Literature and The Contemporary

Fictions and Theories of the Present

Roger Luckhurst, Peter Marks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582312043
• eBook ISBN: 9781317883609
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At the end of the century, much criticism has become devoted to `last things': the end of history, the end of the subject, the end of the novel, the end, even, of the end. Literature and the Contemporary, in contrast, aims to provide through twelve essays evidence of the way in which the literature of the 1990s is constantly engaging in questions of memory and history and the representation of time in the present day.

The essays in the book survey theories of temporality from various cultural and philosophical standpoints, and represent critics writing from feminist, postcolonial and `queer' perspectives discussing literature in `our time'. The collection addresses such central issues as the politics of memory, colonial legacies, women's time, racial and sexual identities in the 1990s, and covers a wide range of contemporary authors, works and issues, some of which are treated for the first time. Among the contemporary works discussed are the prize-winning books Graham Swift's Last Orders, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres.

While discussing some of the most significant novels of the 1990s, this collection also offers a diverse yet cohesive critique of the millennial leanings of much `postmodernist' criticism, which it argues should be replaced by more variously nuanced engagements with literature and the contemporary.

Chapter One
Hurry up please it’s time: introducing the contemporary

Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks

I

Contemporary adj., from con-, together + tempus, tempor-, time, temporaries, of or belonging to time.

1. Belonging to the same time, age, or period; living, existing, or occurring together in time.

2. Having existed or lived from the same date, equal in age, co-eval.

3. Occurring at the same moment of time, or during the same period; occupying the same definite period; contemporaneous, simultaneous.

It is only the 1972 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary that adds:

4. Modern; of or characteristic of the present period; esp. up-to-date, ultra-modem, spec, designating art of a markedly avant-garde quality.

For an adjective commonly used to designate the cutting edge, the up-to-the-minute, the now, this last meaning of the contemporary arrives tardily, limping into the OED supplement as a distinctly post-Second World War connotation. It is this meaning that this book wishes to treat; the contemporary contemporary, as it were. The awkward title of this collection aims to break open the phrase 'contemporary literature', to force the adjective out of hiding, the better to isolate the complex meanings and effects that attend the contemporary. But isn't this also rather too late? Students of literary and cultural history have already done with the literature of modernism, of modernus, of'today'. What's left of the day that we might call 'contemporary'?

Since Charles Baudelaire's essay, The Painter of Modem Life, most definitions of 'modernity' have contained his sense of 'the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent. . . whose metamorphoses are so rapid' as to risk escaping capture.¹ Baudelaire's rhetoric has since been consistently surpassed, with many cultural critics arguing that modernity is forever accelerating, speeding us ever faster through rapid mutations, each moment more breathless, more extraordinary than the last. In 1895 one cultural commentator expressed unease about the speed of modem life, such that 'even the little shocks of railway travelling, not perceived by consciousness, the perpetual noises, and the various sights in the streets of a large town, or suspense pending the sequel of progressive events, the constant expectation of the newspaper, of the postman, of visitors, cost our brains wear and tear'.² More recently, the speed of circulating capital, cultural fashion and technological advance can render criticism even more hyperbolic. Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the acceleration of modernity has reached escape velocity from the gravitational pull of any grounding in reality or history such that we are left floating in weightless, directionless space.³ Jacques Le Goff has proposed that 'the acceleration of history' is the principle historians must now address, a speed of transformation that, in his view, 'has made the official definition of contemporary history untenable'.⁴ Elsewhere, technological advances are held to proceed so fast in their imbrication with the body as to inaugurate the 'post-human'.⁵ For Lorenzo Simpson, increasingly technologised 'life-worlds' are bent on the 'annihilation of time'; for Paul Virilio, 'computer time . . . helps construct a permanent present, an unbounded, timeless intensity'.⁶ We read pronouncements of the end of history, the end of the subject, the end, even, of the end.⁷ As we arrive latterly at a contemporary definition of the contemporary, it is only to discover that time, in its hurry, appears to have accelerated out of time altogether.

Such, at least, has been the position of a certain strand of cultural criticism that sought to define the state of the contemporary world and contemporary culture under a single definitional umbrella: postmodernity. Essential to the formulation of the condition of postmodernity was a sense in which the temporal had been displaced into spatial categories: architecture cannibalised all past styles and displayed them together as spatially adjacent; television channel hopping made the pictorial archives of history instantly and randomly juxtaposed, fatally dislocating the continuity of historical narrative. The remnants of disappearing history could only be energised by movement in space, as in the 'travels in hyperreality' undertaken by Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco through America.⁸ The exemplary postmodern object became in many ways the city, whether in its architectural jumble of spatialised times or in the vertiginous speed of transformations of the urban fabric. 'It all comes together in Los Angeles', Edward Soja pronounced, in a book subtitled 'The Reassertion of Space'.⁹ The urgency yet impossibility of mapping new contemporary cultural spaces became the purpose of much criticism: the metaphor of the map appeared everywhere.¹⁰ Cultural critics seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time getting lost in the foyer of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, even if Hollywood films obligingly provided spectacularly simple escape routes in plummets from the Hotel's towers.¹¹ Uncircumventable here was Fredric Jameson's seminal essay, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', first published in 1984. If, as he stated, 'we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of. . . history, which itself remains forever out of reach', this was because time had been flattened and spatialised by the remorseless advance of multinational capitalism in its global reach and space—time compressions.¹² Jameson, on one level, was writing the new guidebook for the spatial mutations suffered by those living in the time after Time.

II

None of the contributors to this collection resort to these arguments, tinged as they tend to be with apocalyptic sentiments. Rather, the contemporary is thought in other ways. The anxiety that attends the now, the up-to-the-minute, might indeed intensify as modernity is seen to accelerate. As Thomas Docherty explains in the opening to his essay, however, the paradox of the now has always been a problem of representation, for to present it is necessarily to re-present it, thus introducing a crucial delay, a splitting of temporality. The instant of the 'now' always eludes the grasp, can never be self-identical: it is either 110 longer or not yet present. This effect can be marked as a loss, as the impossibility of seizing the present time. It can be transposed to the definition of an era, one given epochal coherence by rendering 'lost' temporality in spatial forms as displays of nostalgia or pastiche. Or else the difference at the heart of the 'now' can be seen as a constitutive and productive heterogeneity, a circulation of multiple times within the single instant. We might take this to be what the 'contemporary', con-temporarius, literally suggests: 'joined times' or 'times together'. This is to say that the capitalised and technologised accelerations of modernity do not abolish time so much as confront us with an urgent need to recognise a number of temporalities in various relations, never simply reducible to 'annihilation'. Ursula Heise may be correct in considering that 'the culture of time in the late twentieth century has evolved faster than the theoretical reasoning which has accompanied it',¹³ but this should not result in the abandonment of the category of time. It should, rather, be the impetus to think time and temporality again, which may in turn allow new ways of approaching the literature of the contemporary. As Steven Connor suggests, if the contemporary is thought as the con-temporal, conjoined yet incommensurate 'times together', this can provide productive openings into the plural cultures of time beyond the panic narratives that have recently beset literary and cultural theory.

Looking through this collection, it is striking how diversely the problematic of 'time today' can be approached by different theoretical orientations; striking, too, how many cultural and literary forms can be read as confronting or displaying these effects of contemporality. We have organised this collection to accentuate different ways of considering the contemporary, inviting our authors to write on specific thematics or from specific theoretical perspectives. We have coupled essays together as a way of structuring responses, although we hope that the ways in which the essays speak across, echo or argue with our notional divides will activate the reader to discern their own routes through the book.

The first section, 'Time Today', is headed with essays by Steven Connor and Peter Osborne, both of whom confront the predominant view that time and history have entered into crisis in the late twentieth century. Connor's extremely lucid and wide-ranging survey pursues the frequently contradictory fates pronounced for time (hurrying up, slowing down, too little, too much time), and also investigates the proposals that have begun to emerge for conceiving of counter-times that resist the logic of temporal desuetude, before elaborating his own conception of con-temporality. The essay ends with a capsule reading of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The multiplicity of times that circulate in The Satanic Verses (and the simplistic reduction of them in the catastrophic division of Eastern 'primitive' time and Western 'civilised' time in the debates that have surrounded the text) is the occasion for summing up how the notion of con-temporalities can problematise monolithic pronouncements on the fate of time in the contemporary.

Peter Osborne approaches the perceived 'crisis' of temporality from a rigorous philosophical standpoint, providing a helpful contextualisation from the philosophy of history for current articulations of the 'impossibility' of conceiving a 'total' history of the contemporary moment. Osborne usefully glosses the different orders of time that have been distinguished in philosophy (cosmological, phenomenological and socio-historical time), arguing that pronouncements of the 'end of history' are products of a fundamental embarrassment with the project of unifying these times. Why embarrassment? Because unifying temporal orders is a product of the nineteenth century: Greenwich Mean Time, establishing a global standard measure, is a gesture of imperialism and an act of enforcing conformity on other cultures and other temporalities. A totalising or unifying philosophy of history, such as that so influentially propounded by Hegel, is now inevitably seen as implicated in that colonial project, the idealism of an endlessly progressive history of Spirit mocked by the barbarities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalist expropriation and imperialist violence. It is this which gives the impetus to such contemporary pronouncements as Jean-François Lyotard's injunction to 'wage a war on totality',¹⁴ and this which explains the suspicion of modernity so central to definitions of postmodernism. Osborne, while sympathetic to these critiques, argues that the abandonment of 'total history' by critical theory only leaves it open to contemporary versions like Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, a vacuous mock-Hegelian epic which contends that the conflicts and struggles which drive history have come to end because American capitalist democracy has 'won' the war. Osborne proposes re-considering temporality as experience and therefore as the basis for a new politics of time, one which may allow for different, oppositional or competing articulations of history and experience and thus, as he suggests, allowing for 'the simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise'.

These two important critiques provide ways of re-vitalising the temporal aspect of the contemporary that are pursued by subsequent contributors. Both Thomas Docherty and Wendy Wheeler, although in very different ways, refuse the equation of the postmodern with the absence of time and history, and argue that the postmodern may be regarded as a renewed engagement with temporality. For Docherty, this takes the form of contending that the homogenisation of time by modernity is performed under the aegis of a 'universal history' in which the event is subsumed into a singular and expectant narrative – rather like the ways in which 'futures' are now packaged, unitised and traded in markets that seek to manage and neutralise risk, aiming to make any future event calculable and profitable. In contrast, literary texts that might be marked as displaying what Docherty terms 'postmodern contemporaneities' are those which display flashes of the ungraspability of the object and of the event, which communicate the incalculable heterogeneity of times circulating in the instant of the 'now'. The work of Seamus Heaney, Harold Brodkey and Ian McEwan provide the occasion for this suggestive glimpse of an aesthetics of the object and the event.

Wendy Wheeler considers that modernity, as rendered in the project of Enlightenment philosophy, is fundamentally melancholic – haunted, that is to say, by the losses induced by the commitment to the eradication of superstition and wholly materialist explanations of the world, yet denying the existence of any ghostly trace of prior beliefs. Modernity's aggressive self-positioning as severing itself from a 'pre-historic' world of superstition can only be done by disavowing the losses essential to its emergence. The time of 'development', of modern history, is a melancholic time. Through the contemporary novels of Graham Swift, however, Wheeler points to indications of a faltering emergence of an acknowledgement of loss, a recognition and thus a precipitation of a mourning for the melancholic compulsions which drove modernity. Swift's fictions are full of secret histories (Waterland) and debts to the dead (Ever After, Last Orders) which serve to show that the 'emptiness' of present time can only be rendered meaningful by an engagement with the traumas of the past. In this essay, we encounter our first ghost of the book, a spectre which, in different forms, flits through several contributions (there are disturbingly material ghosts in Msiska's essay, more ethereal ones in Rooney's), fully materialising only in the last piece by Mandy Merck. This is only logical, for what is the ghost but the irruption of one time into another, the (dis)embodiment of contemporary 'times together'? The ghost appears, 'the time is out of joint', disadjusting the glazed self-identity of the 'empty' present.¹⁵ To turn, to face the ghost of the past, Wheeler suggests, is t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Hurry up please it's time: introducing the contemporary
• PART ONE: TIME TODAY
• PART TWO: INTERSECTIONS
• Index