Conclusions: The Clamouring Continues …

Abstract

In this book I have attempted a survey of narrative methodologies employed by contemporary writers which are oriented, out of ambitions for a renewed authenticity founded on character (for aesthetic and/or ideological reasons), towards a discourse built on the various, often competing, demotic voices to be found throughout these islands. It has been proposed that this demotic discourse often seeks to represent both the internal and the external worlds of these characters concurrently so that, with an empowering self-reflectivity, the medium of representation will appear to come, by sleight of hand, from the representee. The analysis has focussed on both the potentialities of such methodologies and on their pitfalls, and it has isolated a set of paradigms with which to explore the multiple voices of recent fiction; for, it could certainly be argued, as Lodge and Bakhtin would, that this ‘polyphony’ is virtually a precondition of the genre’s continued viability:

What I learned from Ulysses, though it took some time for the lesson fully to sink in, or to manifest itself in my own writing, was that a novel can do more than one thing at once — indeed, that it must do so. It should tell us more than one story, in more than one style.¹