The phrase ‘the possibility of literature’ harbours two distinct forms of possibility. It refers in one of its senses to the conditions which make literature possible – the forces which dictate whether and in what ways literature can come into the world. And in the other it concerns the forms of possibility that literature itself creates, the possibility that it summons into being. The word ‘of’ is the pivot around which these two meanings turn.

The essays that are collected here are all centrally concerned with the hinge that is made by this ‘of’. How far is literary expression a reflection of its conditions of possibility (as these are referred to in the first sense of the phrase)? How far can literature itself float free of these conditions in order to critique or reimagine the world that it represents? How does the genitive ‘of’ instantiate this double imperative, binding the possibilities that determine and delimit literary thinking to those that it invents?

In addressing these questions, these essays trace a selective and symptomatic history of the conditions of literary thinking, as they have played themselves out over the first decades of the twenty-first century. I wrote the oldest essay in this volume – ‘Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading’ – at the turn of the twenty-first century, when I was in my late twenties. This essay, which grew out of a PhD thesis I completed in 1997, was already approaching this question of literary possibility – a problem which I belatedly realise I have been thinking about throughout my writing life. How, it asks, can we address the political power of Beckett’s imagination – how can we give critical expression to the radical utopianism of his rejection of the world as it is – when that power is drawn so explicitly from its equally radical refusal of its own possibility. ‘To be an artist’ a young Beckett famously declared, in what had the feel of a kind of anti-manifesto, ‘is to fail as no other dare fail’.¹ Can we erect a literary politics upon this failure, a failure whose only possible achievement is that it radicalises itself ever more fully, so that it can only become potent through its heightened impotence, and can only succeed by failing better?

To ask this question at the turn of the current century was to ask it at a time when the broader critical consensus in the Anglo-American academy about what constituted a literary politics was coming unstuck. William Davies and Helen Bailey, in their 2021 volume Beckett and Politics, cite my essay as part of what they call a ‘first phase’ of criticism which addressed what has come to be known as a ‘political Beckett’, and which oriented itself in relation to that broader paradigm shift in our understanding of literary politics.² Before the arrival of this ‘phase’ – a first wave, perhaps, of ‘political Beckett’, but a third wave of Beckett criticism more generally – there was an uneasy agreement, among very different kinds of critic, that Beckett’s writing constituted a rejection of the very possibility of political engagement or commitment. A first wave of critics who saw in Beckett’s work the expression of a fundamental universal condition gave way, in the nineteen eighties, to a second wave which found in Beckett something very nearly the opposite, not a basic ground of human being, but the ontological groundlessness which it was a central task of later twentieth-century literary and critical theory to expose.³ The critics in the first wave were often implacably opposed to those in the second, as proponents of each tended to face each other across the territory that was contested in what was known as the ‘theory wars’. But for both groups of readers, Beckett’s work was not, strictly speaking, political. It either eschewed political commitments in favour of a revelation of an underlying condition which was above, or beneath, or immune to, mere political life. Or it dismantled political life into the undecidable, unrepresentable, or unnamable conditions of being that are revealed to us in the deconstructive tendencies of literary expression.

So, to propose a ‘political reading’ of Beckett in the early 2000s was to push against an orthodoxy about literary politics that survived the great divides of the twentieth-century theory wars; but it was to do so, as I have said, at a moment when that orthodoxy was already coming undone. The political commitments of later twentieth-century literary theory tended to take place under the sign of the ‘post’ – the post that recurred in poststructuralism, in postcolonialism and in a host of other ‘posts’ which gathered under the umbrella term postmodernism. It was this collective function of the post (a prefix which became at this time kind of signifier in its own right) that Kwame Anthony Appiah had in mind, when he asked, in an influential 1991 essay of that title, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’. Appiah’s answer to this question, broadly speaking, was yes. Postmodernism, he argued, involved what he called a ‘clearing of the space’, a ‘distancing of the ancestors’ (p. 342) in which the historical content of modernity is perceived to have been overcome, or ‘transcended’.⁴ This clearing, this overcoming of history, takes place, for Appiah, as a result of the emergence of a global public sphere, and of the globalization of capital. ‘Postmodern culture’, he writes, ‘is global – though that emphatically does not mean that it is the culture of every person in the world’ (p. 343). It is global because capital is global, and so the overcoming that we see in postmodern culture is the overcoming that we see too in the emergence of late stage capitalism. The experience of postness comes about as a result of the ‘incorporation of all areas of the world and all areas of even formerly “private” life into the money economy’ (p. 344). It is global capital, in its radical fungibility, that clears space, that frees us from our entrenchment in local places and histories, as it ‘turns every element of the real into a sign’ (p. 344). Postmodernism, as most theorists who have employed the term have recognised, is thus bound up in a close association with global capitalism, an association which causes difficulties for anyone seeking to contrive a postmodern politics that is not complicit with a western political economy. How does a postmodern cultural form, which has come about as a symptom of late capitalism, act as a critique of the operations of capital? This is a question that attends all thinking of postmodernism, and it is inescapable too, Appiah suggests, when we find that same prefix at work in postcolonial theory. When an attempt to think the aftermath of western colonial power is conducted through the shared logic of the post – when, as Appiah puts it, ‘postcolonial meets postmodern’ (p. 356) – we find that the very experience that the postcolonial thinker is seeking to recuperate, to recover from the western imperium, is put under the erasure that is the defining feature of the post. ‘For the post- in postcolonial’, Appiah writes, ‘like the post- in postmodern, is the post- of the space-clearing gesture’ (p. 348).

This space-clearing ‘post’ is the medium in which late twentieth-century critical thought takes place, its ‘structure of feeling’, its ‘cultural dominant’.⁵ It is powered, of course, by a wide range of theoretical forces and political commitments that are transformative in their own right, and which often do not themselves partake of the logic of the post. But it is one of the peculiarities of this period in western intellectual history that a diverse set of languages and thought forms – from deconstruction to the various strands of third wave feminism to theories of the rhizome – are subsumed under the sign of the post. Only such a peculiar effect could explain the illusion of a common ground between a thinker such as Fredric Jameson, whose career is spent trying to develop a language for a postmodern Marxism, and a thinker like Francis Fukuyama, who acts as a theoretical enabler for the more rapacious versions of Anglo American neoconservatism that emerged in the wake of Reagan and Thatcher. When Jameson writes, in his 2003 essay ‘The End of Temporality’, that the postmodern period sees the ‘wholesale liquidation of futurity, of which the revival of Hegel’s “end of History” was only an intellectual symptom’, he no doubt has Fukuyama in mind, along with the common ground they seem to (but in fact do not) share.⁶ Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, drawing on Alexandre Kojève’s, is premised on the conviction that the ‘countries of post-war Western Europe’ – ‘that is, those capitalist democracies that had achieved a high degree of material abundance and political stability’ – are ‘societies with no fundamental “contradictions” remaining’.⁷ In the last decade of the twentieth century, Fukuyama writes, the liberal democracies of the west were ‘emerging victorious’ as all other forms and systems of government fell away, and we achieved a universal consensus on the rectitude of the ‘liberal idea’. ‘That is to say’, he writes, ‘for a very large part of the world, there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy’ (p. 45). This triumph of western democracy spells the end of history, because it means that there is no real alternative to liberalism, and so history, understood as a struggle between competing world views, is over. Of course, Fukuyama breezily concedes, ‘many things could be improved’. We could ‘house the homeless’, for example, or ‘guarantee opportunity for minorities and women’ (p. 46). But nevertheless, despite these minor flaws in this best of all possible worlds, ‘we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better’ (p. 46). Under these circumstances, we can see that the formation, in 1957, of the ‘European Community’ was ‘an appropriate institutional embodiment of the end of history’ (p. 67).

Jameson’s ‘post’ and Fukuyama’s thus yield oddly congruent pictures of historical finitude, even if the two thinkers come from diametrically opposed positions. ‘In our grandparents’ time’, Fukuyama writes, ‘many reasonable people could foresee a radiant socialist future in which private property and capitalism had been abolished’ (p. 46). For both Fukuyama and for Jameson, such a future is no longer available. ‘Few periods’ Jameson writes, ‘have proved as incapable of framing immediate alternatives for themselves, let alone of imagining those great utopias that have occasionally broken in the status quo like a sunburst’.⁸ Fukuyama’s liquidation of futurity comes about through the post-ideological consensus that, as he puts it in an article published, unironically, on 11 October 2001, the ‘west has won’;⁹ Jameson’s from his theoretical conviction that the ‘historical tendency of late capitalism’ is towards what he calls a ‘reduction to the present’, a weakening of historicity, a waning of affect.¹⁰ It is a symptom of the post, of postness as a cultural dominant, that such different thinkers should arrive at a condition that feels so much the same, a condition of frictionlessness, of historical vapidity, in which it is difficult to gain any material purchase. And it was in this broader late century context that it proved so difficult to arrive at a reading of Beckett’s work that could escape the sense that his writing was itself empty of historical content, was itself an expression of the end of history. Beckett’s work, of course, conspires with this difficulty, and is in deep sympathy with a critical sensibility which is tending towards historical exhaustion, towards waning and weakening. Molloy speaks for many of Beckett’s borderline creatures when he says that he lives in ‘a world at an end, in spite of appearances’ – a world in which ‘I too am at an end’.¹¹ Molloy offers himself as a ‘last man’ – a version of the ‘last man’ that appears in the title of Fukuyama’s book, and who, Fukuyama writes, ‘reportedly emerges at the end of history’ (p. 300). In Molloy, or in an empty late work such as The Lost Ones, Beckett presents us with dying worlds, which resist any attempt to tie them to a historical moment or a geographical space, and which tend to collapse critical thinking into itself, to confront it with its own limits. Indeed, it is hard to think of a more thoroughgoing depiction of critical and political exhaustion than The Lost Ones, in which the world consists of a ‘cylinder’ containing a global population of ‘searchers’ who are dying one by one, until we are left with one last searcher, a last man: ‘There he opens then his eyes this last of all if a man’.¹² The searching of the searchers, despite its relentlessness, appears so futile, so facile, so empty of content, that it has the effect of emptying out any kind of critical inquiry that it might itself provoke, or that we might bring to it. Beckett’s work appears not only to resist criticism, but to cause critique itself to malfunction. This is what Adorno means when he writes, in an influential early response to Beckett’s 1956 play Endgame, that ‘interpretation of Endgame cannot pursue the chimerical aim of expressing the play’s meaning in a form mediated by philosophy’.¹³ ‘Understanding Endgame’, Adorno says, ‘can only mean understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the fact that it has no meaning’ (p. 243). It is what Derrida means, too, when he explains that he can’t write about Beckett because he writes ‘in my language, in a language which is his up to a point, mine up to a point’. Derek Attridge presses him on this feeling, that Beckett is ‘too close’ to him, that he in some way occupies the inside of his own language. ‘Is there a sense’, Attridge asks, ‘in which Beckett’s writing is already so “deconstructive”, or “self-deconstructive”, that there is not much left to do?’. ‘No doubt’, Derrida replies, ‘that’s true’.¹⁴

The reception of Beckett’s work is bound up at the turn of the century with the critical logic which draws Derrida together with Jameson, Adorno and Fukuyama, into a false perception of historical finitude, what Adorno himself would call a ‘reconciliation under duress’ in which the rush to the post appears to have overcome the historical content of modernity.¹⁵ But it is abundantly clear that this sensibility, this structure of critical feeling, so millenarian in character, does not survive the turn of the millennium. However fictional calendrical conventions are, historical change tends to become interwoven with them, with the passage from decade to decade, from century to century; and the entry into the twenty-first century coincided with a profound shift in the texture of western historical experience – a shift which is manifest in the quite dramatic expiry of ‘postness’ as an explanatory category. Fukuyama’s conception of belatedness, of coming after the end, involved his sense that there are no longer any fundamental contradictions remaining at the heart of western democracy. In this he draws, again, on Kojève, and on the latter’s claim that the modern western state has completed the ‘real process of historical evolution, in the course of which man created new Worlds and transformed himself by creating them’. With the completion of this process, Kojève writes, we are able to ‘reveal the World – that is, to reveal being in the completed totality of its spatial-temporal existence’.¹⁶ It was always a bizarre quirk of the late century historical mood that such a complacent and imperialist conception of historical completion could have become entangled with the postness at work in formulations not only of postmodernism but of postcolonialism, postfeminism and so on; but the early years of the current century destroyed this unlikely alliance, and revealed to us, in the plainest possible way, the contradictions that persist in the concept of western democracy, and that always underlay the various strands that went into the perception of postness, of the overcoming of a historical period of modernity. The dawning of the new millennium produced a recognition, widely felt, that history is not after all over, or at least that the end of a collection of historical structures and apparatuses (the dominance of postness being one of them) did not herald the end of everything, but rather saw the beginning of some new things, some different things.

It is conventional to date the arrival of this recognition in the western political imagination to 11 September 2001 – a date on which, like Woolf’s ‘December 1910’, everything changed (‘All human relations have shifted’, Woolf writes, ‘and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature’).¹⁷ It was difficult at the time, and it remains difficult now, to accord to the terrorist attacks that took place on that day a proper historical scale. Jean Baudrillard, in a typically extravagant essay written a few months after the attacks, conceives of the event in the very terms, of historical finitude, that it seems to me to contest. ‘We must’ Baudrillard writes, ‘assume that the collapse of the towers – itself a unique event in the history of modern cities – prefigures a kind of dramatic ending and, all in all, disappearance both of this form of architecture and of the world system it embodies’.¹⁸ Baudrillard cannot address the event outside the millenarian tendencies that shape his own thinking, so he sees the collapse of the World Trade towers as the symbolic manifestation of some death drive in western power itself (a death drive which was always native to that power, and bound up with its unending persistence). ‘Seeing them collapse themselves’, he writes, ‘as if by implosion, one had the impression that they were committing suicide in response to the suicide of the suicide planes’ (p. 47). Such a response to the 9/11 attacks seems to me both offensive and exaggerated (‘What has critique become’, Bruno Latour asks, when a ‘marshal of critique’ can claim ‘that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself?’).¹⁹ It is strikingly at odds with J. M. Coetzee’s less grandiose assessment of their world historical significance, when he describes them, in the guise of one of his late alter-egos, as ‘the pin-pricks of terrorism’.²⁰ This question of scale was one of the challenges that the attacks presented, in their immediate aftermath, to our models of global politics and international relations. How might we find a credible means of measuring their magnitude? How might we decry this grotesque murder of innocent people, while situating it in relation to the wider global balance of power? Baudrillard’s response suggested how unsuited his theoretical language was to that task, and how little purchase the language of ‘dramatic ending’ had on the consequences of the event. The attacks quite obviously did not signify the disappearance of the world system of late capitalism. But neither, as Coetzee knows when he uses the term, can they be seen as pin-pricks. Aside from their gravity in their own right as acts of terror, they represented and initiated a historical change whose consequences are still unfolding.

This shift, as it has played out over the two decades since the attacks, has taken many forms, all of which bear, as historical events always do, an uncertain and contingent relation to any single historical cause. The military response to the attacks – the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US led ‘coalition of the willing’ – has not only inflicted untold damage in the middle east, but has contributed to a much wider shift in the global balance of power.²¹ The failure to secure a UN resolution to authorise the war in Iraq has had a lasting negative impact on the legitimacy of the United Nations, and the disastrous consequences of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have exacerbated that impact. Tony Blair’s support for US aggression, which was instrumental in securing the invasion without a UN mandate, was predicated on his stated belief in the benign power of global capital.²² But the consequences of the wars that he enabled have caused even the zealous Blair to express doubts about the future viability of the global west. He wrote an essay, in response to the catastrophic withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan in 2021, that betrayed this crisis of Blairite faith, and that gave a peculiarly eloquent testimony to the damage that the wars he enabled have done to the very concept of western hegemony, in whose name they were fought. Both Blair and George W. Bush insisted that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were prosecuted in order to install democracy in the middle east – to continue that march towards the universalising of the liberal idea that Fukuyama celebrates in 1992. As Bush was fond of putting it, ‘freedom’ itself was ‘on the march!’.²³ But Blair concedes, in 2021, that the belief in any such cause – scarcely credible when he championed it in 2001 – seems in the wake of the US withdrawal to be blatantly delusional. ‘Today’, he writes, on 21 August 2021, ‘we are in a mood that seems to regard the bringing of democracy as a utopian delusion and intervention, virtually of any sort, as a fool’s errand’.²⁴ As a result, he goes on, ‘the world is now uncertain of where the West stands’, and Blair himself fears that we are at ‘a moment when the West is in epoch-changing retreat’ (np).

The historical passage from the terrorist attacks in 2001 to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 has seen this dramatic weakening of US hegemony – and interwoven with it has been a series of other failures that have made that late twentieth-century picture of an unassailable west look like the fantasy it always was. The global economic crash of 2008 fatally undermined the strand of neoliberal economics that saw the market as an engine for the production of wealth, and for the resolution of those contradictions that Fukuyama thinks have already vanished in the wake of the globalization of liberal democracy.²⁵ The models of globalization that drove centrist governments in the west throughout the later decades of the twentieth century were predicated on the idea that national boundaries would weaken, as we moved towards global communities, legitimated not by national sovereignty but by international trade. The 2008 crash upended that cultural logic, as national governments were forced to shore up their own economies, and to intervene in the market, whose freedom from any form of state control had been, since the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1973, the founding principle of the neoliberal project.²⁶ The historical tendency away from nation states and towards larger federations underwritten by global capital originated in the wake of the second world war with the establishment of bodies such as the United Nations in 1945, NATO in 1949, and, in 1957, the European Community, which Fukuyama and Kojève see as the ‘institutional embodiment of the end of history’. The 2008 crash is part of a reversal of that historical logic, a reversal which takes us towards the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, and the rise of ever more rampant right-wing nationalism in the US and across Europe. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to many in the west, at the end of the twentieth century, to presage the inevitable growth of a global market place and the steady erosion of the nation state, but the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the failure of virtually every element of that neoliberal project. This reversal leads to Blair’s fear, in August 2021, that the west is ‘in retreat’; and it has an influence, too, on the first major conflict in Europe since 1945. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is, among other things, a manifestation of the expiry of the global US, and a sign that we are in the midst of a tectonic shift in the global balance of power between Russia, China and the west.

Under these circumstances, it is easy to see why the logic of the post, of the overcoming of historical contradictions, has not survived the turn of the century. It has been central to the experience of western cultural life in the current century that the dominant narratives that we have fashioned with which to expound the cultural logic of late capitalism are no longer serviceable (a failure which makes of the ‘we’ itself, which I continue to evoke throughout these essays, a kind of conundrum: who is this ‘we’, this ‘our’, this ‘us’; what are the terms which govern such a community; who is included in it, who expelled; and what legislative or discursive forms can legitimate it?). Postmodernism was framed, by one of its most influential early theorists, as a movement based on a scepticism towards grand narratives (‘The grand narrative’, Jean-François Lyotard writes, ‘has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses’).²⁷ But, against the grain of Lyotard’s own thought, postmodernism itself became, unmistakably, a grand narrative, a lingua franca which ascribed a kind of homogeneity to the diverse elements of contemporary life it encompassed. With the lapsing of the languages of postmodernism, with the peeling away of an estranged form of capitalism from the cultural languages that seemed to articulate it, we have found ourselves in a condition of near compulsory inarticulacy – an inarticulacy which is radicalised by the other dominant context for twenty-first-century cultural life, a context that dwarfs all others. That is, the phenomenon of climate change. As thinkers from Timothy Morton to Wai Chee Dimock to Ursula Heise to Timothy Clark have demonstrated, the climate emergency presents the most significant challenge to our critical capacities, a challenge that unsettles the fundamental terms in which we have conceived of the relation between the human and the planet, between culture and nature.²⁸ And yet despite, or perhaps because of the enormity of the threat that eco-crisis presents to our capacity to picture or inhabit the world, our critical literary forms have been strangely slow or reluctant to answer this demand. This is what Amitav Ghosh means when he writes that the ‘climate crisis’ is ‘a crisis of culture and of the imagination’ – that the ‘currents of global warming’ are ‘too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration’.²⁹ It is what Richard Powers means when he urges us, speaking through his fictional alter-ego Mia Erdmann, to contemplate the sublime multiplicity of an ecology that lies outside of the terms in which human imaginative forms have framed it. ‘When our stories yearn for a vanished world, green and pleasant’, Erdmann writes, ‘they do so out of sheer terror, however suppressed, at the real look of the energy bazaar that truly surrounds and encloses us’.³⁰ It is the task of our critical institutions, as it is the task of our literary forms, to overcome that terror, to find a way of seeing the world, shorn of its human forms. ‘The real, bedrock deal’, she says, ‘is vegetative, fungal, invisible: superbugs, extremophiles, bacteria that thrive on acid and salt, that never see the sun, that live in suspended animation 320 degrees below Fahrenheit, or mass in a spoon of soil in concentrations beyond anyone’s ability to number’. What kind of literature, what kind of philosophy, might approach such a world? ‘What’, Erdmann asks, ‘would a literature that knew all this look like?’ (p. 63–63).

Erdmann’s question, asked in Powers’ 2005 story, is our question, the question that has dominated critical thinking over the course of the last two decades, the question that has lain behind all of the essays collected in this volume. What kind of critical imagination can address a world which appears no longer to conform to the forms with which it has been made legible to us? However little we know about the world now, we know that it is not Kojève’s world, the world that is created by us, and that can ‘reveal being in the completed totality of its spatial-temporal existence’. It is a world that appears estranged from the forms in which we have imagined it and thought about it, and so the imperative that has driven twenty-first-century critical theory has been to discover new forms, new critical languages, new literary possibilities. With the failure of US hegemony, as Noam Chomsky puts it, we are led to ask whether ‘another world is possible’, and how to ‘create constructive alternatives of thought’.³¹ As the terms that have oriented twentieth-century thinking and imagining lapse – as our ecosystems become alien to us, as the idea of the west as a global organising principle falls into crisis, as the organising power of the post wanes – we have collectively sought a new language, a language that might replace or supersede the rhetoric of the ‘post’. But that collective effort has been thwarted, at every stage, by the contradictions that it seeks to overcome. How does one supersede the language of the post, a language that is already grounded in a logic of supersession, a logic of supersession that has failed?

One response to this problem has been to look for forms of postness that might come after the waning of the post, a kind of mise-en-abime of belatedness in which our critical terms enter into infinite regress. We have tried on the various languages of the ‘post-post’, as we might try on an outlandish suit. We have experimented with something like a ‘late post’, as in Jeremy Green’s Late Postmodernism, in which postness (as an expression of the logic of late capitalism) has itself entered into a late phase.³² We have flirted with the idea of ‘post-critique’, most influentially in Rita Felski’s elaboration of that term, in which we ‘articulate a positive vision for humanistic thought’ (p. 186) by trying to cure ourselves of the scepticism with which postmodern critique (as a hermeneutic of suspicion) has been associated.³³ These forms of post-postness then become bound up with other attempts to get past the exhaustion of postmodern thinking, by deploying terms such as ‘metamodernism’, or the ‘new sincerity’ (a movement, like Felski’s post-critique’, through which we try to escape the collapse into inarticulacy by repurposing a value system that predates the post).³⁴ But it is difficult to resist the feeling that these new terminologies lack conviction, and that they are symptoms of, rather than a redress to, the sense that the western academy has lost its critical authority, as the intellectual and political co-ordinates of the contemporary moment resist any kind of systematic theoretical or epistemological articulation. As John Guillory has recently argued, it is difficult not to see in the emergence of post-critique – in what he calls the ‘rejection of disciplinary methods of reading in the postcritical moment’ – a ‘crisis of legitimation’ and a ‘crisis of faith’.³⁵ The urgent call, from many different strands in contemporary thought, for a ‘decolonisation’ of the university, is in part a response to this perception, this sense that the western university itself as a knowledge producer is irredeemably entangled with a colonial, fossil fuelled passage in world history that has passed, and so cannot itself be the vehicle either of renewal or of supersession, without making an epistemological leap that far exceeds the rhetoric of the post, or of the post-post. The troubling complicity between postmodernism and postcolonialism that Appiah sees in 1991 grows in the 2000s into a much broader scepticism about the capacity of our critical institutions themselves to outlive the passing of the European colonial age. Hamid Dabashi writes, in Europe and Its Shadows, that ‘“Europe” is a metaphoric moment that has exhausted its epistemic possibilities and has now positively imploded onto itself – and we need to move beyond it’.³⁶ Given that, as Priyamvada Gopal has recently argued, the ‘Western university form’ is a ‘widely established colonial institution’ which has been historically responsible for ‘colonial knowledge gathering’, it seems clear that for the university to produce new paradigms for critical thinking it needs to undergo a fundamental ‘reckoning’, as Gopal puts it, ‘with its own self-constitution in the crucible of empire’.³⁷

Without such a reckoning, without a refashioning of the cultural apparatuses of the west whose full scope and significance is not yet clear, our available critical languages struggle to achieve the kind of overarching articulacy that was arguably last seen in Jameson’s Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The theorist who has come closest in the last decade to Jameson’s capacity for articulating an encompassing cultural logic – Sianne Ngai – does so in a way that demonstrates, itself, something like the immanent failure of such a language to capture twenty-first-century experience. Ngai composes a set of new ‘aesthetic categories’ that are partly grounded in Jamesonian Marxist critique, and that have been more influential than any other aesthetic-critical formations proposed in the current century; but these categories cannot help but replicate a sense of their own malfunctioning. Most notably in her analysis of the ‘gimmick’, as what she calls an ‘aesthetic response’ to ‘mature, crisis prone capitalism’ (p. 33), Ngai’s work exposes, and draws upon, the peculiar vacuity of its own procedures.³⁸ The gimmick, she argues, is a species of device that is both too efficient and not efficient enough. Its tricksiness derives from its capacity to seem effective, even wonderfully or magically so, while revealing that its wondrousness is also, and at the same time, defective, deceptive, unsatisfying. In this respect, Ngai shows, the gimmick is expressive of the operations of capital, which also seems to nourish where it starves, or better nourishes and starves at the same time. ‘Overperforming and underperforming, encoding either too much or not enough time, and fundamentally gratuitous yet strangely essential, the gimmick is arguably a miniature model of capital itself’ (p. 6). It is a mark of Ngai’s singular critical power that she can harness this contradiction in the constitution of the gimmick, in order to deploy it as a means of examining what she calls, quoting Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, a ‘social theory of capitalism as a totality’ (p. 33); but it is a feature of the explanatory power that she finds in the gimmick that it partakes, itself, of the contradictions of the gimmick, that it is, itself, ‘gimmicky’.³⁹ The theory of the gimmick, she acknowledges, is one that exhibits an excess of coherence, while threatening, as a result of that very excess, to become incoherent, as the gimmick will always be too explanatory and not explanatory enough. This is not a failure of Ngai’s category – or if it is it is one that can only, in accordance with Beckett’s logic, fail better – as it is an intrinsic part of its function to discover its coherence in its incoherence. When critique is bound up with capital in its ‘mature’ phase, Ngai’s work suggests, then critique itself exhibits an antinomial relation between the overly expressive and the inexpressive, the perceptible and the imperceptible, the full and the empty.

This, then, is the fate of critique today, and in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Felski searches for a form of ‘humanistic’ thinking that might counteract the implosion of critique by reanimating older critical categories; Gopal calls for a dismantling of the terms on which the colonial university has been founded in order, in Dabashi’s words, to ‘move beyond’ the shadow of European imperialism; Ngai employs a critical device that is itself a symptom of the operations of twenty-first-century capital as the only means of diagnosing our aesthetic response to those operations. These three responses map out the conditions of possibility of literary critical thinking now; and they set the terms, too, for the thinking conducted in the essays gathered together in this volume. Each of the pieces collected here – written at different times, and in response to different occasions – bears the mark of the limits to critique that I have sketched out in this introduction, the limits against which Ngai, Felski and Gopal conduct their own thinking, the limits that Amitav Ghosh and Mia Erdmann find in the failure of our literature to address the climate emergency. The essay on Beckett’s politics – the earliest essay in the collection, and published here as Chapter 2 – reads for the continued existence of possible worlds in Beckett’s work, even as the flow of his writing is towards the denial of such possibility. And then each of the other essays collected here presses against some element of resistance, some limit to thought. The essays address a range of writers – from Cervantes to Maria Edgeworth to Emily Dickinson; from Herman Melville and W.B. Yeats, to Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf; from Philip Roth and Don DeLillo to James Kelman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith – a range of writers whose work makes these limits to the possibility of critique palpable. How is Melville’s imagining of the prosthetic body limited and disfigured by what Toni Morrison calls ‘whiteness as ideology’ (Chapter 1)?⁴⁰ How does Ishiguro articulate the relation between the human and the machine in a posthuman environment, without recourse to reactionary categories of the human (Chapter 4)? How does the university as an institution examine or sustain the idea of aesthetic beauty, without simply reproducing beauty as a reactionary ideological category (Chapter 6)? How do new and experimental forms of realism and fictional representation press against the given boundaries between human and animal, and between human and non-human (Chapters 7 and 8)? How can we give critical expression to forms of counter-history, without simply translating those forms into the dominant language they seek to resist (Chapter 9)? How can we see or imagine an ontological ground to shared life – what Wallace Stevens calls ‘mere being’ – when our ways of seeing and thinking lead us to organise life into categories that can never be politically neutral or transparent (Chapter 11)?⁴¹ How are we to imagine the future, when futurity itself appears estranged from our existing experience of duration, our languages of tensed being (Chapter 12)? How do we measure the relation between the superficial and the profound, the shallow and the intense, when cultural forms under late capital have elided that opposition, and rendered shallowness itself intense, and intensity shallow (Chapter 13)? How can we know or experience happiness when eco-crisis has made of the terms of human happiness a kind of sick joke, as well as an agent of toxicity (Chapter 14)? The closing essay offers rereading as a figure for the kind of work that literary criticism must do today – rereading as a continual attempt to approach a kind of literary possibility that continually eludes us. Does rereading allow us to repurpose a literary tradition, to make it expressive of and responsive to our own deranged contemporaneity? Or does rereading simply mark and perform the necessary inadequacy of our critical and aesthetic forms, their helplessness before the reading to come, the world to come, which will always evade our apparatuses for thinking, seeing and knowing?

In putting these questions, in relation to the various writers they address, these essays trace the conditions of possibility for a critical literature, as they unfold over the first two decades of the century, and in the wake of the ‘post’. They enact, in the limits of their own articulacy, the ways in which a form of historical and temporal continuity – the persistence of history past Jameson’s and Fukuyama’s end of history – is flung free of the forms in which we might narrate it. In doing so, they suggest that the forms and institutions in which the possibility of literature finds itself enshrined – from our aesthetic categories, to the university as a custodian of critical thought – have inclined in these years towards a kind of atrophy. The tendency of critical expression, under these circumstances, is towards what Beckett calls the ‘ideal tautology’, the speech act, in Wittgenstein’s terms, whose accuracy and truthfulness relies on its absolute vacuity.⁴² The tautology, Wittgenstein writes, ‘lacks sense’.⁴³ It has ‘no truth-conditions, since it is unconditionally true’ (p. 41). ‘In a tautology’, he says, ‘the conditions of agreement with the world – the representational relations – cancel one another, so that it does not stand in any representational relation to reality’ (p. 41). We can rely on the tautology to agree with itself, to enact a perfectly sealed form of self-reference. This is what Lauren Hartke discovers, in Don DeLillo’s turn of the century novel The Body Artist, as she reflects on a box of breadcrumbs. ‘She looked at the bread-crumb carton’ the narrator says, ‘for the first true time, really seeing it and understanding what was in it, and it was bread crumbs’.⁴⁴ It is what Jeff Lockhart thinks, in DeLillo’s 2016 novel Zero K, as he is exiled to a minimalist cell in the desert at the end of the world. ‘The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’.⁴⁵ The tautology exhibits the capacity of words to mean what they say. A chair is, unquestionably, a chair. Peter is inescapably Peter (‘this is who you are’ Althusser writes, ‘you are Peter!’).⁴⁶ But the increasing prevalence of the tautology in the Anglophone fiction of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a mark not of a successful speech act, but of one which is tending towards emptiness, one which is losing its representational grip on reality. This is what Snowman, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, finds when the words that he learned in his youth no longer conform to the dystopian, posthuman world in which he now lives. He keeps lists of words that he wants to preserve – ‘Mesozoic’, say, or ‘valance’, or ‘serendipity’.⁴⁷ ‘He can see the word’, he thinks, ‘he can hear the word’. But the word does not touch anything beyond itself. ‘He can’t attach anything to it’. ‘This is happening too much lately’, he thinks, ‘this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his wordlists drifting off into space’ (p. 43). As the world, in these late fictions, slides beyond the grasp of language, language itself becomes an empty piece of machinery, a stopped clock, whose only reference is to itself, its own sign system. ‘The world shrinking down,’ as the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road puts it, ‘about a raw core of parsible entities’:

Atwood, DeLillo and McCarthy recognise here that the climate emergency, and the associated crisis of the human, has opened a gulf between language and the world – a gulf that is at the heart too of J. M. Coetzee’s writing. Contemporary crisis requires us to attempt to see past what Coetzee calls ‘the great Western discourse of man versus beast, of reason versus unreason’, and thus to recognise that ‘reason’ itself ‘is not the being of the universe nor the being of God’.⁴⁹ Instead, he writes, it looks ‘suspiciously like the being of human thought’, ‘the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking’ (p. 67). To think outside this spectrum, as the climate emergency requires us to do (as Powers’ Erdmann requires us to do) is to see that reason itself is a kind of self-reference machine. ‘For’, Coetzee writes, ‘seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology’ (pp. 69–70). Climate crisis makes language appear tautologous; this is what DeLillo sees, in his play The Word for Snow. When global warming turns white spaces green, the only referent of snow will be the word, snow. ‘The word for snow will be the snow’.⁵⁰ It is what Jacques Derrida sees when he declares, with his own distrust of the capacities of critical reasoning, that ‘critique and non-critique are fundamentally the same’, that critique and non-critique have become oddly tautologous.⁵¹ How, Coetzee asks, can we imagine a critical literature, when words themselves have lost their relation to the world, when Wittgenstein’s ‘representational relation’ has failed? In a line which Timothy Bewes takes as an epigraph to his own recent attempt to imagine a future for critique, Coetzee writes that we are living at a moment in which ‘the bottom has dropped out’.⁵² ‘There used to be a time’, Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello says, when we knew how language related to reality. ‘We used to believe that when the text said, “On the table stood a glass of water”, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them’ (p. 19). But at some unspecified point, some cataclysmic version of Woolf’s December 1910, Costello says, all that changed. ‘The word-mirror has broken, irreparably it seems [….] The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming “I mean what I mean”’. ‘There used to be a time’ she says, ‘when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers playing our parts. The bottom has dropped out’ (p. 19). The failure of this binding between word and world has inaugurated us, Bewes writes, into a ‘postfictional age’, an age in which the conventions that had allowed us to employ imaginative speech acts in order to orient ourselves to the world have lapsed – an age in which, in the words of Bewes’s other epigraph, taken from Deleuze, ‘the link between man and world is broken’.⁵³ Where Charles Dickens was writing at a time, for Bewes, when ‘fiction is a fully operative category’ (p. 44), a writer such as W. G. Sebald is writing in a ‘postfictional universe’, in which the capacity of language to oversee shared being – the Forsterian ‘question of connection’ – has failed. In Sebald’s writing, ‘it is no longer possible to distinguish the person writing from the person represented, the actions described from the act of description’ (p. 43). Something has ‘happened’, between Dickens and Sebald, ‘such that the kinds of social, economic, and ethical connections presupposed in Dickens’s works are no longer possible’. In the passage from Dickens to Sebald, ‘the fictional conceit has collapsed’ (p. 43).

All of the essays collected here register some version of this collapse. The continued possibility of critical literary thinking takes place in its shadow – and not only in relation to writers that postdate whatever it is that has happened to cause the word mirror to shatter, the bottom to drop out. As both Coetzee and Bewes acknowledge, the historical location of this shift is elusive, and its effects are retrospective. It may be that, ‘in Dickens’, as Bewes puts it, the ‘conceit is intact’, and fiction is ‘fully operative’ (p. 44); but for us, reading Dickens, this is no longer so. To read Dickens now, is to read him under the conditions of fictional possibility that obtain now, just as Coetzee can see that to read Cervantes is to read him in our own time, the time in which words, for Coetzee, will no longer stand up and be counted. It is to read him as Simón and his adopted son David read him, in Coetzee’s late trilogy of novels known as the Jesus books. As a young child, David teaches himself to read, miraculously, by studying an abridged copy of Don Quixote, and demonstrates to his surrogate father, Simón, his new skill. Simón ‘chooses a page at random’ from the book, and instructs the boy to ‘read’:

This scene of reading takes place in the world that Coetzee imagines in the Jesus books – a strange, evacuated world, whose inhabitants have been ‘washed clean’ of their commitments and connections to each other, a purgatorial world of critical disorientation and emotional detachment that resembles, unmistakably, our own. In evoking Cervantes here, in a fictional world the status of whose reality is so uncertain, Coetzee stages a dialogue with the writer who, more than any other, established the terms in which fictional possibility is interwoven with the relation of writing to reality. Coetzee has called him the ‘first of all novelists’, who writes of a ‘world where a living play of feelings and ideas is possible’.⁵⁵ But in David’s reading, the tension between the fantastical and the not fantastical is calibrated according to the world in which David lives, a world where the relation between the imaginary and the real obeys something like Bewes’s postfictional imperatives. It is to read him under circumstances in which the opposition between critique and non-critique has become obscure, and the critical languages we have for overseeing the productive exchange between mind and world (the exchange ‘in the course of which man created new Worlds and transformed himself by creating them’) have fallen into abeyance.

These are the circumstances that prescribe critical thinking today, and that oversee the possibility of critique in the essays that are collected here; but while these essays exhibit and demarcate the limits of critique, they also, and at the same time, work towards a form of literary possibility that continually exceeds those limits, even if it does so by entering into a zone of inarticulacy, a kind of speechlessness or unnamability. This excess, this entry into a region of poetic nonexpression threaded into expression itself, is at work even, or perhaps particularly, in those writers who are most concerned to deny its possibility. Coetzee’s fiction stands as a rebuke to the conditions of literary possibility, a demonstration of the ways in which the literary imagination is bound up with the limits of what he calls human reason. Reason cannot free itself, Coetzee’s Costello suggests, from the tautology of reason. ‘Of course’, she says,

Reason can gain no access to non-reason, to a way of thinking that is not under its sway. Reason tends to absorb non-reason into itself, as critique, in Derrida’s terms, tends to ‘situate the non-critical in a place which would no longer be opposed to, nor even perhaps exterior to, critique’.⁵⁷ There is no place outside of ‘systems of totality’ from which to view the totality; and yet Coetzee’s oeuvre, from beginning to end, is a demonstration of the porousness of the totality, when it is given expression in fictional form. His own narratives are machines for the production of a voice that does not belong within the sign systems that they create, a voice that occupies, in part, that position from which reason could attack and dethrone itself. It is the nature of fiction, the nature of literature, to bring that position into view, to show us that nonreason is a constituent part of our reasoning apparatuses, and so the province of a kind of critical thinking that is unique to literature, that happens every time literature happens.

We can see this happening – we can see literature happening – as David reads Cervantes’s words in the strange, postfictional limbo that is the territory of Coetzee’s late work. ‘God knows whether there is a Dulcinea in this world or not’. ‘I neither engendered her nor gave birth to her’.⁵⁸ These words, declaring the absolute undecidability of Dulcinea’s existence, and the inoperability of our gendered rhetoric of conception and parturition, exceed any of the semantic fields from which they might emerge. Do they belong to Cervantes? Do they belong to Coetzee? Or to Simón, for whom they are read? Or to David, who reads them? Or to we who read David reading them? What language are they written in? Are they written in Cervantes’s Spanish? Are they written in Coetzee’s English? Are they written in the halting Spanish that David and Simón speak, the language which they adopt when they arrive in their limbo after their first language, whatever it was, has been ‘washed away’? Simón asks David to copy down what he has read. ‘Write down’ he says, ‘“God knows whether there is a Dulcinea in this world or not”’. David obeys, and ‘shows him his exercise book. Deos sabe si hay Dulcinea o no en el mundo, he reads: the line of words marches steadily from left to right’ (p. 218). What kind of fiction is this? What kind of description? The steadily marching line of words, written in one language and then bewilderingly in another, emerging from one century and then another, one semantic field and then another, falls continually into a kind of unworded realm, a realm that cannot be subsumed under any given regime of signification, but that continually prises sign systems apart, that continually opens onto the outside of any system to which it might belong.

This capacity of literary writing to exceed its own terms is the engine of literary possibility, as it is conceived in the essays collected here. It is the force that is contained in the ‘of’ – the genitive that ties the conditions that make literature possible to the possibility that literature itself engenders. Literary possibility blasts open the limits that determine it as, for Walter Benjamin, it is the task of historical materialism to ‘blast open the continuum of history’;⁵⁹ but this excessive force emerges not from a denial of its determining conditions, not as a negative theology or an article of imaginative faith, but from those conditions themselves. This is the hinged nature of the ‘of’, which looks, like Benjamin’s angel, two ways, which binds while it frees, frees while it binds (‘I’ Donne’s poet writes, ‘Except you enthral me, never shall be free’).⁶⁰ Coetzee does not invent some ‘being’ that stands outside the ‘vast tautology’ of reason, does not grant some imaginary agent the power to see the ‘universe’, as Coetzee puts it in Diary of a Bad year, outside the ‘paradigms of thought we bring to it’.⁶¹ He no more gives us a consolatory version of the world, or of humans’ place in it, than Samuel Beckett does – a writer who is one of Coetzee’s key points of reference. Coetzee and Beckett are both concerned to provide us with pictures, in Beckett’s phrase, of ‘How It Is’, rather than of how it might or ought to be. Beckett’s The Lost Ones is as unenchanted a picture of the world as one can easily imagine, a world caught in the grip of that historical current towards finitude and futility that I have traced here in the passage of critique past its own conditions of possibility. The world of The Lost Ones is all that is the case, a total system, from which nothing is missing. ‘In the cylinder alone’, the narrator says, ‘are certitudes to be found and without nothing but mystery’ (p. 216). The searchers look for whatever it is they look for, turning restlessly around the sealed periphery of the cylinder, searching with their ‘famished eyes’, climbing up and down ladders in order to explore ‘niches’ that are secreted in the ‘unbroken surface’ (p. 220) of the walls. They search and climb in obedience to a set of elaborate rules which ‘in their precision and the submission they extract from the climbers resemble laws’ (p. 207). But whatever ethical spirit animates those laws, whatever erotic or intellectual longing compels the searchers to search, remains to us obscure. We cannot see beyond the limits of the totality. There is nothing behind the veil. There are no possible worlds, only this one, and there is no ‘being’, in Coetzee’s terms, who can see it from ‘outside’. To imagine such a being – a critical reader, say, who might come to some measured conclusions about the purpose of life in this place – is to meet with the remnants of Beckett’s comedy, to experience, like Winnie in Happy Days, a ‘brief … gale of laughter’ when we ‘happen to see the old joke again’.⁶² When the narrator ponders what ‘an intelligence’ would be ‘tempted to see’ (p. 212) in this spectacle of searching – when he asks what ‘a thinking being coldly intent on all these data’ (p. 214) would make of life in the cylinder – he reduces thinking, critical intelligence, to a kind of comic fatuity, one which we struggle, even now, as we are coldly intent on yet another ‘reading’ of The Lost Ones, to cure ourselves of.

For Beckett, as for Coetzee, critique becomes fatuously mystical when it is bound up with a theological investment in the outside, the beyond. But even if this is so, it is a shared characteristic of their aesthetic that the possibility of a critical literature – of a critical reading – persists as an element of their picturing of a totality that has no outside. In the world of The Lost Ones, the narrator tells us, there is a history of religious belief, a history which has been characterised by doctrinal differences which are slowly ebbing away, as history itself moves towards its inevitable but unthinkable end. ‘From time immemorial’, he says, ‘rumour has it or better still the notion is abroad that there exists a way out’ of the cylinder:

This is an extraordinarily mobile passage, one which performs, right in front of us, the capacity of language to create its own surplus that is the condition of literary possibility. It reads, in part, as an extension of a tradition of theological satire that has roots in Swift. The partisans of the secret passage and the hidden trapdoor are descendants of the big-endians and little-endians of Gulliver’s Travels. For them, Dante’s struggle towards the light of divine and earthly love is rendered merely comic. The ‘flue’ to which Beckett’s trapdoor leads is taken from the moment at the end of the Inferno when Dante and Virgil emerge from darkness into an illuminated place where the sun and other stars were shining. ‘We climbed’, the poet says,

All three volumes of the Divine Comedy end with this movement towards the light, and all three endings are lit by their heavenly final word, ‘stelle’.⁶⁴ But if the searchers’ struggle towards that starlight persists in The Lost Ones, it does so only as a feature of the process by which the light dies. ‘Its fatuous little light’, the narrator says, ‘will be assuredly the last to leave them’ (p. 207), as the passage of history is the desultorily slow dawning of the recognition that our own epistemological and theological paradigms are artificial, tautologous. ‘Thus by insensible degrees the way out transfers from the tunnel to the ceiling prior to never having been’ (p. 207). The cancelling of the paradigms of knowledge and belief are here equated with the end of history, and the last man. But what is so compelling about this passage, what makes it such a provocation to critical reading, is that its narration of the historical trajectory towards finitude continually escapes that narrative, continually exposes and exceeds the limits of that historical paradigm. Religion dies in the cylinder, ‘in accordance with the notion requiring as long as it holds that here all should die’ (p. 206). It is the nature of entropic systems to dwindle and die. As Lucky tells us in Waiting for Godot, despite the existence of a ‘personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension’ who ‘loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell’, it is ‘established beyond all doubt’ that ‘man in short man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation is seen to waste and pine waste and pine’.⁶⁵ Religion dies; ‘but it does so with so gradual and to put it plainly so fluctuant a death as to escape the notice even of a visitor’ (p. 206). Even a visiting ‘intelligence’ looking on at the cylinder, even a ‘thinking being’ coldly intent on anatomising this system, could not put their finger on the moment that this death occurs. The death of religion, the death of history, is so slow, so gradual, so fluctuant, that in order to perceive it, you have to be in the secret of the gods. You cannot see it from your position inside the cylinder, inside the paradigm, inside the tautology. In order to see the process by which belief dies, you have to occupy the very position that the death of belief is slowly, gradually, fluctuantly revealing to be non-existent.

This is emphatically not to say that Beckett’s writing, or Coetzee’s, summons faith from atheism, praise from burial. There is no way out, no exit from the cylinder and no mystical outside that is the province of an intelligence or of a thinking being. But what The Lost Ones does demonstrate, as clearly, as coldly as it is possible to demonstrate, is that the languages that allow us to see the world in which we live, that allow us to describe it to ourselves and each other, include within them, as a part of their constitution, an unworldliness, or otherworldliness, that cannot be eradicated, and that it is the vocation of literary thinking to animate. The narrator describes to us the world of the cylinder, and the rules that govern the society of searchers that live there, in such a way that we can see that the ‘needs of the cylinder’ are met, ‘so all is for the best’ (p. 216). The echo here of Leibniz, and behind that of Voltaire, suggests that the tautological adequacy of description here eradicates the possibility of other worlds.⁶⁶ This desperate hell is the best of all possible words, the only possible world. But it is the brilliance and the singularity of The Lost Ones to see that the narrative refusal of possible worlds is the very mechanism that opens the cylinder to possibility. The narrator appears to change his mind, towards the close of the narrative, to rethink. The turbulent climate in the cylinder, the vibrating movement from extreme heat to extreme cold that obtains there, suggests to him that perhaps the end of history has not yet arrived after all, and so the world that we see is not quite yet all that is the case. ‘The persistence of the twofold vibration suggests that in this old abode all is not yet quite for the best’ (p. 223). We can read best, here, as worst (as the narrator of Worstward Ho commands himself to ‘say that best worst’).⁶⁷ Best and worst become interchangeable, at this limit to expression, and so the deferred arrival of the best of all possible worlds is the only flicker we have of hope for a better one. But it is not actually the case that the narrator changes his mind here, or has some volte-face concerning the texture of historical finitude in the cylinder. It is the discovery of this text that continuation is woven into finitude, that the picture of a history that is already over summons that very historical surplus that indicates to us that history continues, even if it does so in a way that has no language for itself, no duration, no tense. The continuation of history takes place in that outside to the cylinder that the narrative itself equates with the refusal of its existence, that impossible space from which it is possible to see, without seeing, the slow death of belief, among the little people of searchers, the dying of that fatuous little light. ‘Its fatuous little light will assuredly be the last to leave them always assuming they are darkward bound’ (p. 207).

This peculiar tension between ‘assuredly’ and ‘assuming’ opens the fracture that runs through the cylinder of The Lost Ones, the fracture that testifies to the possibility of literature as it is conceived throughout the essays collected here. The certainty of death, the absolute refusal of any way out of the predicament of being as it is encountered in the cylinder, owes its certainty, its assuredness, to the assumptions that structure that predicament. As the most insistent refrain of The Lost Ones has it, the ‘certitudes’ that are to be found ‘in the cylinder alone’ are certain only ‘if this notion is maintained’, only within the ‘paradigms of thought’ that we bring to it. The task of reading Beckett’s work, outside of the critical consensus with which I opened this introduction, is one which requires us to dwell in the opening that occurs when, for an unmeasured instant, the paradigms that structure thinking give way, and we see that the non-existent outside of the cylinder is a structuring principle of its inside, of the languages with which we encounter it. As Coetzee puts it, in his own essay on Samuel Beckett, ‘Something opens and then almost immediately closes again. In that split second a revelation takes place. It is trying to be understood (language creaks under the strain) how the universe works, what the laws are’.⁶⁸ To read the possibility of literature, as I do in these essays, as it is at work in writing from Cervantes to Coetzee, from Edgeworth to Dickinson to Woolf, from Melville to James to Roth, is to approach this split second revelation, this sense that we can see in the darkness of a world that lies outside the spectrum of human thinking. Few writers, of course, approach this opening, this split second, with the austerity that we find in Beckett, and that is reflected in Coetzee. Beckett stands as a limit case, a test of the possibility of literature at its furthest edge. But the terms in which Beckett binds and liberates critical possibility to and from its refusal points towards a form of critique, a form of literary thinking that might survive the historical moment we have reached now, in which it has become so difficult to see the opposition between critique and non-critique. It is this form of critique that is put into a kind of motion, when David reads from his abridged copy of Cervantes in Coetzee’s Childhood of Jesus, and we see deep into the join between the fantastical and the not fantastical. It is this form of critique that is at work when Toni Morrison rereads Melville, and finds in him a brief and difficult suspension of whiteness as ideology. It is what we see, in Emily Dickinson, when her poetry allows her to ‘grow accustomed to the Dark’, to discover that the darkness of unknowing is threaded into the light of thought, so that ‘What I see not, I better see’.⁶⁹ It is what we see, in Virginia Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts, when an amateur village pageant recreates the history of England, playing it out on a ‘natural stage’ in the grounds of a country house in 1939, as the forces of history propel us towards world war. Woolf’s novel anatomises the join between history and fiction, as they conspire to write us into our being; but it turns, at its heart, around the recognition that literature makes briefly perceptible a kind of being, a kind of between, that has not been conscripted to any fiction, or any history. As one of the actors in the pageant says to its author, ‘You’ve stirred in me my unacted part’.⁷⁰

It is this unacted part, this visible darkness, that these essays seek to bring to critical expression, as a way of approaching the continued possibility of literature in our time. But if this is so, if this volume offers a theory of literary possibility in the wake of ‘theory’, it does so in the understanding that such possibility evades any given theoretical or political apparatus. There is no ‘post’ to append to any descriptors of our cultural life that could capture this kind of possibility, and no new critical vocabulary that could render it legible. Rather, the only kind of theory that these essays can lay claim to is a constellatory theory, in the sense in which Walter Benjamin uses that term, a theory that emerges from the disaggregation of its elements. ‘Resolute refusal of the concept of “timeless truth” is in order’, Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project. But such a refusal does not consign us to fatuity, or non-criticality. Truth is not a ‘merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike’.⁷¹ It is this nucleus of time that Benjamin sees contained within the literary image, as it flashes upon us, in that split second interval that Coetzee finds in Beckett. ‘It is not’, Benjamin writes, ‘that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the new to form a constellation’ (p. 463). Cervantes does not cast his light on Coetzee, or Coetzee his on Cervantes; rather, this coming together forms a constellation, a literary moment of being that lies outside of what Marcel Proust calls the ‘field of possibilities’.⁷² ‘The image that is read –’, Benjamin writes, ‘which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded’ (p. 463).

The essays that are collected here bear the imprint of our perilous critical moment in the images that they recover, the fleeting forms of nonbeing that stir, unacted, in the collective literary mind. They testify at once to a kind of inarticulacy, a theoretical insufficiency in relation to the world before us, and to a continued, ravening thirst for the kind of knowing, the kind of truth, that literary writing promises. The volume concludes with an essay on Proust – ‘On Rereading Proust’ – that is a testament both to that inarticulacy, and to that thirst. Proust shows us that literature is never consigned to a given reading, never yields to a theory, as all literary knowing awaits the reading to come. As Marcel realises, at the orchestral close of A la recherche, literature calls always to a rereading, in which ‘this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape’.⁷³ It is the constellatory image, Benjamin writes, in his own essay on Proust, that bears the mark of this truth, forever offering itself to us, forever withholding itself from us. The image in Proust contains its own separation, its own falling into the disunity of which it is made, while also, at the same time, harbouring a ‘rejuvenating force’ that might overcome that disunity, in a sudden moment of pristine clarity. ‘When the past is reflected in the dewy fresh “instant,” Benjamin writes, ‘a painful shock of rejuvenation pulls it together once more’.⁷⁴ Half-darkness is the province of illumination in Benjamin’s Proust, as it is the province of literary possibility in the essays collected here. We are living in what Emily Dickinson calls a time of ‘larger – Darknesses’; critical thinking takes place now in what she calls the ‘Evenings of the Brain’.⁷⁵ We are at a moment when our given critical forms cast only a dusky and intermittent light. But in Dickinson, in Proust, in Beckett, in Coetzee, literary thinking takes place in the dark, or the half-dark. The literary image makes of darkness a kind of illumination, a lighter blindness, so that, as we look into the obscurity of our own present,

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