Narratives of decline: on contemporary European high-brow fiction’s engagement with cultural critique

This article examines fictional engagement with cultural critique, understood as a critique that measures the present against an idealized past and interprets contemporary cultural phenomena as symptoms of decline. The article contends that narratives of decline in contemporary fiction take on complex, literarily sophisticated forms that go far beyond the conventional means of nostalgic depictions or evaluatively charged spatial contrasts like urban vs. rural settings. It justifies this thesis with a selective analysis of four acclaimed contemporary European high-brow novels—Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, Houellebecq’s Submission, Kracht’s Imperium, and Randt’s The Haze over Coby County—, which demonstrates (1) the variety of complex forms of mediatization and modalization that literary fiction employs to engage with this form of critique, and (2) to analyze the relevant narratological devices in this regard. The analysis leads to the conclusion that contemporary high-brow literature takes different, nuanced stances towards cultural critique: from actualizing to suggesting between the lines to reducing certain forms of cultural critique to absurdity while upholding other forms of it. To this end, this special type of committed literature employs a whole range of narratological devices—characters as bearers of an ideology, evaluative narrator commentaries, reflective passages, utopian/dystopian settings, and unreliable narration—, sustaining a supposedly outdated or even false narrative of cultural decline.