The Stubborn Path of the Novel: Residual Modernism in Joseph O'Neill's <em>Godwin</em>

This article joins recent scholarly work that considers postmillennial fiction's indebtedness to canonical modernism. It argues that postmillennial fiction indebted to modernism does not treat modernist themes and styles as resources for innovation in the present so much as it raises questions about the lack of change over time. This formulation finds an illuminating case study in Joseph O'Neill's novel Godwin (2024), which continues O'Neill's career-long effort to recontextualize the preoccupations and stylistic signatures of modernism. O'Neill redeploys such modernist tropes as grail quests and the imperialist engagement with racial and ethnic difference to satirical ends, and he adopts a style that echoes modernist fiction in foregrounding the limits and affordances of characterological perspective, in moving among multiple layers of embedded narration, and in the use of scambled narrative sequence. The article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to frame O'Neill's aesthetic as "residual modernism" that activates literature's powers of critique. It routes its discussion of O'Neill's residual modernism through Zadie Smith's widely read essay "Two Paths for the Novel" (2008). Where Smith sees in O'Neill's 2008 novel, Netherland, an effete aesthetic, this article contends that O'Neill's residual modernism affirms literature's powers of critique at a time when promiment voices in the humanities are advocating for postcritical methodologies. Call it the stubborn path of the novel. To label Godwin a work of residual mdoernism is not to accuse O'Neill of hackneyed writing but to argue that the novel is provocative not in spite but because of its familiarity.