Ordinary stuff: Contemporary British fiction and everyday life

Neal Alexander

For many critics, the character and direction of British

fiction in the twenty-first century is overwhelmingly

determined by the eventfulness of contemporary history. The

9/11 attacks and their aftermath are taken to have left an

indelible mark on the cultural imagination so that, whatever

their ostensible content, recent novels are inevitably

shadowed by the threat of global terrorism, a crisis in

multiculturalism, and narratives of trauma that are at once

personal and historical. For instance, Philip Tew describes

contemporary British fiction as essentially ‘traumatological’,

evincing an emergent ‘aesthetic economy of exceptionality’ in

which experiences of threat, upheaval, and social

transformation dominate.1 This certainly seems to describe a

prominent trend in the work of writers such as Martin Amis,

Ian McEwan, and Pat Barker, but it may also overplay the

extent to which recent novels respond immediately and directly

to current events. By contrast, Dominic Head notes that many

novelists, after 9/11, have placed ‘greater emphasis on

personal feeling’ and shifted attention ‘towards the domestic

sphere’.2 He also cautions against the use of 2001 as an

historical marker, for, although it may accurately identify ‘a

shift of cultural mood’, such a neat division tends ‘to1 Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2007),pp. xvii, xvi.2 Dominic Head, The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), p. 100.

overlook those continuities that may eventually obscure the

line in the sand.’3

One such continuity can be identified in the

preoccupation of several recent British novels with the

complexities and ambiguities of everyday life. Rather than

offering a traumatological perspective on grand historical and

political crises, these texts seek ways of attending to the

overlooked, the disregarded, the unremarkable, articulating

the significance of the insignificant in order to challenge

normative hierarchies of value. By demonstrating how the non-

events of quotidian experience can become implicated in the

event of literature, they effect a reconfiguration of what

Jacques Rancière calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’,

thereby ‘suspending the normal coordinates of sensory

experience.’4 In this way, the invisible is rendered visible

and the voiceless are given a voice. Indeed, the capacity for

taking the ordinary and the everyday seriously, as subjects

worthy of aesthetic attention, is integral to the democratic

politics of literature, which consists in undoing settled

hierarchies of subject and style so that distinctions between

‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ subjects, or ‘high’ and ‘low’ styles

are dissolved.5

[Slide]

3 Head, The State of the Novel, p. 28.4 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents trans., Steven Corcoran(Cambridge: Polity, 2009), p. 25.5 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature trans., Julie Rose (Cambridge:Polity, 2011), pp. 8, 10.

In Rancière’s succinct formulation, literature is ‘the art of

writing that blurs the distinction between the world of art

and the world of prosaic life by making any subject equivalent

to any other.’6 As we will see, recent fictional

representations of everyday life also tend to combine mundane

subject-matter with conspicuous stylistic experiment, and

their literary effects often play off against this tension or

disparity between form and content. In so doing, they at once

admit everyday life to the realm of the literary and affirm

literature’s embeddedness within everyday life.

However, it can hardly escape our notice that the act of

attending to everyday life is itself fraught with paradox and

contradiction. For, by rendering the unremarkable remarkable

and granting significance to the insignificant, the very

ordinariness or everydayness of everyday life would appear to

elude representation.

[Slide]

Indeed, despite its ubiquity as the ground of social

experience, Maurice Blanchot contends that the everyday is

defined by its very elusiveness or fugitive quality. ‘Whatever

its other aspects,’ he writes, ‘the everyday has this

essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to

insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth,

without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of

all possible signification. The everyday escapes.’7 For

6 Rancière, The Politics of Literature, p. 54.7 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation trans., Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 239-40.

Blanchot, the everyday is essentially the unperceived, the

insignificant that escapes all attempts at formulation or

representation, and yet it is also the very ‘site’ of

signification itself. If this definition has a positive

content, it is that everyday life comprehends both

significance and insignificance, the ordinary and the

extraordinary; or rather that it deconstructs the distinctions

upon which such oppositions rest. In this regard, Blanchot

echoes the seminal work of Henri Lefebvre, for whom the

everyday has an irreducibly ‘double dimension’, encompassing

both ‘platitude and profoundness, banality and drama’: ‘In one

respect everyday life is nothing but triviality or an

accumulation of commonplaces. […] And yet it is in the

everyday that human dramas ravel and unravel, or remain

unravelled.’8 In what follows, I want to briefly examine this

double dimension of everyday life, whereby the ordinary and

the extraordinary are intertwined, as it figures in three

recent British novels: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), James

Kelman’s Mo said she was quirky (2012), and John McGregor’s Even the

Dogs (2010). Before turning to consider these texts in detail,

however, I want to offer a few more general observations on

the relationship between the novel and everyday life.

[Slide]

An awareness of the contradictions of everyday life is

far from exclusive to contemporary fiction, although it is

often treated there with a particularly heightened self-

8 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of theEveryday trans., John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), p. 65.

consciousness. In fact, the effort to bring quotidian

experience into literary representation is arguably central to

the history of the modern novel’s formal development. Ian

Watt, for instance, describes how the eighteenth-century

novel’s flexible handling of narrative time made possible a

‘detailed depiction of the concerns of everyday life’, one

sensitive to ‘the texture of daily experience’.9 In turn,

Michel de Certeau claims that ‘the tragic or poetic murmurings

of the everyday’ are crucial to the proliferating ‘micro-

stories’ of nineteenth-century realism; and Franco Moretti

discovers ‘a culture of everyday life’ at the heart of the European

Bildungsroman tradition: ‘Far from devaluing it, the novel

organizes and “refines” this form of existence, making it ever

more alive and interesting – or, with Balzac, even

fascinating.’10 For her part, Laurie Langbauer argues that

there is an intrinsic connection between the routines and

open-endedness of everyday life and the formal characteristics

of series fiction, from Trollope to Woolf.11 More recently,

Bryony Randall and Liesl Olson have each revealed the extent

of literary modernism’s preoccupations with ‘dailiness’ and

ordinary experience.12 Indeed, Olson claims that ‘the modernist

9 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1972 [1957]), p. 24.10 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life trans., Steven Rendall(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 70; Franco Moretti,The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture new ed. (London: Verso,2000), p. 35.11 Laurie Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).12 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007); Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York:Oxford University Press, 2009).

novel treats the everyday with a new centrality’.13 There are

important differences of perspective and focus in these

several accounts, particularly concerning period and genre,

which should not be ignored. Nonetheless, what they all share

is a conviction about the novel’s decisive orientation towards

the ordinary, the common, and the everyday. Collectively, they

imply that a large part of the purpose of the novel is to make

everyday life an object of aesthetic attention, and to

discover forms appropriate to its fictional representation.

[Slide]

Rita Felski elaborates this point further in her

discussion of the novel’s capacity to ‘enchant’ its readers by

transfiguring the base materials of quotidian existence before

their very eyes. ‘Novels give us the magic, as well as the

mundanity, of the everyday,’ she contends; ‘they infuse things

with wonder, enliven the inanimate world, invite ordinary and

often overlooked phenomena to shimmer forth as bearers of

aesthetic, affective, even metaphysical meanings.’14 Felski is

right to see such imaginative transmutations as a great

strength of the novel, for they are closely related to its

democratic potential, its treatment of all subjects as equal

and interchangeable, so that even the most banal or

inconsequential aspects of life radiate mystery and

significance. Narrative fiction, she suggests, directs the

reader’s attention towards that which is usually ignored or

overlooked, revealing the magic and wonder that is latent in

13 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, p. 18.14 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 70.

ordinary things. But once the everyday has been transformed,

by the alchemy of fiction, into something magical and

wonderful the stubborn ordinariness of everyday life would

appear to dissolve or evaporate, ultimately escaping

representation. As Felski herself observes: ‘Literature’s

heightened sensitivity to the microscopic detail marks its

difference from the casual inattentiveness that defines the

everyday experience of everyday life.’15 So, literature’s

attentiveness and sensitivity enable it to apprehend the

luminous significance of even the most minor detail of

everyday life, whilst at the same time failing to grasp its

essential everydayness.

This tendency of everyday life to exceed all attempts at

comprehension does not necessarily mean that it is ultimately

unrepresentable, but it does suggest some of the limitations

of novelistic realism. Although its broad scope and facility

for describing and classifying suggest that the realist novel

is well-suited to exploring everyday life, Michael Sheringham

argues that it has ultimately ‘proved a poor conductor of

everydayness, not so much […] because of its fictionality but

because of its tendency to abstraction.’ In realist fiction,

he contends, everyday life is ‘reduced to an objective

background’, or else it is laid out as an ‘external spectacle’

to be ‘scrutinized, situated, classified, and evaluated’ by a

dominating narratorial intelligence.16 But this is to ignore

15 Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2000), p. 90.16 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 44, 42.

the amorphousness of everyday life, its inherent resistance to

formulation or systematisation. Consequently, Sheringham

suggests that in the modern period ‘it is often where the

artifice of fiction is made most manifest that an effective

grasp on the everyday is seemingly achieved’, giving as

examples Joyce’s Ulysses and the modernist experiments of

Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec.17 Paradoxically, then,

successful fictional representations of everyday life will

necessarily incorporate a self-conscious awareness of the

problems that attend any representation of the everyday. Ben

Highmore makes a similar point when he notes that everyday

life calls for ‘an aesthetic of experimentation that

recognizes that actuality always outstrips the procedures for

registering it.’18 Again paradoxically, the act of attending to

everyday life also depends upon the failure to attend,

inattentiveness, for the fugitive character of ordinary

experience is essential to it. I want to argue that a similar

aesthetic of experimentation, which includes a reflexive

awareness of its own representational limitations, can be

found in the novels by McCarthy, Kelman, and McGregor to which

I now turn. Moreover, although they can be situated in a long

novelistic tradition of representing everyday life, each of

these texts can also be seen to extend the legacies of

literary modernism into the twentieth century through their

respective formal and stylistic innovations.

[Slide]

17 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 45.18 Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 23.

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a novel that wears its

modernist pedigree and aesthetic self-consciousness on its

sleeve. From its laconic opening paragraph, it frustrates

readerly expectations of psychological depth, character

development, or the exploration of human relationships.

Instead, the narrative maintains a deliberately flat, neutral

tone, largely restricts itself to the description of actions

and things, and employs a plot that is monotonously cyclical

though not without a certain spiralling momentum. As Zadie

Smith remarks, Remainder ‘empties out interiority entirely’ and

creates its effects ‘by accumulation and repetition’.19 In some

respects, the novel is a black satire on contemporary

preoccupations with trauma, though it is more centrally

concerned with the inauthenticity of even the most mundane

experiences of everyday life.20 McCarthy’s narrator has been in

an accident involving ‘something falling from the sky’, an

originary trauma that remains a significant absence throughout

the text, for the narrator either cannot remember or will not

speak of the event itself.21 (He is prevented from doing so, in

any case, by a clause in his compensation settlement.)

Following the accident, and a protracted period of physical

recovery, he becomes uncomfortably aware of the mediated,

self-conscious, inauthentic character of his relationship to

the world of quotidian experience. Yet, he also comes to

realise that such inauthenticity is itself ordinary rather19 Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton,2009), pp. 84, 83.20 For a nuanced reading of Remainder as a critique of trauma fiction, seePieter Vermeulen, ‘The Critique of Trauma and the Afterlife of the Novel inTom McCarthy’s Remainder,’ Modern Fiction Studies 58, 3 (2012), pp. 549-68.21 Tom McCarthy, Remainder (Richmond: Alma Books, 2006 [2005]), p. 5.

than exceptional; that his own fallen condition simply makes

him ‘more usual than most.’22 From a café window in central

London, he watches a group of ‘media types’ in the street and

is struck by the stylized gestures and actions through which

they perform their identities: ‘They reminded me of an ad –

not a particular one, but just some ad with beautiful young

people in it having fun. […] See? Just like me: completely

second-hand.’23 Fellow customers in the café, tourists, gay

clubbers, and even a group of homeless people are all judged

to be similarly fake, inauthentic. Ironically, the narrator’s

model of unmediated, authentic being – reality itself – is

Robert de Niro’s performance in Mean Streets, every movement and

gesture of which he regards as ‘perfect, seemless’, and

McCarthy develops this inversion of the customary

relationships between the simulated and the real with wry

humour and baroque inventiveness over the course of the

novel.24

It is easy to see, then, how Remainder might be read as ‘a

poststructuralist allegory about representation’, and the

novel maintains an implicit dialogue with continental theory

throughout.25 More specifically, this allegorical dimension

foregrounds the problems of representing everyday life,

particularly its resistance to systematisation, but also

illustrates the double articulation of the everyday as both

significant and insignificant, ordinary and extraordinary.

22 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 24.23 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 50.24 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 23.25 Justus Nieland, ‘Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife ofModernism,’ Modern Fiction Studies 58, 3 (2012), p. 589.

[Slide]

Whilst attending a house party, the narrator becomes

fascinated by a crack in the wall of the bathroom and

experiences a powerfully sensuous ‘vision’ of everyday life in

an urban apartment block:

I remembered all this very clearly. There’d been liver

cooking on the floor below – the smell, the spit and

sizzle – and then two floors below that there’d been

piano music. Not recorded music playing on a CD or the

radio, but real, live music, being played on a piano by

the man who lived there, a musician. I remembered how it

sounded, its rhythms. […] The neighbour who’d cooked

liver on the floor below me had been an old woman. I’d

passed her on the stairs most days. I had a memory of

passing her outside her flat’s door as she placed her

rubbish on the landing. She’d say something to me; I’d

say something back, then carry on past her. […] Most of

all I remembered this: that inside this remembered

building, in the rooms and on the staircase, in the lobby

and the large courtyard between it and the building

facing with the red roofs with black cats on them – that

in these spaces, all my movements had been fluent and

unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but

natural.26

This passage, which unfolds over several pages, depicts a

prelapsarian world of immediacy and authenticity by means of

an almost Proustian involuntary memory. However, the excess of

detail with which such ordinary, unremarkable scenes are26 McCarthy, Remainder, pp. 61-2.

described implies that they are more hyperreal than real,

imaginative fabrications rather than actual memories. Through

the very intensity of his attention to it, the narrator

invests this tableau of everyday life with an overwhelming

significance that seems to dispel or transfigure its

everydayness. ‘I remembered this with all the force of an

epiphany, a revelation,’ claims the narrator, suggesting an

encounter with the divine or numinous.27 Smalltalk on the

stairs, the ambient sounds and smells of other people’s lives

are no longer merely banal or mundane but pregnant with all

the mysteries of the ‘real’.

These contradictions are deepened when the narrator hires

a large staff of facilitators and re-enactors to simulate

exactly his vision or memory of everyday life in the apartment

building. In doing so, his objective is to feel authentic,

real; but the obvious irony is that his means of pursuing this

aim only exacerbate the simulated character of his lived

reality. If, as Blanchot claims, everyday life ‘brings us back

to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived’ –

which is precisely what McCarthy’s narrator wants – then it

also ‘escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all

coherence, all regularity.’28 It is no surprise, then, that the

narrator’s increasingly elaborate re-enactments cannot

ultimately satisfy his hunger for authentic being. The

ecstatic tingling feeling he sometimes experiences is

ephemeral and unreliable, requiring ever more extreme projects

to be devised as triggers; and no matter how carefully the re-27 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 62.28 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 239.

enactments are planned and rehearsed ‘the openness and

indeterminacy of the everyday’ always frustrates his attempts

to capture it.29 McCarthy’s narrator-protagonist is himself a

kind of ‘artist’ seeking to transcend the contingencies and

accidents of ordinary, inauthentic existence, to ‘triumph over

matter’; yet, he later concedes that ‘matter’s what makes us

alive’.30 Ultimately, then, Remainder affirms the inauthenticity

of the ordinary, and bears out Lefebvre’s contention that

everyday life is ‘in a sense residual, defined by “what is

left over” after all distinct, superior, specialized,

structured activities have been singled out’.31 Everyday life

is the indivisible remainder that cannot be exhausted by

attempts to order, understand, or represent it.

[Slide]

A very different exploration of the authenticity or

inauthenticity of everyday life is undertaken in the fiction

of James Kelman. The characteristic world of his novels and

stories is that of ordinary working-class experience: its

routines of work and worklessness, social constraints and

existential conditions; but most of all the variety and

resourcefulness of its linguistic expressions. Indeed,

Kelman’s fiction consistently seeks to redress the occlusion

of such experience from the realm of art and literature. ‘In

our society,’ he writes, ‘we are not used to thinking of

literature as a form of art that might concern the day-to-day

29 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 30.30 McCarthy, Remainder, pp. 220, 161, 281.31 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I: Introduction trans., John Moore(London: Verso, 1991), p. 97.

existence of ordinary women and men, whether these ordinary

women and men are the subjects of the poetry and stories, or

the actual writers themselves.’32 Yet, Kelman’s commitment to

the representation of ordinary, day-to-day existence also

entails a break with the conventions of social realism that

predominate in working-class writing; his version of ‘realism’

is infused with the formal and stylistic experiments of

literary modernism and existentialism. As Cairns Craig

observes, in Kelman’s narratives ‘context massively dominates

over event’, so that his texts ‘might be said to be fulfilling

Virginia Woolf’s assertion that the novel ought to examine “an

ordinary mind on an ordinary day”’.33 Similarly, Drew Milne

speaks of ‘Kelman’s modernist and existentially distinctive

representation of life rhythms’, noting that his characters

‘are represented within existential problems of everyday

life.’34 Because Kelman’s fiction acknowledges the validity and

complexity of everyday life, it also adopts a range of

sophisticated narrative and stylistic techniques, emphasising

the artifice that is involved in representing ordinary

experience. Perhaps his most distinctive innovation is to fuse

spoken and written language in his handling of interior

monologue and free indirect style, eliding the distinction

between the voices of narrators and characters and thereby

32 James Kelman, “And the Judges Said …”: Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002),p. 65.33 Cairns Craig, ‘Resisting Arrest: James Kelman,’ Gavin Wallace and RandallStevenson, eds., The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 104.34 Drew Milne, ‘The Fiction of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh: Accents,Speech and Writing,’ Richard J. Jane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew, eds.,Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 159, 167.

refusing the ‘usual hierarchies’ of realist narration.35

Moreover, Scott Hames contends that the perceived authenticity

of Kelman’s vernacular language should not be mistaken for

some passive record of reality; rather, he is ‘a realist

artist’, for ‘the seemingly “raw” and artless features of

Kelman’s vernacular are in fact the most stylised and

deliberately crafted.’36 So, if Kelman’s fiction can be

regarded as affirming the authenticity and significance of

ordinary experience, it also attests to the artifice and

inauthenticity of its literary representation. Although his

work illustrates Rancière’s conviction that literature blurs

distinctions between the world of art and that of prosaic

reality, its fidelity to the actual is produced through

techniques of aesthetic distance and estrangement.

Kelman’s narrators are overwhelmingly male and his

fictional world predominantly masculine, so his most recent

novel, Mo said she was quirky, marks a departure by relaying the

thoughts and experiences of Helen, a young Glaswegian woman

who works in a London casino, over a 24-hour period. In the

opening pages, Helen is on her way home after a night shift

when she has a brief, tense encounter with ‘two homeless

guys’, one of whom she thinks she recognises as her estranged

brother, Brian.37 Then the lights change and her taxi moves

off. In the extended passages of interior monologue that35 Simon Kővesi, James Kelman (Manchester: Manchester University Press,2007), p. 12.36 Scott Hames, ‘Kelman’s Art-Speech,’ Scott Hames, ed., The EdinburghCompanion to James Kelman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p.89.37 James Kelman, Mo said she was quirky (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), pp. 1,3.

follow, Helen’s tired but restless mind returns often to this

encounter – could it have been Brian or was she mistaken? –

but also weaves it into a fabric of other more ordinary,

everyday concerns: her job at the casino; her relationships

with her young daughter, Sophie, and her boyfriend, Mo; their

tiny flat; her ex-husband; memories of her childhood in

Glasgow; her need to sleep, and her inability to do so. In

this way, Kelman’s novel gradually subordinates its dramatic

opening event, a chance encounter that threatens to blast open

the continuum of Helen’s everyday experience, to what Felski

calls ‘the everydayness of everyday life’, its ‘mundane,

taken-for-granted, routine qualities’.38 At the same time, the

narrative frequently enacts Helen’s extrapolation from her own

experience to larger social and political questions: the

disparities between rich and poor, the powerful and the

powerless; a masculine culture of violence against women and

children; cultural differences in a multicultural society; and

the social invisibility of the homeless, the destitute, the

dispossessed. ‘People’s lives;’ she thinks, ‘they have them

and dont have them. They live and die, we dont even notice.’39

[Slide]

A certain tension between events and non-events, ordinary

and extraordinary experiences persists throughout the novel,

then, and is arguably central to its self-conscious, artful

presentation of humdrum dailiness. Take, for example, the

following passage in which Helen reflects on her own

ordinariness:

38 Felski, Doing Time, p. 80.39 Kelman, Mo said she was quirky, p. 205.

Helen read a novel about a woman that was a journalist.

She was just a young woman but quite famous in her own

right because of her adventures. Some of it was fanciful

but it was interesting too. Helen could recognise things

and identify with her, especially how people clung to

you. Oh but she was very different to Helen. Helen hadnt

done anything with her life, not of interest to other

people. Only ordinary stuff. Ordinary stuff weighed you

down and like how you couldnt get moving, you couldnt,

you were trapped and all of these adventures, whatever

they were, whatever, what she was thinking, what was she

thinking? Even the day, she didnt know the day. She didnt

know anything.40

The ironic reflexivity of this passage is immediately

apparent: here is a character in a novel who believes her own

life and experiences are too ordinary to be of interest to

readers of novels. Yet, the effect of Helen’s self-deprecating

reflections is clearly to challenge the received wisdom that

‘ordinary stuff’ is not the stuff from which novels are made,

and to encourage readers to question the criteria by which

‘interest’ and aesthetic value are judged. Kelman’s prose is

also carefully crafted to convey the idiomatic expressions

(‘like’, ‘whatever’), repetitions, and reversed syntax that

are distinctive of Helen’s way of speaking and thinking. Even

the omission of apostrophes from ‘hadnt’, ‘couldnt’, and

‘didnt’ contributes to the impression of an exhausted mind

cycling over, losing the thread, turning back on itself. At

the level of the sentence, then, the very artlessness of40 Kelman, Mo said she was quirky, p. 64.

Helen’s thoughts and language betrays the extent of the

novel’s stylistic contrivance, the sheer artistry required to

convey the textures and rhythms of an ordinary mind on an

ordinary day.

[Slide]

Kelman’s novel displays an abiding interest in the lives

of the marginal and the voiceless that lends a pronounced

ethical and political inflection to the representation of

everyday life. A similar kind of imaginative empathy is

evident in Jon McGregor’s third novel, Even the Dogs, which

follows the fortunes of a loose group of homeless, unemployed

addicts on the wastelands and sink-estates of an unnamed city

in the English midlands. Although Dominic Head rightly

observes that the ‘waning of class consciousness’ in

contemporary British society has caused the steady decline of

the traditional working class novel, Even the Dogs might be

regarded as one of several twenty-first century novels

depicting the experiences of a growing ‘underclass’

disenfranchised by the consolidation of middle-class dominance

and consumer capitalism.41 Its democratic politics consist in

the attempt to articulate such experiences from within, so to

speak, but the formal means by which this occurs is strikingly

inventive. For, the novel frequently employs an ambiguous

first-person plural narrative voice that is clearly

homodiegetic but difficult to locate or identify with any

precision. Indeed, McGregor himself remarks in interview that

41 Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 72, 73.

Even the Dogs is ‘a realist story told from a nonrealist

perspective.’42 Apparently deriving from the posthumous

collective consciousness of the text’s shifting constituency

of characters, this spectral, interrogative voice is

repeatedly contrasted with the dispassionate discourses and

procedures of various state authorities – the police, welfare

officers, social workers, pathologists – that McGregor also

renders with consummate precision. The tensions and

contradictions that result turn upon fundamentally political

questions of inclusion and exclusion, significance and

insignificance. By making the human conditions of destitution

and hopelessness visible and granting a voluble, clamouring

voice to those marginalised by mainstream society, Even the Dogs

exemplifies fiction’s fundamentally democratic capacity for

‘the invention of words by means of which those who don’t

count make themselves count’.43 Through its acute attentiveness

to its characters’ quotidian experience, the novel seeks to

reconfigure both aesthetic and political norms of

representation.

The focal point for Even the Dogs’s fragmented and

divagating narratives is the dead body of Robert Radcliffe:

estranged father, ex-husband, chronic alcoholic, friend. As

the narrators accompany Robert’s body from its initial

discovery, through crime scene investigation, autopsy, and

coroner’s inquest, to its ultimate cremation and disposal,

McGregor also documents the chaotic and dysfunctional lives of

42 Caroline Edwards, ‘An Interview with Jon McGregor,’ Contemporary Literature51, 2 (2010), p. 240.43 Rancière, The Politics of Literature, p. 40.

his sometime companions as they attempt to fulfil their daily

needs to score, or eat, or find a place to sleep. In this way,

the well-rehearsed procedures of salaried professionals are

interwoven with, and set against, the desperate tactics of

everyday routines that are both strange and fundamentally

boring.

[Slide]

For instance, as the narrators reflect, waiting is almost an

existential condition for the homeless, the addicted, and the

unemployed:

All this waiting though. Still.

Waiting outside the night shelter for them to open

the doors. Hanging around for hours to make sure you get

your place. Waiting at the walk-in centre to get

something sorted, and getting referred on to somewhere

else so you can wait a little bit more. Waiting for the

chemist to open to get the daily script.44

As this passage illustrates, McGregor’s portrayal of drug-use

and addiction is neither censorious nor glamorising, choosing

instead to linger upon the humdrum business of keeping alive –

the daily script – which is the background to rare moments of

narcotic ecstasy or abject misery. Indeed, his use of anaphora

here replicates the experience of monotonous repetition and

regular routine at the level of stylistic expression. What

seems extraordinary to one character, Steve, is the ordinary

tenderness of human touch, remembering how a chiropodist had

once treated his feet with unexpected care and attention:

‘Most people going out of their way not to touch you all day,44 Jon McGregor, Even the Dogs (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 103.

to not hardly brush up against you or even catch your eye or

anything. And then that. Washing and drying and holding his

feet, one in each hand.’45 The gentle syntactical patterning

and diminishing rhythm of that last sentence mimic the slow

release of Steve’s remembered pleasure, the pleasure of being

touched and held, contrasting sharply with his tense anger at

actual or imagined rebuffs. Simply not being ignored, or

neglected, or avoided counts as an affirmation for many of

these characters, but McGregor is also conscious of the

aesthetic and ethical challenges that attention to the

everyday lives of such outcast characters poses.

If McGregor’s idiomatic language is deliberately prosaic,

and monotonous to a degree, then it frequently provides a foil

to his involved experiments with formal presentation.

Sometimes these bear directly upon the layout of text on the

page, as in Chapter Two, where the final sentence of each

paragraph is terminated before its grammatical completion, as

if mimicking Danny’s inability to focus or resolve his

thoughts.

[Slide]

Occasionally, the narrative breaks down altogether into

inarticulate fragments as Danny frantically searches for

Robert’s daughter, Laura, in the deserted city centre:

Laura she couldn’t she said but

Had to find

45 McGregor, Even the Dogs, p. 72.

Fuck46

Similarly inventive is Chapter Five’s account of the coroner’s

inquest, which is presented in the format of a court

transcript peppered with ellipses, non-sequiturs, and

parenthetical notes recording inaudible responses or

expletives. Here, it is the official record that is revealed

to be incomplete or incoherent, for all its efforts to

‘investigate the facts’, and the verdict on the cause of

Robert’s death is ultimately inconclusive.47 Moreover, whereas

the proceedings of the coroner’s court are distinguished by

their dispassionate formality, the first-person plural

narrative voice frequently interjects to speculatively

reconstruct Robert’s final moments or to protest against the

indignity of his body’s unceremonial disposal. In this

chapter, and throughout the novel, widely differing social

perspectives, value systems, styles, and discourses come into

conflict, their very friction registering the mundane

significance of a man’s lonely death and its aftermath.

The final pages of the novel depict Laura’s attempts to

get clean and embrace a different kind of everydayness.

Initially, her naïve plans for escaping into an ordinary world

‘without fear or shame, without scars or sores or bruises or

scabs’ are dismissed by Danny as ‘bollocks’, his defensive

cynicism rejecting Laura’s vision of everyday life as a

pleasant but unviable fantasy.48 The two perspectives, hopeful

self-delusion and hardened resignation, vie with each other

46 McGregor, Even the Dogs, p. 31.47 McGregor, Even the Dogs, p. 164.48 McGregor, Even the Dogs, p. 44.

over the course of the novel, framing an inquiry into the

shifting constitution of everyday life.

[Slide]

Just as the coroner’s verdict on the manner of Robert’s death

remains inconclusive, so too does the question of Laura’s

possible redemption, which hinges on her ability to exchange

one set of everyday routines for another, making a cup of tea

first thing each morning rather than looking to score:

Can she give herself the time. Is she halfway there and.

Waiting for the tea to brew. Scooping out the bag and

dropping it in the bin and stirring in the milk. Can she

make plans now. Is there space in her head for. Sitting

at the table with the steam rising out of the mug and

catching the light and turning in the air.49

Here, Laura imagines herself in a domestic reality that is

made to seem strangely unreal, partly by the insistent

questions, phrased in the clichéd idioms of her keyworker,

that intrude upon her thoughts, and partly by the estranging

close-up effects of the images themselves. The grammatical

discontinuity of sentences that seek to measure her

psychological fortitude implies uncertainty, flickers of self-

doubt at a moment she wants to see as a turning point. Both

formally and thematically, then, the scene illustrates

Felski’s observation that every life ‘interweaves the everyday

and the non-everyday’, though in widely-varying ratios.50

Laura’s irresolute hesitations mark the intersection of the

49 McGregor, Even the Dogs, p. 195.50 Felski, Doing Time, p. 92.

ordinary with the extraordinary as the simplest of domestic

pleasures is charged with a significance that it cannot bear.

As I have tried to suggest, the challenges of

representing everyday life have far-reaching aesthetic and

political implications, which can be set against those of the

so-called ‘traumatological’ condition of contemporary British

fiction. Every attempt to give fictional expression to

quotidian experience enters, either explicitly or implicitly,

into an ongoing dispute over what counts as interesting or

significant, what is deemed worthy of representation. There

is, then, always a political dimension to texts that interest

themselves in the ordinary and the mundane, for in doing so

they imply a challenge to normative hierarchies of value,

which are at once aesthetic and political. Yet, to render the

everyday remarkable, worthy of comment and consideration, is

also to encounter certain intractable paradoxes or

contradictions. For, as Jean-Luc Nancy remarks, the everyday

is characterised by its ‘non-appearance’, so that ‘it appears

impossible not to submit the everyday sometimes to the infamy

of significance and sometimes, in order to save it, to the

hyper-significance of absorption into history, into the

aesthetic, or even the religious. In such an accession, the

everyday loses its everydayness.’51 Between insignificance and

hyper-significance, the importance of everyday life might be

said to reside in its fugitive character, its liability to

frustrate or escape representation the very moment it attracts

attention. The novels by McCarthy, Kelman, and McGregor that I51 Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles trans., Franson Manjali (New York:Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 40, 38-9.

have discussed are distinctive – though not, of course, unique

– for the self-conscious manner in which they face such

contradictions, and for the formal and stylistic inventiveness

they employ to articulate the significance of the

insignificant. By registering the elusiveness and

inexhaustibility of the everyday they at once affirm its

aesthetic interest and blur the distinctions separating the

world of art from that of ordinary life.