Chapter 13 - Shallow Intensity

Summary

This essay responds to the perception that later twentieth-century experience underwent a shallowing of intensity – what Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed as a ‘waning of Affect’.

The essay reads this shallowing, as it is represented in the novel of the period, and as it reflects the logic of late capitalism, and of neoliberal culture. But while it examines the ways in which the novel partakes of this logic, it suggests at the same time that the experience of shallowness itself yields a particular kind of intensity, one which is at odds with its affective weakening. If we are to understand the relation between late capitalism, neoliberalism and waning of affect, we have to address the ways in which shallowness become its own kind of intensity – in which shallowness and intensity enter into a shifted relation with one another.

Reading the later twentieth-century novel from Philip Roth to Muriel Spark to Margaret Atwood to James Kelman, the essay argues that we can see a form of fictional expression emerging at this time, in which the novel does not abandon its commitment to forms of political intensity, but in which it rewrites the given relations between the weighty and the trivial, between weakening and intensifying, between fiction and reality.