“A Great Many Things Were Dead”:
Crisis in British Metamodernist Fiction
Iza Hemelaar
S4222946
HLCS Thesis (Literary Studies)
June 2018
First assessor: Dr. U. Wilbers
Second assessor: Prof. dr. O. Dekkers
Image credit: Smith, Ali. “The Novel in the Age of Trump.” New
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER 1 11
“A CLUSTERFUCK OF WORLD-HISTORICAL PROPORTIONS”: METAMODERNISM AND CRISIS
CHAPTER 2 26
“THE GARBAGE PATCH OF HISTORY AND TIME”: METAMODERN SUBJECTIVITY AND TEMPORALITY IN
TUTH OZEKI’S A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
CHAPTER 3 39
THE “FUNDAMENTAL RIDDLE OF OUR TIME”: METAMODERN EPIPHANY IN TOM MCCARTHY’S SATIN
ISLAND
CHAPTER 4 56
“PANIC. ATTACK. EXCLUDE”: METAMODERN CONNECTIVITY IN ALI SMITH’S WINTER
CONCLUSION 72
METAMODERN BELIEF AND DESIRE
Introduction
[…]
Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead.
Love was dead. Death was dead.
A great many things were dead. (Smith, Winter 3-4)
With death, death and more death Ali Smith opens her novel Winter (2017), portraying a twenty-first century ‘wasteland’ in which society and all forms of culture, politics and humanity have died. The novel’s themes of disillusionment are reminiscent of the anxieties addressed in modernist literature. Such anxieties induced modernists to consider the previous Victorian literary conventions to be no longer appropriate to address their concerns. A similar tendency occurs in recent fiction, as since 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror,
postmodernism’s ironic and arbitrary nature, its emphasis on futility and the subversion of truth and meaning no longer appear to represent adequate vehicles to address contemporary anxieties that foreground the importance of ethics, affect and sincerity.
Winter and other recent fictions respond to contemporary crises, including the
extreme political polarisation and a widespread rise of nationalism that led to public displays of racism and further exclusion of minority groups based on fear for the influx of refugees in Europe and the United States. Such concerns have given rise to the post-truth era, as coined by Ralph Keyes in his work The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary
Life (2004). This implies that it has recently become increasingly challenging to separate
alternate facts, fake news and mythology from factual information and actual research, as the 2016 Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States have
demonstrated. Moreover, increasing occurrences of environmental disasters and
contamination have caused ethical concerns for global warming. Simultaneously, the internet and digital technology have become entirely intertwined into every aspect of daily life, which has resulted in debates about the ethics of technology, its violation of privacy and its capacity to rapidly spread false and questionable information on a global scale.
Scholars of contemporary literature argue that postmodernism has exhausted its resources and they have opted for new terms to address the contemporary. In The 2000s
(2015) Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson present three main reasons for the end of the postmodern era; namely that “first, in a purely chronological sense, then perhaps the events of 9/11 can be seen as a representative historic marker”, secondly, they argue that postmodernism has come to “its limits in a philosophical sense”, and that thirdly,
postmodernism has reached “its ends and means as a set of cultural practices” (14-15). In other words, the postmodernist avant-garde has become part of mainstream contemporary culture; its political and philosophical goals have been achieved and postmodernism is thus no longer relevant to adequately address contemporary society or to generate societal changes. Various scholars have introduced new cultural models to replace postmodernism, including Geoffrey Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism (2012), Nicholas Bourriaud’s
Altermodernism (2009), Alan Kirby’s Digimodernism (2009) and Adam Kelley’s New Sincerity (2016). Other scholars have suggested the term ‘Metamodernism’, through which they identify a turn away from postmodernism in favour of modernist sentiments.
Metamodernism engages with this tradition to address the present and its anxieties. David James points out that this return could itself appear contradictory,
because to associate modernism with this talk of recuperation sounds quite opposed to the language of rupture on which so many vanguards of the early twentieth century staked their reputations? Surely, the basic premise of any modernism is, effectively, a demand; writers should forego all things vestigial or inherited in order to propel their methods forward and to produce art that reaches for alternative horizons. (2012, 2)
As such, James argues that modernism constantly challenges accepted norms in order to move literature forwards, and that this mode of critical innovation and rupture continues to be relevant in contemporary literature. He also emphasises the importance of inheritance and tradition to early-twentieth-century modernism, and it should become clear how
Metamodernism also commits itself to a dialogue between tradition and the contemporary. In my thesis I explore this concept of Metamodernism in contemporary British fiction through a close reading of three British novels from the 2010s. The novels that I have
selected as case studies are A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki1, Satin Island (2015) by Tom McCarthy and Winter (2017) by Ali Smith. I focus on two aspects of the current crisis, namely anxieties about digital technology and climate change, which feature in
1 Ruth Ozeki is an American-Canadian author with Japanese ancestry, but A Tale for the Time Being was
all three of the novels and represent specifically twenty-first century concerns. I will analyse how contemporary authors address the modernist tradition by expressing ethical
commitments. By determining the function of digital technology and climate change in contemporary Metamodernist novels, I aim to analyse how these aspects engage with specific modernist features, such as the experience of time and subjectivity. Simultaneously, I will demonstratehow the relationship between these modernist themes and crises informs contemporary, twentieth-first century anxieties and debates. This dialogue between
modernism and the contemporary is what should make the fiction decidedly Metamodernist. I will answer the question of how crisis, and more specifically anxieties about digital
technology and climate change, informs and shapes Metamodernist fiction, as it engages with both modernism and contemporary culture. I will argue that crisis necessitates a return to modernism in order to address the present.
Environmental concerns have become especially urgent in the twenty-first century after the appearance of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006). In literature this caused an increased awareness of the environment and for an exponential growth of ecocritical theory. My aim is not to offer an ecocritical reading of the novels in which I examine the relationship between individuals, texts and nature through ecocritical theory, but rather to focus on the ethics of human involvement with nature and the consequences of this involvement. Nevertheless, the notion of the Anthropocene is relevant to the anxieties and ethics addressed here. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker refer to the rapid spreading of this ecocritical conception across academia as “a rare intellectual event in itself; it may very well point towards humankind’s becoming conscious of its destructive
behaviour” (Van den Akker and Vermeulen 2017, 31). The Anthropocene indicates that humans have entered a new phase and are now in the position to profoundly influence nature and the climate. Whereas before in history humans depended on the environment, since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century the environment is now controlled, mastered, and even destroyed, by humans.
Vermeulen and Van den Akker also identify a shift in the networked-based ubiquitous presence of digital technology since the turn of the millennium. They recognise, firstly, “a qualitative change on a cultural level structured around the social affordance of networked computer” (31). This is characterised by “a shift towards social media platforms and ‘Web 2.0’ business models”, including Google, Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram (31). The term Web 2.0 refers to the development of the internet to a shared communication model, on which every user can share or download content and interact. Vermeulen and Van den Akker
characterise this development as “the waning of the logic of television (or mass media) culture and the emergence of the logic of network (or social media) culture (for better and for worse)” (32). Secondly, they identify a quantitative change; a “technological leap in the productive powers of capitalism”, a “shift form the workplace-specific computers” to “the personal computers” that are “relatively cheap and small” (32). These changes in the function of digital technology for the individual, as well as conceptions of climate change that have rapidly entered our mindsets, testify how such anxieties have become deeply integrated into everyday reality. In my reading of the novels I will focus on how it disrupts the lives of individuals and societies and how it forms, fractures and controls subjectivity. As such, my focus on climate change and digital technology in my reading of the Metamodernist novels should demonstrate how these crises are able to profoundly influence individual subjects, as well as society at large.
In this thesis I mainly focus on modernist themes and content rather than formal and stylistic innovative features, because my aim is not to identify every modernist reference that contemporary British authors incorporate into their novels, but rather to contribute to the Metamodernist debate by categorising how and why authors re-engage with modernism and employ it as a vehicle to express current anxieties. In the first chapter I will discuss how scholars have approached defining ‘post-postmodernist’ literature and I will delineate the Metamodernist debate. I will discuss why and how Metamodernism features in contemporary fiction, how it has developed from postmodernism and how ethics are a central part to this literature. In the next three chapters I will demonstrate how Metamodernism is informed both by modernist and contemporary culture and how crisis necessitates a return to modernist themes through close readings of three British novels, with a specific focus on themes of digital technology and environmental concerns. Each of these novels embodies contemporary anxieties and modernist references while their narratives are also sufficiently different in order to enable a stylistically and thematically comprehensive approach to Metamodernism.
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being is divided into two narratives that intertwine across time and space. The recent past follows the Japanese teenager Nao, who is severely bullied both in school and on the internet. Simultaneously, she struggles to cope with her suicidal father, uncovers the history of her great-uncle, a World War II Kamikaze pilot, and explores the Zen Buddhism of her feminist great-grandmother. Nao chronicles her
experiences in a repurposed notebook, which is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) that has its pages replaced by blank paper. In the present the writer Ruth finds the notebook at the shore of British Columbia, assuming it came with the waves of the 2011
tsunami. Ruth reads the diary and attempts to uncover the mysterious identity of Nao and her family, while the writings also profoundly influence the course of her own life. With its experimental approach to the cyclical experience of time, the blurring threshold between the real and the imagined and the references to Proust, the novel engages with the modernist tradition to address present-day crises, including the consequences of environmental contamination and disasters and the ethics of digital technology.
The protagonist U. in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island is a corporate anthropologist who aimlessly collects files on seemingly arbitrary cultural phenomena. Meanwhile he also works on an immense assignment that should explain the universal nature of culture and society, but which remains unspecified and fractured throughout the novel.McCarthy is known for his engagement with the modernist avant-garde tradition, as he declared his attempt “to navigate the wreckage of that project” (par. 5). Satin Island denies any identification with its
characters through exteriority, disrupts the experience of time and embarks on the futile quest to ascribe meaning to an archive of arbitrary cultural phenomena. It also futuristically
engages with the ubiquity digital technology and depicts an aesthetic fascination with oil spills. As such, the novel undermines conceptions of organic, authentic, artificial and mechanical.
Winter is the second instalment in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet and, similar to Autumn
(2016), it depicts the increasing unrest in Brexit Britain. Smith is known for her engagement with modernism, mainly through her references to Virginia Woolf, her playful approach to the experience of time and her use of stream-of-consciousness narration. In Winter the elderly conservative Sophia is followed by the mysterious apparition of a child’s levitating head while she struggles to cope with her loneliness during Christmas and is forced to come to terms with her estranged, radically left sister Iris. Her son Arthur, author of a nature blogthat has acquired a life of its own, has hired a stranger to act as his girlfriend. Together they visit Sophia and witness the confrontation of conflicting political ideologies. Smith’s experimental prose portrays Britain’s current political crisis through themes of disillusionment with digital technology and its fabrication of identity and truth, the detachment from nature and the importance of protest. Winter explores the consequences of an encounter between opposing political beliefs and in this sense re-instates the Forsterian motto “only connect” in an age when political ideologies are becoming increasingly polarised (Forster 195).
The three novels discussed above engage with modernist sentiments, but since Metamodernism is not yet a well-defined genre, scholars address different aspects of modernism that they recognise in contemporary fiction. David James and Urmila Seshagiri
argue that postmodernism “no longer dominates critical discourse or creative practice”, and they define Metamodernism as a return to modernist stylistic and formal features in
contemporary literature (87). Although recent scholarship has expanded the boundaries of modernism into a transnational movement of experimentation that occurred across various spaces and times, the Metamodernism that James and Seshagiri define engages with modernism strictly as “an era, an aesthetic, and an archive that originated in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (88). Amongst its key features James and Seshagiri identify an experimental fiction that is both shaped by “an aesthetics of discontinuity,
nonlinearity, interiority and chronological play” and by narratives that “describe fictions – overtly experimental or otherwise, plotted around the very creation and reception of modern art and letters” (89).
While James and Seshagiri mainly focus on a return to modernism’s formal and stylistic characteristics, in their “Notes on Metamodernism” (2010) Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker introduce a different point of view in the debate that is more thematically and philosophically oriented. They perceive Metamodernism as a “structure of feeling” that is yet to be clearly defined and is gradually becoming more visible in
contemporary culture, appearing in various different forms and shapes (2). They also
acknowledge the end of the postmodern era, as Vermeulen and Van den Akker assert that its “years of plenty, pastiche and parataxis are over” (2). However, unlike James and Seshagiri who identify a clearer rupture with postmodern sentiments, Vermeulen’s and Van den Akker’s Metamodernism is characterised as a tendency that “oscillates between the modern and the postmodern”, in which the Metamodern typically represents both a “modernist commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment” (5). An oscillation, however, should not be regarded as a balance between the modern and postmodern, but rather in the typically modernist conception of the vortex, in which the different, often opposing, tendencies push and pull between poles.
Allison Gibbons follows Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s definition of
Metamodernism and she further develops the notion of the ‘aesth-ethical’, which, she argues, pervades Metamodernist literature through ethical critique, as it imposes the injustices and anxieties of the contemporary, globalising society through a “global ethics”. As such, Metamodernism displays a profound ethical commitment, revealing concerns about an “increased digitalisation hyper-reality of society, conscious of the shifting relationships in a globalising world, and it hopes for a shared sustainable future, however untenable it might be” (2014, 31). Consequently, Metamodernist authors share a responsibility “to raise the
consciousness and the conscience of the general public” and Metamodernist fiction “becomes a vehicle through which to increase awareness of contemporary insecurities – environmental, social, political” (31).
Ethics in Metamodernist fiction represents an especially relevant perspective to my thesis, since the focus on contemporary crises necessarily embodies its ethical ramifications. One of the main features that James identifies in the occurrence of modernism among contemporary authors is how this ruptures with postmodernism by “reconcili(ating) fiction’s formal integrity and ethical accountability as it survives the vanities of postmodern self-reflexivity, an endeavour that tests the way we recognise the consequences of that survival” (2012, 17). Metamodernism thereby differs considerably from postmodernism in the sense that its literatures are, to a certain extent, no longer engaged with postmodern scepticism. Bentley et al argue that some contemporary authors, including Tom McCarthy, Ali Smith and Will Self, “have all continued to use the self-reflexive and metafictive complexities
associated with postmodernism in their fiction, (while they) have also tried to come out of the other side of relativism this implies with an alternative act of ethical positions appropriate to the new millennium” (17). They argue that in contemporary fiction the quest for meaning no longer appears futile, as characteristic of postmodernism, but that it “is still a worthwhile endeavour, thus rejecting the scepticism of such a quest in much postmodern thinking” (17). From this perspective contemporary literature could be regarded as offering resistance to oppressing systems, a resistance, moreover, that is no longer futile and meaningless as opposed to how it features in postmodernism. Vermeulen and Van den Akker introduce a different perspective by arguing that Metamodern discourse is committed to what they identify as “Kant’s ‘negative’ idealism”, an “as-if” thinking that implies that “the
Metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility” (2010, 5). In other words, their conception of Metamodernism represents an oscillation between sincerity and scepticism, direction and meaninglessness. It embodies resistance, sincerity, a search for meaning and progress, but simultaneously its narratives also remain to some extent embedded in the presumption of futility.
In this thesis I will explore how Metamodernism in British novels corresponds to James’ and Seshagiri’s modernist oriented features on the one hand, and to the more philosophical and thematic oscillation of Vermeulen and Van den Akker on the other hand. These conceptions do not necessarily exclude one another, but can also appear
complementary, as will become clear in my readings of the three novels. A Tale for the Time
contemporary phenomena and anxieties, including an ethical approach to digital technology and to environmental concerns. This focus on contemporary crises makes the topic of this thesis urgent, since it directly responds to how literature incorporates concerns that are deeply integrated into society at this very moment. Moreover,as Metamodernism is not yet a clearly defined genre and scholars have various definitions of what the Metamodern entails, this thesis will also contribute to categorising Metamodernism and to defining its characteristics.
Chapter 1
“A Clusterfuck of World-Historical Proportions”: Metamodernism and Crisis
In this chapter I will discuss previous scholarly research about how modernism features in contemporary fiction and outline the Metamodernist debate and its ethical commitments. I will discuss how Metamodernism is situated historically, how it departs from postmodernism and why modernism offers an appropriate platform to respond to crisis. I will, however, also argue how postmodern sentiments are still relevant to Metamodernism. By arguing how crisis features in twenty-first century British fiction and how it affects individuals and threatens their subjectivities it should become clear that Metamodernism critically re-engages with the modernist tradition to offer a vehicle to address the contemporary crisis. I will mainly focus on the conceptions of Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, who define Metamodernism through the broader perspective of cultural studies. They argue how it has developed from postmodernism and how it is situated historically by contextualising Metamodernism in relation to twenty-first century events and anxieties. Alternatively, David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s conception of Metamodernism solely focuses on literary studies as represented through stylistic and formal experimentation and innovation, and does not as much engage with contemporary concerns and how it has developed from
postmodernism. Their insistence on the periodization of modernism as a period of literary innovation that originated around the 1900s, however, more clearly defines the return to modernism of contemporary literature.
In their introduction to Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After
Postmodernism (2017), Vermeulen and Van den Akker define Metamodernism against the
parameters of postmodernism that were introduced in Frederic Jameson’s polemical work
Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). They define
Metamodernism “first and foremost as what Raymond Williams called ‘a structure of feeling’”, which, they argue, has replaced Jameson’s conception of the postmodernist
structure of feeling (2017, 22). Williams coined this phrase in his Preface to Film (1954), and it is best understood as a sentiment that has become “so pervasive” in a particular time that it has become structural (22). Despite this omnipresence, however, it cannot straightforwardly be defined, and Williams stated that only in art “it can be realised, and communicated, as a whole experience” (quoted in Van den Akker and Vermeulen 23). The structure of feeling cannot be connected to any particular event or phenomenon that caused it, but rather communicates a generational expression of a particular time’s dominant sentiments and
anxieties (24). For example, whereas Jameson’s postmodern structure of feeling could be characterised by “senses of an end – of History, social class, art, the subject, etc.” Vermeulen and Van den Akker conceive Metamodernism as “typified by the return of many of these debates, foremost among them History, the grand narrative, Bildung and the agent” (2015, 55).
The supposed ‘end of History’ is connected to the Hegelian notion of the Telos. In their “Notes on Metamodernism” (2010), Vermeulen and Van den Akker refer to this as “Hegel’s ‘positive’ idealism”, which implies the belief that history is progressively moving forward towards some end and goal (5). Postmodernism had already dismantled this belief in progress, but Metamodernism takes a different standpoint towards the Telos that both
underscores and undermines it. Van den Akker and Vermeulen define this as a shift to “Kant’s ‘negative’ idealism”, an “as-if” thinking that Immanuel Kant determined “as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal” (5). Metamodern discourse, therefore, does acknowledge the Telos, but simultaneously conceives that “history’s purpose will never be fulfilled because it does not exist. Critically, however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it does exist” (5). This Metamodern belief in an “impossible possibility” is inspired “by a modern naïvité yet informed by postmodern scepticism” (5). Thus, Vermeulen and Van den Akker argue, Metamodernism attempts to achieve an unachievable goal, as it “moves for the sake of moving, attempts in spite of its inevitable failure; it seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find” (5).
History with a capital H implies “not simply the chronology of time passing, but the chronicle of mankind’s evolutionary process” (Van den Akker and Vermeulen 2017, 16). In relation to this, Vermeulen and Van den Akker cite Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History” (1989), in which he argued that “mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings”, the “unabashed victory of liberal democracy” in which “all the really big questions had been settled” (quoted in Van den Akker and Vermeulen 16). Fukuyama altered his conception of the End of History
approximately twenty years later, when he published “The Future of History” in 2012 and argued that his declaration of the end of History was premature since recent political and cultural developments had led him to question this ‘victory’ (16). Vermeulen and Van den Akker assert that since the millennial turn History is increasingly regarded as not yet finished because there are “plenty of ‘big questions’ left to answer” (16). This pertains to neoliberal issues that have challenged the system of ‘liberal democracy’, including political extremism and problematised notions of the freedom of speech and censure since the introduction of
social media. Such events have, Vermeulen and Van den Akker argue, caused History “to have, once more, been kick-started”, with the consequence that “the postmodern vernacular has proven increasingly inapt and inept in coming to terms with our changed social situation” (17).
History, then, never did end, both because the progress towards some predetermined
Telos has been challenged and because there are still crucial questions left to answer
concerning twenty-first century anxieties. Vermeulen and Van den Akker characterise the 2000s as a period of disruptive changes:
the maturity and availability of ‘digital’ technologies and ‘renewable’ technologies reached a critical threshold; the millennial generation came of age determined to recreate the world in its own image; the BRICs rose to prominence; the era of cheap oil and fantasies of nuclear abundance gave way to fracking-induced dreams of energy independence; ‘Project Europe’ got derailed; immigration policies and multicultural ideals backlashed in the midst of a revival of conservative nationalism; US hegemony declined; the Arab Spring toppled many a dictator that had long served as a puppet for Western interests; bad debts became, finally and inevitable, as much a problem for the First World as it always has been for the Third World; and the
financial crises inaugurated yet another round of neoliberalization (this time by means of austerity measures of all sorts), exposing and deepening the institutionalized drive towards economic inequality and ecological disaster. (28)
Although Vermeulen and Van den Akker do not refer to these developments as crises, they do emphasise their catastrophic, if not apocalyptic, nature and even argue that this “neoliberal path” could lead within a couple of decades “to a clusterfuck of world-historical proportions” of extreme inequality with disastrous consequences of climate change (35). This represents, in other words, very much a crisis, because these developments of global capitalism suggest a future with nothing to look forward to. The belief in a catastrophic near future itself also challenges the Telos because it pertains to the fact that history does end, not because the predetermined goal has been achieved, but because there is nothing left to hope for.
Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s conception of Metamodern ‘as-if’ thinking, then, attempts to resist the inevitable failure and the futility of progress by offering sentiments of hope, sincerity and commitment that counter this crisis.
This ‘cluster-fuck’ emphasises how Vermeulen’s and Van den Akker’s definition of Metamodernism is not a celebration of the contemporary, because they argue that “in many ways we think we are even worse off than before” (21). Metamodernism thus originates in crisis, and, I argue, in sentiments that the issues that postmodernism sought to critique have become reality. Whereas postmodernists were committed to pointing out the slippery nature of truth and meaning and emphasised the futility of any commitment, the twenty-first century itself has become a slippery slope in which it is no longer a priority for media outlets and politicians to present truth. Josh Toth makes a similar statement when he argues that “the very rhetorical strategies we typically associate with postmodernism are now being
redeployed by the political right. Increasingly, in fact, alt-right populists like Donald Trump (in America) and Marine and Marion Le Pen (in France) tend to revel in a ‘pervert’s
universe’, willy distorting any number of ‘facts’ so as to ‘say it like it is’” (62).
Perhaps the oscillation between modern and postmodern sentiments, “rather than synthesis, harmony, reconciliation and so on” that Vermeulen and Van den Akker identify in Metamodernism can be interpreted to stem itself from crisis (2017, 21). Considering how the Metamodern as they define it oscillates, for example, between hope and futility, or
direction/progress and aimlessness, could itself be regarded as the manifestation of the contemporary crisis. Twenty-first century fiction offers hope or sincerity that attempts to counter oppressive, inhumane or reductive systems. However, the sense of crisis that is deeply rooted in society and individuals is capable of constantly calling these forward, hopeful movements back, acting as a pervasive reminder of societal fears, polarisation and exclusion. As such, these opposing sentiments can only ever manifest themselves in an oscillation, a neither/both dynamic, because while there is hope for something better, a desire for human connection in the midst of such chaos, the crisis remains omnipresent and is deeply rooted into reality.
In the introduction I referred to how Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson regard 9/11 as a crucial factor to the end of postmodernism.They also explain how this event inspired doubt in contemporary society by connecting it to the theories of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) Žižek argues that 9/11 should not be considered as a reality check that exposes Western society’s illusions, as many other theorists have claimed, but rather as the opposite, that it was the fantasy that became real:
it was before the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceiving the Third World horrors as something which was not actually part of our social reality; as
something which existed (for us) as a spectral apparition on the TV screen – and what happened on September 11 was that this fantastic screen apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality. (quoted in Bentley et al 5-6)
Such catastrophic events were already prefigured in Hollywood films, and Žižek argues that these disaster fantasies correspond to psychoanalytical insights; namely that everyday reality can only be maintained when certain potentially violent desires, which “parasitically appeal to such destructive urges and give expression to the unconscious wishes for society to end in catastrophe”, are suppressed (6). This corresponds to Lacan’s notion of ‘traversing the fantasy’; these fantasies are so deeply integrated into our realities that they are part of reality. Consequently, they function as a release for destructive desires so that they cannot come into being in actual society, and “only by fully identifying with the fantasy, can we structure our resistant excess differently so that it is not perpetually sublimated (…) but enabled to function as an alternative core of our identity” so that it “offers an alternative point of view and therefore a genuine perspective on ‘reality’” (6). The events of 9/11 revealed that “one way in which we consciously chose to believe the world worked was revealed to be at odds with another way in which we knew it worked but chose to ignore” (7). Žižek does not advocate here for the postmodern dismantling of reality, but rather the opposite, that “we
should not mistake reality for fiction (emphasis not mine)” (quoted in Bentley et al 7).
Ultimately, he considers fiction as a vehicle to address crisis, as Bentley at al point out, which allows us to form a cognitive response “to the crises of the decade” (7). If we are only able to sustain ‘the Real’ when we fictionalise it, then the events of 9/11 shattered both reality and fantasy in a way that it has fractured the threshold between these domains. A manner of coping with crisis is to continue fictionalising it, and fiction, therefore, represents a vehicle that allows for the apprehension and confrontation of crisis.
Emily Horton argues in her Contemporary Crisis Fictions (2014) how such fictions foregrounds crisis “as a human experience” and she explores its influences on individuals (38). This, she argues, challenges “existing modes of social thinking, precisely by registering the intimate hold that crisis has on contemporary social relations, in particular with respect to self-doubt, insecurity and anxiety occasioned by contemporary global life” (3). Horton’s fictions mainly focus on the consequences of neoliberalism in a globalised and cosmopolitan context on the everyday. She points out that British authors, and specifically Graham Swift, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, have displayed increasing amounts of “shared social and
ethical dimensions” in their works (1). These novels foreground “the shift in social meaning in the contemporary, and on the affective and ethical repercussions of this for the
contemporary subject” (5). She identifies the works of these authors “as key instances of a new crisis fiction genre particular to the global capitalist context of post-consensus British life”, to which they respond by seeking “to establish a cosmopolitan ethics of interpersonal responsibility and cross-cultural awareness that is deeply relevant to contemporary British experience” (1-2). Horton’s argument centres mainly on how the globalised and
cosmopolitan context influences everyday experience, not “in the form of a breakdown of linguistic signification as witnessed by postmodernism, but perhaps more centrally in a mode of everyday social anxiety and global neoliberalism” (3). Moreover, Horton argues, crisis fictions reconsider postmodernist conceptions that “authorise the re-imagining of disrupted epistemological and ethical belief systems, in order to appreciate possibilities for social recuperation” (16). In other words, her conception of crisis fiction moves away from postmodernist literary conventions to focus on the everyday consequences of neoliberalism on individuals and it therefore expresses ethical and affective concerns. Crisis fiction thus departs from postmodernist forms of deconstruction in order to establish social, societal and political recovery. Twenty-first century fiction then becomes a vehicle to express “left-wing resistance” that manifests itself into how “the search for truth, knowledge and justice remains paramount, contradicting the postmodern embrace of textualist relativism” (16).
Horton, however, recognises a departure in crisis fiction from high experimentalism, which does not correspond to my own conception of how authors employ innovative
modernist features to address anxieties. She writes that her study “concentrate(s) more closely on modes of subjectivity, affect and genre, which tie them to a crisis narrative aesthetic” (4). Horton thereby distinguishes Swift, McEwan, and Ishiguro from other late twentieth-century authors, such as James Kelman and J.G. Ballard, that displayed fierce resistance to Thatcherite politics and neoliberalism by “offering unique imaginative and experimental innovations as a way of emboldening dissent and critical thinking” (15). Swift, McEwan and Ishiguro, but also more recent authors including Zadie Smith, David Mitchell and Ali Smith, Horton argues, are “more socially and ethically oriented, likewise taking part in political opposition but doing this more precisely through an attention to social ethics and affective subjugation” (15). Such authors thus appear to emphasise the importance of ethics and affect in their fiction and therefore regard literary innovation to be of secondary
importance. However, I argue that Ali Smith, but this can likewise be applied to Zadie Smith and David Mitchell whose works have also been considered Metamodernist, is very much
engaged with literary experimentation and uses it as a vehicle to respond to crisis. Critics, Horton argues, regard the foregrounding of ethical commitments as “to intentionally restrict the terms of technical novelty, obliging these writers to limit their technical genius” which “arguably avoids the more overt virtuosity of modernism” (36). Horton opposes these arguments by pointing out that crisis fiction does continue to be, in fact, concerned with stylistic features, which are “expressed in conciseness, everydayness, and understatedness” (36). In addition to this, I argue that modernist experimentation did actually engage with ethical concerns. Ethics and formal and stylistic experimentation do not necessarily exclude one another, but experimental features represent an appropriate vehicle to express ethical anxieties, as they were to modernist authors. Moreover, the crisis that Horton identifies in contemporary fictions arises from twentieth-century developments, as it has its roots in post-consensus British politics, and the authors have also published and developed their works throughout the last decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first (14). The authors that I discuss, however, all respond to anxieties that are much more pertinent since the millennial turn, even though the roots of these anxieties are also situated in late twentieth-century neoliberalism.
Peter Middleton addresses “Fictions of Global Crisis” “whose rhetoric of destruction, prediction and transformation and schemes for prevention dominate our news media:
economic collapse, AIDS, global warming, terrorism, genocide, refugee migrations, nuclear war, even the threat of asteroids, all provide material for novelists” (205). Disaster scenarios are concerned with translating how such global destruction and chaos affect the lives of people, and they “point to failures of comprehension, broken communications, cultural incommensurabilites and other damage to global interdependence” (205). The crisis that Middleton identifies is much more preoccupied with global disasters on an apocalyptic scale, such as is represented in novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), while Horton’s fictions of contemporary crisis mainly focus on politics. Nevertheless, it is also relevant to this thesis because of the implications of natural disasters that it explores. Its disastrous, critical nature corresponds to Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s ‘clusterfuck’, although Middleton more clearly visualises an apocalyptic, dystopian future in global crisis fiction. Such fictions also represent the consequences of crisis on people and the everyday. Consequently, global disasters are able to “disrupt the epistemic capacities of ordinary
consciousness”, which can feature in a language or modes of expression that have themselves been damaged (206-207).
Disaster fictions have multiple functions, as Middleton points out, because they not only serve as “prophetic warnings”, but they also reflect “global social breakdown” in which humanity in its entirety is profoundly affected, and, moreover, they reflect “a crisis of
subjectivity” (221). Subjectivity relates to the subject’s conception of the self, and it concerned with consciousness, agency and selfhood. As such, it is especially relevant to modernism, which emphasised the importance of subjective experience and “helped inaugurate this domain of the novel and remains a measure of what fiction might achieve” (221). Raoul Eschelman’s notion of ‘performatism’ is relevant to this perspective because he emphasises the return of the importance of subjectivity and the focus on the individual in twenty-first century literature by arguing that in the “performatist epoch” “the point is to preserve the integrity of the subject even under the most unfavourable conditions” (6-7). Moreover, Eschelman also endows the performatist subject with a “political responsibility”, questioning how “the individual (should) work towards a political goal in the absence of any clear ideological guidelines” (10). This implies that the subject is provided with a purpose, a goal, and a drive to resist oppressing political systems that the postmodern subject would have previously approached with an attitude of “ironic indifference” (10). Horton, Middleton, and Eschelman all emphasise how crisis can profoundly affect subjectivity, which is
something that I will also explore in my reading of the novels.
The contemporary crisis thus requires the return to subjectivity and ethical
commitment, which is why modernism offers an adequate platform to address these anxieties. Hutcheon argues how postmodernism “has called into question the messianic faith in
modernism, the faith that technological innovation and purity of form can assure social order” (12). She makes this argument in connection to architecture, but the modernist
‘messianic faith’ is nevertheless crucial to what motivates contemporary novelists to return to modernism. Modernism, which also originated in anxiety and resistance, offers a platform of hope, sincerity, order and direction that attempts to counter crisis and to restore disrupted subjectivities. Modernism thus represents a fertile ground for contemporary reflections.
James and Seshagiri define Metamodernism as a return to modernism that represents a specific historical period, an era from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, because an inclusive approach to modernism that occurred across several different eras and spaces would undermine “the technical achievements and affective character of early-twentieth-century art” (90). These aspects, the technical innovations and the connection between affect and modernism, are relevant to my conception of Metamodernism. Vermeulen and Van den Akker do not adhere to any strict periodization, and their conception of
Metamodernism is rather a combination of the pre-postmodern (i.e. modern) and postmodern, as they do not make specific references to modernism. James and Seshagiri, however,
strongly emphasise the periodization of the modernist era as crucial to Metamodern discourse and they characterise Modernist innovation to be inherently connected to the cultural
devastation that resulted from World War I (87). My conception adheres to James and Seshagiri’s periodization, because it is important to address the specific context in which modernism originated in connection to the contemporary crisis.
Modernism cannot solely be reduced to the drive to ‘make it new’, to use Ezra Pound’s well-known motto, and the stylistic and formal innovations occur alongside a response to the era’s anxieties. This is what James and Seshagiri also point out when they argue that “defamiliarizing strategies of resistance and discomfiture are not merely a stylistic or hermeneutic matter”, because they move beyond aestheticism in order to address political and ethical goals that are realised “by remobilizing modernist procedures” (95). They refer to Laura Marcus, Rebecca Walkowitz and Neil Lazarus who have each offered new
methodologies to address modernism through a more inclusive, cosmopolitan, transnational and postcolonial approach, thus bridging “a perceived gap aesthetic analysis and cultural critique, opening the way for rich discussion about political and ethical facets of modernist narrative technique” (96). These methodologies, however, all concentrate on reworking the modernist legacy, and while they retrospectively approach Modernism through a
contemporary perspective, they are not necessarily concerned with Metamodernism and how modernism is employed in contemporary fiction for ethical commitments. What they do, however, demonstrate, is that modernism indeed offered a platform for such commitments and that it would be reductive to solely understand modernism through its stylistic and formal innovations.
Michael Levenson argues that modernist artists and writers were constantly
committed to challenging forms of oppression and consciously “engaged in forms of creative violence” (2). The goal was not to “simply set the imagination free”, as Levenson points out, but “first of all to challenge an unfreedom, the oppressions of journalism, of genteel
audiences, of timid readers, of political and religious orthodoxy. So much of the story that these figures told themselves was a tale of tyranny and resistance” (2). Levenson also emphasises how modernism was driven by anxieties that consisted of “an alienation, an uncanny sense of moral bottomlessness, a political anxiety” and that modernists questioned and doubted “the foundation of religion and ethics, the integrity of governments and selves, the survival of redemptive culture” (5). Such modernist anxieties are therefore similar to the
conceptions of contemporary crises, because they foreground ethical responsibilities and attempt to resist oppressing systems.
James’ volume Modernist Futures (2012) offers crucial insights into how novelists engage with the modernist tradition and how it is committed to ethical concerns, although James does not explicitly mention crisis. He explores “the reasons why modernist impulses remain so politically enabling for writers who have responded (…) to the material conditions that shape racial, sexual and social identification or injustice. This approach assumes that the particularities of form are therefore central, rather than incidental, to our estimation of contemporary fiction’s involvement in ethical and political realms” (4). In other words, form is intrinsically connected to context and James also discusses this in connection to the “scepticism about the perceived irreconcilability of craft and context in critical practice” (6). It would be a mistake to assume that “critical formalism” obscures “ideologically driven interpretations, as though turning from social effects to stylistic expressions were the only means of getting back in touch with the ‘novelness of novels’ today” (6-7). Political and ethical responsibility, then, need not obstruct or minimise formal and stylistic aesthetics. James cites David Attridge, who asserts that form itself embodies social critique: “whatever else the ‘modernist’ text may be doing (…), it is, through its form, which is to say through its staging of human meanings and intentions, a challenge that goes to the heart of the ethical and political” (quoted in James 7). Consequently, it would be a misconception to assume that, for example in Ali Smith’s intricate stream-of-consciousness narration, the innovation merely exists for the sake of itself, to display stylistic experimentalism, and is not connected to any contexts this novel addresses. Narration of interior subjectivity thus allows for
contemporary writers (to) reveal the potential for modernist fiction to be more than simply a laboratory for examining consciousness as a hermetic domain. Instead, they incorporate techniques for showing how mental experiences are shaped by material circumstances, how protagonists’ psychological states adapt to and are mutually pervaded by the social realms they navigate – revealing their working definition of the modernist novel as a medium for connection interiority and accountability, braiding the description of characters’ innermost reflections into the fabric of worldly
situations. (9)
The display of interior subjectivity is actually pertinent to exploring how contemporary crisis affects the lives of individuals. “Modernist methods”, James concludes, “thus enable
contemporary novelists to remap that ‘mental landscape’ where transformative contexts of social interaction, political assessment and ethical accountability can be envisioned” (8). James places “formal integrity” at the heart of his exploration of contemporary engagement with Modernism, and he argues that he regards “literary innovation less as the product of cultural instabilities than as the very medium that brings the reader, through their intimate engagement with form, into a more ethically involved relation with how specific contexts of social crisis, racial injustice or political destabilisation are represented by novelists today” (12). For James, then, innovation is not so much the product of crisis, as much as it is meant to demonstrate to readers the effects of crisis, and innovation is therefore itself ethically engaged.
Similarly, Andrzej Gasiorek argues that “it’s misleading to suggest that modernism in general sought to inhabit a privatised aestheticist realm” in which aesthetics and ethics were entirely separated (171). Although “many modernists rejected the idea that literature should be judged according to moral criteria”, this, as Gasiorek points out, “didn’t mean that they were indifferent to moral questions” (170). Moreover, modernism consisted of more experimental forms than the stylistic innovation as advocated by James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, for example. Although E.M. Forster’s novels do not resemble the experimental depiction of reality, his writing “is rooted in empirical reality and seeks to develop
nineteenth-century narrative conventions rather than to shatter them” and Gasiorek argues that it would be “a mistake to think of Forster as a non-experimental novelist who simply produced cosy humanist fictions about bourgeois life” (172). Forster’s writing did depict innovations that engaged with “exploring different ways of representing variable viewpoints at the level of style, undermining all stable narratorial grounds” as well as exploring how these perspective dissolve and cannot be adjudicated (172).
Forster was also ethically engaged, “creating uneasy novels that explored the limitations of liberalism, the dangers of narcissism and the consequences of moral obtuseness” (172). I would like to add to this that the renowned motto of Howards End (1910), ‘only connect’, embodies what I believe to be profoundly relevant to how
Metamodernism responds to the contemporary crisis in the novels that I explore. Namely, it appears to be anxieties caused by increasingly polarised political ideologies, the apparently irreconcilable breach between the West and the Middle East, the repercussions of human involvement with nature, the consequences of the ubiquity of digital technology on human life, and the blurring threshold between facts and fiction that infiltrate media, which all obstruct the ability to ‘only connect’. In the novels that I have chosen for this study, it is
human relationships that are at stake because people are displayed suffering from crisis on a subjective level. Human connections are forged, displaced and disrupted by crisis, but they are also offered as an antidote to these anxieties.
The Metamodern structure of feeling could be characterised as a profound inability among millennials to confront contemporary anxieties. Vermeulen and Van den Akker argue that “the millennials know too much of today’s exploits, inequalities and injustices to take any meaningful decision, let alone position themselves on a convenient subject position, yet they appear – from the political left to the political right – to be united around the feeling that today’s deal is not the deal they signed up for during the postmodern years” (2015, 58). Millennials expected utopian promises that originated in the Postmodern era; promises of plenty, of “careless consumerism and eternal growth”, which have since the turn of the millennium become increasingly unattainable. Hence, as Vermeulen and Van den Akker argue, contemporary art is engaged with “reimagining utopia primarily because they are faced with a radically unstable and uncertain world” (65). In other words, contemporary crises have invigorated these ‘utopian desires’ for a return to the postmodern promises of plenty, because now that postmodernism is over, such promises have become unattainable. It is then precisely this yearning for something that is out of reach that would characterise Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s notion of ‘Kant’s negative idealism’, the ‘as-if’ thinking that moves towards some unattainable goal. While modernists desired for utopia, a holistic approach to history and for human progress and development, postmodernism rejected these ideals in an era where there appeared to be too much ready availability of the fulfilment of individual desires. Now that this has become unavailable, there is a renewed longing for such utopian ideals.
Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s notion of ‘as-if’ thinking is also closely connected to how Linda Hutcheon argues that postmodernism underlies “in its ironic way the realization that all cultural forms of representation – literary, visual, aural – in high art or the mass media are ideologically grounded, that they cannot avoid involvement with social and political relations and apparatuses” (3). In other words, postmodernist thinking was profoundly aware of the complete interference of underlying structures into every aspect of culture, society and politics. Nowthat postmodernism has come to an end does not imply that people are no longer aware of these power structures, but if anything this has become increasingly more problematic with the advent of the post-truth era in which the lines between facts and fiction have become blurred in politics and in which digital technology follows and records every single aspect of life. Rather, following this ‘as-if’ thinking, the awareness of these power
structures has not dissolved, but its intrusion is continuously being ignored or minimised – consciously or unconsciously – in order to foreground individual choice, free will and the ability to offer resistance.
Hutcheon summarises the challenges to postmodern art by the question of how “there is not a center to even the most decentered of these theories”, in which she refers to
postmodern theorists such Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, who have repeatedly attempted to subvert the “notion of center” (14). Connecting this conception of centre and decentre to Metamodernism, could Metamodernism then be perceived as an attempt to ‘re-centre’ the ‘decentred’? In other words, now that literature no longer embodies the desire to undermine meaning and truth or repeatedly underscores a sense of futility, but rather incorporates ideals of direction, resistance and commitment, Metamodernism could be understood as displaying a desire for integrity, a centre. However, the advancements of postmodern theories cannot simply be ignored, and it would be ineffective to act as if the centre was never challenged at all. It would be fruitful, then, to consider Metamodernism as an attempt to return meaning and direction to the decentred world by building on these theories.
Tim Woods does so when he discusses the proliferation of ethics in recent literary studies and also underscores the ethics of postmodernism. Woods explains how, during the Postmodern years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, “the issue of ethics was neglected (…) partly because it was felt that ethics had been surpassed or discredited” (153). Whereas it might appear as postmodernism was not much engaged with ethics, however, Woods also points out that the (post)structuralist and deconstructionalist critical practices were in fact
overwhelmingly motivated by ethical concerns – the attempts to expose the oppression of marginalisation, through culture, race, class and sexuality. These identity-centred projects are largely about the dismantling of ethical systems that present themselves as speaking for everybody; yet in countering these totalising positions and discourses of oppression, redirecting errors and omissions in arguments and uncovering blindspots and prejudices, one is inevitably impelled by ethical investments. (153)
It is therefore futile, Woods points out, to create this distinction between “ethical and non-ethical criticism”, because the focus should be on “different non-ethical approaches – at the most
basic, a distinction between the universalist and the differentialist, or ‘other-oriented, approaches” (154).
Among the crucial features that Jameson identifies in Postmodernism is a “waning of affect”, the unavailability of meaningful emotional responses, and Alison Gibbons connects “human response to the disintegration of history, the superficiality of postmodern
representation, and the free-floating signs of intensities of a mediatised consumer bubble” (“Affect” 107). If postmodernism can be characterised by the abandonment of the modernist subject’s meaningful response and “internal emotion in response to the external world”, recently, Gibbons argues, there has been an “affective turn” in which “affect is seen to have occurred in parallel with the demise of postmodernism” (107). Gibbons argues that in the contemporary “we can perhaps speak once more of a hermeneutics of the self, a will and ability to process intensities so that we can articulate meaningful emotional reactions or cognitive responses to today’s social situation” (109). In relation to the ‘as-if’ approach to History that Vermeulen and Van den Akker have proposed, the desire for meaningful emotional experience is, however, not fully realised, as Gibbons argues: “contemporary identity is therefore both driven by a desire for meaningful personal emotional experience while being aware of the constructed nature of experiences, particularly in relation to social categories of identity” (110). The main characteristics of the affective turn, as Gibbons outlines, include “the importance of collectivity or with-ness, the persistence of irony even if it is now kept in check by sincere undertones and overtones, and the continued prevalence of self-consciousness and metafictive practise” (111). Metamodernist subjects thus appear to desire connectivity, both on the individual and on the collective level, which refers back to Forster’s motto ‘only connect’. Moreover, irony continues to be relevant in Metamodernism, although this is no longer bound to a postmodern sense of futility.
Gibbons expands on the ‘affective turn’ in contemporary autofiction and argues how it responds to “global concerns such as terrorism and the environment or place(s) the self in relation to conflicts, thus exploring an individual’s ethical responsibilities to and affective engagements with socio-political events. This is because contemporary crises have reformed affective sensibilities” (“Contemporary Autofictions” 163). Consequently, Gibbons argues, “the decentred self reasserts itself by grounding its subjectivity in lived experience as well as in the interactions between our bodies and our environments” (163). Autofiction, then, becomes a meaningful manner in which individuals respond to contemporary crises because it allows for an exploration of the consequences of such crises on their subjectivity. However,
this argument could be applied to Metamodernist fiction in general, because, as I have argued, it is crisis that urges literature to return to the modernist exploration of subjectivity.
Lastly, another important difference between postmodernism and modernism is depth. Whereas modernists were committed to revealing hidden depths underneath the surfaces, postmodernists flattened the surfaces and emphasised their emptiness. For Metamodernism, however, Vermeulen points out that “contemporary artists, activists and writers feel that appearances may well inspire sensations of an outside, of an elsewhere – even if the existence of that elsewhere is by no means certain, often even unlikely or impossible” (183). In other words, contemporary fiction approaches something that is otherwise considered as flat and without profound meaning, as postmodernism has previously already undermined its meaning, and newly applies or offers glimpses of depth onto those previously emptied surfaces.
Considering these arguments, my conception of Metamodernism ‘oscillates’ between modernist and postmodernist sensibilities, which characterises itself an ‘as-if’ approach to historical thinking, the attempt to ‘re-centre’ the already ‘de-centred’ and the desire to project depth onto previously emptied surfaces. Metamodernism incorporates the stylistic and formal innovations of modernism, as well as its ethical and hopeful commitments, while these are constantly restrained by postmodernist sentiments of irony, futility and aimlessness. Hence, it would be meaningful to consider Metamodernism as a modernism informed by
postmodernism, as if the present returns to modernist sentiments but simultaneously cannot ‘unlearn’ the lessons of postmodernist sensibilities. The desire for modernist sentiments is encouraged by crisis, which pertains to both formal and stylistic innovations and the ethical responsibilities projected onto narratives. Because modernism was similarly preoccupied with anxieties and ethical commitments, it is now also an appropriate vehicle for
contemporary authors to express their concerns. Similar to modernism too, is how
Metamodernist narratives reveal how crisis profoundly influences individual subjectivities. In my readings of the three novels, I will therefore focus on how crisis influences the subject. In the next chapter, a close reading of A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki,
exemplifies how autofiction displays the ‘affective turn’, as introduced by Gibbons, with a specific focus on how anxieties about the climate and digital technology profoundly disrupt subjectivities.
Chapter 2
“The Garbage Patch of History and Time”: Metamodern Subjectivity and Temporality in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) combines autobiographical details of Ozeki’s life with fiction. The novel relates how Ruth finds a diary, a watch and a French journal in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on the shore of a British Columbian island. They belong to the Japanese schoolgirl Nao, and were assumedly brought by the waves from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Written approximately a decade before Ruth’s present, the diary started as an attempt to chronicle the life of Nao’s great-grandmother Jiko, a feminist New Woman turned Buddhist nun. However, the focus turns to Nao’s struggles, as she is subject to severe bullying, which eventually culminates into her classmates staging an attempted rape scene, of which they post the video online. Simultaneously, Nao expresses anxieties about her suicidal father and she uncovers the history of her great-uncle Haruki, who was a Kamikaze pilot during World War Two. Ruth becomes increasingly invested in finding out the truth about Nao and is eventually able to travel across space and time to positively interfere in Nao’s present. The novel could not only be regarded as Metamodernist because of its intertextual connections to the French modernist writer Marcel Proust and his experiments with temporality, but it is also haunted by contemporary crises that cause subjectivity and time to unravel. Consequently, it displays an ethical commitment towards digital technology and nature in order to restore subjectivities and foreground the cyclical experience of time. I will first discuss the novel’s intertextuality with modernism and its preoccupation with crisis, after which will argue how these features are explored in connection to subjectivity and temporality by focussing on the interference of digital technology and the natural environment.
A Tale establishes an intertextual connection to modernism by referencing to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Nao has written her diary in an upcycled edition of the novel, which
has its original pages replaced by notebook paper, and she thereby projects her own narrative onto that of Proust. Consequently, Nao embarks on her own search for lost time and similar to Proust’s novel, A Tale connects the past, present and future as it contemplates the passage of time. The novel thereby distorts the thresholds between reality and dreams as the
experience of time is altered. Although A Tale is not experimental in the sense that it displays modernist stream-of-consciousness narration, it does explore what the boundaries of
lost time, and old Marcel Proust was sitting in France a hundred years ago, writing a whole book about the exact same subject. So maybe his ghost was lingering between the covers and hacking into my mind, or maybe it was just a crazy coincidence, but either way, how cool is that? (…) I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. It was more just that it felt as if me and old Marcel were on the same wavelength. (23)
As such, Nao imagines being connected to the modernist author who has entered her present to serve as a source of inspiration, as she embarks on a similar writing project that also contemplates the passage of time.
The second intertextual connection emphasises the occurrence of subjectivity as a modernist theme. Jiko was a feminist anarchist from the Taishō Democracy, a liberal period in Japanese history between 1912-1926. As a novelist, Jiko contributed to the Japanese ‘I-novel’ genre that is characterised by a “‘confessional’ style, it’s ‘transparency’ of text, and the ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’ of its authorial voice”, as well as “issues of truthfulness and fabrication, highlighting the tension between revelatory, concealing, and self-effacing acts” (149). Through this reference, Ozeki broadens the scope of a Eurocentric approach to modernism. Moreover, she underscores the importance of the subject’s
conception of the self, which is especially apparent in the confessional writing style of Nao’s diary, who tells her reader that “if I were a Christian, you would be my God. Don’t you see? Because the way I talk to you is the way I think some Christian people talk to God” (136).
The events that characterise the turn of the millennium have a profoundly negative impact on the characters. Allison Gibbons points out how “the tsunami haunts Ruth and Oliver’s thoughts” while “Nao’s narrative is punctuated by two major events both symbolic of the failure of late capitalism”, namely the dot.com bubble burst and 9/11, which have deeply influenced the personal and economical well-being of Nao’s family (2013, par. 8). As a response to these crises, A Tale is permeated with hope: “whether looking for Nao, looking to the future, or looking for now, A Tale for the Time Being is a tale about humanity and the future and, whatever shadows of doubt, about not quite losing hope” (par. 12). The dot.com bubble burst ended a period of genuine optimism, which Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker characterise as “economic neoliberalism and (multi-)cultural liberalism with its promises of trickle-down economics, careless consumerism, frictionless diversity and eternal growth in a global village” (2017, 30). This period represents Nao’s childhood in America before her family was forced to move back to Tokyo. She remembers this as a time
of prosperity, during which her family participated in careless consumerism and received special treatment because of their Japanese background: her father was regarded “like a small pet that they could take for a run on the golf course and teach new tricks. He was always coming home with brand-new high-end appliances (…). We had a lifestyle. Here we were barely managing a life” (43). In contrast, Japan offers the family poverty and hostility and Nao is bullied for her status as an ‘exchange student’. The United States that Nao longs for, however, belongs to the past, as the 2000s have considerably changed it to an unsafe,
contaminated place, and Nao does not “want to get mowed down by some freaky high school kid in a trench coat who’s high on Zoloft and has traded his Xbox for a semiautomatic” (42).
Several scholars have already written on subjectivity, the autobiographical hybridity and the interweavement of reality and fiction in A Tale, as the mixture of fact and fiction is further complicated by the footnotes that Ruth provides in Nao’s diary and the use of
calligrams. Rocío G. Davis explores the “narratological or ontological slippages between the imagined, the imaginary, and the images we construct about our own lives” (88). Sue Lovell refers to A Tale as a posthumanist narrative, which requires the “sense of a biographically stable self” because subjectivities are challenged by “constantly changing social forces and technologies that overdetermine identity and dictate behaviour” (59). As the novel is
occupied with how global crises influence the subjectivity of individuals, it also corresponds to Emily Horton’s and Peter Middleton’s conceptions of crisis fiction, as well as the
connections that Gibbons makes between autofiction and Metamodernism. Gibbons argues how autofiction “departs from postmodernism’s self-serving logic” through its investment in the self, “it narrativises the self, seeking to locate that self in a place, a time and a body. It also pertains to represent truth, however subjective that truth may be” (“Autofiction” 148). Consequently, contemporary identity is “both driven by a desire for meaningful personal experience while being aware of the constructed nature of experiences” (“Affect” 111). The threat that crisis poses to subjectivity also connects to Raoul Eschelman’s argument that the subject must be preserved ‘at all costs’, and that “characters are endowed with the ability to manipulate time, space, and causality for their own benefit” (7). In A Tale, time and space are constantly manipulated through Nao’s and Ruth’s connection.
Nao’s diary represents an endeavour for her to affirm her own subjectivity, as it grounds her sense of self in a tangible object. That Ruth has found the diary appears both coincidental and predestined. It corresponds to the Metamodernist ‘as-if’ thinking that Vermeulen and Van den Akker propose, because Nao realises that her imagined reader does not exist, while she is also desperate for a meaningful connection: “you’re just another stupid
