Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm 9780367860554, 9781003037583

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“Scholars and students seeking insights into how to think about fiction in the global era will profit in several ways from Transcending the Postmodern. The essays herein are not only a wonderful introduction to the power of transmodernism as a theoretical frame but also exemplary instances of critical work. The authors should be commended for the clarity and insightfulness with which they discuss key contemporary literary texts from the perspective of transmodernist theory.” —Christopher K. Coffman, Boston University

Transcending the Postmodern

Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to helping define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English. Susana Onega is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and a member of the Academia Europaea. Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France).

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

















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Transcending the Postmodern The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm

Edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-86055-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03758-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix



PART I

The Poetics of Transmodernity

21

1 The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality

23

SUSA NA ON EGA

2 Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Meta-narrative: An Alternative Reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

49

SA R A V ILLA M A R Í N-FR EIR E

3 The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

68

A N G E L O M O N AC O

PART II

Ethical Perceptions

89

4 Problematising the Transmodern: Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration

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J E A N - M I C H E L G A N T E AU

viii Contents 5 Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm: Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

109

M AT T H I A S S T E P H A N

6 Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

133

L AU R A C O L O M B I N O

PART III

Migrancy and the Possibility of Reenchantment

155

7 A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia: Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit

157

BÁRBAR A AR I ZT I

8 Diversity, Singularity, Reenchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

177

M E RV E S A R I K AYA - Ş E N

PART IV

Perspectives on Biopolitics

193

9 Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey’s Novel Archipelago

195

JULIA KUZNETSKI



Contributor Biographies Index

231 237

Acknowledgements

The idea for the present volume originated in a monographic seminar of the same title organised by the editors at the fourteenth International Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) that took place in Brno (Czech Republic) in August–September 2018. But the idea of devoting a seminar and a volume of collected essays to this subject should be set in the context of a wider, ongoing collaborative research activity carried out by the editors over the last two decades, which has materialised in the co-edition of six volumes: The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction (Rodopi, 2011), Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge, 2013), Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form (Routledge, 2014), Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st-Century Fiction (Routledge, 2017) and The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest (Routledge, 2018). The co-authorship of the Introduction, the co-editing of the book and the article on Jon McGregor by Jean-Michel Ganteau are part of a project funded by the French Ministry of Education through the laboratory to which he belongs (EMMA-EA 741). The co-authorship of the Introduction, the co-editing of the book and the article on David Mitchell by Susana Onega form part of her ongoing research activity as research leader of the excellency team Contemporary Narratives in English (code H03_17R), financed by the Government of Aragón and the European Development Fund (ERDF) through its 2014–2020 programme “Building Europe from Aragón.” Within this frame, Susana Onega has participated, respectively, as research leader and as member, in two subsequent competitive research projects financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (METI) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) that are directly concerned with the subject of the book: “Palimpsestic Knowledge: Inquiries into a Transmodern Literary Paradigm” (code FFI2015-65775-P) and “Literature in the Transmodern Era: Celebration, Limits and Transgression” (code FFI2017-84258-P). Together with her thanks to the Government

x

Acknowledgements

of Aragón and the ERDF, Susana Onega would like to express her gratitude to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the ERDF, and Jean-Michel Ganteau would like to express his to the French Ministry of Education for making the existence of this book possible.

Introduction Transcending the Postmodern Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau

Authors from such diverse theoretical fields as the philosophy of liberation, the social sciences, the philosophy of history, literary criticism, ecology or architecture have pointed to the emergence, since the 1980s, of elements signalling a shift towards a new cultural paradigm they have coincidentally termed “Transmodernity.” The term was coined by the Spanish philosopher and feminist Rosa María Rodríguez Magda during a conversation with Jean Baudrillard in Paris in 1987 (2011, 1) and theorised by her in La sonrisa de Saturno (1989), El modelo Frankenstein (1997), Transmodernidad (2004) and several essays mentioned in the Works Cited. What led her to coin the term was a growing awareness that the 1980s were a period of transformation, transience and acceleration signalling the transcendence of the postmodern paradigm (Rodríguez Magda 2017, n.p.). More concretely, it was meant to express the awareness that the ‘post-’ rupture was indeed an illusion; that although the Grand Narratives resulting from the effort of Theory were shown to be set, and to some extent, that they were false stories, we were on the point of being enveloped by another dialectic of totalization of the financial economy, global geopolitics, and the new communication technologies. Our current reality is both trans-national and virtual. (2017, n.p.) As this quotation makes clear, Rodríguez Magda thinks that, although one of the conceptual pillars of postmodern thought is the negation of grand narratives and the acknowledgement of fragmentation, multiplicity and pluriversality, Postmodernity has fallen prey to the opposed impulse to put together and globally join the scattered pieces of the grand narratives due to the virtual revolution of Information Society, thus facilitating the creation of “a new Grand Narrative: Globalization” (2004, 28), or “the Great Fact of Globalization” (2017, n.p.). Her main contention is that the constant presence of flux and connectivity of our present Information Society fosters an emerging dialectics of totalisation that, rather than hierarchical or pyramidal, follows a network-like model devoid of clear organisation or any hegemonic centre, and that

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Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau

this fluid, interconnected, unstable social reality begs for a similarly fluid, “transborder” mode of thinking (2004, 30), capable of responding to the gnoseological demands made by an era of swift transformations and fluidity in which water-tight boxes no longer make sense and everything functions as long as it is interconnected. Information Theory allows us to witness developments occurring simultaneously in many places at the same time, and not merely as echoes or reverberations, but precisely on account of the fact that we are interconnected (2004, 31). Other elements that attest to an increasingly pervading fluidity are transgenic experimentation; the cyborg model, which embraces the metaphor of a mutating, transhuman body; transsexuality, which paves the way for a vast array of possible genders, desires and identities beyond traditional dichotomies; transnational organisations, which renders obsolete the notion of the nation-state; transnational problems and occurrences; and transnational communities and migrations. According to Rodríguez Magda, these changes in the very qualifying notions with which we claim to describe our present world provide evidence of a series of epistemic shifts taking place since the 1980s that point to the emergence of the transmodern paradigm (1989, 2004, 2011). Interestingly, she believes that we are not aware of this shift, that we continue applying modern ways of thinking about political and ethical matters while endorsing postmodern positions in cultural and aesthetic questions and simultaneously reflecting upon globalisation, thus giving the impression that we are jumping back and forth between two paradigms that have lost their momentum. She, therefore, calls for a transmodern type of thinking that would allow us to comprehend what is taking place in our current world. The aim of the present book is to contribute to the elucidation and foregrounding of this paradigm shift by analysing the way in which a representative number of contemporary writers in English with different nationalities, religions and/or cultural backgrounds are imaginatively responding to the questions posed by it. As Rodríguez Magda herself acknowledges, since the 1980s the term “Transmodernity” has been employed in relation to socio- cultural change by thinkers belonging to such diverse areas of knowledge as the Argentinean-Mexican philosopher and historian Enrique Dussel, the Belgian theologian and philosopher Marc Luyckx Ghisi, the London-based Pakistani writer, scholar and cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar, the French legal anthropologist Etienne Le Roy and the joint directors of the TransArchitecture Foundation in Paris between 1998 and 2000, Marcos Novak and Paul Virilio (2–3). A relevant fact about the emergence of the transmodern paradigm is, then, the strikingly different perspectives and responses it has elicited all over the world. Rodríguez Magda aligns herself to the dominant Western philosophical position when she situates the origins of her description of transmodern culture

Introduction  3 in a perception of the present common to various authors but labelled in different ways and offering different answers, such as [Fredric] Jameson’s ‘late capitalism,’ [Zygmunt] Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity,’ [Ulrich] Beck’s ‘second modernity,’ [Gilles] Lipovetsky’s ‘hypermodernity’ or [Slavoj] Žižek’s ‘desert of the real’. (2011, 4; our translation) Also in this tradition lies her definition of Transmodernity in dialectical terms as the third totalising synthesis of the modern thesis and the postmodern antithesis, incorporating elements of both, in the triad formed by Modernity, Postmodernity and Transmodernity (2011, 2). In agreement with this, she rejects those thinkers who draw the emphasis either on the rupturist or the continuist elements between the modern and the postmodern phases (2011, 4), and argues that “Transmodernity prolongs, continues and transcends Modernity, it is the return, the copy the survival of a weak, diminished, light Modernity […] a detached, ironic return that accepts its useful fictionality” (2011, 6; our translation).1 For the same reason, Rodríguez Magda rejects the use made of the term by thinkers outside the European philosophical tradition: for example, Enrique Dussel, who employs the term “transmodern” to designate those theories arising out of the Third World that vindicate a proper space for Latin-American cultures in front of Modernity and seeks to incorporate into it the look of the postcolonial other (Rodríguez Magda 2011, 2). The fact that the term “transmodern” is being used by different types of thinkers both inside and outside the European philosophical tradition is interpreted by Rodríguez Magda as a simple terminological coincidence providing evidence of the many contradictions of Modernity and of the growing need to find a new model capable of granting significance to the change of cultural paradigm taking place in our present age (2011, 3). Concurring with Rodríguez Magda, Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and José María Yebra-Pertusa, in the Introduction to their recently published volume of collected essays, Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English (2019), describe the advent of Transmodernity in dialectical terms and concede that “[i]n a sense, it is almost an umbrella term [… that] requires re-conceptualisation in all fields of knowledge, including those of literature and criticism” (9). This dialectical outlook on Transmodernity is also endorsed by the Croatian academic and leader of the Feniks Foundation for Developing Human Potential and Innovative Actions in Croatia Irena Ateljevic in her essay “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” (2013). Nevertheless, as the optimistic tenor of her title already suggests, Ateljevic thinks that, rather than the product of sheer coincidence, the quasi-simultaneous appearance of the term in widely different areas of knowledge is a clear case of synchronicity, the phenomenon “whereby people sharing similar levels of consciousness are engaged in parallel intellectual universes

4  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau around the globe, and articulate related ideas, but often express them in different wor(l)ds and terminologies” (207). As she argues, “[r]eading major works of renowned social historians, political scientists and sociologists, a holistic picture emerged” leading her to believe “that a new global consciousness is awakening and fundamental changes are to occur” (207). Accordingly, Ateljevic interprets the synchronic emergence and convergence of concepts, systems and processes in different parts of the world as proof of a global epistemological shift taking place in the context of the post-9/11 world, which has climaxed in a global crisis of wars, terrorism, climate change, over-consumerism, increasing gaps between the rich and poor, social alienation, and individual feelings of pressure, anxieties, chaos and powerlessness world-wide. (200–1) Instead of interpreting the shift from Postmodernity to Transmodernity as evidence that we have fallen prey to the new Grand Narrative of Globalisation, as Rodríguez Magda argues, Ateljievic sees it as a major global mind change about the future of humankind and the earth, expressed in “a whole range of futurist scenarios from the ‘softer’ questions of environmental sustainability to the radical argument that humanity is in danger of collective death” (201). Drawing on Riane Eisler’s study of human evolution, The Chalice and the Blade (1987), Ateljevic argues that human beliefs, institutions and relations are structured according to the possibilities afforded by two antagonistic underlying systems: “the partnership and the domination system” (Ateljevic 209). As she explains, Eisler shows that ancient times (before 3500BC) were based on matrifocal values, which did not mean the opposition to patriarchy (i.e. the domination of women over men), but rather that societal organization focused on the values of giving life, fertility, the pleasure to exist, artistic creations and sexual pleasure. However, over time, the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe, in our time still symbolised by the ancient feminine chalice or grail was replaced by the lethal power of the blade. In the new world, of which we are the last heirs, ‘power’ is no longer viewed as the ability to give life, but is construed as the power to bring death, destroy life, subdue others and be obeyed at all cost. (Ateljevic 209) Given that the beginning of prehistory is usually dated back to the first appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa 300,000 years ago, it could be stated that the shift from the partnership to the domination system initiated at the beginning of prehistory reached a climax with the advent of Modernity, a period characterised by the reliance on reason, endless progress and the perfectibility of humankind. For the first time in

Introduction  5 human evolution, knowledge was understood as a coherent mass of rational beliefs and socio-ethical processes, responding to objective and scientific models validated by experience and the progressive domination over nature, strengthened by technological development. The paradigm shift that brought about the Age of Reason and culminated in the French Revolution, with its demands for equality, liberty and fraternity, was essential for the development of capitalism, industrialisation, secularisation, rationalisation and the birth of the nation-state, but it also brought about the legitimation of violence and greed, the justification of capitalism, colonial domination, the subjugation of the other and the exploitative annihilation of the earth, unrestrained by belief in transcendence and in the spiritual dimension of life-giving and sustaining powers. This would explain why by the end of the nineteenth century, the enhancement of the Modernity paradigm had led to a generalised loss of cognitive cohesion, evincing the traumatic component in a patriarchal society ruled by the double standard of morality and the ideology of endless progress. Its corollary was the First World War, the international crisis created by the political theology of the sovereign nation-state that justifies political action in terms of friends and enemies (see Onega 2014, 494–6). In the literary field, this traumatic element at the core of Modernity was given imaginative expression in the proliferation, throughout the Enlightenment period, of the Gothic genre in Britain, Germany and other European countries, thus providing evidence of the prescience of creative writers to detect and represent indirectly the psychic and sociocultural dangers of a society abiding by the rules of the domination system and governed by reason to the exclusion of feelings, emotions and spiritual values, so that [b]y the time Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1898) was published, the rationality of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum had already reached the solipsism of cogito ergo omnia sum that was to become the banner of existentialism in the 1930s and 1940s. (Onega 2014, 495) As is well known, the response of Modernist literature to this solipsistic “inward turn” was to take the task of reconnecting self and world to its ultimate consequences. In the period between the two World Wars, the rising political, ideological and cultural tensions and the class and racial struggles that culminated in the collapse of the British Empire, the birth of the USSR, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, among others, would eventually lead to “a rethinking and putting into question [of] the bases of our western modes of thinking” (Hutcheon 8), thereby paving the way for the crisis that brought about the shift from Modernity to Postmodernity in the 1960s and 1970s. As Jean-François

6  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau Lyotard famously argued in The Postmodern Condition (1979), these decades witnessed a shift in worldview characterised by a generalised loss of faith in humanist values and the widespread demands for engagement and commitment by the new pacifist, anti-militarist, feminist and “green” political options then emerging. These new ideological positions, with their critique of totalising “grand narratives” – those forms of imaginative invention built in terms of linear progress towards emancipation – opened up new spaces for the expression of the fragmentary and competing ideologies of the political, sexual, ethnical and religious margins of society in the form of petits récits (60), little narratives capable of offering heterogeneous and diverse perspectives on the (traumatic) stories of the religious, sexual and ethnic minorities forced into silence or erasure by the dominant discourse. This shift from Modernity to Postmodernity was yet again accompanied by the birth of a new literary genre, in this case, historiographic metafiction, a type of novel built on the paradoxical combination of self-reflexivity and the levelling of history and literature to the same status of human construct (Hutcheon). The postmodernist rejection of Hegelian World History as a grand universal narrative of explanation had an undoubted ethical and political value as it facilitated the rise of marginal voices and the rediscovery of oppressed pasts, like the Jewish memory of the Holocaust or the revelation of the horrors endured by African slaves during the “Middle Passage.” However, certain voices have attacked the very foundation of subaltern “counter histories” as being none other than identity politics, fostering the definition of human identity in exclusive and separatist categories and privileging cultural identities over socio-political ones. What is more, at the level of theory, there are critics who consider that the postmodern critique of Modernity has “led us to eclectic relativity and fundamentalisms that in many ways have paralysed us to claim any possible way forward” (Ateljevic 202). In the 1980s, this charge of relativism was enhanced by the confluence of several factors: the cultural radicalism propounded by certain ideological conceptions of postmodernism and certain uses of deconstruction; the development of Feminist and Queer Criticism and Theory; and the rise of African-American, Postcolonial and Multicultural Studies, with their systematic questioning of Western discourse (patriarchy, humanism, imperialism) and their interpretation of cultural relativism as a symptom of the decadence of the Western world, all of which provoked an “ethical turn” in the fields of moral philosophy and literary criticism (see Arizti and Falquina; Onega 2008; Onega and Ganteau 2011). Ateljevic cites as an example of this critique Jeremy Rifkin’s assertion in The Empathic Civilization (2009), that postmodern deconstruction has brought us to a kind of “modernity reduced to intellectual rubble and an anarchic world where everyone’s story is equally compelling and worthy of recognition” (5). However,

Introduction  7 Rifkin considers this “raz[ing] of the ideological walls of modernity” (5) a necessary and salutary phenomenon as “the human spirit was freed up from old categories of thought, [forcing us] to find our own paths in a chaotic and fragmented world” (5). As he argues, the very extremity of the situation brought to the fore “the paradoxical relationship between empathy and entropy [that is at] the very core of the human story” (2), thus producing an unexpected effect: “The irony is that our growing empathic awareness has been made possible by an ever-greater consumption of the Earth’s energy and other resources, resulting in a dramatic deterioration of the health of the planet” (2). Against the belief that “human beings are, by nature, aggressive, materialistic, utilitarian, and self-interested,” Rifkin asserts that “we are a fundamentally empathic species” (2) and that “the most important question facing humanity” at present is: “Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?” (3). His positive answer – “The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy” (3) – suggests that, far from being, as Rodríguez Magda argues, the ironic copy of a weak, diminished, light Modernity, Transmodernity is an essentially optimistic cultural shift evincing a global mind change triggered by the generalised need to recuperate the spiritual and life-giving values of the partnership system. The striking different outlooks on Transmodernity exemplified by Rodríguez Magda, on the one hand, and Ateljievic and Rifkin, on the other, point to the extraordinary complexity of the paradigm shift currently taking place. This complexity suggests that we need a new interpretive grid capable of articulating the spatio-temporal inter- connectedness of identity, history, memory and culture while skewing the risks of totalisation and universalism, and capable of linking local thick descriptions of historically and geographically specific situations with a global relational net through transversal dialogues and “pluriversalism” (Dussel 1994, 2008; Grosfoguel 2008), that is, through horizontal dialogues among different traditions of thought, as opposed to universalism. In keeping with this, Max Silverman argues that a central problem of Postmodernity is the separation of history and memory and the relegation of memory to the sphere of the “subjective” and “lived” relationship with the past of the individual or the group (17), thus obliterating the fact that they necessarily feed on and influence each other. Starting from this premise, Silverman proposes a rethinking of the connection between history, memory and the creative imagination in relational, rather than oppositional terms, with a view to establishing “the historical and psychical base of cultural memory as a genuine composite affair” (18). This aim situates Silverman in line with those contemporary critics who have drawn attention to the appearance, in the 1990s, of a “memory boom of unprecedented proportions” (Huyssen 5), with memory becoming “both a central and an organising concept within research in the humanities

8  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau and in certain branches of the social sciences” (Radstone 1). This memory boom may be said to signal a definitive move away from the historicist mode still prevalent until the 1980s, the moment when scholars “began invoking memory as a way to critique the totalising mode of conventional historical discourse” (Douglass and Vogler 6). It is in this context that many of those minority groups that had been excluded from hegemonic historical discourses on the grounds of class, gender, race, religion or sexual orientation have tried to re-construct their fragmented memories and their silenced (her)stories (Andermahr and Pellicer- Ortín) in the public realm. These “counter histories” (Radstone 10–11) have come to defy long-established versions of history through a good range of cultural practices that have voiced their experiences of trauma and displacement. The literary forms emerging from the convergence of trauma and memory constitute a hybrid literature combining fiction with life-writing, testimony and other (pseudo)autobiographical genres. The birth of these “limit-case” narratives (Gilmore; Onega and Ganteau 2014) demonstrates that contemporary literature still has the secular capacity to give expression to and provide mechanisms of resilience and empathic understanding for the painful experiences and memories of individuals and groups, and so, to provide essential tools for the working through of trauma in our “wound age” (Ganteau and Onega 2017, 2018). Needless to say, the birth of these new literary forms has forced the Academia to devise new analytical schemes. Thus, Silverman proposes the construction of “a poetics of memory” based on the notion of “palimpsestic memory,” that is, on the consideration of memory as “a ceaseless process of straddling and superimposition of elements, and condensation and displacement of meaning [in which] memory traces overlap, intersect and are transformed” (22). His proposal is based on Freud’s comparison of memory to the mystic writing pad (1925), whose inscriptions made on the top part of the pad can be erased by lifting the thin sheet of celluloid, but not the traces of the marks left on the wax surface below (Silverman 24). As Silverman argues, “the principle of the superimposition of different traces to condense surface and depth, present and past, and the visible and the invisible remains a powerful way of envisaging the work of memory” (25). Such a movement might be compared to that of belatedness or Nachträglichkeit, since what characterises traumatic temporality, originally defined by Freud and elaborated on by many of its followers, is a return to an initial, buried, inaccessible – hence invisible – violent event that is reactivated by a second violent breakthrough. In Jean Laplanche’s terms, it takes two eruptions of violence to make a trauma (Laplanche 171), a state characterised by the possibility of making time move in two directions simultaneously, the first event acting on the second one, even while the later one acts back on the initial one. This allows for the creation of a traumatic loop whose positive, healing function is to re-read the past

Introduction  9 and have access to one element that had hitherto been absent from the traumatised subject’s memory. While Silverman sees memory as a complex process of condensation and displacement working on a relational, rather than a linear, basis, in conformity with the workings of traumatic temporality and of Nachträglichkeit, Sarah Dillon draws on Thomas de Quincey’s definition of memory as an “involuted,” palimpsestic structure which makes it impossible for compound experiences to be disentangled and which keeps disrupting the difference between past and present, in order to assert that memory adopts its own organising principles (Dillon 248). This anti-linear nature of memory echoes Walter Benjamin’s model of history in terms of constellations (a term he took from Baudelaire) and catastrophes developing through Messianic time, devised as a response to Hegel’s dialectical concept of history (Onega 2014, 496–7). Similarly, Michael Rothberg (2000) draws on Benjamin’s aforementioned notion of constellation to argue that the “montage” of the categories of realism, modernism and postmodernism has materialised in the birth of “traumatic realism,” a new literary genre aimed at representing the Holocaust, which deploys the characteristic hybridity, liminality and excessiveness of contemporary trauma narratives in general. From this notion of montage, Rothberg, in a later work (2009), goes on to argue for the multidirectionality of memory as a way to bring together the Holocaust and Postcolonial Studies. Multidirectional memory creates dialogues between different histories, bolsters the articulation of silenced histories and works against competitive memory and the uniqueness of some experiences, thus responding to the increasing demand for solidarity and the possibility of new visions of justice in a globalised world. Benjamin’s historical constellations, Silverman’s palimpsestic memory, Dillon’s de Quinceyan palimpsests of the mind and Rothberg’s multidirectional memory are all anti-dialectic theoretical frames that envision either historical events or our memory of them as inextricably intertwined and jagged, rather than linearly and progressively arranged, thus providing a new, relational way of seeing and understanding the past, the present and the future. Yet another anti-linear model, endorsed by Ateljevic, is Gloria Steinem’s feminist notion of “circularity paradigm” (1993, 189–90), according to which: Progress lies in the direction we haven’t been […]. If we think of work structures as circles, excellence and cooperation are the goal—not competition. Progress becomes mutual support and connectedness. If we think of nature as a circle, then we are part of its reciprocity. Progress means interdependence. (Ateljevic 213) This circular conception of progress and of the relationship between selves and world can be metaphorically applied to that of Modernity,

10  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau Postmodernity and Transmodernity. Luyckx Ghisi suggests as much when he asserts that “the very concept of transmodern implies that the best of modernity is kept while at the same time we go beyond it” (qtd. in Ateljevic 202). As Ateljevic notes, quoting Ziauddin Sardar, [a]s such, it is not a linear projection which takes us from (pre)modernity via postmodernity to transmodernity; rather, it transcends modernity in that it takes us trans, i.e. through, modernity into another state of being, ‘from the edge of chaos into a new order of society’. (Ateljevic 202–3) According to Ateljevic, this argument reflects the original meaning of the term, as put forward by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda (1989, 13) when she described the relationship of Modernity, Postmodernity and Transmodernity in Hegelian terms as forming a dialectic triad that completes a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis so that “the third tends to preserve the defining impetus of the first yet is devoid of its underlying base: by integrating its negation the third moment reaches a type of specular closure” (Ateljevic 203). Though her outlook on this dialectic triad is meant to convey the idea that “transmodernity is critical of modernity and postmodernity while at the same time drawing elements from each” (Ateljevic 203), its association to the Enlightenment notion of history dialectically moving forward to a prescribed end, precludes it from transmitting the complexity, glocality, multiversality and synchronicity of the phenomenon with the efficiency of the circle, the palimpsest, the constellation, multidirectional memory or, as Sardar acutely argues, the multiverse as theorised by chaos theory: In all complex systems — societies, civilisations, eco-systems etc. — many independent variables are interacting with each other in great many ways. Chaos theory teaches us that complex systems have the ability to create order out of chaos. This happens at a balancing point, called the ‘edge of chaos’. At the edge of chaos, the system is in a kind of suspended animation between stability and total dissolution into chaos. At this point, almost any factor can push the system into one or other direction. However, complex systems at the edge of chaos have the ability to spontaneously self-organise themselves into a higher order; in other words the system ‘evolves’ spontaneously into a new mode of existence. Transmodernism is the transfer of modernity from the edge of chaos into a new order of society. As such, transmodernism and tradition are not two opposing worldviews but a new synthesis of both. (para. 12) Sardar’s refusal to envision transmodernism and tradition as pair opposites is crucial for the understanding of the relationality and transversality

Introduction  11 of the multiperspectival dialogue between the past and the present spontaneously arising quasi-simultaneously at “the edge” of Western countries dominated by the postmodernist discourses of multiculturalism and postcolonialism. As Sardar argues, in countries with a Muslim culture, tradition is not considered as a static and backward force that must be rejected and even suppressed in order to progress, but rather as the dynamic force that “will take them forward, with their identity intact, to a transmodern future” (para. 8). This conception of tradition would be applicable to Latin-American and many other non-European cultures as it makes the notion of progress compatible with respect for differential cultural and religious traditions. As such, it is representative of the model of Transmodernity postulated by thinkers outside the European philosophical tradition that, as we have seen, is rejected by Rodríguez Magda precisely because it proposes the coexistence of the pre-modern and the modern. Sardar’s vindication of eccentric cultural traditions brings to mind Rothberg’s contention that at the centre of the notion of multidirectionality is the ethical need to deconstruct the “West/non-West binary that is at the root of Eurocentric thinking (and some forms of resistance to it),” since “event-based, systemic, and structural trauma […] cut[s] across all borders” (2009, xvii). This need, also endorsed by Dussel, Grosfoguel or Silverman when he argues that “the poetics of memory with regard to traumatic events […] is fundamental to any renewal of the politics of memory today” (22), reflects a generalised ethical concern with offering a more comprehensive alternative to the dominant Eurocentric perspective on such central issues of our present age as the status of labour under globalisation, the relation between the first and the third worlds after decolonisation, and the impact of climate change. Thus, Silverman denounces the Euro-American “insatiable consumption of clothes and gadgets” (xv), which contributes to the terrible working conditions in developing countries and, echoing Rothberg, concludes that we are “implicated subjects, beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously” (xv). Silverman’s “appeal to our slumbering consciousness” by exposing the “hidden potential of the so-called ‘normal world’” (13), and Rothberg’s notion of the implicated subject situate these critics in line with the “ethical turn” that took place in the 1980s. Originating, as already mentioned, as a response to the excesses of extreme postmodernist thought, this turn to ethics provides evidence that the postmodern paradigm initiated in the 1960s was moving towards an ideological crisis, compounded of such complex socio-cultural and historical factors as the effects of the two World Wars and other armed conflicts, the clash of civilisations, the processes of decolonisation and globalisation, and the alienation of affects caused by the new technologies and the consumer society. Central to this ethical turn was Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of

12  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau alterity, with its demand that we submit our subject position and look at the other in the face. Today, Levinas’s ethics of alterity not only remains a valid tool to delve into current texts, especially when dealing with marginal identities. It also elicits reactions that supplement its own limitations. For example, Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (1999, 2001), which sets great store by the concept of exteriority, argues for the adaptation of Levinas’s ethics of alterity so as to bring into focus the marginal position of his South-American identity. This demand allegedly grants him legitimacy and a new perspective on the processes of colonisation and decolonisation. Like those of Silverman, Rothberg or Sardar, Dussel’s theoretical frame may be said to respond to a growing need to provide an alternative to Eurocentrism by problematising and displacing the idea of Modernity through consideration of earlier, exterior cultures. Such a critique had already been voiced from such diverse epistemic fields as, among others, Black Feminist Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Queer Theory, Trauma Studies, Memory Studies, Eco-criticism, the Theory of Affects, the Theory of Resilience and the Ethics of Care for and towards the Other (be it human, animal or inanimate things). Central to all these theoretical frames is the need to establish a horizontal – even “south south” (Dussel 2011, 32) – communication among diverse cultures and nationalities before developing a new, transmodern southnorth relationship. Only in this way can such epistemologies provide a critical border-thinking capable of re-enacting a Levinasian ethics of alterity and of consolidating pluriversal knowledge as an alternative to the univocal and teleologically oriented knowledge provided by grand universal narratives. Ateljevic, like Rifkin, approaches Transmodernity in an optimistic vein as a “planetary,” “postpatriarchal” and “postsecular” vision, “in which humans are beginning to realise that we are all (including plants and animals) connected into one system, which makes us all interdependent, vulnerable and responsible for the Earth as an indivisible living community” (203). In so doing, she partly echoes Luyckx Ghisi’s vision of Transmodernity as being based on a series of categories such as the “post-patriarchal,” to which he adds post-industrialism and postcapitalism expressed in terms of anti-materialism (Luyckx 2010; Luyckx Ghisi 2001). For both Luyckx Ghisi and Ateljevic, such priorities contribute to the “reenchantment” of the contemporary world that is one of the main effects of Transmodernity. We do not share Rodríguez Magda’s dialectical outlook on Transmodernity for the reasons explained above, and we have serious doubts about the optimistic outlook on it proposed by Rifkin and Ateljevic. However, we agree with these authors (and the authors mentioned above by Ateljevic) that there are signs pointing to the emergence of a “socio-cultural, economic, political and philosophical shift” (Ateljevic 200), whose existence has passed unnoticed due, to a great extent,

Introduction  13 to the sheer lack of a term to name it. We will therefore employ the term “Transmodernity” as an umbrella term on which to substantiate our working hypothesis: namely, that contemporary narratives in English are responding to the tensions at work in our globalised society by generating new stylistic, generic and/or modal forms that would correspond to a transmodern culture. In opposition to Rodríguez Magda and Ateljevic, we will attempt to demonstrate that Transmodernity does not correspond to the third synthetic shift in a three-fold Hegelian move from Modernity to Transmodernity, but rather that it arises out of the accumulation and intermingling of them all in a relational way comparable to the structure of Freud’s, Dillon’s and Silverman’s palimpsestic memory, or also of Benjamin’s historical constellations and Rothberg’s montage of realist, modern and postmodern literary elements. Further, we concur with Alcoff’s proposal, following Dussel, that, in order to interpret these literary texts, “we need to develop an ‘analectical’ method” (2011, 67). As Alcoff explains, analectics is a neologism for an attempt to think beyond what is currently thinkable […]. While Marxist dialectics stays within the realm of intelligibility, in a dialogical opposition and sublation of the dominant worldview, analectics seeks to bring that which remains outside the dialectic into visibility. (68, 67) As a method aimed at decolonising Western epistemology by moving beyond the terms of reference and intelligibility established by the current dialectical system, analeptics allows us to imagine that which has been made absent and invisible. Thus, it rejects the traditional Marxist formulations of the abstract categories of class, because “[they] cannot address the specificity of group identities such as the indigenous, the poor, racialized peoples, women, religious minorities, and sexual minorities” (72). As Alcoff argues, this epistemological position is both moral and political, as it requires attentiveness to social identity not simply in order to show how colonialism has, in some cases, created identities, but also to show how it has silenced and epistemically disauthorized some forms of identity while shoring up the authority of others. (72) Beyond and outside Hegelian dialectics, Dussel’s and the other mentioned approaches imported from philosophy and the sibling fields of psychoanalysis and Trauma Studies might help us determine the way in which the violence of the contemporary world may provide a re-reading of both Modernity and Postmodernity, favouring the emergence of the hidden, invisible excesses of rationality. According to Dussel, Western Modernity wanted to suppress the value structures of ancient cultures

14  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau yet was unable to do so fully because these ancient cultures hold “enough human potential to give birth to a cultural plurality that will emerge after modernity and capitalism” (2002, 234). Dussel’s words refer here to what in the field of Postcolonial Studies is known as “Subalternity,” a set of practices, values or ideas coming down from pre-modern times and cultures which have almost disappeared but whose ghostly traces can, however, still be perceived. As we have seen, Sardar makes a similar point when he underlines the dynamic value of tradition in Muslim culture. In order to move beyond the dialectical space and jump outside the postcolonial frame of reference and recover those pre-modern traces of non-Western cultures, we need to exert our imagination as well as the figurative power of metaphor. Nevertheless, the interconnected net as metaphorical figure does not completely gather the spatio-temporal diversity and friction between elements, while the figure of the palimpsest, with its contradictory play between presence and absence, present and past, here and there; Steinem’s circular movement difficult to disentangle; or Sardar’s chaotically arranged multiverse, seem more in accordance with the analectical method and the complexity of the transmodern condition. Accordingly, the rationale for this book of collected essays is that there is evidence of a paradigm shift we would call “Transmodernity” taking place since the 1980s and that, although still largely unnoticed by the Academia, contemporary narratives in English are already responding to it by generating stylistic, generic and/or modal forms capable of expressing the tensions at work in our globalised world in various, often strikingly different ways. We, therefore, propose the analysis of a representative corpus of contemporary literary texts in English that seem to have responded to the challenges set by the transmodern paradigm. We feel that this task has to be done urgently as the philosophers of history and sociologists that have been theorising Transmodernity have done so without addressing the contribution of literary texts to the divulgation and strengthening of the values of relationality, transindividuality, reenchantment and ecological sustainability promoted by the new cultural paradigm. This is what the ten chapters contained in this volume set about doing by paying attention to various transmodern themes and fields of application (Postcolonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Eco- criticism, Feminist Criticism, etc.), but also to figures of relationality that privilege the horizontal over the vertical, like the palimpsest or the rhizome, in conformity with Ateljevic’s evocations (204). The book is divided into four sections: Part I, devoted to “The Poetics of Transmodernity,” includes three essays: Susana Onega’s “The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality”; Sara Villamarín-Freire’s “Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Metanarrative: An Alternative Reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous

Introduction  15 Life of Oscar Wao”; and Angelo Monaco’s “The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island.” Although, as indicated in the titles, the novels examined here are written by authors with strikingly different literary allegiances who hail from well differentiated geographical areas, they all make use of generic experimentation to provide similar visions of the fluid, interconnected, unstable reality of selves and worlds in the transmodern era. Part II, entitled “Ethical Perceptions,” contains three essays: JeanMichel Ganteau’s “Problematising the Transmodern: Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration”; Matthias Stephan’s “Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm: Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah”; and Laura Colombino’s “Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.” Here again, the groupings overflow national boundaries. Even while paying attention to aesthetic categories, as in the first part, the novels under discussion in this section prominently lay the stress on the ethical dialogue initiated by Transmodernity, problematising the notion of transmodernism by reference to other -isms and to the past. Part III, entitled “Migrancy and the Possibility of Reenchantment,” contains two essays: Bárbara Arizti’s “A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia: Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit”; and Merve Sarikaya-Şen’s “Diversity, Singularity, Reenchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Once again, these pieces hail from different parts of the English-speaking world but share Transmodernity’s horizontal organisation, addressing, at times negatively, one of the central issues of transmodern thought, the possibility of overcoming class, racial, gender and ideological differences by showing the conditions for the emergence of a better world based on solidarity, interconnectedness, love and reenchantment. Part IV, entitled “Perspectives on Biopolitics,” also contains two essays: Julia Kuznetski’s “Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey’s Novel Archipelago” and Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen’s “A Transmodern Approach to Biology in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman.” They address the way in which two female novelists from different backgrounds and cultural areas resort to very distinct generic frameworks to challenge our Cartesian habits of mind regarding embodiment, intelligibility and knowledge by evoking contemporary reactions to environmental vulnerability. In so doing, they solicit the readers’ emphatic unsettlement for the destruction of the earth and its living creatures in our present and near future, at a time when the Anthropocene has become a major issue. Having a close look at this widely varied corpus of contemporary fictions from four main complementary areas of study has allowed us to consider the complexities inherent in any analysis of transmodern

16  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau productions and aspirations. As the analyses have shown, at the heart of these texts often lies a tension between contradicting forces, as some texts seem to be torn between a fascination for the highly technological, the digital and the absence of direct contact, on the one hand, even while on the other evincing a crave for proximity and connection that overcomes racial, ethnic, class and/or gender distinctions and favours a direct experience geared to materiality, corporeality and transindividuality. Similarly, an attraction to procedures and fixtures that promote loss of agency and the impersonality of the post-subject inherent in posthuman explorations may well be countermanded by an opposite claim for greater subjectivity and the resistance of the living, vibrant subject, whether human, animal or mineral, in a universe of endless potentiality. Indeed, a possibly ambiguous sideration in front of the feats of technological advancement may be said to coexist with a determined consideration of the natural world, whereby “biosphere politics” and a new respect for the earth and its inhabitants of all sorts (Ateljevic 212) is textually inscribed. Such an orientation is certainly not fortuitous. What Luyckx Ghisi interprets as a “post-materialist” transmodern vision (2001, 168) accommodates a compatibility with a new materialist (Coole and Frost) vision of the world that seeps into many of the novels analysed in this collection. Whether they are located in Britain or in other parts of the globe, they tend to evoke a world whose vibrancy may be experienced on all pages. They postulate a continuum between all living things, from the mineral and vegetal to the human through the animal world. Such a vision implies considering all life forms as just that: living entities; hence submitted to time and death; hence vulnerable creatures. Needless to say, the presentation of such a vulnerability provides an ethical response, since vulnerability excludes autonomy and calls for a vision of subjects and beings as interconnected and, more specifically, interdependent. Such a “putting together of vulnerabilities” or “shared vulnerability” is what Luyckx Ghisi (2001, 177) finds to be constitutive of the transmodern. The ethical impulse at the heart of such considerations clearly points towards a (bio)political apprehension: natural (including human) vulnerability implies solidarity in the face of illness and death, hence a political and ethical awareness of what should be done to protect the world.

Note 1 In similar fashion, within the context of the post-post- movement, Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen propose a new category: metamodernism. Their view is that metamodernism does not introduce a break from, or a continuity with postmodernism, but rather a “bend,” both incorporating postmodern characteristics and moving beyond them (3). From their perspective, postmodernism moves away from postmodern ironies and privileges a new sincerity (2). For a wider contextualisation of the post-postmodernist movement (that does not refer to metamodernism), see Rudrum and Stavris.

Introduction  17

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. “An Epistemology for the New Revolution.” Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.2 (2011): 67–78. Accessed on 08/05/2018 at: https://escholarship. org/uc/item/3492v2pt/. Web. Aliaga-Lavrijsen, Jessica, and José María Yebra-Pertusa. “Introduction: Transmodern Perspectives on Literature.” Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. Eds. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and José María Yebra-Pertusa. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 1–17. Print. Andermahr, Sonya, and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín, eds. Trauma Narrative and Herstory. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2013. Print. Arizti, Bárbara, and Silvia Martínez-Falquina, eds. “On the Turn”: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Print. Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (June 2013): 200–19. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1955. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Print. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialism.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Eds Diana Coole and Samantha Fox. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. 1–35. Print. Dillon, Sarah. “Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies.” Textual Practice 19.3 (2005): 243–63. Print. Douglass, Ana, and Thomas A. Vogler. Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Print. Dussel, Enrique. 1492: El Encubrimiento del Otro: Hacia el Origen del “Mito de la Modernidad.” La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 1994. Print. ———. Postmodernidad, transmodernidad, postmodernidad y transmodernidad. Puebla: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1999. Print. ———. Hacia una filosofía política crítica. Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001. Print. ———. Twenty Theses on Politics. Trans. Ciccariello Maher. Foreword by Eduardo Mendieta. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008. Print. ———. “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (2011): 28–59. Print. Elgin, Duane, with Coleen LeDrew. Global Consciousness Change. Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm. San Anselmo, CA: Milenium Project, 1997. Accessed on 17/06/2018 at: https://duaneelgin.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/ 11/global_consciousness.pdf/. Web. Eisler, Riane, The Real Wealth of Nations. San Francisco, CA: Berret Koehler, 2007. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’.” General Psychological Theory, Chapter XIII, 1925. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. VII. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. 227–32. Print.

18  Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega, eds. Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st-Century Fiction. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. London and New York: Routledge. 2017. Print. ———. “Introduction.” The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest. Eds. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, 1–15. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Hacia un pluri-versalismo transmoderno decolonial. Towards a Decolonial Transmodern Pluriversalism. Para un pluri-versalismo transmoderno decolonial.” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá – Colombia 9 (JulyDecember 2008): 199–215. Print. hooks, bel. All about Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York and London: Routledge. 1995. Print. Laplanche, Jean. L’Après-coup. Paris: PUF, 2006. Print. Luyckx, Marc. “The Transmodern Hypothesis: Towards a Dialogue of Cultures.” Futures 31.9–10 (1999): 879–1016. Print. Luyckx Ghisi, Marc. Au delà de la modernité, du patriarcat et du capitalisme: La société réenchantée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Print. ———. “Towards a Transmodern Transformation of Our Global Society: European Challenges and Opportunities.” Journal of Future Studies 15.1 (September 2010): 39–48. Print. Onega, Susana. “The Ethics of Fiction: Writing, Reading and Representation in Contemporary Narrative in English. A Research Project.” Literatures in English. Priorities of Research. Eds. Wolfgang Zach and Michael Kenneally. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2008. 57–64. Print. ———. “The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality.” The European Review 22.3 (2014): 491–503. Print. Onega, Susana, and Jean-Michel Ganteau, eds. Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction. DQR Studies in Literature 48. Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York, 2011. Print. ———. Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Print. ———. The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Print. Radstone, Susannah. Memory and Methodology. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Print. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Los Angeles, CA: Tracher, 2009. Print. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. La sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989. Print. ———. El modelo Frankenstein. De la diferencia a la cultura post. Madrid: Tecnos, 1997. Print.

Introduction  19 ———. Transmodernidad. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2004. Print. ———. “Transmodernidad: un nuevo paradigma.” Transmodernity, Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.1 (2011): 1–13. Accessed on 06/06/2015 at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/57c8s9gr/. Web. ———. “The Crossroads of Transmodernity.” Keynote lecture delivered at the International Conference on “Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English.” Trans. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Susana Onega. University of Zaragoza 26 April 2017. Accessed on 23/05/2018 at: www. academia.edu/33683346/_The_Crossroads_of_Transmodernity_/. Web. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis and London: U. of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. ———. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. ———. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2019. Print. Rudrum, David, and Nicholas Stavris, eds. Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print. Sardar, Ziauddin. “Islam and the West in a Transmodern World.” Islam Archive Online 18 August 2004. Accessed on 25/09/2019 at: https://archive. islamonline.net/?p=14902/. Web. Silverman, Max. Palimpsestic Memory. The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. Oxford: Berghahn P, 2013. Print. Steinem, Gloria. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. London: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. Print. Van den Akker, Robin, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen. Metamodernism, Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017. Print.

Part I

The Poetics of Transmodernity

1

The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality* Susana Onega

Introduction: David Mitchell’s Transmodern Poetics Readers of David Mitchell’s fictional works agree that his third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), constitutes his most accomplished example so far of an extraordinarily original and engaging form of creative writing that, while displaying clear postmodernist and visionary traits, somehow defeats any attempts at pinning it down within a concrete literary trend. Thus, while Scott Selisker describes Mitchell’s works as examples of “The Global Novel” (443–59), Richard Bradford places Mitchell in a trend he calls “The New Postmodernists,” characterised by “a brand of contra-realism so flexible and eclectic as to almost defy definition” (47). Bradford situates the emergence of this trend after the 1970s and describes it as a reaction to Thatcherism characterised by the tendency to attune “radicalism […] to the demands of the marketplace” (48). Accordingly, he asserts that, with Cloud Atlas, Mitchell “seem[s] to have traversed the long-established chasm between the world of perverse experimental writing and the reading public” (62). However, as Peter Childs and James Green rightly argue, this misconceives, or at the very least, underestimates, Mitchell’s fiction. Mitchell’s novels do not merely rehearse the stylistic inflections of a domesticated postmodernism, as Bradford terms it, but rather articulate a complex response to the current material conditions of the world. (26) Childs and Green illustrate their view by arguing that Mitchell’s first three novels, Ghostwritten, number9dream and Cloud Atlas are palimpsests of competing voices and styles that cycle through disparate but always interlinked temporal and special settings. As globalization forges new patterns of human interaction, interconnectedness and awareness, the nested layers of stories within stories in these novels, and

24  Susana Onega their mixing of different modes of reality, articulate the fluidity and multiplicity of contemporary relations and subjectivities. (26) According to this, Mitchell’s first three novels express the fluidity and multiplicity of contemporary relations and subjectivities in our globalised world through the creation of palimpsests of competing voices and styles contained in disparate stories belonging in different modes of reality but linked temporally and spatially. Drawing on this, I will attempt to demonstrate that the poetics of Cloud Atlas offers an innovative and accurate response to the shift of cultural paradigm from Postmodernity to Transmodernity that, according to a growing number of sociologists, philosophers of history and literary critics (Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa; Ateljevic; Dussel; Le Roy; Luyckx; Onega 2017; Rodríguez Magda), has been taking place since the 1980s. In various essays (see the Introduction to this volume), the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda has expressed her view that one of the clearest signs of this paradigm shift is that, for all its undermining of master narratives, Postmodernity has fallen prey to the opposed impulse to put together and globally join the scattered pieces of these grand narratives due to the virtual revolution of Information Society, thus facilitating the creation of a new Grand Narrative: Globalisation (28). She contends that the fluidity and connectivity of Information Society fosters a process of totality that follows a network-like model devoid of clear organisation, hierarchical structure or hegemonic centre, and that this fluid, interconnected, unstable social reality begs for a similarly fluid, “transborder” mode of thinking (30), capable of responding adequately to the new questions about the nature of reality and the validity and limits of knowledge arising out of this era of swift transformations and fluidity in which everything is interconnected. Mitchell’s novels may be said to offer an extraordinarily innovative response to these questions. His fictional worlds offer a multiplicity of perspectives and voices and are populated by a whole range of characters belonging to different races, nationalities, social classes and even species, and displaying striking cultural, political and religious differences. But, unlike those in multiculturalist novels set in our postcolonial, globalised world, Mitchell’s characters do not attempt to “write back” the Eurocentric experience of colonisation from the perspective of the colonised. Rather, as I argued elsewhere with reference to Ghostwritten, they exist in a complex multiverse ruled by random and yet meaningful coincidences […] in terms that emphasise the multinational connectedness of individuals, history, memory, and culture while skewing the risks of totalisation and universalism [thus conveying] a transpersonal conception of self and world. (Onega 2019, 51)

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  25 In other words, Mitchell’s imaginative response to the gnoseological demands made by the shift from Postmodernity to Transmodernity involves a move beyond the bounds of what Gerd Bayer acutely describes as “the Enlightenment ‘invention’ of individuality” (345) and towards a transpersonal mode of being requiring “an integrative or holistic approach that considers not just the intellect, but the whole embodied person situated in local and global community, ecosystem, and cosmos” (Krippner xvii). The world(s) inhabited by these characters coexist in parallel present moments and form part of a multiverse ruled by the principle of endless potentiality of Chaos Theory. My contention is that this transpersonal conception of self and world is crucial for the understanding of the difference between the postmodernist poetics of multiculturalist and postcolonial fictions and the transmodern poetics of Cloud Atlas. The fact that Mitchell’s third novel is entitled Cloud Atlas already evokes the structuring principle of Chaos Theory, inaugurated by Mitchell Feigembaum’s study of the structure of clouds in 1974 (Gleick 3). But, given Mitchell’s interest in Eastern cultures, it also evokes “The Cloud Gate Dance,” the oldest known dance in China. In a striking example of serendipity, choreographer Lin Hwai-min created the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre in Taiwan in 1973 (Lin n.p.), one year before Feigembaum initiated his study of dynamical systems in New Mexico. Lin’s extraordinarily complex and innovative performances develop through the blending of Western dance with Eastern ontology in what is perceived by viewers as a haphazard and disconnected way requiring an emotional response from the audience (Warnecke). The fact that the ultimate truth conveyed by these plays is revealed though a process of epistemological unravelling and displacement demanding the emotional involvement of the public provides a significant model for the transmodern poetics of Cloud Atlas. In the following pages, I will analyse Cloud Atlas from the relational perspective and the logic of potentiality provided by Chaos Theory, using the structure and logic of the palimpsest as an interpretive device capable of articulating the transmodern poetics of the novel. My working hypothesis is that, put together, the structure of embedding, the generic hybridity and the emotionally charged and apparently disjointed contents of Cloud Atlas generate a process of epistemological unravelling and displacement that allows Mitchell to transmit allegorically an overall final truth about the human condition in our post-traumatic transmodern age.

Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality in Cloud Atlas Overtly, the structure of Cloud Atlas is very similar to that of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). It contains

26  Susana Onega six – instead of ten and a half – apparently unrelated stories referring to widely different times and places and belonging in various literary and non-literary genres, clogged with metafictional echoes to canonical works that function to undermine their historicity and foreground their constructedness. However, this impression of disconnectedness is soon called into question, not only because the stories are linked by recurrent motifs foregrounding relations of power and greed, but also because the titles and characters of the earlier stories reappear in the later ones, while the stories themselves are interrupted and continued in reverse order in the second half of the novel, thus setting into question the temporal progressiveness of the six stories, which apparently run from the nineteenth century to a post-Apocalyptic future. Thus, the first story, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” is abruptly interrupted in the middle of a sentence, coinciding with the end of a page (Mitchell 2012, 39) in what seems a printing flaw, and continued at the beginning of the last section of the novel (475), so that the two split halves of the journal constitute the all-encompassing external frame of the other, similarly split, stories, with the last one, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rithin’ After,” occupying the centre. Christopher A. Sims has described this story as “the only unbroken section of the novel” (181). However, it is also divided into two parts, even though they are separated only by a double blank space with a line in the middle (Mitchell 2012, 254). While this division reveals the perfect symmetry of the novel’s Matryoshka doll structure, the difficulty in spotting it creates an effect of indeterminacy similar to that produced by the Oulipian game on the number 9 played by Mitchell in Ghostwritten (see Onega 2019, 51–52), comparable to the hidden dimensions in String Theory. This effect of indeterminacy is enhanced by the fact that some of the characters in Cloud Atlas also exist in earlier and/or later novels by David Mitchell, thus conveying the idea that they belong in the same fictional multiverse, as the writer himself acknowledges: “each of my books is a chapter in a sort of sprawling macro novel. […] I write each novel with an eye on the bigger picture and how the parts fit into the whole” (Mason n.p.). Apparently, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” situates the beginning of Mitchell’s alternative history of the world at the height of colonisation and imperialism as it is the journal kept in the midnineteenth-century by a notary during a business trip on board a merchant ship, the Prophetess (Mitchell 2012, 17), from Australia back to San Francisco. However, this chronology is deceptive as the journal includes the story of the Moriori, the first inhabitants of Chatham Isle, called by them “Rangiauria” and revered as mankind’s birthplace (32). The Moriori had lived in isolation for millennia (11), so that their language lacks a word for “race” and “Moriori” simply means “People” (11). The subjugation of these “noble savages” ruled by “imperishable peace” (12) by the violent and cannibalistic Maori provides the essential

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  27 predator/prey leitmotif around which the six stories develop. As Mitchell noted in an interview, Cloud Atlas is “a book about predacity and predation […] individuals preying on groups, groups preying on individuals” (Denes n.p.). Rather than oppositional behavioural patterns, this predator/prey binary should be interpreted as Blakean “Contraries,” that is, as essential elements in the progression from innocence to experience (Blake 248). The fact that the Maori invasion of the Chathams (Mitchell 2012, 16) was part of the plan of colonisation devised by the British Empire qualifies the British as the alien dominant predators that destroyed the natural balance between these aboriginal tribes and their environment. The centrality of the encounter of the fittingly named American Adam with Autua, the last prelapsarian Moriori, inaugurates Mitchell’s alternative history of the world with an antipodean myth of origins placed in the Polynesian Eden (32). At first sight, the second story, “Letters from Zedelghem,” seems totally unrelated to the first. It contains the letters addressed to his university mate and lover, Sixsmith, by Robert Frobisher, a gifted music student recently expelled from Caius College, Cambridge, and disinherited by his father, a wealthy career churchman (469), for dishonourable behaviour. Dated between 31st May and 12th December 1931, the letters are posted from Belgium, most of them from Château Zedelghem, where Frobisher had found precarious refuge as amanuensis for the erstwhile famous British composer, Vyvyan Ayrs. However, in the letter of 14th July, Robert tells Sixsmith that he had come across the edited journal of a voyage from Sydney to California written by a notary from San Francisco called Adam Ewing, entitled “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” (64). This comment places the first story in a relation of embedding with the second that shatters the readers’ assumptions about the journal’s ontological status. Frobisher describes it as a curious dismembered volume without covers, unstitched binding beginning in the nineteen-ninth page (64). While this description confirms our hypothesis about the printing flaw, it also shatters our assumption that the journal was complete, and so, that Ewing had begun keeping it on Chatham Isle, not Sydney. We are again baffled by Frobisher’s later comment that he has just found the missing part, from “the interrupted page to the end of the first volume” under his bed (460) as this remark contradicts our assumption that the journal was published in a single volume. The uncertainty thus created is increased by two footnotes added to the journal by Ewing’s son, Jackson (21, 501). In the first, Jackson mentions having written an Introduction (21) that neither the readers nor Frobisher know about, thus confirming the incompleteness of the journal. The existence of these footnotes alerts readers, and also Frobisher (64), that the original text has been edited and printed after the notary’s death, thus undermining the journal’s authenticity and generic status. This doubt is increased by Ewing’s mention, in the first published entry, of a “trail of recent footprints” (3) he

28  Susana Onega had found on a solitary strand on Chatham Isle, as the intertextual echo to Robinson Crusoe it conveys situates the journal in the hybrid genre of the autobiographical travelogue inaugurated by Daniel Defoe. This generic instability is increased by Ewing’s comment, after listening to the spoken history of the Moriori, that it reminded him of the writings of Defoe or Melville (10), particularly, of the crimes imputed by Melville to Pacific missionaries in Typee (492).1 The overall effect of this intertextual dimension of the journal is comparable to the ghostly traces left by the older text on the new one after its palimpsesting. As Sarah Dillon argues, the spectrality of these traces begs for a “palimpsestuous” or relational reading, aimed at unravelling the complex ideas or images tainting the surface of the palimpsest in their irreducible unity (4, 43). This is precisely the type of reading Frobisher makes of the journal. For example, he calculates that Ewing undertook the journey in 1849 or 1850 (64) from passing remarks about the gold rush. Through this and similar guesses readers can conclude that the first published journal entry was written on Thursday, 7th November 1850 and the last on Monday, 13th January 1851. Another, more significant example of relational reading is Frobisher’s association of Ewing with Melville’s Cpt. Delano in “‘Benito Cereno,’ blind to all conspirators” (64). This comment shows Frobisher as a well-read and active reader, capable of discovering the traces of a key covert hypotext of the journal. Like “Benito Cereno,” the journal is informed by what Lene M. Johannesses calls a “poetics of peril” (377) based on an aesthetics of rupture, dislocation and translocation of meaning and displacement, evident, for example, from the reversal of the trope of cannibalism (Bayer 352) at the beginning of the journal, when readers discover that the footprints found by Ewing on the beach do not belong to a naked cannibal but to Henry Goose, a former English surgeon (Mitchell 2012, 3). The doctor is digging teeth from the sand of the “Arcadian strand” that had been “a cannibals’ banqueting hall” (3), with the aim of using them to make dentures for the English nobility. His purpose is double: earning a fortune and taking revenge on the Marchioness who had made him lose his position in London with imputations of malpractice (4). The notary is shocked and disgusted by Goose’s plan and tone, but he dismisses his negative judgement of him as unjust and premature because he is a gentleman (59), thus allowing his race and class bias to affect his judgement. Throughout the journal, Ewing will repeatedly note and dismiss as inconsequential Goose’s racist and misogynistic ideas and, although he is shocked by his dishonest and greedy quack-doctor behaviour with the occasional patients he treats whenever they reach a port, Ewing will trust him when he diagnoses him with an infection of the brain caused by an endemic parasite (35) and prescribes a life-endangering treatment, without suspecting that he is poisoning him with arsenic. The notary’s incapacity to see Goose’s predatory character because he is a friend and

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  29 a gentleman shows the importance of social bonds in the building of trust among the builders of the Empire. The equivalent of Crusoe’s meeting with Friday takes place the day after Ewing’s encounter with Goose. Passing below the Indian hamlet (6), Ewing was led by a strange humming (6) to the place where a Moriori slave he later learns is called Autua was being publicly flogged by his Maori master. The notary was terribly shaken by the brutal punishment and felt like swooning with empathy under each fall of the lash (6). Then, a peculiar thing occurred, the beaten savage found Ewing’s eye and shone him an uncanny amicable look (6) in what may be interpreted as a recognition of mutual humanity. Ewing was struck by the contrast between the black slave’s shuddering body and his self-possessed face that he compared to the serenity of a martyr already in the hands of the Lord (6). However, he did nothing to stop the flogging and wrongly concluded that the bizarre, beelike hum emitted by the Moriori slaves witnessing the punishment was the expression of their “inbred, bovine torpor” (6), when in fact it was a ritual meant to strengthen Autua’s resilience. A few days later, during a solitary trip to the Conical Tor, Ewing heard this hum again in the course of what he describes as a fearsome and sublime experience (20). After reaching the summit of the volcano, he stepped on a deep hollow covered by turf and fell into it as the turf disintegrated under his weight (19). The fall literally took the American Adam across the various palimpsestic strata of human history from his mid-nineteenthcentury present back to Polynesian prehistory. As his sight adjusted to the dimness, Ewing found himself surrounded by hundreds of faces, “adzed by idolaters into bark” and he realised that he was “the first White in that mausoleum since its prehistoric inception” (20). He then heard a puzzling hum and traced it to a mass of flies orbiting something impaled on a branch (20). As he poked it with a stick, he was terrified by the impression that it was a human heart pulsing as if alive. Then, a salamander emerged from it and darted along the stick to his hand (20). Shattered by the uncanny experience, which a Bible-reading Evangelist like him would surely relate to Satan as Lord of the Flies, Ewing was unable to connect the flies’ hum with that emitted by the slaves during Autua’s flogging, thus missing the symbolism of life and rebirth associated to the insects’ metamorphosis. Still, Ewing dismissed the idea of telling his white acquaintances about his discovery for fear that they would fell the trees and sell the dendroglyphs to collectors (21), thus showing that he had already started to question the colonisers’ ethos (21). On board the Prophetess, Ewing becomes a direct witness to the repeated acts of brutality of the crewmen, but he seems as incapable of judging them as he is of realising that Goose is poisoning him. Thus, although Rafael was the same age as his son Jackson (499), he did not listen to his desperate call for help and was preternaturally blind to the sexual harassment inflicted on him by “Boerhaave & his ‘garter snakes.’

30  Susana Onega Not just on Christmas night, but every night for many weeks” (499). At the beginning of the journal, Ewing admitted that he occasionally glimpsed “a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrum of itself” but that, as he approached it, it moved “into the thorny swamp of dissent” (17). It was his fear of dissenting from the white majority, then, that made Ewing blind to these acts of brutality. As Frobisher acutely notes, Ewing was prey to a fatal flaw of misperception comparable to that of Captain Amasa Delano with respect to the true nature of Captain Benito Cereno’s relationship with his black servant Baboo. It is only after Autua saves his life in extremis by confronting Goose and Boerhaave and taking him to the Catholic mission in Honolulu (506) that Ewing finally comprehends the “truer Truth” that “for the human species, selfishness is extinction” (508). The fact that it is the peaceful and loyal black slave who saves the American Adam from the British doctor’s rapacious clutches reverses the roles allotted by Melville to the dignified and pitiful Spanish captain and the treacherous and vengeful black slave in “Benito Cereno.” Further, as Bayer notes, Autua’s action also reverses Crusoe’s treacherous “sell[ing] of his saviour, Xury, back into slavery” (352) in a preliminary adventure. From this perspective, the slightly odd colocation of the word “Pacific” in the title of the journal reveals the palimpsestuous traces of its covert significance: that, if there is an alternative to the biblical doctrine that justifies the destructive predacity of the Maori and the European colonisers, it lies in Autua’s redemptive message of ecological pacifism. The proof that, at the end of the journey, the good-hearted notary has rounded off his quest for maturation is that he decides to join the abolitionist cause, knowing that he will have to suffer for opposing human nature (508–09), and that his life was only like a drop of water in the ocean (509). Ewing’s answer to these self-addressed warnings is two-fold. One is the practice of communal cohesion and friendship of the Moriori: “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” (509); the other, also learnt from the Moriori, highlights the importance of the imagination in the creation of reality: If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world […] peaceably […], if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. (508; emphasis in the original) Ewing’s discovery that it is the idea that creates the event places the responsibility for the predatory world brought into existence by the diseased Imperialist dream of dominium terrae on the individuals believing in it but also opens up the possibility of imagining into being a lifeenhancing alternative to it, based on the nature-loving and empathetic ethics of equality and peace of the Moriori.

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  31 Given the structure of embedding of Cloud Atlas, this revelation may be seen as the final truth underlying the process of epistemological unravelling and displacement of the other stories of domination and submission as well. The version of Ewing’s journal we have read begins on Chatham Isle, the largest of the Chatham Islands, and ends on Honolulu, the largest of the Hawaiian Islands. The fact that Ewing’s journey begins on one archipelago and ends on another points to insularity as an important spatial metaphor for the relation among the six stories. Although Frobisher is in Belgium when he writes the letters, he is, like Ayres, born on the British Isles, and he admires the old musician because he is the author of a symphony, Matryoshka Doll Variations, and a song cycle, Society Islands (52). While the first title conveys an equivalence between the multiple distinct movements in a symphony and the thematic unitycum-difference evoked by the Russian-doll structure of the novel, the second suggests that, like the different islands in an archipelago, these stories stand in a relation of unity-cum-separation comparable to that of the various worlds existing in parallel dimensions according to String Theory. The third story, “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” is also situated on an island, Buenas Yerbas, the fictional counterpart of the Isla de Yerba Buena on the Bay of San Francisco that was intended by its first Spanish settlers as a trading post for ships engaged in the process of colonisation. The fact that this is the port of destiny of the Prophetess establishes a tenuous thematic link with the first story that reinforces the novel’s palimpsestic structure. Overtly, “Half-Lives” is thematically linked to “Letters from Zedelghem” in that it narrates the encounter of Luisa Rey, a young local gossip columnist (91), with Sixsmith, Robert Frobisher’s addressee. In 1931, when Frobisher sent him the letters, Sixsmith was a young man studying physics at Cambridge. In “Half-Lives,” he appears as the sixty-six-year-old Dr Rufus Sixsmith (90), a Nobel Laureate who had worked in the Manhattan Project (124), recently commissioned to write an expert report on the HYDRA-Zero nuclear reactor at Swannekke Island. As Heather J. Hicks notes, this island is the fictional “doppelganger” of Three Mile Island (189n.12), the power station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the most important nuclear accident in the United States took place in 1979. “Half Lives” is set in the summer of 1975 (Mitchell 2012, 108), when the accident could have been avoided. The action develops around the conflict between the Seaboard Corporation – the reckless profitmaking sponsor of the Hydra-Zero project – and the Swannekke Island protesters, who are members of the GreenFront (124–5) campaigning under the PLANET AGAINST SEABOARD banner (123). The fact that the Seaboard Corporation was ready to silence Sixsmith’s report even at the cost of murder shows that, in the twentieth century, the predatory role is exerted by multinational corporations, with the GreenFront activists representing their ecological and pacifist Contrary.

32  Susana Onega After Sixsmith is murdered, his colleague Isaac Sachs gives Luisa his copy of the report (100) and makes an elaborate plan to leave the country. Sitting on the jet in which he intends to escape, Sachs starts perusing his notes on the model of time he is working with. This is the entry he reads minutes before being blown up by the C-4 bomb planted beneath his seat: •

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. (393; italics in the original).

Echoing Ayrs’s Matryoshka Doll Variations, Sachs employs the metaphor of an infinite Russian doll of embedded present moments to express the central tenet of quantum mechanics that things in nature occur simultaneously on multiple scales and belong in open systems with the potential to change the organisation as a whole. Similarly, his assertion that the difference between the actual and the virtual is relative reflects Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the postulate that every quantum physical measurement depends on the position of the observer. If we compare Sachs’s image of a Matryosca doll to the embedded structure of the stories contained in Cloud Atlas, we must conclude that they co-exist in parallel dimensions in a relation of instability in a present marked by catastrophe (Bayer 345 and passim). In an earlier notebook entry, Sacks exemplifies these present moments with the sinking of the Titanic, a random event whose catastrophic singularity makes it indelible in the collective memory. As the direct witnesses disappear and the actual past is forgotten, “a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever ‘truer’.” (392; italics in the original). What plays a crucial role in the construction of reality is, then, the collective memory of what Walter Benjamin called in Illuminations a random and unexpected “moment of danger” that flashes up in the memory and interrupts the routine of predictable moments (255). Like Ewing, Sachs sees no difference between the actual future and “a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams” (Mitchell 2012, 393; italics in the original). His time mode is, then, constituted by present moments with potentially infinite actual and virtual pasts and futures interacting with each other according to the perspective cast on them from the present. This temporal structure echoes Benjamin’s relational interpretation of the past in terms of constellations (257). While Sachs’s relational time mode provides a model for the parallel lived and remembered pasts and futures in the universe of endless possibility of Cloud Atlas, Benjamin’s

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  33 notion of constellation can help us distinguish between the “moments of danger” narrated in each story and the multi-layered single catastrophe built by the piling up of these moments in a structure of embedding that can only be perceived if, like Benjamin’s Angel, we cast a relational backward glance on all of them from our own present-time perspective. While the revelatory force of these moments lies in their capacity to disrupt the predictable and stable cause-and-effect linearity of World History, it is the single catastrophe built on the palimpsestic accumulation of these rare historical events that acquires the omni-temporality of Messianic time and is kept in the collective memory. In Mitchell’s alternative History of the World, this single catastrophe is constituted by the repetition-with-a-difference throughout the six stories of the predator/ prey leitmotif. The conception of Cloud Atlas as a History of the World constituted by constellations of moments of danger piling up into an omni-temporal global catastrophe is enhanced by Frobisher’s comment that he is helping Ayrs compose a symphony called Eternal Recurrence (461). Interpreted as a metacomment, this title adds Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence to the palimpsestic structure of the novel. Frobisher admits to having taken Ayrs’s bible, Also sprach Zarathustra and feeling, after reading ten pages, that “Nietzsche was reading me, not I him” (63). However, echoing Nietzsche’s eventual dismissal of Wagner’s art as decadent and reactive (Nietzsche 212–3, 317–44), Frobisher disregarded Ayrs’s musical project and, inspired by a vivid dream, started working on his own piece, the Cloud Atlas Sextet. In the dream, he found himself in a china shop crowded with porcelain antiquities, afraid that he would cause several to fall and smash to bits if he moved (43). When he accidentally knocked a Ming vase off its pedestal, he was struck by the “glorious, transcendent” noise it made (43), and started deliberately smashing the figurines imprisoning him: —orgy of shrapnel filled the air, divine harmonies my head. Ah, such music! Glimpsed my father totting up the smashed items’ value, nib flashing, but had to keep the music coming. Knew I’d become the greatest composer of the century if I could only make this music mine. (43) According to Nietzsche, truly creative artists partake of the Will to Power, a pre- and transpersonal stream of form-creating forces originally presented as chaos, that is, as “an infinite play of forces dispersed in a multitude of perspectives and yet as a living universal medium common to all beings” (Haar 26). It is the perception of this universal and infinite form-creating potential in the sounds he hears in his dream that makes Frobisher think that he would become the greatest composer of the century if he could make this music his.

34  Susana Onega Echoing Blake’s notion of Contraries, Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, established a relation between Energy and Reason – the Dionysian and the Apollonian. While the Apollonian artist, commanded by reason, creates beautiful illusions and “los[es] contact with the nauseous suffering of existence,” the Dionysian artist, led by the imagination, produces “a clear image of reality; a reflexion of the real” (Pollard 70–71). However, “unlike for Blake, the Dionysian is will-less. Nietzsche realises that no action of his can alter the eternal condition of things, the chaotic suffering of becoming.” (70). A central trait of the Dionysian artist is, then, the strength to acknowledge fate, “a recognition that being is merely the horizon of becoming and that, as such, the power to will it must recur eternally, must be an eternal Self-overcoming.” (73). It is this “yessaying” (73) to the nauseous suffering of existence – this amor fati – that grants artistic creativity its redemptive and proleptic character: “This spirit who accepts tragedy, ‘who bears the heaviest fate . . . can nevertheless be the lightest and most transcendent’ […]. A supreme, divine artist recklessly creating and destroying” (73). While Robert’s frenzied smashing of the porcelain figurines in his dream signals him as a Dionysian artist, the fact that his father was toting up their value may be said to express the young musician’s desperate urge to free himself from the vital and creative paralysis enforced on him by his “Pater” (Mitchell 2012, 44 ff.), a figure of authority whose social position as career churchman associates him with Nietzsche’s ascetic priest. As he argued in Genealogy of Morals, for two millennia the task of the ascetic priest has been “the reinterpretation of suffering as feelings of guilt, fear, and punishment” (Nietzsche 141), convincing the sick that they should see their suffering as a well-deserved punishment, so that “one no longer protested against pain, one thirsted for pain; ‘more pain! more pain!’” (141; emphasis in the original). Just as Coleridge’s dreaming of “Kubla Khan” was interrupted by the unwelcome arrival of a person from Porlock bringing him a bill, so Frobisher’s dream is interrupted by the violent knocking on his door of money collectors (Mitchell 2012, 43). Afraid that they would tell the hotel manager that he “had no means of settling his now-hefty balance” (44), Frobisher escaped swiftly through the bathroom window (43–44) of the fittingly named Imperial Western suite (43), thus renouncing forever the hated title of “Son of an Ecclesiastical Somebody” (44), and severing his social bonds with the class sustaining the British Empire. His decision to travel to Belgium to offer himself as amanuensis to the now half blind and syphilitic Vyvyan Ayrs, instead of jumping off Waterloo Bride, was meant to materialise his dream of obliging his father to admit that the son he had disinherited was the greatest British composer of his time (45). After finishing it, Robert describes the Sextet as “[l]ifetime music arriving all at once” (460, 470), containing echoes of a myriad canonical

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  35 musical works (63, 470). Echoing Blake’s reliance on the creative imagination and Zarathustra’s invitation to engage in visionary creation, he describes the composition of the Sextet as a manifestation of the Will to Power triggered by prophetic inspiration: “Wish I could make you [Sixsmith] see the brightness. Prophets went blind if they saw Jehovah. Not deaf, but blind” (461). Still, for all his dreams of gaining the admiration of his castrating father, after finishing the Sextet Robert feels like “a spent firework” (470), and makes the decision to kill himself while listening to Nietzsche’s gramophone record (471), convinced as he is that we live in a world of eternal recurrence: “Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter” (417). By choosing to commit suicide, the Romantic young musician situates himself beyond nihilism at the point of utter will-lessness, when saying “yes” to living the same bleak life again and again is the expression of amor fati. During his stay in the castle, Robert had half-jokingly allowed Ayrs’s wife, significantly named Jocasta, to use him as sex partner, but he then became madly in love with Eva, the Ayrs’s distant and fascinating seventeen-year-old daughter. The impossible love triangle formed by Jocasta, Eva and Robert, together with the fact that he is an artist of passionate and sensitive temperament who is writing letters to a bosom friend, point to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) as a covert hypotext of “Letters from Zedelghem.” This hypotext reveals a guilt-ridden, masochistic drive beneath Robert’s will-lessness that transforms him from Nietzschean “Yes-sayer” – a person capable of uncompromising acceptance of reality per se – into that of sacrificial figure, like Autua or Sonmi. This Christ-like facet of Robert’ personality responds to a carefully screened trauma. The real motivation for his decision to travel to Belgium was the fact that his elder brother Adrian, his father’s favourite, had been killed in action in the First World War and probably lay buried in the cemetery of the Eleventh Essex of the Fifty-third Brigade in Zonnebeke (440–1). When Robert visited this cemetery, he was terribly depressed by the realisation that he was unable to “divine which KNOWN UNTO GOD was Adrian’s” (441). Robert, who had grown up in his brother’s legendary shadow (441), harboured strong feelings of guilt for hating him, and of shame for knowing that his father would have preferred Robert to have died instead of him. Once the traces of this forcefully repressed trauma are uncovered, the fact that Robert is writing the letters thirteen years since Armistice (440) points to the talented musician as representative of the inter-wars generation that was too young to be called to service before 1918 and lived with mixed feelings of relief and shame, knowing that they had escaped from the fate of “[a]ll those Adrians jammed like pilchards in cemeteries throughout eastern France, western Belgium, beyond” (441–2) by sheer chance. From this historical perspective, Robert’s suicide becomes

36  Susana Onega a yielding to, rather than an overcoming of the nihilistic despair instilled in him by his father’s priestly interpretation of suffering in terms of guilt, fear and punishment. The possibility of sustaining both readings reflects the undecidability of the eternal struggle between Reason and Energy, understood as Blakean Contraries. Unlike paired opposites, Contraries do not exclude each other but need each other to progress: both are elements of that Selfhood which has to be annihilated in order that a regeneration of Identity, of Imagination, can take place. Yet, in this recognition, the poet does not finally overcome the duality and thus end the struggle. The struggle itself is his creativity. (Pollard 67) This Nietzschean conception of selfhood is enhanced by Robert’s bisexuality, a trait that associates him with Blake’s Satan as the hermaphrodite, dualistic selfhood at war with itself, the true hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Pollard 68), 2 thus establishing a difference between Ewing’s Enlightenment and Frobisher’s Romantic sense of self. Finally, while Ewing’s journal belongs in the age of Imperialism ruled by monopoly capitalism, the fact that Robert’s letters are written in 1931 situates his life story in the period of the Great Depression, the worldwide collapse of the free-market or laissez-faire economy system that began in the New York stock market crash of October 29, 1929. Given that Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, the fact that, in Germany, Ayrs is denounced as “a Jewish devil” (71), while Zedelgem (without the h of its fictional counterpart) became a British prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War, adds a mood of gloom, anxiety and apocalyptic terror to the leitmotif of predatory violence versus ecological pacifism initiated in the first story. The third story, “Half Lives,” set in 1975, shows the effects of the next stage in the Western dream of dominion, multinational capitalism, a system in which capitalist expansion is ruled by international corporations transcending national boundaries. It begins with Rufus Sixsmith leaning over the balcony of the hotel where he had hidden himself, pondering on the risks of being murdered by the Corporation if he makes public the serious flaw he had found in the design of the nuclear reactor. He sees a sad-looking young woman leaning over the neighbouring balcony and half-jokingly thinks of proposing a suicide pact to her (89). His association establishes a transpersonal link between Luisa Rey and Robert Frobisher that is later enhanced by Luisa’s experiences of déjà vu and the fact that she bears the same comet-shaped birthmark (122) as him (85, 120). Soon after, the prestigious scientist and the young journalist get trapped in the hotel elevator (91) in a clear case of serendipitous coincidence. Thus, Sixsmith learns that Luisa was the daughter of the late Lester Rey, a member of the Buenas Yerbas Police Department

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  37 turned correspondent after his incorruptibility nearly cost him his life. Like Frobisher, Lester had lost a brother in action, in his case, during the Second World War (92), while he remained at home by sheer chance. He covered the Korea War for Illustrated Planet, was Latin American correspondent for the West Coast Herald, and stayed in Saigon during the Vietnam War (94). Sixsmith had read and admired his reports because he wrote them “from the Asian perspective” (92). These references to armed conflicts provide the historical background to “Half Lives” and function proleptically to draw attention to Korea, the territory where the fifth story, “An Orison of Sonmi~451,” takes place. After his conversation with Luisa, Sixsmith makes two decisions. One is to send a copy of his expert report on the Hydra nuclear reactor to Megan, his niece, who was writing her doctoral thesis on radioastronomy at the big dishes on Hawaii (94). This reference to Megan is also proleptic as the astronomical observatory in Hawaii plays a central role in the sixth story, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After.” The other is to send Luisa another copy of the report and go to the airport to take the first flight to London. This is the moment of danger that transforms Luisa from frustrated novelist-cum-apathetic gossip columnist into valiant research journalist like her father. When, on the next morning, Luisa reads an obituary lamenting Sixsmith’s suicide in the Bon Voyage hotel at the Buenas Yerbas International Airport, she goes to the hotel and manages to get a crumpled pack of letters sent to Sixsmith by Robert Frobisher (116). Reading them, Luisa is so dizzied by the vividness of the images of places and people invoked by the letters that “she can only call them memories” (120). Later, when she is leaving her hotel room in haste to avoid being murdered herself, Luisa is haunted by a feeling of déjà vu with Robert Frobisher escaping through the window from another hotel (139). When she listens to possibly the only extant copy of Frobisher’s posthumously recorded Cloud Atlas Sextet, she finds the sound intimately familiar (408) and feels the urge to own the record as she wonders: “Where have I heard it before?” (408). There are only two possible answers to this question: either Luisa has recognised the pre- and transpersonal stream of form-creating forces in the music; or she herself composed the Sextet in her previous incarnation as Robert Frobisher, a possibility the pragmatic journalist’s daughter (120) had dismissed when she read that he had a comet-shaped birthmark like hers. Still, in keeping with Mitchell’s transindividual and transmodern conceptions of self and world, virtually all the protagonists have a comet-shaped birthmark, feel connected by serendipitous coincidences and uncanny experiences of déjà vu, and can cross the spatio-temporal and ontological boundaries separating the diverse fictional worlds not only of the six stories in Cloud Atlas but also of other novels by David Mitchel. We have seen Robert Frobisher reading Adam Ewing’s journal; Rufus Sixsmith reappearing in “Half-Lives” and Luisa Rey finding and

38  Susana Onega listening with elation to the Cloud Atlas Sextet. In the following story, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” Luisa Rey is mentioned as a fictional character in an unpublished novel of the same “lousy” title, written by “one dubiously named Hilary V. Hush” (156), and sent to Timothy Cavendish’s vanity press for publication (162). The undecidability thus created about Luisa’s ontological status (comparable to that of Ewing as the real author of a journal or the fictional protagonist of a travelogue), is increased by her appearance in Ghostwritten as the author of Hermitage, “the greatest true-crime psychological exposé written since Capote’s In Cold Blood” (Mitchell 2001, 377). This transforms “Half-Lives” into either an autobiographical murder-mystery written by Luisa Rey under a pseudonym, or a thriller written by someone else with Luisa and Sixsmith as its fictional protagonists. Tim Cavendish and his brother Denholme also appear in Ghostwritten as co-owners of The Cavendish Literary Agency (294) and although, like Luisa, Tim does not believe in reincarnation, he has a comet-shaped birthmark and has a strong impression of déjà vu at the dangerous moment of his escape from Aurora House, the residence where his brother has interned him, when he discards the sensation of having lived through the same moment many times before (Mitchell 2012, 380), thus echoing Robert’s and Luisa’s escapes from their respective hotels. Generically, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” is an autobiographical memoir, written “in longhand” (146) in the witty and farcical style of picaresque narratives, with Tim displaying the characteristic carefree position of the pícaro as sympathetic outsider, untouched by the false rules of a corrupt and predatory society. However, unlike the classical rogue, who is usually a low-class youth fending for social advancement, Tim is “sixtysomething” (146) like Sixsmith and, like Frobisher, a heavily indebted Cambridge don with a love for literature, struggling to adapt a business based on the sale of printed books to the demands of an ever-more narcissistic and uncultured society. The story is situated in the novel’s present at a time evincing the negative effects of the conservative policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in a globalised capitalist world. Tim begins his retrospective narration with a moment of danger he lived six years earlier (145). He was strolling along Greenwich Avenue in a state of happy intoxication after having cashed the fat check that an ex-chief of the Rhodesian police had given him to edit and print his autobiography (145), when he was knocked down and robbed of his watch by “a trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie” (144). This assault is the first in the long list of evermore violent events that pinpoint his ghastly ordeal. As such, it has a double proleptic charge. While the physical attack on an inebriated elderly man by teenage girls points to the predatory nature of the generation reared under Thatcherism, the fact that Tim’s client is an ex-chief of the Rhodesian police shows the vanity publisher promoting an enforcer of white supremacism.

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  39 As the story develops, it becomes evident that Tim is a racist, a malechauvinist, a compulsive liar and a sponger, but readers enjoy his relentless optimism, bordering on arrogance, even in the direst situations, and we are ready to condone his only too human flaws when he makes us laugh with the gruesome details of the unexpected ordeal that changed his drab and meagre life and forced him to discover his (mock-)heroic capacity for survival. This transformative event took place on the Night of the Lemon Prize Awards (147), when one of his vanity writers, a gangster called Dermot “Duster” Hoggins (146), responded to the adverse review of his fictional memoir, Knuckle Sandwich (149), by propelling the prestigious reviewer into the air over the railing of the roof garden where they were celebrating the ceremony (150). With characteristic flippancy, Tim, who, significantly, was listening to a jazz sextet (149), immediately thought that this unexpected act of violence had transformed the unsaleable Knuckle Sandwich into the “impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer” (150). His dream of wealth soon materialised as Hoggins was sent to prison and he sold in four months the ninety thousand copies of the memoir he had hurriedly printed. However, Tim was so deeply indebted that all the money he cashed was taken by his creditors (152). Therefore, when Hoggins’s three thuggish brothers broke into his house and reclaimed the money (153), Tim found himself in the same situation as Robert Frobisher when he was woken up by the money collectors at the hotel, with the difference that, while they interrupted Robert’s creative dream, what the Hoggins brothers interrupted was Tim’s lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (153). This event determined Tim to make a quick escape. But when he asked Denholm for help, he sent his candid younger brother to Aurora House, a residence devised for rich people to get rid of obnoxious elderly relatives. Echoing Ewing’s unflinching trust in Dr Goose, Tim did not see the betrayal behind Denholme’s plan, even though, unlike the notary, he was himself an untrustworthy liar. Like Frobisher, Tim started his quest with a train journey from London, in his case, to Hull, where the residence was located. This journey proved not only Tim’s ineptitude and arrogance as a traveller but also the dreadful travelling conditions provided by SouthNet Trains (161), a railway company displaying the stupendous shortcomings brought about by the privatisation of the British Railway in the 1990s. Ironically, however, it was due to the appalling succession of delays that Tim started reading the manuscript of Half-Lives (162) and also decided him to walk to Dockery House, the Art Nouveau house in the outskirts of Cambridge Tim had been driven to by Ursula, his first love, forty-seven years before, making him feel like Tutankhamen (163) determined to lose his virginity with his Divine Cleopatra (163). This episode echoes Frobisher’s love for Eva Ayrs, not only because both were unfulfilled but also because Eva was

40  Susana Onega an Egyptologist (454) and had a pony called Néfertiti (54). After several vicissitudes, Tim arrived at Aurora House in a taxi driven by an Indian driver who mispronounced “exactly” as “Zachary” (172), thus establishing a proleptic link both with the Indian taxi driver that takes Sonmi and Hae-Joo Kim to the Moon Tower in the fifth story (226), and with Zachry, the narrator of the sixth (239 ff.). Once in Aurora House, Tim found himself submitted to a strict regime of constant surveillance, violence, humiliation and enforced medication that points to his ordeal as representative of the predatory/prey relations ruling the treatment of the elderly in the Thatcherite era. The first part of “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” ends with Tim losing consciousness (181) after suffering a stroke induced by his enforced medication following on an escape attempt (353). The second begins with his strenuous efforts to recover his lost memories and sense of self (354). It is at this point that Tim starts editing the manuscript of Half-Lives for publication on the consideration that “the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential” (357). However, immediately after making this decision, Tim (echoing Frobisher’s baffled discovery that Ewing’s journal was incomplete), realised that the copy he had brought with him was abruptly interrupted at the life-endangering moment when Luisa was driven off a bridge (357). Still, again like Frobisher, Tim, on his return to his office, was delighted to find that the postman had delivered a parcel with part two of the book and a photo, thus discovering that the V of Hilary V. Hush “is for Vincent!”3 The other thing Tim decided to do after his return to work was to turn his memoir into a film (355). This decision played a key role in the transformation of Sonmi, the protagonist of “An Orison of Sonmni~451” from well-disciplined fabricant into abolitionist leader, like Adam Ewing, and sacrificial figure, like Autua. The story is situated in the near future in the peninsula of Korea, now called Nea So Copros, an isolated territory where a Unanimity Corpocracy of “purebloods” presided over by a godlike Beloved Chairman and the boardmen on the Juche exert totalitarian control over a society divided into producers and consumers and arranged pyramidally in various strata according to differences in economic power. The Contrary to the Unanimity Corpocracy is the Union, apparently, a submerged revolutionary faction attempting to subvert the system from within, whose name echoes the Union of Concerned Scientists opposing nuclear experimentation in “Half Lives” (102). The facts that an apocalyptic nuclear disaster has already taken place and that the greenhouse effect and other human interventions have rendered the British Isles (234) and other parts of the Western world inhabitable situate the story in the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz, Steffen and Crutzen). The Orison of the title is a 3-D record of Sonmi’s testimony (192), carried out by an Archivist from the Ministry of Unanimity for future

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  41 historians (185). After watching the “Cavendish Disney” (334), Sonmi situates its script over a century before (236), when the Archivist’s “grandfather’s grandfather […] was kicking in his natural womb” (235), thus situating the narrative present in the early twenty-second century. Her comment that the world represented in Cavendish “picaresque [was] both indescribably different from and yet subtly similar to Nea So Copros” (234) points to Sonmi’s historical period as the stage after global capitalism when the struggle of multinational corporations for global economic and technological control has been succeeded by a single Corpocracy imposing unanimous thought and totalitarian social structures. The word “Juche” (Korean for “self-reliance”), designating the highest policy-making board of corpocrats, alludes to the official state ideology of North Korea, originally devised by Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) as a variant of Marxism-Leninism, that developed into a distinctly Korean set of principles since the 1950s. The control exerted over Nea So Copros by the Corpocracy includes the erasure of historical and cultural records of the “pre-Skirmishes” past (323), the abolition of any form of privacy, and the substitution of “pre-consumer religions” like Buddhism or Christianism (328–30, 332) for the worship of “Prophet Malthus” (328), and the compulsory learning of Catechism items aimed at imposing a radical consumerist faith, the worship of money-making, and the overexploitation of an already dying earth (325), with millions of clones materialising the capitalist dream of providing a cheap, exponentially efficient and submissive unlimited workforce instead of human slaves. The name “Nea So Copros,” an acronym of “New east asian Sphere of Co Prosperity” (Anonymous n.p.), connects the state ideology of the Unanimity Corpocracy with the imperialist philosophy used by Japan to justify its colonial activities in Korea, Manchuria, and China during 1930–1945 (Swan 139–49), thus representing the Eastern counterpart to Western Imperialism. As in George Orwell’s 1984, in this dystopian Anthropocene, individuals are constantly watched by sophisticated technological means, clones have a collar they cannot remove from their necks without blowing up their heads, and purebloods have a chip, euphemistically called a Soul, implanted in an index finger that makes their identity data and exact location immediately available to the forces of repression, while their whole lives are accessible in 3-D recordings. Affluent pureblood consumers enjoy all the advantages of the new technologies, while migrants and lower-strata members live in slums exposed to radioactive rain and suffer from all types of dreadful diseases and lingering deaths (316). Most crucially, the development of biotechnology and genomics has allowed for the mass production in wombtanks of a variety of clones genetically programmed to carry out all sorts of exploitative tasks beyond the limits of endurance of human slaves. After their thirteen-year term of service, the clones are slaughtered and turned into “liquefied biomatter, for wombtanks, but most of

42  Susana Onega all, for Soap” (343),4 the nourishment of replicants, made of proteins and “amnesiads” meant to deaden curiosity and repress the expression of personality (186, 187). The fact that, in Aurora House, Nurse Noakes reproached Cavendish for his misbehaviour by telling him, “Because you are new I will not have you eat soap powder” (173) adds a chilling proleptic charge to her threat that enhances both Tim’s transindividual connection with Sonmi and the palimpsestic configuration of Cloud Atlas, as the Corpocracy’s invention of Soap shows Neo So Copros again reversing the derogatory attribution of cannibalism to non-Westerners initiated by Dr Goose in Ewing’s journal. The rare event that put an end to Sonmi’s life as a well-oriented, submissive fabricant working daily in a Papa Song dinery for nineteen hours (185) took place the night an older fabricant, Yoona~939, showed her some fascinating objects from “outside” kept in a secret room by their pureblood supervisor, Seer Rhee (191). As readers eventually learn, Yoona had been given a modified type of Soap aimed at the cerebral upsizing of service fabricants (206). After her escape attempt and death, the experiment is continued with Sonmi at Taemosan University (220– 21). However, Sonmi was so neglected by the student she was allotted to that, like the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, she found the time and means to acquire a wide knowledge by reading books (207), including Decline and Fall (218), Tim Cavendish’s favourite read. Eventually, Sonmi was allowed to attend classes as a regular student. One of the seminars she attended dealt with Thomas Paine, the author of Rights of Man (1791), written in answer to Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. This reference strengthens the intertextual connexion between Sonmi and the Creature in Frankenstein, as Mary Shelley used him to foster the radical ideas on human rights she shared with her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. After this, Sonmi’s process of ascension is accelerated by going out with a postgraduate student, Hae-Joo Im, and watching forbidden films (233). The first is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. Sonmi’s watching of the film is interrupted by a phone call warning them that they are in imminent danger. This interruption coincides with the ending of the first part in Tim’s narration (235). Sonmi’s act of watching the film destabilises the ontological and generic status of the “Ghastly Ordeal.” While readers of the novel take Cavendish’s narration for a real life memoir written by a vanity press editor, to Sonmi and Hae-Joo Im Tim is a fictional character in an old picaresque film (234). At the same time, the interruption forces Hae-Joo Im to reveal his true identity as Union leader (236). After this, Sonmi’s trust in her rescuer will be tested once and again, as he will change identities several times in the course of their perilous journey for freedom. Like Ewing and Cavendish, Sonmi will never mistrust her dubious helper, and she will find the film useful and even transformative. When, in a scene that echoes Luisa Rey being driven off a bridge, Sonmi

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  43 sees a pureblood man swing a terrified miniature fabricant genomed as a Zizzi doll off a bridge, Sonmi is reminded of the scene from the Cavendish film when a criminal throws a pureblood off a balcony (335), and realises that violence could be responded with violence. At this stage, Hae-Joo and Sonmi had already suffered a murder attempt in a car that repeats that of Luisa Rey, shaking free in Sonmi “an earlier memory of the blackness, gravity, inertia of being trapped in another ford. Where was it? Who was it?” (314). This experience of déjà vu, together with her comet-shaped birthmark (198), establishes a relation of transindividuality between Sonmi and Luisa that repeats that of Luisa and Robert and enhances her humanity although she is a clone. When they arrive at the colony of recidivist purebloods led by Ms. Yoo, an ancient-looking Abbess (239) reminiscent of the Catholic nuns that saved Ewing’s life in Honolulu, Sonmi is warmly welcome. The Abbess’s words of farewell: “nothing is more heinous than the enslavement of your tribe” (333), shows that she took Sonmi’s humanity for granted. This is the message informing the declaration of rights of ascended fabricants written by Sonmi (346); and also the reason why she willingly assumed the role of sacrificial victim demanded of her by the Union, even knowing that it was a fake Contrary to Unanimity devised by the Corpocracy itself to attract social malcontents and keep them under surveillance (348). Her decision to cooperate with her “judases” (349) grants Sonmi the cunning to “see a game beyond the endgame” (349) that Adam and Tim lacked. As she expected, her “show trial” generated a stupendous media coverage that ensured the reproduction of her Declaration and blasphemous Catechisms “a billionfold” (349). Proof of the success of her willing sacrifice is that, in “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rithin’ After,” situated “hundreds of years” after her death (277), Sonmi has become the sole deity of the Valleysmen, the tribes occupying the nine valleys of “Big I” (the largest island in the Hawaii archipelago) after “the Fall” (253), the apocalyptic end of Nea So Copros. “Sloosha’s Crossin” is a yarn told by old Zachry Bailey, the last of the “Valleys Civ’lize” (308), to the children of the peaceful tribe on Maui (the second largest island in Hawaii) where he had found refuge after the nine Valleys were conquered and their inhabitants massacred or enslaved by the Kona. The fact that Zachry ends his life on Maui establishes a palimpsestic relationship with the first story as, during his enslavement, Autua “yarned tales of Maui to birds & birds yarned sea tales to [him]” (32) as a form of resilience. Yet another key element Zachry and the Valleysmen have in common with Autua and the Moriori is that both live in the mythical or sacred stage of civilisation. After the Fall – the nuclear explosion that put an end to the Anthropocene – human beings regressed to the prehistoric age, as is stated in a Valleysmen’s yarn: “Back when the Fall was fallin’, humans f’got the maki’ o’ fire” (284). This yarn tells how a Wise Man helped humankind by giving instructions to Crow

44  Susana Onega to fly to the mouth of a Mighty Volcano across the ocean – surely the Conical Tor – and return with a burning branch (284). With its echoes of Ted Hughes’s Crow, this yarn may be considered a myth of origins. After the Fall, we find a number of small settlements in the Hawaiian archipelago leading peaceful and industrious lives in perfect harmony with nature, while their Contrary, the predatory Kona, are systematically raiding their villages and killing or enslaving them. The Kona are polytheistic worshipers of natural elements and the horses they ride so well. By contrast, the Valleysmen have developed a syncretic monotheistic religion around the figure of Sonmi with Buddhist and Christian elements. Like the Moriori, they have a strong communal relation and a close connection with their ancestors facilitated by the wooden effigies carved by each of them and deposited after their deaths in the Icon’ry (258), a sacred place, like that found by Ewing in the crater of the Conical Tor, where the living communicate with their beloved dead through dreams propitiated by Sonmi, and where boys at the age of fourteen undergo a rite of passage known as Dreaming Night (245). When Zachry is submitted to this rite, he has three dreams whose true meaning requires the Abbess’s interpretation. Their meaning must be learnt by heart as the dreams will determine Zachry’s future (246). When his village is destroyed by the Kona, Zachry risks his life to rescue his family icons while wondering in despair: “where’d my tribesmen’s souls be reborned” (302). The icons constitute, then, an umbilicus mundi of sorts connecting the two worlds and ensuring reincarnation, thus enhancing the palimpsestic and cyclical nature of their world. During the huge gathering at Honokaa market, Zachry, after smoking “blissweed” and dancing to the sound of the drum, had an out-of-body experience in which he felt “years passin’” and “glimpsed all the lifes [his] soul ever was till farfar back b’fore the Fall” (287), until he himself became “Crow’s wings beating” (288). Just as the Edenic life of the Moriori was disrupted by the arrival of the British colonisers, so the Valleysmen are visited twice a year by the Prescients, the descendants of the Old Uns (the highly advanced civilisation that had provoked the Fall), in order to barter utensils for food. Still, when they asked the Abbess for permission to leave a woman called Meronym in the village to learn their habits, Zachry was plagued by the suspicion that the Prescients were planning to subdue the Valleysmen and settle in Hawaii. His suspicions were wrong as Meronym’s real aim was to locate the astronomical observatory on Mauna Kea built by the Old Uns (283) in the hope of reconnecting the earth with another planet and escape to it before the levels of radiation and the impending plague (294) that was approaching Prescient, their secret island, made it inhabitable. The fact that this is the observatory where Megan, Sixsmith’s niece, used to work enhances the connection between the reckless profit-making ideology of twentieth-century multinational corporations and

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  45 that of the Old Uns. When Meronym rescues Zachry from the Kona (292), his suspicions turn into unbounded admiration fostered by his growing conviction that she is a reincarnation of Sonmi (309), as they both have a six-pointed comet-shaped birthmark (303). As in Ewing’s journal, the generic status of Zachry’s yarn is problematised by a posthumous epilogue written by his son, in which he dismisses his father’s belief in reincarnation (309), and states that most of his yarning was “jus’ musey duck fartin’” (308). Still, he admits that the stuff about Meronym the Prescient was mostly true (309) and that he had found the silvery egg he called orison (300; emphasis in the original). He then tells readers: if you warm the egg in your hands, a beautsome ghost-girl appears in the air an’ speaks in an Old-Un tongue […]. Sit down […] Hold out your hands. Look. (393) Taken as a metacomment, this invitation enhances the circularity of the novel, for, if we turn the page and look, we will find the second half of “An Orison of Sonmi~451.”

Conclusion Referring to Zachry’s contention that Meronym was a reincarnation of Sonmi, Sims tries to solve what he takes for an incongruence by arguing that Meronym and the other Prescients “are either artificially created like the Papa Song fabricants […] or are descended from those fabricants” (180). This explanation ignores the crucial fact that, together with “parallel-species reincarnation,” Buddhism contemplates “cross-species reincarnation” between humans, animals and even plants (Obeyesekere 44) and, what is more, completely misses the transindividual and transmodern conceptions of self and world that Mitchell is at pains to transmit to readers, namely, that we must extend the sense of identity beyond the personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche, and cosmos (Scotton 3–8), lest our History of the Word should end, like that of Cloud Atlas, with five Prescients and Zachry living utterly precarious lives with a few friendly Maui on the only habitable island of our devastated planet. This ending may be said to provide a neat allegorical image of the multi-layered single catastrophe built by the piling up and embedding of the Benjaminian moments of danger narrated in each story each pinpointing a further stage in the Western diseased dream of domination of the earth. However, it should not be forgotten that Mitchell’s is a world of potentialities created by the power of the human imagination, so that, while to the highly rational and technically advanced Prescients the only future that awaits them is extinction, to the mythically minded

46  Susana Onega Zachry and Maui it simply means reincarnation and the beginning a new cosmogonic cycle. Unlike Robert Frobisher, who interpreted this possibility in Nietzschean terms as the exact repetition of the same life of nauseous suffering ruled by fate, Zachry and the Maui, like the Moriori before them, share with Isaac Sachs (and also with Buddhism) a quantum notion of the universe, that is, a multiverse built on the infinite repetition of present moments occurring simultaneously on various scales and belonging in open systems, and so, with the potential to correct the mistakes made in earlier lives and cosmogonies and imagine into being better ones. This is the emotionally-charged final truth revealed to readers through the process of epistemological unravelling and displacement provided by the palimpsestic structure of the novel.

Notes * The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (codes FFI2015-65775-P and FFI2017-84258-P); and of the Government of Aragón and the ERDF 2014– 2020 programme “Building Europe from Aragón” (code H03_17R), for the writing of this chapter. 1 There are also less overt allusions to Billy Budd, brought to mind by the terrible ordeal and suicide of young Rafael on board the Prophetess (493–94, 497–98); or to Moby Dick, evoked by Ewing’s habit of calling his minuscule cabin “coffin” (37, 492), among others. 2 This association is made explicit by Ayrs’s response to Robert’s remark that Ayres was his Verlaine and he his young Rimbaud: “Then where is your Saison en Enfer?” (Mitchell 2012, 81). 3 “V is for Vincent” may be an allusion to Jean Vincent, the author of the Atlas des nuages (1907), or Vincent’s Cloud Atlas, one of the earliest illustrated guides or “atlas” to every type of clouds. 4 The name “Soap” echoes “Soylent Green,” the foodstuff produced in a similar manner in the eponymous post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie directed by Richard Fleischer in 1973. Both refer back to real Nazi practises.

Works Cited Aliaga-Lavrijsen, and José María Yebra-Pertusa. International Conference on Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. University of Zaragoza. Contemporary Narratives in English Research Group. http://cne.literatureresearch.net/. (26–28 April 2017). Web. Anonymous. “What is the Significance of the Name ‘Nea So Copros’ Signifying Korea in Cloud Atlas?” (9 December 2015). Accessed on 22/05/2018 at: www.quora.com/What-is-the-significance-of-the-name-Nea-So-Coprossignifying-Korea-in-Cloud-Atlas/. Web. Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (June 2013): 200–19. Print. Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. Print.

The Transmodern Poetics of Cloud Atlas  47 Bayer, Gerd. “Perpetual Apocalypses: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Absence of Time.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56.4 (2015): 345–54. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1955. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. and Intro. Hannah Arendt. Preface by Leon Wieseltier. 1968. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (circa 1790). The Poetical Works of William Blake. Ed. John Sampson. New York and Toronto: Oxford UP, 1956. Print. Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Print. Childs, Peter, and James Green. “The Novels in Nine Parts.” David Mitchell: Critical Essays. 2011. Ed. Sarah Dillon. Canterbury, U.K. Ghylfi Ltd., 2014. 25–47. Print. Denes, Melissa. “Apocalypse Maybe.” The Guardian. Accessed on 08/06/2018 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/21/fiction.davidmitchell/. Web. Dussel, Enrique. Postmodernidad y transmodernidad. Puebla: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1999. Print. Gleick, James. Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable. 1988. London: Vintage, 1989. Print. Haar, Michael. “Heidegger and the Nietzschean Physiology of Art.” Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation. Eds. David Farrell Krell and David Wood. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. 13–30. Print. Hicks, Heather J. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity beyond Salvage. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Print. Johannesses, Lene M. “Poetics of Peril.” CounterText 3.3 (2017): 377–91. DOI: 10.3366/count.2017.0104/. Web. Krippner, Stanley. “Foreword.” The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology. Eds. Harris L. Friedman and Glenn Hartelius. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. xvii–xix. Print. Le Roy, Étienne. La terre de l’autre. Une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière. Paris: L.G.D.J., Lextenso Editions, 2011. Print. Lin, Hwai-min. “Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan.” Company Website. Accessed on 06/05/2018 at: https://meanycenter.org/tickets/2018-03/production/cloudgate-dance-theatre-taiwan/. Web. Luyckx, Marc. “The Transmodern Hypothesis: Towards a Dialogue of Cultures.” FUTURES 31.9–10 (1999): 971–82. Print. Mason, Wyatt. “David Mitchell, the Experimentalist.” The New York Times Magazine 25 June 2010. Accessed on 04/10/2019 at: www.nytimes.com/2010/ 06/27/magazine/27mitchell-t.html/. Web. Mitchel, David. Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts. London: Hodder, 1999. Reprinted as Ghostwritten: A Novel. New York: Vintage International, 2001. Print. ———. Cloud Atlas: A Novel. 2004. New York: Random House, 2012. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals – Ecce Homo. 1967. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdalb. Ed. with Commentary, Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.

48  Susana Onega Obeyesekere, Gananath. Karma and Rebirth: A Cross Cultural Study. 2002. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas Publishers Private Ltd., 2006. Print. Onega, Susana. “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm.” CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary. Special number on Thinking Literature across Continents (December 2017): 362–76. Print. ———. “Oulipian Games, ‘Transpersonality and the Logic of Potentiality in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten.’” Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. Eds. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and José María Yebra-Pertusa. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019. 50–69. Print. Pollard, David. “Self-Annihilation and Self-Overcoming: Blake and Nietzsche.” Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation. Eds. David Farrell Krell and David Wood. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. 63–79. Print. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. Transmodernidad. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2004. Print. Scotton, Bruce W. “Introduction and Definition of Transpersonal Psychiatry.” Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology. Eds. Bruce W. Scotton, Allan B. Chinen and John R. Battista. New York: Basic Books, 1996. 3–8. Print. Selisker, Scott. “The Cult and the World System: The Topoi of David Mitchell’s Global Novels.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47.3 (2014): 443–59. DOI: 10.1215/00295132-2789148/. Web. Sims, Christopher A. Tech Anxiety: Artificial Intelligence and Ontological Awakening in Four Science Fiction Novels. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co. Inc. Publishers, 2013. Print. Soylent Green. Dir. Richard Fleischer. Per. Charlton Heston, Lee Taylor-Young and Edward Lee Robinson. Metro-Goldwing-Mayer, 1973. Film. Swan, William L. “Japan’s Intentions for Its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as Indicated in Its Policy Plans for Thailand.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 27.1 (1996): 139–49. Print. Vincent, Jean Atlas des nuages. Annals of the Royal Observatory, Brussels. Vol. 20. London: Edward Stanford, 1907. Print. Warnecke, Lauren. “Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan will Perform ‘Formosa’ at the Harris Theater.” Chicago Tribune 17 February 2018. Accessed on 06/05/2018 at: www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/dance/ctent-cloud-gate-dance-card-0228-story.html/. Web. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Will Steffen, and Paul Crutzen. “The New World of the Anthropocene.” Environmental Science & Technology 44.7 (2010): 2228–31. Print.

2

Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Meta-narrative An Alternative Reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Sara Villamarín-Freire

A Paradigm for a Globalised World: Dimensions of the Transmodern Project Despite the relative novelty of the term, there are multiple definitions of what Transmodernity is, where it comes from and where it is heading. In this chapter I review some of these definitions, paying special attention to the version of Transmodernity developed by Enrique Dussel. I intend to explore the common ground between his interpretation of Transmodernity and the transnational approach to literature. I will focus on the particular case of transnational Latino/a literature and consider some of its defining features. I will argue that, depending on the motivations behind this type of approach, the transformative potential of in-between literatures such as Latino/a fiction might be eclipsed, since, as Winfried Fluck observes, the transnational cannot be wholly separated from the national from which it departs (366). Instead, I propose interpreting transnational Latino/a fiction through the lens of Transmodernity. I contend that addressing transnational Latino/a fiction as transmodern fiction allows us to frame it within an alternative meta-narrative that foregrounds aspects otherwise overlooked or ignored by the still predominantly Western-biased episteme behind transnational approaches. In her article “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?,” Irena Ateljevic notes that Transmodernity’s many definitions converge insofar as they all contemplate an “emerging higher collective consciousness” as a defining feature, a process Ateljevic describes in terms of “a major global mind change and paradigm shift” simultaneously taking place at the “socio-cultural, economic, political and philosophical [levels]” (200–01). Such a paradigm shift would lead to the overcoming of both Modernity and Postmodernity while “drawing elements from each” (203); or, as Marc Luyckx puts it,

50  Sara Villamarín-Freire Transmodernity “means keeping the best of modernity” but also implies “going beyond it” (972). The same conception has also been brought to the fore by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, credited by Ateljevic as the thinker who first coined the term in her essay La sonrisa de Saturno: Hacia una teoría transmoderna (1989). Rodríguez Magda regards the current paradigm shift as the result of a dialectical process wherein Transmodernity would represent the synthetic element in a purported Hegelian triad formed by Modernity (thesis) and Postmodernity (antithesis) (2004, 28, 33). According to Rodríguez Magda, Modernity is by definition “anchored in the possibility and legitimacy of global discourse,” a discourse that was put overtly into question by postmodernism and its critique of grand narratives (2008, n.p.). Transmodernity would thus represent a watershed insofar as it facilitates “a new Grand Narrative, i.e., Globalization.” For Rodríguez Magda, “our mode of thinking” in transmodern times “should become […] ‘transborder,’ fluid, interconnected and unstable,” thereby mirroring the “transnational” structures that nowadays vertebrate our global existence (2008, n.p.). In contrast to this rather Eurocentric interpretation,1 Enrique Dussel’s vision of Transmodernity departs from the existing relation between core (i.e. Western) and peripheral cultures. 2 For Dussel, Transmodernity is a response to Eurocentric discourses that emerges from the “omitted potentiality” and “exteriority” placed “beyond” Western Modernity; that is, in the margins occupied by so-called peripheral cultures. The mere existence of peripheral discourses counters “the metanarrative of modernity” (Alcoff 60), a distinctively Western phenomenon which, as Linda Alcoff has pointed out, Dussel does not see as being characterized by a reflexive attitude toward one’s own conventional beliefs and practices, à la the standard normative (and Eurocentric) account, but by the development of a constituting, differentiated, masterful ego, the I conquer ego of Descartes’s individualist epistemic foundationalism. (62) Thus, as Alcoff further explains, for Dussel, modernity is essentially bound up with an egotistical assumption of the right of mastery and domination. […] [E]pistemic reflexivity in European modernity is less about putting one’s own beliefs on firm grounds […] than about deflating all possible reasons to listen to the other, or to accept the authority of others, or to consider alternative approaches different than those I myself have produced. (62)3 Central to Dussel’s outlook on Transmodernity is, then, the “affirmation” and “self-valorization” of those “negated or merely devalued”

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  51 peripheral cultures, whose discourses have been purposefully left “outside of modernity” (Dussel 2012, 49). In other words, Transmodernity represents the opportunity to articulate an alternative “meta-narrative that claims an even larger reach than the modern, with a more truly global and thus universal reference in place of the exclusivity of modernity to European-based and Eurocentric societies” (Alcoff 61). Thus, Linda Martín Alcoff summarises Dussel’s transmodern project as an idea designed in part to retell the story of Europe itself with an incorporation of the role of its Other in its formation […]. But it is also to retell the story of world history without a centered formation either in Europe or anywhere; no one becomes the permanent center or persistent periphery. (63)4 As Dussel explains, following the reception of postmodern philosophy in Latin America from the 1960s onwards, one of the many concerns being explored was precisely this erasure of permanent centres and persistent peripheries.5 Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies, at first engaged in exposing the power relations existing between core and margin, started to shift towards a position that posited the inadequacy of the “standard vision of that universal history” for both non-Western and Western societies alike (2012, 36; emphasis in the original). Dussel speaks of the necessity to “reconstruct the concept of ‘Modernity’ from an ‘exterior,’ […] global perspective” in order to overcome the “clearly Eurocentric connotation” modernity still possesses in Europe and the United States (2012, 37; emphasis in the original). The “alterity” of peripheral cultures “with respect to European Modernity,” after having been consistently excluded from the centre, makes them “not modern,” and therefore not “post-modern either” (Dussel 2012, 42). They did not emerge as an a posteriori answer to Western imperialism; on the contrary, they coexisted along with – and were persistently overlooked by – Eurocentric Modernity, which renders them “simultaneously pre-modern, […] contemporary to Modernity, and soon, trans-modern” (Dussel 2012, 42).6 According to this perspective, Transmodernity would facilitate reassessing the relation between peripheral cultures, core cultures and Eurocentric Modernity. In doing so, it might correct the imbalance hitherto existing between centre and margin by integrating all discourses into a meta-narrative that would foreground interconnectedness as a shared value. Nevertheless, some authors have underscored that a meta-narrative that privileges interconnectedness has already been established: globalisation. Rodríguez Magda sees globalisation and Transmodernity as basically the same phenomenon,7 whereas Glen D. Kuecker introduces a distinction between them: in his view, “neoliberal globalization is the ultimate pursuit of the modern world-system’s rule-set,” a “paradigm […] deep enough to serve as a meta-narrative for almost all ideologies”

52  Sara Villamarín-Freire (156–7). Transmodernity, on the other hand, would represent “both a theoretical position within post-colonial critical theory and a lived reality,” inasmuch as it seeks an “escape from the modern world-system through the transcendence of the Western epistemic,” as well as what Kuecker labels as “a transmodern ontology” (156–7); that is to say, “a way of being human that transcends the modern world-system and generates its own ways of seeing and thinking” (163). One way in which Transmodernity can definitely overcome the meta-narrative of Eurocentric Modernity is by stressing “[d]iversity and border-crossing, […] in-betweenness, […] and hybridity” (165), thereby bringing forth the “importance of pluralistic difference and fluid, crossable borders as ways to breakdown the modern world-system’s homogenized other” (164). In a nutshell, the myriad viewpoints on Transmodernity can be roughly separated into two main groups: namely, those that privilege a Eurocentric perspective in its relation with Modernity and those that aim to offer an alternative to Western Modernity by merging the peripheries with the centre. We have to wonder to what extent “keep[ing] the best of modernity,” as Luyckx says, also entails keeping a Westernbiased approach to phenomena such as hybridity or border-crossing.8 This problematic persists when we try to approach literary works that put the focus on these issues. Some terms such as “transnational fiction” or “diasporic fiction” have been consistently used, hence stressing the in-between character of both these discourses and the authors producing them. However, the transformations undergone by diasporas and transnational fluxes throughout the last decades make it hard to keep terminology unaltered. In what follows, I examine to what extent diasporic communities have changed during the last few decades, paying special attention to the similarities and differences between the notion of diaspora both nowadays and thirty or forty years ago. I also address the relation between transnationalism and diasporas in order to unravel the implications of using terms such as “transnational literature.”

Transnationalism through the Transmodern Lens Jorge Duany defines transnationalism in rather neutral terms as the construction of dense social fields through the circulation of people, ideas, practices, money, goods, and information across nations. This circulation includes, but is not limited to, the physical movement of human bodies as well as other types of exchanges, which may or not be recurrent, such as travel, communication and remittances (20–21). By contrast, Arif Dirlik considers: Transnationalism […] raises basic questions about the meaning of national belonging and identification, or cultural identity, when a population is dispersed broadly spatially, following different

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  53 historical trajectories in different locations. It also assigns a formative power to encounters between people of different national and cultural backgrounds, who are transformed by the encounters in different ways. (296) Both definitions foreground the spatial component of transnationalism insofar as it includes the physical movement of populations as well as material and immaterial elements. Duany focusses on the elements put into circulation, whereas Dirlik emphasises the questions transnational fluxes may raise in terms of identity and belonging. Yet he also identifies a positive outcome due to the formative power of transnational encounters. As Fluck notes, these encounters “beyond national borders” might allow us “to arrive at fascinating new aesthetic objects that have emerged out of the contact of cultures” (369). These arguments seem to be in consonance with the distinctive transborder, fluid mode of thinking we can find in Transmodernity; it is not difficult to envision such fascinating new aesthetic objects as products of the current paradigm shift. Nevertheless, there is not just one possible type of transnational approach to literature from the American Studies viewpoint but rather multiple possibilities with different scope and goals. As Fluck argues, there are “several different versions” of transnationalism, and each of them envisions “different rewards in doing so” (366). In Fluck’s own words, the word transnationalism [in the context of American Studies] is basically a code word for an America reinvigorated by an aesthetic plenitude made possible by cultural flow and exchange. Transnationalism here refers to an extension of the promises of diversity beyond national borders to arrive at fascinating new aesthetic objects that have emerged out of the contact of cultures. (369) These transnational narratives are often built on a basic dichotomy between identity formation in the nationstate, which is always associated with a stable, monolithic identity, and identity formation in a transnational world which promises to unsettle stable identities as a necessary precondition for regaining agency. (Fluck 371) For Fluck, the problem with “aesthetic transnationalism” is that it is “not just innocently aiming at a cosmopolitan broadening of interpretive horizons” (367). On the contrary, it “also pursues the goal of reconceptualizing America,” and is ultimately a vehicle for “imply[ing] theories for and about America” (367) that echo the clear-cut division between centre (here, US discourses) and peripheries (external non-US

54  Sara Villamarín-Freire influences) that were subject to Dussel’s criticism. In Fluck’s view, even though “transnational American studies want to provide conceptual tools” for unsettling stable and unified national identities, this desire for flexibility regarding the creation of new subjectivities “can also be seen, not as subversion of the political system but, on the contrary, as adaptation to a neoliberal logic in which movements of peoples and ideas are now the instruments of a new order of global capital” (368–9). Fluck concludes that The forms of transnationalism that are currently dominant in American studies are not a new beginning, then. On the contrary, the main project remains that of a struggle against interpellation by the U.S.-American nation-state in order to construct new identities. In most of the cases presented here, transnational American studies have merely extended long-dominant paradigms beyond borders, and by doing so, they have created the false impression, perhaps also to their practitioners, that they are doing something new and potentially revolutionary. (379–80; emphasis added) This argument, I believe, is the reason why we should be careful in our use of transnational approaches to in-between fictions such as Latino/a fiction.9 I am not trying to suggest that we should stop using these terms altogether, but I believe that they could be reframed and contextualised through the lens of Transmodernity. In doing so, we would be putting the emphasis on the potentialities of transnational fiction to become a bridge between Western and non-Western discourses. The hitherto clearcut distinction between the two can be only overcome by merging both into a third type of discourse, one that comes neither from the centre nor the peripheries, and is elaborated beyond national borders. Bearing this in mind, I would like to consider some of the definitions and features of transnational Latino/a literature and diasporic communities while trying to bring forth the contact points they may share with Transmodernity. In the following lines I review some of the arguments that sustain the identification of Latino/a literature as transnational literature. In addition, I deal with the manner wherein diasporas have been affected by transnational flows, and try to interpret these factors from a transmodern angle. In her overview of transnational Latino/a fiction, Juanita Heredia speaks of how this literary category broadened from referring to the writings of Chicano/a and Puerto Rican authors in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s towards including nowadays “a wider array of authors from virtually all of the Latin American diasporas,” with greater representation of authors “of Central American and South American backgrounds” (169). In this sense, Heredia notes, Latino/a literature “do[es] not espouse one national dimension” (167), since it “encompasses various geographies and temporalities that reach

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  55 beyond the Americas to spaces such as Africa, Asia, and Europe” (169). In doing so, Latino/a fiction breaks “national boundaries” as it “places its authors within the larger scope of world literature” (169). Likewise, Theresa Delgadillo considers that most Latino/a narratives are articulated around “transnational interests,” namely, issues of migration, border- crossing, navigating between more than one identity or affiliation, and so on (601). The dissolution of national boundaries echoes the blurring of centre and periphery that Dussel, Rodríguez Magda and Luyckx see as a main feature of Transmodernity. It might seem that the boundaries being crossed in this case are those between North and South.10 Heredia speaks of an expansion of the Latino/a canon “in a hemispheric context” (168). So does Delgadillo, who describes contemporary Latino/a literature as “representing a wider spectrum of Latinidad” (602). Moreover, the range of authors and nationalities included in this Latinidad “evinces even greater engagement with hemispheric over exclusively US realities” (602).11 However, in some cases transnational Latino/a fiction is equally tied to “US realities” due to the coexisting connections between Latino/a diasporic communities, their native countries and the United States. Latino/a communities have consistently settled throughout the United States in the last decades, experiencing a great transformation in the process. Due to the fuzziness of an all-comprising definition of diaspora,12 in Blurred Borders (2011) Jorge Duany chooses to highlight some aspects that are still relevant to diasporic communities nowadays. He states that, generally speaking, diasporic identities “cannot be contained within a single nation-state, nor can their practices and discourses be completely understood from a well-bounded political, territorial, or linguistic perspective” (17). Likewise, he foregrounds the sustaining of “strong social, economic, cultural, political, and emotional bonds” between diasporic communities and their countries of origin as a defining feature (17). However, it is worth mentioning that the progressive expansion of transnational networks has substantially influenced the formulation and maintenance of “classic” diasporic interconnection. For Juan Flores, one of the defining features of the “new diasporas” currently emerging in the age of globalisation has to do precisely with “the intensity and reciprocity of the ties between emigrant or exiled populations and their countries of origin” (21); following van Hear’s definition, he privileges the term “transnational community” above “diaspora” in order to fully apprehend all the nuances and implicit connotations of these changes (21). The main difference between “classical diasporas” and “new diasporas” originates in the increasing degree of mobility attained by their members. Higher mobility leads to different configurations of both diasporic experiences and identity, since the once unidirectional movement is nowadays increasingly bi- or multi-directional. Therefore, phenomena such as hybridity or border-crossing acquire new layers of meaning,

56  Sara Villamarín-Freire insofar as transnational fluxes not only include diaspora members moving from the peripheries to the centre but also those travelling back from the centre to the peripheries. In Diaspora Strikes Back (2008), Flores uses the term “reasporican” to pinpoint the experience of remigrants: [These] returning emigrant nationals (“remigrants”) of many countries bring cultural ideas and values acquired in diaspora settings to bear on their native lands or that of their forebears, often with boldly innovative and unsettling effect. This often unwitting and unintended cultural challenge […] has a particular edge because it is lodged not by “foreigners” imposing their ways in accord with reigning systems of international power, but by “one’s own,” as it were […]. They are outsiders and “others” whose presence all too often spurs resentment, ridicule and fear, and even disdain and social discrimination with clear racial and class undertones. Yet at the same time, their presence also elicits fascination, engagement, and change. (4–5) In his analysis, Flores sees the impact of reasporicans in their countries of origin as an opportunity for “radical re-charting of anti-imperialist cultural politics in the hemisphere” (49). As he further states, In the traditional view, the national territory is thought of as the fount of cultural perspectives that are alternative and oppositional to hegemonic metropolitan cultures of domination, and that resistance then informs the cultural and political agenda of the nation’s diaspora within the metropolis. It is now becoming evident that this transnational flow may also travel in the opposite direction and that the colonial diaspora itself may well generate a culture of resistance to national elite domination and complicity. Cultural remittances— eminently transnational as a consequence of circular migration and the ubiquity of contemporary communications technology—implode in the national territory as something foreign, and yet in their local relevance not so foreign after all. (49; emphasis added) The “reasporican” dimension of diasporas nowadays is also noted by Heredia in her overview of Latino/a literature in the United States. She perceives that a “shift” has taken place in Latino/a fiction, now more concerned with capturing “transnational migrations” that do not only contemplate “traveling to the United States as a final destination” but are more concerned with what she calls “voyages of return” (167). These narratives, mostly published “in the first decade of the twenty-first century,” intend to capture “a return to Latin America through physical journeys, memories, or maintaining cultural and social practices” (Heredia 167). These texts explore the possibilities of inhabiting liminal spaces and

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  57 adopting fluid identities, in contrast to earlier Latino/a narratives that focussed on the arrival and adaptation to the host US culture.13 In this respect, it is fundamental to bear in mind that the exchanges between native and host culture within Latino/a diasporic communities are influenced by the fact that, in this case, native culture also implies peripheral culture, whereas host culture implies core culture. From a peripheral perspective, transnationalism has the potential to subvert “anti-imperialist cultural politics in the hemisphere,” to use Juan Flores’ words (49); the beyond-the-national component is precisely what introduces the possibility of reassessing those practices sustained by hegemonic power. Going back and forth across borders constructs a “global relationality among elements” and helps prevent them from becoming “irreducibly local” (Alcoff 65). This version of transnationalism aligned with diasporic communities is best understood within the meta-narrative of Transmodernity: The transmodern metanarrative suggests a recipe for moving forward not through universalist procedures justified via a transcendental arguments [sic] outside of cultural or historical specificity, but via an analysis of how and where cultural dialogues can occur most productively given the way in which the current global discursive regimes have been affected by colonialism. Radical critiques respond […] from another place or location, positioned as the exterior to those designated universal cultures of European Modernity. […] It is from here that new paths for future development and dialogue will emerge toward “pluriversality as a universal project.” (Alcoff 65–66) The recuperation of peripheral discourses in Latino/a “voyages of return” narratives, as well as their integration alongside other elements taken from the host culture, can be counted among the defining traits of transnational Latino/a fiction. In terms of identity and affiliation, we must take into consideration that some of these authors are second- or third-generation migrants and, therefore, might feel more compelled to see themselves as US citizens. Others, however, identify with their Latino/a roots and, sometimes, with their African or Asian ancestry as well. Their works tend to explore the contradictions and self-questioning triggered by this permanent state of in-betweenness. It is from such an outer position that they are able to critically engage with centre and periphery alike, trying to deconstruct both discourses and then reassembling them together. However, a question remains to be answered: Can we isolate the “transmodern traits” in these writings? Are there particular elements that can be said to be transmodern currently being employed in transnational Latino/a fiction or other in-between literatures? Thus far, my

58  Sara Villamarín-Freire review of the shared aspects of transnational literature and Transmodernity has focussed on rather theoretical questions. I will now turn to analyse particular mechanisms that may be regarded as potential features for a definition of transmodern literature. In the following section I will review some of the literature on Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) in order to shed some light on the elements currently at work in Latino/a fiction, particularly linguistic features, as well as textual and paratextual elements. I will attempt to demonstrate that Díaz’s novel represents a type of transmodern text that is truly hybrid insofar as it combines discourses from the peripheries and the centre which result in a completely different third discourse that is neither postcolonial nor postmodern but transmodern.

Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Transmodern Literature Published in 2007, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao follows three generations of the Cabral-De León family trying to come to terms with a turbulent family past. The main plot follows Oscar, a nerdy DominicanAmerican boy whose quest for love ultimately leads him from New Jersey to Santo Domingo, where he will meet a tragic fate. Oscar’s journey is inevitably marked by the traumatic experiences of his mother and grandfather under the dictatorial regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. The narration jumps back and forth in time, unravelling the stories of Oscar’s mother, Beli (Hypatia Belicia) and her father, Abelard Cabral, through detailed flashbacks which also alternate spatial locations, moving from the United States to the Dominican Republic and back. These three intercalated plotlines form what Jennifer Harford Vargas has described as “a transgenerational cycle of violence” (9). The voice behind these assembled stories is that of Yunior, Oscar’s roommate in college, who turns into a “writer-historian” (Hanna 500) as he researches Oscar’s family past. Yunior is profoundly aware of the challenge that gathering the scattered pieces implies, and constantly struggles to fill in the blanks and gaps to be found in the official family history. I aim to discuss some of the formal mechanisms employed by Junot Díaz in this novel which, in my view, are used to push the narrative beyond the limits set by genres, language and the text itself. I believe these formal mechanisms are used to enhance the themes and storylines that vertebrate the novel while taking it to a completely new level. It is perhaps too far-fetched to affirm that these formal aspects are transmodern; rather, I suggest that it is the combination of form and content that creates a transmodern fictional work. Notions that have been marked as transmodern features, such as interconnectedness or hybridity, are here underscored through multiple textual and paratextual resources that I review in the following paragraphs. Mainly, I intend to focus on the

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  59 palimpsestic quality of the novel, presented as a rewriting of official, hegemonic discourse and concerned with restoring the voices silenced under Trujillo’s dictatorial regime. In the Introduction, we are first presented with the two concepts around which the novel develops: fukú and zafa. Fukú, or “the Curse and the Doom of the New World” (Díaz 1), is said to either have been brought from Africa “carried in the screams of the enslaved,” or unleashed by the “arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola” (1). Far from being “ancient history” (1), it has been a constant throughout Dominican history, especially during Trujillo’s dictatorship. Any ill-fated event can be regarded as a manifestation of fukú; even the creation of the Dominican diaspora is said to be the consequence of “Trujillo’s payback to the pueblo that betrayed him” (6). Moreover, fukú is not exclusively Dominican: “The Puertorocks [Puerto Ricans] want to talk about fufus, and the Haitians have some shit just like it” (6). Fukú spreads throughout the Caribbean and feeds upon those nations that were subject to colonial domination. “Fukú americanus,” we are told, “was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles” (1; emphasis in the original). Yunior, the narrator, tells us that “[e]verybody in Santo Domingo has a fukú story” and that despite its seemingly superstitious nature, its influence is unstoppable because “no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (5–6). Fukú functions “as a metaphor for the perpetuation of colonial power structures” (Mahler 119) and is used to convey the sensation of cyclical, inescapable violence.14 It represents the most visible side of colonialism and imperialist policies in the Caribbean, including, of course, neo-colonialism under the sign of the United States’ foreign policies (see Díaz 3–6; Mahler 121). The greatest expression of fukú in the Dominican Republic in contemporary times is also an example of the “damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships” (Díaz 3n1); in this case, Trujillo’s regime. Jennifer Harford Vargas sees fukú as the “symbolic chronotope for the time-space of domination that is continually regenerating and transforming” (9). As such, fukú would act as a mechanism with the potential to create a “trans-American community through an act of imagined identification across forms of domination, spaces of (neo)colonial violence, and histories of subalternization” (10). This “fukú foundational fiction” (10) serves to foreground the common history of Latin-American peripheries in an inherently transnational manner. Starting in 1492, fukú summarises the colonisation and domination of native Caribbean cultures and their subsequent displacement to peripheral positions provoked by European – and later US – colonial interference, “from colonialism through the Trujillato to the current era of neoliberalism, employing the persistent presence of the fukú to suggest that the Dominican Republic has never truly been liberated from the tyranny of colonial rule” (Mahler 121). Using Enrique Dussel’s terminology, fukú may be said to stand for

60  Sara Villamarín-Freire the history of domination endured by Latin America resulting from the consolidation of Western Modernity. It is no wonder, then, that zafa, the only thing that can put a stop to fukú, comes from folk culture, that is to say, from a position radically alien to Modernity. Articulated as a resistance discourse, zafa can be seen as the expression of the South-South dialogue that Enrique Dussel speaks of. Moreover, structuring the story around the poles of fukú and zafa suggests that “understanding Oscar’s life requires a transgenerational family story and a trans-American history, just as understanding Trujillo’s reign requires remembering the colonial past and recognizing contemporary dictatorial relations” (Harford Vargas 15). The local mirrors the national and even the transnational, given that fukú is common to all Caribbean countries, and possibly to all Latin-American countries as well – even though this is not explicitly mentioned in the novel. Yunior explains that fukú’s ominous influence can be counterbalanced with zafa, a word used to “prevent disaster from coiling around you” (Díaz 7). The story of Oscar and his family is presented as a “fukú story,” whereas the act of writing as well as the resulting book are “zafa,” the narrator’s “very own counterspell” (7). This zafa story is an alternative version of the official history of the “U.S.-backed dictatorship” exerted by Trujillo and, in a broader sense, “a transamerican counter-dictatorial act” (Harford Vargas 10). In short, zafa rewrites fukú. Unfortunately, it cannot wholly mend the damage caused by the dictatorship. Even though Yunior seeks to uncover the stories erased by the regime, he often acknowledges his inability to fill in the void left by some unutterable trauma or some experience forever lost, therefore leaving gaps and blanks scattered throughout the text. Yunior struggles to reconstruct and “uncover both the story of the family and the history of the nation” (Hanna 498), which are connected precisely through the common denominator of violence and trauma. As Monica Hanna notes, Yunior’s sources “are fragmentary at best” due to the fact that “so much of the history he wishes to recover has been violently suppressed and shrouded in silence” (498). As Hanna suggests, “while Trujillan history is only concerned with the powerful, Yunior’s history includes the stories of those who resist despite their lack of power” (504). In this sense, we can consider the zafa story Yunior writes to be a palimpsest. Writing the book is an act of struggling and resilience as he means to incorporate the voices left out of the hegemonic discourse. Hanna also mentions that Yunior’s narration “is meant to act as a direct counterpoint to the national history presented by the regime” by presenting, first of all, “a narrative voice that diverges from that of the Trujillan model […] a univocal voice of nationalistic rhetoric” (504). According to Hanna, “[i]t is this internalization of the Trujillan historiography that Yunior battles throughout the text by positing an alternative based on memory and inclusion” (504).

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  61 His alternative historiography is purposefully unpolished, to the extent that he overtly recognises his limitations and contradictions, and even admits that he made up some parts of the story in order to fill in the gaps left by the intractability of the most traumatic events. But perhaps the ultimate goal of Yunior’s rewriting is not to offer the complete story as it happened but rather, as Jennifer Harford Vargas suggests, to “interrogate dictatorial power in its various sociohistorical manifestations” through the use of diverse “narrative techniques and formal structures,” namely, “oral sources, footnotes, and silences” (10) that are introduced “to mimic the dissemination and repression of information under dictatorship and dictate a story against dictatorship without being dictatorial” (18). In addition, Yunior’s assembling of these scattered, silenced stories, as well as his attempts to fill in the gaps, serves to emphasise “the constructed nature” of his story and any story alike, hence compelling readers “to examine the power structures behind the act of telling” (Hanna 501) In this respect, it is important to notice that Yunior is able to articulate this counter-discourse of resistance precisely because he occupies the liminal space between “two cultures ([his] own [Dominican] culture and Modern culture [represented by US culture]),” as Dussel puts it (2002, 47). However, in this case there is a radical differentiation between Yunior’s “own culture” and “Modern culture” that needs clarification. Yunior is part of the Dominican-American diaspora, and although his focus throughout the novel is clearly put on Dominican history and identity, he nonetheless borrows from traditional Latin-American genres such as magical realism as much as he does from US popular culture, hence conveying the impression that he does not privilege one over the other.15 By incorporating elements taken from “superhero comics, magical realism, and noir, […] as well as conventional historical narration” (Hanna 499–500), Oscar Wao simultaneously “engages with Caribbean literary and historical discourses, with a heavy emphasis on Afro- Caribbean literary tradition, while also adopting narrative structures and references particular to US literature and popular culture” (499). It is precisely from such a position that the meta-narrative of Transmodernity can be successfully articulated. Yunior’s zafa story represents the attempt to create a critical alternative to the official, Eurocentric discourse from a perspective that has incorporated Western and nonWestern elements alike, hence creating a “pastiche,” as Hanna states (500). Likewise, Joy Sanchez-Taylor sees this “hybrid-genre text” as an attempt “to move away from static representations of Dominican history towards not-yet-realized depictions of Dominican and Dominican American cultures” (94); the incorporation of science fiction and fantasy elements into the novel “allows [Díaz] to comment on current and future possibilities” for these cultures (95). The exploration of “current and future possibilities” through the hybridisation of genres and forms is inherently transmodern. Likewise, the alternative discourse

62  Sara Villamarín-Freire to hegemonic Eurocentrism that merges non-Western and Western elements is transmodern. The constant mixture of genres, languages and registers, as well as the numerous references left unexplained, pose a challenge to readers approaching Oscar Wao. There are several levels of interpretation that can be unlocked and whose reading depends on a number of factors, namely, the amount of prior information possessed by readers on Dominican history or Western science fiction, fantasy and comic books, but also linguistic knowledge. In the novel, Yunior constantly draws from science fiction and fantasy, both significantly “Western” genres, in order to convey those “parts of the Dominican experience [that] cannot be expressed” (Sanchez-Taylor 98).16 Namely, any reader who is familiar with the fictional universe of The Lord of the Rings will easily form a mental image of Trujillo after he has been compared to Sauron, regardless of his or her prior knowledge of Dominican history. From this perspective, Yunior might as well be reasporican rather than diasporican, insofar as he is taking “cultural ideas and values acquired in diaspora settings” and using them to convey otherwise unutterable Dominican experiences with an “unsettling effect” (Flores 4). Sean O’Brien, while commenting on the unexplained references in the novel, states that “Oscar Wao gives readers just enough context to foreground the challenge of incorporating such information into the reading process” (76). He concludes: Oscar Wao’s readers, forced to make decisions about how to deal with frequent allusions to traditions and contexts that do not purport to be universal or even widely shared, find themselves in […] a world that contemporary readers ignore at their own risk, as global fiction in English increasingly draws on contexts beyond the Western tradition. (76–77) By using elements whose main function is to unsettle the readers and push them beyond their comfort zone,17 Yunior is challenging them to gather information on their own. Moreover, his constant contradictions and rectifications create the impression that he cannot be fully trusted, even if his intentions are good. The perception of his narrative as misleading or purposefully wrong seeks to activate reader collaboration. I believe this posture regarding the reader is indicative of a certain transmodern attitude. Due to the immediate availability of any piece of data online, we can now approach the reading process differently. We can choose to complement the information we are given if we do not fully understand it; we can gather extra information if we wish to, and do so as we go on reading. Novels such as Oscar Wao seek to unsettle the reader (especially the Western, English-speaking reader) by shifting the frame of reference we are used to; but by adopting this strategy of

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  63 defamiliarisation, as the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky called it (see Crawford 209), they are seeking to counter the deadening effect of habit and convention and deautomatise perception, thus triggering a positive reaction. Depending on our will to engage in this way of reading, we might discover new layers of meaning. As my analysis has attempted to show, the application of a transmodern frame of reference to transborder, hybrid fictions such as Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao may enrich the manner wherein we approach contemporary literature, especially in those cases where literary manifestations escape the traditional classification according to national literatures. It seems clear that, given the proliferation of terms such as “transnational literature” or “global literature,” the national paradigm established as the sole frame of reference might be on the brink of becoming obsolete. However, as I have argued above, a transnational approach means nothing if we do not first problematise the metanarrative that sustains it. Even if we attain higher levels of interconnectedness due to the proliferation of transnational networks, true interconnectedness and solidarity will never be attained lest we start articulating these exchanges from a position beyond our Eurocentric comfort zone. It is in this sense that Transmodernity provides an opportunity to rethink our position in a global scenario where new challenges constantly emerge and previous meta-narratives no longer account for the transformations currently taking place. A truly global consciousness will only be possible if we deconstruct our position of privilege and reconstruct our discourse without establishing either a permanent centre or a permanent periphery, as Enrique Dussel envisions.

Notes 1 This distinction is introduced by Ateljevic at the beginning of her article, as she distinguishes between the opinions of “Europeans/Americans” and “postcolonial and subaltern writers” (201). The distinction is drawn again when discussing the differences between Luyckx’s and Dussel’s viewpoints (204). Furthermore, in his definition of Transmodernity, Luyckx explicitly speaks of “the West” being “in a process of transition from modernity towards what we called transmodernity,” thereby limiting the experience of Transmodernity to some parts of the globe. While discussing this issue he later on explicitly mentions “the positive reaction of the non-Western participants,” and comments on the fact that “[non-Western participants] perceived [this] as a Western opening to criticism of modernity, as an entrance door to an unexpected new kind of dialogue with us.” (972). 2 Dussel speaks of peripheral discourses existing in “Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.” This particular definition comprises any nonEuropean culture displaced and confronted by “an ‘imperial’ culture […] which originated with the invasion of América [sic] in 1492.” (2012, 33). 3 The ideas advocated by Dussel regarding Modernity have little to do with Rodríguez Magda’s understanding of the same concept. These differences

64  Sara Villamarín-Freire

4

5

6 7 8 9

10

are crucial insofar as the genealogy of the concept changes substantially. For instance, Magda’s view on Transmodernity as the result of a dialectical process is radically incompatible with Dussel’s views. For further reading, see Alcoff. It is worth noting that the blurring of centre and margins is also signalled by Rodríguez Magda as one of the distinguishing aspects of Transmodernity: “the globalized society no longer contents itself with the dichotomy of the center and its margins, but instead thrives on a network of interconnected megalopoles indicative at any rate of a ubiquitous transborder space.” (2008, n.p.). For a comprehensive account of the transformation undergone in postcolonial Latin-American thought from the 1970s onwards, see Enrique Dussel’s Hacia una filosofía política crítica (2002), especially Chapter XXI, “La filosofía de la liberación, los subaltern studies y el pensamiento poscolonial norteamericano” (435–52). Dussel identifies “post-modernity” as a distinctively Western phenomenon which “indicates that there is a process that emerges ‘from within’ modernity and reveals a state of crisis within globalization.” (2002, 223). In particular, she states that “[g]lobalization is the all-embracing Total, the chaotic and dynamic fulfillment of the dialectical imperative, the new paradigm that I have proposed to refer to as Transmodernity.” (2008, 17). For a critique of the Western epistemological framework adopted by postcolonial Latin-American thought, see Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel. The characterisation of Latino/a fiction as in-between fiction stems from Latinos/as plural identity, caught between their Latin-American background and their US upbringing (for those who were born in the US) or acculturation (for those who immigrated to the US). In the ground-breaking Borderlands/ La Frontera (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa speaks of los intersticios, or the spaces between the different worlds to which Latinas are relegated as a result of their alienation from both the mother culture and the dominant culture, i.e. US culture (20). Fatima Mujčinović observes in her analysis of Anzaldúa’s argument that “[t]he confusion of not knowing in which culture one will find acceptance and belonging is intensified with the awareness of the tension between different cultural orders” (28). Therefore, in addition to the attempts to juggle multiple identities, Latino/a in-betweenness often embraces a critical perspective, insofar as it takes advantage of this awareness in order to subvert cultural hierarchies. As Mujčinović further elaborates, in-betweenness can be felt as “a location of entrapment, confinement, and isolation,” but at the same time it also “carries a potential for transformation as it destabilizes the singularity and autonomy of cultural authority and subsequently provides alternative forms of existence” (30). It is precisely this potential for transformation that aligns US Latino/a experience with Dussel’s transmodern project. Let us bear in mind that Enrique Dussel sees Transmodernity as a metanarrative with the potential to create a North-South dialogue: A future trans-modern culture […] will have a rich pluriversity and would be the fruit of an authentic intercultural dialogue […]. [A]n intercultural dialogue must be also transversal, but at the same time it needs to set out from a place-other than a mere dialogue between the learned experts of the academic or institutionally-dominant worlds. It must be also a multicultural dialogue that does not presuppose the illusion of a non- existent symmetry between cultures. (2012, 43; emphasis in the original)

11 In this “Latinidad” Delgadillo includes “the other Latinos/as”; that is, LatinAmerican migrants—or their descendants—other than Mexican, Puerto

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  65 Rican, Cuban and Dominican, who settled in the US yet were not as numerous there as the aforementioned nationalities. Delgadillo explicitly mentions Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Peruvian, and Colombian Americans, among others (602). Establishing “Latinidad” with an ample transnational focus that also incorporates other spaces beyond Latin America can help promote the South-South dialogue needed before a North-South dialogue might take place: “It is more than anything a dialogue between the ‘critics of the periphery,’ it must be an intercultural South-South dialogue before can [sic] become a South-North dialogue” (Dussel 2012, 48). 12 Different definitions of diaspora have been given by Clifford (1994), Safran (1991) and Flores (2008), to name but a few representative names. 13 Here I am referring to trends rather than strict periodisation. Generally speaking, there are narratives that explore the process of adapting to the host culture, whereas others tend to focus on the attempts to reconnect with the native culture. Namely, Julia Álvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991) would be representative of the former, whereas Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) would be representative of the latter (although they were published only a year apart from each other). Nevertheless, I think that the second trend is perhaps more ubiquitous nowadays, precisely due to the influence of transnational fluxes. In the words of Heredia, [t]ransnational Latino/a narratives differentiate from previous decades because they provide more cultural, social, and historical contexts that explain the reasons for departure from the heritage/homeland. To understand US Latino/a literature in the twenty-first century, one must pay attention to multiple geographies and histories within the narratives, elements that often reveal the circumstances under which the protagonist and the family had to migrate across nations and continents. (169) 14 For the analysis of the idea that Yunior’s story is cyclical and the connections between cyclical time and magical realism in Oscar Wao, see Hanna. 15 We are never told how Yunior feels about his “American identity,” whereas we do hear a lot about his relation with the Dominican Republic and the attempts of all characters to come to terms with their Dominican roots. However, it is true that all American-born characters in Oscar Wao (that is, Yunior, Oscar and Lola, Oscar’s sister and Yunior’s once girlfriend) have been raised in the United States surrounded by Western pop-culture references, and seem comfortable with this dual cultural background. Of course, being at ease with US cultural references does not entail that Yunior cannot maintain a critical stance regarding hegemonic powers and its ever-lasting influence in the Caribbean. 16 For a detailed account of the influence of science fiction and fantasy genres in Oscar Wao, see Sanchez-Taylor. 17 In this regard, the case of Spanglish in Oscar Wao is another source of trouble. There are several authors who have analysed in detail the linguistic hybridity of the novel. See Casielles-Suárez and Dumitrescu.

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Enrique Dussel’s Transmodernism.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.3 (2012): 60–68. Accessed on 17/06/2018 at: escholarship.org/uc/item/58k9k 17t/. Web.

66  Sara Villamarín-Freire Álvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents. 1991. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Print. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Print. Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (2013): 200–19. Accessed on 02/06/2018 at: www.integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_trans modernity.pdf/. Web. Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia. “Radical Code-switching in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90.4 (2013): 475–87. Accessed on 28/11/2018 at: DOI:10.3828/bhs.2013.30/. Web. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. “Latinoamericanismo, Modernidad, Globalización. Prolegómenos a una crítica poscolonial de la razón.” Teorías sin disciplina. Latinoamericanismo, poscolonialidad y globalización en debate. Eds Santiago Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Mendieta. México: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1998. 169–206. Print. Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. Accessed on 29/09/2018 at: www.jstor.org/stable/656365/. Web. Crawford, Lawrence. “Viktor Shklovskij: Différance in Defamiliarization.” Comparative Literature 36 (1984): 209–19. Print. Delgadillo, Theresa. “The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.” American Literary History 23.3 (2011): 600–24. Accessed on 11/09/2018 at: www.jstor.org/stable/41237457/. Web. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print. Dirlik, Arif. “American Studies in the Time of Empire.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 2.3 (2004): 287–302. Accessed on 10/09/2018 at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1477570004046771/. Web. Duany, Jorge. Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Print. Dumitrescu, Domnita. “Dude was figureando hard: El cambio y la fusión de códigos en la obra de Junot Díaz.” Perspectives in the Study of Spanish Language Variation. Papers in Honor of Carmen Silva-Corvalán. Eds Andrés Enrique-Arias, Manuel J. Gutiérrez, Alazné Landa and Francisco Ocampo. Santiago de Compostela: Servizo de Publicacións e Intercambio Científico Campus Vida, 2014. 397–432. Accessed on 22/11/2018 at: dx.doi.org/10 .15304/va.2014.701/. Web. Dussel, Enrique. Hacia una filosofía política crítica. Bilbao: Desclée De Brouwer, 2001. ———. “World-System and Transmodernity.” Nepantla: Views from South 3.2 (2002): 221–44. Print. ———. “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.3 (2012): 28–59. Print. Flores, Juan. The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Fluck, Winfried. “A New Beginning? Transnationalisms.” New Literary History 42.3 (2011): 365−84. Accessed on 09/10/2018 at: www.jstor.org/stable/ 41328972/. Web.

An Alternative Reading of Oscar Wao  67 García, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. Print. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.1 (2011): 1−36. Accessed on 04/03/2019 at: dialnet. unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3998080/. Web. Hanna, Monica. “‘Reassembling the Fragments.’ Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Callalloo 33.2 (2010): 498−520. Accessed on 11/09/2018 at: www.jstor.org/stable/40732888/. Web. Harford Vargas, Jennifer. “Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” MELUS 39.3 (2014): 8−30. Accessed on 11/09/2018 at: www.jstor.org/stable/24569858/. Web. Heredia, Juanita. “Transnational US Latino/a Literature: From the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century.” Hispania 100.5 (2017): 167–72. Accessed on 11/09/2018 at: www.muse.jhu.edu/article/688450/. Web. Kuecker, Glen D. “From the Alienation of Neoliberal Globalization to the Transmodern Ways of Being: Epistemic Change and the Collapse of the Modern World-System.” Journal of Globalization Studies 5.1 (2014): 154–70. Print. Luyckx, Marc. “The Transmodern Hypothesis: Towards a Dialogue of Cultures.” Futures 31.9–10 (1999): 971–82. DOI: 10.1016/S0016-3287(99)00056-7. Print. Mahler, Anne Garland. “The Writer as Superhero: Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 19.2 (2010): 119–40. Accessed on 24/09/2018 at: DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2010.494928. Web. Mujčinović, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature. From Ana Castillo to Julia Álvarez. Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Print. O’Brien, Sean P. “Some Assembly Required: Intertextuality, Marginalization, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45.1 (2012): 75–94. Accessed on 22/09/2018 at: www.jstor.org/stable/43150831/. Web. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. La sonrisa de Saturno: Hacia una teoría transmoderna. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989. Print. ———. Transmodernidad. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2004. Print. ———. “Globalization as Transmodern Totality.” Transmodernity 27 December 2008. Accessed on 02/06/2018 at: http://transmodern-theory.blogspot. com/2008/12/globalization-as-transmodern-totality.html/. Web. Sanchez-Taylor, Joy. “‘I Was a Ghetto Nerd Supreme’: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Latina/o Futurity in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25.1 (2014): 93–106. Accessed on 25/09/2018 at: www.jstor.org/stable/24353118/. Web. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (1991): 83–99. DOI: 10.1353/dsp.1991.0004. Web. Van Hear, Nicholas. New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities. Seattle: University of Washington P, 1998. Print.

3

The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island Angelo Monaco Certain novels not only cry out for critical interpretations but actually try to direct them. David Foster Wallace (“The Empty Plenum”)

Intellectual matters frequently come up in Tom McCarthy’s prose, but they have rarely been contextualised from the perspective of the novel of ideas and the critical debate that this genre has fostered.1 Essential to McCarthy’s œuvre is the engagement with the transmission of ideas, a recurring trope in his work as a scholar and an artist. The typical landscape in McCarthy’s fiction is shaped by transmission of information, questions of existential significance and absence of emotions. The relevance of the connection between ideas and literature is clearly manifested in his essay Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006), where, studying the comic series created by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé (né Georges Prosper Remi), McCarthy describes Tintin’s adventures as a literary text that, in exhibiting hidden meanings, seems to hold the key to the secret of literature itself. In McCarthy’s view, Hergé’s portrayal of human nature echoes the detailed novelistic representations typical of writers like Balzac or Jane Austen, aimed at contributing to a complex textual endeavour that “forms a lens, or prism, through which a whole era lurches into focus” (2006, 9). Drawing on Roland Barthes’s methodology in S/Z (1969), McCarthy specifically refers to the “hermeneutic code,” which, as the English novelist explains, is the very activity of reading that starts in a text. What emerges is an exploration of hidden layers of meaning and complex narrative mechanisms through which “[t]he text creates the secret, and the secret underpins the text, making it readable through its unreadability” (McCarthy 2006, 146). Hergé’s hero himself is an emblem of his age: Tintin spends his time tracking down radio signals, exploring crypts and tombs, decoding puzzles and unveiling meanings, the very same cognitive mechanisms that fuel McCarthy’s fictional heroes. Like Tintin, the main character of McCarthy’s novel C (2010), for instance, is concerned with circuits, codes, transmission and signals. Born at the turn of the twentieth century, Serge Carrefax, an airman in the Second World War, can feel “an almost sacred tingling,

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  69 as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code” (McCarthy 2010, 141), thanks to his position as an aerial observer. Carrefax’s exploration of Modernity through radio signals, Egyptian codes and other textual riddles conveys a convergence of those images and ideas that saturated the early twentieth century. In his previous novel, Men in Space (2008), McCarthy had used Byzantine paintings to unveil a set of hidden meanings and inscriptions that transmit and reproduce ideas and emotions. Set in Prague against the backdrop of the breakup of the USSR, Men in Space features a choral narrative technique: each chapter displays brief vignettes about immigrants and expatriates from Eastern Europe, the United States and Britain. By thus foregrounding a world in fragmentation, McCarthy’s complex novels invite readers to search for the missed connections of a mosaic-like tale. Not only is such a saturation of data the blueprint of McCarthy’s aesthetics as a novelist, he also tends to shape his work as a visual artist. In 1999, McCarthy co-founded the “International Necronautical Society” (INS), 2 a creative space that, by combining art, literature and philosophy, organises events and regularly publishes semi-serious avant-gardist manifestos with the aim of exploring the meaning of human existence. In line with McCarthy’s narrative style, the organisation challenges the traditional definition of the human by stating that “inauthenticity is the core to the self, to what it means to be human, which means that the self has no core, but is an experience of division, of splitting” (2012, 9).3 The rejection of the humanist notion of a united self pervades the text that is central to the INS’s philosophy, the “New York Declaration on Inauthenticity,” where McCarthy screens the self and the accumulation of ideas, media and data of our contemporaneity.

Satin Island as a Novel of Ideas in the Transmodern Age The theme of men facing a world resisting interpretation resurfaces in every novel by McCarthy, including his latest one, Satin Island (2015). This novel testifies to the author’s central concern with ideas and abstract structures that transcend human knowledge, engaging with the great questions of our contemporaneity. “Me? Call me U.” (2015a, 14), the first-person narrator states, parodying the famous opening line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), as the homophony of “U.” and “you” already suggests a renunciation of autonomous selfhood, leaving the reader with some doubts about his identity. A contemporary flâneur, frequently caught between places, U.’s mission is to “unpick the fibre of a culture (ours), its weft and warp – the situations it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it” (2015a, 25). Like the unnamed narrator of Remainder, the protagonist of McCarthy’s fourth novel disrupts any received notion of human integrity: as a corporate anthropologist, U. travels to conferences, observes various aspects of contemporary culture,

70  Angelo Monaco collects data for an ethnographic inquiry named the “Koob-Sassen Project” and works on a mysterious “Great Report” on the epistemological and ontological questions of contemporaneity. Though U. draws upon Claude Lévi-Strauss’s methodology, his ideas on “present-tense anthropology” (91) are inspired by Paul Rabinow’s work on the contemporary and are interwoven with elaborate metafictionality. From the very first pages of Satin Island the reader is confronted with a problematic interpretation of reality: while much of the images depicted in the novel are filtered through U.’s anthropological gaze, the lack of psychological depth, emotional conflict and plot make the narrative format very close to the genre of the novel of ideas. Albeit “a contradiction in terms” (LeMahieu 177), insomuch as novels of ideas challenge the traditional novelistic form, Satin Island seems to fit into this narrative genre in that the story bridges the discrepant visions of the main character and the proliferation of data surrounding, even threatening to suffocate him. In his description of the genre, Michael LeMahieu contends that “the novel of ideas emerges on its own terms after the end of modernism” (179), with the decline of Henry James’s “art of the novel” and the need to confront the scientific and technological innovations that contributed to the development of the genre. Similarly, Peter Firchow forewarns readers that the genre cannot be reduced with the formula “novel + ideas = novel of ideas” (526). He instead remarks that the novel of ideas is not a genre but a species of novel within the same genre in which “the intellectual content is either more overt or more stressed, or both, than is the case with the other species of the novel” (526). A novel of ideas is then concerned with moral values, truth and questions of existential significance. Unlike the philosophical novel, where the author writes “from a position that is not elevated above the reader, but one in which the reader meets the author halfway” (Bewes 428), a novel of ideas stages an authorial predetermination that Bewes describes as a form of “literary dishonesty” (428) typical of contemporary literature. With the manipulation of the plot in the service of political and intellectual ideas, the authors of this type of novel, Bewes adds, are dishonest insomuch as they “constantly subordinate aesthetic concerns to political ones” (423). As he suggests, the novel of ideas “is the product of a highly reflective age” (432) and thereby it exists in a “fractured condition” (432). Interestingly, the status of the novel of ideas remains the subject of a debate with a sense of deadness looming dangerously on its horizon and making it look like an endangered species. While some authors, like Will Self, contend that contemporary fiction is taking the form of “zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn’t lie down” (Self n.p.) because of the mass changes in our public sphere introduced by the Internet, others claim that the exhaustion of the imagination is a trope of the novel of thinking. As Peter Boxall argued during a discussion on the life of the novel of ideas held at

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  71 the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2015, the novel of thinking “has always required and imagined a public sphere that isn’t available” (Boxall, Erdal and O’Hagan 00:09:43–00:09:49) since it tends to live “beyond the conditions that allow it” (00:10:14–00:10:17). From Boxall’s perspective, novels of ideas seem remote and their potential possibilities take time to come to fruition. The ramifications of this question being too vast to explore in the space of a chapter, I will focus on the reasons why novels of ideas may elude comprehension, making them appear as a dead and asynchronous genre. Whereas LeMahieu suggests that the novel of ideas flourished in the second half of the twentieth century, “freed from the shackles of modernist aesthetic ideology” (180), it was a modernist writer who spoke in defence of the genre. In “The Future of the Novel” (1923), D. H. Lawrence writes that “it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple” (154– 5), concluding that “the two should come together again in the novel” (155). Lawrence’s invocation of a harmonious coexistence between fiction and philosophy calls forth the return to a mode of writing which might enable a balance between selves and the world. The business of the novel, Lawrence argues, is to disclose the relation between man and the universe, a narrative aesthetics that formulates “a whole new line of emotion, which will get us out of the old emotional rut” (155), revealing the contrast between modern technology and human emotions. A similar preoccupation with intellectual ideas influenced Aldous Huxley’s fiction. In Point Counter Point (1928), an ongoing debate between intellectuals discussing possible themes and storylines for a novel, Huxley outlined his own definition of the novel of ideas through his spokesman, Philip Quarles. According to the hero of Huxley’s novel, the chief limit of the genre is that “you must write about people who have ideas to express—which excludes all but .01 per cent of the human race” (385). In Huxley’s hands, the novel of ideas is “a vehicle for satire” (Bowering 9) but also “an expression of the tremendous vitality which ideas had in the 1920’s; it is also a testimony of an important characteristic of that period: intellectual confusion” (Hoffman 137). Novels, as David Foster Wallace reminds us, do sometimes “cry out for interpretations” (218), swinging between flat human beings and post-human questions while yet serving “the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach & grasp […] for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life” (218). Human emotions and post-human matters similarly appear in McCarthy’s latest novel, where the concerns about language and intellectual aspirations are imported from the genre of the novel of ideas. By combining anthropology and such global questions as environmental decay and human vulnerability, McCarthy turns ideas into material for a novelist

72  Angelo Monaco to play with. His manipulation of literary genres offers nuanced parodies of the novelistic language. The novel, which is replete with puns and puzzles, is structured into fourteen chapters, each containing paragraphs numbered like a treatise (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on), with an ambiguous fictional content. In addition, the cover of Satin Island features a series of labels – “A Treatise,” “An Essay,” “A Report,” “A Novel,” “A Manifesto” and “A Confession” – that appear crossed out and are allegedly indicative of the possible alternative formats of the book. Although “A Novel” is the only un-slashed word, McCarthy’s narrative experimentation reveals an ambiguous form. If, in LeMahieu’s words, “the novel of ideas tends to be a hybrid designation” (180), then Satin Island edges towards the form of the novel of ideas in that it bridges abstractions and metanarration, thus stretching the limits of novelistic representation. Like the works of his favourite novelists, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett or Alain Robbe-Grillet, for instance, McCarthy’s novel is morally and aesthetically concerned with the nature of fiction writing. In a piece for The Guardian (2015), he insists on the necessity of meditating on the role of writing in an age dominated by corporate capitalism. By comparing the writer to “a dying man who is trying to speak” (2015b, n.p.), McCarthy understands anthropology as a vital literary form in a moment when writing seems to capitulate “in the shadow of omnipresent and omniscient data that makes a mockery of any notion that the writer might have something to inform us” (n.p.). Concomitantly, U.’s obsessive ethnographic inquiry seems to evoke the impossibility of writing fiction in the era of post-truth and globalisation where instantaneity and fragmentation have replaced unity and grand narratives. The novel is pervaded by a sense of meaninglessness and mystery about U.’s job: drifting from Turin to the North Atlantic, the anthropologist shuttles from laptops to alien sightseeing, in the throes of archiving reality into a dossier on “the First and Last Word on our age” (McCarthy 2015a, 70), that provides an analogy for the job of the novelist. On the one hand, Satin Island conjures up a proliferation of data that mimics anthropological enquiries, specifically Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955)4 and Rabinow’s conceptualisation of contemporaneity as “assemblage” (5), as McCarthy himself admits in the “Acknowledgments.” On the other hand, the novel’s metatextuality features a critique of the very meaning of the novelistic genre by displaying the inadequacies of writing grand narratives. In other words, in drawing ideas from anthropology, U.’s problematic inquiries reflect the cultural anxiety that literature has lost its creative power, borrowing tools and ideas from other fields. How can we approach the oscillation between the return to the celebration of grand narratives, which postmodernism had rejected, and the awareness of the limitations of finding shape? As Jean-François Lyotard famously put it, the tradition of the grand narratives “has lost its credibility […] regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  73 narrative of emancipation” (37). In a similar vein, Jean Baudrillard questioned the myth of grand narratives, conceiving postmodernism as an implosion of meaning which promotes, instead, a proliferation of signs and simulacra. According to Baudrillard, the collapse of meaning in the postmodern world results in an endless circulation of floating signifiers through which “truth, reference, objective cause have ceased to exist” (4). Against this backdrop, Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda uses the term “Transmodernity” to deal with our present age as it vacillates between the end of Postmodernity and a prolongation of Modernity. Transmodernity, Rodríguez Magda claims, corresponds to “the postmodern without its innocent breaking-the-rules; it is image, series, Baroque fugue and self-reference, catastrophe, loop, fractal and inane repetition; entropy of the obese, bruised data inflation; aesthetics of the full and of its disappearance” (2017b, n.p.). Bearing in mind this description of the transmodern paradigm, the present chapter will attempt to investigate the tensional interaction between the anthropological quest for meaning and the disruptive metanarrative format in Satin Island. My starting hypothesis is that McCarthy’s mixture of hyperrealist descriptions, modernist stream-of-consciousness techniques, postmodernist metanarrative devices and intertextual references situate Satin Island at “the crossroads of transmodernity” (Rodríguez Magda 2017a, n.p.), on the verge of meditation and fiction, stasis and acceleration. In order to illustrate this convergence, I will read Satin Island as a text which gets to grips with such transmodern traits as data inflation, the hegemony of the digital and the triumph of globalised society. I will first explore U.’s anthropological research in relation to the transmodern paradigm. In particular, I will examine how the tangled web of data proliferation affects his ontological status, revealing a crisis of agency. Then, I will analyse how the novel emphasises the metafictional paradox of “finding shape” by staging amorphous and shape-shifting ways to write about the contemporary. In contending that, as a transmodern novel of ideas, Satin Island inhabits a buffer zone, I will finally argue that McCarthy’s formal solutions follow Rodríguez Magda’s notion of Transmodernity in that the narrative succumbs neither to detailed observation nor centrifugal alienation, but rather embraces both directions, thus hinting at a vision of humankind that resists the aesthetics of an evacuated subjectivity.

The Transmodern Moment: Agency and Knowledge in the Age of the Anthropocene In her seminal work, La sonrisa de Saturno: Hacia una teoria transmoderna (1989), Rodríguez Magda introduced the word “Transmodernidad” as an umbrella term referring to the emerging consciousness of the global transformations taking place in the 1980s. Following Hegel’s

74  Angelo Monaco dialectic triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, Rodríguez Magda understands Transmodernity as critical of both Modernity and Postmodernity, insomuch as it “tends to preserve the defining impetus of the first yet is devoid of its underlying base: by integrating its negation the third moment reaches a type of specular closure” (2008, n.p.). A synthesis of the modern thesis and postmodern antithesis, the transmodern bridges the gap between the search for unity of the former and the celebration of fragmentation of the latter. In a similar way, Irena Ateljevic, drawing on Marc Luyckx Ghisi (2010), contends that Transmodernity “is not a linear projection which takes us from (pre)modernity via postmodernity to transmodernity; rather, it transcends modernity in that it takes us trans, i.e. through, modernity into another state of being” (202–3). The interplay between the impulse of modern thinking, through material reality, and the postmodern simulacra of simulation results in a transmodern “change of record” (Rodríguez Magda 2008, n.p.), where transience and acceleration cohabit. The prefix “trans,” Rodríguez Magda adds, “denotes dynamism, but also confusion, because it mixes planes, accumulates them, hybridizes them” (2008, n.p.). Although a unique and clearly defined conceptualisation of the term can be hardly provided, Transmodernity, therefore, prolongs Modernity, promoting an unstable and interconnected totality which might provide responses to the challenges of our contemporary era. So what exactly does such a philosophical premise mean in terms of its translation into the literary field? Despite the widespread impression that we are living in a post-literary age, literature, as Susana Onega argues, has always undergone changes “according to the need either to facilitate or to resist the successive shifts in dominant paradigms that take place whenever the discourses sustaining them cease to provide adequate explanations of self and world” (371). In her view, the present paradigm shift from Postmodernity to Transmodernity provides the basis for “articulating the spatio-temporal inter-connectedness of identity, history, memory, and culture” (373), midway between the metaphysical protection of the self and the fragmentation of postmodernism. This description might be applicable to Tom McCarthy’s fiction, as Satin Island is similarly concerned with analytical investigations of how human subjects and inanimate objects tend to affect each other in ordinary situations. As McCarthy points out in an interview, U. was a writer in the original draft of the novel, but the author later abandoned the idea of writing a book about the impossibility of writing fiction, preferring instead the figure of the anthropologist as “a perfect stand-in for the writer. He looks at the world and reports on it” (McCarthy, Corby and Callus 139). Consequently, the protagonist’s response to the loss of meaning is conveyed through his efforts at infusing meaning into the world, navigating through the ruins of grand narratives and, at the same time, casting light on a “new emergent landscape of fragments,

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  75 and constellating  these into new micro-systems” (140). This dialectical tension between unity and fragmentation does emerge in the novel’s engagement with the complex mosaic of what it means to be human in our present, chaotic age, chiming with the divergent formulations of transmodern aesthetics as it straddles the theoretical border between Rodríguez Magda’s celebration of reality as “an all-encompassing whole” (2017b, n.p.) and Luyckx Ghisi’s invitation “to engage on the way to reenchantment” (42), in order to rediscover a sensory wholeness and integrity through the body rather than by means of technology. 5 It makes sense, then, to read McCarthy’s novel, with its grids and systems of infrastructure, as reflecting the post-human mode in line with the tenets of the Anthropocene. Post-humanism can be seen, borrowing Rosi Braidotti’s words, as “an opportunity to empower the pursuit of alternative schemes of thought, knowledge and self-representation” (12). Braidotti’s interrogation of the traditional vision of humanity can be juxtaposed to Transmodernity in that they both present the human condition as characterised by a common preoccupation with the technological transformations of our contemporaneity. Digitalisation, globalisation and climate change, some of the key aspects of the Anthropocene, are well reflected in the transmodern configuration of the self: the human mind, Rodríguez Magda notes, “plays with its transformation and […] expands it with technological prostheses. We are all mutants connected to the net, cyborgs that proclaim the era of the postcorporal and the transhuman” (2008, n.p.). Satin Island similarly represents an engagement with the convergence between the human mind and science, by depicting what climate change, for instance, might mean for humans at a time of upheavals and transformations. As Pieter Vermeulen and Ioannis Tsitsovits comment, the invocation of environmental issues, like the oil spill that attracts U.’s interest, “give[s] rise to a proliferation of data that in turn shape the assemblage of human and nonhuman forces that we inhabit” (194). Though the term has an elusive meaning, the Anthropocene inscribes ecology and human life as textual layers where literature “is decidedly not a placeholder for human distinctiveness, but instead an intimation in which agency is distributed across human and nonhuman agents” (210; emphasis in the original). This shared spread of agency challenges the idea of human primacy, furnishing ample scope for the limitation of human exclusiveness and confirming the crisis of human activity. The novel’s preoccupation with economy, finance and environment seems to suggest the lack of autonomy of the self which comes to be merged with matter and environment. The presence of matter in the novel reduces the space for self-realisation and underscores a transmodern vision of reality as “no longer found in the movement of aggregates of atoms (objects), but rather in the movement of packages of bites, quanta of information transmitted in real time” (Rodríguez Magda 2008, n.p.). The transmodern moment, hence, refuses to

76  Angelo Monaco rely only on humanity, and U.’s engagement with the infrastructures of our globalised world engenders what Rodríguez Magda calls the “society of knowledge,” “built and transformed according to the quantity of knowledge that it can transmit” (n.p.). This post-human performativity is staged through U.’s anthropological exploration of the real, which eventually proves a metanarrative attempt to encapsulate the essence of the transmodern era. In narrating the post-human transformations  of our present culture, Tom McCarthy offers his personal observation of  the human (and its limits) and what it might mean to write fiction when ideas seem to exhaust human consciousness. In Satin Island, information and ideas are everywhere. Like the reader, the enigmatic U. finds himself bombarded by external reality, but, unlike the reader, he tries to manipulate and give shape to ideas and matters, concerning himself with the production and the acquisition of knowledge. His anthropological investigation entails a metafictional “constructedness” (McCarthy 2014, n.p.). As McCarthy argues in “Writing Machines,” the binary opposition fiction/reality is meaningless since the challenge “isn’t to depict this real realistically, or even ‘well’, but to approach it in the full knowledge that, like some roving black hole, it represents […] the point at which the writing’s entire project crumples and implodes” (n.p.). U.’s anthropological mission, the Koob-Sassen Project, is a similarly opaque attempt to embody contemporary reality that eventually functions as a sort of semiotic black hole. The project is never clearly defined and U.’s contribution remains vaguely specified. The reader learns that the Koob-Sassen Project involves “many hooksups, interfaces, transpositions—corporate to civic, supranational to local, analogue to digital and open to restricted and hard to soft and who knows what else” (McCarthy 2015a, 15). Connection, as McCarthy’s protagonist illustrates in this extract, represents the obsession with data processing and, in the attempt to find shape, it reproduces “the invisible infrastructure on which contemporary life operates” (Vermeulen and Tsitsovits 202). Probably named after Hilary Koob-Sassen, a visual artist working with texts and videos,6 the project, “formed of many other projects, linked to many other projects—which renders it well-nigh impossible to say where it began and ended” (McCarthy 2015a, 15), exemplifies the novel’s fascination with technology and network culture. Being ubiquitous and affecting everybody and nobody at the same time, the Koob-Sassen Project is compared to a “black box” since “[s]ometimes it seemed enormous, like an emperor’s mausoleum; at others it appeared no larger than a trunk, or a coffin” (94). An ever-changing document, full of contradictions, its only unchanging aspect is that “it was black: black and inscrutable, opaque” (94). Albeit amorphous and shape-shifting, the Koob-Sassen Project epitomises the novel’s metatextual fixation with finding shape, reflecting U.’s disorientation when facing the myriad of situations that define reality.

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  77

Shaping the Contemporary through “Present Tense Anthropology” Satin Island is not the first novel that Tom McCarthy constructs around the arena of knowledge, ideas and signals of our contemporaneity. Like his previous three works, his latest novel ignores conventional plotting and shares the author’s interest in “inscription as a process that continuously flows around and through what we customarily understand as ‘meaning’” (Lea 120). In his writing as a whole, McCarthy presents the mechanisms of inscription in terms of codes, buzzes and buffers as a way to condense meaning and propagate it beyond the pages, a relevant theme well explored in his essay “Transmission and the Individual Remix” (2012). Originally written as an e-book, this work of literary theory clearly draws on T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). It shows how writing is never original, being an act of synthesis of other sources. Though the subtitle of the essay is “How Literature Works,” McCarthy’s aim in writing it is “is not to tell you something, but to make you listen” (2012, 1). As indicated in this quotation, the role of the novelist, for McCarthy, is to give coherence to all the fragments of information that proliferate around us so that the reality that emerges out of the act of writing is, in Rodríguez Magda’s words, one of “a new fluctuating diffuse magma, but impregnably all-embracing” (2017b, n.p.). Satin Island addresses the global flow of capital, goods and people in “a world in constant transformation” (n.p.) through U.’s obsessive quest for finding and shaping meaning. The task of accepting the mission of archiving human and post-human matters is at the core of the novel, despite the archivist’s awareness of the limitations of such an arduous task. As Jarrett Zigon acutely observes, U. perfectly epitomises “the disciplinary anxiety that has emerged as many anthropologists increasingly struggle with the recognition that nonanthropological concepts are often better suited for hermeneutically interrogating the complexity of human worlds” (139). In the opening scene of Satin Island, McCarthy interweaves religion, war, environmental decay and sport by juxtaposing the various images coming from the screens in an airport lounge. The novel opens with U. stuck in Turin’s hub-airport, one of the many European “transfer points, rather than destinations in and of themselves” (McCarthy 2015a, 5), while all around him a similar conflation of ideas and information materialises. First, U. evokes the famous linen shroud of Turin, discovered there in the nineteenth century. While he dismisses the truth about the origin of the radiocarbon figure bearing the negative image of a man associated with Jesus of Nazareth, U. reflects on how people “see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen” (4). Just as a proxy is an intermediary that conveys information and enables connection, so the shroud is “a bolt that secures the scaffolding that in turn

78  Angelo Monaco holds fast the entire architecture of reality, of time” (4). U.’s musing on the shroud underscores the contrast between matter and media. While it is known that the shroud dates back to the thirteenth century, the image is a veil, “a foundation myth” (4), between reality and illusions. Then, the anthropologist’s attention is captured by the news of the death of a parachutist, glimpses of a football match between Barcelona and Bayern Munich, and the destructive consequences of an oil spill. Surrounded by screens and laptops, U. receives a text message from his boss, Peyman. “We won” (8), the text announces, and naively U. looks at the screen showing the football match until he finally understands that Peyman is referring to their company being selected for the writing of the Koob-Sassen Project. McCarthy thus places his narrator among a jungle of visual media: while waiting for his plane in the Italian hub, U. ends up absorbed in a chain of simultaneous thought processes, showing how his mind is trained to make connections between visual stimuli. Among the various facts and ideas that haunt U.’s mind, a massive underwater leak, caused by an offshore rig’s malfunction, catches his interest. U. regards the oil spill as “the flow of time itself” (136): as it slowly spreads over the silt and vegetation, viscously penetrating the earth, U. compares its “repeating pulses” to the linearity of time since it “embodies time, contains it: future, present, past” (136; emphasis in the original). The fluid movement of oil and water, where the first “brings the latter into its own more fully, expressing the sea’s splendour in a manner more articulate, […] more poetic […] more lyrical” (131), crystallises temporality, revealing an anarchic chronological dimension with neither origin nor end, a perpetual sense of fragility in which other moments of crisis circulate and pull one another. Slowly drifting off to reveries of a possible conference talk on the environment, U. imagines that when “oil splatters a coastline, Earth wells back up and reveals itself; nature’s hidden nature gushes forth” (134). U.’s imaginary talk ends with the paradoxical contention that the man responsible for this oil leakage ought to be considered a true environmentalist (134) insomuch as he enables the environment to emerge in its sublime totality. Whereas in Chapter 10, U. employs the motif of the oil leak as a symbol for ecology, culture and time, the previous chapter follows U. at an international conference in Frankfurt on the anthropology of the contemporary. Here, U. discusses the temporal essence of Modernity by providing insights into the meaning of the term. He declares that the term “epoch” originally meant “‘point of view’, as in the practice of astronomy” (115) and, only at a later stage, the term came to be used as a way to organise the world into fixed periods (115–6). In this episode, U.’s adaptation of the etymology of the word “epoch” mobilises his cognitive efforts to catch the meaning of an unstable and chaotic world, in line with Rodríguez Magda’s idea of “magma” (2017b, n.p.). As the anthropologist claims in his talk, what is required to understand the

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  79 question fully is not the contemporary but rather “an anthropology of The Contemporary” (McCarthy 2015a, 116; emphasis in the original). In other words, if the anthropological approach is a way to produce knowledge and gain insights into the world, what U. proposes is not the classical method à la Malinowski (88), where “Write Everything Down” (86) is the first commandment, but “a new realm” (89) of anthropological investigation: U-thnographers!—no longer scrolling through dead entrails of events hoping to unpack the meaning of their gestures, would instead place themselves in-side events and situations as they unfolded— naively, blithely and, most of all, live—their participation-from-within transforming life by bringing its true substance to the fore at every instant, in the instant, not as a future knowledge but as the instant itself, which, like a ripened pod, would overswell its bounds and rupture, spawning meaning, spreading it forth to all corners of the world. (89–90; emphasis in the original) Notably, this description of a new anthropological method of enquiry, which U./McCarthy ironically calls “Present Tense Anthropology™” (91), functions as an attempt at disclosing an encompassing link that may embrace the contemporary world, “an anthropology bathed in presence, and in nowness” (90; emphasis in the original). By paradoxically adopting the trademark symbol “™,” U. offers a service, an unregistered creation that he himself has fathered, evocative of Rodríguez Magda’s vision of transmodern contemporaneity where “instantaneity is a permanently updated present” (2017b, n.p.). Echoing this perpetual “nowness,” U. becomes obsessed with the question of finding shape, but he never achieves his dreams as what he finds is new meanings always coming out, a sense of buffering in which the contemporary seems to finally deflate into no meaning. Charged by Peyman with the task of compiling what is referred to as “The Great Report” (McCarthy 2015a, 69–70), U.’s attempt at totalising the current moment into a definitive document leads him to spend his time filling in a wide range of dossiers on different situations, alternating moments of insights with fruitless observations. His accurate search for the hierarchic structures of knowledge recalls Mr. Casaubon’s encyclopaedic project on world myths in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871). On the verge of finding similarities among non-Christian mythological sources, the pedant Victorian scholar spends his life in a futile quest for the key to “all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world” (Eliot 46) that he would later restore to their original unity. In a similar vein to Casaubon’s obscure archiving project, U. strives to condense our reality in a book that will come out of the jungle like some unknown fantastic beats (McCarthy 2015a, 71–72). Just as Eliot’s

80  Angelo Monaco clergyman is unable to complete his monumental work, so McCarthy’s anthropologist comes to the awareness of the impossibility of accomplishing his mission, not so much because it might be unwritable, but, on the contrary, because “it had already been written” (153; emphasis in the original). What U. underlines here is that the instantaneous network of data and digital technology saturates anthropology and literary writing alike since they are embedded into a neutral and indifferent binary system that would perpetuate itself (153). As U. progresses in his enquiries, he becomes increasingly conscious of a growing sense of failure. Like his often-quoted hero Lévi-Strauss, U. tries to achieve some sort of “master meaning,” but he finally falls victim of a deep depression (152). The purity that anthropologists crave for is a chimera, as it is a state lacking frames of comprehension, interpretation or analysis (22). Such an evaporation of meaning, Tom McCarthy explains, informs not only U. and Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology but also literary writing, in that it corresponds to a “form of duping—not just of readers but of himself too, carrying meaning to the point of ambiguity again and again” (2014, n.p.). This suggested equivalence between fiction and anthropology addressing the disruption of meaning along a frame of repetitions and temporal disarray begs for a consideration from the temporal perspective of Transmodernity.

Transmodern Time between Buffering and Adjacency In addition to ideas and matter, the novel performs a temporal mingling, a loop of repetitions dissolving the linearity of time. Interruptions, transitions, suspensions and moments of intercourse animate the temporal structure of Satin Island, contributing to a symphony of memoirs, dreams and transient realities. When U. learns of a parachutist’s death, he ruminates about the circumstances behind it – a murder? a suicide? an accident? – until he finally experiences a sort of epiphany at the end of Chapter 11, on the sudden conviction that it was a Russian Roulette pact (McCarthy 2015a, 148). The anthropologist theorises that the other members of the victim’s club had made an illicit deal and, since all parachutes looked the same, nobody could know the one they had sabotaged. And yet, while such an incredible realisation is, in U.’s view, “almost as visceral as the ritual unmasked” (149) – an allusion to Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski’s discoveries about tribal rites – U. is later caught by a glint of disappointment when he understands that his conspiracy theory cannot work since “all divers,” U. reflects, “use only their own, personal packs” (151). Humans shape meaning retrospectively, so that by the time U. tries to make sense of his ideas, the moment has already ticked away. McCarthy’s novel, then, inhabits a sort of temporal suspension that manifests itself in the form of “a continuous jetlag as his consciousness of experiencing the world drops behind his actual experiencing of phenomena” (Lea 148).

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  81 If the exploration of the contemporary exposes U. to a cognitive crisis, the alleged limitation of human agency materialised by the story may be said to unfolds with frequent bouts of buffering. McCarthy’s narrative repeatedly offers readers a sense of plenitude with images, data and thoughts replicating endlessly in the digital era, while temporal linearity is doomed to crash. The novel is thus subject to the logic of temporal condensation, a space of delay and separation that not only U. frequently encounters, but may be said to shape McCarthy’s very mode of writing in general, thus favouring a chronological suspension that brings to mind Rodríguez Magda’s vision of transmodern temporality as “a period of transformation, transience, and accelerated time” (2017b, n.p.). In commenting on the “extraordinary kind of aphasia” of McCarthy’s debut novel Remainder, Peter Boxall claims that “time and space hang together in ways so new and so strange that we have to relearn our most basic orienteering to get from here to there, from one second to the next” (21). The tempo of Satin Island is similarly saturated while the motif of buffering becomes a symbol of frozen temporality. Just as the oil spill is the metaphor for the flow of time itself, so buffering becomes the emblem of cyclical time. In Chapter 7, a buffer circle appears on the screen of U.’s laptop while he is watching a video on YouTube. In a sort of epiphanic monologue, U. confesses losing himself in it just as with the circle and being granted the revelation that what he was actually watching was nothing less than “the skeleton laid bare, of time or memory itself” (McCarthy 2015a, 85). Focussing on the protagonist’s mental mapping, a form of temporal opacity, torn between acceleration and paralysis, emerges. As U. further explains, “[w]hen the narrating cursor catches right up with the rendering one, when occurrences and situations don’t replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain […] then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo” (86). The buffering problem does not simply interrupt and disrupt the temporal frame of the clip but also displays something never seen before. Buffering is, then, a generative space. As U. concludes, in buffering there is no enjoyment either of the experience or of the consciousness of it: “Everything becomes buffering and buffering becomes everything” (86). This is why he ultimately proposes to write a dossier on buffering. In U.’s world, meanings emerge along buffer zones, a perpetual present where repetitions, connections and epiphanic associations – as in the cases of the oil spill or the parachutist’s death – distil ideas and promote a cyclical temporal frame. Thus, buffering transfers the characteristics of digital temporality into the novel, bridging the gap between reality and the attempts at representing and finding shape. At the same time, buffering is one of the motifs McCarthy employs to criticise the stagnation of our present age. His anthropological quest does not lead U. towards the Great Report; rather, he realises that “the age itself, in all its shape-shifting and multi-channelled incarnations”

82  Angelo Monaco (87) is unframeable. Like the falling parachutist, U. is doomed to fall into meaninglessness, dwelling on a buffer zone where archiving and writing are interwoven with his own ideas on the stuff of the world, which is black (135). Despite the references to Lévi-Strauss, U.’s methodology is, as suggested above, inspired by Paul Rabinow’s project on the anthropology of the contemporary. During the aforementioned conference in Frankfurt, U. regards the contemporary as a suspect term (115), proposing, instead, a temporal frame that breaks up time into repeated fragments of the past: Better to speak […] of a moving ratio of modernity: as we straddle the dual territories of a present that, despite its directional drive, is slipping backwards into the past, and a future that will always remain notional, we are carried through a constantly mutating space in which modernity itself is no more than a credo in the process of becoming ‘dated’, or at least historical. (115; emphasis in the original) U.’s reflections on the present age replicate Rabinow’s definition of the contemporary as “the moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and the near future in a (non-linear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical” (2008, 2). Significantly, Rabinow adds that the contemporary involves not the “new” but “the emergence of forms within which old and new elements take on meanings and functions” (24). One of the main tenets of Rabinow’s theory is the principle of adjacency, conceived as an ever-shifting space where new and old are interfaced. Adjacency, Rabinow writes, is “a distinctive double reversal, a kind of ethical and epistemological conundrum in which and through which many of us find ourselves perpetually seeking our way – and giving form to ourselves and to our work” (34). Here, the intricate combination of past and present recalls Rodríguez Magda’s definition of Transmodernity as a synthesis of the modern and postmodern, “a fluid return of a new configuration of the previous steps” (2017b, n.p.). Following Rodríguez Magda, one can argue that time loses the logical chain of before and after, since “[t]he transmodern world is not one in progress, nor is it beyond history, it is an instantaneous world, in which time reaches the breathtaking speed of an eternally updated present” (2008, n.p.). As an “adjacent” observer, U. embraces doubts and truth, virtual and real, fragmentation and wholeness, epitomising the disrupted temporality of adjacency, ruling “the space of problems. Of questions. Of being behind and ahead. Belated or anticipatory. Out of synch. Too fast or too slow” (Rabinow 34). As “a mode of virtual untimeliness” (49), adjacency provides U. with a cultural synthesis of different temporalities, spaces, and ideas: his hybrid and rhizomatic mode of inquiry reflects

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  83 the adjacency not only of his method of inquiry, but also of the world surrounding him, as U. dwells on the threshold of temporal boundaries and information loops. As a consequence, Satin Island resonates with the divergent approaches to Transmodernity, split between a human attempt at integrating knowledge and information, and a post-human reality defying rationality. In the novel’s epilogue, however, ideas and matter make space for an act of “literary dishonesty,” in Bewes’s words (428), revealing some residual resilience of the self in manipulating those repetitions and inscriptions that saturate the human mind.

Ideas, Fiction and Transmodernity: A Coda Satin Island explores the nature of meaning and ideas. In its synthesis of different experimental techniques, the novel is anything but traditional, subverting literary conventions and fitting Zadie Smith’s famous judgement of McCarthy’s style as moving away from what she terms “lyrical realism”7 (2009, 92), its major quality being the disruptive force “to shake the novel out of its present complacency” (93). The combination of modernist and postmodernist influences offers readers hyperrealist descriptions, like the long and accurate vignettes of the oil leak; minute observations of the many places where U. transits, such as the airport lounge and the harbour in the end of the novel; exteriorising states of mind through modernist stream-of-consciousness techniques or epiphanic revelations in indirect speech; and, finally, postmodernist metafictional meditations on writing, with references to the Great Report, the Koob-Sassen Project and the anthropological works by Claude Lévi-Strauss. As far as the textual format is concerned, such an amalgamation interestingly inches towards the form of the novel of ideas that Michael LeMahieu describes as “a dressed-up political, polemic position paper, or expository essay” (180), revealing a tendency towards the coexistence of a multiplicity of perspectives on reality. Satin Island, with its fluid interrelation between human ideas, technology and objects, rests on the input of transmission, transforming anthropological inquiry into a metatextual preoccupation with the need to map the flow of the various signifying structures at work in the novel. While U. is initially preoccupied with sensory configurations and large information patterns, the conclusion, instead, highlights the end of illusions for the protagonist of the novel. By the end of Satin Island, U. becomes more neurotic and less trustworthy. In the very final scene, after having arrived in New York, he finds himself suspended between two types of meaningless options: whether to go or not to go to Staten Island (McCarthy 2015a, 213). While he is queuing for the ferry, he undergoes a new crisis of agency, here specifically in relation to language. By staring at the building of the naval company and walking around it, the three-dimensional

84  Angelo Monaco signboard “STATEN ISLAND FERRY” gradually dissolves in a profusion of re-arranged words, pregnant with implications like “STATE IS ERR […] SAT AND FRY […]” (205), until U.’s perspective eventually shows the word “SATIN.” For U. the word is a revelation, reminding him of a dream where he was flying over a dark island with a plant burning rubbish (162). U. finally realises that the island is similar to Staten Island, one in New York’s harbour, and he understands that, in the dream, he had involuntarily changed its name into “Satin.” As he surfs the net, U. discovers that the word “satin” designates a type of weave (165), while the almost similar “statins” are cholesterol-lowering drugs, their chemical composition resembling the structure of a weave (165–6). Whereas a landscape of fragments looms large in the novel, U.’s final decision not to take the ferry and walk back to New York is inspired, as McCarthy himself explains, by “the end of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, when [Eugène de] Rastignac goes back into the city. He goes: ‘À nous deux, maintenant!’” (McCarthy, Corby and Callus 140). Such an ambivalent attitude signals a moment of resistance, an act of disruption against the profusion of ideas and matter in the attempt to recover a sense of human agency. Whereas bleak tones, temporal disarray and magmatic ideas permeate the narrative, the blinding radiance on the water near the harbour generates a “holocaust of light” (McCarthy 2015a, 216) which eventually resets U.’s vision of the borders between self and world. This conclusion seems to suggest that U.’s archival work of data registration does not ultimately prefigure the end of human agency. What makes Satin Island a novel, rather than one of the other crossed-out genres displayed on the cover, is that it shows the illusions of complete immersion in knowledge and information, unveiling the ambiguous connection between objects and humans, while also hinting at a vision of humankind that resists the aesthetics of an evacuated subjectivity. In the oscillation between a sense of acute disorientation and the efforts to find shape, U.’s approach eventually uncovers the idea of writing as a tantalising challenge and, in this sense, the novel of ideas genre that I have tried to suggest in relation to Satin Island may be able to reveal the metamorphic power of the narrative form. “To succeed in writing a novel,” LeMahieu explains, “is to fail to represent an idea” (189). It is the consciousness of such limits that animates McCarthy’s fiction in the effort to represent the various parcels of our complex and dense world. As a novel of ideas, Satin Island dwells on the threshold of Transmodernity, its liminal form resonating with the force of “the limit, of resistance, that might reconstruct those regulative ideals in which to recognise ourselves, that might preserve that fragile life that we are as a planet and as individuals” (Rodríguez Magda 2017a, n.p.). Confronting such a fragile contemporary world, trapped in contingent knowledge, emotional emptiness and global capitalism, the reader is encouraged to

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  85 ponder the transmodern quality of a critique of our present age. U.’s abbreviated name is allegorically indicative of the participatory form of the narrative, being as it is a pun on the second-person pronoun ‘you’ and, therefore, issuing an invitation to the reader to share his tentative quest for meanings. The novel, in my view, gestures towards a transmodern perspective that succumbs neither to detailed observation, typical of the systemic discourses of Modernity, nor to the centrifugal alienation of postmodern fragmentation, but rather embraces both directions. In summary, McCarthy’s stance allows for a reconsideration of the postmodern and modern frames, interrogating the rigid demarcations of the two approaches and producing a fluid transformative shift towards Transmodernity.

Notes 1 In his review in The Irish Times, Kevin Gildea describes Satin Island as “a book of ideas, both original and borrowed” (2015, n.p.). 2 McCarthy launched the INS and published the “Founding Manifesto” in The Times with the English philosopher Simon Critchley. The project aims at charting the creative space of death and, by resorting to the style of the early twentieth-century avant-gardist movements, it offers a parodic view of the sense of human finitude. 3 The extract is part of the “New York Declaration on Inauthenticity” delivered by McCarthy and Critchley at the Drawing Centre, New York, on September 25, 2007. The paper was later collected in The Mattering of Matter (2012), a volume containing all the documents issued by the INS over the years. 4 Lévi-Strauss’s book documents his ethnographic researches in the Amazon basin and in India, during the first half of the 1950s. For McCarthy, anthropological methodology recalls novelistic writing in that “it is also infused with meditations on the very act of writing―the blindspots that it opens up, the traps or pitfalls that it sets” (2015b). 5 Luyckx Ghisi draws from Max Weber’s conceptualisation of modern Western civilisation as entzaübert (“disenchanted”) in that the prevalence of rationality “has alienated us all from our bodies, our souls, our intuitions, our feeling” (41). Thus, against Rodríguez Magda’s insistence on knowledge and rationality, Luyckx considers Transmodernity as coterminous with emotional and instinctual experiences. 6 The son of Saskia Sassen, the sociologist noted for her investigation of the disastrous consequences of globalisation and international human migration, Hilary Koob-Sassen collaborated with Tom McCarthy in a transmedia project at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 2015. 7 In “Two Paths for the Novel” (2008), a piece written for The New York Review of Books and later collected in Changing My Mind, Smith championed McCarthy’s prose as a new road for the contemporary Anglophone novel to follow, becoming a point of departure for academic engagements with the English writer. Reworking David Lodge’s celebrated essay “The Novelist at the Crossroads” (1969), where Lodge described the crisis of realism and the emergence of non-fiction and fabulation in postwar British fiction, Smith claims that the experimental and the realist coexist in healthy times but, since we do not live in healthy times, experimentalism is likely

86  Angelo Monaco to fail. Contrasting Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland with McCarthy’s Remainder, Smith argues that while the first may be located in the style of a “lyrical realism” marked by existential crisis and anxiety, the latter offers “a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward” (92). In McCarthy’s novel, Smith adds, experimentalism and nihilism are indicative of a “strong refusal” (71) of that realism made of fully rounded characters and plot.

Works Cited Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (June 2013): 200–19. Print. Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. 1970. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1994. Print. Bewes, Timothy. “What Is ‘Philosophical Honesty’ in Postmodern Literature?” New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000): 421–34. Print. Bowering, Peter. “The Novel of Ideas.” Aldous Huxley: A Study of His Major Novels. 1968. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 5–18. Print. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print. Boxall, Peter, Jeannie Erdal, and Andrew O’Hagan. “Is There Life in the Novel of Ideas?” Public Lecture. Literary Festival 2015. The London School of Economics and Political Science, 28 February 2015. Accessed on 09/09/2018 at: www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=2943/. Web. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity, 2013. Print. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Print. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919. The Sacred Wood and Early Major Essays. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. 27–33. Print. Firchow, Peter. “Mental Music: Huxley’s Point Counter Point and Mann’s Magic Mountain as Novels of Ideas.” Studies in the Novel 9.4 (Winter 1977): 518–36. Print. Gildea, Kevin. “A Story that Doesn’t Believe in Stories.” Review of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island. The Irish Times 2 May 2015. Accessed on 20/06/2018 at: www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/satin-island-by-thomas-mccarthyreview-a-story-that-doesn-t-believe-in-stories-1.2196627/. Web. Hoffman, Frederick J. “Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas.” College English 8.3 (December 1946): 129–137. Print. Huxley, Aldous. Point Counter Point. 1928. London: Vintage, 2009. Print. Lawrence, D. H. “The Future of the Novel.” 1923. Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 149–56. Print. Lea, Daniel. Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017. Print. LeMahieu, Michael. “The Novel of Ideas.” The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1945–2010. Ed. David James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 177–91. Print. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. 1955. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. London: Penguin, 2012. Print.

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island  87 Lodge, David. “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” 1969. The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1971. 3–36. Print. Luyckx Ghisi, Marc. “Towards a Transmodern Transformation of Our Global Society: European Challenges and Opportunities.” Journal of Future Studies 15.1 (September 2010): 39–48. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. McCarthy, Tom. Remainder. London: Alma Book, 2005. Print. ———. Tintin and the Secret of Literature. London: Granta, 2006. Print. ———. Men in Space. London: Alma Book, 2008. Print. ———. C. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. Print. ———. Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. Print. ———. “Writing Machines: Tom McCarthy on Realism and the Real.” London Review of Books 18 December 2014. Accessed on 10/04/2018 at: www.lrb. co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines/. Web. ———. Satin Island. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015a. Print. ———. “The Death of Writing: If James Joyce Were Alive Today He’d Be Working for Google.” The Guardian 7 March 2015b. Accessed on 13/03/2018 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/07/tom-mccarthy-death-writingjames-joyce-working-google/. Web. McCarthy, Tom, James Corby, and Ivan Callus. “The CounterText Interview: Tom McCarthy.” CounterText 1.2 (August 2015): 135–53. Print. McCarthy, Tom, and Simon Critchely, eds. The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. Print. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. 1851. New York: Norton, 2002. Print. Onega, Susana. “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm.” CounterText 3.3 (December 2017): 362–76. Print. O’Neil, Joseph. Netherland. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print. Rabinow, Paul. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Print. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. La Sonrisa de Saturno: Hacia una teoría transmoderna. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989. Print. ———. “Globalization as Transmodern Totality.” Transmodernity 27 December 2008. Accessed on 27/03/2018 at: http://transmodern-theory.blogspot. it/2008/12/globalization-as-transmodern-totality.html/. Web. ———. “The Crossroads of Transmodernity.” Trans. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen and Susana Onega. Plenary Lecture read at the Conference on Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. University of Zaragoza, 26 April 2017a. Accessed on 23/05/2018 at: www.academia. edu/33683289/_The_Crossroads_of_Transmodernity/. Web. ———. “Transmodernity: A New Paradigm.” Trans. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen. Transmodernity 9 May 2017b. Accessed on 20/03/2018 at: http://transmoderntheory.blogspot.it/. Web. Self, Will. “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real).” The Guardian 2 May 2014. Accessed on 02/10/2018 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2014/ may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction/. Web.

88  Angelo Monaco Smith, Zadie. “Two Paths for the Novel.” Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009. 71–96. Print. Vermeulen, Pieter, and Ioannis Tsitsovits. “The Anthropocene Scriptorium: Writing and Agency in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island.” Anglistik & Englischunterricht 86 (December 2017): 193–216. Print. Wallace, David Foster. “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10.3 (1990): 217–39. Print. Zigon, Jarrett. “Satin Island: A Novel on the Anthropology of the Contemporary.” Anthropology Now 8.2 (September 2016): 138–40. Print.

Part II

Ethical Perceptions

4

Problematising the Transmodern Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration Jean-Michel Ganteau

Introduction In the Introduction to a collection of critical essays entitled Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English, Jessica AliagaLavrijsen and José María Yebra-Pertusa provide a series of definitions of Transmodernity hailing from various disciplines and cultural fields. This leads them to offer the following synthesis: In a sense, Transmodernity is almost an umbrella term that comprehends all that is virtual, transnational, transethnically cosmopolitan, connective, glocal, strategic and transubiquitous, among other things and, as such, requires re-conceptualisation in all fields of knowledge, including those of literature and criticism. (9) Despite the “almost” qualifying the “umbrella term” nominal syntagm, what the definition suggests is the all-encompassing nature of a notion that may be said to be even more far-reaching when used under its adjectival form, that is, the transmodern. Such a semantic fanning out necessarily raises a certain number of questions as to the relevance and applicability of the category that Spanish philosopher and cultural critic Rosa María Rodríguez Magda (2011) has analysed in terms of a paradigm shift. For her, Transmodernity famously constitutes a dialectical third – in Hegel’s acceptation – standing in relation with Modernity and Postmodernity. Here are defining elements that she lists in the same article: Transmodernity prolongs, continues and transcends Modernity. […] Transmodernity is the postmodern without its innocent breakingthe-rules; it is image, series, Baroque fugue and self-reference, catastrophe, loop, fractal and inane repetition; entropy of the obscene, bruised data inflation; aesthetics of the full and of its disappearance, entropic, fatal. Its key is not the post, the break, but the transubstantiation of paradigms through communicating vessels. (2017a, n.p.) In other words, for Rodríguez Magda Transmodernity, even while maintaining a dialectical relationship with the two preceding categories, does

92  Jean-Michel Ganteau not break neatly with them and takes them as references, necessarily relying on them. This is a vision that seems to be accepted by most commentators, as is made clear in the rigorous survey provided by Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa (1–17). Still, another vision, forcefully put forward by Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel, situates the roots of Transmodernity in an altogether different ground. To him, Transmodernity rejects all reference to Modernity, as it implies “an explicit overcoming of the concept of ‘postmodernity’ (since the latter still represents a final moment of modernity)” (41; emphasis in the original). He argues that Modernity is an exclusively Western, Eurocentric idea, and that the cultures of the south pre-dating European colonisation have constituted an “exteriority” to the dominant culture of Modernity, in being excluded or neglected, even while they persist to this day (42). In his view, these cultures of the South – in the plural as they hail from the south of various continents and not only South America – are “simultaneously pre-modern (older than modernity), contemporary to modernity […] and trans-modern as well” (42; emphasis in the original). This leads him to formulate a definition of Modernity in four points, articulated from within the framework of the philosophy of liberation that he is one of the main creators and representatives of: In the first place, it suggests the affirmation, the self valorization of one’s own negated or merely devalued cultural moments which are found in the exteriority of Modernity […]. Secondly, these traditional values […] should be a point of departure for an internal critique, from within the culture’s own hermeneutical possibilities. Thirdly, the critics should be those who, living in the bi- culturality of the “borders,” can create critical thought. Fourthly, this means a long period of resistance, of maturation, and of the accumulation of forces. It is a period of the creative and accelerated cultivation and development of one’s own cultural tradition which is now on the path toward a trans-modern utopia. (49; emphasis in the original) The radicalness of such a definition lies in its displacing the apparent origins of Transmodernity by making them emerge outside and alongside those of Western culture. It is also inherent in the critical dimension coming from the exterior and aiming at the establishment of a new order, as indicated by the term “utopia,” very much at odds with most definitions of the contemporary. For Dussel, Transmodernity entails not so much reparation as constructive criticism and nothing short of revolutionary aspiration. I am aware that such a radical vision of Transmodernity that is “engaged in a critical, intercultural dialogue” (50) may sound somewhat

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  93 irrelevant in relation to what seems to be a more dominant vision, at least in the European academe, that is, Rodríguez Magda’s. To her and to many critics, Transmodernity has become intimately linked with globalisation, as she avers in her article “Globalization as Transmodern Totality” (2004). In this piece, she starts from the premise that the contemporary moment is that of globalisation, under the influence of technological evolution, and she somewhat circularly states that “a globalized society corresponds to a type of culture that [she has] referred to for some time as ‘transmodern’” (2008, n.p.). In a more recent piece, she has returned to what she calls “the Great Fact of Globalization,” insisting that it provides a new grand narrative – a status that does not apply to Transmodernity, she indicates – and making her critical stance as to transmodern developments more explicit (2017b, n.p.). Among the characteristics of this new culture, Rodríguez Magda itemises as prevalent among other categories: simultaneity, interconnection, “breathtaking speed,” the abolition of space leading to instantaneity, the postcorporal and the transhuman, the glocal, the network, the megalopolis, etc. In fact, she provides a list of characteristics of each period (Modernity, Post-modernity, Transmodernity), the third one continuing and going beyond the preceding ones, as indicated above (2008 and 2011, n.p.), an inventory that she thoroughly comments on in her 2008 essay. Now, all such examples of systematisation aim at clarification, which is undoubtedly praiseworthy. Still, by promoting such an arrangement, one runs the risk of erecting what Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa have identified as “almost an umbrella term” or category, as mentioned above, which raises the spectre of generalisation and a series of methodological questions about the role of art and literature in reflecting, contributing to or else problematising this paradigm shift through the means of refraction or resistance. Of course, the contemporary novel in English is very much concerned with the themes evoked by Rodríguez Magda: such authors as Tom McCarthy, for instance, have engaged with the evocation of globalised culture, the prevalence of cyberspace and cyberpresence, and the resulting instantaneity and simultaneity intrinsic to it, more particularly in his fourth novel, Satin Island, to take but one instance from the field of contemporary literature. Less glaringly so, many novels take the responsibility of evoking the interconnectedness of various locales and, paradoxically, temporalities (I am thinking of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Patrick Neate’s Jerusalem). Even more discreetly, fiction may echo the effects that the global situation has on the local, as is the case with Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier, where global electronic warfare has very concrete, incarnated consequences on the daily lives of British or Iraqi citizens. The same type of impingement is at work in Jon McGregor’s fourth novel, Reservoir 13 that, miles away from McCarthy’s or Mitchell’s narratives, concentrates on the life of a village in a secluded nook of a valley, somewhere in the Peak District.

94  Jean-Michel Ganteau The novel hinges around the painful, repetitive effects of a central loss: that of a thirteen-year-old girl who disappeared into the countryside, on New Year’s Eve, never to emerge again. It is haunted by what is presented as a collective trauma, with recurrent counter-factual sightings of the missing girl, years after she disappeared, apparitions that never lead to any kind of comfortable resolution, thereby displacing the rules of the detective novel and turning it into a “post-thriller” (Corrigan n.p.). It is characterised by a high degree of repetitiveness, both thematised through the careful observation of the village rituals (the yearly pantomime, the well dressing) and natural rhythms, and granted poetic form, through the use of rhymes (Hadley; Kemp; Wood). This provides a way of revisiting the basic rules of narrative efficiency, as the novel is in many ways what has been called an experimental text (Wood). In Reservoir 13, McGregor strikes at the roots of one of the pillars of fiction, that is, characterisation (a programme initiated in his previous novel, Even the Dogs, and brought to a state of consummation here, as noted by Wood or O’Donnell, for instance). One step further, the novel plays a perilous trick on the reader by blasting the plot dynamics and indefinitely expanding the sense of waiting, soliciting the reader’s patience (Corrigan; Wood). This is made possible by means of massive repetition, which stretches representation to its limits and deepens the text’s opaqueness, thereby favouring an experiential reading in which repetition and the natural and communal rhythms are performed almost as much as they are described. As underlined by all commentators, the observation of minute events (already present in his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things) is displayed on every page, through “painstakingly accumulated detail” (Merrit n.p.) meant to present the “minutiae of life” (Corrigan n.p.) and by means of a “fluid and fastidious prose” (O’Donnell n.p.). The narrative voice is that of an impersonal narrator who “omnisciently darts in and out of his characters’ lives” (Wood n.p.) while letting the characters’ voices emerge through free direct discourse. The impersonal narration depends on a shifting focalisation equally privileging the bird’s eye view and ground-level observation, either individual or collective. With Reservoir 13, McGregor once again focusses on the microscopic and the ordinary, on the “luminous dignity of the everyday” (O’Donnell n.p.), recording “the often overlooked remarkableness of the everyday” (Kemp n.p.) or, in another reviewer’s terms, answering the question “What would happen if the television cameras stayed?” (Taylor n.p.) – that is, after the effervescence over the girl’s mysterious disappearance has subsided. As may be inferred from this brief evocation, Reservoir 13 is essentially confined to the limits of the valley, without any possibility of glimpsing a horizon or a vanishing point, the sole presence of the cars on the motorway that can be seen from the hills reminding the readers of the existence of a reality outside the nook. At other times, the news from

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  95 the vast world are brought to the community’s awareness through television, so much so that instead of the distant rumble of the planet, ubiquitous violence is imported into the characters’ drawing rooms. And, of course, the young generations become digitally literate and addicted to telecommunication devices and usages as the story unfolds (or rather repeats itself) over the thirteen chapters chronicling thirteen years of the community’s life after the girl’s sudden disappearance. From this point of view, a sense of the instantaneous and of synchronicity seeps into the novel. Similarly, one may consider that such a focus on the humble lives of the local in contrast with the global events breaking into the characters’ consciousness is evocative of the preference for the glocal as a characteristic of Transmodernity, according to Rodríguez Magda (2008, 2011). Still, I would argue that Reservoir 13 eschews most of the categories present in the third column of the lists that she has devised and that the novel seems by no means to be concerned with such items as telepresence, the figure of the network, the Megalopolis, the virtually induced practice of “static connectivity” or the precession of “pensée unique” (Rodríguez Magda 2008, n.p.), or with any of the items featuring in Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa’s definition of Transmodernity. More precisely, such possibilities seem to be pushed to the periphery of the narrative as they are only glimpsed at the better to be deflected. I do not mean that Reservoir 13 is an explicitly anti-transmodern novel (whatever that may be), but that it seems to choose to turn its back on most of the possibilities associated with the transmodern in its global, digital phase. In the following pages, I am essentially concerned by the ways in which a certain type of experimental fiction, emblematised here by Reservoir 13, resists and problematises the categories and effects of the transmodern as expounded by Rodríguez Magda. My point is that it proposes to do so by ethically training the reader’s attention and consideration. In a first part I address the issue of instantaneity in relation with the novel’s warped temporal dynamics. I then move on to spatial categories like the glocal and cyberspace as displaced by a neo-materialist emphasis on the local. The third part engages with transmodern specificities like “monolithic thinking” and “pensée unique” as problematised by the figure of the open community.

The Limits of Instantaneity Instantaneity and simultaneity seem to be consensually considered as foremost representatives of the transmodern. Such a centrality is underlined in one of Rodríguez Magda’s articles where she comments on her categorical triads. More specifically, this is what she says about transmodern time: “The transmodern world is not one in progress, nor is it beyond history, it is an instantaneous world, in which time reaches

96  Jean-Michel Ganteau the breathtaking speed of an eternally updated present” (2008, n.p.) We may easily agree with this definition, on account of our permanent experience as users of digital technologies. The sensation of inhabiting an “instantaneous world” dominated by a “breathtaking speed” is experienced on a daily basis by a large proportion of the population of Western democracies. And, of course, fiction sets itself the task of evoking such a state of affairs, as exemplified in such novels as Reservoir 13, whose younger characters have plugged into the possibilities of infinite connection and instantaneous communication. Still, I find it remarkable that the novel should represent the possibility of such a world the better to turn its back on it. As suggested above, this is essentially done by radically disrupting the temporality of fiction in general and by recuperating the dynamics of detective fiction, as noted by early reviewers. It is obvious that the prose narrative of fiction may accommodate a certain degree of repetitiveness, beyond which the traditional idiom of realism is simply defaced. Now, Reservoir 13’s experimental vein essentially relies on a high degree of repetition. In fact, each of the thirteen chapters chronicling the life of the community after the girl’s disappearance begins with the same sentence (“At midnight, when the year turned, there were…”) and the novel as a whole is structured in the same way, relentlessly going through the succession of seasons, signalling the biyearly movements of the clock (forwards and backwards) and documenting the natural rhythms of the vegetal and animal worlds together with the rituals marking out the life of the community. The multiplication of structural rhymes and thematic repetitions does create the impression that nothing much happens in the community, or at least that nothing new ever occurs. The text seems to go harping out on the same, which thwarts any attempt at progression, jeopardises the reader’s involvement in the story (as there is basically no story to be told) and makes the narrative almost freeze into a-temporality. This is made possible by resorting to a poetics of haunting not unlike that to be found in traumatic realism. In fact, it seems as though the girl’s unexplained disappearance were never to be assimilated by any member of the community, the individual inassimilable events connecting to each other to build up a collective trauma to be durably felt by the community. This hypothesis is substantiated by the number of sightings of the girl that prove to be but illusory and that create a web of echoes through the narrative. Similarly, the text opens itself to the recurrence of refrains under the guise of recapitulations cropping up regularly, almost verbatim, as instantiated in the following passage: “The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. In the photo her face was half-turned away from the camera as though she didn’t want to be seen, as though she wanted to be somewhere else” (McGregor 2017, 182). Time and over again, textual fragments refer to the search parties and the inquest, as if the unsolved mystery of the girl’s disappearance kept tugging at the characters’ consciences, as if each one

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  97 were somehow accountable for the event, as if some form of responsibility kept being solicited years after the events took place. The impression that the readers are left with is of being incapable of moving on, caught as they are in what looks like a vicious circle of repetition compulsion that seizes hold of the community and prevents them from moving along and becoming detached from the tragedy. In other terms, the spectre hailing from an earlier period cannot be laid to rest, and the past keeps repeating itself in the present, even while it is partly remembered – as no one has access to a full memory of the event, no member of the cast of characters having witnessed the disappearance. The poetics of haunting is instrumental in effecting a slowing down that the readers are led to experience, turning its back on the instantaneity effect associated with the contemporary and the transmodern, suggesting that the cultural moment is necessarily more complex than we would be led to think. This poetic and structural choice is supplemented by the revisiting of the conventions of the detective novel. Indeed, as indicated by most reviewers, these are initially flaunted the better to be subverted. The narrative starts as a mystery story, but the resolution of the central enigma fails to come. As in traditional detective novels, the readers’ patience is solicited through what may originally qualify as suspense. Still, the false trails and red herrings multiply – Did her father do it? Her boyfriend? Old Jones from school who is charged with paedophilia? Is she lying at the bottom of reservoir 13? – without any hypothesis being validated. Not too far into the narrative, the readers realise that the point of the novel is not to tease them into discovering who did it or what happened, but simply to make them experience an inordinate sensation of waiting (not unlike what McGregor represented in his previous novel, Even the Dogs, without achieving a similar degree of performance). This has led Maureen Corrigan to insist that “Reservoir 13 generates suspense, not out of chase scenes or sly dialogue, but out of the extended narrative experience of waiting —waiting for something, anything, to break in Rebecca’s case” (n.p.). Needless to say, the search never comes to fruition and the waiting merely begets more of the same as the inquest remains open despite the passage of time (McGregor 2017, 238). My point is that by implementing massive repetition, refusing narrative progression and distorting the conventions of detective fiction, Reservoir 13 not only represents but also performs a resistance to instantaneity. The temporal model that it favours is poles apart from that supposedly characteristic of the transmodern. It makes the readers experience a decidedly sedate rhythm, getting them to slow down and take their time. It teaches the readers how to wait, as pithily indicated by James Wood: “But once the reader learns to slow down […], nothing is really tedious” (n.p.). In contradistinction with the frenzy that has been described by specialists of the economy of attention holding sway over the Western world, the novel prefers to remind readers that time passes

98  Jean-Michel Ganteau and not that we have no time. In fact, the latter experience has come to dominate the lives of many contemporary citizens, so much so that “a sense of guilt as regards our relation to time” has imposed itself as a norm (Roda 186; my translation). Turning its back on a life dominated by the multiplication of digital notifications and solicitations that stretch the possibilities of attention (Boullier 96) and instil a permanent sense of urgency, the novel proposes an experiential immersion into a radically distinct temporality. Such a slowing down introduces the possibility to experience the world, as opposed to the digital model of permanent solicitation whose implementation means that you no longer experience the world: you will only use (or get, or seek) already experienced data about an object that will no longer be an object from the world of your experience, but a mere reference to a preconditioned world. (Berardi 157; emphasis in the original, my translation) What the novel brings the readers is the experience of an expanded time inducing a greater availability to receive the welter of information held between the covers of the book. Instead of “siderating” the readers through the means of constant solicitation and simulation, the narrative grants them the capacity to “consider” the world and the other (Macé 23–24; my translation) by mobilising our affects and getting us to engage with singularities. In other terms, it creates a space where the readers are allowed to take their time to attend to items of otherness as an ethical gesture resisting generalisations and misapprehensions. From this point of view, and by promoting consideration as praxis, Reservoir 13 makes an ethical choice, as Corine Pelluchon reminds us: “Ethics is not based on science or philosophy; it primarily relies on the subject’s experience of the world and of him/herself, his/her intellectual representations, values and emotions” (89). Through the practice of attention and consideration, the novel contributes to the renewal of mimesis by experimenting a poetics of waiting whose experiential value is given pride of place. In its resistance to the powers of instantaneity, the narrative reminds us that, in the Aristotelian definition of representation, “mimesis is the unfurling of a force, of an activity, and does not rely so much on knowledge and intellectual speculation as on action and praxis” (Revault d’Allonnes n.p.). Such an ethical praxis is a major means of resistance to transmodern instantaneity.

A New-Materialist Emphasis on the Local Learning to take the time to consider brings about the capacity to experience the singularity of people and things, and thereby to make oneself available to the particulars of both natural and human life. As indicated

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  99 in the Introduction, this is an aspect of the novel that reviewers have generally underlined – Kemp, for one, has declared that “McGregor, once again hauntingly highlights the remarkable in the everyday” (n.p.). Now, I would argue that engaging with the evocation of “the minutiae of life” (Corrigan n.p.) is also a way of focussing on the very local, eschewing any particular stress on the global, and rejecting the supposedly transmodern supremacy of the glocal (Rodríguez Magda 2008, 2011). In Reservoir 13, the double stress on the global and the local has disappeared to the privilege of the latter. This goes along with a dedicated effacement of references to cyberspace that is replaced with innumerable vignettes engaging with natural and human lives. In other terms, it seems as though the novel were taking a firm stand on what has been analysed as “a generalised crisis of perception” (Crary 37) – and of attention, I would add. More particularly, the narrative may well be set to counter what Nicholas Mirzoeff has defined as “visuality,” that is, “both a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority, and a means for the mediation of those subjects to that authority” (xv). According to him, we live in a “post-panoptic” society where “the visuality of global counterinsurgency produces a visualized authority whose location not only cannot be determined from the visual technologies being used but may itself be invisible” (20). The observer through whose perception the world of Reservoir 13 is mediated is certainly no digital or surveillance apparatus imposing a regime of visuality from above. Of course, there are moments when the bird’s-eye-view mode of focalisation is privileged (Hadley n.p.), producing an effect of “pagan omniscience” (Wood n.p.). But this type of panning perspective cohabits with vignettes that are closer to the earth – humbler, in the etymological meaning of the term, which recalls Marc Luyckx Ghisi’s insistence on humility as a modality of transmodern reenchantment (187). In such passages, details from the natural world and the human community are envisaged on a level with the objects concerned. The impression of a detached, automatic observation, as mediated by a camera (Hadley n.p.), is soon replaced by the experience of the effervescence of life and matter, what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter” or “wild materiality” (vii). In other words, the sensation-saturated vignettes provide “an aestheticaffective openness to material vitality” (Bennett x) that immerses the readers into the physical world instead of privileging panoramic observation. The multiplicity of close ups produces a kaleidoscopic vision where singularities are juxtaposed and interact without ever allowing for a generalising, totalising vision, in conformity with Luyckx Ghisi’s evocation of the transmodern refusal of Modernity’s vertical, authoritarian structures (27) and creation of a more horizontal, democratic system that privileges equality (39). The persistence and ascendance of the local are effected by interspersing the chronicle of puny human activities with close ups of natural life.

100  Jean-Michel Ganteau The text multiplies pictures of animals, fleeting in their conciseness and acute in their precision. This is the case of birds, with the arrival of swallows and some enigmatic noises among the herons: “By April the first swallows were seen and the walkers were back on the hills. At the heronry high in the trees above the quarry there was a persistent unsettledness of wings” (McGregor 2017, 90). Elsewhere, particular attention is paid to the buzzards raising their chicks (150), and, in turn, to the springtails, the foxes and badgers. Chapter 8 and winter open on the evocation of fish: “The rain broke over the hill like a wave and blew straight into people’s faces. The river was high and there were grayling in number feeding on the caddis larvae and shrimps” (185). The narrator’s microscopic obsession, which lends visibility to the most apparently insignificant aspects of life, also addresses the tiny moves of the invertebrates, on late summer days: “In the dead grass around the cricket field the eggs of the skippers turned from white to yellow, and the larvae span themselves into cocoons” (252). Of course, the interest in the smallest of natural micrologies extends to the vegetal world, as we see the bracken unfurling: “The clocks went forward and the evenings opened out. The bracken shoots sprang slowly from the hills and unwound towards the sky” (267). In such passages, the impression that the readers are left with may approximate that of a fragment from a film briefly shot at high speed, which underscores the subjectivity of the take and lends agency to what is generally considered to be certainly alive but essentially passive and to be acted on. Such passages – and they abound in the novel – are evocative of a new materialist vision that is expressed through attentive sketches of the animal and vegetal worlds, giving pride of place to matter and corporeality, “emphasiz[ing] the productivity and resilience of matter” and showing that “matter becomes” instead of just being (Coole and Frost 7, 10; emphasis added). The vibrancy of such matter makes each single vignette singular and rejects any possibility of generalisation, let alone totalisation. As already suggested, each fragment retains its integrity, even though it is connected with all others, producing the impression of a living eco-system made up of interdependent singularities that do not merge into one another. Such an evocation is reminiscent of Luyckx Ghisi’s comments on the transmodern reenchantment of the world that pays attention to interconnections and “mutual vulnerabilities” (126, 128; my translation). Miles away from the abstract, simulated hyperreality of the transmodern age, such a neomaterialist orientation insists on the incarnated nature of experience. Admittedly, such a neo-materialist drive is to be considered in relation to the “post-materialist,” “post-capitalist” conception of the transmodern pronounced by Luyckx Ghisi (168), as the emphasis on pulsating, corporeal materiality relocates transmodern reality in the living, hence the vulnerable, making all the vegetal, animal and human inhabitants of the

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  101 vignettes interdependent and promoting the vision of a post-capitalist, more humane world. This is all the more interesting as the multitudinous glimpses of natural life are juxtaposed with tiny brushstrokes fleetingly sketching the lives of villagers, most often taken individually. This has led Tessa Hadley to comment that “the villagers coexist in equality with the whole sensuous ecology of the place they’re in” (n.p.), which entails that, by mere contiguity, the characters’ own corporeality is highlighted. This in turn throws “new emphasis on the material dimension of social existence” (Coole and Frost 16), underlining the characters’ reliance on their milieu and their dependence on natural resources and on each other. By resolutely focussing on the indigenous and even providing an anatomy of the local, Reservoir 13 performs the consideration of details in their singularity. This it does, more often than not, by means of what Corine Pelluchon calls “humility,” that is, by refusing a totalising, panoramic vision; by displaying the singular; and by recording minute events at ground-level, close to the earth or humus, in which the term originates (32). What I see at work in these pages is “[t]he attentive and benevolent eye that the subject of consideration casts on the world and its beings [and that] does not accrue from a vision from above” (Pelluchon 32; my translation). Now, I would contend that such an attention to vibrant details is not only a means of rehearsing that “the everyday holds the extraordinary” (Sherman 145) or, in Martha Nussbaum’s reading or Aristotle, that the philosopher “sees in the trivial the scene for the expression of human excellence” (359). One step further, it points at the fact that the consideration of life in its materiality reminds us that it is “necessary to start from the body and of our dependence on the material conditions of existence” (Pelluchon 61; my translation). The ethics of consideration based on attention to embodied singularities are therefore a powerful means to make the reader experience what is common to all lives, that is, a vibrant materiality that is also the root of human corporeality. Through attentiveness to the inescapable condition and limits of incarnation based on a hyperbolical attention to the microcosmic and the local, the novel favours a reflection on the vulnerability of all lives, hence on the dependence of all living beings on their ecosystem and on each other. It thereby shows that by developing one’s perceptive capacities, by paying attention to singularities and by practising consideration, the incarnated other is allowed to emerge in its vulnerability, a far cry from a dematerialised, totalising transmodern conception of consumption as distraction. In Sandra Laugier’s terms, then, there is such a thing as an ethics of perception and attention, based on “the effort to remark that which is so present and ordinary that one cannot see it any more” (257; my translation). And clearly, it is fiction’s responsibility to expose the reader to such an ethics.

102  Jean-Michel Ganteau

An Open Community As indicated above, Reservoir 13 mixes or rather juxtaposes human and non-human lives and experiences the better to signal their interdependent nature. This is what is suggested by some reviewers and appears time and over again in the narrative. Regularly, the narrator moves from the evocation of one to the other without any type of preparation and without the least transition: Les Thompson walked his fields in the evening while the sun was still warm on the grass. The heads were up and the cut would come tomorrow. In the beech wood the fox cubs were taken away from their dens and taught to find food for themselves. A white hooded top was found in a clough on the top of the moor, oiled a deep peatbrown and fraying at the seams. (McGregor 2017, 97–98) In such passages, the materiality of experience is put to the fore, reminding the reader that human life in its biological dimension (zoē) is generally occluded in favour of bios, referring to life in its social and rational dimension. The new materialist inclination of the narrative proposes, in Rosi Braidotti’s words, “a shift away from anthropocentrism” underlining the “interdependence of material and symbolic forces in the making of social and political practices” (203). Of course, the repetitiveness at work in the novel and the impulse to chronicle the passage of time over thirteen years get the readers to experience a strong sense of the passing of time. From this point of view, flaunting the materiality of the human by focussing on incarnation is an efficient way of foregrounding the common vulnerability of the human and natural worlds by stressing the sense of continuity between the two. Rejecting the hegemony of cyberspace and the dematerialisation implemented by the turn to the digital, and a far cry from the totalising function (I am referring to the “pensée unique” category propounded by Rodríguez Magda) inherent in the use of such devices, the commonality that is represented in the novel is the sum of individual exposures. In fact, by juxtaposing a myriad vignettes, the narrative trains the reader’s attention to singularities and gives almost equal prominence to each one of them. Such an option postulates some form of egalitarian distribution of attention, while the specialists of the economy of attention have clearly established that there are limited possibilities of attention – which makes it such a precious currency, nowadays (Citton 7–8) – and it runs against the grain of commentaries on the anti-egalitarian dimension of attention that has been underlined by some critics (Sherman 147). The even distribution of consideration among objects of the natural and human worlds alike is conducive to the creation of a sense of the common that, far away from the allegedly “monolithic thinking”

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  103 inherent in the transmodern paradigm (Rodríguez Magda 2011, n.p.), rejects blending into a totality and preserves singularities. Such a situation specifically concerns the life of the community as presented through a poetics of what, for lack of a better word, I would call the whisper. It relies on a special treatment of speech representation in that Reservoir 13, like McGregor’s other novels, is remarkably devoid of direct discourse. Here, the characters’ interventions are merged into paragraphs and are not fitted with inverted commas, even if the introductory verb generally remains: Lynsey opened her eyes and looked at Sophie. Edinburgh, she said. We’ll all go to Edinburgh. I’ll do English, you guys do whatever. It’s cheap up there. Sophie stroked her arm and said yes, we’ll definitely all go to Edinburgh, we’ll all go together, if we get in, we’ll be a gang up there. Linsey closed her eyes. (McGregor 2017, 119) While retaining a form a singularity, the characters’ voices are shown to be on an equal level, juxtaposed as they are with narrative or descriptive segments, and the use of a hybrid form hovering between free direct and indirect discourse tends to emphasise, if only spatially and visually, the equality of voices. From such poetic choices seems to emerge a “we” that, unlike what happens in Even the Dogs, remains an addition of individualities. This is certainly what has led some critics to insist on the democratic dimension inherent in the treatment of speech representation, as McGregor listens to the diffuse whispering of the world, an untraceable whispering, undefined; an undefined whispering, then, which cannot be attributed and which at the same time resonates with a myriad solitary lives, held together by the thread of some imperceptible connivance. (Bernard 299; my translation) This impression is confirmed by the inordinate frequency of impersonal phrases and passive forms, which are displayed on certain pages: By the end of the afternoon, word went round that the match was not being lost. More people turned up to watch. The exact score was a matter of confusion, but […] there was a general understanding that the game had been won for the first time in memory. In the shelter of one of the cloughs coming down off the moor, a well-made den was discovered, birch and larch branches propped up against each other and the whole thing roofed with bracken until the light barely shone through. It wasn’t known who had built the den or what it had been used for […]. (McGregor 2017, 227–8; emphasis added)

104  Jean-Michel Ganteau In such passages, the impression of a “diffuse whispering” does emerge, as if the reader were privy to the voice of the community, a collection of dis-originated trifling voices. This is what Marielle Macé, following in Claude Lefort’s wake, calls “skirting” (côtoyer, as a river skirts a road, or as people rub shoulders with one another): “Skirting is precisely the ordinary political task; it was, for Claude Lefort, the fitting term of democracy: even before entering in a relationship, being side by side, skirting – where one has to engage with the others, agreeing or disagreeing […]” (Macé 20; my translation). The kaleidoscopic poetics of the vignette and snatches of disoriginated voices promotes this impression of skirting or being side by side which is a way of “unclosing” (déclore) the self (46; my translation). Considering the other in his/her individuality once again implies an ethical impulse, as if in the attentiveness of consideration lay exposure to the other and dispossession of the self. This is what Pelluchon maintains when she specifies that [t]he ethics of consideration relies on a philosophy of the subject that does not refer to an essence of man. Its starting point is the subject conceived of in his/her corporeality. The latter underlines his/her vulnerability or passivity and foregrounds the pleasure intrinsic in the fact of living and the always relational character of the subject. (24; my translation) I would then argue that instead of the “caring or empathic individualism” that Rodríguez Magda sees as central to the transmodern paradigm (2011, n.p.), Reservoir 13 provides the picture of a multitude of singularities that never consolidates into a fixed community but that remains open, inorganic, relying on exposure. This is probably what Myriam Revault d’Allonnes has in mind when describing the power of “interweaving/interlocking.” To her, the narrative is never merely an account of ‘oneself’ conceived as an isolated self. […] The capacity to account is inscribed —like action, which is necessarily plural— in the interweaving and interlocking of narratives and lives that call to one another and answer one another. (n.p.; my translation) With his experimental fiction, what McGregor does to the novel form and to mimesis is to revive the ethical and political function of representation considered as praxis, in the Aristotelian tradition. The novel thereby becomes the form of presentation that does not merely duplicate and “figure” but produces and “re-figures,” thereby having a purchase on the redefinition of the community, emphasising once again the performative dimension of mimesis (Revault d’Allonnes n.p.; my translation). Thanks to the fictional presentation of a community in its ecosystem, and owing

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  105 to the attentiveness to otherwise invisible details, Reservoir 13 presents us with an invitation to practice consideration as a condition for a living together that is also a “convivance” or living with the other (Pelluchon 148). In other terms, the characters’ attention to one another and towards the minutiae of the natural world becomes an invitation to practice attentiveness, that is, to choose for oneself to be attentive to singular experiences that each individual gives salience to. For in fact, against the monolithic menace of Transmodernity as “the Great Fact of Globalization” (Rodríguez Magda 2017, 23), the novel promotes the responsibility to respond to individualities, based on the choice of each and every one as the condition for the practice of democracy: “There cannot be any democratic economy of attention without each human being contributing equally to define ‘what matters’ —because each individual matters as much as any other” (Laugier 265; my translation). In so doing, it tips the scales in favour of another conception of Transmodernity as a new type of “global relational consciousness” (Ateljevic 202) that gives pride of place to “partnership models of society” (Ateljevic 2010) favouring the mutual exposure of singularities that renders individuals interdependent and makes vulnerability a social, political lever.

Conclusion Reservoir 13, in its experimental orientation, gives access to the invisible occluded by the everyday. It does so through a poetics of skirting or juxtaposition that sets side by side, and on an equal footing, vignettes of the natural and human world, thereby emphasising the vibrant materiality of all life, and human corporeality. In so doing, it uses some of the features of neo-materialism the better to expose the vulnerability of all lives, that is, beyond its singularity, the inescapable interconnectedness hence openness of each life. Ultimately, it provides a vision of the human community as never totalising, never stabilised but in the process of becoming. As explained above, by resorting to such thematic and above all poetic options, the novel chooses to slow down, focus the reader’s attention and above all train it, and engage with singularities of the incarnated type. This has an ethical and political function in that, by training the reader to be attentive and to consider alterity in its individuality – without ever yielding to the temptation to reduce or totalise – the narrative produces a performative, training effect, which reminds us of and revitalises the praxis inherent in representation. Now, among the concrete consequences of such choices intrinsic to the practice of an ethics of attention and, beyond, consideration, the novel teaches or reminds us that “to attend means to care for” (Sherman 15) and that, more specifically, literature shows us how to attend and more specifically teaches us that being a (good) perceiver implies a willingness to be perplexed (Nussbaum 162). I would argue that literature generally

106  Jean-Michel Ganteau and McGregor’s novels in particular do just that, that is, provide the conditions for an experiential reading, leading to the realisation that “perception is not a given but a social activity” that has to be acquired (Le Blanc 13; my translation). Those elements are proof enough that by choosing the promotion of an ethics of attention and consideration, and by fostering the political effects on which such an ethics is grounded, Reservoir 13 refuses the totalising claims of the transmodern paradigm and contributes to the development of fiction’s powers of resistance and, possibly, dissensus. In so doing, it calls for what Susana Onega has called “an increased demand for solidarity” (373) that she sees as characteristic of a more positive, hopeful vision of Transmodernity. Against the totalising, monstrous vision of Transmodernity that emerged in Rodríguez Magda’s earlier publications and that she herself toned down more recently (2017b), a more positive conception appears, borne by such critics as Ateljevic and Luyckx Ghisi. It postulates that the transmodern world is one in which the worst excesses of Modernity are corrected through a post-patriarchal, post-capitalist, post-industrial orientation that places the individual in his/her singularity and materiality at the heart of a world where mutual dependence reigns supreme and in which caring for the other (vegetal, animal, human) as a singular, vibrant other has become the expression of a reenchanted, relational ethics postulating individual responsibility and the exercise of consideration.

Works Cited Aliaga-Lavrijsen, Jessica, and José María Yebra-Pertusa. “Introduction: Transmodern Perspectives on Literature.” Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. Eds Jessica Aliaga-Lavrjisen and José María Yebra-Pertusa. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 1–17. Print. Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (June 2013): 200–19. Print. Bernard, Catherine. Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2019. Print. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Berardi, Franco. “Attention et expérience à l’âge du neurototalitarisme.” L’Économie de l’attention. Ed. Yves Citton. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. 147–60. Print. Boullier, Dominique. “Médiologie des régimes d’attention.” L’Économie de l’attention. Ed. Yves Citton. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. 84–108. Print. Braidotti, Rosi. “The Politics of Life Itself and New Ways of Dying.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Eds Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. 201–16. Print. Citton, Yves. “Introduction.” L’Économie de l’attention. Ed Yves Citton. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. 7–31. Print.

Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration  107 Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialism.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Eds Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. 1–35. Print. Corrigan, Maureen. “What Happens to a Tranquil British Town When a 13-year-old Girl goes Missing.” The Washington Post 5 October 2017. Accessed on 22/08/2018 at: www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/ what-happens-to-a-tranquil-british-town-when-a-13-year-old- girl-goesmissing/2017/10/03/36b87884-a788-11e7-b3aa-c0e2e1d41e38_story.html? utm_term=.24ee90b86f1d/. Web. Crary, Jonathan. “Le capitalisme comme crise permanente de l’attention.” L’Économie de l’attention. Ed. Yves Citton. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. 35–54. Print. Dussel, Enrique. “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (2011): 28–59. Print. Hadley, Tessa. “Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor Review – A Chilling Meditation on Loss and Time.” The Guardian 15 April 2017. Accessed on 14/10/2017 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/15/reservoir-13-by-jon-mcgregorreview/. Web. Kemp, Peter. “Review of Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor.” The Times 26 March 2017. Accessed on 14/10/2017 at: www.thetimes.co.uk/article/booksreservoir-13-by-jon-mcgregor-jpbxhs96j/. Web. Laugier, Sandra. “L’Ethique comme attention à ce qui compte.” Ethique de l’attention. Ed. Yves Citton. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. 252–65. Print. Le Blanc, Guillaume. L’Invisibilité sociale. Paris: PUF, 2009. Print. Luyckx Ghisi, Marc. Au-delà de la modernité, du patriarcat et du capitalisme. La société réenchantée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Print. Macé, Marielle. Sidérer, considerer. Migrants en France, 2017. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2017. Print. McCarthy, Tom. Satin Island. London: Vintage, 2016. Print. McGregor, Jon. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Print. ———. Even the Dogs. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print. ———. Reservoir 13. London: Fourth Estate, 2017. Print. Merritt, Stephanie. “Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor Review – An Aftermath in Elegant Slow Motion.” The Guardian 23 April 2017. Accessed on 22/08/ 2018 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/23/reservoir-13-jon-mcregoraftermath-in-slow-motion-review-novel/. Web. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Print. Neate, Patrick. Jerusalem. An Elegy in Three Parts. London: FigTree/Penguin, 2009. Print. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York and Oxford: OUP, 1992. Print. O’Donnell, Paraic. “Reservoir 13 Review: A Humane and Tender Masterpiece.” The Irish Times 8 April 2017. Accessed on 10/08/2017 at: www. irishtimes.com/culture/books/reservoir-13-review-a-humane-and- tendermasterpiece-1.3023466/. Web.

108  Jean-Michel Ganteau Onega, Susana. “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm.” Countertext 3.3 (2017): 362–76. Print. Parker, Harry. Anatomy of a Soldier. London: Faber and Faber, 2016. Print. Pelluchon, Corine. Éthique de la considération. Paris: Seuil, 2018. Print. Revault D’allonnes, Myriam. Le Miroir et la scène. Ce que peut la représentation politique. Paris: Seuil, 2016. Ebook. Roda, Claudia. “Économiser l’attention dans la relation homme-machine.” L’Économie de l’attention. Ed. Yves Citton. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. 174–90. Print. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa Maria. “Globalization as Transmodern Totality.” 2004. Transmodernidad. Chapter 1. Barcelona, Anthropos. 27 December 2008. Accessed on 15/04/2017 at: http://transmodern-theory.blogspot.com/2008/ 12/globalization-as-transmodern-totality.html/. Web. ———. “Transmodernity: A New Paradigm.” 2011. Trans. Jessica AliagaLavrjisen, 2017a. Accessed on 10/08/2017 at: www.academia.edu/32907978/ Transmodernity_A_New_Paradigm_1/. Web. ———. “The Crossroads of Transmodernity.” Keynote lecture delivered at the International Conference on “Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English”. Trans. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Susana Onega. University of Zaragoza, 26 April 2017b. Accessed on 23/05/2018 at: www. academia.edu/33683289/_The_Crossroads_of_Transmodernity/. Web. Sherman, Jon Foley. A Strange Proximity. Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Print. Taylor, Kate. “A Girl Vanishes. But in This Novel, Time Is the Real Mystery.” The New York Times 30 January 2018. Accessed on 22/08/2018 at: www. nytimes.com/2018/01/30/books/review/jon-mcgregor-reservoir-13.html/. Web. Wood, James. “The Visionary Power of the Novelist Jon McGregor.” The New Yorker 27 November 2017. Accessed on 22/08/2018 at: www.newyorker. com /magazine /2017/11/27/the-visionary-power-of-the-novelist-jonmcgregor/. Web.

5

Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Matthias Stephan

Some critics argue that the last decade or so has witnessed a move away from the paradigms of postmodernism in literary studies. While postmodern scholars have long heralded the death of postmodernism, and postulated what is beyond – or after – it, the reconsideration of the scope and applicability of the postmodern project on a global scale has been criticised as well. Scholars from a number of disciplines and geographic origins have argued for a new vision of the future, one which champions positive values and discards those aspects of society which are deemed harmful or detrimental to sustainability, tolerance and cooperation. This view is articulated as a paradigm shift towards Transmodernity, a position which reacts to Modernity and Postmodernity and proposes a way forward, a constructive – rather than a deconstructive – vision of humanity. This chapter considers the construction of such a vision in two contemporary novels, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), two early twenty-first-century novels that explore the complexities of identity when confronted with different ontological paradigms. In order to better understand the transmodern paradigm, I will use the notion of transculturalism, in its relationship to both postcolonial and multicultural expressions of identity, my intention being to address the question of how postmodern theory pervades contemporary literature, and how contemporary authors are reacting to that dynamic. Through an exploration of White Teeth and Americanah, the chapter elucidates the use of modernist and postmodernist elements in understanding how the characters construct their transcultural identities1 and goes on to consider the idea of a transmodern formulation of identity as a by-product of this potential intersection. The backgrounds of the protagonists, the focus on various class, racial and ethnic contexts, and geographic migrations all point towards a diversity of experience that modernism and

110  Matthias Stephan postmodernism do not specifically address in their formulations, and the question becomes whether a construction of transmodernism might be able to account for that lack. However, we first must focus on the formulation of Transmodernity. Irena Ateljevic suggests that the term designates “a very complex thesis” about “a new paradigm of the world which communicates certain underlying values that humans rely on to make their judgments and decisions in all areas of their activities” (202). As such, it may be argued that Transmodernity functions as a structure of consciousness (see Stephan), or a worldview, constructed as a grand narrative. This is done on several bases, which need to be explored, especially the relationship between the new transmodern paradigm and postmodernism, the conception of teleology in the understanding of the transmodern mode, and the relationship between national, regional and interpersonal understandings of culture and identity.

The Transmodern Paradigm One of the earliest proponents of Transmodernity is Enrique Dussel, who advocates for the transmodern as an alternative to the Western conception of the postmodern, developed in other cultures outside of hegemonic Western discourse. In Ateljevic’s words: “Dussel’s (2009) central argument revolves around the role of intercultural dialogue in bringing about and defining the shift towards transmodernity” (205). Through this appeal to the intercultural, which, as Ateljevic notes, is also true of Luyckx Ghisi’s argument, Dussel provides a critique of the rise of modernist discourses, specifically the Eurocentric discourses he feels need to be transcended with the new paradigm. The argument of this chapter also privileges considerations of culture, specifically the interpersonal transcultural experience, which we see forefronted in both Smith’s and Adichie’s novels. Dussel presents his concept of Transmodernity as a response to Modernity’s excesses, and its blindspots. In “World-system and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” he argues, modernity’s recent impact on the planet’s multiple cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindu, Islamic, Bantu, Latin American) produced a varied ‘reply’ by all of them to the modern ‘challenge.’ Renewed, they are now erupting on a cultural horizon ‘beyond’ modernity. I call the reality of that fertile multicultural moment ‘trans’-modernity. (Dussel 2002, 221; emphasis in the original) In response to the perceived marginalisation of either national, ethnic or regional cultures – those that are not easily incorporated into the Western frame – Dussel claims that the construction of the new transmodern

White Teeth and Americanah  111 paradigm needs to specifically include those discrete cultural units, seeing their inclusion both as a righting of the wrong of exclusion and as a way of infusing society with new (or other) ideas which can renew and move society forward in the wake of declining or undermined Modernity. He insists that this subsequent movement from Modernity should not be towards Postmodernity, as the concept of ‘post’-modernity indicates that there is a process that emerges ‘from within’ modernity and reveals a state of crisis within globalization. ‘Trans’-modernity, in contrast, demands a whole new interpretation of modernity in order to include moments that were never incorporated into the European vision. (Dussel 2002, 223; emphasis in the original) He argues this in relation to the political, rather than philosophical, underpinnings that Postmodernity is and has been associated with in Latin America. As Rosa María Rodríguez Magda has pointed out, Dussel frames [his argument] in the context of a philosophy of liberation and reflection on Latin-American identity, taking as transmodern theories those that, coming from the Third World, claim a proper place facing Western modernity, incorporating the look of the Postcolonial subaltern other. (2017, n.p.) In other words, his vision of Transmodernity considers a dialogue between and among different world cultures, including those who have not had the chance to speak for themselves, and through which we, collectively, can develop a world-wide cultural paradigm that we all agree upon. This is a laudable goal, but there are problems with Dussel’s formulation. First, later iterations of the proposal have come to the conclusion that, for example, the construction of a single Latin-American identity is untenable. The creation of such an entity, as divorced from global paradigms and colonial heritages, is one of the legacies of the rise of postcolonial discourse and the deconstruction of imperial hegemonies. However, the underlying principles of that critique are not limited to creating regional or even national identities, but rather are applicable to further overarching political entities. Dussel himself argues that the hypothesis that had permitted us to reject the idea that there was not Latin American culture now enabled us to discover a new critical vision of both peripheral and even European culture. This task was undertaken almost simultaneously in all areas of peripheral postcolonial culture (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), although unfortunately to a less extent in Europe and the United States. (2012, 37; emphasis in the original)

112  Matthias Stephan With this new critical apparatus, one is able to articulate how different cultures can have different positions and realise that it is not possible to reduce any culture to a particular set of values. And yet, his proposal for a transmodern framework builds upon a series of intercultural dialogues aimed at determining, in a synthetic way, how to develop or articulate the new transmodern paradigm. This is done first by those who have the cultural position to become intermediaries between local cultures and hegemonic Modernity. As Dussel argues, It is above all, a dialogue between a culture’s critical innovators (intellectuals of the “border,” between their own culture and Modernity). It is not a dialogue among those who merely defend their culture from its enemies, but rather among those who recreate it, departing from the critical assumptions found in their own cultural tradition and in that of globalizing Modernity. (2012, 48; emphasis in the original) This process is then carried forth on increasingly more global levels, until it first materialises in “a dialogue between the ‘critics of the periphery’” (Dussel 2012, 48; emphasis in the original) because “it must be an intercultural South-South dialogue before it can become a South-North dialogue” (2012, 48), and then finally culminates in the South-North dialectical solution that creates the transmodern worldview. His argument rests on the idea that some cultures were historically overlooked, and that there are specific values – related to democracy, religion, and the environment – that need to be incorporated into contemporary culture as an antidote to Modernity and globalisation, which have caused tangible problems worldwide, through their focus on exploitative growth and the consequent consumption of resources. Dussel argues that for the indigenous cultures of Latin America there exists an affirmation of Nature that is completely distinct and much more ecologically balanced, which today is more necessary than ever, given that capitalist Modernity confronts Nature as something exploitable, marketable, and destructible. (2012, 50) He sees an articulated, democratically constructed (through discrete cultural groups) worldview as the only means forward. While the end-goal of this reasoning is certainly something one should seek, the means for arguing for this vision, the practical coalition building, are grounded on epistemologically suspect principles. This returns us to the notion of identity politics, in which there are separate entities that, by virtue of their historical position, use their political power to try and make themselves equal. Just as Dussel laments the current

White Teeth and Americanah  113 position of Latin America, so have feminist scholars like Patricia Waugh (1998) argued against the potential loss of feminist identity, while African-American scholars demonstrated concern about newly won positions in the academy, all in reaction to the advent of postmodernism (in the North-American iteration) in the 1970s and 80s. Dussel admits that the version of postmodernism that he historically connected to postcolonialism is not the same as that which championed deconstruction (Derrida) and questioned the historical grand narratives (Lyotard), noting that “what we ourselves had called ‘postmodern’ was something distinct from that alluded to by the Postmodernists of the 1980s” (Dussel 2002, 37). And it is “1980s” postmodernism, especially the strong version (Rorty), which calls for a renunciation of identity politics, and rather a championing of a politics of difference. Scholars like bell hooks forcefully argue that we cannot try to maintain newly articulated cultural identities, like the African-American, or Dussel’s Latin-American; rather, radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a ‘politics of difference,’ should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people. […] If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact, then a critical break with the notion of ‘authority’ as ‘mastery over’ must not simply be a rhetorical device. It must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. (hooks 626) In so doing, in calling for theorists to practice what they preach, such a plea needs to allow for a complete deconstruction of discrete identity markers as culturally determined, and replace this with intercultural dialogue on an interpersonal and ad hoc consensual basis. Only through a politics of difference, where one’s culture is not ascribed solely on ethnic, geographic, or national categories, can we allow the agency to articulate the transmodern conception outlined by Dussel, Rodríguez Magda, Ateljevic and others. This needs to be done by accepting the lessons of Postmodernity, not dismissing them as politically charged, or as too closely associated with (articulations) of Modernity. As Ateljevic points out, Ziauddin Sardar (2004) articulates another critique of the essentialist notion of culture, which is that it allows for certain political and even religious groups to use positions of relative power to impose their versions of culture for political ends. This has been done with reference to nostalgic historicism, ethnic, religious and regional pride, and class divisions. Black Americans, for example, have long contested the universal context of America asserted by white members of society, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. By appealing to a particular “ancient” or “traditional” culture, one

114  Matthias Stephan eliminates internal divisions within any cultural unit (or imagined community, to use Anderson’s terminology), and at the same time reifies a historical moment as a construction/representation of that culture. The argument is problematic, as it relies on historical narrative (consider the current debates about monuments in the US South, Syria and India) to construct a nationalistic narrative on the basis of a supposed past. If the concept of one’s nation overlaps with the definition of one’s culture, then national iterations represent the feelings of all members of the nation, dismissing internal divisions, political opposition and even diverse subcultures. Thus, as Ateljevic notes, [Sardar] warns that in developing a transmodern framework to open discussions it is important to think of the Muslim world beyond the strait jackets of either ultra-modernist or ultra-traditionalist governments (neither of whom have any understanding of transmodernism) and involve ordinary people instead—activists, scholars, writers, journalists, etc. (206) By suggesting that the national governments are not the correct group to identify the transmodern framework, Sardar is essentially advocating for a more interpersonal solution. By eschewing “traditional” or “radical” versions of Middle Eastern governments but entrusting the concepts to the people – presumably those that agree with him – Sardar moves us back from the identity politics traps of essentialism to the interpersonal, an aspect which I will discuss with the novels in the second half of the chapter. Yet another scholar who has articulated a transmodern vision is the philosopher and theologian Marc Luyckx Ghisi. In an article he signs as Marc Luyckx, entitled “The Transmodern Hypothesis: Towards a Dialogue of Cultures,” he suggests that not only have certain cultures been excluded, as Dussel has argued, but also that religious sentiment has also been dismissed in the largely secular globalised Modernity. His argument is that the time is ripe for a more inclusive version of society: We suggested that the West is in a process of transition from modernity towards what we called transmodernity—which means keeping the best of modernity but going beyond it: the exclusion of spiritual and religious considerations from politics and public affairs is no longer appropriate, even though the distinction between the two realms needs to be maintained. (Luyckx 972; emphasis in the original) One of the issues that Luyckx challenges is the notion of premodern cultures, those which have a specific, articulated, “enchanted” conception of their cultural identity. He argues that many of the problems are

White Teeth and Americanah  115 between people who have different worldviews, and that “21st century conflicts will likely be not between religions or cultures but within them, between premodern, modern, and transmodern worldviews” (971). While premodern cultures are “enchanted” with definitions of truth deeply connected to their cultural understandings, modern cultures are “disenchanted,” no longer connected to the religious. Luyckx suggests that the future is to be found in the transmodern worldview because it features a creative mix of rational and intuitive brainwork; an enthusiastic embrace of new information technologies; a tolerance, even celebration, of diversity; a conviction that protection of the physical environment has to be a central concern for every human being (973). Philosophically, he also articulates that questions of truth, which are sacrosanct in premodern cultures, are more diverse than those cultures admit. In the transmodern paradigm, there is a means, according to Luyckx, of solving those problems through intercultural dialogue: We may be increasingly confronted by culture wars about the definition of truth—by epistemological wars, wars between beliefs about belief. The problem lies in the belief I have about the Other’s belief or vision; many people feel besieged by the beliefs of Others, uncertain how to react to them. The central puzzle is how to allow other humans to believe what they choose to believe, without forcing them to follow our truth. (979; emphasis in the original) As with Dussel, this vision assumes rather discrete essentialist visions of culture, but the idea that dialogue represents tolerance of diverse opinions pushes us further into the anti-essentialist positions of the postmodern (hooks). If the position of the transmodern is to equally accept all viewpoints, to allow diverse opinions, then we need to open up the discussion beyond the essentialist views of cultures and transcend those divisive paradigms. If we understand Postmodernity not as the equivalent, or derivative, of a globalised Modernity but rather, as Rodríguez Magda articulates it, as meaning “the emergence of multiplicity, fragmented and centrifugal, and joyfully irreconcilable” (2017, n.p.), then Postmodernity is more closely aligned with Luyckx’s conception than is Dussel’s version of national cultural paradigms. Rodríguez Magda further argues that we should read Transmodernity as the synthesis of a dialectical process, not with the premodern, enchanted, society that Sardar and Luyckx are considering but with the modern and the postmodern. As she argues,

116  Matthias Stephan “Trans” is not a miracle prefix, or the longing for an angelic multiculturalism; it is not a synthesis of modernity and premodernity, but of modernity and postmodernity. It constitutes, in the first place, the description of a globalized, rhizomatic, technologic society, developed from the first world, confronted with others, while at the same time it penetrates and assumes them; and secondly, it constitutes the effort to transcend this hyperreal, relativistic enclosure. (Rodríguez Magda 2017, n.p.) With this formulation, Rodríguez Magda argues that Transmodernity, like its predecessor Postmodernity (Stephan 74), functions using a rhizomatic structure, which not only acknowledges other cultures but subsumes them into this paradigm. She differentiates the postmodern and the transmodern, the latter not being based on the underlying model but on its effects and its usage, as her argument presents the transcendent aspect of Transmodernity with globalisation (here, counter Dussel, globalisation is framed as a positive development, rather than as something that should be eschewed). “Therefore if modern culture corresponded to an industrial society, and postmodern society to postmodern culture, a globalised society corresponds to the type I call transmodern” (Rodríguez Magda 2017, n.p.; emphasis in the original). While I agree that the transmodern need necessarily be considered a global phenomenon, I disagree that the postmodern was not so, and I find that the understanding of postmodern society here is lacking a substantiation, one which is provided elsewhere in Rodríguez Magda’s work. She does see positive value in the legacy of postmodernism, for example, when she states: I think we should be cautious; postmodern criticism evidenced a whole series of fallacies and unquestioned pretensions. The need of solid criteria cannot make us forget those precautions and lead us to the point of departure, nor fundamentalisms, nor tradition, nor theology, nor naturalism nor communitarianism can offer an alternative. (2017, n.p.) The benefit of the postmodern era was the deconstruction of grand narratives that did not have epistemological foundation. This cannot, as she calls for, be replaced with simply a weak version of Modernity: “Transmodernity prolongs, continues and transcends Modernity; it is the return, the copy, the survival of a weak, reduced, light Modernity” (2017, n.p.). Rather, I argue that it needs to be an assertive, reconstructive force in the wake of the postmodern condition. Accepting the legacy of Postmodernity opens up the landscape for identifying epistemological frameworks upon which to build the type of society that Transmodernity asserts is possible. This, I argue, can be done not through largescale national efforts, but on a local level, and collectively built to a consensus on larger and larger scales.

White Teeth and Americanah  117 I am not alone in this assessment, as it is arguably also the position of Jeremy Rifkin in The European Dream (2004). Ateljevic, in her articulation of the transmodern, cites Rifkin’s assessment of the postmodern project. However, to give more context, I will first point to the paragraph preceding the one she emphasises. Rifkin writes: the post-modernists engaged in an all-out assault on the ideological foundation of modernity, even denying the idea of history as a redemptive saga. What we end up with at the end of the post-modern deconstruction process are modernity reduced to intellectual rubble and an anarchic world where everyone’s story is equally compelling and valid and worthy of recognition. (5) Ateljevic finds this position a negative one, but I find it compelling – the idea that each individual, with his or her various backgrounds, class positions and geographical roots, has equally valid opinions is at the heart of the tolerance championed by Luyckx and the call for more diverse (especially Global South) voices in the debates by Dussel. The problem, as Rifkin (and Ateljevic) sees it, lies in the idea that “they left them with no particular place to go” (Rifkin 5). Yet, it is in exactly this wake, after the tearing down of the grand narratives that had been shown to have no meaningful foundation, that the opportunity arises for the construction of something new, on solid grounds. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that: “Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (79). This situates postmodernism in the position of a blank slate, with the false narratives wiped away. This view is open, rhizomatic, with no predetermined path, and it becomes our choice to decide which modernisms, which boundaries or structures to erect in the aftermath of the removal of those grand narratives we have come to rely upon. Fredric Jameson suggests in this respect that what arrives in this gap is not a new, positive force but a reliance upon the old narratives instead: I believe, by taking a further step that Lyotard seems unwilling to do in the present text, namely to posit, not the disappearance of the great master-narratives, but their passage underground as it were, their continuing but now unconscious effectivity as a way of ‘thinking about’ and acting in our current situation. This persistence of buried master-narratives in what I have elsewhere called our ‘political unconscious.’ (xi–xii; emphasis in the original) This could be paralleled with Rodríguez Magda’s call for a return to a weak version of Modernity, to what she calls “a distanced, ironic return that accepts its useful fiction” (2017, n.p.), but I believe that the transmodern has the potential to offer a true alternative, if done through

118  Matthias Stephan conscious choice and consensus building, based on interpersonal interactions. It is one of the “outs” that I propose in Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century (Stephan 2019), the idea that I call “determination” (198). This parallels Jeremy Rifkin’s call for the European Dream (opposed to the American Dream associated with the legacy of global modernism): The European Dream is an effort at creating a new historical frame that can both free the individual from the old yoke of Western ideology and, at the same time, connect the human race to a new shared story, clothed in the garb of universal human rights and the intrinsic rights of nature — what we call a global consciousness. (Rifkin 7) So, constructed upon – or within – the rhizomatic pattern that I identify as the postmodern structure of consciousness, I argue that, through the interpersonal, we can construct a new transmodern paradigm to carry us forth into the twenty-first century and beyond. Through a look at contemporary fiction, I believe that we can already see representations of this transmodern paradigm in both cases. I will first discuss how the position in which such an interpersonal dialogue can be most fruitfully demonstrated, and then in the analysis of the two case studies, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, show how both existing structures have been challenged, and that the ability to assertively construct one’s identity in the wake of those deconstructed paradigms allows for the assertion of a new transmodern worldview. Each of those novels presents the idea of a space outside of one’s own normative cultural hegemony, and it is in those liminal interstices that this conversation commences.

The Transcultural Site Focussing on specific transcultural sites within each text, I will consider different modes of identity, arguing that there are three fundamental modes by which individual identity is constructed, each based on a different experience with the other. In this, I will be following Donald Hall’s formulation of the distinction between identity and subjectivity: For our purposes, one’s identity can be thought of as that particular set of traits, beliefs, and allegiances that, in short- and longterm ways, gives one a consistent personality and mode of social being, while subjectivity implies always a degree of thought and self-consciousness about identity, at the same time allowing a myriad of limitations and often unknowable, unavoidable constraints on our ability to fully comprehend identity. Subjectivity as a critical concept invites us to consider the question of how and from where

White Teeth and Americanah  119 identity arises, to what extent it is understandable, and to what degree it is something over which we have any measure of influence or control. (3–4) In essence, I will argue that the site of a transcultural encounter leads to three ways in which the resulting transcultural experience can affect the identity of the individuals involved. First, in what I call the “classical,” or multicultural mode, the innate identities of the individuals entering into the encounter can be maintained and re-enforced (this represents concepts like diasporic multiculturalism). This maps onto Luyckx’s premodern worldview, in which the singular culture holds complete sway, but also in some ways to the modernist worldview, in which these discrete cultural identities are formed in “relief,” through a confrontation with otherness, one’s identity being formed in the rejection of the other. In the other two modes, the individual’s identities can be altered in relation to the other. In the postmodernist mode, the encounter relies on underlying cultural similarities, which can elide cultural difference to the point where it becomes impossible to determine a difference between oneself and the other, forcing the conscious construction of new defining characteristics by which to construct an identity. The transmodern mode, which, I will contend, is the most positive outcome of transculturation, is to focus on a deeper understanding that arises from a recognition of, acceptance of and focus on the differences between individuals that become a bridge to further encounters, change and understanding. The transmodern mode has to consider identity through a combination of the freedom associated with the postmodern mode, which has deconstructed the essentialisms of the classical and modernist construct, but has also come to recognise the external factors that come into play in such identity constructions. The transmodern mode allows for an understanding of how that negotiation takes place and how, through a transcultural site in which the dominant of a cultural context is removed, one can postulate a different kind of identity construction. Transcultural theory presents a dialectical approach to identity, in which the interaction with another culture is a critical move towards a synthesis that produces greater cultural understanding. As such, “one’s identity is not strictly one dimensional (the self) but is now defined and more importantly recognized in rapport with the other” (Cuccioletta 8; emphasis in the original). I will argue that it is not just an interaction with the other that is important, but how that interaction takes place and in what way it affects the subjectivity of the individual, as this is what sheds light on the concept of subjectivity itself. Transculturalism has been presented as part of “the quest to define shared interests and common values across cultural and national borders” (Slimbach 206), and in essence as a means of moving towards a new understanding of humanity as a whole: “In many ways transculturalism, by proposing

120  Matthias Stephan a new humanism of the recognition of the other, based on a culture of métissage, is in opposition to the singular traditional cultures that have evolved from the nation-state” (Cuccioletta 8; emphasis in the original). However, following Wolfgang Welsch, I will focus on local interactions, in the realm of the individual and interpersonal connections in which the boundaries of cultures can be explored, recognising that individuals are not simply the product of a great national or cultural identity but rather that of a series of individual interactions which cumulatively shape one’s identity. Furthermore, these local interactions are the sites in which transcultural negotiation takes place, and thus can be most clearly understood. Mary Louise Pratt famously introduced the concept of “the contact zone” to the academic debate on postcolonialism, where much of current thought about transculturation stems from. The contact zone refers to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 34). I want to contrast the violent nature of the contact zone (grappling, clashing) in an asymmetrical relationship (reminiscent of the power relations inherent in colonialism, for example), with the more symmetrical (or out of context on both sides), relatively positive nature of the transcultural site. The transcultural site represents a displacement of the individuals, as they stand in and for their respective cultures, from their reinforcing cultural contexts. Through this displacement, which Fernando Ortiz identifies as one of the features of transculturation in his Cuban Counterpoint, the transcultural encounter can become one of mutual acceptance and develop in a more positive direction (32–33). The outcome of such an encounter, as I argue, is by no means uniform, but through entry into a transcultural site, the power relations inherent in each cultural context are removed, leaving the individuals more vulnerable and open to each other’s cultures. This fact leaves open the possibility of a transmodern identity, as will be shown with reference to each of the novels. John McLeod’s concept of the transcultural threshold is also important here: “The transcultural threshold can productively be thought of as one of conversation and silence, engagement and displacement, where cosmopolitan and postcolonial approaches productively inform each other rather than short-circuit an attempt to build ethical, hopeful mundialisation” (11; emphasis in the original). What I would like to emphasise are the notions of displacement – which, I would argue, is already partially accomplished through the removal of the individual from their respective cultural contexts – and engagement. In Ortiz’s conception, there was no possibility of return to one’s original context but, with globalisation, the more real-world implications of McLeod’s argument are more salient. The productivity inherent in meeting across

White Teeth and Americanah  121 such a threshold allows for more understanding. It is in a transcultural site, and across a transcultural threshold, that the couples meet in the texts I am presenting here, and it is across that threshold that there is the possibility of constructing one’s subjectivity (using Hall’s conception) in the positive mode proposed by Transmodernity.

Locating the Transmodern in the Interpersonal Zadie Smith’s White Teeth conveys the notion of a transcultural site quite clearly in the relationship between the protagonists, Archie and Samad. The novel opens on Alfred Archibald Jones, Archie, a working-class white male from the outskirts of London. However, as it develops, we come to learn that the defining moment of his friendship with Samad is based on common experiences during the Second World War. There, displaced from both Archie’s traditional English context and Samad’s Bengali heritage, they are able to form a friendship that undercuts their own stereotypes of the other – and form a connection that changes both of their individual identities. Archie’s definition is predicated on his participating in an activity which traditionally solidified an English national identity, the tradition of the Englishman going to war on the continent which has helped to define English imperialism harkening back to Henry V on Crispin’s Day. And yet, as Archie and Samad were both on foreign soil, and displaced from their unit and the hierarchy of the military context, they found themselves bonding: In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue. (Smith 96) This proves to be a defining moment for Archie, changing his entire outlook on Samad. However, this experience in what I term a transcultural site also affects Samad, and no less dramatically: What am I going to do? Go back to Bengal? Or to Delhi? Who would have such an Englishman there? To England? Who would have such an Indian? They promise us independence in exchange for the men we were. But it is a devilish deal. (112) The experience fundamentally changes their outlook on each other – no  longer are they just English, or just the other, but somehow they are both, both – to a degree. The process leads towards a type of synthesis that produces a greater cultural understanding. This threshold, once reached, allows for the possibility of the hopeful, ethical friendship

122  Matthias Stephan which could spread, just as the cultural understanding was able to occur here. Yet, as numerous scholars studying Smith assert, the presentation of characters in White Teeth cannot be simply read as a formation of a cultural dialectic. Katina Rogers argues that this configuration is designed to complicate the reading, as neither Archie nor Samad sit comfortably as representatives of their given culture, making a strictly multicultural, cosmopolitan reading lacking. She insists that [Smith’s] radically diverse characters brought together in the former imperial hub of London would seem an ideal starting point for an author who wished to sing the praises of hybridity and of theories such as cosmopolitanism, but Smith is no such author. Rather, she paints them in such a way to push toward a more complex understanding, sometimes explicitly critiquing the expected philosophical standpoints. (Rogers 45) Similarly, Younghee Kwon argues for an understanding of identity in a state of becoming: I want to offer a more nuanced reading of the novel on the assumption that it highlights the crucial role of desire in the multi-ethnic subject as it is always in the process of being made, not so much existing in completed form. (1217) Both scholars suggest that Smith’s presentation exceeds simple notions of identity politics and moves towards the articulated vision of a transmodern identity, with both postmodern agency and social constraints as factors. For example, the after-effects of the Archie/Samad relationship change reactions by other characters to both of them, a fact which demonstrates that it is not possible to treat the conception of identity as a vacuum, independent of the local and tangible social construction. Archie is presented as already othered from an ostensible white dominant context by virtue not just of his friendship with Samad but by a quality this interaction has given to him. For example, in one of the outside descriptions of Archie, he is presented as strange due to his interactions, including his new wife: “Oh, Archie, you are funny,” said Maureen sadly, for she had always fancied Archie a bit but never more than a bit because of this strange way he had about him, always talking to Pakistanis and Caribbeans like he didn’t even notice and now he’d gone and married one and hadn’t even thought it worth mentioning what colour she was until the office dinner when she turned up black as anything and Maureen almost choked on her prawn cocktail. (Smith 69; emphasis in the original)

White Teeth and Americanah  123 Thus, Archie not only is understood as outside of the norm by having an interracial marriage but is also defined as different by his “strange way about him.” The quality seems to be one of being open to multicultural contexts, without that being problematic, what Kwon calls the “emancipatory dimension of multi-ethnic subjectivity” (1230–1). This is a quality I would argue is not dependent upon having been in a transcultural site, or having crossed a transcultural threshold, but could be achieved through deconstructing such categories in one’s own understanding developed through culturally mediated experiences, such as reading a novel. This would have to be specific novels, however. As Roy Sommer argues, a survey of multicultural fictions of migration, which can be defined as literary representations of ethnic identity and cultural alterity, proves that the notion of multicultural pluralism [...] is much more widespread than the cosmopolitan or transcultural representation of hybrid identities à la Rushdie. (158) And yet, while those novels which reinforce cultural differences in a multivalent society are more common, those fewer novels that Sommer calls “‘transcultural’ novels, promoting a kind of cultural hybridity compatible with Bhabha’s vision of the third space,” are “enormously influential” (162). Smith’s novel also displays the postmodern paradigm, with the demonstration of how the result of a cosmopolitan upbringing results not only in the intersection of national and ethnic identity markers but in their elision as well. Smith presents this by looking at the subsequent generation, not the displaced and relocated identities of Samad and A rchie, who are presented as having distinct national identity markers, but rather the next generation: This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. (Smith 326) Here one can ascribe cultural markers based on names and combinations, but the real-life experiences of these children are only understood in the individual, with perhaps the fish pond or football cage exerting as much influence on their subjectivity as Leung, Rahman or O’Rourke. In the postmodern approach, cultural differences are elided, rendered either illusory or unimportant, whereas the transcultural experience seems to rely on and deem important exactly these points of difference, regarding them as inaccessible and critical, and yet transcendable into some form of understanding. The postmodern approach is based on an underlying

124  Matthias Stephan commonality, which becomes, through a stripping away of other culturally imposed factors, the only identity markers remaining. By contrast, in the transmodern context, cultural understanding is achieved through perceived and yet accepted difference, these differences and otherness being the new common thread that the transcultural encounter uses to achieve true communication. Laura Moss calls this new understanding “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (12), identifying Smith as “part of a generation of writers who have written about hybridity – racial, cultural, and linguistic – as part of the practice of everyday life” (11). In contrast to the situation of the contact zone, postulated by Pratt, these hybrid characters do not exist in a polemic between their suggested and expected identity markers (as Archie and Samad demonstrate). They simply are. The desire for a rootedness to identity, even, and perhaps especially, in the wake of postmodernism, is not relegated to those that feel in an othered position in comparison to the cultural norm. Smith’s novel, set in England, still presents the ostensible white English context as a desired ideal, in particular for the non-white characters. Both Archie’s biracial daughter and Samad’s twin boys are drawn to the Chalfen household, a more upper-class “white” family. Irie’s attraction is described as such: “She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfishness. The purity of it” (328; emphasis in the original). This perception, however, does not represent or ascribe a “reality” to the Chalfen identity or their experiences. The quotation continues, “It didn’t occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by the way of Germany and Poland, née Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she was of them” (328). By using the Chalfens, Smith demonstrates that even if, from certain perspectives, there is a cultural hierarchy, its perception is dependent upon individual, grounded factors, which make up the subjectivity of the characters themselves. This presentation, as well as the multivalent language Smith uses, “undermines what Caryl Phillips has called ‘the mythology of homogeneity,’ which endures in Britain in spite of evidence to the contrary and ‘prevents countless numbers of British people from feeling comfortable participating in the main narrative of British life’” (Ledent 84). Rather than a purely postmodern paradigm, or a traditionally asymmetrical relationship as are oft presented with in the ongoing immigrant and refugee debates, a transmodern perspective more accurately represents the continual alteration of identity through contacts in transcultural sites, even if those are in the Chalfen house itself. As for the twins, they are also presented as searching for their roots, both the brother who is sent back to Bangladesh and the one that remains in England: Likewise, the brothers will race towards the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they

White Teeth and Americanah  125 have just been. Because this is the other thing about immigrants (’fugees, émigrés, travelers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow. (Smith 466; emphasis in the original) Both cultural contexts form a part of their identity formulation, and it is not possible to escape those markers, as the postmodern identity would suggest. A transmodern subjectivity seeks out those points of difference and uses them as a means of formulating the individualised identity necessary for thriving in an ever-globalised world. It represents what Moss calls a “post-postcolonial novel,” which presents “a comic portrait of a hybrid community and in a portrait of quotidian racism — in order to show both as a legacy of the history of multi-Britain” (15), and in order to do this, she utilises a transmodern paradigm. This is the world presented in the other case, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a novel which presents characters travelling from a Nigerian context to the United States and England in search of a different and better life, only to find that the life they seek is back in Nigeria, but can only be found, or achieved, if they themselves fundamentally change. While this may sound like many novels in the African-American tradition, Adichie’s novel is different in that it is neither a story of the evolution of a distinct national identity, nor is the United States the context that provides the primary background for the developments of the novel’s main protagonist, Ifemulu. As Nora Berning argues, “Adichie, like other emerging novelists belonging to the third or fourth generation, is part of a global canon of novelists whose works feature characters with hyphenated identities oscillating between the global and the local” (3), an oscillation that, I argue, situates her presentation of identity within a transmodern paradigm. The title itself sets the novel apart from both the African-American and Black British traditions, as “Americanah” represents a Nigerian rather than an American category: the renamed identity for a Nigerian who has become Americanised. This is not the story of America, it is the story of an “Americanah,” it is story of her identity as self-constructed but within the context of Nigeria, informed by her life experiences. The term is a common reference in the Nigerian context, in which Ifemulu and her boyfriend Obinze are raised, as represented in the following quotation about a fellow African immigrant, Bartholomew: “He was one of those people who, in his village back home, would be called ‘lost’ He went to America and got lost, his people would say. He went to America and refused to come back” (Adichie 116; emphasis in the original). What the novel presents, however, is not the simple loss of identity, of the concept of cultural assimilation as the African immigrant moves from Nigeria to the West for a “better” life, but how these characters develop their own Afropolitan identity. As Taiye Selasi argues, “What

126  Matthias Stephan distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to complicate Africa” (n.p.). The novel not only complicates Africa by rendering it as homogenous neither in class nor ideology, it also complicates the characters’ interpersonal relationships and their ideological underpinnings. Focussing first on the influences of the United States on Ifemulu’s character, and then turning to Obinze for a British context, will show how their mutual decisions reflect the transmodern paradigm. Adichie’s novel is rich in storylines and points of development for her characters, but they are focussed on the interpersonal relationships Ifemulu has, first with Obinze in Africa, and then with her two main sexual partners in the United States, Curt and Blaine. In Nigeria, despite being happy with Obinze, her first love, she would become restless, wanting more of an experience of life. Obinze was not necessarily the problem, as “[s]he liked that [Obinze] wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt” (Adichie 63). In fact, “[s]ometimes she worried that she was too happy” (63). This leads Ifemulu to conclude that There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. (289–90) In other words, her restlessness is not limited to her relationship with Obinze but is a recurrent feature of her character as she is continually looking for the correct dynamic, the combination of her own expectations and the social constraints imposed on her interpretation of her own identity. This kind of sensation is what initially triggers her decision to move to America. Obinze’s trajectory is somewhat similar, postulated as the typical experience of a certain class (educated, financially stable, socially connected) in the postcolonial context of contemporary Nigeria. Despite the stereotype of a war-torn continent, which presents African immigrants as refugees, Adichie’s is a story about a different class (not impoverished, in peril), with characters behaving according to different motivations (life satisfaction, chasing a version of the American Dream). In so doing, Adichie presents a new kind of intercultural, immigrant narrative. Berning argues that “the intercultural novel is […] shaped simultaneously by a representative and transgressive potential” (4) and that “Adichie undermines the generic conventions of the typical immigrant novel that leave no room to self-alienation” (4). Similar to Smith’s novel, Adichie presents identity in a state of becoming, deconstructing established qualities of the narrative in order to show that “the making of one’s own identity is relational both in the interpersonal and intercultural sense” (Berning 5). This is presented as part of both Ifemulu’s

White Teeth and Americanah  127 and Obinze’s understanding of their native context, which needs to be abandoned, even if temporarily, to provide the perspective to both understand and alter the embedded cultural norms that it implies. Ifemulu, through her relationships with Curt and Blaine, comes to a better grasp of herself, her own needs and desires, and how she understands herself with relation to social constraints. Curt, an upper-class white man, makes her feel safe and delicate: “Curt did indeed hold her like an egg. With him, she felt breakable, precious” (Adichie 219). While, for some time, this seems ideal, upon reflection she realises that she was positioning herself within a framework she was uncomfortable with: She had not entirely believed herself while with him—happy, handsome Curt, with his ability to twist life into the shapes he wanted. She loved him, and the spirited easy life he gave her, and yet she often fought the urge to create rough edges, to squash his sunniness, even if just a little. (287) Her eventual rejection of Curt also shows Ifemulu confronting the notion of race in America, a concept she is not familiar with from the Nigerian context. It is only in the United States, not her native Nigeria, that Ifemulu understands race as a contributing factor. Yogita Goyal argues that “the novel reveals to American readers their obsession with blindness to race and its pervasive presence in all interactions with people” (xii). Yet it is only once confronted with the realities of race in America – an external marker which, along with innate qualities and a postmodern sense of choice, leads to the formulation of her subjectivity  – that Ifemulu starts to find her own sense of self. As Katherine Hallemeier argues, this fact provides her relationship with Curt and Blaine an allegorical character: “Ifemulu’s relationships with Curt and Blaine may be read as allegories for understanding ‘the question’ of race in the United States” (240). This, in turn, lets Ifemulu see them, and herself, as different. They are already displaced, the men by virtue of their cultural position in the United States and Ifemulu due to her distance from Nigeria, which makes the United States, in Americanah, a transcultural site. She is able to take this new notion of displacement to her future relationship with Blaine (and eventually, “home” to Nigeria). My contention is that by understanding that, while identity is not fixed externally (as one would understand in a classical or modern paradigm, either internally or borne in relief in contemplation of an other), external factors do come into play in how we form our subjectivity, and how others perceive our identity, which situates Ifemulu under the transmodern paradigm. Indeed, those external factors, the groundedness in the local, cannot be dismissed. As Mindi McCann suggests, “race and racial difference are hardly fixed or stable concepts in the twenty-first century […] what we

128  Matthias Stephan have instead is a tangle of shifting definitions, ideas and perceptions of racial divisions and ethnic classifications” (201). However, when placed in the local context, these shifting ideas and perceptions form the basis of the transmodern identity, which allows for a self-conscious construction within the constraints of tolerance of other’s opinions and values. This is best seen at the end of the novel when Ifemulu and Obinze find each other again. In attempting to articulate the reasons why she felt the urge to return to Nigeria, Ifemulu explains: “The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything to say to each other if we were from the same place,” and it pleased him [Obinze] to hear that, because it gave his relationship with her a depth, a lack of trifling novelty. (Adichie 457–58) Yet it is more than a common background, but a willingness to hear each other’s motivation as well as to understand the subtle national cues which also constrain their identity. After both protagonists return to Nigeria, there are still complications in the eventual resolution of the romantic plot, as Obinze is now married with children. In addition to legal complications, there are social responsibilities. When contemplating simply leaving his wife for Ifemulu, his friends counsel him not to adopt “white-people behavior,” on the consideration that: If your wife has a child for somebody else or if you beat her, that is reason for divorce. But to get up and say you have no problem with your wife but you are leaving for another woman? Haba. We don’t behave like that, please. (472) This represents not only a piece of advice from a friend but an explanation of the social context in which they need to operate. Obinze wants the “American” ideal of marriage for love but is constrained by political realities of entanglements for his wife (who would be rejected by Nigerian society) and social responsibilities (by virtue of his wealth and business connections, needing to sponsor people and not think only of his desire, love, want for Ifemulu, even history). Ifemulu has had a similar development, with a cautionary tale provided by her Aunt Uju, who was the mistress of a powerful, married, public official, an affair which ended badly. She eventually found a positive relationship only when she had her own independence. The end of the novel presents Ifemulu and Obinze’s joint decision to live together, despite social pressure on Ifemulu to marry and pressure for Obinze to remain in his marriage, pressure for her to not be “the other woman” or a mistress, to be independent, and pressure for him to be the provider. “The characters must negotiate the

White Teeth and Americanah  129 ways [in which] difference — as an inherited concept and an imposition from outside — affects [their] sense of self” (McCann 211). In the end, through their interpersonal relationship, we can see the transmodern ideal, which requires free choice, with recognition of the real social consequences of one’s actions – the ability to move forward with open eyes: “For a long time she stared at him. He was saying what she wanted to hear and yet she stared at him. ‘Ceiling,’ she said finally. ‘Come in’” (477). Their final encounter shows both the desire, the hesitation, the need for reflection, and finally an assertion of choice.

Conclusion As Hallemeier has pointed out, the award-winning Nigerian writer Helon Habila is the clearest representative of a “post-national” turn in contemporary African literature, whereby a new generation of writers “liberate[s] itself from the often predicable, almost obligatory obsession of the African writer with the nation and with national politics” (232). What this represents is a distancing of national identity markers from becoming the sole, or even the main, intersections in defining the characters presented by African authors. The same is true of Smith as well as Adichie. As I have attempted to demonstrate, the distinct modes of subjectivity foregrounded by these writers function through close readings of those mentioned transcultural sites, all considered on an individual, interpersonal level. Each of these encounters requires the recognition of cultures beyond one’s own, but the reaction to this encounter differs depending upon the structure of the underlying subjective construction. Diasporic multiculturalism presents a scenario in which cultural identity is reinforced through a transcultural encounter, producing a multicultural society, which reinforces essentialism through reliance on a version of identity politics. A postmodern – and posthuman – take on identity construction, where the two cultures meeting in the transcultural site are eliminated through the recognition of inherent similarities and constructed (and thus false or unsustainable) differences, is one in which a universal humanity is recognised, so that differences become accidental (in the Aristotelian sense), not defining characteristics. In “Postmodern Blackness”, bell hooks argues that “[c]ontemporary African-American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of ‘authentic’ black identity” (629). These words situate her in favour of a postmodern identity construction, rather than a return to essentialist identity politics, with prescribed roles for specific national or ethnic groups. Yet, the texts by Smith and Adichie may be said to have gone a stage further by presenting a transcultural experience which produces a greater cultural understanding, by recognising this postmodern understanding, but also aspects of otherness involving the acceptance of difference. This  represents the

130  Matthias Stephan transmodern paradigm. This is achieved by providing external perspectives, especially those which can then be perceived as constructive rather than divisive. How each text presents the transcultural experience is critical to understanding its conception of identity and how it is formed, and the characteristics of the transcultural sites represented. As we have seen, the representation of more open and positive cultural encounters in Smith’s and Adichie’s novels produce different results depending on the characteristics and dynamics of each encounter. However, in both cases, their representation of a transmodern identity seems fitting for today’s world. These novels open up the possibility for the positive construction of Transmodernity called for by Dussel, Ateljevic, Luyckx and others, built upon the conflation of individual and interpersonal decisions, which collectively can form the backbone of a new era. These novels show how this type of choices can be made, and seem inevitable given the transcultural nature of contemporary existence. The transmodern, with its focus on tolerance and respect for each other and for the spaces we occupy (social, environmental, cultural), is not just what we desire, it reflects how contemporary authors imagine our time into being.

Note 1 “Transcultural” is considered here in relation to the diversity of cultures present in the given context, with transcultural representing a more hybrid form of cultural identity than is expressed (or understood) through notions of the multicultural or intercultural (which are often seen as setting discrete national or regional cultures in contact with each other).

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. London: Fourth Estate, 2013. Print. Anderson, Benedick. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalisms. 1983. Revised Edition, London and New York: Verso, 2006. Print. Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of Our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (2013): 200–19. Print. Berning, Nora. “Narrative Ethics and Alterity in Adichie’s Novel Americanah.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.5 (2015): 1–8. Accessed on 21/05/2019 at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss5/5/. Web. Cuccioletta, Donald. “Multiculturalism or Transculturalism: Towards a Cosmopolitan Citizenship.” London Journal of Canadian Studies 17 (2001/2002): 1–11. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. 1967. Trans Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Print. Dussel, Enrique. “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity.” Nepantla: Views from South 3.2 (2002): 221–44. Print.

White Teeth and Americanah  131 ———. “Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of the Philosophy of Liberation.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.3 (Spring 2012): 28–59. Print. Goyal, Yogita. “Africa and the Black Atlantic.” Research in African Literatures 45.3 (Fall 2014): v–xxv. Print. Hall, Donald E. Subjectivity. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Hallemeier, Katherine. “‘To Be from the Country of People Who Gave’: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah.” Studies in the Novel 47.2 (Summer 2015): 231–45. Print. Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic, 1995. Print. hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness.” Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. Eds Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy. 1990. New York: Norton. 1998. 624–31. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Foreword.” The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. vii–xxi. Print. Kwon, Younghee. “White Teeth and the Making of the Multiethnic Subject.” English Language and Literature 58.6 (2012): 1215–33. Print. Ledent, Bénédicte. “The Many Voices of Postcolonial London: Language and Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004).” New Soundings in Postcolonial Literature: Critical and Creative Contours. Eds Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose. Leiden and Boston: Brill/ Rodopi, 2016. 79–93. Print. Luyckx, Marc. “The Transmodern Hypothesis: Towards a Dialogue of Cultures.” Futures 31 (1999): 971–82. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. McCann, Mindi. “‘You’re Black’: Transnational Perceptions of Race in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Andrea Levy’s Small Island.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.2 (2018): 200–12. Print. McLeod, John. “Sounding Silence: Transculturation and Its Thresholds.” Transnational Literature 4.1 (November 2011): 1–13. Accessed on 21/05/2019 at: http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/vol4_issue1.html/. Web. Moss, Laura. “The Politics of Everyday Hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Wasafiri 18.39 (2003): 11–17. DOI: 10.1080/02690050308589837/. Web. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. 1978. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Art of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40. Print. Rifkin, Jeremy. The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. London: Tarcher/Penguin, 2004. Print. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. “Transmodernity: A New Paradigm.” Trans. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen. Transmodernity 9 May 2017. Accessed on 04/12/2019 at: http://transmodern-theory.blogspot.it/. Web. Rogers, Katina. “‘Affirming Complexity’: White Teeth and Cosmopolitanism.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 9.2 (Spring 2008): 45–61. Print.

132  Matthias Stephan Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Sardar, Ziauddin. “Islam and the West in a Transmodern World.” Islam Online Archive 18 August 2004. Accessed on 04/12/2019 at: www.islamonline. net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&pagename=Zone-EnglishLiving_Shariah/ LSELayout&cid=1158658505216/. Web. Selasi, Taiye. “Bye Bye Babar.” The Lip Magazine 3 March 2005. Accessed on 16/03/2019 at: http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76/. Web. Slimbach, Richard. “The Transcultural Journey.” Frontiers: The International Journal of Study Abroad XI (August 2005): 205–30. Accessed on 21/05/2019 at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ891470.pdf/. Web. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Penguin, 2000. Print. Sommer, Roy. “‘Simple Survival’ in ‘Happy Multicultural Land’?: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Hybridity in the Contemporary British Novel.” Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments. Ed. Monica Fludernik. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 149–81. Print. Stephan, Matthias. Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2019. Print. Waugh, Patricia. “Postmodernism and Feminism.” Contemporary Feminist Theories. Eds Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998. 177–93. Print. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. Eds Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194–213. Print.

6

Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant Laura Colombino

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) is a semi-mythological novel set in Southern England around the mid-400s AD, a period about which little certain is known. The Romans had long since departed and only few scattered ruins of their refined civilisation remained in the “desolate, uncultivated land” (Ishiguro 2015a, 3). When the Anglo-Saxon invaders arrived, they built settlements and fought wars against the indigenous inhabitants, the Britons, but these were finally led to victory by the semi-historical figure of King Arthur and the two populations coexisted peacefully under his reign. Yet, after a generation or so, the Britons suddenly disappeared from the land, as if they had been wiped out. The event has led some historians to speculate that an ethnic cleansing took place. It is just before this possibly tragic outcome that the novel begins. Arthur is long dead and the imposed harmony – based on the repression of past conflicts and the construction of the false myth of Arthur’s mercifulness – is about to be disrupted, plunging the country back into a new cycle of violence and revenge. In Ishiguro’s fantasy reconstruction, the fragile peace is enforced by the Britons first by violence then by subterfuge: a mist, emanating from a she-dragon’s breath, has generated forgetfulness in people and temporarily appeased their thirst for vengeance. The novel is a metaphor of how nations and their peoples cope with ethnic conflicts and collective traumas through agreed or imposed amnesia, but also of the way in which the need for justice of the oppressed can resurface when society fails to confront the legacies of a troubled past. By speculating on the forced coexistence of two communities in post-Roman England and alluding to the historical possibility of genocidal slaughter, Ishiguro establishes an implicit parallelism with the manipulations of memory that enabled xenophobic massacres such as those in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. The novel suggests that where peace is militarily enforced, holding down previous ethnic conflicts, these are bound to erupt again as soon as totalitarian leaders loosen their grip. As historian Erna Paris reminds us about the aftermath of dictatorship in the Balkans,

134  Laura Colombino [w]ith Tito and his Brotherhood and Unity strictures out of the way, it was possible to reopen old Second World War wounds that had never healed, especially the death of many thousands (the numbers were vastly disputed) of Serbs and Jews who perished in the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp. (361) Though it engages with many of Ishiguro’s hallmark preoccupations – how memory wanes and gets repressed or distorted, and our inability to fully face the past – The Buried Giant signals a stark departure from his usual focus on subjectivity and his intimate, reminiscing mode, in that this time his customary themes are recast within the wider frame of society and its collective memory. His parable about remembering and forgetting points metaphorically to all nations and communities. As he claimed in an Interview: Almost any major country you can think of has long-buried memories […] there are these recurring patterns that have to do with being human, the fact that we have to live in human communities, we have to live in human relationships. And so it was very appealing to me to set it deliberately in a place that wasn’t real, so that I could invite the reader to apply it to all kinds of situations. (in Chattopadhyay n.p.) The work of Paris – her investigation into countries with a troubled past which reinvent themselves – was a source of inspiration for him (see Ishiguro and Ondaatje). According to Paris, “[t]he stories of countries are much like the stories of our own lives: filamented, partly illusory and threaded through with remembered fact and fantasy” (449). “The number of ways we shape historical memory is,” she believes, “surprisingly limited, ranging from outright lies and denial, as in Serbia and Japan” – where events like the Nanking massacre were erased from people’s consciousness – “through judicious mythmaking, as in France” (451) – which constructed “the resistance myth as a fairy tale” (79) – “to benign or deliberate negligence,” as with slavery and racism in the United States (451). In a context in which violence seems omnipresent, Ishiguro feels the need to think comparatively and connectedly. Therefore, he eschews what he fears might be a quasi-journalistic treatment of a specific local history and explores instead the potential universality of a semi-mythological landscape. It may seem simplistic and inadequate to try to frame the question in mythic terms. But it is the very complexity of the problem that demands a working narrative with a global vision. On these grounds Ishiguro creates – so I argue here – myths and metaphors that point multidirectionally to a number of different memories, traditions and cultural imaginaries across space and time. This move shows Ishiguro aligning himself with the

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  135 “new paradigm shift coincidentally termed ‘Transmodernity’ by several renowned social historians, political scientists, and sociologists, in what Ateljevic describes as a clear case of Jungian synchronicity” (Onega 373). Although the use of allegory and myth in The Buried Giant has confused some critics, it is symptomatic of recent tendencies in fiction. In an article entitled “Postmodernism Is Dead. What Comes Next?,” Alison Gibbons suggests that “today’s cultural climate” is characterised by “a renewed engagement with history and a revival of mythic meaning-making that the arch-postmodernists would have abhorred” (n.p.). In actual fact, myth and history did abound in late twentieth-century novels such as those by Peter Ackroyd and A. S. Byatt, yet they were used within a cultural paradigm dominated by textuality and constructivism – therefore, as “part of a broader, postmodern movement that saw the problematisation of the idea of the grand narrative, of ‘History’ and its claims to universality, totality and objectivity” (Crownshaw 10). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, myth and history have acquired altogether different implications. No longer do they seem to be reservoirs of texts that the postmodern writer plays with metafictionally in order to convey a sense of cultural relativism, the loss of meaning or the ungraspable nature of truth and the past. Rather, they are tinged by today’s overwhelming concern with what it means to be human, ontologically and ethically, and by the fascination with stories of shared significance. Drawing on Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen argues that the age of Transmodernity can be “understood as a dialectical synthesis of the modern thesis and postmodern antithesis, accepting the ethical and political challenge of modernity and postmodern examination in order to define a field beyond nihilism and uncertainty” (n.p.). Although this dialectical outlook on Transmodernity would require nuancing, it seems evident that there is a need among contemporary writers to overcome the weak relativism of postmodernity; an urge implicit, for example, in Pat Barker’s statement that, at the beginning of the new millennium, writers and readers seem to prefer great stories embedded in our culture to those which feature contemporary settings and are the creations of the individual mind alone: The great question to me is the popularity these days of historical fiction. Is it a sign that people have actually lost faith in fiction altogether, in contemporary fiction? Are we finding stories which are simply the invention of the single mind, with invented characters, are we finding them a little bit too light-weight and are we needing the reassurance of a historical event of agreed significance in order for the book to be worthwhile? I do think there’s a crisis of confidence in fiction. (Mantel and Barker n.p.)

136  Laura Colombino Barker explains the recurrent tendency – testified by her own mythological novel The Silence of the Girls (2019) – to go back to the great myths and historical events as deriving from our perception of their enduring value. The motivation behind her choice of the Trojan War to frame her novel is that “it’s proved that it’s not ephemeral, it’s been around for three thousand years […]. There is a guaranteed importance” (Mantel and Barker n.p.). The use of myth in early twenty-first century fiction has never been fully investigated in relation to the concept of Transmodernity, but there are significant clues of its relevance in Gibbons’s article on the crisis of Postmodernism and in Susana Onega’s “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm.” As Onega suggests: Although her conception of postmodernism is rather perfunctory, Gibbons’ association of its death with a return to myth-making and emotionality is significant in that it points to a revival of the counter-textual visionary tradition […], triggered by “a new dominant cultural logic”. (367) Ancient myths were vital, she claims, “not only for the representation and transmission of useful knowledge but also for the strengthening of collective cooperation and communal cohesion” (368). Particularly relevant to my analysis of The Buried Giant is her insistence on the comforting function of myth – and, along with it, of religion and art – in the representation of trauma and “the transmission and integration of awful, though necessary, knowledge into the collective unconscious” (369). A central concern in my essay is Ishiguro’s interest in myth as a noble lie (Plato) through which the human community can be addressed across space and time through a transmodern mythopoesis and an ethical commitment which are transnational and transhistorical. A crucial theme will be the psychagogic virtues of falsehood, whose relevance in psychotherapy, philosophy and Memory Studies will be outlined by way of introduction to Ishiguro’s mythopoetic creation. Then, the manifold cultural sources which give shape to the seemingly plain, unobtrusive imagery of the novel will be unveiled in order to appreciate the transcultural nature of Ishiguro’s tropes. Finally, the ethical concerns of the novel will be interrogated, by considering how, in The Buried Giant, memory – which has been a longstanding interest in Ishiguro’s fiction at the level of the individual consciousness – acquires a collective dimension and is conveyed through a disembodied narrative voice, which is the voice of History. Through this reminiscing abstract narrator, Ishiguro commemorates metaphorically all the traumatic past(s) of humanity, suggesting, in transmodern fashion, the interconnectedness of human communities across time no less than space.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  137

Screen Memories At the heart of The Buried Giant is the deeply affecting portrait of a marital relationship. The story begins when Axl and Beatrice, an old married couple, embark on a journey to reunite themselves with their long-forgotten son, who, they believe, is living in a nearby village. Though deeply in love, they are confused about the origins of this feeling: because of their failing memory caused by the mist, they have forgotten whole chunks of their past. Haunted by fears of being separated from each other and worried that their feeling may be less authentic because of their amnesia, they are determined to recapture their shared memories. They are persuaded that their love will survive the resurrection of even the unsettling passages of their life together and that they have a moral duty to confront the truth. As Ishiguro suggests in an interview, “[i]f they don’t face their dark memories, is their love a false one? Is it based on something not real?” (in Srebotnjak n.p.): this is the ethical question that the novel explores at the level of personal relationships. As the story unfolds and the mist begins to fade, the slow retrieval of the obscure passages of their life together poses a serious threat to their love and it becomes dubious whether their feelings will be strong enough to withstand the return of past shadows. The novel seems to conclude that, though there are arguments in favour of the retrieval of the past, “[w]e do need to sometimes keep something buried” (Ishiguro in Srebotnjak n.p.) in order to move on with our lives. As Ishiguro suggests in the same interview, this issue has been long discussed “in psychotherapy circles” (Srebotnjak n.p.). Concurring with Ishiguro, Ian Hacking asserts: In the matter of lost and recovered memories, we are heirs of Freud and Janet. One lived for Truth, and quite possibly deluded himself a good deal of the time and even knew he was being deluded. The other, a far more honourable man, helped his patients by lying to them. (qtd. in Sturken 121) Sometimes, Pierre Janet even hypnotised his patients into believing a trauma never occurred. As Marita Sturken points out, Janet’s pragmatic approach to psychotherapy raises an important question: When is it better to forget? To resituate the recovered memory debate outside of a binary of truth and falsehood, of memories as fantasies versus memories as receptacles of experiences, we must begin by examining the long-standing equation of memory with healing, whether as the truth narrative of the individual or the cultural healing of collective testimony. (244–5)

138  Laura Colombino Ishiguro’s use, in his own words, “of fantastical tropes as a means of distraction from realities too painful to face” (in Cain n.p.) seems to tip his balance in favour of the therapeutic power of benign deceit – not unlike the Apollonian lies that Nietzsche saw as vehicles for the transmission and integration of the intractable real into the collective unconscious of a community (see Onega 369). Along the same lines, philosopher Hans Blumenberg sees myth as a mechanism which helps humans survive in a harsh and indifferent world, dissolving the anxiety that the unknown produces and rendering it familiar and approachable, through “the appearance of calculable magnitudes to deal with and regulated ways of dealing with them” (qtd. in Nicholls 17). I will return to myth in the following. But let us dwell a little longer on screen memories as instruments to grapple with the intractable real, in order to appreciate how they can work transculturally and transhistorically. Ishiguro’s concept of “double-cross metaphor,” a trope of his own devising, is especially relevant in this connection. He elucidates its meaning in an interview for Knopf Doubleday, where he discusses the reception of Soldier Blue, a Western film on the savage slaughter of American Indians by the American cavalry. When it was released in 1970, most people took it as a thinly disguised allegory of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which some renegade US soldiers killed North Vietnamese civilians as a form of reprisal. Looking back now, claims Ishiguro, I would say that although it was pretending to be a metaphor about Vietnam, it was about the even more uncomfortable thing which is the genocide of the native Americans. It was a way of confronting a very, very difficult subject and it was done via this very clever thing: pretending it was a metaphor about something else when, in fact, it was the thing it actually was. That’s what I call a double-cross metaphor […]. I think this is something we do in real life all the time. (Ishiguro 2015b, n.p.) The individual dimension of this psychological mechanism is one which Ishiguro explores in his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), where the narrator appropriates another person’s story to talk about her own and, by so doing, avoids confronting her own trauma (Ishiguro in Krasny n.p.). In this respect, The Buried Giant comes from the realisation of the full potential of such a technique when applied to a broader societal context. Film scholar Miriam Hansen describes a similar process when she argues that “the popular American fascination with the Holocaust may function as a ‘screen memory’ in the Freudian sense, covering up a traumatic event —another traumatic event— that cannot be approached directly,” such as the genocide of Native Americans or the Vietnam War (qtd. in Rothberg 12). Along the same lines, historian Michael Rothberg

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  139 claims that “[t]he mechanism of screen memory thus illustrates concretely how a kind of forgetting accompanies acts of remembrance, but this kind of forgetting is subject to recall” (13). For Ishiguro, literary metaphors have a productive, transhistorical potential through the continuous negotiation over time between remembering and forgetting, recognition and estrangement. His semi-historical tale about the origins of England as a nation may work, above all for international readers, as a screen memory for a number of displaced referents across the globe. But it is also intended for English readers as a double-cross metaphor of the long and repressed history of conquests and bloodshed on which civilised England has laid its foundations across centuries of imperialism and even at its inception as a nation. It is in this light that we should interpret the words of the omniscient narrator at the beginning of The Buried Giant: “I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are” (5), the voice says apologetically. The tone sounds familiar and suggests parallels with other narrative voices in Ishiguro’s work, such as those of Stevens in The Remains of the Day (1989) and Kathy in Never Let Me Go (2005). What is so peculiar about these two characters is that they appear to be telling their stories to those of their kind (respectively, butlers and clones), while the reader overhears their confessions (see Colombino 2018, 213–4). In Ishiguro’s own words: Who is the narrator talking to: that’s a very important decision for me. Because often in my books I like to have not just an I but a you and that you is almost always not the reader. Kathy in Never Let Me Go, she’s addressing another clone like her. Stevens the butler, he’s addressing another servant. These people can’t even imagine an audience beyond their small world. So the reader is put in the position of almost eavesdropping. All these kinds of decisions go towards determining what the language should be like, what the voice should be like […] what kind of game is the narrator playing in the kind of hide and seek —himself/herself and the person who’s being addressed. (in Srebotnjak n.p.) One of my contentions is that the mysterious voice in the incipit of The Buried Giant belongs to an abstract entity, which is the disembodied personification of the English national consciousness. This consciousness addresses those of its kind – the present English community – but appears unaware of the larger readership eavesdropping on its tale. It is on these grounds that Ishiguro’s novel can work transculturally and transhistorically: it lends itself to multiple appropriations through space and time while it conveys the transmodern sense that we are all connected and interdependent across nations (or communities) and generations.

140  Laura Colombino Indeed, Ishiguro implies as much when he points that, as a contemporary reader of Plato, he feels part of an unintended audience: There never seems to be a clear relationship between the audience an author thinks he is addressing and the audience that, in fact, the author does come to address. Many of the great classical writers, whether the ancient Greeks or whoever, had no idea they would eventually address people from cultures very, very different to themselves. Possibly Plato was writing simply for the people who were living in Athens at the time, but of course we read him many, many years later, in very different cultures. (Ishiguro and Oe 59–60)

Prosopopoeia On their journey through a bleak semi-mythological territory roamed by ogres and pixies, Axl and Beatrice face many obstacles and mortal threats, both human and supernatural. Along the way, they make two main encounters: one with the aged knight Sir Gawain, whom Ishiguro transforms into a loquacious, horse-loving quixotic grotesque; the other with a Saxon warrior named Wistan, whose mission is to slay Querig, the she-dragon, and protect Edwin, a Saxon boy. In Barbara Jane Newman’s words: “The plot meanders like a quest romance, repeatedly throwing these characters together, then separating them, until they converge in a climactic confrontation” (333). The book is set at a time when the legacy of King Arthur still lingers on the land and Christianity has begun to take hold, if only tentatively. Setting his story in this moment of transition allows Ishiguro to parse complex ethical questions through the clash between the pagan Wistan and the Christian Gawain, who stand for opposed value systems. Ishiguro suggests that, around the turn of the millennium, the act of setting characters in relation to each other disclosed all its potential to him: “I probably worry much more about relationships than characters. That came to me as a revelation not long ago, probably fifteen years ago” (in Srebotnjak n.p.). The philosophical concerns and conundrums explored in The Buried Giant are no longer couched in the aporetic reflections of reminiscing characters, such as Stevens in The Remains of the Day or Masuji Ono in An Artist of the Floating World. Rather, they produce a constellation of semi-allegorical characters, each embodying a specific perspective in the orchestration of the question that lies at the core of The Buried Giant: is it better to remember or to forget? No doubt, the use of personifications is in keeping with the mythical cast of the novel. But it is also one that Ishiguro recognises as innate in him, a rhetorical move he has felt instinctively drawn to from the early stages of his career. In his own words: Recently I’ve been interested in the difference between personal memory and societal memory, and I’m tempted almost to personify these

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  141 two things. […] being able to resort to fantasy opens things up enormously. I’ve often done this, even if it doesn’t look so obvious, even if there aren’t things that look like mythical creatures. Creating an incredibly stuffy English butler in The Remains of the Day, I was very aware that I was taking something that I recognised to be a very small, negative set of impulses in myself […] taking those and exaggerating them, and turning them into a kind of monstrous manifestation. The butler doesn’t look like a conventional monster, but I always thought that he was a kind of monster. (in Gaiman and Ishiguro n.p.) Critical interest in prosopopoeia, in images that represent abstract ideas in embodied form, has been in the air in recent years. For a long time, personification has “suffered from the dismissal of allegory as merely conventional and mechanical, a charge made by the romantics, who opposed it to symbolism” (Melion and Ramakers n.p.), and has found only sporadic contemporary supporters. Paul de Man, who is one such advocate, sees prosopopoeia as “the master trope of poetic discourse” (48). Similarly, Ernst H. Gombrich praises its vitality and vividness: While we are under its spell we are unlikely to ask whether such a creature really exists or is merely a figment of the artist’s imagination. And thus, the arts of poetry, of painting and sculpture, of drama and even of rhetoric aided by tradition can continue the functions of mythopoeic thought. (254–5) More recent critical interventions have re-established the importance of prosopopoeia more firmly in the wake of James J. Paxson’s influential The Poetics of Personification (1994) and even as a consequence of “cognitive studies’ current assertion that all our thinking is metaphorical and embodied” (Melion and Ramakers n.p.). But let us return to The Buried Giant. Justice and peace are two equal but opposed ideals which the pagan warrior Wistan and the Christian knight Sir Gawain respectively see as their ethical duty to fight for on behalf of their communities. Wistan’s name signals an intertextual allusion to Beowulf, where the character Wiglaf, who staunchly supports Beowulf in his fight against the dragon, is referred to through the patronymic as Weohstan’s son (Anonymous 1999, 86). Like his namesake, Ishiguro’s character will finally kill a dragon as a form of justice and commemoration of the dead in his community, but the fulfilment of his heroic quest will not bring about the regeneration of the land. Rather, it will stir the buried giant of memory, shattering the peaceful coexistence of the two peoples and causing future death and destruction. This outcome makes Wistan’s quest paradoxical and his victory melancholy: the latter brings him no sense of triumph and makes him doubtful about

142  Laura Colombino the consequences of his accomplished mission. Indeed, his doom is reminiscent of Greek tragic drama, where particular choices or decisions, or even someone’s character, can trigger a whole series of fatal or fateful events, which cannot be stopped and where no redemption is in store for the hero. In The Buried Giant the irresistible urge that drives Wistan’s actions to their melancholy outcome suggests a sort of dream logic. So, it is no accident that, in Part III, the two chapters devoted to Gawain – who follows a similar ineluctable trajectory – are in the form of hallucinatory reveries. Both heroes are at the service of, and overwhelmed by, the noble ideal they represent. Gawain fights for the protection of societal bonds, however artificially enforced they may be, whereas Wistan expresses his resentment at the idea that the infinite mercy of the Christian God towards sinners may be an alibi for all kinds of brutality. If sentiments of forgiveness are usually taken to show the moral advance that Christianity made over ancient Greek culture, Ishiguro seems to suggest that justified anger too – what Aristotle termed orgê – deserves a certain amount of respect: “The person who is angry at the right things and towards the right people, and also in the right way, at the right time, and for the right length of time, is praised,” writes Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics (Book 4, Ch. 5, § 3; 1125b ff.; 61). We may conclude that both Wistan and Gawain are well-meaning idealists. Yet, as is often the case with Ishiguro, there is something inhuman about their steadfast loyalty to an ideal of justice (for Wistan) and peace (for Gawain), whose intransigent application leads to the extremes of violence and impunity respectively. In fact, monstrosity as the flip side of idealism is a favourite motif with Ishiguro and so is the exploration of how ideals can be used and corrupted by power (see Colombino 2019). In this respect, the Anglo-Saxon King of Mercia, who manipulates his community by using the lever of the revenge instinct, and the Briton Lord Brennus, who maintains his power by guaranteeing a state of dumb forgetfulness and ignorance of the past, work as ruthless biopolitical counterparts to the well-meaning Wistan and Gawain. In this complex orchestration of characters, Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon boy, provides the link between the societal and the individual levels. At the end of the novel, when Wistan passes the torch of retribution to the boy, the latter is assailed by doubt – “something else came back to Edwin: a promise made to the warrior; a duty to hate all Britons. But surely Wistan had not meant to include this gentle couple,” he ponders (Ishiguro 2015a, 328). Should young Edwin be loyal to Wistan’s cause and seek revenge against all Britons? Or should he make at least an exception with Axl and Beatrice, the decent couple who have shared his journey? “Master Edwin,” they plead: “We both beg this of you. In the days to come, remember us. Remember us and this friendship when you were still a boy” (328). Edwin’s conundrum is reminiscent of Jacques

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  143 Derrida’s sense of the aporia on which responsibility is premised: the idea that in being loyal to one particular ideal, community or person rather than another, one inevitably disregards those who are excluded. In his own words: As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all other others. (Derrida 68) As J. Hillis Miller so eloquently expresses it in a sustained analysis of Derrida’s The Gift of Death, this aporia is “a universal feature of the human condition anywhere at any time” (218).

Transcultural Myths Though ogres, pixies and dragons make fleeting appearances in the novel, as if they were extras in a film (a simile Ishiguro enjoys making in interviews), The Buried Giant is no fantasy novel in the usual sense applied to the definition. Ishiguro is not interested in conjuring up an entirely make-believe world. Rather his aim is to project an image of our vague, misty collective idea of the past – the past as it is in the imaginative range and awareness of the contemporary subject. In order to do so, he creates a landscape which taps into a common or at least very widespread reservoir of jumbled notions and fictional representations: “there are many things beside what is officially called history that goes into the memory of a nation. I think, for instance, a lot of popular entertainment can quite carelessly create a sense of what has happened in the past” (Ishiguro 2017, n.p.). If, in The Unconsoled, he allows the projections of the dreaming mind to exist literally in Kafkaesque fashion, in The Buried Giant he lets the projections of the collective memory be literalised in a variety of allegorical personifications and myths, iconographies and fictions, which give shape to a sort of dreamscape of our collective unconscious. Rarely does the feeling of déjà vu abandon the readers, as they follow the characters across this semi-visionary landscape. At times, for example, we seem to recognise a Blakean iconography: “The two large rocks, leaning one towards the other like an old married couple, had been visible from some way down. […] But when at last [Axl and Beatrice] reached the twin rocks, […] they sat close against one another, as if in imitation of the stones above them” (Ishiguro 2015a, 265). Elsewhere, in the mysterious widows who torment Gawain with reminders of his past dark deeds, we seem to capture a reincarnation of the witches in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. And is not the episode at the monastery,

144  Laura Colombino with its grotesqueries and ingenious misdirections, a probable echo of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose? Even more prominent, perhaps, is the tendency of the narrative pace to slow down and crystallise in pictorial scenes. According to Joyce Carol Oates, in The Buried Giant “characters are so thinly drawn as to suggest figures in an ancient tapestry, or in an allegorical fable like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas” (n.p.). But the image of the ancient freeze would work quite as well as a simile: The sky had thickened, so that to Axl it was as if the newcomers had been carried here on the clouds. Now both of them, in near-silhouette, appeared peculiarly transfixed: the warrior holding firm his rein in both hands like a charioteer; the boy leaning forward at an angle, both arms outstretched as though for balance. (Ishiguro 2015a, 300) Finally, the very title and general theme of the novel find an echo in the Celtic giant Finn McCool, who sleeps under Dublin, dreaming Irish history throughout James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The mythical world of The Buried Giant stems from the interaction of different cultural traditions: Greek epic and tragic drama, Christian iconography, the Arthurian legends, Celtic and Japanese folklore, as well as modern popular culture. Although Japanese settings feature in Ishiguro’s first two novels and the samurai tradition contributes to the definition of the devoted hyper-English butler of The Remains of the Day, the transcultural imagery and symbolism found in The Buried Giant is unprecedented in his work and clearly inscribes the novel in a transmodern paradigm which suggests planetary interconnectedness. Invariably, Ishiguro tends to mingle various legacies in the same myth or mythical figure. So, when we read of the thin, tall Sir Gawain and his vainglorious idealism, we cannot but be reminded of Don Quixote drawn by Honoré Daumier, but when he rides – a solitary knight against the wide horizon – he may as well be John Ford in the Far West or a samurai in a Kurosawa film. As Ishiguro himself recognises, Gawain is “like a figure from one of those elegiac Westerns, an ageing gunfighter from a bygone era” (in Anonymous 2017, n.p.). As a child, he adds, “[I] saw in those Westerns some of the samurai stories I had been brought up on” (n.p.). In a conversation with Neil Gaiman, Ishiguro makes a similar point, capturing the unexpected similarity of combat techniques in Italian Westerns, samurai films and the Iliad. Their fight scenes, he claims, are quiet contemplating moments of tragedy where the two combatants study each other for a long time before a single well-aimed, deadly stroke is delivered. As he suggests: The Iliad is fascinating on this. Its stand-offs are almost bizarre. There’s supposed to be this huge, wild battle going on the plains

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  145 outside Troy, and yet in this mayhem one warrior faces another and they start a conversation: they say, “Oh, and who are you? Tell me about your ancestry.” They swap stories about their grandfather, and one of them will say, “You know, my dad met your dad when he was travelling, and he gave him a very nice goblet.” So a strange bubble develops around the two combatants. And then they fight, or sometimes they discover they rather like each other and decide not to. Things like the final confrontation between Hector and Achilles are definitely on the side of Kurosawa, not Errol Flynn. (Gaiman and Ishiguro n.p.) The transculturality of Ishiguro’s myth can be further appreciated towards the end of the novel, when the dragon Querig is finally found. The old creature lies in a barren pit, where “the only living thing visible, aside from the dragon herself, was a solitary hawthorn bush sprouting incongruously through the stone near the centre of the pit’s belly” (Ishiguro 2015a, 310). In Christian iconography, Jesus’s crown of thorns is made of hawthorn (Becker 138), so Ishiguro may have wanted this detail to allude to the sacrifice of Querig – that is, of peace – about to be accomplished in the name of justice. The hawthorn, one of the most sacred trees in Celtic mythology, where it symbolises love and protection, also stands metaphorically for the relationship between Axl and Beatrice. But the transculturality of the image extends to Japanese mythology: though hawthorns are absent in the folkloric tradition of the Land of the Rising Sun, “large, unusual, or old trees are often considered sacred” in Japan (Foster 115). A notable example is the kodama, the tree spirit, which artist Toriyama Sekien uses “as the opening image in his first catalog of yōkai, completed in 1776 —the first in his famous series. The picture shows an old man and woman who seem to have emerged from a crooked old pine tree” (Foster 115). The association is worth pursuing, because the legend of this married couple is one of the most famous in Japanese folklore and bears similarities with the story of Axl and Beatrice: An old married couple —his name is Joo (尉) and hers is Uba (媼) known together as Jotomba— are said to appear from the mist at Lake Takasago. The old man and his wife are usually portrayed talking happily together with a pine tree in the background. Signifying, as they do, a couple living in perfect harmony until they grow old together, they have long been a symbol of the happiness of family life. (Greve n.p.) Joo and Uba are said to have lived to a very great age and died at the same hour on the same day, and since then their spirits abide in two paired pine trees, symbols of their marital relationship. “Takasago No

146  Laura Colombino Uta,” a traditional Noh play based on this myth, shows that all relationships fall short of the ideal of enduring happiness expressed in the story of Joo and Uba (Tyler 33). Axl and Beatrice are persuaded that they can obtain from the boatman – that is, from death itself – permission to travel together to the island of afterlife, just as Greek heroes were sent to the Islands of the Blest, not seldom as couples (e.g. Achilles and Medea). But, predictably, their desire remains unsatisfied, because in Ishiguro’s fiction, life always fails to meet our ideals. Ishiguro crystallises the theme of love, care and fear of the inevitable separation by death in a transcultural myth, which comes at the intersection of the similarities between different mythologies and, in so doing, produces in readers recognition and estrangement in equal measure. In this respect, if Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day is an Everyman (Parkes 42), Axl and Beatrice are an Everycouple with touches of many cultural traditions coexisting transmodernly in a palimpsest-like fashion, where layers fold into one another and produce multiple refractions of presence and absence. It is as if Ishiguro were constructing a Jungian-like collective unconscious, by creating archetypal figures that represent patterns of behaviour we share universally as human beings. He does not do so, however, by producing a serendipitous connectivity and synchronicity between different experiences in space and time as, for example, David Mitchell does in Ghostwritten. Nor does he require a tour de force that stretches the limits of our ability to empathise with a diversity of local histories (Vermeulen 85). Rather, he creates figures in which every tradition blends into the others, lends salient points and tones down. The effect is of a misty, slightly off-kilter collective memory common to the “transcultural community to which we belong” (Epstein 328). According to Ateljevic, Transmodernity describes a cultural phase that “tries to connect the human race to a new shared story, which can be called a global relational consciousness” (203). Significantly, she explains the nature of this tendency by borrowing the Jungian concept of synchronicity, “whereby people sharing similar levels of consciousness are engaged in parallel intellectual universes around the globe, and articulate related ideas, but often express them in different wor(l)ds and terminologies” (Ateljevic 207). Ishiguro’s interest in collective memory; the dream-like quality of his story; and, finally, his use of myth (or allegory) in both characterisation and narrative structure also suggest parallels with Modernism. In the estimation of theorists of the transmodern – but also of literary critics who prefer the label of “Metamodernism” to describe recent developments in fiction (James and Seshagiri) – early twentieth-century aesthetics is especially relevant to contemporary literary practices. In this connection, new insights could probably be gained from a comparison between Modernist and Transmodern uses of mythology as the vehicle

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  147 of a collective, world consciousness, where different cultures in space and time resound and find a unifying principle in the face of “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot 478).

Mythopoesis: The Noble Lie Although Socrates is clearly committed to the virtues of truth, at several points of the Platonic dialogues he discusses the benefits of falsehood. This occurs most notably in Book III of The Republic, with the discussion of the “noble lie” (414d–415c). Here Socrates and Glaucon agree on the need of a creation story in order to found their utopian city. The citizens will be told that everything they have experienced up until this point has been a dream and that while they were dreaming, their real selves were being moulded underground and nurtured inside the earth, who is their mother, thus making them all related. The myth serves two purposes: it justifies the existence of different classes in the city, saying that different citizens have different metals in their soul (some gold, some silver, some bronze, some iron and some brass); and it unifies the city, by making the citizens think that they are all related and, for this reason, should live in harmony. Socrates explains that one should “attempt to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of the city, that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams” (III.414d, 94) and that, while they were dreaming, their souls, weapons and tools were shaped. In Nicholas Ryan Baima’s words: the noble lie attempts to cause an epistemic revolution in its citizens by telling them that their memories and experiences were really just a dream. The hope is that in doing this, the citizens will reject the things that they previously learned, and thus will be primed to absorb the content of the noble lie. (38) The virtue of falsehood emerges also in the discussion of the soul’s immortality. In the Phaedo upon confronting death, Socrates clings to certain beliefs about death and the destination of soul regardless of whether or not these beliefs are true. This demonstrates that the value of truth is limited in scope for Plato; sometimes the demands of living well require us to abandon the pursuit of truth and knowledge. (Baima 5) Beneficial falsehoods misled one about why something is right in order to get one to form a true belief about the action that should be pursued. This demonstrates the way in which, for Plato, practical concerns have a kind of primacy over theoretical ones.

148  Laura Colombino Similarly, Ishiguro claims that sometimes a community or a society has to be “pragmatic” (in Srebotnjak) and allow for fables – such as King Arthur’s mercifulness in The Buried Giant – if they foster a peaceful coexistence. Therefore, it is perhaps no accident that echoes of Plato can be found in The Buried Giant. For him, knowledge is about remembering (each soul existed before birth with the Form of the Good and perfect knowledge of Ideas), and so is truth for Ishiguro: it lies in the past we have half-forgotten and should recapture through the painful act of remembering. At the beginning of the story, Axl and Beatrice reflect on this very possibility, while they live in the warren as near outcasts within their own community. Their inquisitive minds, which interrogate the past, set them aside from their fellow Britons, whose memory has flattened into the ever-present of news, rumours and the constant erasure of truth. At the beginning of the novel, Axl and Beatrice decide their search can no longer be procrastinated: “There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay,” says Beatrice (Ishiguro 2015a, 19). Yet, as their story unfolds, we feel that deferral is precisely what their journey is about: not just because of the obstacles and difficulties they encounter along their way but also because their journey is a metaphor of their last years together, which Axl tries desperately to protract as long as possible. According to Socrates, the prolonging of a tale can be therapeutic: I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief —for the risk is a noble one— that this, or something like it, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale. (Plato 114d1–6) Although myth is a form of deception, as Plato argues in The Republic, its incantation is psychagogic, as it fosters a detour from reality which redirects our soul on the right path. Like Querig’s mist, which is a biopolitical form of manipulation and, at the same time, an act of care (in that it generates peace), Ishiguro’s beguiling myth of knights, warriors and dragons is, in Plato’s words, gennaion pseudos, a noble lie. Not a tale which will hold the community together in a utopian republic, but one which will tell a story about the difficult balance between truth and reconciliation, memory and forgetting. Ishiguro’s myth casts a spell on us more than a historical novel on a specific place, community or nation would be able to do. Telling the story of a single country would imply getting enmeshed in conflictual memories and rival interpretations of events. Therefore, Ishiguro chooses a diversion from reality, a mythological dream where collective memories are only half-recognisable to any single community as its own and where the setting may work metaphorically to suggest that “played out here was something that has been going on over and over in history”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  149 (Ishiguro in Srebotnjak n.p.). For Ishiguro, as for Plato, what has already happened will happen again because human nature is always the same.

Conclusion: The Transhistorical Ethics of The Buried Giant In his review of The Buried Giant, Jason Cowley notes: One of the mysteries of the book concerns the narrator. Who is the absent author? Who is in charge here? One is aware of a bashful, occasionally self-referring presence who seems directly to address the reader as if from a perspective far in the future. (n.p.) This voice, I have already argued, belongs to a national consciousness which, from the present of narration, addresses its own community – the one which is in its concerns and imaginative range, as butlers were for Stevens or the ancient Greeks for Plato. The references this voice makes to the English landscape and architecture are significant in this connection. The narrator tries to familiarise his audience with ancient Britain – “our country” (Ishiguro 2015a, 5) – by pointing out resemblances between the landscape of post-Arthurian England and the one observable “from the high windows of an English country house today” (87), or between the interior of a “longhouse” and a “rustic canteen many of you will have experienced in one institution or another” (80). It is not hard to see in these similes two intertextual references to the narrative settings of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, respectively. Nor is it wide of the mark to suppose that the “underground passages and covered corridors,” which connect shelters in the “sprawling warren” (Ishiguro 2015a, 4), will evoke in the reader’s mind the labyrinthine setting of The Unconsoled. All this suggests Ishiguro’s intent to draw his larger readership into the game as an audience undisclosed to the narrator. The experimentation of The Unconsoled stemmed from this one question: if the dreaming mind were a narrator, what kind of techniques would it use? So, one may presume that Ishiguro worked on a similar question to conceive his third-person narrator in The Buried Giant: what features, he must have wondered, should characterise a voice addressing its own community as well as – unintentionally – a number of others? The answer must have been that such a voice would slow down and crystallise narration into the time of myth. It would probably produce a dreamscape of misty collective memories relevant to an English audience as well as capable of resonating – in mysterious unpredictable ways – with different audiences in space and time. It would be apologetic and cautious, concerned not to hurt the feelings of its community while painting the picture of ancient Britain as a barbarous country. Finally, it would use a semi-mythical setting, because its community audience would love being

150  Laura Colombino deceived into thinking this story in terms of a metaphor for some other troubled community or nation in the recent past (the double-cross effect). Towards the end of the novel, a third-person narrative voice is heard again: Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history. You are in any case part of an ancient procession, and so it is always possible the giant’s cairn was erected to mark the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war. This aside, it is not easy to think of reasons for its standing. One can see why on lower ground our ancestors might have wished to commemorate a victory or a king. But why stack heavy stones to above a man’s height in so high and remote a place as this? (Ishiguro 2015a, 291) This time it is the voice of “history, which is basically a kind of memory” (Ishiguro in Lawson n.p.): it speaks from some time in the future, turning back its melancholy gaze to its intended readers and, inadvertently, to us all, who are eavesdropping on its tale. Chillingly, this audience – that extends transculturally and transhistorically – is described as part of the “ancient procession” of past war victims. Is this voice, we wonder, that of the angel of history, as described by Water Benjamin in the ninth thesis of “On the Concept of History” (1940)? Is Ishiguro’s narrator trying to “awaken the dead” (Benjamin 392) from the oblivion of time and build a monument from the strange archive of debris piling at his feet? If Wistan kills the dragon in order “to build a monument to kin slain long ago” (Ishiguro 2015a, 323), Ishiguro’s intent behind The Buried Giant may well be to erect his own metaphorical memorial to all the “innocents slaughtered in war” (291) and long forgotten. Read in this key, the novel becomes an imaginary act of remembrance in which an obliterated past of cruelty and oppression fights off the mist of oblivion and flashes up from the rubble of history to take on the shape of a haunting, eerily beautiful and emotionally troubling story. The gap in the historical reconstruction of post-Roman England offers Ishiguro an almost blank space to stage metaphorically all the repressed pasts which hide in the shadows of the memory of every nation. The “semi-mythical Dark Ages setting [is] a means of universalising the very particular conflicts —France after the occupation, the Rwandan genocide, the disintegration of Yugoslavia— whose characteristics [Ishiguro] wanted to crystallise” (Kite n.p.) in a transmodern shape with facets of many different cultures. Benjamin believed that the only way to “fight for the oppressed past” (396) is to reclaim it from the catastrophe of time “which keeps piling

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  151 wreckage upon wreckage” (392). Arresting this forward movement, he claims, produces a cessation of happening, a moment in which a certain past era takes on a visual configuration that makes sense in the present. Through this standing-still of the chain of events the oppressed past reemerges from the forgetfulness by which it has been covered, flashes up to our cognition and becomes part of the present time. Indeed, we may conclude that Ishiguro’s narrator is like Benjamin’s angel of history: while time moves forward, he stays and “awaken[s] the dead” from the ruins of time, “mak[ing] whole” – if only imaginatively – “what has been smashed” (Benjamin 392). In this metaphorical commemoration of all the traumatic pasts, there is “a drive of alterity, a metaphysical desire (Emmanuel Levinas) for the other” (Dussel 330), the victim who did not make it onto the record. This ethical imperative – so crucial to the transmodern paradigm – extends to the whole human community in temporal as much as spatial terms, lending the novel a distinctive elegiac tone. Ethical concerns have always been at the core of Ishiguro’s investigation but only on an individual basis; The Buried Giant engages instead with communities on a global scale, insisting on our relationality and casting a spell on the reader with a tale of understated transculturality and transhistorical resonance. Axl and Beatrice emerge from the warren underground as in one of the many myths of origins, then progress like pilgrims through a symbolic landscape of remembrance and oblivion – with its existential, ethical and biopolitical quagmires as well as its bogs of buried pasts – and finally land on the shore of regret and loss: all the while, as they proceed, we are haunted by the ghosts of mythical, literary and historical presences of various cultural origins, half emerging from the mist of our collective memory. Ishiguro’s post-Arthurian parable is less a going back to a half-historical tale embedded in a nation’s culture than a transmodern “Final Fantasy” (Rodríguez Magda n.p.), where figures and stories are merged and moulded anew by Ishiguro’s mythopoetic creation – not through a flamboyant, serendipitous connectivity, but in a subdued manner and with the sense that collective memory is an imperfect medium, which alternately reveals and deceives.

Works Cited Aliaga-Lavrijsen, Jessica. “Transmodern Reconfigurations of Territoriality, Defense, and Cultural Awareness in Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep.” Societies 8.4 (2018): 103. Accessed on 14/04/2019 at: DOI: 10.3390/soc8040103/. Web. Anonymous. “Kazuo Ishiguro Interview on The Buried Giant (2015).” Manufacturing Intellect 7 October 2017. Accessed on 11/03/2019 at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=9lnLKZQNqaE/. Web. ———. Beowulf: The Fight at Finnsburh. Trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland. Ed., Intro. and Notes Heather O’Donoghue. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. 350 B.C. Second Edition. Trans., Intro., Notes and Glossary Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. Print.

152  Laura Colombino Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (June 2013): 200–19. Print. Baima, Nicholas Ryan. “Truth, Knowledge, and the Value of False Belief in Plato.” Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations 484, 2015. Accessed on 15/03/2019 at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/484/. Web. Barker, Pat. The Silence of the Girls. London: Penguin, 2019. Print. Becker, Udo. The Continuum Encyclopedia of Symbols. New York and London: Continuum, 2000. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Vol. 4 (1936–1940). Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003. 389–400. Print. Cain, Sian. “Writer’s Indignation: Kazuo Ishiguro Rejects Claims of Genre Snobbery.” The Guardian Sunday 8 March 2015. Accessed on 14/03/2019 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/kazuo-ishiguro-rebuffs-genresnobbery/. Web. Chattopadhyay, Piya. “Kazuo Ishiguro: The Buried Giant.” Interview. The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Episode: The Agenda in the Summer: Kazuo Ishiguro, Part 1 22 July 2015. Accessed on 02/01/2019 at: www.tvo.org/video/programs/theagenda-with-steve-paikin/kazuo-ishiguro-the-buried-giant/. Web. Colombino, Laura. “Caring, Dwelling, Being: The Phenomenology of Vulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest. Eds Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. New York and London: Routledge, 2018: 203–22. Print. ———. “Idealism, Farce and International Heterotopias: Aristocracy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” Representations of British Aristocracy: 19th Century–Present. Eds Stefania Michelucci, Luisa Villa and Ian Duncan. Jefferson: McFarland’s, 2019. Forthcoming. Print. Cowley, Jason. “The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.” Review. Financial Times 27 February 2015. Accessed on 15/03/2019 at: www.ft.com/content/ e1accb18-bd0d-11e4-9902-00144feab7de/. Web. Crownshaw, Richard. “The Future of Memory: Introduction.” The Future of Memory. Eds Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. 3–15. Print. De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Print. Derrida, Jaques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995. Print. Dussel, Enrique. “Deconstruction of the Concept of ‘Tolerance’: From Intolerance to Solidarity.” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 11.3 (15 September 2004): 326–33. Print. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Warner, 1986. Print. Eliot, T.S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth. A Review of Ulysses, by James Joyce.” T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot. The Critical Edition. Vol. 2 The Perfect Critic, 1919–26. Eds Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP; London: Faber and Faber, 2014. 476–81. Print. Epstein, Mikhail. “Transculture: A Broad Way between Globalism and Multiculturalism.” Between Global Violence and the Ethics of Peace:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant  153 Philosophical Perspectives, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 68.1 (January 2009): 327–52. Accessed on 12/04/2019 at: www.jstor. org/stable/27739771/. Web Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. Oakland: U of California P, 2015. Print. Gaiman, Neil, and Kazuo Ishiguro. “Let’s Talk about Genre: Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in Conversation.” The New Statesman 4 June 2015. Accessed on 11/03/2019 at: www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishi guro-interview-literature-genre-machines-can-toil-they-can-t-imagine/. Web. Gibbons, Alison. “Postmodernism Is Dead. What Comes Next?” Times Literary Supplement 12 June 2017. Accessed on 15/03/2019 at: www.the-tls. co.uk/articles/public/ postmodernism-dead-comes-next/. Web Gombrich, Ernst H. “Personification.” Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500. Ed. Robert R. Bolgar. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. 247–57. Print. Greve, Gabi. “Meoto Fuufu and Enmusubi.” Daruma Museum Website 8 August 2010. Accessed on 14/03/2019 at: https://darumamuseum.blogspot. com/2010/02/meoto-and-enmusubi.html/. Web. Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber & Faber, 1982. Print. ———. An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. Print. ———. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. Print. ———. The Unconsoled. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. Print. ———. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Print. ———. The Buried Giant. London: Faber & Faber, 2015a. Print. ———. “Kazuo Ishiguro on Fiction, Allegory, and Metaphor.” Knopfdoubleday 19 February 2015b. Accessed on 17/02/2019 at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=y_oJvXl_c4k/. Web. ———. ノーベル文学賞：カズオ・イシグロさん　長崎出身の日系人 [“Nobel Prize in Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro. A Japanese Emigrant from Nagasaki.”] Mainichi Newspaper (5 October 2017). Accessed on 15/03/2019 at: www.youtube. com/watch?v=BwWwFb--8dc/. Web. Ishiguro, Kazuo, and Kenzaburo Oe. “A Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation.” 1989. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Eds Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2018. 52–65. Print. Ishiguro, Kazuo, and Michael Ondaatje. “Conversation at the Man Booker 50, Southbank Centre.” SoundCloud (8 July 2018). Accessed on 14/03/ 2019 at: https://soundcloud.com/southbankcentre/kazuo-ishiguro-michaelondaatje/. Web. James, David, and Urmila Seshagiri. “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution.” PMLA 129.1 (2014): 87–100. Print. Kurosawa, Akira, dir. Throne of Blood. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni, Ryūzō Kikushima. Producers Sōjirō Motoki and Akira Kurosawa. A Toho Studios Production. Released 15 January 1957 (Japan). Film. Lawson, Mark. “Mark Lawson Talks to Kazuo Ishiguro.” Broadcast Television Series, BBC Four 22/02/2015 20:30. Web. Kite, Lorien. “Ishiguro Explores Both the Past and the Need to Outlive It.” Financial Times 5 July 2017. Accessed on 09/08/2018 at: www.ft.com/content/ e356779e-a9e5-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97/. Web.

154  Laura Colombino Krasny, Michael. “Kazuo Ishiguro Returns to Fantasy with The Buried Giant.” Interview. KQED News 7 September 2015. Accessed on 14/03/2019 at: www.kqed.org/forum/201509071000/kazuo-ishiguro-returns-to-fantasywith-the-buried-giant/. Web. Mantel, Hilary, and Pat Barker. “Rewriting the Past. Conversation at the Man Booker 50, Southbank Centre.” Chaired by James Naughtie. SoundCloud 6 July 2018. Accessed on 14/03/2019 at: https://soundcloud.com/ southbankcentre/hilary-mantel-pat-barker-rewriting-the-past/. Web. Melion, Walter, and Bart M. Ramakers. “Personification and Allegory: Selves and Signs.” Arcade. Literature, the Humanities and the World. 2016. Accessed on 14/03/2019 at: https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/personification-andallegory-0#_ednref14/. Web. Miller, J. Hillis. For Derrida. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. Print. Mitchell, David. Ghostwritten. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999. Print. Newman, Barbara Jane. “Of Burnable Books and Buried Giants: Two Modes of Historical Fiction.” Postmedieval 7.2 (2016): 328–35. Print. Nicholls, Angus. Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Print. Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Remains of the Britons.” The New York Review of Books 2 April 2015. Accessed on 25/05/2018 at: www.nybooks.com/ articles/2015/04/02/ishiguro-remains-britons/. Web. Onega, Susana. “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm.” CounterText 3.3 (2017): 362–76. Print. Paris, Erna. Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000. Print. Parkes, Adam. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: A Reader’s Guide. New York and London: Continuum, 2001. Print. Paxson, James J. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. Plato. Phaedo. Second Edition. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. New York: Hackett, 1977. Print. Plato. The Republic of Plato. Second Edition. Trans., Notes and Interpretive Essay by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Print. Rodríguez Madga, Rosa María. “Transmoderenity: A New Paradigm.” 2011. Trans. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen, 2017. Accessed on 13/05/2019 at: http:// transmodern-theory.blogspot.com/. Web. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. Srebotnjak, Tina. “Author Kazuo Ishiguro Talks about his Latest Novel with Freelance Journalist Tina Srebotnjak.” Toronto Public Library’s YouTube channel 17 March 2015. Accessed on 15/03/2019 at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Wg88dMl2d6s/. Web. Sturken, Marita. “Narratives of Recovery: Repressed Memory as Cultural Memory.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds Mieke Bal and Jonathan Crewe. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College P, 1999. 231–45. Print. Vermeulen, Pieter. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2015. Print. Tyler, Royall. “Takasago.” Pining Wind: A Cycle of Noh Plays. 1978. Cornell East Asia Series 17. Accessed on 15/03/2019 at: http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/ japanese/ noh/TylTaka.html/. Web.

Part III

Migrancy and the Possibility of Reenchantment

7

A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit* Bárbara Arizti

Introduction It has never been easy to name the contemporary moment, let alone pinpoint the defining traits that make it different from what is, slowly but surely, shifting to the background of history. Defying the lack of temporal distance, Jeffrey J. Williams discusses the notion of the contemporary in art and literature in his article “The ‘Contemporary’ Moment: How Postmodernism Became Passé” (2014). As he reflects, “[b]y the 1970s, the idea of the modern had become timeworn, and critics and philosophers diagnosed a turn to the postmodern (n.p.).” “Now,” he adds, “we seem to be in the midst of another turn” (n.p.). According to Williams, although for some scholars the current moment is simply “an extension of the postmodern era,” there is a certain degree of consensus that postmodernism “is no longer adequate” (n.p.). Thus, as art historian Terry Smith rightly notes, “the best descriptions of postmodernity, like Fred Jameson’s, come from the early 1980s, and since then we’ve had 1989, 2001, 2008” (qtd. in Williams n.p.). Williams summarises the situation by asserting that, in general, literary critics agree that postmodernism is on the wane but are, however, unsure about how to define what comes after it. What analysts, critics and scholars from all fields of knowledge as well as the ordinary citizen strongly concur with is the fact that the contemporary moment is unfolding in the context of an unprecedented globalisation spurred by the media and information technologies. “There were, of course, international movements in art and culture before,” Williams explains, “but they gravitated to the centers of modernity, to major cities like New York, Paris, and London. Globalization suggests less vertical and more fluid relations among cultures” (n.p.). Whereas Williams does not venture to put forward a term for the emerging period and sticks instead to the rather bland idea of “the contemporary,” other critics have started to propose the word “Transmodernity” to name the new times. Faced with what she calls the “Grand Fact” – rather than the Grand Narrative – of Globalisation, Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda is one of those who resort

158  Bárbara Arizti to the term “Transmodernity” to label what she believes to be a true paradigm shift (2004, 5). Transmodernity, she states, is “the description of a globalised, rhizomatic, technological society, gestated from the first world, confronted with its others, while at the same time it penetrates and assumes them, and, second, the effort to transcend this hyperreal, relativistic enclosure” (3; my translation). Although, it seems, Rodríguez Magda did not exactly coin the term herself (2), she needs to be credited for having developed Transmodernity into a full philosophical theory, starting with her book La sonrisa de Saturno in the year 1989. In this chapter, I intend to analyse The Unknown Terrorist, by Tasmanian-born Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan, against the postulates of Transmodernity – drawing on Rodríguez Magda’s along with those of others also engaged in thinking through the present moment – in the specific context of post-9/11 Australia. Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist, published in 2006, is set in contemporary Sydney following a fictional failed terrorist attack. As the author explains in “Politics, Writing, Love,” the story is loosely based on his own personal experience. In 2004, Flanagan was frontpage news on his home island after writing an article in The Guardian on the logging of old-growth forests and exposing the collusion between a timber company and the Tasmanian government, entitled “Paradise lost — with Napalm.” As Flanagan recalled years later, Paul Lennon, the then Premier, “declared neither [him] nor [his] writings welcome in ‘the new Tasmania’” (2007, n.p.). What most shocked him, though, was how easily people were duped by the stories the media were running on the affair, with reckless disregard for the truth. It dawned on him that “what was happening to [him] was but a very small example of what was happening in a much larger, much more horrific way around the world” (n.p.). “It was clear,” Flanagan adds, “that endless lies were being told about Muslims, terrorists, Iraq, refugees, our own freedoms and liberties, and it was being done to protect power and money, and no one seemed to care” (n.p.). As a committed writer and a believer in the power of books to transform human consciousness, Flanagan set out to write a novel offering, as he explains in “Politics, Writing, Love,” a “mirror to what we had become” as well as “a defence of what it is to be human” (n.p.). The Unknown Terrorist, the author states, is “about love, about its inadequacy, about our hopeless need for it” (n.p.). More concretely, it is, again in the author’s own words, “a parable about four days in the life of a Sydney pole dancer who is mistakenly identified as a terrorist” (n.p.). The life of Gina Davies, a twenty-six-year-old stripper also known as the Doll, is ruined after a one-night stand with Tariq, an alleged Islamic terrorist she has just met. Richard Cody, a middle-aged television presenter – a regular at The Chairman’s Lounge, the club where Gina works – starts a smear campaign against her as a revenge for her refusing his sexual

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  159 advances. Cody, who is a very powerful and well-connected journalist, is in desperate need of a good story since he has just learnt about his impending demotion. After recognising Gina in a surveillance camera footage run on television, he makes and hosts a TV programme presenting her as “The Unknown Terrorist,” an ordinary “Aussie turning on their own” (Flanagan 2006, 107). Overnight, Gina becomes the most sought-after criminal in the whole country and ends up being accidentally shot down by a well-meaning policeman, right after she has killed Cody in the Chairman’s Lounge. As Flanagan acknowledges in the section “A Note on Sources” printed at the end of the novel (325), Gina’s story is drawn from Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead (1974). In what Williams has aptly described as a further example of literature “contempori[sing] itself, putting old stories in current skins,” (n.p.) Böll’s novel was, in turn, inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s The Criminal by Reason of Lost Honour: A True Story (1786), which is the story of an ordinary good man who turns into a criminal due to adverse external circumstances (Buchan n.p.). Similarly, the life of Böll’s Katharina Bloom, an honest twenty-seven-year-old housekeeper living in West Germany in the 1970s, takes an unexpected turn when she falls in love with a stranger on the run from the police after a bank robbery and is targeted by a crooked journalist she ends up killing. Both Katharina’s and Gina’s stories unfold in a climate of social and political fear, the Red Army Faction and the Al-Qaeda scares, respectively. Both Böll and Flanagan write their novels in defence of civil liberties and as a fierce denunciation of the role of unscrupulous media (Buchan n.p.). According to Michael Ashby, Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist is “a veritable novel ‘for our times’”; according to Jen Webb, it contributes to “a heightened awareness of the world within which we live” (6); and Michiko Kakutani describes it as a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world, a globalized world in which fear is a valued commodity for terrorists and governments alike, a world in which rumors and misinformation circumnavigate the globe in the flash of an eye, and narratives—constructed by politicians and tabloid reporters, and avidly consumed by a spectacle-hungry populace—replace facts and truths. (n.p.) More than thirty years mediate between the publication of Böll’s and Flanagan’s works, and the well-trodden world of the nineteen seventies, which saw the advent of Postmodernity having evolved – as mentioned before – into a more diffuse present moment that critics are still striving to define. In her 2011 article, “Transmodernidad: un nuevo paradigma,” Rodríguez Magda explains Transmodernity as a dialectical synthesis between the thesis of Modernity and the antithesis of Postmodernity

160  Bárbara Arizti (2004, 8). This idea can be better comprehended in visual terms through the ancient figure of the palimpsest, whose surface reveals, in this case, the palimpsestuous marriage of Modernity and Postmodernity, neither dominant, but still substantially contributing to the current design. The prefix “trans,” Rodríguez Magda elaborates, alludes to the need to transcend the crisis of Modernity, picking up on its unfinished ethical and political project – equality, justice, liberty, etc. – without losing sight of the postmodern critique of metanarratives, which laid bare “a whole series of fallacies and unquestioned pretentions” (7; my translation). In her view, the values endorsed by Modernity are no longer uncritically regarded as universal but are, all the same, of service as mere regulative ideals (7). In this article, Rodríguez Magda also mentions what can be described as a deeper, more ancient layer of the palimpsest: the traces of the premodern period, which survive in our contemporary societies in the form, among others, of the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism (3). In “The Crossroads of Transmodernity,” Rodríguez Magda describes Islamic terrorism as an uneasy mixture of “premodern tradition and modern, technological development” (2017, n.p.) that, as she argues in “Transmodernidad,” profits from our media and cybernetic society, borrowing “the same reticular form” (2004, 4; my translation), which is, Magda states, “what causes us a diffuse anguish, an unavoidable terror” (4; my translation). The metaphor of the net, instituting a kind of precarious but interconnected balance, is precisely what vertebrates our transmodern present (10). “We are no longer in the post but in the trans,” writes Rodríguez Magda. “There is no ‘outside’,” as all attempts to question the system, from anti-globalist movements to Islamic fundamentalism, remain wrapped in today’s totalising globalisation (11; my translation).

Transmodern Narratives of the Limit: The Dos and Don’ts of the Contemporary Moment In “The Crossroads of Transmodernity,” Rodríguez Magda undertakes the updating of a concept she has been working on for almost thirty years now. From the primarily descriptive tone of her 2011 article, she moves on to a more prescriptive, more combative approach, prompted by the latest circumstances and events that have shaken contemporary Western society out of its technological euphoria, such as the rise of angry nationalism, the upsurge of populist politics and the current migratory crisis. “The task of philosophy, of narrative, of art,” she states, “is to show [the] internal contradictions within what is considered to be a given Weltanschauung. To foreground the points of rupture, to perceive the anguish of their misalignments” (2017, n.p.); and the task ahead of us is formidable: “we must scan the paths of transgression […] promoting attempts at sustainable trans-development, fostering redistributive

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  161 justice and the sustainability of the planet” (n.p.). Alluding to the fact that postmodern rupturism has been readily engulfed by neoliberal globalisation, Rodríguez Magda defends that “we cannot use the same strategies that the market has already turned against us” (n.p.). Instead, she argues, we must recover the concepts deconstructed by postmodernism, “not as substantial and static realities but as operational simulacra to stop the devastation” (n.p.). In my opinion, one of Rodríguez Magda’s most interesting contributions in “The Crossroads of Transmodernity” is the distinction between what she calls “narratives of celebration” – those that reiterate and thus help consolidate the dominant discourse – and “narratives of the limit,” which act as the Jiminy Cricket of the emerging Zeitgeist: Our descriptive task cannot yield to the temptation of becoming a mere narrative of celebration, the festive aspect of our techno-euphoric society. We must delve deeper into the narrative of fracture, into the narrative of the limit, because the perverse process of totalisation employs both evident and subtle mechanisms of exclusion, crowds that appear on the screens only as backdrop, extras of desolation, whose real existence is irrelevant, the horror of their faces or their dismembered bodies feeds only the informational voracity, that uses our anguish as a spur for the audience, or encourages impossible discourses of diffuse solidarity. (n.p.) In his essay “What is the Contemporary?,” Giorgio Agamben describes contemporariness as “a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it” (41). The Italian philosopher draws on Nietzsche’s thesis on the culture of his own time in Untimely Meditations in order to affirm that the “truly contemporary” are those “who neither perfectly coincide with [their time] nor adjust themselves to its demands” and are thus better equipped to grasp it (Agamben 40). Agamben’s contemporaries – piercingly observing their own time (44) – must take upon themselves two complementary tasks. The first is the perception of the time’s darkness: Those who can call themselves contemporaries are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. (45) More subtly, the contemporary must strive to “perceive, in the darkness of the present, […] a light that, while directed towards us, infinitely distances itself from us,” like the light originating from remote galaxies, which reaches us already in the form of darkness (46). Perched between the “no more” and the “not yet” of the present moment (48), the truly

162  Bárbara Arizti contemporary exists in Messianic time, a “chronologically indeterminate” time (52) from which they can transform chronological time by “putting it in relation with other times” (53). By “dividing and interpolating time” (53), contemporaries make of the fracture “a meeting place […] an encounter between times and generations” (52). Read against Agamben’s theories, Rodríguez Magda’s work on Transmodernity, I would argue, seems to have evolved in line with his idea of contemporariness, toning down her more celebratory earlier approach to become more focussed on denouncing its limits. In the footsteps of Rodríguez Magda, this chapter tackles Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a narrative of the limit, or, borrowing from Joyce, as a “nicely polished looking-glass” (90) of our times, exposing the darkness of the contemporary moment, compounded of personal and political corruption, the excesses of counterterrorism, fake news and post-truths. The Unknown Terrorist is framed by two brief but very potent extradiegetic reflections on the idea of love. These reflections, together with the fact that the characters, especially Gina, the protagonist, often ponder on the nature of human relationships, invite an additional reading that puts the spotlight on what some thinkers consider to be another defining characteristic of the contemporary period – derived, in part, but not exclusively, from globalisation – namely, a growing emphasis on the relational. In “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?,” Irena Ateljevic takes up the arguments of Marc Luyckx Ghisi – former member of the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission under Jacques Delors – and Jeremy Rifkin – US economic and social theorist – about this emerging interest in the relational in contemporary societies. Luyckx explains Transmodernity, in Ateljievic’s words, as “a new paradigm of the world which communicates certain underlying values that humans rely on to make their judgements and decisions in all areas of their activities—economy, politics and everyday life” (202). Celebratory but cautious, Luyckx believes that we are transitioning to a transmodern way of thinking —even if it is “still a minority mindset” (Luyckx 1999, 974) – that implies “keeping the best of modernity but going beyond it” (972). More specifically, Modernity, a Eurocentric construct, does not provide “a common platform for dialogue between Western cultures and other cultures” (976). In contrast, Transmodernity – within a “genuinely global perspective” (974) – constitutes “a worldview that finds nourishment in complexity, in networking, in consensual decision-making and in environmentally sustainable strategies” (975). In a later article, Luyckx stands by his idea that “transmodernity is a deep change and we are in the midst of it” (Luyckx Ghisi 2010, 47). In his view, citizens around the globe are more and more aware that “if Humanity continues industrial, capitalist,

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  163 patriarchal growth and development strategies, it is in danger of collective suicide” (40). He mentions a series of emerging values that can act as an “extremely powerful motor of transformation”: “respect for Mother Nature, care for communities, for family relations, for internal growth, for other cultures, desire for another economic logic, etc.” (40). Interestingly, he explains the current turbulences in the world order as clashes between those – a large majority – who “feel uncomfortable in this strange period of transformation and retreat to premodern or modern intolerances” and those who follow the more tolerant transmodern epistemology (40). In a similar vein, Jeremy Rifkin speaks of a new global relational consciousness in The Empathic Civilization. He affirms that a new paradigm is a matter of life or death, and that tapping into our innate capacity for empathy constitutes the only way out of the current conundrum, that is to say, the emergence of a global consciousness in a world in crisis. Rifkin adopts a wide-ranging approach which includes the biological and cognitive sciences, literature and the arts, theology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology and communications theory (Rifkin 2) in order to prove that “we are a fundamentally empathic species,” thus challenging the belief that humankind is utilitarian and egocentric by nature (1). As he wonders: Is it possible that human beings are not inherently evil or intrinsically self-interested and materialistic, but are of a very different nature—an empathic one—and that all of the other drives that we have considered to be primary—aggression, violence, selfish behavior, acquisitiveness—are in fact secondary drives that flow from repression or denial of our most basic instinct? (18) For Rifkin, empathy is “a driving force in the unfolding of human history,” something overlooked by “our official chroniclers—the historians,” more focussed on recounting social conflict and wars (9). He elaborates on Hegel’s definition of happiness as “the blank pages of history” (qtd. in Rifkin 10) by affirming that we are not often told of “the other side of the human experience that speaks to our deep social nature and the evolution and extension of human affection and its impact on culture and society” (10). At the core of human history, Rifkin asserts, lies the paradox of the interdependence of empathy and entropy, since, ironic as it may seem, more complex energy-consuming civilisations encourage empathy in providing “an opportunity for greater exposure to and contact with other unique selves” (41). This is precisely the case of our highly interconnected global societies. The problem, Rifkin points out, “is that our growing empathic awareness has been made possible by an ever-greater consumption of the Earth’s energy and other resources, resulting in a dramatic deterioration of the

164  Bárbara Arizti health of the planet” (2). The crucial question ensues: “Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?” (3). Before turning to the analysis of Flanagan’s novel, I will finally refer to Christian Moraru’s argument in Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary, as he detects in some contemporary fiction a similar move towards relationality. Working in the field of North American literature but with an eye on the international panorama, Moraru coins the term “cosmodernism” to designate the relational shift he believes is now taking place within the “highly networked environment” of late globalisation (312). The very term chosen by Moraru attests to his attitude towards modernism and Modernity: still around, worth preserving, but in a basically revamped form. Modernity, as well as modernism, he writes, “was too self-absorbed […] to lay bare the risks embedded in the modern project” (43), while postmodernism only opened “another chapter in the narrative it sought to ‘deconstruct’” (310). In contrast, cosmodernism is an emerging paradigm, “a new imagination modality” (2) “of mapping out today’s world as a cultural geography of relationality” (5). “The cosmodern imaginary,” Moraru insists, witnesses “the rebirth of modern rationality as relationality” (39), a move away from egology – understood as the “subordination of others to the self’s pre-ordained reasonings and rationalizations” (57) – and towards ecology, in the broad sense of the word: [T]he ecology cosmodemism wants to be sets out to critique lateglobal egology. What I designate by ecology is a cultural environment organized around the self’s vital links to an “other” whose radical difference—whether racial or ethnic, linguistic, sex- or gender-based, and so forth—must be entertained as a possibility and cultivated in a world whose dominant thrust seems narcissistic, self-reproductive, standardizing, pushing others to reproduce “our” lifestyles and fantasies. In other words, the relatedness inherent in cosmodemism speaks to and upholds unabashedly an ethics of difference. (8) Consequently, for Moraru, cosmodernism is not only “an imaginary of worlded aesthetic relations” but also, importantly, “one of ethical relatedness” (313), holding out “the ethical imperative of togetherness” (304). Cosmodernism’s relationship with its own time, that of late globalisation, is one of “conjunction,” that is, a combination of reflection and critique: “Cosmodernism comes to the fore against the backdrop of late globalization as a sustained reflection of, and on, global issues and concerns, a thematization more than once critical of the historical moment on which it otherwise depends” (35).

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  165

The Unknown Terrorist as a Post-9/11 Novel: Exposing the Australian War on Terror Flanagan’s novel – set in the aftermath of the Bali bombings, where almost half of the victims were Australians – opens with news of a terrorist bomb scare in Sydney. Gina, the main character, inadvertently hears “a nearby radio [run] the same news it always seemed to run”: [T]he repetition of distant horror and local mundanity was calmly reassuring. More bombings in Baghdad, more water restrictions and more bushfires; another threat to attack Sydney on another alQa’ida website and another sportsman in another sex scandal, a late unconfirmed report that three unexploded bombs had been discovered at Sydney’s Homebush Stadium. (Flanagan 2006, 12) As the narrative progresses, though, Gina’s indifference turns into growing fear when she is caught on camera with Tariq, a young Middle Eastern man, who, only the day before, had rescued her best friend’s sixyear-old son from the sea and with whom she has just spent the night. Richard Cody’s fabricated story turns her into “a lunatic stripper about to blow God knows how many innocent people up” (263). “Since she has a low-life job, since she is connected to no one she can easily be promoted as a threat to everybody,” states Richard Carr in his analysis of the novel (65). Janet Wilson appositely argues that The Unknown Terrorist “is less about terrorism […] than about the distortions […] of counterterrorism that lead to the violation of citizens’ rights and the victimization of the innocent” (95). “The vision of counterterrorism out of control,” she adds, “constructs a negative dystopic image of contemporary Australia as an uncaring indifferent society” (95). That the focus of Flanagan’s work is on state-sponsored counterterrorism is confirmed by the fact that he dedicates his novel to David Hicks, an Australian citizen who spent six years in Guantanamo Bay Prison after the Twin Towers attacks and whose charges were dropped in the year 2012. The Unknown Terrorist neatly fits the category of “post-9/11 fiction.” This category comprises an expanding collection of novels that engage with the consequences of the September attacks and the ensuing so-called “war on terror,” a collection featuring several Australian authors, “despite the fact” – affirms Jen Webb – “that Australia has, government discourse to the contrary, been relatively free of the turmoil caused by September 11” (3). Carr describes the post-9/11 world, both in Australia and worldwide, in the following terms: Airports large and small adopted strict security measures; governments suspended individual rights as a means of aborting terrorist plots; national security alerts cautioned citizens against ignoring the

166  Bárbara Arizti potential threat lurking behind the apparently ordinary. Australia, half a world away from the fallen Towers, vigorously took up the war on terror. The terrorist was no longer the remote figure featured briefly in a news broadcast; he might be the bloke next door. (63; emphasis in the original) There has been, in fact, quite a lot of debate about whether the attacks, along with the states’ response, changed the world for ever. In Rodríguez Magda’s comparative table – built à la Ihab Hassan with a further column displaying Transmodernity – Modernity revolves around the “territory,” Postmodernity favours the “extraterritorial,” while the transmodern period is defined by “transborder ubiquity” (2011, 34), what can be constantly encountered across borders. This free-floating omnipresence perfectly applies to both the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism and the new forms of global war against terror. In the opinion of John Frow, both phenomena “did indeed inaugurate a genuine historical break” as they changed “the organisation of the modern state around secular and pluralistic Enlightenment principles” (qtd. in Webb 1). In spite of the fact that “the war against terror claim[ed] to be a war in defence of Modernity as a way of life” (Curtis x), the world that emerged after the September 9/11 events challenged what remained of modern values, especially that of liberty. Furthermore, the post-9/11 world reserved another nail for the coffin of postmodernity, since, I would argue with Gilles Lipovetsky, the “increasing insecurity of people’s lives has supplanted the carefree ‘postmodern’ attitude” (40) that characterised the nineteen seventies and eighties. This new form of insecurity is not merely a consequence of international terrorism but also of excessive state control. As many a critic has denounced, in line with Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, the “‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (Benjamin 257), for the state of exception has become “the hidden foundation on which the entire political system [rests]” (Agamben 1998, 12). Julia Boll turns to Ulrich Beck’s study of “risk awareness and the resulting politics of fear” so as to explain “global society’s increasing acceptance of the state of exception as the norm.” In her own words: “[Beck] observes that worldwide there are new security arrangements in place as a reaction to anticipated terror attacks […]. The anticipation of catastrophe changes the world, he says, and we have become members of a ‘world risk society’” (31). In his award-winning essay, “The Writer in a Time of Terror” (2006), Australian author Frank Moorhouse criticises post-9/11 Australian counter-terrorist legislation and its pernicious effect on civil liberties at the same time as he reflects on the role of writers in counteracting excessive control by the government. Likewise, The Unknown Terrorist brings under scrutiny the tension between national security and civil liberties. One of the main targets of Flanagan’s novel is precisely the

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  167 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which, together with the Federal Police, launches the citywide hunt for Gina. Gina feels betrayed rather than protected by the security forces and wishes that “she still lived in the Australia where such things didn’t happen” (Flanagan 2006, 186). Siv Harmsen, the ASIO man in the novel, is a particularly sinister character. When Tony Buchanan, working in Counter Terrorism, expresses his doubts about Gina being a terrorist, he answers: This story, you know, it serves a bigger purpose, the big picture, right? […] How bad would it look if we were wrong? What a victory for bin Laden’s bastards that would be! People out there don’t understand […] how we have a war between good and evil happening here. (271) Harmsen also alludes to the widespread practice of scaremongering: “People are fools […]. Unless they’re terrified, they won’t agree with what we do and why we have to do it” (272). As Carmen Lawrence puts it in Fear and Politics, “fear sells—and it gets governments elected”: “It seems that now, more than ever before, we are invited to feel insecure,” [as] “those who raise these fears hope that, by concocting and exaggerating threats to our survival, by pushing the panic button, they can control us” (126). After the conversation between the two members of the security forces in The Unknown Terrorist, the reader is left with the impression that the three unexploded bombs at Sydney Homebush Olympic Stadium were planted, that Tariq – Gina’s one night lover – was no real terrorist and that he was conveniently disposed of by the security forces themselves. Significantly, Carr refers to the New Australia as “a nation that has discovered a new focus for its fears and a new set of lies designed to quell them” (Carr 66).

In the Era of Post-truth According to Bruce Bennett, Flanagan’s main target in The Unknown Terrorist “is the Australian media whose journalists and their employees fall too readily for government propaganda and make their ratings-based reputations on vastly exaggerated projections of violent threats to people and property” (13). Richard Cody, the journalist behind Gina’s downfall, shares the same disregard for the truth as the main representatives of the intelligence system in the novel. Although at some point in the narrative he says that he despises “journalists who [make] things up” and hates “the phrase ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story’” (Flanagan 2006, 181), he ends up abiding by. In the words of the external narrator,

168  Bárbara Arizti he did not say to himself, ‘Given there is no real evidence this woman has ever done anything wrong, I will create an image of her as a monster.’ No, because that would have been a disgraceful act of cynicism, and no true cynic can afford to be anything other than genuine in his opinions. [… Cody] firmly believed that […] journalism […] was to use the truths you could discover to tell the story you believed to matter (181). Cody unethicality echoes Evan Davis’s definition of post-truth as a product of that special class of modern professional communicator: the people who are paid to craft messages and explain things to us. They turn out to be the worst offenders when it comes to mangling the message in a way that obscures the plain truth (x). Davis compares contemporary culture to that of the Soviet Union. As he argues, both share “a pervasive tendency of those in authority to overstate their case” and “bombard us with messages that are disconnected from reality as we see it” (xvii). The only difference between them, he categorically concludes, is that “in the Soviet case, it was the reality that was shameful [whereas] in ours, it is the communicators” (xvii). Along similar lines, James Ball summarises Harry Frankfurt’s argument about what he prefers to call “bullshit” rather than post-truth: “to tell a lie, you need to care about some form of absolute truth or falsehood, and increasingly public life is run by people who don’t care much either way—they care about their narrative” (6). When Jerry Mendes, a television network executive, rhetorically asks Cody: “These fuckwits who think it’s about the truth, you know where they go wrong?,” he patronisingly answers: “They think the truth has power […]. But it’s crap. People don’t want the truth, you know that, Richie?” (26). Ball devotes Part II of his monograph to investigating into the sources of the phenomenon and to enumerating a series of agents involved in the process of spreading bullshit: “politicians, old media, new media, fake media—and us, the consumers of news” (12). In like manner, besides targeting the media, Flanagan, in The Unknown Terrorist, emphasises the role of ordinary citizens in the triumph of fake news and post-truths. “Not everyone’s against you,” – a friend tells Gina while she shows her a copy of The Sydney Morning Herald denouncing “the climate of hysteria that could lead to innocent people being prosecuted” (Flanagan 2006, 161). Gina retorts, “No one cares about a shitty article lost in there. […] You’re the only person I know who reads [The Sydney Morning Herald]. Everyone else is like me—they just look at the Telegraph headlines and watch Richard Cody” (161). In “The Crossroads of Transmodernity,” Rodríguez Magda affirms that “from a gnoseological perspective we are in the era of the post-truth,

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  169 in the overcoming of referential theory, the signifier failing to find its meaning in the objective referent” (n.p.). As is well known, the Oxford Dictionaries chose the word “post-truth” as their word of the year 2016. In this respect, Alison Gibbons provides an interesting reflection – very much in the line of Rodríguez Magda’s idea of Transmodernity – on a term that she believes can help grasp “the radical cultural shifts that are underway”: While modernism was ultimately founded on a utopianism that upheld certain universal truths, postmodernism rejected and deconstructed the notion of truth altogether. The prefix “post-” paradoxically ends up drawing into closer focus the very concept it seeks to reject. The two elements of the word therefore form a kind of metonym for the current stance; “post” reflects a lingering postmodernist distrust, while “truth” remains an important touchstone. (Gibbons n.p.) The year 2016 witnessed Trump’s presidential election along with the Brexit referendum. Arron Banks, the British businessman who financed the Leave.EU campaign, is right in his analysis of the referendum outcome: “The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success” (qtd. in D’Ancona 17). In a recently published book, Post-truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (2017), English journalist Matthew D’Ancona highlights the two key ingredients of post-truth politics: “the triumph of the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex” (20). For him, the difference between post-truth and traditional lying lies in the reaction of the public: “Outrage gives way to indifference and, finally, to collusion” (26). In the Preface, D’Ancona confronts readers with two opposing attitudes: those who share a complete disregard for the truth and those who still care for “the central value of the Enlightenment” (5), and urges them to side with the second and to act (5). It is clear that reason, the pillar of Modernity conducive to the Grand Narrative of truth – already under suspicion in the times of Postmodernity – has currently lost its appeal. As a matter of fact, D’Ancona finds the intellectual roots of the post-truth era in postmodern philosophy (91). Although he openly acknowledges its important contributions – its emphasis on multiplicity, personal liberty and civil rights as well as the fact that it opened our eyes to subtle forms of power and hegemony – he also believes that “by questioning the very notion of objective reality [the postmodern school of philosophy] did much to corrode the notion of truth” (92), a notion that, for him, was “a gradual and hard-won achievement” (101). In “The Crossroads of Transmodernity,” Rodríguez Magda writes: “Even the items of news transmitted through the media show that they

170  Bárbara Arizti are not directed to reasoning but to emotion, so that they become more and more harangues or calls to lynching” (2017, n.p.). The philosopher’s words bear perfectly upon Flanagan’s novel and the fate of its main character. Gina moves in a world dominated by the media. The newspapers, the television, the radio and the countless plasma screens in shop windows, shopping centres and stations all feature the same story. Screens all over Sydney broadcast the same security camera footage of Gina and Tariq, the police raiding Tariq’s apartment block, a bearded man in Arabic dress and Gina characterised as the Black Widow in a private strip show, alongside images of the Twin Towers burning; the Bali, Madrid and London bombings; and the Homebush Stadium bomb scare. Hiding in a sleazy hotel, only hours before being killed, Gina watches Cody’s national exclusive on the identity of the unknown terrorist in his current affairs show, Undercurrent. Besides the already mentioned familiar images, the show offers an interview with a sickly old man, Gina’s father – who, the reader knows, abused her as a child – complaining that she has not visited him for years, that she is “cold as a fish” and that she does not know “how to love” (Flanagan 2006, 284). Hailed by the media – in the Althusserian sense – as a terrorist, Gina, as Webb notes, “performs the role; she steals a gun and murders the journalist who has stage-managed the event” (7). As Gina realises with terror: “They were morphing her pixel by pixel into what she wasn’t, the Black Widow, the dancer of death, the unknown terrorist” (261). In the end, Gina gives in and finds “a way of agreeing with the television, the radio, the newspapers, not fighting and denying them, not […] hoping to escape from them. […] One had to conform […] even with a new role she hated as much as that of terrorist” (172).

The Relational Turn and the Role of Empathy Like Böll’s Katharina Blum, The Unknown Terrorist is divided into short numbered sections. However, while the seventies text is written in a very factual, very restrained style (Buchan n.p.), with some doses of narrative self-consciousness, Flanagan’s novel is a baroque (Buchan n.p.) fast-paced thriller, “a suitable alarmist form for our paranoid, terror-infested global landscape,” in the opinion of Catherine Morley (85). In her view, “the meshing of lives […] flickering from one camera angle to another, is deliberately disorienting, with stories and frames of reference tumbling over into one another in messy entanglements” (86). More significantly for my analysis in this section of the chapter, the story of Gina Davies is framed by a short prologue and epilogue, both starting with the following sentence: “THE IDEA THAT LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH is a particularly painful one” (Flanagan 2006, 1, 315; capitals in the original). The prologue revolves around the figures of Jesus and Nietzsche, two dreamers the narrator connects with the figure of the

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  171 suicide bomber. Jesus, he provocatively writes, “is history’s first, but not last, example of a suicide bomber” (2), since, confronted with the failure of human life, he sacrificed “his own life to enable the future of those around him” (1). “Nietzsche wrote, ‘I’m not a man, I am dynamite’” and he was “promptly diagnosed as mad” after embracing “a cart horse being beaten brutally by its driver” (2). The narrator describes Nietzsche as “a man who sacrificed his life for a horse” (2), and, after affirming that “ideas always miss the point,” he proceeds to reveal Gina’s death (2), thus aligning her to some extent with the fate of the two historical figures. In fact, at the end of her life, Gina accepts her role as society’s scapegoat and sees her killing Cody and her own death as redeeming the fate of countless innocent women unfairly condemned (312). The epilogue deals with transcendence and puts forward the idea that “love is never enough, but it is all we have” (316). All main and secondary characters in the Unknown Terrorist – no matter their straightforward nastiness or ambiguity – long for meaningful personal relations. They are “glad simply to watch [their children] sleeping […] warm and safe” (73) at what is for them the happiest, most peaceful time of day (164); they crave for “company, the warmth and stimulation of sharing the everyday” (75); Cody wishes he could talk to (198) and hold (203) his estranged son; and Gina imagines herself caring for her still-born baby (240) and envies the look of love of an African mother she meets on the train while in hiding (224). Although her father’s opinions are obviously tinted by his vicious nature, Gina appears, de facto, as an ambivalent character. She is described as a good listener (46) and, judging by how she relates to her best friend’s six-year-old son, she can be affectionate and caring (99). Her life, though, is not ruled by any grand ideals and her obsession with money and designer clothes firmly aligns her with today’s consumerist society. In line with postmodern individualism, she leads a rather navel-gazing existence, giving “herself over to what was immediate and likeable” (11), allowing herself only “small dreams” (9) and “small happinesses” (11). As the narrator explains, Gina, described by the police as a loser, embraces “disappointment […] in order no longer to be disappointed” (9). She has a plan, though, and she’s only 300$ away from “making it work” (37). In a few days, she would have been able to pay the deposit on an apartment that would allow her to start a new life, ease out of pole dancing and take up a university course (57). As Webb puts it, “these are quite innocent longings, and entirely in line with contemporary social values” (7). Besides her materialism and self-indulgence, Gina is quite prejudiced herself. “They should shoot the bastards” (Flanagan 2006, 87), she says about terrorists, ironically anticipating her own death; and she yells at a woman in a burkah who walks into her: “Just fuck off back to wherever you’re from” (93), although she immediately repents having lost her

172  Bárbara Arizti temper (94). Gina is quite a reflective person, aware that consumerism always leaves you wanting (60) and longing for “dreams, feelings and sensations […] no one had ever paid cash for” (56). She is also usually generous with the underprivileged (61). Already wanted by the police as Tariq’s accomplice, she comes upon a beggar and thinks of helping her, partly out of empathy but partly because she believes that if she helps the beggar, “then someone might help her”: “somehow in helping the beggar was the solution to her own problems” (123). Gina’s reaction brings to mind Rifkin’s belief that empathy makes us aware of our shared vulnerability at the same time as it reinforces and deepens our own sense of selfhood. We see aspects of ourselves “in the struggle of others and extend empathic awareness” (Rifkin 41). In the end, however, the woman’s smell and her pus-filled sores deter Gina and she walks away: “her revulsion had […] abruptly overwhelmed her empathy,” the narrator explains (124). The day before her death, Gina undergoes an epiphany: Wasn’t she, after all, the same? Hadn’t she that very morning ignored the beggar with the raw face? And only a few hours ago had she not rushed past and old woman being tormented by kids? To her horror she saw that, as she had never cared or wondered or questioned, nor now would anyone care or wonder or question the stories they heard about her. As she had helped no one, how could she now expect anyone to help her? And as she had in a chorus condemned others, how could she be surprised that others in a chorus were now condemning her? And she saw that all the people following the story of “the pole dancing terrorist” were simply behaving as she had. (186–7) Borrowing Webb’s words, Gina “discovers empathy, and realises the effects of racism and abuse, only when she becomes the target of these actions and attitudes, and too late to atone or to make any changes” (8). To my mind, Michael Rothberg’s concept of the “implicated subject” comes in handy in order to understand the character of Gina as well as Flanagan’s crusade against indifference. As Rothberg explains, an implicated subject is neither simply perpetrator nor victim, though potentially either or both. […]. We are more than bystanders and something other than direct perpetrators in the violence of global capital. Rather, […] we are implicated subjects, beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously. (xv) For the purpose of my argument, Gina’s epiphany is a further proof of the importance of relatedness and empathy in Flanagan’s novel.

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  173 Although too late in her case, it dawns on her that we are all connected and that indifference kills, perhaps even more than terrorism. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler argues in favour of highlighting relational ties as a way of promoting ethical responsibility: If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the ‘we’ is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against; or, rather, we can argue against it, but we would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation. (22–23) Echoing this, Flanagan wonders in “Politics, Writing, Love”: “Could it be that the world also advances through the countless acts of individual goodness and kindness made every day by numberless everyday people?” (2007, n.p.). It is true, as Rifkin says in The Empathic Civilization, that the “hundreds of small acts of kindness and generosity” that characterise the everyday world are not newsworthy, unlike the story of Sydney’s unknown terrorist, but it also certain that they constitute the “very means by which we create social life and advance civilization” (10).

Conclusion Briefly concluding, I have here read The Unknown Terrorist as a narrative of the limit, or in Rodríguez Magda’s terms, as a narrative “of resistance,” which might enable the reconstruction of “those regulative ideals in which to recognise ourselves” and thus help “preserve that fragile life that we are as a planet and as individuals” (2017, n.p.). As a product of Transmodernity in the weak, chronological sense of the term, The Unknown Terrorist mirrors the excesses of the post-9/11 world and the triumph of barefaced relativism in the media in the context of contemporary Australia. Notwithstanding the fact that the threats of Islamic terrorism “are not myths or imaginings,” as Bennett puts it (14), Flanagan’s novel provides necessary insights into the real dangers both for society and for the individual of falling prey to disproportionate unscrupulous state control. Gina, the main character, falls victim of fake news and post-truths spread by immoral media but also encouraged by general widespread indifference towards our neighbours and towards the truth. Perhaps more significantly, the novel meets the requirements of Rodríguez Magda’s transmodern paradigm in that it appears as a dialectical synthesis between the now questioned grand narratives of Modernity and the navel-gazing solipsism of some forms of Postmodernity. “We cannot, for reasons of mere subsistence, remain in relativism, but neither must we resurrect absolute beliefs,” defends Rodríguez Magda (2017, n.p.). More resolutely, the philosopher Simon Blackburn

174  Bárbara Arizti suggests taking “the post-modernist inverted commas off things that ought to matter to us” (qtd. in D’Ancona 108). Through the characters’ deeper yearnings and the evolution of the protagonist, the novel promotes a return to the basics of what makes us human, namely, in the words of Judith Butler in Precarious Life, our “inevitable interdependency” (xii), contributing in this manner to the cosmodern imaginary of relationality as described by Moraru. In The Unknown Terrorist Flanagan shows us the reverse of empathy, care and connection – values believed to be gaining ground by Luyckx and Rifkin – in the form of a parable on the contemporary moment’s dead-ends. The novel’s focal point is, certainly, on “the darkness of the present,” borrowing Agamben’s phrase (2008, 46). However, like the Italian philosopher’s true contemporaries, Flanagan manages to catch a glimpse of the light that there is among the century’s shadows, even if this light is not yet bright enough to dispel them.

Note * The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (codes FFI2015-65775-P and FFI2017-84258-P); and the Government of Aragón and the ERDF 2014– 2020 programme “Building Europe from Aragón” (code H03_17R), for the writing of this chapter.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 1995. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print. ———. “What is the Contemporary?” 2008. What is an Apparatus? Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. 39–54. Print. Ashby, Michael. “The Unknown Terrorist.” Eureka Street 30 October 2006. Accessed on 12/07/2018 at: www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=17 14/. Web. Ateljievic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (June 2013): 200–19. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 1955. Illuminations. Ed. and Intro. Hannah Arednt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64. Print. Bennett, Bruce. “Of Spies and Terrorists: Australian Fiction After 9/11.” Asiatic 2.1 (June 2008): 10–20. Print. Ball, James. Post-truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World. London: Biteback Publishing, 2017. Print. Boll, Julia. The New War Plays: From Kane to Harris. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Print. Böll, Heinrich. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Original Title: Die Verlorene Ehre der Kathatina Blum. 1974. Trans. Leila Vennewitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1994. Print.

Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist  175 Buchan, James. “The Pursuit of Honour: A Review of The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan.” The Guardian 21 April 2007. Accessed on 17/07/2018 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview 19/. Web. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004. Print. Carr, Richard. “A World of … Risk, Passion, Intensity, and Tragedy”: The Post9/11 Australian Novel.” Antipodes 23.1. Special Issue: Fear in Australian Literature and Film (June 2009): 63–66. Accessed on 30/01/2018 at: www. jstor.org/stable/41957762/. Web. Curtis, Neil. War and Social Theory. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print. D’Ancona, Matthew. Post-truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. London: Ebury Press, 2017. Print. Davies, Evan. Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About lt. London: Little, Brown, 2017. Print. Flanagan, Richard. “Paradise Lost – with Napalm.” The Guardian 21 April 2004. Accessed on 12/07/2018 at: www.theguardian.com/world/2004/ apr/21/australia.environment/. Web. ———. The Unknown Terrorist. London: Atlantic Books, 2006. Print. ———. “Politics, Writing, Love.” The Monthly (October 2007). Accessed on 12/07/2018 at: www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2007/october/1191293511/ richard-flanagan/politics-writing-love/. Web. Gibbons, Alison. “Postmodernism is Dead. What Comes Next?” The Times Literary Supplement 12 June 2017. Accessed on 29/01/2019 at: www.the-tls. co.uk/articles/public/postmodernism-dead-comes-next/. Web. Joyce, James. Letter to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906. Selected Letters. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: A Viking Compass Book, 1975. 90. Kakutani, Michiko. “A Misunderstanding, and a Simple Life Descends Into a Nightmare.” The New York Times 8 May 2007. Accessed on 12/07/2018 at: www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/books/08kaku.html/. Web. Lawrence, Carmen. Fear and Politics. Carlton North, VIC: Scribe, 2006. Print. Lipovetsky, Gilles. Hypermodern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Print. Luyckx, Marc. “The Transmodern Hypothesis: Towards a Dialogue of Cultures.” Futures 31 (November 1999): 971–82. Print. Luyckx Ghisi, Marc. “Towards a Transmodern Transformation of Our Global Society: European Challenges and Opportunities.” Journal of Futures Studies 15.1 (September 2010): 39–48. Print. Moorhouse, Frank. “The Writer in a Time of Terror.” Griffith Review: Edition 14: The Trouble With Paradise (2006). Accessed on 23/07/2018 at: griffithreview.com/edition-14-the-trouble-with-paradise/the-writer-in-a-timeof-terror/. Web. Moraru, Christian. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Print. Morley, Catherine. “The End of Innocence: Tales of Terror After 9/11.” Review of International American Studies 3.3–4.1 (Winter 2008 / Spring 2009): 82–93. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations. 1873–76. Trans. R. J. Hollindale. Ed Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

176  Bárbara Arizti Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. Print. Riley, James. “What is the Contemporary?” Contemporaries: University of Cambridge Contemporary Research Group 15 March 2013. Accessed on 25/01/ 2019 at: www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/contemporary/?p=257/. Web. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. La sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989. Print. ———. Transmodernidad. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2004. Print. ———. “Transmodernidad: un nuevo paradigma.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.1 (2011): 1–13. Accessed on 18/07/2018 at: escholarship.org/uc/item/57c8s9gr/. Web. ———. “The Crossroads of Transmodernity.” Keynote lecture delivered at the International Conference on Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. Trans. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen and Susana Onega. University of Zaragoza, 26 April 2017. Accessed on 23/05/2018 at: www. academia.edu/33683289/_The_Crossroads_of_Transmodernity/. Web. Rothberg, Michael. “Preface: Beyond Tancred and Clorinda – Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. xi–xviii. Print. Schiller, Friedrich. The Criminal by Reason of Lost Honour: A True Story. 1786. Accessed on 23/05/2018 at: https://archive.org/stream/talesfromgermanc00 oxenrich#page/34/mode/2up/. Web. Webb, Jen. “Distant Context, Local Colour: Australian ‘post September 11’ Fiction.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Special Issue: Common Readers and Cultural Critics (August 2010): 1–14. Accessed on 20/07/2018 at: www.openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index. php/JASAL/article/view/9622/9511/. Web. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The ‘Contemporary’ Moment: How Postmodernism Became Passé.” The Chronicle Review. Chronicle of Higher Education 61.15 (8 December 2014). Accessed on 22/02/2019 at: www.chronicle.com/article/ The-Contemporary-Moment/150347/. Web. Wilson, Janet. “The Contemporary Terrorist Novel and Religious Fundamentalism: Richard Flanagan, Mohsin Hamid, Orhan Pamuk.” Burning Books: Negotiations between Fundamentalism and Literature. Eds. Catherine Pesso-Miquel and Klaus Stierstorfer. New York: AMS Press, Inc. 91–107. Print.

8

Diversity, Singularity, Reenchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Merve Sarıkaya-Şen I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart. Nâzım Hikmet (“On the Matter of Romeo and Juliet” 1994, 145)

After the publication to wide acclaim of her Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things (1997),1 the recent release of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) has aroused diverse interests among her readers. During the two intervening decades Roy wrote numerous essays on the destruction of ecosystems, the violation of human rights, the catastrophic effects of capitalism and globalisation and the bleak side of democracy in India.2 As a civil rights activist with political awareness, sensitivity to social injustice and environmental consciousness, Roy has reached a wide and varied audience with her prose essays. However, in the aftermath of the election of the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi as Indian Prime Minister in 2004, Roy decided to turn to fictional writing. In an interview with Tim Lewis, she explains that her return to fiction stemmed from her sense of loss against such divisive forces as Modi: For so many years, I’d been trying to yell from the rooftops about it and it was absolutely a sense of abject defeat and abject despair. And the choice was to get into bed and sleep for five years, or to really concentrate on this book [The Ministry of Utmost Happiness]. I didn’t feel like writing any more essays, although I did write one, but I felt like everything I had to say had been said. It was time to accept defeat. (Lewis n.p.) Although Roy regards her own efforts as defeat and disillusionment, the publication of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has kindled hopes that a better future for India is possible.

178  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy presents the possibility of a better world by taking strength from solidarity, interconnectedness, love and reenchantment through the interdependent stories of Anjum, a hijra – a hermaphrodite and later a transwoman – and Tilo, an architect-turned-activist. There are basically three parts in the novel. In the first part consisting of the first six chapters, we hear the story of Anjum leaving her family to live in the House of Dreams, a residence for transwomen where she tries to heal her wounds by adopting a baby daughter named Zainab and taking strength from maternal love. After getting caught in the Gujarat pogrom, however, she moves from the House of Dreams to a graveyard and builds there the Jannat Guest House3 to provide the dispossessed with a re-enchanted world in which people rely on their emotional and spiritual sources rather than pure rationality as an act of solidarity. While reading Anjum’s story, the readers witness the havoc in India, including the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster and the massacres of the Sikhs in 1984; the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002; and the political protests in Jantar Mantar revolving around Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal,4 two real-life figures from the “India against Corruption” movement. In the second part, consisting of Chapters 7–9, we hear the story of Tilo, a persona non grata in India trying to move on by drawing on the power of interconnectedness and romantic love. Her story revolves around her relationships with Garson Hobart, Naga and Musa. Tilo loves Musa, who later becomes a Kashmiri militant. She later marries Naga, the son of a diplomat, and she finally becomes Garson Hobart’s tenant when she tries to hide away from the police because she has unofficially adopted a baby girl named Miss Jebeen the Second, after Musa’s baby girl, who was killed with her mother during a civil protest. Both the first six chapters dealing with Anjum’s fictional story and the chapters presenting Tilo’s fictional story as well as the Kashmir struggle for independence explore the chaotic atmosphere of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century India. In the final part – the last three chapters – Roy brings together Anjum’s and Tilo’s stories when Tilo decides to move to Anjum’s Jannat Guest House and build her own school there. The novel displays emotional shattering, suffering and resilience not only through the traditional author-narrator’s voice but also through newspaper clippings, diary entries, epitaphs, poems, song lyrics and testimonies. Thus, the structure of the novel mirrors the chaos surrounding the characters in the fragmented world of India. As this summary makes clear, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is concerned with diverse worlds – including those of hijras, adopted babies, militants, political activists and victims of religious and political tensions – and negotiates a politics of the biosphere that eclipses (post)essentialist contradictions and boundaries of gender, religion and politics. The novel thereby partly qualifies as a transmodern narrative giving voice to the subaltern subjects and presenting their

Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness  179 interconnectedness within a radically tolerant and re-enchanted world. The term “Transmodernity” was coined by the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda in 1989 in order to account for the paradigm shift that she felt was taking place around the time she was writing. As she later stated, Transmodernity corresponds to “a true paradigm that can illuminate gnoseological, sociological, ethical and aesthetic aspects of our present” (2017a, n.p.), and is basically characterised by “transformation, transience, and accelerated time” (2017b, 14). Drawing on Rodríguez Magda’s arguments, many academics in different fields have elaborated on different aspects of transmodern philosophy. For example, Ronnie Lessem and Alexander Schieffer argue that what we should do is “listen […], in the context of mutually assured diversity, to what we term diverse ‘worlds’” (285; emphasis in the original). Similarly, Irena Ateljevic insists that Transmodernity presents a diversified biosphere in which “the grounds of shared risk, vulnerability, and interconnectedness of all humans occupying our Earth are acknowledged” (216). From a related perspective, the Belgian philosopher and mathematician Marc Luyckx Ghisi contends that we need to place more emphasis on our spiritual, emotional and intuitional sources rather than on pure rationality as underscored by Modernity (41–42). Although restrictive and open to criticism, these basic definitions of transmodern discourse provide a useful framework for the understanding of Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and its chronicling of precarious and porous lives inextricably connected with each other in a world promising possible happiness. In the following pages, I will attempt to demonstrate that such basic tenets of Transmodernity as diversity, interconnectedness, radical tolerance and reenchantment impregnate the characterisation and thematisation of the novel. I will first envisage how the novel listens to precarious lives, including that of wounded animals and hijras in opposition to capitalist and consumerist practices, thus building a transmodern cultural world and presenting it as indispensable and urgent for Indian culture. I shall also try to show that, by so doing, the novel addresses the individual singularities of the contemporary religious and political victims in India. I will finally focus on the narrative form of the novel and discuss how Roy tries to achieve truthful communication through the combination of fictional and non-fictional elements.

“To the Unconsoled”: Listening to Diverse Worlds In Rodríguez Madga and a spate of other academics’ views, from the nineteen-eighties onwards there occurred a paradigm shift towards Transmodernity involving the absorption and transcendence of Modernity and Postmodernity and signalling a more hopeful and promising perception of our world.5 Reflecting on the demise of the postmodern

180  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen period and postmodernist culture, Mikhail Epstein suggests that we use the prefix “trans-” to describe our age: The last third of the twentieth century developed under the sign of “post,” which signalled the demise of such concepts of modernity as “truth” and “objectivity,” “soul” and “subjectivity,” “utopia” and “ideality,” “primary origin” and “originality,” “sincerity” and “sentimentality.” All of these concepts are now being reborn in the form of “trans-subjectivity,” “trans-idealism,” “trans-utopianism,” “trans-originality,” “trans-lyricism,” “trans-sentimentality,” etc. (546–47) Our present world, therefore, is “trans-,” signifying a more idealistic, original, lyrical and sentimental realm compared to previous ages. From a related viewpoint, Ateljevic places the move towards transmodern philosophy “in the context of the post-9/11 world, which has climaxed in a global crisis of wars, terrorism, climate change, over-consumerism, increasing gaps between the rich and poor, social alienation, and individual feelings of pressure, anxieties, chaos and powerlessness worldwide” (200). She argues that Transmodernity emerged as a “fresh and promising move towards a new era of humanity” (201) and “a hope for [the] human race” (203) suggestive of a more positive and reassuring outlook on our present and future. Although similar to Ateljevic’s optimism, Latin-American and postcolonial critic Enrique Dussel’s transmodern philosophy centres on the effects of globalisation and the ethics of liberation. In his planetary vision, Dussel argues that since the civilising projects of Eurocentrism have totally destroyed humankind and the ecology of the planet, the only solution is to live with otherness or alterity, a situation rendered possible in a “multipolar or transmodern cultural world, which protects life and encourages humans to live together instead of simply facilitating profit, private appropriations and personal benefits” (2006, 491; emphasis in the original). Only when we listen to “the experience of the victims: the ideas of those who have been invaded and dominated and who have not had the chance to express themselves” can we reach an alternative history of the world (491–92). Giving voice to victimised and negated cultures will help them return to “their status as actors in the history of the world-system” because they have already been active in the world history although negated by the hegemony of European discourse (Dussel 2002, 224). Dussel explains that Chinese, Japanese, more generally Far Eastern, Islamic and Hindustani cultures were regarded as contemptible, unimportant and inadequate, and that such treatment has only resulted in their thriving in silence in the shadows of the so-called modernised cultures in Europe (2011, 17–18). Dedicated to “the unconsoled,” The Ministry of Utmost Happiness presents a transmodern cultural world which refuses to facilitate profit

Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness  181 and tends to protect life against capitalist and consumer practices by paying homage to those left without consolation, including animals, and privileging their existence in Indian culture. The novel opens with an unsettling cry against environmental destruction and hints at the (im)possibility of hampering the annihilation of the ecosystem. A variety of animals ranging from flying foxes to bats, crows, sparrows and vultures accompany the twilight in a seemingly romantic nature. At the same time, however, vultures have been wiped out because of the diclofenac poisoning used in feeding cattle with the aim of developing their muscles and raising the production of milk. The cattle become the bait for vultures and cause their death over a period of time, a deadly outcome of consumerism: “As cattle turned into better dairy machines […] vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired” and, unfortunately, “they tumbled of their branches, dead” (Roy 2017, 2; emphasis in the original). In the following pages of the novel, we see Roy’s similar worries about ecological destruction and criticism against the practices of consumerist society in India. For example, Tilo questions genetic modification when she says: “one is never really sure whether a bull is a dog […]. But perhaps this is the path to genuine modernity?” (299). Echoing Ateljevic’s and Dussel’s disapproval of the destruction of the ecosystem, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness interrogates global crises including over-consumerism and civilising projects that annihilate life on earth. The only solution the novel offers against such global crises is to collectively care for survival through a respect for all types of otherness and difference, including the lives of hijras. Neither male nor female but with elements of both sexes, hijras adopt some aspects of female behaviour. One of the most important defining characteristics of hijras is their devotion to and identification with Mother Goddess Bahuchara Mata, a fact that signposts “their special place in Indian society and the traditional belief in their power to curse or confer blessings on male infants” (Nanda 237). Throughout Indian history, however, hijras have been treated inconstantly. In the Mughal Period, they were so highly respected that they could work as advisors to the politicians, administrators and guardians of the harems, but with the dawn of British colonialism, from the eighteenth century onwards, they were repulsed by colonial rule and denied civil rights, the effects of which can still be observed in their exposition to extreme social isolation, humiliation and deprivation (Michelraj 17–19). In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy presents the sharp historical and political shift in the status of hijras with the aim of attending to their past and present wounds. Anjum and her hijra friends face physical abuse and violence throughout the novel. For example, they are “kicked on their backsides as though they were circus clowns” (Roy 2017, 35). Besides, they symbolise the chaotic atmosphere of India itself. As one of Anjum’s hijra friends

182  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen says: “The riot is inside us [hijras]. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t” (23; emphasis in the original). Instead of the usual description of Partition as the division of India and Pakistan, the novel presents an analogy with hijras torn between two identities. Thus, the novel provides the possibility of an alternative history of India still suffering from the wounds of Partition that echoes Dussel’s call to listen to the experience of the victims in order to have an alternative historical reading of the world. This approach to history echoes Walter Benjamin’s assertion that “not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge” (260). With a Benjaminian echo, although negated and disdained by the hegemony of colonial rule, hijras have been active in Indian history and culture as is acknowledged in the novel. At the same time, the hijra community in the novel is the source of hope for a better India. As the Ustad in the House of Dreams states, hijras are “blessed people” (Roy 2017, 53). Similarly, Anjum learns that a hijra is “a Body in which a Holy Soul lives” because hijras are “beloved of the Almighty” (27). In keeping with this, Anjum does not recoil at the sight of the cruel treatment and abusive behaviour of the people around but rather behaves as a tree would: “she let the hurt blow through her branches like a breeze and used the music of her rustling leaves as balm to ease the pain” (3).6 The similarity between Anjum’s resilience, which is her internal mechanism to cope with adversity, and a tree’s inherent power of endurance echoes Roy’s environmental consciousness. Besides, the novel tends to provide consolation for the present wounds of hijras exposed to painful treatment by the dominant layers of society. The novel also tries to situate everyone on the same footing, especially through the portrayal of Anjum. As Anjum herself states, she is “a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing” (4). Anjum’s description of herself as the embodiment of everybody and everything is in line with Ateljevic’s argument that Transmodernity defends “biosphere politics without inherent domination and superiority of one over another,” whereby “the grounds of shared risk, vulnerability, and interconnectedness of all humans occupying our Earth are acknowledged” (216). Similarly, Dussel calls for “a transition; from the imposition of the dominating ego on the ‘Other’ to the intersubjective construction of the reasons of everyone,” instead of a Eurocentric, exclusive and violent world (2006, 501). In this sense, the novel seems to be calling for a transition from the interests of singular individuals to the motives of everyone through Anjum’s story. At the same time, the novel presents singular localities, such as those of religious and political marginalities in India under the effects of globally traumatising events, such as 9/11, and insists on considering their sufferings ethically and politically, as I will discuss below.

Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness  183

Individual Singularities: Religious and Political Victims in India Politically and culturally important events which have left world-wide marks such as 9/11 invade the lives of hijras and other characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. On the evening of 11 September 2001, Anjum and her hijra friends watched the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers live on TV (Roy 2017, 40). Besides killing thousands and traumatising all US citizens as well as the world in general, the 9/11 attacks triggered a chain of events that have changed millions of lives worldwide ever since. Given that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers were believed to be responsible for the attacks, the United States of America launched a war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan which had been protecting and hosting bin Laden and his supporters for nearly a month after the attacks. Therefore, Afghan families had to flee their homeland and look for shelter in various places such as India, the effects of which are traceable in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. As the narrator notes, “[b]y December Old Delhi was flooded with Afghan families fleeing warplanes […] nobody really understood exactly what those poor people had to do with the tall buildings in America” (40–41). The fact that Afghan people had to move their homes and live in India is a telling example of the interconnectedness of human beings proposed by transmodern philosophy: what happens in the United States has an influence over Afghanistan and India. Moreover, the status of Afghan Muslims was a “boon to many in India” because they believed that “India should declare itself a Hindu one” (41). Therefore, the Poet-Prime Minister, the leader of Hindu nationalism, gives a provocative speech referring to the terrorist attacks in New York: “The Mussalman [sic], he doesn’t like the ‘Other’ […]. His Faith he wants to spread through Terror.” (41). He adds that “what had happened in America could easily happen in India,” a warning and vexation against the existence of the Muslims in India (42). The Prime Minister’s speech also shows that anger against Muslims is not limited to the United States, the home of the attacks, but is very much a global issue. However, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness envisages 9/11 not so much in its globally devastating effects but as a means to consider the individuals in their singularity, especially with regard to their sufferings because of their religious and political status. For example, instead of dealing with Islamic segregation on a global scale, the novel explores the situation of Muslims in India on an individual basis by looking into the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place in the Indian state of Gujarat governed by Chief Minister Modi in 2002. Following a clash between Muslim vendors and Hindus at a railway station in Gujarat, fifty-nine Hindus were burnt to death. Immediately held responsible for their atrocious demise, the Muslim community was exposed to the violent

184  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen revenge of Hindu people including rape, looting and killing over three months, which left nearly two thousand people dead – mostly Muslims – approximately three thousand injured, and tens of thousands homeless (Mishra n.p.). In the novel, Roy presents the traumatic effects of the riots through Anjum and her travel companion Zakir Mian’s journey to Ahmedabad in Gujarat, where Zakir Mian is murdered and Anjum undergoes a brutal treatment at the hands of Hindu nationalists. After going to Ahmedabad to look for his father and Anjum, Zakir Mian’s son ends up finding Anjum devastated in the men’s section of a small refugee camp and brings her back to the House of Dreams (Roy 2017, 46). Traumatised by her experiences in the Gujarat riots, Anjum does not want to talk about what has happened but only reacts “impassively” (47). Although Anjum does not verbalise the atrocious events, her traumatic memories of being surrounded by Hindu nationalists going so far as killing infants incessantly haunt her in the following days: “She tried to dismiss the cortege of saffron men [Hindu nationalists] with saffron smiles who pursued her with infants impaled on their saffron tridents, but they would not be dismissed” (61). She also tries to forget what has happened to Zakir Mian but fails to do so: “She tried to forget the way he had looked at her just before the light went out of his eyes. But he wouldn’t let her” (61). Besides, when Anjum remembers that Hindu nationalists did not kill her because killing a transgender would bring them bad luck, she feels insecure and vulnerable: “her relationship with the Rest-ofHer-Life remained precarious and reckless” (66). Thus, the novel lays great emphasis on Anjum’s reactions after her dreadful experiences in Gujarat: becoming impassive, being haunted by Zakir Mian’s death and ultimately feeling precarious. In so doing, the novel privileges an attention to religious and political victims in India as individuals in their singularity. To put it differently, Anjum’s exposure to appalling experiences opens up the possibility of disclosing her individual sufferings as a Muslim transgender. More importantly, Anjum’s vulnerability is the source of her strength traceable to her establishment of the Jannat Guest House in a graveyard. Anjum and her friends belonging to the segregated racial, sexual and class minority collectively construct a re-enchanted and tolerant world of falling and dispossessed people, which turns out to be a source of spirituality, love, solidarity and hope for a better India. It is the re-enchanting and radically tolerant atmosphere of the Jannat Guest House that edges towards the spirituality and solidarity put forward by transmodern philosophy.

“We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers”: Towards Reenchantment and a Tolerant Epistemology Luyckx Ghisi defines Transmodernity not only as a social, cultural and political but also a religious and spiritual paradigm shift. Drawing on

Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness  185 Max Weber’s arguments about the way Modernity has disillusioned the world, Luyckx Ghisi states that, by placing an unnecessarily heavy emphasis on rational reality and science, it has isolated us from “our bodies, our souls, our intuitions, our feelings and our creativity” (41–42). He argues that instead of attributing rational thinking and science a divine status, our transmodern reality asks for a sustainable world: Science and technology, as with all human actions, have to be reoriented towards world citizens’ desire for a sustainable and socially inclusive world. They have to respond and become ‘responsible’. They have to recuperate their human status and contribute to the common Good. (Luyckx Ghisi 42) Besides, rationality has increased Western anxieties about death because of disbelief in immortality. According to Luyckx Ghisi, what transmodern philosophy calls for is “reenchantment,” which he defines as “a way to experience wholeness again in hope and joy” by incorporating “intelligence, rationality, feelings, intuitions, bodies, souls, love, sexuality, hope, money, work, politics, etc.” (42). He goes on to argue that achieving such wholeness does not mean adherence to dogmatic religions but awareness of our relationality with other beings in the world, including animals and plants because they are also part of the cosmos like human beings, an argument suggesting the tolerant epistemology of transmodern philosophy (41). In summary, the basic tenets of transmodern philosophy proposed by Luyckx Ghisi downsize the emphasis on science and rationality while underlining the importance of using them for the highest good of humanity by creating a re-enchanted world of solidarity, tolerance, happiness and hope. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the Jannat Guest House, created by Anjum and her friends in a graveyard that accidentally turns into a funeral parlour, is a perfect example of a re-enchanted world where politics, feeling, hope, love, bodies and souls are intermingled. Much more so as it is after her traumatic experiences in Gujarat that Anjum goes to the graveyard and builds there the Jannat Guest House. A girl from a brothel called Rubina dies and her friends cannot find a bathhouse to bathe her body, a graveyard to bury her in, or an imam for her funeral. When they go to the graveyard, Anjum and her friend Saddam welcome them, thus giving the Jannat Guest House a new purpose of bathing and burying those rejected by the graveyards of the Duniya (the world), for example: Saddam Hussein’s father, who had been lynched by Hindu nationalists, and Tilo’s mother, who had not been forgiven by the Syrian Christian church. These dead, who cannot be honoured in the traditional way, are properly buried by the members of the Jannat Guest House. During the funeral, Tilo remembers her mother’s favourite lines from “St Crispin’s Day Speech,” which is an address from Shakespeare’s

186  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen Henry V (1599), the symbol of English patriotism and nationalism. In the speech, the king stirs his soldiers to courage and solidarity by saying: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; (Roy 2017, 414) The intertextual reference to Shakespeare’s encouraging and unifying speech provides a compendium of transmodern hopefulness and sentimentalism rather than pure reasoning. By burying and honouring in a specific way invisible persons like Saddam Hussein’s father and Tilo’s mother, the members of the Jannat Guest House turn the graveyard into a dynamic transmodern realm of solidarity and tolerance. The Jannat Guest House also provides esprit de corps with animals and plants, in line with transmodern relationality. Like the wounded residents of the Jannat Guest House, the animals living happily ever after in the graveyard are injured: a peacock, unable to fly, living with its mother; three old cows sleeping all day; three dozen budgerigars coloured in garish dyes by their earlier owners with the purpose of preventing them from escaping; a small tortoise with clover in one nostril; a lame donkey; and several cats. Besides, there is a vegetable garden full of beans, chillies, tomatoes and different kinds of gourds which add up to the ecological variety of the graveyard. In order to take care of the animals and plants, some physically strong drug addicts are employed, which gives them “some temporary solace” (400). The fact that looking after the animals and plants brings some kind of consolation to the addicts resonates with Luyckx Ghisi’s statements that relationality with animals and plants is an indispensable component for achieving transmodern wholeness and tolerance. Besides, the Jannat Guest House presents a re-enchanted world providing links between life and death that is reminiscent of transmodern spirituality. For example, after losing her connections with Musa, the possibility of hearing about his death does not frighten Tilo, not because she loves him less but because the angels keep an illegal crack between two worlds, “so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle” (Roy 2017, 398). Therefore, when Musa dies, Tilo is not overcome by grief because she could visit and write to him through a crack in the graveyard (437). Thus, she experiences a kind of wholeness in hope and joy although she has literally lost her beloved. Such a connection between two worlds is also peculiar to the chaotic atmosphere of Kashmir suffering from the struggles of independence. As Musa says: “in our Kashmir the dead will live for ever; and the living are only dead people, pretending” (343). On the one hand, Musa underlines the turmoil in Kashmir while, on the other, he calls for a world in which we remember

Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness  187 our connections with life after death and the spiritual world. Considering Anjum and her friends’ efforts to help the dispossessed, the Jannat Guest House seems to be the only platform in India for establishing connections with life after death and the source of hopefulness. The artistic representation of such a transmodern world of unity and wholeness in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness requires developing specific writing strategies, as I will elaborate on in the last section of this chapter.

“Too Much Blood for Good Literature”: Conveying Truth With its message and topographical arrangement, the poem that Tilo reads towards the end of the novel shows Roy’s interest in sharing a narrative that would include the interests of everybody and everything and thus achieve relationality and wholeness: How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything. (Roy 2017, 436; emphasis in the original) Undeniably, writing such a narrative requires a singular narrative form, different from those usually produced by a traditional authorial narrator. This leads to an interrogation about going beyond the boundaries of conventional language, as Anjum notes when she asks: “Was it possible to live outside language?” (8). Similarly, Tilo makes a meta-comment on the novel by saying: “there is too much blood for good literature” (283). What Tilo suggests is the difficulty of representing through fiction the horrifying chaos pervading contemporary India as a whole. Considering the role of fiction in conveying terror and turmoil in India in a way that other forms of writing cannot Roy refers to the epigraph to the novel, taken from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963)7: “And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true” (Roy 2017, 307). Evidently, Roy uses this epigraph with the aim of directing the attention of the readers to the importance of fiction in conveying truth.8 In an interview with Anita Felicelli, the

188  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen writer herself explains that “history cannot do what fiction can do because you cannot provide footnotes for the kind of terror that has been unleashed. Fiction, when you get it right, can tell you that” (Felicelli n.p.). In an answer to “Famous Fans’ Questions,” Roy blurs the distinction between fictional and non-fictional writings and explains what her novel should and can do: If you were to take out the milestones in this book and just do nonfiction about them, they would not be what they are. Only a novel can tell you how caste, communalisation, sexism, love, music, poetry, the rise of the right all combine in a society. And the depths in which they combine. We have been trained to ‘silo-ise’: our brains specialise in one thing. But the radical understanding is if you can understand it all, and I think only a novel can. (Roy 2018, n.p.) Roy’s comments on her novel seem to reiterate Nielsen, Phelan and Walsh’s argument that human beings are concerned not only with matters of fact and with what is the case but also with evaluative questions that encompass possibilities and alternatives […]. Fictive discourse invites the reader or listener to imagine something—to ask, often tendentiously, ‘What if?’. (64) They further state that even though the worlds of fiction and non-fiction are distinct from each other, “they are often so closely interrelated that opinions about real life can be strongly affected and changed by fictional examples, stories, and arguments” (64). Their statement is very similar to Paul Dawson’s discursive approach to fictional and non-fictional narrative, which “does not proceed from a distinction between what is inside a narrative text and what lies outside it, but treats narrative discourse of fictional texts alongside other nonfictional and non-literary discourses in the public sphere” (104; emphasis in the original). Echoing this, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness plays with its own generic status by combining fiction with real-life figures and non-fictional elements such as newspaper clippings, diary entries, gravestone inscriptions, poems, song lyrics and testimonies, all of which act as complementary narratives to the fictional parts accounting for the chaotic atmosphere of India. For example, Anjum and her friend Saddam Hussein, both fictional characters, attend “India against Corruption” protests in Jantar Mantar, where they meet two real-life figures, Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal. When Anjum wants to adopt an abandoned baby, Arvind strongly stands against her and a clash ensues between Anjum, “a woman trapped in a man’s body […] raging at her glands, her organs, her skin, the texture of her hair, the width of her shoulders, the timbre of her voice,” and Arvind,

Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness  189 “a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind […] raging at a world in which the balance sheets did not tally” (Roy 2017, 122). Arvind believes he is “always right” whereas Anjum thinks she is “all wrong, always wrong” (122). However, Arvind is “reduced by his certainties” while Anjum is “augmented by her ambiguity” (122). As Filippo Menozzi argues, “the two characters show the conflicted encounter in the novel between historical document and fictional representation” (4). Though valid, the criticism has yet to consider how the novel problematises the generic distinctions between fictional and nonfictional worlds. In keeping with Roy’s ideas about the role of fiction, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tells how the civil rights movements in India are intertwined with an individual’s story of maternal love. Besides, the novel questions the validity of certainties in Arvind’s life in opposition to the power of ambiguities in Anjum’s portrayal. To put it differently, the novel not only makes the readers ask questions about matters of fact but also makes them think about possibilities and alternatives through the inherent power of fiction.

Conclusion As Paul Dawson brilliantly asserts, “a work of fiction is a public statement circulating in the same discursive formation as its author’s nonfictional statements” (198). Accordingly, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness presents Roy’s criticism against religious, political and gender crises in India through a diversity of characters going between porous borders but finally achieving solidarity in a transmodern world of interrelations between human beings, animals and nature informed by hope and love. The novel starts with an epigraph from Nâzım Hikmet, an eminent Turkish poet, underscoring the power of love: “I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart.” Besides, the novel ends in sync with its beginning in a world of possible happiness and hope symbolised by the Jannat Guest House, thereby showing an absolute determination to persevere through the reparative force of solidarity and interdependence. The residents of the Jannat Guest House – the home of fallen people from different parts of the society – are not only the living and the dead reject of society but also animals and plants, as observed in the last chapter. Significantly, Roy presents in it a dung beetle named Guih Kyom with the capacity to save the planet: “Guih Kyom […] was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell” (Roy 2017, 438). Besides, the dung beetle knows that “things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to” (438). Dung beetles are famous for carrying dung in round balls and constructing breeding chambers with it, burying themselves in them to re-emerge fifteen or eighteen weeks later. Ancient Egyptians found the motion of the dung balls and dung beetles similar to the movement of the sun across the sky to be reborn every day. Therefore, they associated dung beetles

190  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen with Khepri, the God of the Sunrise, the symbol of immortality, creation and rebirth (Sax 42; Dodd 49). By underlining the power of a dung beetle to save the planet, the novel suggests that there is a possibility to go beyond the chaos in India and live in a hopeful world in which the interests of everybody and everything can be taken into account rather than an exclusive and violent world of blood and suffering. Clearly, as demonstrated above, the thematic components and narrative form of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness relate to the transmodern paradigm. On the one hand, the narrative form, with its inclusion of various nonfictional forms of writing, resonates with the pluriversality and interconnections of Transmodernity. On the other, the novel gives voice to the experiences of those who have been negated and/or neglected in Indian history through the thematisation of diversity, interconnectedness and ­reenchantment as well as an attentiveness to the singularities of Indian life. The novel considers the marginal subjects in India in their singularities as interdependent and re-enchanted beings. This is achieved through a singular narrative form combining fictional and non-fictional genres which presents Roy’s attempts at truthful communication, thus asking readers to approach the novel as the author’s thought-provoking and moving literary representation of one of the most chaotic places in the twenty-first century: India.

Notes 1 Roy uses a question asked by Sophie Mol, one of her characters in The God of Small Things, as the title of her opening chapter in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: “Where do old birds go to die?” (1997, 16). In this way, Roy invites readers to approach The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as part of her fictional production, thematically related to her previous novel. 2 Roy has written several non-fictional books such as The Cost of Living (1999), criticising the Narmada Valley dam project; Power Politics (2001), a collection of essays about the dangers of globalisation and privatisation; and The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001), a collection of political essays about globalisation as well as terrorism and nuclear disarmament. She has also published a collection of essays about the failure of democracy in contemporary India, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (2009). 3 According to Islamic belief, the word “Jannat” denotes the place where the morally good and faithful followers of Islam will go after death. 4 Anna Hazare is one of India’s best-known social activists; Arvind Kejriwal is a famous anti-corruption politician. 5 Different names have been used to characterise the cultural manifestations of our age including, but not limited to, pseudo-postmodernism, digimodernism, altermodernism, cosmodernism, hipermodernism, metamodernism, posthumanism, post-millenialism and post-postmodernism (see Aliaga-Lavrijsen). 6 Anjum’s fight against the dominant social order can also be considered as the struggle of a liminal subject who has “the potential to subvert the dominant social structure with her/his ambiguous identity, or in-betweenness since s/he is not yet defined by and therefore subservient to any normative social positions” (Göçmen 289).

Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness  191

192  Merve Sarıkaya-Şen Lewis, Tim. “Arundhati Roy: The Point of the Writer is to Be Unpopular.” The Guardian 17 June 2018. Accessed on 10/08/2017 at: www.theguardian. com/books/2018/ jun/17/arundhati-roy-interview-you-ask-the-questions-thepoint-of-the-writer-is-to-be-unpopular/. Web. Luyckx Ghisi, Marc. “Towards a Transmodern Transformation of our Global Society: European Challenges and Opportunities.” Journal of Future Studies 15.1 (September 2010): 39–48. Print. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World.” Symplokē 12.1 (2004): 53–68. Print. Menozzi, Filippo. “‘Too much Blood for Good Literature’: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the Question of Realism.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.1 (2018): 1–14. Print. Michelraj, Muraj. “Historical Evolution of Transgender Community in India.” Asian Review of Social Sciences 4.1 (2015): 17–19. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. “The Gujarat Massacre: New India’s Blood Rite.” The Guardian 14 March 2012. Accessed on 10/08/2017 at: www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2012/mar/14/new-india-gujarat-massacre/. Web. Nanda, Serena. “The hijras of India: Cultural and Individual Dimensions of an Institutionalized Third Gender Role.” Culture, Society, and Sexuality: A Reader. Eds. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 237–49. Print. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative 23.1 (January 2015): 61–73. Print. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. “Transmodernity: A New Paradigm.” Trans. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, 2017a. Accessed on 10/08/2017 at: http:// transmodern-theory.blogspot.com.es/2017/05/transmodernity-new-paradigm. html/. Web. ———. “The Crossroads of Transmodernity.” Trans. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen and Susana Onega. Plenary Lecture read at the Conference on Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. University of Zaragoza, 26 April 2017b. Accessed on 24/06/2018 at: www.academia.edu/ 33683289/_The_Crossroads_of_Transmodernity/. Web. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: India Ink, 1997. Print. ———. The Cost of Living. New York: Modern Library. 1999. Print. ———. Power Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001a. Print. ———. The Algebra of Injustice. New Delhi and London: Viking, 2001b. Print. ———. Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009. Print. ———. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. London: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House, 2017. Print. ———. “Famous Fans’ Questions.” The Guardian 17 June 2018. Accessed on 28/01/ 2018 at: www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/17/arundhati-roy-interviewyou-ask-the-questions-the-point-of-the-writer-is-to-be-unpopular/. Web. Sax, Boria. The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in World Myth, Legend, and Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001. Print. Shakespeare, William. Henry V. 1599. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2000. Print.

Part IV

Perspectives on Biopolitics

9

Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey’s Novel Archipelago Julia Kuznetski

Introduction “Everybody’s plastic —but I love plastic. I want to be plastic” (Colacello 41) – these famous words by one of the emblematic representatives of the transition of Western culture from Modernity to Postmodernity, Andy Warhol, summarise both the modernist project of discursive reality (surely Warhol did not envisage literally turning into a piece of plastics) and postmodern anti-elitism, or breaking of the boundary between the high and the low, “me” and the crowd, celebration of (inartistic) mass reproduction and (self)irony. What this utterance perhaps did not imply at the time is that the speaking subject, the material substance and the surrounding environment could be viewed as one, co-emerging and co-influencing each other. In 2019, however, an average Western adult is estimated to consume 50,000 particles of microplastics a year and inhale almost as much, through fish, drinking water, sugar, salt, as well as through breathing air in the cities (Carrington n.p.) – an estimation pointing to the alarming tendency that, in the twenty-first century, humans who produce plastics are literally turning into it, in the most tangible and material way, through its coming back to us and into us. It seems that we can no longer resort to discursive postmodern irony, which remains within metaphor and discourse, as the ineluctable material reality does not depend on the discourse, nor ceases to exist where language stops. This calls for a new view of reality, which my chapter will address: “transcorporeality” and an outlook aiming to overcome the unsustainable dualisms of culture/nature, me/the other, me/the world, inside/outside, which can be justly regarded an important aspect of the Transmodern project. The Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodriguez Magda (2019) recalls a conversation with Jean Baudrillard in which the term “transmodern” spontaneously flew out of the other notions they had been playing with: “transpolitical” and “transsexual” (n.p.). Similarly, Patrick Murphy (2013), in examining “relational practices” as largely shaping mid-twentieth-century Western thought, argued that nothing is “mastered once and for all” (3–4), and came up with the term “transversal”

196  Julia Kuznetski as a “rejection  of the universal” (1). Murphy’s notion of “transversality” is that of “relational difference” (2), that is, of a “comingling” (2) of non-unitary practices and phenomena that allows subjects, theories, methodologies and “non-identities” to co-exist without “absolute dictates” or “falling over each other” (2). This is not the new “totalising whole” rejected by Rodríguez Magda in her evocation of defunct Postmodernity (n.p.), nor is it characterised by the “consistent rationality” and “global systemic discourses” of Modernity (n.p.). “Transversality” – and, further on, “transversal praxis” – cuts across cultures and disciplines without fusing or hybridising. It also forms, in Murphy’s words, “a dialogic relationship between the abstract and the concrete, the theory and the practice, the concept and the application” (4). It is perhaps what indicates the paradigm shift addressed by both Rodríguez Magda and Murphy. As Rodríguez Magda points out, while postmodernism is characterised by a shift that strengthens the linguistic sphere and renders actual reality immaterial, Transmodernity “offers us a synthesis between material and fiction” (n.p.). In the same vein, Murphy challenges postmodern/poststructuralist “categorical abstractionists” and their keenness on theory as divorced from both reality (or lived experience) and the literary text, and stresses that the transversal praxis he proposes involves “a continuous shift back and forth, weaving a fabric of terminologically informed critique always open to correction” and actively sensitive to “their relationship to real effects in the world” (5). In tune with this, Elizabeth Grosz (2010), while summarising her understanding of the Deleuzean model of knowledge as connection between theory and practice as “modes of heterogeneity” that she finds especially helpful for twenty-first-century feminist analysis, shows how “concepts run into material practices, and practices come to function as exemplars […] not by unifying, but by diversifying, proliferating, diverging, producing that which is different” (47). Drawing on all this, transcorporeality, a notion I define and expand on in the next section, emerges as this perfect difference both fitting and extending the transmodern paradigm by bringing together theory and practice, concepts and materiality, politics, ideas and the body, science, technology and embodiment. Having examined these concepts, I move on to the discussion of Transmodernity and transcorporeality as manifested in Monique Roffey’s novel Archipelago (2012).

Embodiment and Fluidity: The Transmodern and the Material When providing the definition of Transmodernity, Rodríguez Magda addresses, in her own words, “the description of a globalized, rhizomatic, technological society, developed from the first world, confronted with its others, while at the same time it penetrates and assumes them”

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  197 (n.p.; emphasis added). What interests me in this definition, in addition to the paradigm shift and turn from Postmodernity to Transmodernity discussed above, is her resorting to the word “rhizomatic” to mean multidirectional and reaching out beyond the linear. This special word, hailing from the field of natural sciences and nature-oriented discourse, alerts at once to the natural that is still perceived as “out there” and the intellectual as “in here” – a dichotomy that Transmodernity is obviously seeking to overcome. As proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), “the rhizomatic” serves as a model of thought in critical theory that, differently from the “arboreal” or treelike hierarchical model, allows to move in multiple directions at once without a clear and definite end. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” presents the beginning of the merging of the discursive and the material in present-day theory and may be viewed as facilitating a shift to Transmodernity. However, it seems to me that by resorting to the terms “assume” and “penetrate,” Rodríguez Magda is still operating within the linear field, or the logic of one incorporating the other. In contrast, transcorporeality as an enmeshing, reciprocal interpenetration, as seen by Stacy Alaimo (2010), would be useful for widening the transmodern field by adding to it an environmental connection (embodied in the “rhizomatic”) and by stressing the idea of fluidity of many notions and engagements, especially in discussing a twentieth-century novel related to water and the humans’ relationship with it. Roffey’s Archipelago is set in the Caribbean, where the author grew up and where she spends part of her personal and professional time.1 The novel is dedicated to her brother Nigel Roffey, a sailor who lived through an unexpected and devastating flood in Trinidad in 2008 (Roffey 359), just like Gavin, the main character in the novel. As a result, Gavin loses his house, his baby son, who drowns, and his wife, whose deep depression causes their separation. He has to continue as normal, going to work and taking care of their six-year-old daughter Océan, who suffers from PTSD and loses her mind every time it rains. Gavin’s own trauma shows itself in a material way in the form of an aggravating psoriasis that renders him helpless and unfit for work. In despair, he throws his mobile phone into the sea, and sets sail on his old boat, the Romany (alluding to wandering Roma people), which becomes a kind of Noah’s Ark for him, his daughter and their non-human or, rather, more-thanhuman companion, their dog Suzy. The ensuing main part of the novel represents movement in seascape, getting to know one’s body through contact with the body of the sea, and re-evaluation of his previous perceptions and attitudes through the idea of water, which, as I argue here, is a perfect example of transcorporeal and transmodern fluidity. As Astrida Neimanis (2017) rightly points out, 2 there has been a “fluid turn” in recent social and cultural theory, addressing Zygmunt Bauman’s notions of “liquid Modernity” and its components, such as

198  Julia Kuznetski “liquid love,” “liquid life,” etc., as tropes for “anti-atomistic thinking” (22). If for Bauman, “liquid” is rather a metaphorical notion countering the “solid” power structures of the past with a new, “increasingly mobile, slippery, shifty, evasive and fugitive power” of human engagements (14), Neimanis takes it literally to consider water as a transcorporeal embodiment. Thus, in her own book, titled Bodies of Water, she seeks “to intervene in and to disturb [the hegemonic] imaginary of ‘modern water’ […] as something ‘out there’” (21). For Neimanis, as well as for Alaimo and other new materialists/feminist posthumanists, such as Karen Barad, Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti, there is no division between “us” and “the world” in which, as Alaimo puts it in the interview I conducted with her, “some transhistorical ‘Man’ acts upon the inert, external matter of the world” (Tofantšuk 2019, 26–27). Such a division is characteristic of the Cartesian dualism underlying Modernity, which the transmodern project should be implicitly overcoming. Yet, as we have seen in the use of the terms “assume” and “penetrate,” the Cartesian legacy may still be there. According to the Cartesian mind/body juxtaposition, the mind is the higher, universal, part of reason, and the body the secondary, discardable part, with the material world being but an extension of the mind and, consequently, worthless on its own. This outlook on mind and body results in the view of the world as “matter out there” and creates the illusion of us as “separate and safe” rational beings (Alaimo in Tofantšuk 2019, 26), “licenced to control” the “irrationality of disorderly space” (Plumwood 104–5). Countering this is the idea of the “body-in-place” envisioned as a transmodern body dependent on the affirmation of others on earth, not bound but in a dynamic relation that Alaimo would call “transcorporeal” (passim), addressing (and not assuming!) the reciprocal interdependence and co-becoming of the human body and the material environment. In this scheme, the body/mind dualism does not exist and the body itself is in transit between the unstable inner self and the non-othered environment. As suggested before, a perfect illustration of the idea of transcorporeality may be found in water and our relationship with it, whether we acknowledge it or not. Our human bodies consist of water up to 60% (Anonymous, n.p.); we depend on water for living and water is also all around us. As Neimanis emphasises, all bodies, including animals, fungi, plants, etc., are water. What is more, our reaction in extreme and notso-extreme situations is first of all water: we sweat when we are nervous or excited, salivate when we see or think of something appetising, we have humours such as phlegm and bile, and much more (Neimanis 28). Finally, in consuming others’ bodies and their liquids (containing both nutrition and toxins), we become “bodies caught up in one another’s currents […] the body of the rain cloud, and the body of the increasingly toxic sea” (Neimanis 38). This indeed points to what Judith Butler has

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  199 brought to the fore when speaking of the body as an unfinished process: “Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own” (2004a, 27). According to new materialism, there is always interaction, porosity, a possibility to travel between identities, which become blurred – as do power relations. Agreeing with Butler on the view of the body as an unfinished process, Patrick Murphy proposes to move away from the idea of individual autonomy and towards a “multidirectional conception of self with both conscious and unconscious components” (51). In his view, the result of this movement would be the disintegration of the limitation of our sense of self “to humans of a certain mental state” (51). What would this mean for us? What methodological turns would it suggest? First of all, if the self is not limited to human ascription, it can reach beyond the human, to what Murphy, drawing on Bakhtin’s dialogism (Murphy 11), calls “anothers” (passim). Second, if we do speak of humans, the term would not be limited to mean “a certain mental state” (Murphy 51) – that is, a fixed set of values, ideas and stereotypes, choices and lifestyle – but also to those of “high” intellectual order: mental and linguistic capacities; in other words, the compulsory attributes of the rational “One” (in Plumwood’s terms, as alluded to above). Alaimo acknowledges that transcorporeality is indebted to Butler’s concept of the body and the subject as “immersed within a matrix of discursive systems” (Alaimo 2016, 112), characteristic of the poststructuralist/postmodern paradigm. However, she takes the concept further by insisting that the subject is immersed not only in the discursive but also in the material world or, as she puts it, drawing on Karen Barad, the “intra-active material agencies” (Alaimo 2016, 112– 13). “Intra-action” is the neologism coined by Barad as an alternative to causality. It “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad 33), suggesting that there are no individual agencies that precede the other, that these agencies are only “distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (33). Barad stresses that “there is no discrete ‘I’ that precedes [the] action,” with causality being “an entangled affair” (394). With her background in quantum physics, she dwells on Prufrock’s dilemma: “Shall I dare disturb the universe?” as a Modernist way of watching one’s life from a distance, indulging in inaction and evading responsibility (Barad 395). For Barad, to ask such a question or pose such an issue would mean to “stand outside the universe and let it ‘run’” (395), with or without disturbing it. Contemplating either possibility would imply an “exterior position” (396) that does not make any sense in new materialism, since, as I argue, it suits Transmodernity and distinguishes it from Modernity. “We are of the universe—there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming” (Barad 396; emphasis added).

200  Julia Kuznetski Thus, by extending the discursive paradigm into an enmeshment with the material world and with the notion of intra-action, with its “flows of substances and agencies and environments” (Alaimo 2016, 112), as well as with politics, science, culture and ethics, the transcorporeal subject extends into what can be described as a transmodern relationality, as we shall see in the analysis of Archipelago below. As Neimanis concludes, “[a]s bodies of water, we are always, at some level, implicated” (38; emphasis in the original).

Transcorporeal Blurring and the World “Out There” As pointed out above, Archipelago starts with Gavin, deeply traumatised after the loss of his son in the flood and the estrangement of his depressed wife, having to take care of himself, his house, his daughter, and his dog; or rather, with the dog supervising the man in the kitchen, reminding him of dinner with her “keen sense of time” (Roffey 3). It is only half-way through the sea voyage (in fact, only in the last quarter of the narrative) that we get a full account of what happened to the family and its circumstances. As Gavin painfully recalls (so far stifling the whole picture within himself, which is typical of a traumatised psyche), the flood was the result of an extremely heavy rain, “so loud it drowned out all other sounds, so heavy it short-circuited the world” (233). While the rain is a natural phenomenon, the ensuing flood was in fact anthropogenous, resulting from urban development – the building of “condos” or luxury apartments, on the hill (223) and deforestation – a “denuding of the forest” (223) that would have kept water at bay. Without the protection of the trees, the water floods right into Gavin’s neighbourhood in Port of Spain (Trinidad). Trying to fight the Anthropocene with the Anthropocene, Gavin builds a wall around his house to protect it from the flood. Finding himself unable to withstand the corrupt and greedy land developers (234), he thinks he can fight nature by extra walling, reasoning that “this happens every year” and “it will be OK” (235). He refuses to listen to those “without reason” (in the Cartesian sense) – his dog “moaning with unease” under the table (234), or a neighbour’s blind and autistic old father “getting upset” (236). Claire, his wife, who will eventually be lost to depression and put out to therapeutic sleep, is currently preserving common sense, knowing that “nothing bad would ever happen” (235) if they are determined to stay inside with their Christmas tree installed, though they are living in hot and rainy Trinidad. She “didn’t want to look over the garden wall” (235), making, together with Gavin, the mistake of separating themselves from the “world out there” and rationalising what cannot be rationalised. The wall, which has an obvious symbolic significance here (separating the inside from the outside, me from the material world as the other), falls “with an almighty crack” (236; emphasis in the original). The symbolic and spectacular

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  201 falling of the wall, with all its catastrophic consequences (the house is destroyed by the wave of mud, the baby boy is drowned in his cot and the dog is carried away by the wave, to reappear a few days later), shows the conspicuous and ineradicable presence of the natural world within that of the human, the impossibility of erecting a boundary and shutting oneself inside the wall of reason. Significantly, during the disaster, Gavin is thinking of rain and nature in military or technological terms: it is “Rain like war,” with “great tearing sounds, and the clatter of an army marching” (234); “A new roar, louder, like a machine switched on, a chainsaw revved” (237); against his “thin garden walls” (235), rain is “a solid wall of water falling from the sky” (234); and the flood that bursts into his house is described as “the wave of water like an athlete taking a hurdle” (236). This imagery is the result of the separation of the human and natural worlds in the rational imagination. Indeed, the family, literally “hurled against a wall, thrown flat” (237), and unable to move (238), is physically overpowered by the wave that is ascribed the anthropomorphous quality of being “agile” (238). However, such a separation, implicit as it is presented, is not possible. In Alaimo’s words, nature will always be there, “as close as one’s own skin, perhaps even closer” (2010, 2). Indeed, their reaction is described as first of all physical: Océan is “blue with cold, her eyes wild” (Roffey 238); her mother is speechless, shaking (238); and Gavin’s “heart [is] yammering, a pulse of unbound energy leaping about his neck, his face” (238). The onset of psoriasis that he cannot control and his dependence on the “black toxic liquid” of coffee (10) producing “acid in his stomach” and turning his urine “a strange yellow” (162) are further instances of physical reaction, alongside with such bodily reflexes as “feeling sick in his stomach” at seeing death (172), feeling how “his head throbs and his heart struggles” (119) trying to understand his part in the family tragedy. Elsewhere, his stomach “heaves” at the sight of his daughter’s deep wound (249) or at the smell of his gone dog still filling his nostrils (324). And when Océan is talking about baby birds knowing that mommy will always come back  – which is not something she is sure of in the case of her own mother – it is Gavin’s guts that “twist at her oh” (305). Finally, as the tsunami rises on the other side of the world, in Japan, he feels a foreboding with his “spine, his flesh, his cells […] tingling” (342) and his stomach “constricts” and “turns to mush” (343). Thus, through material, bodily reactions, the main character comes to the point when he starts abandoning his rationalist attempts to make sense of the situation and manages to accept things as they are in the material world. He realises that he had ended up working in an office, “living the wrong life […] his hands, how fat he is, his shitty job, N. 3 […] his house of cards” in order to keep his instincts “boxed up” (162); and he becomes aware that he and his wife had “been working hard to live a small good life and it wasn’t enough. The flood was random, a rare

202  Julia Kuznetski occurrence. But what troubled him most, then and still, is that the flood had no meaning, no order; it was a catastrophe to him and meant nothing to nature” (244). This reflection shows Gavin realising that he had been wrong to look for meaning and order, to see the world in terms of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” As he realises on the sea, the world never stops, even if the humans are not thinking or trying to make sense of it, and it is the humans that are enmeshed in it and not the world being a part of the human imagination. Gavin arrives at this perception when he stops seeing the world as “out there.” Namely, opening his eyes at night and feeling the air and rain on his face, he finds himself surprised “with all the activity going on around him while he’s so inert. The black sky is alive, twinkling with a fierce intelligence; the world doesn’t switch itself off, ever. It revolves eternally: busy, electric” (267–8). As we can see, agency switches places here: not the habitual “Man” acting upon “the inert, external matter of the world” (see above), but the external agency of “vibrant matter” – to recall Jane Bennett’s phrase and book of the same title (2009) – enmeshing man in it.

Archipelago as Voyage, Water Story and “Material Memoir” Gavin’s escape into the sea is a journey away from himself and simultaneously toward himself. On the sea, he can give way to his grief, and also sense and accept his vulnerability. His most intense physical sensations are likewise experienced on the sea. The sea is their temporary home, but also Gavin’s first love. He thinks: “How nice it would be to fall asleep into it, into the calm loving arms of the sea” (Roffey 71). We must note here that Gavin’s love is neither possessive nor romantic: as we have seen, nature has agency in this novel, as is especially clear on the sea, which can be calm and turquoise, but also dangerous, dark, enormous and devastating. The sea is like a witch: it may hurt or heal, having magical powers. Common sense would condemn her but a nature lover would appreciate the magic connection as Gavin does in the case of the sea. The voyage of the Romany is rendered with topographic precision, supplied with a map drawing to document the Caribbean islands that father and daughter visit, and the sea territory they cross. Here, the idea of Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann’s bioregion (1977) as “a terrain of consciousness” (qtd. in Buell 83) can be said to apply. Elaborating on the notion, Lawrence Buell (2005) dwells on places within a watershed district and their inhabitants not as separate nations and cultures, but as “a collectivity of ethnically and economically diverse stakeholders” (84), thus presenting an alternative to the nation-state. The idea of a bioregion fits the transmodern idea of relationality and transversality: instead of rigid borders defined by the government, nation and language,

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  203 perhaps redrawn as a result of a military or political conflict, a territory can be viewed as defined by species, climate and common environmental problems that do not terminate at the border point, nor can be fenced off or diverted by border patrols. In Archipelago, Gavin crosses several countries, clears through numerous customs, shows his passport and switches between languages while witnessing something more crucial than political division: the polluted sea, plastic on beaches, dead animals and fauna changed because of human activity. In this sense, we can relate to what Cecilia Chen (2009) says on mapping as a constructing practice of organising and articulating the imagined understanding of physical place. Mapping and drawing borders are usually considered to be a constructing practice, changing nothing of the real, material properties of the place, or solving its problems. Instead, as Chen suggests, attention should be paid to “dwelling with the others in evolving ecosystems of matter and meaning” beyond artificially drawn political borders. Prolonging such an understanding of place as a bioregion, Chen proposes to extend the paradigm into what she refers to as “watery places” and, in so doing, into “thinking with water” (274–5; emphasis in the original). She explains that while “place” is usually associated with landed territory, “thinking place in terms of water may dissolve certain land-based preconceptions,” including the way in which we perceive territory, our relation to it and our relations with others, “whether these relations join us to other locations, other beings, or other events and spacetimes” (275). Thus, while a “bioregion” is a solid and encompassing, naturally created region, formed around a major watershed (Buell 135) but not necessarily including the waterbody itself, Chen’s “watery place” implies a truly transversal and transmodern relationship, because, as she argues, it views everything as “mutually transforming and transformative” (275). This is because, if we think in planetary terms, being fluid, water is not really “contained” by places, nor does it contain them. Rather, places are, as Chen emphasises, “always permeable and permeated with water” (275), thus calling for a totally different articulation of bodies, material and semantic contexts, a different temporal and spatial relation and, ultimately, a different ethics of environmental community with a stress on relationality (275). In Archipelago, there is a unique combination of the perception of place as a site of emotional attachment – as the epigraph suggests, “islands can only exist if we have loved on them” – and of the sea as a vast space where the characters sense their own relationality. Thus, Gavin contemplates how the sea, being grand and massive, “stirs unfathomable moods in him” (Roffey 315), makes him fascinated, yet itself “owes them nothing” (314), “isn’t interested in him” (314). It is this realisation and the abandonment of the habitual idea of human agency that brings about reconciliation and the removal of guilt on the night of the catastrophe: “he could not stop the rain from falling, from scaring his child” (231). Naturally, a man could not do the

204  Julia Kuznetski impossible – the rain “still walked down the mountains all around” (231) – and neither should he be seeking an impossible revenge. It is in fact through Océan that this different relationality is expressed: while discussing Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick as being motivated by revenge, they agree that it would not be wise to hurt nature, because Moby Dick represented “God, or nature” and, as in their case, “[n]ature did not know it hurt us. How could it know? Nature is its own creature” (175). Thus, in the context of the novel, walling out the world “out there” does not help; and neither does it help to rationalise it or take revenge. By contrast, Gavin learns the story of a white dog that had been cruelly tossed from a boat by his former owner (268) and is nevertheless able to joyfully jump about, not remembering what happened, not trying to rationalise what cannot be rationalised, not acting out trauma as the human character does. What happens on the sea can be also seen in terms of Alaimo’s material memoir, a notion which, as she explains in the above-mentioned interview, refers to trying to understand oneself not in terms of “I think, therefore I am,” but in terms of relatedness to the material processes and sincerity about one’s body (Tofantšuk 2019, 26). In Bodily Natures, Alaimo draws on the example of Audrey Lorde’s Cancer Journals, where one has to find ways of expressing something one cannot “swallow or digest,” searching for “the words we do not yet have” (Alaimo 2010, 86–87). The body substitutes the lack of words for the liquid we are made of, because, as Alaimo stresses, we are not made of words (2010, 87). In the same way, for the characters in Archipelago, words appear much later, while their voyage starts with a symbolic sea-sickness, when the all-powerful sea induces all land liquids with their sorrow and pain to just come out in a ruthless, physical way (Roffey 38–40). Similarly, as Gavin is crying in the shower, the “pelting cleansing rain” mixes with his tears and “his body heaves” (231). Most importantly, when swimming, he feels “like he’s scratching his soul,” a telling metaphor referring to his physical and mental healing, as his skin disease gradually disappears and “the fluid in his veins is catching up with the fluid and the rhythms of the sea” (46). Thus, Gavin and his daughter enter a transcorporeal relationship with the sea and with their own selves, which we might even call “transfluidity” – not only because of the interaction of fluids but also because their selves become more fluid in the process, and the border between human and animal similarly liquefies, as discussed below.

The Cruelty of Human Exceptionalism and Its Transanimal Alternative As we have seen, the sea in this novel is in no way something inert and abstract “out there,” bordered by land and out of sight and the imagination. The agentic sea is also the home of many “more than human”

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  205 creatures, from seals, dolphins and even whales to various sorts of fish (115), including flying fish. Animals and birds, including the gorgeous flamingos, also populate the land, but all this does not make the novel simply vividly exotic or romantic. On the contrary, it is full of spectacular cruelty, often facilitated by the clash of the human and the non-human world, in which the humans “assume” (to go back to Rodríguez Magda’s rhetoric problematised above) the non-human creatures as “their other.” For instance, seeing a turtle with amputated legs kept in a small tank (Roffey 167) reminds Gavin of seeing another turtle painfully dying on a beach in the sun with its fins cut out (167). In another symbolic scene, Gavin and Océan witness an iguana run over by a car whose driver didn’t stop (172). The killing is described as an act of anthropocentric possession – “like it was theirs to crush” (172) – as well as a mismatch and rupture between “the human race” (172) and the lumbering and slow lizard (172) coming out into the highway. “But surely no one will run over such a creature and then a baf, a car rides straight over the lizard, leaving it in the road, bleeding, its back broken” (173; emphasis in the original). As rendered by Gavin with the almost animal “baf” in his reaction, this scene invites a revaluation of the Anthropocenic interventions and unnatural environments in which the animal “others” are killed or tortured and mutilated. Speaking of the phenomenon of the zoo as an “unnatural environment,” Christina Colvin ascribes this exploitative practice to “the violent requirements of modernity” (718), while exploring the literary rendering of animals as “consumer goods and entertainment” (716) on the example of Marianne Moore’s use of animal imagery in her poetry. Addressing the current Anthropocene condition with the rhetorical question: “What can animals become within the environments we influence?” (724), Colvin seems to accept as given the modernist project of “fluctuating combinations of desire, violence, and the urgency to conserve species” (724), as opposed to Donna Haraway’s call in When Species Meet (2008) to view animals in what we can see as more transmodern “entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not” (qtd. in Colvin 716). Haraway was known for her writings on the cyborg in the late-twentieth-century (1985), a notion that, she contended, undermined the idea of human exceptionalism alongside other major events such as the turn from the Copernican earth-centred universe to the New Physicists’ model of endless possible worlds coexisting in different dimensions; the Darwinian turn toward the human as biologically embodied; and the Freudian turn that “undid the primacy of conscious processes” (Haraway 2008, 11). The definition of the cyborg as a creature blurring the boundaries between “human” and “animal” and between “human” and “machine” (Haraway 2001) can be said to signal a point of transition from Postmodernity to Transmodernity, the period in which many boundaries turn into reciprocally influencing processes. Further,

206  Julia Kuznetski in When Species Meet, Haraway’s view of human beings as “getting laptops and lapdogs into one lap” (12) removes human exceptionalism and thus overthrows the anthropomorphic idea of the “superiority of the human order over the animal order” (11), as addressed earlier by Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am, published in full in English in 2008, the same year as Haraway’s When Species Meet. In this work, originating from a seminar of the same title (1997), Derrida explores his own hypothetical vulnerability at being confronted with a domestic cat that is looking at him naked. What, and how does the cat see? Here comes the problem of the human gaze and of the sudden and new awareness of one’s nakedness (as in the Garden of Eden). In Sarah Bezan and James Tink’s reading, Derrida explores “the intellectual uncertainty that the simultaneous proximity and distance of the animal to the human domain has evoked in ethics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis” (x). In exploring his confrontation with the animal as other, Derrida addresses the modernist rupture of physical closeness alongside a self-imposed distance of the “rational” individual from the “world out there” as indicated above. In reversing the gaze (imagining being seen naked by his pet-cat and not the habitual other way round), Derrida uncovers a whole domain of relationships, of what it means to be human or animal or living creature. An alternative, to complement the Derridean reading, is David Abram’s idea of “becoming animal” explored in his book of the same title (2010). Abram describes a reciprocal connection of body and landscape and the ability of both for mutual influence. As he argues, “the depth of a terrain – the relation between the near and far aspects of that land – depends entirely upon where you are standing within that terrain. As you move, bodily, within that landscape, the depth of the scape alters around you” (Abram 85). The point of view here is that it is not the linear “me-watching-cat” or even its reverse, “cat-watching-me,” but rather a dissolving of the lens, turning it inward or all around, simultaneously. As Bezan and Tink note, the fact that Derrida identifies the “historic confusion of all nonhuman living creatures with the general […] category of animal” leads to failure to recognise “any form of sentient life” (x–xi), ascribing the ability to suffer to the human subject only, as life is being historically meditated as being human and animal (x–xi). In Archipelago, the line between human and animal is blurred, for example, when Gavin talks of his dog Suzy as being intelligent and endowed with emotions, just like the dolphins they encounter in the sea. Contemplating how animals also feel pain and grief, have moods but do not seek revenge, unlike humans (Roffey 176), Gavin reconsiders the habitual Cartesian and even Darwinian hierarchy. What is more, looking at the same sky Darwin had looked at in his time, Gavin realises, in opposition to Darwinism, that “[a]nimals fill the gap between man and God” (324).

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  207 Further on, when Suzy is carried away by the sea and Océan is feeling lonely and abandoned, a white whale appears out of the depths (316), and Océan takes it for Moby Dick (318). A direct allusion to Melville’s masterpiece, 3 the albino whale is depicted differently in Archipelago: it is neither revengeful nor malicious, quite unlike the whale constructed in literature (Melville) and Ahab’s imagination. Contrarily to Gavin’s fear, this white whale does not split the boat in two, as it could do given its might (317), since it is not after father and daughter, but is just there, just inhabiting that big sea. In this scene, Gavin experiences the reversal of the gaze, being looked at by the huge whale, in a manner similar to Derrida’s cat, and this makes him reconsider the relationship of the human and the more-than-human: “and then it becomes clear; the whale is looking directly at Romany, its eyes fastened on them standing there in the cockpit. The whale is studying them, curious” (318). Gavin’s reaction, surprisingly, is not of fear but of love: “he feels engulfed in this natural serotonin surge of love, of bliss. It is rarely so freely and spontaneously released” (318). Significantly, in this description, the emotion is communicated through a chemical substance – serotonin, the happiness hormone – and conveyed in a fluid imagery, as the character is “engulfed” in the substance. At the same time, the scene is curiously reminiscent of Hélène Cixous’s subversion of patriarchal angst, “that internalised horror of the dark,” of “going into the forest” (Cixous 878), at confronting female desire and creativity. As she argues in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” it is this fear that leads to the construction of the Medusa as a monster in “the history of reason” (879). However, if one puts reason aside and looks at the Medusa “straight on to see her,” as Cixous insists, it will appear that “she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful, and she’s laughing” (885). It is at this moment of looking at the whale/ nature “straight on” that Gavin feels the upsurge of hormones and experiences a kind of love, “something the beast knows about” (Roffey 318). As he is looking “straight on,” the beast starts singing, as if trying to say something (318). In Becoming Animal, Abram holds (3) that it is by moving bodily within a landscape – what he describes as the ever-changing “flesh of the breathing world” (78) – that one becomes fully human, a humanity paradoxically achieved through deeply growing into one’s own animality (10). In our case, the people in seascape become, we can say, “transanimals” through the act of seeing and being seen by the animal other, that is, by communicating with nature and animals as “critters” or “companion species” as Haraway theorises in When Species Meet (2008, 16–19).

Everything Is Related and Nothing Is Set in Stone Dwelling on our oceanic origins in the final chapter of Exposed (2016), Stacy Alaimo brings out the Darwinian paradox of man being an animal

208  Julia Kuznetski yet being “repulsed” by the awareness of one’s animal heritage (2016, 116). In the same way, Butler speaks of “abjection” as a reaction of the type “I would rather die than do or be that!,” comprising a “zone of uninhabitability” that the subject denies (1993, 243), even if this is our natural reaction (e.g. sexuality). However, Alaimo stresses that it is by “accepting the unacceptable,” that is, the fact that “even our brain follows the same law” as that of the animal world, as both affirmed and denied by Darwin, that we may be able to overcome our mental and spiritual exceptionalism and finally accept as given that in our origins we are “‘the amphibian-like creature’, then the ‘fish-like animal’, and, finally the ‘aquatic animal […] with the two sexes united in the same individual’” (Alaimo 2016, 116). The sea is indeed a perfect place for the mixing of genders, where naturally transsexual creatures abide, for example, clown fish or moray eel (Stevens n.p.). In the novel, due to unsettling combinations of many factors, such as “the sea which is visible and the winds which are invisible” (Roffey 247), things are not straight or strictly divided and the characters navigate in “a fluid effort of rigour, mental and physical” (247; emphasis added). Thus, while navigating Gavin thinks of himself and his female guide/co-pilot/companion Phoebe as all together: “woman man, boyman man, and sometimes he feels like a boy and sometimes he cannot see which of them is the woman and sometimes he feels big and sometimes he feels small” (247). And neither is the sea a place where something can appear “unnatural,” because, being liquid, it transcends boundaries and challenges the dualist logic of natural/unnatural. For instance, this is taken up in a memorable conversation with Océan about marine phenomena, in this case, flying fish. The girl finds it crazy that a fish would have wings, and her father’s reply is that this is how things are in nature: “Nature makes some birds which can’t fly at all, and some beasts which can fly and swim easily. Nature makes odd creatures, some which can seem quite unnatural” (75; emphasis in the original). Here, we can dwell on the paradox embedded in the pun: how can things seem unnatural if nature made them? It seems that, indeed, there is more freedom and more possibilities in nature, although our mind would deny it, while looking for clear-cut categories. Have we not heard of certain relationships being considered “unnatural” in culture? It is no accident that Gavin’s invitation to Océan to “see” things for herself (75) is emphasised in the text: How much of what we see, feel, perceive, experience as “right” do we rationally deny as “wrong”? Thus, the definition of “natural,” too, is but discursive and depends on the point of view. As I have written elsewhere (Tofantšuk, forthcoming), for Butler, as for Alaimo, nature is a realm of possibilities allowing to see the physical body and many of its realities as not “written in stone” (Butler 2004a, 29), thus making it possible to “exceed the norm” (e.g. of heteronormativity). As Gavin tells Océan, sometimes the earth “shifts about”

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  209 and “laughs” (Roffey 139) and he himself experiences how the sea, quite literally, “turns things upside down” (135), as when they are swimming with turtles as if they were flying about in space and the sea looking like the sky from underneath (135). This experience of being outside the usual relations of up and down is like being “beside oneself” in the Butlerian sense (2004b) – that is, being outside habitual categories, but also outside a sense of individual and individualist autonomy, in interrelation with others. While speaking mostly of social life as mostly an “ethical enmeshment” (2004b, 25), Butler still uses strong bodily imagery that allows to extend her notion of being “beside oneself” onto transcorporeal relations as well, in which the most important thing is the upsetting of a hierarchy: “being a porous boundary, given over to others, finding oneself in a trajectory of desire in which one is taken out of oneself, and resituated irreversibly in a field of others in which one is not the presumptive center” (2004b, 25). In Archipelago, it is often through Océan, who is young and unspoilt by rationalism, that most transcorporeal experiences are communicated. Thus, her father repeatedly calls her a “mermaid” (that human/nature hybrid); as he sees her swimming he cannot help but compare her to “a creature of the sea, a juvenile tortoise or radiant sunfish” (Roffey 115). And, whether in a direct or accidental reference to Butler, she is described in this scene as “[not] scared; she’s out of herself” (115; emphasis added). What is more, when Gavin speaks of how the sea makes one think about everything, he also feels that “[h]e is beside himself” (314; emphasis added). Having made the journey around the Caribbean archipelago and having witnessed various manifestations of the sea, its relationship to land, as well as the co-existence and “intra-action” – as in Karen Barad’s notion, explained above – of various creatures and phenomena, and having examined themselves in relation to it all, the characters finally arrive at a momentous realisation: “Everything on the planet is related to everything else. […]. Seals and humans have a link” (Roffey 327). It is worth noting that he does not only say “everyone” but also says “everything,” meaning that not only creatures and people are related but also substances, the animate and inanimate world: “the sea is water. We are made from water. So again, it is related” (328). This realisation, achieved through the narrative, that her dog, which is made of water and related to seals, is now with the white whale, makes Océan finally overcome her traumas. She also comes to believe that her brother, killed by the brown substance of the deadly wave, has in fact turned first into a mermaid and then back into water, the primary substance. How everything is related is also reiterated at the end of the novel by an earthquake and tsunami hitting Japan and rolling further as far as the Galapagos Islands, where Gavin and Océan luckily survive by hiding in a highland park together with turtles who know intuitively where to hide.

210  Julia Kuznetski Thus, Gavin finally comes to sense this transcorporeal enmeshment, which is healing and liberating: The sea, you know. It gets you thinking. I thought I was separate. Me against the world. I wanted to escape that house, everything. But really, I’m part of it all, the earth, the sea. I can’t get away. (Roffey 356; emphasis in the original) This provides Gavin with freedom and an ability to overcome trauma and reunite himself with his wife and his home-country. As the waves can occur anywhere and a tsunami from far away can reach at any moment, and we are all intertwined in currents and climates, there is no running away on the planet. As Alaimo puts it, we are ourselves “the very substance and stuff” of this world (in Tofantšuk 2019, 26).

Conclusion Monique Roffey’s novel Archipelago is framed by rain, a natural element that is not only fulfilling a symbolic function as it does in many famous books and films (e.g., A Farewell to Arms, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, etc.) but is also very physical, material and decisive in the outcome of events, from the destruction of the house to the purification and reconciliation of the survivors during the sea voyage, pointing simultaneously to the archetype of the Deluge, with the boat being a miniature Ark, as suggested earlier. In the final scene, Gavin’s sister Paula, a strong-willed journalist residing in the United Kingdom and knowing all about law and order, is described as being “beyond herself,” whirling in “sweet, sweet rain” (358) and the endless joy of the Carnival in Trinidad. Historically, the Carnival of 2011 was held days before the devastating earthquake in Japan, respectively, 7–8 March and 11 March 2011, as Roffey explains in the Acknowledgements (360). In Archipelago, the chronology is reversed so that the novel winds up on a celebratory note, the celebration of the flesh and the elements, as “rain dances down from the sky and turns every person into a slippery wet brown statue” (357). Water, presented as an agent of destruction, death and trauma at the beginning of the novel, is now a source of life and joy, as people catch it with their mouths, allowing it to run down their throats like wine (357) and the air – another element – is “full of sex and love” – another exchange of fluids, and another allusion to Noah getting himself drunk after the Deluge and calling on his human and animal company to “be fruitful” (Genesis 9:7). As I have tried to show in this chapter, water serves as a manifestation of transmodern fluidity, combining the symbolic, discursive and practical materiality characteristic of Transmodernity. Within this transcorporeal movement across bodies and natures, a new sense of self emerges, challenging that of a human master vs. the world “out there.” In effect, there

Monique Roffey’s Archipelago  211 is no human self as a solid autonomous block with a mind inside, but rather a collectivity of fluid, watery, transanimalistic, permeable selves, which are simultaneously “beside themselves” and stand in a transcorporeal relationship with a world that is similarly relative and similarly fluid and fragile, too fragile to be simply and rationally “mastered.”

Notes 1 Roffey divides her time between Trinidad and the United Kingdom, and her novels are likewise set intermittently in Europe and the Caribbean, her most famous Caribbean novel being The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (2009), longlisted for the Orange Prize. Characteristically, in all her books, Roffey combines the intimate view of the insider with the critical eye of the outsider. 2 I wish to thank Stacy Alaimo for recommending the work of Neimanis to complement her own, as well as for the compelling and instructive interview she gave for the Estonian culture weekly Sirp, in which she elaborated on her ideas of transcorporeality and the body in the Anthropocene, as cited below. 3 There are further references to Moby Dick, a novel which indeed serves as a powerful intertext for Archipelago, but this aspect will not be discussed here so as to keep focus and save space.

Works Cited Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon, 2010. Print. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Print. ———. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2016. Print. Anonymous. “The Water in You.” The USGS Water Science School Monday, 23 July 2018. Accessed on 17/03/2019 at: https://water.usgs.gov/edu/ propertyyou.html/. Web. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Half-Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. 2nd edition. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007. Print. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P, 2000. Print. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Ecologist 7 (December 1977): 399–401. Print. Bezan, Sarah, and James Tink. “Introduction: Seeing Animals after Derrida.” Seeing Animals after Derrida. Eds Sarah Bezan and James Tink. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. ix–xxii. Buell, Laurence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge, 1993. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004a. Print.

212  Julia Kuznetski ———. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 2004b. Carrington, Damian. “People Eat at Least 50,000 Plastic Particles a Year Study Finds.” The Guardian 5 June 2019. Accessed on 17/03/2019 at: www. theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/05/people-eat-at-least-50000plastic-particles-a-year-study-finds/. Web. Chen, Cecilia. “Mapping Waters, Thinking with Watery Places.” Thinking with Water. Eds. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis. Montreal & Kingston, London, IL: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013. 274–98. Print. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” 1975. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875–93. Print. Colacello, Bob. Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. New York: Vintage 2014. Print. Colvin, Christina M. “Composite Creatures: Marianne Moore’s Zoo-Logic,” Isle 42.4 (2017): 707–26. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Gattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. 2006. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. “The Time of Thought.” Feminist Time against Nation Time: Gender, Politics and Nation-State in an Age of a Permanent War. Eds. Victoria Hesford and Lisa Diedrich. London: Lexington Books, 2008. 41–56. Print. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 1984. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. 2001. 2269–99. Print. ———. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. 2008. Print. Murphy, Patrick. Transversal Ecocritical Praxis: Theoretical Arguments, Literary Analysis and Cultural Critique. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013. Print. Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Print. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. “Transmodernity: A New Paradigm.” Trans. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, 2017. Accessed on 22/03/2019 at: http://transmodern-theory. blogspot.com.es/2017/05/transmodernity-new-paradigm.html/. Web. Roffey, Monique. Archipelago. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print. Stevens, Sidney. “11 Animals that Can Change Their Gender.” Modern Nature Network 5 February 2019. Accessed on 22/03/2019 at: www.mnn. com /earth-matters/animals/photos/animals-can-change-their-gender/ gender-fluidity/. Web. Tofantšuk, Julia. “The Body is a Battleground: An Interview with Stacy Alaimo.” Interview published in Estonian as “Keha on lahinguväli: Intervjuu Stacy Alaimoga,” 2019. Trans. Julia Tofantšuk. Sirp 11 (22 March 2019): 26−27. Print. ———. “A Journey through Eco-apocalypse and Gender Transformations: New Perspectives on Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve.” Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature. Ed. Douglas A. Vakoch. London: Routledge, forthcoming.

10 A Transmodern Approach to Biology in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman* Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen All beings alive today are equally evolved. Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet (1998)

Introduction Fiction, especially that of a speculative nature, often opens a window into our present, our past and our future that enhances human understanding. Hence the special importance of ground-breaking literature, particularly at times of social uncertainty and ideological change. Some writers possess an exceptional talent to foresee general and particular human traits and a great ability to represent our attributes, behaviours, fears and desires in an engaging aesthetic form. This fact makes literature in general and science fiction (SF) in particular an ideal field to explore the human mind as well as the world we inhabit and construct, as SF often speculates about the possible near (and far) futures. Contemporary SF is usually classified into two main types: apocalyptic narratives and technological utopias. However, some works transgress these categories, showing a different response in line with what I consider to be a transmodern perspective of a near-future world in which human beings explore the universe and interact with other non-human beings. In the following pages I will try to justify this assertion by analysing Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), an SF novel that provides a highly imaginative literary response to the challenges posed by the near future in terms that I consider transmodern. As I will attempt to show, the interspecies encounters between human beings and alien biologies that take place in a number of different worlds lead to a subsequent implosion of traditional biological and ontological categories. Some of these beings challenge our Cartesian habits of mind regarding embodiment, intelligibility and knowledge. The encounters with the alien beings and the strong desire of Mary, the narrator, to communicate with them, as well as the inevitable interference of the roles of observer/observed, imply an ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies,1 which calls

214  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen for a transmodern “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” – “an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing and being” (Barad 2007, 185). This transmodern approach to biology and culture ultimately implies a reconfiguration of our approach to the world(s) which requires an ethical and active response, or, in Donna Haraway’s terms, a “response-able” practice (Haraway 2008, 2016). In order to understand the conceptual framework for the conceptualisation of this kind of transmodern response to the challenges of our imagined future, it is necessary to briefly explain the paradigm shift initiated in the late twentieth century and continued at the beginning of the twenty-first, which led Western civilisation from the postmodern to the transmodern age. First, a short overview of the most essential characteristics of transmodern discourse will be offered in order to better understand the particularities of transmodern fiction as represented by Mitchison’s path-breaking SF novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman. This will be followed by a brief introduction to a transmodern approach to biology in the next section, meant to help readers understand the novelties in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs. Finally, the novel itself will be analysed from this perspective in the last section. As the analysis will show, Mitchison’s biological speculation and the representation of interspecies relationships could be said to inaugurate a transmodern perspective on biology in general and on xenobiology2 (XB) in particular. This revolutionary view, later developed by thinkers such as Karen M. Barad and Donna Haraway, leads to a new ethical paradigm on a planetary scale, or a new “ethico-onto-epistem-ology,” to put it in Karen Barad’s term, which is characteristic of (late) transmodernist thinking.

The Transmodern Paradigm and the Birth of a New Approach to Biology The term “Transmodernity” was coined by the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda in 1989 to refer to an epistemic break or paradigm shift occurring since the 1980s (2017, 1–2).3 Other thinkers, such as the Liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel (1999, 2001, 2002, 2005), the Belgian philosopher and mathematician Marc Luyckx Ghisi (1999; 2008), the Filipino social activist Nicanor Perlas (2011), the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff (1997), the Pakistani expert on Muslim thought Ziauddin Sardar (2010) or the French anthropologist Etienne Le Roy (2011), among others, have also used this term. They all seem to agree that Transmodernity transcends the two previous periods of Modernity and Postmodernity. According to Rodríguez Magda, Transmodernity constitutes a dialectical synthesis of the modern thesis and postmodern antithesis that endorses the ethical and political challenges both of Modernity and Postmodernity in order to define a field beyond nihilism and uncertainty (Suárez Bustamante 86).

Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman  215 Transmodernity has been generally conceptualised as “a global transformation process, consisting of a paradigm shift brought about by various contemporary global processes. Among these, technology has been considered the main factor in the configuration of the new transmodern society” (87), especially technology related to computerisation and communication. As Andrea Mura explains, the transmodern forces of globalisation and the development of computerisation have brought about “dramatic transformations in the way in which space, time and communication are perceived” (72). Everything seems to be connected in the here and now. And this has brought about the rise of “virtuality” and “the emergence of a new way of experiencing space and reality” (72, emphasis in the original) by means of the new technological structure of multimedia communication. Another defining characteristic of Transmodernity, which is linked to the development of the Internet and this “new way of experiencing” the world, is the break with linear and Cartesian thinking. Instead, nets, webs, knots and maps of tensions have become useful metaphors for transmodern thinking. These tropes represent the complexities of the transmodern worldview more precisely, overcoming binary oppositions and creating some space for the development of “a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (Haraway 1991, 191–2, emphasis added). In the last decades, posthuman, postcolonial, poststructuralist and new materialist feminist critics and philosophers,4 who have been thoroughly questioning the “human” – that is, the “embodied and embedded accounts of the multilayered and complex relations of power that structure our ‘being human’” (Braidotti 15) – have offered new and valuable insights into the transformations of contemporary knowledge. The feminist scholar in science and technology studies Donna Haraway emphasises the intertwined essence of natures, cultures, subjects, and objects (2016, 13), following Karen Barad’s understanding of the world as constituted in terms of intra- and inter-action (Barad 2007).5 According to their view, earthlings form “complex, dynamic, responsive situated, historical systems” (Haraway 2016, 58). All organisms establish relational and sympoietic6 arrangements, dynamic patterns of organisation. All beings constantly engage in complex physical relationships, symbiotically, assembling in diverse ecological units.7 As we shall see in the next section, the concept of symbiotic relationship among beings will be essential to an innovative (relational) transmodern understanding of living systems, their characteristics and their behaviours. In this line of thought, Haraway creatively uses the metaphor of “string figure games” (2016, 13), a form of continuous weaving, play and storytelling (14), to refer to the active interconnectedness or entanglement,

216  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen made out of “attachments and detachments, […] cuts and knots” (32), which characterises Transmodernity.8 As we shall see in the following section, this interconnectedness also characterises life on earth, as seen by contemporary evolutionary biologists such as Lynn Margulis,9 whose Serial Endosymbiosis Theory (SET) – first developed in her Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (1970), and later in Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (1981) – completely revolutionised traditional Darwinian “survival-ofthe-fittest” approaches to biology.10 According to Margulis’s discovery, eukaryotic cells evolved from the symbiotic merger of non-nucleated bacteria, which had previously existed independently. Therefore, symbiosis was a major force in the evolution of cells and in the origins of evolutionary novelty. The fact that life on earth is based on symbiotic processes led Margulis to develop a new view of life on a planetary scale, which strongly rejects the idea that there are more and less evolved beings. As she explains, leaving behind traditional teleological and anthropocentric views on evolution, “[a]ll beings alive today are equally evolved” (1999, 3). In keeping with this, all beings belong to a symbiotic union11 – an idea that Naomi Mitchison seemed to share, as can be seen in Memoirs – thus opening up for a transmodern perspective on life and biology. Life is seen in a new light in the transmodern age, as sympoetic or “collectively-producing systems […] do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries” (Haraway 2016, 61). Consequently, traditional classifying labels collapse in the contemporary and emerging biological evolutionary theories.12 Consistent with this, Haraway refers to a fascinating organism whose unusual characteristics challenge traditional “epistemological and visualizing systems” (Barad 2014, 227): the brittlestar – or Ophioma wendtii 13 – which Barad analyses in Meeting the Universe Halfway 14 and later develops in her article “Invertebrate Visions: Diffractions of the Brittlestar” (2014). As was discovered in 2001 (Aizenberg et al. 819), these many-armed creatures have evolved in “intra-action” with their environment, responding to the different stimuli and negotiating their environments without eyes or brains. Brittlestars are definitely not ideal Cartesian subjects, as they “transgress the sacrosanct divides between organic and inorganic, machine and animal, episteme and techne, matter and intelligibility, macro and micro” (Barad 2014, 235). As we shall see when analysing Mitchison’s novel – in which there are some “radial entities” (2011, 14), and alien creatures “like a five-armed starfish” with radial vision (11) – Memoirs also “rewrites the metaphysical opposition between mind and body as a dualism based on a fantasy of embodiment in a metamorphic species” as Gavin Miller points out (260). These radial beings, whose spiral structure has dominated all mental and psychic processes, inevitably clash with human bi-lateral perception and either-or principles (Mitchison 2011, 11).15 This may

Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman  217 hinder our human comprehension if we do not broaden it adequately to the newly found realities. In the following section, I will attempt to show how these fresh theorisations have contributed to the emergence of a new vision on biology and on the relationships between human and non-human species in the field of literature.

Science-Fiction Literature and a Transmodern Perspective on Biology In the second half of the twentieth century, SF seems to have been dominated by robots, androids, cyborgs and clones as our fellow – or antagonistic – creatures. As Sherryl Vint has pointed out, “[i]n the late twentieth century, sf [sic] enthusiastically took up the question of cyborg identity” (178). Now, after almost exhausting the question of the man-machine relation, SF literature seems to have moved on to explore “our kinship with animals” (178), as well as the question of the boundary between human beings and “all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers” (Derrida 402, emphasis in the original). Admittedly, speculation about the relationship between human beings and animals has been very much present in many literary works in the last century – from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius (1944) and Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island (1963) to Anne McCaffrey’s Decision at Doona (1969), Bruce McAllister’s “The Girl Who Loved Animals” (1988) or Ken MacLeod’s Engines of Light series (2000–2002) (Vint 177). But it is becoming even more relevant in the transmodern age, now that “natural” species are disappearing and that “[o]ur manipulation of animal bodies through selective breeding and genetic manipulation [… has reached an] unparalleled degree of intervention” (178). In the early seventeenth century, blood transfusions from animals to human beings were performed in England and France (Dooldeniya and Warrens 2003, n.p.). In the nineteenth century, some skin grafts – especially from frogs – were carried out (Cooper 2012, n.p.). And in the 1960s, some not-very-successful chimpanzee kidneys and heart transplantations were made (Cooper 2012, n.p.). Currently, the existing shortage of organs for a rising demand has led to an increasing attention to other sources of organs for human transplantation such as pigs (Dooldeniya and Warrens 2003, n.p.). In the transmodern age, “xenotransplantation” – that is, the transplantation of living tissue from one species16 to another – has become a more effective technique17 and its potential is being seriously explored. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the relationship between human beings and animals is becoming more significant in transmodern fiction.

218  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen Additionally, many thinkers, scientists and writers have wondered about the origin of life and the evolution of intelligence in the universe, and they have tried to imagine how alien life beyond our planet might be. In the transmodern age, the interest in astrobiology – that is, the scientific field that questions whether extra-terrestrial life exists and how humans could detect it – also known as “exobiology” or “xenobiology,” has also been increasing since NASA funded its first exobiology project in 1959 (Hubbard n.p.). The scientific curiosity surrounding key issues such as the origin and definition of life, bioenergetics, reproduction or intelligence, materialised in 1998 in the creation of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI), which hosts a very active multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional collaborative investigation to advance the knowledge of astrobiology.18 NASA has eight currently active and three planned missions to Mars,19 the latest incursions onto the Moon, including China’s Chang’e-4 mission, which landed on the dark side of the Moon on January 3, 2019. Recently, it has also carried out a research programme on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, and an abundant biochemical examination of many meteorites and comets. All these undertakings show that exobiology is boosting in the first decades of the twenty-first century, raising many questions about exotic biochemistries and the possible nature(s) of life in the universe. Fiction, especially SF literature, has developed in parallel, to explore an issue that is no less important than exobiology: “xenology” – that is, the study of extra-terrestrial biology, culture, etc. The topics examined by xenology can range from the existence of alien civilisations to interstellar and interspecies communication, contact with alien species, etc. We can find fictitious speculations on alien life as early as the second century AD with Lucian of Samosata’s A True History, not to mention many creation myths in which deities were often stellar beings. But it was during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that fictional treatments of extra-terrestrial life proliferated. Especially remarkable are John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), Percival Lowell’s Mars (1896), John Munro’s A Trip to Venus (1897), Garrett Putnam Serviss’s A Columbus of Space (1909) or Mark Wicks’s to Mars via the Moon (1911), to cite just a few. As Robert Freitas has commented, these nineteenth-century romantic visits to alien planets soon gave rise to the modern era of SF, when “the number of scientific and fictional investigations of the problems and benefits presented by intelligent extraterrestrial races rises almost exponentially” (n.p.). As he further states, in 1929 Hugo Gernsback coined the term “science fiction,” and, after the pulps of the 1920s and the technological space operas of the 1930s and 1940s, both science and science fiction have become remarkably sophisticated, dealing in detail with interstellar travel, extrasolar alien life,

Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman  219 reasonable planetary environments conducive to the evolution of such life, and various particulars of possible alien physiology, sociology, and philosophy. (n.p.)20 The speculative focus on xenology and the representation of imaginary relationships between human beings and alien biologies and cultures are the aspects of contemporary SF that seem most interesting as many of the literary works exploring all these topics contribute to the creation of a new transmodern perspective on biology, humanity and planetary identity. Particularly imaginative and innovative in this respect is Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman, a novel in which the interspecies encounters that the main character has while exploring different planets dismantles clear-cut boundaries and oppositional binaries in the realm of biology, of personal and species identity, and of interspecies communication. What is more, as I will attempt to show, the transmodern perspective on biology found in Memoirs will confront readers with what can be described as a new ethical transmodern paradigm.

Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman: Or the Relationship between Human and Non-Human Species Naomi Mitchison’s twenty-second novel – publicised as “her first science fiction novel” (1962, cover; emphasis in the original) – is one of a kind, as neither the Scottish writer is a typical SF writer nor her Memoirs is a standard SF novel. As its title suggests, the novel takes the form of the main character’s personal account of her professional and personal experiences during her space missions, where she encounters and is able to communicate with many different non-human extra-Terran species: “radiates” (Mitchison 2011, Chapter 1); “jags” – who seemed to be so nearly without consciousness that the scientists were ready to count them provisionally as not-life (15); “Epsies” – intelligent non-lovable beings (26); “Rounds” (Chapter 3) – described as “round-headed, dark-eyed fauna” (30); “alien grafts” (Chapters 4, 5, 11, 13); Martian “znydgis” (Chapters 4, 5, 14); lichenoids; bird-fish; dolphinoids; and “mats of vegetation” (76), which were in fact enormous urchins (Chapter 6). Other life forms she encountered seem more familiar: caterpillars, butterflies, spider-like forms and wood crabs (Chapters 7–10), “Diners” – similar to dinosaurs (143) – and even Terran reptiles, dogs, jackals (Chapters 10–11) and cows (Chapter 11). Mary, the autodiegetic narrator, a young, curious and adventurous woman of science, presents a selective and detailed account on some of the reflections and events she comes across in the course of several space expeditions, which ultimately provoke profound alterations in her perception of self and world. As Hilary H. Rubinstein writes in his 1976 introduction to Memoirs, the novel “has no significant beginning

220  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen or climax, no plot, and its characterisation, apart from that of the space heroine herself, is rudimentary” (8). However, the interactions of Mary with other species and worlds are quite complex, as her determination to investigate and communicate with other life forms raises the complicated issue of mutual “interference” with these forms. Mary is an interspecies communications-specialist or xenotranslator. On her expeditions, she communicates with extra-Terran species, and while on earth, she also speaks with non-human animals. Xenocommunication 21 requires a special state of mind so as not to impose one’s mindset onto the others. In fact, Mary is aware that her strong desire to establish contact with alien creatures may be detrimental to her professional skills – that she would forget about her expedition if she came on a really interesting communication problem (Mitchison 2011, 5). Still, as Isobel Murray states in her 2011 Introduction to the novel, Mary is always open “to the possibilities of communication, opening herself completely” (xi). Being a good expeditionary scientist is especially difficult for a xenocommunicator, as the first job requires strict obedience to the principle of non-interference, 22 whereas the second calls for a certain degree of emotional permeability and intellectual openness towards the other. As we shall see, underlying the whole memoir is Mary’s preoccupation with “interferences” and the tension between having to use reason to carry out scientific analyses and relational feelings to establish xenocommunicative connections. Perhaps, one of the most striking encounters experienced by Mary and her colleagues takes place on planet “lambda 771 in the Q series” (11). There, “the inhabitants’ evolutionary descent had been from a radial form, something like a five-armed starfish, itself developing out of a spiral” (11). The biological characteristics of these alien radial entities – who had a “peripheral ring of brain-plus-eye material” and whose main organs were “central and not orientated in any direction” (14) – are strongly reminiscent of the Terran brittlestars that Barad interpreted as non-Cartesian subjects (see above). Indeed, their physical and mental characteristics seem to contest binary classifications. The bodies of these radial beings are completely different from those of human beings. For example, their perception, like that of brittlestars, 23 has nothing to do with that of two-eyed beings: “They perceived not two, but a great number of images of a much more diffuse kind, which built up into the sort of perception which one could guess at through their art” (19). Their vision is “of the same quality all around,” and there is no front or back for them (19). Their mathematics and their technology are different too (19). Their civilisation is organised according to their perception of their environment: they have “low buildings, profusely decorated on the undersides of their roofs, mostly with spirally fungal and rooting forms” (11). Moreover, their minds are radically unlike to those of human beings: “These creatures had a definitive top and bottom, necessary after

Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman  221 all for gravitation. But the radial pattern which had developed out of the budding spiral had remained throughout evolution and completely dominated all mental and psychic processes” (11). As Mary further explains, human beings are constantly choosing between two options, and our language and actions are structured accordingly: “In communication, as, of course, you realise, by the constant succession of a or b, a or b choices, snap judgements and actions can be made as rapidly as possible in the semi-intuitive technique we have all learned, which is both mental and manual” (18). Radiates have “an entirely different outlook […]. [T]hey never thought in terms of either-or” (18). By comparing our human thought system – which is the product of a long evolutionary process strongly based on our biological characteristics: we have a “two-sided brain, two eyes, two ears” (18) – to that of a dissimilar alien species, Mary is able to deconstruct her own thinking process and tune in with that of the radiates. As she explains: It is only in circumstances like this that we realise how much we ourselves are constructed bi-laterally on either-or principles. […] I knew this in a sense, but when it came to attempted communication it increased my difficulties far more than I ever thought it would. (11) As an expert in communication with non-human species, Mary has to overcome this difficulty. She has to get “into the same state of mind” as them in order to communicate efficiently (19). However, this intellectual effort does not leave her untouched, as it requires a strong empathetic effort: I was coming more and more into tune with the five-choiced world. Naturally I did not realise it was affecting my own personality. […] When their wheeling dances started, I found myself emotionally wheeling with them […]; I felt myself merging in an all-sided relationship. (20) Not only her feelings but also her basic thinking processes are affected: “I was beginning to think of general philosophical problems in a way that seemed new and full of possibilities” (20). Eventually, her personality seems to disintegrate, as “happens under the action of some of the hallucinogens” (20). Her abnormal experiences with this non-human non-Terran species are difficult to translate into the English language, as Mary herself acknowledges: “It is not easy to recall all this. Because the actual words in which they are recalled are too sharp and unambiguous, plain uncompromising Terran words, often with exact opposites!” (20). Perception, language and identity are mutable, but also inextricably linked.

222  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen Similarly, the species who communicate also get entangled, as they have to share a common space. In When Species Meet (2008), Donna Haraway argues that creatures’ identities and affinities emerge through their encounters, their relationships. Following Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s view on “sym-bio-genesis,”24 Haraway defines organisms as complex “ecosystems of genomes, consortia, communities,” bounded by symbiotic formations (2008, 31). She further states that “[o]rdinary identities emerge and are rightly cherished, but they remain always a relational web opening to non-Euclidean pasts, presents, and futures. The ordinary is a multipartner mud dance issuing from and in entangled species” (32). This perspective on the entanglement of species is endorsed by Mitchison’s protagonist. As Mary reflects, I suppose one of the things which one finds it hardest to take is that one must develop a stable personality and yet that inevitably it will be altered by the other forms of life with which one will be in communication, and that these bio-psychical alterations must be accepted. (Mitchison 2011, 8–9) Mary’s desire to know how non-human Terran species and non-Terran life forms breed and live their lives is so intense that her interest in communication becomes linked with the mentioned “bio-psychical alterations.” This becomes most evident in two fascinating episodes in the novel – Chapters 4, 11–13, where the character-narrator describes her experiences with grafts – in which the duality between human and non-human is radically broken.25 In Chapter 4 (42–54), Mary recalls how she became interested in certain aspects of immunology (42), after discovering that “alien tissues call up anti-bodies from the living mammalian body” (42). As commented in the third section, xenotransplantation is quite tricky in this respect. However, Mary wonders whether it would be possible to “take a tissue so alien that it is not recognised even as an enemy so that no anti-body is produced” (42); or whether symbiosis would be possible “with a mammalian host” (42). This theoretical supposition is put into practice when she decides to experiment with an alien graft. Grafts had already been done on “various experimental animals, dogs, pigs, jackals, horses, the amiable Martian znydgi, and a few other species” (44). But Mary wants to go a step further and so decides to get a graft herself, which is implanted on her thigh (48). She expects to learn how to communicate with the grafts thanks to this intimate closeness (46). As the graft successfully attaches to her body, Mary’s menstrual cycle stops, as “ovulation [does] not take place” (48–49). Still, the most striking outcome of this experiment is not physical but mental. Mary is radically transformed by this pregnancy-like experience: “I began to be possessive about my graft; I could not think about it coldly” (49); and she develops strong maternal feelings for her graft, which she

Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman  223 names Ariel: “I couldn’t rest until I had reassured myself that it was perfectly all right” (49). As she further explains, “I had a feeling it was part of me, in the same way that Ariel and Caliban are part of Prospero, as they are normally shown in productions of the Tempest” (49–50). Mary expects to learn about communication with grafts in general thanks to her intimate closeness with Ariel (46). However, communication with her implanted graft is not particularly successful (52) and at a certain point Ariel dies (53), leaving Mary somewhat depressed. Maybe that is the reason for her second attempt to have a fresh graft implanted on her thigh again (149). And so do others, such as Zloin the Martian, and Daisy the dog (158). On this occasion, the “grafts grew a good deal faster, and had a more pronounced effect” (160). The hosts experiment with music and tactile communication, and their behaviours and identity become strongly affected again. Mary recalls that as the days went by, “our conduct became increasingly abnormal” (162), and her colleagues observe that she “[has become] very odd to talk to” (161). The influence and sense of connection with the graft makes Mary wonder about her (new) identity: “in what sense was I me?”; “I can barely recognise myself” (161). She then concludes that she has regressed into a pre-intellectual state (164) and that she is completely under the influence of the graft, “except that far down, almost smothered, there was still a very small quietly struggling observer” (167). Nonetheless, the experiment is brought to an abrupt end as her colleagues realise that she is no longer behaving and thinking like a civilised scientist and they remove the graft from her hip, so that “I—or it—bled and bled” (168). As these passages show, connection with non-human species can be experienced as a symbiotic relationship that makes the rule of non-interference with alien cultures impossible to obey. All communication demands an openness and empathetic stance that questions the idea of a stable and immutable individual identity. As Haraway states, “communication, even with ourselves, is xenobiology: otherworldly conversation, terran topics, local terms, situated knowledges” (2004, 145; emphasis in the original). Identities and affinities emerge, then, through encounters, a fact that involves the necessity of an ethical approach and the application of “response-able” practices (Haraway 2008; 2016). For Haraway, there is responsibility in every “relationship crafted in intra-action through which entities, subjects and objects, come into being” (2008, 71). 26 Haraway’s concept of “response-ability” – a collective “praxis of care and response […] in ongoing multispecies worlding on a wounded Terra” (2016, 105) – “is always experienced in the company of significant others” (2008, 89). Response-ability emphasises the necessary ethical drive in real and imaginative practices and politics to rearticulate the relations of minds and bodies (89). As Haraway argues, we all need to become more curious about the relations that constitute our ways of living in order to make worlds that are less deadly for human

224  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and non-human others. From this ethical perspective, communication, especially storytelling, becomes a practice that can render us capable of responding better “within and as part of the world” (Barad 2007, 37).

Conclusion: A New Ethico-onto-epistem-ology in the Transmodern Age As the analysis has attempted to show, Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman creates an imaginary near-future world in which human beings interact with a variety of Terran and extra-Terran non-human life forms, thus casting a transmodern perspective on the multiverse. Transmodern SF literature, in which the relationship between human beings and animals is becoming more significant, questions our understanding of life and allows us to imagine new reconfigurations that are currently being introduced by the latest scientific developments. In the transmodern age, as well as in Memoirs, linear and Cartesian thinking is replaced by an innovative symbiotic and a relational understanding of living systems, their characteristics and behaviour being based on active interconnectedness and entanglement. Clear-cut boundaries and oppositional binaries are dismantled in the realm of biology, of personal and species identity, and of interspecies communication. This transmodern biological perspective, in which creatures’ identities and affinities emerge through their encounters with alien others, is inextricably linked to the birth of the new transmodern ethical paradigm Haraway calls “ethico-onto-epistem-ology.” According to Barad, each of us “is part of the intra-active ongoing circulation of the world in its different mattering” (2014, 234). In the transmodern age, the traditional concepts of subject and object, nature and culture, fact and value, human and non-human, organic and inorganic are no longer clear-cut oppositional terms (234). Entities are no longer understood as inseparable but rather as entangled beings. We can know the world “because we are of the world” (Barad 2007, 185; emphasis in the original). As Barad insists, difference is not about othering/separating but rather “about making connections and commitments. What is on the ‘other side’ of the cut is not separate from us. Agential separability is not individuation; the dynamics is one of differentiating-entangling” (2014, 234).27 Consequently, in Transmodernity, ethics is no longer “about the right response to the other but about responsibility and accountability in lively relationships. ‘We’ are a part of these relationships; we do not stand apart” (234). Space explorers can no longer be detached from the non-human species they encounter, as they (we) are all agentive beings, entangled with other phenomena. Additionally, communication is always a form of intra-action, symbiotically altering its participants. I would argue that this is the most revolutionary characteristic of transmodern thinking: all species, human and non-human, are biologically and relationally entangled, a circumstance that must inevitably lead to

Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman  225 the acknowledgement of an essential responsibility towards each other. As an imaginary space for the entanglement of strangers, transmodern literature seems an ideal field for the exploration, representation and gathering of knowledge about these transcendent and crucial issues.

Notes * The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (codes FFI2015-65775-P and FFI2017-84258-P); and the Government of Aragón and the ERDF 2014– 2020 programme “Building Europe from Aragón” (code H03_17R), for the writing of this chapter. 1 By “intra-active agencies” we mean the capacity to establish relational bonds “as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces” among diverse living agents (Barad 2007, 141). 2 It is generally believed that the term “xenobiology,” which is defined as “the study of the biology of alien life-forms” (Prucher 274), was coined by Harold Wooster in 1954. However, Wooster himself acknowledged that: “it is quite possible that I saw it used elsewhere, in fiction or non-fiction, and made use of it” (223). Still, most probably, the term was first used by the United States SF writer Robert A. Heinlein in The Star Beast (1954) a science fiction novel originally serialised, and later published in a somewhat abridged version, in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (May, June, July 1954) as Star Lummox (Prucher 274). 3 Other terms such as “pseudo-modernism,” “cosmodernism,” “hypermodernism,” “metamodernism,” “post-postmodernism” or “trans-postmodernism,” have been used too. See Onega 2017; Aliaga-Lavrijsen 2018; and AliagaLavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa 2019. 4 Especially outstanding and relevant to contemporary transdisciplinary feminism are the contributions by British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (b. 1941); American feminist scholar Donna Haraway (b. 1944); Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (b. 1949); Italian philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti (b. 1954); American feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad (b. 1956); and Belgian philosopher of science Vinciane Despret (b. 1959), among others. 5 Karen Barad uses the neologism “intra-action” to signify “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (2014, 228). Interaction assumes that there are separate individual agencies, whereas intra-action recognises that these agencies do not exist as individual agencies and only emerge through their mutual entanglement (238). 6 “Sympoiesis” – a term coined by Beth Dempster (2000) – means “making-with” (Haraway 2016, 58), and refers to boundaryless systems of collective production that “are characterized by cooperative, amorphous qualities” (Dempster 2000, 4). It emphasises “linkages, feedback, cooperation, and synergistic behaviour rather than boundaries” (4). As Dempster further states, [s]ympoietic systems recurrently produce a self-similar pattern of relations through continued complex interactions among their many different components. Rather than delineating boundaries, interactions among components and the self-organizing capabilities of a system are recognized as the defining qualities. (4)

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with wild honeyguide birds, who team up together to hunt for honey (MacDonald, n.p.). They communicate both ways, as the honeyguide-human relationship “involves free-living wild animals whose interactions with humans have probably evolved through natural selection […] over the course of hundreds of thousands of years” (Spottishwood, n.p.). Mary’s working life is bounded by professional protocols, of which “do not interfere” is the strongest one. Those who commit interference will be punished and forbidden to leave the Earth ever again. However, sometimes “[i]t was extremely hard to know […] without interference” (Mitchison 2011, 14). And as Mary recognises, deep down, “[w]e are always interfering” one way or another (139). Brittlestars secrete a crystalline form of calcium carbonate and organise it to make optical arrays. Their skeleton functions thus as a visual system, “furnishing the information that lets the animal see its surroundings and escape harm” (Abraham, n.p.). As Abraham further states in his path-breaking article, fittingly entitled “Eyeless Creature Turns Out to Be All Eyes,” “[t]he brittlestar lenses optimize light coming from one direction, and the many arrays of them seem to form a compound eye” (n.p.). Margulis and Sagan argue, in their Acquiring Genomes. A Theory of the Origin of Species (2003), that an organism is the fruit of the “co-opting of strangers” (205). They further state that fusion, sensitivity and accommodation are among the main sources of Darwin’s missing variation (205). No less fascinating is Mary’s first child, a haploid daughter, Viola, the result of the accidental activation of one of her ova by Vly, a two-sexed Martian who communicated all over with his tongue, fingers, toes and sexual organs (58) on their expedition to planet Jones 97. As Haraway comments, “Karen Barad […] has, over many years and in several publications, crafted the powerful feminist theory of intra-action and agential realism. She and I are in firm solidarity that this theory richly applies to animals entangled in relations of scientific practice.” (2008, 331). Agential separability “rejects the geometries of absolute exteriority or absolute interiority” (Barad 2017, 176). “Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity” (177). On the contrary, it is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit, and so, radically open.

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Contributor Biographies

Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen is Lecturer in English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She was a founding member of the publishing house Jekyll & Jill until 2016, where she edited, revised and translated some books, such as El otro McCoy by Brian McCabe (Jekyll & Jill, 2012) and Eva Figes’s La version de Nelly (Jekyll & Jill, 2014). After finishing her Doctoral Thesis on contemporary Scottish fiction, she published several articles, book chapters and books on Scottish literature, such as the monograph The Fiction of Brian McCabe (Peter Lang, 2014), and trauma, such as Is This a Culture of Trauma? (Interdisciplinary Press, 2013) and “To Love Beyond Breath, Beyond Reason: A. L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad.” Papers on Language and Literature. 55.2 (Spring, 2019) – as she was a member of the project “Trauma and Beyond: The Rhetoric and Politics of Suffering in Contemporary Narrative in English” until 2015. She is currently working on the transmodern as part of the projects “Palimpsestic Knowledge: A Transmodern Literary Paradigm” (FFI2015-65775-P) and “Literature in the Transmodern Era: Celebration, Limits and Transgression” (FFI2017-84258-P). She recently edited the volume Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English (Routledge, 2019) and a special issue on the Transmodern for Societies 8(2). 23 “Representations of Transmodern War Contexts in English Literature.” She continues reading and writing on contemporary Scottish fiction – “Greenock-Outer Space: Place and Space in Ken MacLeod’s The Human Front and Descent.” Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfrey, eds. The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019 –, with a new interest in the genres of speculative fiction and science fiction, and, more specifically, on feminism, reproduction and motherhood. Bárbara Arizti is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Zaragoza and a member of the “excellence” research team “Contemporary Narrative in English,” funded by the Aragonese Government and the ERDF. Her current research interests are postcolonial literature and criticism, and, more concretely, Australian and Caribbean authors. She is particularly interested in the relationship between

232  Contributor Biographies ethics and literature; Trauma Studies; Memory Studies; and, more recently, Transmodernity. Arizti has published widely in specialised journals and collective volumes, and is the author of a monograph on David Lodge (2002) and the co-edited volume On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English (2007), together with Silvia Martínez-Falquina. Some of her latest publications are “Self-representation and the (Im)possibility of Remembering in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Mr. Potter” (Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature. Eds. Susana Onega, Constanza del Río and Maite Escudero-Alías. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); “The Holocaust in the Eye of the Beholder: Memory in Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café” (Memory Frictions: Conflict, Negotiation, Politics. Eds. María Jesús Martínez Alfaro and Silvia Pellicer Ortín. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017); and “From Egology to Ecology: Elements of the Transmodern in Tim Winton’s Eyrie” (Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. Eds. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijen and José M. Yebra-Pertusa. Routledge. 2019). Laura Colombino is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Genova. She has a long-standing focus on transdisciplinary studies – in particular, the relationship between writing and the visual arts; architectural spaces and their embodiment; the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city; and biopolitics and the body. She is the author of the monographs Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Peter Lang, 2008) and Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2013), winner of the AIA Book Prize 2015. She has edited and co-edited books on Ford Madox Ford (Rodopi, 2009 and 2013), most recently the Routledge Research Companion to Ford Madox Ford (2019), and published essays and articles on Victorian, modernist and contemporary writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Robert Byron, Peter Ackroyd, J. G. Ballard, A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Iain Sinclair. She is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Kazuo Ishiguro: Ethics and Aesthetics. Colombino has reviewed works for the Journal of Artistic Research and contributed to the catalogue of the exhibition Lee Bul, Hayward Gallery, London 30 May 2018–19 Aug 2018, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin 29 Sept 2018–13 Jan 2019. She is a member of the Academia Europaea and Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association, and was Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London in 2018. Jean-Michel Ganteau  is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the editor of the journal Études

Contributor Biographies  233 britanniques contemporaines. He is the author of three monographs: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (2001), Peter Ackroyd et la musique du passé (2008) and The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Literature (2015). He is also the editor, with Christine Reynier, of four volumes of essays: Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Publications Montpellier 3, 2005), Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth- Century British Arts (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerrannée, 2007), Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth- Century British Literature (PULM, 2010) and Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth- Century British Arts (PULM, 2011). He has also co-edited, with Susana Onega, The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English (Rodopi, 2011), Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge, 2012), Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form (Routledge, 2014) and Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction (Routledge, 2017). He has published extensively on contemporary British fiction, with a special interest in the ethics of affects, trauma criticism and theory, and the ethics of vulnerability, in France and abroad (other European countries, the United States), as chapters in edited volumes or in such journals as Miscelánea, Anglia, Symbolism, The Cambridge Quarterly, and so on. Julia Kuznetski (Tofantšuk) is Associate Professor of British Literature and curator of the Liberal Arts in Humanities programme at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, Estonia. Her MA and PhD dissertations focussed on construction of gender and identity in the fiction of contemporary British women writers. She is author and editor (with Silvia Pellicer-Ortín of Zaragoza University, Spain) of Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in PresentDay Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2018) and has published articles and delivered papers on gender, identity, diaspora, trauma, Herstory, ecocriticism, ecofeminism and postcolonial and diaspora British literature, most recently in Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and International Voices (edited by Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Routledge, 2018) and Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Literature and the Environment (edited by Douglas Vakoch, Routledge, 2020, upcoming). Her recent research and teaching interests include art and literature by women, gender studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, diasporic identities, transcorporeality and transversal readings. She has developed and taught MA and PhD courses focussing on ecocritical considerations of twentieth-/ twenty-first- century literary texts, and co-supervised PhD theses that employ a postcolonial, ecofeminist and material ecocritical perspective as well as a transcorporeal reading of the body in contemporary

234  Contributor Biographies art. Julia is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, the English Society for the Study of English, the Finnish Society for the Study of English, the KAJAK Centre for Environmental Humanities, Tallinn University Gender research group, Estonian Women’s Studies Centre ENUT, Lexington Books’ “Ecocritical Theory and Practice” series Advisory board and European Anglophone Gender Studies Network. Angelo Monaco holds a PhD in English Literature (University of Pisa, 2017). His research interests focus on the contemporary novel, specifically Indian fiction in English; ecocriticism; postcolonialism; and the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, with particular emphasis on Trauma Studies. His publications cover such issues as diaspora, empathy, globalisation, melancholia, nostalgia and vulnerability, and they have appeared in international journals (Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Estudios Irlandeses, From the European South, Impossibilia, Il Tolomeo, Le Simplegadi, Modern Fictions Studies, Textus) and edited volumes (Cambridge Scholars, Liguori, Routledge, Transcript). He is the author of Jhumpa Lahiri. Vulnerabilità e resilienza (ETS Edizioni, 2019). Susana Onega is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and a member of the Academia Europaea. She has written numerous articles (in Anglia, Anglistik, Connotations, Journal of Literary Theory, Symbolism, European Journal of English Studies, Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines, The European Review, Twentieth-century Literature, The European Legacy, CounterText and Orbis Litterarum) and book chapters on contemporary British literature and narrative theory, and is the author of five monographs: Análisis estructural, método narrativo y “sentido” de The Sound and the Fury de William Faulkner (Pórtico, 1980), Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (UMI Research Press, 1989), Peter Ackroyd: The Writer and his Work (Northcote House & The British Council, 1998), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Candem House, 1999) and Jeanette Winterson (Manchester UP, 2006). She is the editor of Estudios literarios ingleses II: Renacimiento y barroco (Cátedra, 1986) and “Telling Histories”: Narrativizing History/Historicizing Literature (Rodopi, 1995. Reprinted and transferred to digital printing, 2006). She has introduced, edited and translated into Spanish John Fowles’s The Collector (Cátedra, 1999) and has co-edited, with José Angel García Landa, Narratology: An Introduction (Longman, 1996. “Introduction” translated into Turkish, 2002); with John A Stotesbury, London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis (Carl Winter, 2001); with Christian Gutleben, Refracting the Canon in Contemporary Literature and Film (Rodopi, 2004); with Annette Gomis,

Contributor Biographies  235 George Orwell: A Centenary Celebration (Carl Winter, 2005); with Constanza del Río and Maite Escudero Alías, Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature (Palgrave, 2017); and, with Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary Narrative in English (Rodopi, 2011), Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge, 2012), Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form (Routledge, 2014) and Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction (Routledge, 2017). She is also the author of monographic sections on “John Fowles in Focus” in Anglistik 13.1 (Spring, 2002: 45–107), “Intertextuality” in Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics 5 (New York: AMS. Press, 2005: 3–314), “Structuralism and Narrative Poetics” in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (2006), and “Vulnerability” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020, upcoming forthcoming) and “Jeanette Winterson” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature (2020, upcoming). Matthias Stephan  (Aarhus University, Denmark) researches primarily on postmodernism and its implications not only in literary fiction but also in the Gothic, science fiction and crime fiction. His work has appeared in Scandinavian Studies, Coolabah and La Questione Romantica, and his monograph Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century is available from Palgrave Macmillan. He is general editor of Otherness: Essays and Studies and coordinator of the Centre for Studies in Otherness. Merve Sarıkaya-Şen is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Culture and Literature, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Her more recent research interests are related to contemporary literatures in English, with a specific focus on trauma, memory, diaspora studies and transmodernity. She has presented papers and published articles on works by Fulke Greville, John Milton, William Makepeace Thackeray, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Grace Nichols, Carol Ann Duffy, Tom McCarthy, Aminatta Forna, Hanya Yanagihara, NoViolet Bulawayo and Arundhati Roy. She is the author of the following book chapters: “A Traumatic Romance of (Un)belonginess: NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names” (Routledge, 2019), “The Masochistic Self Quest of the Harassed Hero in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life” (Routledge, 2018) and “The Construction of Vulnerability and Monstrosity in Slipstream: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder” (Routledge, 2017), and of the following journal articles: “The Trauma of Betrayal in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier” (Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, 2018), “Correlations between Western

236  Contributor Biographies Trauma Poetics and Sierra Leonean Ways of Healing: Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love” (DTCF, 2018) and “The Representation of Trauma and Trauma Coping Strategies in Grace Nichols’s I is a Long Memoried Woman” (English Studies, 2017). Sara Villamarín-Freire is a PhD candidate at the University of A Coruña, where she currently holds a position as predoctoral teaching assistant. Her dissertation focusses on the relation between father figures, memory and ethics in contemporary US literature. She received her bachelor’s degree in English Studies from the University of A Coruña (2014) and her master’s degree in Literary Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid (2016). She has presented several papers at both national and international conferences. Her research and publication interests include contemporary American fiction, post-millennial trends in literatures in English, graphic narratives, postmodern fiction, critical theory and the relation between literature and philosophy.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes Abraham, Jonathan 227n23; “Eyeless Creature Turns Out to Be All Eyes” 227n23 Abram, David 206–7 Ackroyd, Peter 135 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 15, 109–10, 118, 125–30; Americanah 15, 109, 118, 125, 127 Adjacency 80, 82–3; see also Buffer zone; Buffering; disrupted temporality of 82 Aesthetics 69, 71, 73, 91; of an evacuated subjectivity 73, 84; early twentieth-century 146; of rupture 28; transmodern 75 Affects, the 98, 119; alienation of 11; Theory of 12 Africa 4, 55, 59, 63n2, 111, 126; see also Slave; -an ancestry 57; -an immigrant(s) 125–6; -an literature 129; -an mother 171; -an writer 129 African-American 113; resistance 129; Studies 6, 113; tradition 125 Agamben, Giorgio 161–2, 166, 174 Age of empathy 7 Age of Reason 5, 7; see also reason Agency 53, 73, 75, 100, 113, 202–3, 227n27; crisis of 73, 83; external 202; human 81, 84, 203; loss of 16; postmodern 122; regaining 53; Science, Environment, and the Material Self 204 Aizenberg, Joanna, Alexei Tkachenko, Steve Weiner, Lia Addadi and Gordon Hendler 216 Alaimo, Stacy 197–200, 204, 207–8, 210, 211n2, 212; Bodily Natures; Science, Environment, and the Material Self 204

Alcoff, Linda Martín 13, 50–1, 57, 64n3; see also Analeptics Aliaga-Lavrijsen, Jessica 135, 190n5, 225n3; “Transmodern Reconfigurations of Territoriality, Defense, and Cultural Awareness in Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep” 135, 190n5, 225n3 Aliaga-Lavrijsen, Jessica and José María Yebra-Pertusa 3, 17, 24, 46, 91–3, 95, 225n3; Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English 3, 17, 24, 46, 91–3, 95, 225n3 Alienation, social 4, 180 Allegory 131, 135, 138, 141, 146 Al-Qaeda 159, 183 Álvarez, Julia 65n13; How the García Girls Lost their Accents 65n13 American Studies 53–4; transnational 54 Amor fati 34; see also Fate; Nietzsche; Wil-lessness Analectics 13; see also Alcoff Analeptics 13 Andermahr, Sonya and Silvia PellicerOrtín 7 Anderson, Benedick 114 Anthropocene, the 15, 40–1, 43, 75, 200, 211n2, 215; Age of 73; dystopian 41 Anthropologist, the 2, 69, 72, 74, 77–8, 80, 214, 225n4 Anthropology 70–2, 77–80, 82, 163; of the contemporary 78–9, 82; present tense 70, 77, 79 (see also Lévi-Strauss) Antilles, the 59 Anti-materialism 12

238 Index Antithesis 3, 10, 50, 74, 135, 159, 214; see also Synthesis; Thesis; Anzaldúa, Gloria 64n9; Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza 64n9 Anxiety 36, 72, 77, 86n6, 138 Archipelago 31; see also Roffey; Caribbean 209; Hawaii(-an) (Islands) 31, 43, 44 Aristotle 101, 142; Nicomachean Ethics 142 Arizti, Bárbara and Silvia MartínezFalquina 6 Artist 34; Apollonian 34; Dionysian 34; divine 34 Ashby, Michael 159 Asia 55, 63n2, 111; -an ancestry 57; -an culture 110; -an perspective 37 Astor, John Jacob 218; A Journey in Other Worlds 218 Ateljevic, Irena 3–4, 6, 9–10, 12–14, 16, 24, 49–50, 63n1, 74, 105–6, 110, 113–14, 117, 130, 135, 146, 162, 179–82; “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” 3–4, 6, 9–10, 12–13, 16–17, 24, 46, 50, 63, 74, 105–6, 110, 113–14, 117, 135, 146, 162, 179–80 Attention 95, 97–102, 101, 105, 184, 203; see also Consideration; economy of 97; ethics of 105–6 Austen, Jane 68 Australia 26, 157–58, 165–7, 173 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) 167 Author(s) 54, 129; African 129; of Central American and South American backgrounds 54; Chicano/a 54; Puerto Rican 54 Baima, Nicholas Ryan 147 Ball, James 168 Balzac, Honoré de 68, 84; Le Père Goriot 84 Banks, Arron 169 Barad, Karen 224, 225n1, 225n4, 225n5, 225n13, 226n14, 226n27, 227n26; “Invertebrate Visions: Diffractions of the Brittlestar” 216 (see also Brittlestar); Meeting the Universe Halfway 216

Barker, Pat 135–6; see also Mantel, Hilary and Pat Barker; The Silence of the Girls 136 Barnes, Julian 25; A History of the World in 10½ Chapters 25 Barthes, Roland 68; S/Z: An Essay 68 Baudelaire, Charles 9 Baudrillard, Jean 1, 73, 195 Bauman, Zygmunt 198 Bayer, Gerd 25 Beck, Ulrich 3, 72, 166 Becker, Udo 145 Beckett, Samuel 72 Belatedness 8; see also Freud; Nachträglichkeit Belgium 27 Benjamin, Walter 9, 13, 32–3, 45, 150–1, 166, 182; see also Catastrophe; Constellation; Danger; ’s Angel 33, 151; Illuminations 32; “On the Concept of History” 150 Bennett, Bruce 167, 173 Bennett, Jane 99, 106 Beowulf 141 Berardi, Franco 98 Bernard, Catherine 103 Berning, Nora 125–6 Bewes, Timothy 70, 83 Binary (opposition) (system) 27, 80, 215, 220; fiction/reality 76; predator/prey 27; of truth and falsehood 137; West/non-West 11 Biology 15, 213–14, 216–17, 224; of alien life-forms 225n2; astro- 218; exo- 218; extra-terrestrial 218; transmodern perspective on 219; xeno- 214, 218, 223, 225n2 Bioregion 202–3 Biosphere politics 16, 182 Birthmark 36, 37; comet-shaped 36–8, 43 Black Feminist Studies 12 Blackburn, Simon 173 Blake, William 27, 34–36, 143; see also Contrary(-ies); ’s Satan 36 Blumenberg, Hans 138 Body(es) 29, 75, 85n5, 101, 182, 185, 188, 196–200, 203–4, 206, 208, 210, 222–3; animal 217; in the Anthropocene 211n2 (see also Transcorporeality); anti- 222; dismembered 161; human 52, 198; of the increasingly toxic sea 198;

Index  239 mammalian 222; mind(/) (and) 198, 216; mutating 208, 211n2; out-ofexperience 44; of radial beings 220; of the rain cloud 198; transhuman 2; transmodern 198; water- 203 Boff, Leonardo 214; Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor 214 Böll, Heinrich 159, 170; The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum 170 Boll, Julia 166 Border-crossing 52, 55 Bouiller, Dominique 98 Boundary(-ies): national 15, 36, 55; ontological 37; spatio-temporal 37, 83, 216 Bowering, Peter 71 Boxall, Peter 70, 81 Boxall, Peter, Jeannie Erdal, and Andrew O’Hagan 71 Bradford, Richard 23 Braidotti, Rosi 75, 102, 198, 215, 225n4 British Empire, the 5, 27, 34 British Isles, the 31, 40 Brittlestar(s) 216, 220, 226n13, 227n23; see also Barad Buchan, James 159, 165, 170 Buddhism 41, 45–6 Buell, Lawrence 202–3 Buffer zone(s) 73, 81 Buffering 79–81; see also Adjacency Burke, Edmund 42 Butler, Judith 173–4, 198–9, 208–9; abjection 208; Precarious Life 174 Byatt, A.S. 135 Cain, Sian 138 Caius College 27 California 27 Callus, Ivan 74, 84 Cambridge 27; don 38 Cannibal 28; naked 28 Cannibalism: trope of 28 Capitalism 5, 14, 177; corporate 72; global 41, 84, 178; late 3; monopoly 36; multinational 36; post- 12 Capote, Truman 38; In Cold Blood 38 Care 12, 105, 146, 148, 158, 163, 168–69, 172, 223 Caribbean, the 59, 60–1, 65n15, 197, 209, 211n1; Afro- literary tradition 61; archipelago 209; countries 60; islands 202

Carr, Richard 165, 167 Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia 65n17 Castro-Gómez, Santiago 64n8 Catastrophe 9, 32, 45, 73, 92, 166, 203; see also Benjamin; global 33; multilayered single 33, 45; omnitemporal 33, 150 Celtic 144, 145 Centre 50, 52, 54–8, 63; see also Margin; Periphery; permanent 63 Chalice, feminine 4 Change; see also Shift: climate 4, 11, 75, 180; mind 4, 7, 49 Chaos 4, 10, 33, 178, 180, 187, 190; edge of 10; Theory 10, 25, 47 Chatham Isle 26–8, 31 Chathams, the 27, 31; invasion of 27 Chattopadhyay, Piya 134 Chen, Cecilia 203 Childs, Peter and James Green 23 China 25, 41, 218 Chthulucene, the 226n8; see also Haraway Citton, Yves 102 Cixous, Hélène 207 Clarke, Arthur C. 217; Dolphin Island 217 Class(es) 5, 8, 13, 15–16, 34, 56, 109, 113, 117, 121, 126, 147; bias 28; minority 184; oppressed 182; social 24; struggle 5 Clifford, James 65n12 Clone(s) 41, 43, 139, 217; see also Cyborg; Fabricant; Mutant Cloud(s) 25, 46n3, 144; rain 198; structure of 25 (see also Feigembaum) Cloud Gate Dance, the 25; Theatre 25 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 34; “Kubla Khan” 34 Collective unconscious 136, 138, 143, 146; see also Memory Colombino, Laura 139, 142 Colonialism 13, 19, 57, 59, 120, 181; neo- 59 Colonisation 12, 24, 26–7, 31, 59, 92 Coloniser(s) 29, 44; British 44; European 30, 44 Colvin, Cristina 205 Communication(s) 12, 52, 215, 220–4; instantaneous 96; interspecies 218–20, 224; multimedia 215; tactile 223; technologies 1, 56; theory 163; true

240 Index 124; truthful 179, 190; xeno- 220, 226n21 Community(-ies) 103–5, 114, 125, 136, 138–43, 146, 148–51; diasporic 52, 54–5, 57; open 95, 102; trans-American 59; transnational 55 Connectedness 7, 9, 24, 74; see also Interconnectedness Connectivity 1, 24, 95, 146 Consciousness: global 4, 17–18, 63, 118, 163; national 14, 139; slumbering 11 Consideration(s) 91, 95, 98, 101–2, 104–6; see also Attention; ethics of 15, 104; religious 114 Consolation 181–2, 186 Constellation(s) 9–10, 33, 140; see also Benjamin Constructedness 26, 76 Consumer(s) 11, 40–1, 168, 181, 205 Consumerism 172, 181; over- 4, 180–1 Contrary(-ies) 27; see also Blake; ecological and pacifist 31; fake 43 Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost 16–17, 100–1 Cooper, David K.C. 217, 226n17; “A Brief History of Cross-species Organ Transplantation,” 217, 226n17 Corpocracy 40–1, 43 Corporation(s) 36; see also Capitalism; international 36; multinational 31, 41, 44 Corporeality 16, 100–1, 104–5; see also Transcorporeality Corrigan, Maureen 94, 97, 99 Cosmodernism 164, 190n5, 225n3; see also Moraru; cosmodern imaginary 174 Cosmogony(es) 46; -ic cycle 46 Cosmos 25, 45, 185 Counterterrorism 162, 165; see also Terrorism Cowley, Jason 149 Crary, Jonathan 99 Crawford, Lawrence 63 Creation: artistic 4; visionary 35 Cricket, Jiminy 161 Crownshaw, Richard 135 Cuccioletta 119–20 Culture(s) 7, 12–14, 24, 56–7, 61, 64n9, 64n10, 65n13, 69, 74, 76,

78, 92–3, 110–16, 119–20, 122, 129, 130n1, 135, 140, 144, 147, 150–1, 157, 161–2, 161–3, 168, 182, 196, 200, 202, 208, 214–15, 218–19; alien 223; ancient (Greek) 13–14, 142; (anti-imperialist) -al politics 56–7; Caribbean 59; contact of 53; core 51, 57; dominant (of domination) 56, 64n9, 92; Dominican 61; Eastern 25; exterior 12; folk 60; globalised 93; Hindustani 180; imperial 63n2; Indian 179, 181; Latin-American (see Latin America); Modern (-ised) 61, 180; Muslim 11, 14; (/)nature (and) 195, 224; negated 180; network 76; non-European 11, 63n2; non-Western 14; peripheral (postcolonial) 50–1, 57, 111; pop65n15; postmodern (-ist) 116, 180; premodern 14, 114–15; of resistance 56; transmodern 2, 13, 64n10; universal 57; US (popular) 57, 61, 64n9; Western 49, 92, 162, 195 Cyberspace 93, 95, 99, 102 Cyborg 75, 205, 217; see also Clone; Fabricant; Mutant; definition of 205; identity 217; model 2 D’Ancona, Matthew 169, 174; PostTruth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back 169 Danger, moment(s) of 32, 37–8; see also Benjamin Darwin, Charles 206, 208, 227n24; -ian paradox 207; -ian survival-of-the-fittest 216; -ian turn 205 Darwinism 206 Davis, Evan 168 Dawson, Paul 188–9 De Man, Paul 141 De Quincey, Thomas 9 Death 16, 85n2, 141, 146–47, 170–72, 183–87; collective 14; of postmodernism 110, 136 Decolonisation 11–12 Deconstruction 6, 111, 113, 116; postmodern 6, 117, 215 Defamiliarisation, strategy of 62–3; see also Shklovsky Defoe, Daniel 28; see also Travelogue; Robinson Crusoe 28 Déjà vu 36–8, 43, 143

Index  241 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 197 Delgadillo, Theresa 55, 64n11, 65n11 Delors, Jacques 162 Dempster, Beth 225n6; Sympoietic and Autopoietic Systems 225n6 Denes, Melissa 27 Derrida, Jacques 113, 143, 206–7, 217; The Gift of Death 143; “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” 206 Despair 44, 177, 197; nihilistic 35 Despret, Vinciane 225n4 Dialectic(s): -al concept of history 9; -al imperative 64n7; -al process 50, 64n3, 115; -al system 13; -al third 91 (see also Synthesis); cultural 122; Hegelian 13 (see also Hegel); -ic triad 10, 74 (see also Antithesis; Synthesis; Thesis); Marxist 13; of totalisation 1 Dialogue: intercultural 64n10; multicultural 64n10; North-South 64n10, 65n11; South-South 65n11 Diaspora 52, 55–6, 59, 61–2, 65n12, 132; classical 55; colonial 56; Latin American 54; members 56; new 55; reasporican (dimension of) 56, 62; settings 62 Díaz, Junot 14, 49, 58–61, 63; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 14, 49, 58, 61–3, 65n14, 65n15, 65n16 Digital, the 16, 73, 76, 81, 98–9, 102; see also Digitalisation; era 81; model 98; phase 95; technology(ies) 80, 96; temporality 81 Digitalisation 75; see also Digital Dillon, Sarah 9, 17, 28, 47 Dirlik, Arif 52–3 Disconnectedness 26 Discourse(s) 195; counter- of resistance 61; direct 103; dominant 6, 161; Eurocentric 61, 180; free direct 94; global 50; hegemonic 59–60, 180; historical 8; hybrid 58; narrative 188; nature-oriented 197; Non-Western 54; Poetic 141; postcolonial 111; resistance 60; third (type of) 54, 58; transmodern 179, 214; Western 6, 54, 110 Displacement 8–9, 25, 28, 31, 46, 59, 120, 127 Diversity 14–15, 30n1, 53, 115, 178–9, 189–90

Dodd, Adam 190 Domination: colonial 5, 59; diseased dream of 45; forms of 59; history of 60; national elite 56; right of mastery and 50; system 4–5; timespace of 59 Dominican(s): (-American) culture(s) 61; (-American) diaspora 59, 60; history (and identity) 59, 61; Republic, the 58–9, 65n15 Dominion, Western dream of 36 Dominium terrae 30; see also Terra Don Quixote 144 Double-cross metaphor 138–39 Douglass, Ana, and Thomas A. Vogler 8 Douglass, Frederick 113 Duany, Jorge 52–3, 55; Blurred Borders 55 Dumitrescu, Domnita 65n17 Dussel, Enrique 2–3, 7, 11, 14, 24, 49–50, 63, 63n3, 92, 110, 130, 151; see also Pluriversalism; Hacia una filosofía política crítica 12–13, 61, 64n5; “World-System and ‘Trans‘modernity” 110 Earth, the 44–5, 78, 99, 101, 147, 163, 179, 182, 198, 205, 208, 216; destruction of 15, 181; domination of 45; dying 41; exploitative annihilation of 5; overexploitation of 41; respect for 16; richness of 30; ’s energy 7; saving of 7, 164 Eco, Umberto 144; The Name of the Rose 144 Eco-criticism 12, 14 Ecology 1, 75, 78, 101, 164, 180 Economy system 36; Free market or laissez-faire 36 Ecosystem 25, 101, 104, 177, 181, 203, 222 Eden 206; Polynesian 27 Eisler, Riane 4, 17; The Chalice and the Blade 4, 17 Eliot, George 79; Middlemarch 79 Eliot, T. S 77, 147; “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 77 Embedding 14, 27, 31, 33, 45; narrative 14, 23, 25 Embodiment 15, 182, 196, 198, 213, 216 Emigrant 55–6; see also Immigrant; Migrant; Remigrant

242

Index

Emotion(s) 68–71, 98, 170, 206–7; absence of 68; -al attachment 203; -al bonds 55; -al conflict 70; -al emptiness 84; -al involvement 25; -al permeability 220; -al response 25; -al shattering 178; -ally charged 25, 46 Emotionality 136; see also Emotion Empathy 163–64, 170, 172, 174; global 7, 164; -ic unsettlement 15 Energy 7, 163, 201; Reason and 34, 36 Enlightenment (the) period 5, 10, 25, 166, 169 Enmeshing 197, 202 Enslavement 43; see also Slave Entanglement 128, 170, 199, 215, 222, 224, 225, 225n5 Entropy 7, 73, 91, 163 Environment 27, 75, 78, 112, 115, 164, 195, 198, 205, 216, 220 Epstein, Mikhail 146, 180 Ethico-onto-epistem-ology 214, 224 Ethics 98, 101, 143, 200, 206, 214, 224; of alterity 11–12 (see also Levinas); of attention 104, 106; of Care 12; of consideration 15, 91, 101, 104–6; of difference 164; of environmental community 203; of equality and peace 30; of liberation 180; of perception and attention 101; relational 106; transhistorical 149; turn to 11 Eurocentrism 62, 180; alternative (discourse) to 12, 61; hegemonic 61 Europe 51, 55, 111, 180, 210n1; -an academe 93; -an colonisers 30; -an Commission 162; -an countries 5; -an culture(s) 11, 111; -an discourse 189; -an Dream 118; -an Modernity 50–1, 57; -an philosophical tradition 3, 11; -an vision 111; Eastern- 63n2, 69 Europeans 59; /Americans 63n1 Evolution 93, 163, 216, 218–19, 226n20; human 4–5 Exobiology 218; see also Xenobiology; Xenology Experience 96–102 Experimentation 2, 15, 40, 149; generic 15; narrative 72; transgenic 2 Exteriority 12, 50, 92, 227n27; see also Dussel

Fabricant(s) 40; see also Clone; Replicant; ascended 43; miniature 43; service 42 Fake news 162, 168, 173; see also Post-truth Fate 34–5, 46; see also Amor fati Feigembaum, Richard 25; see also Cloud Feminist Criticism 14 Feminist Theory 6 Fertility 4 Fiction(s): British 18, 47, 85n7; contemporary 18, 47, 70, 88, 118, 131, 135, 136, 164, 192; detective 96–7 (see also Novel); diasporic 52; experimental 95, 104; francophone 18; global 62; hybrid 63; multiculturalist 25; post-9/11 165; postcolonial 25; transmodern 214, 217; transnational 52, 54 Firchow, Peter 70 First World War 5, 35 Flanagan, Richard 15, 157–9, 162, 164–8, 170–4; “Paradise Lost — with Napalm” 158; “Politics, Writing, Love” 158, 173; The Unknown Terrorist 15, 158–9, 162, 165–8, 170–1, 173–4 Fleischer, Richard 46n4; Soylent Green 46n4 Flores, Juan 55–7, 62, 65n12; see also Reasporican; Diaspora Strikes Back 56 Fluck, Winfried 49, 53–4 Fluidity 2, 15, 24, 195–7, 210 Folklore 144–5; see also Celtic; Mythology Ford, John 144 Forgetting 134, 139, 148 Foster, Michael Dylan 145 Fragmentation 1, 69, 74–5, 82, 85 Frankfurt, Harry 78, 82 Freitas, Robert A. 218; Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence, and Civilization 218 (see also Xenology) Freud, Sigmund 8, 137; mystic writing pad 8 (see also Silverman); Nachträglichkeit 8, 17 (see also Belatedness) Fukú 59–60; see also Zafa; foundational fiction 59; story 60

Index  243 Fundamentalism(s) 6, 160; see also Terrorism; Islamic fundamentalism 160 Future 78, 180, 213; see also Past; Present; actual 32; infinite actual and virtual 32; lived 32; near 15, 40, 82, 213, 224; post-Apocalyptic 26; remembered 32; transmodern 11, 64n10, 115; virtual 32 Gaia 226n8; see also Terra; hypothesis 226n11 Gaiman, Neil and Kazuo Ishiguro 141, 144–5 Ganteau, Jean-Michel and Susana Onega 8; see also Onega, Susana and Jean-Michel Ganteau García, Cristina 65n13; Dreaming in Cuban 65n13 Gender 8, 15–16, 164, 178, 189, 192; transgender 184, 192 Gernsback, Hugo 218 Ghisi, Marc Luyckx 2, 10, 12, 16, 49, 74–5, 85n5, 99–100, 106, 110, 114, 162, 179, 184–6, 214; see also Luyckx Gibbon, Edward: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 39 Gibbons, Alison 16n1, 135–6, 168–9 Gildea, Kevin 85n1 Gilmore, Leigh 8 Gleick, James 25 Global, the 99, 125; see also Glocal; Local; novel 23 Globalisation 2, 4, 11, 24, 51, 72, 75, 85n6, 93, 112, 116, 120, 158, 164, 178, 180, 190n2, 215; age of 55, 93, 160, 162 (see also Rodríguez Magda); the Great Fact of 1, 93, 105; neoliberal 51, 161 Glocal, the 91, 93, 95, 99 Glocality 10 Godwin, William 42 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 35; The Sorrows of Young Werther 35 Gold rush, the 28 Gombrich, Ernst H. 141 Goyal, Yogita 127 Graft(s) 222–3; alien 219, 222; implanted 223; skin 217 Grand Narrative(s) 1, 4, 24, 72–4, 93, 110, 135, 157, 169; see also Master narratives; Pétits récits; celebration of 72; critique of 50,

173; deconstruction of 116–17; historical 113; negation of 1; ruins of 74; totalising 6; universal 6 Great Depression, the 36 Greve, Gabi 145 Grosfoguel, Ramón 7, 11, 64n8; see also Pluriversalism Grosz, Elisabeth 196 Guilt 34–6, 98, 203 Gujarat 178, 183–85, 192 Haar, Michael 33 Habila, Helon 129 Hadley, Tessa 94, 99, 101 Haitians, the 59 Hall, Donald E. 118, 121 Hallemeier, Katherine 127, 129 Hanna, Monica 58, 60, 65, 65n14 Hansen, Miriam 138 Harassment, sexual 29 Haraway, Donna 224, 225n4, 226n7; “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” 205; “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” 216; Haraway Reader 223; “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far” 227n15; Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 215; Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene 215–16, 225n6, 226n8, 226n9, 226n12; When Species Meet 205, 207, 214, 222–3, 226n15, 226n16, 227n26 Harford Vargas, Jennifer 58–61 Harrisburg 31 Haunting 96–7, 150 Hawaii 37, 43–4 Hawaiian Island, the 31 Hawthorn 145 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 73, 91, 163; see also Dialectic(s); History Heinlein, Robert A. 225n2; The Star Beast 225n2; Star Lummox 225n2 Heisenberg, Werner 32 Heredia, Juanita 54, 56, 65n13 Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi) 68; see also McCarthy Hicks, David 31, 47, 165 Hicks, Heather J. 31 Hikmet, Nâzim 177, 189; “On the Matter of Romeo and Juliet” 177 Hispaniola, the 59

244

Index

Historiographic metafiction 6; see also Hutcheon History(-ies); see also Prehistory: alternative 26–7, 33, 180, 182; ancient 59; counter(-) 6, 7; Enlightenment notion of 10; family 58; Hegelian World 6; Hegel’s dialectical concept of 9; human 3, 17, 29, 46, 49, 163; of the nation 60; national 60; palimpsestic strata of 29; silenced 9; spoken 28; of subalternization 59; trans-American 60; universal 51; Walter Benjamin’s model of 9; of the world 25–7, 33, 46, 180 Hitler, Adolf 36 Hoffman, Frederick J. 71 Holobion 226n7; see also Haraway; Margulis Holocaust, the 6, 9, 138; of light 84 Honolulu 30–1, 43 hooks, bell 18, 113, 115, 129, 131; “Postmodern Blackness” 129 Hope 180, 182, 184–6, 189 Hubbard, Scott G. 218; “Astrobiology: Its Origins and Development” 218 Hughes, Ted 44 Human rights 42, 118, 178; radical ideas on 42 Humanism 6, 120 Humankind 43, 45, 73, 84, 163; destruction of 180; future of 4; perfectibility of 4 Humility 99, 101 Hutcheon, Linda 5–6; see also Historiographic metafiction Huxley, Aldous 71 Huysen, Andreas 7 Hybridisation 61; of genres and forms 61 Hybridity 9, 52, 55, 58, 122, 131; cultural 123–24, 132; generic 23, 25; linguistic 65n17, 124; racial 124 Hypermodernity 3 Identification 52, 54, 181; imagined 59 Identity(-ies) 69; Afropolitan 125; anti-imperialist cultural 56; cultural 6, 52, 114, 120, 129, 130n1; diasporic 55, 132; fluid 57; group 13; human 6; marginal 12; monolithic 53; multiple 64n9;

plural 64n9; politics 6, 112–13, 114, 122, 129; regeneration of 35; social 13; socio-political 6; SouthAmerican 12; stable 53 Iliad 144 Imagination, the 14, 30, 34, 36, 45, 202, 204, 207; artist’s 141; creative 7, 35; exhaustion of 70; new modality 164; rational 201; regeneration of 36 Immigrant(s) 69, 123–5; see also Emigrant; Migrant; Remigrant; African 125; experiment 123; narrative 126; novel 126; as refugees 126 Imperialism 6, 26, 36, 139; English 121; Western 41, 51 Impersonality 16 In-betweenness 52, 57, 64n9, 190n6 Incarnation(s) 101–2; previous 37 Indeterminacy 26 India 177–8, 181–4, 187–90; alternative history of 181; consumerist society in 181; democracy in 177; fragmented world of 178; Muslims in 183; political marginalities in 182; political victims in 179, 183–84 Indigenous, the 13 Individuality 25, 104–5 Industrialisation 5 Information Society 1, 24 Instantaneity 72, 79, 93, 95, 97–8; see also Simultaneity Inter(-)connectedness 15, 23, 51, 58, 63, 93, 105, 178–9, 182, 190, 216; see also Connectedness; active 215, 224; of human (beings) communities 136, 183; planetary 144; power of 178; as a shared value 51; and solidarity 63 Interdependence 9, 102, 163, 189, 198 Internet 70, 215 Intra-action 199–200, 209, 216, 223–24, 225n5, 227n26 Ishiguro, Kazuo 15, 133–44, 148–51; An Artist of the Floating World 140; The Buried Giant 15, 133–34, 136, 138–39, 144, 148–50; Never Let Me Go 139, 149; A Pale View of Hills 138; The Remains of the Day 139–41, 144, 146, 149; The Unconsoled 143, 149

Index  245 Ishiguro, Kazuo and Michael Ondaatje 134 Isla de Yerba Buena 31 Islands of the Blest 146 James, David and Urmila Seshagiri 146 James, Henry 70 Jameson, Fredric 3, 117, 157 Janet, Pierre 137 Japanese folklore 144–5 Johannesses, Lene M. 28 Johnson, Samuel 144; Rasselas 144 Journal, the 26–8, 30–1, 36–8, 40, 42; covert hypotext of 28; edited 27; entry 28; incompleteness of 27; intertextual dimension of 28; -’s authenticity 27; -’s ontological status 27; two split halves of 26 Joyce, James 72, 144, 162; Finnegans Wake 144 Kakutani, Michiko 159 Kashmir 178, 186 Kemp, Peter 94, 99 Kim Il-sung 41; see also Korea King Arthur 133, 140 Kite, Lorien 150 Kodama 145 Kona, the 43–5; predatory 44 Koob-Sassen, Hilary 76, 85n6; see also Sassen Korea 37, 40–1; North 41 (see also Kim Il-sung); War 37 Krasny, Michael 138 Krippner, Stanley 25 Kuecker, Glen D. 51 Kurosawa, Akira 143–5; Throne of Blood 143 Kwon, Yonghee 122–3 Laplanche, Jean 8 Latin America 51, 56, 60, 63n2, 65n11, 111, 113; indigenous cultures of 112; -n background 64n9; -n countries 60; -n culture(s) 3, 11, 110–1; -n diasporas 54; -n genres 61; -n identity 111, 113; -n migrants 64n11; -n peripheries 59; -n thought 64n5, 64n8 Latinidad 55, 64n11, 65n11 Latino(s)/a(s); see also Literature: canon 55; (diasporic) communities 55, 57; in-betweenness 64n9;

plural identity 64n9; roots 57; (transnational) fiction 49–50, 54–8, 64n9; (transnational) (US) literature 49, 54–6; (transnational) (voyages of return) narratives 55, 57, 65n13 Laugier, Sandra 101, 105 Lawrence, Carmen 167; Fear and Politics 167 Lawrence, D. H. 71; “The Future of the Novel” 71 Lawson, Mark 150 Le Blanc, Guillaume 106 Le Roy, Étienne 2, 24, 214 Lea, Daniel 77 Ledent, Bénédicte 124 Lefort, Claude 104 LeMahieu, Michael 70–2, 83–4 Lennon, Paul 158 Levinas, Emmanuel 11–12, 151; ethics of alterity 12 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 70, 80, 82–3, 85n4; see also Anthropology; Tristes Tropiques 72 Lewis, Tim 177 Life-writing 8; see also Testimony Liminality 9 Lin Hwai-min 25 Lipovetsky, Gilles 3, 166 Literature(s) 5–6, 38, 63, 68–70, 74–5, 93, 105, 157, 159, 163, 213, 217; African 129; contemporary 63, 70, 72, 74, 93, 109, 191n8; and criticism 3, 91; global 63; good 187; ground-breaking 213; hybrid 8 (see also Life-writing; Testimony); in-between 49, 57; Modernist 5; national 63; North American 164; Science Fiction (SF) 217, 224, 226n20; transmodern 58, 225; transnational (approach to) 52, 53, 58, 63; (transnational) Latino/a 14, 49, 54–6, 65n13; US 61; (US) transnational (Latino/a) 49, 54–6, 63, 65; world 55 Local, the 60, 93, 95, 99, 101, 122, 125, 127; see also Global; Glocal Lodge, David 85n7; “The Novelist at the Crossroads” 95n7 London 37 Lord of the Rings, The 62 Love: liquid 198; marriage for 128; maternal 178, 189; power of 189; quest for 58; romantic 178; theme of 146; triangle 35

246

Index

Lovelock, James 226n11; Gaia. A New Look at Life on Earth 226n11, 228n8 Lowell, Percival 218; Mars 218 Lucian of Samosata 218 Luckhurst, Roger 226n20; Science Fiction 226n20 Luther King Jr., Martin 113 Luyckx, Marc 12, 24, 52, 55, 63n1, 114–5, 117, 130, 162, 174; see also Ghisi, Marc Luyckx; “The Transmodern Hypothesis: Towards a Dialogue of Cultures” 114 Lyotard, Jean-François 5–6, 72, 113, 117; The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 6, 117 MacDonald, Fiona 227n21 Macé, Marielle 98, 104 MacLeod, Ken 213; Engines of Light series 217 Mahler, Anne Garland 59 Malinowski, Bronisław 79–80 Malthus, Thomas Robert 41 Manchuria 41 Mantel, Hilary and Pat Barker 135–6 Maori, the 26; violent and cannibalistic 26 Margin(s) 6, 50–1, 64n4; see also Centre; Periphery; -al identities 12; -al subjects 190; -al voices 6; core and 51 Margulis, Lynn 213, 216, 222, 226n7, 226n11, 227n24; Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species Origin of Eukaryotic Cells 216, 227n24; Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons 216; Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution 213 Mason, Wyatt 26 Master narratives 24; see also Grand Narrative(s) Materiality 16 Matryoshka doll 26, 32; see also Russian doll Maui 43, 45–6 McAllister, Bruce 217; “The Girl Who Loved Animals” 217 McCaffrey, Anne 217; Decision at Doona 217 McCann, Mindi 127, 129

McCarthy, Tom 15, 68–9, 71–81, 83–5, 85n2, 85n3, 85n4, 85n6, 85n7, 86, 93; C 68; (INS) “International Necronautical Society” 69 (see also McCarthy, Tom and Simon Critchey); The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society 85n3; Men in Space 69; Remainder 69, 81, 86; Satin Island 15, 68–70, 72–7, 80–1, 83–4, 85n1, 93; Tintin and the Secret of Literature 68 (see also Hergé); “Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works” 77; “Writing Machines: Tom McCarthy on Realism and the Real” 76 McCarthy, Tom and Simon Critchey 85n2, 85n3; INS “Founding Manifesto” 85n2 (see also McCarthy); “New York Declaration on Inauthenticity” 69, 85n3 McCarthy, Tom, James Corby, and Ivan Callus 74 McGregor, Jon 15, 91, 93–4, 96–7, 99–100, 102–4, 106; Even the Dogs 94, 97, 103; If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things 94; Reservoir 13, 93–9, 101–6 McLaughlin, Robert L. 191n8 McLeod, John 120 Media, the 157–58, 168–70, 173 Melion, Walter and Bart M. Ramakers 141 Melville, Herman 28, 30, 69, 207; “Benito Cereno” 28, 30; Billy Budd, Foretopman 46n1; Moby Dick 46n1, 69; Typee 28 Memoir(s) 39–40, 220; autobiographical 38; fictional 39; material 202, 204; real life 42; symphony of 80 Memory(-ies) 37; see also Collective unconscious; Remembering; as an involuted palimpsestic structure 9; anti-linear nature of 9; boom 7–8; collective 32–4, 143, 146, 148–9, 151; fragmented 7; of the Holocaust 6 (see also Holocaust); Jewish 6; lost 40; multidirectional 9 (see also Rothberg); palimpsestic 8–9, 13 (see also Silverman); politics of 11; screen 137–9; Studies

Index  247 12, 136; traces 8; traumatised subject’s 9 Menozzi, Filippo 189 Mereschkowski, Konstantin 226n10 Merrit, Stephanie 94 Metafictionality 72 Metamodernism 16n1, 146, 190n5, 225n3; see also van den Akker, Robin, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen Meta(-)narrative: alternative 49; of Eurocentric Modernity 52; of modernity 49; transmodern 57 Metatextuality 72 Michelraj, Muraj 181 Middle Passage, the 6; see also Slave Migrant(s) 41; see also Emigrant; Immigrant; Remigrant; LatinAmerican 64n11; second- or third generation 57 Migration(s) 2, 55, 85n6, 109; circular 56; fictions of 123; transnational 56 Miller, Gavin 216 Miller, J. Hillis 143 Milton, John 36; Paradise Lost 36, 158 Minority(ies) 184; ethnic 6; groups 8; religious 13; sexual 13 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 99 Mishra, Pancaj 184 Mitchell, David 14, 23–28, 31–4, 37–8, 45, 46n2, 93, 146; Cloud Atlas 14, 23–7, 31–3, 37, 42, 45, 93; Ghostwritten 23–4, 26, 38, 146; number9dream 23 Mitchison, Naomi 213–14, 216, 219–20, 222, 224, 226n15, 227n22; Memoirs of a Spacewoman 15, 213–14, 219, 224 Modernity 3–7, 9–10, 12–14, 50–2, 60, 63n1, 63n2, 64n6, 69, 74, 78, 82, 85, 91–3, 99, 106, 109–17, 135, 157, 159–60, 162, 164, 166, 169, 173, 179–81, 185, 195–9, 205, 214; diminished 7; Eurocentric 51–2; European 50–1, 57; light 3, 7, 116; liquid 1, 3, 197; metanarrative of 49; postmodern critic of 6; weak 7; Western 13, 50, 52, 60, 111 Modi, Narendra 177 Moorhouse, Frank 166; “The Writer in a Time of Terror” 166 Moraru, Christian 164, 174; Cosmodernism: American

Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary 164 (see also Cosmodernism) Moriori, the 26; prelapsarian 27 Morley, Catherine 170 Moss, Laura 124–5 Mozambique 226n21 Mujčinovič, Fatima 64n9 Multicultural Studies 6 Multiculturalism 11; angelic 116; diasporic 119, 129 Multiverse, the 10, 14, 24–6, 46, 224; chaotically arranged 14; fictional 26 Munro, John 218; A Trip to Venus 218 Mura, Andrea 215 Murphy, Patrick 195–6, 199 Murray, Isobel 220 Mutant(s) 75; see also Clone; Cyborg; Fabricant My Lai massacre 138 Myth(s) 71, 73, 78, 134–6, 138, 143–9, 173; see also Mythology; Mythopoesis; -al creatures 141; -al stage 43; antipodean 27; creation 218; false 133; foundational 78; (-ical) world 79, 144; -making 134, 136; of origins 27, 44, 151; resistance 134; transcultural 143, 146 Mythology 124, 145–6; see also Folklore; Celtic 145; Japanese 145 Mythopoesis 15, 136, 147; -ic thought 141; transmodern 133 Nachträglichkeit 8–9; see also Belatedness; Freud Nanda, Serena 181 Narrative(s); see also Grand Narrative(s); Petits récits: of celebration 161; (choral) technique 69; of the limit 160; limit-case 8 (see also Gilmore); Mother 168; picaresque 38 Nation-state 2, 5, 53, 55, 120, 202; sovereign 5; theology of 5; U.S.American 54 Nature 32, 78, 112, 189, 200–2, 204, 207–10, 215; as a circle (cyclical) 9, 44; culture/, 195; and culture 224; domination over 5; harmony with 44; human 30, 68, 149; -oriented discourse 197; rights of 118; romantic 181; whale/ 207

248 Index Neate, Patrick 93; Jerusalem: An Elegy in Three Parts 93 Neimanis, Astrida 197–8, 200, 211n2 Neoliberalism, era of 59 Net, the 75, 84, 160, 215; see also Internet; global, relational 7; interconnected 14 Network, the 93, 95; culture 76; of data 80; -ed environment 164; -ing 162; Instantaneous 80; of interconnected megalopoles 64n4; -like model 1, 24; television 168; transnational 55, 63 New Jersey 58 New materialism 199 New York 36, 69, 83–4, 85n3, 157, 183; stock market crash 36 Newman, Barbara Jane 140 Nicholls, Angus 138 Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan and Richard Walsh 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich 33–5, 138, 161, 170–1; see also Amor fati; Power; Also sprach Zarathustra 33; The Birth of Tragedy 34; On the Genealogy of Morals – Ecce Homo 34; Untimely Meditations 161 Nigeria 126–8 9/11 157–9, 165–6, 173–4, 182–3; see also Post-9/11; September 166 Noble lie, the 136, 147–8; see also Plato Noh play 146 Novak, Marcos 2 Novel, the: Anglophone 85n7; antitransmodern 95; Booker Prize winning 177; Caribbean 211n1; circularity of 45; contemporary (Anglophone) (in English) 85n7, 93, 109; detective 94, 97 (see also Fiction); global 23; historical 148; of ideas 15, 68–73, 83–4; immigrant 126; intercultural 126; (late) twentieth-century 135, 197; linguistic hybridity of 65n17; macro 26; multiculturalist 24; post-9/11 165; post-postcolonial 125; (’s) palimpsestic structure (of the) 31, 33, 46 (see also Russian Doll); (semi-) mythological 133, 136; SF (science fiction) 213–14, 219, 225n2, 226n20; of thinking 70–1; transcultural 123; transmodern

poetics of 25; twentieth century 197; twenty-first-century 109; zombie 70 Nussbaum, Martha C. 101, 105 Oates, Joyce Carol 144 O’Brien, Sean P. 62 O’Donnell, Paraic 94 O’Hagan, Andrew 71 Onega, Susana 5–6, 9, 24, 26, 74, 106, 135–6, 138, 225n3; “Thinking Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm” 136 Onega, Susana and Jean-Michel Ganteau 6, 8; see also Ganteau, Jean-Michel and Susana Onega O’Neil, Joseph 86; Netherland 86 Ortiz, Fernando 120; Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar 120 Orwell, George 41; 1984 41 Other(s), the 12, 50, 98, 104–6, 115, 118–21, 127, 143, 146, 151, 195, 203, 220, 224; see also Levinas; Self; caring for 106; Latinos/as 64n11; material world as 200; postcolonial 3; subjugation of 5; woman 128 Otherness 98, 119, 124, 129, 180–1 Pacifism, ecological 30, 36; see also Peace Paine, Thomas 42; Rights of Man 42 Palimpsest(s): -ic configuration 42; -ic relationship 43; of the mind 9 (see also De Quincey; Dillon); surface of 28; -ting 28; -uous or relational reading 28, 30 Parable 134, 151, 158, 174 Paradigm(s) 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 14–15, 24, 49–51, 53–4, 63, 64n7, 73–4, 91, 93, 103–4, 106, 109–12, 116, 118, 124–7, 130, 135–5, 144, 151, 158, 162–4, 173, 179, 184, 190, 196–7, 199, 200, 203, 214–15, 219, 224; see also Shift; Transmodern; circularity 9 (see also Steinem) Paris, Erna 133–4 Parker, Harry 93; Anatomy of a Soldier 93 Parkes, Adam K. 146 Partnership system 7

Index  249 Past; see also Future; Present: actual 32; colonial 60; infinite actual and virtual 32; lived 32; remembered 32; virtual 32 Patriarchy 4, 6 Paxson, James J. 141; The Poetics of Personification 141 Peace 30, 133, 145, 148; see also Pacifism; fragile 133; imperishable 26; justice and 141–2 Pelluchon, Corine 98, 101, 104–5 Pennsylvania 31 Perception 3, 33, 62–3, 99, 101, 106, 124, 136, 161, 179, 202–3, 216, 219–21 Periphery(ies) 50–8, 63, 65; see also Centre; Margin; -al discourses 50, 57, 63n2; -al perspective 57; -al positions 59; -al (postcolonial) culture(s) 50–1, 57, 111; -al ring 220; critics of the 112; LatinAmerican 59; of the narrative 95; permanent 63 Perlas, Nicanor 214 Personification 139, 141 Petits récits 6; see also Grand Narrative(s) Philosophy 13, 69, 71, 98, 136, 163, 206, 219, 236; of history 1; imperialist 41; of liberation 1, 12, 92, 111 (see also Dussel); moral 6; of narrative 160; postmodern 51, 169; of the subject 104; transmodern 179–80, 183–5 Picaresque 41; film 42; narratives 38 Pícaro 38 Plato 136, 140, 147–9; see also Noble lie; Phaedo 147; The Republic 147–8 Plumwood, Val 198–9 Pluriversalism 7; see also Dussel; Grosfoguel; Pluriversality; Universalism Pluriversality 1, 190; see also Pluriversalism; Universalism; as a universal project 57 Poetics, the 24, 103–5; of haunting 96–7; of memory 8, 11 (see also Silverman); of peril 28; postmodernist 25; transmodern 14, 23, 25; of Transmodernity 14, 21; of waiting 97 Pollard, David 34, 36

Postcolonial Studies 6, 9, 12, 14 Postcolonialism 11, 113, 120 Postcorporal, the 75, 93; see also Transcorporeality; Transhuman Post-human, the; see also Posthumanism: explorations 16; matters 71, 77; mode 75; performativity 76; questions 71; reality 83 Post-humanism 75, 190n5; see also Post-human Post-industrialism 12 Postmodernism: domesticated 23 Postmodernity 1, 3–7, 10, 13, 24–5, 49–50, 73–4, 91–2, 109, 111, 113, 115–16, 135, 157, 159, 166, 169, 173, 179, 195–7, 205, 214 Post-9/11; see also 9/11: Australia (-n counterterrorist legislation) 15, 157–9, 166; fiction 165; novel 165; world 4, 159, 165–6, 173, 180 Post-patriarchal, the 12 Post-truth(s) 72, 162, 167–9, 173; see also D’Ancona; Fake news; definition of 168; era of 72, 168–9; politics 169 Power(s) of the universe; of the blade 4; to bring death 4; dictatorial 61; economic 40; figurative 14; hegemonic 57, 65; of the human imagination 45; lethal 4; lifegenerating 4; life-giving 5; of metaphor 14; nurturing 4; relations of 26; sustaining 5; systems of international 56 Powerlessness 4, 180 Pratt, Mary Louise 120, 124 Predacity: of the European colonisers 30; of the Maori 30 Predator(s) 27; see also Binary; dominant 27; /prey leitmotif 27, 33; /prey relations 40; -y violence 36 Prehistory: Polynesian 29 Present(s); see also Future; Past; Time: eternally updated 82, 96; moments 32; narrative 41; nest of 32; perpetual 81; yet to be 32 Priest: ascetic 34 Progress 4–6, 9, 11, 36; circular conception of 9; endless 4–5; -ion from innocence to experience 27; linear 6 Prophet 35; -ic inspiration 35 Prosopopoeia 140–1

250 Index Prucher, Jeff 225n2 Psychoanalysis 13 Quantum: mechanics 32 (see also String Theory); notion of the universe 46; physical measurement 32; physics 199; quanta of information 75 Queer Theory 6, 12 Rabinow, Paul 70, 72, 82 Race(s) 8, 24, 26, 28, 30, 118, 127, 146; in America 127; extraterrestrial 218; human 71, 118, 146, 180, 205, 226n16 Radicalism 23; cultural 6 Radstone, Susannah 7 Ramakers, Bart M. 141 Rationalisation 5 Rationality 5; excesses of 13 Reading: experiential 94, 106 Reagan, Ronald 38 Real, the 34, 76; desert of 3 Realism 9, 86, 96; agential 227n26; contra- 23; crisis of 85n7; lyrical 83, 86n7; magical 61, 65n14; traumatic 9, 96 (see also Rothberg) Reality: construction of 32; different modes of 23; fluid 24; hemispheric 55; image of 34; interconnected 24; material 74; social 24; transnational 1; unstable 24 Reason; see also Age of Reason: and Energy 36; reliance on 4 Reasporican 56, 62; see also Remigrant Rebirth 164, 190; see also Reincarnation; life and 29 Recurrence 96; eternal 33, 35 (see also Nietzsche) Red Army Faction 159 Reenchantment 12, 14–15, 75, 99–100, 155, 177–9, 184–5, 190 Reincarnation 38, 44–6, 143; see also Buddhism; Rebirth; cross-species 45; parallel-species 45 Relatedness 164, 172, 204 Relationality 14–15, 151, 164, 173–7, 177, 185–7, 203–4; with animals and plants 186; figures of 14; global 57; transmodern 186, 200; and transversality 10, 202 Relativism 6; cultural 6

Religion(s) 2, 8; dogmatic 185; pre-consumer 41; syncretic monotheistic 44 Remembering 60, 134, 148, 204; see also Memory; and forgetting 139 Remigrant(s) 56; see also Emigrant; Immigrant; Migrant; Reasporican Repetition(s) 46, 73, 80–1, 83, 91, 94, 96–7, 165; compulsion 97; -with-adifference 33 Replicant 42 Resilience 29, 43, 60, 100, 178, 182; mechanisms of 8; residual 83; theory of 12 Response-ability 223 Responsibility 30, 93, 101, 105–6, 143, 173, 199, 223–4 Revault d’Allonnes, Myriam 98, 104 Revolution, the French 5, 42; virtual 1, 24 Rhizome 14, 197 Rifkin, Jeremy 6–7, 12, 117–18, 162–3, 172–4; The Empathic Civilization 6, 173; The European Dream 117–18 Rimbaud, Arthur 46n2; Une saison en enfer 46n2 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 72 Robert, Adam 226n20 Roda, Claudia 98 Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María 1–4, 7, 10–13, 24, 50–1, 55, 63n3, 64n4, 73–9, 81–2, 84, 85n5, 91, 93, 95, 99, 102–6, 111, 113, 115–17, 135, 151, 157–62, 166, 168–9, 173, 179, 195–7, 205, 214; El modelo Frankenstein. De la diferencia a la cultura post 1; “Globalization as Transmodern totality” 93; La sonrisa de Saturno, hacia una teoría transmoderna de la Transmodernidad 1, 50, 73, 158; “The Crossroads of Transmodernity” 73, 160–1, 168–9; Transmodernidad 1; “Transmodernidad: un nuevo paradigma” 159 Roffey, Monique 15, 195–7, 200–11, 211n1; Archipelago 15, 195–7, 200, 202–4, 206–7, 209–10, 211n3; The White Woman on the Green Bicycle 211n1 Roffey, Nigel 197

Index  251 Rogers, Katina 122 Rothberg, Michael 9, 11–13, 138, 172; implicated subject 11, 172; montage 9, 13; multidirectionality 9 Roy, Arundhati 15, 177–9, 181–4, 186–90, 190n1; The God of Small Things 177, 190n1; The Ministry of Utmost Happiness 15, 177–81, 183, 185, 187–99, 190n1 Rubinstein, Hilary H. 219 Rudrum, David and Nicholas Stavris 16n1 Russian doll; see also Matryoshka doll: of embedded present moments 32; structure 31 Safran, William 65n12 San Francisco 26; Bay of 31 Sanchez-Taylor, Joy 61–2, 65n16 Santo Domingo 58 Sardar, Ziauddin 2, 10–12, 14, 113–15, 214 Sassen, Saskia 25n6 Savage(s): beaten 29; noble 26 Sax, Doria 190 Schiller, Friedrich 159; The Criminal by Reason of Lost Honour: A True Story 159 Science fiction 46n4, 48, 61–2, 65n16, 214, 217–19, 225n2, 226n15, 226n16; see also SF Second World War 5, 36–7, 68, 121, 134 Secularisation 5 Sekien, Toriyama 145 Selasi, Taiye 125 Self(-ves); see also Other: Enlightenment sense of 36; lack of autonomy of 75; -overcoming 34; -realisation 75; Romantic sense of 36; transmodern configuration of 75; unified 69; and world 24, 45 Self, Will 70 Selfhood 36; dualistic 36; Nietzschean conception of 36; (renunciation of) autonomous 69 Selisker, Scott 23 Serendipity 25; -ous coincidence 36 Serviss, Garrett Putnam 218; A Columbus of Space 218 Seshagiri, Urmila 146 SF 213–14, 217–19, 224, 225n2, 226n20; see also Science fiction

Shakespeare, William 185–6; The Tempest 223 Shelley, Mary 42; Frankenstein 42 Sherman, Jon Foley 101–2, 105 Shift(s); see also Change: economic 12; epistemic 2; epistemological 4; paradigm 2, 5, 7, 14, 24, 42, 49–50, 53, 74, 91, 93, 109, 135, 158, 179, 184, 196–97, 214–15; philosophical 12; political 12; socio-cultural 12; towards the transmodern 85 Shklovsky, Viktor 63 Silverman, Max 7–9, 11–12; see also Memory Sims, Christopher A. 26, 45 Simultaneity 93, 95; see also Instantaneity Singularity 15, 32, 64n9, 98, 101, 103, 105–6, 177, 183–4 Sir Gawain 140–1, 144 Slave(s); see also Middle Passage; Slavery: African 6; black 29; human 41; Moriori 29 Slavery 30, 120, 134; see also Slave Slimbach 119 Smith, Terry 157 Smith, Zadie 15, 83, 109–10, 118, 121–6, 129–30; “Two Paths for the Novel” 85n7; White Teeth 15, 109, 118, 121–2 Soap 42, 46n4; powder 42 Society: corrupt and predatory 38; European-based and Eurocentric 51; narcissistic and uncultured 38; non-Western 51; patriarchal 5; Western 51 Socrates 147–8 Soldier Blue 138 Solidarity 9, 15, 16, 63, 106, 161, 178, 184–6, 189, 227n26 Solipsism 5, 173 Sommer, Roy 123 Space(s) 3, 14, 55–6, 59, 64n9, 65n11, 81–3, 98, 118, 130, 198, 203, 209, 215, 219–20, 222; see also Cyberspace; abolition of 93; blank 26, 150; creative 69, 85n2; dialectical 14; expeditions 219; explorers 224; heroine 220; imaginary 225; liminal 56, 61; missions 219; mutating 82; nonlinear 82; of problems 82; social 120; third 123; time- (and) 59,

252 Index 81, 134, 149, 203 (see also Time); time- (and), 59, 81, 134, 149, 203; transborder 64n4 Spanish Civil War 5 Species 24, 203, 205, 217, 220, 222, 226n16; alien 218, 221; brittlestar 226n13; companion 207; crossreincarnation 45; empathic 7, 163; endangered 70; entangled 222; extra-Terran 219–22; human 30, 219, 224; identity 219, 224; metamorphic 216; natural 217; non-human 217, 219, 221–4; parallel- reincarnation 45 Spottishwood, Claire 227n21 Srebotnjak, Tina 137, 139–40, 148–9 Stapledon, Olaf 217; Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord 217 Staten Island 83–4 Steinem, Gloria 9, 14 Stengers, Isabelle 225n4 Stephan, Matthias 15, 110, 116, 118; Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century 118 Story(-ies) 61; see also Yarn; of domination and submission 3, 60; (her)- 8 (see also Andermahr, Sonya and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín); human 7; mystery 97; scattered, silenced 61; within stories 23; transgenerational family 60; traumatic 6 Strathern, Marilyn 225n4 String Theory 26, 31; see also Quantum, mechanics Sturken, Marita 137 Suárez Bustamante, Damián 214 Subaltern Studies 14, 64n5 Subalternity 14 Subject(s): animal 16; human 16, 74; implicated 11, 172 (see also Rothberg); interconnected 16; interdependent 16; living 16; mineral 16; post- 16; traumatised 9; vibrant 16 Subjectivity(ies) 16, 24, 100, 118–19, 121, 123–4, 127, 129, 134, 180, 227n27; Evacuated 73, 84; new 54; transmodern 125 Suicide 35–7, 46n1, 80; bomber 171; collective 163 Surveillance 40, 43, 99, 159 Sustainability 109; ecological 14; environmental 4; of the planet 161 Swan, William L. 41

Sydney 27, 158, 165, 167, 170, 173 Sym-bio-genesis 222 Symphony 31, 33 Sympoiesis 225n6 Synchronicity 3, 10, 95, 135, 146 Synthesis 3, 10, 50, 74, 77, 135, 159, 173, 214; see also Antithesis; Dialectic(s); Hegel; Thesis; totalising 3 Tasmania 158 Taylor, Kate 94 Technological, the 16 Technology(ies) 75–6, 83, 185, 196, 215, 220; bio- 41; communication(s) 3, 56; digital 80, 96; -ic society 116, 158, 196; -ical advancement 16; -ical control 41; -ical development 5; -ical innovations 70; -ical prostheses 75; -ical utopias 213; information 115, 157; modern 71; new 11, 41; the new 41; visual 99 Temporality 78, 98; see also Time; a- 96; digital 81; disrupted (-ing) 82, 96; frozen 81; omni- 33; transmodern 81; traumatic 8–9 Terra 219–24, 226n8; see also Dominium terrae; Gaia; extra(non-) -n species (life) 219–22; -n brittlestars 220; -n words 221; nonhuman –n (life forms) species 222, 224; wounded 223 Terrorism 4, 165, 173, 180, 190n2; see also Counterterrorism; international 166; Islamic 160, 165, 173 Testimony 8, 40; see also Life-writing Thatcher, Margaret 38 Thatcherism 23, 38 Theory of Affects 12 Theory of Resilience 12 Thesis 3, 10, 50, 74, 135, 159, 214; see also Antithesis; Dialectic(s); Hegel; Synthesis Thinking: Eurocentric 11; (transborder) mode of 12, 23; transmodern (type of) 2 Third World: relation between first and 11 Three Mile Island 31 Thriller 38, 40; fast-paced 170; post- 94

Index  253 Time(s) 4, 8, 16, 26, 58, 78, 81–2, 95, 97–8, 102, 130, 139, 150–1, 157, 159, 161–2, 164, 169, 200, 205, 213; see also Temporality; accelerated 81, 179; ancient 4; catastrophe of 150; contemporary 59; cyclical 65n14, 81; expanded 98; flow of 78, 81; linearity of 78, 80; Messianic 9, 33, 162; mode 32; of myth 149; oblivion of 150; pre-modern 14; present 151; real 75; (relational) model (of) 32; (-) space(s) (and) 59, 134, 136, 139, 146–7, 149, 215, 226n8 (see also Space); transmodern 50, 80, 95 Titanic, the (RMS) 32 Tofantšuk, Julia 198, 204, 208, 210 Tolerance 109, 115, 117, 128, 130, 179, 185–86 Totalisation 7 Trace(s): of forcefully repressed trauma 35; ghostly 28; memory 8; palimpsestuous 30 Tradition(s) 3, 10–11, 62, 116, 121, 134, 141, 146; African-American 125; -al lying 169; Aristotelian 104; Black-British 125; cultural 11, 92, 112–13, 144, 146; European philosophical 3, 11; folkloric 145; of the grand narratives 72; literary 61; in Muslim culture 14; premodern 160; religious 11; samurai 144; of thought 7; visionary 136; Western 62 Transanimality 15, 195 TransArchitecture Foundation 2 Transcendence 1, 5, 171, 179; belief in 5 Transcorporeal, the 197–8, 200, 204, 209–11; see also Transcorporeality Transcorporeality 15, 195–9, 211n2; see also Corporeality; Postcorporal Transculturalism 15, 109, 119 Transculturality 145, 151 Transhuman, the 75, 93; see also Postcorporal; Transcorporeality; body 2 Transindividuality 14, 16, 23, 25, 43 Transmodern, the 10, 69, 91, 95, 97, 110–11, 115–17, 121, 130, 146, 195–6; age 25, 69, 100, 214, 216–18, 224; approach to (perspective on) (life and) biology 214, 216–18; body 198; context

124; (cultural) world 82, 106, 177, 179–80, 187, 189; discourse 179, 214; epistemology 163; era 76; fiction 214, 217; fluidity 197, 210; framework 112, 114; hopefulness and sentimentalism 186; ideal 129; identity 120, 122, 128, 130; instantaneity (see Instantaneity); literature 225; mode 110, 119; moment 75; mythopoesis 133, 136; narrative 178; paradigm 103–4, 106, 109–10, 112, 115, 118, 125–7, 130, 136, 144, 151, 173, 190, 196, 214, 219; period 166; perspective 85, 124, 213; philosophy 179–80, 183–5; present 160; project 198; reality 100, 184; reenchantment 75 (see also Reenchantment); relationality 186, 200; representations of 95; SF literature 224; society 215; spirituality 186; subjectivity 125; temporality 81; thinking 214–15, 224; time 80, 95; totality 93; wholeness and tolerance 186; worldview 112, 115, 118, 215 Transmodernism 15, 110, 114 Transmodernity 80, 82–5, 85n5, 91–3, 95, 105–6, 109–11, 114–16, 121, 130, 135–6, 146, 157–8, 160, 162, 166, 169, 173, 179–80, 180, 184, 190, 196–7, 199, 205, 210, 214–16, 224 Transnationalism 52–4, 57; aesthetic 53; spatial component of 53 Transversality 10, 196, 202 Trauma(s) 8, 11, 60, 137–8, 172, 197, 204, 209–10; collective 94, 96, 133, 138; events 11, 61; -ic experiences 58, 185; -ic (-ising) event(s) 61, 138, 182; -ic memories 184; -ic past(s) 136, 151; -ic realism 9, 96 (see also Rothberg); -ised psyche 204; -ised subject 9; narratives 9; representation of 136; repressed 35; screened 35; structural 11; unutterable 60 Trauma Studies 12–13 Travelogue 38; see also Defoe; autobiographical 28 Tribe(s) 27; Aboriginal 27 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas 58–60, 62; -an historiography 60; -an history 60; ’s dictatorial regime 59; ’s dictatorship 59

254 Index Trump, Donald 169 Tsitsovits, Ioannis 75–6 Turin 72, 77; shroud 77–8 Turn(s): from the Copernican earthcentred universe 205; Darwinian 205; to the digital 102; ethical 6, 11; fluid 197; Freudian 205; inward 5; methodological 199; of the millennium 140; to the postmodern 157; post-national 129; relational 170; of the twentieth century 68 Twin Towers attack 165 Tyler, Royall 146 Ubiquity 56; transborder 166 Undecidability 36, 38 United States, the 31, 51, 54–6, 58–9, 65n15, 69, 111, 125–8, 134, 183, 225n2; see also US; -backed dictatorships 59; ’s foreign policies 59 Universalism 7, 24; see also Pluriversalism Universe 4, 46, 71, 199, 213, 218; Copernican earth-centred 205; of endless possibility 32; of endless potentiality 16; fictional 62; intellectual 3, 146; powers of 4; quantum notion of 46 Unravelling: epistemological 25, 31, 46 US, the 64n9, 65n11; see also United States; South 114 USSR 5; breakup of 69 Value(s) 13–14, 51, 56, 62, 92, 98, 109–10, 112, 116, 119, 128, 136, 140, 160, 162, 174, 199, 224; emerging 163; of Enlightenment 169; ethical and political 6; of giving life 4; humanist 6; lifegiving 7; matrifocal 4; modern 166; moral 70; political 6; of relationality 14; social 171; spiritual 5; of transindividuality 14; of truth 147 van den Akker, Robin, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen 16n1; see also Metamodernism Van Hear, Nicholas 55 Verlaine, Paul 46n2 Vermeulen, Pieterand Ioannis Tsitsovits 75–6, 146

Vibrancy 16, 100; vibrant matter 99, 202 Victim 80, 151, 172–3; sacrificial 43 Vietnam 138; War 37, 138 Vincent, Jean. 34n3; Atlas des nuages 34n3 Vint, Sherryl 217 Violence 8, 13, 30, 39–40, 43, 58–60, 95, 133–4, 142, 163, 181, 205; of global capital 172; legitimation of 5; (neo)colonial 59; predatory 27, 36 Virilio, Paul 2 Vulnerability 16, 101–2, 104–5, 179, 182, 184, 202, 206; environmental 15; human 16, 71; natural 16; shared 16, 172 Wagner, Richard 33 Waiting 94, 97–8; narrative experience of 97; poetics of 98 Wallace, David Foster 68, 71; “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress” 68 War on Terror 165–6 Warnecke, Lauren 25 Web(s) 73, 215; of data 73; of echoes 96; relational 222; -site 165; webbed connections 215 Webb, Jen 159, 165, 166, 170–2 Weber, Max 85n5, 185 Wells, H. G. 217; The Island of Doctor Moreau 217 Welsch, Wolfgang 120 Western-biased episteme 49 West/non-West binary 11 Wholeness 75, 82, 185–7 Wicks, Mark 218; To Mars via the Moon. An Astronomical Story 218 Wilde, Oscar 5; The Picture of Dorian Gray 5 Will to Power 33; see also Nietzsche Wil-lessness 35; see also amor fati; Nietzsche Williams, Jeffrey J. 157, 159; “The ‘Contemporary’ Moment: How Postmodernism Became Passé” 157 Wilson, Janet 165 Wollstonecraft, Mary 42 Wood, James 94, 97, 99 Wooster, Harold 225n2; “Xenobiology” 218, 223, 225n2 World(s): animal 16, 96, 208; better 15; capitalist 38; chaotic (and

Index 255 fragmented) 7, 78; fictional 24, 37; in fragmentation 69; globalised 9, 14, 24, 38; human 16, 77, 102, 105; instantaneous 82, 95–6; material conditions of 23; new materialist vision of 16; non-fictional 189; non-human 205; of potentialities 45; predatory 30; resisting interpretation 69; self(-ves) and 24; vegetal 100; Western 6, 40, 97 Wound(s) 178, 181–2, 201; age 8; -ed animals 179; -ed Terra 223; of Partition 182; Second World War 134

Xenobiology 214, 218, 223, 225n2; see also Exobiology; Xenology Xenocommunication 226n21 Xenology 218–19; see also Freitas Xenotransplantation 217, 222 Yarn 43–5; see also Story Yōkai 145 Zafa 59–60; see also Fukú; story 60 Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Will Steffen and Paul Crutzen 40 Zigon, Jarrett 77 Žižek, Slavoj 3

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