ABSTRACT
Building up on the conventions of the it narrative, Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier (2016) follows its protagonist from the battlefields of Afghanistan to his rehabilitation period in Britain, after he underwent a double amputation after stepping on an IED. It is obviously concerned with global relationships and shows the world as a perpetual flux of interconnections and communication, in which time has been replaced by instantaneity, place by “ubiquitous trans-border space”, and the body by an enhanced, “post-corporal” reality—elements that Rosa María Rodríguez Magda considers as characteristic of Transmodernity. Still, the novel resists the alternative totalizing claims of the Transmodern. It delineates the situatedness of distinct, singular localities and puts them in relation with one another without their being subsumed by any global sense of totality. It uses the ironic image of instantaneity to sound the deep causes and long-term effects of highly singularized moments that resist the banalization of high-speed flux. Against the dominant new model of “connected isolation” or “solidarity-based type of individualism”, it provides a vision of the subject as radically dependent on others and, beyond this, as caught in a web of interdependence.
