‘Nothing survives its telling’ (NW): Redefining the Literary Event in the Latest Novels of Zadie Smith, Jonathan Coe, Ian McEwan, Tim Pears and Pat Barker

Abstract

This paper focuses on six very recent British novels which question the nature and ethics of the literary event, forging plots that are based on very few events indeed, or the point of which is precisely to create events and fill the vacuum of the characters’ lives. Whether the void be narratively used or created, it can be filled with and made up for by new metafictional devices such as self-narration which becomes an event in itself. Coe, Smith and McEwan also invent new literary forms of explanations as the unfolding or the expansion of imaginary or real events in both space and time. ‘Nothing survives its telling’, Smith writes in NW—conversely, or perhaps similarly, the novels under study suggest that telling the event and narrating the plot create and actualise them as much as they bring to the fore the deceptive yet necessary dimension of fiction in any form of event.

Keywords

• emptiness
• event
• explanation
• fiction
• McEwan
• metafiction