“The texture of et cetera” — Synchronizing with the Blurry Real in 21st Century Artists’ Novels (Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Kate Zambreno)

Abstract

Whether it is in the wake of a “Return to the Real” in visual arts” (Foster 1996), of “Reality Hunger” (Shields 2010), a number of novelists of the third millennium have shown an ever growing interest in accommodating the forms of the real into their fictions. For a certain category of novels, the fascination for the real translates into considerable changes brought to the novel’s inherent relation with time. As shown by Peter Boxall, the speed and instantaneity that are specific to our 21st century seems to be counterbalanced in a certain number of novels by an infinite attention to the slow passing moments of our everyday reality (2013, 1–18). This article focuses on three novels that revisit the forms of the Künstlerroman in the 21st century (Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, 2011; Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life, 2012; Kate Zambreno, Drifts, 2020) and looks at the strategies used by their narrators to grasp the elusive nature of the transient real while in the process redefining the novel as a site where to explore formal possibilities rather than as a set of generic constraints.