ABSTRACT
Peter Boxall’s The Prosthetic Imagination (2020) stresses the status of the novel form as the principal prosthesis of the imagination. The Bakhtinian echo in Boxall’s title is highly relevant in our multimedia saturated times. The novel’s aesthetic expression provides us with an exceptional form that can encompass and explore different artforms such as painting, photography, and indeed, conceptual and performative art. The tension that can be scrutinized is basically the same aesthetic pressure that arises in ekphrastic endeavors generally and historically—that is, descriptive prose is not identical to colors and forms on a canvas or any pixelated surface. However, it is precisely this discrepancy that can be reflectively and even systematically incorporated in the prosthetic dimension of the literary mind. Even more profoundly formulated, the novel form explores mimesis as such while performing it. This aesthetic facet comes to the fore in sharp relief through the analytic triangulation of three works by prominent contemporary novelists. In The Making of Incarnation, Tom McCarthy continues his project of exploring the interface between reality and a digitalized, and mostly visual, counterpart which seems to reproduce a given reality as well as produce an altered reality. A similar mimetic scrutiny—with obvious Baudrillardian shades—is performed by Michel Houellebecq in The Map and the Territory. Both novels examine the economized networks which art and the technology of representation are forced to adapt to. Partly in contrast, Don DeLillo sets up the performative arena of the body as a liminal zone in which art and life interact as a near metaphysical force in the creative act itself. Through a careful analysis of these works, this chapter explores the aesthetic dimension of the novel as a prosthetic device that in turn inspects the aspects of projection and imaging, while simultaneously making manifest art’s immanent core of affectivity—that is, the experiential moment of a subject engaging with any artwork (novel, performative piece or painting)—that per definition cannot in itself be transcended. This is the zone of aesthetic experience that the novel may problematize, and challenge the reader to think through, but which finally manifests itself as an irreducible factor. The chapter ultimately demonstrates how the novel form provokes aesthetic thinking in relation to conceptual and performative artforms.
