In 1980 I did not have a computer. Neither did anyone else I knew. E- as a prefix to anything such as e-passports was not in use then; in 2017 the capture of biodata in many different forms such as iris recognition has made e-passports a norm. Similarly, the ability to manipulate biodata and bio materials through biotechnological innovation, for instance in the context of fertility, has revolutionised ideas of kinship and can, in 2017, accommodate notions of multiple biological parents to a single child. The driverless car is being tested. Paro, the robot seal, is being used to comfort the elderly as robot carers for the elderly are being developed. Technology-enhanced surveillance is becoming ever more sophisticated, with the state and corporations submitting to and exploiting the self-learning algorithms of artificial intelligence systems that pervade the everyday.

In 1983, the journal Granta released its first ‘best of’ issue, featuring the twenty most promising British novelists under the age of 40. The Granta 7 roster proved auspicious and laid the groundwork for the careers of some of the most successful British novelists of the late twentieth century. Based on a campaign run by the Book Marketing Council, the issue ran over 300 pages and included the work of such figures as Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. From Thatcherism to the expansion of British identity, and from gender inequality to newly flexible models of history, the issue’s themes announced the main literary and cultural preoccupations of the decade.

To bring this Companion to a close is necessarily to reflect on the future, on the ways in which the historical formations that we have traced in the preceding chapters allow us to conceive, at this brief and troubled threshold of our shared present, of the time to come.

When does the present begin?

An immediate answer to this curiously vexing question might be to suggest that the present does not begin. The present, one might argue, has no duration. It is the now, the passing moment, and as such cannot be truly said to have a beginning or an end, and cannot be measured, or regarded in any sense as having passed, or being to come. The present does not unfold or occur, but is the vanishing, fleeting medium of our immediate becoming.

In a eulogising essay following the death of John Updike in 2009, Ian McEwan wrote: ‘American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer [and now Updike], is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth.’ Philip Roth would go on to announce his retirement from writing in 2012 and passed away in 2018, thus eradicating the final face from McEwan’s literary Mount Rushmore. McEwan’s friends and peers, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, similarly wrote eulogies for Updike; just as McEwan and Christopher Hitchens (another member of their literary set) had done for Saul Bellow in 2005 (‘What other American novelist’, asked Hitchens, ‘has had such a direct and startling influence on non-Americans young enough to be his children?’), while Amis and McEwan both spoke at Bellow’s memorial in New York. Amis also wrote an account of Roth’s oeuvre the year after his retirement, and followed this with an appreciation after his death, while McEwan remembered Roth on BBC Radio.

To write of ‘postmodernism’ is both to skate on thin ice and to tread familiar ground. Almost every piece of scholarship that uses this classification must begin, by convention it seems, with a lengthy tract on what precisely is meant by ‘the postmodern’. It is precarious ‘thin ice’ because these definitions are not always aligned with one another and are sometimes delicate. For instance, many of the tropes that one might call ‘postmodern’ and to which I will shortly turn are clearly exhibited in Romantic-era writing or in the epic of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Such definitional work is ‘familiar ground’, though, because the procedure has become so routinised as to appear mundane.

The opening of Samuel Beckett's excruciatingly condensed late work, Worstward Ho, gives perhaps the most succinct definition we have of what it is that the novel does. The narrator begins by instructing himself on what he must do in order to begin. ‘Say a body’, he says (commanding himself and obeying the command in the same breath). ‘Say a body. Where none… A place. Where none. For the body. To be in.’

These are the essentials of the fictional scenario. ‘That’, as the narrator puts it, ‘at least’. In making fictions, we propose bodies taking up spaces, in the full knowledge that these bodies and these spaces do not exist. The defining feature of a novel body is its non-existence, its special talent for not being. As Theodor Adorno puts it, everything that happens in a novel, every element of its material texture, is defined and shaped by this fundamental property. ‘Even an ordinary “was”’, he writes, ‘in a report of something that was not, acquires a new formal quality from the fact that it was not so’. Or as Elizabeth Bowen writes, with a succinctness that echoes Beckett's, ‘The novel lies, in saying something happened, that did not’. To populate a fictional space with fictional bodies is to perform an act of engendering, of progeneration, which is also and at the same time the overseeing of a general extinction. The novelist imagines multitudes but he or she is also, to quote the French title of Beckett's late work The Lost Ones, a ‘dépeupleur’, a depeopler. As Thomas Bernhard's narrator says of his own narrative, in Bernhard's exquisitely comic novel Extinction, ‘the sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes’.

I

In the last chapter I suggested that our understanding of narrative voice – that fundamental formal property of the novel – is now entering a transformative phase. To understand how the novel works today – to understand what we mean by the value of the novel – we need to develop a new way of thinking about the novel voice, a new way of hearing it. If this is true, then it is so to the extent that the broader formal apparatus of the novel, of which the voice might be thought of as only one element, is also entering a crisis, in which its most essential attributes have to be rethought. I mean, of course, the formal category of realism, the mode which is so closely associated with the novel that the two – realism and the novel – have sometimes appeared mutually to define one another. It is the novel that allows us fully to conceive of realism, and it is the urge towards realism that has shaped the passage of the novel, from its earliest beginnings. As Georg Lukács has put it, ‘realism is not one style among others’, but, rather, ‘all writing must contain a certain degree of realism’. ‘All styles’, he writes, ‘(even those seemingly most opposed to realism) originate in it or are significantly related to it’. There is a ‘tendency’, Fredric Jameson has recently argued, both ‘to identify realism with the novel itself’ and to think of the ‘history of the novel’ as ‘inevitably the history of the realist novel, against which or underneath which all the aberrant modes, such as the fantastic novel or the episodic novel, are subsumed’.