What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English – The First Decade
University of Lincoln, UK, 9-12 July 2010
Introducing his paper delivered as part of the “Genre and Boundaries” panel mid-way through the
conference, David James admitted his uncertainty as to whether the title of the event he was
attending should properly contain a question mark or not. On the handout he circulated to
accompany his reading, the conference was entitled “What Happens Now?”; on the official
material circulated to delegates by the organisers, however, it was simply “What Happens Now.”
Between these two phrases – one in the interrogative mood and the other in the indicative – lies a
world of difference: something like a state of total bewilderment, as against a gesture of confident
pronouncement.
James’s own object of study – what he called, after Iris Murdoch, the “crystalline novel” – might
be said to aptly capture the doubleness here, and the structural difficulty of separating these two
versions of the conference title. This genre of the novel, which James suggested is undergoing a
renaissance in contemporary Anglo-American literature, is one that seems on the surface
relatively certain of its generic boundaries and representational conditions, especially when put
next to the playful confusion of permissions that marked the characteristic fiction of the
postmodernist period. At the same time, nevertheless, the crystalline novel tends to depict a
protagonist metaphorically at sea in the world, searching in vain for the kinds of existential and
linguistic certainties that will give his/her life a shape, meaning and narrative purpose. It might
be said, indeed, that these protagonists are searching for a theory to fit their practice, and thus
their plight is not unlike the critic of twenty-first-century literature, looking to negotiate in new
and uncertain ways with writers and texts that are themselves inheriting the age of high theory
along with their readers.
(On the issue of the correct grammar of the conference title, organiser Rupert Hildyard, who was
chairing James’s session, declined in his wisdom to offer an opinion one way or the other. As far
as I am aware, the other organiser, Siân Adiseshiah, was never asked the question.)
Two days previously, in the opening plenary lecture of the conference, poet Don Paterson had
emphasised the potential power of recent neuroscientific discoveries to improve the theory and
practice of literature and literary criticism. In contrast to both the “sentimentality” of the standard
approaches to literary writing inherited from Romanticism, and the overly complex linguistic
paradigms offered by poststructuralism, the terms of neuroscience have begun to offer, in
Paterson’s stated view, the possibility of a new classicism in our relation to literature, one
potential benefit of which would be a more accurate manner of teaching creative writing in the
context of increasing professionalisation. Yet despite Paterson’s polemical confidence as to the
direction literary studies should be moving (a polemic he admittedly softened somewhat in the
discussion immediately following his lecture), the theme of uncertainty emerged early on in the
conference as an opposing principle, and did not leave the scene thereafter. Indeed, the debate
seemed rarely to be about whether such uncertainty marked the contemporary scene, focusing
instead on how best to understand its indubitable prevalence.
One side of the debate was characterised by Mark West’s emphasis on the felt precariousness of
contemporary existence, captured in both the post-9/11 mini-genre of the novel built from endless
questions, alternatively mild and troubling, and in Nicholas Bourriaud’s theory of the
Altermodern. Bourriaud likewise featured in Alan Kirby’s paper enumerating potential
nomenclature for the current state of modernity in the early twenty-first century, and
precariousness found expression in the uncertainty Kirby admitted as to which if any of the terms
he mentioned as names for a new “cultural dominant” – Performatism, Hypermodernity, the
Altermodern, Digimodernism – would still prove adequate in a decade’s time.
Against this emphasis on the precariousness of both living in and speaking of the contemporary,
other speakers suggested a more potentially enabling relation to contemporary uncertainty,
reading in it a kind of structuring principle that allows for new forms of artistic engagement and
critical practice. In this camp were the papers delivered on the “Neo-Victorianism” panel by
Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann, who argued that the contemporary return to the Victorians
bespeaks our own anxiety about a new stage of modernity to come, but that the self-conscious art
produced by and through this anxiety – including works by Michel Faber, Sarah Waters and the
filmmaker Christopher Nolan – gains power through an embrace of uncertainty at a structural
level, bringing readers and audience into dialogue with the artist. My own reading of a New
Sincerity in American fiction of the early twenty-first century, where reader and writer connect
with each other through joint exploration of the porous border between sincerity and
manipulation, also had something to say to this debate, and the debate itself emerged at the
conference as an important site for conceiving a new politics of literature and literary studies.
Of course, I should acknowledge at this point that my own account of the conference here is itself
riven with a kind of necessary uncertainty. Having failed to develop, even in the new age of the
twenty-first century, an ability to be in more than one place at any particular moment (and I defer
here to Cheryl Cliffe’s illuminating analysis in her paper of the problem of reconciling
instantaneity with inner time duration in contemporary fiction and theory), my view of the
conference is inevitably partial, based on the small percentage of contributions I witnessed.
Bequeathed the variety of perspectives offered by the modernist novel of a Faulkner or a Woolf,
my account would no doubt offer a multiplicity of narratives from the conference, dealing with
other significant themes such as nature writing and eco-criticism, autobiography and life-writing,
literary developments in drama and poetry, and theoretical developments in postcolonialism and
feminism. No doubt other major concerns would arise from these viewpoints, and the conference
would look different and inevitably more diverse.
Indeed, reports emerging from the two panels on drama suggested that political concerns
currently trump more overtly theoretical ones in critical debates within that field, with explicitly
political issues becoming ever more central to the dramatic languages and forms being developed
in twenty-first-century theatre. Lynette Goddard’s illuminating plenary lecture on developments
in black British theatre indicated the extent to which realism has remained the dominant mode
within this strand of drama, as black writers have moved from an emphasis on identity politics to
writing state-of-the-nation plays that appear on mainstream stages.
In other plenary events that marked the conference, however, the twinned problems of
uncertainty and of theory/practice continued to arise with notable frequency. For instance, in
reading from his forthcoming genre-bending triptych Walking to Hollywood, Will Self arrestingly
combined these contemporary problems by creating an ambiguously autobiographical narrator
who spends much of his narrative space riffing on burning academic issues in film theory and
psycho-geography. In a similar vein, Iain Sinclair’s plenary lecture/reading (this uncertain binary
is itself telling) argued for greater sensitivity to place in both artistic and critical practice. Sinclair
reminded his audience that their presence within a university lecture theatre in Lincoln had a
more than negligible impact on the status of their discourse, even if that impact could never be
assessed with anything approaching certainty.
Tim Crouch’s My Arm, performed on the conference’s first evening, also partook in the
prevailing dilemmas, combining theatrical practice with a kind of theoretical self-conscious that
served to provide endless speculation among delegates as to what exactly the play was saying
about our world and our times. Later, enlightenment would be provided on Crouch’s work by
Louise LePage’s paper on the “Posthuman” panel, at which the question-and-answer session
almost inevitably centred on the uncertainty regarding the designation of the term “posthuman,”
and on the vexed historical specificity of the trope of human as cyborg.
In many ways, these overriding questions regarding contemporary critical practice arose most
forcefully in the two panels on trauma, among the most impressive at the conference. The
sessions were named simply “Trauma 1” and “Trauma 2,” almost as if they formed part of a
minimally differentiated series, a chain of orphaned posthumans along the lines of the characters
in perhaps the conference’s most discussed novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The
blankness of this numbering scheme also suggested the serial repetition of trauma, a repetition
enacted in the uncanny thematic cohesiveness within the two panels. “Trauma 1,” featuring
papers by Nick Bentley, Emily Horton and Ulrike Tancke, centred around Philip Tew’s recentlycoined concept of the “traumatological,” a term which aims to name the universal recognition of
traumatic contemporary existence that Tew sees as marking post-9/11 fiction. This generalisation
of trauma was returned to with a different emphasis in “Trauma 2,” featuring papers by María
Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, Susie Karpasitis and Beatriz Domínguez Garcia. Here the focus of the
individual papers was mainly on issues of representation, but what emerged in the discussion
which followed was a collective and genuine anxiety among the speakers regarding the
fashionable status of the critical field of trauma studies as it currently stands. This anxiety stems
from the fact that – like fashions in all spheres of life – trauma theory risks producing uniformity
within the frame of a professed respect for difference (earlier, a similar point emerged in Maite
Escudero-Alias’s paper historicising queer theory in the academy). The expansion of the
traumatic trope to take in virtually all aspects of twenty-first-century existence – a theme of both
panels – here emerged as coextensive with the field’s relative power as a marketing label within
the contemporary academy. This power in turn tends towards emptying the term of its signifying
specificity, as more critics enter the field and extend the trope to account for new material.
In one of the striking juxtapositions and continuances that seemed to mark the flow of the
conference, this problem was returned to and crystallised in the “Haunting and Loss” panel,
which took place in the final session, directly after “Trauma 2.” Here Wolfgang Funk, Kinga
Földváry and Tricia Connell addressed, in direct and oblique ways, the haunting of contemporary
practice by theory in its various determinations. Funk theorised a contemporary division between
what he called the Reality Principle and the Uncertainty Principle, where the former names an
orientation toward science and human thought that sees in these the possibility of explaining all
the world’s phenomena along rational lines, whereas the latter accepts the limits of human
knowledge and the ghostly haunting of knowledge by that which exceeds it. In her paper,
Földváry examined the last five Booker Prize-winning novels, and suggested they should be seen
as characterised by the inheritance and acceptance of loss, a loss felt by their protagonists as a
kind of unnameable past and memory. Földváry considered the claims trauma theory might
profess upon this theme of loss, but, as if in direct response to the previous panel, she warned
against the generalisation of the traumatic trope to account for kinds of loss that seem less
identifiable as determined by singular events.
In passing, Földváry also suggested that what most marked the lives of the protagonists of these
prize-winning novels was the struggle to survive the loss of metanarratives, an uncertainty as to
the purpose of life that seems the inescapable twenty-first-century inheritance of a Lyotardian
postmodernism. This generalised loss of confident purpose and certainty, beyond the scope of a
narrowly traumatic account, appears also to be the fate of the theorist-critic in the early new
millennium, a realisation captured in a remarkable manner by Connell’s concluding paper, on
Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry. Beginning with the admission that she had brought a typescript of her
paper to the conference but had almost immediately felt a dissatisfaction and need to completely
rewrite it, Connell proceeded through a mass of handwritten pages in an attempt to locate and
clarify her core argument. The bravery and felt honesty of this gesture was accentuated by
Connell’s insistence that at the centre of her dissatisfaction was the problem of how we could
now situate Duffy’s work in relation to literary theory, and especially feminist theory. Thus the
audience was returned to the conference’s two abiding themes: on the constative level Connell’s
paper addressed the problem of reconciling criticism with practice in an era when the inheritance
of theory is general for writer and critic; and on the performative level Connell’s delivery enacted
the loss of contemporary certainty, registered as a kind of critical trauma.
With the loss of certainty surrounding so many of our cherished critical metanarratives – be they
New Critical, New Historicist, Marxist, poststructuralist, feminist etc. – what are we, as theoristcritics, now doing? What happens now? This final panel seemed to hold a kind of key. Connell’s
reading of Duffy emphasised the necessity and sincerity involved in the critic writing out from
his/her own position of uncertainty; Földváry’s paper suggested a kind of critical reserve and
patience in the face of what we still do not know about literature, and may never fully
understand; and Funk extensively cited Derrida and Levinas as offering a tentative path to a
future that may involve acknowledging the ghostly presence of uncertainty in our own critical
practice, and exploiting that uncertainty as a enabling resource.
Following such an emphasis on openness to the future, offering any kind of conclusion here
would be premature on my part; as Rachel Falconer suggested in her compelling plenary lecture
on McEwan’s Solar that closed out the conference after almost four full days of debate, perhaps
closure is not now to be sought in the traditional manner, either in the contemporary novel or
elsewhere. After all, we are still just at the beginning of a new time, and what happens now is
always the future and the past within the ever-changing present.
Adam Kelly
14/07/10