Legacies of Modernism: Re-examining Metamodernist Classifications in Ali Smith’s How to be Both and Ian McEwan’s Atonement
The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great variety of morbid symptoms. — Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
In the preface to Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction, Peter Boxall includes Gramsci’s quote about morbid symptoms to foreground his arguments about the contemporary novel. Gramsci’s claim, understood as referring to “the appraisal of any transitional phase during which an old order is already dying, but a radically different new one is not yet able to be born” (Achcar para. 17), gives us an insight into what Boxall means when he argues that the twenty-first century “is marked by an uncertainty about the age of our time” (12):
“Twentieth-century western culture, it suggests, was dominated by a sense of the lateness of the hour… The predominance of the prefix ‘post’ in the compound nouns that describe later twentieth-century experience is a symptom of this sense of an ending that permeates so many of our cultural environments. But with the turn of the century… we have entered into a new sense of our age, in which our conception of late culture comes into a difficult contact with the apprehension of a youthful time, a dawning era for which we do not yet have a terminology.” (Boxall 12, emphasis mine)
Here, Boxall asserts that the anxieties of the later twentieth-century have manifested as various sense-making ideas, of which postmodernism will be what this essay is most concerned with. While late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism “attempts to represent aspects of contemporary living that cannot find concrete or representational forms,” postmodernism as a sense-making movement “shares modernism’s attempt to capture the unpresentable, but questions the very possibility of aesthetic form standing in as a substitute for the unpresentable” (Bentley 726). Boxall claims that the twenty-first century, however, is still waiting for an emergent lexicon through which we can make sense of the contemporary condition. In this uneasy landscape, he states that the novel becomes “one of the most powerful and inventive critical tools we have with which to address the emerging conditions of a new being in the world” and “offers us a means of apprehending the present” (14). It is through studying the contemporary novel, then, that one can most astutely observe the effects of the twenty-first-century paradigm shift– one marked most pertinently by the shift from “the kinetic speed of a motor vehicle to the electronic speed of digital information exchange” (Boxall 4).
The state of flux in which the modern world operates has naturally seen a parallel shift within the world of fiction-reading, and paved new ways to interpret the contemporary novel. The “new” movement of metamodernism here emerges as one such movement striving to be “born,” replacing the “old” and “dying” postmodernism as the dominant discursive context in which the contemporary novel operates. Known influential proponents of metamodernism, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, have explicated where and how they think the metamodernist movement should be situated: “epistemologically with (post)modernism, ontologically between (post)modernism, and historically beyond (post)modernism” (2). To them, metamodernism is “characterised by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment” (2), and constitutes a new type of modernism. Other scholars like David James and Urmila Seshagiri view metamodernism less of such oscillation but rather a return to modernism (Bentley 728). Its value thus lies in its reassessment and remobilisation of narratives of modernism (James and Seshagiri 89). Here, narratives of modernism refers to a) “experimental fiction shaped by an aesthetics of discontinuity, nonlinearity, interiority, and chronological play,” and b) “fictions — overtly experimental or otherwise — plotted around the very creation and reception of modern art and letters” (James and Seshagiri 89). The idea that many (post)modernist tendencies have been modified to take different shapes and adopt new meanings in the transforming material landscape of the twenty-first century has proven to be enticing to many scholars. Some have even gone as far as to label certain contemporary novels as metamodern, among which this essay will go on to examine two: Ali Smith’s How to be Both and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
Despite the evident traction the movement has gained within scholars of the contemporary novel, Boxall remains that “the sense that the historical language which is required to describe the passage past the far horizon of postmodernism is lacking, or unformulated” underlies metamodernism as a critical movement (59). In what I interpret as an attempted reconciliation of this conflict, Nick Bentley references Jean-Francois Lyotard’s modernism-postmodernism distinction to claim that “it might be more accurate to see metamodernism as a category within the postmodern, rather than offering a clear break with it” (725). To exemplify this, Bentley offers readings of so-called metamodern novels– David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Zadie Smith’s NW– that “place them in the interstices between Lyotard’s dichotomy” and categorise them as trailing postmodernist novels (726). “Trailing” here means both to be “on the trails” of/investigate postmodernism and to (chronologically) follow in the wake of postmodernism, while still experiencing its effects (726). In this essay, I argue that How to be Both and Atonement, while both reassessments of narratives of modernism, negotiate their relationship to the postmodernist novel differently. I suggest that How to be Both exists as a metamodernist novel within the superset of postmodernism, while Atonement represents trailing postmodernist (rather than metamodernist) fiction that strikes “for an experimental edge” but “is unable, yet, to find a mode that that is significantly different from the formal characteristics associated with the postmodern” (Bentley 739–40). I will first compare the novel’s reassessment of dual meanings in James and Seshagiri’s narratives of modernism. I then track the more apparent structures of authorial construction in the novels, namely the dismantling of binaries in How to be Both and intertextuality in Atonement. Finally, I assess if the novels have indeed revealed themselves to be metamodernist and trailing postmodernist respectively.
How to be Both as a two-part novel operates at the paratextual level as a narrative of modernism. The unusual way in which the book was published, with half of the copies beginning with George’s narrative and the other starting with Francescho’s. That the readers are differentiated in their reading experience, determined the moment they pick the book off the shelves, and yet are unaware of the author’s chronological manipulation constitutes the novel as “experimental fiction shaped by an aesthetics of discontinuity, nonlinearity, interiority, and chronological play” (James and Seshagiri 89). The reader “does not know whether they are reading one story or two” and both stories have the heading ‘one’ regardless of which one the book starts with, further destabilising any sense of a chronological before and after (Liebermann 144). The modernist technique of fragmentation is also used to add to the sense of nonlinearity and discontinuity, which then demonstrates the postmodern impulse to reveal how the novel itself is a highly constructed form. Francescho’s narrative begins with fragmented clauses, dispersed over the page in the shape of a double helix DNA structure (189). This fragmentation achieves two things. It initially draws our attention to the authorial construction of the novel in the formatting and placement of the text. Then, with deeper inspection, the fragmentation reveals the mechanisms of storytelling underlying the novel. Depending on whether one read George’s narrative first or Francescho’s, the line “Ho this is a mighty twisting thing” either references the portion where George and H discuss the etymology of the word “Ho” (137) or becomes the referenced portion itself. The line itself is also self-reflexive, the “mighty twisting thing” referring to the double helix DNA structure of the text which happens to be another referencing/referenced moment from when George sees a sculpture of the DNA structure from her train (171). The twisting, self-reflexive DNA structure thus becomes a metaphor for the interweaving of modernist and postmodernist inheritances in the text, and How to be Both emerges as a metamodern novel through its oscillation between modernist narratives and the postmodern impulses.
Similarly, Atonement reassesses a narrative of modernism “plotted around the very creation and reception of modern art and letters” (James and Seshagiri 89). Despite criticism that the supposedly realist novel “inappropriately resorts to a modish self-referentiality” at the end, Brian Finney claims that Atonement is “concerned with the making of fiction” from the beginning (69). The narrative begins with a young Briony obsessed with writing The Trials of Arabella, and subjugates everything within her worldview to serve “the demands of her own fiction” (Finney 69). When what is “real” and what is “fiction” to her gets conflated, she wrongs Robbie and hurts him in an irreversible manner. She then attempts to use fiction to correct the errors that fiction caused her to commit (Finney 69). This is supported by the revisions made to Two Figures by a Fountain as recommended by Cyril Connolly, even before the reveal that Briony has been the writer of the entire novel all along– the supposedly realist “Part One” is revealed to have already been corrected accordingly, from the appearance of the Meissen vase rather than a Ming one, and the Bernini being inside the Piazza Barberini rather than the Piazza Navona (Robinson 475). This attention to the metafictional aesthetic is furthered by McEwan in his deliberate associations with Briony’s writing to that of modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s. Cyril Connolly questions Briony on the stream-of-consciousness style in Two Figures– which the reader has already read would later find out that it is just Part One of the novel– asking if she may owe too much of it to Woolf (Smith 314). This letter, Richard Robinson argues, results in the “violating the boundaries between real and fictional worlds well before the metafictional adjunct of the epilogue” and is a “postmodernist moment… tellingly embedded within a discussion of how a writer influenced by Woolf should represent the world of which she is a part — that is, within a discussion of modernist epistemology” (475). While narratives of modernism certainly exist in Atonement, unlike in How to be Both, they operate within a work of fiction about writing fiction, and the pattern becomes not one of oscillation between modernism and postmodernism, but modernism’s reliance on postmodern self-reflexivity.
The way in which How to be Both eludes the categorisation of simply modernist or postmodernist is in its dismantling of dichotomies. According to Bentley, the “collapsing of binaries” becomes a way of “navigating the middle-way between extremes and of pursuing one of metamodernism’s chief concerns: interconnectivity” (990). In the novel, the dichotomies of male/female and more pertinently, life/death, are investigated and disassembled. Francescho’s gender-bending affords them liminality, which then manifests as their ability to transcend the traditional parameters of life and death, as well as the rules of time and space. The liminality of Francescho is diametrically opposed to George, who is characterised by her insistence on grammatical correctness prior to her mother’s death. Her rigidity within boundaries is also seen in her insistence on being called George, not Georgia, nor both. Rebecca Pohl insinuates that Francescho later becomes a symbol of healing and acceptance for George:
“Del Cossa connects the teenaged George to her dead mother, who, after becoming smitten by del Cossa’s frescoes, had spontaneously whisked her children to Italy in the middle of the school term to view the paintings in situ. It is through her mother’s enthusiasm — and its ghostly embodiment in the shape of del Cossa, who hovers around her — that George grieves for and comes to terms with her mother’s death.” (Pohl 699)
Francescho embodying both male and female, being both alive and dead, seems to echo the novel’s title as an instruction to George on “how to be both.” Here, it could be said that H is made to be Francescho’s contemporary counterpart. Like them, H feels comfortable with her liminality. Rather than binaries, her identity in this new contemporary condition is made up of fluid parameters. Her name is Helena Fisker, H, Helena, or any one of those (Smith 78). Her parents are from France, Karachi, and Copenhagen, so she is simultaneously from the north, south, east, and west, all at once (Smith 88). Her sexuality is gestured to in the form of a possible romantic relationship with George, but not explicitly defined by heterosexual/homosexual and the likes of such binaries. Both Francescho and H’s liminality thus become a metaphor for the text itself and its liminality as an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist influences, echoing Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s model of the metamodern.
On another level, the ease with which Francescho navigates these binaries reveals the relationship between fact and fiction, what is real and what is fabricated. The reader is made aware, through Francescho’s ghost, of the “obtrusive ways” of Smith’s authorial presence (Masters 990). Yvonne Liebermann writes that “[i]n typical postmodern fashion, it seems, Smith lets her readers always stay aware of the fact that our access to reality is through representations” (148). The fact/fiction binary is investigated through George’s viewing of the pornographic video she finds on YouTube:
“She was there under the YouTube videos of Vampire Weekend and the puppy falling off the sofa and the cat sitting on the hoover that hoovered by itself and the fox so domesticated that the person taking the film could stroke its head.
She was there under the pop-ups and the adverts on Facebook, and under the facts about the history of the suffragettes on the BBC site which George looked up for school. She was there under the news item about the woman who tried to buy a burger at a McDonald’s drive-thru on her horse…” (Smith 35–6)
Here, Liebermann claims that How to Be Both “questions the evidentiary nature of photographs and similar media that allegedly have a more immediate connection to the ‘real’,” and that even though the girl being drugged might be ‘real,’ George watching the video does not connect her to the ‘real’ but ironically “alienates her from the reality of the girl’s suffering, reducing her response to a mechanical and repetitious act” (145). The idea that she sees the girl under the news about the woman trying to buy McDonald’s while on horseback is hence tainted with postmodern irony (Liebermann 145). The inability to represent empathy in George’s reality through a representational form like video thus makes clear the novel’s resignation towards modernism’s rejection of realism. This and George’s act, tainted in postmodern irony, meet once again at a metamodernist crossroads.
In Atonement, however, what needs to be uncovered is the text’s careful interplay of other textual references. Beyond Briony’s obsession with emulating Virginia Woolf, postmodern intertextuality is used by McEwan to evoke the country-house novel in Part One, sometimes also called his “Jane Austen” novels, in a “traditional realistic manner” (Han and Wang 138). McEwan focuses Part One on the sexually-charged relationship between between Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner, echoing the affair of Ted and Marian in another one of McEwan’s inspirations, L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (Ingersoll 249). This setting of a country manor mirrors the one The Go-Between begins with, while creating the atmosphere of “a self-contained replica of society that long ago moved into pastiche in such divergent representations as Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound and Robert Altman’s recent film Gosford Park” (Ingersoll 249). Earl G. Ingersoll contends that McEwan’s pastiche of the detective novel might even be more crucial than The Go-Between as intertextual elements (249). Here, the creation of the “foreboding atmosphere of an imminent crime” (249) could in fact be doing two things synchronously. One, it signposts to the reader that a crime of sorts is about to be committed, involving the reader in attempting to figure out what the crime is and who the criminal is before that information is revealed. The title, Atonement, similarly helps to gesture towards the committing of a crime and the need for someone’s crimes to be atoned for. This sense of suspense builds until Briony’s moral transgression is committed, the country-estate setting is done away with, and the reader is left satisfied with the resolved mystery. Two, it tricks the readers into thinking that the “whodunit” plot has been exposed, until they arrive at the epilogue, only to realise that the mystery in question– the narrative levels– have barely been unravelled. In utilising intertextuality, McEwan’s epilogue “radically subverts the reader’s knowledge of not merely the ‘content’ of the preceding narrative but its provenance as well” (Ingersoll 249), and at the paratextual level, implicates readers in a keep the twist ending a secret (Ingersoll 249). The postmodernist intertextual complexity thus becomes the main framework through which we are to understand the novel.
Bentley contends that if metamodernism were to be a concept of value, it “is only useful at the level of its attitude towards the fragmentary and plural nature of contemporary local, national and global conditions” (740) He elaborates that metamodernism could “represent a workable tag to identify those texts that display fragmented narratives in order to explore (and tentatively celebrate) the possibility of reducing that fragmentation and deconstruction and the implied disassociation and factional disruptions that are a feature of contemporary societies” (740). In other words, where modernism fails in capturing the unrepresentable fractures of modern society and postmodernism basks in the deconstruction of these metanarratives, metamodernism presents the possibility of reconstruction. Bentley further asserts that a metamodernist work like How to be Both then “attempts to re-humanize a post-human or indeed anti-human set of conditions that pertain in much poststructuralist and postmodernist work” (740). Broadly speaking, such re-humanisation is achieved in George’s eventual coming to terms with her mother’s death, with the help of the two characters diametrically opposed from her, Francescho and H. The novel hence suggests that within the plurality of contemporary society, there still exists genuine and productive human connection that is worth celebrating. The attitude towards the “efficacy of a harmonious relationship between disparate and often contesting positions” (Bentley 740) thus becomes that of an optimistic one in How to be Both. The novel itself also becomes a representation of metamodernism and its value as a subset within postmodernism.
On the other hand, the reassessment of narratives of modernism in Ian McEwan’s Atonement yields a novel that is not too distant at all from the postmodern aesthetics of metafiction and intertextuality. McEwan’s novel exists as a response to modernism, and resonates neither with James and Seshagiri’s idea of a return to modernism, nor Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s ‘oscillating’ model of the metamodern. Here, I borrow Bentley’s conception of a trailing postmodernism to explain a novel like Atonement whose experimental edge manifests in a way that those not derail from the associations with the postmodern. Atonement as a trailing postmodernist text thus situates it firmly within the (post)modernist scholarship, until of course, the body of literary criticism can find a way to sever its ties cleanly from the vestiges of postmodernism.
In this essay, I identified the context within which metamodernism as a movement emerged. I discussed Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept that metamodernism is oscillation between the modernist and postmodernist with James and Seshagiri’s idea that metamodernism was a return to modernism, and how these definitions could be supplemented by Bentley’s idea that metamodernism was a subset of postmodernism, rather than severed from it. Through analysing the novel’s reassessment of narratives of modernism, structures of authorial construction in the novels, I contend that How to be Both and Atonement stand in contemporary culture as metamodernist and trailing postmodernist novels. English novelist Tom McCarthy once claimed in 2010 that, “The task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism” (McCarthy 38). The vestiges of modernism and postmodernism warrants more research in order to create a lexicon that can accurately reflect and critique the ever-changing landscape of the contemporary.
(3316 words)
Works Cited
Achcar, Gilbert. “Morbid Symptoms: What Did Gramsci Really Mean?” Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power, vol. 1, no. 2, Feb. 2022, pp. 379–87, https://doi.org/10.1163/26667185-01020010.
Bentley, Nick. “Trailing Postmodernism: David Mitchell’sCloud Atlas, Zadie Smith’sNW, and the Metamodern.” English Studies, vol. 99, no. 7, Oct. 2018, pp. 723–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2018.1510611.
Boxall, Peter. “Twenty-First-Century Fiction.” Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 1–18, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511902727.001. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.
Finney, Brian. “Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 68–82, https://doi.org/10.1353/jml.2004.0073.
Ingersoll, E. G. “Intertextuality in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 241–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/40.3.241.
James, David, and Urmila Seshagiri. “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 129, no. 1, Jan. 2014, pp. 87–100, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2014.129.1.87.
Liebermann, Yvonne. “The Return of the ‘Real’ in Ali Smith’s Artful (2012) and How to Be Both (2014).” Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives, Routledge, 2021, pp. 16–31, http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003167204-2. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.
McCarthy, Tom. “To Ignore the Avant Garde Is Akin to Ignoring Darwin.” Interview by James Purdon. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.
Masters, Ben. “Adjustment-Style: From H. G. Wells to Ali Smith and the Metamodern Novel.” Textual Practice, vol. 35, no. 6, June 2021, pp. 967–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2021.1935750.
McEwan, Ian. Atonement: A Novel. Anchor, 2003.
Pohl, Rebecca. “Ali Smith, Enthusiasm, and the Literary Market.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 63, no. 4, 2017, pp. 694–713, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2017.0053.
Richard Robinson. “The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 56, no. 3, 2010, pp. 473–95, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2010.0015.
Smith, Ali. How to Be Both. Penguin UK, 2014.
Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 2010, p. 5677, https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677.
