Keiran Dugan

Against Immediacy: Fictional Mediation and Apophatic Representation

In Immediacy: or, The Style of Too-Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh argues that the contemporary cultural logic, which she terms “immediacy,” privileges immediate, unmediated access to reality. In literature, this impulse manifests through evasions of fiction and style, as forms such as autofiction are increasingly valued for their apparent proximity to lived experience. This paper challenges the assumption that directness in artistic representation provides authentic and comprehensive access to reality by examining apophatic modes of literary representation, particularly within postmodern literature. Through readings of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, alongside theorists such as Linda Hutcheon and Serge Doubrovsky, I argue that historical and human connection depends upon confronting that which cannot be fully known, recovered, or expressed, while nonetheless endeavoring to communicate and understand these experiences through fictional mediation.

Both Morrison and O'Brien employ apophatic artistic strategies, using fragmentation, ambiguity, repetition, and fictional indirection to approach experiences that resist complete articulation. Through fragmented narration and formal experimentation, Beloved acknowledges the impossibility of fully recovering lives excluded from dominant archives, particularly those of enslaved women, while nonetheless rendering those lives partially knowable and emotionally accessible. Similarly, The Things They Carried repeatedly revises and fictionalizes the experiences of soldiers during the Vietnam War, suggesting that traumatic and novel experiences cannot be accessed through direct retellings, but must instead be indirectly revealed through contradiction, revision, and imaginative reconstruction.

Rather than seeking to eliminate mediation, Morrison and O'Brien embrace its limitations and possibilities. Rather than presenting incompleteness as a failure of representation, both works foreground absence, distance, and uncertainty as conditions through which understanding becomes possible. By drawing attention to what remains beyond representation while still striving to render it shareable, Beloved and The Things They Carried affirm the enduring capacity of literature to foster historical and human connection.