This article examines Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016) in the context of current debates about the novel after postmodernism. Scholars such as David James and Adam Kelly have influentially argued that a significant body of con- temporary novelists are writing fiction which complicates and develops post- modernist concerns and techniques. These claims notably resemble McGuire’s contention, in his recent academic monograph, that realism can ‘offer its pro- ponents an aesthetically and philosophically sophisticated way of engaging with and contesting the particularities of contemporary, even postmodern, experience’. This article focuses on McGuire’s innovative techniques for rep- resenting bodily feeling. The central tension in the novel, between abstract concepts and the affective demands of the body, brings to mind J. M. Coetzee’s claim that ‘[t]he body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt’. I argue that The North Water deserves substantial critical attention in its own right, but also that this important novel, with its intense preoccupation with bodily feeling and its anti-anthropocentric stress on the affinity between human and animal life, exemplifies significant trends in contemporary writing. The article concludes with the suggestion that McGuire’s novel, alongside works by several other influential writers, represents, not a reactionary rejection of postmodernist scepticism, but an emerging mode of contemporary fiction that proceeds from the materiality of the body, and which is less concerned with exposing the absence of metaphysical foundations than with testing the value of particular human beliefs and sentiments.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)