The Novel in the Epoch of Social Systems: Or, “Maps of the World in Its Becoming”

These pages pose a general, even rough, question: What is the situation of the artwork, and particularly the novel, in what may be described as the epoch of social systems? I mean to suggest that this question has emerged, if often inexplicitly, on a range of fronts, in recent versions of the so-called “method wars” in literary studies, and in the humanities more generally. If we demilitarize this rhetoric, and demobilize the nearly one-word arguments that tend to underwrite it, it may be possible to get at the intricated place of the novel among social systems today. It may be possible too to get at (borrowing Alexander Kluge’s good way of framing such matters) something of the precision of rough ideas. Perhaps no American novelist more incisively stages what this convergence looks like—what this systems-ironic turn in the form of the novel means—than Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s fiction serves as the throughput of the analysis of the shape and distinction of the art system among a manifold of comparable, and rival, social systems. It provides a view of the pathos, and enchantments, of networks and systems of systems, across the practices and disciplines, the tableaux and forms, the proliferating self-descriptions and roadmaps of contemporary life