The Art of Uncertainty: Forms of Omniscience in the Novels of Robin Jenkins

Cairns Craig

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The Art of Uncertainty: Forms of Omniscience in the Novels of Robin Jenkins

In: The Fiction of Robin Jenkins

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Cairns Craig

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 67–89

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004342491_006

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Jenkins’s narrative technique might seem to be aligned with that return to ‘realism’ and rejection of modernist experiment which characterised many of the major novelists from the 1930s to the 1950s. But this adoption of an apparently straightforward third-person omniscient narration is continually undermined by an alternative perspective which emphasises the relativity of the judgments by which events are constructed. Such internal conflict within the texts produces formal structures which are much closer to the experiments of the modernists and the postmodernists than they are to the neo-realism of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. At a formal level, Jenkins’s novels re-enact Nietzsche’s dialectical conception of the birth of tragedy and, at the same time, sceptically negate the significance which Nietzsche still attributed to tragedy: Jenkins’s novels represent a dialectic which has no resolution but produces instead an endless and mutual undermining of all possible human values.

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The Fiction of Robin Jenkins

Some Kind of Grace

Series: SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature, Volume: 26 and SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature Online, Volume: 26

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004342491

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2017

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies
  - Criticism & Theory
  - English & Anglophone

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The Art of Uncertainty: Forms of Omniscience in the Novels of Robin Jenkins

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The Fiction of Robin Jenkins

Some Kind of Grace

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