English Prize Essay Happiness and Experimentalism: on H(a)ppy and The Lesser Bohemians

Abstract

Abstract This essay contends that happiness offers an alternative point of entry into recent debates about the supposed ‘hybridity’ or ‘dialectic’ of realism and experimentalism in contemporary literature. Sarah Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness suggests that happiness is a particularly contemporary concern; I will also argue that it has been brought surprisingly to the fore in two recent experimental texts, Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians1 and Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY. At first glance, the marriage of experimentalism and happiness may appear odd; as Sianne Ngai observes, the avant-garde ‘is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge’, and Rachel Greenwald Smith has delineated a supposed tension between affect and postmodernism. However, Claire Colebrook’s theory of a relationship between literature and non-teleological or desubjectivized happiness helps us to see how Barker and McBride mobilize the destabilizing capacities inhering in literary form to return a greater complexity and ambivalence to the concept of happiness. This suggests one way of placing the novels in terms of literary history and contemporary aesthetics, evoking what Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker call a ‘metamodernist oscillation’ between postmodern suspicion and modernist hope. However, the erratic behaviour of happiness as narrative telos in the novels also challenges the logic of aesthetic categories by alerting us to the strangeness of literary form, suggesting that qualities normally attributed to experimental writing may be possibilities inhering in literature as such.