| Summary: | This article offers a reading of the euphemised forms of experimentation hosted by the contemporary novel through the category of afterwardsness or deferred action, through which anterior forms of experimentation can be envisaged. It addresses Nicholas Royle’s Quilt (2010), and more particularly the formal and ethical reconfigurations that it performs. The narrative renews the conventions of elegiac discourse through the means of a poetics of trauma that prises the text open, exhibits the modalities of its reconfiguration and evinces a preference for vulnerable form. In Quilt, one of the main modalities of reconfiguration lies in the dialogue between fiction and theory, according to the powers of what the author, in the eponymous theoretical study, has called “veering.” In so doing, Royle provides a practice of experimentation as faithfulness to trouble, which calls on the reader to perform consideration or attentiveness as a prelude to dispossession. For him, faithfulness to the spectre of experimentation that haunts modern and contemporary literature goes along with a poetics and an ethics of vulnerability.
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