Language and Loneliness: The Late Novels

Abstract

Alongside the novel ‘after Joyce’, as represented by the novels of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Handke and others, there flourishes a novel that seems to possess continuity with what is loosely called nineteenth-century realism, which continues to employ recognisable and ordinary scenes and characters, and which is apparently indifferent to the searching questions about language that preoccupy the ‘post-Joyceans’. This continuity is particularly evidenced in England, where flirtations with literary modernisms in the 1960s and 1970s were both short-lived and relatively superficial. There is a parochialism about contemporary English culture, but acknowledging it does not explain the survival of the traditional form, or something like it, not only in England but in most cultures where the novel has flourished. It might simply be argued that what characterises the post-modern is diversity (and that there is correspondingly much greater diversity within the tradition than the use of ‘traditional’ here suggests). So much may be admitted, but it leaves the problem of the applicability of contemporary literary theory, which has developed in close alliance with modernist forms, to the normative tradition.