Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

This essay sets out to explore the relationship between late modernity and late style, in the context of the dawning of the third millennium. I want to suggest here that the deeply ingrained sense of cultural agedness that has characterized the historical mood of the last several decades is in a certain tension with the equally powerful conception of our age as a period of virtually unprecedented novelty. Cultural theorists of remarkably different political and philosophical persuasions, from Theodor Adorno to Gilles Deleuze, from Francis Fukuyama to Fredric Jameson, have registered what Frank Kermode has succinctly characterized as a “sense of an ending” in our collective historical consciousness, a sense of belatedness that has expressed itself in the terms by which we have sought to describe postwar twentieth-century culture: the recurrence of the adjective late in compounds such as “late capitalism,” “late modernism,” and “late modernity,” and the experience of aftermath so powerfully evoked by the application of the prefix post to virtually all aspects of Western cultural life.¹ Yet this apprehension of historical completion or exhaustion coexists with an experience of a present that is so young, so rapidly growing and changing, that it is difficult even to inhabit it, to hold it still long enough to glean a clear understanding of its features. Historical time is old, sluggish, and exhausted, slouching its Yeatsian way to Bethlehem, but it is also new and unformed, so much so that it is difficult to resist the idea that the future has arrived “ahead of schedule,” in Don DeLillo’s phrase (Players 84), that the Derridean time to come has contaminated the obsolescent present.² The turn of the millennium is figured, time and again, and in a wide range of different fictional and theoretical forms, as the calendrically convenient bridge between these opposite historical conditions, as if the passage from one century to the next doubles as a transition from old to new, from the last world historical order to one as yet unimagined. This tension, I want also to suggest here, finds a certain kind of expression in contemporary fiction, and particularly in fiction written in what Adorno and Edward Said call a “late style.”³ The work of a wide range of “late stage” authors writing around the turn of the millennium, I argue, exhibits “late” cultural symptoms; late fictional style in contemporary writing performs the exhaustion of a culture, the growing old and tired of Western modernity itself. But it is also this late fiction, this threadbare prose, that prepares the narrative conditions in which the new, the future, might come to expression, and in which one might hear the first faint echoes of next year’s voice.

I want to start, though, not at the turn of the millennium but a little earlier, with the growth of a late-historical consciousness in the writing of the second half of the twentieth century. The writer who, perhaps more than any other, has given poetic expression to a late culture in this period is Samuel Beckett—the author who exemplifies, both for Adorno and for Deleuze, the exhaustion of literary possibility in the postwar period.⁴ It is in Beckett’s writing that the poetic perception of late-historical processes is at its most acute, and it is perhaps partly for this reason that his influence feels now to be so powerful. If contemporary writers are seeking to orient themselves in relation to a period of time that has come to an end, then it is Beckett’s writing, more than any other author’s, that appears to give dramatic shape to such an ending. Beckett is a writer who begins at the end, who encounters a crepuscular gloaming at the dawn of his career, who repeatedly figures birth itself as a kind of death. As Pozzo memorably puts it in Waiting for Godot, “They give birth astride of a grave” (84). Murphy, Beckett’s first...