Frederik Tygstrup

Speculation and the End of Fiction

Abstract The propensity for speculation within modernity is well established. It ranges from the artifices of the “as if” – the thrills of imagining that everything that is might also be different, codified by Robert Musil as an inherent “sense of the possible” – to the daring betting on the “what if,” invoking better futures with an utopian spark or grim prospects to hedge oneself against. The twin inclinations to imagine the different and to project the future are the hinges of the modern imagination. In the early eighteenth century, three powerful media of speculation came into being almost at the same time: the calculus of probability, paper money, and literary fiction. In different ways, they enabled agencies of correlating what is and what is not – whether in terms of risk assessment, circulation of capital, or social self fashioning. By the beginning of the 21st century, these media of speculation seem to have reached a point of excess. With big data, probabilistic speculation is about to accustom us to read “what if”-questions in an altogether indicative mode, just as big finance has succeeded in reversing the hierarchy between value assets and the media of liquid capital. This then raises the question of what happens to the third medium of speculation in our late modernity, that of fiction? This article attempts to diagnose the fate of fiction in an age of hypertrophied speculation, how practices of fiction-making migrate, how the functions of fiction transform, and eventually how our present notion of fiction is due for a conceptual makeover.

Cultural Poetics and the Politics of Literature

In his memoirs, A Tale of Love and Darkness, published in 2004, Amos Oz tells the story of his grandmother’s death. Arriving in Israel on a warm summer’s day in 1933 from one of Eastern Europe’s grey winter villages, she saw the hot marketplace in front of her, with its bloody carcasses, colourful fruit, sweating men and noisy vendors and passed her verdict: ‘The Levant is full of microbes.’ She immediately embarked on a comprehensive hygiene regime, which she zealously came to maintain over the next 50 years — a regime which included cleaning, scalding, airing and disinfecting everything, including her own body, on a daily basis. The cleaning frenzy comes to an end only when she collapses at 80-something with heart failure during one of the three hot baths, which were part of her daily routine. So what did the grandmother die of? The fact is that she died of heart failure. But the truth is that it was her monstrous hygienic programme that killed her. And, on a philosophical tone, Oz adds: ‘Facts tend to hide the truth from our eyes.’1