From markets to metafiction: satires of the literary marketplace at the dawn of two new centuries

Abstract

This paper provides a comparative reading of two pairs of satirical novels – one pair from the end of the nineteenth century, and one pair from the start of the twenty-first – in order to explore similarities, continuities and variations in satirical practice between the dawns of two new centuries.George Gissing‘s New Grub Street (1891) for example, is a novel about the writing of novels. It implicates its writer and readers in the process of creating satirical representations of a society from which they cannot distance themselves. Or, it is a novel involved in the using up of the very stock of cultural capital that it deploys. This contrasts with William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), where satire is employed as a connective device, projecting onto a desired future a fictional dissolution of social, political and economic hierarchies.The paper suggests that more recent novels by Sebastian Faulks and Amanda Craig use satire to create a sense of the world that is caught somewhat between the two poles of entrapment and social transformation embodied by Gissing and Morris. Craig’s Hearts and Minds (2009) and Faulks’s Week in December (2009) satirise the public culture of contemporary London. At one level, as was the case for Gissing and Morris, the pleasure offered by these texts for the reader is trying to decode or identify which public figure is being satirised in the fiction. At another level, however, the novels by Craig and Faulks satirise not only this or that individual figure, but also the whole culture of representing public figures through different media narratives. In other words, what is satirised is the practice of satire itself. It is a practice that can be described as satire upon satire, or meta-satirical satire.The paper concludes by suggesting that the satirical practice of Craig and Faulks demonstrates a basic thematic continuity with that of Gissing and Morris at the level of content: an agonistic desire to transgress the rules of a society, combined with an awareness of one’s own limited position within that society. At the level of form, however, the practice of Craig and Faulks is subtly different. Combining a renewed interest in satirical representation with a meta-fictive and meta-satirical practice gives rise to a nascent fictional form, appropriate to the cultural, economic and political conditions of the 21st century.