This project aims at exploring secrecy as a form, both in its aesthetic and socio-political dimensions. The narratives selected for study in this project both deal with secrecy at a thematic level, through plot construction and characterization, as well as in the reconstruction of socio-historical contexts in which secrecy may be relevant, and at a structural level, either by the deployment of strategies and topoi typical of genres, like autofiction, trauma narratives, cyberpunk or the gothic, or by presenting peculiar kinds of formal difficulty which may be perceived as a resistance to reading. The authors included as a primary corpus for our project are these:

Colson Whitehead
Don DeLillo
Thomas Pynchon
Jonathan Franzen
William Gibson
Neal Stephenson
Richard Morgan
Salman Rushdie
Kazuo Ishiguro
Margaret Atwood
Madeleine Thien
Roisín O’Donnell
Donal Ryan

J.M. Coetzee
Helon Habila
Witi Ihimaera
Sia Figiel
Irvine Welsh
Andrew O’Hagan.

This project proposal is anchored in two theoretical realms. On the one hand, the recent rise in the humanities and social sciences of what has come to be known as the field of secrecy studies (Birchall 2016), concerned with the central role played by secrets in public life, political structures and cultural representations, and fundamentally indebted to Georg Simmel’s sociological work on secrecy as a determining factor in social relationships. In their defense of the value of secrecy, thinkers and scholars in this field have tended to focus on secrets from a social and political point of view, and here lies the main contribution of this project: to show the crucial ways in which literature may contribute to our understanding and analysis of secrecy. In doing so, we are following a long line of critics and theorists – constituting our second theoretical anchor – that have approached literature as the realm of secrecy par excellence.

A tentative formulation of the connection between these two theoretical concerns may be succinctly put as follows: literary texts, to the extent that they remain always open for further interpretations which do not exhaust the immediate context of reading, can be perceived as exemplary forms of secrecy, replicating an operating mechanism which is to be found in all forms of human sociability and public life, as argued by Simmel. In our main aim to establish a dialogue between secrecy studies and literary studies, we are fundamentally indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida, in which the “implications” of his thoughts on the secret, as argued by Derek Attridge in Reading and Responsibility (2010), “still have to be followed through with any comprehensiveness” (2010: 42). In their concern with the interrelation between democracy, secrets and the politics of transparency, in the context of the society of information and big data, numerous scholars have turned to Derrida. We wish to join these critics, emphasizing Derrida’s “linking of the secret, literature, singularity, democracy and the event” (Attridge 2010: 47).

As argued by Attridge in his contribution to our book Secrecy and Community in Contemporary Fiction in English (Bloomsbury, 2021), the issue of form does not feature explicitly in Derrida’s account of the secret. Thus we join Attridge in claiming that “the formal properties of literary works play a significant part in their impenetrability; they do not fold seamlessly into the meanings of the text.” A main concern in this project, then, is to identify these formal properties.