Literary Endgames: The Post-Literary, Postcritique, and the Death of/in Contemporary Literature

ABSTRACT

Since the millennium, contemporary novelists have produced innovative works of fiction that rely upon an in-built awareness of the novel’s demise in a post-literary age. Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Tom McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro and J.M. Coetzee utilize the exhaustion of the novel form to hone a new realism more attentive to the repressed forms of embodied life that underpin the novel’s tradition of liberal humanism. Whilst other critics have noted how contemporary fictions produce new forms of (non)human subjectivity by estranging the forms of the novel, this essay emphasizes the fundamental contingency of the materialism presented by each of the postmillennial novels discussed here. To be embodied in space is also to be embedded in time. I trace how the postmillennial novel underwrites this insight by framing life as necessarily bound to death. This sense of living through death – through a relation to ending – is seen as fundamentally modernist and I trace its theoretical articulation in the narratologies of Frank Kermode and Walter Benjamin. Finally, I explore how this co-implication of life and death emerges through a post-literary esthetic that disturbs some of the key arguments behind the coeval movement of postcritique.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Barnes’ narrator summarizes, toward the end of the novel, this particular vision of life as follows: “Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” (105).

2. Peter Osborne argues that this “splitting [of] the present from within (into the ‘old’ and the ‘new’)”, makes the “modern” an inherently “critical term” (Osborne).

3. As Berlant suggests, a “Deleuzian politics, or something like a politics of affect, is an oxymoron or worse, a bourgeois mode of sensational self-involvement masquerading as a radically ungovernable activity of being” (14).

4. Kermode writes: “Hannah Arendt, who has written with clarity and passion on this issue, argues that the philosophical or anti-philosophical assumptions of the Nazis were not generically different from those of the scientist, or indeed of any of us in an age ‘where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself’” (38).

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Notes on contributors

Marc Farrant

Marc Farrant is a Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He recently completed his PhD, on Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, at the University of London.