ABSTRACT
A. L. Kennedy is a prolific contemporary writer who is difficult to categorise. Often praised for her ease with postmodern literary strategies, including her metafictional preoccupations with the purpose of writing, such interpretation is often quickly qualified by reference to the ethical seriousness of her method and intent; her stylistic expertise is not ‘an empty technical exercise or a display of postmodern knowingness, but rather works in the service of some more traditional, humanistic purpose’ (Mitchell 2008: 146). ‘Humanistic’ here may refer to the specifically humanist conceptions of truth, reality and a coherent selfhood, and also to the more broadly understood humanizing ideas of freedom and equality and their ethical connotations. The implication of the lesser moral consciousness of postmodern writing, that an ethical discourse can only be adequately realised in more humanist modes, is one encouraged by Kennedy herself when in interviews she rejects all labels but can assert ‘I’m a humanist’ (March 1999: 107). However, her work is aptly summarised in Patricia Waugh’s description of Muriel Spark:
[She] embraces neither a complacent liberalism nor an anarchic postmodernism. Her stories […] are neither ‘true’ nor simply ‘lies’; they are neither mimetic representation nor simply the play of signification; they neither assume a fixed human moral order nor abjure morality altogether. For these reasons, her novels, too, cannot easily be assimilated to the dominant aesthetic categories of realism, modernism, or postmodernism.
(Waugh 1989: 217)