Psychic Entanglement and the Twenty-First-Century Network Novel

The representational tools developed in twentieth-century novels of psychic connection can also speak to the sense of phantasmic connection underscoring the present moment of online community, contactless technology and virtual assets. How to conceptualise the extension and boundaries of the self, a primary issue in the twentieth-century novel of psychic connection, has become a more central question than ever in the novel and criticism of it. For Peter Boxall, it is the ‘sense of a profound disjunction between our real, material environments and the new technological, political and aesthetic forms in which our global relations are being conducted that lies at the heart of the developments in the twentyfirst- century novel’ (9). As Boxall characterises it, twenty-first-century fiction enacts the ‘construction of a new and delicate narrative identity, a new mind with which we might think a contemporary global condition’ (141). That mind is, however, not as new to the novel as Boxall's account suggests: the interconnected thinking needed to wrestle with global interconnections is already enacted by twentieth-century novels of psychic connection.

In the twenty-first century many novels reject investment in the development of individual characters, instead emphasising how networks of connection come into being and grow. The network novel, in which multiple protagonists succeed one another, tangentially or profoundly influencing the course of each other's lives – exemplified by the likes of Zadie Smith's NW (2012), Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (2019) and David Mitchell's Ghostwritten (1999) – has become a prominent, celebrated subgenre, credited by Patrick Jagoda with demonstrating that the novel as a literary form ‘continues to affect the present’ (46). Such novels, invested in intersection and interfusion, do what Berthold Schoene suggests is needed from the novel today. Drawing on sociologist Ulrich Beck, Schoene asserts that in the twenty-first century the novel ‘must do its best to demonstrate that “in a world of global crises and dangers produced by civilization, the old differentiation between internal and external, national and international, us and them, lose their validity and a new cosmopolitan realism becomes essential to survival”’ (45).