Introduction: How Do Novels Think about Neoliberalism?

TLDR: The fourth biennial conference of the Society for Novel Studies as discussed by the authors was held at the University of Pittsburgh in May 2016 under the leadership of Jonathan Arac, then SNS vice president.

Abstract: The fourth biennial conference of the Society for Novel Studies was held at the University of Pittsburgh in May 2016 under the leadership of Jonathan Arac, then SNS vice president. Novel sponsored British novelist Tom McCarthy as the keynote speaker, and he agreed to let us publish both his talk and his provocative interview with Nicholas Huber. Members of the editorial board selected four additional papers from the conference that, in their view, shed new light on the relationship between the novel and neoliberalism. The remaining papers in this issue are based on invited talks from symposia held at Duke and Brown Universities that focused on the contemporary novel, critical theory, and the curious relationship these two modes of writing have taken up in the past half century. All the essays went through the journal’s standard review process. To introduce this special issue, we chose two essays that frame the largely unstated question that the collection as a whole addresses: McCarthy’s keynote talk, “Vanity’s Residue,” which leans heavily on certain novels as a mode of critical theoretical writing, and Dierdra Reber’s “ATale of Two Marats,” which leans just as heavily on the explanatory logic of political-economic theory as McCarthy does on that of novels. Together, these essays ask us to consider how major contemporary novelists have changed the novel’s “partition of the sensible . . . which,” according to Jacques Rancière, “allows (or does not allow) some data to appear” (11). Is this alteration of the reader’s formal expectations a matter of course—an expression of the generic obligation of the novel to violate the established novel form, however one construes it? Or do the formal features that distinguish novels written in the last thirty years or so alter that obligation itself? Should we consider the variations that encourage us to identify certain novels with “neoliberalism” as variations of the novel as a genre—or do they amount to a different order of difference that in turn amounts to a different set of generic requirements? If the latter, then can we say that the novels now being written for a global audience are breaking with the novel form itself and dissolving the contract, which changes those expectations— including that of the element of surprise—that readers bring to novel reading? Reber and McCarthy are of one mind that the turn in political and novel history now attributed to neoliberalism has actually been three centuries in the making. Reber begins with the concept of laissez-faire coined by the mid-eighteenthcentury Physiocrats who argued that the economy should be free of regulations to develop according to its own natural law. She shows how that principle derives energy from its opposition (“abhorrence” is her word) to a form of vertical authority that describes itself as rational. Her account holds the vertical authority of empire responsible for curbing the horizontal drive of laissez-faire until the end of the Cold War period, when neoliberalism emerged from the collapse of vertical authority. She sees Trumpery as symptomatic of this collapse: “In a cultural climate dominated by