Novelistic Ruins: Textual Fragmentation and Contemporary British Literature

Abstract

A esperanca, a imagem e a resposta utopicas discutidas por Terry Eagleton e Georg Lukacs se tornam evidentes nos romances elencados neste artigo ( Atonement de Ian McEwan, The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time de Mark Haddon, Bring up the Bodies de Hilary Mantel e White Teeth de Zadie Smith) na maneira que os conflitos sao, se nao resolvidos, pelo menos revestidos de uma aparencia insolita nas coisas e objetos inventariados em listas. O que eu proponho neste artigo e pensar como as listas dos referidos romances participam na ruptura da linguagem, no colapso da narrativa, no confronto de perspectivas, na fragilidade do valor e na vacuidade de sentido. Os romances contemporâneos tendem a nos dar um tipo de atalho na percepcao por meio do uso de listas, enumeracoes e inventarios, os quais suspendem a linguagem, a narrativa, a subjetividade, o valor e o sentido, em sua confusa voracidade e infinidade. Palavras-chave : Listas. Utopia. Ruinas. ABSTRACT The article discusses both the textual fragmentation and the utopian space of literary lists in Ian McEwan’s Atonement , Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time , Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by following the lead of Terry Eagleton and Georg Lukacs. It is my contention that the utopian hope, image, and response created in contemporary novels are evident in the way contradictions acquire a poetic veneer in the things and objects inventoried on lists. It is to the aid of an ars disjunctoria that the postmodernist novelists have returned and this return spells out as the utopian hope towards, image of, and response to, the willingness to allow the newly released parts of narrative to float, mingle, and monumentalize themselves as ruins. This utopian space created with the help of lists in contemporary novels has to do with the relative failure of formal realism and with the hardening of the conclusion, reached by Eagleton and Lukacs, that to narrate is itself a moral act. The article also discusses the extent to which the lists in the said novels participate in the overall break-up of language, in the collapse of narrative, in the clash of subjective standpoints, in the fragility of value, in the elusiveness of meaning, and in the creation of a “ruinous” present. The conclusion points to how contemporary novels tend to give us a kind of foreshortening of perception through the use of lists, enumerations, and inventories which suspend language, narrative, subjectivity, value, and meaning in their dizzying voraciousness and infinity. Keywords: Lists. Utopia. Contemporary Ruins.