4. Political Critique

Abstract

If, as shown in the previous chapter, C can be considered a text focused on aesthetic critique (i.e. an interrogation of its own conditions of aesthetic possibility and self-situation within a specific literary history and/or taxonomy, independently of the university), then this is the type of metafiction that is most vulnerable to the accusation of political nihilism. A purely formalist mode, after all, whether in the university or in fiction seems to disavow politics, even if Remainder does make an ethical critique of representational art. 1 While certain texts exemplify an aesthetic critique of the process of canonisation, taking this element far from the university, others, such as Roberto Bolaño's 2666, to which I will now turn, work very differently. In fact, if one wanted an easy divide between the forms of critique enacted by these two texts, C would conduct aesthetic, formalist critique while 2666 could be said to practice political critique. The two are inseparable to some extent; the content/form dichotomy is clearly false. For the purposes of thinking about these two areas, however, it is clear that various metafictions respectively focus more strongly on aesthetic or political critique. By 'political critique' in this chapter I mean that texts such as 2666 thematically represent ethical and political issues that intersect with the interests of the academy. There are some challenges inherent in this mode. Fiction and the academy may independently reach the same conclusions about issues of ethical import in the present. For instance, it is no coincidence that postcolonial and ecocritical themes should arise in a world recovering from the British Empire and one in which the threat 1 In the limited reading that I have presented, C comes across as an apolitical novel, which is perhaps a little unfair.