The Novel As The Walking Dead?

 I have not had a good day today - not feeling quite well, tired out, achy, having not stirred from the apartment (so far).  I point all this out as a preface to my saying I am not sure that I understand David Vichnar's Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing (3:AM Magazine).

The best description of necromodernist is:

 Common to both assessments of Armand’s writing — to reverse a well-known Lyotard maxim regarding postmodernism — is a notion of a type of modernism in its posthumous state, a necromodernist condition in which writing persists in the ruins of literature’s once-modern ambitions. Necromodernism neither celebrates the new nor nostalgically mourns the old, inhabiting instead a space where cultural memory, media saturation, and infrastructural collapse converge into textual practice. It is neither an elegy for modernism nor a prophecy of what comes next, but rather a practice of endurance.

 Okay, I get that much. I read on, waiting for where novels should go. Instead, there is more explanation. Wherein I have read only one novel.

 1. Necromodernism continues some of the radical tendencies in late-postmodernist writing produced in the wake of the many 1960s proclamations of the “death of the novel,” like Nathalie Sarraute’s “age of suspicion,” Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, John Barth’s “Literature of Exhaustion”, and Ronald Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. Thus, a vast genealogy spanning the last three decades of the 20th century and reaching across languages and continents — from Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream (1970; trans. 2016), Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975; trans. 2005), Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra (1975; trans. 1976) to Julián Ríos’ Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel (1983; trans. 1991) and Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives (1998; trans. 2007) and 2666 (2004; trans. 2008) — includes mega-novels that, despite their ruinous form, still strive for the condition of architecture. They rehearse the untranslatability of literature into linear narrative, whether through polyphonic glossolalia, textual overgrowth, or multilingual play and semantic entropy. Conversely, a genealogy of the first three decades of 21st-century English-language necromodernist mega-novels — starting with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1997) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), and including tomes like Lynne Tillman’s American Comedy (2006), Joshua Cohen’s Witz (2010), Alan Moore’s Jerusalem (2016), and John Trefry’s Massive (2024) — comprises works that refuse to simplify, streamline, or submit to the attention economies of the present.

These tomes do not merely expand the novel — they enact a praxis that is simultaneously necromantic and architectural, their writing constructing ruins-in-process, vast labyrinths of language that resist closure, and in so doing marking a refusal of literature’s “function” as communicative instrument. They engage in literature as an entropic machine, a necropolis of signifiers, a literature that survives as infrastructure survives — broken, provisional, haunted — where meaning is no longer constructed but scavenged from debris.

Yep, there is Infinite Jest, but I do know of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666. 

I may have learned more about Infinite Jest from this essay than in all other works I have read. It does align with my reading.

2. Two necromodernist masterpieces as unlike each other as Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Armand’s The Combinations (2016) are both centred on the tragic violent deaths and spectral afterlives of their respective patriarchal protagonists, James Orin Incandenza (JOI) and “The Prof” Tomáš Hájek. JOI’s death can be read both as an homage and a move beyond (and against) high modernism. While in life this experimental, encyclopaedic “auteur” stages the Joycean father-artist in American late-century form, JOI’s grotesque, self-annihilating, head-centred suicide with domestic technology (the microwave oven) allegorises the exhaustion of the high-modernist dream of the autonomous masterpiece. His ugly legacy for posterity — the lethal master-film “the Entertainment” — then folds Shakespeare/ Joyce/ Wallace into one lineage of “total” artworks and father-ghosts. Infinite Jest inherits modernism’s ambition while overturning its faith in aesthetic autonomy, relocating literary value from mastery to relationship, contingency, and care.

***

Their further parallels then extend from these two central structuring absences. Each book revives the cathedral-scale project of totality, yet frames it as a haunted object: cf. Wallace’s shattered-chronology endnotes and Armand’s combinatorial grids (chess/“octaves”/files), where the big forms are literally raised only to be shown as ruins. Both texts obsess with archives and notational apparatus and perform necromancy at the level of materials: Infinte Jest’s endnotes, filmography, and dossiers stand in parallel to The Combinations’ state files, library stacks, and sealed papers. Both novels turn paratext into plot, making the dead paperwork speak while exposing its epistemic limits. Finally, both portray their own striving towards form as a type of literary addiction and compulsion: AA mantras, rituals, and relapse cycles in Wallace rhyme with Armand’s iterative “investigations” and list-logics. In both, repetition becomes an aesthetic of haunting—characters and texts reenact what they cannot resolve.

There is the point that I think annoyed me most with DFW - the lack of resolution. I think my mind has no great trouble allowing for an open ending. I read Blood Meridian as not having a neat ending that answers all question; it may raise even more. No Country for Old Men lacks an ending explaining and resolving the plot. But Infinite Jest just ends, its irresolution does not seem so much as commentary as much as the writer running out of words.

Expanding its thesis further, discussing novels of which I am wholly ignorant:

Whilst quite diverse and very much in leagues of their own, all these writers resurrect high-modernist procedures (streamed interiority, montage/collage, documentary apparatus, polyphony) and put those “dead” forms to work inside today’s mediascape, often with literal ghosts, archives, or revenant voices. What unites their necromodernist impulses is not style or ideology but a shared condition: writing in a time when literature is no longer central even to itself and finding in that marginality a strange freedom. What links these works is their commitment to excess as writerly praxis. Narrative is not abandoned but drowned in a surfeit of commentary, digression, and linguistic interference.

Excuse me, but this freedom seems to me to be the freedom of suicide. Yes, we are even more immersed in information overload. This overload has brought us the Trump Presidency. But we find ways to survive the howling onslaught of words, ideas, and plain noise. Shouldn't literature take on how we live now?

 But where the water starts getting deep for me is in these paragraphs:

5. In each case, the “text” becomes the scene of writing itself rather than its product. Consequently, each novel stages a continuous process, instead of parading as a finished commodity. What this praxis effects is a shift from representation to performativity: Massive describes until description collapses under its own density; The Combinations shuffles until the act of combination becomes more significant than the result; Larva and Bottom’s Dream demand that reading become a physical ordeal, an enactment of linguistic impossibility. In Makin’s triptych, the seriality of text undermines closure, insisting that dwelling in the language itself is the only possible “plot.”

This is not Joyce’s encyclopaedism re-performed, but the novel conceived of as archive of the already-decayed. Schmidt’s monstrous page-columns, Ríos’s multilingual saturation, Armand’s vertiginous palimpsests, Makin’s seemingly endless serial accumulations — all of these deploy excess as a critical resistance to the contemporary literary economy of brevity, clarity, and digestibility. Trefry, too, treats description as an endless surface that resists plot’s reduction to skeleton, demanding instead that the reader dwell in stratigraphy.

These books are, in a sense, anti-cultural products: they demand time, patience, and acceptance of incompletion. In doing so, they enact a politics — not of slogans or themes, but of form itself. In persisting as unreadable, they insist on the possibility of thought beyond optimisation. A Tomb in H-Section is exemplary here: it does not seek to be “about” anything in the reductive sense; it is, instead, an experience of navigating the wreckage of narrative in the 21st century. And in that experience, it points to what literature, however marginalised, can still do: not to revive the modernist project, but to haunt the present with its afterlife.

Critically, these texts should not be read genealogically — as descendants of Joyce or Pynchon, for example — but synchronically, as constellations of textual praxis that opposes late-capitalist aestheticised escapism. Each in its own way insists on opacity, overproduction, and unreadability as critical tactics. Against the neoliberal demand for transparency and communicability, these works perform a counter-economy of the unreadable as political strategy. Necromodernism here is a shared condition: literature composed of ruins, spectral intertexts, archival debris, linguistic overproduction, and the refusal of a future teleology. Thus, what is common to Schmidt, Ríos, Wallace, Makin, Trefry, Armand et al. is not merely scale or difficulty but a shared commitment to the unreadable as praxis. Their novels are not failed communication but deliberately anti-communicative constructions. They force us to confront language as architecture, ruin, and mass; they displace the novel from a linear temporality to a necromodernist simultaneity. In this constellation, the novel survives not as a living organism but as a machine-for-the-undead.

 Let set out my reactions, so far.

1. Performativity I will accept as accurate. It seems to me to be the conclusion of an idea I came to when reading in prison. The novel is a form whose content is filched from other genres. Before the Twentieth Century, it was the history, the romance, the memoir provided models upon which novels were based. Film became the genre copied (or rebelled against) in the Twentieth Century. The novel borrowing from film become performances in themselves does not seem so strange. It could also be likened to abstract art and various forms of jazz, where the technique becomes the art. This has not been productive for art or jazz; I cannot see it being productive for literature. Art should be to connect with humanity, not perform masturbatory acts for a sect based upon secret knowledge.
2.  I had trouble finding a prescription for the future until I ran across "but to haunt the present with its afterlife". Taking a stand against the tech bros, against the screen culture, against our willful know-nothing culture, seems a most honorable goal for literature. However, literature becoming a coded message for cognoscenti subverts any of its subversive power.
3.  The "linear temporality to a necromodernist simultaneity" returns me to my idea of literature as taking on the techniques of film. It is also a bit of modern life  - and a bit of David Hume - everything happening on thing after another and at the same time. That is reality. I do not know how else to describe reality - but for one thing. That is, put the author back in as the mediator between the word and the page.

It hurts again to sit upright and type. Too much stuff that was to be done remains undone. All I have at the end of the day are ideas without having the time or the energy to apply them.

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