earticle

영어

This essay examines the postmodern understanding of fact, fiction, and truth in Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word in order to contend that postmodernist doubts about universal Truth should not be conflated with post-truth politics. Studies on post-truth phenomena have claimed that post-truth politics simplified and misused postmodernism. The essay suggests that we need a theoretical ground to criticize post-truth politics without reinstating universal Truth and that The Last Word might help understand critical differences between postmodernism and post-truth. A ‘biographical-novel-in-disguise’ that has been read as a fictionalized account of V.S. Naipaul, The Last Word depicts a young biographer’s struggle to represent a renowned writer’s life, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, or biography and the novel. Like ‘historiographic metafiction,’ The Last Word is based upon postmodernist doubts about our ability to unproblematically know and transparently represent the past—which is always already textualized and subject to interpretation. The Last Word paradoxically reveals its interest in truth by delving into the complexities of representing truth. In The Last Word, facts are to be interpreted to be meaningful and the struggle to know truth leads not to the discovery of what really happened but to a rewriting of the past. What The Last Word teaches us is not that facts do not matter but that they are not enough. To conclude, The Last Word offers postmodern insights that should not be conflated with the disregard and rejection of fact and truth in the post-truth era.