The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

My essay investigates the influences of the transmodern paradigm on Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, Satin Island (2015), which features U., a corporate anthropologist working on the questions of contemporaneity. In particular, I examine how the tangled web of data proliferation and the saturation of ideas affect U.’s ontological status, revealing a crisis of agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Then, by drawing on the theoretical framework of the novel of ideas, I analyse how the novel engages with the metafictional paradox of “finding shape,” showing that U.’s anthropological inquiries inhabit a buffer-zone, a temporal frame that interweaves stasis and acceleration, past and future. I finally argue that McCarthy’s linguistic and formal solutions situate Satin Island at the crossroads of transmodernity: while stretching the fictional representation to the limit, the narrative succumbs neither to detailed observation nor centrifugal alienation. By invoking a problematic relation between human and post-human, through a transmodern critique of our present age, the novel thus hints at a vision of humankind that resists the aesthetics of an evacuated subjectivity.