Immediacy’s languor is punctured by abjection to produce immersive mood

Evidence

As we noted in “Imaginary,” the quality of fluid transmission here is subject to undertows, irruptive spurts that can paradoxically reabsorb. Thus does an unlicensed partnership of blasé and sadism center blood, shit, vomit, miscarriages, cutting, or other abjections. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation exemplarily punctuates spartan expressivity with corporeal excrescence, including an art gallery defiled by deliberate defecation. In Ling Ma’s Severance, it is the uncontrolled plague and the unexpected pregnancy; in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (which the New York Times calls “a novel” but the New Yorker calls a “story collection,” while the publisher, Penguin, calls it only “a deceptively slender volume,” and the author calls it “the mind in motion”), it is imagining whether rape is actually that bad. These corporeal and affective extremities are levers of immediacy as mood, magnetisms that magnify languor chronicles into irresistible immersion. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 184

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names ‘abjection as lever of immediacy’ — corporeal excrescence punctuating spartan expressivity is a recognizable device across Moshfegh, Ma, and Bennett.
• QUESTION: The Bennett ‘Pond’ genre dispute — novel, story collection, ‘deceptively slender volume,’ ‘the mind in motion’ — is a live example of generic indistinction she argues immediacy produces; worth checking the sources.