Late, but Timely James Kelman's Reappraisal of Modernism

Keeping in mind the inherent power plays between "central" and "peripheral" literariness summoned by Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late, my essay attempts an examination of the ways in which the novel recasts the tropes and conventions of "high modernism" as tools for political affirmation and generic reappraisal. Kelman's stylistic and narrative choices do not only perform the task that has mainly been attributed to him, that of providing a voice to the dispossessed, but also pose implicit questions about the role narrative conventions play in the reader's interpretative habits, and of fiction's political and ethical impact on the world. Most importantly, however, I will investigate the notion of "lateness" present in the novel's title as the repository of modernism's conflation of dystopian disintegration and (impossible) utopian hope, and Kelman's main tool for appropriating and reevaluating literary tradition.