The Aesthetics of Post-Realism and the Obscenification of Everyday Life: The Novel in the Age of Technology

This article will examine how a post-realist aesthetics situated within a Baudrillardean realm of simulacra has come to dominate much of contemporary fiction. The excessive consciousness of the “real” as mere artifice leads many serious authors to engage in an ongoing mockery of mimesis. Yellow Dog (Martin Amis, 2003), Fury (Salman Rushdie, 2001), Dorian: An Imitation (Will Self, 2002), and The PowerBook (Jeanette Winterson, 2000) are all works by major, well-established writers with international reputations, and they have been chosen in an attempt to illustrate some of the dominant tendencies in the British novel today. They all seek to renew a doubting diegesis through constant self-reference, whether it be to their own status as texts or through recourse to a perverted and ironic intertextuality which is used to bolster up their beleaguered poetics. As they engage in the cloning of creativity in order to produce the endless replicas and debased imitations of compromised originals, which they make available to their readers as examples of a late postmodern and, usually virtual, “reality,” the very medium or mode of expression of the novel is put into question. The rampant technophilia which characterizes these examples may be representative of a wider tendency in the twenty-first century novel for which technology constitutes both an opportunity for experimentation but also an essential threat to its future.1 In competition with the