In Conversation: Martin Amis
From his new home base in Brooklyn, the British novelist and firebrand talks to David Wallace-Wells about sex, porn, rioting, the difference between London and New York, and the dwindling fortunes of postmodernist literature and American empire.
"Postmodernism had, I think, tremendous predictive power—it predicted how the world was going to be. Now even a politician will talk about, how am I going to spin this. It’s all knowing, and wised up, and confessedly wised up, in a way that it didn’t used to be, before. But as a genre it was naturally kind of disappearing up its own ass.
And now we’re back. We’re not post-postmodern, we’re just later modern. All that experimentation in fiction is dead, for another set of reasons. Like p.c. ideology, experimentation is a sort of luxury item. When times get hard, you won’t hear anything about that kind of supersensitivity to people taking offense. And I think what has happened in fiction is that fiction has responded to the fact that the rate of history has accelerated in this last generation, and will continue to accelerate, with more sort of light-speed kind of communications. Those huge, leisurely, digressive, essayistic, meditative novels of the postwar era—some of which were on the best-seller lists for months—don’t have an audience anymore."
No comments:
Post a Comment