Chapter 3 - Death

Summary

This chapter explores the most minimal scale at which utopian expression can be identified through a range of lyrical formal solutions to the problem of the lived time of the individual subject and its inevitable ending at the moment of death. Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), Grace McCleen’s The Land of Decoration (2012) and Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002) all offer experimental proto-utopian solutions to this question of the finitude of narrative and subjective time, through dead narrators, proliferating timescales, miraculous times and moments of temporal arrest. These novels, I argue, destabilise notions of linear time, posing a variety of simultaneous utopian ‘moments‘ through which various conceptions of time and memory are constellated, opening up the radical alterity of the future.