The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative [1 ed.] 9781032423203, 9781032423234, 9781003362265

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The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative

This book uses attention as a prism through which to interrogate the literary text. It starts from analyses of the changes that the mediasphere and communication technologies have brought for the contemporary subject, submitting him/her to the tyranny of a new attention economy. My point is that the contemporary novel and memoir resist such infuences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an “ecology of attention” (Citton) based on poetic options whose pragmatic effect is to develop an ethics of the particularist type. To do this, I draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various felds: psychology, but also more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, and analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the ethics of care and vulnerability. By using a selection of fctional and non-fctional narratives, I address such issues as social invisibilities, climate change, AI and cognitive disability and end up drafting a poetics of attention. Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the editor of the journal Études britanniques contemporaines. He is the author of four monographs: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (2001), Peter Ackroyd et la musique du passé (2008), The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Literature (2015) and The Aesthetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative (Routledge 2023). He has published extensively on contemporary British fction, with a special interest in the ethics of affects, trauma criticism and theory, and the ethics of vulnerability, in France and abroad (other European countries, the USA), in the form of chapters in edited volumes or articles in such journals as Miscelánea, Anglia, Symbolism, The Cambridge Quarterly and so on.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

53 Memory and Nation-Building World War II in Malaysian Literature Vandana Saxena 54 Of Love and Loss Hardy Yeats Larkin Tom McAlindon 55 Real Recognition What Literary Texts Reveal about Social Validation and the Politics of Identity Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl 56 Connie Willis’s Science Fiction Doomsday Every Day Carissa Turner Smith 57 “All Will Be Swept Away” Dimensions of Elegy in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon Wit Pietrzak 58 The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau 59 Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature Miriam Fernández-Santiago and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández 60 The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative Jean-Michel Ganteau For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Literature/book-series/RSCL.

The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative Jean-Michel Ganteau

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Jean-Michel Ganteau The right of Jean-Michel Ganteau to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 9781032423203 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032423234 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003362265 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003362265 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction I.1 The Attention Economy 2 I.2 A Relatively Recent Category 8 I.3 An Ethical Apparatus 12 I.4 Attention to the Ordinary 17 I.5 Turning towards Literature 22

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Social Invisibilities 1.1 Refugee Tales 32 1.1.1 Showing 35 1.1.2 Ghosting 40 1.1.3 Caring 42 1.1.4 Raging 44 1.2 Exploring the Closet 47 1.2.1 Visibilities 48 1.2.2 Shifting Perceptions 50 1.2.3 Ending with a Whimper 56 1.3 Wandering with Intent 58 1.3.1 Investigating the Ordinary 59 1.3.2 What Matters 61

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Embedded Visibilities 2.1 Seeing the Land 68 2.1.1 Observing What Is Lost 68 2.1.2 The Anti-Pastoral 70 2.1.3 Relationalities 72 2.1.4 Inventorying 75 2.2 On the Same Spectrum 78 2.2.1 Collecting the Mundane 79 2.2.2 Perceptual Realism 82

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vi Contents 2.2.3 Consideration(s) 84 2.3 Discordant Scales 88 2.3.1  Echoes and Portents  89 2.3.2  Acknowledging the Anthropocene  94 2.3.3 Inescapable Entanglements 96 3 Of (Wo)men and Machines 3.1  The Time Will Come…  102 3.1.1  A Time Out of Joint  102 3.1.2  Machines That Mimic Minds?  106 3.1.3 Quandaries 109 3.1.4 Beyond Exceptionalism? 112 3.2 Artificial Perception 119 3.2.1  An Unwonted Focus  120 3.2.2 AI Vulnerability 124 3.2.3 Machine Vigilance 128

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4 Disabled Brains 4.1 Linguistic Impairment 138 4.1.1  Varying Attentional Tides  139 4.1.2 Perceptual Immediacy 143 4.1.3  An “Ethics from Down Under”  147 4.2  Autobiography and Cognitive Disability  151 4.2.1 Doubles 152 4.2.2 Oscillations 156 4.2.3 Relationality über alles  159

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Conclusion

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References Index

173 185

Acknowledgements

Writing a monograph is a lengthy, uplifting but also burdensome process that cannot be achieved individually and ruthlessly reveals the author’s dependences. I am indebted to too many friends, colleagues, students and members of my families to attempt to draft a list of accomplices, helpers and inspirers. I am sure that those who stood by me over the months of preparation and writing will recognise themselves. Thank you all for caring. I would like to thank the editors of the journal L’Atelier for letting me use part of an article entitled “Éthique de l’ordinaire: la philosophie du langage ordinaire au prisme de The Salt Path de Raynor Winn” originally published in issue 13.2 of the journal (September 2022). My thanks equally go to the editor of Études britanniques contemporaines for letting me use part of my article “The Great Chain of Vibrancy: Scalar Remanences in Contemporary Climate Change Fiction” originally published in issue 62 of the journal (June 2022).

Introduction

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They fash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure flls, And dances with the daffodils. William Wordsworth (Wordsworth 187)

Wordsworth’s lines feature among the best known in the English language; they have been the object of ample exegesis and have been widely broadcasted throughout the English-speaking world and well beyond. I have opted for Wordsworth’s tutelary presence at the beginning of this work on attention as I feel they evince many of the characteristics associated with this category. In the frst stanza of the poem, the poet’s loneliness and musings are interrupted by a sight that triggers off a surprise effect and produces an event breaking with the continuum of habit. Such a canonical intervention of involuntary attention plays off a background situation of day-dreaming against one of arrest and focus, thereby reversing what we have learnt to accept as common in our digital age, i.e., a state of concentration disrupted by ceaseless solicitations from various sources, as analysed by Jonathan Crary, Maggie Jackson and Yves Citton, among others. In so doing, it refers to a former, possibly idealised age in which taking the time to wander and gaze was not necessarily considered a luxury. Beyond this, the fragment tells us many other things: that attention can also be voluntary (“I gazed—and gazed—”) and that it has a duration, as suggested by the two dashes that introduce a pause and make us share in the poet’s collected vision and breathing, and as indicated by the shift to the present tense in the concluding stanza. Another aspect of attention that crops up beautifully in these lines is its ethical capacities, in so far as attending to the object allows for a transformation of the latter by the poet’s gaze. Indeed, in the preceding

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362265-1

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Introduction

stanzas, through such devices as simile (“Continuous as the stars”), personifcation (“dancing in the breeze”) and hypotyposis (the reference to details gives the impression that the scene becomes animated under the readers’ eyes), the landscape departs from its realistic, metonymic basis so as to swing into a cosmic vision. Still, more interestingly perhaps, the poet himself is deeply changed by the experience, as the concluding lines make clear. Such structural, thematic and poetic choices evoke the twofold movement of attention that is both inward-looking (drawing on concentration and affect, but also self-refexive, as the poet specifes when he considers the retrospective movement of attention) and outward-looking, as the episode speaks of his opening up towards alterity embodied in these lines by a natural element. Wordsworth’s hypercanonical poem evokes and performs the relational experience of attention in which its ethical dimension inheres.

I.1 The Attention Economy Such an atmosphere of sedate walking and tranquil recollection provides a picture of attention that may well be idealised. Still, it is obviously at odds with that which we have come to accept as characteristic of our daily existence. Reading Wordsworth’s piece the reader is taken back to a pre-industrial period and to a rural context when time, precisely, was available—or at least, this is how we may conceive of the late 18th century. Yet, Lily Gurton-Wachter reminds us that, in the famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), “Wordsworth complain[ed] about a degradation of attention among British readers,” and she goes on to explain that “Wordsworth’s point is that the political and social transformations of the period, in conjunction with the new media that documented them altered how people paid attention altogether” (Gurton-Wachter n.p.). What Wordsworth had in mind was the way in which the increasing circulation and consumption of newspapers was transforming the reading habits in many ways, as going through an article implied a different pace from that used when attending to poetry. The turn of the 19th century, then, seems to provide a fruitful point of comparison with our period, suggesting that attention is a capacity that is always under threat and that its main enemy is modernity in its various phases. Indeed, speaking about attention nowadays implies in more ways than one speaking against, as many of the studies devoted to the subject are reactions to what is generally perceived as a state of permanent distraction. The ascendance of distraction is well documented, and this category has been the focus of critical and theoretical enquiry for quite a long time. Walter Benjamin, for one, devoted one of his most famous essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” to the distracted spectator, considering distraction, pace Adorno, as a positive category instrumental in making every single spectator an expert who, in the case

Introduction 3 of flm reception, does not need to exert his or her attention, as stated in the conclusion of his essay (Benjamin n.p.). But of course, Benjamin’s conception of attention was much more complex than what transpires from this very famous text and was characterised by “a dialectics of concentration and distraction” (Duttlinger 43) that maintained all the same “an openness towards the marginal, the overlooked and the forgotten” (Duttlinger 50; see also Liska 23). Still, distraction is generally understood in derogatory terms as constituting the major effect of what has been defned as “the economy of attention.” The phrase is widely used and has become the title of an infuential collection of essays edited by Swiss philosopher and literary scholar Yves Citton: L’Économie de l’attention. Nouvel horizon du capitalisme? (2014), which could translate as The Economy of Attention: Capitalism’s New Horizon? and that was followed by his The Ecology of Attention (2014, published in English in 2017). Of course, Citton invented neither the phrase nor the concept which, according to Jonathan Crary, emerged in the late 20th century in Silicon Valley: In the 1990s, when Google was barely a one-year-old privately held company, its future CEO was already articulating the context in which such a venture would fourish. Dr Eric Schmidt declared that the twenty-frst century would be synonymous with what he called the “attention economy,” and that the dominant global corporations would be those that succeed in maximizing the number of “eyeballs” they could consistently engage and control. (Crary 2014, 75) The very graphic allusion to the eyeballs is not devoid of predatory connotations, and this is in line with the denunciations that Jonathan Crary and many other commentators have levelled at the mediasphere’s actions on our attentional capacities. Another theorist of the economy of attention—not an insider, this time—is clearly Richard A. Lanham who, as early as 2006, published the path-breaking The Economics of Attention. Style and Substance in the Age of Information in which he pithily accounted for the groundswell that he saw as affecting our way of consuming and, at best, processing information. He described in unambiguous terms a paradigm shift affecting what had been known till then as the information society: Economics, as we all remember from Introduction to Economics, studies the allocation of scarce resources. Normally we should think that the phrase “information economy,” which we hear everywhere nowadays, makes some sense. […] But information is not in short supply in the new information economy. We’re drowning in it. What we lack is the human attention needed to make sense of it all. It will be easier to fnd our place in the new regime if we think of it as an

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Introduction economics of attention. Attention is the commodity in short supply. (Lanham vi)

From its earliest defnitions, the attention economy is described in extreme terms, pointing at an inbuilt crisis on which it seems to thrive, opposing over-abundance to structural penury, the question being how to articulate those most proftably for the main purveyors of information and, therefore, attention. Various critics have concentrated on the principles on which the attention economy rests. The radical asymmetry between plenty and scarcity has been analysed by Georg Franck in terms of ontological unbalance as the media “broadcast attention thanks to mechanical reproduction while the consumers pay […] with live attention” (Franck 61; translation mine). What appears in such commentaries is that attention is in the process of losing its use value even while its exchange value is rising, as made explicit in Citton’s pointed observation that we are now embedded in an “economy of visibility whose currency is fame” (Citton 2017; emphasis added). One step further, not only information, attention and fame have become commodifed but also the intimation is that we, as collectively enthralled computer users and screen gazers (pace Wordsworth), have become products. In fact, it is one of the most biting ironies of the economy of attention that, even while we are consulting and downloading heaps of information for free, the price has to be paid in attentional terms, so much so that “[w]hat is free here is the price already paid by my attention. [… If ] a product is free, then the real product is you! More precisely, your attention” (Crary 2014, 22; original emphasis). When addressing the various aspects of collective attention (as opposed to joint attention or else individual attention, as we shall see later), most commentators insist on attention economy’s thriving on visibility, which is itself dependent on vanity. They provide analyses of such classifcation systems as PageRank described by Pasquinelli as “a parasitic apparatus designed to capture the value produced by common intelligence” to transform it into “the unoffcial currency of the global economy of attention” (Pasquinelli 171–72; translation mine). Necessarily, such devices rely on the users’ craving for fame, which Citton describes in terms of “an ontology of visibility” (Citton 2017, 69), a radical claim that points to the no less drastic sweeping change that he sees as affecting contemporary subjectivities. The over-production of information and the correlated excessive soliciting of attention are, of course, made possible by the digitalisation of information and culture, which Katherine N.  Hayles, among others, has described as the hallmark of the posthuman age. This is what Franco Berardi denounces when he inveighs against the “electrifcation” (Citton 2017, 91) or digitalisation of experience whose consequence is that screen users no longer experience the world directly but “through data that are already experienced and

Introduction 5 relate to objects that are no longer objects of your experience, but mere references to a pre-conditioned world” (Berardi 157; original emphasis; translation mine). Inherent in the digitalisation is a “standardization” (Citton 2017, 97) of experience produced by the collective consumption and embracing of the same data that format and homogenise our attention, by providing frames of perception that are also imposed on the viewers. This ties in with the process of “de-singularisation of experience and orientation” that Berardi sees at work in the mediasphere (Berardi 155; translation mine), since the capturing of collective attention on a quasi-global scale leaves little or no room for originality and jeopardises any initiative. Such uniformisation goes along with a culture of the same that entraps the singular viewer into more attention to similar data as the tracking devices identify his/her preferences and consumption habits, select corresponding information and feed it to the same pair of eyeballs, more surfng involving more notifcations in turn entailing further reading and solicitation. This infnite loop reproduces itself and favours the creation of “microworlds” (Crary 2014, 9), leading to the paradoxical situation of a general homogenisation breeding pre-ordained capsules of individual attention. The general picture that emerges out of this literature review is that of a world in which the subject as purveyor of attention is confronted with ceaseless solicitations, with an unstoppable acceleration of the rhythm of consumption, the attention economy being one in which—paradoxically once again—distraction from pursuits other than data consumption reigns supreme. Ultimately, such a degree of hyper-active distraction effects a fragmentation, as the myriad individual capsules of attention and consumption give rise to subcultures within mass culture (Cohen 3). This is what Joshua Cohen indicates when he interprets contemporary culture as being under the sway of pure distraction, as the title of his study—Distracted: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction—showcases. And the idea is taken up in multiple contexts and by sundry authors working in the felds of visual studies, or else information theory, as is the case, for instance, with James Harcourt in Exposed (Harcourt 3). Admittedly, the above evocation may sound excessive—an impression no doubt buttressed by its briefness. For one thing, even if the idea of global capitalism looms large in the criticism on the age of distraction, it does not apply to all societies and all areas of the globe in the same way, as not everybody on this planet is equipped with unlimited access to the internet, and as some traditional societies are still content with time-honoured attentional regimes. Citton does address the issue of “geopolitical attention exploitation,” insisting that “the most advanced—Western—cultures export information massively and import huge amounts of live attention for it, while the cultures of other regions export very modest amounts of information and accordingly earn little

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Introduction

attention for it” (Citton 2017, 85; original emphasis). Still, the situation that he, Crary and all commentators quoted above describe is one that remains heavily Western-centred. Moreover, the radical description of the attention economy relies on the martial tropes that pepper the various texts, mostly inherited from a rhetoric of class struggle—not to say warfare. Citton, for one, insists that the working-class/bourgeoisie divide has been replaced by new classes, i.e., “those who appear in the media and those who do not” (Citton 2017, 84; original emphasis). In the same book, he addresses another type of class confict between “the vectoralist class” (who monitor the information and attention economy) and “the hacker class,” whose function is to interfere (Citton 2017, 91). Similarly, some proposals and formulations may sound excessive, as is the case with Crary’s announcement that our age is that of the end of sleep—24/7. Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep—even if he takes care to tone down the sub-titular affrmation early on in his book: “As the major remaining obstacle—in effect, the last of what Marx called ‘Natural Barriers’—to the full realization of 24/7 capitalism, sleep cannot be eliminated” (Crary 2014, 17). In other terms, the above evocations may be considered to be cast in a tone that verges on the apocalyptic. Of course, other views on the situation are not necessarily as dark as those evinced above. For instance, some commentators have described the contemporary changes affecting attention as characteristic of the posthuman age. In the conclusion to her path-breaking study, N. Katherine Hayles, for one, takes store of the situation and draws conclusions similar to those broached above, stating that “the scarce commodity is human attention” (Hayles 1999, 287). But her attitude differs from that of the opponents to the attention economy as she sees positive developments in this: It makes sense, then, that technological innovation will focus on compensating for this bottleneck. An obvious solution is to design intelligent machines to attend to the choices and tasks that do not have to be done by humans. The programs work along lines similar to neural nets. […] If we extrapolated from these relatively simple programs to an environment that […] supplies synthetic sentience on demand, human consciousness would ride on top of a highly articulate and complex computational ecology in which many decisions, invisible to human attention, would be made by intelligent machines. (Hayles 1999, 287) In Hayles’s vision, not only do machines provide information and attention, but they are also delegated the attentive capacities to process some information and leave humans to attend to more specifc matters—a situation partially explored in Chapter 3 of this study. In contrast to

Introduction 7 the apocalyptic evocations above arises a quasi-utopian vision of machine-assisted attention that would enhance human capacities and power and would become a landmark of our “posthuman” age. Similarly, in an often-quoted article, she discriminates between two categories: deep attention, corresponding to “a cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities [and] characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods, […] ignoring outside stimuli […], and having a high tolerance for long focus times,” to which she opposes hyper-attention “which is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (Hayles 2007, 187). She identifes the frst category as belonging to an older generation of students while associating the second one to Generation M or the media generation (Hayles 2007, 188). Admittedly, she reviews a series of problems raised by the emergence of the new regime that introduces a crisis in teaching practices (brought about and illustrated by attention-defcit disorders, for instance). Still, she does not condemn or reject hyper-attention and calls for teachers and faculty members to see the benefts of the two types of attention, concluding on a solemn note: “we cannot afford to ignore the frustrating, zesty, and intriguing ways in which the two cognitive modes interact” (Hayles 2007, 198). Clearly, there seems to be room for some form of nuanced evocation and assessment that may put some radical views into perspective. In the ordinary reader’s (if such an entity exists) experience, the truth may lie somewhere in between extreme formulations. Indeed, the literature devoted to the economy of attention takes care to radicalise positions for clarifcation’s sake and to disconnect notions from one another, transforming them into polar opposites. This is clearly the case with the attention–distraction pair, and Crary is very much aware of this when he avers that “attention and distraction cannot be thought outside of a continuum in which the two ceaselessly fow into one another, as part of a social feld in which the same imperatives and forces incite one and the other” (Crary 2001, 51). Still, in hyper-technologised post-industrial societies, it is true that solicitations accruing from the mediasphere and the permanent regime of warnings and alerts bombarding the contemporary Western subject may lead to hyper-attention, exhaustion and the sense of a permanent fragmentation, miles away from the experience recorded and poetically presented by Wordsworth with which this introduction starts. This is a point that Crary does not miss as he observes that the economy of attention erodes or annihilates experiences of reverie in a culture that privileges “the priorities of effciency, functionality, and speed” (Crary 2014, 88). In this context, reading, in the sense of reading literature, in a possibly old-fashioned way—i.e., reading such cultural products as poetry or novels—may be considered “an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction” (Ulin 148) and as a way to “pace

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Introduction

ourselves,” which may be interpreted as meaning both slowing down and pacifying ourselves (Ulin 149).

I.2 A Relatively Recent Category The above developments seem to have led us into a digression, away from attention, towards distraction. Still, in his groundbreaking study of the rise of attention in the 19th century, Crary clearly identifes attention as the essential component of what he defnes as a characteristic of Western modernity: “My contention […] is that modern distraction was not a disruption of stable and ‘natural’ kinds of sustained, value-laden perception that had existed for centuries but was an effect, and in many cases a constituent element of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects” (Crary 2001, 49; original emphasis). The crisis of attention that has been diagnosed as a salient specifcity of late modernity by such commentators as Citton (2014, 10) or Crary, among others, goes along with a shift in attentional practices arising from massive industrialisation and targeting the dangers of distraction in a context in which functionality and productivity were at stake. This is thoroughly documented by Crary, but also by earlier commentators, among whom French philosopher Simone Weil who concentrated on the tyrannical requirements affecting factory workers in the frst part of the 20th century in her “Factory Work” (Weil 1946) or her “Spiritual Autobiography” (Weil 1959, 61–83). The indictment of distraction as jeopardising productivity thereby appears as intrinsic to the advent of late capitalism, even while pointing at its inherent embedding in the rise of new, fabricated forms of attention, both contributing to the crisis of attention that helps defne the specifcity to the period: Inattention, especially within the context of new forms of largescale industrialized production, began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was often the very modernized arrangements of labor that produced inattention. It is possible to see one crucial aspect of modernity as an ongoing crisis of attentiveness. (Crary 2001, 13–14) Additionally, many studies underline a move from denunciation to downright pathologisation. Among many others, German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels addresses the issue of dysfunctional attention and more especially the phenomena of fascination or sideration (paralysis) that are provoked by trauma (Waldenfels 2010, 42). What he has in mind of course are the critical moments when the traumatised patient lies in the throes of repeating in the present a violent breakthrough that occurred in the past, as the memory of the hurting episode is so painful that it cannot be assimilated in the subject’s psyche. In such cases, instead

Introduction 9 of being remembered, it is repeated or re-enacted in the present under the shape of hallucinations, nightmares, etc. In such circumstances, corresponding to traumatic neuroses, attention is totally mobilised, which produces a state of incapacitation. More generally, it might be said that attention loses fexibility in any case of acute pain, whether psychic of somatic, which captures all the suffering subject’s notice and precludes any opening onto other objects, or in cases of cognitive disability, as will be developed in Chapter 4. And of course, the last few decades have been marked by a strong interest in pathologies that affect specifcally attention, as is the case with ADHD (attention-defcit hyperactivity disorder) which has thrown into visibility some disabilities affecting children and has made Ritalin—the drug prescribed to attend to hyperactivity disorders—ubiquitous. All these developments clearly contribute to defning attention as problematical. In contemporary discourse, it is more often than not considered in terms of penury, impairment, exhaustion. More than being envisaged as a capacity—which it is—it has come to be apprehended through the prism of incapacitation, as people are too tired or too busy to attend, since their experience of everyday rhythms has generally come to translate as “I have no time.” The attention crisis that Crary, Citton and others see as characteristic of late capitalism and of the digital age seems to help redefne the contemporary subject as the seat of vulnerability, another central notion in the apprehension of attention that I would like to give prominence to in this study. Indeed, while we may take for granted that attention as a theme of our everyday lives (outside of learning situations) has not always been so prominent as it is today, we are perhaps not as clearly aware that it has become an object of philosophical and scientifc interest fairly recently. The crisis of attention documented by Crary is inherent in the massive production of captive, functionalised attention harnessed to the manufacture of industrial products on a large scale that accompanied the industrial revolution. Naturally, this situation gave a degree of visibility to attention and, at the turn of the 19th century, transformed it into an object of inquiry and into a scientifc subject. Waldenfels reminds us that “attention is not part of the great themes of Western philosophy that deals with being, time, space, freedom or the subject” (Waldenfels 2010, 33; translation mine). Yet, he calls up a line of philosophers whose work has addressed the subject, from the origins of Western philosophy to the present: Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, Leibniz, Wundt, James, Bergson and Husserl, each one trying to “situate attention at the heart of experience” (Waldenfels 2010, 33; translation mine). As appears in this short list, the names that correspond to the period that Crary or Gurton-Wachter identify as decisive in fashioning the modern profle of attention are those of psychologists (Wundt, James) and, coming in their wake, phenomenologists (Bergson, Husserl).

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Introduction

Indeed, up to this period and before the advent of modern psychology and, later, phenomenology, the study of attention mobilised specialists from various disciplinary felds. This is what Gurton-Wachter reminds us of: Before modern psychology became a distinct discipline of study or a profession at the end of the nineteenth century, attention both distinguished and put into curious alignment the seemingly disparate felds of medicine, aesthetics, theology, pedagogy, ethics, politics and rhetoric, all of which, we might say, were competing for attention. (Gurton-Wachter n.p.) This makes attention in the Romantic period an “unpredictable and uncontrollable” category (Gurton-Wachter n.p.) whose elasticity has enduring effects, as transpires from the preceding pages. In the feld of Anglophone studies, William James’s early defnition of attention has been very infuential: Attention […] 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, localization, concentration, or 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. (James 403–4) These sentences are quoted in many studies so as to display some of the basic traits constitutive of the modern defnition of attention, i.e., its positive valorisation as accessory to knowledge, its opposition to distraction, and its selectivity. More particularly, its relationship with consciousness—of which it is envisaged as a component—is put to the fore, as if consciousness were the background state, or what would be called nowadays the default mode and attention were used to enhance it. One should also remember that the late 19th century saw the emergence of other big names in the feld of psychology in Europe too, the frst name coming to mind being Théodule Ribot’s, whose La Psychologie de l’attention (1888), published just before James’s The Principles of Psychology, was instrumental in promoting attention as an independent psychological category. These scientists were contributing to laying the ground for the modern defnition of attention and the above categories were to be taken up and developed over the next century. Typically, the description of attention relied—and still relies—on a series of contrastive pairs like pre-attentiveness vs. attentiveness, involuntary vs. voluntary, sustained vs. transient.

Introduction 11 At the heart of the debates also lay the issue of attention’s relation to exteriority, and more particularly its dependence on its object, which necessarily raised questions relating to agency defned by Wayne Wu as “attending as you intend” (Wu 32). Among the other major themes relating to the defnition features selectivity, as seen above, but also the fact that attention is an inherently limited capacity, which ties in with the analyses to be offered by the specialists of the economy of attention. Besides, the link between attention and emotion did not pass unnoticed as applied to various cognitive and pragmatic procedures like fltering or presenting an object, but also concentrating, performing tasks or, conversely, not attending, among others (Wells and Matthews). Other categories were also introduced, like those of meta-attention (i.e., attention to one’s attention) or, more recently, joint attention, which Citton defnes in the following terms: “a collection of more specifc, localized situations, where I know that I am not alone in the place in which I fnd myself, and where my consciousness of the attention of others affects the orientation of my own attention. In this case, we are dealing with situations of joint attention” (Citton 2017, n.p.; original emphasis). Joint attention, then, is a more recent object of study that was given prominence in the late 20th century and insists on the relations between attention and exteriority. Interestingly, the analysis of this category leads Citton to insist that “I  never pay attention alone” (Citton 2017, n.p.), thereby laying the stress on the relational and, as we shall see, ethical dimension of attention that is of paramount importance in the context of literary studies. The other main feld of study that invested a great deal of consideration in attention is, admittedly, phenomenology, a branch of philosophy whose connivance with literature and literary studies is well documented. If we return to the poem with which this book starts, steeped as it is in sensorial and bodily notations and their effects on consciousness, the frst parameter that may come to mind is that attention is an event. This idea is inherent in James’s emphasis on focus and selection, as seen above, which implies a massive change and an arrest in the chain of automatic perception that brings in a shift in perception and concentration. It is as if the stream of perceptions were interrupted and only the theme of attention (its nucleus) were available, its context being suddenly put on hold and made momentarily inaccessible—I am referring here to P. Sven Arvidson’s defnition of what he calls “the sphere of attention” that he considers as made up of three concentric zones with the theme of attention at its centre, surrounded by its context, the outer layer being that of the margin of attention (Arvidson 4–6). In Wordsworth’s poem, arrest is duplicated as the frst focus is provoked by a stimulus hailing from the natural world that catches the persona’s eye (involuntary attention, or what Bergson would have called “automatic recognition” or “recognition by inattention” [Bergson 98; original emphasis]), while

12

Introduction

the second one, voluntary this time, takes place in the future, in another context which is temporarily thrown into the background to give room to the original theme and object: the daffodils. In other words, attention’s main effect is one of interruption. This characteristic is evoked by Bergson, when he analyses voluntary attention (Bergson 101), and by many commentators who use various metaphors: “rupture” (Perreau 84), “derangement” (Wehrle 163), etc. One step further, Merleau-Ponty insists on the added value of this event, lingering on its creative potential: not only does “a perception awaken attention [but also] attention develops and enriches this perception” (Merleau-Ponty 29), a positive appraisal that he encapsulates in unambiguous terms: “Attention frst presupposes a transformation. […] Here it is literally a question of creation” (Merleau-Ponty 31–32). Indeed, the creative potential of attention, its capacity to introduce change and constitute itself as an event that transforms perception will be at the heart of our investigations in the following chapters.

I.3 An Ethical Apparatus Still, before the occurrence of the event with its dramatic hence narrative potential, there exists a motionless, eventless state that is the feld of emergence of the capacity to be affected by a perception, some sort of availability that constitutes the background to any perceptual event. This is presented very clearly in A.J. Steinbock’s account of Husserl’s description of the eight phases of attention that, rather than insisting on rupture, underscores a continuum from the pre-attentional to the fully attentive. The frst two stages are presented through passive qualities emphasising opening and receptivity: disposition and passive discernment. They are followed by one in which receptivity implies a turning towards the object of attention that provides the transition from passivity to activity, the latter being the prerogative of the last fve movements (Steinbock 60–61). There follows from such indications that attention is a multi-layered phenomenon and that its manifestation, whether involuntary or voluntary, corresponding with an interruption, is dependent on a prior quality or capacity that is also an availability. This is perhaps why, as suggested by Wordsworth’s poem, attention is “a disposition for what cannot lend itself to anticipation” (Alloa 135; translation mine). This does not mean that this stage is characterised by passivity. Of course, it is of necessity less active than that corresponding with the event of attention in itself, as seen above, but it is made up of a state of receptivity and waiting. Simply, it implies an attentional impulse that is yet without an object, which in phenomenological terms is referred to as “awareness”: “It seems that we should start earlier,” Alloa goes on, “postulating a frst attentional state that could be called ‘awareness,’ an empty attention, so to say, a univalent structure of the x is attentive

Introduction 13 type” (Alloa 133; original emphasis; translation mine). This frst attentional state or awareness may be considered as a predisposition towards openness possibly to internal states, but also and mostly to external manifestations and solicitations. Clearly, this is one of the sine qua non conditions for the emergence of an ethical disposition, as suggested by Natalie Depraz, in her book-length study of Husserlian attention, when she evokes the “intentional openness that provides an essential impulsion to both the perceptive and […] proto-ethical dynamics of attention” (Depraz 2018, 11; translation mine). Elsewhere, and building up on this consideration, she evokes “a disposition of receptive waiting” that she paraphrases as “a disposition to welcoming that is a letting come” (Depraz 2018, 24; translation mine) and thereby implies an affnity with waiting and opening to otherness. Besides, both the waiting disposition and the attentional event itself— and more especially the latter—are also characterised by a change in quality and texture of perception and, ultimately, consciousness. Typically, I would say that in this lies one of the main affnities between attention and the literary text, both being concerned with the presentation (and the expression in the case of the literary text) of intense emotional states and the density of experience. This is clearly what happens in Wordsworth’s lyrical poem, of course, in which the forceful emotional moment is duplicated and made to echo durably within the concentrated space of the page. Many commentators have insisted on this characteristic, from James’s original defnition (“the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form” [James 403; emphasis added]) through Bergson who describes it as “render[ing] perception more intense and […] spread[ing] out its details” (Bergson 100). In her commentaries on Carl Stumpf’s works, Depraz goes so far as to suggest that there is such a thing as an erotics of attention and evokes the “process of intensifcation, increase and strengthening […] proper to our becoming attentive” (Depraz 2010, 258; translation mine). Naturally, the intensifcation of experience is inherent in the motions of a desire whose seat is the perceiving, (pre-)attentive subject turned towards exteriority and animated by an appetite for what lies or stands beyond the limits of the self. In other words, the interruption that goes along with the attentional dynamics implies what Husserl called an ēpochē, i.e., an “unclosing” of the self, “an internal hollowing out among whose virtues features that of a proto-ethical liberation” (Depraz 2018, 64; translation mine). Such “hollowing out” or “unclosing” may remind us of other, germane ethical models that have promoted the cult of impersonality, in the realm of arts and literature, or else philosophical positions like those of Simone Weil for whom attention, in its most incandescent manifestation, was nothing but a complete eclipse of the self: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as a prayer. […] Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” (Weil 2002, 117). It also dovetails with what Iris

14

Introduction

Murdoch defned as the “unselfng” power of attention “which is not just a planning of particular good actions but an attempt to look right away from the self towards a distant, transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy” (Murdoch 2013, 99). It is also reminiscent of Emmanuel Levinas’s pithy phrasing: “Attention is attention to something because it is attention to someone. The exteriority of its point of departure is essential to it: it is the very tension of the I” (Levinas 1979, 98). Exteriority, the I as mere tension towards the other: in such lines the ethical relation seems to boil down to attentionality as a mode of being-for-the-other that, in Levinas’s radical terms, defnes the ethical subject: “To evoke attention is not a subsidiary work; in attention the I transcends itself” (Levinas 1979, 137). Such a vision of the self as fundamentally broken up and hollowed out in always already attending to the other so as to better encounter him/her ties in with Martha Nussbaum’s vision of the self as bereft of autonomy and as characterised by vulnerability to the outside, whether it be the material environment or the other. In fact, she sees the subject as essentially “orectic,” i.e., driven by needs and desire, hence necessarily open and characterised by ontological vulnerability. In other terms, attention would both favour and showcase “the needy and non-self-suffcient elements of our condition” (Nussbaum 357). From this perspective, as I shall argue in the following chapters, attention may be considered as an essential modality of vulnerability—hence openness—and thereby of an ethical disposition. This does not mean that all attention is of necessity ethical: clearly, attending to the other may be fraught with predatory intentions. Literature does dramatise such a use of attention, especially in some (sub)genres like the Gothic, horror stories, thrillers, etc. Still, basing my observation on the work of many philosophers, be they specialists of phenomenology or of ethics, I am particularly interested in the dialogue between the literary text—more specially, but not exclusively, the text of fction—and the theoretical discourse on attention, the latter being more often than not refracted by the former. I would like to argue that, on account of its characteristics like interruption, intensifcation, openness, the study of attention as both thematised and performed by the narrative of fction provides for the reader an experiential knowledge of what it is to attend and contributes to an ethics of literature. In Depraz’s terms, “attention is an experience of kinesthetic and rhythmical mobilisation of the subject. Far from being a mere projector on the phenomenon that would leave him/her scot free, it produces effects that affect him/her deeply. […] Attention, triggered off by its affective dynamics, turns to the red light of the ethical drive” (Depraz 2018, 108; translation mine). The contemporary literature on the subject insists that this ethical impulse may also fnd its source in the category of “joint attention” that has increasingly captured the interest of the scientifc community, over the last few decades. Depraz gives a concrete defnition of this

Introduction 15 phenomenon, referring to situations when “two people fx their attentions on one third object, and are conscious of the community of their attentions even though this consciousness remains in the background” (Depraz 2018, 286; translation mine). This corresponds to many situations, and most clearly to that of teaching, when teacher(s) and learner(s) spend a great deal of their time experiencing this type of involvement that opens each individual to other consciousnesses and to the community that the class constitutes. Observing the specifcities of joint attention, Depraz suggests that it allows for the emergence of “mutual awareness” (in the acceptation mobilised in the preceding paragraphs) and, ultimately, makes attention edge towards “inter-attention” (Depraz 2018, 287; translation mine). In other terms, joint attention implies a connivance between two or more participants about a same object and is the condition for the emergence of a collective or at least communal attention that, in certain extreme circumstances as those observed by Crary and Citton, may lead to blind consumption and an impoverishment of the self. In other cases—and this is what this study is primarily interested in—joint or communal attention will entail the emergence and maintaining of empathy, care and solidarity, qualities and activities that are intrinsic to the expression and practice of ethics. There appears a continuum between individual attention and joint attention or mutual awareness, or else collective attention that is based on the invariant of openness to alterity, hence vulnerability to exteriority, a term— vulnerability—that I am using here in a positive acceptation, as the capacity to open oneself to otherness, to accept one’s needs for what is outside us (including the other), hence our relational capacities. It should be noted that such dispositions and capacities condition and buttress the social nature of attention, as indicated by many commentators, among whom Perreau, whose purpose is “to articulate the theory of attention to the theory of social experience” (Perreau 80; translation mine). One step further, in his analysis of joint attention, Shaun Gallagher explains how it operates on a continuum between the individual and the social, as it “forms a bridge between primary intersubjectivity and secondary intersubjectivity” (Gallagher 111), by which he means a bridge between “face-to-face interactions” and wider relations cathected to “social cognition” and “participatory sense-making” (Gallagher 112). The spectrum of attention, running from the individual to the social, relies not only on the common tenor of openness, but also—and as importantly—on that of concrete experience—possibly incarnation. In fact, even if attention implies a change in consciousness through selection, hence focus, hence intensifcation, as indicated above, it also goes along with a modifcation of perception and the bodily perceptual apparatus. Depraz insists on the incarnated reality of attention when she speaks of “the attentional gesture,” implying that the exercise of attention mobilises the body before any other element of

16

Introduction

subjectivity: “attention is a relational and tangible bodily experience, not an invisible, internal mental activity” (Depraz 2018, 49; translation mine). Even if this is expressed in fairly hyperbolical terms (one could be tempted to insert “primarily” between “not” and “an invisible […] mental activity”), what accrues from this defnition is the concrete and practical nature but also effects of attention that cannot be envisaged independently of their applications. In other terms, attention is intrinsically compatible with a praxis that fnds its ground and expression in relational exchanges—be they inter-individual or more collective, even social in orientation and scale. The study of attention, whether in real-life situations or in fctional representations, is precisely of interest because it allows for the observation of ethical, social and political relations and phenomena. In the case of the narrative of fction—and this extends to non-fctional narratives—this is often made through various types of focalisation, and through telepathic access to the consciousness of characters. Such devices allow for the sharing of perception and attention from the singular, incarnated perspectives of characters, which favours the communication of intimacy and experience. I do not mean that this is a prerogative of fction. In fact, Wordsworth’s poem does the trick of making the reader participate in the act of perception and in the density of experience effciently and beautifully. Still, this study will concentrate on a series of contemporary British narratives whose span makes for a more comprehensive and social application of attention in its relational, ethical impulse. Ultimately, as may be surmised from the above, the conception that I will draw on most regularly throughout this study hails from what Depraz calls “vigilance,” which she defnes in contradistinction with the more traditional model of what she terms “attention concentration.” For her, this special quality of attention, vigilance, implies “being present to the other” (as opposed to being closed in on oneself, in the case of attention concentration), “being temporally open to the unknown”, which implies the quality and experience of waiting for the unknown (vs. being closed off in memories), “hope” (against a preference for mastering what is known), and, last but not least, “a precarious relation to the other in which risk-taking is an index of authenticity (as opposed to the stability and security found in possession)” (Depraz 2018, 320; translation mine). Once again, this is tantamount to seeing vigilance, hence attention, as a modality of vulnerability to the other (in Nussbaum’s acceptation) and as a means of dispossession in Athena Athanassiou and Judith Butler’s acceptation of the term, i.e., a “fssuring of the subject” (Butler and Athanassiou ix) that fnds its origin in the perception of the other’s vulnerability, positing that the subject is non-sovereign, relational and embedded in a system of interdependences. In such vulnerability, precariousness and dispossession of the self lies the ethical imperative of attention that it is the responsibility of contemporary narrative to (re-)present.

Introduction 17

I.4 Attention to the Ordinary Psychology and phenomenology, admittedly, do not have a monopoly on the study of attention, and I would now like to turn to the feld of analytic philosophy and, more specifcally, of Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) in its relation with the main subject of this book. The ordinary has mobilised critical discourse for decades. Leading journals have included this issue among their concerns, devoting special numbers to it, as in the case of Modern Language Notes 130.5 (December 2015), entitled Comparative Literature Issue: Practices of the Ordinary. The ordinary is also at the heart of certain investigations in the domain of political philosophy, as indicated by such works such as L’Invisibilité sociale (Social Invisibility) or, as the title makes clear, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires (Ordinary Lives, Precarious Lives), by French philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc. It is also one of the touchstones of the ethics of care or, more broadly, the ethics of vulnerability, feminist-inspired currents that have endeavoured to bring to the fore the daily and invisible practice of care workers, revealing a system of dependences and interdependences that are still lacking visibility. Its perception also requires a humility that asks the human subject to consider—in the sense developed by French philosopher Corine Pelluchon—not only others but also all living beings by renouncing any “dominating or overhanging view” (Pelluchon 32; translation mine) and placing oneself at the level of things, other animals and the environment in which one evolves. Through these theoretical currents, an ethical constant emerges, which calls for responsibility in the face of various forms of otherness (human or otherwise). By referring to care, social invisibilities, new-materialism or, more broadly, the consideration of vulnerabilities, researchers in the feld of literature and, more broadly, the humanities, are invited to work with theoretical approaches and to invent critical practices that place the societal and environmental dimension at the heart of their work. The latter is based on the observation that certain invisibilities affecting entire sections of ordinary life are insuffciently perceived, whether defned in opposition to precariousness in a social framework (Le Blanc 2007, 35) or, more broadly, in terms of entanglements or interdependencies that French philosopher Baptiste Morizot concretely envisages through the metaphors of weaving and grafting—or rather cutting (bouturer)—with/onto the living (Morizot 233). However, if these emerging currents, among others, are based on attention to various qualities of the ordinary, they seem to leave insuffcient room for the modalities of expression of this ordinary. OLP is a typically Anglo-Saxon theoretical current concerned with taking into account the opacity or linguistic texture in order to account for the way in which discourse, particularly literary discourse, is ordered in relation to the ordinary and seeks to account for it. This is perhaps

18 Introduction what Cora Diamond suggests when, in The Realistic Spirit, she defnes what she means with the “realist mind” as presented in literature: habits, turns of speech, turns of thought, styles of phrase as morally expressive of an individual or of a people. The intelligent description of such things is part of the intelligent, the sharp-eyed, description of life, of what matters, makes differences, in human lives. Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian specifcation of ethics leaves room (or is intended to leave room) for attention to these things; an account of ethics, or of moral philosophy, which takes action as defnitive […] does not. (Diamond 375) It is therefore quite natural to turn to Ordinary Language Philosophy, of which Diamond is one of the most respected representatives, in order to defne the contours of an ethics of the ordinary, which would take into account the ordinary as an object of attention but also as a means of expression. We can indeed remember that Cora Diamond is, alongside Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam, one of the most infuential exponents of this theoretical trend, whose origin is attributed to the works of G.E. Moore, J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The latter is credited with having proposed, in the second part of his work and career, a warning against the abstraction and “craving for generality” that, in his view, have taken hold of philosophy and that he attributes to the use of the scientifc method: I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.” (Wittgenstein 1965, 18) The defnition of philosophy as a space of description constitutes a fundamental orientation of OLP, which focuses on “facts” and not “truths” (Murdoch 2005, 159; translation mine) and which, according to Sandra Laugier—one of the major exponents of this branch of analytic philosophy in France—in addition to proposing a descriptive tool is characterised by its perceptual utility: “ordinary language is not to be envisioned only as having a descriptive, or even agentive function, but as a perceptual instrument that allows for subtlety and adjustment in perceptions and actions” (Laugier 2015a, 232). It seems to me, precisely,

Introduction 19 that this question of language as an instrument of perception and attention lies at the heart of the ethics of the ordinary. On the one hand, because it makes it possible to speak out against what is seen as “a denial or undervaluation of the ordinary, as a general phenomenon in contemporary thought” (Laugier 2015a, 217), thereby opposing a corrective force to a generalised reallocation of objects of perception—the latter of which can be linked to the formatting imposed by a dull economy of attention (Citton 2017, 7–18). On the other hand, because it proposes a creative vision of the ethics of the ordinary by developing our perceptive capacities, and in particular our attention as readers. In this regard, Sandra Laugier reminds us of one of the main orientations of Ordinary Language Philosophy: “Thus OLP is from the outset oriented towards social matters and attention to the unseen, to neglected reality. Its primary methodological ambition is a conceptual analysis that would make it possible to recognize the importance of context in the practice of language, thought and perception” (Laugier 2015a, 228; emphasis added). OLP thus invites us to take into account a context (social, but not only) in order to detect what, precisely, is not identifed, what, being part of ordinary objects or practices, is struck by invisibility. It is therefore an education in perception and an apprenticeship in attention to what is unseen that an ethics of the ordinary inspired by this branch of philosophy proposes to develop. In accordance with Wittgenstein’s prescriptions, it issues warnings against generalities and abstractions in order to promote the consideration of ordinary objects in their concreteness. More precisely, it calls on the necessity to describe them and thus, beforehand, to perceive them so as to be in a position to attend to them. A humble ethical stance is thus proposed, which does not consist in referring to a set of rules or a system of virtues, but in opening our eyes, both as citizens and as readers, to perceive the world in its banal aspects, privileging what is “important” over what the prevailing norms defne as what is “right” (Laugier 2015a, 221). As Sandra Laugier points out, OLP proposes a redefnition of ethics: “OLP is the basis for redefning ethics as attention to ordinary life and care for moral expressivity” (Laugier 2015a, 218). In another article, she takes up Stanley Cavell’s refections on cinema by recalling that this art proposes above all not only knowledge but also an experience of the ordinary: “Cinema, answering the Emersonian call for democratic and ordinary art, is able to describe everyday reality. Our experience as spectators comes out of an ordinary shared culture-access to the ‘physiognomy’ of the ordinary” (Laugier 2012, 1001). Once again, the potential to describe the ordinary deployed by language is expressed in these words, with an insistence on its being instrumental in inventorying, albeit always partially, ordinary objects. This is an essential phase in the exercise of the realistic spirit as defned by Diamond and, moreover, this descriptive activity is coupled with an experiential function, insofar as it is the spectators’ experiences—sharing the existence of ordinary

20

Introduction

people in the flm but also in the projection room, around them—that are nourished both by the perception of ordinary activities and objects and by an immersion in them and a sharing of them. Describing, but also sharing, making people feel: far from abstractions and decalogues, an ethics of the ordinary consists in the incarnate learning of very concrete perceptions, in a daily practice of attention to detail that has to be sustained, as indicated by Veena Das: My acknowledgement of the other is not something that I can do once and then be done with it. The suspicion of the ordinary seems to me to be rooted in the fact that relationships require a repeated attention to the most ordinary of objects and events, but our theoretical impulse is often to think of agency in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than a descent into it. (Das 6–7) Narrative arts have an immense superiority in this domain because, whether they promote a participatory practice, such as cinema, or a more solitary one, such as the reading of literary texts, they turn their backs on abstractions to set in motion singular lives and activities, to which readers bring a particular reaction. For Cavell, cinema—like literature in its various forms for Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, or television series for Sandra Laugier, for instance—is the space for the emergence of experiences and uses. Indeed, as Toril Moi reminds us commenting on Wittgenstein’s words, it is usage that allows language to function in an unlimited and open way, opposing any possibility of closure dictated by an ideal of abstraction (Moi 198). Above all, she points out that it is the prerogative of the humanities to work on the particular: “In the humanities, our love for the particular case—the specifc poem, novel, or flm, the specifc artist, painting, or composition—fuels our work” (Moi 202). This is precisely what the arts in general, and narrative arts in particular—and among them, prominently, fction—allow: to perceive and attend to the ordinary in its singularity, beyond screens and appearances. In other words, narrative constitutes an essential lever in our perception of the ordinary and its invisible aspects because, embarking us in an embodied experience, it makes us carry out an “investigation,” in the sense that the ordinary is never given but is the fruit of an effort to access and inventory it (Laugier 2015d, 72; translation mine). It is precisely this practice of investigation in search of the ordinary singularities struck by invisibility that literary narrative allows us to conduct. Still, one of the essential challenges of OLP is to learn to perceive the ordinary not only when it is invisible, but also when it is visible, i.e., to acquire the capacity to see what is in front of our eyes and which only begs to be perceived, described and taken into account. This is what Wittgenstein indicates in an often-quoted passage from the Philosophical Investigations: “What we are supplying are really remarks

Introduction 21 on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes” (Wittgenstein 1986, §415, 125). Far from curiosities, which would be by defnition exceptional or at least rare—and therefore would logically escape perception—it is indeed observations of the observable that are at stake here. They address objects that are always present before our eyes and, as a result, demand that we make an effort to notice them. To perceive the ordinary in what is visible, precisely, requires work and the training of perception, it also requires a pre-attentional disposition and the exercise of attention in order not to go beyond appearances but to take them into account, as Sandra Laugier reminds us, drawing on Foucault’s Dits et écrits: “The ordinary exists within this characteristic diffculty of access to what is right before our eyes” (Laugier 2015b, 1044). It is thus a work of attention with the aim of considering the visible that is required: one of the responsibilities of narrative in general and of fction in particular is precisely to describe this work and to share an experiential content. Sharpening perceptions and attention is one of the modalities of OLP whose proponents emphasise its creative capacity. This is what Sandra Laugier indicates in an article devoted to romanticism and the ordinary, when she synthesises Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s thinking on this question into a pithy paradox: “the ordinary is the search for a new land to discover and explore, then to describe. The thought of the ordinary is experiential, improvisional, demands new forms of attention to the human form of life” (Laugier 2015b, 1041). In the tradition of the English Romantics generally, and more specifcally Coleridge (even if Sandra Laugier refers to American Romanticism), attention to the ordinary has the capacity to renew perception and unclutter the ethical subject—and, in a literary context, the readers—in order to make the ordinary happen. This is evidenced in Wordsworth’s poem, in which the words give an account of an ordinary object that they wrest from a denial or an absence of perception in order to bring about an enduring reality through involuntary and voluntary attention. Such recourse to the realistic spirit favoured by Cora Diamond contributes to setting into motion an ethics that is based on “an attention to the particular” (Laugier 2015a, 221) and makes it emerge in an appreciation of what is right. This type of activity places the subject of attention at the heart of the process of producing a singular ethical judgement adapted to a particular situation. Moreover, as mentioned above, it is the role of literature to enable this kind of creative apprehension of the ordinary and to order it into a practice of right living, which it does by “drawing attention to the facts” (Murdoch 2005, 159; translation mine), which are new—as opposed to received truths and other catalogues of moral prescriptions.

22 Introduction Moreover, the perception of the ordinary, visible or invisible, allows for the exercise perhaps not so much of the just as of the important, which is in line with Cora Diamond’s indications that “moral capacity lies in an attention to what matters” (Diamond 375). This is what Sandra Laugier confrms in an article devoted to life forms. Taking a detour through care as “sensitivity to the details that matter in lived situations” (Laugier 2015d, 70; emphasis added), she comes to formulate the particularistic essence of care as attention to the other (whatever its status and nature): The perspective of care is part of the particularist turn in moral thought: against what Wittgenstein in The Blue Notebook called the ‘drive for generality’, the desire to enunciate general rules of thought and action, to assert in morality attention to the particular(s), the ordinary details of human life. It is this descriptive will that modifes morality and weakens it: learning to see what is important and not noticed […] (Laugier 2015d, 71; translation mine) Such particularism is based on the singularity of a perception that is not conditioned by pre-established norms of recognition and that is exercised on a particular object or situation grasped and attended to in its ordinariness. It implies that ethical responsibility lies with the individual who, at the cost of a work of perception giving rise to an investigation, decides on what is important and pays sustained attention to it, so that what is important/what matters becomes the condition for the emergence of what is right, since the latter cannot precede the former. We can thus see how literature, which privileges singular and embodied situations, gives a concrete account of and promotes the sharing of experiences. In this way, it is able to do ethical work by sharpening attention to what matters and by inviting readers to decide what matters in turn after whetting their capacities to perceive the ordinary.

I.5 Turning towards Literature As suggested from the beginning of this introduction, the study of attention is by defnition compatible with that of literary texts. In fact, the emotional density that phenomenologists comment on is a quality that is naturally accommodated by all literary genres and modes, from the lyrical poem to the romance through tragedy. Similarly, the experiential richness underlined in many studies on attention is a specifcity shared with literary texts, which shirk abstraction and deal in concrete examples, preferring incarnated singularities embedded in a context and activating the expressive pole of the narrative as opposed to its mere representational function (Caracciolo 36). Additionally, openness is a recognised literary trait, based on transtextuality, certainly, but also

Introduction 23 fgural ambivalence or radiation, among many techniques. And it should be granted that many commentators hailing from various disciplinary felds do refer to literature and to literary models of attentiveness, which is the case of Citton, but also Depraz, and clearly Murdoch, whose double status as a philosopher and a novelist gave her an edge over some other analysts. Still, when scholars outside the humanities insist on the necessity to address the topic from and interdisciplinary perspective, that of “consciousness studies,” they do not necessarily pay justice to literary contribution: Another large phenomenon has blossomed in the last decade or so, called interdisciplinary consciousness studies. This area of active research includes neurologists, physicists, theologians, animal behaviorists, computer modelers, geneticists, mathematicians, biologists, and of course philosophers of all kinds, such as epistemologists, philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, continental philosophers, and again, of course, psychologists of all kinds, including developmentalists, cognitive scientists, neurologists, and various brands of experimental psychologists. In my opinion, interpreting our conscious lives in terms of attention puts attention into its proper place in “consciousness studies.” (Arvidson 188) It is no use looking for a mention on literary studies in this list, as if neither the immense corpus of primary sources nor the critical and theoretical literature addressing them or entering in a dialogue with them were struck with invisibility. Indeed, the situation seems to be the following one: in discussions on attention, especially in the feld of philosophy, literature never seems to be far away from the authors’ preoccupations or interests, even though the dialogue between attention and literature is rarely addressed in specifc analyses, let alone in book-length studies. As if it were the God of literary criticism and theory, attention seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Of course, this is a reductive observation as, in fact, a certain number of books have been devoted to the study of attention in literature. I have already quoted from Lily Gurton-Wachter’s Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (2016). Not only has it been an inspiration for the consideration of Wordsworth’s poem in the preceding pages, but also its subtitle, “the poetics of attention,” invites to consider attention as a literary category per se, suggesting that there is a language of attention and possibly specifc forms. GurtonWachter’s path-breaking work testifes to an intimate knowledge of the Romantic period and addresses the production of such poets as Cowper, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats. It is erudite and thoroughly documented, privileging a transdisciplinary approach and making history and literature collaborate. It focuses on the transition period before

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Introduction

the rise of psychology, when attention did not belong to any specifc feld, i.e., before the standardisation of the category that took place from the 19th century onwards. It examines the military context in which Romanticism emerged and against which, in Gurton-Wachter’s words, it reacted, i.e., the context of the Napoleonic wars when fear of invasion reigned supreme and suspicion was rife. The author delves into the military origins of the command “Attention!” and the exhortation to keep watching others as possible suspects—both obvious examples of institutionalised, voluntary attention—and shows how Romanticism “derails” that process by divorcing attention from suspicion and by promoting a non-voluntary, more passive and open type. As suggested above, it addresses such issues as the fdgetiness of readers (see Wordsworth’s complaint as to the way in which contemporary readers of newspaper articles did not spend enough time on poetry any more). More relevantly to our concerns, Gurton-Wachter shows how Romantic poetry promoted attention to minute, ordinary details, and how, through its “exquisite susceptibility” to exteriority, it favoured the subject’s opening up and vulnerability to others of various natures and ontological statuses. More especially, she provides a poetics of attention based on rhythm, i.e., the see-saw movement between concentration and its relaxation, strain and slackening that is eminently evoked and performed through the poets’ formal choices. She also insists that poetry makes for a “double attention” or “divided attention” in so far as it encourages the reader to focus on both meaning and sound (Gurton-Wachter n.p.), a point also made by Citton in The Ecology of Attention (Citton 2017, 158). Similarly, in his study of poetry as a powerful lever to mobilise attention, Andrew Epstein remarks on the particular powers of form as a poetic specifcity of our age: Throughout this book, I argue that this recurring idea—that “poetry is a form of attention” at “its most intense,” that poems should aim to be “vessels of attention”—is not a timeless or “natural” defnition of poetry. It is, rather, historically conditioned and specifc to our time and place, a refexive response to widespread fears that “our ability to pay attention isn’t what it once was.” (Epstein 13) Clearly, one of my main purposes in this study is to make a similar point as regards the British contemporary narrative (of fction), forms and rhythms soliciting and trapping attention in a sustained, sustainable way that is part and parcel of the ecology of attention promoted by Citton that it is the responsibility of narrative to make possible. Other literary scholars have tackled the issue, in the feld of drama studies and more specifcally performance studies. This is the case, for instance, of Jon Foley Sherman, whose A Strange Proximity. Stage Presence, Failure and the Ethics of Attention (2018), as the subtitle

Introduction 25 indicates, moves into the feld of ethics and is very much concerned with such issues as vulnerability to the other and care. Echoing some of the above-mentioned philosophers and critics, he also insists on the particularism of attention, which trades in singularities and “embodied action” (Sherman 147), all the more so when it is considered in the context of drama. One step further, echoing Depraz as a reader of Husserl, he pinpoints attention’s “enlarging” power and its capacity to promote “wonder,” despite—or on account of—its non-egalitarian, asymmetrical distribution (Sherman 153). Clearly, Sherman stands in the line of critics seeing attention not as a means to concentrate on oneself and shut oneself off against the world but, quite on the contrary, as a way to open up and relate, hence assume responsibility for the other, which is the ground of the ethics of alterity that the attention generated by stage presence specifcally and performance more generally are a gateway to. If Sherman is not explicitly concerned with the poetics of attention, he does insist on the forms and effects inherent in the powerful phenomenon of stage presence, obviously. Other authors have claimed that poetics is at the centre of their concern. This is the case with Daniel Richard Hoffman, the author of a PhD dissertation on “Paul Valéry and the Poetics of Attention” (2016), a work very much infuenced by Simone Weil’s writings on attention and her insistence on desire (Hoffman 105). Certainly, the most accomplished analysis of attention in relation to fction is Alice Bennett’s Contemporary Fictions of Attention. Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century (2018), which provides a thoroughly researched introduction on the notion followed by monographic chapters focusing on the novels of David Foster Wallace, Joshua Cohen, Ali Smith, Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith and Ben Lerner. Bennett does take into consideration the contemporary laments on the crisis of attention and the dangers of distraction and has read widely on the issue. Still, she refuses to use the apocalyptic tone that has been prevalent among many commentators and argues that contemporary fction is compatible with modes of resilience: “Rather than presenting an incapacitating blow to literary fction, 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 fragilities” (Bennett 4). She is therefore interested in attention’s vulnerability as a force, i.e., as a capacity to fnd the ways to displace, renew and reconfgure itself when confronted with massive apparatuses of distraction. She identifes the main modality of attentional resistance as residing in “an aesthetic of inward attention” that she defnes as “a variety of meta-attention that defects part of the readers’ attention from the book and onto the texture and fuctuation of reading attention itself” (Bennett 8). Bennett, like Gurton-Wachter or Citton, is also concerned with the workings of double attention, which implies a double object, i.e., the thematic content and its form, and which seems to be a staple of literary attention, or more specifcally

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Introduction

of reading. Indeed, in her exploration of the novels that make up the corpus of her study, she does propose a poetics of attention that is determined by the effects of inward attention and that she classifes under three headings: First—and most obviously—meaningful representations of attention. Narrative fction, with its long-standing convention for depicting interior states, is almost uniquely placed among artforms in its ability to convey the complexity of characters’ attention. Second, use of the conventions of narrative to orchestrate or infuence readers’ attention. […] Like all literary objects, fctions of attention arrange reading’s rhythms and intensity. Finally, in the feature that I have been referring to as ‘inward attention’, these fctions 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 […] 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 (Bennett 11; emphasis added). In this quotation, the italicised passage does broach a poetics of attention that gathers depth and momentum in the close readings provided in the monographic chapters that give information on a wide range of situations and valences, from the “affectless attention” (Bennett 102) performed by McCarthy’s uncanny fctional experiments to Ali Smith’s more epiphanic prose from which emerges a conception of “attention as affection” (Bennett 75). Overall, Bennett is intent on referring to a poetics of attention that is also the means to present an ethics of attention, very much akin to an ethics of care which reverberates with Levinasian echoes in the section devoted to Zadie Smith, in a culminating vision of the other “interrupting us and attracting our attention” (Bennett 127). What appears from this brief review of a series of infuential monographs that have tackled the relationships between attention and literature, addressing attention in literature, but also, in many ways, literature as attention, is that they recurrently foreground the idea of exteriority. In fact, it seems as if, in a literary context, the ethical potential of attention—which gives access to the external world and refuses the reader’s isolation—were augmented and deployed. Of course, such an orientation is omnipresent in Murdoch’s philosophical writings and percolates into her novels, an inspiration that, in many ways, comes from Simone Weil, as demonstrated by Panizza (Panizza 95–100). In one of her major essays, “The Sovereignty of Good and Other Concepts,” she returns to the idea of the Weilian impersonal, reminding us that (attention to/ through) art and more generally beauty is “an occasion for unselfng”

Introduction 27 (Murdoch 2013, 82). In another seminal essay often quoted in contexts when attention and literature are jointly considered, “Salvation by Words,” Murdoch also dwells on the ethical function of the aesthetic— and of literature more particularly. She insists on literature’s capacity for self-criticism and for accepting its own incompleteness, thereby providing a vision of literature’s innate vulnerability as a guaranty of openness to truth, and of sincerity: “Great art, then,” she asserts, “by introducing a chaste self-critical precision into its mimesis, its representation of the words by would-be complete, yet incomplete, forms, inspires truthfulness and humility” (Murdoch 1997b, n.p.). Furthermore, as suggested in the previous quotation, such a vision of art as the seat of ethics goes along with humility, which, in Murdoch’s vision, is granted nothing less than the status of virtue: “Both art and philosophy constantly re-create themselves by returning to the deep and obvious and ordinary things of human existence and making there a place for cool speech and wit and serious unforced refection” (Murdoch 1997b, n.p.). In other terms, both art and philosophy know how to be attentive and make us attentive to the ordinary, which should not be surprising, at this stage, as we have seen that Murdoch features among one of the tutelary references of OLP. Attention to the ordinary and an ethics of the ordinary is what literature in general and a certain type of (fctional) narrative, in particular, promote, as will appear in this study. Lingering on the ethical theme, I fnd it central and fruitful that literature should be the site of incompleteness and vulnerable form and meaning, as suggested earlier. Murdoch has powerfully commented on this specifcity and Citton may have something similar in mind when, about the Freudian category of free-foating attention that he associates with the reading of literature, he suggests that “by not paying attention to what someone is trying to tell us we will better understand the meaning of that message” (Citton 2017, 155), which is certainly a way of referring to the interpretive and ethical added-value that literary texts grant to the practice of attention. One of the singularities of literature would then lie in promoting a specifc type of attentiveness: “making ourselves attentive to what signs can say, beyond what the author may have wanted to say” (Citton 2017, 158). In other terms, as an ethical category attention opens to otherness, makes the subject (both outside and inside the fctional text) vulnerable, and eschews any type of closing in on oneself and sovereignty. This is certainly why Citton insists that attention in general—and I shall argue that this concerns more specifically attention applied to and in fction—lends itself to an “echology” (Citton 2017, 230–56), which he describes through various acoustic and musical fgures like unison, counterpoint or polyphony. In so doing, he points at attention’s intrinsic relationality and invites us to ponder on the potential of an ecology of attention based on consideration of the other, sustainable, non-violent being-for- and with-the-other, which is

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somehow tantamount to showcasing the caring power of attention in its literary and non-literary dimension. One step further, I would argue that such a relational ethics are particularly compatible with fction on account of its formal and technical characteristics. This has been spotted by many commentators, among whom Bennett who insists on fction’s singular capacity to depict 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 people have checked out. Fiction allows us the fantasy that we can gauge others’ concentration and for that reason the pairing of fction and attention will always produce effects impossible in any artform. (Bennett 42) Indeed, the affnity between fction and the heightened (re-)presentation of attention is an essential though fairly insuffciently documented literary reality. What I mean here is that there is something consubstantially common to the workings of fction and joint attention. For in fact, the situation of joint attention, when two subjects are attending to the same object even while being aware that they are sharing their experience, is very much akin to what happens every time information is imparted through internal focalisation in a narrative. In this case, both reader and narrator, whether the latter is an impersonal narrator or not, even while being on distinct ontological planes, and even though the realisation is not synchronous, are somehow aware that shared focalisation on the same object will take place or has taken place, which is part and parcel of the uncanny, telepathic effect that the prose narrative of fction can have on readers. It seems as though the relationships between fction and attention (to and in fction) have been insuffciently taken into account. Because of their formal, technical affnities and resonances, and because of their ethical potential, I would argue that their meetings and collaboration call for further investigation, and this is the reason that lies at the origin of this study. All the more so as, to return to the opening lines of this introduction, the ethical power of attention is, in Murdoch’s terms, to “pier[ce] the veil” (Murdoch 2013, 86) of illusions and fallacies and to achieve a new visibility, a form of defamiliarisation that was essential to Coleridge’s defnition of poetry whose purpose lies in “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the flm of familiarity and selfsh solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand” (Coleridge n.p.; emphasis added).

Introduction 29 That our electronic age has become associated with a crisis of attention is a well-documented fact, as shown at the beginning of this introduction. What is not so clearly signposted is that this brings along a reaction focusing on what Andrew Epstein has called an “everyday hunger” that he defnes as “a powerful craving for closer contact with the most taken-for-granted and familiar aspects of the quotidian, a desire for greater knowledge and more thorough documentation of our daily lives” (Epstein n.p.). He sees this as particularly relevant in contemporary US poetry, from Frank O’Hara to Charles Olson through John Ashbery, Marianne Moore, Jorie Graham and Allen Ginsberg, among many others, so much so that “a poetics of everyday life [has] come to dominate American poetry” (Epstein n.p.). More especially, he takes up O’Hara’s phrase “attention equals life” as the title of his book and as one of the levers of his demonstration because he sees the category as having a determining role in our lives, describing it as “the idea that attention is such a crucial aesthetic, and human, faculty that in some ways it is life itself, if only because it alone has the ability to provide proof and documentation of human existence” (Epstein n.p.; original emphasis). Finally, even if he shows that attention to the everyday has been a characteristic of our civilisation and of literature from classical times to the present, he argues that it has been established as a literary norm in the post-Romantic period, in high Modernist novels essentially, but that the brand of the everyday that contemporary literature and culture have come to be fascinated with is of a specifc type, as “over the past half-century both poetry and culture in general have become ever more preoccupied with the everyday and the commandment to pay attention to it” on account of our transformed experience of daily life triggered off by “new threats to our capacity for sustained attention” (Epstein n.p.). After what may be interpreted as a postmodern suspicion of realism, contemporary art and culture are thereby the site of a “powerful return to the ‘real’” (Epstein n.p.), a turn that characterises US poetry, but also many other areas of contemporary production, among which contemporary British visual culture, literature and, specifcally, fction, as Catherine Bernard has powerfully demonstrated (Bernard 2018). In this volume, I navigate between the ethics and poetics of attention as thematised and presented in a series of contemporary British narratives published over the last two decades, some belonging to the canon of contemporary fction, others being more overlooked by critics. Most of them are fctional but for two memoirs that are pored over in Chapters 1 and 4. The choice of including non-fctional narratives into a corpus essentially made up of novels relies on the hypothesis that, whether fctional or not, stories or accounts are instrumental in attending to the world, which implies perceiving it—not the least of capacities—and describing it. My point is that these two activities, perception and

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Introduction

description, provide the material out of which emerge a poetics and an ethics of attention. As made clear in this introduction, I shall rely massively on the fndings of sociologists, specialists of communication sciences and philosophers that have worked on the economy and ecology of attention. Their discoveries will in many ways throw light on the context in which the narratives that I have selected emerge and will also be of use in the formal explorations that I intend to conduct. As may be surmised from the above, I am also very much indebted to philosophy: phenomenology and political philosophy, among others, but also analytic philosophy and, more particularly, Ordinary Language Philosophy. Admittedly, my main theoretical inspiration will hail from the feld of ethics—the ethics of alterity and the ethics of care, essentially, which are so instrumental in evoking the contours of an ethics of attention. In fact, the consideration of the ordinary in its invisibility or visibility, will be at the heart of many of my readings. From this point of view, my inquiries will attend more specifcally to the outward dimension of attention, as opposed to its introspective value. In other terms, I shall attempt to keep track of the way in which perception, consideration, and description as activities generate an opening of the subject that provides the relational momentum of attention, hence its ethical potential and force. Each one of the following chapters addresses the central issue of the poetics and ethics of attention along the lines developed above and is organised around a single thematic confguration. Chapter 1, “Social Invisibilities,” concentrates on the representation of social relegation. It provides a reading of Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand (2008) along the lines of hospitality considering it as a fctionalisation of the refugee narrative. It goes on to examine Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane (2007) as a fctional testimony on the ordinary lives of members of submerged sexual minorities in the 1960s. It concludes on an analysis of Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (2018), an autobiographical account relating the author’s and her husband’s fall into social precarity and exclusion. It is dominated by an interest in the ethics and politics of attention as a capacity that has to be built up for readers to see what the dominant frames of perception exclude from consideration. Chapter 2, “Embedded Visibilities,” shifts towards the ground of what is known as British New Nature Writing. It considers human individuals and groups as they are embodied and embedded in (relation to) their natural environment, with a special interest in the way in which they provide an inventory of an ordinary that is more often than not defned by its vibrant visibility. To do so, it focuses on Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002), Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017) and Welsh novelist Cynan Jones’s The Long Dry (2006). It is generally inspired by a new-materialist perspective that is conversant with posthuman topoi, both in their fctional and theoretical renditions.

Introduction 31 Chapter 3, “Of (Wo)men and Machines,” takes its lead from the posthuman inspiration of the previous one but, as the title indicates, concentrates on the human–machine continuum. It addresses the issue of artifcial intelligence as embodied by humanoid robots by observing their relations with human characters. In these pages, attention is envisaged in its voluntary dimension, as associated with learning situations, these being so prominent in both Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and People Like You (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). At the heart of the chapter resides the interplay between the emotional and the ethical that characterises both novels and is central to the pragmatics of attention that they develop. Chapter 4, “Disabled Brains,” moves to the area of the narrative presentation of cognitive disability both in its fctional dimension, with Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand (2021), and its non-fctional facet, with Wendy Mitchell’s Somebody I Used to Know (2018), the autobiography of a woman living (and writing) with early onset dementia. As in the previous chapters—but perhaps more specifcally in this one—attention is seen in relation with vulnerability, as both texts consider the workings of incapacitated brains and the way in which disability leads to capacity-building, resilience and possibly empowerment. From this point of view, the ethics of care in their relation to attention—one of the threads of this study—may appear more prominently in this concluding chapter.

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Social Invisibilities

Social invisibilities and the way they are addressed by attending to the imperceptible and the ordinary are at the heart of this chapter, in line with the main tenets of Ordinary Language Philosophy presented in the introduction. In the following pages, I turn to some emblematic areas in which power is exerted on individuals and communities that become deprived of both visibility and voice and are relegated into imperceptibility. This leads me to focus on hospitality, gender and precariousness. I am interested in the way in which narrative, whether fctional or non-fctional, solicits and trains the reader’s perception and attention, and promotes an ethics of the particularist type. By diving into worlds usually kept away from the eyes of the general public, these texts allow for a consideration of imperceptible situations and forgotten individuals, reminding us that they are also constitutive of what matters. In so doing, they make it clear that there is such a thing as a “narrative democracy” relying on the sharpening of perception and attention to the otherwise imperceptible (Le Blanc 2014, 23).

1.1 Refugee Tales This sub-chapter shares its title with a series short narratives collected in four different volumes to this date. The frst one was published in 2016 and originated in an initiative of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. The original title of the project was “A Walk in Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees (from Dover to Crawley via Canterbury)” (Herd and Pincus 2016, n.p.). It starts with a prologue and boasts as its main hypotext Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, each chapter being called after its narrator’s status or function (“The Migrant’s Tale,” “The Arriver’s Tale,” “The Interpreter’s Tale,” “The Appellant’s tale,” etc.). The scheme was inaugurated by a walk along the North Downs Way that roughly coincides with the Pilgrims’ Way, heading to Canterbury. This procession of 80–150 people was meant to draw attention to the consequences of Britain’s tightening immigration policies in the wake of David Cameron’s premiership. In other terms, it was meant as a manifestation and a performance of countervisuality aiming to make visible DOI: 10.4324/9781003362265-2

Social Invisibilities

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what is usually occluded from general knowledge and stand against the power of publicly manufactured ignorance and denial. In the afterword to the frst volume, David Herd speaks of the “sheer conspicuousness” of the event (Herd and Pincus 2016, n.p.) and of its well-defned political ends, getting the original witnesses, spectators of the show performed after the walk and readers of the collection to engage with such issues as immigration, asylum seeking, detention and deportation and to attend to what is generally kept away from the generally accepted frames of perception—Herd summarises the objectives of the project as “showing so as to refuse to be kept from view” (Herd and Pincus 2016, n.p.). If showing was clearly at the heart of the scheme, allowing people to make themselves heard was also a central issue. This is the reason why established novelists like Ali Smith (volume one) or else Monica Ali, Lisa Appignanesi and Bernardine Evaristo (volume three), among others, lent their voices and pens to the programme, accepting to listen to the victims of the immigration laws and to produce accounts as faithful to the original testimonies as possible, lending their vocabulary and syntax to the speakers whose mastery of English was not up to publishing standards and allowing them to remain anonymous, though singularly delineated in the particulars of their recounted experiences. By lending their voices to—as distinct from speaking for or on behalf of—the most socially vulnerable of the vulnerable, the participants in the project helped “the voice of the voiceless” (Le Blanc 2007, 135; translation mine) to emerge, both boisterously and fimsily. In so doing, they contributed to throwing situations of precariousness into visibility and lending agency to the unseen and the unheard by helping them become subjects of discourse— and possibly address—as opposed to mere objects of discourse. The issue of audibility is crucially brought to the fore by Jonathan Wittenberg, who tells “The Erased Person’s Tale”: “As I listen and record, I become a companion in defance against the silence in which vicious regimes try to bury the knowledge of the crimes they have committed against the dead and disavow the living trauma of those who manage to survive them” (Herd and Pincus 2019, n.p.). Even if all stories manage to capture the singularity of a particular experience and get us to attend to each specifc situation, most accounts return to a set of experiences that are common to most refugees’ lives: the experience of economic, social or political violence in their country of origin, fying away from danger, the traumatic experience of entrusting one’s life to the cupidity and recklessness of smugglers, the crossing of the Channel, detention (rarely short, generally long and often accompanied by the adjective “indefnite”), escape and clandestine life, or precariousness when being deprived of the possibility to work and being permitted to live on a paltry allowance, the menace of deportation. Those are always accompanied by anxiety and a sense of arbitrariness that run through all stories, as pithily expressed in “The Embroiderer’s

34 Social Invisibilities Tale” as told by Patrick Gale: “The trouble is that all the stories become the same in the same way because they all sooner or later narrow down to a lorry, a box, a cell” (Herd and Pincus 2019, n.p.). By exposing the reality of an ordinary condition of extreme precariousness that does not ft our own defnition of the ordinary, the Refugee Tales make us attend to what matters, addressing us at times and inviting us to revisit our own situated knowledge and positions, as made resoundingly and ragingly clear in the incipit of “The Fisherman’s Tale” as told in Ian Sanson’s inexorable anaphoras: You’re not really going to listen. No one listens. You’re not really going to hear. No one hears. You’re not really going to care. No one cares. (Herd and Pincus 2019, n.p.) Of course, the force of this interpellation lies in the use of the adverb “really,” which targets a half-hearted willingness to listen, hear and care, interrogates its motivations and draws attention to the need to engage fully. This is what the eponymous protagonist of “The Lorry Driver’s Tale” as told by Chris Cleave does, as he tricks the narrator—a journalist come to interrogate him on his journey through Northern France and across the Channel—into believing that he has betrayed a refugee, even while he has helped him reach his destination, in fact, casting him into an emblem of care for and solidarity with the rejected other (Herd and Pincus 2016, n.p.). “When you are a refugee, you learn to pay attention to doors,” Little Bee, one of the narrators of The Other Hand, a novel by Chris Cleave, precisely, warns the reader (Cleave 335). Indeed, that the invisible is a recurrent modality of the visible (and vice versa) is what ordinary experience keeps teaching us and what Chris Cleave’s second novel keeps reminding the reader of. The door that the above quotation refers to is that of a police car into which Little Bee, one of the two protagonists, has been frmly invited to sit while the offcer is checking her identity. She is an illegal immigrant, just released from a detention centre, and the offcer will soon discover that she has not been granted refugee status, which will lead to her deportation in the fnal chapter. The car door, of course, metaphorically hails back to the doors of the detention centre, to Sarah’s (the other protagonist) family house’s door, and also to all types of passages that spell out freedom as much as imprisonment in the novel’s symbolical and narrative economy. As expected, the police car door will close in on her, so that she will be sealed into invisibility, spirited away to the police station, and then, under cover of the night, towards the airport prior to her deportation to Nigeria, her homeland, i.e., the place where her life is jeopardised on account of the crimes that she witnessed, which the local authorities had rather she were not in a

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position to relay. The detention centre, but also the police car, and even Sarah’s house, in which Little Bee fnds temporary shelter, are capsules validating Le Blanc’s remark that, for precarious people, the outside is inside, i.e., the excluded are within the walls of the city, even while being deprived of all rights: “The situation of the foreigner is not a shared human situation, it rests on a designation that creates the possibility (social, judicial, economic) to be inside even while being inside” (Le Blanc 2010, 44; translation mine). An ordinary, invisible door accesses visibility on account of a specifc situation, that of the asylum seeker, which Cleave’s narrative chooses to put a frame around, thus getting the readers of his highly successful novel to shift their own frames of perception and modify their focus. 1.1.1 Showing Still, The Other Hand is not overwhelmingly about what stares into our faces in such a blatant way that we are blinded by its obviousness. On the contrary, it sets great store by what we cannot see or refuse to see and is thereby struck by a structural, ethical and political invisibility that has little in common with the blinding powers of proximity and immediacy. This is due to the fgure of the refugee (or, rather, the asylum seeker here), which, in Mireille Rosello’s terms, “inaugurates a global crisis of storytelling—both for those who are asked to justify their presence in a new country and for those who listen to testimonies” (Rosello 13). Of course, the type of narrative that is at stake in the previous quotation is that which the asylum seekers have to deliver and submit for validation, not the content of a narrative of fction. Still, such testimonies are evoked in the novel and they do alert the reader to the pragmatics of refugee narratives. Precisely, the fact that the novel should be made up of two alternate frst-person accounts—the asylum seeker’s and the British resident’s—lends a great deal of audibility and visibility to what is usually kept secret and indicates a way in which “testimonial injustice,” to take up Miranda Fricker’s phrase, may begin to be redressed. The confrontation and above all meeting of the two perspectives, of course, is instrumental in turning a story of exclusion into one in which hospitality tries to assert its rights and power. From this point of view, the novel presents a rather felicitous ethical encounter in which two individuals enter into a relation based on solidarity with and responsibility for one another. The Other Hand is about what individuals can do for each other. From this point of view, it showcases the issue of vulnerability, confrming that no subject is sovereign and autonomous: neither Little Bee nor the effcient, affuent, infuential Sarah, who is the editor of a successful magazine and seems to have been in charge of her life up to the critical moment when she met a Nigerian girl feeing from murderers on an African beach. Similarly, the novel is about globalisation, free-wheeling capitalism and

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what the oil industry does to some African nations like Nigeria, and primarily about the fact that no country can boast a situation of independence, hence unmitigated sovereignty. Chris Cleave presents the reader with a world in which no individual, no country, no continent and no island are islands unto themselves. He describes a system of interdependences, thereby paving the ground for ethical exploration. In so doing, he exposes the fasco of a policy of hospitality by rigorously demonstrating that the states fail in providing hospitality even while showing how the responsibility has been transferred to the individual sphere. This is the observation that Fabienne Brugère and Guillaume Le Blanc start from in documenting what they see as “the end of hospitality” (a phrase that they use as the title of their book): “Confronted with the defeat of political hospitality, hospitality gets organised again at the ethical level” (Brugère and Le Blanc 24; translation mine). To make this point, Cleave uses the singularising powers of fction and describes incarnated individuals who, because, precisely, they are described as fesh-and-blood subjects as opposed to abstractions, are vulnerable and dependent on others. This fgure of physical and ontological vulnerability is revealed in the novel’s central scene, taking place two years before the moment when the protagonists are narrating their intertwined stories. It refers to Little Bee and Sarah’s frst meeting on a beach in Nigeria, when the latter (also the narrator of the relevant chapter) amputates herself by cutting the middle fnger of her left hand with a machete in exchange for Little Bee’s and her sister’s lives—Nkiruka, the elder sister, will not survive, as narrated by Little Bee in another chapter. The fact that the murderers hunting the two sisters should require that Andrew, Sarah’s husband, cuts off his middle fnger is of course a retaliation against consistent humiliation, as one of them explains: “White man been giving me this fnger all my life. Today you can give it me to keep” (Cleave 162). Nathan Frank has analysed the passage in comparison with other types of self-mutilation, like the soldiers’ shooting their trigger fngers to be invalidated out of the army. He comments that Sarah takes care to hide her stump and does not wear it as a badge of courage or resistance throughout the novel (Frank 65–66), but the missing digit will be converted into a problematical yet effcient visibility through the many references to the phantom pains or itches that crop up throughout the narrative. Still, Andrew refuses to perform the amputation on himself, a renunciation that will fing him into deep depression and provoke his death. By taking his place, Sarah becomes the embodiment of the empathetic, responsible Western subject who refuses to consider that what happens in Nigeria is none of her business and is ready to assume responsibilities practically and in her fesh. The founding moment of the meeting on the beach and of the selfamputation shows how the body is the seat of power and violence,

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sounding the biopolitical theme that will reverberate throughout the story. In fact, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, the refugee is nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birthnation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the fgure of human rights. (Agamben 1998, 134) By defnition, the dramatic scene of self-amputation contributes not only to extending the frame of perception to what is hidden from Western eyes but also to refusing rejection into the status of bare life and the ensuing autonomisation of bare life as a category. By cutting off her own fnger, the white, affuent British woman signals that zōē—or organic life—cannot be separated from bíos—or “the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (Agamben 1998, 1). The gesture also reminds us of our intrinsic vulnerability, in which originates (inter-) dependence, hence responsibility for the other(s), and therefore ethics: “Life is incarnated. Vulnerability is corporal, which implies that we are always already outside ourselves, affected, touched. The body reduces our autonomy, Judith Butler writes, since, on account of our corporal existence, we are always already outside ourselves, exposed to others and entangled in other lives” (Brugère and Le Blanc 112; translation mine). The central scene of the novel, which puts bodily existence so luridly to the fore, is taken from a chapter narrated by Sarah but, interestingly, shown through Little Bee’s eyes, as an evocation of the characters’ mutual and ethical entanglement that happens at frst sight: When the killer turned away, I dropped to my knees. I looked straight at Little Bee. She saw what the killer did not see. She saw the white woman put her own left hand on the hard sand, and she saw her pick up the machete, and she saw her chop off her middle fnger with one simple chop, like a girl topping a carrot, neatly, on a quiet Surrey Saturday, between gymkhana and lunch. (Cleave 165) The scene is a dramatic expression of vulnerability and solidarity, as already suggested, and it relies on a complex delegation of focalisation, the focaliser, Sarah, imagining (without acknowledging it) what the other character is seeing. The refection is also a projection from the white woman narrator onto the Nigerian girl who is deprived of agency on this beach, or at least whose agency becomes crystallised in her gaze, reducing her down to the status of witness. Still, the projection

38 Social Invisibilities is not presented as an identifcation with and a possession of the other character. Rather, the impression that the reader is left with is that of gazes meeting for a second, without becoming stabilised, without being given enough time to settle. What results is the presentation of two gestures: Sarah’s move towards Little Bee whom she cannot see, and Little Bee’s move towards Sarah, who is not watching her at this moment. Concern for the other and attention to the other fuel this scene of mutually spontaneous recognition. The self-mutilation becomes impersonalised for aesthetic reasons certainly (how much gore could the readers take in a novel whose generic conventions do not make them expect too much bloodshed?), but also because the episode provides a pure presentation of joint attention since the two characters are attending to the same object while being conscious of their mutual focus—a situation in which originates the ethical power of the narrative. As has been underlined, joint attention is a situation that fosters a strong sense of experientiality and the readers’ engagement (Caracciolo 42). It is fully at work in this founding moment whose complexity only Sarah, the narrator, can witness, so that a relay is necessary to validate the testimony from a third party and make the readers attend to an invisible, intimate gesture that has transpersonal and, allegorically, trans-national repercussions. The political gushes from the ethical, and, typically, the one who provides visibility is the character generally smitten by invisibility, in some sort of a new, reciprocal distribution of the invisible and the perceptible alike. The Other Hand forcefully makes the readers pay attention to what is kept from their eyes: a confdential act of self-mutilation performed on a secluded beach, between a thick forest and the emptiness of the ocean, somewhere in Nigeria. In so doing, it levels criticism at the way in which oil companies take possession of villages built on oil felds and slaughter their inhabitants. The survivors, like Little Bee, have no choice but to run into exile and seek asylum from European democracies since, having witnessed such atrocities, they are in a position to expose the complicity between the oil companies and the state. One of the powers of fctional narratives is precisely to transport protagonists, narrators and readers alike to inaccessible places and to bring about a change in perception. Being allowed to stand on that beach, the readers are made to attend to an ordinary that is not part of their usual sphere of reference. Moreover, the technical miracle of internal focalisation—whether delegated, as is the case in this scene, or not—gets them to share experiences from inside and to attend to what would normally be an individual’s prerogative. In this way, the novel enlarges the readers’ perceptual and ethical capacities, making them beneft from an experiential knowledge of otherwise undetectable situations that may correspond to possible ordinaries. The beach scene, the voyage in a freighter as a stowaway, the two years spent behind the walls and fences of a British detention centre, the release

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into the British streets as illegal immigrants, the crossing of the suburbs and of London prior to seeking refuge at Sarah’s place, the arrest and deportation occurring at the end of the narrative all correspond to the critical yet ordinary menaces affecting asylum seekers—and the narrative of the two years in the detention centre provides a description of a brand of ordinary that is also a quotidian. In fact, The Other Hand, despite some melodramatic strains, is also and essentially steeped in the realistic idiom and, as all realistic novels, its purpose is to get the readers acquainted with milieus that they have no prior knowledge of. The difference is that, in this case, very few readers have access to what is meant to be hidden for political reasons. In Butlerian terms, the novel shifts frames of perception: “[s]uch frames are operative in imprisonment and torture, but also in politics of immigration, according to which certain lives are perceived as lives while others, though apparently living, fail to assume perceptual form as such” (Butler 2009, 24). One step further, it allows the readers to see that there is such a thing as frames and to pay attention to these frames, in a meta-attentional movement that radiates with ethical implications. The logic of the novel is, in many ways, that of the obscene, in that it puts centre stage what is meant to be kept out of the stage, in the wings, by taking the readers on a tour of what is generally inaccessible. This is notably the case with Little Bee’s ride in the police car, on her way to the airport, as she is being deported under cover of the night: “All along the streets the windows of the apartments were silent and blind, with the curtains closed. I disappeared without anyone to see me go” (Cleave 344). The personifcation of the windows (“blind”) insists on a radical invisibility based on the incapacity to see and possibly on a deliberate choice, i.e., that of denial. The evocation of deportation hesitates between incapacity and unwillingness to pay attention, making the ethical implications of the scene even more intricate, as the blind eyes are also the reader’s—yours and mine. Such a paradoxically indirect yet frontal solicitation is a powerful reminder of our ethical responsibilities and of the failure of hospitality policies. It shows us, like many other passages in this novel, that in the contemporary world frontiers are “dilated” since “the border is not only space, it is also time. It extends from the pre-border of departure zones towards inland cities where chance identity checks are performed, through the detention centres on both sides of borders” (Brugère and Le Blanc 141; translation mine). What the novel effciently does is alert us to the invisible ubiquity of frontiers that escape perception, choosing to faunt the invisible and to make the immaterial tangible. This is tantamount to getting the readers to perceive an ordinary invisibility, ordinary for some groups and individuals that suffer from a specifc type of exclusion and that the majority of the population does not feel concerned with. Materialising the immaterial in such a fashion, the novel shocks the readers into perception by

40 Social Invisibilities extending the realm of the ordinary and gets them to attend. In other terms, the conditions are created for a renewal of perception so that the reader may determine what matters … through the specifc irruption of materiality, precisely. 1.1.2 Ghosting Another traditional way of getting the reader to pay attention to the invisible is through the fgure of spectrality, a trope traditionally used to refer to individuals or groups whose ontological or social status is weakened—the excluded, the relegated, the subaltern. Achille Mbembe has described the lives of the refugees with indirect reference to spectralisation, indicating that they are deprived of an identity of their own and, thereby, of any type of agency: “Migrants and refugees […] have neither proper names nor faces and possess no identity cards. They are merely a kind of hollowed out entity, walking vaults concealed by a multitude of organs, empty yet menacing forms in which we seek to bury the fantasies of an age terrifed of itself and of its own excess” (Mbembe 101). As already suggested, The Other Hand is a story in which the absent manifests itself through the fgure of the phantom limb or digit. This motif crops up several times in the narrative, as Sarah feels sensations like formication that cannot have a somatic grounding. Of course, this presents the reader with a very concrete image of the presence of the past, as if it were repeating itself in the present according to the most basic rules of psychic trauma. It suggests for instance that the very violent breakthrough that took place on the beach was too acute to be assimilated completely by the victim’s (Sarah’s) psyche and that it metaphorically repeats itself in the present, even if the episode exists in the character’s memory. More traditionally, the fgure of the ghost also dogs Little Bee, the epitome of social and ontological downgrading in the narrative’s economy. This comes to a climactic expression in an episode when she crosses London, on her way to Sarah’s house—the only address in her possession—, a moment when she makes the experience of being an illegal asylum seeker that the passers-by are not able or willing to see. The occurrence is so alienating that she is under the impression that she is the one whose presence is tangible, while the crowd of Londoners are spectralised: “If I did meet you then the frst thing you would have noticed would have been my eyes staring at your face, as if they were trying to see someone else in you, as if they were desperate to make you into a ghost” (Cleave 121–22). The ghosts of course are those of the dead that she left in Nigeria: her sister and all other members of her family and village. In this passage, contagion looms large, as if invisibility could spread to those who are generally granted the privilege of visibility. The intimation is that vulnerability is a common condition and that precariousness is more widely distributable than is willingly accepted. This ties

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in with Brugère and Le Blanc’s description of displaced people who are stuck “in an indefnite in-between space, some sort of spatial and temporal no man’s land, in which the only possible attitude is waiting,” a situation that they consider to be evocative of limbo, when people become “unemployed fgures, feshless ghosts waiting in vain to be granted refugee status” (Brugère and Le Blanc 63; translation mine). Such lines are reminiscent of Jon McGregor’s evocation of the life of relegated, excluded characters in Even the Dogs, a novel that does not address the issue of the refugee and the illegal immigrant but focuses on the situation of British citizens whose lives have been made invisible through social exclusion. They share this condition of invisibility and institutionalised loss of agency with the asylum seekers whose lives are evoked in The Other Hand and are spectralised and confned in a similar type of limbo (Ganteau 2015, 144–46). In both cases, the paradoxical, effaced fgure of the spectre appears as a lever for triggering off attention to the invisible. Besides, as indicated by Esther Peeren, not only is haunting a fgure instrumental in pointing at invisibilities, but it is also itself submitted to intermittent imperceptibility and “is conditional upon being noticed” (Peeren 2014, 9), which indicates that haunting is intimately interfaced with attention. As already suggested, the contagion process envisaged above points at a shared vulnerability, hence at a common situation of dependence and interdependence, and therefore at a fairly well-distributed sense of responsibility. One step further, the responsibility of ordinary “legal” citizens is underlined in a more pointed way as the novel takes care to document a tendency to choose denial or “the undervaluation of the ordinary” (Laugier 2015a, 217) as a way not to attend. This type of reaction is repeatedly exposed in The Other Hand, when British citizens (Sarah and her husband being cases in point) close their eyes or shut off their ears, emulating the blind houses that preside over Little Bee’s last drive along the benighted London streets. Men seem to be especially prone to this type of attitude, as Andrew, Sarah’s husband, evades responsibility for what happened on the beach when Little Bee calls him (Cleave 24), an attitude that is echoed by Lawrence, Sarah’s lover, who refuses to face the consequences of the Nigerian girl’s deportation: “It isn’t my problem. I can’t be responsible for all the trouble in the world” (Cleave 267). Such words are emblematic of the resistance to hospitality that the novel showcases, at both individual and collective levels. Yet, they contrast with Sarah’s decision, when she accepts to face her past and to commit herself to helping Little Bee in unambiguous terms: “I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester” (Cleave 246). By opposing such attitudes and by making Sarah’s ethical jump overwhelmingly visible, the narrative denounces denial as the manufacture of invisibility and silence, a denial that is defeated when meeting the other in her incarnated singularity and vulnerability, as she

42 Social Invisibilities materialises in the couple’s garden (Cleave 141). Interestingly, Sarah’s irresistible impulse away from repression and towards acceptance of the other’s singularities is fraught with temporal implications, as it marks a move from the emergency of rescue (lending a temporary hand) to the  more sustained involvement of hospitality (Brugère and Le Blanc 101–107). From this point of view, the novel chooses to end up on an open yet positive note: even if Little Bee is deported and her plight uncertain in the concluding pages, Sarah and her son Charlie join her in Nigeria as Sarah has decided on protecting her, making the text a story of sustainable involvement and promoting an ecology of attention to the invisible. Cleave’s intention seems to be to make it clear and visible that in ethics (individual expressions of responsibility for the other) lies the possibility of a hospitality policy at the national and international levels, remote as it may concretely seem in the concluding lines. 1.1.3 Caring In conformity with the tenets of Ordinary Language Philosophy (or OLP) summarised in the introduction to this volume, the novel also creates the condition for a new attention to hardly visible objects and realities that it throws into visibility. As we are reminded by Laugier for one, ordinary language, which I consider here to correspond to the language of such a contemporary novel as The Other Hand, is “a perceptual instrument” (Laugier 2015b, 232). In consonance with the principles of OLP, such a novel provides a frame of perception for the fctional rendition of refugee narratives and does this by allowing for a plurality of points of view and voices “oriented towards social matters and neglected realities” (Laugier 2015b, 228). This means that perception has to be trained so that new forms of attention may allow the reader to see things anew and/or to see new things. From this point of view, Cleave’s purpose may be said to echo that expressed by Conrad in the often-quoted preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, when he explains that the purpose of his text is “to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless” (Conrad 1979, 146). This is precisely what The Other Hand strives to do: retrieve poor lives from disregard and invisibility by shifting the frames of perception and setting them around items so as to redeem and enhance their visibility. This implies transporting the Western reader towards other “dark places of the earth,” to echo another text by Conrad (2012, 5) and make them attend to what happens there, but also get them to consider what happens around them, in contemporary London. In other terms, The Other Hand addresses various manifestations of the ordinary, whether they be near to or far from the reader. One should remember that, from the late 17th century onwards, the near has been defned as the province

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of the novel while the far is considered as the stamping ground of the romance, as indicated in an early contrastive defnition of the two modes described by Congreve in his preface to Incognita (Congreve 5). Still, The Other Hand evokes the far through the idiom of realism, rubbing the reader’s nose into the ordinary grit of another location. Visual indices like “columns of thick black smoke” (Cleave 50) capture the protagonists’ and the readers’ attention, either on TV screens or on site, underlining a political vulnerability that has become global. The resort to symbolism is a traditional way to enhance visibility, especially when an image is used with a federating purpose, to gather a myriad other ones and encapsulate them powerfully, as is the case with the potent cultural reference to Golgotha that Little Bee uses to refer to her dispossessed country: “From my country you have taken its future […]. We do not have the seed, we have the husk. We do not have the spirit, we have the skull. Yes, the skull” (Cleave 258). The violent concreteness of the image calls forth yet another economy of gazes, as the skull produces an effect akin to Derrida’s conception of the “visor effect.” Hamlet and Horatio see the ghost watching them without seeing his eyes that are hidden by his helmet: “This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion” (Derrida 2014, 6–7; original emphasis). Similarly, in The Other Hand the uncanny experience of a gaze that is both known and unknown and which reduces the viewer to a position of precariousness and instability is concretely mediated, as if the Western readers caught two monstrous, empty sockets watching them, both referring back to and announcing death in an inescapable circularity. The human body here is reduced to the corpse, excarnating the fgure of vulnerability and paradoxically incarnating it beyond the fesh, negatively fguring the other’s gaze to thematise visibility radically. In such passages, the scales fall from the readers’ eyes so that they are given access, through the framing device of the skull, to the renewal of their perception and to a new, intense form of attention. The materiality of the image triggers off violent affects that are the mainspring of the novel’s ethical and, above all, political agenda under the guise of a glaring allegory that Catherine Bernard considers as the means to provide “the negative truth of a world in ruins” (Bernard 2018, 41–59; translation mine). Attention to visible aspects of the ordinary also relies on fgures that are less associated with abstraction and remain irreducible in their concreteness. This is the case with bodily manifestations induced by violent affects, since the ordinary realities that the novel focuses our attention on are often of an organic nature, on account of the irrefragable rule according to which in the body begin vulnerabilities. On the frst

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morning after her release from the detention centre, Little Bee wakes up in a dormitory meant to welcome seasonal Polish workers on the precincts of a farm whose owners have chosen to give temporary sanctuary to the four asylum seekers considered as illegal immigrants. She is drawn out of her sleep by the metallic noise of a chain hanging from the high ceiling. What has caused the chain to move is the weight of a body, i.e., that of one of Little Bee’s temporary companions who has preferred suicide to survival in a foreign, hostile context. As she humps from her bed, she steps into something wet and cold that she identifes as the girl’s urine: “A puddle of it had collected underneath the girl with no name. I looked up and saw a single drop of urine hang from the big toe of her bare foot, then sparkle as it fell to the foor” (Cleave 113). The luminescent drop that catches the light of dawn solicits the character’s eye and provides an experiential reading in which the cold wetness of the foor becomes an extension of the grey sparkle. The cold glint of the fuid incarnates the violence of the girl’s gesture and refracts the ferceness of the situation of which the body leaves a trace or a print, ironically and brutally compensating for the girl’s absence of papers and identity in the foreign land. The fact that the death is not stated but referred to through its consequences (the coldness of the foor, the last drop detaching itself from the toe) tersely translates the reality of the situation through the violence of the metalepsis, i.e., this type of metonymy in which an object or action is evoked indirectly and through contiguity, by alluding either to its causes or to its effects, a powerful way of soliciting the readers’ emotions through the means of experiential traces. The time it took the fuid and even the body to get cold is concentrated in one instant. In such a disproportion, which discloses death in its crudest materiality and with lightning speed, both the narrator’s and the reader’s affects are solicited, as if through the means of an interpellation. Attention to the visible in its rawest, most humble materiality is compelled through the experiential fulguration of the metalepsis. 1.1.4 Raging Shifting (the conditions of) perception, as suggested above, is a radical gesture that solicits violent affects by representing the vulnerable body so as to trigger off an incarnated response—the reader’s. At times, the violence goes the other way round as, instead of favouring an immersive reaction, the text suggests a distance and uses the powers of defamiliarisation. On the very morning of their release from the detention centre, in a lengthy expository scene when the four illegal immigrants erroneously released without any papers fnd themselves outside the gates, they try calling taxis that would take them away towards the city and possible friends or relatives—in vain. They set off walking along the road,

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precariously stepping in what fails to materialise immediately as their new lives and are hailed by the farmer who will offer them shelter for a few nights “This government doesn’t care about anyone. You’re not the frst people we’ve seen, wandering through these felds like Martians. You don’t even know what planet you’re on, do you?” (Cleave 88). The cosmic metaphor suggests the extent of the estrangement of these representatives of displaced populations. It is a potent image hailing from popular culture and cutting short any trite reference to exoticism. Sweeping along the spectrum from ethical decision to political positioning, the farmer resorts to the linguistic violence inherent in defamiliarisation to paradoxically express a proximity to and an interest in the girls that he shares with the reader. His attitude is one that faunts both the ethical and political dimensions of care, a capacity that starts with attending to the other’s vulnerability before edging towards a praxis consisting in becoming involved, concretely, in care giving. This passage, in which individual ethical involvement is substituted to the absence of institutional support, throws the idea of responsibility centre stage, showing how individuals assume responsibilities and pointing to a more general defection. In so doing, it explains how precariousness and invisibility are not only allowed to exist but also possibly produced. It also clearly shows that “inexistence is a social category” (Brugère and Le Blanc 53; translation mine), and a political one, certainly. At the same time, it takes pains to demonstrate that conforming to this idea is not a necessity. In fact, the farmer stands against the widespread tendency not so much to deny as to reject the reality of the other and the possibility of hospitality: “[Inexistence] refers to a way of reasoning that grants the local population the capacity to present its own categories as natural. To be a local then means to impose its own frame as the central perspective” (Brugère and Le Blanc 53; original emphasis; translation mine). The farmer, precisely, rejects such an option, introducing the idea that it is possible to attend. This is expressed in his anger, one that betrays a high quality of attention and is directed at “those who do not attend, those who do not see the difference, those who cannot see the problem, those who ‘can’t be bothered’” (Macé 33; translation mine). Against such an attitude, what the farmer and the text promote is consideration as opening to the other’s life and refusing closure onto oneself. The farmer’s anger, of course, echoes the rage of other characters: Sarah’s and Little Bee’s. Admittedly, the protagonists are not reduced to just this negative affect and, as the novel moves on, more room is devoted to the expression of empathy. Still, the opening pages, in which Little Bee explains why she would like to be a one-pound coin, an object boasting more privileges than a displaced human being like her, let her spell her rage out loud. This is far from insignifcant as voice is a condition not only of audibility but also of visibility. From this point of

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view, what the novel does is give a voice to those who are generally not heard, frst by making Little Bee one of the two narrators in the story and quantitatively the main narrator, as the book opens and closes on chapters that she is in charge of; and, secondly, by thematising the importance of language. In fact, she explains at length that, while she was in the detention centre, she realised that there were two ways for women to exist and prepare for their return to a life outside: either make themselves physically attractive or learn to speak the queen’s English like a native. She specifes that she devoted her time to doing this—and this also justifes the structural and ethical choice to make a displaced, illegal character the main narrator of the novel, even while casting doubt on Derrida’s interrogation as to whether as soon as the xenos speaks our language, he/she does not qualify as a foreigner any more (Derrida 2000, 15). The early pages are interspersed with passages when the other women released from the detention centre are incapable of speaking English as the frst scene evokes how they are queuing beside the only telephone booth in the hall of the detention centre, trying to call a taxi in broken English. The purpose of the scene is clearly to show how incapacitated they are, and that the only one who can make herself understood is Little Bee, which provides the pat confrmation that she was right in applying herself to the study of Nigeria’s offcial language. This is in consonance with Le Blanc’s indications when he argues that precariousness goes along with linguistic vulnerability: “Social justifcation is not of a distinct nature from linguistic justifcation” (Le Blanc 2007, 137; translation mine). The resort to a displaced narrator who has a creative command of the queen’s English and is highly articulate is proof of the need for resistance to structures of obliteration. Such a resistance implies the consciousness of the necessity to shift the norms of perception: by speaking, shouting and venting out her rage, Little Bee “testifes to herself by using the very forms that would suspend and annihilate her” (Le Blanc 2007, 169; translation mine). Raging is a way for Little Bee to create the conditions of her audibility and thereby of her visibility, which clearly puts her on the way to empowerment. This gives her the power to address others, as opposed to being merely addressed by others, a force that she uses consistently, calling the readers to attention and targeting them by using a “you” that marks the limit of her linguistic vulnerability. By claiming and practicing the power to address others, she solicits the Western reader’s responsibilities and strikes at the fences that could be erected between constructed communities of the “us” and “them” type. The narrative thereby reminds us of the reality of shared responsibilities, as in the strikingly visual passage where she evokes the presence of a British Jeep that has been left rotting in the jungle for quite some time: “I saw that the jungle and the Jeep had grown together, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began—whether the jungle grew out of the Jeep or the Jeep

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grew out of the jungle” (Cleave 304). In this Conradian view of a world whose various parts are united in darkness, menace and evil, a vision of interdependence and global responsibility is achieved as the novel “creates new frames of intelligibility” (Brugère and Le Blanc 93; translation mine) to allow us to pay attention to the need for hospitality. From this point of view, The Other Hand evokes the British woman’s “right to look” in the Nigerian girl’s eyes, and vice versa. As opposed to a normative visuality that is authorised and sovereign, and is more often than not interfaced with surveillance, it allows for a “right to look [that] is not [merely] about seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love” (Mirzoeff 1). Such a right to look is the condition for the deployment of an attention whose relationality remains powerful and mobilises ethical and political levers.

1.2 Exploring the Closet All novels do not end up on such an upbeat tone. If Cleave’s protagonists manage to make themselves heard in the face of hostility, some excluded individuals remain silent to the end. This is the case with Mr F, the protagonist of Neil Bartlett’s third novel, Skin Lane, who belongs to the category of the excluded on account of the dissonance between his education and his long-denied sexual preferences. The novel chronicles his painful itinerary towards self-discovery against the background of the passing of the Sexual Offences Bill through Parliament, from January to August 1967. The realistic dimension is buttressed by the inscription of the protagonist’s individual story into the history of the country, as suggested above, but also by a very detailed account of Mr F’s activities. In fact, he is the last in a line of distinguished furriers working in the City of London and perpetuating a trade that vanished in the late 20th century. The evocation of the microcosm of the network of streets and alleys, together with a detailed and regular presentation of the tools of the trade (all sorts of scissors and cutting devices) and its sundry activities strengthen the sense of realism. The anonymous frst-person narrator uses a technological discourse that gives the impression that he knows everything about the world of the furriers and that he can give an exhaustive account of their activities, one of the hallmarks of realism (Ganteau 2017, 177). From this point of view, the novel grants the contemporary reader access to a lost world where the origins of skins, pelts and furs, the rare names of the animals they come from, and the sundry visual and tactile effects that they produce are put on show as the narrator revels in providing detailed accounts of this very specifc, exceptional context. Clearly, high on Bartlett’s agenda features the wish to make the reader discover a secluded branch of activity and a world that used to be fairly invisible and has vanished from sight.

48 Social Invisibilities 1.2.1 Visibilities Of course, the purpose of the novel is to address the issue of visibility— or, rather, visibilities. Skin Lane permanently solicits the eye: the lustre of the furs, the ballets of workers and managers, the performances of customers going through ftting sessions bolster the scopic economy of a narrative that is structurally determined by its fascination with visual arts and drama. This is perceptible when the narrator goes to a gallery and peers at paintings of naked male bodies, or when he remembers or hallucinates scenes from the zoo, or when he slings pelts at his apprentice so that the room becomes animated like a Noah’s Ark or fying brutes. Besides, the structural recurrence of one of his nightmares, when he sees the naked body of an anonymous young man hanging upside down in his bathroom, links up with the pictorial imagination that reigns over the narrative. More importantly, the novel is built on a series of very dramatic scenes in which the protagonist is confronted with his apprentice—the object of his dumb passion—in the staircase, in the ftting room, in the workshop at the top of the house, possibly reminding the reader of Bartlett’s work as a dramatist and stage director and of his fascination with drama. In fact, the characters are distributed along a spectre that goes from full visibility to extreme invisibility. The frst pole is ostentatiously occupied by secondary characters like Maureen, the owner’s cousin’s girlfriend, who is given a fur coat by her suitor, chooses red fox as the most suited pelt and indulges in ftting sessions when she strikes poses as an actress, surrounded by various members of the management and of the staff, until she becomes immortalised in a blackand-white photograph published in the Evening Standard in October 1967 (Bartlett 157–61, 341). Of course, Beauty, the protagonist’s unacknowledged sweetheart, seems to naturally belong in the limelight and is an apt specialist in getting everybody’s attention and revelling in it, as repeatedly and emphatically indicated (Bartlett 103), with his permanent elegance, his unblemished skin and his black hair that catches the light in such an irresistible way. To this end of the spectrum might also belong, metaphorically, the beast, since the novels is an explicit rewriting of Beauty and the Beast—as signposted from the italicised passage that serves as a prologue to the frst chapter. The beast is of course Mr F, in his incarnation not as humble, vulnerable, self-effacing, star-crossed lover but as outraged, jilted devotee whose anger transforms him into a monster: “Mr F’s dream was beginning to make itself subtly visible in his face. It was starting to show through. His eyes had taken on an odd glitter […]” (Bartlett 232; original emphasis). The monster, which by defnition is made to be seen/shown, as indicated by the etymology of the term (the Latin monstrare for “to display” [Ganteau 2017, 184]), captures the protagonist’s attention, Beauty’s, and the readers’, most clearly, in a scene that stages a showdown between Mr F and Beauty, before the

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former sets fre to the workshop and the whole building in a paroxysm of light and visibility that is but the prelude to effacement of all traces and return to invisibility. The beast generally lies crouching inside, well-guarded and unseen, gnawing at the protagonist’s heart and psyche and kept locked up in the darkness, so much so that attention to invisibilities is quite obviously what the novel in most determined to achieve. The literary resurrection of the lost branch of activity, the description of what used to happen behind the walls of the furrier’s factory, the evocation of the tangle of inaccessible lanes making the proceedings even more secret (Bartlett 36), the inside of Mr F’s one-bedroom fat, all these cordoned-off places become the object of inquiry of a fairly loud narrator who boasts most of the prerogatives of omniscience. In fact, Skin Lane is a story of loneliness and exclusion, the eponymous skin, the instrument of contact and relation with the external world providing an ironic commentary from the onset. The frst ffty pages give pride of place to the protagonist’s routines: his journeys to and from work, the tasks he accomplishes in unfailing order when he is at home, his unshared life, the silences resonating around him and, more menacingly, inside him, the unanswered questions. The narrative sets itself the task of making the reader shift between the protagonist’s demeanour and activities, and his inner landscape. On the one hand, the lengthy expository phase evokes an excessive absence of remarkable traits in the protagonist that is in itself notable—once it has been noticed, that is. In fact, for no ascertained reason, Mr F leads a life of such discretion, totally devoted to his work, that his colleagues never fully realise that there is something amiss behind such an appearance of mastery and normality, all the more so as nobody shares any instant of his personal life. This implies that the witness should come from an altogether different sphere, and the frst-person heterodiegetic narrator (who turns out to be marginally homodiegetic in the last pages of the novel) precisely assumes this function. He chooses to focus on the character and his milieu, retrieves his life from indiscernibility and oblivion for a few crucial, critical months, and leaves him to relapse into invisibility. On the other hand, thanks to delegated internal focalisation, the reader becomes privy to Mr F’s thoughts and feelings, and more particularly his fear that the dream that has been troubling his usually uneventful nights for some days should come back to harrow him. The dream, whose protracted irruption is artfully prepared, acts as a counter-fgure of his own invisibility and of the repression of his innermost desires. It is clearly a symptom that should be read as a manifestation of his unconscious, evoking a reality to which he has no conscious access. As explicitly indicated, the protagonist is the victim of a split: he has an “ability to be two people” with a “week-day self” (Bartlett 188), which he and the reader only discover after he has been destabilised by the recurrent dream that has also thrown into light his capacity for

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denial. Interestingly, the narrator shows the emergence of this category and its transformation, chapter after chapter, from unconscious condition to realisation that there are feelings he is unwilling to explore and drives he prefers to put a tight lid on. The dream as symptom points at a trauma through exposure to a cultural disqualifcation of affects, the narrative suggests. Admittedly, it could refer to a previous traumatic breakthrough uninscribed in the protagonist’s memory and reactivated by a new violent occurrence, the two of them remaining hidden to both protagonist and reader, in which case the textual silence would be a powerful index of the degree of the character’s condition. Still, I do not feel that such a hypothesis should be privileged in a text characterised by a frst-person, quasi omniscient narrator who gives the impression of having access to all manner of information and details, since the second hypothesis would not be congruent with such an aesthetic choice. As is the case with trauma fction, Skin Lane concentrates on the hidden subconscious and conscious mechanisms affecting a protagonist. What it does differently from the bulk of trauma fction is throw what is happening inside a subject’s mind into visibility even while very few indices betray the condition externally. By using the staples of trauma fction as identifed by Anne Whitehead, among which intertextuality and intensifcation, Bartlett manages to renew the fruitful paradox of the fctional representation of trauma that “emerges as that which, at the very moment of its reception, registers as a non-experience, causing conventional epistemologies to falter” (Whitehead 5; emphasis added). I would argue that registering a non-experience and, precisely, the indirect recording of this non-experience is what the novel does, thereby getting the reader to pay attention to an invisibility of a radical type, which in most part escapes the protagonist’s consciousness. In so doing, it pushes to the extreme the workings of dramatic irony and provides the condition for the emergence of an immersive reading. 1.2.2 Shifting Perceptions Clearly, the novel is interested in invisibilities and in getting the reader to pay attention to them. Now, invisibilities notoriously belong to various types, and rely on sundry factors, as Le Blanc specifes. In fact, they may be socially conditioned through appropriation (as is the case with slavery), instrumentalisation (as in various cases of exploitation), or else absence of perception (Le Blanc 2009, 13). I would argue that what we are presented with in Skin Lane is invisibility through the absence of or faulty perception. This is what the novel attempts to expose and redress by putting the reader in the situation of seeing what generally escapes perception, and more specifcally what escaped perception in the late 1960s, even if of course the situation may still apply in the third decade of the 21st century. By attending to what is invisible, inaudible and

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absent, and making it visible, audible (more of this later) and obscene, the novel contributes to the elaboration of a “negative phenomenology” whose purpose is “the elucidation of invisibilities” (Le Blanc 2009, 91; translation mine). If such a task remains fairly theoretical, for philosophers (and Le Blanc is conscious of this), it falls within the remit of literature to make it very concrete by incarnating it in characters and allowing the reader to beneft from an immersive and experiential knowledge of it. By providing a double, stereophonic and -scopic evocation of invisibility from outside (Mr F escapes detection from his peers and colleagues) and from inside (the origins and nature of his trauma are invisible or at least very partially accessible to him), Skin Lane solicits the reader’s ethical capacities of analysis of and concern with the situation. This is mediated through the presentation of singularities that the reader can relate to. Furthermore, by plunging individuals in a social and historical context in such an insistent way (thanks to the loud, impersonal narrator), what is obtained is a political commentary on the situation and the practice of a politics of literature whose purpose is to guarantee “attention to all,” which is a forceful expression of the political impulse of literature in promoting “narrative democracy” (Rosanvallon 26; original emphasis). Showing absence is, indeed, what Skin Lane manages to do very effciently. This is not completely original, as absence is the central theme and driving energy of some modes like the elegy, the ghost story or else the romance in its open-ended, deconstructive type, among other forms. Still, Bartlett’s novel does this in a fairly original way by showing absence from outside and from inside, stereoscopically, as indicated above. In fact, Mr F’s essential discretion, his two-dimensionality, in the eyes of his colleagues, and his absence of a third, personal and intimate dimension is referred to repeatedly, in the same way as the absence of connection to his own desires and, possibly, traumatic past is equally signposted. This implies a failure of relationality and the temptation of autonomy that the narrative shows to be a pure myth. In fact, Skin Lane very clearly presents the reader with a wounded protagonist, the wound being described metaleptically, through its violent effects, the frst of which being Mr F’s eschewing any type of contact (Bartlett 12) to the extent of making him himself the victim of what many of his contemporaries, the narrator and the reader—whose connivance is courted by the narrator—would see as a “deformity”: “In all of the nineteen years since the frst night when he sat [in his new fat] testing the springs of the mattress […], he has never invited anyone to join him in that single bed of his” (Bartlett 45). Of course, the wound that he both literally and unwittingly inficts on himself while cutting a pelt in Beauty’s presence objectivises the one that he unsuspectingly carries within himself, but otherwise, his is an “invisible wound” (Bartlett 43), as underlined by the very explicit narrator whose self-appointed duty is, precisely, to throw this injury into visibility so as to get the reader to attend to invisible

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areas of ordinary experience: “Something nobody can see, but which I can tell you about” (Bartlett 44; original emphasis). And not only does the narrator tell us about the invisible wound, thereby fulflling his function as a witness, but he also recounts its effects, shows them, and even gets us to feel them, by addressing the readers directly and soliciting their empathy and, ultimately, engagement, as Sandrine Sorlin has powerfully demonstrated (Sorlin 160–64). In fact, the title heralds one of the main themes of the novel which is that of the erotics of seeing and touching. And, of course, the skins that the narrative displays are those of animals but also of human beings, which provides a series of contrastive parallelisms that fuel the fgural dimension. The more Mr F watches and touches the skins of critters of all ilk in all legitimacy, on account of his trade, the more he avoids watching—let alone touching—the skins of human animals: the young man that he sees in his dream and the more ontologically feshed out young men that he meets in the streets or at work, among whom Beauty. Admittedly, he allows himself some measure of peering at the nightly visitor that inhabits his recurrent nightmare, and he also lets himself have a good stare at religious paintings of male nudes in an art gallery that he patronises from time to time. Thanks to painting, “Mr F start[s] to stare at the wound” (Bartlett 72), we are pointedly informed, all the more so that the canvas he is having a look at is a representation of the scene when Thomas introduces his fnger into Christ’s wound, a very effcient way to suspend disbelief. The spectacle of watching and touching a wound and the fesh and skin around it provides a powerful fgure of the protagonist’s incapacity and craving to do so, as established in the next scene when he watches a young worker sitting opposite him on the train and taking advantage of the journey to get some rest. The fact that the anonymous passenger cannot reciprocate the gaze—or even be aware of it— reproduces the optical asymmetry of the picture gallery and allows Mr F to attend very precisely to the young man’s physical appearance (Bartlett 78). Still, the gallery scene provides the occasion for a moment of joint attention in which Mr F, while he is watching the painting, is addressed by an anonymous visitor, who comments on the quality of the work without any preamble, creating a situation in which Mr F, who was lost in solitary contemplation, becomes aware that someone is attending to the same object that he is focusing on, both characters being conscious that they are sharing the experience: “He isn’t looking at Mr F, despite the fact that he is standing right next to him, but staring straight at the painting. Right at the wound, in fact” (Bartlett 73). For a few seconds, the experience of joint attention might show the excluded, isolated character that there is such a thing as gratuitous, spontaneous relationality, a hypothesis that he does not take into consideration for one instant. In this scene, joint attention is solicited the better to be discarded, as an index of the protagonist’s deprivation of relationality through sheer

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incapacitation. And such an incapacitation lies in prolonged disaffection, as made emphatically clear by the narrator, and also in the protagonist’s incapacity to participate in the “art of doing” (faire œuvre in the original French, Le Blanc 2009, 26–27). Despite Mr F’s insertion in the world of working and production, he cannot participate fully in social production and interaction and his creativity is drastically reduced, for emotional reasons. For this very motive, the wounded protagonist cannot open himself and belong to a vaster life and remains on the outskirts of society, inside and outside at the same time, in an outside that is characterised by its being inside (Le Blanc 2010, 44). This prevents him from inventing his own lifestyle (style de vie, in the French original [Le Blanc 2009, 26]), which is tantamount to depriving him of agency and relegating him to a form of life that he has not chosen for himself and that he has to submit to—as distinct from contributing to its creation. These are conditions and effects of social invisibility, quite obviously, and they remind us that vulnerability and visibility—and, I would argue the visibility of vulnerability—“depend on social norms of recognition” (Butler 2006, 43). Such norms allow subjects to lead an ordinary life— understood as a life in which they are not deprived of agency—to go on participating in collective life, and to partake of the democratic life of the community. They are generally taken for granted but, as indicated by Le Blanc, we may all experience moments of invisibility and inaudibility, when the frames of perception are put elsewhere. But some individuals or groups are structurally deprived of perception: Could it be that this normality is a social construction due to the social and political conditions made for ordinary lives? The fact that some lives are structurally and not accidentally invisible and/ or inaudible reveals that social normality is not self-evident, that it depends on a whole set of norms of apprehension, recognition and justifcation of lives. (Le Blanc 2021, n.p.) When the norms of recognition are respected and not worked on, what is obtained a situation of invisibility in which the precarious and the excluded fail to be detected, and “fall into the holes of History” (Le Blanc 2014, 16, translation mine), which illustrates Mr F’s fate and which the narrator is volubly intent on correcting. Telling and showing absence constitutes an ethical and a political gesture of resistance through a testimony whose function is not only to draw attention to ordinary invisibilities but to convert the invisible into visibility. Not only does the novel pay attention to the protagonist’s exclusion, but it also delves into the origins of the situation, attending to the invisibility of the mechanisms of othering at work in the society of the times—and still valid in many contemporary contexts. From this point of view, Skin Lane addresses the issue of the power of words,

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reminding the readers of the effects of linguistic violence. Early on, the narrator insists on this theme in unambiguous terms: “It is the words that do it, I think. The words that men use to each other” (Bartlett 46). An example of interpellation is to be found 200 pages later, in one of the climatic nodes when the protagonist is confronted with Beauty, trapped in the staircase, a scene that leads to these parting words—and shot: “‘Well I’ve got news for you. I’m all fxed in that department. So you, Mr F, can go and fuck—’ Beauty put a full stop between every word: ‘Right. Off. Alright?’” (Bartlett 246). In traditional fashion, this scene associates interpellation (Butler 1997, 24–28) with the attendant effect of exclusion. It reminds the reader that the protagonist is, like any of us, a linguistic subject and that “we are exposed to language prior to being able to form a speech act” (Butler 2016, 18), which implies in turn a loss of agency, in some situations like the one evoked in the novel. One step further, such passages contribute to making the readers attend to the indiscernible presence of norms, which are everywhere to be felt but so generally taken for granted that they seem to be characterised by transparency. I would argue that Bartlett, along with Butler but using the potentialities of a different medium, is intent on showing that and how the “I” is “always already in relation to a set of norms” (Butler 2005, 8), which means that the subject is always already caught in a set of norms. This is what Butler describes in terms of the subject’s opacity, i.e., “moments of unknowingness about oneself which emerge in the context of relations towards others” (Butler 2005, 20). Such an opaqueness induced by the subject’s relation to others allows to measure a vulnerability intrinsic to his dependence on others and resonates with the traumatic complex and invisible, internal wound that it is one of the novel’s main commitments to pay attention to. In fact, Skin Lane reminds us, with Butler and Athanasiou, that “the human is always the event of its multiple exposures” (Butler and Athanasiou 32), and it seems at times that Mr F is reduced to exposure, i.e., that being radically exposed defnes him. Interestingly, such an evocation relies on a great deal of linguistic opacity, by which I mean a system of echoes and correspondences and the narrator’s faunted eloquence, showcasing the fgural texture of the narrative and thereby problematising its largely realistic inspiration. By letting loose its poetic potential, Skin Lane uses the tools of literature and the singularity of fction to get the reader to attend to what matters for individuals caught in a social web of (inter-)action and dependences. In doing so, it pays attention not only to individual and social vulnerability but also to its production and effects. In such circumstances, when getting the reader to consider the invisible, fction provides a critique that mobilises its ethical and, beyond, its political power. One step further, the narrator, after delving into the origins of the problem, also focuses on how to alleviate it and possibly correct it. This implies a posture that is overall compatible with the practice of care.

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In fact, even though the protagonist’s snappish, holier-than-thou, and at times cruel side is never occluded—particularly so in his progression towards the symbolical status of beast in his relation to Beauty—the impression that the reader is left with is that of an overwhelming benevolence as regards Mr F whose fgure as a victim deserving empathy dominates the narrative. Caring for the character is an attitude that the narrator consistently reverts to (Sorlin 164), and the frst stage of caring, as seen above, consists in being conscious that there is someone to care about, i.e., in identifying an object of attention. Now, it is one of the basic characteristics of the novel that it concentrates on a limited number of protagonists—and a single character achieves this status in Skin Lane, a text that opens itself in many ways to the genre of the fctional biography. This is the reason why the narrator displays his partiality to the protagonist, showing that he understands the latter’s frustrations and is ready to take some part in alleviating them, in passages that may smack of the old-fashioned practice of narrative metalepsis associated with omniscience. This is the case in some italicised passages, where a hesitation as to the origin of enunciation emerges or, more precisely, when internal focalisation allows the reader to be as close as possible to the character’s thoughts and when some linguistic events are reported without it being possible to determine who is speaking. One instance may be found in the following passage, where Mr F is fnally allowing himself to concentrate on the visitor that haunts his nights, remembering the details of his nightmares and, for once, allowing himself to stare at the young man’s body and to consider it in detail: He tries to slow everything down. Opening the door. Reaching in for the light-switch. Looking up and seeing the body refected in the washbasin mirror— He pauses here, and has a drag on his cigarette. Then he closes his eyes. That’s better. (Bartlett 54; original emphasis) The use of a blank space associated with italics brings in a great deal of hesitation as to the origin of the second statement and gives the impression of a spectral double voice, as if the character were mouthing the words with the narrator. The impression is that the narrator is not only keeping an eye on him but also accompanying and encouraging him, like a one-person chorus speaking from another ontological plane. In these lines, as in the passages when the narrator encourages Mr F to stare (at paintings, at other men), what we are privy to is the staging of the possibility of liberation or at least resistance. It sounds as if the former were granting the latter “the right to look,” in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s acceptation of the phrase, i.e., the opposition to regimes of “visuality” that he defnes

56 Social Invisibilities as “a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority, and a means for the mediation of those subject to that authority” (Mirzoeff xv). By getting the protagonist to stare at male bodies, thereby granting him “the right to look,” the narrator suggests a style of countervisuality that becomes possible very feetingly. In fact, “[t]he right to look is strongly interfaced with the right to be seen,” Mirzoeff adds (Mirzoeff 4), which means that, thanks to the narrator’s attention, Mr F assumes visibility for a few months in his life before falling back into oblivion and anonymity at the end of the novel, travelling along a narrative arc of descent and failure. From this point of view, it is telling that the possibility of complicity offered by Beauty during the scene when Maureen tries on her red fox coat should end up as a fasco. In fact, while both characters are surrounding the young woman, attending to the same object and being conscious of it, Beauty’s grin is not reciprocated and the moment comes to an end without reaching fruition, as if positive relationality and success were something that Mr F did not have the capacity to achieve and as if his only option were the refusal and failure to relate. Ultimately, it seems as if the novel’s specifc attentional apparatus based on an impersonal, quasi omniscient narrator who is both the witness of the protagonist’s invisible internal states and of the external social pressure exerted on him were meant to appear in its effciency the better to peter off, as if success were, of necessity, short lived, were but a preparation for and a modality of failure. Clearly, Mr F as a fgure of the excluded is prevented from developing his “art of doing” and from acquiring a lifestyle, in Blanc’s acceptation of the terms. In other contexts, some marginal characters, who suffer from exclusion to a lesser degree than Mr F, admittedly, manage to exert agency and make the goalposts shift in their own subtle way. This is the case of the Tramp, the protagonist of Chaplin’s flms, of whom Le Blanc indicates that he contributes to change: “minority rhythms become embedded in majority rhythms, become entangled with them for some time without being reduced to them, before being expelled from them, so that they end up producing rhythms that boast their own autonomy” (Le Blanc 2014, 146; translation mine). But Mr F is allowed no other option than lamentable failure. 1.2.3 Ending with a Whimper That visibility and audibility are closely linked is a hypothesis that Le Blanc investigates in L’Invisibilité sociale and that is incarnated in the character of Mr F. In fact, Skin Lane provides a study of silence as much as invisibility, and from this point of view the very eloquent narrator seems to speak the more loudly as the protagonist does not manage to fnd his own voice, let alone to make himself heard. Isolation and exclusion, reliant on the failure of relationality as they are, imply minimal communication, and this is why Mr F is heard to exchange as few words

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as possible with the newspaper seller, on the way to work. He is also known for his terseness among his colleagues at Scheiner’s, and he even fails to answer the anonymous visitor who addresses him at the gallery, so that the moment of inchoate joint attention remains just that, i.e., inchoate. When he speaks in an institutional context, he reserves his communication to work matters or instructions to his apprentice, rarely escaping the level of platitude. Of course, he reels on the brink of aphasia every time he is the prey of intense feelings or desires that he does not want to betray. At most, he lets himself voice double entendres that resonate with sexual connotations for the reader, whereas he does not seem to be aware of any specifc echo. This is the case in a fairly ambiguous scene in which Mr F asks Beauty to try on the coat that is designed for Maureen as part of the boy’s process of apprenticeship (but which the reader cannot but erroneously decipher as a step towards initiation): Beauty did as he was told, crossing the workroom […] and then coming hesitatingly back in just his shirt-sleaves. Mr F Was still patiently holding out the coat. “Let’s be having you,” he said. (Bartlett 213) The intimation is that even when he is on the verge of saying something, he simply does not, unwittingly leaving connotations to do the job, which points at his impossibility to utter the content of what really matters to him and obsesses him and, ultimately, casts even more doubt on his capacity to say things. Fittingly, Mr F’s dumbness reaches its apex in the climactic scene when he confronts Beauty, at midnight on a Saturday, after the Boy has offered to repay him for a favour that Mr F did him (“You can have me. Can’t kill me, can it?” [Bartlett 264]). In this highly visual and dramatic scene, no embrace takes place and Mr F is content with cutting away the boy’s clothes with his sharp cutter’s knife until the latter is shackled by his trousers and underpants, and cannot move an inch. This is when Beauty speaks out (“Afraid, are you?” [Bartlett 300]), to which Mr F replies that he is indeed afraid. But he never manages to state the cause of his fear and merely repeats the words “No one has ever—” (Bartlett 300, 301). Aposiopesis and silence dominate, which the narrator cannot resist confrming: “But the missing word is never spoken” (Bartlett 301). This clinches the analogy between the protagonist and the beast of the fairy tale, one of the striking and differentiating characteristic of non-human animals being their dumbness (Bartlett 299). In fact, Mr F will never pronounce those words but will write them in a letter to Beauty that he never allows himself to send and that will be found in his table drawer after his death, as revealed in the explicit, almost the concluding words of the novel: “Fuck me” (Bartlett 343). The relative lack of ft and agreement between the frst and second parts of the sentence (“No one has ever—fuck me”) makes visible the

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length of time that elapses between the moment of enunciation in writing and the moment when the sentence is completed for the reader. The broken syntax is an index of the protagonist’s turmoil and, at the same time, it indicates the failure of address incumbent on the speaker, as the two segments do not connect syntactically. This is all the more remarkable and, possibly, poignant, as the reader is put here in a very active situation as s/he is the one in charge of remembering the frst segment that appears more than forty pages before the second one. The readers’ attention and agency are thereby solicited so as to supply the missing words and virtually assist the partly aphasic protagonist to say what he feels, in a movement that makes them not only care about the character but also, fairly concretely, take care of him. Rarely are readers solicited to such an extent so that they are led to participate in a practice of reading that makes them get immersed into the text. In this, they are prolonging the narrator’s protective gesture towards the character, making attention develop into a form of action. I would argue that in such instances the pragmatics of fction are harnessed to a practice of care that is a development of the ethics of attention to invisible and inaudible elements of the ordinary world. In fact, by practically taking part in the reconstitution of the protagonist’s speech act, both the narrator and the reader try to heal a defcient address and show the way towards empowerment. From this point of view, it may be said that the novel is about the failure not only of audibility but also of address affecting a protagonist who is most of the time interpellated (like the readers) and clearly not addressed (partially like the readers), and who is therefore concomitantly deprived of the capacity to address. Butler reminds us of the fundamental need of address to validate social existence, insisting that it is necessary to have a “you” to address oneself to: “if there is no ‘you,’ then I have lost myself,” she adds judiciously (Butler 2005, 32). From this perspective, Skin Lane is a novel about an excluded subject who loses himself, being made inaudible and invisible by linguistic norms that pre-exist him. The narrator’s sympathy is seen to fail to make Mr F change tack and achieve agency and empowerment so as to adopt a lifestyle of his own. The only things the super-active narrator can do is repeatedly and eloquently solicit the reader’s own sympathy and, of course, make us attend to the protagonist’s emblematic fate, thereby taking part in an ethics and a politics of attention. Even if short lived, Mr F’s access to visibility will have contributed a testimony and a homage to the wounded, silenced and excluded.

1.3 Wandering with Intent As already underlined, the novel in English, since its modern origins, namely since it was constituted in the 18th century as a realist narrative in opposition to the excesses and exoticism of romance, has been a favourite

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terrain for the evocation of the close and the familiar, to use Congreve’s defnition (Congreve 5). This capacity extends to non-fctional narratives, such as memoirs and autobiographies, among others, or to more hybrid texts, of which Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path is a representative. Originally released in 2018, the book was re-published by Penguin the following year and has gained public acclaim, making it to the shortlist of several literary prizes. It boasts features of the diary, the autobiography, and the travelogue, while accommodating poetic creation and lyrical and obviously imaginative fights of fancy. It follows the wanderings of the narrator and protagonist, Ray, and her husband, Moth—both are over ffty and have been married for 32 years—along the South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. The frst few chapters chronicle the protagonists’ downward spiral into destitution, after they lose their homes, jobs and savings in a risky fnancial investment, and after Moth is told he suffers from an incurable degenerative disease that will affect his life expectancy. Most of the frst part is thus devoted to the sudden shift into precariousness through legal deprivation of the ordinary life (in Le Blanc’s sense) that the couple had been leading for several decades. They had spent most of their adult lives renovating a Welsh farmhouse and transforming it into a guest house, which gave them audibility and visibility, and allowed them to take part in the “work of doing” (Le Blanc 2009, 30; translation mine) by mobilising their capacity to “invent [their own] lifestyle” (Le Blanc 2009, 27; translation mine). After being told the terrible news, with a few hundred euros to spare after paying off their debts, they decide to buy rudimentary camping equipment to… walk, precisely because this is the only way they can stay on their feet and keep on the move, somehow, and because camping is the only option left to them so that they can lead the life of homeless people without having to resign themselves to this status or being pinned down as dossers. However, contrary to what these lines may suggest, The Salt Path is not a misery memoir about the destitute existence of Welsh ffty somethings. Even if many setbacks, sufferings and humiliations await the protagonists on their long and arduous way, their journey is above all an initiatory one in which resilience and hope will eventually intervene. 1.3.1 Investigating the Ordinary Although the logic at work in The Salt Path is distinct from that of Orwell’s choice to share the lives of the invisible and the precarious, who are given thankless tasks or live off begging in Paris and London in the 1930s—Raynor Winn did suffer from social relegation and did not have to pass off as destitute—the experiences of immersion are comparable in many ways. Admittedly, unlike Down and Out in Paris and London, The Salt Path is more pastoral than urban, with the protagonists

60 Social Invisibilities walking through only a few larger villages or seaside resorts. However, as they immerse themselves in the various environments they cross, their perception is sharpened by the discovery of new landscapes and natural elements of a vegetal or geological nature, but also by the posture of the walker, which guarantees a form of humility in terms of pace and level of perception. It is therefore the observation of an ordinary reality that is discovered through various efforts and encounters that the narrative proposes to investigate and presents as the protagonists’ investigation. The latter is punctuated by various relatively didactic passages that review aspects of public policy, as in Chapter 4, “Rogues and Vagabonds” (subtitled “A brief note on homelessness”). In just over three pages, the narrator indulges in a historical digest of measures taken to penalise the homeless in the UK, culminating in the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act of 2014, passed under the Cameron government, which gives municipalities free rein to punish the homeless (Winn 33–34). Critical analysis of the offcial discourse resonates with the evocation of the adventures of the neo-precarious couple, as they become experts in unauthorised camping, but also survival and camoufage techniques, and particularly as their pilgrimage takes them through relatively urbanised areas. Their experience is one of accommodation to the signs of an ordinary reality that is kept under the expected thresholds of perception and which becomes apparent through encounters. The narrative thus becomes an expression of the responsibility of the protagonists who, navigating at the level of banal experience, maintain a disposition to perceive ordinary lives banished from the radar screens of the majority of citizens: an invisible ordinary that they notice and describe and whose experience they endeavour to translate. This is particularly the case in the last part, when they meet John, a homeless worker who, with other members of the local precariat, has set up a hidden camp in the woods: Most of them worked: part-time, insecure jobs, low wages, seasonal living that made it diffcult to secure a rented home. But we can live here, keep a little self-respect. […] We keep it clean; we’re not substance dependents like many on the streets, just country people; the countryside’s our home but we’ve been priced out. They kept their lives hidden, never lighting fres for fear of the smoke giving them away (Winn 236). The texture of the narrative, based as it is on the profusion of concrete details and on the voice of a representative of the invisible and unheard, allows for the sensitive sharing of a new experience: that of an invisible and unheard ordinary which offers an embodied vision of contemporary anti-pastoral (Gifford n.p.; Lilley 123–24). The intimation is that

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the rural areas, like the urbanised ones, are no longer sheltered from economic fuctuations. These are indeed more perceptible in the periurban areas that give its title to the penultimate chapter, from which the above extract is taken, “Edgelanders.” In this faraway setting, at the western tip of England, the surveyors cling to the cliff-side paths while the representatives of the rural precariat continue to experience exclusion, pushed by a centrifugal force towards these edges and margins. By conducting the investigation, sharpening perceptions, and privileging a humble point of view, the protagonists, including the narrator, put into practice an ethic of the ordinary and share a strong experiential content with the readers. Such episodes can take place while the walkers are alone on their path, preys to the relegation and ostracism inherent in precarisation. As already indicated and according to Le Blanc, the outsider’s condition is characterised by the fact that the excluded are not outside of society but rather within it (Le Blanc 2010, 44). Now, this exclusion (being in an outside that is located, paradoxically, inside) is indeed the one that affects the protagonists who, transformed into substitutes, are called upon to occupy undeclared temporary jobs and suffer the effects of relegation. However, Ray and Moth, despite their degraded status, have access to moments of recognition of the ordinary. 1.3.2 What Matters Indeed, one of the essential challenges of Ordinary Language Philosophy is to learn to perceive the ordinary not only when it is invisible, but also when it is visible, i.e., to acquire the capacity to see what is in front of our eyes, waiting to be perceived, described and taken into account. Far from curiosities, which would be by defnition exceptional or at least rare—and therefore relatively hidden from perception—observations of the order of the obvious may be at hand. They are not likely to generate scepticism or incredulity since they are always present before our eyes and, as a result, demand that we make an effort to notice them. To perceive the ordinary in what is visible, precisely, requires work and the training of perception, as we shall see in the next chapter, in order to take appearances into account. This is what Sandra Laugier reminds us of, drawing on Foucault’s Dits et écrits: “The ordinary exists within this characteristic diffculty of access to what is right before our eyes” (Laugier 2015b, 1044). A work of attention that aims to take into account the visible is required and one of the responsibilities of narrative is precisely to describe this work and to share its experiential content by soliciting the powers of the narrative’s generic inscription (autobiography and travelogue, here) and its linguistic “texture.” This is a category dear to Iris Murdoch, who sees the fesh of words as an essential modality of ethical vision, “the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral

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beings” (Murdoch 1997b, 241). This brand of ordinary can thus only be apprehended with an “effort,” as Murdoch insists, and for her the ethical subject must “strive to see rightly” (Murdoch 2013, 37–40). It is precisely because relegation triggers the project of walking, and because this is enacted and recorded in narrative, that the perception of the ordinary sharpens, so that what is visible but ordinarily unrecorded demands attention. Perhaps one of the most striking passages in The Salt Path is the one in which the couple, in a pleasantly bucolic setting just off the path that they are hiking on, make a striking encounter: On a bench, tucked into the stems, as a pile of rags, surrounded by supermarket carriers full of possessions and hovered over by fies. An old man with his life in plastic bags. He was motionless. Like a rabbit in the hedgerow, picked over by crows, swarmed by fies, eggs lain, maggots growing, sucked up and absorbed into the cycle. We stood by the body on the bench, feeling our place beside him, our place in the cycle, one foot in the hedgerow of decay. ‘Fuck off.’ Not dead then. (Winn 125) A life, a body, in plastic bags. Out of modesty, the text omits “bin”: “plastic bin bags” would have denoted the world of the morgue in too frontal a manner. However, what is given to be seen, felt and experienced here, in the ordeal of the encounter, is indeed a becoming shame that solicits the concrete reality of a shared ontological vulnerability. The perception of an ordinary other offered to the sight of those for whom such spectacles count, requires the walkers to stop and settle down. In this densely textured experiential evocation, the surveyors once again enrich their status as witnesses with that of actors and underline their dependence on a context. The entanglement of lives and environment fnds its expression through the invasion of the organic, which refuses separation in order to highlight the crude and concrete modalities of a trans-corporeality that speaks only of vulnerability and solidarity (it should be noted that, in a very tangible way, solidarity will be affrmed after this extract through sharing, Moth giving half of the couple’s food ration to the sleeper). The attention to the ordinariness that the protagonists choose to spot is a radical ethical experience. To be a realist, in the sense that Cora Diamond gives to this term, is indeed to see what is in front of us (Laugier 1999, 14). The responsibility of both protagonists is precisely to decide to see what matters and to do the work of determining what matters. In such passages, we come close to the power of literature, as defned by Iris Murdoch in her writings on the novel, to which she attributes the strong value of ethical awakening, as Sabina Lovibond reminds us: “she assigns to the novelist [the

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role] to provide a concrete though necessary imaginary demonstration of personal morality as the stuff of consciousness, and in doing so, to step for moral inspection by the reader” (Lovibond 190). In many ways, The Salt Path shows to what extent the ethics of the ordinary, the ethics of vulnerability and the ethics of care are linked in an ethics of otherness that situates attention to the other at the heart of a context allowing us to experience interdependence. Sharpening perceptions and attention is one of the modalities of OLP whose proponents emphasise its creative capacity. This is what Laugier indicates in an article devoted to romanticism and the ordinary, when she synthesises Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s thinking on this question into a fertile paradox: “the ordinary is the search for a new land to discover and explore, then to describe. The thought of the ordinary is experiential, improvisional, demands new forms of attention to the human form of life” (Laugier 2015b, 1041; emphasis mine). In the tradition of the English Romantics and Coleridge (even if Laugier refers to American Romanticism), what is at stake is renewing perception and uncluttering the ethical subject—and, in a literary context such as the one we are concerned with, the readers—in order to make the ordinary happen. It is precisely this aim that is at stake in the examples taken from The Salt Path discussed above: in all cases, the words give an account of an ordinary that they wrest from a denial or an absence of perception in order to bring about another reality. Systematically, this recourse to the realist spirit favoured by Diamond contributes to setting in motion an ethics that is based on “an attention to the particular” (Laugier 2015a, 221) and makes it emerge into an appreciation of what is right. Such an activity places the subject of attention at the heart of the process of creating a singular ethical judgement adapted to a particular situation of recognition of the ordinary. Moreover, it is the role of literature to enable this kind of creative apprehension of the ordinary and to order it into a practice of the good life, which it does by “drawing attention to facts” (Murdoch 2005, 159), which are novel—as opposed to received truths and other catalogues of moral prescriptions. However, what the perception of the ordinary, visible or invisible, allows for is the exercise perhaps not so much of the just as of the important, which is in line with Diamond’s indications that “moral capacity lies in an ‘attention to importance’” (Diamond n.p.). This is what Laugier reveals in an article devoted to life forms. Making a detour through care as “sensitivity to the details that matter in lived situations” (Laugier 2015d, 70; emphasis added), she comes to formulate the particularistic essence of care as attention to the other (whatever their status and nature): The perspective of care belongs to the turn to particularism of moral thought: against what in The Blue Book Wittgenstein called “the

64 Social Invisibilities crave for generality,” the desire to enunciate general rules of thought and action, the need to value in morals attention to the particular, to the ordinary details of human life. It is such a descriptive drive that modifes morality and undermines it. (Laugier 2015d, 71) Such a particularism is based on the singularity of a perception that is not conditioned by pre-established norms of recognition and that is exercised on a particular object or situation captured in its ordinariness. It implies that ethical responsibility lies with the individual who, at the cost of a work of perception giving rise to an investigation, decides on what is important, so that what matters becomes the condition for the emergence of what is right, since the latter cannot precede the former. Literature, which privileges singular and embodied situations, gives a concrete account of experiences and promotes the sharing of experiences. In this way, it is able to do ethical work by sharpening attention to what counts and by letting readers decide what counts in turn, not before having worked to consolidate their disposition to perceive the ordinary. In The Salt Path, as in many non-fction stories or novels, this ethical function goes hand in hand with a humility of point of view, embodied in the singular perspective of a focaliser who reports on lived or potentially lived experiences. Thus, in Raynor Winn’s writing, the discovery of ordinary moments and realities in the natural or social environment (or a mixture of the two, as indicated in the passage about the homeless man lying on the bench) promotes attention to the particular and expresses a decision about what matters. One step further, the responsibility for detecting what is important can take on political, even militant overtones, as is the case towards the end of the story, when the narrator calls on the readers to get mobilised, engaging in what might be called a “sharing of importance” which is also an encouragement to keep an individual watch on that importance: How can there be so few individuals who understand the need for people to have a space of their own? Does it take a time of crisis for us to see the plight of the homeless? Must they be escaping a war zone to be in need? As a people can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid? If the homeless of our country were gathered in a refugee camp, or rode the seas in boats of desperation, would we open our arms to them? Our native homeless don’t ft that mould; we prefer to think their plight is self-induced and their numbers few, yet over 280,000 households in the UK claim to have no home and the percentage of those who arrive at that state because of some kind of addiction is small. If they—we—all stood together, men, women, children, we would look very differently to one man alone in a shop doorway, addicted to anything that gives

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him a means of escape. How would we be viewed, then? (Winn 259–60; original emphasis) The outpouring of rhetorical questions, followed by the assertive passage that pins reality as closely as possible to the demographic indications, allows for the eruption of a “we” that solicits all collective and individual responsibilities, arouses readers through its force of interpellation and demands attention to this ordinary that is struck by collective denial. Indeed, “As a people can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid?” should be understood as: “As a people can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be validated?” i.e., a need validated by the norms of perception outside of which our attention cannot be exercised—or rather must learn to be exercised—in a collective manner, certainly (“As a people”), but also individually. From these lines, where righteous indignation rumbles, emerges a call for the exercise of responsibility to discover what is important, what counts and what matters. Anger runs through Cleave’s, Bartlett’s and Winn’s narratives that speak against various forms of social inequalities relying on epistemic injustice. Even if it is not consistently lambent and alternates with moments privileging punctum, it sets the narratives ablaze in some critical moments, throwing the invisible into the glaring light of attention. Perceiving invisibilities is what the narratives consistently promote, training the readers to attend to what matters and equipping them with a modicum of ethical and political acumen. The next chapter keeps addressing the ethical and political edge of attention but will turn to visibilities of various types as they emerge from investigations of the natural world. It traces the ways in which humans are considered in their vulnerability, in a network of interdependences that debunk anthropocentric and speciesist claims and gets readers to pay attention to the natural environments in which living beings are embedded.

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Inviting the readers away from city centres and taking part in the deterritorialisation of contemporary British literature is a moment that The Salt Path clearly contributes to. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the canon of the contemporary novel in England tended to be overwhelmingly urban, with leading fgures like Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd and Ian McEwan—but also Graham Swift with Last Orders, or Jeanette Winterson with The PowerBook, among many others—privileging urban areas and, prominently, London as the main locale or backdrop for their narratives. It was a time when the authors of what used to be known as “the London Novel” (Peter Ackroyd, but also Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock) were promoting a model of Englishness that was essentially metropolitan, darkly and sublimely urban, and that largely turned its back on more rural evocations. Perhaps this was nowhere as conspicuous as in Martin Amis’s London trilogy (Money, London Fields and The Information), for instance, that captured the spirit of the times with a clashing mixture of humour and gravitas, anatomising the fears, thrills and black bile of the era. This does not mean that the provinces and the countryside were absent from the production of the period—such a beacon of postmodern literature as Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) clearly testifes to the contrary—but a great deal of the works constituting the contemporary cannon attended to urban issues and locales. This is suggested by David James who notes the opposition between the metropolitan novels of the past and the regional narratives that have gathered more visibility recently: “Various spatial ‘signs’ have been co-opted as guiding metaphors by postmodernist analyses concentrating on the modern metropolis, to the exclusion of a more capacious account of regional novelists today” (James 15). At a time when environmental issues and problems raised by the evidence of climate change did not come very high on public and private agendas, the novel seemed to refect urban preoccupations until, progressively, rurality invited itself back as a background, a theme and a political lever into a gathering wave of narratives contributing to the emergence of a British strand of nature writing. These are both non-fctional (Helen McDonald’s hugely famous H is for Hawk and Robert McFarlane’s Landmarks come immediately to DOI: 10.4324/9781003362265-3

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mind) and fctional, as is the case with Sarah Hall’s novels, for instance, which predominantly take place in Cumbria (except for certain narrative strands in How to Paint a Dead Man and for the American part of the story in The Electric Michelangelo). Anxieties inherent in climate change must have been instrumental in operating such a de-centring move, many narratives leaving the stamping ground of the metropolitan and suburban areas to focus on locales traditionally associated with the pastoral. This does not mean that the pastoral has been resuscitated in its time-honoured form. Specialists of the genre have consistently drawn our attention to its labile, adaptive tendencies. This is the case with Terry Gifford’s classical study, whose last two chapters are respectively devoted to the anti-pastoral tradition and the “postpastoral.” He considers Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” in which “the natural world can no longer be constructed as ‘a land of dreams’, but is in fact a bleak battle for survival without divine purpose” (Gifford n.p.) to epitomise the anti-pastoral drive that runs through contemporary literature. He uses the second term to refer to a pastoral inspiration that is more ethically and politically oriented in relation to the natural environment: “a pastoral that has avoided the traps of idealisation in seeking to fnd a discourse that can both celebrate and take some responsibility for nature without false consciousness” (Gifford n.p.). More recently, Deborah Lilley has taken up the “anti-pastoral label” to refer to such works as Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (Lilley 123–24), which depicts a failed utopia embedded in a dystopian framework against the backdrop of the author’s favourite Cumbrian landscapes, even while providing a variation on the secular motif of the food narrative. She has addressed the validity of the contemporary adaptations of the mode in the context of the Anthropocene that deprives us of any consolatory retreat, as we experience a world where nature can no longer be seen as a haven of peace, since its agency has become more clearly tipped towards the violent, destructive side (Lilley 120). Anyway, irrespective of the various tags and labels used by specialists of the genre, I consider pastoral as a mode, present and active in the shape of infections or strategies of various degrees of salience in contemporary British fction. This is what I address in the following pages, i.e., the way in which “developing a mature environmental aesthetics” (Buell 32) is one of the courses that the novel has embarked on. My point is that, to do so, fction harnesses the powers of attention to make visible, but also to resist and, one step further, to open up the pastoral idiom and the readers’ ethical capacities. Throughout this chapter, I focus on three novels that I think are infuential in developing Buell’s “environmental aesthetics,” i.e., Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 and Cynan Jones’s The Long Dry, making the contemporary concerns with climate change become increasingly prominent on my way, and moving from an analysis of the

68 Embedded Visibilities contemporary anti-pastoral to that of the multi-scalar perception of the Anthropocene.

2.1 Seeing the Land In the previous chapter, I have considered various ways in which attention to ordinary invisibilities and, to a lesser extent, visibilities contributes to the ethical and political drive of narratives and solicits the readers along such lines. This tendency is very much present in Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, her frst novel published in 2002. It sets the background for the rest of her oeuvre, as stipulated by Emilie Walezak for whom it “sowed the seeds of her literary appropriation of her native region as a cultural landscape” (Walezak 2018, n.p.). The action is situated in a Cumbrian valley, in the mid-1930s, when the secular lifestyles of its inhabitants and their locale are sacrifced to the construction of a reservoir whose name lends its title to the novel. It chronicles the last two years in the lives of the inhabitants of the small village of Mardale, and the fact that the title should put to the fore the presence of the reservoir to the prejudice of the village, reversing the proportion of textual space devoted to the evocation of each site, suggests the obliteration of the village from the outset. Eileen Pollard sees Haweswater as “a pastoral novel” (Pollard 16), which it is to a certain extent, if one takes into account the overwhelming presence of natural landscapes and of the close relationships tying the inhabitants to the land and the earth that they live on and out of. Still, the bleakness of the situation, and the tragic ending that sees the death of the two protagonists (Janet Lightburn and Jack Liggett) contribute to “dramatiz[ing] a moment of irrevocable change in the landscape’s history” (Walezak 2018, n.p.)—and in the community’s, admittedly. 2.1.1 Observing What Is Lost Haweswater is a novel about ending and about what it is to experience the inexorability of a countdown necessarily thematising “survival and survivalist strategies” (Walezak 2018, n.p.). Time in Haweswater has certainly nothing to see with the eternal spring of the Edenic model in which the pastoral move originates as the traditional rhythms of nature and of agricultural activities are confronted with the warped, compressed time of the countdown. In Agamben’s terms, it disrupts chronological time replacing chronos with kairos (or linked time) and owes much to what the Italian philosopher describes as “a contraction of past and present, that we will have to settle our debts, at the decisive moment, frst and foremost with the past” (Agamben 2005, 78). This is accentuated by the structural choice of a prologue chronologically situated after the building of the eponymous reservoir and the fooding of

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the valley, the bulk of the novel consisting in a long analepsis that ekes out the time that the days of the community take to end, till it reaches, roughly speaking, the same temporal level as that of the prologue, in the fnal section. The epilogue takes the reader into the future the better to seal the main action with the suicide of the female protagonist’s brother, Isaac, drowning in the waters of the reservoir whose wall her sister had attempted to blast with explosives, taking her own life in the failed attempt and thereby literally embodying the sacrifce of the valley. Such a grim temporal girding is evocative of the anti-pastoral drive and contributes to building a version of Buell’s “mature environmental aesthetics” into the narrative. In so doing, it trains the reader’s attention to details and memorial recall by instilling a few allusions into the prologue that will surface in the penultimate (III:II) and last (III:III) chapters, just before the epilogue, activating the novel’s immersive dimension through the means of “experiential traces” (Caracciolo 46). In the opening pages, while Samuel Lightburn, Janet’s father, is returning for the last time to his former house that is being fooded, he is driving his cart through the streams of the drowned dirt road and he describes the foor of his vehicle, mentioning the action of the rain that “camoufaged the stains on the cart’s wooden planks, the blood, the fuid and discharge, made during the births and deaths of many animals” (Hall 2016, xi). The excess of material notations that saturate this very sensual opening and will characterise a great part of the narrative allows for the inscription of a proleptic hint that will reappear at the end of III:II, as Samuel hoists his daughter’s maimed corpse onto the self-same cart, juxtaposing two animal forms—one human, the other non-human—in a faint yet vivid echo of the previously quoted sentence: “At his cart he set down the body, next to the drowned, sodden sheep. Still enough free blood in her body to mark the wooden surface. And the river water and the blood mixed” (Hall 2016, 251). The fact that the two manifestations of this echo should be separated by two hundred and ffty very tightly knit pages testifes to the narrative’s poetic texture that showcases a whole series of interdependences: between textual sites and tropes, between the human and the rest of the natural world, between the valley’s past and its ineluctable future. Before the reservoir project was launched, the farmers had been living in the valley, cut off from the wider world, except during certain international commotions, like WW1, which took its toll on the young men of Mardale and the surrounding villages. Still, the impression that the historical chapters give is one of quasi-autarchy and scarcity of relationships with the outside world. The narrator specifes early on that “the bonds were strong and necessary and abundantly understood,” a picture of in(ter)dependence that is hyperbolised by the polysyndeton, so that the inhabitants are characterised as “insular” (Hall 2016). This implies a great measure of invisibility that Hall sets about correcting

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by dramatising and “depict[ing] at length the harshness of agricultural life” (Walezak 2018, n.p.). I am tempted to add that she also depicts the beauty of such a life as most characters are extremely attached to their land and soil that they pay attention to, look after and care about. Widening the readers’ frames of perception, she gives access to the various activities inherent in shepherding, harvesting, and more domestic and communal chores like cleaning the little church and seeing to it that its brass fttings are shining. Access to a lost world of hard manual work of which contemporary readers in Western democracies are no longer particularly cognisant is generously and thoroughly allowed. This provides the narrator with the opportunity of exploring the vibrancy of the Mardale world and of observing characters being attentive to other characters, as is the case with Ella, Samuel’s wife, observing many of her husband’s banal gestures that are magnifed and made beautiful by their association to ordinary natural details and needs: “The way he pressed his boot down on a clump of daffodil bulbs, pushed them back into the soft soil, was simply a matter of seeing them out of place and responding” (Hall 2016, 190). The mention of the daffodils here may well refer back to another literary tradition that glorifed the natural beauties of the area, that of the Romantic school of the “Lakist” poets, of which Wordsworth is one of the best-known representatives, as obviously indicated by the poem on which this study opens. However, in this passage where Ella attends to Samuel attending to an element of the natural world, the relationship between the character and his/her environment is dual, as Samuel, whose attention is caught by the beauty of a spectacle, goes out of himself towards this item of the natural world not only for his own sake—i.e., to fnd enduring comfort and joy in the vision of the daffodils—but to contribute to the spontaneous preservation of the natural cycle. By multiplying such micro-moments and gestures where characters attend and witness each other attending, Hall draws the picture of a lost community of people happily embedded in their natural environment despite the hardships that are imposed on them by the diffculty of their work and the hardness of the weather, an entanglement that testifes to a caring, bi-directional relationship of mutual sustenance. 2.1.2 The Anti-Pastoral In so doing, she is intent on “developing a mature environmental aesthetics,” answering Buell’s invitation (Buell 32) and opening the pastoral infection to an anti-pastoral drive that gives pride of place to responsibilities. Those extend to the sphere of the labourers that are contracted to help build the reservoir and whose working and living conditions are painstakingly examined throughout the frst chapter of the second part—the frst section of which is narrated in the present tense. Their evocation begins at dawn, when they can hardly be seen in the dusk

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and the mist, so that they are compared to ghosts: “They walk in this early hour without life, as if moving from a grave, merely following the ghoulish form in front to create a procession of spectres, lost in the dark, undulating through the rips of trees” (Hall 2016, 155). The present tense and the humble focalisation, operating at ground level, put the readers onto the same footing as the walking men, making them share in the phantom walk through the woods, in a passage where, metonymically, the men’s silhouettes become confused and assimilated with the spooky trees. Such a vision insists on a community of vulnerability between the natural environment and its temporary inhabitants, drafted into the valley so as to contribute to its sacrifce in favour of the greater comfort of the urban areas, downstream. It also contributes to the satirical strain of the anti-pastoral, which takes on board social considerations and sets great store by documenting the community of precariousness in which the inhabitants of the valley, whether native or imported, are deprived of agency. In fact, decisions that infexibly determine their future are impersonally taken and voted in Westminster and their implementation is delegated to huge private companies. This is unambiguously stated in passages inveighing against the commodifcation of workers whose agency is reduced to naught: “as if casually thrown from the gods into a world where they are pawns, expendable” (Hall 2016, 160). In such moments, Hall makes the anti-pastoral tip towards social realism, using a metaphor that some political philosophers have resorted to, i.e., that of spectrality. The lives of the farmers who are sacrifced at the hands of the Manchester City Waterworks and those of the workers are invisible from the London and Manchester of the 1930s and from the perspective of the contemporary reader who is given access to the fact that some lives “are waiting for confrmation,” as if they were “supernumerary” (Le Blanc 2011, 18–19; translation mine). Attention to the submerged, and even to that “odd, dying breed of labourer that led a semi-nomadic existence” (Hall 2016, 163), the navvy—evoked in a fairly didactic passage—is given pride of place and fuels the narrative’s ethical and political agenda. Haweswater gets the reader to go through a welter of microexperiences of the natural world and its human inhabitants. In so doing, and by never shying in front of the task of paying attention to the ordinary elements and lives of the valley, it asks the readers to “pace” themselves (Ulin 149), a reading experience not so different from that to be had when going through a conventionally realistic novel, with minute, lengthy descriptions. In so doing, it resists the hectic rhythms of modernity, following Wordsworth’s original fears as to the capacities of modern readers and reminding us, with Jonathan Crary, that “[i]t is possible to see one crucial aspect of modernity as an ongoing crisis of attentiveness” (Crary 2001, 13–14). The view of eternal England, that of the farming communities and of the Merry Olde England of sports and games evoked

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at the beginning of II:II (Hall 2016, 173–78), reminds the readers that attending is inherent in taking time, slowing down, thereby eschewing distraction. The (anti-)pastoral move is in itself an index of the refusal of the general distraction described and condemned by such commentators as Yves Citton: thematic content and the revisiting of the secular pastoral mode contribute to a more sedate, more attentive aesthetics. Reading Haweswater (and I shall argue along similar lines when considering Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13) implies taking part in an “act of resistance,” puny as it is, in a landscape of distraction (Ulin 148). Of course, this is inherent in rhythms, both diegetic and narrative, as suggested above. In other terms, even if the characters are solicited by their everyday tasks and by their relation to the natural and social environments, they live in a context that stands poles apart from the highly technologised one dominated by a permanent fux of information requiring their attention as customers and prospective buyers. Choosing a pastoral setting and situating it in a pre-electronic age is certainly a frst step towards adopting affrmative attentiveness. Such a situation makes for awareness and availability, contributing to a mode of characterisation that is fairly traditional, miles away from McGregor’s Reservoir 13—but more of this later. This is the case with the previously quoted passage in which Ella watches her husband meticulously attending to the daffodils, in a cascade of attentiveness that is evocative of the character’s receptiveness being itself fairly contagious for the reader. Such an awareness or availability corresponds to what Depraz has analysed in terms of “receptive waiting,” which she sees as the “proto-ethical dynamics of attention” (Depraz 2018, 11; translation mine). Openness to the social and natural environment is a reality that the narrative gives pride of place to, furthering the generic agenda of the novel, which largely consists in creating and observing the conditions and modalities of relationality among a group of characters. The protagonists and secondary characters of Haweswater live under each other’s scrutiny and their relations are essentially non-violent ones, based on attention and openness to the other. 2.1.3 Relationalities From this point of view, the novel harbours some of the conventions of the conversion narrative as its pre-defned villain, Jack Liggett, the representative of the company in charge of building the reservoir, moves from the status of intruder and dispossessor to that of member of the community. The transformation is predicated on his negotiating an extension to the farmers’ tenancies before eviction, falling in love with Janet Lightburn, making friends with her younger brother Isaac, settling in the valley, developing a passion for the natural environment and fnally dying while mountain-climbing, in a scene that foregrounds his

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becoming-mountain and clinches his rootedness to the place (Hall 2016, 202–203). In his full opening to the dwellers and to the valley, Jack Liggett moves from invasion to dispossession and radically surrenders himself, becoming the picture of vulnerability to various types of otherness. His frst appearance in the narrative casts him as the representative of “radical exteriority” (Ganteau 2020, n.p.), as he is frst compared to a peacock (Hall 2016, 46), a fairly exotic bird in the secluded valley whose attention he captures by driving a brand-new red car, completely incongruous in this context. Still, his original description suggests a humbler association, as rendered through Paul Levell’s artistic (he is the local painter) and highly attentive scrutiny: “he scruffed the hair of the boy nearest as he ran past him and winked, his eyelashes fickering like the dark, pollened wings of a moth” (Hall 2016, 46). The animal and the vegetable worlds are thrown together here through the pollen metaphor, and this chain of associations stretches to the human so as to include it, suggesting from the outset that there is more to this peacock than just meets the eye. The more humble, indigenous moth signals in the direction of ephemerality, suggesting that the character’s existence will come to an end at the same time as the life of the village and connecting him to the local fora and to one of its main representative items, gorse, whose fowers play a central part in Hall’s The Carhullan Army, as the emblem of the revolt of the Carhullan women against the oppressive power of the state. The gorse bushes, fowers, and more especially their smell are the source of a powerful epiphany that seizes hold of the male protagonist of Haweswater: Jack Liggett had tasted coconut before. He was one of only a few people in the country to have enjoyed that privilege. […H]e had not ever found the favour of coconut rich in the air as he did now, after descending a steep, loosely shaled mountain. […] He realized he was surrounded by fowering gorse bushes that were exploding perfumes from their yellow fowers into the air (Hall 2016, 141). In Wordsworthian fashion, the man’s walk in the mountain is interrupted by a sudden soliciting corresponding to a seizure of involuntary attention that builds up into voluntary attentiveness. In conformity with the structural contents of the epiphany, attention disrupts the ordinary and allows for the discovery of another item of ordinariness that had been there all the time but had not been perceived. The fact that the male protagonist, the original epitome of aggression and exclusion, should prove to be an example of heightened attentiveness to the natural world and the people of the valley underlines the value of availability that the novel puts to the fore. Dramatising the end of their way of life, putting them under stress, and showing how they keep being attuned to their natural environment and to the others is a way to underline the ethical values of

74 Embedded Visibilities opening and faithfulness to the other through attention as both a disposition and an activity that characterises the village dwellers. This is perhaps what Rita Felski has in mind when she defnes a characteristic of literary texts in relation to attention and concentration: “What art does offer […] is a training in modes of paying attention. Through its endless curiosity about detail and nuance, its ferce concentration on the qualities of its own medium, it invites us to look closely at what we might otherwise overlook” (Felski 60). In other terms, and in Merleau-Ponty’s wake, we are allowed to recall that “perception awakens attention [but also] attention develops and enriches this perception” (Merleau-Ponty 29), a double movement clearly present in the coconut-gorse passage above and on almost every page of the novel. This is instrumental in generating a vivid and concrete vision of life and ethical situations, a far cry from dryness and abstraction, in a fondness of texture that is intensely Murdochian in its effects. The consideration of psychological nuances is at the heart of the novel as much as the attentiveness to the multifarious details of ordinary life, with Jack Liggett as the intruder turning into a protector and Janet as the heroine of romance characterised as much by her total surrender to the man she loves as by her revolt (including physical violence) against him. Such moments of radical concreteness and vividness are to be found for instance in the unforgettable passage where young Isaac, who is characterised by his yen for running water, plunges his head in an ice-cold stream, at the heart of winter, trying to decipher the signs of this watery world with his own “foreign body” (Hall 2016, 75), fghting against the oxymoronic violence of the natural element, “cauterized by ice” (Hall 2016, 74) and studying a crayfsh in its tiniest, most ordinary and freshest details (Hall 2016, 75). In this passage, the particularist attention to the natural environment is mediated both through the gaze and through the sense of touch. In such passages, closeness to the soil is such that it is defamiliarised into subaqueous proximity as some form of consideration in Pelluchon’s acceptation of the term. In this submersion, that Walezak envisages in terms of “the hydrocommons between man, land, animal and weather” (Walezak 2022, 113), the character reaches into the freezing water to do the exact contrary of contemplation from above. He assumes a perspective that is not only on the level of the soil but plunges in an infra-region, to be on a par with the crustacean beings and pebbles that people the bottom of the stream, forfeiting any kind of superiority and pushing his attentive and perceptive limits to a paroxysm of pulsating agony. The scene is evocative of the “benevolent and attentive gaze of the subject of consideration who […] rejects any overhanging view” (Pelluchon 32; translation mine). This points to the character’s radically relational disposition, hence his vulnerability to the world around him, itself compounded of the ability to pay attention to ordinary visibilities

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otherwise kept beneath the level of perception. In Haweswater, attention increases perception which produces an intensifcation of sensations and feelings—the characters’ and the readers’. The narrative becomes enriched and densifed by a multiplication of tiny notations that, more often than not, are borrowed from the natural world. This is not so different from the descriptive impulse generally associated with the realistic idiom, with its craving for exhaustiveness. In realistic fashion, then, the text promotes attentiveness to the ordinary, with the difference that this is done in relation to the vibrancy of the natural world, animal, vegetal or mineral. The matter of Hall’s Cumbria throbs and sends vibrations through the landscape, the characters and the readers, privileging intensifcation and producing an experiential knowledge of the milieu that it calls forth. In a digital world that the contemporary reader consumes and which he cannot access directly any longer (Berardi 157), Hall’s novel strives to present the vibrancy of the natural environment and to promote the sharing of singular experiences, rejecting the uniformisation of the digital fow. 2.1.4 Inventorying As suggested in the previous developments, attention does not merely have an intensifying function but an opening one, i.e., it makes for a turning of the attentive subject towards the others and their natural environment. From this point of view, it may be considered an effcient means to identify embeddings and to observe them. Such a presentation is based on the development of a mature environmental poetics whose main function is to make an inventory of the life of the valley before it is destroyed. This is particularly the case of the frst part of the novel in which the expository intention is omnipresent, either through descriptive parts or in scenes of everyday rural life. The impulse towards “investigation” (Laugier 2015d, 72; translation mine) recommended by the upholders of Ordinary Language Philosophy allows for a perception of the ordinary that is there without being necessarily noticed. It is particularly at work in these pages that seem to collect the linguistic material for the memorial preservation of Mardale and the valley. From this point of view, the whole of the second chapter (I:II), with its encyclopaedic evocation, espouses the poetics of the inventory, giving an impression of exhaustiveness by referring to emblematic characters, activities, locales and elements of the natural world. Remarkably, the expository chapters (and to a lesser extent the following ones) are characterised by a dense metaphorical texture that produces the sense of vibrancy animating the evocation of the lost world. A great proportion of these tropes is defned by a high degree of hybridity, since the inhabitants of the valley are identifed to other representatives of the animal world, as suggested in the following sample: a dog (Hall 2016, 46, 80), a peacock (Hall 2016, 46),

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a  moth (Hall 2016, 46), cows (Hall 2016, 93), birds (Hall 2016, 115, 155), insects (Hall 2016, 164, 218) and more generally animals (Hall 2016, 21). They are also compared with items of the natural world like fowers (Hall 2016, 19), the air (Hall 2016, 29), the valley itself (Hall 2016, 48), the woods (Hall 2016, 127), a mountain (Hall 2016, 128), a cliff (Hall 2016, 179), water under various shapes from the rain to a pool through the river (Hall 2016, 50, 54, 56, 66, 115, etc.) and the reservoir itself (Hall 2016, 248). Thanks to such a tropological incrementation, what is obtained is the vision of a microcosm governed by harmony: the valley, the lives that it harbours and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman, are thereby seen to breathe and palpitate, to throb and vibrate to the same rhythm. This is certainly what Walezak has in mind when she refers to the multi-scalar presentation that Haweswater gives a vivid rendition of: “from the macro-scale of geology to the micro-scale of cellbiology” (Walezak 2018, n.p.). Such a picture is built very progressively, as the page references above indicate. They are woven into the narrative and solicit the readers’ attention to this metaphorical orientation, allowing for a gradual unearthing not unlike the process of attunement that Felski identifes as one of the specifcities of the artwork: “Attunement […] becomes a slow and often stumbling process, a gradual coming into view of what we would otherwise fail to see. […] Patience and slowness are mandated, not the greedy and indiscriminate gulp” (Felski 60). In making a vibrant inventory of the valley, the narrative asks us to pace ourselves as readers and to mete out or attention in a discriminating way, encouraging us to determine what matters in a selection of ordinary details and (in-)visibilities. Such an investigation constitutes a training in attention and reminds us of the necessity to open ourselves to our natural environment, its inhabitants, and their glory and vulnerability, at the same time. Similarly and reciprocally, attention implies a great measure of vulnerability to otherness and the capacity to let oneself be dispossessed of one’s self-centredness and sovereignty. On top of interruption and intensifcation, two core effects that we have gone through above, it lays the ground for an openness of the subject that brings along a great measure of impersonalisation, or at least makes a strong sense of personality (this is obviously the case of Janet as a character) compatible with the capacity for impersonality. Such precarious yoking generates a fruitful tension that is at the root of the ethical disposition and relation, in a practical, concrete way (as distinct from the abstract Levinasian models of radical being for the other, for instance). In fact, this type of confguration is reminiscent of Murdoch’s consideration of attention to beauty as “an occasion for unselfng” (Murdoch 2013, 82). Continuous with this idea of unselfng is the one of embeddedness or entanglement, as responsibility for the natural environment and other human beings is at the core of opening towards this type of ordinary exteriority. From this point of view, Hall’s vision of the subject’s inherent

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relationality echoes Haraway’s when she describes the “entanglements that [she] call[s] contact zones” (Haraway 4). In Haweswater, being is always a matter of being in contact with or being a contact zone of entities belonging to separate ontological levels and yet creating a site where intensities meet. In other terms, the gathering of various species, even items, in the wide spectrum of the natural world echoes Haraway’s idea that “[t]o be one is always to become with many” (Haraway 4; original emphasis): through the use of tropic attunement, a woman may become (with) a mountain but also (with) a river and also (with) a bird, etc. (in the same way as a mountain is also a man is also a face is also a gust of wind is also a stream of light, etc.). The novel gives a very concrete vision of such entanglements and interdependences, insisting that living implies living with. From this point of view, the inventory of the doomed valley is one in which the ethical spring of attention is solicited to incite the reader to attend to ordinary (in-)visibilities, decide what matters, and hence adopt a concrete way to search for and act in favour of the good life: “Accountability, caring for, being affected and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other” (Haraway 36). The prevalence of contact zones is expressed through the metaphorical networks that I have broached above and also, very remarkably, in the brief ekphrasis of the paintings that Paul Levell, the local artist and veteran of WW1, keeps producing. The vision of the “body as land” (Pollard 10) and the “naturifcation of the people” (Walezak 2018, n.p.) are potently evoked in Paul Levell’s Lakeland paintings that “reveal rocks in the shape of people and bury bodies in the environment with formal accuracy. Humans are jigsawed into a cliff or river, or hewn out of the landscape, a man’s torso kept in a cairn of rock, a child in the womb of a mountain wall, vast amalgams of environment and humanity. People of kept stone” (Hall 2016, 185). Similarly, Walezak has demonstrated how “the women’s bodies, particularly the bodies marked by agricultural activity, refract the landscape. The embodied female experience echoes environmental interconnections” (Walezak 2022, 83), which beautifully insist on the idea of the human-non-human continuum. Perhaps the interfacing of the human and the non-human is never envisaged with such a degree of consummation as in the fnal image of Nathaniel, the Lightburns’ old neighbour and Samuel’s dear friend, who gathers up the last of his physical forces to go and die on his own on the mountain, as recounted from Samuel’s perspective: “The rock became a man, an old friend, grey with the cold and death, as grey as the background of scree” (Hall 2016, 185). Never is the becoming-mountain or becoming-Cumbria so powerfully expressed as in these lines, which concretise, incarnate—and ex-carnate at the same time—the reality of entanglements and interdependences that only Samuel’s attentive, caring gaze allows us to share with him. Haweswater is a story whose

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characters are attentive to the ordinary world around them and that teaches readers to emulate them. It calls on them to fnd for themselves what matters, like the tutelary old man espousing the land in his death, and like the traces of the departed who used to people the valley: the Lightburns on an old fading photograph (Hall 2016, 255), the “chisel marks […] left in the upper concrete walls of the dam as the illegible, artless signatures of a hundred men who had toiled in all weathers had slowly bolted together the skeleton and then walled in the anatomy of a huge stone dream” (Hall 2016, 257). It refuses not to attend and will bear witness to traces of the ordinary.

2.2 On the Same Spectrum Jon McGregor belongs to the same generation of English writers as Sarah Hall. As early as his frst book, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), he evinced a singular interest in the presentation of the commonplace, as this circadian novel based on an alternate narration sets great store by observing the micro-events taking place in an unnamed street, watching anonymous characters and their gestures in their tiniest details, listening to their words, creating the impression of ordinary people going about their small errands and following their own lifestyles, the main narrator and protagonist observing their comings and goings with consistent attentiveness. Such an orientation was confrmed in his second novel, So Many Ways to Begin (2006), which focuses on the male protagonist’s quest for his origins as much as on his passion for collecting mundane objects that metonymically recall moments and events of various magnitudes and emotional importance. David being a curator at the local museum, a great deal of the narrative is organised around these objects, each chapter beginning with a description of a single item, in imitation of the text boxes affxed to exhibits, so that they seem to be imported into the narrative and their vibrant thingness becomes palpable. The difference here is that the objects are not on display and are not chosen for their remarkableness—or rather, they are remarkable in that their singularity is not immediately given but has to be sought for, retrieved from invisibility. His third novel, Even the Dogs (2011), provokes an in-yer-face experience of social exclusion as its choral narrator—a gathering of invisible speakers whose ontological status remains indefnite to the end—sets about chronicling the life and death of Robert, a former soldier, who fell into precariousness and then alcoholism and lived in a sordid squat, surrounded by a group of drug addicts. It presents the reader with an insider’s view of the ordinariness of survival, describing the routines of excluded individuals running after the next fx, experiencing withdrawal, meeting with social workers, and waiting endlessly, as they are gradually bereft of their residual agency. This does not mean that McGregor’s novels are free of extraordinary

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events: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is also about the intimate experience of discovering one’s pregnancy and ends up on the powerful, cinematic evocation of a traumatic event and its repercussions on a group of anonymous neighbours; So Many Ways to Begin takes the consequences of the Blitz into account, weighs their collective and individual impacts and gives pride of place to the shattering discovery that one’s mother may not be one’s biological mother; Even the Dogs refects on the dramatic events shattering people’s lives, like the experience of war, of stepping on a mine, and on the irrefragable singularity of each death and of each process of mourning; Lean Fall Stand (2021), to which we shall return in the last chapter of this study, anatomises an accident taking place in Antarctica and its far-reaching, disrupting consequences. Still, they leave a great deal of room for the evocation of the mundane and the trite and to the attention that it takes to perceive them, beyond appearances. 2.2.1 Collecting the Mundane In many ways, it is a programme that his fourth novel, Reservoir 13, sets about completing by poring over a rural community, living in an anonymous village in a secluded valley in the early 21st century, and providing the reader with juxtaposed snatches of interpersonal and social dealings interspersed and strictly juxtaposed with snatches of natural life. Here, again, the evocation of ordinary life in its animal (including human), vegetal and more widely environmental dimensions assumes all-encompassing proportions and comes to singularise a novel that unobtrusively plays the trick of doing away with one of the most basic elements of the prose narrative of fction, i.e., characterisation. Indeed, no protagonists emerge from the cast of characters who are all reduced to a (very) secondary level and whose dealings do not seem to assume more prominence than those of other components of the natural environment. In fact, it is not the frst time that McGregor has chosen to evoke rurality through he means of the (anti-)pastoral as his collection of short stories, This Is Not the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2012), is located in the Fens, the importance of the landscape and agency of the land being nothing less than central in most of the stories. Still, Reservoir 13 signposts a change of orientation in the novelist’s production as it indicates a shift towards the rural that will be confrmed in Lean Fall Stand (2021), which takes place in Antarctica and in an English rural community. Of course, Hall’s frst and McGregor’s fourth novels share an obvious specifcity: their titles refer to reservoirs. One might even be tempted to see in this echo McGregor’s homage to Hall, with his situating for the frst time a novel of his in a rural setting that could well be located in her favourite region. Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in the brief

80 Embedded Visibilities passage where the summer dry season is briefy evoked, in conformity with McGregor’s snippet-like technique, to refer to the spectral villages sleeping underwater: “The last days of August were heavy with heat and the hedgerows turned brittle and brown beneath it. The reservoir levels fell quickly and there was talk the fooded villages might be seen again” (McGregor 2017, 122). These two sentences, with their densely alliterative prose, impersonal cast and consideration of the details of natural life, sewing together terseness and punctiliousness, are characteristics of McGregor’s fourth novel. Reservoir 13 is characterised by a great deal of repetitiveness. It is made up of 13 chapters, each one of them spanning one year, and inside each chapter, the same landmarks in each singular year are evoked: the shifting of the clocks in the spring and autumn, the well-dressing rituals in spring, the bonfre night in November, the Christmas carols, pantomimes and attendant routines, etc. Each chapter, from the second onwards, begins with the phrase “At midnight when the year turned,” and several other phrases are taken up, verbatim, echoing through the sections, refrain-like, which makes the narrative edge towards the poetic form, as signposted by the epigraph borrowed from Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird.” From the outset, clearly, as signposted through the tutelary presence of the American poet, the stress is laid on the need to consider the natural world and to make an inventory of it, and this is certainly what makes the Hall of Haweswater and the McGregor of Reservoir 13 such companion novelists. Each of the thirteen chapters is made up of thirteen long paragraphs, completely devoid of direct discourse in its traditional form, as is the case in his other novels. Each one of them being devoted to the evocation of a month—even if no specifc temporal information is given at the beginning of the paragraph—the readers can situate themselves temporally. Such a typographical organisation and the use of such a composition are instrumental in providing the specifc vision of characterisation that I have alluded to above: in each textual block, the description of the human subjects is fung together with that of the other elements of the natural world, and their speech—the element that is supposed to mark their singularity—is not given any prominence or special status by inverted commas or dashes. The impression is that there are no barriers between the participants in the world of the novel, that all are juxtaposed and put on the same level, in a narrative and typographical vision of embeddedness that could be considered as a characteristic of pastoral fction in times of climate change. Admittedly, pastoral is not the only modal or generic element at work here as Reservoir 13 also uses the terms of detective fction the better to abuse them. The novel starts with the disappearance of a teenager, Rebecca Shaw, who had come to spend some days in the village with her parents, around New Year’s Eve, and vanished while they were walking in the countryside never to

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surface again. Some expository pages describe the circumstances of the disappearance, the organisation of search parties, the shock wave running through the village and affecting its inhabitants. As time moves on, the characters most directly involved with the lost girl (her parents and her local friends that she met on the preceding summer) do crop up, in scenes related to her continuing absence like the reconstruction of the circumstances of her disappearance, complete with actors from Manchester (McGregor 2018, 7–8). In conformity with the rhythmical inspiration of the narrative, a refrain crops up regularly in the following chapters, with minimal variation, reminding the readers of her disappearance in an echoic, haunting fashion that never absents itself from the text while marking the passage of time: “The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. She would be seventeen by now […]” (McGregor 2018, 106). Such recurrences solicit the reader’s memory and attention and evoke the haunting presence of the event among the community of villagers, as if they were the victims of some sort of collective trauma, and as if the violence of the disappearance—i.e., the hole that it leaves among them—were too acute to be assimilated, repeating itself in the present. In traditional fashion, the function of the detective quest is to whet the characters’ and the readers’ curiosity and to make them attend to each single clue. This is the case in the early pages of the novel but, as time passes, there seems to be a loss of acuity among the cast. For instance, when one of them, walking a dog, fnds the fragments of “an old walking jacket or body-warmer, navy blue, with the lining ripped and the stuffing spilling out” (McGregor 2018, 141), she simply pulls the dog away and catches up with the friend that she is walking with without doing anything special and without the impersonal narrator passing a comment, in the very last sentences of the April paragraph in Chapter 6, fve years after the events. The impression is that attention is raised the better to be made to drop and that all clues are displayed the better to peter out into snares. This is the case when a white top corresponding to the missing girl’s original description as precisely of the blue body warmer is discovered, triggering off “extensive searches” (McGregor 2018, 98) that remain completely inconclusive. Another strand of the detective plot is similarly inaugurated the better to be abandoned as Jones, the school employee and jack of all trades, is arrested on the grounds that he has been keeping child pornography on his computer, a line of enquiry that never comes to fruition. Neither does the one concerned with the group of teenagers: one of them, James, started having a tryst with Becky Shaw, hid the fact from his parents and from the police, only to be quickly exonerated from any guilt—this aspect of the narrative will be developed in McGregor’s The Reservoir Tapes, that write and fesh out Becky Shaw’s relations with her parents and friends before her disappearance. In other terms, the rational mode of attentiveness to the clues that could

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allow to reconstitute the truth about the disappearance and process its shock peters out into a spectral mode. In fact, one of the text’s many refrains evokes unconfrmed sightings or dreams that recur relentlessly and build up the impression of a community that is still somehow acting out the trauma of the disappearance: “The missing girl was seen walking around the shore of the reservoir, hopping from one breakwater rock to another with seemingly not a care in the world” (McGregor 2018, 75). Such a haunting presence that has become part and parcel of the community’s life is powerfully presented through their dreams, as suggested by the relentlessness of the anaphora: There were dreams about her appearing on television again, gazing at the cameras as she was hurried from a car to a house in a London street, unable to talk about where she’d been. There were dreams about her crawling through the caves, her clothes smeared with mud and tar in the dark. There were dreams about her held captive, in basements and isolated barns, always with something across her mouth or her eyes. (McGregor 107) This is certainly a way to transform the extraordinary into the ordinary, of showing how an event becomes paradoxically appropriated by a group even while its members have little to no agency in the process, which provides an image of spectrality as a modality of the everyday. This corroborates Neal Alexander’s vision of McGregor’s early novels as essentially concerned with the common and the fact that they are “distinguished by [their] attentiveness to the mundane and the profane, the overlooked and the discarded” (Alexander 720), an everyday that is both “ordinary and […] shared,” mediated through a poetics of scrupulous attention to detail, juxtaposition of vignettes and recurring spectral bouts that testifes to the novel’s “fundamentally democratic” orientation (Alexander 721). In other terms, the novel uses some generic conventions the better to blast them, which is the case with the detective novel topoi, showing that the interest lies elsewhere than in the dramatic exploitation of a disappearance. 2.2.2 Perceptual Realism Reservoir 13 multiplies references to micro-events and details of communal life juxtaposed with vignettes of the natural environment so as to allow the readers to access the everyday in its most trivial dimension. This may constitute a general characteristic of literature, and more specifcally of modernist literature (Alexander 710–21), and even more especially of McGregor’s fction, in Alexander’s words: “his novels and stories discover the extraordinary in ordinary routines or relationships while remaining alert to the alienations that inhere in the very textures of

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everyday life” (Alexander 720). In other terms, Reservoir 13 represents the “inattentive attentiveness” (Alexander 725) with which the characters necessarily apprehend the world in its multifarious and vibrant ordinariness. Selectivity is one of the basic characteristics of attention, relying on the fact that one cannot attend to everything all the time, and the novel by defnition performs a selection of information that orients and processes the reader’s involvement, consideration and attention. At times, and this is notoriously the case with the long descriptive pauses that characterise a practice that has come to be associated with realism, the selection may not seem as effcient—at least to the contemporary readers—as they would wish it to be. This is where Reservoir 13 takes great aesthetic risks by faunting its own narrative vulnerability as, chapter after chapter and in each long solid block of a paragraph, vignette after vignette and refrain after refrain, it harnesses the powers of repetition to both represent and vividly present an experience of the ordinary in its repetitiveness that shows how the characters attend or, precisely, cannot attend all the time. In the same way, the readers are led to consider an array of details that they cannot wholly grasp, making them accelerate at times, at other moments slow down, varying the degrees of attention or inattention that they allot to the texture of events and details. From this point of view, the snares characteristic of the detective plot are distractors that capture attention on one aspect of the narrative, repeatedly, the better to lead readers astray, or at least from what I consider the chief interest in the novel, i.e., the interdependences among human beings and the natural environment in which they live, their embeddedness. Both characters and readers are therefore seen to stray and err, wrongly choose objects of attention and at times fail to attend to what is worth it. In this rhythmical and poetic capacity lies Reservoir 13’s experimental ambition, and its “fundamentally democratic” orientation (Alexander 721): it constructs a narrative rendition of how a mind that is not incapacitated reacts to the environment in which it is involved. Interestingly, Reservoir 13’s densely poetic prose makes for “double attention” or “divided attention” (Gurton-Wachter n.p.), which is supposed to be a prerogative of poetry but may be solicited by novels, particularly those which, like McGregor’s, are intent on formal experimentation. One could think that such a situation is conducive to defamiliarisation and distancing from the thematic content of the narrative. Still, in this case, I would argue that the two simultaneous objects of attention echo and strengthen each other as the repetitive patterns of the novel (the refrains, anaphoric strain, alliterative inspiration, etc.) provide a rhythmical image and equivalent of the cadences of social and natural life. In other terms, the thematic content fnds not only an illustration but also, and more importantly, an extension in the novel’s echoic prose that itself solicits the readers’ ears and makes them take part in the same cadences.

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The densely poetic prose therefore provides us with something like an immersive knowledge of the diegesis, so that they dive into the heart of the rural community, sharing its preoccupations, collective actions and, above all, perceptions of their natural environment. The divided attention that Reservoir 13 elicits is an effcient poetic and ethical lever in that it allows for a presentation of things, beings and the natural and social environments in their vibrancy and singularity. It constitutes a powerful tool of singularisation that fts and renews the idiom of the new pastoral and provides a concrete, incarnated version of embeddings, hence a means to make more tangible the continuum between the human and the non-human worlds, which in the end captures the reader’s responsibility. In what might be considered a counterintuitive move, divided attention does not estrange but renews and attunes—in Felski’s acceptation of the term—thereby unbridling and optimising intensifcation, that outstanding characteristic of attention. As already suggested, another singular trait of Reservoir 13 lies in the attentiveness to the details of the natural world that it promotes. As I have suggested elsewhere (Ganteau 2018), this is dependent on McGregor’s well-established intention to bring to light what is generally kept under the threshold of visibility. By focusing on a secluded rural community and its natural habitat, by chronicling the minute events that animate it, by recording the shockwaves of a collective trauma and lending them spectral in- or excarnation, it contributes to guarantee a “right to look,” in Mirzoeff’s terms, eschewing and problematising the prescriptions of “visuality” and granting the inhabitants of the valley with the “right to be seen” (Mirzoeff 2, 4). This is perhaps why it may be argued that “Reservoir 13 is essentially attuned to the rhythms of the invisible and the inaudible” as it not only throws the unseen into light but also the immaterial into visibility by allowing the reader to sight the absent and the lost (Ganteau 2018, n.p.). Still, the resistance to visuality does not merely concern the human element. Quite on the contrary, it becomes quickly clear that priority is given to the natural environment from the outset. What I mean here is that despite the fact that the greater part of the narrative space is devoted to the character’s dealings that build up a picture of their communal lives, their actions lend the plot the necessary degree of impetus, even if it is not linear but rather multiply circular and, in the end, unvectorised. 2.2.3 Consideration(s) By privileging a model that verges on the reticular, the novel accommodates an exceptional proportion of what I have called above “vignettes” or “snatches” taken from the natural world that occupy a not inconsiderable proportion of each paragraph and chapter. This generates an impression of saturation buttressed by the fact that these vignettes have

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the tendency to recur. For instance, fugitive glances of badgers or foxes in the undergrowth, buzzards gliding in the sky, feldfares stopping during their migrations, but also snowdrops “nosing out of the soil” (McGregor 2018, 159) or else running waters spread through the pages. They provide a kaleidoscopic vision of the natural environment relying on their attention to detail on and micro-adjustments to this world that is distinct from human society, juxtaposed with it but also connected with it through its essential rhythms. The image that comes to mind is that of the natural vignettes fanking the snippets of the human world but also dovetailing with them, building up an impression of solidarity and, more particularly, of interdependence. Indeed, “dovetailing” provides an apt image, taken from the natural world, to refer to the embeddings and entanglements that McGregor’s novel, together with this chapter, are concerned with. Juxtaposition, solidarity, entanglement, interdependence are everywhere faunted and woven into the narrative texture while being part of it, as in the following emblematic example: In the beech wood the foxes gave birth, earthed down in the dark and wet with pain, the warm cubs pressing against their mothers for warmth. The dog foxes went out fetching food. The primroses yellowed up in the woods and along the road. The reservoirs were a gleaming silver-grey, scuffed by the wind and lapping against the breakwater shores. In the evening a single runner came silently down the moor, steady and white against the darkening sky. (McGregor 2018, 35) In such a passage, attention to the ordinary becomes the fuel and the matter of the narrative, etching out a new democratic vision that encompasses the humans and their natural environment, by juxtaposing but not levelling since each item is worthy of a vignette that captures its singularity. Reservoir 13 plunges into the woods to reveal what is there to be seen and give the reader the right to look and realise that, in French philosopher Baptiste Morizot’s terms, [w]e are woven into all living beings […], individually grafted onto them, so that we grow with each of them and suffer with each of them […]. We are woven by the great diplomatic spider, it links all of us together, one by one, by affliations and ties, so that in the end, entangled in these attachment threads, nobody, neither wolf nor ewe or meadow can move in the distance without your heart jingling. (Morizot 233; translation mine) Through McGregor’s prose, consideration of the other’s singularity (and of course “other” here extends to all the living) implies an awakening of

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all singularities, even yours and mine as onlookers and readers. It reveals the vibrant texture of solidarity that resonates through a great chain of living that Morizot expresses through the word “égard” that could be translated by “respect” or “consideration,” precisely, in his evocation of antispecism: Everywhere in the world, in non-dualist cultures, there is an imperative of consideration even towards those that one kills or eats […]; even toward generous natural environments that one exploits, and precisely because one exploits them, there is an imperative of consideration. Consideration is discretely located between the moral and the instrumental, it implies a position of reciprocity which is not a form of egalitarianism or sanctuarisation of the other. This is where everything is at stake (Morizot 285; translation mine). In many ways and through the humble position of consideration that, according to Pelluchon, implies seeing things from the ground and certainly not from above and by rejecting any overhanging position (Pelluchon 32), McGregor presents a narrative evocation of embeddings and interdependences in their vibrant materiality. Such humility and consideration tend to eschew any exceptionalist temptation, showing a continuum between human and non-human activities, and situating all lives on the same spectrum, postulating a continuity of all living organisms. As seen above, a specifc poetics based on the juxtaposition of vignettes and a singular use of refrains and fgures of repetition is solicited to provide an apt presentation of this vibrant spectrum. Another literary technique is also hyperbolically at work here, i.e., that of impersonality, of which Reservoir 13 provides many examples. In fact, the whole of the narrative is mediated through an impersonal narrator who pays a great deal of attention to the details of everyday life and refrains from any self-referential commentary or subjective effect. Focalisation may be delegated to characters, punctually, but more often than not there is a resistance to ascribing a specifc source of focalisation. In other terms, the narrative depends on some ubiquitous origin of focalisation that could be located within the consciousness of human observers as much as they could correspond to the perspective of the fox, or the badger, or the buzzard, emblematic presences in the microcosm of the novel, without any tinge of omniscience. Such a fexible, hovering practice of focalisation is consistent with a specifc use of voice that sets great store by evoking the rumours produced by the community of villagers. Some passages are saturated with impersonal phrases, which gives an awkward ring to the text, as if the narrator wanted to draw attention to the refusal or impossibility to ascribe any origin or authority to the narrated discourse: “There were more sightings […]. It was known that […]. There was talk that […]” (McGregor 2018, 77).

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It seems as if no individual human agency were effective in the world of Reservoir 13, as if the characters’ personality—in the same fashion as the narrator’s—were erased, which contributes to the humbling down of the human element in favour of the evocation of a continuum of being. Besides, such an impersonalisation denotes an opening of the attentive subjects to their natural environment, a reminiscence of the Weilian or Murdochian unselfng that is inherent in the act of attending, hence of fracturing one’s personality the better to privilege access to exteriority. From this point of view, the language of impersonality contributes as much as that of juxtaposition and repetition to the building up of a poetics of attentiveness whose ethical purpose appears throughout the novel and which largely consists in revealing the reality of embeddings and entanglements, hence in soliciting the reader’s responsibility. One step further, and conversely, one may be tempted to see in the novel a warning against the dwindling powers of attention in the face of routine. This is generally suggested by the cyclical narrative structure that takes the risk of recurrence, hence of courting the readers’ boredom, the return of seasons and regular episodes, refrain-like, producing some measure of numbing. As seen above, this is counterbalanced by the use of singular vignettes, which get the readers to attend to the ordinary and to throw ordinary details into visibility. Still, such snatches are equally affected by recurrence, and such elements link up with the impersonal technique of presenting rumour so much so that, quite paradoxically, the impression may be one of attentiveness that is compounded or productive of numbing. In fact, there may be degrees of involvement and urgency to consider, and this is what McGregor’s novel is also intent on doing. At fairly regular intervals, but not as frequently as the refrains that I have already alluded to, some irruptions from the wider world are introduced, mediated through the television screen. The frst one erupts at the beginning of chapter 2: “On the television there were pictures of foods across norther Europe: men in waterproofs pulling dinghies through the streets, collapsed bridges, drowned livestock” (McGregor 2018, 37). The other occurrences concern fres (69) or bush fres (208), an overturned ship (159), and fnally, in some sort of recapitulation, “explosions, fres, collapses, collisions” (269). Such disruptions are very brief (one sentence), begin in the same way (“On the television…”) and are juxtaposed with the snatches or vignettes of the social and natural life going on in the valley. The fact that they appear less frequently and that they should concern the outside world grants them the value of novelty and produces a strongly disruptive effect. Clearly, those glimpses of the television screen all speak of catastrophes linked to environmental damage and climate change, bringing in the idea of the Anthropocene with its attendant hyperobjects that can only be perceived circuitously, through their violent effects (Morton 1). They are reminders of the fact that, even if the secluded valley with its pastoral setting

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seems to be protected from disasters, this may well be an illusion as the rest of the world is not immune to them. In other terms, McGregor’s novel refuses numbing and denial and demands an attentiveness of another type to a reality of another sort, that is as ordinary as that of the valley but which is more diffcult to perceive. This is why it is introduced through glimpses, to imitate how our consciousness vacillates and shies in front of the realities of climate change. And this is also why, in the end, I would argue that Reservoir 13 is very much concerned with drawing our attention to that menacing reality, addressing the spontaneous production of numbing and denial and getting us to attend to the reality that it contributes to veiling. Herein lies the ultimate ethical and political message of the novel as anti-pastoral that takes on board and asks the reader to take into consideration the inescapable reality of the Anthropocene.

2.3 Discordant Scales I would now like to consider yet another anti-pastoral which puts the issue of embeddings high on its aesthetic and ethical agendas. It has been termed a “posthuman idyll” by Esther Peeren in her illuminating analysis of rural invisibilities (Peeren 2021, n.p.), an aspect of the narrative to which I will return presently. Welsh author Cynan Jones has published fve tightly packed novels the frst four of them taking place in his native Ceredigon and the adjacent region of Pembrokeshire. He has been drawing attention to the lives of their inhabitants with lucidity and a consistent determination to reject clichés. His fourth novel, Cove (2016), moves away from this topography as it is situated at sea, not far off from the coast, but without any allusion to toponyms or local specifcities. It relates the survival of a man, alone at sea in his kayak, who is struck by thunder, loses his bearings and the use of his left arm, and manages to get nearer the shore in the middle of a second storm that might hurl him onto the rocks, leaving the reader hanging in mid-air at the very end of the narrative. Of course, this circuitous, non-directional voyage is the pretext for anamnesis, as he progressively retrieves fragmentary memories, hovering between his father, whose ashes he was supposed to be scattering during his outing, and the woman he loves, who seems to be pregnant. The political concerns are not as clearly signposted in this novel, whose orientation is more specifcally metaphysical, as in the other ones. His ffth novel, Stillicide (2019), edges from Ceredigon towards a more urban context and is situated in what looks like the (near) future, even this is never really made explicit. It is postapocalyptic as it presents a world in which water has become a rare resource that has to be carried in a water train at great risk to be meted out to the inhabitants of the city, and in which huge infrastructures are being built so as to accommodate icebergs that are towed to the port

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so as to meet the population’s needs. It moves clearly away from the stamping ground of the pastoral, even in its dark version, even while buttressing its eco-critical involvement by presenting the impending effects of the Anthropocene. Otherwise, Jones is known for his observation of Welsh rural life in its most violent aspects. This is the case of his second novel, Everything I Found on the Beach (2011), which delves into the sordid existences of three men: a fsherman mourning the death of a friend, a Polish immigrant working in the local slaughterhouse to support his family, and an anonymous Irish criminal. His third novel, The Dig (2014), takes the reader on a tour of the hidden, illegal practices of badger-baiting and provides an immersive experience of the game, in squalid, illegal joints, which would have seemed at frst sight to be alien to the otherwise pastoral landscape. Everything I Found on the Beach, like The Dig, throws into visibility some of the codes of the underworld that is harboured by the Welsh countryside, renewing our vision of rural lives and offering a complex picture of the Welsh area that provides the locale for his whole œuvre. 2.3.1 Echoes and Portents I have chosen to focus on his frst novel, The Long Dry (2006), which chronicles one day in the life of a farmer and his family on a small estate, a few miles from the sea. As indicated by the title, it signposts its concern with climate change from the very beginning and it presents the reader with a series of events of a portentous nature: the day starts with Gareth discovering that a new-born calf died during the night and then moves on to the death of another one, still born, and the disappearance of a cow that is heavy with calf, running away from the heat to fnd shelter in the earthy remains of a pond. On the self-same day, the vet comes to put to sleep Curly, an old dog and the family’s favourite; we are given access to the protagonist’s and his wife Kate’s doubts as to the possibility of living on the farm for too long and are privy to their son’s plans to go away and start a new life. Shockingly, a rogue prolepsis (“rogue” because it is mediated by an unprepared bout of omniscience in a novel in which internal focalisation is otherwise used consistently) announces the death of their little girl, Emmy, eight days later, after eating a lethal mushroom. In other terms, it is a narrative that starts with portents and forecasts tragedy, signposting the workings of fate and its enmeshing with individual destinies. Something is rotten in this area of Wales, clearly, and it is Jones’s job to let the smell escape from the wings and invade the stage. In fact, as suggested by the title, The Long Dry refers to a long period of draught that affects the land and its inhabitants, and more especially the people and animals on Gareth’s farm. This does not make the novel a variation on the apocalyptic theme, of the type performed by forebears like

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J.G. Ballard in The Drought (1965), for instance. Still, the novel is rife with allusions to or evocations of dryness and the absence of rain which recur like a motif, making it impossible to forget that the disarray in the farm is connected with a more global, climatic disturbance, both echoing each other in a multitude of correspondences. In fact, with The Long Dry we are witnessing the effects of what Timothy Morton has called a “hyperobject”: A hyperobject could be the Lago Agrio oil feld in Ecuador, or the Florida Everglades. A hyperobject could be the biosphere, or the Solar System. A hyperobject could be the sum total of all the nuclear materials on Earth; or just the plutonium, or the uranium. A hyperobject could be the very long-lasting product of direct human manufacture (Morton 1). Such examples underline the sheer magnitude of hyperobjects, thereby raising the issue of scale, one of the buzz words in contemporary ecocriticism and more especially Anthropocene studies. Whether they refer to or are the result of natural phenomena or human activities, hyperobjects share a set of characteristics that Morton describes in the following way: Hyperobjects have numerous properties in common. They are viscous, which means that they “stick” to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal; in other words, any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject. They involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to. […]. Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time (Morton 1). Globality, magnitude and invisibility: these are the common traits of hyperobjects as forces that seem to be located on a plane of existence different from ours and are perceptible only through the effects they have on individuals, populations and the environment—natural or not—in which they are embedded. Indeed, such a conception of the human subject as entangled in a milieu of living beings and quick matter, and dependent on hyperobjects that stand above and elsewhere and seem to be both nowhere and everywhere at the same time may evoke a secular version of the “great chain of being” that was made popular in E.M.W. Tillyard’s groundbreaking The Elizabethan World Picture published almost eighty years ago (1943). Issues relating to scale are at the heart of the conception of what is known as the “great chain of being,” that emblem of humanism and the Renaissance which puts forward the issue of scale—or rather scales,

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in this context—and may be apprehended in at least two ways: frst as the great chain envisages a hierarchy from the lowest (inanimate) to the highest (God), through various strata of the living world and “man.” In Tillyard’s terms, “cosmic order was yet one of the master themes of Elizabethan poetry” (Tillyard 14; emphasis added); second, as this vertical organisation is based on order, itself relying on degree: “God created as many different kinds of things as he did creatures, so that there is no creature which does not differ in some respect from all other creatures and by which it is in some respect superior or inferior to all the rest” (Tillyard 27). Such a vision of degrees refers to the image of the links on the chain and the rungs on the ladder that both differentiates and encompasses all its components. My point is that in contemporary literary evocations, the scala naturae of the times seems to reappear in a secularised context, in partial, spectral fashion, admittedly. It makes contemporary texts, and more specifcally those belonging to the category of climate (change) fction, resonate with their predecessors and thereby helps us trace a move from humanism to post-humanism, from anthropocentrism to the contemporary crisis of exceptionalism. My point in making the Tillyardian conception enter into dialogue with present production is to suggest a way in which contemporary literature uses secular imagery and literary topoi to get the reader to attend more acutely to contemporary concerns about the environmental and climatic crises. In other terms, fction uses the interruptive and disruptive powers of attention to produce ethical changes and raise political consciousness in a more effcient way. Of course, God is missing from Cynan Jones’s chain of beings, but a fairly good sample of earthly materials and beings are arrayed in their vibrancy. Attention to ordinary details of life on the farm and to its specifc rhythms testifes to the narrator’s receptivity and attentiveness that Depraz, as already mentioned, considers as the “proto-ethical dynamics of attention” (Depraz 2018, 11; translation mine). The circadian structure implies a great deal of focus on and attention to ordinary details that are generally kept below the level of visibility. This is the case with the passages evoking the texture of the earth, the quality of the soil, various representatives of the vegetal world (“the Sedge” is the title of a section) and the state they are left in, the animals, from the insects to the mammals, complete with Curly the dog, who taught little Emmy how to walk, and the stray cow, whose perceptions and decision are given through internal focalisation, etc. Such pages solicit the characters’ and readers’ perception powerfully and, once again, modify it and provide an “intensifcation” of experience (Depraz 2018, 258). An emblematic moment is offered when the old vet, coming to the farm to put Curly to sleep, fails to identify a bee that has settled on a dandelion and seems to be occupied gathering pollen, one of the sundry vignettes of ordinary bucolic life that contribute to densifying the novel’s texture. In the next

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paragraph, the focalisation that used to be the vet’s shifts to Emmy, the little girl whose observation of humble details and natural curiosity never fails. With her keen perception and her vision on a level with the humble lives of the natural environment, she detects that what appears to be a common bee is in fact a cuckoo bee, come to infltrate the hive and kill the queen, a tiny item in the catastrophic chain of correspondences at work in the novel: “If the vet looked more closely at the bee he’d notice it was unbusy, not collecting the bright pollen from the fower into sacks on its legs. It was a cuckoo bee. […] But the vet doesn’t notice so much, because he is thinking about the old dog” (Jones 2014a, 83). On account of her superior attentional capacities, the child is a mother to the man in such a passage, in yet another Wordsworthian echo, who takes part in the investigation and inventory of the natural world and provides a testimony. In this passage, joint attention is presented in a complex way: the narrative does not indicate that each character is aware that the other is observing the same object but this is strongly suggested by the textual proximity of the two observations. The structural irony that is introduced provides an effcient way of discreetly yet unequivocally showing the ethical superiority of attentiveness to ordinary singularities that are there to be seen, exposed to individual perception in an invitation to train perception, precisely, and once again strip the flm of familiarity— to refer to yet another romantic poet, Keats this time. Of course, the human characters are not neglected in the evocation. This is evident in many passages delving into the complexity of the protagonists’ relationships, but also as Gareth remembers one of his father’s childhood experiences in which a little boy reported to the teacher that he had seen an angel on his way to school, on a sub-zero morning: And there in the ice, where the fall began, was a girl, catching the light like spider thread, with her white shawl spread out around her in the frozen water. It was years before they were told that she had drowned herself because she’d found she was with child […] (Jones 2014a, 30) As suggested in this umpteenth reference to problematic birth, correspondences are rife in this tightly woven narrative: the cows, the angel, Kate and her miscarriages, to take but one thematic strand, and the dead angel in the waterfall echoing forward to the “Destroying Angel,” a common way of referring to amanita virosa (Jones 2014a, 71). Similarly, references to electricity, a latter-day avatar of ether, abound, gravitating around the image of the magnetic storm, in relation to the eponymous concern, climate change: The rain stopped; that day the sun came out hot and fast and deliberately. There had been a geomagnetic storm. Epileptics had fts,

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and people prone to strokes or with weak hearts were ill, some died. The electric things of our body went wrong in many people. The swallows came early, and that day a cloud of racing pigeons and one white dove landed at the farm. They came suddenly and curiously and were very lost (Jones 2014a, 17). It might be tempting to see in these lines an example of pathetic fallacy, the protagonist projecting his anxiety and disarray onto the elements and dwellers of the world. Still, the scientifc orientation anchors the evocation in a more objective context, based on the observation of physical phenomena, which draws the reader’s attention to the rules of physics at work in the natural world, available for everybody to see but generally passing unnoticed. Elsewhere, Gareth and Kate’s teenage son, Dylan, turns his back on the farm and chooses to concentrate on the promises of the town, with its night clubs “and bare arms and small skirts and white skin bluing in the epileptic lights” (Jones 2014a, 26), the paronomasia (electric/epileptic) radiating on to “the electric sound of birds” (Jones 2014a, 73) to be heard many pages thence. The impression is that the traditional correspondences that, in the Renaissance, strictly used to respect the criteria of degree and order (God/king/lion/eagle/dolphin/ gold, etc.) have made room for derangement and leaking out, as if the principle of strict parallelism had been replaced by a horizontal one of contagion, the magnetic/electric/epileptic being confated together and affecting all rungs on the ladder evocative of a René Girard’s “crisis of Degree” (Girard 424–25). Of course, the Renaissance context in which Girard analyses such a crisis is radically distinct from the one in which Jones’s novel was produced, in epistemological terms, and its manifestations in Shakespeare’s plays essentially affect interpersonal relations at the level of the family and the body politic. Still, the crisis of degree does provide an apt image of the degradation of relations: by using the religious frame of the great chain of being the better to abuse or at least warp it, The Long Dry anchors itself in a new tradition, i.e., that of climate change narratives that, in Timothy Clark’s words, provide a “juxtaposition of the trivial and the catastrophic” (Clark 14). Through the use of warped correspondences, a sense of the cosmic is built into the text, which makes for the circuitous, metaleptic evocation of hyperobjects, introducing a sense of the contemporary sublime that was absent from the clearly ordered, accessible cosmogony of the Renaissance— even when it was affected by the Girardian “crisis of Degree.” One step further, it throws the onus on the readers, encouraging them to attend to diffuse manifestations of the crisis, predicated on both rational explanations (relying on the laws of physics, for instance) and potentially irrational ones (interfaced with the explicit and invasive use of correspondences that evoke a pre- or early modern type of epistemology). In other terms, by multiplying literary devices, like correspondences, which

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faunt the text’s literariness, it invites the readers to perceive intensities and thereby attend to what matters so as to feel responsible for the ecological and climate crises. 2.3.2 Acknowledging the Anthropocene As already suggested, baffement is one of the main effects of the presentation of hyperobjects concurrent with the Anthropocene. Fiction may choose a low-key, spectral approach, as is the case with Sarah Hall’s novels, for instance, or address the issue full on, as in the works of such precursors as J.G. Ballard or, more recently, Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods) or Ian McEwan (Solar). Now, as underlined by many commentators, the Anthropocene raises an aesthetic challenge that consists in adapting the novel’s intrinsic interest in the individual and human activity fuelling the narrative dynamics to a shift of agency that has become prominent in the light of recent discoveries, among which catastrophic events linked with climate change. Admittedly, the issue of human agency as pitted against the adverse currents of fate is not a brand-new one: Greek tragedy brings into play this dialectic as a mainspring for its plots, and such structures have been imported into the medium of fction for quite a long time. Still, Adam Trexler evokes the challenge of “the yet-pervasive origin story of literature, shifting attention from author-geniuses to texts in a complicated material world,” which he goes on glossing in this way: “Perhaps the central question […] is how climate change and all its things have changed the capacity of recent literature” (Trexler 13; original emphasis). In other terms, novels like The Long Dry address the diffculty inherent in the presentation of varying scales that defy immediate apprehension. Admittedly, fction boasts some tools that make it open to such challenges: genres and modes (tragedy, SF), poetic devices (tropes like the metalepsis) and the ability to present psychological phenomena (perception, sublimity, denial, etc.), among others. Besides, the novel has always been intent on etching individual destinies against larger canvasses (historical and sociological ones, primarily). And of course, the evocation of scales is at the heart of the great chain of being. From this perspective, confating “the domestic and the interplanetary” (Trexler 26) may not appear as something totally revolutionary for literature in general and for the novel in particular. The Long Dry uses this situation innovatively by multiplying reference to dryness and drought almost to saturation, which grants fgural opaqueness to the narrative as a correlative of the heightened resistance of the material world that the human protagonists keep bumping into, as if the densely repetitive were used to promote an experiential rendering of the new diffculties. Moreover, the novel makes an indirect presentation of the hyperobject of climate change that intervenes on another,

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global plane, and can only be presented circuitously, through its effects: the enduring drought, the death of calves, the disarray of pigeons: The electronic particles in the crystal, moving between different iron in the structured path, turn the ore magnetic and tell the pigeons their way. They’ve also found iron […] in their inner ear — the things which give them a sense of where they are in the air, of the space they move through. If the earth’s geomagnetics are wrong, they get lost (Jones 2014a, 90). Such passages provide powerful metaleptic presentations that allow the readers to fumblingly apprehend (but less fumblingly so as the references accumulate) the sheer extent of climate change despite its limited visibility. Of course, they express a powerful sense of vulnerability, affecting the whole of the natural world in which human subjects are embedded and of which they are part and parcel. And in the glimpse and, possibly, revelation of such vulnerability lies some experiential, destabilising knowledge of the multiplicity of scales that the novel leads the readers to attend to so as to beneft from the disruptive powers of defamiliarisation. In fact, it looks as if one of the main differences between the scalar vision of the Renaissance and its recent avatars lay in the fact that the whole of the strata of the great chain of being, encompassing the minute and the cosmic, used to be a norm onto itself, whereas in the contemporary period, paradoxical as it may seem—on account of the advances in science and technology characterising the last four centuries—the standard of perception should be reduced to one plane. This is suggested by Timothy Clark, in a chapter of his infuential study on ecocriticism subtitled “The Terrestrial as Norm”: “one scale forms a kind of norm for us, the usually taken-for-granted scale of our day-to-day existence and perception” (Clark 29). The power of climate change fction in general and of The Long Dry in particular is to make the readers pay attention to the multiplicity of norms of perception, which systematically involves a process of defamiliarisation, hence a destabilisation. The sense of baffement and awe inherent in such apprehensions is compatible with the literary presentation of trauma, as underlined by several critics, among whom E. Ann Kaplan who, in her work on dystopia, has championed the contested category of PreTSD. It also possibly hails from the romantic tradition of the sublime that presents the reader with magnitudes conversant with the infnite or, more relevantly in a secular context, the unlimited. As with more traditional sublime evocations, the readers of climate change fction may be presented with passages where the object of contemplation or, more particularly here, partial perception, is too huge for the imagination to apprehend it as

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a whole, hence the mixture of pleasure and awe for the viewer and, vicariously, the readers. By transposing such thematic and aesthetic topoi into a secular context, The Long Dry reminds us that “[t]he anthropocene […] demands an imaginative sense of scale; it requires that we ‘scale up our imagination of the human’” (Vermeulen 139). On step further, it taps the ethical dimension of the sublime which, in its ambivalence, fails to apprehend a totality while drawing attention, even if negatively, to its presence and magnitude. In other terms, the sublime defamiliarisation intrinsic to the experience of a plurality of scales wields a considerable ethical power in that it makes the readers pay attention to the limited scope of its norm of perception, allowing them to realise that perception is a cultural construct and possibly getting them to shift the goal posts of their observation. This is what Pieter Vermuelen suggests when he tackles the issue of responsibility and agency (against the grain of the critical doxa on the subject): The anthropocene inserts the human into geological deep time as a responsible agent. Deep time, in the anthropocene, is not the human’s other, but rather another plane on which it cannot but exert agency. If anything, it further augments human responsibility and agency: the human is the force that has decisively contributed to global warming, mass extinction of species, and rising sea levels, but it is also the only power that can consciously intervene in the destructive movements it has unleashed. (Vermuelen 139) 2.3.3 Inescapable Entanglements As suggested earlier, the Elizabethan world picture rests on a set of correspondences based on parallelisms between elements coming from diverse domains of existence (the animal, the vegetal, the mineral, etc.) but belonging to the same rungs of the ladder in each of these domains. Such horizontal relations seem to be organised in terms of parallelism and echo, which indicates a fairly low level of interdependence. Still, when considering the chain in its vertical, hierarchical dimension, Tillyard insists on the relatedness of all elements: “Everything had to be included and everything had to be made to ft and to connect” (Tillyard 6). Elsewhere, he comments on the basic principle of inclusion in a chain of solidarity in which the higher is always dependent on the lower, and vice versa: “it made vivid the idea of a related universe where no part was superfuous, it enhanced the dignity of all creation, even the meanest part of it” (Tillyard 31). Despite a strict assignation to a specifc rung on the ladder, all items, in their paradigmatic relations, were thereby related, solidary, inter-dependent, and I would say that this type of literary conceit is naturally compatible with a neo-materialist vision of life that postulates a continuum of vibrancy (the word is Jane Bennett’s, of

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course) of which the human is a part and not the centre. This echoes one of the tenets of ecology and of ecocriticism, Hubert Zapf reminds us in his Literature as Cultural Ecology, since “one central axiom of ecological thought is universal interconnectedness” (Zapf 11). Now, speaking of interconnectedness implies of necessity evoking the issue of interdependence, hence vulnerability. In fact, as soon as a being is dependent on others, the failure of sovereignty and autonomy inherent in the demands of physiological needs, for instance, becomes apparent. As indicated by Nussbaum in her reading of Greek tragedy and poetry, human nature is orectic, i.e., turned towards the world and the other on which and whom he/she is dependent through his/her appetite and desires (Nussbaum 357). This postulates the subject’s basic openness that the literary text is notoriously well-equipped to express. For instance, the analogy between the female body and the earth is a topos that has been lampooned by feminist critics and that The Long Dry indulges in when evoking Kate’s body, smitten with barrenness like a wasteland and ironically evoked in terms of fertility in several passages seen through Gareth’s perspective: On the third time they told her she couldn’t have children then. She was thirty-four and damp like autumn, not wet in the way young women are, like spring, but damp and rich and earthy, and it didn’t seem right that she could not have a child. She was fertile and hungry, like fallen leaves. (Jones 2014a, 36) The Keatsian echoes of a craved-for “mellow fruitfulness” are expressed in lines in which the simile (“like autumn”) becomes effaced to leave room for the metaphor (“damp and rich and earthy”), suggesting a community of being on the same plane that reverberates through the novel, catches the readers’ attention and thereby allows them to beneft from an experiential knowledge of the post-anthropocentric, posthuman vision. Elsewhere, in the above-quoted passage devoted to the pigeon, the emphasis is laid on the way in which living organisms are compounded of elements belonging to the mineral world, which leads the narrator to round off the section in the following terms: “It makes you wonder what crystals run through us, what drops of salt? Because something in us gives us a sense of where we should be, too, if we listen” (Jones 2014a, 90). These words are evocative of the tenets of new materialism and more specifcally of Donna Haraway’s observations on the porosity of organisms, including the human subject, when she avers: “I am a creature of mud, not of the sky” (Haraway 3). More specifcally, they relate to her concept of the “contact zone” (Haraway 4) referring to the entanglement between subject and environment, and among species which Stacy Alaimo evokes in the following words: “Potent ethical

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and political possibilities emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature” (Alaimo 2). In the preceding words conjuring up Kate’s maturity, but also the pigeon’s and the human subject’s common mineral inheritance, the stress is laid on transcorporeality, which sees bodies as “sites of interconnection” (Alaimo 4) and makes clear that “the substance of the human is inseparable from ‘the environment’” (Alaimo 2). From this perspective, human exceptionalism—let alone individual sovereignty—are exposed as myths through the novel’s insistence on the materiality of the body that makes the readers pay attention to the existence of restrictive norms of perception: clearly the hierarchical vision of the Renaissance, with its promotion of relationality based on a strict order is given a new twist in the radical and literal vision of transcorporeality as commonality. Unlike the early modern vision of the human body encompassing all other items of the physical world (an image evocative of that of the body politic, the monarch incorporating all of the subjects), the transcorporeal perspective provides the vision of a radical exteriority and openness in which frontiers blur to leave room for the fgure of a common materiality. In this context, Alaimo’s dialogue with Elizabeth Grosz leads her to quote from the author of Volatile Bodies: “we need to understand the body, not as an organism or entity in itself, but as a system, or series of open-ended systems, functioning within other huge systems it cannot control through which it can access and acquire its abilities and capacities” (Alaimo 10). This leads her to consider some examples of transcorporeality, among which food that she defnes as “the frst basic transcorporeal substance” (Alaimo 12) and possibly the most obvious source of continuity between bodies and their (natural) environments. In The Long Dry, food is also an instrument of death, as demonstrated by Emmy’s eating the lethal mushroom that will kill her, a radical way of showcasing the openness of bodies and their susceptibility to otherness, hence ontological vulnerability. One other central illustration of direct transcorporeality lies in contamination from the sheep, as the origin of Kate’s miscarriages were caused by chlamydia transmitted to Gareth “in fuids from handling the sheep” (Jones 2014a, 49). This is what Karen Barad may have in mind when she defnes “entanglements” and explains that to be “entangled” implies “lacking an independent, self-contained existence” (Barad ix). The characters in The Long Dry and the world surrounding them are entangled, dependent on each other, and submitted, ultimately to the same forces and a common destiny in the context of climate change. This vision is based on what Barad has defned as “intra-action,” that she takes to be the “mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad 33). The intimation is that “[i] ndividuals do not preexist their interaction; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (Barad ix). Such an evocation ties in with Haraway’s vision of existence

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not so much in terms of being as in terms of becoming and, more specifcally, “becoming with” (Haraway 27; emphasis added), resorting to the Tillyardian fgure of the dance in a new, unexpected way: “all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex-nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter” (Haraway 25; original emphasis). The novel’s insistence on correspondences, the realisation that there is such a thing as a plurality of norms from which to perceive and attend, and the demonstration of the inevitability of embeddings and entanglements rely on the idea that “the self is co-extensive with the environment” (Alaimo 89), which is at the same time a way of exposing the “fantasy of human exceptionalism” (Haraway 11). From this point of view, I would argue that Jones’s novel develops an ethical and political vision of literature as ecological force (Haraway 27), in which the reader’s responsibility is solicited on account of disclosures as to the reality of vulnerabilities and entanglements, in a vision of interdependences that has evolved crucially since the Renaissance. In fact, what appears from a confrontation with Tillyard’s description is an evolution from humanism to post-humanism that is predicated on a vision of the human as decentred and entrapped in a horizontal chain of entanglements in which the cosmic vision of the Renaissance world, which set great store by materiality, is given a twist in the context of a new-materialist turn that grants prominence to interactions and intra-actions. In this context, the readers are made to attend to new relationships between the human and the non-human, to consider ordinary realities that were either invisible to them or too obvious to be seen, to accept their reliance on matter and to develop new responsibilities for their natural environment. This is confrmed in Esther Peeren’s evocation of The Long Dry: “This positions the contemporary rural not so much as a realm in which the presence and centrality of the human is naturalized through its proximity to and cultivation of nature, as is the case in the conventional idyll, but as one in which the human and the natural are deeply intertwined.” And it is on account of this specifcity that she classifes Jones’s novel in the category of the “posthuman rural idyll” (Peeren 2021, n.p.). From The Long Dry and, admittedly, a raft of contemporary novels, emerges a “posthuman environmental ethics” (Alaimo 24) that it is the responsibility of fction to bring to the fore so as to shift the reader’s attention to the new, hidden or all-too visible provinces of the ordinary and solicit the reader’s responsibilities. Haweswater, Reservoir 13 and The Long Dry are emblematic of a recent type of British nature writing that borrows many characteristics from the counter-pastoral or postpastoral type, generic or modal strategies analysed by such critics as Gifford or Lilley. Beyond their obvious

100 Embedded Visibilities singularities, they are all intent on promoting a consideration of the ordinary singularities of the natural environment, making us aware that there are norms of perception that may prevent us from seeing the visible which is under our eyes but that we are usually unable to perceive. This they do by tapping the poetic resources of fction and making a specifc use of focalisation, vibrant and humble realism, rhythm and correspondences, among other devices. Admittedly, they take care of not forgetting the human subject and communities even while displacing them and presenting in various ways how they have been submitted to an effcient de-centring. They thereby set great store by promoting a vision of all elements of the natural world, including the human ones, as embedded or entangled in each other and in the wider reality of their environment so as to both present and encourage “a balanced interdependence” (Morizot 273; translation mine; original emphasis). In so doing, they put forward a relational ethics that recommends attention to—hence responsibility for—the other elements of the natural world, in a posthuman orientation that rejects anthropocentrism and speciesism that can be considered as a “posthuman naturalism” (Walezak 2022, 113). In line with the previous developments, the next chapter follows on the posthuman orientation of a growing part of contemporary fction but shifts its focus to the man-machine continuum and keeps engaging with the de-centring gesture intrinsic to the posthuman ethos.

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The manifestations of the posthuman are not necessarily located in rural contexts, as is well established, and the continuum between the human and the non-human may espouse modalities other than the becoming-nature that is exemplifed in Hall’s, McGregor’s and Jones’s novels. Clearly, the becoming-machine of the human or at least its enhancement through the means of various prostheses has been used as the hallmark of the posthuman through the fgure of the cyborg that assumed pride of place in the literature devoted to the subject from its inception in Donna J. Haraway’s infuential work (Haraway 1991). Still, the hybrid entity of the cyborg has also developed into some more extreme instances of the human-non-human continuum that have affrmed the demise of anthropocentrism in even more radical terms with the rise of a strong interest in artifcial intelligence and more particularly in the fgure of the humanoid robot. According to some critics, this has led to the rise of a sub-genre referenced as the “android novel” (Kopka and Schaffeld 67), which some of the leading contemporary British novelists have recently taken an interest in. This is clearly the case of Jeanette Winterson, with The Stone Gods (2007) and, more recently, Frankissstein (2019), Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). The fact that Booker Prize winners and a Nobel Prize laureate should have turned to the subject of AI, and more especially of humanoids, in the last two years, evidences the centrality of the subject and has enticed me to choose the last two novels as the main corpus of this chapter to address the way in which they deal with some of the central binaries on which Western culture is premised, chief among them the human-non-human divide and the potential re-negotiation of this boundary performed by fction. In the pages that follow, I choose to present the two novels in chronological order, which does not imply, as will become evident, that I consider McEwan’s work as a preparation for Ishiguro’s, or the latter’s as a more satisfying or convincing narrative than the former.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362265-4

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3.1 The Time Will Come… Machines Like Me returns to McEwan’s early fascination with artifcial intelligence and to the fgure of Alan Turing who was already the protagonist (under the name of John Turner) of his The Imitation Game, a radio play broadcast by the BBC in 1980 (Kopka and Schaffeld 52). In the later work, Turing is also granted prominence and becomes the conscience of the novel, providing an authority and a point of reference that the protagonist, who is also the narrator, seems to lack in many ways. 3.1.1 A Time Out of Joint The action takes place in 1982 but, as indicated by most reviewers, the world of the early eighties bears a great deal of resemblance to that of 2019. This is due to the “speculative” dimension (Theroux n.p.) of the narrative which refers to the present as “the frailest of improbable concepts” (McEwan 2019, 64) and illustrates it by a modifcation of history, making the text edge towards the genre of the uchronia. In fact, McEwan fantasises that Turing, when presented with the choice between being submitted to chemical castration or going to prison, chose the latter option, served his sentence and used his time in jail to produce founding work on AI. In this parallel strand of history, he never committed suicide and helped develop AI and broadcast it through the means of open source, with the result that the technological advances to be noticed in 1982 are well ahead of the reality of 2019 and the decade before—as the narrator is writing at least thirty years after the events (McEwan 2019, 173). The main reason why the worlds of 1982 and of the second decade of the 21st century are seen to merge in a novel that taps the uncanny powers and effects of slipstream, is thematic: McEwan wants to go back to his fascination with Turing. By showing the technological advances that could have taken place had he lived and been allowed to go on with his work, he pays homage to a tutelary fgure and perpetuates the memory of his achievements. In Machines Like Me, Turing is in his 70s, he lives with his male partner and is involved in research and charity work, his oeuvre seems to be universally acclaimed and he has taken a keen interest in humanoids. The consequence is, in Ian Patterson’s words, that the world of the novel is “slightly oblique to the one we know, a counterfactual variation designed to make the Frankenstein trope easier to accept” (Patterson n.p.). Acceptance of the Frankenstein trope—which is clearly signposted—may be a reason for the use of slipstream, but I feel that there is more to it. For one thing, the theme of the frailty of the present and of the possibility to take another path on the historical fork allows for topical references and commentary: in 1982, Margaret Thatcher leads the nation into a war with the Argentine, loses it, so

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that the Falklands become the Malvinas, which will lead to a Labour victory and the advent of a left-wing Prime Minister, Tony Benn, who coaxes the country into an early Brexit before being killed by a bomb planted by the IRA. The novel goes on to document the economic crisis that follows, showing a nation divided, strikes and demonstrations paralysing central London, and the frst signs of a sobering economic crisis (McEwan 2019, 295). As in Saturday (2005), McEwan’s concern with the state of the nation serves as a backdrop to the main action of Machines Like Me which, like the previous novel, shows the protagonist threading his way through London on the day of a big march against one of the nation’s neo-colonialist ventures (the war in Iraq in Saturday, the Falklands war in the latter novel [McEwan 2019, 295]). Similarly, in both narratives, the physical menace comes from a member of the less privileged classes (McEwan 2019, 295), and of course, the reader is allowed to share a central and sustained interest in the processes of (human) consciousness. Other thematic strands dovetail with some of McEwan’s recent fction like that of the protection of childhood so prominent in The Children Act (2014), as Charlie and Miranda, the protagonists are intent on adopting an ill-treated child—a latter-day Dickensian urchin—and have to go through a protracted administrative struggle to achieve their purpose. Likewise, McEwan returns to the previous ground eminently covered by Atonement (2001) by making penance and the need of reparation is central to the ethical framework of Machines Like Me: the female protagonist never recovers from failing to prevent her best friend’s suicide after the latter was raped and refused to let anybody but Miranda know about it. This leads her to go to bed with her friend’s abuser and accuse him of rape, so that the dead girl’s family will never know what happened really and he will have to serve a sentence that, in Miranda’s plan, will somewhat compensate for his previous escape. The judicial and, above all, moral and ethical exploration that is so central to the novel—as is the case with the bulk of McEwan’s fction—revolves around this narrative strand. As suggested from the above elements, the universe of Machines Like Me is fairly bleak in many respects. It is a world plunged in a political, economic and social crisis, and the personal upheavals that the protagonists go through seem to be extensions of the wider often calamitous context. In such a system of correspondences echoing and bracing one another could be seen another justifcation for the use of a slipstream technique that makes the worlds of 1982 and 2019 appear to leak into one another. In fact, by making the contemporary, with its advances in AI and robotics, repeat the fctional 1982 and its stupendous innovations in the feld of humanoid robots, the impression is that the reader’s present is repeating the characters’ past. This impression is intensifed by the fact that so much of the novel’s past respects our memories or the

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historical accounts of the period, with admittedly destabilising details (like the Beatles getting back together and releasing new albums) which, on the whole, remain punctual and fail to deface the reader’s direct or mediated experience of the early 1980s. Slipstream does not ruin realism but displaces it obliquely, warping it from within without destroying it, with the result that, on account of the sense of repetition, it seems as if the past were perhaps not so much remembered as repeated or re-lived in the present. This lends Machines Like Me a spectral, uncanny dimension, not unlike that associated with the mechanisms and literary representations of trauma, otherwise known as Nachträglichkeit, “afterwardsness,” “belatedness” or “deferred action” (Laplanche 23–24; Caruth 2021, n.p.). The intimation is that the violence of the Thatcher years is still largely unassimilated by the nation and that the shock keeps sending ripples into the present, in the same way as the individual, medical, judicial and ethical violence perpetrated on Turing, with enduring scientifc and concrete consequences, is equally unassimilated and comes back with a vengeance. Interestingly, Waldenfels sees Nachträglichkeit as a central component of attention, as “something that happens too early” while “my response comes too late” (Waldenfels 2013, n.p.), which beautifully illustrates the defamiliarising and revisionist effect of the pragmatics of attention that McEwan favours in his treatment of a warped historical time. As suggested above, Machines Like Me accommodates an array of literary genres. The reviewers were quick in spotting references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the plot revolves around Charlie’s buying a state-of-the-art humanoid robot, Adam, whose outward appearance and movements make him pass as human. Besides, the frst chapters of the novel are devoted to the discovery of Adam’s capacities and to setting his personality parameters, a task that Charlie shares with Miranda, with whom he is starting an affair. In this novel in which reproduction is a moot point (the couple manage to adopt little Mark in the last pages, though), Adam becomes the two protagonists’ child through “homemade genetic shuffing” (McEwan 2019, 33), a latter-day echo of Mary Shelley’s learning monster and an echo of recent developments in AI, as “the fgure of the child has emerged (albeit only recently) as an equally compelling model for the artifcial and computational sciences” (Wilson n.p.). As with the Frankenstein myth, what does not fail to happen is that their creature escapes their control and assumes a fair measure of autonomy, thereby incarnating the fear of human obsolescence that is so central to contemporary evocations of humanoid robots and machine intelligence more generally as is regularly signposted in Winterson’s re-writing of the Frankenstein myth, for instance (Winterson 152, 157). From this point of view, the novel bows in the direction of dystopia, as has been observed by various critics (Kopka and Shaffeld 55). Some reviewers remarked on its nodding towards the “flm noir” (Theroux

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n.p.): Gorringe, the rapist that Miranda sent to jail, is about to regain his freedom in the frst half of the novel and has vowed that he will seek revenge on her, which weaves some suspense into the narrative and allows for the plot’s ethical complications. Machines Like Me is also indebted to romance and melodrama, as may be seen in the strand of the plot bringing in the afore-mentioned street urchin and in the pact that Miranda makes with herself that she will avenge her friend, which she keeps to the end. Similarly, Gorringe’s miraculous atonement and conversion into a law-abiding, God-fearing citizen may sound so pat as to strike the miraculous, almost wonderful chords of romance. Besides, references to The Tempest abound, granting substance to the romance architext, as is apparent through the character of Miranda, the emblem of purity in many ways, despite appearances—Adam, who goes to bed with her, deputising for Caliban, that other secular fgure of hybridity and of non-humanity (Beck 91). With the difference that her father, Maxfeld, an elderly literary scholar, does not qualify as a latter-day Prospero, a role that is attributed to Alan Turing, whose position in the narrative economy is that of the enlightened man, who acts as the ethical conscience of the novel. In fact, Machines Like Me is about conscience as much as consciousness, as underlined by most reviewers. From this point of view, it updates Saturday’s neurological gesture that consisted in the protagonist’s literally peeping into his wife’s brain (McEwan 2005, 44) by having access to the humanoid robot’s mind. This happens when one of the employees of the company that manufactured Adam appears at Charlie’s fat for maintenance purposes. By connecting the robot to her laptop, she manages to display what are supposed to be the parameters of Adam’s “consciousness”: “Mental processes, Adam’s subjective world fickering in full view” (McEwan 2019, 190). Displaying what is inside—the brain, the mind, consciousness—is one of McEwan’s permanent quests, as exemplifed in his steady revisiting of Modernist techniques and predecessors, in Saturday as much as in Atonement, for instance. Of course, one of the most salient specifcities of fction is its ability to (re-)present consciousness, generally human, but also at times non-human, as is made clear in 18th-century it-narratives or their contemporary avatars. Now, what is at stake here is the (re-)presentation of a humanoid’s “consciousness,” the inverted commas indicating the doubts as to this possibility, a question that recurs throughout Machines Like Me. Even if the narrator is human and if a great deal of textual space is devoted to the evocation of his consciousness, the thematic focus of the novel is AI and the way in which humanoids act, but also make decisions, and feel, even if this is presented from outside (more of this later). This is bound to raise problems concerning the issue of attention as, according to phenomenologists—and Bergson chief among them—consciousness is a condition of attention (Depraz 2018, 3). In the following pages, I show

106 Of (Wo)men and Machines how McEwan’s novel uses AI as a mirror to human attention that is thereby defned negatively (in the photographic meaning of the term), a technique that is strikingly different from the one privileged by Ishiguro, as we shall see in the second half of the chapter. 3.1.2 Machines That Mimic Minds? The novel is very much concerned with the “electrifcation” or digitalisation of attention (Citton 2017, 91). As already mentioned, the world of 1982 is one in which computers seem to be present in all houses and in which young people spend a lot of time using social media. This theme is aired fairly early in the novel when Charlie, who is falling in love with Miranda but has been warned against doing so by Adam on account that she may be “[a] systematic, malicious liar” (McEwan 2019, 30), tries to track her on social networks. His attention becomes captivated by the images that he gathers of a bi-dimensional, pixelated young woman, “liv[ing] in the refections of her friends” (McEwan 2019, 37), a character reduced to signs who seems to be a product of simulation. The world of 1982 very much looks like that described by Citton in his Ecology of Attention, when he depicts the digital apparatuses meant to capture collective attention. It is also evocative of Berardi’s remarks on the standardisation of experience that has reached such a point that the world cannot be accessed directly any more (Berardi 157). Still, those indications are used as a mere background, as the novel’s interest lies elsewhere. In fact, Adam is the non-human fgure of digitalisation and he is invested with the powers of ceaselessly attending to what is archived on the internet and with the capacity to hack into databases so as to sift through information that would have otherwise been denied him. As his colossal data-processing powers allow him to check innumerable sources, be it in newspaper reports of in records from her trial, he retrieves information about Miranda’s pass and issues a warning against her. When in rest mode, Adam spends most of his time browsing through the internet and learning everything he comes across in a thorough way, from recipes to the classics of British literature. In other terms, in his situation as a child or, at least, a learner, who comes into Charlie’s house without pre-conditioned memories, Adam attends systematically to what is available on the internet and is capable of unlimited data treatment. It is as if the learning situation were exclusive of any possibility of distraction, which makes the humanoid a thoroughly serious critter, rather radically devoid of humour. Of course, this contradicts the basic laws of human attention, among which the frst rule formulated by Citton, i.e., the postulate of limited resource according to which “the total quantity of attention available to humans is limited at any given time” (Citton 2017, 50; original emphasis). As a

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result, most postulates and rules presented by Citton are invalidated: what seems most characteristic of Adam’s idiosyncratic mastery over attention is that it lacks fuidity and falls short of what critics inspired by phenomenology have referred to as the “modulatory,” or “cyclical,” or “oscillatory” model of attention (Depraz 2018, 122, 176, 179; translation mine). The impression is that of some form of Bergsonian rigidity that comes to affect the humanoid, which is only just natural as Bergson analyses cases in which movements suggestive of a loss of fexibility and indicating some form of automatic, non-human reaction create a comic effect, the induced laughter being meant as a corrective to such a rigidity (Bergson 1913, 9, 21). With the difference that, in Machines Like Me, the systematic, automatic and rigid mode of attention that characterises the humanoid reveals another type of truth, i.e., Adam’s non-humanity, which curtails any comical effect and, quite on the contrary, tends to lend some sort of an uncanny atmosphere to several passages, perceived by the narrator and the readers. Indeed, the humanoid’s systematically exerted attentional powers give the impression of a form of insipidness, as if all attention and no distraction made Adam a dull boy. In this area, the mirror that Adam holds to the human protagonists of the novel is one in which they are all singularised in their failings, admittedly, but also by a fuidity that is characteristic of the world of “natural” (as opposed to artifcial) beings. The demise of Citton’s frst postulate and all the ensuing rules therefore maintains the binary between human and non-human, natural and artifcial, strengthening what Rosi Braidotti sees as “the Humanistic norm” that is based on the “binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism.” She adds that “[c]entral to this universalistic posture and its binary logic is the notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration” (Braidotti 2013, 15). It must be admitted that, as regards the model of humanoid attention that it chooses to thematise, the novel seems to lean towards the postulate of human exceptionalism, promoting a traditional vision of anthropocentrism. In spite of Adam’s perfect imitation of human movement that dazzles Charlie in the opening chapter, especially in the passage when the former puts on his clothes without a hitch and in beautifully fuid movements (McEwan 2019, 27), the mechanical dimension prevails not only as regards the inadequate oscillation between attention and distraction but also as concerns the issue of perception. In fact, as we are reminded by specialists of the subject, attention is to be considered in relation with perception, the latter providing the “basso continuo” of the former and the two capacities interacting as perception triggers off attention while attention intensifes perception through the means of concentration and focalisation (Depraz 2018, 17; translation mine). This applies strictly when representing the narrator’s consciousness from inside, in

108 Of (Wo)men and Machines the episode when his perception of noises gets him to sharpen his attentiveness and concentrates on one single event. An instance may be found in the passage when Charlie meets little Mark in the swing park on the Common (McEwan 2019, 47–51); or when he becomes briefy aware his own cuckolding by Adam, frst alerted by Miranda and Adam’s noises as they are cavorting in the bedroom just above, before immersing himself in the scene, with the attendant emotional investment and intensifcation of experience (Depraz 2018, 263). Still, one of the questions that the novel raises is that of humanoid perception, as Adam is ridden with sensors that allow him to simulate vision, hearing and, apparently, touch (he does not eat and there is no mention of his olfactory capacities). His ability to simulate perception is thereby differently geared on to his attentional capacities. As with the distraction-attention binary, the interactional processes between perception and attention are singularly connected. Of course, Adam boasts immense powers of concentration or, at least, focalisation, and of course, the selection of a piece of information in a continuum of solicitations, digital or not, leads him to more focus and data gathering. Still, such possibilities do not involve any “expansion of being” (Depraz 2018, 141, translation mine), the humanoid’s ontological status being a moot point throughout, admittedly. Similarly, there cannot be any “intensifcation” of experience (Depraz 2018, 263) in so far as the modifcations are quantitative and correspond to a rise in the amount of data gathering, in the quality and refnement of the conclusions that Adam may arrive at without any emotional crystallisation or breakthrough. Granted, one of the most surprising aspects of the novel is that Adam professes his love for Miranda, writes haikus as tributes to her and pledges that, unlike the other humanoids of his series, he is not intent on performing a mode of suicide or downgrading as he is too much in love to do so. Yet, unlike the human characters, he remains fairly impervious to the intensifcation of being inherent in attentional processes, once more holding the mirror up to the human characters and contributing to affrming the exceptional powers of the natural over the artifcial—something that the novel as an aesthetic and pragmatic apparatus is particularly well equipped for doing. In the end, when observed through the thematic lens of attention, one could argue that some of the early declarations of specialists of the posthuman like the following one are still valid: in McEwan’s fctional world, “we are [indeed] still coming to terms with the huge degree of complexity involved in replicating anything approaching human-like behaviour” (Pepperell 4). Indeed, it seems as if Haraway’s “cyborg myth […] about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (Haraway 1991, 154) were very partially realised in the technologically advanced world of Machines

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Like Me where the humanoid character remains othered, consolidating the traditional anthropocentric humanist vision. 3.1.3 Quandaries If consciousness is one of the central issues of the novel, with reference to what philosophers call “the problem of other minds” (Kopka and Schaffeld 59; Lucas n.p.), the main focus is certainly on ethics. More precisely, despite the similarities between the human and the humanoid protagonists, and even if some of their positions and reactions are common, it seems as if the narrative encourages the strengthening of the human/ non-human divide in this area. As indicated above, the plot is fuelled by certain events that give rise to the formulation of dilemmas. The main one centres around the flm noir strand, that is around Miranda’s choice to avenge her best friend who committed suicide after being raped, as a teenager, a vengeance that she makes possible through a lie. As already mentioned, she acts as if the rapist had abused her, goes through a trial and gets him sent to prison. Miranda is not troubled by many scruples on this account: she is too much preoccupied with mourning her friend and her only regrets apply to her not telling what had happened to her friend’s family, which, she is convinced, could have saved her. In fact, she is determined to act as an “[a]venging angel” (McEwan 2019, 244). When the rapist, Gorringe, is freed, following Adam’s advice (he has indulged in some benchmarking of his own to assess which moment would be the best for the encounter), Miranda, Charlie and Adam confront him and Miranda tells him the truth as a means to round off her vengeance and to unburden herself at the same time. But in one of the melodramatic passages that characterise the narrative, Gorringe reveals that he already knows this, that he became a religious person in prison, and that he sees Miranda as a godsend thanks to whom he could pay his due, come to terms with his guilt and accept it as God’s will. This means that he is ready to let the truth appear in full light so that the justice of men partly adds up to God’s, which Miranda is very averse to, as his disclosures would imply a new trial, hence, on top of the diffculties inherent in the judicial situation, the probable cancellation of the adoption process that she initiated with a view to adopting Mark. The moral dilemma is expressed in the following terms: should she go ahead and reveal what she did so that she pays for her crime and starts with a clean slate, or should she remain silent—a more comfortable option and one that would warrant that her adoption plans come to fruition? As suggested by various reviewers, this makes for a fairly cumbersome assemblage of episodes, whose justifcation lies, precisely, in the creation of the fraught moral situation in which Charlie and Miranda are trapped.

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Now, the situation is based on a lie and, as we know from the epigraph—“We are not built to comprehend a lie,” taken from Kipling’s poem “The Secret of the Machines”—Adam is programmed to tell the truth and is unable to lie, a capacity that, like humour or irony, the novel resolutely puts on the side of the human. This is the reason why Adam has recorded Gorringe’s confession of his crime and produced a “complete transcript of [the] story” (McEwan 2019, 275) that he plans to send to the police. His justifcation for doing so is the following: “you schemed to entrap Gorringe. That’s a crime. […] If he’s to be charged, you must be too. Symmetry, you see” (McEwan 2019, 275). Besides, he considers the following aggravating circumstance: “You said he raped you. He didn’t, but he went to prison. You lied to the court” (McEwan 2019, 275). Of course, perjury is the crime that Adam is programmed not to take lightly at all, so that he refuses to hear Charlie’s and Miranda’s arguments. The consequence is that, with Miranda’s complicity, Charlie hits Adam’s head with a hammer, which leads to his fade out and death. While he is saving and uploading the data that constitute his “being,” he treats his human companions to a last speech in which he reveals that he has already given the fles to the police, which means that Miranda will not avoid the dreaded trial. This shows that the humanoid’s ethical apparatus and reactions function up to a point, which signals yet another opposition between human and non-human, apparently confrming one of the binaries on which humanism is based, as indicated by Braidotti and other posthuman scholars. The human mind and human life are presented in their complexity and contradictoriness, which is due to their embodied nature, i.e., their embedding and embodiment in an organic soma that is the seat of needs, sensations and emotions. Said differently, as opposed to the posthuman vision of the subject that is post-individual, radically relational, transversal, and tending towards the impersonal (Braidotti 2019, 40), the incarnated human protagonists are typifed by the density of their affective life, their vulnerability to diverse parameters and their entanglements with each other and various demanding situations. This justifes McEwan’s use of the Dickensian urchin plot, as the child, on top of competing with Adam (both are shown to be learners in the narrative economy), acts as the object of attachments, hence complication and opaqueness in relational terms. Adam, on the contrary, is only capable to work in a closed system, as indicated by Turing: “But life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language” (McEwan 2019, 178). His ethical stance is a “rule-based approach” (Kopka and Schaffeld 61) that acts on abstract principles. Being unequipped to take into consideration the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the human mire of emotions, he loses sight of “the very particularity of the particular” (Askin 172). In other terms, “Adam seems to be Kantian deontology personifed” (Kopka and

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Schaffeld 61). The vision of machine ethics that the novel displays is one that stands on the side of strict morals, based on the respect of a rule book, as distinct from an ethics of the Aristotelian type that would imply the consideration of complex situations and the permanent fne-tuning of judgement. It is also strikingly different from the feminist apprehension of ethics, and especially of the ethics of care as defned by Carol Gilligan in her path-breaking In a Different Voice, where she extols the specifcity of the “second perspective” in opposition to the dominating, abstract position of Kantian ethics (Gilligan 74). This is where the divide between the human and the non-human appears most blatantly. In fact, the ethical ground that the novel covers provides the arena for two contradictory models of attention: the non-human one being vertical, of the top-down type, as opposed to the human one, of a horizontal brand, implying consideration of and attention to specifc situations in their fuidity. In other terms, the humanoid’s ethical capacities fall short of the posthuman ideal enunciated by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall when they insist on localism and particularism: “Local and perspectival solutions to universal crises, developed contextually through human ingenuity in pragmatic relation to specifc materialities, can be mobilised in innovative ways towards the development of practical measures with an emergent effect, potentially bringing general benefts” (Braidotti and Bignall 17). They equally fail to implement an ethics of care that is also part of an ethics of attention, as seen in the introduction to this volume. Such an ethics is based on attention to the details and complexities of specifc situations that require a high degree of responsiveness to a context considered in its singularity, taking its complexities into account (Laugier 2015c, 136). In other terms, such an ethics, which consists in paying attention to others, but also in practically taking care of them (and this is obviously the case with Adam, who is in the situation of attending to Miranda so as to help her get resolve the conundrum in which she has placed herself) requires that the subject of care consider the variegated details of the other’s position in its rational but also emotional dimensions. The other’s vulnerability, but also the subject’s exposure to the object of care are central to the practice of such an ethics in which attention relies on the perception of invisibilities (through lack or excess of visibility) and triggers off an action towards the alleviation of diffculties or sufferings (Laugier 2015c, 132). This leads Laugier to defne care as “a contextualist [ethics] rooted in a living relation to the other” (Laugier 2015c, 129; translation mine) and to insist on its particularist orientation (Laugier 2015c, 128). It appears that such an ethic brings about a shift from what is “just” or good to what “matters” (Laugier 2015c, 130). Admittedly, this is only possible in the context of subjects who are both embedded and embodied, the novel suggests, since the humanoid’s embeddedness in a network of relations is presented as insuffciently attuned to taking the complexities of the

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living—meant here as the organic—into consideration. For that reason, the novel underlines the limits imposed on the non-human character: here, machine ethics correspond more specifcally to machine deontology or machine morals. They thereby represent a traditional moral apparatus and stance based on rule-book decision, without access to any particularist vision. They invest their full attention in applying moral norms to situations that defy such a top-down, simplifying approach and emblematise a form of machine failure that, in the end, compares unfavourably with human frailties. Once again, the novel seems to favour a humanist vision in which the non-human is discarded in terms of a “pejoration of otherness” (Braidotti 2013, 68) and Machines Like Me seems quite far from “shifting morals to the technological artefacts,” in Braidotti’s upbeat appreciation of the situation. 3.1.4 Beyond Exceptionalism? Yet, some aspects of the novel do seem to point to the direction of a possible continuum on which the human and non-human positions would be situated and allowed to collaborate if not always merge. Admittedly, Machines Like Me raises quite a few ambiguities as regards this point. To begin with, it insists on the high degree of similarity between Adam’s physical appearance and that of any human subject, as indicated all through his extensive initial portrait (McEwan 2019, 23–27). Still, no ontological continuum is validated here as Adam’s birth is described in terms of his being delivered to Charlie’s house on a stretcher, rejecting the image of reproduction, replacing it with that of replication and thereby indicating that all resemblances between human and humanoid are due to simulation and are to be attributed to human intelligence: “It was a triumph of engineering and software design: a celebration of human ingenuity” (McEwan 2019, 27). However, other passages seem to suggest a higher degree of commonality between the human and the non-human. This is expressed in the narrator’s doubts, which the reader is given access to thanks to the autodiegetic mode of narration. At some point, Charlie is destabilised by Adam’s capacities of visual perception, as he stares into his eyes. Even if he is aware that the humanoid’s eyes work by sorting out “a torrent of zeros and ones fash[ing] towards various processors that, in turn, direct […] a cascade of interpretation towards other centres,” he is still very much at a loss as to explaining “what pass[es] along his own optic nerve” (McEwan 2019, 128). This leads him to express the following doubts: “Despite the clean divide between the living and the inanimate, it remained the case that he and I were bound in the same physical laws” (McEwan 2019, 128). From this intuition of not only similarities but also a shared perceptual apparatus using the same processes, he jumps on to the intuition of the limits of anthropocentrism in unequivocal terms: “Perhaps

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biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the fgure standing in front of me was not fully alive” (McEwan 2019, 129). In such passages, it looks as if the narrator were participating in the “deconstruction of species supremacy” (Braidotti 2013, 65) that some scholars see as one of the linchpins of the posthuman and which the novel gives a good airing to in a full page devoted to the evocation of the issue: “Once we sat enthroned at the centre of the universe, with suns and planets, the entire observable world turning around us in an ageless dance of worship. […] Finally […] we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?” (McEwan 2019, 80). Admittedly, such refections reveal the narrator’s and, I would argue, the author’s ambivalence about AI and the conundrum of other minds. They replicate what early commentator Robert Pepperell had diagnosed about the “anxiety and enthusiasm” (Pepperell 1) in the face of technological change and testify to a deep-rooted fear as to human obsolescence—the narrator uses the adjective “obsolete” in the respect, on page 84—otherwise referred to as “anthropogenic existential risk” (Kopka and Schaffeld 54). At the same time, they express a fascination for the possibility of a somehow shared nature and it is diffcult not to hear some measure of hope in such glimpses that open up the possibility of some common potentia. Such an interpretation is buttressed by other passages when, for instance, the narrator calls forth the tutelary authority that Turing embodies to put forward the idea that as soon as “we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine” (McEwan 2019, 84). This theme is regularly sounded, particularly when Adam articulates his feelings and confesses to his love for Miranda, and more particularly when he expresses it in haikus of an obvious triteness that make him espouse the role of the lovelorn teenager, hence elicit a patronising reaction from the other protagonists. Such circumstances generate in turn a form of dramatic irony that endears him, somehow, to the reader. And perhaps this feeling of commonality culminates just before Adam’s execution, in a refective passage when Charlie comments on the way in which his own language—i.e., the narrator’s—reveals the blurred boundary between human and non-human: “There it was, ‘hate it’, ‘persuade him’, even ‘Adam’, our language exposed our weakness, our cognitive readiness to welcome a machine across the boundary between ‘it’ and ‘him’” (McEwan 2019, 273). What such passages reveal is the temptation of—or at least a fascination with—monism as the refusal of dualism and binaries that Braidotti considers as an “applied neo-materialist perspective […] inspired by an updated version of Spinozism” that she sees as a pillar of posthumanism and of posthuman studies (Braidotti 2019, 106).

114 Of (Wo)men and Machines One step further, the novel, as indicated by Kopka and Schaffeld, performs a Turing test that solicits the reader’s attention and involvement. Such a test was devised by Alan Turing in the 1950s and consists in “a thought experiment to fnd out if machines can operate with human-level intelligence” (Kopka and Schaffeld 62). It consists in asking an individual to evaluate the responses of two candidates, A and B, who are in another room and that s/he cannot see or hear, the communication being possible through written transmission only. The tester has to guess which of the two candidates is the machine and which is the human being. The test is based on language and on deception: “the machine does not have to be as intelligent as a human, it just needs to appear so” (Kopka and Schaffeld 63). The two critics claim that Machines Like Me “performs a Turing test because readers judge whether Adam can pass as human” (Kopka and Schaffeld 62). This is true enough, and indeed not only the readers but also the narrator is put in the position of a tester throughout, as his consistent musings and elaborations indicate. In other terms, the Turing test is thematised in the novel and is part and parcel of its explicit presentation of the issue of machine consciousness. Still, I am interested in another version of the Turing test which I feel the novel performs too, but solely on the reader, this time. In this version of the experiment, what is at stake is as much whether Adam can pass as human as whether Charlie can pass as a machine. In fact, some passages cast doubt as to this possibility, throughout the novel. From the beginning, Charlie tends to conceive of Adam as some sort of a double, a narrative thread that is fairly well signposted and runs through the early chapters. First of all, Charlie gives Adam clothes of his own to cover his initial nakedness, making him another version of himself (McEwan 2019, 28), a gesture which has been anticipated in the initial description of Charlie’s setting the personality parameters of his recent acquisition. Similarly, in the expository sections the text reproduces, in italics, the instructions or proposals conceived by the manufacturer, and the new owner has to tick boxes and make choices that provide the basic components of the robot’s personality. Midway through this operation, after reading yet another parameter, Charlie is struck by the following thought: “This was me. But should I be replicating myself?” (McEwan 2019, 7). More than the child or at least as much as the child (his and Miranda’s), Adam thereby becomes the replica or double of the protagonist. After these initial clues, which whet the reader’s attention, two more scenes at least build up on the fgure of the double. At one point, after he has been cuckolded by Adam, Charlie remembers a discussion that he had with Miranda while they were in bed: We were mid-embrace, in the conventional position. She drew my face towards her. Her look was serious.

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She whispered, ‘Tell me something. Are you real?’ (McEwan 2019, 81). Of course, this may be taken as an enthusiastic evaluation of Adam’s performance as a lover. But this may equally imply that Miranda was fantasising about having sex with Adam even while she was lying in Charlie’s embrace, since questioning the reality of Charlie’s presence— or, rather, being—suggests that she may have mistaken him for his humanoid friend. Besides, several chapters later, on the special day when Charlie and Adam are introduced to Miranda’s ailing father, the latter confuses Charlie with Adam, and vice versa, of course, even if emphasis is laid on the frst aspect of the slip-up owing to the internal focalisation: “Hilarious. Or insulting. Or momentous in its implications” (McEwan 2019, 226). In other terms, the novel explicitly presents us with a becoming-human of the machine, in so far as the divide between human and non-human, strong as it is, exists all the same alongside the humanoid’s bewildering capacity not only to look like the humans but, possibly, to be endowed with the ability to process and synthesise the data that equip him with what looks like thought, and to be able to feel, which is central in his relational activities. Of course, there are limits to all those aspects, but still, the premise of the novel, and its beginning, is that of a becoming-human of the machine based on the progress of AI and on Alan Turing’s predictions. What is less clearly thematised is the symmetrical movement, i.e., the becoming-machine of the human protagonist and narrator, and this is where the novel is performing some form of Turing test in the most effcient way, mobilising the readers’ attention and securing their involvement. Such a dynamic relies on the use of such devices as point of view and, above all voice. In fact, most reviewers have commented on the novel’s strange, at times discordant exploitation of various types of discourse. In the London Review of Books, Ian Patterson lampooned the essayistic moments in unambiguous terms, claiming that they lent some passages “a pub-quiz air” (Patterson n.p.). Rabeea Saleem’s piece for The Irish Times equally lamented the presence of “digression and explanatory drive,” the tendency to “ruminate on every topic, no matter how trivial,” and railed at “a two-page pontifcation into the historical background of germs” (Saleem n.p.). Reviewing the novel for The New York Times, Jeff Giles used a violently organic metaphor, inveighing against the narrative’s “arteries being clogged with research and back story” (Giles n.p.). Of course, a tendency to display thoroughly-researched information informs some of McEwan’s preceding novels. This is eminently the case with Saturday, in which the readers are treated to what at times looks as a disquisition on neurology and neuro-surgery. Of course, this tendency to impart information to the reader on such or such a domain of interest is a basic rule of realism and, as McEwan is taking readers into

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areas of high specialisation that they are not expected to have access to, some form of thematic, technical ballast is invited into his narratives. In Saturday, the use of an impersonal narrator with a strict internal focalisation through the protagonist’s perceptions and thought-processes helps thematise and naturalise the information that one would expect to fnd in an essay. Machines Like Me uses an altogether different type of narrator. In fact, Charlie is not experienced in the art of telling stories. He has written a book on AI, but his present narrative seems to be his frst written attempt at giving an account of himself. This may explain the fact that the tone of the incipit rings with Dickensian echoes (Patterson n.p.); that some passages are overtly melodramatic, peddling some clichés; that some information blocks are at times juxtaposed a bit too awkwardly with more dramatic or narrative passages; or that, in Marcel Theroux’s words, the characters’ voices should lack singularity: “A further weakness is a reliance on long expositional speeches that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually saying. Miranda is the worst offender, but elsewhere Turing explains the history of AI in a voice identical to the narrator’s, which is itself rather similar to Adam’s” (Theroux n.p.). Such variations require the exercise of the type of double attention elicited by literary texts, in which concentrating on the story goes along with simultaneously considering the way in which it is mediated (Citton 2017, 158). They also command progressiveness and slowness in considering the minute, gradual shifts in voice and tonality that are constitutive of what Felski defnes as attunement to the specifcities of the narrative (Felski 60). And I would argue that they buttress the hypothesis of the narrator’s becoming-machine: the tendency to intersperse the narrative with essayistic or encyclopaedic chunks for instance, and the dissonance that this creates alert the readers to the fact that the unexperienced narrator may be writing in the same way as a humanoid may think, with jumps and inconsistencies that do not seem to take into account the complexity and the fuidity of experience and of the literary text. From this point of view, what emerges is a situation in which the imitation game goes both ways, Adam mimicking the narrator and other human beings, in his learning process, in the same way as Charlie’s mode of thinking and processing information follows Adam’s course. And precisely, acting like, implies a mode of performance that, through exposition to duration, may result in becoming with. In other terms, the attentiveness that each individual, human or non-human, devotes to the other brings along an openness that unleashes the proto-ethical potential of attention (Depraz 2018, 11) and edges towards the “ethics of becoming” that is so central in posthuman parlance (Braidotti 2013, 49). In Manuela Rossini’s terms, “the life of any mortal creature writes itself in the singular-plural; there is no human or non-human being that is not, at the same time, an embodied ‘being-with’, or co-existence of self and other” (Rossini 159).

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One step further, I cannot help feeling that insuffcient attention may have been paid to the title, which is reproduced in Adam’s parting words, while he is nearing extinction and entrusting Charlie and Miranda with some predictions. His last words are a haiku of his composition, comparing the inferiority of the human fate limited to one life with that of other components of the organic world, like leaves on a tree, that get renewed each spring, a metaphor for AI’s capacity to fout death and rethink our relation to time in apt posthuman fashion. Before reciting the poem, he introduces it in the following terms: But it’s not about leaves and trees. It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together … the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time … we’ll surpass you … and outlast you … even as we love you. Believe me these lines express no triumph… Only regret (McEwan 2019, 279). In other words, the title refers to the prediction of human obsolescence that is such an anxiety in relation to AI and which animates the debates on machine ethics. It is also a quotation from Adam’s speech, which suggests that the eponymous “Me” is Adam, the “You” being the narrator, characters and, potentially readers, since the illocutionary force of the pronoun radiates well beyond the confnes of the page. Still, when putting this in relation with the dissonance examined above, it seems as if Kipling’s poem had itself been downgraded into obsolescence. In fact, after asserting the power of the machines, culminating with “We are everything on earth—except The Gods!,” the poem closes on an italicised section that largely mitigates the previous upbeat tone: Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all that power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain! (Kipling 759; original emphasis) On the contrary, McEwan’s novel may introduce the uncanny idea that the “Me” of the title includes the narrator’s “I,” which would activate the ghostly hypothesis that Adam himself may be the narrator of the story passing off as Charlie, once, thirty years after the events of 1982, technological advances have produced machines that no longer necessarily work in a closed system but have managed to process complex information—which used to be the prerogative of humans, precisely. This would account for the chronological unease that characterises the novel and that I have apprehended in terms of Nachträglichkeit above: not only is this device meant to pay homage to Turing’s work and infuence, but also to suggest that, despite Adam’s parting expression of untimeliness,

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we readers of the 21st century leafng through the frst-person narrative some thirty years after the events are already and unknowingly plunged into an age in which the perfection of AI has become a more concrete reality. Reading Machines Like Me through the prism of attention reveals the novel’s deep ambivalence in relation to the joint subjects of machine consciousness and AI. Admittedly, it seems to confrm most of the binaries associated with the traditional ethos of humanism. This is the inference that most commentators arrive at, among whom Kopka and Schaffeld, who insist that “McEwan’s narratological choices perpetuate a benignly anthropocentric stance” (Kopka and Schaffeld n.p.) and conclude on the novel’s “steadfast humanism” (Kopka and Schaffeld n.p.). I have tried to complement and trouble such a reading by showing that even though it applies strictly to the events and situation of the fctional year 1982 as presented in the novel, this is not necessarily the case when the temporal complexity is taken into consideration, including the moment when the retrospective narration takes place, which would imply an equally ambivalent stance on posthuman developments, anyway. In this case, the novel’s main pragmatic effect would be to involve the readers in a Turing test the better to pull the carpet from under their feet, shockingly revealing their belatedness by implying that their present is already a future. That they are already, unwittingly, there. Seen in this way, the novel performs or at least gives an experiential knowledge of the latency inherent in perceiving violent, traumatic breakthroughs, as indicated Cathy Caruth: The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself. The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is frst experienced at all. (Caruth 1995, 7–8; emphasis added) From his point of view, McEwan could well be showing us trauma in the making, in between the frst breakthrough of AI in the fctional world of 1982 and the present corresponding to the moment of narration, more than thirty years later. If this is the case, Machines Like Me offers a glimpse of that powerfully destabilising power of AI, which signals the wider trauma of the entry into the posthuman age even while exposing anthropocentrism as a myth and possibly showing that even if not endowed with ethical capacities of the particularist type, sentient beings like Adam, even if not of woman born, may well be superior in terms of judgement, as suggested by Ivan Callus’s analysis of the title: “Moral prevarication and expedient conduct in the midst of ethical quandaries

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is what people like us countenance and machines like Adam do not” (Callus 39).

3.2 Artifcial Perception Even if Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, also uses a humanoid character, it refects fairly differently the trauma of the entry into the posthuman age. Perhaps the reason is that Ishiguro’s novel moves one step further than McEwan in choosing a humanoid not only as a character but also as the protagonist, and goes on to interrogate the limits of the narrative prose of fction by making it—or her—the frst-person narrator. In fact, for an author very much involved in the writing of stories whose frst-person narrators have the power to delve into and probe at the motions of their own consciousnesses, the choice of a humanoid as teller is no slight decision, as the debates on AI and machine consciousness occupy a fair share of media coverage. Most reviewers were keen to situate Ishiguro’s eighth novel in the wake of his previous production, several of them insisting on the continuity with The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005) (Self n.p.; Thomas Jones n.p.). What prompted the comparisons was Ishiguro’s technique that consists in using frst-person narrators that very painstakingly and retrospectively account for their perceptions and ruminations, mixing the hope to move on and the denial of a central issue or secret that is revealed very progressively and is ultimately allowed to puncture the narrative (Gordon n.p.). Of course, the reviewers equally raised the issue of genre, and underlined the presence of science fction (Thomas Jones), on account of its speculative dimension and of its use of technologically advanced creations and … critters. The other recurrent generic mention was that of dystopia, in relation with Never Let Me Go, admittedly, as Klara and the Sun is situated in a country that looks like the USA in a near future and that does not compare favourably with the readers’ present. Contrary to what is to be found in Machines Like Me, no temporal games are played upon the reader in Ishiguro’s text, and no sense of an uncanny obliqueness to the present is instilled in the narrative. The world of Klara and the Sun is very much like ours and very little defamiliarisation is meted out to the reader. Still, it is dystopian in content as it rehearses some dominant contemporary anxieties about pollution, social disruption and human obsolescence. Klara is a solar-powered humanoid, an AF, or artifcial friend (there are Boy AFs and Girl AFs) of the B2 generation that has already been replaced by B3s as the novel opens. AFs are produced to become the best friends of teenagers. They are displayed in showrooms where customers come to choose them before taking them home. They are programmed to be carers, to look after the teenager they have been allocated to and make him/ her happy. They are initially devoid of any information and they learn

120 Of (Wo)men and Machines from experience, developing some form of uniqueness, as is the case with Adam in Machines Like Me. Being solar-powered, they are very much concerned with pollution, which is presented as a major issue—from this point of view, Klara’s worship of the sun could be a lever for an allegorical reading of the novel as a warning about climate change. Still, the main thematic constituent of this dystopian world is the indirect evocation of a society that is the prey of a cut-throat competition. In fact, even if this is never stated bluntly, it seems as if in the world of Klara and the Sun robots had come to replace most human workers, even taking some of the best positions, making humans redundant or “substituted.” As a consequence, parents who can afford it may choose to get their children to be enhanced or, as the text prefers, “lifted,” which in fact means that they go through an operation of “genetic editing” that is supposed to give them the best chances in life and secure a job (Ishiguro 2021, 247). The reader discovers progressively that the process of tampering with the children’s genetic inheritance does not come without danger. In fact, Josie, the teenager who adopts Klara, is severely ill on account of the treatment that she was submitted to, and the reader learns midway through the novel that she used to have an elder sister, Sal, who died after she was “lifted.” In her review for The International New York Times, Radhika Jones commented on Ishiguro’s trick of using “banal language […] redeployed with sinister portent,” a characteristic that words and phrases like “lifted,” “the unlifted,” “genetic editing,” or else “substituted” powerfully activate (Jones n.p.). This lends the novel a sense of diffuse menace compounded of knowledge and uncertainty, or denial. It also makes the social and political background against which the story is etched send ripples of unease and gets the reader to attend to the general situation in which society seems to be separated into two strata: the privileged class of those who still have a job—which will at some point be wholly made up of genetically enhanced survivors—and the underclass of downgraded, “unlifted” citizens. The consequences of such a situation are a mounting social violence that has led some people like Josie’s father to live in a survivalist community, which makes another character call him a fascist (Ishiguro 2021, 231). Of course, there seems to be a fairly elevated degree of rage against the robots, as one urban episode makes clear (Ishiguro 2021, 242), for even if the bulk of the plot takes place in a secluded spot in the countryside, where Josie, her mother and their neighbour Rick, Josie’s best friend, live, the novel begins and ends up in the city, from store window to scrapyard. 3.2.1 An Unwonted Focus Choosing a frst-person narrator who is also a humanoid robot is a move heavy with consequences as regards the task of representing consciousness. It raises issues in the treatment of voice and, above all

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here, focalisation, related to the challenge of realism—and more specifically psychological realism. The evocation of consciousness, but also of perceptions, and admittedly attention implies breaking new ground. This does not mean that using a non-human frst-person narrator is totally innovative (Zunshine), but still, it sounds something like a statement or an alert that a Nobel Prize winner renowned for the crafting together of introspective frst-person narratives should embark on such a venture. All characters in Klara and the Sun are shown to be attentive to each other: Josie’s mother, the housekeeper that she has hired, Melania, and Rick pay a great deal of attention to Josie, whose illness requires permanent care. And at times, Klara herself is the object of deep attention, when she is considered for purchase in the frst part of the novel, or later when her capacities to help Josie and even impersonate her if the girl were to disappear, are assessed and tested. But of course, as in The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans or Never Let Me Go, the main subject of attention is Klara as narrator and main source of focalisation. As with Machines Like Me, this is accentuated by the fact that she fnds herself in a learning situation (Edmund Gordon even considers the novel as a Bildungsroman [Gordon n.p.]). The frst pages of the novel are clear about this permanent intake of new information as the experience that Klara has ever had at this early stage is that of peering through the windows of the store in which she is displayed. This provides her with her only access to the world and a strong sense of dramatic irony hovers over the frst part and will never absent itself from the pages, even while it goes decreasing. A great deal of defamiliarisation emanates from this early stage, as when Klara, whose powers of observation are always extolled by the manager of the store (Ishiguro 2021, 8), watches a scene performed by a small man in a raincoat standing across the street and a woman that she calls Coffee Cup Lady, she crossing the street so that they can embrace. What looks like an emotional scene, in which two people who have not seen each other for quite some time meet again in happiness and possibly sorrow remains a mystery to Klara, and an interpretation has to be provided by the manager of the store (Ishiguro 2021, 19–21). Klara learns by trial and errors, and the fact that, as readers, we should know so much of what she is coming to terms with puts us in a position of superiority that will possibly be reversed in the end, when considering how superior she may be on another, ethical plane, this time. The other function of the dramatic irony is to solicit our empathy for the budding subject that we catch in a process of becoming, striving to become an intelligent, sentient humanoid robot with a unique personality, as she goes on through her short life, makes her own experiences, and is fashioned by her relationships with her essentially human environment. In other terms, the frst parts of Klara and the Sun are characterised by a form of “double dialectic” in which the readers’ engagement with the non-human narrator elicits both defamiliarisation

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and empathy (Bernaerts, Caracciolo, Herman and Vervaeck 72–73). In such circumstances, empathy and defamiliarisation work hand in hand, as the estrangement produced by Klara’s unknowing perspective tends to renew the reader’s perception on human behaviour and more particularly on the complexity of human emotions, which proves diffcult to grasp for the non-human character but that she will manage to espouse. The consequence is that, despite the strangeness of her observation and language, Klara is quickly and effortlessly adopted as a fctional character. In other terms, her fctional status immediately compares to that of a human character, which puts her technically and pragmatically on a par with the other individuals and enhances her “humanity”—or at least her human traits. Empathy is solicited by a special treatment of voice. From the beginning, and as suggested in the evocation of the passage of Raincoat Man and Coffee Cup Lady, there emerges a systematic tendency to transform nouns into names, as a child would do. Similarly, being solar-powered, she never refers to the sun without capitalising the word, giving it Godlike attributes. The fascination with names is also omnipresent in the dialogues as, when Klara as a character is referring to other characters who are present in the scene or addressing them, she never uses personal pronouns and repeats their names. The impression that such idiosyncrasies create is, precisely, that of a highly individualised narrator, with a distinguishable voice, who retains speech elements characteristic of childhood arousing the reader’s tenderness, empathy, and wish to trust in what is presented as an honest, innocent narrator. Still, as underlined above, what is most remarkable in the realistic evocation of Klara’s consciousness is the singular use of focalisation. At several stages, the reader’s attention is drawn to special moments in which Klara’s visual perceptions solicit her own attention. This is the case early on in the frst part when she observes two taxis following each other, not such an astounding piece of information, one would feel. Still, she specifes that, as the frst taxi starts moving faster, the gap widens between the two and allows for the fgure of an unaccompanied teenage girl to emerge into her feld of vision and be observed for some time till the gap between the taxis increases to reveal that in fact she is followed by her boy AF walking three paces behind her—which by the way allows her to intuit the big discovery of her own programmed obsolescence. What I mean here is not that she will be replaced by robots of a new generation (she has witnessed and accepted this) but that despite the easy, generous feelings that may be originally shared by a child and his/her AF, the child is bound to change and to move on, discarding the AF in the process: “The boy AF had accepted this, even though other passers-by would see and conclude that he wasn’t loved by the girl. And I could see weariness in the boy AF’s walk, and wondered what it might be like to have found a home and yet to know that your child didn’t want you” (Ishiguro 2021,

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15–16). The frst hint at Klara’s lonely end in the scrapyard is dropped in this passage when a greater reliance on attention shared with the narrator solicits our consideration as readers. Indeed, unlike what happens in Machines Like Me where the humanoid robot is seen from outside, in Klara and the Sun the robot’s strangeness remains nominal. We never feel endangered by her and there is little if no mystery as to her intentions and feelings. Since she is given credibility as a character and as a narrator, her attentional capacities have to be shown to approximate to those of other characters or narrators. This is why the oscillatory movement between background consciousness and attention bolstered by perception is one of the rules of this narrative as it is of Ishiguro’s other novels—and of the bulk of realistic fction. The iterative passages, providing background information, are interspersed with singulative ones, when the narrator concentrates on the telling of a singular event that requires our attention, as is the case on page 15 (“Once, […]”), or on page 19 (“It was two days after I’d frst met Josie.”), and many others. Such variations in the frequency with which episodes are narrated testify to and perform a “discontinuist” (Moinat 84) rhythm of attention that abides by the rules described by Citton in his The Ecology of Attention. They also provide the condition for the experience of intensifcation (Depraz 2018, 263). This is the case in the above-mentioned passage, but also in sundry other ones, and more specifcally at moments when something seems to go wrong with Klara’s perception. Such situations may be due either to the depletion of her batteries, or to experiences of perplexity or stress, as fragmentation often distorts and delays her apprehension of the external world. The frst time that such an occurrence emerges, on page 26, the kaleidoscopic presentation of the scene comes as something of a shock, or at least a surprise. Certainly, the reader gets used to such episodes in which Klara concentrates on her own perception, i.e., attends to her own attention, as appears in the following passage coinciding with one of the climatic episodes in the novel: “‘Klara,’ the Mother said in a frmer voice, and suddenly she’d partitioned into many boxes […] In several of the boxes her eyes were narrow, while in others they were wide open and large. In one box there was room only for one staring eyeball” (Ishiguro 2021, 208). This is also the case in the later parts of the novel, when Klara’s capacities have been impaired after she has accepted to deliver part of the precious liquid that is contained at the back of her head in her generous and misguided attempt to ruin a machine that she thinks is at the root of all pollution—in so doing, she is intent on honouring a pact that she has made with the Sun whose purpose is to save Josie’s life, an illustration of the novel’s melodramatic strain designed to insist on the narrator’s endearing capacities for hope. In such passages, the images that she gets are made up of cones or cylinders that take more time to organise themselves into recognisable objects

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(Ishiguro 2021, 237). Similar episodes, in which the narrator attends to her own perceptions and, one step further, to her attention, are preludes to the fnal introspective pages showing Klara standing on her own in the scrapyard where she is allowed to have “her slow fade” (Ishiguro 2021, 298). Towards the end of the last part, the events in her narrative reach the moment when she is narrating them and, with nothing to do and nobody to interact with, she concentrates on her memories, sorts through them and puts them in order, commenting on the way in which they tend to overlap and merge, in a manner reminiscent of free association. In such passages (with a special mention of pages 301 and 302) what is obtained is an effect not unlike that favoured by the high Modernist masters of psychological realism, and the capacity to attend to the objects and forms of her own attention makes Klara, at the end of her apprenticeship as an AF, the worthy successor of Ishiguro’s famous frst-person narrators. 3.2.2 AI Vulnerability Perhaps the main reason that accounts for Klara’s credibility as both a protagonist and a narrator is the fact that, like all other main characters in the novel, she is essentially vulnerable. What I mean here is that, like all living beings, and unlike the machines in Kipling’s poem or Adam’s fellow humanoid robots, her life is programmed to end rather quickly. Adam’s vision of endless renewal, in his fnal haiku inspired from the cycles of nature, is not an option in Ishiguro’s world. At one point, Capaldi, the mad scientist fgure that contrives replicas of human beings so that the latter can go on “living” after their own deaths, comes to Josie’s mother’s house to present a plan of his: against what he considers to be popular prejudice, according to which some people react violently in front of intelligent machines, he wants to prove that AFs are so advanced and admirable that the humans need not fear them and should take the opportunity to learn from them. To do so, he suggests Klara lets herself be dismantled so that he can peer into the “sealed black boxes” that accommodate the AF’s brain (Ishiguro 2021, 297)—but also mind and heart, as there seems to be no hesitation in Klara and the Sun that the protagonist also has a mind and emotions, as they are witnessed from inside. He goes on explaining: “You AFs, you’re magnifcent. We’re discovering things we’d never have believed possible. […] I know you’ll be uniquely useful to us. Please, will you help?” (Ishiguro 2021, 297–98). These words imply the possibility of discovering the secrets of AF uniqueness, complexity and effciency, so as to learn from them and to warrant not only their replication but also their improvement, which implies in turn some form of continuity beyond the physical envelope of hardware that constitutes each individual AF. Still, the offer is rejected by Josie’s mother: “Klara deserves better. She deserves her slow fade”

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(Ishiguro 2021, 298). As seen above, she does get through this process of exclusion and dilapidation that makes the mother’s “deserves” ring with some acerbic irony. The last pages of the novel, when she is abandoned in an open-sky scrapyard while retaining all her intellectual and emotional capacities, generate a great deal of pathos. This is made even more acute by the fact that Klara is visited by her former manager, who had slipped from the plot at the end of the frst part only to eventually pop up unannounced, a fgure of failure and nostalgia herself. Their short exchange consists in some sort of recapitulation of the main achievements in Klara’s life, and it allows her former manager to express her admiration for Klara: “[You]were certainly one of the most remarkable. You had such unusual insight. And observational abilities” (Ishiguro 2021, 304). Thanks to the frst-person narrative, the readers know full well about such qualities and are aware that they are intact, which makes Klara’s discarding and dumping all the crueller, yet another means of effciently securing the reader’s empathy. In the explicit, as Klara watches her former manager “walk away” (those being the last words in the novel), the impression that we are left with is that Klara’s fade out is duplicated in the manager’s own, as she herself absents herself progressively from Klara’s feld of perception and from the story, on tiptoes as it were. At this moment, a common obsolescence is underlined—unless it could be called “mortality,” as Ishiguro’s human treatment of the humanoid narrator invites us to consider. Anthropological and humanoid vulnerability seem to merge here, giving pride of place to the idea of a continuum between the human and the non-human—and even the organic and the inorganic—signposting the issue of obsolescence and insisting that it is shared more universally than meets the eye. Thanks to the use of frst-person narration, the novel invites us to consider some general “ontological vulnerability” (Maillard 198; translation mine) that cuts across well-established binaries and defeats all considerations of exceptionalism. Ishiguro’s narratorial choice would then seem to endorse some of the central tenets of posthuman thought, among which that of a relational capacity extending well beyond the human species, including “non-anthropomorphic” elements, hence, implicitly, anthropomorphic elements like humanoid characters and narrators (Braidotti 2013, 60). More importantly perhaps, such aesthetic choices allow for the expression of a specifc ethical stance relying on the durable analogy between human and humanoid. Clearly, the exclusion of the intelligent, sentient robot and her dumping into a scrapyard is evocative of what contemporary societies are doing to some of their members or would-be members, as is potentially the case with the elderly, subjects suffering from disabilities, refugees, etc. As already underlined, some individuals and communities are thrown into invisibility on account of norms of recognition or disposability that apply differently to groups, infra-national and supra-national alike. This is what Judith Butler has never ceased to

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remind us of, ever since the publication of her ground-breaking work on precariousness: “vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is attributed to any human subject” (Butler 2006, 43)—and to any humanoid subject, Ishiguro’s text suggests. Klara and the Sun is therefore a novel that sets great store by constructing a continuum of rationality, sentience and responsibility so as to make the reader pay attention to ordinary invisibilities, according to the basic tenets of Ordinary Language Philosophy. It therefore triggers off an allegorical reading that lays bare the exclusionary mechanisms of contemporary societies, and in so doing promotes a politics of literature that obliquely contributes to the debate as to what Western democracies are capable of, and as to their limits. If Klara and the Sun is a book about hope, as indicated by some commentators, it is also one about human exclusion and loneliness. What the novel equally gets the readers to pay attention to is another form of vulnerability of a distinctly relational type that Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou have expressed in terms of exposure in the specifc acceptation of an exposure to the other, as indicated above (Butler and Athanasiou 2). Indeed, it seems as if the humanoid narrator of Ishiguro’s novel is the sum of multiple vulnerabilities, very much like a wounded protagonist like Mr F in Skin Lane. To quote Butler and Athanasiou again, I would claim that Klara proves that “the human [and the humanoid are] always the event of [their] multiple exposures” (Butler and Athanasiou 32). This means that not only is Klara exposed to obsolescence but that she is the exact picture of vulnerability to the other. In other terms, Klara seems to be programmed to be and to almost practically “incarnate” this (in-)human ideal that Emmanuel Levinas has consistently defned and called for in his oeuvre. In Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, he offers a radical reading of vulnerability; to him “subjectivity is sensibility—an exposure to others—, a vulnerability and a responsibility in the proximity of the others, the-one-for-the-other” (Levinas 1991, 77). Besides, vulnerability is one of the pillars of passivity, an essential concept in his ethics as passivity is instrumental to the surrender of being that is at the root of the ethics of alterity and that he envisages in terms of disinterestedness (or “dés-inter-essement,” in the French original). To him, “exposure as a sensibility is […] passive […]; it is like an inversion of the conatus of esse, a having been offered without holding back” (Levinas 1991, 75). In other words, as I have underlined elsewhere, vulnerability, based on passivity, manifests itself independently of volition: in the ethical relation, the self is a being-forthe-other and is defned by its way of always already being a hostage of the other (Ganteau 2015, 6). Of course, such a model has been largely infuential in the ethical turn that took hold of the humanities at the end of the 20th century, but it has also been criticised on grounds of its idealism and impracticality, as opposed to other ethics of a more incarnated,

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pragmatic type, like the Ricœurian ethics of alterity or the ethics of care, for instance. Paradoxically, then, Ishiguro’s solution is to provide an instance of such an impossibly radical being-for-the-other by choosing a narrator who is technically non-human, even if she can boast all the qualities of selfessness and openness to the other that guarantee the emergence and sustainability of the ethical relation. The enhancement that Klara provides is of an ethical nature: she is not the type of humanoid robot designed for the performance of repetitive, irksome tasks. She is simply programmed to have access to feelings, to attend to others and care for them. She was devised to allow for a praxis of being-for-theother, which remains an ideal in the Levinasian philosophical model but which the power of fction manages to actualise. This is the reason why Klara is the epitome of precariousness: because she can be disposed of, because her obsolescence is infexibly programmed, because she exists only in relation to the others (when she is of no use, in the last part, she is allowed to stand by the fridge or in the utility room upstairs) and because she enacts the etymological meaning of precariousness which means “beseeching,” from the Latin praecarius and its compound, prex, meaning “prayer” (Regard 86). In other words, precariousness also refers to a condition of instability and provisionality, as of a tenancy being uncertain and “depending on the favour of another” (OED online), for which one has to beg, using a suppliant tone. This is what Klara does, precisely, in her attempt to save the child that she has been entrusted with and for whom she feels radically responsible. Attending to Josie’s welfare, in this case, implies becoming the picture of humility and selfessness and choosing the way of sacrifce. As already explained, Klara consents with sacrifcing some measure of a precious solution stocked in her skull, just behind her ear, because she is led into thinking that this will put out of order a machine used for road repairs and producing a large quantity of black, toxic fumes. To her innocent, hopeful mind, if she does so the pollution will be lessened, which will please the sun—or rather the “Sun” as she spells the word throughout. Being solar-powered, of course she considers that the sun is the source of all life and it appears as a bountiful godhead that happens to be going to bed in a barn, on the top of the hill close to Josie’s house. This is why, escorted by Rick, she returns to the barn at the top of the hill on a sunny day to meet the sun—or rather its golden rays—and pray for his help in saving Josie, now that she, Klara, has honoured her part of her self-imposed pact by destroying the polluting machine. Two pages are devoted to the pleading in itself (Ishiguro 2021, 275–76), a long orison in which the character’s attention (and the readers’) is totally devoted to the absolute other. Attending to the other is to be understood here as praying for the other, a radical instance of being-for-the-other that is reminiscent of Levinas’s disinterestedness and of Murdoch’s unselfng—and,

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admittedly, of Weil’s praise of prayer that, in Ishiguro’s fctional world, is allowed to come to fruition (Ishiguro 2021, 292). 3.2.3 Machine Vigilance A non-human yet all too humane frst-person narrator is what characterises the narrative in more ways than just one. Granted, such a choice allows for an experiment in what machine consciousness might be like, and it also allows for a fctional experiment in what such a picture of selflessness and being-for-the-other could achieve in practical terms. Still, unlike what is to be found in various ethical models in which the will of the subject has to be exerted, since they have to decide what matters instead of abiding by rulebooks, what happens with Klara is that we are presented with an oxymoronic alliance of programmed attention to the particularities of the other. In other terms, Klara’s reactions to the other’s proposals or needs (be they expressed or implicit) are automatically, always already oriented towards their satisfaction and her own unselfng, which implies that, in her case, the relation of care for/of the other does not precede responsibility (Laugier 2015c, 136) but follows upon it. Or perhaps, as Klara is designed to learn and improve through experimentation and experience, thereby warranting her uniqueness, the particularist attention that she pays to everyday situations concerning her charge may be said to buttress the original programming, both general orientation and particular consideration working together to give an example of how disposition and action become allies. From this point of view, Klara is the picture of what Depraz calls “vigilance,” by which she means that attention relies not only on cognitive powers but also on ethical opening and involvement (Depraz 2018, 26). In the end, what emerges is the wish of undoing boundaries between the human and the non-human not only by making the non-human acceptable through her transformation into a round character whose narratorial functions make her close to the reader but also by showing how she prolongs and deploys human ethical dispositions and capacities. From this point of view, the novel seems to corroborate Braidotti’s vision that “[c]ontemporary machines are no metaphors, but they are engines or devices that both capture and process forces and energies, facilitating interrelations, multiple connections and assemblages. They stand for radical relationality and delight as well as productivity” (Braidotti 2013, 92)—with the difference here, perhaps, that the interrelations and connections seem to be of an asymmetrical type, providing an incandescent vision of the ethical relation. Furthermore, on top of promoting the idea and practice of being-forthe-other, Klara and the Sun presents the reader with another type of extreme situation, i.e., that of becoming-other—if I may use this tautology. Of course, through her apprenticeship of human ways, Klara is on a

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course that makes her tend towards the human, including complexity of feelings, as seen above. From this point of view, she qualifes as a round character and learns about life’s realities. Even if her programming does not allow her to change fundamentally, she acquires considerable depth throughout her initiation process and an understanding of situations, including that of rejection and loneliness, which make her the complex character treated in a realistic way on which the novel hinges. Still, the main element of becoming-other is articulated in a central scene in which the whole family—including the estranged father—together with Klara, Rick and his mother, go to the city to meet Mr Capaldi. The purpose of the trip is to get Josie to model for a portrait that is being made of her. Still, the whole episode is shrouded in mystery and, in typical fashion for an Ishiguro novel, the narrator allows enough clues to transpire so that the reader knows that some revelation of the hefty type is under way. In a central scene when Klara is admitted into the “artist’s” studio, she is presented with a questionnaire and types her answers into a computer, not letting the reader become privy to the content of the questions. Then, in transgression of the general docility that has characterised her from the beginning, she goes into a room into which she was not invited to step and discovers the portrait that is, in fact, a replica of Josie in the making. The ghastly secret of the novel is thus unveiled progressively, much in the same way as the fact that the main characters and narrator of Never Let Me Go are revealed to be donors raised and educated the better to be sacrifced to save other people’s lives (and of course the two novels work along similar lines, i.e., getting us emotionally involved with characters the better to make us experience how inhumane their sacrifce is). Because Josie’s elder daughter Sal died after being “lifted” and because the rather basic replica or “doll,” as the characters insist, that was made of her never worked at the time as AI was not advanced enough to do so, the idea that Josie’s mother and Mr Capaldi have mulled over and put into execution is that they should make an outward envelope of the girl who seems to be dying from the consequences of her genetic editing, get Klara to assumer her appearance and, as she is gifted with such attentional and observational powers, ask her not only to impersonate but also to become Josie, having accompanied her at every single moment of her life over the last months. This is what Mr Capaldi expresses in unambiguous terms, addressing Josie’s mother as she is finching from the idea of completing the task: There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now. It’s not faith you need. Only rationality. (Ishiguro 2021, 210)

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In fact, they will go on with the plan which will be cancelled, ultimately, as Josie gets better, recovers, goes on with her own plans and moves to college, forgetting about Klara. She then leaves her behind, with the consequence that the AF ends up in the scrap yard after being allowed to go through her slow fade. Anyway, what is concretised in this pivotal passage is a process of becoming that goes two ways. In fact, Josie, when menaced with anthropological obsolescence despite her genetic editing, unwittingly fnds herself in the grips of a becoming-machine as Klara is to replace her and to become her, the idea being that after acting like her for some time she will be able to move from analogy to identity. Reciprocally, we are presented with a simultaneous and complementary scenario according to which Klara, an AI device, is caught in a logic of becoming human, beyond the structures of analogy, and on the strength of a rehearsal leading to an impersonation. In fact, she is confronted with a leaking into the other as a modality of becoming-human (Ishiguro 2021, 207). Either way, this transformation is made possible on account of Klara’s exceptional attentional capacities that are demonstrated several times in the novel, as in the initial episode in which Josie’s mother asks the AF narrator to imitate her daughter’s way of walking and other idiosyncrasies, to make sure of her capacity to attend (Ishiguro 2021, 43; see also 103–104). In Klara and the Sun, attention allows for a knowledge of the gestures of the other but also of the other’s mind and, more radically, heart. And it is because Klara can attend to singularities that she is also capable of becoming unique, far away from the idea of a programming common to all intelligent machines of her kind and rendering each identical with the other. The novel may be said to espouse an anti-human perspective, conveyed by Klara’s capacity to allow an “ethics of becoming” (Braidotti 2013, 49) to triumph, a position tentatively and furtively voiced by Josie’s father when he confesses that Mr Capaldi may be right, that “there’s nothing so unique about [his] daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer” (Ishiguro 2021, 224). In other terms, the uniqueness lies both in the humans and in the intelligent, sentient machine, in this novel. It should come as no surprise as, in the end, despite the technological inspiration and the homage that it seems to pay to the non-human, Klara and the Sun does not challenge the principles of humanism, which is inherent in the narrative choices on which it is based. In fact, writing a novel whose protagonist and narrator is an intelligent machine implies bestowing on it a high degree of humanity. Otherwise, the dynamics of empathy would most certainly fail. As already emphasised, for them to work Klara’s vulnerability has to be evoked realistically, which is what happens throughout, as empathising implies projecting feelings onto a critter and reciprocally making the latter the seat of not only affects but also emotions. On account of this constitutive bias, the intelligent machine here may be seen as a hybrid whose non-human components are much less prominent that the human ones. In other terms, despite the defamiliarising treatment of focalisation, which reminds us that

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digitalisation may simulate perception but is of a radically distinct nature, and even as we are shown from inside the virtual translation of experience into data (Rutsky 189), what prevails eventually is Klara’s anthropomorphic traits. From this point of view, I would argue that the novel seems to present a demise of dualisms—through the processes of becoming-machine or becoming-human—the better to maintain them. Similarly, there does not seem to be a deconstruction of species supremacy at work here. In fact, Klara is shown to be the repository of quintessentially human qualities, as she provides the image of what an enhanced human being would be, in the feld of ethics and more particularly of the ethics of alterity and of care. The novel thereby gives the lie to such posthuman tenets, which led some commentators to claim that “we have never been human,” paraphrasing Bruno Latour’s famous title (Clarke 142), so much so that we are left with a demonstration that we are human, all too human. The novel plays the trick of presenting a nominally non-human character and narrator who is in fact the depository of human and humane values, which has led Alex Preston, in his review for The Guardian, to conclude on the fact that it privileges a vision of “the beauty and fragility of our humanity” (Preston n.p.). It would seem as if McEwan and Ishiguro were at cross purposes. In fact, beyond appearances, i.e., in spite of the fact that Ishiguro’s move in using a humanoid narrator is highly transgressive, in the end Klara and the Sun promotes a humanist perspective. Machines Like Me is more radical in its spelling of a posthuman programme in which the human is severely decentred. This implies that even if Ishiguro’s novel may be considered to be more innovative, formally (relying on the central feature of a frst-person narrator that is an android robot), it consolidates the humanist status quo, as opposed to McEwan’s novel that underlines human limits and points at a horizon of ethical excellence that would rely on AI. Still, despite such apparently opposed stances, bot narratives share a lot by investigating the human–non-human continuum through the adjacent themes of AI and machine consciousness. This they effect through a special treatment of attention that is systematically on the side of the human, as it promotes a particularist approach specifc to the human, hence a particularist type of ethics. The technical onus lies on the resort to a specifc use of a humanoid perspective in Ishiguro’s novel while McEwan privileges a pragmatic gesture, making the reader perform a Turing test. Both texts promote a vision of attention as developing imitative capacities that are instrumental in replacing being with becoming(-with), thereby incarnating one of the tenets of posthuman thought. What results is a fourishing of attention in its relational nature, conducive to an openness to alterity that spells the subject’s (human or non-human) vulnerability. In the next chapter, I turn to this notion by moving towards the feld of disability and, more specifcally, cognitive disability.

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The changing perception of the human subject and his/her embeddings is an issue that contemporary narratives keep addressing from various perspectives. That of artifcial intelligence is of paramount importance, challenging and displacing the human from outside and raising the issue of an alternative embodiment. Intelligent machines expose the myth of individual and species sovereignty and draw attention to the subject’s radical openness and vulnerability. Attention to dependence and interdependence is also solicited from within the human province, by narrating disability, among other possibilities envisaged in the earlier chapters of this book. Indeed, embodiment implies a susceptibility to be wounded physically, psychically or neurologically through accident or through ageing that interrogates the modern vision of the subject as independent, i.e., respecting the ideal norms that defne what it means to be able. From this point of view, the idea that everybody may become disabled at some point in their lives has been gaining leverage and has given rise to a new category, the “temporarily able-bodied” or TAB. Alice Hall suggests that adopting this perspective allows for a “democratization of disability,” as “being disabled or having the potential to become disabled, is an aspect of identity and embodiment that all human beings share” (Hall 6). This suggests that any reader’s position on narrating disability can be an insider one, even if, for a majority of readers, the disabled is the other. But in this area as in many others, the outsider may well be an insider at the same time, and vice versa. In the feld of disability studies, the prominence of the norm has been thrown into visibility by Lennard J. Davis, in his ground-breaking Enforcing Normalcy (1995). He argues that humanity has discovered what a norm is very recently, in the 19th century, with the rise of industrialisation and the development of statistics (Davis 1995, 24), but that we live in a world of norms against which every aspect of our daily lives is measured. Such criteria defne the “normal body” and, thereby, the disabled body, which leads Davis “to focus not so much on the construction of disability as on the construction of normalcy,” so much so that “the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled DOI: 10.4324/9781003362265-5

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person” (Davis 1995, 23–24). Even if such a social constructionist model of disability has become very infuential in disability studies, it has been contested for various reasons, namely because it tends to promote a vision of disabled bodies as “docile” or “subjected,” as underlined by A. Hall (Hall 26). This gives short shrift to the militant orientation of disability studies that fnds its origins in second-wave feminism and in the work of groups suffering from discrimination and social stigma, as the introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies reminds us of: “Disability studies can trace its origin to the organization of disabled people whose voices emerged in the late 1960s and who shared ideas from those of previously excluded groups such as African Americans in the US, black and other minority ethnic groupings elsewhere, women, and lesbians and gay men” (Roulstone, Thomas and Watson 3). Still, the social construction of disability and disabled bodies remains a dominant approach. Admittedly, the emergence of disability studies as a discipline and the changed perspective on disability are the results of a long process that started from a situation of characterised exclusion, invisibility and pathologisation. Indeed, retrieving disability from the medical feld so as to make it assume pride of place in the social and political arena was one of the challenges of early theorists, like Rosemarie GarlandThomson who, in her Extraordinary Bodies (1997), stated her political agenda: “I want to move disability from the realm of medicine into that of political minorities, to recast it as a form of pathology to a form of ethnicity” (Garland-Thomson 6). For her, empowerment could clearly be based on physiological difference so as to achieve more visibility and equality of rights. Fifteen years on, Margrit Shildrick could promote what she calls “Critical Disability Studies” and sees as a “postconventional approach” (Shildrick 2012, 32). As opposed to the traditionally valued aspects of personhood associated with “autonomy, agency […] and a clear distinction between self and other,” she called for a “new focus on the signifcance of embodiment; an awareness of the workings of the cultural imaginary; a deconstruction of binary thought in favour of the fuidity of all categories; and a recognition that emotion and affect are as important as the material aspects of life” (Shildrick 2012, 32). From her perspective, disability studies are nothing less than a means to re-think the issue of the human subject as a deconstructed, problematised object of investigation and mode of being or, rather, becoming. Over the past two decades, disability studies have emerged as an academic feld that privileges interdisciplinary dialogue. In their introductory chapter, Roulstone, Thomas and Watson insist on this specifcity that anchors the discipline in the Humanities and they go on to list ten disciplinary felds that are central to it (Roulstone, Thomas and Watson 5). Interestingly, literature does not feature among them. This does not mean that literature’s contribution to the area is inexistent. Quite on the contrary, many articles and several book-length studies by

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literary scholars have demonstrated the signifcant role of fction, among other forms, in drawing attention to disability and in making representations of the disabled shift. This is the case with Garland-Thomson and A. Hall, as indicated above, but also David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis (2000), among others, namely Michael Bérubé whose work on disability and narrative has become a reference. Still, as underlined by Davis, “if disability appears in a novel, it is rarely centrally presented” (Davis 2017, 71). Of course, there are glorious counter-examples, as indicated by the main corpus addressed in Garland-Thomson’s pioneering study, as she draws examples from eminent American novelists like Faulkner and Steinbeck. Still, when considering the production of the last two centuries, it appears fairly quickly that Davis is largely right. This is all the more obvious since, as demonstrated by Mitchell and Snyder, “disability creeps,” meaning that traditional narratives of fction use disability as one central fgure that emblematises a character, subsuming all other traits (Mitchell and Snyder xi). It makes the stigma stick to the character, depriving it of the wealth of specifcation that could have made it rounder and more realistic. Additionally, Mitchell and Snyder fnd fault with the way in which the literary text encodes the disabled body as a trope, and more particularly as a metaphor, which implies that disability’s fgural status paradoxically effaces the specifcity of its own situation and refers to an altogether different notion—more often than not a moral indication. This leads the authors to ponder on the following conundrum, which encapsulates what they think typifes the literary presentation of disability as narrative prosthesis: “while stories rely upon the potency of disability as a symbolic fgure, they rarely take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions” (Mitchell and Snyder 48). In other terms, disability in narrative would tend to efface itself, being instrumentalised for other purposes in a selfveiling movement that obfuscates it even while it presents it, so much so that the disabled body in its material, realistic dimension and the concrete effects of the situation are rarely assessed for themselves. Such a regime of problematical visibility clearly contributes to a strengthening of the norms that allow to apprehend the “normalcy” and dominance of ableism. This is certainly not the case with such texts as Harry Parker’s debut novel, Anatomy of a Soldier (2016). Written by an ex-soldier that served some time in Afghanistan before being severely wounded and amputated, it is made up of 45 chapters that are also monologues produced by objects, thereby reviving the conventions of the it-narrative (Bernard 2016). Another particularity of this experimental narrative is its emancipation from the bonds of chronological order. Such a high degree of fragmentation clearly favours a reading of the novel as representative of traumatic realism (Rothberg 6, 19), the narrative fragments featuring

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the equally disjointed memories of the protagonist’s stepping on a mine during a mission. The shattered structure, enhanced by the perpetual change of narrators, itself refers to the dismemberment of Captain Tom Barnes’s bodily integrity. Such aesthetic choices clearly match the narrative contents of this novel that addresses the issue and communicates the experience of what it is to become disabled and what it is to start living with disability. Still, I would argue that its more innovative and committed aspects reside in its painstaking, at times unbearable evocation of the material reality of amputation and rehabilitation. In fact, the object-narrators provide a metonymic apprehension of the protagonist’s experiences, both physical and psychological, and they do so at ground level, taking physicality into account in a radical way that gets the reader to pay attention to the character’s embodiment. These objects hail from various areas: the military sphere, as is the case with the drone that kills two Afghan boys; the ethnic one, referring to the lives of the Afghan population that Tom Barnes cooperates with, as shown in the prosopopoeia of a hand-made carpet; the world of the hospital, as indicated with the tourniquet that is applied to the protagonist’s leg just after he has stepped on the mine or the saw that cuts through his leg; and that of rehabilitation, with the emblematic wheelchair and, more strikingly, the prostheses that he has to learn to walk and live with. The shock of the frst chapter, when the reader does not know who/ what is speaking till the very last lines, is compounded with the crudeness of the actions listed in a breath-taking rhythm evoking the reality of emergency: “I was there when the doctors looked worried. I clung to him when he came back, when he had output and his faltering heart pulsed again. I was still there when they hung the bag of blood above BA5799 and they cut the remains of his leg away” (Parker 2). As apparent in these lines, the narrative is characterised by an aesthetic of the humble, in that it uses simple objects as narrators and because it provides a perspective that is close to the ground and the event. In so doing, it rejects any elevation or any vantage point, which promotes the materiality and concreteness of the disabling event and of the ensuing disability. Such a manner of throwing material reality in the reader’s face edges at times towards the unbearable, as in Chapter 13, narrated by the surgical saw that is performing the second amputation. As it delves into the depth of the bone and tissues—a drastic way to take the reader into the character’s intimacy—denial of the reality of amputation and of the disabled body becomes impossible. The same could be said of the passages narrated by the prosthesis where the technical and sensorial aspects of the situation are probed into with scrupulous dedication: “There was no symmetry to your injuries. The other socket was bigger than mine and plugged round your stump up to the base of your pelvis. The metal frame and cylinder of the knee joint knocked against me as you adjusted it, grunting as you pushed into the socket and wincing at

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the unnatural feeling” (Parker 225). The stump, in its raw materiality, normally taken away from our view and which would usually be the object of denial, as we do “have diffculty in recognizing other people or ourselves as disabled” (Garland-Thomson x), is inescapably present here. It is displayed metonymically, being only described by contiguity—i.e., through the objects that accommodate it and the sensations and pain that they provoke—which partakes of a poetics of the obscene that fings centre stage what is generally left in the wings. Still, the specifcity in the relevant passages is that, by avoiding to provide a visual display and offering a metaleptic evocation of the stump, the circuitous presentation prevents any voyeuristic impulse. In other terms, we are far away from the spectacular imaginary that Garland-Thompson describes when analysing the culture of freak-shows and other ways and circumstances in which the spectacular is faunted in the reader’s face, in some traditional cultural evocations of disability (Garland-Thomson 55–63). In Anatomy of a Soldier, attention to the invisible is compulsory and the characteristics of this individual situation are mediated in ways that reject the consumption of a spectacle the better to share in an intimate experience. And not only is attention compulsory but its effect is to catch the reader’s “repeated attention” to an ordinary situation, i.e., a situation that may be extraordinary for the reader but that flls in the protagonist’s daily life and that elicits the reader’s “responsiveness” (Das 6, 7). Here, the point of view of the prosthesis is a powerful means to de-centre the vision of dependence and, through the specifc literary devices of prosopopoeia and internal focalisation, to achieve the counterfactual feat of renewing the perception of the disabled body and of what it is like to be disabled. In Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier, the experimental potential of the novel is solicited to puncture the norms of perception of disability that used to be the province of the traditional novel (Davis 2017, 72) so as to reframe our perception the paradoxical, object-mediated incarnation of incapacity laying the stress on its effects. I would argue that the metonymic drive that characterises this novel is a powerful lever to strike at the generalising powers of the metaphor: no move (meta-phora) towards generalisation and simplifcation is allowed as the reader’s attention to singularities is secured. From this point of view, Parker’s text kowtows Mitchell and Snyder’s description of what they call “modernist and postmodernist antinarratives” that “seek out means for disrupting the popular disability expectations [that] accrue around normalcy narratives” (Mitchell and Snyder 164). More specifcally, it seems to take part in what they see as the ethical and political programme of contemporary narratives of disability that refuse to use the fgure of the disabled the better to distort it, euphemise it and abuse it. On the contrary, they expose norms and secure attention to the incarnated, material experience of disability in a productive way:

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Postmodern narrative does not seek to fully repair or resolve a character’s impairment, but rather delves into the social, personal, political, and psychological implications of impairment as bequeathing a social awareness. This yields a literature teeming with disability as a matter of identity, perspective and subjectivity. As a result we will contend that disability studies bears a responsibility for recognizing and assessing the productive possibility in our era’s approaches to fguration and narrative of disability. (Mitchell and Snyder 165) Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier clearly fts the ethical bill that transpires from Mitchell and Snyder’s analyses. To do so, it taps the perceptual and “proto-ethical” powers of attention (Depraz 2018, 12), reminding the reader that it is a perceptual action that has to be trained and developed into a capacity. It thereby makes us attend to disability, showcasing the tension between its social construction and material reality and getting us to take its specifcities into consideration. Still, even though it presents the protagonist’s trauma indirectly, through narrative fragmentation and by using the resources of traumatic realism, the novel concentrates on the disabled body and is less directly concerned with disabilities of a more invisible type. In fact, the literary representation of cognitive disability seems to lag behind that of physical incapacity. Of course, instances of psychiatric affiction haunt the pages of the canon of literature in English, but they are more often than not the object of narratives caught in norms of recognition and submitted to control procedures that dispossess the disabled subjects, preventing them from accounting for their own disability. To take up a hyper-canonical example, this is eminently the case with Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason, who is deprived of speech and emits what the novel describes as sub-human, animal noises (Brontë 250–51). Texts written from inside the experience of cognitive disability (of the psychiatric or the neurological type) are fairly rare. Still, as underlined by G. Thomas Couser, “in late twentieth-century life writing, disabled people have initiated and controlled their own narratives in unprecedented ways and to an extraordinary degree” (Couser 483). As will be developed in the fnal part of this chapter devoted to Wendy Mitchell’s Somebody I Used to Know (2018), an autobiographical account of the author’s struggle with early-onset dementia, people with cognitive disabilities have started occupying the subject position in narratives, which opens up the possibility of empowerment. This is confrmed by Couser who avers that “one can fnd autobiographical accounts of conditions that would seem to preclude frst-person testimony altogether—for example autism, locked in syndrome, and early Alzheimer’s disease” (Couser 483: original emphasis). This is quite in line with what Mitchell and Snyder recognise as a new possibility offered by literature, which “provides us with a unique space for contemplating the complexity of

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physical and cognitive existences that is absent from nearly every other discursive space” (Mitchell and Snyder 166). Writing from inside the experience is of course what the autobiographical format allows for, but I would argue that this is also what the narrative of fction manages to achieve through its formal and pragmatic specifcities relying on internal focalisation and linguistic creativity. While it seems that the evocation of speech impairment has remained “underdeveloped” in literature (Roulstone, Thomas, and Watson 7), I would argue that the novel is fully equipped for presenting and performing situations of speech impairment and attending to disabilities, as is eminently the case with Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand (2021) that is in great part devoted to the manifestations of aphasia. Such narratives get the reader to pay attention to life forms that remain largely challenged and invisible but that strive to maintain or adopt specifc life styles all the same. And this they do owing to the formal specifcities offered by narrative, whether fctional or autobiographical.

4.1 Linguistic Impairment Admittedly, some earlier attempts at presenting cognitive disability may have paved the way for contemporary literary evocations. I have in mind B.S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal (1971), whose subtitle, A Geriatric Comedy, points at the darkest dimension of the genre. As is the case with all of Johnson’s oeuvre, this is a determinedly experimental text in which the same scene is narrated—or possibly just perceived— by various elderly people living in a home over which the eponymous matron rules mercilessly. They suffer from various degrees of sensory and cognitive impairment, and each chapter corresponds to a character/ narrator’s perception or evocation of the same scene. This provides an array of accounts spanning from consistent narrative, structured and coherently written, to versions presented on pages spotted with isolated words themselves separated by huge blanks. Through this narrative choice, the novel manages to evoke cognitive disability by presenting words as the effects and/or symptoms of disability. In the British context, then, there seems to be if not a tradition, at least a trickle of novels that associate formal experimentation with the evocation of dementia or other pathologies affecting the cognitive apparatus and a sustained concern for this type of neuro-novel. This is only to be expected at a time when the generation of the baby boomers is ageing and when the extension of life-expectancy has been multiplying the cases of disability linked to old age. Such is the context in which Jon McGregor published his ffth novel, Lean Fall Stand (2021). Like his previous narratives, this one goes in a direction that he had hitherto left unexplored, thematically, and offers an innovative type of formal experimentation by addressing the issue of aphasia and, one step further, by presenting it.

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4.1.1 Varying Attentional Tides Even if Lean Fall Stand follows a new direction, it shares some concerns with McGregor’s previous novel, Reservoir 13. For one thing, it brings in ecological concerns much in the same way as the earlier narrative, i.e., not by throwing them into the reader’s face but through intermittent and fairly unobtrusive references. The scene opens up in Antarctica where the protagonist, Robert Wright, is in charge of Station K, an outpost built some ffty years before for mapping purposes. His impressive experience of the region in which he has spent several months in a row for the last thirty years, makes him responsible for the welfare of two post-doctoral students who are employed on a GPS survey mission. The frst part is made up of the alternation of their interior monologues, every chapter being devoted to each of the three characters in turn. In breach of security rules, they have separated and are now caught in a sudden storm: Robert lies on the ground a few inches from a cliff from which he manages not to fall; Luke fnds refuge behind their skidoo; and Thomas, the amateur photographer, fnds himself drifting on an ice foe. The fact that the characters are cut off from each other by the storm and can only rely on the radio system to try to make contact with each other, associated with a visibility that is close to naught does not allow for a panoramic view of Thomas’s aquatic progress. Still, from the beginning, the reader cannot but fnd in this situation an echo of the white bear drifting on an ice foe that has become such a powerful and ubiquitous icon of climate change. The intimation is that, without any exception, all species are submitted to the menace of the Anthropocene and that the threat on human populations is getting closer. This is confrmed in several passages, as when, in Part 2, the scene shifts frst to a hospital in Chile, to which Robert has been evacuated after suffering a stroke during the previous episode, and then to Cambridge, where he has been repatriated and where his wife, Anna, holds a teaching and research position as an oceanographer. As she discovers the extent of Robert’s impairments (originally, he cannot walk unattended and he is smitten with quite severe aphasia, rendering all communication precarious), she has to learn to become a full-time carer while receiving repeated solicitations from her colleagues who are fnalising a scientifc project whose results are due to be presented at an international conference on climate change. We learn that she has been working on “anthropogenic climate impacts” since the mid-1980s (McGregor 2021, 85), that she supervises students’ works on the subject (McGregor 2021, 107) and that the results presented at the conference are of utmost importance to her and her team as they “would feed into the next IPCC” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (McGregor 2021, 181). At one point, she tries to escape from the stress of her multi-tasked, taxing existence by crouching at the edge of the river, close to their house, only to be invaded by a

140 Disabled Brains vision of catastrophic fooding devastating the landscape around her and the attendant infrastructures. The whole of the novel is situated within the context of global impairment brought about by the release of huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which clearly echoes some of the concerns of Reservoir 13 and other narratives examined above, in Chapter 2. In common with McGregor’s previous novel, Lean Fall Stand boasts another thematic and formal trait: the presence of a mystery at the heart of the narrative that sparks an inquest on the events that led to Thomas’s death at Station K. From the outset, we know that the safety measures were partially respected and that the original breach in security was made all the more critical as, because of his stroke and subsequent aphasia, Robert could not make radio contact with the base. Being privy to Robert’s diffculties and groping grasp of the situation as he is going through the emergency situation, the reader manages to assess the gravity of the circumstances that the three characters are plunged into and realises that the protagonist somehow failed in his duty. Of course, Thomas’s death prompts an inquiry, frst internal and then external, which surfaces regularly in the narrative, as Robert’s son is anxious that his father gets legal protection. The scene of the inquest (McGregor 2021, 184–86), when speech-impaired Robert is cross-examined by a lawyer and cannot manage to make himself understood, is one of the passages when his frustration erupts most intensely. Only towards the end is the reader allowed to share Robert’s own reconstitution of the truth (McGregor 2021, 258), which puts an end to the detective drive of the novel, without too much of a loss for the reader as, obviously—and in the same way as in Reservoir 13—the detection plot is only used the better to be abused by failing in the earlier novel and petering out in this one. Clearly, the main interest lies elsewhere: essentially in the presentation of cognitive disability and speech impairment after suffering a stroke. It also resides in the ways in which disability changes the lives of the family around the patient, and particularly of those who fulfl the duty of carers. From this point of view, Lean Fall Stand draws attention to the often invisible role of those on whom the (everyday) lives of the disabled depend. It prominently and innovatively attends to the collective reality of rehabilitation work as the third part is devoted to the weekly sessions that Robert and Anna take part in, along with a group of other people suffering from aphasia and their helpers, culminating in the staging of a show stage managed and performed by the aphasic characters. As may not be apparent from the above evocation, the novel thematises various situations in which the characters’ attention is solicited in critical and constrained circumstances. The frst part, taking place in Antarctica, has been described as a “cliffhanger” (Michaud n.p.) in which dramatic tension climaxes: the characters do not know where

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they stand in relation to one another, they are overwhelmed by the biting experience of the wind and the cold, they have lost all sense of orientation and they can only rely on their radios to establish precarious contact with one another. The reliance on limited perceptions in a context in which survival is at stake makes for a very tight attentional focus that leaves little room for a perceptual background. The high degree of selectivity and concentration brings an impression of isolation, the characters having to rely on themselves and their attempt at establishing contact throwing into relief the reality of their dependence on each other and on well-established procedures. The strict internal focalisation, rendered in interior monologue, makes it clear that there is little room for wandering, even though each one of the characters remembers some scenes from his earlier personal life or from his training prior to the expedition to Station K. This favours an immersive experience of which Alan Massie has written that it is “as gripping as anything you would wish for” (Massie n.p.). In this frst part, constrained, voluntary attention is used to produce an intensifcation of experience that has been observed by many specialists, among whom Depraz who, in Husserl’s wake, speaks of the subject of attention’s “density of being” (Depraz 2018, 28; translation mine). Dramatic tension decreases in the second part of the novel, after the early pages in which Anna has to confront many uncertainties as to Robert’s health and capacity to survive. After the frst section taking place in the hospital in Santiago, the repatriation to Cambridge and the care that Robert receives in hospital and at home do not compare in eventfulness to the frst section. Granted, peripetaeia is not totally absent from those pages, but they are essentially devoted to the routine that involves Robert and Anna, and the very little help they get from professional carers when they return home. In other terms, the gripping, event-packed frst part leaves room for a slacker rhythm. Such a change goes along with a shift in narrative mode as the reader is no longer entrusted with the intimacy of the character’s consciousnesses through interior monologue. An impersonal narrator is in charge of the narrative in the second part and delegates focalisation to Anna most of the time. This means that Robert becomes the object of focalisation and a great deal of narrative space is devoted to Anna’s deciphering his utterances, facial expressions and gestures. The attention is constrained by the spatial restrictions and absence of movement that characterise the new situation, as Anna and Robert fnd themselves marooned at home. In other terms, the second section is essentially concerned with the everyday work of the impaired protagonist, who starts rehabilitation, and that of the improvised carer, who is confronted with the diffculties of multi-tasking. In other terms, both characters fnd themselves ensconced in a learning situation which channels their attentional capacities and energies. The moments of joint attention between carer and patient, in

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this section, introduce a more directly relational dimension that was in large part absent from the frst part, with its solipsistic organisation of three interpolated interior monologues. Here, the temporality and strict selection of information inherent in the emergency is replaced by a more sedate rhythm that allows for the presentation of the ordinariness of care—even if some breathtakingly anaphoric passages underline the relentlessness of Anna’s solicitations and activities (McGregor 2021, 150–52). The movement away from solipsism towards relationality and away from urgency to routine is confrmed in the third part that evokes the weekly meetings of characters in which some evolutions take place against a fairly repetitive background. This has been remarked by various reviewers who excoriated the slackening in rhythm in unambiguous terms. For Michaud, in the third section, “the novel loses its way” (Michaud n.p.), while for Massie it is no less than “disappointing” and “falls sadly fat” (Massie n.p.). Estelle Birdy found that “[t]he surfeit of humdrum details [… left] an otherwise well-crafted book more sterile than it needed to be” (Birdy n.p.). I would argue that such judgements fail to do justice to the text in at least two ways. First, by neglecting to attend to the progression from climax to routine, which is obviously a powerful way for McGregor to blast traditional plot dynamics—as he does in Reservoir 13—and discard the spectacular in favour of the ordinary. In other words, while traditional plot dynamics privilege action leading to a climax, a specifc syntax and glossary are implemented here as the plot of Lean Fall Stands stands|leans/and falls—, vigorously frustrating the reader’s expectations. In fact, this should be nuanced, as the action does not actually fall: the third section builds towards the climax of the rehab sessions, with the staging of the play by the disabled characters that manages, thanks to the metafctional representation of the events that took place in Antarctica, to allow Robert to narrate and perform his version of what happened during the two storms at Station K. This in itself provides a strong emotional resolution to the novel, some form of catharsis without madness or murder, associated with the climax of the third section which is also, I would argue, the climax of the novel as a whole. Second, such critiques give short shrift to the novel’s progression from isolation to opening out to the others, and more specifcally from individual to collective attention, implying that the plot dynamics are instrumental in driving the novel’s ethical purpose, which is suggested by Alexandra Harris in her acknowledgement that the last part introduces a “collective voice,” much in the same way as in the other novels by McGregor (Harris n.p.). In fact, the narrative’s progression signposts an evolution from solipsistic to joint and on to collective attention, systematically performed in a constrained context due to extreme conditions, either on account of climatic events or of the teaching situation of rehabilitation. But such a collective dimension is

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not of the type that is intrinsic to the attention economy described by Citton, in which attention is a product that market operators vie for. It is a collective attentiveness and responsiveness that is in keeping with an ecology of attention resting on sustainability and fair share, as the evocation of cognitive and linguistic disability cannot be considered outside of relationality. In fact, even if communication technologies are referred to in the novel, either they fail or they are of little effect indeed. This is the case in the opening section that mentions the fact that the cell phones are of no value in the cold and where reliance on radio communication proves to be an unwarranted experience. Similarly, in the second section, a tablet is given to Robert, on which he is encouraged to work on his linguistic rehabilitation autonomously. But this is essentially a way to underline the absence of social services that are elsewhere criticised for their ineffciency and for leaving patients and carers on their own (McGregor 2021, 165), so that Robert is very soon deprived of one-to-one language therapy (McGregor 2021, 186), leading him to attend the group rehab sessions that make up the third section. Distraction is a category that receives very little thematic treatment, apart perhaps from moments when Robert, who tires very easily in rehab, drifts towards other concerns and into sleep in a repetitive way. This is not particularly original, in that the novel, in general, is a machine that aims at focusing the reader’s attention on the characters’ or the narrators’ own perceptions. Additionally, the whole of McGregor’s oeuvre is an attempt at attending to the characters’ own focusing on details, mixing up the trivial and the momentous. In other terms, the use of internal focalisation in If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways to Begin, or else Even the Dogs, and the resort to a hovering perspective that does not correspond to one (stable) consciousness but scrupulously considers the details of ordinary life in Reservoir 13 bolster a reliance on strict focalisation that begets immediacy and makes for an ethical opening. 4.1.2 Perceptual Immediacy At the heart of the presentation of cognitive disability lies a type of metonymy that, as suggested above, eschews the analogical generalisation of the metaphor and fosters immediacy through the means of continuity. Such is eminently the case with the presentation of the stroke from an internal perspective, as the protagonist—also known as “Doc” in the professional sphere—is caught in the storm and tries to make sense of what is happening to him, in the middle of the frst section. His fght against the biting cold and his anxiety over his failing to warrant the security of his colleagues developing into his need to fnd a course of action to set things straight are given in interior monologue, right at the close of Chapter 6: “Doc got on the radio, and started to ask Thomas

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to confrm his location. Something sharp struck him on the back of the neck and he went down fast” (McGregor 2021, 30). Here, the absence of knowledge as to what is happening to him makes Robert interpret the pain in his head as coming from outside. In other terms, the event of the stroke in itself, being inaccessible to cognition or at least to his own interpretive capacities at the time, is recorded in terms of its effect, i.e., a severe pain. The central event is therefore apparently effaced the better to be evoked circuitously, according to the powerful logic of metalepsis that paradoxically effaces the better to solicit effects, hence an experiential knowledge, and thereby a greater proximity with the character. The reader is placed in the same situation of unknowing as the character and left standing in mid-air as the next brief chapter is devoted to Luke’s interior monologue and his striving to make contact, and Chapter 9 consists in a fairly long analepsis where the impersonal narrator of part two appears to give Luke and Thomas’s common perspective on their training and frst weeks at the station, thereby providing an external perception of Doc. The two interpolated chapters bring in a delay that imitates and performs the character’s deferred understanding. This provides an effcient preparation for the shock of the concluding chapter of part one that plunges the reader into Robert’s blurred consciousness again. In this closing chapter, the reader dives into the protagonist’s groping mind and shares his sensations and perceptions. As he “crashes into” (McGregor 2021, 63) the hut of Station K, Robert realises that he is slow, that there is something wrong with his right leg, that his head hurts. He knows that all this is bad news but fails to interpret the situation. The reader is better equipped to understand what is happening, and the divergence in degrees of understanding allows for a gap that does not bring any emotional distance. The dramatic irony gathers momentum throughout the chapter as the reader is frst warned that something might be wrong with Robert’s thought processes and language through the means of a hyperbolical alliteration as he “peel[s] off his waterproofs, his fngers fumbly fatly with the zips” (McGregor 2021, 63). The repetition evokes the slow movements but also alerts the reader to the materiality of language, the fat fngers offering a visual and tactile image of the thickening of his thought processes. And then emerge the lexical and syntactical incongruities that crop up in the represented thought processes of his interior monologue: “He rawed the rum numbness of his face. No. Rubbed. Rubbed the rum rawness. No” (McGregor 2021, 64), this idiosyncrasy recurring in alternation with other ones like “White noise breaking in like apple sauce. Applause” (McGregor 2021, 64). The linguistic deterioration due to this frst stroke that is never named and cannot be described in plain, direct terms and that novelistic discourse cannot represent except through the ekphrasis of an MRI or the resort to pathological-ese, will be given an incremental treatment as the chapter unfolds, ending with whole paragraphs in which the interior monologue

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gives way to patches of stream of consciousness (McGregor 2021, 78, 79). Here, all trace of the past tense, that marker of traditional narrative discourse, disappears, bringing along the narrator’s effacement, and the syntax melts into a juxtaposition of words and at time one-word sentences, repetition invading the character’s speech: “Breath. Big breath. Mouth open, cold air. Lungs burst. Breath, breath, breath. Stand. Lean. Fall” (McGregor 2021, 78). In such passages, the metalepsis is powerfully at work as the event of the stroke is presented through the linguistic symptoms that it provokes. The gap of metaphor, based on comparison, is rejected in favour of the trying contiguity of metonymy and the experience of breathlessness is literally shared by the reader who is led to take part in the rehearsal of the linguistic breakdown. In such passages, linguistic impairment and linguistic vulnerability are evoked as directly, faithfully and respectfully as fctional narrative can. Immediacy of perception and the sense of an experience shared by the character and the reader also emerge through a special treatment of attention that privileges singularity. The novel abounds in passages making the reader share intimately the protagonist’s internal perception of his own disability, as is the case in Part 3, in the opening words of Chapter 7: Sssss. Sssss. The word was snapped in half before it even hit the air, of course. Storm. Storm. Nothing to it. The young woman telling him to take his time didn’t help. Time wasn’t the shortage here. Sssss. (McGregor 2021, 252) Such moments of joint attention when the disabled character, the therapist and, beyond the fourth wall of fction, the reader are made to attend to the same object—Robert’s linguistic disability here—solicit our perception of singularities. This is suggested by a reading of Citton who, in his critique of the digitalisation of attention, analyses what he calls “presential attention” (Citton 2017, 114). His premises are that “we are always attentive in a particular situation” and we “never pay attention alone” (Citton 2017, 114). From this he extracts a series of principles, among which the maxim of corporeal presence: “only presential interaction directly uniting resonant bodies can optimize pedagogical practice” (Citton 2017, 133). From this he elaborates what he calls the “proximity status” that characterises situations like those of teaching, attending a show or a sporting event when “the closer to the performer we fnd ourselves, the more attention tends to be energized” (Citton 2017, 137; original emphasis). One step further, he goes on to defne “the advantage of 1:1 scale [that] allows us to beneft simultaneously from the attentional asymmetries established by the media apparatuses, and to resize them to the scale of bodily presence in a situation of proximity”

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(Citton 2017, 139–40; original emphasis). Of course, the situation that Citton has in mind here is that of real attendance to an event without the overwhelming asymmetry of digital consumption. And clearly the novel as a form of indirect presentation, to follow Aristotle’s time-honoured disclosures, does not put the reader in the immediate presence of a character. Still, I would argue that Lean Fall Stand not only thematises the situation of bodily presence explored by Citton but also extrapolates it. In fact, such a situation is represented from the second part onwards, as the protagonist, then Anna, and fnally the whole of the members of the rehab group are confronted to the other linguistically impaired and physically disabled in the group. A great deal of narrative space is devoted to the evocation of incapacitated bodies that cannot move unassisted, for some of them, or of mouths that can no longer articulate consistently. Furthermore, the play-within-the-novel that is performed at the end of the narrative puts each amateur actor in the situation of 1:1 scale attention to the other members of the cast and plunges the audience in the same 1:1 scale in which attention is energised. By laying the stress on bodily materiality (through the metaleptic rendition of the strokes and of cognitive disabilities that the characters in part three are victims of), the novel makes a point about the immediacy of perception and attention, hence the opening of every character’s presence to the others in a very effcient fashion. This is all the more effective as the reader, discovering the audience watching the fnal spectacle, fnds him-/herself contaminated by the situation and sharing the position of the members of the audience. Such a situation provides an experiential knowledge of the scene in which the character’s proximity to the other characters bleeds into and bolsters up the reader’s own sense of proximity with the same characters. Represented attention and the reader’s attention to the symptoms of cognitive disability are therefore made to acquire a specifc pragmatic force. By using the potentialities of metalepsis and by privileging a communication on 1:1 scale, Lean Fall Stand builds up a poetics of proximity in which attention is both represented and reverberates pragmatically towards the reader. The objects of such a dual type of attention are the cognitively disabled that people the pages of the novel whose disabilities can only be presented through the evocation of the bodily and linguistic symptoms of their strokes. A far cry from the digital models that regulate the collective economy of attention that Citton and Crary have been denouncing, the novel presents us with a version of an ecology of attention in which the cognitively impaired subject opens up and becomes attuned to the other, similarly disabled or not. The proximity is such that the reader is privy to the ways in which disability works, either through the means of internal focalisation, as in the interior monologues and snatches of stream of consciousness of the frst part, or through the intensely tentative verbal interactions evoked in the second

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and third parts that privilege a more dramatic mode of presentation of the disabled characters by depicting them from outside. Such narrative choices allow us to bear in mind that singularity is an essential characteristic of (literary) experience and that attention provides the means to capture it. McGregor’s novel puts the necessity to attend to the disabled other in his/her singularity high on its ethical agenda. To do so, it uses a poetics of proximity and immediacy to make the reader experience the ordinary situation of disability and rehabilitation directly. Confronted with such a situation, we are miles away from the one described by Berardi in his critique of what he calls “neurocapitalism” or “neurototalitarianism” that captures attention through various digital means so as to gear it onto and lock it into cyberspace. In such circumstances, we “do not experience the world directly: we use (or get or look for) data that has already been sifted through experience, about an object that is not that of our experience, but simply a reference to a preconditioned world” (Berardi 157; original emphasis; translation mine). Quite on the contrary, and thanks to the paradox of fction that mediates the better to get closer, the world of disability is experienced (as if) it were at frst hand, without irony or compassion, by paying attention to a complexity of feelings and situations that refuse oversimplifcation, as when Anna vents her doubts: “I don’t want to be a carer; I never even wanted to be a wife” (McGregor 2021, 128). 4.1.3 An “Ethics from Down Under” Such an immediacy is also made possible by what Arvidson calls the “theme” or “focus” of attention that he distinguishes from its context. When analysing the ethical value of attention, he lingers on the idea of the subject’s concentration on the other: “In encountering You, thematic attention focuses on You as a singular embodied attending being which is immediately relevant to the sphere of attention’s own ongoing attending activity. In short, you are in the presence of me, as the theme of my ongoing attending life, and this life is the context for You which is focal” (Arvidson 150). This leads him to describe what he defnes as “the moral moment of attention”—which I take to be an ethical moment, in fact: The moral moment of attention is a tense and intense moment in the sphere of attention in which the you presents itself immediately (in phenomenal time) and directly (in embodied existence) relevant to the I. In encountering You, I am also given to myself. […] You and I are presented within different dimensions in the sphere of attention: the You as theme, the I as thematic context. In moral attention, You confront me in an original way, such that You are attended to as the immediate and direct center of relevancy in my ongoing attending life. (Arvidson 161)

148 Disabled Brains Lean Fall Stand promotes ethical moments of this type thanks to which attention to the (impaired) other opens the subject to the other in his/her singularity and to the specifcity of situations of disability. As suggested above, this is made possible through a meticulous consideration of the details of the ordinary lives of the disabled and carers. In fact, in Waldenfels’s terms, what the novel presents us with is an “ethics from down under” (Waldenfels 43; translation mine) that promotes a humble vision of everyday activities and situations building up into the evocation of an experience that emerges as a life form. The slackening rhythm of Parts 2 and 3 allows for the observation of what has become the ordinary lives of the characters after the protagonist has suffered the stroke. In the second part, the stress is laid on Anna’s routines as she is adapting to her new life, renouncing her collaboration on the scientifc project that she had embarked on and that meant so much to her. These chapters focus on sacrifce and adaptation to the realities of care and some passages, as already mentioned, use the breath-taking power of anaphora to evoke the iterative nature of the tasks that she is plunged in: She had to change the bedsheets in the morning because he’d made a mess of using the pan. She had to help him roll out of the bed and lever himself into the chair. She had to get him out of the wet pyjamas and wash him down with a soaped fannel and a bowl of hot water. She had to get him dry and into warm clothes before his temperature dropped. […] She had to ignore the phone because he needed to go to the toilet. She had to help him stand slowly, and walk with him along the landing, and help him to lower his trousers and sit on the loo. She had to give him his privacy and wait outside the door. She had to change the bedsheets, still, as soon as she got the chance. (McGregor 2021, 150–51) Emphasising the relentlessness of the routine by privileging the internal focalisation on Anna is once again a way to share the experience from within while thematising the reality of dependence and, more generally, relationality. Now, as indicated by Laugier, “relations create and found our responsibilities. And all these responsibilities provide the soil of or texture—to quote Irish Murdoch […]—of moral life” (Laugier 2015a, 142). In the specifc context of fctional representation, the onus of getting across such a texture to the reader relies on the assemblage of words on the page that allow to perceive what is usually hidden, thereby rejecting any possibility of denial. It also makes it possible to react to particular situations so that we are allowed to decide not abstractly on what is good but concretely and particularly on what matters (Laugier 2015a, 130). In other terms, McGregor reminds us that attention is made up of various components among which, at least, a perceptual one and an

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active one in which perceiving not only means training our perception and building up a capacity to perceive, but also actively taking part in the decisional process as to what matters. Ultimately, the novel gives us an experiential knowledge that disabled lives matter and that the lives of the carers matter by confronting us with the texture of such interlaced, interdependent lives. The challenge of providing an “education in attention to ordinary objects” (Laugier 2012, 1010) is at the heart of Lean Fall Stand and comes to fruition, possibly, in the third section, derided by some reviewers for its slackening rhythm. I would argue that, in this section, with its highly iterative drive, in which each collective rehabilitation session is evoked in detail with a low degree of variation from this pattern, what the readers are allowed to perceive is the very progressive, painstakingly slow advances of each one of the disabled characters who adjust themselves to each other and to the helpers and carers. Those are meted out in infnitesimal strokes that do not really promote dramatic tension. Admittedly, the evocation of the sessions is interspersed with some episodes when an increase in tension is perceptible: these are materialised by the fnal stages of the inquest, for instance, but also by happenings inherent in the way in which the sessions are conducted. This is all the truer from the moment when professional dancers are hired to interact and work with the disabled members of the group, which will lead to the relative apotheosis of the concluding show. However, apart from such occurrences, relations and interactions evolve incrementally yet slowly within the restricted universe of the rehab sessions. Once again, the effect of such narrative choices is “to make us pay more attention to the daily” (Epstein 66) or the ordinary which builds up into what some advocates of pragmatism, following in John Dewey’s wake, have defned as an investigation. In fact, an investigation is “a process at the end of which a ‘community of investigators’ manages to solve ‘a problematic situation’ to which it has been suddenly confronted” (Ogien 39; translation mine). Through repetitive collaboration, the characters inventory the characteristics of such a problematical situation that needs time and a thorough processing. Precisely, such an inventory cannot be done at a go and takes a time that is certainly not compatible with that promoted by the high-speed digitalised economy of attention. But it is the novel’s responsibility to take the reader back to such situations in which disability slows down processes and practices. And it also falls within the novel’s ethical remit to tax the reader’s patience and check his/her haste. In Ulin’s words, the novel is instrumental in helping us “pac[e] ourselves [… and let] the narrative prevail” (Ulin 149), which echoes the process of attunement that Felski has described in temporal and perceptual terms: “a slow and often stumbling process, a gradual coming into view of what we would otherwise fail to see. […] Patience

150 Disabled Brains and slowness are mandated, not the greedy and indiscriminate gulp” (Felski 60). Never is this description (“a slow and often stumbling process”) better illustrated perhaps than in the aphasic fght for articulation, the staccato of the plainly aphasic being contrasted with the poetical and nonsensical fowing sentences of those suffering from fuent aphasia, in the third part of the novel. In Lean Stand Fall, McGregor etches a poetic prose that resonates with his earlier novels and fnds its consummate expression in the chiselled rendering of impaired discourse. This does not mean that the productions are beautifed in the least, but the broken, tentative and inchoate utterances produce an idiom that contrasts with the narrator’s discourse and, beyond, with that of more traditional forms of novels. In thus experimenting with language, McGregor taps this specifcity of literary discourse that provides a dual type of attention, i.e., to content and to form, at the same time. Verbal experimentation is an effcient lever to “capture attention” (Epstein 18), more specifcally to the particularity of impaired delivery, both in the characters’ interactions and in their performance in the show that they are staging at the end of the novel. It also reminds us that “the literary work […] aims to adumbrate forms in becoming, which are always a little spectral, and which still remain irreducible to any pre-existing, clear and distinct knowledge” (Citton 2017, 158). From this perspective, Lean Fall Stand allows for the emergence of a novelistic ethics relying on the two pillars of “attention to ordinary life [that of the disabled characters in rehab] and care for moral expressivity” (Laugier 2015a, 218). The capacity to decide what matters goes along with the task to put this into words and to refuse invisibility while bearing witness to the existence of styles of life that do not conform to the norms of ableism. Such a pursuit is achieved here through the use of a language that resists the norms of more conventional novelistic representation. The project is emblematised by the reproduction of disabled speech in free indirect discourse at times verging on free direct discourse and on direct discourse, as seen above. It is also powerfully conveyed in the coda to the novel, which constitutes a brief fourth part and is made up of a recapitulation or rehearsal of the main episodes of the novel, more often than not through one-sentence paragraphs. It provides a shorthand or minimum narration of the whole events, subtracting the welter of information that the reader is now cognisant with without renouncing intelligibility, as each one of the fragments radiates outwards and backwards to its original concept, as if to suggest that scarcity of words is also a relevant way to attain expressiveness—in Laugier’s acceptation of the term. As with a play, a poem or a song that are well known and well-rehearsed, it makes the reader mouth again these humble fragments that the disabled characters are incapable of fuently articulating, enhancing a proximity that is also a gesture of help and care.

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4.2 Autobiography and Cognitive Disability Twice in Lean Fall Stand is the idea of cognitive disability turning the subject into someone else introduced explicitly. The frst time, when Wiktor, one of the members of the rehabilitation group, who is of foreign origin but was raised in Britain and used to have a perfect British English, fnds himself speaking tentatively and with a foreign accent (McGregor 2021, 203), as if he were the double of himself. The second occurrence comes at the end of the show when the reader is given access to Anna’s thoughts that are tainted with the pre-fabricated sentences of the brochures or counsellors aiming to help the carers, as mediated through free indirect thought: “he had come home but he was different. Your loved one may not be the same as the person they were before. Your loved one will still be” (McGregor 2021, 268). It is precisely such a tension between disruption and continuity, splitting and unity, departure and permanence that Wendy Mitchell’s autobiographical account, Somebody I Used to Know, explores. The thematic convergences between both texts do not stop here. Obviously, both of them represent cognitive disability from inside, as was the case with the best-seller by Lisa Genova, Still Alice (2007) that brought massive attention to Alzheimer’s before being adapted to the screen. When reading such sentence as “Still me but with a diseased brain” (Mitchell 2018, 121), the reader cannot but think about the situation described in Still Alice that has, in many respects, prepared the way for the fourishing of narratives about cognitive disability in general and dementia in particular. Yet, Wendy Mitchell’s narrative is a limit-case one, as it does not abide by the rules of fction and proposes a— the frst—book-length account of the internal, personal experience of dementia based on truth to the selfsame experience—as opposed to the respect of mere plausibility. Of course, there are other precedents of narrating in a non-fctional way about what it means to live with dementia. Foremost among them, perhaps, is John Bayley’s Iris. A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998), that provides a close yet external testimony of what Alzheimer’s does to a person’s life and those of the people around her. But Mitchell’s text is in a class of its own because it witnesses the experience from inside without the possibility of solace provided by the suavity of fction—this protective distance afforded by the mode of the “as if” and by various aesthetic, generic and poetical conventions. Even if the writing of autobiography does abide by conventions, and even if the writing of any narrative imposes at least order, selection and emplotment of some sort, writing from within the reality of disability without the safety net of fction gets the reader nominally closer to the rawness of facts. Still, Lean Fall Stand and Somebody I Used to Know have a lot in common in their evocations of cognitive disability from inside. In fact, like McGregor, Mitchell insists that the NHS falls short of her

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expectations and that she who worked for the NHS for ffteen years feels “abandoned” (Mitchell 2018, 63, 102) or “let down” (Mitchell 2018, 155) by a system that diagnoses only to leave the disabled to rely on their own resources or on those of charities. From this point of view, she is particularly vehement when her Personal Independence Payment is withdrawn after a reassessment based on an interview in which she declared that she was involved in volunteer work. She is often invited to talk at conferences to get the public to have a better idea of the disability and the way it affects both the disabled and the carers, and the fact that she takes part in such activities entailed the suspension of state help: “I feel as though I’m penalized for trying so desperately to cope” (Mitchell 2018, 250). Indeed, Mitchell’s narrative has a lot to say about adaptation, and more especially about attending so as to adapt. Like Lean Fall Stand, it also offers an itinerary from individual coping and attention to oneself to a more collective dimension in both attending to others and thereby gaining some self-confdence, at times, either tentatively or in fares of hope. The texts also share the responsibility to give an account of a disability whose cause is invisible and that can only be apprehended through its effects, and this more particularly in the case of people living with the early stages of dementia: “Do I look like I have dementia? Do any of us? It’s not a disease we have stamped on our foreheads; it is an invisible disability” (Mitchell 2018, 117; original emphasis). From this point of view, Wendy Mitchell is very clear about avoiding pathologisation as she explains in one passage in which she rejects such words as “sufferers” or “suffering with” being used in relation to people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, preferring “struggl[ing]” to “suffering,” specifying that in fact she is “living with” dementia (Mitchell 2018, 172; emphasis added). 4.2.1 Doubles Living with Alzheimer’s implies having to struggle with cognitive disabilities and linguistic impairment, which refers back to McGregor’s novel. One of the implications is that even if Mitchell keeps a blog that she updates on a daily basis, the writing of a longer narrative had to be done in collaboration with Anna Wharton, a journalist and professional writer whose name appears on the title page and who features prominently in the acknowledgements section rounding off the volume. The duality that is signposted in the title fnds an echo in the fourhanded redaction of Mitchell’s autobiographical account. Only one voice can be heard, throughout, Mitchell’s, but at times a doubt insinuates itself into the reader’s mind. As the narrative goes on and chronicles the advance of the disability, and as Mitchell gives more examples of the things that she regularly forgets, one is punctually caught wondering how she managed to realise that she had forgotten such or such

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a bit of her experience. Of course, most of the time she may have been told by people around her, like her daughters or colleagues or other volunteers at the Alzheimer’s Society. Certainly, the narrator can know that, as a rule, some memories disappear. After all, as indicated by Aida Edemariam, the text is a chronicle and “a recording of Mitchell’s disappearance, as it happens” (Edemariam n.p.). Yet, at some moments, as she is attending privately to her own thought processes and not sharing the information with anybody, it seems improbable that she remembers what she has just forgotten, which makes such sentences problematical or at least destabilising, as for instance when she remarks on how each one of her disabled friends arrives at a meeting accompanied by partners of children, unlike herself: “I notice that each of them has someone, but before I have time to dwell on that, or what it means to me Katie [the organiser] presses a cup of hot tea in my hand, and my thoughts evaporate like steam” (Mitchell 2018, 151–52). In such passages, the reader may have the impression that some distance enters the narrative, as if the narrator could attend to what she does not remember, could remember what should be a blank—of which she knows what it should contain. In such moments, the reader is possibly reminded of the distance of a double enunciation behind the consistent narrative, but above all, some of these jarring instants are instrumental in drawing his/her attention to the destabilising way in which the disabled brain works, waging a war between incapacity and capacity. In such passages, too, the reader is given an inkling into what A. Hall may mean when she comments on the boom of contemporary autobiographical narratives about disability and underlines the “blurring of the line between the biographical and the fctional” that they offer an experience of (Hall 10). Of course, the fgure of the double—and more particularly the issue of splitting—is announced as early as the title, “used to” underlining a rift that seems to be unbridgeable. This announcement is somewhat extreme, as at many stages of the narrative, continuity between the old able self and the new disabled self is regularly underlined. Still, the memoir’s main structural characteristic lies in the use of italicised passages in which the narrator addresses what she considers her former self directly, stating how painful it is to have to let her go and how sad she feels at being betrayed by her (Mitchell 2018, 47). It should also be noted that the frst page of the narrative, hovering between epigraph and incipit, consists of one such italicised passage in which the narrator addresses her former self, making a special, fragmented use of typography that echoes the techniques of calligrams and indexically evokes the holes that Alzheimer’s is poking in her memory (Mitchell 2018, 1). The image of the split life is recurrent in many passages outside the italicised ones, as if the reality of the separation were unavoidable (Mitchell 2018, 33, 87), and extends to the realisation that the “used to” is partially true because

154 Disabled Brains not completely effective, as more separation is to come, the progressive impairment being also radically that, i.e., progressive: I’m a different me today from the one I was six months ago. […] I’m losing my sense of self, and this is more frightening than anything, because that’s all I have—that’s all any of us have. The one we call ‘me’. Can I rely on this new me, the one with such fuzzy memories of what came before? (Mitchell 2018, 282). Such moments of recognition, whether they are direct addresses to the former self or expressions of the permanent anxiety of loss, instil a high level of punctum. This is certainly because Mitchell’s new life is dominated by the basso continuo of anxiety that, at times, explodes into critical awareness, for such is the paradox of dementia that it is never possible to forget about dementia, she confesses (Mitchell 2018, 282). If we follow Catherine Malabou’s analyses, the pain of such realisations lies in the fact that “[c]erebral auto-affection is all the more fragile and exposed a process as the event of his/her own destruction constitutes the proof of the subject’s own existence” (Malabou 91; translation mine). This may be the reason why, in such moments, she attends to a split that she knows will develop into a rift. Yet, the process is not complete, as, she recognises: “we still have some likenesses” (Mitchell 2018, 13). This is perhaps all the crueller as the continuity between able and disabled, former and new selves prevents any possibility of mourning: it maintains her into some sort of limbo whose characteristic seems to be that of protracted precariousness compounded with a permanent sense of vulnerability. And perhaps this fnds an extreme expression in passages when she attends to how she attends, i.e., moments of “meta-attention” that Citton describes as “based on an oscillation between immersion and critique” (Citton 2017, 215). This is the case when she describes her way of keeping her memories and clinging to her sense of self and makes a list of her adaptation techniques and prostheses: “I keep her alive where I can—in a funny blog post, or a WhatsApp message, an email or a quip written in one of my speeches” (Mitchell 2018, 285). Still, the distance is not instrumental in producing a “critical” message but in showing the frailties of attention itself, or rather its rigidities, as they become less and less fuid and more and more voluntary and constrained. Besides, one of the specifcities of Somebody I Used to Know lies in its treatment of voluntary attention that is made even more important in the context of impairment. In the early stages of the narrative, Mitchell starts realising that there are glitches in her everyday life that she cannot account for and that she is not performing as she used to, she who, as most of us do, took ableism for granted and led a highly active life, at work and in all other spheres. From this point of view, the text is instrumental in fghting against the myth of autonomy and total ableism, as

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we are reminded by A. Hall, for whom “disability perspectives provide a productive means to destabilize the neoliberal fction of the defnitive, self-suffcient, independent citizen of modernity” (Hall 10). It clearly makes a point about vulnerability as a shared condition, both suggesting that we are all temporarily able (which is tantamount to promoting a vision of vulnerability as ontological), even while presenting us with the singularity of an experience. The narrative opens on her account of falling down several times as she is running, which she connects with a blurry impression that has been dogging her for some time, as if her mind were in some sort of a permanent haze. This sets her on her investigation as to what these might be symptoms (or not) of and triggers off a sharp, sustained attentiveness to signs that she starts reading and that will later be checked professionally. Admittedly, any narrative presents the readers with a selection of information that gets them focused and, in the best of scenarios, elicits their sustained attention. This characteristic applies even more singularly here as her quest for information, as in all quest narratives, fctional or not, acts specifcally on what Arvidson has defned as the sphere of attention. More precisely, as she goes hunting after the signs and inventories the capacities that escape her, it seems as if, more than in traditional narratives, the theme or focus of attention took more room and intensity to the prejudice of the thematic context that usually provides a circle of relevance and is drastically reduced here (Arvidson 5). The frst half of Somebody I Used to Know is dominated by the tracking of actions that Mitchell has to renounce: she cannot run anymore, and neither can she bake cakes, read long narratives or watch new flms, use a telephone, remember where the various utensils are in her new kitchen, remember whether she has eaten or has fed her daughter’s cat, among many other lapses contributing to what she calls “my new inability” (Mitchell 2018, 38). Typically, it is when the disability sets in that the reality of ability that used to be taken for granted manifests itself, reminding her and us of the basic function of attention that “conditions our individual survival and allows the subject’s inscription in social space” (Depraz 2018, 1; translation mine). As distinct from what is generally expected from the conventions of a fctional narrative based on reversals and peripetaeia, what we fnd in Somebody I Used to Know is an insistence on repetition, in a story that works incrementally. More precisely, the proportion between eventfulness and more sedate incrementation is re-valued in this text. The narrative is organised chronologically, overall, even if the recurrence of memories and that of italicised passages in which the narrating I addresses the not-yet-disabled narrated I is consistent. It starts with the frst signs of impairment and steadily moves on to the various stages of diagnosis, and on to the narrator’s involvement in volunteer work, her moving houses and a holiday in Blackpool as the mainstays of the plot. Still, the internal presentation of the onset of disability is characterised

156 Disabled Brains by micro-discoveries and the evocation of oscillations. In fact, one of the things that we learn about living with Alzheimer’s is that it implies a constant struggle that sends both disabled subject and reader on an emotional rollercoaster. The narrator alternates between sadness and more dynamic outbursts of anger, between renunciation and the will to fght, between the consciousness of a life to be enjoyed and the awareness that her existence has become more like a mode of survival. “‘You haven’t changed,’ [some people around her] say.” And she disowns them: “But I used to run and cook and bake and work and drive. I survive now by adapting, by focusing on what I can do” (Mitchell 2018, 260). The polysyndeton associated with the use of monosyllabic verbs—the verbal form underlining activity as opposed to a more static substantive form— help the reader gauge and share the extent of the loss. And in so doing, Mitchell throws light on and draws attention to the invisible effects of a disability that she manages to adapt to and make imperceptible most of the time. 4.2.2 Oscillations This is done by focusing on each new impairment, intensely attending to it and fnding a way around Alzheimer’s in moments of triumph when the narrator becomes transfxed by hope, before she meets with another diffculty that she has to circumvent and adapt to. The implication is that the narrative offers a progression from impairment to impairment that is also a progression towards empowerment, in a trajectory that sees her fumbling on the tightrope between defeat and triumph. Overall—and this is basically one of the main motives for writing her autobiography as someone who lives with Alzheimer’s as distinct from suffering from it—the narrative arc privileges capacity building. Putting photographs on the kitchen cupboards that display and thereby indicate what is inside them is a victory over dementia, as is printing maps of the streets and programming trips to various cities well in advance so that she won’t get lost; as is rehearsing the path from hotel to conference venue on the day before an event so that she won’t be late; as is programming alarms so that she knows when to eat, so that she is remembered that she is carrying a bag on her train journey that she might otherwise forget about and leave on board; as is putting forget-me-nots—the emblem of people living with dementia—on the door of her new house so that she can recognise it; as is leaving post-it notes beside her bed so that she is prompted what to do in the morning; as is “burning [a photograph of her daughters on Blackpool beach] to memory” so that she will not ever forget them and creating a “memory room” in her house so that the good moments from her past remain with her. Such instances in which her evaporating memories imply a vanishing of some objects of attention are characterised by an increase in voluntary attention that is both

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programmatic and has to be practiced in the present when she is making her different moves. They are satisfactory to Mitchell as she refects that, despite the effort, she manages to go on. In other circumstances, she is apt to see the positive potential of her disability that makes her discover new pleasures. This happens when, realising that she is no longer able to attend to and remember the details of complex plots, she renounces reading novels and shifts to shorter forms: “I’ve found myself rediscovering the delights of poems, of books that I used to read the girls when they were tiny. There are the losses, but there are also the gains” (Mitchell 2018, 112). In such moments, she feels stronger, as when she is giving an interview for the BBC (Mitchell 2018, 140) or when she holds the attention of the audience at a conference using humour and mastering the art of rhetoric (Mitchell 2018, 253). Of course, such upbeat passages are contrasted with the evocations of her “bad days” in which inactivity, loneliness and disorientation prevail but which remain moments that she always manages to get around in a ceaseless struggle with impairment that has to be continually renewed, living with Alzheimer’s being translated in terms of intense precariousness. Perhaps her attention to the vagaries of time introduced by her cognitive impairment are the most consummate expression of the precariousness of her new life. This concern is thematised early on, when she alludes to the way in which time gets mixed up and, more precisely, disappears by chunks and therefore accelerates. About the manifestations of dementia, she considers that they come unexpectedly. The absence of warning, in practical terms, creates a sense of belatedness, as in the following evocation of unannounced losses: “the last run, the last cake baked, the last drive in your beloved silver Suzuki. But you didn’t know then they would be lasts, dementia gave you no warnings” (Mitchell 2018, 109; original emphasis). In other terms, what accrues is the sense of realising belatedly, after it has gone missing, that an object or an episode has disappeared, and that the subject was absent to this reality as it was happening, which is a powerfully metaleptic way to grant materiality to an absence. In this way, the readers are provided with an experiential sharing of the impairment, from inside, getting and inkling of what it may feel like to have the carpet of perception taken from under their feet. This resolves into a feeling of urgency as the realisation that time is literally missing echoes with the fact that Alzheimer’s, by defnition, is progressive. Such insights lead Mitchell to wonder repeatedly about how much or little time is left her, in terms of consciousness, relative autonomy and being able to recognise those whom she loves. They make her juxtapose refections on her life that seems to be at a standstill, in the early stages of the narrative (Mitchell 2018, 52), hence her impression of wasting her time, with moments when she focuses on time “running through her fngers like sand” (Mitchell 2018, 39), as dementia “steals” not only the past but also “the future you imagined all laid out in front of

158 Disabled Brains you” (Mitchell 2018, 47). As such remarks multiply, a “sense of urgency, to ft in a future before it disappears forever” is triggered off (Mitchell 2018, 82). Deprived of part of her past and of the future that she had always relied on, she fnds herself compelled to live in the present and to make the most of this, enjoying the beauty and quietness of nature or relationships with people she loves or meets in her sundry activities as a volunteer (Mitchell 2018, 245). Still, in moments of crisis and discouragement, in her “bad days,” she confesses that her disability, which she allows herself to envisage in terms of a disease in the following lines, takes everything from her, even the present: “A short circuit in my brain, a disconnect somewhere between my eyes. I’m reminded that this disease can steal the past, the present and the future” (Mitchell 2018, 166). In her specifc treatment of time that corresponds to the particularity of her own experience, far away from any generalisation, Mitchell makes the inventory of what it is to live with dementia and she bears witness to it in a vibrant way, thereby soliciting two of the main functions of attention: the descriptive and the expressive. The evocation of the split self, the investigation of losses and renunciations, the multiple examples of adaptation, the moments of triumph, the existential urgency contribute to the evocation of experiences that provide the concrete texture of a life. They are made up of an inventory of ordinary situations, which may seem extraordinary to the reader but which evoke the daily reality of living with cognitive disability. Attention to the ordinary, in its private dimension, and as applied to a situation of cognitive disability, is thereby used as an ethical lever that takes into account yet another type of invisibility. It is also of utmost importance that, unlike what is often found in traditional literary representations of disability that rely on the “objectifcation of the spectacle that the representation has created” (Garland-Thomson 12), the autobiographical account empowers the disabled subject who is also in charge of representing her experience from inside without anyone speaking in her name and in her place. The memoir is emblematic of the shift from narratives that represent disabled people as signs to one that considers them in their singularity, thereby producing “a movement from tropes to real people” (Bérubé 570). Clearly, we are miles away from the “cultural representations of disability […] at the expense of disabled people” (Couser 483) and herein lies possibly the most powerful lever of the autobiographical narrative as attuned to the presentation of disability. I am not using “representation” here as I need to avoid the connotations associated with the prefx that would imply a reproduction and a degree of indirection, whereas Mitchell’s autobiographical narrative aims at maximum proximity and direction. In fact, the text puts the reader as close as possible to the “1:1 scale” that Citton sees as the maximum guarantee of proximity and quality of communication (Citton 2017, 140). Such a confguration allows for the truthfulness and effciency of the testimony and

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provides the ethical guarantee that the disabled subject may produce her own account, living with her disability (as opposed to merely suffering from it). Mitchell’s disability memoir develops its own ecology of attention in which the ethical imperative is foremost. 4.2.3 Relationality über alles Still, the narrative is not exclusively geared on to the evocation of the narrator’s attention to her own situation, as one of the essential lessons to be derived from Someone I Used to Know is that cognitive disability is compatible with intense relationality and attentional opening to the others. In the early stages, while Mitchell is still reeling from the violence of the diagnosis, she starts accepting the reality of her dependence in unambiguous terms, as indicated by one of the italicised passages when she addresses her former self: “I took your independence for granted then. I envy it now” (Mitchell 2018, 36; original emphasis). This leads her to take into consideration her “new inability” (Mitchell 2018, 38) to embrace, willy-nilly, but with as much lucidity as her condition allows for, the idea of her dependence on others, but also on a variety of devices that she uses as prostheses, as seen above. Of course, this implies a permanent fght and the acceptance of alternations between moments of triumph and episodes of depression, on her bad days, and the gripping sense of the loss of a former life and a former self. Still, as she herself recognises at several stages in her memoir, dependence implies interdependence. Such was already the case in her pre-Alzheimer’s life, as her relations with her staff at the hospital and her daughters were characterised by varying degrees of reciprocal care. This is made clear for instance when she remembers her young girls visiting her in hospital after she had been operated on. What disability reveals or, at least, makes more obvious, though, is the reality of such a system of dependences that translate in a vision of solidarity as predicated on the embodied experience of interdependences. This is what Shildrick suggests, commenting on bodily disability in terms that aptly apply to cognitive disability: The disabled body [and mind] could be seen as paradigmatic, not of the autonomous subject at the heart of modernist discourse, but of the profound interconnectivity of all embodied social relations. In Deleuzian terms, we are all interdependent, and come together, and break apart in unpredictable energies and fows of desires (Shildrick 2012, 39; emphasis added). In Shildrick’s conception of Critical Disability Studies, taking into consideration the reality of our common embodiment implies an extra move towards the de-pathologisation of disability, as dependence and interdependence, these cornerstones of (the ethics of) vulnerability,

160 Disabled Brains become a common property shared by all individuals, even those who align themselves with ableism. One step further, interdependence may be seen in a positive light as it is considered in relation to “energies and fows of desire,” which Shildrick makes even clearer in the following formula: “the ‘disabled’ body [and mind, I would add] signals not some exceptional lack or failure, but simply one mode among multiple ways of becoming” (Shildrick 2012, 39). In other terms, and without mitigating in the least the pain and anguish emerging from Mitchell’s account, it becomes clear as the narrative unfolds that her recognition of her own dependence leading to a system of interdependences is a lever towards relationality as a mode of living with disability and living with others. Relationality is at times featured negatively, through the losses and lacks that it divulges. From the beginning of her account, Mitchell remarks on the friends who have lost touch (Mitchell 2018, 8), on how it feels to be excluded from busy life (Mitchell 2018, 18), on the anxiety-mongering experience of noise when she goes out and fnds herself caught in the fux of ordinary urban life (Mitchell 2018, 184), making her retreat to more pastoral areas and, possibly, within herself when anxiety reaches proportions too high to be tolerated: “I hadn’t noticed it up until now, but more recently I’ve found myself cowering once I step outside the front door, as if the world has turned up its volume overnight without telling me” (Mitchell 2018, 184). Such passages show how the line between cognitive and physical disability is tenuous, and how the author navigates in a continuum of disability that estranges her from her own life, past and present, and makes relating with others a more fragile capacity. Still, as already indicated, Somebody I Used to Know is also full of moments of epiphany, self-enlargement and triumph that coincide with Mitchell’s punctual victories over some effects of the disability. For one thing, those moments are directly inspired by her determination not to merely survive, adapting to and living with the disability, but really to be-for-the-other, as her unconditional love for her daughters and her craving for interpersonal relationships gives her the incentive and energy to fght. In fact, besides “days when Alzheimer’s wins” (Mitchell 2018, 130), there are moments of completion relying on Mitchell’s involvement in volunteer actions on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Society when she meets people and works with them, leading to instants of intense reassurance and satisfaction: “We feel validated, all of us around the table” (Mitchell 2018, 130). The need for validation implies the refusal of being downgraded and excluded, of course. Being validated involves being kept within the frames of recognition that allow for the perception and recognition of individuals prior to validation, so that those living with disabilities are recognised in their singularities. This is what Mitchell clearly expresses as she is becoming involved in a flm project and evokes “the recognition that greets [her]” (140). Very pointedly, it is by featuring in a

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documentary, i.e., by shooting images of herself that will be instrumental in changing the public’s view on the lives of those living with dementia, that she enters the frame of the picture and makes her own disability and, metonymically, others’, shift into the frame and assume visibility. This move from private to public implies a commitment in favour of disability as a mode of living that should not be the cause of suffering, shame and relegation: “I have always been so private, so protective of sharing anything personal, and yet I know that by sharing I can change opinions” (Mitchell 2018, 140). Working with others and for others, in the form of volunteer work for the Alzheimer’s Society, including participating in the collective creation of a documentary implies being caught in a web of activities that allows the subject to do some/their work or to take part in a work, or more generally in an “art of doing” (faire œuvre in Le Blanc’s terms [Le Blanc 2009, 26–27; translation mine]), which guarantees that they will not fall into precariousness and invisibility. In Mitchell’s case, it can even lead to moments of triumph when “the anxiety is replaced with a feeling of empowerment” (Mitchell 2018, 140, see also 253). Fittingly, such moments are achieved thanks to collaborative works in which Le Blanc’s faire œuvre becomes felicitous precisely because the participants pay attention to each other and, more specifcally, are all conscious of being attentive to the same thing or task, which corresponds to the defnition and practice of joint attention, as seen above. In Mitchell’s memoir as in McGregor’s novel, this is exemplifed on occasions of refective and productive gatherings, as in a round-table discussion at a conference, bringing together individuals diagnosed with dementia: We agree that if a thought pops into our head we’re allowed to share it straight away rather than risk it vanishing […]. The more we speak, the more hope grows inside me […]. I am determined to share more, to see the nods that come back to me, to know that someone else feels the same. (Mitchell 2018, 119) One step further, the narrator’s talent for relationality expresses itself in many passages when she takes care of her own carers, which is expressed through her scrupulous attention to their well-being and anguish. The protective refex is triggered off on pages when Mitchell, accompanied by her daughters, receives distressing news about her own situation, when fragments from the diagnosis are meted out without much precaution and she instinctively sets about protecting those whom she loves, immediately “switch[ing] from patient to mother” (Mitchell 2018, 23). In similar instances, we are ourselves plunged into the observation of what Depraz has called “relational attention” in which ethics originates (Depraz 2018, 25; translation mine). Of course, the account of living with the disability is one that insists on the permanent need to fght

162 Disabled Brains and resist against the multiplication of incapacities that make everyday gestures harder to perform. Such a situation necessarily brings about an opaqueness of the self that challenges automatic actions and requires an inordinate amount of effort to perform what used to be done unwittingly. This opacity brings in a measure of self-consciousness, which implies in turn that the autobiographical focuses on a great deal on moments of forced attention. Still, as already suggested, the memoir is not devoid of epiphanic moments when “unselfng” (Murdoch 2013, 82) becomes a possibility and a reality. In other terms, the autobiographical account shows how joint attention is an occasion for evading the prison-house of the self. Not especially the disabled self, since disability also gives the opportunity, in Mitchell’s experience, to open out to others and to favour being-for-the-other, beyond the opaqueness of the self. Once again, the narrative of disability allows for the expression and practice of an ethics based on attention-induced relationality. Admittedly, what we are given to observe in Somebody I Used to Know is the coexistence of two selves within the same subject, with the degree of suffering that this imposes on the author. Such a situation is largely due to what French philosopher Catherine Malabou has analysed in terms of plasticity that she sees as both positive and resilienceinducing, but also negative, as the French verb plastiquer means ‘to blow up.’ This is why she unveils what she calls a “destructive plasticity [that] reveals the possibility inscribed in each individual to become someone else at any moment” (Malabou 385; original emphasis). Mitchell’s memoir is a chronicle of the painful changes brought about by such a fragmentation of the former unique, sovereign self. And it is also a mitigation of such a negative analysis and at times a celebration of the powers that cognitive disability may release. From this point of view, and as already suggested, it sets great store by presenting the more constructive powers of plasticity in their liberating function. In A. Hall’s terms, the narrative reminds us that there may be “something productive, transgressive and powerful about the off-kilter position” that may be expressed in terms of “cripping,” a term coined on the model of the verb “to queer” (Hall 45). From this point of view, Mitchell’s memoir is also instrumental in showcasing that “the presence of disability creates a different picture of identity—one less stable than identities associated with gender, race, sexuality, nation, and class” (Hall 39), a notion that is germane to Shildrick’s promotion of becoming—as opposed to mere being—that she envisages in terms of a “transformative encounter” (Shildrick 2002, 118). To her, “duality is the condition of becoming” (Shildrick 2002, 107) that is conducive to the consideration and practice of a “risky ethics of becoming” (Shildrick 2002, 132). Seen in this light, vulnerability taken as the capacity to be disabled or as defned by each individual’s susceptibility to disability (cognitive or other) is the condition of becoming, i.e., of some “fuidity of all categories” (Shildrick 2012, 32) that has

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to be reckoned with so that we may enlarge our responsibilities. One step further, this may well lead to envisaging cognitive disability as a mode of becoming, as suggested by Shildrick again: the disabled body could be seen as paradigmatic, not of the autonomous subject at the heart of modernist discourse, but of the profound interconnectivity of all embodied social relations. In Deleuzian terms; we are all interdependent, and come together, and break apart in unpredictable energies and fows of life. (Shildrick 2012, 39) Or else, in Haraway’s terms, it may be seen as a mode of “becoming with”—with disability and with the other, in a vision of disability as a lever of agency (Haraway 2008, 27). In fact, Somebody I Used to Know helps the readers crucially revise their perception of disability, so that they take their distance from the icons of Alzheimer’s available on the internet: The videos that appear on screen are exactly the images that my mind has been conjuring up since Jo uttered the words; men and women at the end of their lives, old and white-haired, blankness written large across every face, confned to hospital bed. Surely she must have got it wrong? None of these people are like me. (Mitchell 2018, 45) To such emblems of decrepitude that she also comments on in interview and whose impact has been underlined by critics (Mitchell and Wharton 2019, n.p.; Murphy n.p.), she opposes a vision of disability as compatible with renewed agency, considering the effects of her condition as “productive possibility” (Mitchell and Snyder 165), without ever sweeping under the carpet the dust of suffering and affiction. Her memoir allows for the presentation of disability as a site of defance and critique of ableism (Hall 13). In other terms, getting the reader to attend to such a different conception and to such alternative possibilities meets the agenda of attention whose function, as underlined by various critics is to “resist” (Crary 2014, 17; emphasis added). From this point of view, Mitchell’s autobiography shows what disability costs but also that it is possible to assume agency and control, hence responsibilities while being disabled, which aligns her work on cognitive disability with “the cultural manifestation of a human rights movement” (Couser 484). By promoting attention from inside, she clearly performs a cultural, ethical and political gesture towards justice and consideration for all subjects to be defned and meted out according to criteria attuned to interdependence as opposed to autonomy. In so doing, she contributes—albeit in a different context and from a different perspective—to what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha vociferously defnes

164 Disabled Brains as “disability justice” (Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha n.p.). In the end, resistance seems to be Mitchell’s last word, and I would say that she makes it a priority with Somebody I Used to Know, despite the elegiac and even melancholy strain that invade some of its pages. Her purpose, ultimately, seems to be to shift the goalposts, to adjust the frames of perception, with a view to drawing and exerting the readers’ attention to the hidden singularities of cognitive disability. It is also clearly a call for inclusiveness and consideration of the disabled other that is emphatically an other—precisely—that dogs any individual. Mitchell’s memoir aims at fghting invisibility, promoting invisibility and resisting what Miranda Fricker has called “testimonial” and “epistemic injustice”: Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a defated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. (Fricker 1) In other terms, Mitchell’s autobiography aspires to correct the “credibility defcit” (Fricker 17) attached to people living with cognitive disability so as to redress the prejudices on which testimonial injustice, “as a distinctively epistemic injustice, as a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifcally in her capacity as a knower” is based (Fricker 20; original emphasis). Drawing attention to the fact that one may live with disabilities and become with the other is ultimately a way of showing that cognitive disability is compatible with the maintenance of a form of life and a style of life. With Somebody I Used to Know, Mitchell breaks and extends the limit of the autobiographical narrative, giving an insider’s account of what it means to live with cognitive disability. In so doing, she offers a vibrant testimony whose ethical and political potential lies in her determination to fght in favour of epistemic justice and solicits in gripping fashion the ethical powers and upshots of attention.

Conclusion

The preceding chapters seem to confrm Alice Bennett’s suggestion that the solicitations inherent in the rise of new technologies that have brought about what Citton, among others, has described as a tyrannical attention economy do not seem to constitute a menace for the contemporary narrative, be it fctional or not. As indicated in the introduction to this volume, Bennett fnds that, contrary to what might have been expected, contemporary fction meets the challenge imposed by this new confguration and derives impetus from the situation: “Rather than presenting an incapacitating blow to literary fction, 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 fragilities” (Bennett 4). Indeed, the novels and memoirs analysed above do take into account “attention’s vagaries and fragilities,” as is obviously the case with the texts concerned with cognitive disability. Still, in all the contexts explored throughout this book, whether addressing social invisibilities, inventorying visibilities embedded in the natural environment, or confronting the automatic attention of intelligent robots, the narratives produce a favourable presentation of human attention in its powerful, resilient and creative dimensions, whether it is represented in them or solicited from the readers. Overall, the (non-)fctional narratives that make up the corpus of this study, which are fairly representative of contemporary production, evince an effcient and varied resistance to the values of the attention economy and promote an ecology of attention relying not only on thematic content but also, and primarily, on a specifc poetics itself producing pragmatic reverberations. Throughout this study, I have been intent on tracking the ethical potential of attention, both as a theme and as regards its effects on the reader. As made clear from the introduction, I have turned my back on the inward-looking type of attention, i.e., attention to one’s internal states, for example, which is one of the characteristics of narratives that Bennett is particularly interested in. Such texts indulge in a great deal of introspection, admittedly, but one that thematises the attentive subject him- or herself. Of course, the memoirs that are pored over in the frst and last chapters were produced by authors who are very DOI: 10.4324/9781003362265-6

166 Conclusion much concerned with recounting their own lives, in the same way as the frst-person narratives on which rely Cleave’s or Ishiguro’s novels. Still, these authors and narrators, when giving accounts of themselves, never allow us to forget that they and we are “beings who are formed in relations of dependency” (Butler 2005, 20), and more particularly that “we cannot exist without addressing the other and without being addressed by the other, and that there is no wishing away our fundamental sociality” (Butler 2005, 33). In such an address to the other relies the narrator’s in-built precariousness, as indicated in Chapter 3, i.e., his or her pleading that is one of the original acceptations of precariousness (Regard 86) as the expression of the fssuring of the subject in general and of the attentional subject more specifcally. At the other end of the spectrum, Reservoir 13’s highly impersonal narrator offers an example of pure attunement to exteriority and otherness. In between may be situated the bulk of the novels with which this book is concerned, characterised as they are by impersonal narrators granting prominence to individual consciousnesses in turn, delegating to them the activity of focalisation and getting the reader to share their attention to external objects. Throughout, I have been interested in the (proto-)ethical dimension of attention as a disposition, a capacity and a practice since, both in its involuntary and voluntary regimes, it is instrumental in opening up the subject to alterity. From this point of view, I have been following in Waldenfels’s wake, as he describes attention as an “ur-phenomenon” or “original phenomenon” that he considers to be a starting point for all canonical questions of philosophy and, thereby, ethics (Waldenfels 2013, n.p.). He also insists that attention is a “double event,” made up of frst “pathos”—or “something touching me”—and then “response to the pathos”—or reaction to the other’s demand. This leads him to conclude that attention excludes “all fundamentalism,” as responses have to be “invented” and cannot be “ready-made,” which implies that reacting concerns “something that is alien to me” and that is “elsewhere” (Waldenfels 2013, n.p.). I would argue that this analysis of the radical precedence and exteriority of attention provides contextual evidence for Depraz’s vision of attention along phenomenological lines as essentially “relational,” hence ethical (Depraz 2018, 25). This leads her to re-defne it thanks to the category of “vigilance” that she considers instrumental in our caring relations with the other. Admittedly, this is in many ways a book about ethics, but more particularly about the ethics of literature and specifcally about narrative ethics. In the preceding pages, I have drawn on the thread of attention with a view to observing the workings of a poetics that generates specifc ethical considerations. The frst point that emerges is that the narrative presentation of attention, as might be expected, is instrumental in promoting realism. In fact, whether they concern social invisibilities, natural visibilities, human–machine interactions or cognitive disability,

Conclusion 167 the narratives that I have pored over contribute to an investigation and promote the inventory of a feld of knowledge and experience. Such a tendency appears very clearly in Chapter 2, in the novels representative of British New Nature Writing that I have selected for study, and it is also present in the painstaking exploration of exclusion and invisibilisation displayed by Bartlett, Winn, and Cleave in Chapter 1. It is also manifest in McEwan’s disquisitions and in Ishiguro’s relentlessly and strictly focalised account that anatomises a feld of perception, sifts the relevant information and uses it as grist to the narrative mill. It is in like manner apparent in McGregor’s and Mitchell’s thorough recording of symptoms, rehabilitation and resilience that buttress the narrative arc of their stories of cognitive disability. Such inventories reactivate the time-honoured ideal of exhaustiveness that constitutes one of the horizons of literary realism, based as they are on a specifc vocabulary that is instrumental in evoking a precise area of knowledge. This is most striking, perhaps, in Hall’s and McGregor’s scrupulously informed evocations of biodiversity and the natural environment in which their characters are embedded. In fact, focusing on attention requires that we take into consideration the attendant category of perception, which precedes attention even while instituting one of its modalities. It constitutes an invisible given that is the condition for the existence of narrative and that the readers are not aware of, most of the time. It becomes apparent when used insistently or when associated with moments of rupture or defamiliarisation. Perception, like attention, are the invisible yet necessary conditions for the existence of a narrative, which has to abide by the principle of selectivity but hides it so as to create an illusion of exhaustiveness in inventorying a determined feld of experience. This is where the interest in the ordinary falls within attention’s remit, since sifting the ordinary so as to describe it appears to be a basic component of the narratives’ ethical drives. Diamond may have such an idea in mind when she evokes characterisation in the realistic novel, specifying that “[we] expect in a realistic novel something you might call a phenomenalism of character: it is built up out of observed detail, and in a sense there is nothing to it over and above what we are shown” (Diamond 40). This does not mean that all narratives under study promote a consistent use of realistic illusion. When referring to “the realistic spirit,” I do not just have in mind the aesthetic prescriptions of realism as based on a transparent discourse that is self-effacing and builds up the impression that there is no linguistic mediation between the reader and the world. In fact, as seen in the preceding chapters, the novels that I have addressed do resort to defamiliarising devices and moments in which consciousness of reading is associated with a measure of self-consciousness as to the reading activity. This duality is compatible with the very workings of attention, as we have seen above, which corresponds to a meta-attentional engagement described by Citton (Citton 2017, 212), one of whose specifcities

168 Conclusion is activated by literary interpretation. It is “distinguished by an effort to make oneself attentive to what signs can say, beyond what the author may have wanted to say” (Citton 2017, 158; original emphasis). Such a double attentional regime characterises the novels and memoirs that are the objects of the foregoing analyses. In McGregor’s anaphoric recurrences and other rhythmical insistences that make his prose narratives veer towards poetry, in Bartlett’s and Mitchell’s bold use of typography, in Jones’s preference for correspondences that are at times evocative of a post-baroque aesthetics, but also in McEwan’s didactic saturations arises a dual attentional regime that may be disruptive of the transparency of traditional mimesis but remains instrumental in the development of a realism of the kind defned by Diamond. Such a spirit fnds its roots and expression in the attempt to use the narrative presentation of attention “to think about ethics in a realistic spirit, i.e., not in the thrall of metaphysical requirements” (Diamond 23), that is in a humble way, by placing oneself at the level of the ordinary that it is narrative’s province to describe so as to change its conditions of visibility. This leads us naturally to one of the main technical modalities of the workings of attention, i.e., the capacity inherent in narrative in general and in the narrative of fction most blatantly to make a fexible use of focalisation. As already indicated, the literary texts that this study has pored over are intent on making the readers witness and share a practice of perception that is the pre-requisite of attention and that is used for creative purposes. This is the case with defamiliarising devices like the narrative metalepsis or dramatic irony, to quote but two obvious examples, which make the readers realise that there is such a thing as perception, that otherwise imperceptible basso continuo of attention. They make the readers apprehend that both perception and attention are activities, and that they can be changed or trained the better to concentrate on what is normally left unattended. From this point of view, the realistic spirit evoked by Diamond is paradoxically enhanced by the defamiliarising potential of narratives whose ethical reverberations contribute to identifying and shifting the frames of perception, hence the ordinary’s conditions of visibility, thereby actuating the political edge of attention as an activity. Another salient aspect of the poetics of attention resides in a specifc treatment of time. Narrative is particularly well endowed in terms of rhythmic patterning, all the more so when its poetic pole is activated by importing the fgural and phonic recurrences of refrains and other burdens. Repetition is an effcient device that allows for the imitation of the way in which memory works, for instance. From this point of view, it has the capacity to make the readers share in the repetitions, their memory of a previous moment in the text being solicited at the same time as the reappearance is performed (Caracciolo 46). In pragmatic

Conclusion 169 terms, reiteration is a very effcient tool that promotes an experience of immersion, as is powerfully exemplifed in Reservoir 13, and to a lesser—though effcient—degree in all other narratives in the corpus. The Long Dry, Skin Lane and Haweswater, for instance, deploy fgural richness, which lends itself to the creation of echoes, hence proleptic hints and returns that challenge and solicit the reader’s ear and privilege attention to the prejudice of cursory, diagonal reading associated with another type of scanning as consumption. Another temporal characteristic resides in the use of slowness as a means of resistance to the contemporary hyper-solicitations inherent in the economy of attention. From this point of view, it is remarkable that such texts as Somebody I Used to Know, with its refusal of a clear narrative arc and its privileging a see-saw type of structure, and Lean Fall Stand, with its counter-pragmatic progression from dramatic intensity to defation (a characteristic that it shares with Reservoir 13), manage to get the readers to pace themselves. In other terms, they make them take the time to pay attention and lend themselves to activities such as the perception and consideration of objects apprehended in their incarnated singularities. As seen above, narrative has the capacity to solicit the reader’s attunement, in Felski’s acceptation of the term (Felski 60), a category that is central to the literary medium in that it solicits patience and scrupulous perception, which are essential modalities of consideration. I take this notion in Pelluchon’s defnition (Pelluchon 76), this time, i.e., a rejection of metaphysical contemplation in favour of a humble attention paid to the living, very much in the vein of Diamond’s realistic spirit or Murdoch’s extolment of texture (Murdoch 1997a, n.p.). An essential feature of the poetics of attention that emerges from the reading of this corpus relies on the novels’ tapping this essential trait of attention that Depraz has described as an increase in the “density of being” (Depraz 2018, 28; translation mine) or else as an “expansion of being” (Depraz 2018, 141; translation mine). Attention enhances perception and makes for a more vivid experience of the moment and of the object of consideration, which implies a process of intensifcation. Of course, one of the reasons why people read is because they are looking for intense experiences in relation to various objects, among which ordinary ones. Fittingly, what narratives have the ability to do is not only represent but also share such moments of intensifcation. In the above analyses, this has been recurrently the case with the use of special rhythmic and repetitive devices that make the readers repeat or re-experience instants or details evoked earlier on and that are used as echoic seeds. What the text repeats is thereby rehearsed by the readers, allowing for a community and, thereby, an expansion of individual experience. Admittedly, other devices described above also contribute to such motions, like focalisation whose potential in whetting perception,

170 Conclusion capturing attention, and sharing and intensifying experience is notoriously elevated. It facilitates concentration on single, concrete details and is therefore instrumental in getting readers to attend to the ordinary, promoting modes of visibility that escape customary prescriptions and are imbued with a creative power. Similarly, and in association with focalisation, voice is evidently one of the most effcient means to solicit attention, all the more so as speech representation may spread along the spectrum going from indirectness to proximity—from narrativised to free direct discourse—when contiguity with the character as both object and subject of attention creates various situations of sharing, some of which may approximate that of “joint attention,” when two people are aware that they are attending to the same object. Another fgure that appears regularly in the above analyses is metonymy that rejects association through resemblance, which may be conducive to a great deal of distance, to favour the workings of contiguity, hence proximity. In the various instances when we have come across metalepses, more specifcally, contiguity has proved a powerful lever in capturing and representing attention. Evoking the death of the girl with no name in The Other Hand through the pool of cold urine gathering under her dangling corpse, suggesting Mr F’s untold trauma through its violent effects, conjuring the unlimited dimension of hyperobjects via climactic disturbances and their destructive results, presenting the invisible cause of cognitive disability through its distressing, alienating results, all such instances partake of a metaleptic drive that seems to present an object indirectly the better to make its immediacy perceptible—and to get the reader to perceive it, as analysed by Katia Marcellin (Marcellin). In fact, metalepsis plays a temporal trick on the reader by effacing an object or the causes of an event and only showing its consequences, which is a way of submitting the readers to belatedness. By being presented with effects only, they are allowed to make the experience of a deprivation, hence the violence of an acceleration, hence the intensity of an effect. To a greater degree than the devices listed above, possibly, metalepsis shocks or at least precipitates the reader into sharing an experience and getting an embodied knowledge of an object or event. The spasm is provoked by sheer contiguity compounded of acceleration, which may be envisaged as modalities of the “1:1 SCALE” that, Citton insists, optimises the quality of attention (Citton 2017, 140; capitals in the original). In fact, with metalepsis, as with repetition, focalisation and voice, we get the impression of a direct soliciting, relying on conditions of temporal and spatial proximity released by the effects of contiguity, which produces in turn the sensation of a corporal, embodied sharing of attention. Admittedly, “the closer we are to the performer, the more our attention tends to be energized” (Citton 2017, 137: original emphasis), and this is precisely the feeling produced by a poetics of attention based

Conclusion 171 on and productive of intensifcation that I have tried to show at work in the corpus under study. This corresponds certainly to one of Citton’s rules, i.e., that of “PRESENTIAL ENTHRALMENT” (Citton 2017, 140; capitals in the original). All such devices lay the ground for a poetics of attention that is indexed on an intensifcation of experience that is also a sharing of experience, hence a mode of “unselfng” (Murdoch 2013, 99), paradoxical as it may seem. In Gallagher’s terms, joint attention turns the subject towards exteriority, since he considers our world as “the result of pragmatic and dynamic interchanges between agent and environment […]. On this model, social cognition is based on social interaction” (Gallagher 114). Such “dynamic interchanges” are represented in the novels but they are also shared by the readers, which is also what the adjective “pragmatic” may suggest. Once again, I feel that what is possibly most original in the way in which the literary narrative accounts for and works with attention is that it both represents and presents it, leading the readers to experience and perform attentional experiences in turn. From this point of view, there is some sort of opening of the narrative towards its exteriority that echoes, intra-textually, the character’s opening and, on the extra-textual level, the readers’ own “fssuring up” and sharing that is also a constructive “dispossession” (Butler and Athanasiou ix) and a constitutive one in ethical terms. Contiguity, proximity, immediacy and “presential enthralment,” all such items point at a situatedness in relation to the object and other subjects of attention that inheres in the reader’s own embodiment and thereby resonates in temporal and spatial terms. In concretely soliciting the readers’ involvement, the poetic of attention offers an experiential knowledge of represented situations that it thereby gets to radiate outside the text. The fssuring of the subject of attention therefore echoes a textual opening of sorts, both providing the conditions of relationality. Such a relationality is intrinsic in the textual vulnerability (Ganteau 2015) that echoes the reader’s own exposure, understood as his/her impossible sovereignty and necessary dependence on exteriority generally and on the other more precisely. By being envisaged through attentional situations, it allows for the perception and consideration of objects—including but not exclusively ordinary objects—considered in their singularity. From this point of view, the poetics of attention as evinced in and performed by contemporary narratives allow for a particularist ethic that rejects all dogmatism and pre-determined assessment and promotes vigilance (Depraz 2018, 320). In Depraz’s acceptation, this means a form of attention that implies being present to the other—as opposed to be closed in on oneself—being temporally open to the present and the future—as distinct from a retreat into the past—being open to risk—in contradistinction with an attitude

172 Conclusion privileging a domineering posture clinging to known facts—and a “precarious relation to alterity”—as opposed to the “security inherent in possession” (Depraz 2018, 320; translation mine) that is the condition of an ethical relation. Taken in this sense, “vigilance” appears as a brand of attention that privileges risk and taps the forces of vulnerability so as to accommodate the manifestation of ordinary objects taken in their singularity. In such circumstances, the onus falls on the perceiving, attentive, vigilant subject who has to determine, individually and via an ethics of the particularist type, what matters.

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Index

ableism 134, 150, 154, 160, 163 abstract(-ion) 19–20, 22, 36, 43, 74, 76–77, 110–11 ADHD 9; see also dysfunctional attention; hyper-attention Agamben, Giorgio 37, 68; see also bare life agency 11, 20, 40, 56, 58, 71, 79, 82, 87, 94, 96, 133, 163; deprivation of 37, 53, 71, 78; loss of 41, 54; readers’ 25–26, 38, 43, 48, 58, 76, 97, 115, 127, 164 AI 101–106, 113, 115–19, 124, 129–31; see also artifcial intelligence Alaimo, Stacy 97–99 Alexander, Neal 82–83 Alloa, Emmanuel 12–13 alterity 2, 15, 131, 166, 172 animal(s) 17, 57, 69, 73–75, 79, 89, 96, 137 Anthropocene 67–68, 87, 89–90, 94, 96, 139 anthropocentrism 65, 91, 100–101, 107, 109, 112, 118–19; post- 97 anti-pastoral 60, 67–71, 88; see also pastoral, postpastoral arrest 1, 11, 39 artifcial intelligence 31, 101–102, 132; see also AI Arvidson, Sven P. 11, 23, 147, 155 asylum seeker 32, 35, 39–41, 44 attention: as capacity 2, 6; collective 4–5, 15, 106, 142; communal 15; creative potential of 12; crisis of 2, 8–9, 12, 25, 29; deep 7; divided 24, 83–84; double 24–25, 83, 116; dysfunctional 8; ecology of 24, 27, 30, 42, 143, 146, 159, 165;

economy (of) 3–4, 7, 11, 19, 30, 146, 149, 169; embodied 15; ethics of 1, 26, 30, 58, 111; as event 1, 11–13, 166; hyper- 7; individual 4–5, 15; inter- 15; involuntary 1, 11, 73; inward(-looking) 2, 25–26; joint 4, 11, 14, 15, 28, 38, 52, 57, 92, 141, 145, 161–62, 170–71; limits of 11; meta- 11, 25, 39, 154, 167; nucleus of 11; outward-looking 2, 30; object of 12, 18, 55; poetics of 23–26, 29, 168–71; pragmatics of 31, 104; problematical 9; proto-ethical 13, 72, 91, 116, 137; social nature of 15; sphere of 11, 147, 155; sustained 10, 22, 29, 155; theme of 11; transient 10; voluntary 1, 12, 21, 24, 31, 73, 141, 154, 156, 166; work of 21, 61; see also ADHD attentionality 14 attentiveness 8, 10, 23, 27, 71, 78, 81–84, 87–88, 91–92, 108, 116, 145, 155 attunement 76–77, 84, 116, 149, 166, 169 Austin, J.L. 18, 21, 63 autonomy 14, 37, 51, 56, 97, 104, 133, 154, 157, 163 availability 12, 72–73 awareness 12, 72, 133, 156; critical 153; mutual 15 Ballard, J.G. 90, 94 Barad, Karen 98 bare life 37; see also Agamben, Giorgio Bartlett, Neil 30, 48–58, 167; Skin Lane 47–58

186

Index

Bayley, John 126, 151 becoming 73, 77, 99, 116, 130, 133, 160, 162–63; ethics of 116, 130; -human 115, 130–31; -machine 101, 115, 130–31; -nature 101; -other 128–29 being-for-the-other 14, 127–28 Benjamin, Walter 2–3 Bennett, Alice 25–6, 28, 165 Berardi, Franco 4–5, 75, 106, 147 Bernaerts, Lars, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Henan, and Bart Vervaeck 122 Bernard, Catherine 29, 43, 134 Bérubé, Michael 134, 158 biopolitics 37 bíos 37 Braidotti, Rosi 107, 110, 112–13, 116, 125, 128, 130 Braidotti, Rosi, and Simone Bignall 111 Brontë, Charlotte 137 Brugère, Fabienne, and Guillaume Le Blanc 36–37, 39, 41–42, 45, 47; see also Le Blanc Buell, Lawrence 67, 70 Butler, Judith 37; Excitable Speech 54; Frames of War 39; Giving an Account of Oneself 54, 158, 166; Precarious Life 53, 125–26; Vulnerability in Resistance 54 Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou 16, 126, 171 Callus, Ivan 119 capacity(-ies): attentional 3, 92, 108, 123, 130, 141; ethical 38, 51, 67, 111, 118; perceptual 19, 38 capitalism 5–6, 35; global 5; late 8–9 Caracciolo, Marco 22, 38, 69, 122, 168 care 15, 22, 25, 34, 45, 55, 63, 111, 121, 127–28, 141–42, 150; ethics of 17, 26, 30–31, 63, 111, 127, 131; giving 45; ordinariness of 142, 148; practice of 17, 54, 58; reciprocal 159, 161; -taking 58, 111; workers 17 Caruth, Cathy 104, 118 Cavell, Stanley 18, 20 Citton, Yves 1, 3–6, 9, 15, 23–25, 72, 107, 143, 146, 165; L’Économie de l’attention 3, 8; The Ecology of Attention 3–6, 11, 19, 24, 27, 106, 123, 146, 150, 154, 158, 167, 170–71

Clark, Timothy 93, 95 Cleave, Chris 30, 34–47, 167; “The Lorry Driver’s Tale” 34; The Other Hand 34–46 climate change fction 93, 95 Cohen, Joshua 5, 25 Coleridge, S.T. 21, 23, 28, 63 concrete(ness) 19, 43, 74, 145 consciousness 10–1, 13, 15–16, 63, 121, 123, 143, 157, 167; human 6, 86, 103; machine 105, 107, 109, 114, 118–19, 120, 122, 128, 131; studies 23 consideration see ethics ofconsumption 2, 5, 15, 136, 146, 169 contact zone(s) 77, 97–98 contiguity 44, 136, 145, 170–71 countervisuality 32, 56 Couser, Thomas J. 137, 158, 163 Crary, Jonathan 2–6, 9, 15, 146; 24/7. Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep 2–8, 163; Suspensions of Perception/Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture 7–8, 71 Critical Disability Studies 133, 159; see also disability cyborg 101, 108 Das, Veena 20, 136 Davis, Lennard J. 132–34, 136 defamiliarisation 28, 44–45, 83, 95–96, 119, 121, 167 democracy 85; narrative 32, 51 denial 19, 21, 33, 39, 41, 50, 63, 65, 88, 94, 119–20, 135–36, 148 density 13, 22, 110; of being 141, 169; emotional 22; of experience 16 dependence(s) 11, 37, 41, 54, 62, 69, 132, 136, 141, 148, 159–60, 171; see also interdependence(s) Depraz, Nathalie 13, 23, 25; Attention et vigilance 13–16, 72, 91, 105– 108, 123, 128, 137, 141, 155, 161, 169, 171–72; “La Phénoménologie expérimentale” 10 Derrida, Jacques 43; Of Hospitality 43, 46; Specters of Marx 43 Diamond, Cora 18–19, 21–22, 62–64, 167–68 disability 31, 131–32, 134–37, 140, 145–49, 151–52, 155–63; cognitive 9, 31, 131–32, 134–38, 140, 143,

Index 187 146, 151n 158–59, 162–67, 170; cultural representations of 158; democratization of 132; invisible 152; justice 164; linguistic 143, 145; narratives of 136–37, 153, 162; social construction of 132–33, studies 132–33; see also Critical Disability Studies distraction 2–3, 5, 7–8, 10, 25, 106–108, 143 double, the 114, 151–53 dystopia 67, 95, 104, 119–20 embedding(s) 16, 75, 84–88, 99, 132 embodiment 22, 110, 132–33, 135, 159, 171 emotion 11, 13, 22, 31, 108, 125, 133 empathy 15, 36, 45, 52, 55, 121–22, 125, 130 empowerment 31, 46, 58, 133, 137, 156, 161 entanglement(s) 17, 37, 62, 70, 76–77, 85, 87, 96–99, 110 environment (natural) 17, 30, 67, 70–76, 79, 82–85, 87, 92, 99, 100, 167 ēpochē 13 Epstein, Andrew 24, 29 ethical relation 14, 126–27, 172 ethics 10, 14, 24, 27, 42, 126; of alterity 25, 30, 63, 109, 126–27, 131; Aristotelian 110; of attention 19, 21, 26, 29–30, 58, 111, 161–62; of becoming 116, 130, 162–163; of care 17, 26, 30–31, 63, 111, 127, 131; of consideration; contextualist 111; feminist 111; from down-under 147– 48; of hospitality 42; Kantian 111; of literature 110, 112, 166; machine 112, 117; narrative 166; novelistic 150; of the ordinary 18–20, 27, 61, 63; particularist 32, 63, 111, 131, 172; posthuman environmental 99; practice of 15; relational 28, 100, 162; Ricœurian 127; of vulnerability 17, 37, 63, 159; see also attention; care; consideration; ordinary; the, particular; the, particularism; vulnerability exceptionalism 91, 98–99, 107, 112, 125 excluded, the 35, 40, 47, 52–53, 56, 61

exclusion 30, 35, 39, 41, 49, 53–54, 56, 61, 66, 63, 78, 125–26, 133, 167 expansion: of being 108, 169 experience: concrete 15; density of 13, 16; digitalisation of 4; electrifcation of 4; non- 50; standardization of 5 experiential: content 21, 61; knowledge 14, 38, 51, 75, 97, 118, 144, 146, 149, 171; richness 22; traces 44, 69 exposure 50, 111, 126, 171 exteriority 11, 13–15, 24, 26, 73, 76, 87, 98, 166, 171 Felski, Rita 74, 76, 84, 116, 149, 150, 169 fction 20 focalisation 16, 86, 92, 100, 107–108, 169–70; activity of 166; defamiliarising 130; delegated 37–8, 86; fexible 168; humble 71; internal 28, 38, 49, 55, 89, 91, 115–16, 136, 138, 141, 143, 146; shared 28 Foucault, Michel 21, 61 fragmentation 5, 7, 123, 134, 137, 162 frame(s) 30, 39, 45; of intelligibility 47; of perception 5, 30, 33, 35, 37, 42, 53, 70, 160, 168; of recognition 160; see also perception Franck, Georg 4 Fricker, Amanda 65, 164 functionality 7–8 Gale, Patrick 34 Gallagher, Shaun 15, 171 Ganteau, Jean-Michel 41, 47–48, 73, 84, 126, 171 Garland-Thomson, Rosemary 133–34, 136, 158 gender 32, 162 Genova, Lisa 151 gesture, attentional 15 ghost(s) 40, 43, 51; see also haunting; spectrality Gifford, Terry 60, 67, 99 Gilligan, Carol 111 Grosz, Elizabeth 98 Gurton-Wachter, Lily 2, 9–10, 23–25, 83 Hall, Alice 132–34, 153, 155, 162–63 Hall, Sarah 30, 67, 79; The Carhullan Army 67, 73; Haweswater 67–78, 80

188

Index

Haraway, Donna 77, 97, 99, 101, 108, 163 Harcourt, James 5 haunting 41, 81–82; see also ghost(s); spectrality Hayles, N. Katherine 4, 6–7 Herd, David 33 Herd, David, and Anna Pincus 32 Hoffman, Daniel Richard 25 hospitality 30, 32, 35–36, 41–42, 45, 47; policy of 36 humanism 90–91, 99, 107, 110, 118, 129–30 humanities 7, 17, 20, 23, 126, 133 humanoid 106–107, 109, 112, 115–16, 119, 126, 131; attention 107; narrator 125–26, 131; perception 108; robot 31, 101, 103–105, 120, 127; sentient 121, 123–24; vulnerability 125; see also robot humble 19, 44, 48, 61, 86, 92, 100, 135, 148, 150, 168–69; see also humility humility 17, 27, 60, 64, 86, 127; see also humble Husserl, Edmund 9, 12–13, 25, 141 hyperobject(s) 87, 90, 93–94, 170 immersive: experience 89, 141; knowledge 84; reaction 44; reading 50 impersonal(-ity) 26, 28, 51, 56, 80–81, 86–87, 110, 116, 141, 144, 166 importance 19, 22, 63–64; sharing of 64 inaudibility 50, 53, 58, 84 incapacitation 9, 53 incapacity 39, 52–53, 136–37, 153 incarnation 9, 15, 48, 136 injustice: epistemic 65, 164; testimonial 35, 164; see also Fricker, Amanda intensifcation 13–15, 50, 75–76, 84, 123, 169, 171; of being 108; of experience 91, 108, 141, 171 interdependence(s) 16, 36, 41, 47, 63, 65, 69, 77, 83, 85–86, 96–97, 99–100, 132, 159–60, 163; see also dependence(s) interruption 12–14, 76 intra-action(s) 98–99 inventory(-ing) 19, 20, 30, 75–77, 80, 92, 149, 158, 167

investigation 20, 149 invisibility(e)s 17, 19–20, 23, 30, 34, 38–42, 45, 48, 50–51, 53, 56, 69, 78, 90, 125, 133, 150, 158, 161, 164; manufacture of 41; ordinary 39; political 34–35; social 17, 32, 53; structural 34, 53; see also unseen Ishiguro, Kazuo 31, 121; Klara and the Sun 31, 101, 119–31; Never Let Me Go 119, 121, 129; The Remains of the Day 119, 121 Jackson, Maggie 1 James, David 66 James, William 10–11, 13 Johnson, B.S. 138 Jones, Cynan 30; Cove 88; Everything I Found on the Beach 89; The Dig 89; The Long Dry 67, 89–100; Stillicide 88 Kaplan, E. Ann 95 Kipling, Rudyard 117 Kopka, Katalina, and Norbert Shaffeld 101–102, 104, 109–10, 113–14, 118 Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Lea 164–65 Lanham, Richard A. 3–4 Laplanche, Jean 104 Laugier, Sandra 18–22, 41–42, 61–64, 75, 111, 128, 148–50 Le Blanc, Guillaume 17; Dedans, Dehors: La condition de l’étranger 44, 53, 61; L’Insurrection des vies minuscules 32, 53, 56; L’Invisibilité sociale 17, 50–51, 53, 56, 59, 161; Que faire de notre vulnérabilité 71; “To Be Is to Be Perceived” 53; Vies ordinaires, vies précaires 17, 33, 46; see also Brugère and Le Blanc Levinas, Emmanuel; Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence 126; Totality and Infnity 14 life forms 22, 63, 138 lifestyle 53, 56, 58–59, 68, 78 Lilley, Deborah 60, 67, 99 Lovibond, Sabina 62–63 machine(s) 7, 31, 101–19, 124, 128; consciousness 128, 131; intelligent 6, 124, 130, 132; sentient 130 Maillard, Nathalie 125

Index 189 Malabou, Catherine 154, 162 Marcellin, Katia 170 Mbembe, Achille 40 McEwan, Ian 31; Atonement 103, 105; The Children Act 103; The Imitation Game 102; Machines Like Me 101–19, 121, 123; Saturday 103, 115–16, 105; Solar 94 McGregor, Jon 30; Even the Dogs 41, 78–79, 143; If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things 78–79, 143; Lean Fall Stand 79, 138–51; The Reservoir Tapes 82; Reservoir 13 30, 67, 72, 79–88, 143; So Many Ways to Begin 78–79, 143; This Is not the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You 79 mediasphere 3, 5, 7 melodrama 39, 105, 109, 116, 123 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 74 metalepsis 44, 51, 55, 93–95, 136, 144–46, 157, 168, 170 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 47, 56, 84 Mitchell, David T, and Sharon Snyder 134, 136–38, 163 Mitchell, Wendy 31, 151–64 modernity 2, 8, 71, 155 Moi, Toril 20 Moinat, Frédéric 123 Moore, G.E. 18 moral expressivity 9, 19 Morizot, Baptiste 17, 85–86, 100 Morton, Timothy 87–88, 90 Mundane, the 79, 82 Murdoch, Iris 13–14, 18, 20–21, 23, 27–28, 61–3, 76, 148, 151, 162, 169, 171 Nachträglichkeit 104, 117 nature writing 66, 99 new materialism 17, 97 New Nature Writing 30, 167 norm(s) 19, 53–54, 99, 132, 134; of ableism 150; Humanistic 107; linguistic 58; moral 112; of perception 46, 65, 95, 98, 100, 136; of recognition 22, 53, 64, 125–26, 137; see also perception Nussbaum, Martha C. 14, 16, 20, 97 obscene, the 39, 51, 136 obsolescence 113, 117, 122, 125–27; anthropological 130; human 104, 113, 117, 119

Ogien, Albert 149 opening 12, 24, 30, 76, 87, 128, 171; to alterity 2, 9, 13, 45, 73–74, 142–43, 146, 166; attentional 159 ordinary, the 17–22, 27, 30–32, 34, 40–43, 58–59, 61–64, 71, 73, 75, 78, 82–83, 85, 87, 99, 142, 147–49, 158, 167–68, 170; life 17, 19, 30, 53, 59–60, 74, 79, 143, 148, 150; OLP (Ordinary Language Philosophy) 17–21, 27, 42, 63; see also ethics Panizza, Sivia 26 Parker, Harry 134–37 particular, the 20–22, 60, 63–64, 110; see also particularism particularism 22, 25, 63–64, 111; see also particular, the Pasquinelli, Mateo 4 pastoral, the 67–68, 70, 89; new 84; see also anti-pastoral; postpastoral Peeren, Esther 41, 88, 99 Pelluchon, Corine 17, 74, 86, 169 Pepperell, Robert 113 perception 8, 16–17, 19, 21, 29, 32, 39, 60, 74, 94–95, 107, 111, 157, 160, 163, 167–69, 171; absence of 21, 39, 50, 53, 61, 63, 75; as activity 16, 130; artifcial 109–31, automatic 11; as cultural construct 96; humanoid 108; immediacy of 145–46; and language 19; modifcation of 15, 38; multi-scalar 68; of the ordinary 20, 22, 62–63; renewal of 40, 43–44, 63, 136; singularity of 22, 64, 145; texture of 13; work of 21–22, 42, 61, 64, 92, 149; see also frame(s); norm(s) Perreau, Laurent 12 phenomenology 9–11, 14, 17, 30, 107; negative 51 poetics: of attention 23–26, 29, 87, 168–71; environmental 75; of the inventory 75; of proximity 146–47 poetry 2, 7, 24, 28–29, 83, 91, 97, 168; Romantic 24 politics of literature 51, 126 posthuman, the 101, 108, 113; age 4, 6–7, 118–19; environmental ethics 99; naturalism 100 postpastoral 67, 99; see also anti-pastoral; pastoral

190

Index

pragmatic(s) 35, 58; of attention 31, 104; of refugee narratives 35 praxis 16, 45, 127 precariousness 16–17, 32–34, 40, 43, 45–46, 59, 71, 78, 126–27, 154, 157, 161, 166 proximity 35, 45, 74, 92, 99, 126, 144–47, 150, 158, 170–71 Putnam, Hilary 18 realism 18, 29, 43, 47, 83, 104, 115, 121, 166–68; humble 100; perceptual 82–88; psychological 120–21, 124; social 71; traumatic 134, 137 realist(ic): spirit 18–19, 21, 63, 167–69; mind 18 receptivity 12, 91 refugee 30, 32, 34–35, 37, 41–42, 64; Refugee Tales 32–34 Regard, Frédéric 127, 168 relationality 27, 47, 52, 56, 72, 77, 98, 142–43, 148, 159–65; deprivation of 52; failure of 51, 56; radical 128 resilience 25, 31, 35, 59, 162, 167 response 44, 104, 166 responsibility 16–17, 25, 35, 37, 41–42, 45, 60, 62, 64–65, 77, 84, 87, 96, 126, 128; global 47; individual 22, 36, 64; of narrative 16, 24, 99, 149, 152; for the natural environment 67, 76, 100; reader’s 84, 87, 99 rhythm 24, 100; of attention 123 Ribot, Théodule 10 risk 16, 87, 113, 161, 171–72 robot 105, 131; humanoid 101, 104, 120–21, 123, 127; sentient 125; see also humanoid romance, the 22, 43, 51, 58, 74, 104–105 Rosanvallon, Pierre 51 Rosello, Mireille 35 Rossini, Manuela 116 Rothberg, Michael 134 Roulstone, Alan, Carol Thomas, and Nick Watson 133, 138 scale(s) 76, 90, 95–96; 1:1 145–46, 158, 170; multiplicity of 88–96 Schildrick, Margrit 133, 159–60, 162–63 selectivity 10–11, 83, 141, 167

Shelley, Mary 104 Sherman, John Foley 24–25 silence 33, 41, 50, 56–57 slipstream 102–104 solidarity 15, 32–34, 37, 47, 62, 85–86, 96, 159 Sorlin, Sandrine 52, 55 sovereignty 27, 36, 98; failure of 76, 97, 171; non- 16; species 132 spectrality 40, 71, 82; see also ghost(s) speed 7, 44, 82, 149 Steinbock, A.J. 12 Stevens, Wallace 80 subjectivity 16, 126, 137 sublime, the 95–96 survival 44, 60, 67–68, 78, 88, 141, 155–56 TAB (Temporarily Able-Bodied) 132, 155 telepathy 16, 28 texture 13, 17, 25, 54, 60–61, 69, 74–75, 83, 85–86, 91, 148–49, 158, 169 Tillyard, E.M.W. 90–91, 96, 99 transcorporeality 62, 97–98 trauma 8–9, 33, 40, 50–51, 82, 118–19, 137, 170; collective 81, 84; fction 50, 95, 104 Trexler, Adam 94 Turing, Alan 102, 104–105, 110, 113–15; test 114–15, 118, 131 Ulin, David L. 7, 71–72, 149 uncanny, the 26, 28, 43, 102, 104, 107, 119 unclosing (of the self) 13 uniformisation 5, 75 unseen, the 19, 33, 84; see also invisibility unselfng 13–14, 26, 76, 87, 127–28, 162, 171 Vermeulen, Pieter 96 vibrancy 30, 70, 75–76, 78, 83–84, 86, 91, 96, 100, 158, 164 vigilance 16, 128, 166, 171–72 visibility 4, 9, 30, 32–33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42–43, 45, 46, 48–51, 53, 56, 58–59, 84, 87, 89, 132–34, 139, 161, 168, 170; economy of 4; lack of 17, 91, 95, 111; ontology of 4; recognition 53; vibrant 30

Index 191 visuality 47, 55, 84 vivid(ness) 10, 13, 69, 74, 76, 96, 169 vulnerability 9, 14, 16, 25, 31, 37, 40–41, 53–54, 62, 65, 71, 76, 95, 97, 110, 130, 132, 154–55, 162, 172; AI 124–31; anthropological 125; corporal 37; ethics of 17, 37, 63, 159; to exteriority 14–16, 24–25, 45, 73, 74, 76, 126; humanoid 125; linguistic 46, 132, 145; of the other 16, 11; narrative 27, 83, 171; ontological 14, 36–37, 64, 98, 125, 155; political 43; recognition of 126; social 54 waiting 12–13, 16, 41; receptive 13, 72 Waldenfels, Bernhard 8–9, 104, 148, 166 Walezak, Emilie 68, 70, 74, 76–77, 100 Wehrle, Maren 12 Weil, Simone 8, 13, 26

Wells, Adrian, and Gerald Matthews 11 Wharton, Anna 152 what matters 18, 22, 32, 34, 40, 54, 61–65, 76–78, 94, 128, 148–50, 172 Whitehead, Anne 50 Wilson, Elizabeth 104 Winn, Raynor 30, 58–65, 167 Winterson, Jeanette 94; Frankissstein 101, 104; The Stone Gods 101 witness 37–38, 49, 52, 56, 70, 78, 150, 158, 168 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 18, 20–21; The Blue Notebook 22; Philosophical Investigations 20–21 Wordsworth 1–2, 7, 11–12 work of doing 59 wound 51–52; internal 54; invisible 51–52 Wu, Wayne 11 Zapf, Hubert 97 zoē 37