Hari Kunzru

Posted on May 1, 2012 in Talks | 0 comments

In July 2012 I delivered a paper on Hari Kunzru's latest novel Gods Without Men (Penguin, 2011) at the University of Lincoln's 'What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English" organised by Dr Siân Adiseshiah and Dr Rupert Hildyard. My paper, "Towards a Networked Art Form: Hari Kunzru and the Delinearisation of Narrtive Time," explored Kunzru's novel within the context of a growing number of British writers whose formal experimentation with delinearised narrative structures are increasingly blurring the boundaries between the novel and the short story cycle. Whilst the exemplar of this twenty-first-century narrative innovation – David Mitchell’s 2004 bestseller Cloud Atlas – reveals the ways in which we might understand newly configured modes of inoperative or de-essentialised community, writers like Jeanette Winterson, Marina Warner, and Caryl Phillips similarly blend non-linear narrative structures with a thematic foregrounding of transmigratory passages: between and within characters, across centuries and continents.

Hari Kunzru has recently said in interview that “[w]e live in a networked age so we need a networked art form that can reflect that” (Granta). This paper will therefore explore the interweaving of non-linear narrative structure alongside a thematic foregrounding of networked patterns of connection in Kunzru’s fourth novel Gods Without Men (2011). Expanding an aesthetic project of global interconnection begun in Transmission (2004) (reviewed here), Kunzru’s latest novel embeds his thematic preoccupation with networking into narrative structure. Delinearising chronology, Gods Without Men weaves between a range of historical temporalities – 1947, 2008, 1958, 1969, 1920, 1778, 1871, 1970 and 2009 – all chronotopically centred upon the Californian Mojave desert. Invoking the Balzacian short story “Une Passion dans le Désert” (in which, as he epigrammatically quotes, “il n’y a rien … c’est Dieu sans les hommes”), Kunzru offers a series of linked narratives which encompass a Ufologists’ commune, nineteenth-century Mormon miners, a shell-shocked WWI veteran ethnographer, aircraft engineers in the 1950s, Wall Street investment analysts, an Aragonese friar and missionary in 1778, a teenage Muslim Iraqi refugee, a British rock star stranded in California in 2008, and an investment computational model known as “Walter,” which inadvertently ruins the Honduran economy.

Kunzru’s novel raises the issue of finding a critical language that can accommodate such postsecular, transmigratory convolutions of narrative time and their implications for a globally networked politics. Rather than approaching Gods Without Men as a late, naïve example of postmodern narrative experimentation (as some critics have already done), I argue that we need to construct a new critical language capable of approach the relationship between delinearised narrative structures and a foregrounding of temporality that is increasingly populating contemporary British fictions. 

Here's the Prezi I used to deliver the talk: