Literature of the Non-Self

In 2018, English writer Rachel Cusk announced the death of character. It was only a matter of time, of course. Nominally killing off ideas is a long-held tradition in Western philosophy and literature. In 1882, Nietzsche put the funeral shroud over God. A century later, Fukuyama murdered history. Throughout the 20th century, we repeatedly saw the death of the novel and of its author. The culture has recently been trying to kill the paper book and is now skulking homicidally toward the final act of exterminating reading itself. Our species would be amusing, were it not so earnest. We seem constantly to be engaged in a sort of mental genocide, turning our anxiety into an intangibly terminal act. Death leaves no doubt, after all: it’s definitive, an absence that must be pondered even as its permanence releases one of all responsibility to others and to oneself.