A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction

Abstract

ecent criticism published on contemporary English fiction has laid special emphasis on the historiographic and intertextual dominant of novels struggling to come to terms with a failing sense of historical congruence. Little has been said about the revival of allegory and the almost coincidental emergence of a postmodernist form of the sublime in the works of such writers as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, D. M. Thomas, and Jeanette Winterson. Yet an exploration of this paradoxical polarity may allow us to reconsider the metafictional interrogation of these novelists on the exhaustion of representation and on the aporia stemming from the sometimes paralyzing knowledge that transparency has been radically put into question. Acknowledging this lack of transparency is but the initial step in the reassessment of the fictional agenda, as, for many English writers, the ensuing self-referentiality does not make allowance for two crucial elements of fiction: transience and loss. I would like to suggest here that although they are aware that, in Mihai Spariosu's words, all language is 'allegorical,' being an infinite network of deferments, displacements, and substitutions that point to and stand in for an absent, perhaps imaginary, referent or (60), many contemporary English writers still insist on staring this same absent origin in the face, even if the literary price to pay for this crime of lese postmodernism is the speechless terror of an apocalyptic sublime.