Polypharma Fiction

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.

Automated summary

This article explores how the use of multiple medications is changing the way contemporary novels respond to anxiety and its narrative interest. By analyzing the works of Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Anelise Chen, the author examines how anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications are challenging traditional assumptions about the relationship between mental suffering and aesthetics. Instead of focusing on the potential demise of the novel genre due to psychotropics, the article delves into the formal significance of these drugs in terms of narrative temporality, tension, and plot.