7 - Contemporary British fiction

Summary

Introduction

At the end of the twentieth century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past, including the past in the present, has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings singly and collectively through life, no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail. In which we do not know where the journey is taking us.

Ours is not the first age to think of the 'contemporary' in terms of a loss of the representative power of existing historical maps, but the metaphor has become almost tiresomely familiar to us. Recognising that the map has now come to function primarily as a placeholder term for all those complex and mysterious cognitive frameworks through which we orient ourselves in space and time, Fredric Jameson suggests that maps 'enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole'. Jameson's idea of 'cognitive mapping' is a useful way of beginning to think about the contemporary 'space' of fiction and evolutions in fictional forms which provide peculiarly appropriate vehicles for the articulation of the complex 'structure of feeling' of our own historical moment.