Living on the Surface: Tom McCarthy's Remainder and the Literature of Pure Immanence

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write: "a productive use of literary machine" is "a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force" (106). The idea of schizophrenic literature bringing new possibilities to the world appears across Deleuze's writings but acquires further significance in reference to his later conceptualization of "pure immanence." This paper puts Deleuze's earlier and later works into conversation to illuminate the concept of pure immanence and revisit Deleuze's theorization of literature through this critical lens. In doing so, Tom McCarthy's Remainder is analyzed as a new model of novel that continues Deleuze's genealogy of the literature of pure immanence, which includes Blanchot, Bousquet, Tournier, Zola, and Fitzgerald, among others. As an experimental work of radical absurdity that violates narrative norms, Remainder literalizes Deleuze's central philosophical motifs such as "crack" and "surface" as primary narrative devices, configuring the dissolved self or lost identity at the junction of the Platonic order of things and the Stoic discovery of differences. Tracing the figure of the "cracked I" as the schizophrenic, alcoholic, or pervert in Deleuze's literary examples, this paper demonstrates how Remainder materializes the revolutionary possibilities of such figures identified by Deleuze as an abode of immanence where a pure event can emerge. Juxtaposing Deleuze's philosophical conception of reality, memory, time, and event with McCarthy's novelistic project, this paper sheds new light on both by providing a contemporary exemplification of the literature of pure immanence while elucidating the philosophical implications in McCarthy's rewriting of novelistic conventions, which brings new possibilities to the genre of the novel.