Fiction in the Age of Risk

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Golnar Nabizadeh, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Golnar Nabizadeh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138494275
• eBook ISBN: 9781351026406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

When Ulrich Beck theorised a 'Risk Society' (Risikogesellschaft) in 1986, the threat of global annihilation through nuclear war remained uppermost in the minds of his readership. Three decades on, questions about whether the sensation of risk has mutated or evolved in the intervening period, and whether fiction exhibits evidence of such a change, remain just as urgent. While the immediate risk of the Cold War's 'mutually assured destruction' through World War Three seems to have ebbed, the paradox is that the social goal of safety and security seem to elude attainment. Global financial collapse, Islamic terrorism, human-authored climate change, epidemic disease outbreaks, refugee crises and the chronic erosion of the welfare state now preoccupy those in the developed world and provide the horizons for contemporary anxieties worldwide.

The contributions to this volume explore these themes, locating their significance and representation in a diverse range of contemporary literature, film, and comics, from China, Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom, Pakistan, and the United States. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

The powers of exposure: risk and vulnerability in contemporary British fiction

Jean-Michel Ganteau

ABSTRACT

This article opens by exploring the evocations in Jonathan Coe’s novel, Number 11, of contemporary forms of social, economic and political precariousness. It then addresses the ubiquity of risk in everyday life in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a narrative that thematises exposure and plays on its ambivalence as both a conduciveness to danger, but also an openness to a dependence on the other. Patrick Neate’s Jerusalem is then considered in the light of a principle of interdependence made possible through the trope of inter-generational trauma, and by the staging of relations of care through which exposure to risk allows for the emergence of solidarity. Finally, I turn to Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs to tease out the ways in which the evocation of precariousness and exclusion performed through specific narrative choices promotes the reader’s attentiveness to new visibilities, thereby fostering the ethical and political dimensions of the novel.

In Number 11, published in November 2015, British novelist Jonathan Coe returns to the ground of What A Carve Up!,¹ a ruthless satire of the Thatcher years published in 1994 and addressing the consequences that a series of cynical decisions made by rich, influential dynasts committed to liberalism are bound to have on ordinary, vulnerable individuals. Twenty years have passed since the reader parted with Michael Owens, the protagonist of the first opus, but the more recent narrative makes it clear that some citizens are now as vulnerable as they were in the 1990s, and even that their condition has changed for the worse. In Number 11, as in a fair part of contemporary British fiction, ordinariness seems to have morphed into precariousness, and invisibility has come to affect larger shares of the population. This is obviously the case with the enigmatic Lu, an elderly Chinese illegal immigrant who finds refuge in the basement of one of the secondary characters’ houses.² His situation inspires the following reflections:

Such silence. Such darkness. It is no wonder that in a world like this, things can disappear. Even people. People like Lu, whose existence seemed so precarious, so unrecognized, that there was nothing to stop him slipping away into that woodland at dawn and simply evaporating, blending into the mist.³

For Lu, and for less transient, more permanent UK residents, precariousness and the attendant consequences of invisibility and inaudibility are a permanent risk. This is indicated in Coe’s novels (I am thinking of the protagonist of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim⁴ here, who is seen to be tottering on the brink of personal, economic and social exclusion), but also in a series of texts that provide as many contemporary variations on the template of the Condition-of-England – or rather State-of-Britain – novel: from Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) to Patrick Neate’s Jerusalem (2009), through Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010), among many others.⁵ In Coe’s Number 11, a secondary protagonist, a specialist of media studies at Oxford, is characterised by a hyperbolic nostalgia for the 50s and 60s, a time when people were given a fairly equal treatment in terms of access to cultural facilities, hence for him a blessed period of innocence in which the public did not have to choose those it would help and those it would abandon.⁶ Strikingly, in the very last, short chapter, a new first-person narrator is introduced, who up to this point had only been a secondary protagonist: Livia, a young Romanian woman hailing from Bucharest and clandestinely earning her life in Chelsea by walking the dogs of opulent city dwellers. While her earlier appearances show her to be a likeable character, the last chapter, by forcefully lending a voice to a marginalised subject of the type generally struck dumb and made invisible in contemporary urban societies, casts her as the embodiment of anger and determination. She becomes the figure of the avenger who, the reader belatedly understands, has been murdering a series of highly prosperous citizens characterised by their cynicism and dedicated to multiple turpitudes, among which tax evasion:

I am not angry. I am anger itself.

You may feel pity for my victims. That is your choice. You may place your sympathies with them, or with me. That is your decision.

In the end, I believe, we are all free to choose.⁷

The novel concludes with the re-assertion of choice as the mainspring of political action, and I would argue that therein lies the affirmation of the ubiquity of risk and the necessity of risk taking as an ethical imperative.

What I aim to do in the following pages is engage with the issue of risk as thematised and performed in relation to vulnerability. My starting point is that numerous contemporary British novels concentrate on the representation of vulnerabilities of different types, whether individual or collective, physical or economic, and that to do so they are bound to evoke exposure. Exposure both precedes risk and is part of its potential, thereby appearing as one of the main modalities of risk and being metonymically related to it. Following Judith Butler’s observation that ‘[t]his exposure that I am constitutes my singularity’,⁸ exposure is what characterises the human subject as represented in the fictional corpus that I am addressing here. But even while I am inclined to consider exposure in its negative valence, I also intend to take part of my lead from Martha Nussbaum’s consideration of the positive ethical values of exposure.⁹ I therefore consider risk through the prism of vulnerability and successively envisage dependence, interdependence and attentiveness as basic ethical categories and operators that are particularly effective in contemporary fiction.

Ian McEwan’s Saturday is concerned with the experience of what it is to inhabit a post-9/11 Western metropolis, in which living simply means taking risks or being at risk. From the early pages of the novel, Henry Perowne, the protagonist, is preoccupied and on the alert, woken up in the middle of the night for a reason he cannot identify, and then watching a fiery spot careering through the London sky that he soon identifies as a plane on fire. Visions of global terrorism immediately accrue, and will be fostered later on, when news of the huge demonstrations against war in Iraq (this is 15 February 2003) seep into Henry’s thoughts and impinge on his actions. It is because of the safety measures surrounding the demonstration that he will have to drive through a special street, thereby having a slight car accident that will trigger off a series of peripateiae: humiliating a thug, Baxter, the driver of the other car, so much so that the latter will break into his house on the very same night, shattering the party thrown by Henry and his wife, and endangering members of his family. This brief sketch summarises the degree of exposure – individual, familial, even global – that characterises life in a contemporary metropolis. In Saturday, risk has become immanent, permeating Henry’s consciousness. Because the novel is focalised through him, the reader is given a picture of autonomy put ceaselessly at risk by vulnerability.¹⁰ Such a situation promotes the experience of exposure in a world dominated by collective and individual traumas.

One of the core modalities of permanent exposure resides in the novel’s vision of the contemporary world as inherently post-traumatic. In Saturday, as with many contemporary novels, we are presented with individuals in the grip of social and historical convulsions. In Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière’s paradoxical terms, this allows for the flitting, precarious emergence of a subject whose existence cannot be considered independently of his/her erasure: ‘the coming into being of the subject of history not so much censored as erased, reduced to nothing, and yet inevitably existing’.¹¹ From these words emerges the traumatic logic of the subject’s endangered autonomy, put to risk by his/her ontological and social vulnerability. This is made clear through the many instances of Perowne’s feeling that he is trapped in between traumatic breakthroughs, both collective and individual. The end of the narrative, for instance, multiplies references to a warped, traumatic temporality that links up several wounds: his father’s death is a prelude to his mother’s, which he prematurely mourns over;¹² the horrors of 9/11 are staged as echoes of the huge catastrophes of the twentieth century¹³ and as intimations of more horrors to come, which are foreshadowed by the initial vision of the doomed plane in the dark London sky. In other terms, risk is translated through the image of an unhinged temporality corresponding to traumatic Nachträglichkeit, a term variously translated as ‘afterwardsness’ or ‘belatedness’.¹⁴ Perowne experiences the present as a repetition of past wounds and the preparation for more catastrophes. From this point of view, the present-tense narrative evokes a temporality caught in its precariousness: at the very moment when it is elapsing, it refuses to benefit from the traditional prerogative of hindsight, or the safety of closed, stabilised time. In Saturday, time is the site of instability and risk, and postulates the fact that loss and exposure are always already present, thereby providing an image of ‘vulnerability as trace’, in the Derridean use of the term.¹⁵

Saturday promotes a vision of contemporary culture as dominated by multidirectional risk and reminds us of the contemporary subject’s intrinsic dependence on exposure and injury, as specified by Judith Butler in her study of precariousness.¹⁶ The wounded characters inhabiting the contemporary metropolis are singled out by their heteronomous susceptibility to damage, which reaffirms their inherent vulnerability: whether it be Henry, a neurosurgeon whose job it is to engage with physical (and psychological) frailty, to take professional risks when trying to mend the consequences of bodily risk affecting his patients (for accidental or genetic reasons); or, at the other end of the social scale, the marginalised Baxter, the thug who breaks into Perowne’s life and ends up in hospital, in the last pages of the novel. All characters are individualised through the ‘irreducibility of [their] exposure, of being this body exposed to a publicity that is variably and alternately intimate and anonymous’.¹⁷ The protagonists of Saturday are all enmeshed in communal or social relationships, whether they are fully integrated in society or hovering on its periphery. Their dependence is not only expressed in terms of loyalty or violent opposition, but also in more radical, ontological ways, as suggested through the permanence of trauma, both individual and structural. From this point of view, one of the novel’s main messages concerns the contemporary citizen’s and subject’s limited capacities, and it should be stressed that all protagonists are specifically confronted with their own limitations. Saturday’s universe is a universe in which one has to come to terms with the necessary renunciation of one’s sovereignty and autonomy, a necessity which the reader is ceaselessly reminded of through the ubiquity of risk and exposure.

As suggested above, this is made possible by consistently focussing on the human tenancy of the body as the locus of appetites and needs, vulnerable to time, and susceptible to wounding. Such a vision is emphasised by the choice of a main protagonist and point of focalisation (Henry) who is a neurosurgeon and whose function it is to mend brain damage. The fact that the whole of the narrative should be accessible through his consciousness allows for the portrayal of contemporary culture as ‘wound culture’, a vision based on a perception relying on physical affections and drives. A far cry from the Enlightenment’s conception of the subject as rational and autonomous, what obtains in McEwan’s novel (and all the narratives that I engage with here) is a crucial shift ‘from the paradigm of separat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Fiction in the age of risk
• 1 The powers of exposure: risk and vulnerability in contemporary British fiction
• 2 Evaluating risk in perpetrator narratives: resituating Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones as historical fiction
• 3 Narrating risk: the financial thriller film during the U.S. recession
• 4 John Lanchester’s Capital: financial risk and its counterpoints
• 5 Framing risk in China: precarity and instability in the stories of Li Yiyun
• 6 Risking intimacy in contemporary South African fiction
• 7 Visualising risk in Pat Grant’s Blue: xenophobia and graphic narrative
• 8 Vulnerable lives: the affective dimensions of risk in young adult cli-fi
• 9 Jihadi fiction: radicalisation narratives in the contemporary novel
• Index