Polypharma Fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how the rise of polypharmacy changes the novel genre’s response to the pain of anxiety and its narrative interest. Necessarily focusing its scope while also registering the fluidity, complexity, and exigency of contemporary psychopharmacological experience, it focuses specifically on how anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications are activating an ongoing reassessment among contemporary novelists of ingrained assumptions regarding the centrality of mental suffering to aesthetics. The books I discuss as “polypharma fictions”—by Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Anelise Chen—each challenge the idea of psychic pain as a precondition of narrative development—whether the pain of existential anxiety (Heti), capitalist aspiration (Moshfegh), or willful determination (Chen). Moving beyond the extremes of alarmism and advocacy that have largely structured scholarly responses to the rise of psychotropics, I attend to the formal significance of psychotropics for narrative temporality, tension, and plot. In this more recent fiction, the question is not whether psychotropics presage the end of the novel genre but, rather, what kind of novel it is that incorporates psychopharmaceuticals and, yet . . . goes on.