Characters identified by death-drive repetitions replace conventional inner life in Peace’s fiction

Evidence

Sampling is precisely the right term, since pop, much more than literature, film or TV (Peace actively distrusts these latter two) provides Peace with a methodology for drilling his words into the repetitions and refrains that are his stock-in-trade. Repetition is a hallmark of Peace’s style; he has famously remarked that the strike was intensely repetitive and that the prose would reflect that. But in all of Peace’s writing, repetition is what substitutes for both plot and character. His crime novels make no attempt to interest readers in the intrigue and enigma of plots; the plot of GB84, meanwhile, is given in advance, a kind of readymade. And one strange quality of Peace’s writing that is not immediately evident is that, although it is unusually intimate — reading his novels is always like rifling through someone else’s most secret places — his characters lack what is usually called “inner life”. They are identified less by a reflexive vitality than by death-drive repetitions, riffs, echoes, habit-forms. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 224

Categorization

• XREF: Direct payoff of the ch9/ch10 claims about human beings as instruments of drives and about fixation — Peace’s characters are literally built from drive-repetition. — connects to: Contemporary fiction shifts from representing characters toward presencing raw voice and sensation — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 183; A novel’s symbolic claims can exceed the terms that render its characters coherent — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 250
• DEFINE: Explains how ‘death-drive repetition’ functions as a substitute for both plot and inner life in a writer’s style.

Broader Connections

• Contemporary fiction shifts from representing characters toward presencing raw voice and sensation #expands (0.82) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 183
• A novel’s symbolic claims can exceed the terms that render its characters coherent #expands (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 250