Losing Track of Time - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Losing Track of Time

Jonathan Greenberg

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation tells a story of doing nothing;
it is an antinovel whose heroine attempts to sleep for a year in order to lose track of
time. This desire to lose track of time constitutes a refusal of plot, a satiric and passive-
aggressive rejection of the kinds of narrative sequences that novels typically employ
but that, Moshfegh implies, offer nothing but accommodation to an unhealthy late
capitalist society. Yet the effort to stifle plot is revealed, paradoxically, as an ambi-
tion to be achieved through plot, and so in resisting what novels do, My Year of Rest
and Relaxation ends up showing us what novels do. Being an antinovel turns out to
be just another way of being a novel; in seeking to lose track of time, the novel at-
tunes us to our being in time.

Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble
foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where
there was a bodega that never closed.1

For a long time I used to go to bed early.2

T he first of these sentences begins Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year

of Rest and Relaxation; the second, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. More ac-
curately, the second sentence begins C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of
Proust, whose French reads, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” D. J.
Enright emends the translation to “I would go to bed”; Lydia Davis and Google
Translate opt for “I went to bed.” What the translators famously wrestle with is
how to render Proust’s ungrammatical combination of the completed action of
the passé composé (“went to bed”) with a modifier (“long time”) that implies a re-
peated, habitual, or everyday action. Gerard Genette calls this a problem of “fre-
quency,” since it linguistically blends a singulative narrative event (something that
happens once) with an iterative one (something that happens repeatedly).3 Ac-
cording to Genette, in fact, Proust does not merely employ the iterative; he dis-
plays an “intoxication” with it.4 You might even say that the iterative becomes, for
Proust, the very substance of the novel.5

Moshfegh’s sentence owes a considerable debt to Proust. It doesn’t bend the
rules of grammar, but it induces the same kind of temporal wobble. The open-
ing conjunction whenever possesses the same built-in iterativity as Proust’s adverb

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longtemps, immediately placing us in the cyclical time of daily practices; Mosh-
fegh underscores the habitual nature of the action with the contraction I’d and
the qualifier night or day. As in the Proust, the layering of timeframes–a singular
action takes place as part of a daily routine that is repeated over an unspecified du-
ration of days, weeks, or months–disorients us. Proust’s narrator repeatedly goes
to bed; Moshfegh’s repeatedly wakes up. Meanwhile, the bodega, the endpoint of
the narrator’s habitual excursions, is seemingly immune from time. Open twenty-
four seven, it is a small miracle of capitalism, unaffected by the diurnal cycles of
waking and sleeping, as is the marble foyer that appears to shine just as bright in
the night as in the day. And like Proust’s unnamed first-person narrator (who, af-
ter going to bed early, soon wakes again, roused by “the thought that it was time
to go to sleep”),6 Moshfegh’s narrator is herself disoriented. She passes in and out
of sleep, scrutinizing the state of her own puzzled consciousness, losing and re-
constituting her very relations to the physical world. On each trip to the bodega,
she buys herself “two large coffees,” as though she wants to wake herself up (no
lime-blossom tea, alas); she then loads up on sedatives and antidepressants to
hasten her slumbers. And so, she tells us, “I lost track of time in this way” (1).

Losing track of time is the goal of both narrator and author in My Year of Rest
and Relaxation, making the novel a sort of Recherche in reverse. To be sure, the nar-
rator does inform us that the year is 2000, that she is twenty-six years old, and that
the world of history and politics continues to exist outside her apartment. She
glimpses “Bush versus Gore” on the cover of a tabloid in the bodega. But calendar
time and current events are, for the most part, shut out. “Things were happen-
ing in New York City–they always are–but none of them affected me,” she says.
“This was the beauty of sleep–reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as
casually as a movie or a dream” (4).

It is a commonplace that not only Proust but many of the great modernists–
Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Faulkner–made time their subject.7 As the medium in which
consciousness unfolds, time assumes both thematic and structural importance for
the novel’s efforts to render human experience from the inside. Even H. G. Wells,
one of the old-fashioned Edwardian materialists for whom Woolf had little use,
saw the novel as a kind of time machine, or so he comes very close to saying in the
first chapter of his book of that name:

You are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recall-
ing an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-
minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying
back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet
above the ground. But a civilised man is better off than the savage in this respect. He
can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately
he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn
about and travel the other way?8

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150 (1) Winter 2021Jonathan Greenberg

That is Wells’s unnamed “Time Traveler,” a late-Victorian inventor possessed,
however foolishly, of his age’s confidence in science and optimism about the fu-
ture. The Time Traveler, to be sure, is less interested in recapturing evanescent
childhood experiences or fugitive epiphanies than in comprehending deep or cos-
mic time, the vast expanses over which civilizations and species, continents and
planets, live and die. But whether on the grand scale of the cosmos, or the hum-
bler scale of the individual life, it was the novelists of the era, not the scientists and
engineers, who invented ways “to stop or accelerate” a person’s “drift along the
Time-Dimension.”

No doubt there are many explanations for the modernist novel’s interest in
time, but any account specific to modernism would by definition accept that our
understanding and experience of temporality is itself subject to history and hence
time. The critic Fredric Jameson–here in a digression on Georg Lukács, Walter
Scott, the historical novel, and the historicity of literary forms–identifies the
culprit, unsurprisingly, as the socioeconomic transformations of the West in the
nineteenth century:

The definitive establishment of a properly capitalist mode of production as it were
re-programs and utterly restructures the values, life rhythms, cultural habits, and tem-
poral sense of its subjects. Capitalism demands in this sense a different experience of
temporality from what was appropriate to a feudal or tribal system.9

Historian Stephen Kern, meanwhile, reminds us that the implementation of
a global standard of time in the years between the Prime Meridian Conference
of 1884 and the global broadcast of a time signal from the Eiffel Tower in 1913–
roughly the lifespan of Proust (1871–1922)–led to a “collapse” of “local times.”
The push to standardization was prompted by the speed of the railroad, Kern
notes, and enabled by the even greater speed of the telegraph: “The world was
fated to wake up to buzzers and bells triggered by impulses that traveled around
the world with the speed of light.”10 It is in response to this standardization of
time, and its impact on human “life rhythms” and “cultural habits” (Genette’s
iterative), that modernism intensifies its exploration of time as an interior psychic
phenomenon out of sync with the external standards of modernity, what Jameson
elsewhere calls “the semi-autonomous and henceforth compartmentalized spac-
es of lived time over clock time.”11 This “lived time,” indeed, becomes a reposito-
ry of the individual human being’s unique value.

The desire of Moshfegh’s narrator to lose track of time can thus provisional-
ly be seen as a variation on Proust’s project and that of the modernist novel. If
Jameson is right that the value of “lived time” emerges in reaction to the triumph
of “clock time,” it would stand to reason that a novel that seeks to lose track of
time should announce the persistence of clock time or calendar time in its very ti-
tle. Neither as boldly expansive as One Hundred Years of Solitude nor as meticulous-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLosing Track of Time

ly compressed as The Hours, My Year of Rest and Relaxation identifies a timespan in
the middle ranges. A year is a period over which interest or excitement in a topic
or a story can be sustained. The author, I suspect, had in the back of her mind the
popular food memoir Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2009), a title
that itself riffs on the Peter Weir film The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Joan Di-
dion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) may be lurking there too, and perhaps
another memoir of travel and lifestyle, Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989). Of
course, none of these titles, other than Moshfegh’s, actually belongs to a novel, yet
they still suggest that a year is a timespan fit for a book-length plot. Like a gap year
or a junior year abroad, a yearlong novel occupies a duration ample yet finite, one
over which you can accomplish something substantial, distinctive, or even dan-
gerous: a vacation, a project, an undertaking, an adventure. We even have the crit-
ic Phyllis Rose’s The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (1999).

On the other hand, to devote a year to nothing but sleep, especially by doping
yourself up on prescription and over-the-counter drugs as Moshfegh’s narrator
does, is less a project than an antiproject. In fact, it may be significant that the
“year of” formula originates with the memoir, not the novel; the novel, in con-
trast, would then aim to satirize the memoir and its implicit agenda (Accomplish
something! Do something exciting with your life!) by appropriating this pernicious for-
mula. Moshfegh indeed more or less directs us to take the title of her novel with a
double dose of irony and a drink of water. At least that is one way to read this ex-
change between the narrator and her psychiatrist:

“Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?”
“Yeah. Like The House of Mirth,” I said.
“A sad story,” said Dr. Tuttle.
“I haven’t read it.”
“Better you don’t.” (22–23)

The author, needless to say, has read it, and even lists it on Goodreads as one of her
five favorite novels “set in the city that never sleeps.”12 Moshfegh, in other words,
signals to us that she is no more writing about “rest and relaxation” than Edith
Wharton is writing about mirth.

Moshfegh’s title in fact deliberately and comically obscures the weighty psy-
chic and existential stakes of her character’s daily, yearlong effort to lose track of
time. This effort, which the narrator describes as her “hibernation,” consists of
drug-induced sleep, regular visits to the bodega, and somewhat less regular trips
to the drug store and to Dr. Tuttle for the purpose of restocking the Nembutol,
trazodone, Ambien, Ativan, Xanax, Zyprexa, lithium, Solofton, Benadryl, Ny-
Quil, Robitussin, and other drugs that will constitute what she calls, with a tell-
ing metaphor, her “library of psychopharmaceuticals” (26). Her waking hours she
spends watching popular movies from the nineties, ideally starring Harrison Ford

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150 (1) Winter 2021Jonathan Greenberg

or Whoopi Goldberg. An annoyingly devoted best friend, Reva, visits sporadical-
ly. Memories of childhood, college, and an ex-boyfriend surface. And so the year
slips by: “The speed of time varied, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my
sleep. . . . My favorite days were the ones that barely registered” (71).

T he year of rest and relaxation thus turns out to be a chronicle of days that

barely register. That is to say, in rejecting time, the novel also spurns the
very action that the novel would seem to require to sustain itself. This too
is, broadly speaking, a modernist ambition. The narrative theorist Dorrit Cohn
notes that with Molly Bloom’s monologue in the final chapter of Ulysses, James
Joyce achieves an unparalleled representation of the real-time unspooling of con-
sciousness. He accomplishes this through a curtailment of the character’s move-
ment in space: “Doubtless the most artful stratagem Joyce employed . . . is to set
Molly’s mind into its turbulent motion while setting her body into a state of
nearly absolute tranquility.” While her husband has spent the day out and about,
his mind stimulated by the buzz and hum of Dublin’s streets and pubs, Molly’s
monologue is the thought-stream of “a body at rest,” placed in “calm surround-
ings,” doing virtually nothing but thinking.13 Joyce’s almost perfectly stationary
thinker is not even granted a coffee run to the all-night bodega. (She does get up to
use the chamber pot.) The conclusion of Ulysses allows the inner world to come to
the fore precisely because the outer world is allowed to recede.

For the similarly housebound and stationary narrator of My Year of Rest and Re-
laxation, such a curtailment of action means a disavowal of plot. A plot, literary
scholar Peter Brooks tells us, is a temporal and teleological sequence, “a structuring
operation elicited by, and made necessary by, those meanings that develop through
succession and time.” A plot makes mere events into a story, creating “suspense and
uncertainty” and thereby orienting the reader toward a resolution, a “revelation of
meaning” reached “when the narrative sentence achieves full predication.”14 This
is consistent too with Georg Lukács’s understanding of the novel’s paradigmatic
plot as “the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order
to be proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence.”15
But in Moshfegh’s book, any forward propulsion of events, driven by the prom-
ise of meaning, is rigorously halted. Most obviously, the traditional marriage plot,
with its “predicate” of happily ever after, is jettisoned. The ex-boyfriend Trevor is
unthinkable as a husband, a parody of emotional and sexual selfishness. Indeed,
marriage itself seems preposterous: “Reva often spoke about ‘settling down.’ That
sounded like death to me” (28). (In her Goodreads post, Moshfegh praises the “hi-
lariously radical” premise of The House of Mirth, whose “protagonist’s search for a
husband is utterly unromantic: She’s going broke.”)16

If this novel has no interest in finding Mr. Darcy, neither does it take up the plot
of the Künstlerroman, in which the main character progresses, however fitfully, to-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLosing Track of Time

ward the creation of a work of art. A brief prehibernation job in a Soho gallery,
taken on for no other purpose than “to pass the time,” exposes the contemporary
art world as shallow, voyeuristic, and gimmicky:

On a low pedestal in the corner, a small sculpture by the Brahams Brothers–a pair of
toy monkeys made using human pubic hair. Each monkey had a little erection poking
out of its fur. The penises were made of white titanium and had cameras in them posi-
tioned to take crotch shots of the viewer. The images were downloaded to a Web site.
A specific password to log in to see the crotch shots cost a hundred dollars. The mon-
keys themselves cost a quarter million for the pair. (39)

Moshfegh’s narrator is no Lily Briscoe, and this book seems unlikely to end with
an affirmation that she has had her vision.

And what about social ambition, the “dominant dynamic of plot,” the “force
that drives the protagonist forward” in so many nineteenth-century novels?17 It
is reduced to the contemporary discourse of self-care and self-help, which feebly
disguises a consumerist agenda. Reva, a viewer of Sex and the City and reader of
Cosmo, speaks like “a Hallmark card” (165) and offers pop-psychology slogans that
urge accommodation to a worthless society: “Take some time off and think about
your next move. Oprah says we women rush into decisions because we don’t have
faith that something better will come along. And that’s how we get stuck in dis-
satisfying careers and marriages.” To which the narrator responds, “I’m not mak-
ing a career move” (55). For her, it’s not the move but the whole game that’s the
problem. Reva, bound by the norms and narratives of her gender and class, can
only counsel a restorative break in the action–rest and relaxation–but cannot
envision an end to action itself. At one point Reva leaves a note that reads, “Today
is the first day of the rest of your life! xoxo.” The narrator wants none of it:

I had no idea what I’d said to inspire Reva to leave me such a patronizing note of en-
couragement. Maybe I’d made a pact with her in my blackout: “Let’s be happy! Let’s
live every day like it’s our last!” Barf. (240)

The slogans of self-care–and, with them, any larger, memoir-ish plotline of
self-realization that they suggest–are dismissed as hollow and commercial. This
novel has no more interest in advancing a career than in arranging a marriage.

T he critic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst tells us that “a question at the heart

of all picaresque fiction” is the one asked by Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick:
“Where shall we go to next?”18 Henry Fielding, in his own picaresque,
Joseph Andrews, makes explicit the analogy between reading and the adventure of
travel, praising the gaps between chapters in his book as a source of cognitive res-
toration. Chapter breaks are, in his conceit, sites for rest and relaxation: “those
little Spaces between our Chapters may be looked upon as an Inn or Resting-Place,

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150 (1) Winter 2021Jonathan Greenberg

where [the reader] may stop and take a Glass or any other Refreshment as it pleas-
es him.”19 But a handful of chapter breaks notwithstanding, My Year takes no such
pleasure in either forward motion or refreshment. It is the very opposite of the
Pickwickian picaresque. Shortly before the narrator’s hibernation begins, some
interns at the Soho gallery ask her Pickwick’s very question: what to do next.
“What next?” she thinks. “I couldn’t imagine” (42). There is in this book no next
move, no next episode. The story never gets up from the space between life chap-
ters, never moves on from its comfortable Resting-Place. The gallery job is worth-
while solely because it allows the narrator to take furtive naps in a supply closet,
where she experiences the very best kind of sleep, a “black emptiness, an infinite
space of nothingness” (39). This is a cognitive obliteration akin to what Proust’s
speaker describes in his opening pages as the “abyss of not-being,” the néant that
Roger Shattuck grandly describes as a state of being “abandoned to the point of
elimination from the universe.”20 And like Proust’s narrator emerging from his
néant, Moshfegh’s finds coming to consciousness to be an agonizing reconstruc-
tion of the cosmos. She, however, makes clear that she’d be just as happy not to
see the universe restored: “My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way
possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that
had brought me to where I was” (40).

The future appears foreclosed, then, but Moshfegh’s character is still bur-
dened with a past: those lame but deeply rooted memories that, upon waking,
spontaneously regenerate to fill her mind. She wants to lose track of these past
experiences every bit as much as she wants to fend off the necessity of any action
that will bring on the future. Yet much of the novel consists of her recitation of the
very memories she scorns. In fact, in the unfolding of these prehibernation mem-
ories, the alert reader might notice a slippage or authorial sleight of hand: this
narrative is not a present-tense diary or, like Molly Bloom’s interior monologue, a
real-time unspooling of thought, and so (if we give the matter much thought) we
must conclude that both the prehibernation memories and the actual hibernation
time itself are narrated from a temporal point after the year of rest and relaxation
has concluded. The empty year, as it were, imports these lame memories from the
past and their recitation from the future, and in this way both the pages of the
novel and the days of the year acquire substance, stealthily piling up the building
blocks of backstory, family history, and plot.

Through this recitation, moreover, the narrator provides us enough in the way
of a life history for us to discern, on a psychological level, the sources of her de-
sire to lose track of time. The death of both parents seven years ago is the appar-
ent cause of her current malaise, and her seemingly pathological response to these
losses surely has something to do with the psychic costs of having been raised in a
cold, unloving family. (“None of us had much warmth in our hearts” [49].) She re-
calls, for example, that as a girl she was not allowed to have a puppy. Notably, this

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLosing Track of Time

is a memory first recalled not at the time of the novel’s composition or utterance,
but during the actual narrated events (such as they are) of the year 2000. Just be-
fore the hibernation project, while contemplating some pretentious artwork, the
narrator experiences an involuntary memory, one whose unprompted surfacing
invests it with special meaning and power:

“Pets just make messes. I don’t want to have to go around picking dog hairs out of my
teeth,” I remembered my mother saying.
“Not even a goldfish?”
“Why? Just to watch it swim around and die?” (50)

The modest request for a pet fish becomes a lesson in philosophical nihilism, the
confined life of the fish serving as a metaphor for the pointlessness of human exis-
tence and plotlessness of this novel. Some hundred and fifty pages later, the narra-
tor thinks again of her mother, whom she watched as a child putting on make-up,
“wondering if one day I’d be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made pool, circling
and circling” (212–213).

D espite its satire of Dr. Tuttle and Big Pharma, then, the novel invites us to

read it as a psychiatric case history of sorts, and it takes no special exper-
tise or insight to diagnose the narrator with depression. Indeed her emo-
tional state seems a textbook case of Freud’s melancholia,21 which differs from a
normal condition of mourning in that for the melancholic, not merely the world
but the ego itself “has become poor and empty.”22 (One might say that mourning
stands to melancholia as rest and relaxation stand to whatever kind of cognitive
obliteration or nothingness the narrator seeks.) The narrator tells us quite plainly
that she “wanted a mother” because her own mother “was usually passed out in
her bed with the door locked” (147), sedated by alcohol and Valium. Freud’s mel-
ancholic has internalized the lost love object; in this case, although both parents
have died, that object is the alcoholic mother, who expressed love to her daughter
only in sleep, when they shared the king-sized bed vacated by the unfaithful father.
Having internalized the somnolent mother, the narrator has also internalized the
mother’s unloving cruelty, which she then reproduces, often directing it at Reva
and all of the conventional gendered expectations for plot that Reva represents.
This internalized cruelty is the source of a lively satiric wit and yields a Swiftian
misanthropy that rejects the social world entirely: “I hated talking to people” (1).
Among the loopier theories of the incompetent Dr. Tuttle is the belief that “the
death gene is passed from mother to child in the birth canal” through “micro-
dermabrasions” (80), and for all her unscientific zaniness, the crackpot shrink
glances on a truth: the narrator’s mother has indeed passed on something akin
to Freud’s death drive.23 But of course, in giving life, all mothers also bequeath
(eventual) death. She not busy being born is busy dying.

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The punitive and sadistic mother figure resurfaces in another involuntary
memory of humiliation, this one suffered at the hands of a college art history
teacher. In the memory, the narrator arrives to class late, having broken the heel
of an expensive pair of “black suede stiletto boots.” The instructor punishes her–
ostensibly for her tardiness but actually for her beauty–by having her “stand at
the front of the classroom” with her “left foot arched like a Barbie’s” to be cri-
tiqued by her classmates as “a performance piece.” The well-trained Columbia
undergrads determine that the narrator has been “broken by the male gaze” as the
narrator passes the time by contemplating time, listening to the clock ticking and
observing the cycle of the seasons through the window as yellow leaves fall to the
sidewalk (189).

If the feminist art teacher reembodies the unloving mother, Whoopi Gold-
berg, the narrator’s favorite movie star, provides the nurturing maternal presence
that the birth mother failed to offer. Goldberg is a benevolent if uncomfortably ra-
cialized mammy figure who, the narrator says, “took care of me after my mother
died” (233). Indeed, she tells us, “I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and
picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta” (72). Goldberg’s honest, solid (and
Black) way of giving life stands in contrast to the death-bearing birth canal of the
narrator’s biological mother. Her movies serve as a lullaby, playing on the VCR as
the narrator drifts off to sleep, and her mere presence provides protection against
the outside world:

Whenever she appeared on-screen, I sensed she was laughing at the whole production.
Her presence made the show completely absurd. . . . Wherever she went, everything
about her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see.
Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred. Whoopi was proof. (196)

Goldberg’s parody of the conventions of (White) Hollywood cinema illustrates
the value of an artistic self-consciousness that can rip apart illusions, suggesting
an analogy to the work of the novel itself. To laugh at “the whole production” is
surely a satiric response, but instead of the Swiftian misanthropy of the opening
page, it indicates a quasi-Olympian detachment, what Joel Relihan calls, rescuing
a term from the ancients, catascopia, or looking down.24 The anger and scorn of the
punitive mother gives way to the less heated satiric stance of amused detachment.
The importance of the “good mother” Whoopi Goldberg thus also suggests
that to interpret the hibernation project as merely a manifestation of a neurosis
may diminish its larger significance. Moshfegh does not negate the sense of psy-
chological depth that the rehearsal of her narrator’s “lame memories” creates, but
she does warn us again explaining away the idiosyncrasy of the novel’s premise by
reducing it to a medical symptom. Hibernation may indeed be a symptom of mel-
ancholia, but what is melancholia a symptom of? “The modern age has forced us
to live unnatural lives” (22), says Dr. Tuttle in another one of her utterances that

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hover between wisdom and platitude; this novel certainly gives us grounds to be-
lieve that life in the “modern age,” exposed as “gauche and ridiculous” by Whoopi
Goldberg and Ottessa Moshfegh alike, is unnatural and unhealthy. What cultural
theorist Siane Ngai writes of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener applies almost to
the letter to Moshfegh’s sleeper: “Should we read his innertness as part of a voli-
tional strategy that anticipates styles of nonviolent political activism to come, or
merely as a sign of what we now call depression?”25 Like Bartleby’s “I would pre-
fer not to,” the narrator’s refusal of consciousness, time, action, and plot might
constitute a “powerful powerlessness” that can be understood as a trait of “liter-
ature or art itself, as a relatively autonomous, more or less cordoned-off domain
in an increasingly specialized and differentiated society.” Ngai reads Bartleby’s
“situation of restricted agency” dialectically (she is basically following Adorno),
claiming that the very restriction of agency enables the artwork “to theoriz[e]
social powerlessness in a manner unrivaled by other forms of cultural praxis.”26
The inertness of Moshfegh’s narrator similarly asks to be understood through the
oxymoronic logic of the passive aggressive.27

Thus, what looked like the humanism of the modernists’ experiments with
narrative and temporality–resisting standardization through the valorization of
the Proustian iterative and other forms of “lived time”–begins to look, one hun-
dred years later, more like an antihumanist project. (That modernist humanism,
in fact, with its bid for the redemption of ordinary experience, may now appear
to have always been a bit factitious, strained, or desperate.) Moshfegh posits that
human life is not an interior trove of precious memories or heightened intensities
but rather is just as aimless, just as “poor in world” as goldfish life. In this way, as
we noted, Moshfegh seems to reverse Proust’s quest for lost time rather than to
recapitulate it. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that her most immediate stylistic
influence, at least to my ear, is not any of the great modernists but a more recent
postmodernist, Don DeLillo, whose 1985 White Noise echoes through the text. The
“white noise” in DeLillo’s novel takes the form of a steady stream of verbal frag-
ments, sometimes emanating from the TV, sometimes spoken by blankly ironic
teenagers and academics. More generally, the term describes a broader stream:
not a stream of consciousness but a stream of data, waves, molecules, and impuls-
es (below the threshold of consciousness) associated with the onset of death. This
white noise finds its correlate in My Year in the background noise of the ever- active
VCR showing bland nineties movies and the cable feed that tosses out meaning-
less snippets and images of news, weather, and porn. (“Expect road closures, hur-
ricane force gale winds, coastal flooding,” the weatherman was saying” [182].)
DeLillo’s mock-prophet, a sportswriter-turned-Elvis studies professor, is reborn
as Dr. Tuttle, with her screwball pronouncements on death and brain chemistry,
while Infermiterol, the sleep aid that the narrator begins taking midnovel, is a re-
packaging of DeLillo’s Dylar, the black market synthetic drug that promises to

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rid its users of the fear of death. White Noise, finally, memorably suggests (echo-
ing Walter Benjamin) that “all plots tend to move deathward.”28 (The marriage
plot, recall, sounds to the narrator “like death.”) Plots move us deathward, to the
end of plot; but the attempt to stifle plot, to lose track of time, is also like a death:
death’s second self, you might say, “which seals up all in rest.”

Y et the effort to avoid plot proves hard to sustain. I touched on this problem

earlier, in noting the way that a more-or-less traditional novelistic back-
story creeps into the text in the form of unwanted memories to provide a
psychologically credible grounding for character. In fact, it becomes clear that in
establishing the narrator’s desire to lose track of time, Moshfegh has also set a trap
for her, concealing from her the paradox that annihilating time can from a certain
angle look like an ambition to be achieved in time. A reader might admire–even
take a rooting interest in–the struggles of a character to succeed in her goal of los-
ing track of time, and might eagerly turn the pages to discover the inventions by
which a novelist constructs a story about dispensing with plot. Watching Mosh-
fegh’s narrator traverse a space of nothingness on this high wire holds the reader,
like the tightrope walker herself, in suspense.29

This problem–what we might call plot’s inevitability–is one of which the nar-
rator becomes conscious. While chapter two appears to make significant progress
toward the erasure of experience–“Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray,
monotonous plane ride through the clouds” (84)–the following chapter opens
bluntly with a reminder of calendar time: “In November, however, an unfortu-
nate shift occurred” (85). The narrator confronts “a subliminal rebellion” (85) in
which, under the influence of Infermiterol, she becomes active during her sleep,
rearranging furniture and buying colorful ice pops from the bodega. Such activity,
she realizes, is “antithetical to [her] hibernation project” (86). Her unconscious is
insisting on plot. Plot, born of desire, asserts itself in the form of libido. The un-
conscious initiates a return to sexual courtship, even if the narrator’s racy online
flirtations are a far cry from Jane Austen: “Then one day I woke up to discover
that I had dug out my digital camera and sent a bunch of strangers snapshots of
my asshole, my nipple, the inside of my mouth” (88). A kind of intrapsychic war
erupts between the forces of action and those of inaction: asleep, she orders de-
signer jeans and lingerie; awake, she cancels her credit cards; asleep, she orders
new ones; awake, she cuts them up again.

From this flicker of sexual desire, the unconscious plot-making progresses to
ethical engagement. We noted that in the early sections of the novel, the rejec-
tion of the outside world, especially of Reva, finds expression in a cruel satiric hu-
mor that the reader can enjoy: “Reva came and went, blathering about her latest
dates and heartaches over her mother” (99). As Reva’s mother’s cancer progress-
es, however, this coldness becomes ethically troublesome. Yet in her drugged-out

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sleep, the narrator manages to travel to Long Island for Reva’s mother’s funeral
and even musters a few weak gestures of concern. After the funeral, she gradually
comes to miss her friend, her “whiny, moronic analgesic” (205) who, she realizes,
is at least as effective as a pill for muting pain. Satire, whether it takes the stance of
misanthropy (“I hated talking to people”) or the catascopia of Whoopi Goldberg
(laughing at “the whole production”), typically responds to the world with judg-
ment and critique, leaving antagonisms unresolved and concluding with a retreat
from the social itself (Swift’s Gulliver to his stables, Austen’s Mr. Bennet to his
library). The broader, more encompassing perspectives of the novel, in contrast,
have typically been seen to produce a “comedy of forgiveness,” generating plots
that reconcile antagonisms and illustrate a character’s growth.30 For this reason,
the beginnings of the narrator’s ethical engagement with Reva also suggests the
beginnings of her own psychological healing. During the trip to Long Island, she
tries to encounter her grief even as she characterizes it through the (satirized) dis-
course of pop psychology: “I couldn’t cry. None of that penetrated deep enough to
press whatever button controlled my ‘outpouring of sorrow’” (145).

Thus, the restoration of libido enlivens the plot, the ethical recognition of Reva
warms the heart, the effort to confront loss cracks the satirical veneer of the prose.
But at the same time, these signs of progress threaten to make this quirky anti-
novel into something decidedly more conventional, to resolve a situation we have
come to value for being unresolvable. In the paradoxical logic of the novel’s prem-
ise, the unconscious restarting of the plot also constitutes a reentry into time and
an accommodation to “the whole production” of late capitalist social life. It is as
though we were seeing Bartleby take up his pen and resume his work as a scriv-
ener. The narrator’s gestures of compassion and self-reflection, however feeble,
undercut her rejection of narratives of healing and the insipid culture from which
they spring.

For this reason, the concluding movements of the novel generate a measure of
friction, a sense that the reader must suddenly shift gears and accede not simply to
a plot but to a comic rather than a tragic or satiric one, accepting a narrative of re-
birth, regeneration, and reconciliation. This final phase begins with the narrator’s
effort to double down on the abolition of plot, to undertake a new, more inten-
sive stage of hibernation that will be exactly one hundred and twenty days long:
a “solution to my problems,” she says, that “landed in my mind like a hawk on a
cliff” (254). The VCR broken, her possessions given away, her cell phone thrown
into the East River, the narrator enlists a conceptual artist from the SoHo gallery
as a “jailkeeper” (254) to prevent her from interrupting her slumbers by venturing
out into the world. Yet this suppression of plot is intended to serve its rebirth: “I
could sleep myself into a new life” (260). The doubling down on hibernation only
intensifies the paradox of the plotless novel, generating a will-she-or-won’t-she
suspense worthy of the third act of a Hollywood film. Symptomatically, the nov-

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el begins to mark its sections with a rigorous tracking of time, down to dates on
the calendar: February 19, February 25, May 28. And the hibernation proves tru-
ly therapeutic. The narrator realizes “that this was the end of something” (274),
wakes up “on June 1, 2001,” and understands that she is “alive” (276). She even
picks up DeLillo’s Mao II and reads it “cover to cover” (278).

The intrapsychic resolution enables an existential insight about the nature of
time. During a visit to the Met in September, staring at a still life, the narrator
grasps that she is now able to contemplate her own future:

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was mak-
ing it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying
to capture something–a thought, I guess–as though such a thing were possible, as
though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings–that time could be
contained, held captive. (286)

She reaches out and touches the painting, “simply to prove to myself that there
was no God stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things”
(286–287). I read this insight–a revelation of meaning, to use Brooks’s phrase–
as an acceptance of her own limited existence in time, an understanding that “still
life” is possible only in art. (Even the paintings themselves are “just things, ob-
jects, withering toward their own inevitable demise” [285].) The recognition of
temporal limitation is also an affirmation of the openness of the future.

Whether this insight resolves or dodges the crisis that launched the year of rest
and relaxation is hard to say. It appears that in resisting what novels do, My Year of
Rest and Relaxation shows us what novels do. Being an antinovel turns out to be an-
other way of being a novel. In seeking to lose track of time, the novel attunes us
to our being in time; in depriving character of action, it reveals each person’s be-
ing as continuous with (yet not identical to) her lame memories and her not-yet-
existent future.

I n any case, no definitive judgment can be rendered without consideration of

the final brief chapter, which re-immerses narrator and reader in the larger
world of historical time. On September 11, the narrator watches, records, and
rewatches the horrifying scene during which she believes she sees Reva leap from
the North Tower: “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she
wide awake” (289). An individual act of courage in facing death returns us to the
idea from the novel’s opening that “things were always happening in New York.”
World events, having crept into the novel only through the white noise of decon-
textualized news snippets, finally come to the fore. Here Moshfegh seems to bor-
row not from Proust or Joyce but from Mann, whose Magic Mountain ends abrupt-
ly when Hans Castorp, after seven years of rest and relaxation, is awakened by the
start of World War I: “That historical thunder-peal, of which we speak with bated

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breath, made the foundations of the earth to shake; but for us it was the shock that
fired the mine beneath the magic mountain and set our sleeper ungently outside
the gates.”31 The war for Mann is a moment of historical rupture, Genette’s “sin-
gulative” writ large. It decisively cleaves the past from the present, sealing Cas-
torp’s story hermetically in the past while leaving his future poignantly uncertain.
September 11, 2001, a date on the calendar remembered for its uniquely con-
fused temporality of events watched and rewatched, has come to represent in the
popular imagination a similar rupture, the restarting of history after the supposed
“end of history” achieved by the Western triumph in the Cold War. This popular
narrative–9/11 as the end of the end of history–took on, as we know, a moralis-
tic and politically reactionary coloring as the attacks became a “wake-up call” to
a sleeping and complacent nation. But this novel’s insistence, perhaps in spite of
itself, on the inevitability of plot and the continuing antagonisms of world-histor-
ical conflict is not itself a reactionary gesture. In fact, as a product of the Trump
years, the novel’s recognition of the persistence of historical change might in-
stead be seen as a comment on our current moment’s surge of populist authoritar-
ianisms and the stressing of democratic society, as though it is reminding us that
we cannot take liberal progress for granted. Likewise, its almost quaint recall of
the early, low-tech years of the Internet creates a temporal double vision in which
the absence of now-ubiquitous smartphones, streaming video, and social media
remind us that our narrator’s story has now happened. The “now” of the novel
is past. A novel about rejecting plot somehow found a plot. But while novels end,
history continues. Things were happening in New York City; they always are. In
the words of the whiny, moronic, analgesic Reva, “Things are moving forward. I
guess time is like that–it just keeps going.”

about the author

Jonathan Greenberg is Chair of the English Department at Montclair State Uni-
versity. He is the author of Modernism, Satire, and The Novel (2011), The Cambridge In-
troduction to Satire (2019), and Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving (with Mo Rocca,
2019).

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endnotes

1 Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (New York: Penguin, 2018), 1. Future ref-

erences given parenthetically.

2 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I: Swann’s Way; Within a Budding Grove,
trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), 3.

3 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell University Press, 1980), 114, 116.

4 Ibid., 123.

5 “No novelistic work, apparently, has ever put the iterative to a use comparable–in textual
scope, in thematic importance, in degree of technical elaboration–to Proust’s use of it
in the Recherche du temps perdu.” Genette, Narrative Discourse, 117.

6 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 3.

7 For recent efforts to reopen the subject, see Jesse Matz, Modernist Time Ecology (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); and Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust,
Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
8 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Penguin, 2005 [1895]), 6.
9 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

(London: Verso, 2007), 284.

10 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 2003), 14.

11 Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1979), 14.

12 “Ottessa Moshfegh’s Top Books Set in the City that Never Sleeps,” Goodreads, July 2,

2018, https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1374.Ottessa_Moshfegh.

13 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Modes for Rendering Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1978), 222.

14 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1985),

12, 18.

15 Georg Lukács, “From The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of
Great Epic Literature,” in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 2004.

16 “Ottessa Moshfegh’s Top Books.”
17 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 39.
18 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.:

Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2013), 187.

19 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1742]), 119.
20 Roger Shattuck, “Lost and Found: The Structure of Proust’s Novel,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Proust, ed. Richard Bales (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 76.

21 Joyce Carol Oates, “Sleeping Beauty,” The New York Review of Books, October 11, 2018.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesLosing Track of Time

22 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-
chological Works, Volume 14, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the
Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1957), 246.

23 Freud quotes Schopenhauer in saying that “death is the ‘true result and to that extent
the purpose of life.’” Elsewhere: “The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”
Endorsing the post-Darwinian biology of August Weismann, Freud speculates on the
need for death and its origin in the development of life. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Volume 18,
trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analy-
sis, 1955), 39, 50.

24 “Observation from an unusual point of view, typically from on high.” Joel Relihan,

Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 7.
25 Siane Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
26 Ibid., 2.
27 One might also consider here Lee Edelman’s critical analysis of the ideology of “repro-
ductive futurism,” to which he opposes queerness, which occupies “the place of the
social order’s death drive” in offering a stubborn “resistance to the viability of the so-
cial.” Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 3.

28 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985), 26.
29 “A narrative without at least a minimal plot would be incomprehensible.” Brooks, Read-
ing for the Plot, 5. This might be the place to note that the novel is special among literary
genres in the temporal demands it makes on the reader: because even a medium-sized
book such as this one engages the reader over an extensive duration of time, the prob-
lem of “what’s next” is uniquely foregrounded in the novel.

30 On a satiric “comedy of correction” versus a novelistic “comedy of forgiveness,” see
James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (New York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux, 2004), 3–19; on satire’s refusal to resolve antagonisms, Frank Palmeri, Sat-
ire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon (Austin: Univeristy of Texas
Press, 1990), 13; on the distinctions between satire and comedy, and the relations of
satire and the novel, Jonathan Greenberg, ed., Cambridge Introduction to Satire (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2019), 27–30, 159–163.

31 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1969

[1927]), 709.

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150 (1) Winter 2021Jonathan Greenberg
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