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“A Great Many Things Were Dead”: Crisis in British Metamodernist Fiction

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“A Great Many Things Were Dead”: Crisis in British Metamodernist Fiction Hemelaar 4222946\ 1 “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 Statesman, 13-19 October 2017, pp. 40-45. Hemelaar 4222946\ 2 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 WORKS CITED 77 Hemelaar 4222946\ 3 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 4 (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 shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013 and is therefore is part of the British literary field. Hemelaar 4222946\ 5 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 demonstrate how 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 6 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,
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