Political Post-Postmodernist Fiction: Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch and the Crisis of Meritocracy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.29723Keywords:
Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch, post-postmodernist fiction, Meritocracy, political narrativesAbstract
This essay presents a reading of Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch (2022) as an example of the strand of post-postmodernist fiction foregrounding a sense of political engagement with the contemporary world. Drawing on the rhetorical approach to narrative, the analysis explores how, through the explicit voicing of the protagonist’s ideological commitments, Gunty thematically addresses the current crisis of meritocracy (cf. Wooldridge 2021; Markovits 2019). The fictionalized Midwest town that serves as the novel’s narrative space provides the ideal background for the local narrative to act as counterpoint to the larger cultural narrative linking talent with social mobility. In political post-postmodernist novels like The Rabbit Hutch, the author employs a character as her surrogate within the storyworld, endorsing her values and investing her commentary—emerging here through character-character dialogue and internally focalized narration—with her authority. Thus, rather than serving as an autofictional element that conveys indifference toward referentiality (cf. Dawson 2023), the character-author biographical connection, I argue, aligns with the novel’s emphasis on its “thematic component” (Phelan 2017). Indeed, this emphasis is realized through a metaphorical telling that enables a political discourse on social justice and the deficiencies of meritocracy. At the same time, it highlights fiction’s relevance—as an intersubjective exchange between authors and readers—in interpreting the actual world.
Funding
This article was written with financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Ramón y Cajal Research Grant program (RYC2022-036215-I).References
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