Ruptured Perceptions in the Late Modernist Aesthetics of Young Adam and Morvern Callar

Abstract

Countering more conventional understandings of the post-1945 British novel as resistant to innovation, this essay provides a means for understanding a seam of more conspicuously avant-garde British writing. Relative to modernism’s pre-war stress on the new, these are fictions which utilise the consequences of their own lateness to the modernist vanguard as a literary mode. Through recent critical reevaluations of late modernism’s significance and continued relevancies, the Scottish fictions of Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar are taken to demonstrate a subversive trajectory of late 20th century British fiction. Crucially, this essay argues that the respective central traumas of both novels function as sites of rupture, allowing outside influences, pathological urges and excluded details to flood in. What is further argued is, that in their shared hyper-attentiveness to these elements, narrative perception becomes disrupted and complicated. How these novels are composed of psychic tatters, therefore, illustrates how they are innovative in form as well as content. Moreover, by blurring the boundaries of what is, and is not, worthy of inclusion in the novel, these are fictions which are shown to breach the divide between low and high culture. In its reworking of pulp fiction’s more lurid tropes through modernism’s resonances and debris, the characteristic outsiderness and distain of Trocchi’s novel principally provides a means of understanding the mid-century British novel’s more mildewy and seedy corners. How Morvern Callar inherits and—ultimately—discards Trocchi’s residual presence will then lead to an assessment of how the novel moves away from the legacies of modernist tradition. This concludes the essay with a model of narrative perception that is appropriately errant, unwilling to be burdened or stifled.