The Unseen World: Denarrative Desire in the Contemporary British Novel

This dissertation proposes a new theoretical account of the contemporary British novel's vexed relationship to history. This project examines novels that attempt to rewrite narratives of violence and imperialism through what I see as failed magic tricks: fantastical reinventions of earlier literary or historical texts that ultimately prove untenable. This impulse resists the demystifying attitude of the postmodern novel, exemplified in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), where the ever-present figure of the novelist makes analytical intrusions into the Victorian plot. Instead, the novels that I examine--including works by Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt, and David Mitchell--beguile readers into a temporary state of willful desire for historical recuperation. However, these would-be narrative enchantments threaten violence and pose dark ethical quandaries for both author and reader. This threat of complicity emerges in Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), through the reader's uneasy sympathy for the novel's twinned anti-heroes, a murderer and a detective separated by two hundred years, yet illogically involved in the same crimes. In what I call the necropolitan chronotope of Ackroyd's London, distinctions between these temporally distant characters deteriorate, as do those between life and death, good and evil. Past and present coalesce into a nightmarish void of time, in which attempts at narrative or historical resolution inevitably backfire: events can be neither changed nor undone because they are in a state of perpetual manifestation. I contend that these recent texts express a compulsive denarrative desire to undo or unknow pre-existing narratives, a wish that can never be responsibly fulfilled. This drive is fetishistic; the authors I consider recognize the impossibility of historical revision but enact it nonetheless, through formal experiments that critics often inadequately categorize as belated versions of postmodern irony or playfulness. These over-familiar terms fail to account for the serious claims that these novels make about the uncomfortable inextricability of the past and the present. For example, in Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell constructs densely interlocking layers of pastiche and a unique nested structure that moves first forwards, then backwards in time. Mitchell hews close to metanarratives of modernization and literary history, only to confound both. By considering texts like Cloud Atlas that hover outside the postmodern in the nebulous area of the "post-postmodern," my project traces an alternative lineage of the contemporary novel. Alongside these theoretical questions about history, narrative form, and periodization, The Unseen World interrogates the contentious status of the British novel in relation to broader European, Anglophone, and "world" literary landscapes.