The Politics of 21st-century Modernism in Malarky and Martin John by Anakana Schofield

Abstract

This paper examines the novels Malarky (2012) and Martin  John (2015), by the Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield, which portray the internal states of damaged subjects of modernity: in Malarky, the text is overwhelmed by the grief of its central character, a bereaved wife and mother. In Martin John, the text is subordinated to more sinister mental damage; the impulses and obsessions of a sexual predator. In both novels, Schofield explores her central characters’ damaged consciousnesses using narratological techniques descended from the ‘high modernist’ literature of the 1920s. I argue that Schofield’s novels are themselves twenty-first century modernist novels: drawing upon Marshall Berman’s analysis that modernism aims ‘to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization’, this paper demonstrates the continued political efficacy of this aim in Schofield’s narratology, and locates Schofield’s work within a wider argument that contemporary modernism takes representations of damaged or a-normative consciousnesses as a key tenet.After first demonstrating how Malarky’s central character’s mental a-normativity is represented using a combination of Free Indirect Discourse with subjectivist focalisation, this paper then investigates Schofield’s more radically experimental work, Martin John, in terms of two prior arguments concerning the politics of modernism: Gyorgy Lukacs’ polemic against the perceived immorality of modernist ‘psycho-pathology’, and the later argument by Catherine Belsey and Colin MacCabe that modernism refuses the ‘meta-language’ which governs realist texts, creating an ‘interrogative text’ which demands active interpretation, thus querying the normative boundaries by which damaged consciousnesses are excluded from cultural discourse.