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“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

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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, 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 7 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 blog that 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 8 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 9 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 Being, Satin Island and Winter all appropriate the modernist tradition to address distinctly Hemelaar 4222946\ 10 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.

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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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 12 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 13 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. Hemelaar 4222946\ 14

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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 15

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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 16 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 17 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). Hemelaar 4222946\ 18

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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 19

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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 20 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 21 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 22 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. Now that 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 23 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 ethical approaches – at the most Hemelaar 4222946\ 24 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, Hemelaar 4222946\ 25 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.

Hemelaar 4222946\ 26

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 consciousness can achieve. Nao connects this endeavour to Proust’s as she contemplates Hemelaar 4222946\ 27

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 self-revelatory, self-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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 28 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 Hemelaar 4222946\ 29 story I made up out of thin air because I was lonely and needed someone to spill my guts to. I wasn’t ready to die yet and needed a raison d’être. I shouldn’t be mad at you, but I am! Because now you’re letting me down, too” (340). Ruth similarly commits to this ‘as-if’ thinking when se decides to “go along with the conceit” that “Nao claimed to have written it just for her” (38). It is this search for a meaningful connection, yet knowing that these are constructed, that corresponds to Vermeulen, Van den Akker’s and Gibbons’ conceptions of Metamodernism. In the previous chapter I discussed how Nick Bentley et al refer to Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan to explain how 9/11 has dissolved the thresholds between reality and fantasy. A Tale demonstrates how both personal and global crises induce dream-like states, as the ontological boundaries between reality and fiction become intertwined. In an attempt to confirm Nao’s actual existence, Ruth obsessively watches footage of the tsunami and she finds a video of a survivor standing before the wreckage: “‘It’s like a dream’, he says. ‘A horrible dream. (…) I think when I wake up, my daughter will be back’” (112). The tsunami has disrupted the thresholds between reality and fantasy, as the victim relates: “‘that life with my family is the dream (…). This is the reality. Everything is gone. We need to wake up and understand that’” (112). As such, crisis causes the ontological barriers between reality and fantasy to unravel, and the subject is now lost in this web of entanglement. Crisis causes the characters to ‘oscillate’, to use Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s term, between being and non-being, reality and illusion. Nao’s father failed to commit suicide several times, and he is therefore constantly pulled back and forth between the boundaries of existence and non-existence. He explains how, ironically, in Japanese culture, suicide represents a method of affirming life, because “even although life is a thing that seems to have some kind of weight and shape, this is only an illusion. Our feeling of alive has no real edge or boundary. So we Japanese people say that our life sometimes feel unreal, just like a dream” (87). Similarly, in his diary Haruki relates how, now that he has become a Kamikaze pilot, he has never felt more alive with the close approximation of death. This interplay between reality and illusion, life and death, is connected to a recurrent motif in the novel, namely the desire to return to matter. Isabel Hoving argues that in ecological narratives protagonists are often driven by a desire to return to matter, to cease existing, in order to escape their ordeals (4). A Tale’s main characters all portray this desire, although it is never fully realised. At the beginning of the novel, Nao announces that she plans on ending her life, to “drop out of time”, and she expresses desires to drown and to join Haruki’s lost body at sea (7). Furthermore, she involves Ruth in this process, who starts Hemelaar 4222946\ 30 experiencing anxieties about non-existence. Nao’s diary induces Ruth to dream about a state “that was unformed, that she couldn’t find words for” and that was “not a place, but a feeling, of nonbeing, sudden, dark and prehuman” (122). In another dream she relates a perpetual state of in-betweenness in which “there is no up. No down. No in. No out. No forward or backward. Just this cold, crushing wave, this unnameable continuum or merging and dissolving” (348). Not until Ruth has been able to confirm Nao’s actual existence and has been able to positively interfere in her life, this feeling of non-being ceases. Thus, this oscillation between being and non-being permeates the novel, and, as Vermeulen and Van den Akker argue that Metamodernism can be characterised by a both-neither dynamic, crisis induces the characters’ subjectivities to also embody this. Nao expresses the typical millennial attitude towards crisis. As I have already discussed, Vermeulen and Van den Akker argue how millennials are haunted by contemporary anxieties, because the world they grew up imagining during their postmodern years does not resemble their reality. The ‘as-if’ thinking manifests itself in acknowledging the ethical issues, but nevertheless pretending that they do not exist. Nao expresses this when she mentions that she cannot discuss “the topic of species extinction because it’s totally depressing, and I’ll have to commit suicide right this second” (25). Crisis is hidden behind a locked door, and when opened, it is too overwhelming because it represents a never-ending, downward spiral. In desperation, Nao asks her reader: “what am I supposed to do? It’s not like I can fix my dad’s psychological problems, or the dot-com bubble, or the lousy Japanese economy, or my so-called best friend in America’s betrayal of me, or getting bullied in school, or terrorism, or war, or global warming, or species extinctions, right?” (169). The millennials also occupy a dream-like state, because they are unable to fully apprehend reality. Similarly, Jiko refers to how the Japanese youth is “heiwaboke”, which means “stupefied with peace” and “spaced out and careless” because they do not know war, but this could also be understood as not the absence of war, but rather the ever-growing threat of crises that hovers above the cognitive space (180). Digital technology further complicates the oscillation between being and non-being, as it poses a severe threat to the integrity of subjects. Before Nao turns to writing a diary, she starts her own blog that allows her to record her “big American-style adventure” in Japan, naming it The Future is Nao! (125). Marlo Starr discusses how the novel criticises reductive practises of online identities. The cyber space is initially attractive to Nao, as it “allows her to escape from her physical reality” (100). It does not provide Nao with any release, however, because when no one reads the blog Nao thinks that she gives of “a virtual smell that other Hemelaar 4222946\ 31 people pick up (...). Maybe it’s something in the way your pixels start behaving” (125-126). As Starr argues, Nao’s physical body interweaves with “digital pixels, mingling corporeal with noncorporeal realms of experience” (105). However, it is not only Nao’s physicality that informs her online identity, but the virtual also influences reality as Nao’s sense of self becomes intertwined with the online identity her classmates create of her. After they post a video of a fake funeral they stage for Nao, she becomes liberated from her body and turns into “a ghost myself. I ate and slept, I wrote email to Kayla sometimes, but inside I knew I was dead, even if my parents didn’t notice” (124). Furthermore, soon after her classmates upload the video of the attempted rape scene, along with an auction for her stolen underwear, Nao is persuaded to go on sex dates with clients of a French maid café. The exchange of money for physicality is then transformed from the online world into reality. Starr argues that the interaction between humans and the internet enables the “human mind to merge with technology, collapsing traditional binaries between mind and machine” which results in “experiences of disembodiment that generate chimerical, hybrid identities” (101). As such, this exchange creates alternative, virtual realities. Eschelman argues how narratives that “operate with virtual realities” may appear postmodern, but that their function “is completely different” (13). In contemporary narratives virtual realities serve particular goals, as Eschelman points out, “which postmodernism dismisses as banal, metaphysical expressions of belief” (13). In A Tale, they propose ethical commitments, because they demonstrate how disembodiment creates problematic conceptions of the self, as characters lose control over their subjectivities and the distinction between reality and fantasy. This is mainly realised through Nao’s father, who lost his job because he refused to cooperate when the American army displayed interest in his game interface project to advance “semi-autonomous weapons technology” (307). Nao’s father, however,

was concerned that the interface he was helping to design was too seamless. What made a computer game addictive and entertaining would make it easy and fun to carry out a massively destructive bombing mission. He was trying to figure out if there was a way to build a conscience into the interface design that would assist the user by triggering his ethical sense of right and wrong and engaging his compulsion to do right. (307-8)

In other words, Nao’s father has created an interface programme that alters reality for its users, as soldiers now experience missions of destruction as if they are playing a game. This Hemelaar 4222946\ 32 weapon technology allows its users to merge with the machine, as they become encapsulated into an alternative, virtual reality in which the ethical and affective rules of the real world do not apply. The user’s subjectivity is temporarily suspended as they are transformed to this alternative world in which they cannot perceive the differences between reality and fiction. Ruth also starts to experience her life as an alternative reality, as she loses sight over the boundaries of truth and fiction when her obsession with confirming Nao’s identity becomes more time-consuming. Ruth transforms into a hybrid identity as the internet takes over her sense of self: “Ruth’s mind felt like a garbage patch, an undifferentiated mat of becalmed and fractured pixels. She sat back in her chair, away from the glowing screen, and closed her eyes. The pixels lingered, dancing behind her eyelids in the darkness” (115). She similarly loses control over her reality and starts experiencing time differently: “At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day” (91). Ruth’s obsession with confirming Nao’s existence transforms her life into an alternate reality, as her submersion into digital technology alters her experience of reality, which she now experiences through the veil of the screen. She cannot find online references to Nao, however, because Nao’s father has erased them. As a solution to the reductive virtual practises towards subjects, Nao’s father, prompted by the cyber bullying that Nao underwent, starts a new internet company that provides “an online encryption and security system called Mu-Mu Vital Hygienics” (382). Mu-Mu searches the internet for every occurrence attached to someone’s name and entirely erases them: “my little spiders can neatly undo you if you stop wanting to be” (383). As a result, in the virtual world people can assume a status of non-existence, which represents “true freedom”, as Nao suggests: “no hits is the mark of how deeply unfamous you are, because true freedom comes from being unknown” (383). Consequently, this complete erasure of the online self allows for liberation of the subject in the real world. Gibbons argues that A Tale demonstrates both the instability of time, as it foregrounds “the ephemeral nature of time” and the fact that it “is a human construct that allows us to give shape and order to our temporal being” (2013, par. 5). In other words, as the diary represents Nao’s attempt to catch “the eternal now”, the novel constantly emphasises the slippery nature of time (314). I argue that the novel does not as much display a postmodern preoccupation with pointing out the slippery slope that represents the construct of time, but rather that the ‘now’ never ends. There is no ‘now’ in the conventional semantics, because ‘now’ does not exist as a single, isolated moment. This is symbolised by Hemelaar 4222946\ 33

Haruki’s watch that is engraved with “Sky Soldier,” because the kanji for sky also means “empty”, hence, time is empty (249). ‘Now’ is not ephemeral or constructed, but embodies the past, the present and the future simultaneously. Everything is connected, and thus ‘now’ (or Nao) is always and everywhere. Masami Usui writes that literature creates waves in order to process the trauma of the 2011 tusnami and that “Nao’s stories are the waves from a different shore of the Ocean, but they reach Ruth’s mind” (95). However, even though the connection between Nao and Ruth is forged through the waves that transport Nao’s diary, their connection should not be regarded as a synchronic exchange from Nao to Ruth, but rather as transcended above their spaces and understood as a mutual exchange that is deeply embedded in a cyclical experience of time. This experience of time connects the characters with each other and their environments, as it surpasses the boundaries of linearity, while the novel simultaneously demonstrates the ramifications of humans’ interference with natural processes. It posits the idea of existence in cycles, where there is no beginning or end, but rather processes of renewal. This is explained through the Zen notion of ‘the time being’, who is “someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be”, and which emphasises that everything is intimately connected (1). Consequently, every human or non-human being simultaneously embodies all stages of life, and never fully ceases to exist. Nao visualises this when she imagines Jiko as “part ghost, part child, part young girl, part sexy woman, and part yamamba (mountain witch)” (166). By embodying these different life stages, Jiko exists in the past, present, future and the metaphysical. As the novel posits the idea of time beings, nothing ever fully disappears because the characters and events exist in perpetual cycles. Nao wonders about what would happen if she led her body be taken by the ocean: “the sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets” (193). This is portrayed as a beautiful process that continues the natural cycles of the ocean’s organic life. At the end of the novel it is revealed that Haruki chose not to kill American soldiers and instead flew his aircraft into the water. Ultimately, what Nao imagined of herself has happened to her great-uncle. Daniel McKay points out that “the kamikaze pilot transcends the boundaries of space, time, and death, effortlessly touching down in the present era and enacting a transformative effect on his great-niece” (McKay 15). Although he has died and become part of the ecological cycle of the ocean, Haruki reappears in Nao’s life as a ghost and through his diary, which allows Nao to contextualise her and her father’s struggles Hemelaar 4222946\ 34 to his. Moreover, Nao’s life mimics Haruki’s, and so the cycle commences into the next lifetime. They both had “secret French diaries”, as Haruki kept a diary in French during his time in the army (226). Furthermore, Haruki and Nao’s father were similarly haunted by the ethics of war. As Haruki chose to fly his plane into the waves instead of using it to kill the Americans, Nao’s father quit working on weapon technology. Nao’s diary continues all of their cycles in Ruth’s present, who experiences urgency with regards to helping Nao. However, Oliver points out that the events of the diary actually took place “more than a decade ago, and we know the diary’s been floating around for a least a few years longer (…). So I just wonder if urgency is really the right word to describe it, that’s all” (313). On the island Ruth and Oliver are disconnected from the rest of the world, something that they experience as being behind on time. The novel portrays 9/11 as “one of those crazy moments in time that everybody who happened to be alive in the world remembers. You remember it exactly. September 11 is like a sharp knife slicing through time. It changed everything” (265). On that day Ruth and Oliver were in Manhattan, and they had to hurry back to the island to assure Ruth’s mother and their neighbours of their safety. When they arrived, however, no one had yet heard about the news, which demonstrates how the island is not up-to-date. Natural forces also still have significant influence over the islanders, as storms are represented to be “primeval, hurling everything backward in time” (148). When the power is cut off, Ruth becomes entirely disconnected, and it is not until it comes back on that “the house slammed back into the twenty-first century (…). The world was restored to its place in time, and her mind was back online” (148, 172). The island thus oscillates between the past and present, as natural forces and digital technology push and pull it back and forth. Ruth suspects that Nao has become a victim to the tsunami, as she finds out Jiko’s temple is located at the Miyagi coastline, which was severely damaged. She connects this natural disaster to the rearranging of time, as it dies and starts over again, and Ruth wonders: “if time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated. Was the girl out there somewhere in all that water, her body decomposed by now, redistributed by the waves?” (30). Dipesh Chakrabarty explains how environmental crisis disconnects the past, present and future, which allows for the discontinuity of time (197). The novel emphasises this discontinuity by arguing how human’s involvement with nature interrupts natural, cyclical time. Ocean gyres are “enormous masses of garbage and debris floating in the oceans” in which the plastic is eventually turned into food for fish and zooplankton (36). Opposed to Nao imagining her body naturally disintegrating in the sea, however, this is a contaminating process. Moreover, it underscores how humans have become geological agents, as man-made Hemelaar 4222946\ 35 trash is now integrated into the food chain. This is referred to as a sea “filled with plastic confetti” that “floats around and gets eaten by the fishes or spat up on the beach” (94). By doing so, Ozeki demonstrates how deeply rooted environmental issues of waste have become, as natural beings become hybrid. The tsunami also caused an increasing amount of waste to appear at the other side of the ocean. These remains become treasures for others, since scavengers infiltrate the beaches looking for valuables from Japan. However, they are portrayed as unnatural, as zombies that are stealing from dead, as “the scavengers looked possessed, like zombies, the walking dead. It was ghoulish” (152). Ironically, the novel also represents human’s geological agency as potentially hopeful. Ruth’s husband Oliver is an environmental artist, and his latest artwork is a “botanical intervention he called the Neo-Eocene,” a “collaboration with time and place” (61). This “climate-change forest” is an attempt to re-establish the Neocene, as Oliver plants indigenous flora of this era to anticipate global warming (60). Oliver’s forest sets time backwards to facilitate the planet’s future. As a self-contained space, this heterotopia is an attempt to re-establish nature’s agency, but ironically, this requires human’s interference for a future that is the result of man-made global warming. While the forest has the potential to turn time backwards and renew the natural cycle, it also symbolises the extent of human’s geological agency. Moreover, readers are left to wonder whether this single, contained project could truly cause a lasting impact on the immense scale of climate change. The forest provides hope while there is simultaneously the knowledge that there is no changing the all- encompassing, disastrous future, which connects to the ‘as-if’ thinking. Whereas human’s interference with the environment is causing an ever-growing gyre of environmental disasters, nature itself has the potential to heal, albeit on a small scale. This attempt to restore nature’s agency corresponds to how Ozeki ascribes agency to nature, as it is able to profoundly influence the characters and course of action. The Material Turn, instigated by Bruno Latour, registers how objects, things and matter posses agency and it emphasises how the relationship between humans and things are inherently intertwined. In We Have Never Been Modern (1991) Latour criticises the absolute distinction between society and nature, and he argues that unless we “reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially” we are not truly modern (12). In other words, the approach to the modern, hybrid society has to be revaluated by acknowledging that objects profoundly inform human lives. Ozeki uses these strategies of ethical commitment to emphasise the urgency of environmental disasters and to argue for a different, nurturing relationship between humans and nature. A Tale does not only represent the Hemelaar 4222946\ 36 tsunami as a man-made disaster by emphasising the consequences of the subsequent nuclear meltdown, it also posits the idea that environmental disasters are a method of social reform, as they are caused by human greed. The novel references to the Japanese folklore of the giant catfish, who creates earthquakes and tsunamis as he “caused the earth to shake and tremble by his furious trashing” (Ozeki 198). The catfish is generally referred to as a “World- Rectifying Catfish”, which is “able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up” (198). However, because of collateral damage, “the catfish is filled with remorse” (199). Ozeki thus connects the 2011 disaster to capitalism and posits humans as geological agents. Another natural agent is the Japanese Jungle Crow, which has travelled over the waves of the tsunami to Ruth’s island. The crow embodies time, as it connects Nao’s ‘now’ with Ruth’s and accompanies Ruth along Nao’s story and eventually guides her into her dreams to stop Nao’s father from committing suicide and to deliver Haruki’s French diary at the shrine in Jiko’s temple for Nao to find it. The crow is thus able to considerably influence the course of the plot, as it interferes in Ruth’s life and allows for a solution to Nao’s present. One of Ruth’s neighbours explains this by telling her that “this crow from Nao’s world came here to lead you into the dream so you could change the end of her story. Her story was about to end one way, and you intervened, which set up the conditions for a different outcome. A new ‘now,’ as it were, which Nao hasn’t quite caught up with” (376). Moreover, it had not been for Ruth’s help, “Nao would never have discovered that her father was a man of conscience, or learned the truth about her kamikaze great-uncle” (394). Nature thus embodies both time and possesses the possibility for positive change, which is something that Ruth and Oliver experience on the island. They moved there because Oliver was sick, and on island it appeared “as if the forest were healing him, as if he were absorbing its inexorable life force” (60). Oliver recognises the intriguing history of the forest, and “he could see time unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature” (60). Compared to this vast growth over centuries of history, a human life barely registers, as the trees around their home dwarf “anything human. When Ruth first saw these giant trees, she wept. (…) she had never felt so puny in all her life. ‘We’re nothing,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘We’re barely here at all’” (59). By contrasting the immensity and age of the natural environment with the lives of individual humans, the novel uses scale in order to put the relationship between humans and the environment into perspective. Similar to human’s interference in nature, digital technology also disrupts the cyclical experience of time, which is relevant to the difference between Nao’s diary and her blog. In Hemelaar 4222946\ 37

Digimodernism (2009) Alan Kirby refers to the “the digimodernist onwardness of the blog” which entails that a blog is never finished and always growing. Although a diary can also be added to, it can be read “as a finished, enclosed totality. The diary that is not being added to is complete; the blog in that state is textually dead” (111). Nao experiences this when she refers to how her blog no longer receives any views and none of her American friends respond to her emails: “maybe this is what it’s like when you die. Your inbox stays empty (…) and eventually you have to conclude that you’re dead” (127). In contrast, Nao’s diary is not dead, because Ruth eschews its status as a closed entity and reads it in passages of time that she thinks Nao took to write the entries. Moreover, Starr argues how the novel emphasises the physical qualities or the diary and how Ruth regards it as “as an extension of Nao’s body” (115). When the last pages of the diary go missing, it underscores the relationship of mutual exchange between the diary and Ruth, as the diary prompts Ruth to take action to restore Nao’s past, after which diary’s final pages return. Nao’s presence on the internet is fixed as a totality, while her presence in the ‘real’ is subject to transformation. This corresponds to how Kirby argues that “readership requires the text to refructify, to extend itself, it is synonymous with the text’s incompleteness of scope; and a nonupdated, hence a nonread and so a dead blog is not even memorialized: it disappears off the face of the Web as it had never existed” (112). The internet represents an unnatural cycle that actually does provide an ‘eternal now’, but this is portrayed negatively. There is no past on the internet, as the ‘now’ is all that exists. This becomes apparent in the manner that the internet represents human tragedies, which, corresponding to Kirby, also disappear as if they have never existed. Environmental disasters, and tragedy in general, become part of a gyre. Ruth mentions that soon after the tsunami and nuclear meltdown, people forgot about it, their attention drawn towards the next disaster. On the internet, new information culminates on top of older information, obscuring any previous tragedies that have sunk onto the bottom of this mass. News thus represents a “tidal wave, observed, collapses into tiny particles, each one containing a story” that culminates in the “gyre memory” of the internet:

The images, a miniscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they’re drawn into the gyre’s becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre’s memory is all the stuff that we’ve forgotten. (114) Hemelaar 4222946\ 38

The aftermaths of these disasters are endlessly deferred, its tragedies never fully realised, and the planet’s future is thus marked by an omnipresent and ever-growing threat while news in the digital world disappears as it hovers above the cognitive space where it can no longer be perceived. Shortly after the tsunami “the uprising in Libya and the tornado in Joplin superseded the quake, and the keyword cloud shifted to revolution and drought and unstable air masses as the tide of information from Japan receded” (113). Similarly, after the video of Nao’s fake funeral recedes in views, she remarks: “I’d only been dead for less than two weeks and was already being forgotten. There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace…” (137). The internet thus embodies contrast, because while it allows for an ever-growing body of information, everything that is sucked into the ‘gyre’s memory’ is forgotten and unperceivable, which leads Ruth to wonder about the instability of digital technology. She points out that neither a diary, nor a computer, is entirely reliable: “Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood” (114). However, after the tsunami, people found stone engravings on hillsides “engraved with ancient warnings: Do not build your homes below this point!” (114). A Tale suggests that nature is a both reliable and durable, and it does not capture the ephemerality of time by apprehending an ‘eternal now’, as digital technology does, but instead it represents all cycles of history simultaneously, as nothing ever fully disappears and is always subject to renewal. Ozeki expresses sentiments of hope and a desire for connection to counter the crises that cause the novel’s characters to occupy a state that oscillates between being and non- being, as the ontological boundaries between reality and dream unravel. Events that characterise the turn of the millennium are displayed on a personal, individual level through Nao, who turns to her diary to affirm her threatened subjectivity. She forges a connection that transcends the boundaries of time and space, which allow her to recover her sense of self. A Tale provides an ethical commitment to environmental issues and anxieties about digital technology, ultimately arguing that, while the internet represents an unnatural experience of time, the environment and its natural cycles provide hope and the possibility for renewal. Because the novel is profoundly invested in creating human connections in order to restore subjectivities, it contrasts to Tom McCarthy’s use of impersonal, external narration in Satin Island, which I will discuss in the next chapter.

Hemelaar 4222946\ 39

Chapter 3 The “Fundamental Riddle of our Time”: Metamodern Epiphany in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

While Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being represents a hopeful narrative in which the characters seek connectivity to each other and their environment in order to counter their anxieties, the protagonist from Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) revels in waste and mechanization. U. is a corporate anthropologist who is in search for the epiphanic moment in which all of the arbitrary phenomena he studies will reveal their deeper meaning and inherent connection to one another, but he never actually achieves this. His company celebrates the acquisition of the “Koob-Sassen Project”, which represents an invisible structure that creates and controls meaning. As business corporations have become the contemporary religion, Peyman, U’s boss, represents a god who connects everything to anything as he is transcended above time and space. When U. attempts to uncover the overarching grand-narrative, he becomes fascinated with the aesthetics of mechanisation and oil spills. Fetishizing their pollution and waste, he envisions filth to represent the fundamental truth of the contemporary condition. Opposed to how the characters in Ozeki’s novel establish meaning through their connection, Satin Island reveals how the contemporary essentially consists of meaningless superstructures of mechanised differentiation. Satin Island is, however, also profoundly ethically committed, as it is precisely this uneasiness that situates affect within the reader. Moreover, through the as-if approach that is embodied in U.’s search for meaning and his attempts to project depth onto empty surfaces, the novel strongly corresponds to Timotheus Vermeulen’s and Robin van den Akker’s conception of Metamodernism. McCarthy’s modernist innovation revolves around the novel’s content, a strategy he refers to as a “Trojan horse”, which implies that the more conventional narrative style of his novels allow him to covertly incorporate “modernist and avant-garde preoccupations” (quoted in Robson, p. 50). Moreover, Satin Island has no plot, as U. tells the reader “events! if you want those, you’d best stop reading now” (16). Although little has been written on this novel yet, and especially on its connection to modernism, several scholars have commented on McCarthy’s interaction with the modernist tradition in his other works. Catherine Lanone connects McCarthy’s novel C (2010) to E.M Forster, because “the text as coherer refuses humanism and individual emotions (seen as manifestations of grand narratives and capitalism) yet explores networks, revisiting and subverting Forster’s ‘only connect’” (7). However, she does not make any further connection to Forster’s motto, even though this Hemelaar 4222946\ 40 represents a relevant point that could also be explored in Satin Island. David James argues how McCarthy, in his quest to “navigate the wreckage” of modernism, “delivers a valuable artistic and philosophical ‘archeology’ of modernism, or, more accurately, Futurism, as these novels feature not so much empathic characters as depersonalised enactors, who are often less prepared to perceive the world affectively than to decipher it geometrically” (2011, 6). Similarly, James and Urmila Seshagiri argue that McCarthy’s approach to the modernist lineage entails advancing “the kind of uncomfortable externalism advocated by Wyndham Lewis, who resisted psychological fiction” (94). Lewis’ narratives pay “more attention to the outside of people” in order to emphasise characters’ exterior “shells, or pelts, or the language of their bodily movements” (Wyndham Lewis, quoted in James and Seshagiri 94). Consequently, James and Seshagiri point out that “McCarthy’s externalized fiction challenges the critical privileging of the novel’s capacity to reveal people’s inward ethical behaviors” (94). McCarthy thus resists the focus on impressionism and psychological depth. This exterior narration serves an ethical purpose, and James and Seshagiri argue that “as expressive registers of aesthetic dissent, (it) can also present an index of the political and ethical efficacy that contemporary writing attains by remobilizing modernist procedures” (95). As such, by deviating from conventional representations of interiority, McCarthy establishes political and ethical critique. Literature is then not about representing the world, but about “surrendering to a vertigo that can never be mastered, to an abyss that can never be commanded, or excavated or filled in” (quoted in Gasirek and James 622). By committing his writing to achieving an unattainable goal, McCarthy’s work corresponds to the Metamodernist ‘as-if’ thinking as established by Vermeulen and Van den Akker. Pieter Vermeulen also points out that McCarthy’s novels consistently “attempt to do without the characteristics that traditionally define the novel: plot, character, readerly empathy and sentiment, social vision and psychological depth” (549). By departing from this “novelistic tradition”, McCarthy “challenges this tradition’s reliance of psychological realism and feeling” (550). Consequently, Pieter Vermeulen argues, McCarthy does not provide interior psychological reflections about how trauma affects subjectivities, but instead explores these ethical commitments by making clear “that trauma is also intricately connected to the affect that reading literature can generate” (550). The subject of affect is not represented through the psychological realism of characters, but rather by emptying out any psychological depth. In Satin Island McCarthy displays ethical commitments by having U. not mourn but aestheticise contaminating processes. It is then precisely this absence of affect within the characters that embodies McCarthy’s ethical commitment. As the main character is not fully Hemelaar 4222946\ 41 named, this further strengthens the distance and lack of affect created by the exterior narration. Furthermore, it involves the reader, ‘you’, as it blurs the boundaries between text and reality and places the reader into the position of the anthropologist, embarking on the impossible task to ascribe meaning to the world. McCarthy’s work is thus not straightforwardly modernist in the sense that it displays radical formal and stylistic experimentation or a focus on subjectivity. Initially, Satin Island could sooner appear to represent a continuation of postmodernism, as it is narrated in short, philosophical tracts in which U. embarks on the impossible task to ascribe meaning to an array of arbitrary phenomena that come to his attention. Moreover, as “Satin Island, like all books, contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, re-mixes and straight repetitions”, the novel places itself within the archive of literary history, emphasising how nothing in the text is truly original or authentic, a theme that resonates throughout the novel (McCarthy 222). Among its borrowings, for example, is Herman Melville’s opening line in Moby Dick (1851), as the narrator tells his readers: “Me? Call me U.” (14). Because U. scrutinises every phenomenon that catches his attention by studying the world from his basement office, the novel also recalls Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), an early existentialist work in which a disillusioned, bitter narrator observes and critiques human behaviour and society from his underground lair. Similar to Dostoevsky’s narrator, U. is an intellectual outsider who dissects society, although, unlike Notes, U. does not so much criticise it as much as he revels in society’s decay. Instead of the naturalist, psychological reflections of Dostoevsky’s underground observer, Satin Island is anti-naturalist in the sense that it resists psychological depth or emotional trajectories. As I have already argued, Metamodernist fiction often foregrounds the fact that what postmodernists sought to critique has become a reality in contemporary society. In Satin Island this manifests itself through the emphasis on how nothing is truly real, authentic or meaningful. Simultaneously, everything in the novel is constructed and controlled by super- structures, onto which U. futilely ascribes meaning. Although McCarthy’s novel does not straightforwardly address any contemporary crises, the anxieties about the collapse of belief, the inability to connect, emptied meaning and the ubiquitous control of super-structures nevertheless testify how this profoundly informs the novel. U. becomes fascinated with the death of a parachutist whose equipment has failed during a jump, which symbolises the collapse of belief in the system more generally. Obsessively contemplating why and how the parachutist died, U. refers to this as the “fundamental riddle of our time” (149). Faith is essential to parachutists, as they are forced to believe in their equipment and instructors: Hemelaar 4222946\ 42

“faith that it all – the system, in its boundless and unquantifiable entirety – worked, that they’d be gathered up and saved. For this man, though, the victim, that system, its whole fabric, had unravelled” (98). Consequently, the realisation that this “blind, absolute faith” has been taken away “must have been atrocious” (98). This symbolises both the collapse of the system and people’s faith in it. Established, in its stead, U. visualises a negative world, an alternate reality. The parachutist has encountered a space that “would have retreated – recoiled, contracted, pulled back from its frontiers even though these stayed intact – withdrawn to some zero-point at which it flips into its negative. Negative world, negative sky, negative everything: that’s the territory this man had entered” (99). Reality, in other words, is experienced negatively, and U. wonders if it means that “he’d somehow fallen trough into another world, another sky? A richer, fuller, more embracing one? I don’t think so” (99). Similar to A Tale for the Time Being, Satin Island is concerned with the ‘now’ of time. The novel’s preoccupation is not with establishing the past or future, but with how U.’s anthropologist work attempts, similar to Nao’s endeavour, to ‘capture the eternal now’ by uncovering its overarching meaning. In the opening section of the novel, U. is stranded at the hub airport in Turin, and the manner in which he dissects the space and its use of media demonstrates his obsession with connecting the now. The airport symbolises a hub of seemingly seamless connectivity; being removed from everyday life, it transcends above time and space as it connects worlds. U. is surrounded by screens of “laptops, mobiles, televisions”, which one sequence of connected events (6). These endless repetitions further blur the experience of time. U. watches the recap of a football match on the screen, and he wonders how the repetition of footage enables the moments to be released from temporality. Being “filmed with high-end motion-capture cameras, the type that sharpen and amplify each frame, each moment, lifting it out of the general flow and releasing it back into this at the same time” fascinates him, as he watches “the images for hour after hour, my head rotating with them as they moved from screen to screen” (12). He similarly experiences disasters as not being bound to a specific temporal moment, but rather as if they are happening simultaneously and continuously through digital technology. Alongside the football game, footage appears of an oil spill and of “the aftermath of a marketplace truck bombing somewhere in the Middle East, the type of scene you always see in this kind of report: hysterical, blood-spattered people running about screaming” (7). When U. receives the news that his Company has acquired the Koob-Sassen Project, it subsequently situates the footage out of context, perceiving the footballer as if he “was rejoicing not for his own team and fans Hemelaar 4222946\ 43 but rather for us” and moreover, that even a bombing victim, running “screaming towards the camera, was celebrating the news too: from his ruined market with its standard twisted metal and its blood, for us” (8-9). Being an anthropologist, U. also represents a hub, as he attempts to connect everything. Although his dossiers appear to be arbitrary, springing “up spontaneously, serendipitously, whimsically”, he nevertheless believes that they “would one day turn out to have been related all along, their sudden merging leading me to crack the case. What was ‘the case’? I didn’t know – but that was the whole point: the answer to that would become clear once all the dossiers hove into alignment” (40, 42). By deconstructing the world into recurring patterns he attempts to situate them into an overarching grand-narrative. Through this U. follows his “hero”, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had “remade the entire globe into a collage of recurring colours, smells, and patterns” that were all “co-related, parts of larger systems lying behind not just a single tribe but also the larger one of all humanity” and withhold “some kind of infrastructural master-meaning” (35-36). As such, Satin Island is profoundly concerned with finding the modernist epiphany, the Joycean revelation in which the world’s overlaying grand-scheme will reveal its deeper meaning. Typically Metamodernist, however, is how U. embodies the oscillation between the postmodern tendency to deconstruct everything and the utopian desire for a deeper, universal meaning. Moreover, there is also the sense of not even knowing what the overarching question or goal is, which corresponds to Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s ‘as-if’ thinking. This is also connected to Timotheus Vermeulen’s conception of Metamodern depth, which, as I have previously discussed, represents the projecting of meaning and depth onto surfaces that have been previously emptied by postmodernist thought. At the airport U. references to Turin’s famous shroud that shows “Christ’s body supine after crucifixion” (4). Barely visible, the image was only detected in the negative of a photograph, “which means that the shroud itself was, in effect, a negative already” (4). Moreover, the image is dated to the mid-thirteenth century, but U. argues that worshippers nevertheless choose to believe in the myth of the image, because “people need foundation myths, some imprint of a year zero, a bolt that secures the scaffolding that in turn holds fast the entire architecture of reality, of time” (4). While being aware of the constructed nature of the shroud, which essentially represents an empty surface, worshippers nevertheless choose to believe as if it withholds depth. U. connects this to the experience of reality, which is itself ‘shrouded’, “as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution (…), when it begins to coalesce into a figure that’s discernible, if ciphered, we can say: That is it, Hemelaar 4222946\ 44 stirring, looming, even if isn’t really, if it’s all just ink-blots” (4). In other words, reality consists of projecting depth on essentially empty surfaces. This is also what U.’s job as an anthropologist entails. He compares his work to that of soothsayers and ichthyomancers, who cut “fish open to tease wisdom from their entrails. The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds” (26). As such, U. creates the illusion as if his work of creating meaning has a legitimate impact on the world. This becomes apparent when he argues that his “job was to put meaning in the world, not take it from it” (38). He thus produces “meaning, amplified and sharpened”, and accordingly, he allows himself to think that “the world functioned, each day, because I’d put meaning back into it the day before. You didn’t notice that I put it there because it was there; but if I’d stopped, you’d soon have known it” (38, 40). This production of meaning is also connected to temporality. Inherent to the work of an anthropologist is the profound anxiety that they have always come “too late” (22). Following Lévi-Strauss, U. argues that anthropologists attempt “to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity – of local colour, texture, custom, life in general – from nothing but leftovers and debris” (22) As such, anthropology represents a “double-bind” and an ‘as- if’ thinking, as they “prey” for a purity that essentially unattainable, because when an anthropologist studies its subjects, their enticing mystery vanishes (22). In other words, anything that they attempt to ascribe meaning to is essentially already empty. Thus, there is no pure past in anthropology, as the present is continuously unable to capture this state, which becomes even clearer when U. visits the anthropology museum in Frankfurt. The museum houses thousands of cultural objects that have been collected because of their cultural representations. However, now that they are removed from their specific histories and contexts, their meanings have become obscure and irrelevant. The bunker in which they are preserved is itself disconnected from the past and future, as if time has stood still. The curator informs U. that meaning of most objects has been lost and that she feels as if she is “in the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they stash the holy relic in a box exactly like all the other boxes in some warehouse that just stretches to infinity. Or Citizen Kane: same thing, but the artefacts are heading to the fire. This, she said, sweeping her now-dirty glove around once more, isn’t fire; but it’s oblivion all the same” (121). Thus, when there is no past for the collected objects as the museum does not know their function and meaning, there is also no future, because they are headed for oblivion. Instead, the collection eternally exists in the now, as the bunker, having removed the objects from their past, also preserves them from disappearing in the future. Hemelaar 4222946\ 45

Peyman has assigned U. to write the ‘Great Report’ that should explain the meaning of the entire contemporary moment, and which entails “not just a book: the fucking Book. You write the Book on them. Sum their tribe up. Speak its secret name” because that is “what you anthropologists are for, right?” (70). U. experiences profound anxiety about this, as he cannot connect any of his case studies. Although he desires to contribute to something meaningful, as “simply being under the starter’s orders in this way lent a background radiance, a promise of significance, to everything I did”, he also experiences dread, as it sends his “general levels of anxiety, already high, still higher” (73). This recalls Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s Metamodernist oscillation, because U.’s feelings towards the Great Report fluctuate between genuine hope for meaning to explain the contemporary grand- narrative and anxiety about the act of unravelling it. Moreover, he eventually realises that the Great Report is “unplottable, unframeable, unrealizable: in short, and in whatever cross-bred form, whatever medium of media, unwritable. Not just by me, with my limited (if once celebrated) capabilities, but fundamentally, essentially, inherently unwritable” (145). Consequently, U. experiences a profound sense of loss and grief. The Great Report also motivates U. to coin a new concept of anthropology that specifically underscores its connection to the contemporary, as it represents something that is “neither to-come or completed, in-the-past: it would be all now. Present-Tense Anthropology™; an anthropology that bathed in presence, and in newness” (89-90). He argues that “what we require is not contemporary anthropology but rather an anthropology of The Contemporary”, and he thereby wants to capture not the past, already lost cultures, but everything that defines the now (116). However, U. fails to entice other anthropologists when he introduces the concept during a conference. This lack of enthusiasm and his inability to write the Great Report induces him to consider his own place within the grand scheme, as he wonders “what was I still there for?” (147). What U. does not realise however, is that he cannot write the grand- narrative of his time because it is not the anthropologist that produces meaning, but business corporations. Corporations connect everything as they determine cultural logic and grand- narratives, which represents another crisis in Satin Island. U.’s anthropology has itself become entirely intertwined in corporate culture, which is not only represented by his ironically trademarked ‘Present-Tense Anthropology™’, but also when he describes how he alters anthropological scholarship to meet business demands. He “recycles” other sources as he removes “all the revolutionary shit” and does not credit scholars, because “big retail companies don’t want to hear about such characters” (37). As contemporary meaning is Hemelaar 4222946\ 46 created by companies, Peyman instructs U. to “forget universities!” because they have become “irrelevant; they’ve become businesses – and not even good ones. Real businesses (…) are the forge, the foundry where true knowledge is being smelted, cast and hammered out” (71). The meaning that companies provide, however, does not so much consist of truth and facts as much as it is based on mythology and fiction. What the company essentially does, as Peyman points out, is creating “fiction”, because “the city and the state are fictional conditions; a business is a fictional entity. Even if it’s real, it’s still a construct” (55). As such, fiction precedes facts, because “fiction was what engendered them and held them in formation” (56). Corporate culture thus constructs the contemporary grand-narrative: “the machine could swallow everything, incorporate it seamlessly, like a giant loom that re- weaves all fabric, no matter how recalcitrant and jarring its raw form, into what my hero would have called a master-pattern – or, if not that, then maybe just the pattern of the master” (38). They have become so pervasive, in fact, that they determine every aspect of society and as such also determine the cultural logic, as U. acknowledges that any other structures of meaning have become irrelevant:

forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe (…). The logic underlying the corporation is completely primitive. The corporation has its gods, its fetishes, its high priests and its outcasts (…). It has rituals, beliefs and superstitions, its pools of homespun expertise and craft and, conversely, its Unknowns and Unspokens. (48-49)

Corporations thus represent an entirely new religion themselves, with their own laws, families and rituals of constructed meaning. The “Koob-Sassen Project” especially demonstrates how corporate culture informs contemporary society and it also establishes the return of the relevance of grand-narratives and super-structures. The Project is defined as something that determines the contemporary state, although U. is never able to specify what it entails or what his function within it is. When a friend of U., for example asks him what he will be doing for the Project, U. confesses “I couldn’t really answer him” (32). Despite its obscurity, though, the project is everywhere, as it “will have had direct effects on you; in fact, there’s probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn’t, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this” and it is involved in all domains of society, private, public and corporate, “which renders it well-night impossible to say where it began and ended, to Hemelaar 4222946\ 47 discern its ‘content’, bulk or outline” (14-15). As such, it represents the hidden structures that control every aspect of society, and they have become so entangled that it is impossible to discern them. The Koob-Sassen Project also corresponds to the ‘as-if’ thinking, because U. imagines its employees as “ants” that are labouring towards some unknown, incomprehensive goal (79). They are aware of the Project’s all-encompassing nature and they work for it as if it provides meaning for them, yet they cannot grasp what this truly entails:

so complex was the logic governing the Project as a whole – instructions, though, whose serial execution, even if full comprehension was beyond the scope of any single point in the command-chain, had the effect of moving the whole intricate scheme towards its glorious realization, at which point all would become clear, to everyone, and ants would see as gods. (79)

Because it expresses the desire to explain the grand scheme of it all, while there is also the knowledge this striking realisation is just out of reach, is could be understood as an unattainable Metamodernist epiphany. Peyman, the Company’s boss, represents the corporate tribe’s god who infinitely creates connections. He embodies the universal essence of humanity, “with the overlay of continents and times and cultures stored up in his very genes, his mixed Persian, South American and European ancestry” (51). U. expresses the anxiety that the entire company experiences in anticipation of Peyman’s presence, as they require him “to connect: either to some rich and stellar network that we pictured lying behind this name, Koob-Sassen; or, if not that, then at least to… something. Being near Peyman made you feel connected” (24). Peyman’s presence is, in fact, so pervasive that he is “everything and nothing” (51). He connects everything and everyone “to a world of action and event, a world in which stuff might actually happen; connected us, that is, to our own age”, so much so that “it sometimes seemed as though the very concept of ‘the age’ wouldn’t have been fully thinkable without Peyman (…). He connected the age to itself and, in so doing, called it into being” (51). Simultaneously, though, he represents “nothing”, because his role requires a “reverse camouflage”, as he invented and re-invented the entire world “till he appeared in everything; which is the same as disappearing” (55-56). Similarly, while U.’s office is in the basement, Peyman’s office is high up and is hidden from view within the company building, “invisible, in other words, to the many people who worked in all the other glass-partitioned spaces” (58). This comparison between Peyman and a god becomes even clearer when U. relates how each Hemelaar 4222946\ 48 time he approaches his office, he unconsciously performs a secret ritual, ticking his finger three times: “it was a kind of tic, made all the more enjoyable by the knowledge that only I would ever experience or even know about it” (58). Moreover, when he enters the office he feels himself “transported, for those – for all those – seconds, into a kind of timelessness in which only this act and its unfolding (…) did or could exist”, as if he is himself momentarily suspended from the now (58). Digital technology functions to further undermine meaning in the novel. Meaning is constantly deferred through endless buffering, and although U. realises this, he also futuristically aestheticises it:

I’d spend long stretches staring at the little spinning circle on my screen, losing myself in it. Behind it, I pictured hordes of bits and bytes and megabytes, all beavering away to get the requisite data to me; behind them, I pictured a giant über- server, housed somewhere in Finland or Nevada or Uzbekistan: stacks of memory banks, satellite dishes sprouting all around them, pumping out information non-stop, more of it than any single person would need in their lifetime, pumping it all my way in an endless, unconditional and grace-conferring act of generosity. Datum est: it is given. It was this gift, I told myself, this bottomless and inexhaustible torrent of giving, that made the circle spin: the data itself, its pure, unfiltered content as it rushed into my system, which, in turn, whirred into streamlined action as it started to reorganize it into legible form. The thought was almost sublimely reassuring. (84)

Simultaneously, though, U. questions whether the buffering itself is not meaningless, as he wonders “what if it were just a circle, spinning on my screen, and nothing else? What if the supply-chain, its great bounty, had dried up, or been cut off, or never been connected in the first place? Each time that I allowed this possibility to take hold of my mind, the sense of bliss gave over to a kind of dread” (85). This oscillation between bliss and dread is particularly relevant to Metamodernism, as it again corresponds to the ‘as-if’ thinking, which is perpetuated when U. realises that what he “was actually watching was nothing less than the skeleton, laid bare, of time or memory itself. Not our computers’ time and memory, but our own. This was its structure” (85). As such, “we require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience” (85). In other words, to make sense of our existence, we require “to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events”, and we thus need these structures in order to move forward, even though we are Hemelaar 4222946\ 49 aware of their constructed nature (85). Consequently, “everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything”, and “we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it”, which relates to how Metamodern subjects find themselves in perpetual states of in-betweenness (86). This endless deferral is essentially what defines the contemporary, as U. also related elsewhere that the parachutist, as well as the Koob-Sassen Project, can also be “conceived of as in a perpetual state of passage, not arrival – not at, but between”, which further underscores this Metamodern oscillation and in- betweenness (100). U. refers to the pervasiveness of surveillance, relating how “there’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented”, because there are cameras everywhere, and phones and the internet log every single action, forever stored “in some fold or enclave, some occluded avenue of circuitry. Nothing ever goes away” (152). However, he only approaches this anxiety through his anthropologist background, as it awakens in him the “grotesque realization” and “the truly terrifying thought” that the Great Report has “already been written” (153). Behind the corporations that enable these intrusions lies an empty system that is truly in control, as the report is written “simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself: some auto-alphaing and auto-omegating script – that that’s what it was” (153). This system, being merely an act of differentiation, has no deeper meaning, since nothing motivates the movement between these automatically oscillating poles. Not only is the system itself empty, however, it also renders peoples’ roles in it as meaningless, as “we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains” (153). People, then, are similarly controlled by mechanised, empty and oscillating movements, and especially this reference to slaves and hope is critical to the crisis that Satin Island communicates, as the contemporary does not even provide such sentiments. This realisation represents a change in U., who starts regarding both the Great Report and the Koob-Sassen project as “downright evil. Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (‘re-configuring’) the systems lying behind and bearing on virtually their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it…” (154). U., however, embodies an act of failed resistance, as these realisations induce him to resist oppressing systems, yet he never actually attempts to protest against anything and remains a silent cog in the empty machine. When U.’s conference talk, for example, is met with indifference, he dreams up a revised revolutionary speech, but never makes any attempt Hemelaar 4222946\ 50 to deliver it. Similarly, the funeral of U.’s friend Petr, who has died of typhoid cancer, represents a “litany of falsehoods” because it provides only false factual information about him (175). However, while U. imagines a violent act of revolutionary upheaval, he confesses that “needless to say, we – I – didn’t actually do any of these things. I just sat there, seething with quiet fury that this act of personal and cosmic fraudulence would never be requited” (175). This demonstrates how he embodies a Metamodernist oscillation between direction and futility, as he is pushed and pulled between these two acts by desiring but not achieving anything. When it comes to offering resistance to the oppressive systems, U. aestheticises acts of violent resistance. He imagines a “cohort” of anthropologists joining together for the “cause”: “together, we could turn Present-Tense Anthropology™ into an armed resistance movement: I pictured them scurrying around to my command, setting the charges, using their ethnographic skills to foment riots, to assemble lynch-mobs, to make urban space itself, its very fabric, rise up in revolt” (156-157). This “armed struggle” is compared to “the way those Baader-Meinhof people – highly educated, liberal-arts degrees in their back pockets – ran around causing mayhem. They wore such good clothes! Shirts with big, big collars; aviator sunglasses; flared cords. And they’d have sex with one another all the time” (159). Ultimately, it is not so much the core of the armed resistance that excites U., but rather, its glossy, glamorous surface. He envisions grand schemes of change, but he is himself too caught up in the faceless, empty system of surfaces to generate any form of meaningful liberation. Moreover, he wonders whether there would even be anything to fight against, referring to the ubiquitous invisibility of the faceless system: “the thwarted saboteurs that I myself had mobilized then turned my back on (…) wouldn’t know who to shoot when they came looking for the traitor” (179). U.’s lover Madison did make an actual attempt at offering resistance to the system, albeit also unsuccessfully. She demonstrated against the G8 summit in Genoa, where the protestors received inhumane, humiliating treatment from the police: “I saw this one guy’s chest crumple as they stamped on it – and heard his ribs cracking too. It’s a strange sound, she told me; a bit like those old chocolate bars – the ones with the synthetic honeycomb inside, that used to crunch when you bit into them” (178). Remarkably, it is not the atrocity of violence that strikes Madison and U., but rather its aesthetics. Madison was arrested and sent her to a room where she would be transformed into a human transmitter, as she encountered “a piece of electronic hardware. Maybe a receiver, a detector, wavelength modulator, I don’t know. It was old too: the kind of thing they’d have used twenty years ago, perhaps more. It made an electronic noise” (186). A man tunes the machine, and after Hemelaar 4222946\ 51 sending an electric surge through Madison, he forces her to pose with him. They follow the noise of the machine, as if it guides them. These poses are not erotic, but instead their purpose is to fall into alignment with “the machine, the rhythms of its crackles, bees and oscillations”, in order to become transmitters themselves, which appears to profoundly move the man (191). Accordingly, they act “as if (the machine’s) jags and vacillations meant something” and Madison initially thinks that it sends instructions (189). After a while, Madison too starts recognising a meaning behind the noise, “something that sounded a little bit like children’s voices (…) just shouts and chirps and little bits of sing-song – general infant babble” (190). Consequently, the relation between them and the machine elevates them above time, and Madison experiences it as being brought to the essence and origin of humanity: “time seemed to have stopped. We could have been the only people in the world – the first ever people, new Eve and Adam. Time seemed, she said again, to have just… stopped: to be suspended” (192). Eventually Madison discovers that this is merely an illusion, as the voices she had been hearing were actually children’s voices from outside. It renders the entire experience empty, and this again recalls the oscillation between meaning and non- meaning. Simultaneously, Madison symbolises the merging of human and machine, as she herself has become the extension of a transmitter, which represents a futuristic reversal of natural and mechanical. Justus Nieland argues that McCarthy’s approach to media could be understood as “Only transmit!”, underscoring transmission as a profound aspect of McCarthy’s modernist approach to literature (57). Essentially, to McCarthy literature is about the expression of a “humanist myth of the self”, but rather “of transmission, an act of broadcasting, a scattering of seeds, a dissemination without origin and within an undecidable horizon of listeners” (57). Nieland points out, “what we encounter in literature is ‘not a self, but a network’ of transmissions”, and as such it is not the human connections that Satin Island underscores, but rather the transmissions that communicate something (58). Transmissions, then, replace U.’s failed attempt at creating connections, which is exemplified by how he finds exhilaration in inhuman entities and mechanised operations. However, as Madison’s experience has demonstrated, these operations merely represent empty rituals, and their enactments are essentially meaningless, too. U. mentions the mechanised rituals of the Cargo Cult, in which the Vanuatan tribe re-enacts modern Western rituals, which exemplifies this. During the Second World War, American soldiers camped at their land, and they brought their modern appliances with them. The Vanuatans regarded the American customs as “elaborate rituals, ones whose outcomes were both Hemelaar 4222946\ 52 concrete and desirable. Who wouldn’t want a fridge in a tropical climate, or tinned food where foraging and hunting are arduous?” (102) After the war ended the Americans flew back with their modern technology, and Vanuatans started to re-enact their rituals: “like anthropologists, they’d studied the bat-waving routines, learnt the choreography of military salutation, noted down the chains of tower-to-pilot scripture, and so on” because they believed that these “ceremonies (…) had caused the bounty-laden planes to appear in the first place” (102-103). The tribe genuinely believes that the technology embodies some deeper meaning, and by re-enacting these ‘rituals’ they expect to gain similar access. As Satin Island demonstrates, however, rituals are meaningless and so is their re-enactment. This, however, profoundly fascinates U., who finds satisfaction in this type of meaningless repetition. As he, for example, discovers that the death of the parachutist is similar to that of many others, he relates how this replication “started buzzers ringing all over my head – and made the case of my own parachutist (…) all the more gripping: an originally un-original even becoming even more un-original, and hence even more fascinating” (75). U. also aestheticises pollution, which undermines conceptions of organic and contamination. As such, Satin Island expresses the notion that nothing is truly pristine or pure, but that everything is polluted. U. also applies his fascination with glossy surfaces to digital technology, as he revels in the aesthetics of an empty document page on his computer screen. However, when he accidentally opens a news-page, it impinges “on the clean neutrality both of the screen and of my mind” as it appears “like some malicious genie, taking the screen over – and in an instant, all the extraneous clutter, all the world-debris, that I’d so painstakingly eliminated flooded back into the clearing, ruining it” (112). The appearance of reality on the screens, thus, ruins the aesthetics of ‘pure’ technology. This obsession with a ‘clean’, glossy surface becomes most apparent in the manner in which U. aestheticises natural disasters. At the airport in Turin, he comes across news footage of an oil spill, and he subsequently obsessively fantasises about it. U., however, fails to recognise the oil’s disastrous effects on nature, and he instead regards it as a natural, enhancing process. Re-watching the footage, he imagines a “sweet, familiar scent of home- made toffee at the point – that magical instant – of caramelization” (43). Both the oil itself, as well as the “odourless relays of fibre-optic cable, through the mangling of digital compression, the delays, decays and abstractions brought about by storage and conversion” transmit this (43). Moreover, neither does U. display affect for the polluted animals, as he instead emphasises their glossy surfaces, which “looked like PVD, like fetish gear”, and compares it to “a sluttish Aphrodite frolicking in blackened foam, her face adorned with the Hemelaar 4222946\ 53 look that readers’ wives and models have in dirty magazines” (61). This obsession entirely takes over U.’s thoughts, as he subsequently envisions all his other studies through the same oil-covered coating. The Koob-Sassen Project’s super-structure, too, represents a veil of oil that is “black and inscrutable, opaque” (94). As such, oil pollution becomes the natural condition of the contemporary, and in the revised conference speech that U. imagines, he points out that oil spills even enhance nature. As oil represents “a continuum in which all plurals drown”, it covers anything underneath its smooth surface (128). He argues that it represents “differentiation in its purest form: the very principle of differentiation. Ones and zeroes, p and not-p: oil, water. Behind all behaviour, issuing constructions, sending in the plays – just as behind life itself, its endless sequencing of polymers – there lies a source-code. This is the base premise of all anthropology” (129). As such, the oil emphasises meaning as a set of automatically opposing, oscillating poles, essentially rendering it meaningless. This, however, should be regarded as “an improvement”, because “oil has more consistency than water: it is denser, more substantial – and thus brings the latter into it own more fully, expressing the sea’s splendour in a manner more articulate, (…) more lyrical” (130-131). Ironically, then, oil enhances the natural conditions of water and U. projects drama unfolding upon it. While the oil obscures the ocean’s underlying depths, the full focus is turned towards its glossy surface. The animals are elevated to “martyrs – and, in so becoming, are infused with all the pathos and nobility of tragic heroes. Living Pompeiians! Victims of the oil Gorgon!” as they are “improved: augmented, transformed into monumental versions of themselves” (132). The “true environmentalist” is then someone who enhances the beauty of nature by polluting it (134). As such, U. celebrates emptied surfaces, but he also acts as if the meaning that he projects upon them enhances their very nature. Consequently, oil embodies the fundamental condition of the contemporary, and meaning becomes a smooth surface, as the “flow of oil” represents the “flow of time itself: slowly but inevitable crawling, in a series of identical, repeating pulses, to some final shoreline? It embodies time, contains it: future, present, past” (138). As the fundamental condition of humanity, then, U. also compares oil to Petr’s cancer, which further underscores this reversal of natural and unnatural. The iodine Petr takes as a medicine makes him “radioactive”, as he oozes “rays and isotopes, like a plutonium rod” (45). It reveals how humans, too, are essentially a mechanical system of differentiation, as the cancer is compared to a problem in Petr’s database: “it’s a systems problem, Petr said. If we had a better database, then I’d be out of danger” (65). Because the treatment of iodine does not cure Petr, his cells are sent to a lab in Greece that experiments with curing the disease by Hemelaar 4222946\ 54 injecting his cells with “all kinds of natural things”, such as “cells from honey, and thyme, and rosemary, and the sweat of humming-birds” (92) When the lab eventually finds a potential match in the juice of Jaffa oranges from the Middle East, U. regards this as profoundly disturbing, imaging the Middle Eastern landscape as filled with “observation posts” and “ugly modern concrete topped with barbed wire”, as well the “oil wells” that blacken “the orange groves as well as they drifted across these, leaving tarry deposits on trees’ barks, on leaves and on the fruit itself” (106) As such, U. initially regards the polluted landscape with “all its hatred, all its violence, all its blackness” as a threat to Petr, instinctively knowing that “he was going to die” (106). However, as U. witnesses this blackness take over Petr’s body, he also aestheticises it, regarding it as a natural, enhancing process. Both the smudges and blackness that he envisions to have fully infiltrated patients and the hospital room were “in fact totally correct. It was the world, its stuff, that had left its deposit – on the windows and in Petr’s bones, his organs, his flesh and arteries. The stuff of the world is black” (168). This recalls Petr’s return to purity, and U. thinks that he has

in an almost literal sense, become an angel; looking around the ward, I grew convinced that it was also full of angels: figures whom the world had so deeply penetrated, flooded, impregnated that, refined in them, its forms and colours stripped down to their pure, constituent goo, it emanated back out from them – not as light but as its opposite: this formless, nameless blackness so dense and concentrated, so intense and blinding that, confronted by it, mortals like me had to shield our eyes. (168-169).

Similar to the animals affected by oil, then, the blackness enhances the human condition, as it overlays any depths with a smooth surface onto which U. projects the fundamental, albeit essentially empty, meaning of human existence that is so pure that it is blinding. This is further underscored through U.’s conceptualisation of Satin Island, which embodies the aestheticizing of mankind’s filth. U. envisions “Satin Island” to consist of “buildings – huge, derelict factories whose outer walls and rafters, barely intact, recalled the shells of bombed cathedrals – ran one into the next to form a single giant, half-ruined complex that covered the island’s entire surface area. Inside this complex, rubbish was being burnt” (162). As such, the island’s present reality is built on the consummation of mankind’s past waste, which corresponds to the ocean gyres of trash in A Tale for the Time Being. It is derived from Staten Island, which is New York’s “forgotten borough, the great dump” (165). Hemelaar 4222946\ 55

Ironically, satin refers to something that is soft and smooth, “a glossy surface” opposed to the dirtiness that U. envisions (165). At the end of the novel U. travels to Staten Island, expecting to finally find his moment of true epiphany, that “something would happen” (214). The view of Staten Island is “idyllic”, as it appears to eradicate time completely: “cruising (so it seemed) right out of time, past all statutes and limits, to some other place where everything, even our crimes, had been composted down, mulched over, transformed into moss, pasture and wetland for the duck and coot to build their nests in” (209). As the ferry nears its destination, U. envisions reaching the epiphany, as “a vertiginous excitement at the prospect of this happening: a space meeting its inverse, negative and positive coming together, merging into one; and at the prospect of finding myself standing at the very point where this great fusion was occurring” (210). Typically Metamodernist, however, U. soon realises that his fantasies are meaningless, that there is, in fact, nothing behind Satin Island’s glossy surface. Before he even reaches the island, he decides to travel back, arguing that: “to go to Staten Island – actually go there – would have been profoundly meaningless. What would it, in reality, have solved, or resolved? Nothing (213). Consequently, U. returns to Metamodernist state of oscillation, wading “back through the relentless place, suspended between tow types of meaninglessness” (213). In search for the modernist epiphany, U. eventually realises that the grand-narrative he desires does, in fact, not exist. By emptying out emotion and meaning, Satin Island revisits Forster’s motto ‘only connect’. The novel does not foreground the importance of human connection to counter crisis, but instead appears to embrace crisis by aestheticising glossed over surfaces of contamination and by presenting these as the fundamental condition of the contemporary. It is, however, precisely in this lack of affect and psychological depth expressed in U. that McCarthy communicates the novel’s ethical commitment. Through the ‘as-if’ approach to meaning and truth, the uneasy relation between surface and depth and its emphasis on in-betweenness the novel also seamlessly fits into Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s conceptions of Metamodernism. It would almost appear as if this novel is modelled after their conception, or the other way around. While Satin Island futuristically revels in contamination and emphasises acts of failed resistance, in the next chapter I will discuss how Ali Smith’s Winter establishes the exact opposite, as it underscores nature’s potential to renew itself and the importance of political protest in the current political climate. Hemelaar 4222946\ 56

Chapter 4 “Panic. Attack. Exclude”: Metamodern Connectivity in Ali Smith’s Winter

Set during “a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning”, Ali Smith’s Winter (2017) embodies anxieties about political unrest, environmental contamination and digital technology (4-5). Smith criticises myths of antipathy and xenophobia that permeate the contemporary political climate in Britain and emphasises the importance of human connection and natural renewal. Winter is the second instalment of Smith’s seasonal quartet, continuing Autumn’s (2016) themes with different characters. As it responds to the unrest caused by the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States, Winter portrays the consequences of crisis on a disrupted family that is unable to connect with one another and with reality. The Cleve family is ‘cleaved’, as the sisters Sophia and Iris, both in their seventies, have not talked to each other in decades because of their opposing political beliefs. Arthur, Sophia’s son, wants to visit his mother for Christmas with his ex-girlfriend Charlotte, but, ashamed of their recent break-up, he pays a stranger £1000 to impersonate her. This is Lux, a Croatian-born Canadian student, whose immigrant status prevents her from finding stability, and who is eventually able to connect the family. Similar to A Tale for the Time Being, Winter portrays genuine hope for a better future and emphasises the importance of connectivity in countering crisis. Moreover, by revealing how contemporary reality consists of fictional mythology and by exposing the tensions between surfaces and depths, Winter also corresponds to Satin Island. Smith’s novels ‘oscillate’, to use Timotheus Vermeulen’s and Robin van den Akker’s term, between modernism and postmodernism with their playful use of language, meta- textual elements, the emphasis on non-linearity and the undermining of binary norms. Monica Germanà and Emily Horton argue that Smith’s work embodies a “tension between modernist and postmodernist influences and identifications”, as the essays in their collection “challenge Smith’s postmodern designation” by “positioning it in some ways as an extension of modernism” (6). It displays concerns that are linked “to the formal and political preoccupation of postmodernism”, including her “questioning of overarching meta- narratives, her awareness to language’s fluidity and heterogeneous meaning, and her fascination with liminal boundaries between reality and fiction, truth and lies”, as well as her “political despondency” with regards to “the disaffected, apathetic responses generated by the politics and aesthetics of twenty-first-century media” (4). Smith also incorporates modernist innovative sensibilities, “particularly in its concern for formal consciousness and Hemelaar 4222946\ 57 experiment”, following the example modernist authors including as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield (5). Moreover, Germanà and Horton underscore Smith’s concern for contemporary anxieties, as they argue that “her ethical and political preoccupations offer insightful critiques of the contemporary condition” (1). Mary Horgan specifically connects Smith’s ethical and political preoccupations with her approach to modernism. In her reading of Hotel World (2001), she argues that Smith’s treatment of money corresponds to the modernist ethical agenda. Horgan defines this as “numismatic modernism”, which “constructs a creative, critical response to capitalist modernity by closely engaging with its materials and contexts” (156). As such, Smith uses modernism to address the contemporary “and its pressing social concerns, to ethical and political gain” (166). Although Germanà, Horton and Horgan establish an explicit connection between modernism, postmodernism and Smith’s political and ethical commitment, neither of them refer to Metamodernism. Metamodernism could, however, be a valuable concept to define Smith’s ethical approach to crises. Winter opens with a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche that signals the end of belief: “God was dead: to begin with”, along with many other things, including “romance”, “chivalry”, “poetry, the novel, painting”, “history”, “culture”, “politics”, “democracy” “decency, society, family values” and even “modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead” (3). Smith portrays contemporary society as so profoundly permeated by crisis that past values seem irrelevant, as the novel concludes that “a great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead” (4). While this initially appears to set the tone for a pessimistic narrative, the novel tells its readers to “imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower” (4). As such, Smith emphasises how beauty will always remain hidden underneath any crisis, which resonates throughout the novel. Autumn was published shortly after the Brexit referendum and displays the initial feeling of unease and disillusionment over the outcome. As Kristian Shaw points out, this novel “offers a sustained mediation on the anus mirabilis (sic) that changed the political and cultural landscape of the twenty-first-century society, embedding the contemporaneous events of the EU referendum within a wider cyclical process of British history and natural decline” (18). Winter continues this project, and, published after Trump’s election to presidency, it more explicitly criticises xenophobic politics. Smith has voiced her aversion to this xenophobia and emphasised fiction’s role in countering it, arguing that “the novel matters because Donald Trump. Do I need to add another verb to that?” (“The Novel” 40). Hemelaar 4222946\ 58

Furthermore, she connects this to language, pointing out that “just as much as a time of Trump will have its effect on language, language will reveal the workings of the era of Trump” (40). This emphasis on language is relevant to Winter, because Smith critiques empty, constructed political mythologies. Winter directly responds to recent political events, mentioning, for example, an incident on 31 January 2017, when Nicholas Soames from the Conservative Party barked at opposition member Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh for questioning Trump’s decision to close the borders of the United States to Muslims. Such incidents are placed outside the novel’s main narrative, and as they do not represent opinions voiced by any of the characters, they feature as general statements that demonstrate Smith’s disbelief towards them. Winter ends with Trump’s speech at the Celebrate Freedom Rally on 1 July 2017:

he talks about the words that are written on American money as if it’s money itself that’s the prayer. (…) And by the way, under the Trump administration, he says, you’ll be saying Merry Christmas again when you go shopping, believe me. Merry Christmas, They’ve been downplaying that little beautiful phrase. You’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks. In the middle of summer it’s winter. White Christmas. Gold help us, every one.2 (321-322)

As Trump has brought winter to the middle of summer, natural seasons reveal how the world is out of order. Moreover, by portraying Christmas as a capitalist endeavour and by inviting his listeners “to boo the last President and to boo the name if his own opponent in last year’s election”, Trump replaces the Christmas spirit of love and connectivity by materialism and antagonism (322). Winter is also concerned with environmental contamination and the mass culture of digital technology. Another isolated section of the novel portrays headlines of contemporary newsfeeds that consist of a culmination of disasters, including “that there is now 80% more plastic in the earth’s seas and on its shores than estimated”, that “there’s an attack taking place on MPs by MPs of the same party who don’t agree with them”, and “that a poll has found that citizens of this country oppose a unilateral guarantee for the citizens who live here and who are originally from a lot of other countries to be able to stay here with full rights of residents after a certain date” (219-220). To summarise, they represent only “Panic.

2 Emphasis not mine. Applies to all subsequent quotes from Winter. Hemelaar 4222946\ 59

Attack. Exclude” (220). Charlotte also describes these anxieties when she fights with Arthur about his ignorance. Not only is this winter uncharacteristically warm, she argues: “never mind literal climate change, there’s been a whole seasonal shift. It’s like walking in a blizzard all the time just trying to get to what’s really happening beyond the noise and hype” (58). Similar to how Trump’s presidency is described, then, Smith uses nature to reveal how current political climate is unnaturally chaotic. Winter demonstrates the consequences of crisis within the family. Horton refers to how the family in Smith’s The Accidental (2005) “represent(s) the ethical disaster of contemporary bourgeois society”, which is also relevant to the Cleves, who symbolise a microcosm of contemporary Britain (644). Winter recalls E.M. Forster’s Howards End, not only because the characters’ incompatible political ideologies prevent them to ‘only connect’, but also because the novel’s main setting is an old Cornish country house. Appropriately named ‘Chei Bre’, meaning ‘House of the Mind’, the house brings together the opposing mindsets. Sophia’s name represents wisdom, and accordingly she prides herself in her common sense and endlessly philosophises about beauty. However, as the Scrooge in this Christmas Carol, she is unable to display empathy because she only focuses on surfaces. Sophia became a businesswoman selling imported goods while she was still at college, making “a fistful of money out of Afghan coats” (122). Ironically, she is hostile towards foreigners, even though she has established her fortune through them. She has inherited this xenophobia from her father, who displayed “an abiding hatred of people from particular other countries, from his time in the war” and his work in finance (113). When Lux asks which war she refers to, Sophia replies: “don’t be obtuse (…). The war. The Second World War” (113). The manner in which Sophia refers to this war reveals her Anglocentric mindset. Moreover, although she believes to be “from a more open-minded generation”, she is very conservative (113). This is apparent in Sophia’s disillusionment with contemporary society, as she longs for the past. When Sophia has her eyes tested, she assumes that everything the younger optician tells her is an insult. As she informs Sophia that her eyes are “good as new”, Sophia replies: “you’re inferring I’ve spent my life going around with me eyes shut, or been remiss in some way in fully using them?” (16). Ironically, while Sophia has perfect vision, she is unable to see the world clearly, as she is not able to connect or feel empathy. This becomes clear when she visits the bank and despises its younger employees, longing for “the bank managers of yesteryear” with “their suits, their assurances, their knowing tips, their promises, their clever politesse, their expensive embossed personally signed Christmas cards” (33). Hemelaar 4222946\ 60

When the “Individual Personal Adviser” informs Sophia that money is now manufactured mainly for machines and that bank employees will soon become obsolete, she sees “a flush” on his “neck, ears and cheekbones” (35). Rather than assuming this may signify his fear of being fired, Sophia concludes that the employees have “started Christmas-party drinking early. He didn’t look old enough to drink legally. He looked for a moment like he might actually start to cry. He was pathetic. His preoccupations were nothing to her; why should they be?” (35). Nothing actually raises Sophia’s empathy, as she similarly cannot connect to the suffering of others: “Sophia had been feeling nothing for some time now. Refugees in the sea. Children in ambulances. Blood-soaked men running to hospitals or away from burning hospitals carrying blood-covered children. Dust-covered dead people by the sides of the roads. Atrocities. People beaten up and tortured in cells. Nothing” (29-30). Neither does the suffering of fellow English people touch her, however, because also “ordinary everyday terribleness, ordinary people just walking around on the streets of the country she’d grown up in, who looked ruined, Dickensian, like poverty ghosts from a hundred and fifty years ago” generates “nothing” (30). This statement demonstrates the despair experienced among many British in the current political climate. Sophia’s apathy undermines her pride in her good sense. When Arthur visits her during Christmas he finds her in a state of disarray. She is skinny, has barely eaten in days, talks to herself and is wearing too many layers of clothes, despite it not being cold. Sophia has been hallucinating, as a couple of days before Christmas she is visited by a “disembodied head. It was the head of a child, just a head, no body attached, floating by itself in mid air” (7). The head silently follows her and is a reference to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as Sophia travels across time as the clock strikes midnight, Christmas Eve. The memories of her childhood, young adulthood and early years as a mother expose her indifference to others. Sophia’s memories reveal her aversion towards Iris’ political activism, whose lifestyle of communal living she critiques as a “weak excuse for living irresponsibly. Illegal dirty hippy-hangover pseudo-romantic squat” (117). In 1977 Sophia shared a Christmas with Iris and her activist friends, who at that time occupied the Cornish house that she bought years later. By informing her about environmental contamination and political injustice the activists attempt to interest Sophia in their cause. One story is about a chemical leak from an Italian factory that had not been reported to the authorities:

nobody there had even really known there was a leak till all the leaves had fallen off the place’s trees, dead like winter though it was July, and its birds had fallen dead out Hemelaar 4222946\ 61

of the sky, and cats and rabbits and other small creatures had keeled over dead. Then the people who lived locally started taking their children to the hospital because their faces had broken out in rashes and boils. (119)

Expressing their concern, the activists have scribbled the names of chemical warfare agents on the walls, which Sophia thinks “looked like a nonsense Scrabble game the people living here had painted round the room’s cornicing, still quite elegant regardless of the disrepair” (120). This demonstrates how Sophia only sees surfaces, as she refers to the aesthetics of the words rather than their meaning, whose gravity she cannot deduce. Because this incident took place in Italy, Sophia is also unable to connect it to her own environment, stating that “it was terrible what could happen in other countries” (121). As Iris’ friends start laughing “as if she’d made a very funny joke”, she does not realise that similar leaks occur in Britain, where similar experiments with nuclear and biological warfare occur (121). Sophia believes that beauty represents the essence of humanity and consolidates any suffering, even, as Iris mocks her, “recession or austerity”: “beauty is the true way to change things for the better. To make things better. There should be a lot more beauty in all our lives. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. There is no such thing as fake beauty. Which is why beauty is so powerful. Beauty assuages” (211). As such, she can only connect with the beauty of surfaces. Conservative in taste, she prefers her life to resemble “a perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she’s in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that’s thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank God” (31). Moreover, Sophia does not want any issues to interfere with the quality of the fiction, thereby favouring the admiration of beauty over the acknowledgement of any political atrocities, picturing a setting “where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the future” (31). Sophia critiques the younger generation for not being able to see true beauty. As everything for them is filtered through screens, they cannot appreciate art. Reflecting on the Mona Lisa, for example, she thinks: “the people standing in front of it now were no longer even bothering to turn towards it. They mostly had their backs to it because they were taking pictures of themselves with it; these days that old painting was smiling its superior way at people’s back” (12). This also illustrates Sophia’s aversion to digital technology, which provides only unreliable information. Google represents Hemelaar 4222946\ 62

the new found land. Not so long ago it was only the mentally deranged, the unworldly pedants, the imperialists and the naivest of schoolchildren who believed that encyclopaediae gave you any equivalence for the actual world, or any real understanding of it. And door-to-door salesman sold them, and they were never to be trusted. And even the authorized encyclopaediae, even them we never mistook for or accepted as any real knowledge of the world. But now the world trusts search engines without a thought. The canniest door-to-door salesmen ever invented. (193)

As such, Sophia criticises people who mindlessly accept virtual information as truth, which replaces the profound understanding of the actual world. Sophia, however, also blindly follows constructed truths, believing in the logic of television, tabloids and authoritative figures. When Iris is interviewed on television about environmental contamination, Sophia believes “an expert in the studio” who states “that everything that Iris said is laughable and untrue” rather than her own sister (129). Moreover, Arthur’s childhood with his mother was dominated by television, as he remembers their Christmas celebration: “the lady who is his mother has a television that is bigger than any television he has ever seen. At his mother’s house it is Christmas all week and then it is New Year, on the television” (176). Sophia also regards the information of tabloid newspapers as accepted knowledge. When Iris undermines one of her statements by telling her she must have “read that bullshit in the Daily Mail”, Sophia has to admit that “the Daily Mail was in fact where she’d read it” (230). Similarly, she remembers that when she was thirteen she was profoundly worried about the Soviet space dog Leika. She felt relieved, however, when she read “the dog died in space after a week of orbiting the earth. It died painlessly. It said so in the paper” (237). She similarly believes in the good sense of authoritative figures. The activists mention Lord Mountbatten’s aversion to nuclear warfare, as he delivered a speech in 1979 in which he stated: “as a military man who has given half a century of active service I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose” (quoted in Malcomson 104). Sophia, however, is convinced otherwise: “as if Lord Mountbatten, a military man himself, would be anti nuclear. A military royal would never be so stupid and short sighted and blind” (265). To her, the purpose of the nuclear arms race is “obvious”, as she argues that “we need them to stop the other countries with nuclear weapons attacking us with their nuclear weapons. Simple maths” (265). This demonstrates how Sophia can only truly see the surface of reality. Hemelaar 4222946\ 63

As such, Sophia blindly accepts the mythologies produced by political structures. One of her Christmas Eve memories are about being visited by a representative of “Mr Barth”, who tells her that he requires Sophia’s help, as he admires her “very good sense” (134). He suggests that they both know “there is such a thing as truth, and that the gentle monitoring of those close to us who may or may not be charting anywhere on a fairly wide scale from person of interest to radical activist can sometimes be crucial in disproving their involvement in certain circumstances” (133). As such, he refers to a superstructure of surveillance and production of truth in order to prevent citizens from protesting. Moreover, he argues that “the answer to life’s mysteries”, is the question of “into whose myth do we choose to buy?” (134) The novel hereby references to Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1952), in which Barthes analysed an array of cultural and political phenomena that have become myths. These perpetuate ideas of society that are intertwined with political ideology and social status. Sophia’s ‘truths’ are thus actually politically constructed mythologies, because she does attempt to uncover the depths underneath their surfaces. Iris has devoted her life to undermining these myths. Her name signifies both a flower, which reveals her preoccupation with the environment, and the eye. Although Iris clearly sees the disastrous consequences of capitalism, xenophobic exclusion and environmental contamination, she is nevertheless unable to connect these anxieties to everyday life. Sophia regards Iris’ activism as a “bloody liability” to their family: “wasting her life. Warned and warned again. Reputation. Known to the authorities. Police record” (139). Ironically, Iris is represented as “a hopeless mythologizer”, as Sophia tells Arthur that his aunt is “deranged. Nobody who isn’t deranged can live like she does. Psychotic. Psychotic people see the world in terms of their illusions and delusions, Arthur. You can’t expect the world to accommodate you on your own terms like she does. You can’t expect to live in the world like the world’s your private myth” (173, 156). Sophia ascribes this mythologising to political activism, but opposed to Sophia’s genuine believe in television, tabloids and authority figures, then, Iris undermines this system of mythologies. Moreover, Sophia herself has also created mythologies for Arthur, convincing him that he does not even have an aunt, as Iris tells her: “your attempt to write me out of your son’s history will fail” (300). However, what essentially antagonises the sisters is not their political ideologies but the fact that Iris constantly patronises Sophia. Instead of explaining her beliefs, Iris transforms her politics into a personal attack towards her sister and Sophia remembers their Christmas together as feeling “like a cowed child” (126). Although Iris clearly understands Hemelaar 4222946\ 64 political injustices, unlike her sister, her endless deconstruction of mythologies nevertheless prevents her from enjoying the beauty of life. Iris does not take the time to enjoy Christmas and when Sophia is watching Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), for example, she ceases it as an opportunity to lecture Sophia on the evils of capitalism: “Great film. Iris starts talking about the new dictatorship of the media and the new feudal system the tabloids are milking, the readers the slaves of their propaganda” (264). Similarly, while it is important to point out the lies about “thousands of holidaymakers arriving every day” “from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq”, Iris transforms this into a personal attack towards Sophia and her conservative friends (232). Iris is so politicised that she cannot enjoy anything, and even a Christmas dinnertime conversation becomes antagonised by her endless critique. Despite her flaws, through Iris the novel emphasises the importance of political protest and human connection. She participated in the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, a protest against nuclear weapons that began in 1981 and was not disbanded until 2000. Winter contains isolated fragments about this protest, in which Smith foregrounds how the connectivity of the protestors enabled them to endure the extreme antagonisms they faced. They were told, for example, by the Base Commander that “he’d like to machine-gun the lot of them” and opponents would “poke burning sticks through their tents made of polythene and branches, and pour pig’s blood and maggots and all forms of excrement, including human, of course, over the protesters” (147-148). However, the connectivity of the activists represents beauty, as “once, on the way, some of the marchers garlanded themselves in flowers from the hedgerows they were passing. A man said this to them when they got to the stopping place in the next town: when you walked in, you looked like goddesses. It’s by no means the last time they’ll be seen as mythical” (149). As such, Winter foregrounds the aesthetics of human connectivity in political protest, through which they endure:

the military and the police will soon discover that there’s not much action they can take, in stopping a protest by a group of singing women, that doesn’t reveal the shame and the core brutality in the action they take. In just under two years from now the first cruise missiles will arrive. In just under a year from now on a sleety December Sunday more than 30,000 women from all across the country, all across the world, will line up round the base fence, nine miles of fence and nine miles of people. They’ll join hands in a human fence. (279)

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Smith thereby argues that both political protest and human connection are essential to countering the contemporary crisis. As both sisters raised Arthur, their incompatible worldviews have caused his political ignorance, as he cannot connect politics to anything and experiences anxieties about being fake. As such, Arthur embodies contemporary Metamodernist anxieties by oscillating between opposing viewpoints which results in a feeling of profound unease about something that he cannot apprehend. Arthur follows Sophia’s political conceptions and preoccupation with surfaces, yet he constantly feels guilty about not being real after Charlotte broke up with him because of his ignorance. They argued, for example, about Arthur’s indifference to refugees, Charlotte stating that “we didn’t need to feel responsible because it had been their choice to run away from their houses being burned down and bombed and then their choice again to get into a boat that capsized?” (55). Moreover, as Charlotte argues that Brexit is a culmination “of forty years of political selfishness”, Arthur argues: “as if you can talk about the effect of forty years of politics with any real knowledge when you yourself, if you’re Charlotte, have only lived twenty nine. It is stultifying. No, what it is, really, is a from of self- hurt” (56). As such, he regards current political anxieties as isolated, unconnected incidents. Similar to his mother, Arthur is preoccupied with beauty, as his name suggests, and specifically with finding art in nature. He writes about this on his blog ‘Art in Nature’, to which Charlotte refers to as an “irrelevant reactionary blog” because he does not write about environmental issues (58). To Arthur politics represents something that is bound to a specific time, whereas nature embodies a cycle of growth and regrowth: “what I do is by its nature not political. Politics is transitory. What I do is the opposite of transitory. I watch the progress of they year in the fields, I look closely at the structures of hedgerows. Hedgerows are, well, they’re hedgerows. They just aren’t political” (59). Ironically, since hedgerows actually function as fences, they are political, especially in a time when minorities are being fenced off. Arthur, however, is unable to detect any depth underneath surface meanings and he cannot connect the contemporary political situation to a larger historical and global narrative. To take revenge on Arthur’s political ignorance, Charlotte steals his Twitter account and starts “sending out fake tweets”, telling his followers, for example, that “he’d seen the first brimstone of the new year cycle. 3 months early the first sieg hting of brimstone ! She is also making spelling mistakes on purpose to make him look stupid and slapdash” (49). The fake tweets receive hateful replies, including “one tweet which said if you were a woman I’d be sending you a death threat right about now” (50). The fact that Arthur thinks that this could be a “po-mo joke” instead of a sexist threat itself reveals his ignorance (50). Hemelaar 4222946\ 66

Consequently, Arthur starts experiencing anxieties about his authenticity, thinking that “he is not the real thing” and feeling as if he does not belong in contemporary society because he has nothing to contribute: he is “not an idiot. An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. (…) he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes” (49, 87). As such, the internet distorts Arthur’s experience of reality. Moreover, the twittering is also a reference to Trump’s political posts and ‘fake news’. Directly referring to this connection between Trump and Arthur, Iris mentions that “soon instead of reality TV we’ll have the President of the United States. She holds out an iPad to Art. Thought you should see your latest tweet, she says. According to your feed you’ve just told 16,000 people that a bird that’s usually only resident in Canada’s been seen in a rare sighting today of the coast of Cornwall” (182). Charlotte’s fake news actually becomes reality when on Christmas day a bus of bird- watchers arrives at Sophia’s house. Following the tweet, bird-watchers have truly seen the birds, as the tourists are “going to check all the sighting locations, the maybes and the verified” (192). Iris further underscores this connection when she argues that Trump’s “selfish generation” only talks about themselves, and that she is going to tweet about herself “like a president. I’ll do it presidentially. I mean a fake president, I’ll do it fake presidentially. Art’s chest contracts. She knows, he thinks. His heart sinks. Everybody knows the fake I am” (183). Arthur’s constructed online identity has thus distorted his actual reality because he no longer thinks of himself as a real person. Arthur’s anxieties also induce him with nightmares in which nature forces its politics onto him. He dreams about “being chased by monstrous flowers” and fears “being eaten alive by their “petals like jaws, stamen erect and quivering the sizes of a bettering ram” as they punish him for his political ignorance (151). It leads him to conclude that “it is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser- than-thou” (158). This oscillation between profound subconscious political awareness and conscious political ignorance represents an ‘as-if’ thinking in Arthur’s generation, corresponding to Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s conception of Metamodernism. Sophia remembers Arthur having these dreams in his childhood as a result to Iris’ upbringing, as her lectures about environmental contamination gave Arthur nightmares. He dreamed, for example, about running through a cornfield when he suddenly realises “that he and all the other children running through the field had been poisoned just by breathing in and out getting on their skin the chemicals that the farmers have used to spray corn. And that though it was still a sunny day and the corn was still a lovely yellow colour they were all going to Hemelaar 4222946\ 67 die” (240). Iris has induced Arthur with a sense of postmodern futility because she is insensitive to the fact that her preoccupations are not appropriate children’s stories. Sophia, similarly ignorant, however, teaches Arthur utopian ignorance, telling him “none of it is true”, “because why would the people who do things in the world want anything but the best for the world?” (240-1). Because of these anxieties, Arthur longs for “the essentiality of winter, not this half- season grey selfsameness. He wants real winter where woods are sheathed with snow, trees emphatic with its white, their bareness shining and enhanced because of it (…) For snow to fill this room and cover everything and everyone in it” (215). As such, the essence of winter communicates certain aesthetics to Arthur, as it not only reinstates his mother’s preoccupation with surface beauty, it also resonates back to U.’s desire for smooth, glossed over surfaces in Satin Island. What Arthur receives, however, is a vision, “a foot and a half above all their heads, floating, precarious, suspended by nothing, a piece of rock or a slab of landscape roughly the size of a small car or a grand piano is hanging there in the air”, which, like the Sword of Damocles, looms threateningly above his head (215). As the landmass “will crush them all when it falls. But it hangs there. It doesn’t fall”, it refers to the ever-present peril of environmental contamination and global warming (216). Nature has literally invaded Arthur’s vision as it attempt to wake him up from his political ignorance. Stephen M. Levin refers to the stranger’s arrival in Smith’s novels as “an occasion to meet the other with a stance of radical hospitality, and as an ‘event’ that creates the conditions for new modes of attachment and love” (46). Moreover, their arrival “precipitates a loss of mastery that can, through gestures of radical love and empathy, reconfigure social norms and intersubjective bonds” (46-47). In other words, the guests offer an alternative perspective by changing the family dynamic and by forging connections and a deeper bonding experience between the family members. This is Lux’ role, who, as her name suggests, sheds light on the ruptured family by connecting their incompatible worldviews. She also brings Arthur’s anxieties into perspective and represents a voice against the anti- immigrant discourse that Sophia and Arthur employ. As Arthur pays Lux for impersonating Charlotte, the service she provides reveals how monetary and cultural exchanges within the European Union are mutually beneficial. Lux is mysterious, wears many piercings, and Arthur thinks that it is “probably a bad idea anyway to think to hook up in any way with the kind of person who hasn’t got a phone” (68). She is, however, the only one who can connect to Sophia. It was Lux’ idea to call Iris in order to reinvigorate the doting Sophia. Ironically, after meeting her in a state of disrepair, Hemelaar 4222946\ 68

Lux is the only one who she truly listens to and who is able to feed her. Moreover, Lux uncovers the artifice that permeates both Sophia’s and Arthur’s lives. Sophia still keeps old stock of her previous goods, which consists of furniture and decoration that is purposefully created to look old. When she questions Arthur about this, he explains: “that’s what people like buying just now (…). Household stuff that looks like it has a history. Like you can buy yourself a pretend history for your house or yourself” (177-178). Similarly, Lux questions the authenticity of Arthur’s blog, asking him about his real experiences. Arthur responds that he never writes from experience, but that “it’s a good general sort of invented shareable memory for the people who’ll read the blog” and that his made-up descriptions “help people situate themselves inside the piece of writing” (188). Essentially, then, “none of it is real” (188). When Lux questions Arthur why he does not write from his own experiences, he replies: “oh I couldn’t ever write something like that and put it online” because “it’s way too real” (189). This underscores how the constructed reality of the internet and the actual reality of everyday life are incompatible. Lux also motivates Arthur to question his previous ignorance, inviting him to see politics in perspective as she tells him that it is all about “what we believe is happening” (164). When Arthur tells her about his vision of the floating landmass, showing bits of earth in his hair to convince her that it was real, Lux replies that he reminds her of “the literature doctor (…) The man who wrote the dictionary. Johnson. Not Boris. The opposite of Boris. A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless” (284-285). As such, Lux invites Arthur to look underneath the surfaces to uncover the truth, opposed to the current political climate in which words no longer reveal any sort of meaning, because “where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing?” (287). Lux also adds a human dimension to the politics of exclusion. She tells the family that “now I can’t get a good job because nobody knows if I’ll still be able to be here this time next year or when they decide we have to go. So I’m keeping myself below the radar” (247). She reveals the political hypocrisy when she points out the strangeness of “talking about a room of the future when people like so much to buy new things that look like old things, and the only room I’m used to hearing people talk about is the no room, the no more room” (205). When Sophia answers Charlotte by pointing out that there is indeed no more room, and that immigrants come to Britain “because they want our lives”, Lux argues:

But what will the world do (…) if we can’t solve the problem of the millions and millions of people with no home to go to or whose homes aren’t good enough, except Hemelaar 4222946\ 69

by saying go away and building fences and walls? It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. (206)

As such, the politics of exclusion represent only poor temporary ‘solutions’, as they cannot solve the essence of the issue. Even though Sophia does not change her beliefs, Lux is, unlike Iris, nevertheless able to humanise with Sophia and to actually make her listen (206). Although she represents the same political belief as Iris, Lux thus connects with Arthur and Sophia because she humanises political issues. Moreover, unlike Iris, Lux does enjoy beauty. She explains that she came to the United Kingdom because she felt inspired by Shakespeare’s Cymbaline: “a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning (…). Where everybody is pretending to be someone or something else, Lux says. And you can’t see for the life of you how any of it will resolve in the end, because it’s such a tangled-up messed-up farce of a mess” (200). Essentially, what causes the problems in the play is similar to what contemporary society lacks, namely human connection, as if people live “in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other’s worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story” (201). Believing that if these issues could be resolved “into this graceful thing it is at the end where the balance comes back and all the lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated”, Lux decided to move to the United Kingdom, regarding it as a place of beauty and hope (200). Moreover, when she is asked to describe the most beautiful thing that she has ever encountered, Lux describes the mark on a flower that is left in a Cymbaline manuscript: “a mark made on words by a flower (…). It looks like nothing. It looks like maybe someone made a stain with water, like an oily smudge. Until you look properly at it. Then there’s the line of the neck and the rosebud shape at the end of it” (212). As such, Lux is not only able to see beauty, unlike Iris, but this vision of beauty underneath the play that is essentially about a society ridden with crisis reveals how it signifies hope, not only that everything will be resolved, but that even in the darkest of times there is still beauty to hold onto. Because of Lux’ interfering, the family is able to connect. While Sophia remains politically conservative, she is nevertheless able to communicate with Iris. They sleep next to Hemelaar 4222946\ 70 each other and engage in friendly bickering instead of patronising and antagonising each other. While they continue to disagree, they do so on friendly terms by laughing “lightly” and saying things “fondly” (297). Similarly, they both admit that what they have worked so hard for is essentially the same, agreeing on that they “knew not to want a world with war in it”, that “worked for something else”: “we knew our hearts were made of other stuff,” (301). As such, they both believed in a better future for their generation, and despite the incompatible differences of their beliefs, they are connected in this hope. Lux has also opened Arthur’s eyes to the reality of the political situation. When Arthur is back in London, he not only reads Cymbaline, but he also starts to notice the city’s current sombreness and notes the atrocities that are happening in his direct environment. He refers to the burning of the Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 and the social injustice it represents as

a terrible mirage, a hallucination. But it’s real. The building has gone up in flames so fast in the first place because it’s been shoddily renovated, not being for the use or the residence of people with a lot of money. Many people died. There will be an argument happening all across politics and the media about how many people died because nobody can say for sure how many people were in the building that night, it being a place where a lot of people under the radar have been living. (313)

As Lux mentioned living under the radar, it renders the atrocity more relatable to Arthur. He also starts questioning the inhumanity of anti-refugee politics when he comes across a newspaper article about a crowdfunding for “a boat that intercepts and waylays the rescue boats sent out from the Italian mainland to help the migrants in trouble in the sea. He reads what he’s just read again, to make sure he hasn’t misread it” (313) He resolves to transform Art in Nature into “a co-written blog by a communal group of writers”, and the fact that the isolated sections in the novel all end with the phrase “Art in Nature” and were written after Christmas, suggests that he has become profoundly aware of political issues, as these segments are, in fact, blog posts (318). Arthur is thus finally able to see reality and to connect the events to his personal life, while he nevertheless also continues his quest to reveal nature’s beauty. This becomes apparent in one of the isolated blog fragments, in which Art in Nature refers to how, in crisis-ridden London, “a buddleia is growing in the wall up next to the roof above the old platforms. It is bright purple against the brickwork. Buddleia is tenacious. After Hemelaar 4222946\ 71 the Second World War, when so many of the cities were in ruins, buddleia was one of the most common plants to take hold in the wreckage. The ruins filled with it here and all over Europe” (220). Nature’s beauty is thus able to renew itself after the occurrence of any atrocity, which underscores how it offers hope against the current political climate, similar to the flower in Cymbaline. As such, despite the gravity of the crisis, hope for renewal will always remain. Moreover, as Cymbaline suggests, divided nations occur all across history. Consequently, Winter establishes the hope that connection is able endure to endure anything. This is not only apparent when it comes to Iris’ protesting, but also in relation to the environment. By referring to this period in British history as a winter, it also suggests there will be renewal when spring arrives, which establishes the importance of cyclical time. The novel therefore emphasises both the importance of human connectivity and their connection to the environment. Among Winter’s epigraphs is the quote from Cymbaline “nor the furious winter’s rages”, which foregrounds that human connectivity, hope and beauty are able to endure this winter crisis (i). Because the novel does not dwell on the futility of this endeavour, Winter is not so much an as-if narrative as much as it emphasises how the contemporary will be able to renew itself through natural cycles. As such, while society is haunted by ghosts of crises, underneath it is the ghost of a flower, which not only underscores the importance of cyclical time, but it also offers hope because beauty will always remain. By exposing the constructed mythologies of extremist, xenophobic politics and by arguing how the internet distorts and fictionalises reality, Smith establishes the importance of critically deconstructing surfaces. Winter’s message of combining beautiful surfaces with critical depths could thus be regarded as essentially Metamodernist.

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Conclusion Metamodern Belief and Desire

The three novels that I have discussed embody Metamodernism as they respond to contemporary crises by exploring how individual subjectivities are affected. As such, I argue that Metamodernism originates in crisis. In this thesis I have mainly adhered to Timotheus Vermeulen’s and Robin Van den Akker’s conception of Metamodernism, which they regard as an oscillation between pre-postmodernist and postmodernist sentiments, although they do not so much emphasise the importance of modernism within this debate. I have, however, pointed out modernism’s importance, and by doing so I reconcile Vermeulen’s and Van den Akker’s points with David James’ and Urmila Seshagiri’s definition of Metamodernism. They argue that Metamodernism signifies a clear engagement with the modernist tradition, particularly in formal and stylistic experimental features. Although I have not so much focussed on these aspects, I have demonstrated the importance of modernist themes that the novels engage with in order to counter crisis. This is prevalent in the novels’ exploration of subjectivities, their ethical commitments, hope, desire for integrity and grand narratives, chronological play and connectivity. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being is profoundly concerned with contemporary crises, as it not only responds to disrupting twentieth-century events, including the dot.com bubble burst, 9/11 and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, but also problematises digital technology and environmental contamination. Through the weapon technology designed by Nao’s father, the novel explores the ethical ramifications of automatised warfare, in which users lose their perceptions of the boundaries between reality and fiction. Nao similarly experiences the disintegration of this threshold, as her identity is altered through the cyber bullying of her classmates. Ruth experiences the unreliability of digital technology when virtual information about Nao’s existence continuously slips away from her. By exploring trash in ocean gyres and the consequences of global warming, A Tale also portrays the disastrous consequences of human’s involvement with nature. Ozeki foregrounds the importance of connection with nature and undermines linearity by emphasising natural, cyclical time. A Tale approaches these anxieties by foregrounding typical Metamodernist sentiments of hope and connectivity. These sentiments are also prevalent in Ali Smith’s Winter, which explicitly critiques the contemporary political climate by exploring the consequences of its xenophobic discourse in a disrupted family. Newsfeeds of despair and chaos permeate the lives of the characters, Hemelaar 4222946\ 73 and their irreconcilable political ideologies prevent them from truly connecting to each other. Sophia and Arthur mindlessly believe in mythologies, their world consisting of fiction because they cannot uncover the depths of constructed narrative surfaces. Similar to A Tale, digital technology also obscures the boundaries between reality and fiction, as the fake tweets from Arthur’s Twitter demonstrate how the internet distorts factual information and consequently determines reality. Since his blog’s nature writings are about made-up experiences, Arthur cannot write about anything that is truly real, which emphasises the irreconcilability of digital technology with reality. Also similar is how Winter’s profound concern with climate change and environmental contamination, and its emphasis on cyclical time, through which the novel demonstrates the importance of connection to the environment. By arguing how nature is able to renew itself and emphasising the beauty of nature through the ghost of a flower, Winter offers sentiments of hope and connectivity to counter crisis. Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island approaches crisis differently. It does not dwell on the effects on individual subjectivities, as U. appears to celebrate rather than condemn ethical concerns. Nevertheless, McCarthy’s novel also occupies an ethical approach to crises by exploring exteriority of narration, which situates an affective response within the reader. U. attempts to connect arbitrary phenomena in order to discern the contemporary’s deeper meaning and underlying grand narrative. However, similar to Winter, the novel envisions a postmodern world controlled by super structures of myths, as meaning is produced by corporate businesses. Satin Island is also concerned with issues of digital technology and environmental contamination. U. futuristically revels in mechanical phenomena, and by envisioning meaning to consist of a system of empty differentiation and buffering, it essentially represents a machine of arbitrary, automatised oscillation. Moreover, as U. aestheticises environmental contamination, Satin Island reveals how waste has become integral to the contemporary condition. As Metamodernism seems to originate in crisis, it consequently expresses the same anxieties that modernists experienced, as all three novels foreground the end of belief in contemporary systems. In A Tale, the characters question capitalism and warfare and turn to Zen Buddhism and nature as an alternative. In Satin Island, the collapse of belief in the system is symbolised through the death of the parachutist. Moreover, U. desires the presence of super-structures that should explain the contemporary, yet he is also aware that there is no deeper meaning to anything. Winter most explicitly questions belief, as Smith criticises the xenophobic political climate. By undermining the constructed nature of contemporary mythologies, the novel also problematises belief in such produced truths. This, however, does Hemelaar 4222946\ 74 not imply that these Metamodernist novels do not embody belief themselves. On the contrary, Vermeulen’s and Van den Akker’s conception of ‘as-if’ thinking foregrounds its importance despite the fact that Metamodernist subjects are aware of its constructed nature. As such, Metamodernism commits itself to an ‘impossible possibility’ that displays a tension between ignorance and profound awareness. Nao is profoundly aware of contemporary anxieties, yet she consciously chooses to pretend as if they do not exist, when she tells Ruth, for example, that she cannot talk about species extinction without becoming extremely depressed. The connection between Nao and Ruth is itself also constructed, which they are both aware but nevertheless consciously ignore. The ‘as-if’ thinking is prevalent in Satin Island as U. chooses to believe in a system that essentially consists of empty meaning. Moreover, he envisions grand schemes of change and revolution, but never commits to it, embodying the act of failed resistance and remaining a silent cog in the faceless machine. When he comes close to finding the epiphany at Staten/‘Satin’ Island, U. decides to return, arguing that this supposed revelation would not contribute to anything at all, which illustrates how he constantly oscillates between desire and futility. In Winter the ‘as-if’ thinking is less prevalent, as Smith occupies a more positive and hopeful approach to contemporary crises that is not held in check by futility. Nevertheless, Arthur does embody this thinking when he oscillates between a consciousness of political ignorance and a postmodern unconsciousness that is profoundly aware of the world’s injustices. Arthur is thus both aware and unaware of contemporary anxieties, and by arguing how politics are transitory and unconnected events, he chooses to belief as if they are irrelevant to his own personal situation. Crisis thus profoundly influences the narratives of these novels, as it threatens the characters’ subjectivities, which consequently alters their conception of reality. I referred to how Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson approach contemporary crisis through Slavoj Žižek’s conception of 9/11 as a traumatic event that shattered both reality and fantasy so that the threshold between these domains collapsed. Consequently, it becomes increasingly challenging for characters to perceive the thresholds between reality and fantasy. Metamodern subjects appear to desire modes of fantasy, dreams and disembodiment. However, these desires are never fully realised, which corresponds to the Metamodernist oscillation of Vermeulen and Van den Akker. As such, the characters are constantly pushed and pulled between being and non-being, reality and fantasy, awareness and dreams. Moreover, digital technology also disrupts the lives of individuals and societies as it forms, fractures and controls reality. As such, the three novels that I have discussed embody Metamodernist sentiments by exploring the effects of crisis on individual subjectivities as the Hemelaar 4222946\ 75 ontological boundaries between these domains unravel and the characters occupy states of in- betweenness. A prevalent theme in A Tale is suicide, as the characters constantly desire a return to non-being. Nao’s father repeatedly fails to commit suicide, and Nao herself also expresses her wish to die, having her body return to the natural cycle of the sea, following her great- uncle Haruki’s fate. As such, Nao desires a return to matter, to the essence of nature as she integrates into the cycle of natural renewal. Moreover, throughout the novel there is the sense that characters are not fully awake. Nao’s father points out how the Japanese do not feel truly alive until they commit suicide, and Jiko criticises the youth for occupying a perpetual state of numbness. As Nao’s anxieties take over Ruth’s life, moreover, Ruth starts dreaming about losing control over her own body. In Satin Island, U. is also driven by a desire to return to matter, as the essence of humanity to him represents oil’s blackness, a smooth non-being that obscures any depths. U. imagines the dirt and blackness of typhoid cancer to enlighten his friend Petr, and he similarly approaches the oceans and sea animals that are affected by oil spills, which he argues have their natural states enhanced. This represents a return to matter because U. argues that the blackness brings life closer to its essence. In Winter, Sophia and Arthur occupy dream-like states as they cannot truly see reality. Sophia is stuck in her past because she cannot reconcile with the present, as the disembodied head guides her through her memories. Arthur’s dreams represent an alternate reality in which the world is overtaken by the postmodern horror of environmental contamination. Matter literally forces itself onto Arthur when he is woken up by the vision of a landmass floating above him. These novels, moreover, also express a desire for an integral centre, and through their ethical commitments they seem to embody genuine hope for a better future. As a result to the contemporary crisis, millennials display utopian desires for grand narratives, connectedness and a sense of purpose, sentiments that the postmodernists have previously emptied of meaning. However, the advancements of postmodernism cannot simply be forgotten. As such, I argue that Metamodernism returns meaning and direction to the decentred world by building on postmodernist theories, as it attempts to re-centre the already decentred. Consequently, Metamodernism ‘oscillates’ between modernist and postmodernist tendencies, and novels often employ postmodern features for different purposes, as they are connected to sincerity and commitment rather than futility and aimlessness. The metanarrative structure of A Tale, for example, does not as much emphasise its constructed nature as much as it embodies the novel’s desire for connectivity. Contemporary fiction approaches something that is otherwise considered as flat and without profound meaning, as postmodernism has Hemelaar 4222946\ 76 previously already undermined its meaning, and newly applies or offers glimpse of depth on those previously emptied surfaces. This represents one of Satin Island’s main themes, as corporate businesses, Peyman and U. fabricate and project meaning onto empty surfaces. This preoccupation is also prevalent in Winter, as Sophia and Arthur both desire beauty without any problematic depths. The novels are also informed by chronological play, nonlinearity and the (cyclical) experience of time. A Tale corresponds to the modernist preoccupation with temporality through its references to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, as it opposes linearity to natural, cyclical time, which has the ability to renew and resist anxieties. While Nao initially attempts to capture the eternal now, the novel reveals how time is a slippery construct and offers cyclical time as a method for the characters to heal. In Satin Island, U. is similarly obsessed with the now, as he attempts to explain the deeper meaning of the contemporary moment, but essentially finds himself unable to. In Smith’s novel present-day Britain is stuck in a winter solstice, as the political climate has profoundly disrupted the natural order of the world. However, Winter offers sentiments of hope by arguing that, similar to A Tale, nature has ability to renew itself, and that spring will not be far behind. Another prominent modernist theme is connectivity, which is something that the characters in all three novels profoundly desire. Metamodernist connectivity follows E.M. Forster’s motto ‘only connect’, as crisis threatens connectivity between characters and with their environments. Anxieties cause connections to be forged, for example in U.’s futile preoccupation with connecting his arbitrary case studies, and to be ruptured, which is apparent in the Cleve family in Winter, who can no longer connect to one another. However, as A Tale demonstrates through the connection between Nao and Ruth, and Winter by foregrounding the importance of connectivity in political protest, it is precisely this ability to connect that counters crisis. A Tale for the Time Being, Satin Island and Winter reveal how crisis threatens the subjectivities of its characters, who consequently display sentiments of hope and connectivity. By countering belief and desire by an awareness of their constructed nature and futility, the Metamodernism of these novels appears to ‘oscillate’ between modernist and postmodernist tendencies. As such, Metamodernism seems to critically re-engage with the modernist tradition to offer a vehicle to address contemporary crises. However, the advancements of postmodernism cannot be undone, and as such, the conception of Metamodernism that I have presented in this thesis represents a modernism informed by postmodernism. Hemelaar 4222946\ 77

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