003); Frank Louis Cioffi in ‘ “An Anguish Become Thing”: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest’ sees the novel’s myriad storylines as a performance of excessive narrative material; Patrick O’Donnell’s ‘Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System’ sees Broom as encyclopedic and fascinated by systems-building to manage information (7). See also Matt Tresco’s ‘ “Impervious to U.S. Parsing”: Encyclopedism, Autism and Infinite Jest’. Conley Wouters reads The Pale King as featuring ‘characters struggling to locate themselves in the face of an excess of material that they can be sure is not the self ’, when that material is ‘a flood of external input’ (448): in Wallace’s work as a whole, that flood means some combination of drugs, information, data, and/or entertainment. 8 Hungerford’s most provocative question, and one that was not discussed much in the responses to her ‘confession’ that she would not read Wallace, is whether scholars of literature should ever refuse to continue to give attention to a contemporary work on the way to canonization, in the hope that it might stop the sanctification of someone such as ‘St Dave’ in its tracks? ‘Is it ever acceptable, as a professional matter,’ Hungerford asks, ‘to refuse the culture’s rising call to attend to a literary work?’ (156). This is a much more interesting question than Wallace’s own misogyny (which is the justified starting point for Hungerford’s stance of refusal). In Hungerford’s cultural history of contemporary publishing techniques, she casts productive light on the conditions under which books grab attention and become part of the zeitgeist through a set of marketing techniques that appeal to attentive patterns by the same mechanisms as their own narrative rhythms. 9 It is probably notable that the chart early on in the book which Csikszentmihalyi uses to illustrate the path between boredom and anxiety uses the example of Alex, a boy who is learning to play tennis and who should experience a state of flow in the game if his skills increase at the same rate as the game’s challenges. If not,

Notes

10

11

12

13

14

167

he will become bored or anxious. Wallace, of course, names one of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s pupils in Infinite Jest Zoltan Csikszentmihalyi (mentioned on 965). In the endnotes, we can’t even be expected to attend long enough to read Csikszentmihalyi’s name, and it’s abbreviated to ‘Cs/yi’ (1072). Both tennis and reading are recurrent examples of flow activities that can tip into both boredom and anxiety in the early part of Flow, and Csikszentmihalyi is quick to note that, to be pleasurable, a book should present the right level of challenge to our skills to prevent either boredom or anxiety about our inadequacies as readers (49–50). This essay is worth comparing with Wallace’s 1993 account of losing his original, all-consuming pleasure in maths and logic, which he describes in the Larry McCaffery interview as giving him a ‘special sort of buzz’ like a Joycean epiphany or Yeats’s ‘click of a well-made box’ but which, when he ‘just got tired of it’ was ‘not a fun time’ (‘A Conversation with David Foster Wallace’). For more on the complexities of the gift in Wallace’s work, see Kelly’s ‘New Sincerity’ essay, and then the third chapter of Jeff Severs’s David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books, ‘Dei Gratia’. Czikszentmihalyi’s is not the only book about concentration or productivity in Wallace’s collection, which also includes titles such as The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and On Writer’s Block; it’s possible that they were a useful part of his teaching, as well as being part of his broader library of self-help books. The quest for perfect concentration that approaches something spiritual is allied closely with Wallace’s interest in the dynamics of self-help, of ordinary people trying to fix themselves or to survive in spite of unbearable pain. For more on Wallace’s self-help library see Maria Bustillos’s ‘Philosophy, Self-Help and the Death of David Foster Wallace’. There is a broader question here, of course, about the extent to which philosophy and self-help are essentially antagonistic; the parodic title of a book by the philosopher Simon Critchley, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, perhaps points out this antagonism most pithily. See Chapter 6 for more on self-help and on Critchley. In a particularly apt passage in the context of a discussion of Infinite Jest, Ryle also notes that commentary on a task does not necessarily mean distraction from that task: ‘Sometimes an addict of discourse, like Hamlet, is thought not to be applying his mind to a given task just because he is applying his mind to the secondary task of discoursing to himself about his primary task’ (138). From what we have seen already in Wallace’s ideas of attention as the ‘control of consciousness’ and of the ‘work of choosing’, the outlines of his understanding of attention seem to be in accord with James’s, who saw attention as ‘the essential achievement of the will’, to fix and to hold fast objects in the mind (2.561). Marshall Boswell considers James’s influence in his essay, ‘Trickle Down Citizenship’ and David H. Evans also reads the Marathe-Steeply dialogue from Infinite Jest as

168

15

16

17

18

Notes part of Wallace’s interest in questions of faith and free will, under the influence of James (‘The Chains of Not Choosing’). The reasoning that Evans gives for the prominence of James in his reading of Wallace comes, at least in part, from the detail that Infinite Jest’s Randy Lenz keeps his coke in a copy of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience bound together in one volume with Principles of Psychology. Most of Evans’ observations come from the former’s discussion of free will and its implications for thinking about depression. The Principles of Psychology, in which James formulates his well-known attempt to describe attention, is clearly just as prominent in that example. This passage is included in the back of the print edition of the book, presented by Michael Pietsch alongside another direct address from a narrator who is much closer to Chris Fogle’s style of self-reflective interiority. For another reading of penetrating attention (and boredom) as an ethical act in Wallace’s fiction, see Allard den Dulk’s ‘Boredom, Anxiety and Irony: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self ’. Den Dulk suggests that the IRS examiners’ boredom is somehow noble and self-sacrificing, and an ethical model for emulation (‘They do their job, not because it’s pleasurable, but to provide for their families and because in our society someone has to perform that task’, 57). As is clear from my argument in this chapter, I believe that Wallace did not find it easy to defend the soul-annihilating boredom of these workers’ jobs as an ethical good. For another interpretation of the absent presence of being ‘in a stare’ see David Hering’s reading of this section of the novel with reference to ‘absent possession and ghostliness’ (David Foster Wallace 156) which also ties this process into a broader pattern of looking and gazing in Wallace’s writing. Marshall Boswell, for instance, reads Oblivion as an acknowledgement of some of the seductive qualities of oblivion, of non-consciousness; a reading that we might extend to some of the pleasures of distraction, inattention, ignorance and its bliss (‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’).

Chapter 3 1 Giorgio Agamben, for instance, writes, ‘Those who are truly contemporary. who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in (his sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time’ (‘What Is the Contemporary?’ 11). These irrelevant, anachronous contemporaries are therefore marked by an ability for clear perception and for grasping the moment which seem to be closely allied with attention. Agamben

Notes

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

169

quotes, in the same essay, Roland Barthes’ assertion that ‘the contemporary is the untimely’ (in Agamben 12), affirming a slightly off-kilter temporality, in which the contemporary is always slightly early or slightly late, never immediate and never perfectly coinciding with the present. For example, Andrzej Gasiorek and David James, writing in 2012, express worries about the extent to which ‘we can retrospectively frame the first decade of the 2000s with the same coherence as we can, for instance, the 1980s or 1990s’ (609). This critical acuity might only appear in retrospect, or we might find it too difficult to zoom in, to crop, frame and exclude the past from the present in this visual field. See the essays in Amy J. Elias and Joel Burges’ Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (2016) for more on the contemporary (as a period’s) relationship with the contemporary (as a concept). See Chapter 5 of this book for more on McCarthy’s fiction. Rabinow is acknowledged in Satin Island and the novel’s waiting, observing, marking anthropologist narrator is clearly engaged in Rabinow’s project of attention to the contemporary. McCarthy’s Recessional: The Time of the Hammer also bears the traces of Rabinow’s concept of marking time as a pause or intermission. For a fuller discussion of the meaning of Geistesgegenwart in Benjamin’s work, see Peter Buse et al.’s Benjamin’s Arcades: An UnGuided Tour (137–9). For more on the metaphor of ‘presence of mind’ in Benjamin, and how it relates to the ‘now’ of messianic time, see Stephane Symons’s Walter Benjamin: Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend (2012). Both of these are techniques that David Foster Wallace’s short stories also use, incidentally, as part of their management of readers’ attention: a quiz concludes Wallace’s ‘Octet’ and, as the previous chapter explores, ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ alternates plain text with all-caps interjections as a way of dividing readers’ attention on the page. This is also the meaning of ad tentio – being held in suspense – that Jonathan Crary makes use of in the title of Suspensions of Perception. His concern is with ‘the idea of a perception that can be both an absorption and an absence or deferral’ (10), and there is a necessary contradiction between complete, absorbed perception (that I have been marking as undivided present-mindedness) and the delay or deferral (Crary’s concept of suspension) of that perception. As Ricoeur puts it, muthos is a reply to the distentio animi – the distended or dispersed soul. Where ‘Augustine groaned under the existential burden of discordance’, Aristotle, in the Poetics, is able to identify, ‘in the poetic act par excellence – the composing of the tragic poem – the triumph of concordance over discordance’ (1.31). Currie finds that contemporary fiction has responded to this concern about the future or the past in the present by making distinctive and critical use of prolepsis

170

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Notes and analepsis (but particularly prolepsis). This is the key feature of his work that makes it so productive: rather than simply tracing a thematics of time in the texts he considers, he is able to argue for a formal, structural reordering of contemporary narrative itself into something that is deeply reworked by ideas from the philosophy of time (24–8). Cohen has been regularly compared to Wallace in reviews, although my favourite association between the two comes in Tao Lin’s Taipei, in which the protagonist observes that going to jail for drug trafficking won’t be a problem for him because he will ‘just focus on writing Infinite Witz’ (159). For more on twentieth-century (and earlier) long books, see Edward Mendelson’s essays on encyclopedic narrative (‘Encyclopedic Narrative’ and ‘Gravity’s Encyclopedia’) as well as Hilary Clark’s related discussion of ‘encyclopedic discourse’. David Letzler’s The Cruft of Fiction (2017) does not focus on Cohen’s work (nor does Stefano Ercolino’s 2014 study, The Maximalist Novel), but Letzler does, of course, theorize the mega-novel by way of attention. See the previous chapter for discussion of Letzler’s work on attention and long narrative fiction. The word does appear at the end of the story but there are ways in which ‘McDonald’s’ shares what Stephen Burn has called Witz’s ‘deliberate act of excess that’s also an exercise in omission’ (‘Tribe of One’). The excess in Cohen’s style is clear even at the sentence level in ‘McDonald’s’ and the ‘omission’ in Witz is because the novel, in its 800+ pages about the last Jewish man in the world, omits the word ‘Jew’. ‘McDonald’s’, a mirror-distorted version of the same technique, in which the narrator is afraid of writing the central word of the story, focuses explicitly on this act of omission. See also Bernard Stiegler, who argues very seriously that obesity, environmental destruction, addiction, even impotence, should be laid at the feet of the same shortcomings in attention that takes care of the world and the self (42). The protagonist worries, for instance, about dating his story with brand names. The ubiquity of brand names in fiction has, as the writer knows, already been thoroughly exhausted by writers like Don DeLillo and Bret Easton Ellis. Even the place of McDonald’s in a self-conscious story about the struggles of a writer to imagine future of American fiction invokes the spirit of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’. The story’s apparent ephemeraphobia, then, seems out of step with its own era – afraid of the present, but also a bit retro in its concerns. Gary Johns makes it clear that his definition of presenteeism is much narrower, and only includes working while ill – being present when one should be absent, or attending work when one should not be attending (521). In their exploration of potential escapes – or, rather, ‘Failed Escapes’ from modern work culture’s forced attention and authenticity – Cederström and Fleming take

Notes

171

an excursion into the practices of flotation tanks and sensory deprivation, quoting from a company’s marketing materials that promise to leave you with ‘a clear mind to concentrate 100% on the matter in hand’ as well as increased ‘creativity, the ability to solve problems, concentration span, personal motivation and energy levels’ (52). Even this temporary respite from all demands on the senses is, ultimately, only a way of enhancing concentration for work. The temporary, deathlike experience of non-presence in the world is only a way to return to attentiveness more fully.

Chapter 4 1 In Smith’s book, Cossa’s name is sometimes spelled ‘Franchescho’ rather than ‘Franchesco’ and he is a woman who takes a man’s name in order to succeed as an artist. There is a lot of play in the novel with the word ‘ho’ which George, as she writes a school project on Cossa, identifies as one of the words that would show the unfamiliar language of someone ‘from another time’ (323/137). It is the first word of Cossa’s narrative (‘Ho this is a mighty twisting thing’ [3/189]). The novel itself is evidently a ‘mighty twisting thing’, with its two plied narratives, and I take this opening ‘Ho’ as both ‘an exclamation of surprise and also the call of a boatman’ that George looks up in a dictionary (324/138). The lookout calling for attention (‘Land ho!’) is an appropriate attendant spirit for the whole novel. A similar ambiguous shout goes up at the beginning of Smith’s Hotel World (2001), which begins with a Woohoo! from a narrating ghost, which is both celebratory and spooky. 2 The structure of How to Be Both (some editions with George’s story first and some with Cossa’s) means that in the two variant-ordered editions this passage occurs on different pages. Throughout this chapter I have listed both, with the page number for the ‘Cossa first’ version always (completely arbitrarily) listed first. 3 See Jennifer L. Roberts’ essay ‘The Power of Patience’ for a beautiful and immensely satisfying description of the pleasures of patient, slow, durational looking, in which she relates her insights after spending three hours looking at Boy with a Squirrel by John Singleton Copley. She quotes from David Joselit, who talks of paintings as ‘time batteries’ charged with reserves of temporality, laid down by artists and just waiting to be tapped by their observers. 4 For instance, Frances Wilson in the New Statesman framed a response to the novel through the idea of perspective, noting its interest in spying, surveillance and multiple viewpoints. Lia Mills, in a review in the Dublin Review of Books, suggested that the whole novel was about ‘attention and engagement and how to stay awake in the world and in life, which will be over sooner than we think’.

172

Notes

5 The Kindle edition begins with the following passage which lays out the chooseyour-own-adventure organization of the e-book which is absent from the print editions: Who says stories reach everybody in the same order? This novel can be read in two ways and this e-book provides you with both. In one version, EYES precedes CAMERA. In the other, CAMERA precedes EYES. The stories are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order. Eyes, camera. Camera, eyes. The choice is yours. (iii) In both print and electronic editions, the two sections are headed with illustration of a camera (George’s section) and a plant growing an eye (Cossa’s section) taken from a detail of the real Cossa’s ‘Saint Lucy’. 6 The setting of the frescoes in the villa is encircled by attention and attending: the gallery is staffed by a ‘middle-aged lady (attendant?)’ (235/49); the painting includes ‘an old woman holding a piece of paper who is being attentive to a child’ (236/50). The estranging phrasing of both of these examples seems to draw attention to the word ‘attention’ in each case. This book’s final chapter develops a fuller reading of the art gallery and museum as sites of curated attention and considers the depiction of these sites in fiction as a way of demonstrating attentive processes. 7 In the award statement after winning the Goldsmith’s Prize for How to Be Both, Smith affirmed that the prize is important for novelists who are interested in experimental narrative forms because the prize rewards writers who are interested in the novel’s capacity for both content and form; to offer a full exploration of the potential of its own medium: This prize is really about the thing closest to your heart if you work with the novel as a form, if you’re interested in the novel as a form and the form of language. The point of this is that it’s about language, about all the things a novel can do, not just some of the things a novel can. That’s what this prize is about. It’s about the multi-variousness, the everything the novel can do is included in this prize. (Smith, qtd by Goldsmiths in ‘Ali Smith Wins the Goldsmiths Prize 2014’) 8 In a book that shares a lot with Ben Lerner’s novels (particularly the art gallery scenes, as Chapter 7 will explore), the move into the future tense at the end of the novel is another surprising similarity between How to Be Both and 10:04. See Pieter Vermeulen for more on the tense shift in Lerner (‘How Should a Person Be (Transpersonal)? Ben Lerner, Roberto Esposito, and the Biopolitics of the Future’) and the seventh chapter of Mark Currie’s About Time and his essay ‘Ali Smith and

Notes

9

10 11

12 13

14

173

the Philosophy of Grammar’ for more on Smith’s significant use of tense in her earlier novels. A similar idea, about somehow keeping the dead alive by noticing them or paying attention to their legacy, also appears in the final section of Smith’s Hotel World, in which Dusty Springfield swoops in through a living room window every time someone plays ‘The Look of Love’ and poor Solomon Pavey is denied peace a little longer every time someone reads Ben Jonson’s poem. For more on Stiegler’s intergenerational attention, see Chapters 2 and 7. For Brennan’s early response to Freud, framed through attention, see the third chapter of The Interpretation of the Flesh, ‘The Division of Attention’. For more on the transfer of affective energies as living attention, see her final book, The Transmission of Affect. The Interpretation of the Flesh, makes the case that ways of conceptualizing women have placed negative affects and patterns of thinking onto femininity. Brennan asks whether there is ‘something in the nature or subject-matter of femininity that prompts the tendency to digress’ (83) – does thinking about femininity make us distracted? Brennan traces Freud’s examples of hysterics, and particularly women who are prone to the ‘duplication or division of attention’ that results from daydreaming, those moments when ‘I am privately attending to one thing, but observably doing another, which I attend to only as much as I have to’ (92). There are, I think, echoes here of some of the charged, unwitnessable distraction that exercises Wallace in ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’, in which – as Chapter 2 discussed – daydreaming can become an alternative to gendered expectations about the stoical, masculine control of attention. What is notable, Brennan finds, in the psychoanalytic tradition of considering women’s attention is that it is characterized by love for and attention to another person: Josef Breuer’s – and then Freud’s – female daydreamers enter that state when caring for a person who is sick, or when in love (90–2); Brennan later lays out an account of the mirror stage entirely through the idea that the ego comes to coherence ‘through the attention of another’ (114). For a much fuller exploration of cameras in The Accidental, see ch. 4 of Julia Breitbach’s Analog Fictions for the Digital Age (2012). For more on surveillance in There but for The, and the connections between surveillance and the scrutiny placed on celebrities, see Heidi Yeandle’s ‘Celebrity and Surveillance in There but for The’. Yeandle is particularly insightful in her reading of Miles, the character who locks himself in his hosts’ back bedroom, and shows that it is ‘possible to be both there and not there, both watched and unwatched’. For a reading of There but for The and The Accidental through the concept of the intruder, see Ulrike Tancke’s ‘Narrating Intrusion: Deceptive Storytelling and Frustrated Desires in The Accidental and There but for The’. For Tancke, the intruder

174

15

16

17

18

19

20

Notes is revelatory and transformative, exposing the complacency of the comfortable characters in these novels. Dunja Mohr’s ‘Terror as Catalyst? Negotiations of Silences, Perspectives and Complicities in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Ali Smith’s The Accidental, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ makes a related argument about the status of the intruder as home-invader, to suggest an analogy with the unexpected and intrusive nature of domestic terror attacks. Daniel Lea comments on this passage that being ‘taken off to the side, detoured, disoriented, or derailed are adventures to which the reader of Smith must get accustomed’ (26). In The Problem of Distraction, North’s starting move is to uncouple distraction from attention, and to refuse to treat distraction as ‘an attention to the zero degree’ (5). Our age of deficient attention, he suggests, suffers from an inability to imagine distraction as a force in its own right, and treats it instead as divided or degraded or diverted or deviant attention (6). The challenge, then, is to consider what distraction might be when we unyoke it from attention and from the controlling, choosing will of the attending subject. Young goes on to argue that distraction is a danger because of its threat to the freedom of the will: ‘To be diverted isn’t simply to have too many stimuli but to be confused about what to attend to and why. Distraction is the very opposite of emancipation: failing to see what is worthwhile in life and lacking the wherewithal to seek it’ (3–4). With an incongruous squad of philosophical cheerleaders – from the Stoics to Nietzsche to Heidegger – Young describes how to build up a muscular individual will, avoid distraction, and emancipate the self. In Nicholas Royle’s Veering, he observes, ‘In reading, too, we veer: our attention is not constant, our thoughts and feelings shift about’ (28). Veering might therefore mark the variety of distracted reading that is not straight and which reads slantingly, cross-linking or changing direction to find new meanings. Royle’s examples of this come from poetry (in the third chapter of Veering), but there are instances of the necessity of this veering style of reading across the structural whole of How to Be Both (with its two stories). For examples of work on Smith’s engagement with the concept of history, see the second chapter (‘Inheriting the Past’) of Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction and ch. 7 (‘Fictional Knowledge’) of Mark Currie’s About Time. From a different perspective, Emily Horton’s essays on Smith’s interest in trauma (‘Everything You Ever Dreamed’ and ‘A Voice without a Name’) are also highly relevant to an understanding of the prevalence of another manifestation of disruptive, interrupted temporality in Smith’s fiction. See also Kaye Mitchell’s essay, ‘Queer Metamorphoses’, which makes brief reference to Edelman and Freeman in the context of analysis of mythic time in Girl Meets Boy.

Notes

175

21 See Ross Chambers’s Loiterature, which considers those texts that are ‘sites of relentless intersection, and consequently their narrators’ attention is always divided between one thing and another thing, always ready and willing to be distracted’ (9). For a wide-ranging take on the global literary history of literary digression, see Grohman and Wells’s Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald (2010). 22 For a contrasting representation of multiple screens, see Dave Eggers’s The Circle which, in its satire of the culture of tech giants such as Google and Facebook, describes its protagonist in a workstation full of proliferating screens: a main screen for work queries, a second screen for getting feedback, a third ‘social screen’, and a wrist-worn biomonitor. 23 If you have looked at Portrait of a Man with a Ring and struggled to see a penis, I sympathize. It helps if you look for it horizontally, rather than vertically, in the rocks on the left of the painting. 24 McHale does also remind us that Gravity’s Rainbow was originally to have been called Mindless Pleasures and suggests an alternative reading of the work that sees these mindless, distracted pleasures embedded so far into the texts themselves that it is impossible to categorize the novels as resistant or condemnatory jeremiads. 25 For instance, Mary Horgan reads Smith’s Hotel World as an example of ‘numismatic modernism’ that invokes the spirit of Woolf and Katherine Mansfield to haunt a global hotel that is Jamesonian in its postmodernism. 26 The description of metamodernism as laid out by Vermeulen and van den Akker has been roundly critiqued by Martin Paul Eve, who argues that the oscillation that metamodernism perceives in contemporary culture has persisted on from postmodernism, rather than being something new. Eve’s argument hinges on Pynchon and his oscillation between irony and sincerity; an assertion that has some substantial consequences for the argument of this chapter, which has leant on McHale’s analysis of Pynchon as one pole of an oscillating movement between modernist epistemology and postmodern ontology. 27 One of the most fruitful observations that Vermeulen and van den Akker draw out of this distinction between the both-neither and the neither-nor is a comment about contemporary attitudes to defamiliarization. They suggest that, rather than estrangement, the predominant mode of the metamodern is one of rehabituation, or a heightening of our existing ‘presuppositions’: David Lynch, for instance, provides a habituation towards suburban landscapes by offering ‘close-ups of suburban rituals [that] redirect – and indeed, heighten – our presuppositions about our built environment’ (10). The suggestion that these close-ups (the camera’s proxy for close attention) are an agent for familiarity rather than estrangement, disavowal or deconstruction, is one that has some important consequences for critical reading itself.

176

Notes

Chapter 5 1 Appropriately, in an interview with Lee Rourke in which McCarthy makes this observation, the signal gets distorted and the lyric misquoted: ‘The transmission thing is important. There’s that Kraftwerk song, “I am the receiver and you are the transmitter”, or however it goes’ (‘In Conversation’). 2 For some fuller reflections on the McCarthy/Kittler relationship, see Justin Nieland’s essay ‘Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modernism’, which begins by thinking about McCarthy’s claim to have avoided reading Kittler and suggests that the gesture sets up an uncharacteristic boundary between theory and fiction (571). 3 In this sense, we can think of McCarthy’s work as registering some of the same connotations of attention as Joshua Cohen, as discussed in Chapter 3. Cohen associated attention with the present – the opposite of absent mindedness – and the after-effects of the poststructuralist metaphysics of presence are clearly marked in the amputated attention of the dividual, who is not only divided in space but in time – perhaps a différdual? 4 Callus goes on to explain that U/Ulrich is ‘a very talented man, but he decides that in order to blend in with everything that he is observing, he has to turn himself into what you call, in a joint interview with Simon Critchley, a “dividual”. That’s an interesting intertext.’ I’m not in complete accord with this interpretation since, as I understand it, the dividual is less about ‘blending in’ or disappearing into others, and more about being internally incoherent and ruptured (i.e. divided). There are, though, certainly connections to McCarthy’s broader critique of the contemporary ‘cult of authenticity’ and the idea of the human that Callus identifies in this description of the novel. 5 For some further examples of McCarthy’s disavowal of the dead middlebrow novel see his essays ‘Writing Machines’, ‘The Geometry of the Pressant’ and ‘Stabbing the Olive’; and his 2015 interview in BOMB Magazine (‘Tom McCarthy’). Naïve is a word that crops up in a lot of these essays and interviews, and is probably worth a glossary note: it’s significant that McCarthy opposes the conventional novel’s naiveté with the experimental novel’s capacity to be ‘self-aware’. This distinction could therefore be drawn between conscious attention and oblivious inattention. 6 The work’s heavy self-theorization is a point of comment for many other readers of McCarthy’s writing. For starters, criticism seems redundant when McCarthy himself is so keen to lay out the intellectual origin points for his work (Duncan 11). Some readers have also suggested that it’s the failure of the fiction to match up to the claims of the manifestos that is the essence of McCarthy’s broader project: Pieter Vermeulen, for instance, suggests that an interrogation of ‘the specific ways in which [the fiction] fails to deliver the related deaths of humanism and the novel’ might be

Notes

7

8

9 10

11

12

13

177

the most powerful consequence of reading McCarthy’s claims and aims alongside his literary work (27). In Dennis Duncan’s edited collection on McCarthy for Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers series, for instance, five of the ten essays are explicitly focused on Remainder, while only two others (Eve’s and Weaver’s) focus on just one of the novels (C and Satin Island, respectively). This is also an observation made in some reviews of the book. Amanda Claybough in n+1, for instance, compares the protagonists’ new symptoms to Shklovskian defamiliarization, so that habitual actions now demand new attention and the world is presented afresh. See Arne de Boever for a discussion of the extent to which the narrator’s experience should be considered pharmacological rather than simply therapeutic. Some interpretations of this section of the novel have rightly noted the racial connotations of the narrator’s emphasis on this character’s ‘realness’. Referred to by the narrator as ‘the dead black man’, the character’s race is read by Zadie Smith in ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ as a satirical way of commenting on white fetishization of the authenticity of black identity and experience (87). In the 2015 film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel, directed by Omer Fast, gentrification – as a kind of colonization of urban areas’ racialized ‘realness’ – is more clearly implicated as a subtext for Remainder’s redevelopment and refurbishment plot than in the book itself. McCarthy has also been interviewed walking around Brixton and his accounts of his first time as a middle-class white guy in the borough are reasonably self-ironizing, although still a bit excruciating: ‘I went with a friend into what’s now The Dogstar to buy some dope. We went in, and of course were the only white people there. And, um, there was some altercation and one of the guys took out a knife and slightly cut my friend’s wrist. He was just playing. We just sort of walked out and I went: “That was fucking brilliant!” ’ (‘Existential Ground Zero’). McCarthy wrote an introduction to the Alma Classics edition of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy. This introductory essay, ‘The Geometry of the Pressant’, was also published separately in Artforum in 2008; I’ve cited from the latter in this chapter. This is one of the ways in which U fulfils the anthropological imperative of Paul Rabinow’s ‘marking time’, by noticing or marking his contemporary surroundings. McCarthy mentions having ‘freely and shamelessly lifted’ Rabinow’s thoughts on the contemporary in the acknowledgements to Satin Island. The early part of Chapter 3 of this book touches on Rabinow’s work. Reading these passages of Satin Island, Milly Weaver finds the novel registering an idea about the limits of representation: it is ‘an attempt to figure out the difference between representation that simply soaks up its object and representation – specifically writing – that constructs a more conscious and artificial media intervention’ (112). A ‘more conscious’ media intervention is something that

178

14

15

16

17

18

Notes involves attention as filtering or selection, rather than the transfer or imprint of a representation that ‘soaks up’ or absorbs its object. This is also the description that Joshua Cohen gives for his own Attention! A (Short) History, in which he writes, ‘It’d always been my hope to write a book about nothing’, although that book, he imagines, is also ‘a book about everything’ (186). There is something to this idea about attention: it’s a container or medium elastic enough to hold everything but, in itself, is nothing. This book you’re reading now is, of course, another book about attention and therefore about both everything and nothing at all. In an extended analogy, U describes how, in a video clip the greyed-out buffering bar runs ahead of the red line of played material. In the analogy, the grey bar is experience and the red line is our consciousness of experience. To understand experience, we have to be able to ‘narrate it both to others and ourselves’ (69). However, he reflects, there are some situations in which experience does not move quickly enough and those actions of processing and narrating take over: buffering. The tingling and buzzing and feelings of peace and bliss depicted in Remainder are similar to many descriptions of the phenomenon known as ASMR (Auto Sensory Meridian Response), which is often reported to accompany the experience of watching dull but satisfying things. YouTube fan communities report the sensations watching people folding laundry, washing make-up brushes or organizing stationery, among other triggers, such as soft voices, rustling sounds, and someone paying close attention to you (if this sounds bizarre, start by visiting YouTube and watching ‘_=_Relaxing Towel Folding Tutorial/ASMR_=_’ by GentleWhisperingASMR). Various literary texts have also been suggested to depict ASMR-like phenomena, including the section in Mrs Dalloway in which Septimus describes a woman’s rough voice, ‘which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke’ (24) and, of course, the deathly pleasurable viewing experience of ‘Infinite Jest’, whose wobbly, infant’s eye camera records a mother, offering close and careful attention to the viewer. For more on ASMR itself, see Barratt and Davis, ‘Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response’; for more on the cultural and philosophical aspects of ASMR (including the Mrs Dalloway example above), see Hannah Maslen and Rebecca Roache’s blog post, ‘ASMR and Absurdity’, on the Oxford Practical Ethics blog. Herman’s book is from 2004, the year before the eventual publication of Remainder in France, so this is not a reference to McCarthy’s novel, although it is, of course, a reference to some of its remixed source material from Robbe-Grillet (and possibly Baudrillard’s exemple of the simulated bank robbery). For further examples of modernist studies’ turn to boredom in the last decade, see for instance Sara Crangle’s Levinas-inflected Prosaic Desires (2010) and Allison

Notes

19

20

21

22

23

179

Pease’s Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom (2012), on ‘women’s boredom’. Epstein’s thesis is that American poetry from the 1950s to the 1970s recorded the beginning of a crisis of attention as a result of a new media landscape. Poets from James Schuyler to Kenneth Goldsmith and Claudia Rankine commit to a poetics of the ordinary that runs in opposition to the sublime. At the same time as boredom is a response to too much information, it’s also the mark for matter that does not register attention at all. What is notable about boredom is its status as something unexamined, a ‘blank label attached to everything that fails to grasp one’s interest’ (Svendsen 3), or the equivalent of an intellectual blind spot. U, in Satin Island makes a living studying the things that ‘creep under the radar by being boring’, the ‘symbolic operations lurking on the flipside of the habitual and the banal’ that he can expose to the light of his critical attention (12–3). This essay in the Guardian is perhaps best read as a companion piece to the interview about amputation with which I began this chapter. In both, McCarthy uses his familiar example of the Oresteia to acknowledge the long history of literature and interruptive, overwhelming technological messages. In one of the audience questions that are included in the Diaphanes publication of McCarthy’s talk, someone makes the logical connection to Crary’s 24/7, suggesting that McCarthy’s interval of ‘suspended time’ ought to accord with Crary’s account of the marginalization of moments of rest or time-out in a 24/7 economy (35). McCarthy doesn’t respond to this point, but I think it is a very worthwhile connection. That pause is also the rhythmic rest that Rabinow’s ‘marking time’ identifies. In Infinitely Demanding, the second chapter, ‘Dividualism: How to Build an Ethical Subject’ lays out the foundations for Critchley’s concept. In Faith of the Faithless, the section on Porete and the heresy of the free spirit begins on 121.

Chapter 6 1 Nussbaum, in Love’s Knowledge (1990), was not the only figure to make this argument about ethics, empathy and fiction – Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) also allies narratology and Aristotelian ethics, suggesting that storytelling itself is an activity with ethical implications. Booth and Nussbaum both read narrative as a way of exploring counterfactual possibilities, and therefore allowing for ethical reasoning. For a polemical refutation of Nussbaum’s claims about the Victorian novel in her work on the ethics of fiction, see the introduction to Nicholas Dames’s The Physiology of the Novel.

180

Notes

2 Wilson’s book has brilliant lists throughout of some of the mindfulness-based guides of the last twenty years, including Mindful Knitting, Tennis Fitness for the Love of It: A Mindful Approach for Injury Free Tennis, and Mindful Horsemanship (135–6). What is intriguing about these products is that the self-help book, as an object, has to stand in for the techniques of mindfulness themselves, which are essentially uncommodifiable. 3 See Ole Jacob Madsen’s 2015 account of the critique of mindfulness in Optimizing the Self (51–60). 4 Perhaps the most well-known intervention in the fiction-ethics debate at the beginning of the twenty-first century is Ian McEwan’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ‘Only Love and then Oblivion’, which argues for fiction’s empathyexpanding role in promoting ethical responsibility. 5 According to Roland Robertson’s definition, globalization is ‘the compression of the world and the intensification of a consciousness of the world as a whole’ (8), which pairs a change in connectivity with a change in perception or awareness. 6 Appiah’s attempts to balance these two positions is a response to Peter Singer’s championing of the utilitarian imperative to give every resource possible to the benefit of those less fortunate. Appiah suggests that, while we have obligations to each other, those obligations should take account of difference, and what would be fair and reasonable for one person to give to another. Appiah wonders, for instance, whether it is always unethical to spend money on opera tickets rather than alleviating childhood diseases in developing countries; in this example, the opera tickets are the equivalent of Fatou’s swimming sessions. 7 For more on the ways in which fiction – and particularly the novel – has used narrative techniques to move away from a model of national literatures and towards cosmopolitanism, see Fiona McCulloch’s Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities (2012) and Berthold Schoene’s The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009). Neither make much mention of Smith and, indeed, she is condemned in Schoene’s book as a writer of ‘novels of no consequence, devoid of truth, beauty and community’ (185), a judgement I find astonishing, even of Smith’s early work. 8 See, for instance, Peter Childs and James Green’s Aesthetics and Ethics in TwentyFirst Century British Novels, in which Smith is included as one of the four case studies, and Andrzej Gasiorek’s ‘A Renewed Sense of Difficulty’, in which Smith’s work is used as an example of a return to ethics in contemporary fiction. 9 Smith has continued to champion this position in more recent interviews. Kristian Shaw notes her ‘name-checking Martha Nussbaum’ in an interview with him in 2013 (68). 10 Levinas also has some explicit things to say about attention. For Levinas, the il y a – the baseline state of being – can be conceptualized in terms of attention and the absence of attention. In Existence and Existents, he suggests that the il y a is

Notes

181

attention without the possibility of drawing a circle around that attention; you are forced to attend, but with nothing to focus that attention on. ‘Attention,’ Levinas proposes, ‘presupposes the freedom of the ego which directs it; the vigilance of insomnia which keeps our eyes open has no subject’ (63). The difference between attention and vigilance is the conscious control over that attention. The nature of attention is that it always has a form and shape to itself; it’s always circled. Without that circle, it would just be the egoless sense of vigilance, which is the state of the wakeful, anxious il y a. 11 For an alternative reading of the effects of Smith’s conclusions from the ‘Two Paths for the Novel’ review on NW, see Vanessa Guignery’s ‘Zadie Smith’s NW: The Novel at an “Anxiety Crossroads”?’. 12 37 is a significant number in the novel and, like the ‘sole author’ phrase, it recurs in both text and paratexts. 37 Ridley Street is the squat in Leah’s neighbourhood where Shar lives, and it’s a number that represents other lives lived and other possibilities of love and sexual relationships for her – particularly relationships with women – as explained in a recollection in which Leah’s female former lover shares her belief in the number’s significance. In the text’s structure, this 37 vanishes and reappears like the ace of spades in a card trick: disappearing from the numbered chapters in the second section of the book, which focuses on Natalie, but popping up three times in Leah’s own section. It’s sometimes there in plain sight, and sometimes on the periphery of your attention. It’s the number of a (fictional) bus route to Camden Lock and it’s the page number that’s noted as another character flicks through a book. Leah’s focus on the number leaks out from the story into the form itself, breaking the window of representation and drawing attention to the surface of the text in anti-mimetic ways. 13 An alternative reading of On Beauty’s fondness for aphorism and its relationship with ethics can be found in the final pages of Dorothy Hale’s ‘On Beauty as Beautiful? The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics by Way of Zadie Smith’. In an argument that develops from a defence of Martha Nussbaum’s influence on twentyfirst-century fiction (‘Aesthetics and the New Ethics’) and through her later essay about On Beauty, Hale argues that it is through style – and specifically the stylistic ‘watermark’ of the aphorism – that the novel lays out an ethics based on knowledge of the other and of the other’s alterity: ‘In the particular politics of On Beauty’s narration, the act of knowing people other to oneself is made possible through the sense that otherness is apprehensible only through the identification of qualities that are repeated and shared. The aphorisms in On Beauty show knowledge of the other to be rooted in empirical experience that uses inductive reasoning to posit classifying generalizations (she is like this; people are like that)’ (841–2). The aphorism therefore acts out the risk of attempting to know the other (because it risks reifying, generalizing, objectifying) through its style.

182

Notes

14 This effect, by which we recognize the things that other people might underline or remember, is even more marked when reading on the Kindle platform, in which the device identifies those sections of the book that other readers have highlighted.

Chapter 7 1 For more on The Clock and its commentary on attention and duration, see Richard Martin’s ‘Duration without Breaks: Marclay and McQueen against the Clock’. Martin notes the piece’s place in Lerner’s novel and argues that Marclay ‘wants to rebel against a certain speed and inattention that characterizes the contemporary gallery experience. He wants us to slow down, to spend long blocks of time as a spectator and, via the relentless progression of clips he has assembled, he wants those long blocks of time to be spent thinking about the passage of time.’ 2 This problem of depresentified attention also surfaces in Leaving the Atocha Station as the protagonist finds himself with “redoubled” attention, focusing on all of the details of life in Madrid while at the same time deciding whether to leave or not: “whatever the object of my intensified attention, it was immediately abstracted into my ruminations about the future” (162). 3 One of the significant trajectories that this book has not followed has been through the investigation of the processes of attention-seeking involved in acts of terror, as discussed in work on Lerner’s novel and more broadly in work on spectacle and atrocity. As one of the characters comments in the novel, ‘these attacks were “made for TV” ’ (140). Examples of readers of Atocha who place the Madrid terror attack more centrally than I have done include Marana Borges in ‘A Misunderstanding: Trauma and Terrorism in the ‘9/11 Fiction’. Ann Keniston’s responses to Lerner’s ‘Didactic Elegy’ also offer some insight into questions about terror and the role of representation in diverting attention from atrocities or multiplying their spectacular properties, in ways that also have the potential to inform other interpretations of Lerner’s novel. 4 Benjamin Luys, for instance, remarks that the novel depicts a ‘general sense of “fraudulence” ’ (‘Vital Texts and Bare Life’); Ben Merriman, on the other hand, ranks the ‘twenty-seven self-serving lies’ that Adam tells against real of the terrorist attack, which ‘interrupts’ his petty falsehoods. 5 See Rebecca Walkowitz’s discussion of Leaving the Atocha Station and translation for more about the role that Adam’s proficiency in Spanish plays in the novel (Born Translated 40–3). 6 In an interview with Wave Composition, Lerner gives a full history of this phrase: ‘Maybe I should say that “Life’s white machine,” [Adam] Gordon’s phrase for the rhythm of mundane life, the texture of time as it passes, etc., is very close

Notes

7

8

9

10

11

12

183

to Hart Crane’s “white machine of life,” but it’s also a line from a collaboration between the poets Geoffrey G. O’Brien and Jeff Clark, a line in turn quoted by Ashbery as an epigraph to one of his own poems’ (‘An Interview with Ben Lerner’). Lerner has also noted that many reviewers of the novel failed to take this passage about Adam’s experience of Ashbery’s poetry particularly seriously, which is not all that surprising when Adam doesn’t appear to take anyone else’s aesthetic responses seriously. ‘It is a totally different book,’ Lerner explains, in an interview in Contemporary Literature, ‘if you consider Adam’s reading of Ashbery to be serious and central’ (‘An Interview with Ben Lerner’ 236). My reading in this chapter has certainly tended to take this passage seriously, and to see it as an attempt to think through a central problem about reading – and about aesthetics in general – in the novel. However, it might also be useful to consider whether, as with Pierre Menard’s Quixote, this passage could mean two different things in the context of Atocha and in Lerner’s 2010 boundary 2 essay on Ashbery: we could take Lerner’s thoughts seriously but not Adam’s, for instance. For a much fuller engagement with Lerner’s fiction as secondary to his poetic project, and with Lerner’s non-fiction writing on poetry, see Daniel Katz’s ‘I Did Not Walk Here All the Way from Prose’. Katz argues in favour of the primacy of Lerner’s poetry, and for the prose fiction as an extension of and supplement to the poetry. Lerner describes the relationship between the characters as ‘wilfully confusing’: ‘I think it’s more that the narrator of 10:04 is the author of Leaving the Atocha Station – but then it’s unclear how much the author of Leaving the Atocha Station was the narrator within it, so there are all these different kinds of divisions of fictional levels’ (‘Time Is a Flat Circle’). For de Bruyn, the novel’s presiding interest in the future is ecological, a reading that’s framed by reference to the two weather events that bookend the novel. Vermeulen, in ‘How Should a Person Be (Transpersonal)?’, sees the novel’s future orientation as a way of understanding contemporary depresentification, which also has the potential to feed back into ideas about distraction as depresentification in the novel. It is also worth noting that Lerner’s quotation cuts out Benjamin’s next sentence, which is a more ordinary complaint about distracted youth: ‘And before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colourful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight’ (‘One Way Street’ 456). More evidence for the notion that anxiety about the younger generation’s distractioncrisis and inability to read properly is nothing new. In an interview in The Believer, Lerner comments on the significance of the octopus, connecting it to the coming community of transpersonal

184

Notes

coconstruction: ‘When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body. The personal starts to dissolve, get emptied out’ (‘Ben Lerner’). Of course, the narrator also eats a lot of baby octopods, so the personal seems to get a bit weirdly and literally dissolved in stomach acid in 10:04, too. 13 See Philip Sayers for more on ekphrasis and the representation of ‘Infinite Jest’ in Infinite Jest. 14 McCarthy discusses this history in an interview with Interview magazine: ‘I had that “crack in the wall” moment. I was at a party, and saw the crack, and had the moment of déjà vu. And I thought initially, “I can make an art project.” But what’s so interesting about that, you make a room that you remembered? So what? It’s only interesting if you can expand the zone all the way out to the point of ultraviolence, until you are dying in it. At that point it has to be a novel. Or a mass murder spree’ (‘Tom McCarthy Is No Longer a Well-Kept Secret’). McCarthy relates this origin narrative (the bathroom, the crack, the déjà vu) in a number of other interviews, but nowhere else with the element of the art project. 15 Hepburn’s chapter on Vermeer and Tracey Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring makes the strongest argument in the book about ekphrasis, detail and attention.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Routledge, 2005. Agamben, Georgio. ‘What Is the Contemporary?’ In Nudities, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 10–19. Albanese, Robert William. Paying for Attention: Narratives of Control and the Cultural Economics of Attention, 1990–Present. PhD dissertation. University of Iowa, 2014. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton, 2006. Ashbery, John. ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’. In Selected Poems. Carcanet, 2002, pp. 188–204. Augustine. The Confessions, edited by David Vincent Meconi, translated by Maria Boulding. Ignatius Press, 2012. Bal, Mieke. ‘Over-Writing as Unwriting: Descriptions, World-Making and Novelistic Time’. In A Mieke Bal Reader. University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 96–147. Barratt, Emma L., and Nick J. Davis. ‘Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): A Flow-Like Mental State’. PeerJ, no. 3, 2015. Barth, John. ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. In Lost in the Funhouse. Anchor Books, 1988, pp. 72–97. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. University Press of New England, 2006. Benfey, Christopher. ‘How to Be Both, by Ali Smith’. New York Times. 31 December 2014. www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/how-to-be-both-by-ali-smithreview.html?mcubz=0. Accessed 20 July 2017. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Harvard University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. ‘One-Way Street’. In Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 444–86. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Path to Success, in Thirteen Theses’. In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 144–7. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. Pimlico, 1999, pp. 217–52.

186

Works Cited

Bennett, Andrew. ‘Inside David Foster Wallace’s Head: Attention, Loneliness, Suicide and the Other Side of Boredom’. In Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, edited by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 69–84. Benzon, Kiki. ‘David Foster Wallace and Millennial America’. In David Foster Wallace: Critical Insights, edited by Philip Coleman. Salem Press, 2015, pp. 29–45. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Dover, [1890] 2004. Berlant, Lauren. ‘Faceless Book’. Berfrois. 20 December 2014. www.berfrois.com/2014/ 12/lauren-berlant-performs-clicking/. Accessed 20 July 2017. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’. Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. Birkerts, Sven. Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age. Graywolf Press, 2015. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Faber and Faber, [1994] 2006. Birkerts, Sven. ‘The Time of Reading: A Meditation on the Fate of Books in an Impatient Age’. Boston Review, Summer 1996. http://bostonreview.net/archives/ BR21.3/Birkerts.html. Accessed 20 July 2017. Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. Boddy, Kasia. ‘ “A Fiction of Response”: Girl with Curious Hair in Context’. In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 23–58. Boever, Arne de. ‘Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and “The Great Outdoors” ’. In Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays, edited by Dennis Duncan. Gylphi, 2016, pp. 201–26. Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. University of California Press, 1988. Borges, Marana. ‘A Misunderstanding: Trauma and Terrorism in the “9/11 fiction”’. TRANS: Revue de Littérature Générale et Comparée, no. 15, 2013. https://trans. revues.org/702. Accessed 20 July 2017. Boswell, Marshall. ‘ “The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head”: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness’. In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 151–70. Boswell, Marshall. David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing’: New Essays on the Novels. Bloomsbury, 2014. Boswell, Marshall. ‘Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King’. Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 464–79. Boswell, Marshall and Stephen Burn. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Boulous Walker, Michelle. Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Works Cited

187

Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Breitbach, Julia. Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels after 2000. Camden House, 2012. Brennan, Teresa. The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity. Routledge, 1992. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press, 2004. Brillenburg Wurth, Keine and Inge van de Ven. ‘Posthumously Speaking: Thanatography in a Posthuman Age’. Frame: Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, 2012. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard University Press, 1984. Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2003. Burn, Stephen. ‘ “A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness”: The Pale King’. In David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing’: New Essays on the Novels, edited by Marshall Boswell. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 149–68. Burn, Stephen. ‘Tribe of One’. New York Times. 11 June 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/ 06/13/books/review/Burn-t.html. Accessed 20 July 2017. Burn, Stephen. ‘ “Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing”: Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind’. In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 59–85. Buse, Peter, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken and Bertrand Taithe. Benjamin’s Arcades: An UnGuided Tour. Manchester University Press, 2006. Buurma, Rachel Sagner and Laura Heffernan. ‘Notation after ‘The Reality Effect” ’. Representations, vol. 125, no. 1, 2014, pp. 80–102. Byatt, A. S. ‘Crocodile Tears’. Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. Vintage, 1999, pp. 1–78. Byatt, Jim. ‘Being Dead? Trauma and the Liminal Narrative in J.G. Ballard’s Crash and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder’. Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 48, no. 3, 2012. Cage, John. ‘Four Statements on the Dance’. In Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan University Press, 1973, pp. 86–97. Calhoun Shafer, M. T. ‘The Queerness of Distraction: A Research Program for Theory and Theology’. Theology and Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3–17. Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, translated by William Weaver. Vintage, 1998. Calvino, Italo. Se una Notte d’Inverno un Viaggiatore. Mondadori, 2000. Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. Atlantic Books, 2011. Carson, Anne. ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Tell God’. Common Knowledge, vol. 8, no. 1, 2002, pp. 188–203. Cederstrom, Carl and Peter Fleming. Dead Man Working. Zero Books, 2012. Certeau, Michel de. ‘The Unnameable’. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press, 1988, pp. 190–98.

188

Works Cited

Chambers, Ross. Loiterature. University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Childs, Peter and James Green. Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-first Century British Novels: Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell. Bloomsbury, 2013. Cioffi, Frank Louis. ‘ “An Anguish Become Thing”: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest’. Narrative, vol. 8, no. 2, 2000, pp. 161–81. Clare, Ralph. ‘The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King’. Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 428–46. Clark, Hilary A. ‘Encyclopedic Discourse’. SubStance, vol. 21, no. 1, 1992, pp. 95–110. Claybaugh, Alison. ‘McC’. N+1, no. 11. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-11/reviews/ mcc/. Accessed 6 July 2017. Cohen, Joshua. Attention! A (Short) History. Notting Hill Editions, 2013. Cohen, Joshua. Book of Numbers. Harvill Secker, 2015. Cohen, Joshua. ‘An Experiment in Anxiety’. Interview with Andrew Leland. The Believer. 15 October 2015. https://logger.believermag.com/post/2015/10/15/anexperiment-in-anxiety. Accessed 20 July 2017. Cohen, Joshua. Four New Messages. Graywolf Press, 2012. Cohen, Joshua. ‘Joshua Cohen on the Writing Process’. Big Think. 27 May 2016 http:// bigthink.com/videos/joshua-cohen-on-the-writing-process. Accessed 20 July 2017. Cohen, Joshua. ‘Joshua Cohen’. Bomb Magazine. Interview by Dan Duray. 9 June 2015. http://bombmagazine.org/article/608462/joshua-cohen. Accessed 20 July 2017. Cohen, Joshua. ‘Joshua Cohen’. Full Stop. Interview by Michael Schapira. 2 October 2012. www.full-stop.net/2012/10/02/interviews/michael-schapira/joshua-cohen/. Accessed 20 July 2017. Cohen, Joshua. ‘McDonald’s’. In Four New Messages. Graywolf Press, 2012, pp. 53–84. Cohen, Joshua. ‘McDonald’s’. Triple Canopy. www.canopycanopycanopy.com/content/ mcdonald_s. Accessed 20 July 2017. Cohen, Joshua. PCKWCK. www.pckwck.com. Accessed 16 October 2015. Cohen, Joshua. Witz. Dalkey Archive Press, 2010. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton University Press, 1978. Crangle, Sara. Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation. Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso Books, 2013. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. MIT Press, 2001. Crawford, Matthew. The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction. Viking, 2015. Critchley, Simon. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments on Political Theology. Verso, 2012. Critchley, Simon and Carl Cederström. How to Stop Living and Start Worrying: Conversations with Carl Cederström. Polity Press, 2010.

Works Cited

189

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness. Rider, [1992] 2002. Currie, Mark. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Currie, Mark. ‘Introduction’. In Metafiction, edited by Mark Currie. Routledge, 2013, pp. 1–20. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2007. Darnton, Robert. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. Public Affairs, 2009. Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Harvard Business Press, 2013. Day, Elizabeth. ‘How to Be Both Review – Ali Smith’s Dazzling Dual-Narrative Novel’. The Guardian. 7 September 2014. www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/07/ how-to-be-both-review-ali-smith-dual-narrative-francesco-del-cossa. Accessed 20 July 2017. De Bruyn, Ben. ‘Realism 4°. Objects, Weather and Infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10: 04’. Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 5, 2017, pp. 951–71. Den Dulk, Allard. ‘Boredom, Anxiety and Irony: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self ’. In David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing’: New Essays on the Novels, edited by Marshall Boswell. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 43–60. Derber, Charles. The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Individualism in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, edited by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford University Press, 2000. Donahey, River. ‘You Can Now Watch Joshua Cohen Write a Novel Online in Real Time’. Vice. 12 October 2015. www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gjwvq/go-watch-joshuacohen-write-a-novel-online-in-real-time-vgtrn-851. Accessed 20 July 2017. Dreyfus, Hubert and Sean Dorrance Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. Free Press, 2011. Duncan, Dennis, editor. Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Gylphi, 2016. Dunne, Nathan, editor. Tarkovsky. Black Dog Publishing, 2008. Eaglestone, Robert. Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, 1996. Eggers, Dave. The Circle. Penguin, 2014. Elias, Amy J., and Joel Burges, editors. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. New York University Press, 2016. Elkin, Lauren. ‘ “Anyone over the Age of Thirty Catching a Bus Can Consider Himself a Failure”: Class Mobility and Public Transport in Zadie Smith’s NW’. Études Britanniques Contemporaines. Revue de la Société d’études Anglaises Contemporaines, no. 49, 2015. Elkins, James. What Photography Is. Routledge, 2011.

190

Works Cited

Ellison, Katherine E. The Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Routledge, 2005. Epstein, Andrew. Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. Oxford University Press, 2016. Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolano’s 2666, translated by Albert Sbragia. Bloomsbury, 2014. Evans, David H. ‘ “The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free Will and Fate in William James and David Foster Wallace’. In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 171–90. Eve, Martin Paul. ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’ C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 7–25. Federico, Annette. Engagements with Close Reading. Routledge, 2015. Felski, Rita. ‘Introduction: Everyday Life’. New Literary History, vol. 33, no. 4, 2002, pp. 607–22. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Blackwell, 2008. Ferrante, Elena. Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions, 2016. Ferrante, Elena. The Story of the Lost Child, translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions, 2015. Ferrante, Elena. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions, 2014. Fest, Bradley. ‘The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and AntiEschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest’. Boundary 2, vol. 39, no. 3, 2012, pp. 125–49. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Vanderbilt University Press, 2006. Foer, Jonathan Safran. ‘Jonathan Safran Foer: Technology Is Diminishing Us’. The Guardian. 3 December 2016. www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/03/jonathansafran-foer-technology-diminishing-us. Accessed 20 July 2017. Franklin, Ruth. ‘Reader: Keep Up! The Identity Crisis of Zadie Smith’. New Republic. 14 September 2012. https://newrepublic.com/article/107209/reader-keep-up. Accessed 20 July 2017. Franzen, Jonathan. ‘A Word about This Book’. In How to Be Alone. Harper Perennial, 2002, pp. 3–6. Franzen, Jonathan. ‘Farther Away’. New Yorker. 18 April 2011. www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2011/04/18/farther-away-jonathan-franzen. Accessed 10 July 2017. Franzen, Jonathan. How to Be Alone. Harper Perennial, 2002. Franzen, Jonathan. ‘Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist’. Time. Interview by Lev Grossman. 12 August 2010. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,2010185,00.html. Accessed 20 July 2017.

Works Cited

191

Franzen, Jonathan. ‘Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels’. Harper’s Magazine, April 1996, pp. 35–54. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey. Norton, [1930] 1989. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. University of Chicago Press, 1980. Gallop, Jane. ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading’. Profession, 2007, pp. 181–6. Gasiorek, Andrzej. ‘ “A Renewed Sense of Difficulty”: E.M Forster, Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith on Ethics and Form’. In The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, edited by David James. Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 170–86. Gasiorek, Andrzej and David James. ‘Fiction since 2000: Postmillennial Commitments’. Contemporary Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, 2012, pp. 609–27. GentleWhisperingASMR. ‘_=_Relaxing Towel Folding Tutorial/ASMR_=_’. 10 September 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHiKxytbCWk&t=210s. Accessed 6 July 2017. Germanà, Monica and Emily Horton, editors. Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Bloomsbury, 2013. Gibbons, Alison. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Routledge, 2012. Goldhaber, Michael. ‘The Attention Economy and the Net’. First Monday, vol. 2, no. 4, 1997. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Wasting Time on the Internet. Harper Perennial, 2016. Goldsmiths, University of London. ‘Ali Smith Wins the Goldsmiths Prize 2014’. 12 November 2014. www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize/media/ali-smith-wins-thegoldsmiths-prize-2014/. Accessed 28 March 2018. Gomez. Jeff. Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Groes, Sebastian. ‘Information Overload in Literature’. Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 7, 2017, pp. 1481–1508. Grohmann, Alexis and Caragh Wells, editors. Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Guignery, Vanessa. ‘Zadie Smith’s NW or the Art of Line-Crossing’. Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone, vol. 11, no. 2, 2014. Guignery, Vanessa. ‘Zadie Smith’s NW: The Novel at an “Anxiety Crossroads”?’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines. Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines, no. 45, 2013. Guillory, John. ‘The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading’. In The Turn to Ethics, edited by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Routledge, 2000, pp. 29–46. Gurton-Wachter, Lily. Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. Stanford University Press, 2016.

192

Works Cited

Hale, Dorothy J. ‘Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the TwentyFirst Century’. PMLA, vol. 124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 896–905. Hale, Dorothy J. ‘On Beauty as Beautiful? The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics by Way of Zadie Smith’. Contemporary Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, 2012, pp. 814–44. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000. Harris, Michael. The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Penguin, 2014. Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Fate of Reading. University of Chicago Press, 1975. Hayes-Brady, Clare. ‘ “…”: Language, Gender and Modes of Power in David Foster Wallace’. In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 131–50. Hayes-Brady, Clare. The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity and Resistance. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine’. ADE Bulletin, no. 150, 2010, pp. 62–79. Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes’. Profession, 2007, pp. 187–99. Head, Dominic. The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. Blackwell, 2009. Hering, David, editor. Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Sideshow Media, 2010. Holland, Mary K. ‘Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’. In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 107–70. Horgan, Mary. ‘About Change: Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism’. Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 10, no. 2, July 2016, pp. 155–74. Horton, Emily. ‘ “Everything You Ever Dreamed”: Post-9/11 Trauma and Fantasy in Ali Smith’s The Accidental’. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 58, no. 3, 2012, pp. 637–54. Horton, Emily. ‘A Voice without a Name: Gothic Homelessness in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me’. In Twenty-First-Century Fiction: What Happens Now, edited by Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 132–46. Hamilton, Robert C. ‘ “Constant Bliss in Every Atom”: Tedium and Transcendence in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King’. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 70, no. 4, 2014, pp. 167–90. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema’. October, no. 109, 2004, pp. 3–35. Hendrix, Jenny. ‘The Original Online: Trapped in the Web of Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers’. Slate. 6 July 2015. www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/07/joshua_ cohen_s_book_of_numbers_reviewed.html. Accessed 20 July 2017. Hepburn, Allan. Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2010.

Works Cited

193

Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Horkheimer, Max. ‘The End of Reason’. In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. Contiuum, 1997, pp 26–48. Huehls, Mitchum. After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age. Oxford University Press, 2016. International Necronautical Society. ‘INS Declaration on the Notion of ‘The Future’ Admonitions and Exhortations for the Cultural Producers of the Early-to-Mid Twentieth Century’. In The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society, edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin. Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 264–76. International Necronautical Society. ‘Joint Statement on Inauthenticity’. In The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society, edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin. Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 220–37. International Necronautical Society. ‘The New York Declaration: Joint Statement on Inauthenticity’. www.necronauts.net/declarations/ins_inauthenticity_new_york/ inauthenticity_release.html. Accessed 6 July 2017. Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Prometheus, 2008. Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Oxford University Press, 2011. James, David. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space. Bloomsbury, 2008. James, David. Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2012. James, David. ‘The New Purism’. Textual Practice, vol. 21, no. 4, 2007, pp. 687–714. James, David. ‘Worlded Localisms: Cosmopolitics Writ Small’. In Postmodern Literature and Race, edited by Len Platt and Sarah Upstone. Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 47–61. James, David, editor. The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2012. James, William. The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. Harvard University Press, [1890] 1981. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. Verso, 1998, pp. 1–22. Jansen, Brian Douglas. ‘ “On the Porousness of Certain Borders”: Attending to Objects in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest’. English Studies in Canada, vol. 40, no. 4, 2014, pp. 55–77. Johns, Gary. ‘Presenteeism in the Workplace: A Review and Research Agenda’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 31, no. 4, 2010, pp. 519–42. Johnson, Barbara. ‘Teaching Deconstructively’. In Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Jonathan Culler. Routledge, 2003, pp. 204–12.

194

Works Cited

Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Delta, 1990. Katz, Daniel. ‘ “I Did Not Walk Here All the Way from Prose”: Ben Lerner’s Virtual Poetics’. Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, pp. 315–37. Kelly, Adam. ‘David Foster Wallace: The Critical Reception’. In David Foster Wallace: Critical Insights, edited by Philip Coleman. Salem Press, 2015, pp. 46–62. Kelly, Adam. ‘David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction’. In Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering. Sideshow Media Press, 2010, pp. 131–46. Keniston, Ann. ‘ “Not Needed, Except as Meaning”: Belatedness in Post-9/11 American Poetry’. Contemporary Literature, vol. 52, no. 4, 2011, pp. 658–83. Kernan, Alvin. The Death of Literature. Yale University Press, 1992. Kirby, Alan. ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’. In Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the 21st Century, edited by David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 49–60. Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. Bloomsbury, 2009. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz. Stanford University Press, 1999. Koehler, Margaret. Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Konstantinou, Lee. ‘No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironical Belief ’. In The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou. University of Iowa Press, 2012, pp. 83–122. Krystal, Arthur. Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature. Yale University Press, 2002. Krystal, Arthur. ‘Closing the Books: A Once Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story’. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 292, no. 1750, 1996, p. 54. Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? Penguin, 2013. Lavery, Nick. ‘Post-Humanism and the Distributed Consciousness in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder’. In Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays, edited by Dennis Duncan. Gylphi, 2016, pp. 161–80. Lea, Daniel. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices. Manchester University Press, 2016. LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. University of Illinois Press, 1989. Lerner, Ben. 10:04. Granta, 2015. Lerner, Ben. ‘The Actual World’. 16 June 2013. https://Frieze.com/article/actual-world. Accessed 20 July 2017. Lerner, Ben. ‘Angle of Yaw’. Angle of Yaw. Copper Canyon Press, 2006, pp. 11–57.

Works Cited

195

Lerner, Ben. ‘Ben Lerner’. The Believer. Interview by Tao Lin. September 2014. www. believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_lerner_2. Accessed 20 July 2017. Lerner, Ben. ‘Ben Lerner on Art, Language and Uber’. Interview by Cressida Leyshon. New Yorker. 31 May 2016. www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-thisweek-ben-lerner-2016-06-06. Accessed 20 July 2017. Lerner, Ben. ‘Each Cornflake’. London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 10, May 2014, pp. 21–2. Lerner, Ben. ‘The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy’. Boundary 2, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 201–13. Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016. Lerner, Ben. ‘An Interview with Ben Lerner’. Interview by Ed Sugden. Wave Composition, no. 4. 26 March 2012. www.wavecomposition.com/article/issue-4/aninterview-with-ben-lerner/. Accessed 20 July 2017. Lerner, Ben. ‘An Interview with Ben Lerner’. Interview by Gayle Rogers. Contemporary Literature, vol. 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 218–38. Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Coffee House Press, 2011. Lerner, Ben. ‘Mean Free Path’. In Mean Free Path. Copper Canyon Press, 2010, pp. 37–57. Lerner, Ben. ‘Time Is a Flat Circle – Ben Lerner Interviewed’. Interview by Karl Smith. The Quietus. 8 February 2015. http://thequietus.com/articles/17190-ben-lernerinterview-1004-leaving-atocha-station-poetry-time-knausgaard. Accessed 20 July 2017. Letzler, David. The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention. University of Nevada Press, 2017. Letzler, David. ‘Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s Endnotes’. In David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing’: New Essays on the Novels, edited by Marshall Boswell. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 127–47. Leung, Chuck. ‘No One Is Special: The Techy, Drug-Fuelled Existentialism of Tao Lin’. Slate. 7 June 2013. www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/06/tao_lin_s_taipei_ reviewed_techy_drug_fueled_existential_fiction.html. Accessed 20 July 2017. Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, 2001. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, 1999. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, 1999. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lin, Tao. Taipei. Canongate, 2013. Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Broadway Books, 2010.

196

Works Cited

Lorentzen, Christian. ‘Why Am I So Fucked Up?’ London Review of Books. 8 November 2012. www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n21/christian-lorentzen/why-am-i-so-fucked-up. Accessed 20 July 2017. Love, Heather. ‘Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’. Criticism, vol. 52, no. 2, 2010, pp. 235–41. Luckhurst, Roger and Peter Marks. ‘Hurry Up Please It’s Time: Introducing the Contemporary’. In Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, edited by Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks. Routledge, 1999, pp. 1–12. Luys, Benjamin. ‘Vital Texts and Bare Life: The Uses and Abuses of Life in Contemporary Fiction’. CounterText, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 169–85. Madsen, Ole Jacob. Optimizing the Self: Social Representations of Self-Help. Routledge, 2015. Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain?, translated by Sebastian Rand. Fordham University Press, 2008. Marcus, David. ‘Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity’. Dissent. Spring 2013. www.dissentmagazine.org/article/post-hysterics-zadie-smith-and-thefiction-of-austerity. Accessed 20 July 2017. Marno, David. ‘Easy Attention: Ignatius of Loyola and Robert Boyle’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 2014, pp. 135–61. Martin, Richard. ‘Duration without Breaks: Marclay and McQueen against the Clock’. Alluvium, vol. 4, no. 6, 2016. Maslen, Hannah and Rebecca Roache. ‘ASMR and Absurdity’. Practical Ethics. 30 July 2015. http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/07/asmr-and-absurdity/. Accessed 20 July 2017. Max, D. T. ‘The Unfinished’. New Yorker. 9 March 2009. www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2009/03/09/the-unfinished. Accessed 20 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. C. Vintage, 2011. McCarthy, Tom. ‘The Death of Writing – If James Joyce Were Alive Today’. The Guardian. 7 March 2015. www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/07/tommccarthy-death-writing-james-joyce-working-google. Accessed 6 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Existential Ground Zero’. Interview by David Gavan. Gorse. 25 September 2013. http://gorse.ie/existential-ground-zero/. Accessed 6 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. ‘The Geometry of the Pressant’. Artforum, vol. 46, no. 10, 2008, pp. 392–3. McCarthy, Tom. ‘How Technology Rewrites Literature’. Interview by Thomas McMullan. The Guardian. 23 June 2014. www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/23/ technology-rewrites-literature-tom-mccarthy-internet. Accessed 19 April 2017. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Kittler and the Sirens’. 9 November 2011. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/ 11/09/tom-mccarthy/kittler-and-the-sirens/. Accessed 6 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. Recessional – Or, the Time of the Hammer. Diaphanes, 2016. McCarthy, Tom. Remainder. Alma Books, 2007. McCarthy, Tom. Satin Island. Jonathan Cape, 2015.

Works Cited

197

McCarthy, Tom. ‘Stabbing the Olive’. London Review of Books, vol. 32, no. 3, 2010, pp. 26–8. McCarthy, Tom. Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Granta, 2011. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Tom McCarthy’. Interview by Frederic Tuten. BOMB Magazine, no. 131, 2015. http://bombmagazine.org/article/276933/tom-mccarthy. Accessed 20 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Tom McCarthy’s 6 Favorite Books about Nothing’. The Week. 24 February 2012. http://theweek.com/articles/477866/tom-mccarthys-6-favoritebooks-about-nothing. Accessed 20 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Tom McCarthy Is No Longer a Well-Kept Secret’. Interview by Christopher Bollen. Interview. 13 March 2012. www.interviewmagazine.com/ culture/tom-mccarthy. Accessed 20 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Tom McCarthy: “To Ignore the Avant Garde Is Akin to Ignoring Darwin”’. Interview by James Purdon. The Guardian. 1 August 2010. www. theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/01/tom-mccarthy-c-james-purdon. Accessed 20 July 2017. McCarthy, Tom. Transmission and the Individual Remix. Vintage, 2012. McCarthy, Tom. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. New York Review Books, 2017. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Ulysses and Its Wake’. London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 12, 2014, pp. 39–41. McCarthy, Tom. ‘Writing Machines’. London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 24, 2014, pp. 21–2. McCarthy, Tom, James Corby and Ivan Callus. ‘The CounterText Interview: Tom McCarthy’. CounterText, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 135–53. McCulloch, Fiona. Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. McCullough, Malcolm. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. MIT Press, 2013. McEwan, Ian. ‘Only Love and then Oblivion. Love Was All They Had to Set Against Their Murderers’. The Guardian. 15 September 2001. www.theguardian.com/world/ 2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2. Accessed 20 July 2017. McGurl, Mark. ‘The Zombie Renaissance’. N+1, no. 9, Spring 2010. https:// nplusonemag.com/issue-9/reviews/the-zombie-renaissance/. Accessed 20 July 2017. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge, 1992. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1994. Mendelson, Edward. ‘Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon’. MLN, vol. 91, no. 6, 1976, pp. 1267–75. Mendelson, Edward. ‘Gravity’s Encyclopedia’. In Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. Little, Brown, 1976, pp. 161–95. Merriman, Ben. ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’. Chicago Review, vol. 57, no. 1/2, Summer 2012, pp. 246–8.

198

Works Cited

Mikics, David. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Harvard University Press, 2013. Miller, Adam. The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace. Bloomsbury, 2016. Mills, Lia. ‘Pay Attention’. Dublin Review of Books. 1 March 2015. www.drb.ie/essays/ pay-attention. Accessed 20 July 2017. Mitchell, Kaye. ‘Queer Metamorphoses: Girl Meets Boy and the Futures of Queer Fiction’. In Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Monica Germanà and Emily Horton. Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 61–74. Mohr, Dunja M. ‘Terror as Catalyst? Negotiations of Silences, Perspectives, and Complicities in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Ali Smith’s The Accidental, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist’. In Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity, edited by Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes. Brill, 2016, pp. 79–99. Nealon, Jeffrey T. Post-Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2012. Nieland, Justus. ‘Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modernism’. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 58, no. 3, 2012, pp. 569–99. Nixon, Charles. ‘Attention, Retention and Extension in Oblivion: Stories’. In David Foster Wallace: Critical Insights, edited by Philip Coleman. Salem Press, 2015, pp. 176–91. North, Paul. The Problem of Distraction. Stanford University Press, 2011. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1990. O’Donnell, Patrick. ‘Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System’. In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 1–22. Olson, Liesl. Modernism and the Ordinary: Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Parks, Tim. ‘Reading: The Struggle’. New York Review of Books. 10 June 2014. www. nybooks.com/daily/2014/06/10/reading-struggle/. Accessed 20 July 2017. Pease, Allison. Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pettman, Dominic. Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media. Polity Press, 2016. Phillips, Natalie M. Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Piper, Andrew. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness. Penguin, [1985] 2005. Punday, Daniel. Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology. University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Rabinow, Paul. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton University Press, 2008.

Works Cited

199

Rabinowitz, Peter. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ohio State University Press, 1987. Randall, Bryony. Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Richards, I. A. ‘Gerard Hopkins’ (originally published in Dial, September 1926, pp. 195– 203). In Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Critical Heritage, edited by Gerald Roberts. Routledge, 2000, pp. 140–46. Ricoeur, Paul. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, translated by Erazim V. Kohak. Northwestern University Press, 1966. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Vol 1, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, 1984. Roberts, Jennifer L. ‘The Power of Patience’. Harvard Magazine. November 2013. http:// harvardmagazine.com/2013/11/the-power-of-patience. Accessed 20 July 2017. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. Sage, 1992. Roth, Philip. ‘Philip Roth Reflects on Novel’s Decline and Nemesis’. Interview with Catherine Kearney. Reuters. 5 October 2010. www.reuters.com/article/uk-booksphiliproth-idUKTRE6942MM20101005. Accessed 30 July 2015. Rourke, Lee and Tom McCarthy. ‘In Conversation: Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy’. The Guardian. 18 September 2010. www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/18/tommccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation. Accessed 20 July 2017. Royle, Nicholas. ‘Even the Title: On the State of Narrative Theory Today’. Narrative, vol. 22, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–16. Royle, Nicholas. Veering: A Theory of Literature. Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson, [1949] 1963. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994. Sánchez, Gemma López. ‘ “Mind the Gap”: Powers of Horror and Trauma in Ali Smith’s Hotel World’. Atlantis, 2010, pp. 43–56. Sansom, Ian. ‘Taipei by Tao Lin – Review’. The Guardian. 4 July 2013. www.theguardian. com/books/2013/jul/04/taipei-tao-lin-review. Accessed 20 July 2017. Sayers, Philip. ‘Representing Entertainment in Infinite Jest’. In David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing’: New Essays on the Novels, edited by Marshall Boswell. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 108–25. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performance. Duke University Press, 2003. Self, Will. ‘The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real)’. The Guardian. 2 May 2014. www. theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction. 20 July 2017. Self, Will. ‘Will Self: The Fate of Our Literary Culture Is Sealed’. The Guardian. 3 October 2014. www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/03/fate-literary-culturesealed-internet-will-self. Accessed 20 July 2017. Severs, Jeffrey. David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value. Columbia University Press, 2017.

200

Works Cited

Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford University Press, 2009. Simon, Herbert. ‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’. In Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, edited by Martin Greenberger. Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, pp. 37–53. Slote, Sam. ‘The Recidual Remainder’. In Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays, edited by Dennis Duncan. Gylphi, 2016, pp. 121–136. Smith, Ali. The Accidental. Hamish Hamilton, 2006. Smith, Ali. ‘After Life’. Public Library and Other Stories. Hamish Hamilton, 2015, pp. 135–49. Smith, Ali. ‘Ali Smith: “It’s a Pivotal Moment . . . A Question of What Happens Culturally When Something Is Built on a Lie”’. Interview by Olivia Laing. The Guardian. 16 October 2016. www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/16/ali-smithautumn-interview-how-can-we-live-ina-world-and-not-put-a-hand-across-adivide-brexit-profu. Accessed 20 July 2017. Smith, Ali. Artful. Hamish Hamilton, 2012. Smith, Ali. Autumn. Hamish Hamilton, 2016. Smith, Ali. ‘Conversations with the Undead: Ali Smith Gives the Lecture a Haunting Twist’. Interview by Arifa Akbar. The Independent. 26 October 2012. www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/books/features/conversations-with-the-undead-ali-smith-gives-thelecture-a-haunting-twist-8226873.html. Accessed 20 July 2017. Smith, Ali. Girl Meets Boy. Canongate Books, 2007. Smith, Ali. ‘He Looked Like the Finest Man Who Ever Lived’. The Guardian. 24 August 2014. www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/24/ali-smith-the-finest-man-whoever-lived-palazzo-schifanoia-how-to-be-both. Accessed 20 July 2017. Smith, Ali. Hotel World. Hamish Hamilton, 2001. Smith, Ali. How to Be Both. Hamish Hamilton, 2014. Smith, Ali. How to Be Both. Hamish Hamilton, 2014. Kindle. Smith, Ali. ‘An Interview with Ali Smith’. Interview by Tory Young. Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, pp. 131–48. Smith, Ali. Public Library and Other Stories. Hamish Hamilton, 2015. Smith, Ali. There but for The. Hamish Hamilton, 2012. Smith, Matthew. Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD. Reaktion Books, 2012. Smith, Zadie. ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace’. Changing My Mind. Penguin, 2009, pp. 257–300. Smith, Zadie. Changing My Mind. Penguin, 2010. Smith, Zadie. The Embassy of Cambodia. Hamish Hamilton, 2013. Smith, Zadie. ‘The Limited Circle Is Pure’. New Republic. 3 November 2003. https:// newrepublic.com/article/67211/the-limited-circle-pure. Accessed 20 July 2017. Smith, Zadie. ‘Love, Actually’. The Guardian. 31 October 2003. www.theguardian.com/ books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith. Accessed 20 July 2017.

Works Cited

201

Smith, Zadie. ‘Man vs. Corpse’. New York Review of Books. 5 December 2013. www. nybooks.com/articles/2013/12/05/zadie-smith-man-vs-corpse/. Accessed 15 March 2014. Smith, Zadie. NW. Penguin, 2013. Smith, Zadie. On Beauty. Penguin, 2006. Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. Hamish Hamilton, 2016. Smith, Zadie. ‘Two Directions for the Novel’. Changing My Mind. Penguin, 2010, pp. 71–96. Smith, Zadie. ‘Zadie Smith on NW – Guardian Book Club’. The Guardian. 1 August 2013. www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/01/zadie-smith-nw-book-club. Accessed 20 July 2017. Steiner, George. ‘Books in an Age of Post-Literacy’. Publishers Weekly, 24 May 1985, pp. 44–8. Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford University Press, 2010. Stiegler, Bernard. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, translated by Daniel Ross. Polity Press, 2013. Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Boredom, translated by John Irons. Reaktion, 2008. Symons, Stephane. Walter Benjamin: Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend. Brill, 2012. Tancke, Ulrike. ‘Narrating Intrusion: Deceptive Storytelling and Frustrated Desires in The Accidental and There but for The’. In Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Monica Germanà and Emily Horton. Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 75–88. Tresco, Matt. ‘ “Impervious to U.S. Parsing”: Encyclopedism, Autism and Infinite Jest’. In Consider David Foster Wallace, edited by David Hering. Sideshow Media, 2010, pp. 113–30. Turnbull, David. ‘This Is Water and the Ethics of Attention: Wallace, Murdoch and Nussbaum’. In Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering. Sideshow Media, 2010, pp. 209–17. Ulin, David L. The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. Sasquatch Books, 2010. Veel, Kristen. ‘Calm Imaging: The Conquest of Overload and the Conditions of Attention’. In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman. MIT Press, 2013, pp. 119–32. Vermeulen, Pieter. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Vermeulen, Pieter. ‘How Should a Person Be (Transpersonal)? Ben Lerner, Roberto Esposito, and the Biopolitics of the Future’. Political Theory, 2016. Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin Van Den Akker. ‘Notes on Metamodernism’. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010.

202

Works Cited

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. Columbia University Press, 2006. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. Columbia University Press, 2015. Wallace, David Foster. ‘Authority and American Usage’. In Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Abacus, 2005, pp. 66–127. Wallace, David Foster . ‘B.I. #20’. In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Abacus, 2001, pp. 245–71. Wallace, David Foster. ‘B.I. #46’. In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Abacus, 2001, pp. 98–105. Wallace, David Foster. Both Flesh and Not: Essays. Penguin, 2012. Wallace, David Foster. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Abacus, 2001. Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Abacus, 2005. Wallace, David Foster. ‘A Conversation with David Foster Wallace’. Interview by Larry McCaffery. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13 September 1993, pp. 127–51. Wallace, David Foster. ‘David Foster Wallace’. Interview by Dave Eggers. The Believer. November 2003 www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace. Accessed 10 July 2017. Wallace, David Foster. ‘Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report’. In Both Flesh and Not: Essays. Penguin, 2012, pp. 299–317. Wallace, David Foster. ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’. In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Abacus, 1998, pp. 21–82. Wallace, David Foster. Girl with Curious Hair. Abacus, 2003. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Abacus, 2004. Wallace, David Foster. ‘Lyndon’. In Girl with Curious Hair. Abacus, 2003, pp. 75–118. Wallace, David Foster. ‘Mister Squishy’. In Oblivion: Stories. Abacus, 2005, pp. 3–66. Wallace, David Foster. ‘The Nature of the Fun’. In Both Flesh and Not: Essays. Penguin, 2012, pp. 193–9. Wallace, David Foster. Oblivion: Stories. Abacus, 2005. Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. Penguin, 2012. Wallace, David Foster. ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’. In Oblivion: Stories. Abacus, 2005, pp. 67–113. Wallace, David Foster. ‘The Suffering Channel’. In Oblivion: Stories. Abacus, 2005, pp. 238–329. Wallace, David Foster. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’. In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Abacus, 1998, pp. 256–90. Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Abacus, 1998. Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. Little, Brown, 2009. Wallace, David Foster. ‘Twenty-Four Word Notes’. In Both Flesh and Not: Essays. Penguin, 2012, pp. 261–80.

Works Cited

203

Wallace, David Foster. ‘Up, Simba’. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Abacus, 2005, pp. 156–234. Wallace, David Foster. ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’. In Girl with Curious Hair. Abacus, 2003, pp. 233–373. Warner, Michael. ‘Uncritical Reading’. In Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, edited by Jane Gallop. Routledge, 2004. Weaver, Milly. ‘Restricted Action: McCarthy’s Modernist Legacy?’ In Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays, edited by Dennis Duncan. Gylphi, 2016, pp. 95–120. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Routledge, 2002. Wells, Lynn. ‘The Right to a Secret: Zadie Smith’s NW’. In Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond, edited by Philip Tew. Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 97–110. Wilson, Frances. ‘Art and Its Double: Frances Wilson on ‘How to Be Both’ by Ali Smith’. New Statesman. 3 December 2014. www.newstatesman.com/2014/08/art-and-itsdouble. Accessed 20 July 2017. Wilson, Jeff. Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture. Oxford University Press, 2014. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Penguin, 2000. Wouters, Conley. ‘ “What Am I, a Machine?” Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King’. Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 447–63. Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: How Our Time and Attention Are Gathered and Sold. Atlantic Books, 2017. Yakob, Faris. Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World. Kogan Page, 2015. Yeandle, Heidi. ‘Celebrity and Surveillance in There but for The’. Alluvium, vol. 4, no. 3, 2015. Young, Damon. Distraction. Routledge, 2014.

Index A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 47 Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok 112 Abramovic, Marina 104 absent-mindedness 41, 49–50, 52, 54, 65, 149 n.176 see also present-mindedness absenteeism 66 see also presenteeism absorption, see also flow, immersion, rapt attention vs analysis 137–48, 152–7 and pleasure 43, 98–102 and reading 1, 8, 61, 138–9, 162 n.15 as self-forgetting 14, 29–34, 40, 64, 98, 141, 151–7, 165 n.3, 169 n.7 simulacrum of 38, 45, 48 and sponges 98–102, 106–7, 177 n.13 ADD, see attention deficit disorder adulthood 30–1, 43–8, 81, 143, 149, 166 n.5, see also childhood affect, see also emotional labour and attention as care 23, 29, 74–6, 115–17, 147, 173 n.11 and attention as curiosity 12, 24, 103, 105, 125, see also boredom and interpretation 6–8, 61, 139–43, 155, 162 n.14, 162 n.15 as labour 38–40, 47, 66–7, 69 transmission of (Brennan) 23, 75–6, 115, 173 n.11 ambient information (McCulloch) 89 ambient 74 amputation 23, 93–8, 108–10, 176 n.3, 179 n.21 anticipation 52, 54, 56–8, 69, 156 anxiety 10, 34–5, 42, 45, 166 n.9 aphorisms 131, 181 n.13 appendix 108–9, 138 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 12, 23, 120, 129, 133, 180 n.6 Aristotle 57, 60, 169 n.8

art galleries 71–7, 139–40, 154–6, 172 n.6, 182 n.1 Ashbery, John 1, 143, 146–7, 183 n.7 ASMR 178 n.16 attention see also concentration, focus and aesthetics 72, 139–48, 155–6 of authors 2, 135–8, 146, 160 n.5, 160 n.6, 160 n.7 instrumentalization of 7, 26, 29, 32, 125 as labour 38–9, 47, 51–3, 66–8, 109 and postures 72, 148, 151–3 span 12, 14, 71, 120, 133 attention deficit disorder 12, 15, 27, 43–4, 64–5, 164 n.23 attention economy 15, 19, 29, 107, 122, 129, 163 n.12 attention-seeking 10, 33–4, 61, 182 n.3 Augustine 56–60, 169 n.8, see also distentio animi Austen, Jane 121, 132 autism 12, 142, 164 n.23 avant-garde 103–5 awakening 30, 46–7, 55 background 72–9, 86–92 Bal, Mieke 156 balloons 1, 8, 50, 143, 157 Barker, Nicola 21 Barth, John 112 Barthes, Roland on the contemporary 169 n.1 the pleasure of the text 34 ‘Upon Leaving the Movie Theater’ 30 on the rhythm of reading 163 n.18 and writing degree zero 102 ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (Melville) 67–8 Beardsley, Monroe 34 Beckett, Samuel 101, 103–4, 154 Beller, Jonathan 19 Benjamin, Walter the angel of history 149 jetztzeit 69

206 posture and the dictatorial perpendicular 151, 183 n.9 presence of mind 51, 169 n.5 reception in a state of distraction 142 Bennett, Andrew 16, 34–5 Bergson, Henri 103–4 Berlant, Lauren 87 Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus 6–7, 162 n.11 Birkerts, Sven 2–5, 160 n.5, 161 n.9 blind spot 17, 23, 54, 77, 97, 102–3, 106, 108, 112–13, 122, 143, 179 n.20 book, history and future of 2–5, 13, 19, 159 n.3, 159 n.4, 159 n.5, 163 n.19 books about nothing 103, 178 n.14 boredom see also curiosity, interest as an aesthetic 21, 61, 104–5, 142, 178 n.18 as affect 103–6, 166 n.9, 168 n.16, 179 n.20 and reading 9–10, 61, 163n.18 tolerance of 30, 33–6, 40–8, 64, 125, 161 n.10 boring a hole 40, 111 Boswell, Marshall 165 n.3, 167 n.14, 168 n.18 Boxall, Peter 49–50, 174 n.19 Brennan, Teresa 23, 75–6, 115, 173 n.11 Brooks, Peter 58 buffering 103, 178 n.15 bullshit jobs 82 Burn, Stephen 32–3, 37, 166 n.7, 170 n.12 Byatt, A. S. 156 Byatt, Jim 97 Cage, John 104 Calhoun Shafer, M. T. 84 Callus, Ivan 96, 176 n.4 Calvino, Italo 1, 53, 141 capitalism see also attention economy and modern working practices, 15, 22, 51–2, 66 and postpostmodernism 91–2 and temporality 55–6, 58 care as love 7, 12, 33–4, 74–5, 139 and noticing 76 taking care (Stiegler) 19–20, 23, 44–5, 75–7, 149, 170 n.13

Index as responsibility 26–7, 33–4, 37–8, 77, 79–80, 115–16, 125, 135–6, 138–9, 147 simulation of 38, 51 Carr, Nicholas 2, 5–6, 20, 161 n.10, 164 n.1 Carson, Anne 112 catch-up 88–9, 91 cautionary tale 62–3 CCTV 76–8 see also surveillance Cederstrom, Carl and Fleming 66–8, 170 n.16 centripetal distraction (Pettman) 82–3 childishness 29–31, 39, 138–9, 143, 166 n.6 childhood 13, 19, 43–8, 81, 135–6, 160 n.5, 183 n.11 Childs, Peter and James Green 130, 180 n.8 choosing 11, 14, 108, 142, 153, 164 n.1, 165 n.3, 174 n.16 see also the work of choosing civil inattention (Goffman)124–5 clickbait 12 close reading 6–8, 139, 162 n.12, 162 n.13 Cohen, Joshua 9, 32, 49–69, 83, 106, 110–11, 149, 154–5, 170 n.10, 170 n.11, 170 n.12, 176 n.3 Attention! A (Short) History 16, 22, 52–61, 65, 110, 178 n.14 Book of Numbers 61–2 Four New Messages 61–2, 155 ‘McDonald’s’ 22, 61–9, 170 n.12, 170 n.14 PCKWCK 67 Witz 61–3, 170 n.10, 170 n.12 Cohn, Dorrit 37 Cole, Teju 22 concentration 17–19, 25–6, 35, 40–2, 45, 50, 76, 135–8, 149 contemporary 49–53, 65–9, 168 n.1, 169 n.2, 169 n.3, 169 n.4 cosmopolitanism 12, 16, 23, 115, 119–23, 129, 133, 162 n.17, 180 n.7 Crary, Jonathan on always-on culture 56 on the everyday 105 on the historical disciplining of attention 13, 18, 49, 54, 169 n.7 on presence 52 on sleep 46–7

Index on temporality 23, 179 n.22 Crawford, Matthew 27 Critchley, Simon on the dividual, 23, 95–6, 110, 111–12, 176 n.4, 179 n.23 and objects 100, 105 and self-help 111, 167 n.12 crypts 111–13 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 34–5, 118, 166 n.9 see also flow Cumberbatch, Benedict 86 curation 74, 140, 147, 172 n.6 curiosity 12, 24, 103, 105, 125, 139, 141 see also boredom, interest Currie, Mark 58, 141, 169 n.9, 172 n.8, 174 n.19 data saturation 106–7, 113 see also information overload daydreaming 43–8, 67, 82, 173 n.11 De Bruyn, Ben 149, 183 n.10 De Certeau, Michel 107, 113 deep attention 5–6, 20, 36, 41, 86–7, 161 n.10 see also shallow attention, hyper attention deep reading 2, 5, 159 n.4 DeLillo, Don 14, 62, 91, 160 n.7, 170 n.14 depersonalisation 41 depresentification 137, 156, 182 n.2, 183 n.10 description 9, 73–4, 131, 147, 153–6 dictionary 126–9 digimodernism 142 digression 16, 63, 84–5, 175 n.21 disregard 1, 42, 47, 57, 124–5, 138 see also inattention dissociation 41 distentio animi 57–8, 169 n.8 distraction crisis 1–24, 26, 28, 36, 49, 67, 105, 149, 159 n.2, 169 n.5, 183 n.11 diversion 18, 64, 81–4, 127, 162 n.17 see also entertainment dividual 23, 76, 95–7, 108–13, 176 n.3, 176 n.4, 179 n.23 duration 4, 16, 73, 87, 103–5, 139, 156, 171 n.3 durational art 103–5, 154, 182 n.1 Eaglestone, Robert 130 Eagleton, Terry 7

207

Edelman, Lee 84 education 10, 19, 28, 31, 43–8, 136 Egan, Jennifer 21 Eggers, Dave 61, 175 n.22 ekphrasis 154–6, 184 n.13, 184 n.15 Elkin, Lauren 124 Elkins, James 73 Ellison, Katherine E. 13, 163 n.19 emotional labour 38–40, 47, 66–7 enchantment 24, 137–48, 155, 165 n.3 encyclopedias 31, 64, 163 n.19, 166 n.7, 170 n.11 entertainment 15, 21, 29–34, 165 n.4, 166 n.7 Epstein, Andrew 14–15, 105, 179 n.19 ethics see also care as responsibility and care 15–16, 145 and cosmopolitanism 12, 16, 23–4, 115–33, 180 n.6 and distraction 81 and fiction 27, 115–16, 121, 129–32, 161 n.9, 168 n.16, 179 n.1, 180 n.4, 180 n.8, 181 n.13 Levinasian 111, 122–4, 127, 129–30, 133 event 103–6 everyday 15, 22, 69, 102–7, 113 evolutionary psychology 2, 5 Facebook, 19, 79, 89, 159 n.4, 175 n.22 Faulkner, William 109, 159 n.4 Federico, Annette 6, 162 n.13 Felski, Rita 7, 24, 139, 142–8, 152–3, 155, 162 n.15 Ferrante, Elena 10–11 filter bubble 12 filtering 6, 14–15, 17, 31–2, 37, 43, 81–2, 94, 107–10, 138–9, 153, 177 n.13 see also sponges Fitzpatrick, Katherine 4, 160 n.7 flexible labour 47, 51, 68 flow 12, 33–6, 38, 42, 45, 48, 98–100, 103, 111, 137, 149, 166 n.9 focus see also concentration, hyperfocus, willpower and the blind spot 143 as disciplined attention 1, 6–7, 26, 29, 38, 40, 45, 48, 125–8, 135–6 as narrowed attention 25–48, 49–50, 65, 67, 72–3, 78, 80–1, 86, 89, 161 n.10

208 and pleasure 142 and reading 1, 8, 11, 16–18, 138–9, 152, 159 n.4 focus groups 42–3 Foer, Jonathan Safran 2, 90, 159 n.4 foreground 25, 73–5, 79, 83, 85–7, 90, 92 Frankfurt School 29, 52 Franzen, Jonathan 3, 34, 61, 160 n.6 freelancing 15, 67 Freeman, Elizabeth 84 frescoes 73–8, 87–9, 172 n.6 Freud, Sigmund 23, 93–5, 98, 173 n.11 Fried, Michael 14, 152 Gee, Maggie 22 genre fiction 21, 164 n.25 gift 33–5, 51, 81, 167 n.11 globalization 12, 22, 119–24, 126, 157, 180 n.5 Goffman, Erving 124 Goldsmith, Kenneth 14, 136–7, 179 n.19 Gomez, Jeff 159 n.3, 160 n.5 Google 107, 164 n.1, 175 n.22 Groes, Sebastian 107 Grossman, Allen 148 Guignery, Vanessa 124, 181 n.11 Gurton-Wachter, Lily 13, 50, 54 habit 15, 26, 52, 56, 106, 135, 177 n.8, 179 n.20 Hayles, N. Katherine 5–6, 19–20, 86, 95, 161 n.10 see also hyper attention, deep attention Hall, Stewart 21 Hamilton, Robert C. 36 Hammer, M. C. 109 Harris, Michael 2 Hartman, Geoffrey 2, 161 n.9 Hayes-Brady, Clare 39, 165 n.4 Head, Dominic 21 heed concepts (Gilbert Ryle) 36–7 Hensher, Philip 120 Hepburn, Allan 155, 184 n.15 Herman, David 104, 178 n.17 Hochschild, Arlie Russel 38 see also emotional labour Holland, Mary K. 39 Horkheimer, Max 51 Horton, Emily 77, 80, 174 n.19

Index hospitality 122, 129 Huehls, Mithum 109–10 humanism 96, 104, 107, 111, 117, 176 n.6 Hungerford, Amy 33, 166 n.8 hyperactivity 43–4, 49, 65, 164 n.23 hyper attention (N. Katherine Hayles) 5–6, 12, 19, 64, 86, 161 n.10 see also deep attention, shallow attention hyperfocus 142, 156 hypervigilance 7–8, 162 n.14 hypersynchronization 88–9, 92 hypnagogic visions 46–7 immersion 2, 4–5, 20, 35–6, 101, 102, 110, 138, 143, 145, 162 n.15 see also absorption, rapt attention inattention 42, 52, 64, 76, 92, 124–5, 136, 168 n.18, 176 n.5, 182 n.1 see also disregard, obliviousness information 6, 19, 21, 31, 62, 69, 83, 89, 138, 159 n.4, 161 n.10, 166 n.6 information economy 15, 60 information overload 13–15, 19, 21–2, 29, 31–3, 43, 92, 104, 106–8, 163 n.19, 166 n.7, 179 n.20 INS 96, 99, 103, 105, 108, 110 intention 18, 57 interest 12, 34, 36–8, 71–2, 86, 103–5, 112, 120, 142, 155, 179 n.20 see also boredom, curiosity intergenerational attention (Bernard Stiegler) 149–50 International Necronautical Society, see INS internet 2, 4, 9–10, 12–13, 19, 59, 61–4, 67, 82, 93–4, 103, 107, 121, 136–7, 163 n.21 interruption see also pausing and distraction 50, 117, 126 of domestic spaces 80–1, 85, 126–7 of reading 13, 57, 63 of the subject 23, 95–7, 110, 112–13, 127, 129–32, 182 n.4 by technology 86, 93–4, 179 n.21 and temporality 83–4, 89, 105–6, 109– 10, 174 n.19 inward attention aesthetic of 8–9, 21, 54, 60, 137, 139, 141–2, 157 in The Story of the Lost Child 10–11

Index in Taipei 9–10 in the work of Ali Smith 86–7 in the work of Ben Lerner 146, 148 in the work of David Foster Wallace 36, 47 in the work of Joshua Cohen 64 in the work of Tom McCarthy 97, 101–2, 112–13 in the work of Zadie Smith 115, 131–3 inwit 47–8 iPhone 117, 135–6, 138 irony 7–8, 30, 142, 144, 165 n.3, 175 n.26 Jackson, Maggie 2 Jacobs, Alan 1 James, David 73–4, 120, 130–1, 169 n.2 James, Henry 5, 116–17, 137–8, 141 James, William 16–18, 20, 37, 54, 163 n.20, 167 n.14 Jameson, Fredric 91, 175 n.25 Johns, Gary 66, 170 n.15 Johnson, Barbara 6 Johnson, B. S. 85 Joyce, James 20, 38, 47, 103, 106–7, 130–1, 162 n.17, 167 n.10 Kabat-Zinn, Jon 118 Kafka, Franz 101, 131–3 Kelly, Adam 30, 165 n.4, 167 n.11 Kernan, Alvin 2, 161 n.9 Kirby, Alan 142 Kittler, Friedrich 95, 176 n.2 Knausgaard, Karl Ove 117, 122, 137–9 Koehler, Margaret 13–14 Kraftwerk 94, 176 n.1 Krystal, Arthur 3 Laing, R. D. 32–3 Lanier, Jaron 19 Lea, Daniel 78, 174 n.15 LeClair, Tom 62 Lefebvre, Henri 69 Lerner, Ben 116, 141–57, 172 n.8 10:04 9, 24, 50, 135–6, 147–52, 172 n.8, 183 n.9, 183–4 n.12 ‘The Actual World’ 148 Angle of Yaw 151, 153 ‘Each Cornflake’ 138 The Hatred of Poetry 148, 152

209

Leaving the Atocha Station 9, 24, 136, 139, 144–8, 151–3, 182 n.2, 182 n.3, 182 n.5, 183 n.7, 183 n.9 Mean Free Path 152 Letzler, David 14–15, 31–2, 170 n.11 Levinas, Emmanuel 23, 76, 119, 122–6, 129–33, 178 n.18, 180 n.10 lifehacking 12, 27, 40, 125, 164 n.1 Lin, Tao 9, 162 n.16, 170 n.10 linear attention (Nicholas Carr) 5–6, 20, 161–2 n.10 Lipsky, David 29 Luckhurst, Roger 50 machine attention 12, 23, 35, 76–9 Madonna 123 Malabou, Catherine 47 Marclay, Christian 135, 147, 150, 154, 182 n.1 Marcus, David 125, 128 Marno, David 54 masculinity 40, 173 n.11 matter 23, 99–100, 102–7, 109–10, 162 n.16 Max, D. T. 104 McCarthy, Tom 17, 20, 23, 50, 76, 85, 93–113, 115, 119, 122–3, 133, 138, 154–5, 169 n.4 C 95–7, 101, 107, 112, 177 n.7 ‘The Death of Writing – If James Joyce Were Alive Today’ 106–7, 113 ‘The Geometry of the Pressant’ 102, 106, 176 n.5, 177 n.11 ‘Kittler and the Sirens’ 95 Recessional – Or, the Time of the Hammer 109, 169 n.4 Remainder 95–104, 107–10, 115, 123, 131, 155, 177 n.7, 177 n.10, 178 n.16 Satin Island 23, 96–103, 107–9, 169 n.4, 177 n.7, 177 n.12, 179 n.20 ‘Stabbing the Olive’ 96, 176 n.5 Tintin and the Secret of Literature 102, 112 Transmission and the Individual Remix 94, 101–2, 113 Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish 95 ‘Ulysses and Its Wake’ 107 ‘Writing Machines’ 176 n.5 McCulloch, Malcolm 89

210

Index

McEwan, Ian 21, 119, 173–4 n.14, 180 n.4 McFly, Marty 149 McGurl, Mark 21 McHale, Brian 91, 175 n.24, 175 n.26 McLuhan, Marshall 23, 29, 94–5, 142, 159 n.4 Melville, Herman ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ 67 memory 42, 54–60, 65, 91, 98, 103 metafiction 1, 112, 143–4, 165 n.3 metamodernism 92, 175 n.26, 175 n.27 middlebrow 24, 96, 176 n.5 Miller, J. Hillis 130 mind-wandering 4, 63, 139 mindfulness 6, 12, 15, 24, 26–7, 117–19, 122, 125, 133, 137, 142, 180 n.2, 180 n.3 modernism 8, 15, 21, 37, 55, 84, 105, 161 n.9, 175 n.25, 175 n.26, 178 n.18 Moretti, Franco 6 Morin, Edgar 143 multi-tasking 23, 86 see also split attention narcissism 26, 30, 39, 142, 151, 162 n.16, 165 n.4, 166 n.6 Nealon, Jeffrey 91–2 neoliberalism 27, 47, 125 North, Paul 18, 45, 54, 81–4, 174 n.16 noticing 6–9, 37, 50, 73, 75–9, 87, 116, 119, 137, 151, 162 n.15, 173 n.9 novel of commission (Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan) 148–9 Nussbaum, Martha 27, 115–19, 130, 161 n.9, 179 n.1, 180 n.9, 181 n.13 obliviousness 5, 10, 41–2, 47, 138, 140, 176 n.5 see also inattention octopods 151, 183–4 n.12 oil spills 101 omniscient narrator 130, 154 on-demand see catch-up Oresteia, The 93–4, 179 n.21 overflow 103–4, 106–9

pausing 50, 69, 83, 109–10, 169 n.4, 179 n.22 see also interruption Phillips, Natalie M. 12–14, 164 n.24 photobomb 85–7 Pietsch, Michael 104, 168 n.15 Piper, Andrew 13, 159 n.3, 160 n.5 poetry 14–15, 105, 144–9, 152–4, 169 n.8, 179 n.19, 182 n.6, 183 n.7, 183 n.8 Ponge, Francis 105 pop-up advertising 12, 83 Porete, Margeurite de 111–12, 179 n.23 posthumanism 95–7 Postman, Neil 29 postmodernism 21, 91–2, 104, 108, 112, 142–3, 165 n.3, 175 n.25, 175 n.26 poststructuralism 58, 107, 122, 176 n.3 Potts, Tracey 69 precarious labour 67, 125 presence 52, 58, 61, 65–6, 69, 104, 111, 144, 146, 168 n.17, 170 n.15 presence of mind 22, 44, 50–2, 61, 63, 66– 7, 69, 169 n.5 present-mindedness 49–50, 58, 60–1, 69, 169 n.7 see also absent-mindedness present, the 49–69, 84, 93–4, 98, 106, 119, 137, 149–50, 156, 168 n.1, 169 n.2, 169 n.9, 176 n.3 see also contemporary, temporality presenteeism 22, 66, 69, 83, 170 n.15 see also absenteeism primal distraction (Paul North) 83 procrastination 12, 22, 64, 66–9, 83, 127, 167 n.12 productivity 22, 26–7, 40, 46–7, 66–9, 80, 82, 84, 125, 127, 136, 149, 167 n.12 pornography 59, 61, 79, 155, 164 n.25 prosthesis 23, 93–102, 108 pseudo-modernism (Alan Kirby) 142 psychotechnologies (Bernard Stiegler) 19, 75, 163 n.22 Pynchon, Thomas 14–15, 62, 79, 91–2, 160 n.7, 175 n.26 queer temporality 23, 82, 84, 89

parables 130, 132 paranoia 62, 78–9 paranoid reading (Eve Kosofky Sedgwick) 7–8, 139, 162 n.14, 162 n.15 Parks, Tim 2, 159 n.4, 164 n.25

Rabinow, Paul 50, 53, 69, 169 n.4, 177 n.12, 179 n.22 Randall, Bryony 105 Rankine, Claudia 14, 179 n.19

Index rapt attention 18, 20, 30, 37, 41, 45, 101–2, 138–40, 145, 155–6 see also absorption, immersion rapture 139, 143 realism 74, 96, 104, 111, 123, 131 remixing 94–5, 178 n.17 reparative reading (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) 7, 139, 162 n.11, 162 n.14 residual 23, 93, 95–8, 108–10, 113 Ricoeur, Paul 23, 56–60, 69, 169 n.8 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 101–4, 106, 177 n.11, 178 n.17 Rohy, Valerie 84 Roth, Philip 2, 159 n.4 Rourke, Lee 21, 176 n.1 rubbernecking 79 Ryle, Gilbert 22, 36–8, 41, 115, 154, 167 n.13 Said, Edward 121 Sanchez, Gemma Lopez 77 Satie, Erik 154 Sayers, Philip 30, 184 n.13 Schuyler, James 14, 179 n.19 second glance 72, 74 security cameras see CCTV, see also surveillance Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 7, 139, 162 n.11, 162 n.13, 162 n.15 selective attention 26, 31, 63, 138 self-help 26, 111, 118, 125, 167 n.12, 180 n.2 self-consciousness 4, 98, 137, 141, 143, 145, 152, 170 n.14 self-control 44, 125, 163 n.20 self-improvement 9, 34, 40, 125, 160 n.5 Self, Will 2, 21, 159 n.4 Severs, Jeff 44, 167 n.11 Shackleton, Ernest 109 shallow attention 6, 12 see also deep attention Shaw, Kristian 122–3, 180 n.9 Sheringham, Michael 106 showing off see attention-seeking sidelong attention 10–11, 148–53 Simmel, Georg 125 Simon, Herbert 19, 107 see also attention economy Sincerity 30, 39, 175 n.26 skimming 31, 163 n.18

211

sleep 46–7, 66, 127, 150 sleeplessness 46, 180 n.10 Slote, Samuel 110 slow reading 4, 161 n.8, 162 n.13 Smith, Ali 23, 77–92, 149, 151, 154–5 The Accidental 77–9, 82–3, 173 n.12, 173–4 n.14 ‘After Life’ 85 Artful 77–9, 84, 90 Autumn 80–1 Girl Meets Boy 80, 174 n.20 ‘He Looked Like the Finest Man Who Ever Lived’ 89 Hotel World 77, 82–5, 171 n.1, 173 n.9, 175 n.25 How to Be Both 23, 43, 71–92, 138, 153, 155–6, 171 n.2, 172 n.7, 172 n.8, 174 n.18 Public Library and Other Stories 86 There but for The 75–7, 80–2, 173 n.13, 173 n.14 Smith, Matthew 43–4, 65, 164 n.23 Smith, Zadie 9–10, 23–4, 33, 75–6, 96, 115–33, 136, 138, 154–5 ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace’ 33, 117 Changing My Mind 96 The Embassy of Cambodia 23, 119–23, 130, 132 ‘The Limited Circle Is Pure’ 129, 131–2 ‘Love, Actually’ 115–16 ‘Man vs. Corpse’ 24, 117, 127, 138 NW 10, 18, 23–4, 50, 119–33, 181 n.11 On Beauty 121, 130–2, 151, 181 n.13 Swing Time 10, 123, 154 ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ 96, 122–3, 131, 177 n.10 spectacle 15, 182 n.3 split attention 23, 43, 48, 73, 86, 88, 137, 151, 157, see also multi-tasking sponges 99–100, 138–9 stalking 78 Steiner, George 2 Stevens, Wallace 105, 127 Stiegler, Bernard 19–20, 23, 44–5, 75, 88, 95, 115, 149–50, 163 n.22, 170 n.13

212

Index

see also care, hypersynchronization, intergenerational attention, psychotechnologies strangers 80, 112, 127 surface reading 6–8, 162 n.11 surveillance 12, 23, 76–8, 171 n.4, 173 n.13 see also CCTV Svendsen, Lars 106, 179 n.20 symptomatic reading 6, 162 n.11 taking care (Bernard Stiegler) see care Tarkovsky, Andrei 104 television 3–4, 9, 29, 32, 56, 86–7, 91, 160 n.7 tellability 104 temporality 22–3, 49–53, 56–60, 83–5, 90, 105–6, 133, 156–7, 171 n.3, 174 n.19 see also present, queer temporality Thirlwell, Adam 21 time-shifting see catch-up tingling 98, 103, 106, 178 n.16 Trauma 35–6, 40–2, 97, 174 n.19 Turkle, Sherry 86 Turnbull, David 27 Ulin, David 1–2, 160 n.5 unwitnessable attention 22, 36–48, 66, 136, 154, 173 n.11 Veel, Kirsten 77 Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker 92, 175 n.26, 175 n.27 Vermeulen, Pieter 4, 97, 111, 149, 172 n.8, 176 n.6, 183 n.10 vigilance 7–8, 51–2, 55–6, 60, 62, 78, 162 n.14, 162 n.15 virtual poem 147–8, 152–4 voyeurism 79 wakefulness see sleeplessness Walkowitz, Rebecca 140, 162 n.17, 182 n.5 Wallace, David Foster 9, 14, 22, 31–48, 61, 66, 81, 92, 98, 104, 106, 112, 117–18, 136, 138, 144–5, 154, 160 n.7 ‘B.I. #20’ 18, 32, 38–41 ‘B.I. #46’ 40–1

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men 18, 22, 32, 39, 42–3 ‘Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report’ 31 ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ 28–30, 160 n.7 Girl with Curious Hair  28 Infinite Jest 28–33, 37, 42, 145, 154, 165 n.3, 166 n.7, 166 n.9, 167 n.13, 167 n.14, 184 n.13 ‘Lyndon’ 30 ‘Mister Squishy’ 42–3 ‘The Nature of the Fun’ 34, 39 Oblivion 22, 37, 41–2, 168 n.18 The Pale King 22, 33–7, 40–8, 165 n.3, 166 n.7 ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ 22, 42–8, 169 n.6, 173 n.11 ‘The Suffering Channel’ 42 ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ 29 This is Is Water 26–8, 35–6, 45, 164 n.1, 165 n.2, 166 n.6 see also the work of choosing ‘Twenty-Four Word Notes’ 25 ‘Up, Simba’ 30 ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’ 122, 170 n.14 Warner, Michael 141 web-blockers 9, 12, 83, 127, 136 Weil, Simone 96, 111–12 White, Hayden 59 willpower 12, 15, 17–18, 45, 65, 125, 127–8, 174 n.16, 174 n.17 Wilson, Jeff 118 witnessing 79 see also unwitnessable attention Woolf, Virginia 5, 79, 101, 126, 175 n.25 work of choosing 22, 26–36, 41, 43–8, 81, 138, 167 n.14 writer’s block 64 Young, Damon 82, 174 n.17 Žižek, Slavoj 66, 68 zombies 21, 66