3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

The first chapter claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic, and by extension, questions the English novel’s complicity in propagating that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire, surfaces to the diegetic level in a classic instance of a thematization of the device and becomes available for critical contemplation. Drawing from Max Weber, Mary Poovey, and Georg Lukács, I attend in particular to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve’s recasting of Sutpen’s life as a debtor’s farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a transnational fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the discovery of original forms with which to express the modern transnational world order.

The chapter provides an overview of literary predecessors whose influence is evident across Mailer’s work, but perhaps most notably in his early work: John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

This essay explores ideas of the untimely in connection with a queer politics in Faulkner: queer a commitment to imagining novel forms of dissident desire, pleasure, and affiliation; untimeliness an effect of the non-coincidence of chronological and political temporalities.Faulkner’s fiction is staggered temporally not only as a result of his well-known determination to recollect the traumatic past of nation, region, and individual, but also by less noticed efforts to grasp, in that past, alternative futures, some now foreclosed, others still biding their time. In Faulkner’s historical fiction like Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, we find materializations in the past of futures that may not come to pass; in novels set in the present such as Light in August, we encounter dissident ways of life that resist modern normative constraints; in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem another dimension of the untimely appears, in forms of futurity that beckon with unprecedented gratifications of desire while threatening the resurgence of past forms of bondage.

This chapter follows on from the last to trace the development of the prosthetic modernism discernible at the turn of the twentieth century, as it works through the modernist novel from Proust, Joyce, Stein and Woolf up to the extended late modernist work of Samuel Beckett. The chapter reads Beckett’s reception of Proustian and Joycean modernism, from his novels of the thirties and forties up to his late work Company and suggests that this reception might best be understood as a poetics of twining. Beckett offers an extended reflection on the ways in which the modernist novel performs a mode of twining, a joining together of mind with prosthetic extension; but he also enacts a specific form of untwining, which demonstrates how the novel has always shown the unbound, the disaggregated, to be a constituent part of the terms in which it conducts its binding properties.

For the first twenty-five years or so of his career, Cormac McCarthy was considered a writer of “Southern literature” by most readers. This term designates a literary genre as much as it does a region of origination. Based on paradigms established by the works of earlier Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, among many others, certain aspects of setting, plot, and character become the expected norm for writers from the region. As is the case with these other writers, understanding the cultural realities of McCarthy’s South helps readers understand his Southern works. This chapter discusses the context of McCarthy’s Knoxville, from its Civil War history through Reconstruction to the advent of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It considers how McCarthy’s works reflect this milieu as well as that of the greater South at large, trying to place McCarthy within the context of other Southern writers, and the cultural trends and currents which influenced their writing as well as his.