“[D]oes affect theory offer a set of tools particularly relevant to reading the short story? And does the short story offer a particularly productive illustrative capacity for thinking about the operation of affect?”
(“Roundtable” 185)

The (Neoliberal) Short Story and Disruptive Affectivity

1In Steven Millhauser’s darkly allegorical short story “The Next Thing” from his 2011 collection We Others, the autodiegetic narrator reflects on the comprehensive transformation of his personal, professional, and communal life. This transformation is brought about by the emergence of what starts off with a kind of mega-mall on the outskirts of town and soon develops into a full-fledged parallel society, an Orwellian underground dystopia advertised as “the Next Thing,” but referred to by most simply as “the Under.” Reluctant to visit it at first, the narrator eventually embraces its promises of a better, happier, more convenient life. He even sells his house to the company to move into one of The Next Thing’s underground apartments. From the first paragraphs on, his retrospective description of the “great shift” (88) and the way the Under gradually absorbed him and changed his entire life is framed by a meditation on the inadequacy of his emotional response to the unfolding transformation: “You needed new feelings. You couldn’t just know right off what to make of it, as you might have done with another place” (79).

2In the history of the American short story, we find many prominent examples that foreground such a pairing of social transformation under capitalism and the emotional or affective intensity that accompanies it. It is perhaps no coincidence that affect theorist Sianne Ngai opens her influential first book, Ugly Feelings, with a reference to one of the most iconic texts in the short story genre—Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—, stressing the parallel between Bartleby’s affective equivocality and the “political equivocality of his unnervingly passive form of dissent” (Ngai 1). When the narrator describes how a “feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy” (Melville 2375) disconcerts and “disarms” him by creating a bond between him and Bartleby, it is arguably the intensity of that feeling that prompts him to relate the story in the first place; or in other words, the narrator’s “astonishment drives the narrative” (Murison, “Roundtable” 168). Yoshiaki Furui has further argued in a recent essay that “Bartleby” foregrounds the “close relationship between capitalism and emotions,” and particularly the “circulation and exchange of ugly feelings for economic value” (Furui 357). As in “The Next Thing,” in “Bartleby” societal change gets reflected in emergent emotional states. Their narrativization becomes the main driver for the story, and the intensity this produces is arguably one of the reasons why “Bartleby” still speaks to us today as a powerful story about the alienation and transformation of modern life. While Ngai is largely oblivious of Bartleby’s generic form as a short story, this dimension has been succinctly pointed out by Justine Murison, in the “Roundtable” featured in the special issue on “Affect and the Short Story and Cycle” of The Journal of the Short Story in English: “The affective work in the narrative, including its humor, and the generic work of the short story are inextricably linked. To put this differently, in its very shortness, a short story often depends upon affective loops and leaps in place of exhaustive detail: there simply is no room to spin a totality” (168).

4Picking up on the short story’s history as a seismograph of social change, the focus of my article is on how short stories center around “affective forms of reorientation” (Ahmed 8) that are at once individual and social, and that are interwoven with questions of community and societal transformation. Although I situate my argument in the short story’s long tradition of foregrounding disruptive affectivity as briefly sketched above, my focus will be on very recent examples, especially Millhauser’s “The Next Thing” (2011) and George Saunders’s “The Semplica Girl Diaries” (2013). Based on a close reading of these two stories, I argue that the interrelation between the social-cultural transformation and their narrative expression in the literary genre of the short story is presented mainly through what we might call ‘intense emotions’: relating episodes from their lives, both narrators not only become emblematic or metonymic for “the collective life of the community” (Zagarell 503); they do so through their constant reflections on how that community is being shaped affectively by an increasing commodification and consumption of life. As both stories conjure up fictional worlds and communities that are at once ontologically removed from and structurally related to our ‘reality,’ they exploit the short story form (and the narrative devices of speculative fiction) to highlight what Sara Ahmed calls the “emotional intensities” (12) that bind together subjects, collectives, and objects.

5Regarding the title and overall argumentative trajectory of this article, I take my main cue from Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (2015), and particularly from the definition of the ‘neoliberal novel’ she offers in the first chapter of her book. For Smith, the significant difference between the liberal and neoliberal novel lies in the emotional work they perform. Whereas the liberal novel foregrounds the psychological and emotional interior life of its highly individualistic characters through certain narrative techniques and especially what E. M. Forster called “round characters,” the neoliberal novel is less concerned with the emotional life of its characters or the representation of their psychological depths and secrets. Instead, the neoliberal novel transforms or transvalues the liberal novel’s underlying model of individuality by stressing the relationality of the subject, who is framed as the product of “affective vectors,” its encounters and contact with others: “in neoliberal novels attachments to others are seen as themselves constitutive of the individual’s full realization” (Smith 41). The neoliberal novel consequently moves away from an emphasis on individual protagonists “and toward the construction of emotionally bound groups” (41). The individual of the neoliberal novel is one whose relations with others do not contradict or limit, but rather expand and enrich its self-development.

6The neoliberal novel’s emphasis, at the thematic level (i.e. plot, character development, etc.), on connected selves and affective communities is mirrored on the level of reader response. As Smith puts it, the

contemporary Contract model of literary investment . . . is one in which readers expect reading to be productive of a specific kind of affective value: the value of connection with others that allows for the growth and enrichment of the self. Just as characters in neoliberal novels develop and grow out of contact with other characters, readers too expect emotional development and growth out of contact with the people who populate the narratives they consume. (42)

Identification and emotional enrichment are thus the main tenets of the neoliberal novel’s contract model of literary investment. It promises the reader a return on his investment of reading time, whose payoff no longer lies merely in the understanding of a character’s interior life, but in the connection with others as a source for self-development and personal growth: “the neoliberal novel is envisioned as having value for its capacity to provide a feeling of emotional connection rather than merely for its focus on the interior life of a discrete individual” (Smith 38).

Sticky Objects and Cruel Optimism in George Saunders’s “The Semplica Girl Diaries”

8George Saunders’s short stories frequently approach questions of subjectivity and collectivity via their emotional or affective undertones, and as such can be read as “affective fictions” (Millen). As Alex Millen has pointed out, an “examination of affect in Saunders will help us to understand how his stories bring into imaginative focus the way we feel now; that is, in our era of so-called . . . neoliberalism” (128). Millen makes a persuasive argument as to “how the way we feel now” is reflected in the characters’ hapless performances of self-improvement, but also and especially in Saunders’s rhetoric and humor, exposing the ways in which the economization and financialization of social life increasingly shapes human relationships and communal structures.

12In the story’s foregrounding of emotional states, the diarist’s frequent reflections on his feelings crystallize around various consumer goods, from the luxury cars, plasma TV, and mahogany cabinet at his daughter’s friend’s house to the porcelain jungle cats from her birthday gift list to the Semplica Girls themselves. However, it is the SGs as subject-objects that become the very emblem, or node, for the ways in which communities are shaped emotionally through new, emerging relationships between subjects and objects. Fueled by the “anxieties of neoliberalism” (Ellerhoff 195), Saunders’s story uses the mode of speculative fiction to explore the way in which “community is devastated by commoditization” (Zagarell 512) and the aspirations of extreme capitalism. The SGs serve in this scenario as the tangible and visible objects around which the story’s dominant emotions/affects are organized. Sara Ahmed refers to this as the “stickiness” of objects: “objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension” (Ahmed 11). The immigrant girls displayed as signs of the good life mobilize extreme feelings in the story’s characters. As the narrator comments: “Effect amazing. Having so often seen similar configurations in yards of others more affluent, makes own yard seem suddenly affluent, you feel different about self, as if at last you are in step with peers and time in which living” (Saunders 133, emphasis added). As sticky objects, the SGs make the narrator “feel different about self,” synchronizing him with his peers and the very “time in which living.”

13The narrator’s feelings elicited by his subject-object relationship with the SGs are contrasted by the emotional response of his daughter, Eva. As a peculiar version of what Ahmed calls “bodies out of place,” the girls embody the disruptive emotional intensities that the story projects in the form of speculative short fiction. At the same time, they signify the ways in which individuals and communities are shaped through the contact with others and with objects, a contact that is first and foremost based on—often contradicting—emotional responses. Unlike her father’s, Eva’s response to the SGs is dominated by empathy, as she sees them as subjects rather than objects:

Sat thinking of Eva. . . . Last night, after party, found her sad in her room. Asked why. She said no reason. But in sketch pad: crayon pic of row of sad SGs. Could tell were meant to be sad, due to frowns went down off faces like Fu Manchus and tears were dropping in arcs, flowers springing up where tears hit ground. Note to self: talk to her, explain that it does not hurt, they are not sad but actually happy, given what their prior conditions were like: they chose, are glad, etc. (119)

In Marxist terms, here the suffering of the bodies is not invisibilized in the SGs as commodities, at least not for Eva. While her father, willingly or habitually, blanks out the SGs’ histories of production and labor by reverting to the common narrative of global capitalism—in short, that the global spread of capitalism is beneficial for everyone, improving the living conditions even of those whose labor it exploits (“they chose, are glad, etc.”)—as a child Eva has not yet fully internalized this narrative. In other words, she has not yet transformed her feelings into fetishes, “qualities that seem to reside in objects, only through an erasure of the history of their production and circulation” (Ahmed 11). What is even more, her emotional response forces the narrator to acknowledge these entangled histories as well; histories that connect slavery and human-trafficking to the global disasterscapes of the Anthropocene:

Yikes. Worse than I thought: Laotian (Tami) applied due to two sisters already in brothels. Moldovan (Gwen) has cousin who thought was becoming window washer in Germany, but no: sex slave in Kuwait (!). Somali (Lisa) watched father + little sister die of AIDs . . . Filipina (Betty) has little brother “very skilled for computer,” parents cannot afford high school, have lived in tiny lean-to with three other families since their own tiny lean-to slid down hillside in earthquake. (Saunders 135)

Strange as the SG scenario no doubt is (Saunders said it came to him in a dream), the consumption of human bodies as objects by means of turning them into commodities is of course only a slight intensification of what is already happening in global capitalism’s exploitation of labor force, particularly in countries of the Global South.

15It is tempting to read “The Semplica Girl Diaries” through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” a form of desire and attachment to objects which proves to be detrimental to one’s well-being. The narrator’s aspiration to the SGs as a token of upward mobility and happiness is connected to a “cluster of promises magnetized by a thing that appears as an object but is really a scene in the psychoanalytic sense” (Berlant 16). For Berlant, attrition is what ironically constitutes the very condition of life in the (neo-)liberal society:

The conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the United States, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and the irony that the labor of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the “technologies of patience” that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now. (Berlant 28)

A worn-out subject, the narrator is forced to suspend the “cruelty of the now”; the “time in which living” (Saunders 133) is one in which the promise of the good life is endlessly deferred into the future: “Note to self: Try to extend positive feelings associated with Scratch-Off win into all areas of life” (139). A petty example of the narrator’s hapless attempt to adopt the lessons of positive thinking and self-improvement to climb the career ladder (see Millen 133-34) and thus rise in the neoliberal status game, this quote also, if only implicitly, reveals the narrator’s very inability to sustain positive feelings beyond the acquisition of cultural goods. He is incapable of establishing other, potentially more meaningful and fulfilling habits and relationships—“the stuff that doesn’t have a price,” as David Foster Wallace would put it—, for example in his “aborted attempt to start vegetable garden” (Saunders 123) together with Eva.

Disruptive Affectivity in Steven Millhauser’s “The Next Thing”

17Millhauser’s “The Next Thing,” one of seven new stories published in his 2011 story collection We Others, bleakly envisions the emergence of a gigantic underground department store that, little by little, allures virtually all members of a small-town community to abandon their old homes (and lives) and move to “the Under.” It is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, who curiously alternates between the first person (singular and plural) and second person in his retrospective account of the Next Thing and its effects on his and his neighbors’ lives. In the narrator’s depictions, the very physical appearance and structure of the Next Thing are difficult to grasp due to the constant transformation and expansion it undergoes. The narrator’s descriptions of the Next Thing’s very architecture and forms—its cubicles, aisles, shelves, escalators, high ceilings and the vast emptiness at the fringe of the Under—are frequently interspersed with a number of contradicting sensations, oscillating between fascination, irritation, resentment, and even hatred, which ultimately leave the narrator puzzled and feeling lost:

I came away from that first visit not knowing what I felt. That in itself was worth thinking about. . . . It meant the old words didn’t apply—you needed new ones. You needed new feelings. You couldn’t just know right off what to make of it, as you might have done with another place. (Millhauser 79)

While Saunders’s narrator constantly describes himself and others as either sad or happy, thus foregrounding the disruptive affect of neoliberalist capitalism, the heightened self-reflexivity in “The Next Thing” points toward the very inadequacy of such learned feelings and emotions—as well as of the words that describe them—in light of an all-encompassing social transformation. In what I’d like to call the story’s meta-affective structure, feeling and (un-)knowing are closely intertwined, yet the medium that connects them—language—seems to be inappropriate to both. The narrator’s exposure to, and interaction with, the Under, its objects as well as the spatial movement it affords create a state of profound affective indeterminacy:

The whole visit was shot through with another feeling, an impression that is difficult to pin down. I think it was an impression of wariness, as if I didn’t know what it was I’d just seen. Oh, I knew what I’d seen. I don’t mean that. But there was some other thing I hadn’t seen, something behind or within the things I was seeing. How can I explain it? The cubicles, the Under, it had all begun to work on me—that was clear enough. But I knew I wasn’t going back there, not for a while. It’s impossible to say why. (85)

In his inability to express or explain his feelings properly, the narrator's initial wariness gradually gives way as he is drawn in by the Next Thing’s promises of a better, happier life. Advertised in empty corporate slogans such as “ALWAYS BETTER, ALWAYS BEST” (81), the similarities to Saunders’s story are obvious. After talking to a kind of customer relationship manager, “[a] young man of about thirty, wearing a light sport jacket and plain tie” (81), the narrator eventually accepts the company’s job offer and moves to the Under. As soon as this transition is concluded, another feeling wells up in him, this time a feeling of deep nostalgia:

I like thinking of those houses, but that isn’t the same as wanting them back. They’re part of another time, that’s all. Some people talk about that time the way they talk about everything in the past, as if it has a special glow. Well, it does have that glow. It’s the glow of something you can’t get to anymore, the glow of something no longer there. If you reach out for it, you won’t feel anything at all. (94)

It is interesting how, in the story, any sense of an emotionally meaningful community life is gradually erased by the Next Thing. One day, as he stands at the end of an aisle, the narrator looks into the “tracts of dark” (84) that expand from the Under’s fringes. Seeing lights flickering in the distance becomes a reminder of his old life: They “seemed to me the lights of streetlamps and house windows, in an invisible town, out there in the dark,” he says, “[a]nd I seemed to hear, along with the clatter of shopping carts, and voices in the nearby aisles, the dim sounds of a summer night: laughter on a front porch, dishes rattling through an open kitchen window, a shout, a screen door shutting, a thrum of insects” (84). Community life, with its conviviality and interpersonal relationships, has become a dim echo from the past, drowned out by the noises of the consuming life in the Under. A similar scene is conjured up only a few pages later:

Up there, in our town, even at the best of times, you could feel a sort of worry, a tension, which flowed from the houses out into the streets and up into the leaves of the trees. I don’t know where it came from, that worry, but there were times you could almost hear it, like a hum in a wire, on hot summer afternoons under a blue sky, or on spring evenings at dusk, in the stillness between the slam of a front door and the ringing of a telephone. It was just an impression, of course. But down here, it seemed, you could get away from all that and lead a different kind of life. (91, emphasis added)

Again, Millhauser connects affect to acouesthesia. Worry is the dominant feeling, or pre-personal affect in this passage. Though not having any clear origin, it flows between bodies and their environment as an (almost) audible sensation. However, the narrator’s previous reminiscent mood has already given way to a more rational notion: “It was just an impression, of course.” At the Under, even the feeling of worry has vanished, only to be replaced by something perhaps even worse: “People are tired, that’s what it is” (95).

18As meta-feeling, the narrator’s confusion about his emotional state recalls Ngai’s reflections on affective disorientation, or “feeling of confusion about what one is feeling” (Ngai 14). As Ngai suggests,

in the transnational stage of capitalism that defines our contemporary moment, our emotions no longer link up as securely as they once did with the models of social action and transformation theorized by Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and others under the signs of relatively unambiguous emotions like anger or fear. In other words, the nature of the sociopolitical itself has changed in a manner that both calls forth and calls upon a new set of feelings—ones less powerful than the classical political passions, though perhaps more suited, in their ambient, Bartlebyan, but still diagnostic nature, for models of subjectivity, collectivity, and agency not entirely foreseen by past theorists of the commonwealth. (5, emphasis added)

Millhauser’s story, of course, is only a thinly veiled allegory of the tremendous transformation of life worlds, social relationships and forms of community in the twenty-first century, especially in the wake of “digitalization” and the internet. As we see an increasing part of our work, consumption habits, and social relationships taking place online, in virtual spaces that change their gestalt as quickly as “The Next Thing” in the story, scholars have only just begun to gauge the emotional effects of this transformation, especially in regard to the collective life of communities. Social scientists and media scholars have coined terms like “emotional contagion” and “affective capitalism” to describe this: “We see and feel it happening and yet what actually happens in the process is difficult to describe” (Karppi et al. 2). Note how the narrator’s words in “The Next Thing,” when he relates how all the houses in “the Over” have been sold to the company and the entire town has moved to live in “the Under,” echo this notion: “It’s hard to know what to make of all that. These are interesting times” (Millhauser 96). Read in light of affect theory, we can see how “The Next Thing” provides a narrative form to the sociality of emotion, to the ways in which certain objects and spaces can become “sites of personal and social tension” (Ahmed 11). The results are often profoundly disruptive, challenging not only the way we feel but also our very understanding of the nature and origins of these feelings: “so much follows when we do not assume we always know how we feel, and that feelings do not belong or even originate with an ‘I’, and only then move out toward others” (208).

19In real life, feelings, emotions, and affects, and the cultural work they do, often go unnoticed. Where emotional intensities well up in our contact with other human subjects as well as with objects, they are typically not given a clear shape or gestalt. Literature, by contrast, serves as a medium in which affective experiences are being narrativized and given a particular aesthetic form, reflecting on how they serve as the glue that ties up social bodies and communities. Even more, it is through literary texts and other narrative forms that we can observe how social transformation is always accompanied by “affective forms of reorientation” (Ahmed 8). The short story in particular serves as a genre in which “protagonists are typically left to founder in an inarticulable emotional intensity triggered by external stimuli, the experiences depicted on the page are to a large degree affective” (Wood 35). Drawing upon Charles Altieri’s work on affectivity and aesthetics, Daniel Davis Wood summarizes the affective effects, or resonances, of works of art that are closely intertwined with their aesthetic form, rather than a mere product of their content or meaning: “The work of art is, or can be, an event through which its beholders are, in a sense, shocked out of themselves by having been made privy to a way of seeing the world that subverts or supersedes the norms of human vision” (Wood 32).

20Whether affect is depicted in a story, shapes the narrative transmission, serves as a theoretical-conceptual framework to embed a short story in the wider social-historical context of its production/reception, is framed as a result of the reader’s interaction with it, or—most likely—emerges as the sum total of these different relations, the form of the short story certainly invites for further theoretical reflection on the cultural work, or politics, of emotions and affect. The short story as a literary form has often been associated with notions of debunking (Leitch), defamiliarization (May), dis-enablement and dis-affirmation (Trotter). As often as not, short stories produce a certain cognitive dissonance that forces the reader to match or adjust his or her own assumptions and reality models with the ideas and models presented by the text. While Brosch (55) concedes that cognitive dissonance is not limited to rational forms of intelligence but includes emotional responses as well, theoretical work produced over the past two decades in the wake of the “affective turn” provides us with a more nuanced vocabulary and conceptual toolbox to describe the emotional dissonance that characterizes (the reading experience of) many short stories.

21Based on my reading of two contemporary short stories by Saunders and Millhauser, I have suggested that the neoliberal short story, like the neoliberal novel (Smith), stresses the affective relationality of the subject. Unlike the novel, however, the short story as a genre does not seem to be aiming at an experience of “emotional development and growth out of contact with the people who populate the narratives they consume” (Smith 42). Instead, neoliberal short stories follow a long tradition of foregrounding disruptive forms of affective experience and “ugly feelings” that have long accompanied the very project of modernity. The affective work of the neoliberal short story, one might conclude, lies in the ways it records, reflects, and lends an aesthetic form to the emotional intensities, disruptions, and reorientations of its historical moment, the “time in which living” (Saunders 133).