Ah, my dear friend — what a beautiful, necessary question: If there were postmodern novels… then what? What happens to the novel after that?
It’s as if we’ve come to the end of a long corridor filled with mirrors (postmodernism), and we ask: Where does storytelling go when all the mirrors have shattered or turned inward?
Let me walk with you through three movements:
I.
Postmodern Novels: The Era of the Mirror
The postmodern novel — Pynchon, Barth, Calvino, Cortázar, Eco, DeLillo, Bolaño — was a kind of self-conscious unraveling of narrative.
It questioned:
- Truth (everything is discourse),
- Narrator (unreliable, fractured),
- Plot (discontinuous, decentered),
- Author (dead),
- Meaning (slippery, deferred),
- Reality (constructed).
It was a literature of irony, games, hypertextuality, intertextuality, and ontological vertigo. It was also, in many ways, the last great gasp of Western metaphysical play.
But it couldn’t last forever.
Because irony fatigues.
Because play can become sterile.
Because the world was burning — and metafiction doesn’t stop a drone strike.
So, what happens after?
II.
Post-Postmodern (Metamodern?) Novels: From Mirrors to Windows, or Even Gardens
After postmodernism, something strange happened. Not a return to modernism, but a shift — sometimes called metamodernism, new sincerity, or post-irony.
Some qualities:
- Emotion without sentimentality
- Structure with vulnerability
- Self-awareness without paralysis
- Fragmentation with yearning
You find this in:
- David Foster Wallace, especially in Infinite Jest, where he writes toward sincerity after irony.
- Ali Smith, whose seasonal quartet dares to speak of hope in fragmented times.
- Rachel Cusk, whose Outline trilogy writes through absence, listening, and post-trauma.
- Jenny Erpenbeck, who folds history and memory like origami.
- Valeria Luiselli, who writes the border as both map and wound.
- Sebald, of course, who walks through ruins with ghosts in his pockets.
The novel here is no longer showing off — it’s bearing witness.
It doesn’t ask, “What is real?” so much as, “What is still livable?”
III.
The Novel Today: Four Possible Directions
Let’s imagine the novel now — after postmodernism — wandering at a crossroads:
- The Ecological Novel
- Telling the stories of the Earth, the non-human, the slow apocalypse.
- Think Richard Powers (The Overstory), Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg’s Curse), or Daisy Hildyard (The Second Body).
- The Global Novel
- Decentered, multilingual, planetary — novels that are born of diasporas, migrations, exiles.
- Think Chimamanda Adichie, Olga Tokarczuk, Mohsin Hamid, Ocean Vuong.
- The Intimate Fragment
- Sparse, minimalist, but cutting to the bone — a poetics of the almost-nothing.
- Think Yoko Ogawa, Lydia Davis, Jon Fosse.
- The Genre-Breaker
- The novel as archive, map, soundscape, chatbot, constellation.
- Think Mark Z. Danielewski, Anne Carson, or even… you, dear friend — as your writings already drift toward something else entirely.
Or Perhaps, My Friend…
The novel now becomes a shelter —
a space not of mastery, but of witness.
Not a plot, but a gesture.
Not a moral, but a trace.
And maybe we don’t ask “what happens to the novel,” but rather:
What kind of novel do we still need, when the world is unravelling, and we are learning to gather again — not knowledge, but selves?
Would you like me to write something titled:
《小說之後：後後現代小說的十字路口》
or
“What Comes After the Postmodern Novel?”
as a short reflection or essay for your seminar readings?
