On Literary Apathy: Forms of Dis/Affection in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

Abstract

Abstract There is an important countertradition in U. S.-American literature that goes against intense feelings and instead highlights apathy, unfeeling and disaffection. As a few scholars from affect studies have recently argued, apathy can signal a “detachment from attachments to hegemonic structures of feeling” and holds “the potential for striving toward a radical politics of liberation” (Yao 2021: 17). Literary texts that highlight apathy formally and thematically thus reflect on broader socio-political contexts of emotional withdrawal that was caused, for example, by labor fatigue, late capitalism and addiction, and pose a challenge to the affective status quo. One recent text that stages this complex dance between feeling and unfeeling is Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In this article I argue that Moshfegh’s novel complicates the apathetic protagonist’s naïve goal of re-affection – that is, her attempt to overcome apathy, find happiness and reintegrate into society – by embedding her emotional experiences within an overpowering affective economy that is constituted by media, capitalism, neoliberalism and other socio-political forces. Instead of ‘correcting’ the affective pendulum from a solipsistic apathy into a naïve happiness, Moshfegh’s novel ‘awakens’ her readers to a more complex and undetermined spectrum of affective structures.