The Warped Bildung: Parody, Postmodern Gothic, and the Bildungsroman in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Iain Banks’s first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), set the scene for a literary career renowned for playful transgressions of genre and form. The novel addresses the topical debate on human subjectivity by capitalizing on the Gothic and postmodernism, both of which demonstrate a mutual concern with human subjectivity with a distinctly anti-humanist slant. This study argues that the novel partakes in the foregoing debate through an engagement with a literary tradition inextricably entwined with the discourse of humanism, namely, the Bildungsroman or the novel of formation. Despite the novel’s striking overlap with the Bildungsroman, the examination of its significance has been relegated to the periphery of scholarly attention. Accordingly, drawing on and expanding Linda Hutcheon’s notion of postmodern parody, this study posits that Banks’s novel is a postmodern parody of the Bildungsroman, which taps into subversive Gothic elements in its setting and characterization, which are the two cardinal constituents of the Bildungsroman, as its ironic catalyst in a bid to critique the status of Man in postmodern times. In other words, the novel reprises the tradition of the Bildungsroman with ironic critical distance, depicting the horrific disintegration of humanist subjectivity into posthuman monstrosity instead of his teleological advancement toward positive identity formation and social incorporation.