"Normal" "people"
I watched the BBC3 adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People with the suspicion that I wasn’t its target audience and it roundly delivered. I read Conversations With Friends in a couple of sittings last year and whilst its portrait of late-millenial undergraduate life in the cruel backwash of the 2008 economic crisis was faintly unfamiliar, like overhearing the chatter of people five or six years years younger, its handling of a particular lifeworld was note-perfect. The series of Normal People, which covers a longer span of time, was by comparison unsure of quite what it wanted to be, hoving closest to a quieter and more sophisticated version of the upmarket teen soaps pioneered by Fox and The CW in the 2000s. (Caveat: I haven’t read the original novel of Normal People yet, which apparently differs considerably in tone and style of narration.) That isn’t a fatal problem - especially as a longtime OC fan - and taken on its own terms the series is as breezy, tender and perspicacious as My So Called Life was in the mid-90s, especially the sections on the dull but genuine intimacy of undergraduate life. (Even if the bubble of Trinity shown here and in Conversations With Friends is far more cloistered and self-regarding than my own time at university.) Nor is it necessarily a criticism of the base text: the teen drama is one more thing to be extracted from the impure form of the novel, as the soap opera was from the early 20th century realist novel, via the generic route of the pulp melodrama.
Rooney herself acknowledges this quite cheerfully: “the history of the novel is a history of the love story”, and the satisfactions of the love story - which aren’t quite coterminous with the happiness that is the endpoint of the marriage plot - are bound up with the novel’s proliferation as a commodity from the period of, say, Defoe to Austen - the historical arc generally called its “rise”. The cheap individualism of the heroic love story of Pamela is entangled with the negative portrait of social dissonance in Middlemarch, Bovary or the great examples of the European Bildungsroman. The novel’s portrait of atomised subjects, Rooney notes, seemingly paraphrasing Nancy Armstrong, helped make legible and even construct a society organised as a heap of individual labourers. Her novels reflect on these facts in an intriguingly non-commital way, but Rooney admits that this theoretical perspective doesn’t exactly enter into her writing process. But it’s precisely this “weak” form of anti-capitalist theory - I use the term here with the tone it has in Wai Chee Dimock’s work - in Rooney that I think marks the “contemporaneity” of her writing.
Rooney gets a lot of comic mileage out of the more and less serious left-wing politics her characters hold. Everyone in the Trinity universe of Conversations and Normal People vaguely agree about reproductive rights, pro-Palestine activism and anti-austerity, in the well-mannered way of the liberal middle classes. Jamie and Gareth in Normal People, with their red-trouser conservative talking points, stand out by that very contrast; when Bobbi, late in Conversations, turns a chat on non-monogamy into a condescending monologue on family abolition, it’s a moment of acting out by stepping over the lines of a shared common sense. Bobbi’s self-introduction of “I’m gay and Frances is a communist” displays her characteristic comportment: the plain-spoken exaggeration of an “absolute self-assurance” that doesn’t need to take seriously what it claims as a core of its existence. There’s a strong dramatic irony to Bobbi’s provocations, which to most people who’ve spent time in humanities departments would seem, except for her clarity of formulation, unexceptional fodder. (I think it’s part of the game-playing between the four principals of the novel that Melissa, who as someone who’s seen the worst of the publishing industry should know better, allows herself to be impressed by Bobbi.) When Frances and Bobbi discuss post-graduation, the odd nature of her convictions comes loose from their continual iron-clad performance:
Why should I write a book? she said. I’m not a writer.
What are you going to do? After we graduate.
I don’t know. Work in a university if I can.
This phrase, ‘if I can’, made it clear that Bobbi was trying to tell me something serious, something that couldn’t be communicated in words but instead through a shift in the way we related to each other. Not only was it nonsense for Bobbi to say ‘if I can’ at the end of her sentence, because she came from a wealthy family, read diligently and had good grades, but it didn’t make sense in the context of our relationship either. Bobbi didn’t relate to me in the ‘if I can’ sense. She related to me as a person, maybe the only person, who understood her ferocious and frightening power over circumstances and people. What she wanted, she could have, I knew that.
[…] I thought you were planning to bring down global capitalism, I said.
Well, not on my own. Someone has to do the small jobs.
I just don’t see you as a small-jobs person.
That’s what I am, she said.
Bobbi’s beliefs, for all their seriousness, make her slightly sick, for the reminder of what gives her the luxury of holding them. But Bobbi’s lack of hypocrisy highlights the light value of politics for everyone else. As the most politically integral character, she dwindles in acceptance that all these beliefs, whatever diagnostic power they might have, are in defence of an individual identity that ultimately doesn’t mean much, formed and protected as it is by a cushion of money.
Anastasia Baucina interprets this ambient politics as a way of making a socialist conception of class the novel’s counter-hegemonic “common sense”. The place of money as “the substance that makes the world” is very clear and painful in Normal People, where the divide between Marianne and Connell in a context of deepening inequality is productive of key plot events (Connell’s return to Sligo in the summer, the scholarship that brings him and Marianne back together in Italy). Poshness and its discontents are part of the characters’ everyday conversation, as they deal with the uneven distribution of power with regards small things like to paying the rent or the bar tab even as the monoculture of millennial Trinity presses them together into a single mass. And yet, one would have to answer No to Madeleine Schwartz’s question: “Structural differences, power struggles: this is Marxism, right?” Rooney is far too polite to muckrake, even if she gives most time and sympathetic attention to the view that what’s necessary is a far-reaching change from the system that causes so much suffering and precarity in her characters’ lives. At the same time, her novels would fail to satisfy many Marxist critics in the tradition of Brecht, for whom the whole apparatus of verisimilitude is a motor of capitalism’s reality-principle. Baucina notes that the novels emphasise “inter-relation and mutual dependence”, but by that token most of the tradition of the 19th century novel, as in George Eliot’s portrait of the supportive but ensnaring net of “community”, would be socialist. Moreover, for all of the insistence of socialist politics on human dignity detached from bourgeois moral strictures, Rooney occasionally falls into the traps of realist plot that Raymond Williams so clearly anatomised: what is Connell’s MFA offer if not a descendant of the “magical solution” of the inheritance offered to a lowly orphan in Dickens or Eliot?
This isn’t to suggest that Rooney is somehow Insufficiently Marxist (or, an even worse charge, Insufficiently Dialectical). Much of the better criticism of her two novels has homed in on the peculiar acclaim for them as “great millennial novels”. The persistently frustrated expectation that the novel should, in the 21st century, produce an iteration of itself that captures the form and texture of a particular historical experience at once condenses and disavows an odd circumstance - namely that the novel, like Marxism in its quite different way, has long outlived bourgeois civilisation. As I noted in a review of Marco Roth’s 2012 memoir, the recent micro-genre of the millennial New York story is structured around a narrative failure of individualism: the failure to become what the collapsing mechanisms of class reproduction once - in what feels like an unreachably ancient post-war past - prepared broad swathes of people to be, under the guise of “social mobility”. What would the novel’s individualism look like in a situation where the claims of class - both those of the great institutions of the working class and the crypto-meritocratic self-identity of the middle class - have waned while social inequality has deepened?
An orthodox Marxist criticism would identify Rooney’s realist treatment of precarity as a kind of failed “critical realism” (in Georg Lukács’ phrase), the aesthetic of a class of precarious workers set apart but not yet grasping itself as a social class (in-itself rather than for-itself, to use Lukács’ occasional Hegelian terminology). But that doesn’t seem right. For Rooney’s classed protagonists are bound to a system, and an idea of meritocracy, that they don’t have any active belief in, that can’t provide them with a narrative resolution. Their sense of themselves as “people” is disarticulated from “normality” or the material rewards of hard work; first one, then the other, is put under erasure at different moments in the novels. Consider the exchange late in Conversations when Melissa accuses Frances of adultery as class warfare: “The first time you came to our house you just looked around like: here’s something bourgeois and embarrassing that I’m going to destroy. And I mean, you took such pleasure in destroying it.” But Frances’ half-repressed class hatred is bound only in a very partial way to her affair with Nick: “I wasn’t trying to trash your life. I was trying to steal it.” The love plot and the ending of material happiness travel in parallel. In this sense, the opposite number to Rooney’s works is Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which disavows the structure of fiction entirely, oscillating around the resolution of bourgeois happiness and trying (unconvincingly, in my opinion) to foreground the individual’s place in a web of queer kinship. (There’s a similar flirtation with the risk of cringey writing in both Rooney and Nelson’s sex scenes.) A socialism of the novel after actually existing socialism might look something like Rooney’s: not so much a “a strand of red thread woven through a more complex composition”, as Baucina puts it, but the narrative dispersal of a commodity that no longer functions as a unified whole, where politics fills the gaps left by its breakup. The novel becomes a comedy of manners around the collapsed expectations of the novel itself as a political entity, haunted by a promise of happiness that the novel fabricates its narrative structure by talking around.