The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction

Daniel O'Gorman, Robert Eaglestone, Daniel O'Gorman, Robert Eaglestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781134743773
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education – where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities – but it also offers challenges. What is 'contemporary'? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead.

Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as:

• Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century;

• The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature;

• The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years.

Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.

Part I
Forms

1
The Networked Novel

Caroline Edwards

Contemporary literature, as the term suggests, is defined by its relationship to the condition of being contemporary, or contemporaneity. We can debate the parameters by which we choose to periodise the contemporary: does it, for instance, begin in 1945 with the beginning of the postwar period and its welfarism, immigration and economic stability? Or should we consider the neoliberal recalibration of economic policy with Thatcher and Reagan as building the bedrock for our financial, political and economic situation today? Perhaps we wish to take a more millennial approach and suggest that contemporary literature can be periodised from 2000 onwards, with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 marking the beginning of a new century with its increasingly globalised geopolitics, the rise of stateless networked terrorist organisations and the transnational pressures upon individual nation-states provoked by international financial transactions and the ethical, legal and market frontiers of the digital realm.

Beyond periodising claims, however, lies the paradox of contemporaneity itself. As Giorgio Agamben (2009) notes in his essay ‘What is the Contemporary?,’ our time is yoked with another time or, rather, many other times, and the relationship between them signifies their contemporary nature. Since to be contemporary suggests being with other times, our perception of contemporaneity is then held up for scrutiny in terms of its distance – or proximity – to the present ‘now.’ The study of contemporary literature is thus rooted within a complex philosophical discussion concerning the nature of temporal experience as it mediates between historical time and lived, subjective time. Moreover, the literary form of the novel (with which I shall be concerned in this chapter) is uniquely positioned to convey the qualitatively different kinds of subjective and ‘clock’ times that organise our lives, as well as the possibilities afforded by narrative organisation to represent such lived times. As Paul Ricoeur enthusiastically observes in Time and Narrative, Vol. 2: ‘What resources fiction has for following the subtle variations between the time of consciousness and chronological time!’ (Ricoeur 1985: 107). Examining this relationship between consciousness and narrative time, there has been much written about the times of the modern-ist novel, as well as the postmodernist novel. Modernist narrative innovators such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield were acutely aware of the temporal distinctions to be made between the chronometric regularity of standardised time, and the private times of subjective experience that stretch out the smallest, most mundane moments into extended reveries: throwing up memories into the melee of a chaotic present and secreting distant utopian yearnings. What Henri Bergson referred to as the intuitive, fluid encounters with durée – in which the essence of a singular moment may be felt as an interruption into the spatialised time of the clock’s steady ticking of seconds, minutes and hours (l’étendu) (Bergson 1911) – can be charted in Woolf’s ‘moments of being’ or Joyce’s stream of consciousness, which unfolds the fluxional process of temporal experience (for influential readings of time in the modernist novel, see Schleifer 2000; Kern 2003; Randall 2007; Barrows 2011; Murphy 2011). Meanwhile, readings of time in the postmodern novel have clustered around the central questions of proliferating forks and temporal branchings – those texts which foreground impossible times, simultaneous times, multiple alternate possible trajectories, and loops of chance containing moments whose temporal plasticity offers narrative analogies to Salvador Dalí’s soft clocks (Heise 1997: 51; Gomel 2010). Here, we find writers such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon and Julio Cortázar: chosen for their complex and contradictory timeframes, their experimentation with non-linear narrative form, and their articulation of the increasingly splenetic, globalised times of media production, spectacle-laden simulation and paranoid consumption from the mid- to late-twentieth century.

More recently, however, the dominant paradigm of literary postmodernism has waned and the twenty-first century novel finds itself in an interesting position with respect to the question of time. Over the past two decades a resurgence of interest has sprung up around questions of temporal experience, both within theoretical discussions as well as in the contemporary novel. Recent developments in queer theory, for example, have given fresh impetus to studies of the philosophy of time. Bringing queer phenomenology into contact with studies of temporality, critics have emphasised the way in which a queer experience of time is qualitatively distinct to that of heteronormative subjects and produces a challenge to so-called ‘chrononormativity’ through alternative times of being (Halberstam 2005; Ahmed 2006; Edelman 2004; Freeman 2010). The relationship between queer subjectivity and queer times can similarly be traced in a number of recent novels that examine questions of historical time and linear progress, the anachronism of contemporaneity’s relationship with the past, as well as the possibilities for queer futurity. Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000) embeds the idea of disembodied Internet chatroom anonymity into a fluid consideration of gender and identity that stretches across various historical times as the central characters morph between selves. Meanwhile, Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) uses the non-linear possibilities of graphic storytelling to great effect in an examination of queer identity that blurs past and present. Lynn Breedlove’s 2002 novel Godspeed (2002) also constructs an alternative temporality that Judith Halberstam describes as ludic, using drugs to create a ‘junk time’ inspired by William Burroughs and animating a lesbian picaresque narrative with the speed of accelerated narcotic times and possible alternate histories (Halberstam 2005: 5). Similarly, what has been called the post-AIDS ‘anti-historical novel’ of Jeremy Reed’s The Grid (2008) uses queer identity to reconsider the relationship between past and future in an erotically charged temporal register that pits sexual desire against an apocalyptic backdrop (Stanivukovic 2014: 227).

In addition to the temporal possibilities of queer fiction, a recent spate of novels featuring dead narrators similarly challenge linear narratives of temporal progress in the seamless blending of the living present with the afterlives of deceased characters given narrative voice in a number of striking ways. As Alice Bennett (2012) has argued, such ‘narrative afterlives’ use experimental forms to offer complex combinations of narrative temporal order and causality, employing prolepsis and analepsis to construct supernatural, ‘un-lifelike types of temporality’ that challenge the predominance of mimetic representation in contemporary literary realism (Bennett 73). Novels such as Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001); Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002); John Burnside’s Glister (2008) and Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010) feature dead narrators whose temporal location in a narrative position ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the time of the narrative present affords them an otherworldly and distinctly post-secular perspective on events that unfold within the storyworld. Meanwhile, texts such as Glenn Duncan’s I, Lucifer (2003) and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) employ an afterlife perspective to deconstruct the hierarchical privileging of present time over past and future; whilst Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) sees its central protagonist Ursula living out her life again and again, each time in a different historical period. These temporal structures seem apposite to the transtemporal, transmedial and transnational patterns of connection experienced in the twenty-first-century, in which time and space are felt as increasingly compressed, accelerated and abstracted. The digital network of global communications that charts our progressively computerised lifeworlds stands as the figure for our times and casts its shadow over the contemporary novel in interesting ways. The challenge of wrenching the historical form of the novel into a networked aesthetic appropriate to our digital encounters thus provides fresh opportunities for a plethora of distinctly new temporal engagements that move us beyond modernist and postmodernist timeframes.

This preoccupation with many different kinds of time in the contemporary novel is thus reimagining mimetic representation through a number of innovations in narrative voice, structure and temporality. Such texts might productively be considered as what Ricoeur called ‘tales about time,’ in which ‘it is the very experience of time that is at stake’ (Ricoeur 1985: 101). One of the most striking examples of such innovation can be identified in what I am calling the ‘networked novel.’ Networked novels knit together a disparate set of temporal (and frequently disjunct spatial) locations that are interconnected at the level of narrative structure, as well as being thematically interlaced. Such novels stretch the boundaries between the novel and the short story collection, pulling into contiguity characters that are dotted throughout historical time to present a story that takes as its primary figural terrain the image of the network. In so doing, many contemporary networked novels engage with the idea of transmigration, in which disembodied spirit characters move between host bodies or characters appear to be reincarnated across different time periods (Virginia Woolf’s fictional 1928 biography Orlando can be identified here as the contemporary networked novel’s ur-text, which offers a plasticity of subjective identity and temporal experience as Orlando lives more than 300 years and changes biological sex). Douglas Coupland has touched upon this aspect of what I am calling the networked novel, arguing that texts such as Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011); David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004a); and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) exemplify what he calls ‘translit novels,’ which ‘cross history without being historical; [and] span geography without changing psychic place’ (Coupland 2012). Similarly, the relationship between such temporal networking and the notion of a global narrative form has been considered by Caren Irr in Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (2014). Over the last three decades, the increasingly visible use of multiple novelistic settings, global peregrinations, and networked connections between divergent locales reveals the ambitions of a ‘certain kind of contemporary writer’ to construct what Irr terms the ‘world novel’:

Maxine Hong Kingston, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others have imagined a new ‘epic’ that spans many locations, documents the simultaneous and multidirectional movements of the world’s populations, and registers without being swamped by the new communication technologies. They hope that such works will address the major issues of our era, including peace, ecological crisis, and nuclear threats.

(Irr 2014: 175)

To Irr and Coupland’s mini-oeuvre, we might also add Haruki Murakami’s epic three-volumed 1Q84 (2009–2011), Bernardine Evaristo’s poetic autobiography Lara (2009); Nick Harkaway’s multi-genre-spanning Angelmaker (2012); and Ali Smith’s How to be Both (2014), which connects the fifteenth-century painter Francesco del Cossa with a teenager in contemporary England.

In contextualising the twenty-first-century networked novel we might consider scholarship that has developed the idea of networked narratives in contemporary cinema. As Wendy Everett has argued, the concept of the network has impacted upon the narrative structure of contemporary films: ‘echoing the random growth of the network, there is little or no linear development, and stories and events instead form complex web-like structures’ (Everett 167). Films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999); Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004); Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) thus suggest cyberspace through the way in which their multiple narratives are networked together across space and time. Also sometimes referred to as ‘database’ (Kinder 2002) or ‘modular’ narratives (Cameron 2008), the anachronic and episodic temporal structures that these films construct recast temporal anxieties for the digital age. The film critic Roger Ebert defines this kind of cinema with reference to the digitised metaphor of the hyperlink: ‘a hyperlink movie shows apparently unrelated stories and characters that have a gradually revealed, hidden connection’ and cites Robert Altman’s acclaimed musical drama Nashville (1975), which features 24 main characters ranged across numerous storylines (Ebert 2007).

Rita Barnard connects such globalised cinematic storytelling with the contemporary novel, arguing that the British writer David Mitchell’s 1999 novel Ghostwritten intersperses a series of short stories set in disjunct locales and time periods via the idea of a ‘highlighted hyperlink,’ which she calls ‘Mitchell’s deliberate effort to imagine some sort of global narrative form’ (Barnard 2009: 211). Mitchell has become the literary exemplar of this new kind of globalised narrative, whose networking structure has been described by critics as evidencing a twenty-first-century reimagination of the novel as a transnational literary form, modified to express a contemporary mode of cosmopolitan identity (Schoene 2009; O’Donnell 2015: 5–6; Barnard 2009: 211). Since Ghostwritten in 1999, Mitchell has been praised for the ambitious scope and energy of his novels, his acute ear for distinct narrative styles and the ability to move from genre to genre with apparent ease. With each new novel, what critics have termed ‘the Mitchellverse’ (Berry 2015) has expanded as characters reappear across his texts and increasingly complex backstories become slowly unfolded. As Patrick O’Donnell describes, the architecture of Mitchell’s narrative structures is ‘neither carpenter’s gothic nor that of the sedimented multinovel, but a capacious assemblage of narratives connected to each other in differential patterns’ (O’Donnell 2015: 1). But perhaps most distinctively, Mitchell has been committed to exploring the narrative function of transmigratory characters since a wandering soul known as Arupadhatu transmigrated into the body of a young Danish backpacker travelling through Ulan Bator in the ‘Mongolia’ section of Ghostwritten. These two seemingly disjunct figures – the backpacker and the transmigratory soul – offer Mitchell an illustration of the rootlessness of contemporary globalised life. As Arupadhatu muses, backpackers and wandering souls have much in common:

We live nowhere, and we are strangers everywhere. We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for. We are both parasites: I live in my hosts’ minds, and drift through his or her memories to understand the world. Caspar’s breed live in a host country that is never their own, and use its culture and landscape to learn, or stave off boredom. To the world at large we are both immaterial and invisible.

(G 160)

Mitchell returned to this theme in his 2004 bestseller Cloud Atlas, in which nearly all of the novel’s characters are reincarnations of the same soul and share a comet-shaped birthmark. In his 2010 historical fiction The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell further probed the narrative possibilities of transmigration through the mysterious character of Lord Enomoto, who claims to have cheated death by harvesting and distilling souls for over 600 years. The th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Forms
• PART II Identities
• PART III Ruptures
• PART IV Case studies
• Index