Habibi 1

Chapter One

Introduction

In contemporary society and culture . . . the

grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless
of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of
whether it is a speculative narrative or a
narrative of emancipation.
(Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 37)
I could not believe in the primary significance of
these grand cycles.
(McEwan, Enduring Love 207)

1.1. Ian McEwan

“The battle between realism and modernism/postmodernism is now, in the

early twenty- first century, effectively over. Neither side is victorious but the middle

ground of fiction is shared by hybridized versions of both” (78): this is Bradford’s

adumbration of the current literary ambiance in his book The Novel Now:

Contemporary British Fiction and the touchstone against which the fiction of Ian

Russell McEwan (b.1941), a major contemporary British novelist, has been appraised

as yet. This implies that the grave error of judgement at the heart of Bradford’s

statement has always been ignored. He talks of hybridization—the act of producing

something heterogeneous in origin or composition—as the remedy for the conflict

between various existing literary styles without noticing that it is a salient feature of

postmodernism itself.

In line with other multitudinous attributes including hyperreality, flattened

subjectivity, aesthetic-cognitive reflexivity, plurality; decentring and

deterritorializing; anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism, etc. that have been

 Habibi 2

unanimously associated with postmodernism, hybridity is also a key term in the

postmodernism nomenclature. It acquired its recent relevance to postmodern

ideological and aesthetic perspective when, according to Stoddard, it came to imply

“flexibility, openness, adaptation, ambiguity, contradiction and irony” (338) which

are the idiosyncratic features of postmodernism. Consequently, it is not logical to

assume a hybrid zone out of the postmodern realm specific for contemporary British

fiction to accommodate.

In this light, the hybridization that has been acknowledged through the critical

reception of McEwan’s fiction as the distinguishing feature of his writing is more a

convincing evidence of its postmodernity than a sign of the reconciliation of

contradictory literary styles. Indeed, hybridization in McEwan’s fiction is capable of

producing the same effects that Stallybrass and White attribute to this concept:

“hybridization produces new combinations and strange instabilities in a given

semiotic system. It therefore generates the possibility of shifting the very terms of the

system itself, by erasing and interrogating the relationships which constitute it” (58).

Deploying this technique especially in his later novels, McEwan succeeds in

interrogating the relationships of the constituents of the systems underlying art, ethics,

politics or science. As a result, his late works are in a way in line with all postmodern

fiction, an exposition of incredulity towards the various types of systems notoriously

known as metanarratives. Their structural hybridity clearly justifies Head’s labelling

McEwan along with Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift as one of the

“quartet of key writers” who has been shaping an “ethical vision for the post-consensus” (2).

The incredulity and uncertainty towards various aspects of the dominant

traditional systems is the pivotal theme in most of his late oeuvre. Exercising various

themes and styles through different genres in the post-World War II in England, in
 Habibi 3

fact, McEwan arrives as one of the late twentieth-century’s pre-eminent British

novelists. Beginning with a narrow scope, he wrote two, much-acclaimed, collections

of short stories that display McEwan’s talent for the macabre: First Loves, Last Rites

(1975) which won the Somerset Maugham Award and In Between the Sheets (1978).

According to Rennison, they are “unsettling stories told with a chilly precision of

language with “a reputation for glacially cool prose directed at macabre and bizarre

subject matter” (87). Along with those works, McEwan wrote two children’s fiction,

Rose Blanche (1985) and The Daydreamer (1997), one play The Imitation Game

(1981). Moreover, there are three screen plays including Jack Flea's Birthday

Celebration (1976), The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985), Sour Sweet (1989) and The

Good Son(1993) along with one libretto, For You (2008), and one oratorio, or Shall

We Die?(1983)in his authorial list.

Writing for about three decades from 1975, Ian McEwan’s novels can be

classified under various categories such as the novels of ideas, the historical novels, or

the documentary novels. Nevertheless, since there is a radical change in McEwan’s

train of thought from the dawn of his writing career, the majority of critics such as

Peter Childs prefer to categorize McEwan’s fiction periodically and attribute a

noticeable theme to each period. However, it is preferred here to introduce his novels

based on the gradual expansion of the scope of their themes that begin with

microcosmic issues such as personal, internal conflicts, domestic violence,

innocence/maturity motifs, etc. and then move on to larger issues that concern the

British society and Britain’s national predicaments. Finally, McEwan’s works move

toward international macrocosmic matters such as the catastrophic Iraq war, terrorism

and cosmic issues like global warming or the energy crisis.

 Habibi 4

His first two novels that followed the short stories, The Cement Garden (1978)

and The Comfort of Stranger (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981), according to

Rennison, are “pared-down, ruthlessly concise narratives in which not a single word

was wasted as they moved towards dark revelations.”(87). The Cement Garden is a

gothic novel dealing with sexual maturity of adolescents and the destruction of any

sentimental notions of the innocence of childhood in an orphan family of children.

McEwan in his second novel Comfort of Stranger (1981), which is a tale of sexual

menace, pinpoints sadomasochistic love in a twisted relationship between two

couples. Passing the noticeable themes of his early works which are masculinity and

femininity, violence, and perverse behaviour in a macabre atmosphere, McEwan in

his next novel The Child in Time (1987) recounts the emotional consequences for a

couple whose baby daughter is abducted and explores the notion of time and

synchronicity.

A reliable indication to the expansion of McEwan’s literary vision is his next

three novels, where McEwan, as Childs observes, writes the novels of crisis, of

transformation and of rite of passage. The examples of this stage are The Innocent

(1990), which is an idiosyncratic version of the spy thriller based on the true story of

the Berlin Tunnel and is set during the early years of Cold War espionage; Black

Dogs (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992), a powerful parable of evil in which an

English couple on honeymoon in France soon after the Second World War encounter

two terrifying dogs and the narrator writes to unravel the mysteries of their

relationship after the incident; and finally Enduring Love (1997) ,which opens with a

bravura account of a fatal helium balloon accident near Oxford, and traces its effect

on the surviving witnesses. Indeed, Enduring Love, that is a study of religious

 Habibi 5

‘erotomania’ and obsession, questions the nature of human love and genetic

patterning.

Moving from microcosmic issue and initiating macrocosmic subjects,

McEwan writes a satirical novel Amsterdam (Man Booker prize winner in 1988)

whose focal point is national vicissitudes like the end of the Conservative party and

Thatcherism in 1998.The next novel in this stage is Atonement (2001) which is a self-

reflexive historical metafiction which explores guilt and reparation over sixty years

with a subtle demonstration of the powers of storytelling to blight the future and

redress the past. Saturday (long listed for the Booker Prize in 2005) is another novel

in this cluster which introduces the reader to the post- September 11th scenario and the

manifestation of the Middle-East crisis in Western fiction; On Chesil Beach

(shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007) which is set in the year 1962 forms the cusp

of that huge shift in sexual and social relations; and Solar (2010), with its

multidimensional themes, is an ethical confrontation of the phenomenon of Global

Warming.

1.2 Framework of the Study

McEwan is an accomplished architect of fiction who designs a bridge to span

the gap between realism and modernism/postmodernism. However, the version of

postmodernity which McEwan practices in his later novels including Black Dogs,

Amsterdam, Enduring Love, Saturday and Solar (which are the primary sources of

this study) does not strictly follow the path traversed by the majority of his

contemporary avant-garde novelists who believe, in the words of John Hawkes, “the

true enemies of novel are plot, theme, character and setting” (qtd. in Sim 126).

Therefore, the reader of the said novels rarely experiences the typical postmodernistic
 Habibi 6

moods such as temporal disorder, pastiche, fragmentation, looseness of association,

paranoia, and vicious circles (Sim 126-131). In fact, the point of divergence between

McEwan and those other postmodernist writers is that he does not push the four

conventions of literary cornerstones namely plot, theme, character and setting to

oblivion.

Subsuming those select novels under the category of postmodern novels in a

Lyotardian sense may lead us to expand the meaning of Modernism. In other words,

these novels of McEwan belong to that kind of modernism that is already passed

postmodernism In fact, the prominent cultural periodization which begins with

realism in nineteenth century and comes to twentieth-century modernism and finally

ends with contemporary postmodernism is not accepted by Lyotard. In “Answering

the Question; What Is Postmodernism?”, Lyotard argues “a work can become modern

only if it is first postmodern.” Thus according to his speculation “postmodernism is

not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state and this state is recurrent” (13). In

other words, Postmodern does not replace a worn out modernity, but recurs through

modernity as a nascent state of modernism that is in transformation. Indeed,

modernism for Lyotard is a state of constant upheaval because of its continual

attempts to innovate and progress. So postmodernism for him is an avant-garde force

within the upheavals of modernism that challenges and disrupts its ideas and

categories thus forcing new ways of thinking and acting that resist dominant modern

themes of progress.

According to Lyotard, this modernism that comes after postmodernism

presents the existence of something unpresentable. Such an idea is derived from

Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his discussion of the sublime in which

the imagination in encountering with a too large or powerful thing is stretched to the
 Habibi 7

limit trying to represent what is perceived. In this sense, the sublime is the feeling that

there is something beyond the limit of experience that we can conceive of even if we

can’t represent or know about (qtd. in Malpas 46, 47). Lyotard adopts the idea of the

sublime to describe the way in which art and literature can disrupt the established

‘language games’ as also ways of representing the world. Modern and postmodern art,

he argues, have the capacity to represent the things which have an unrepresentable

existence like the voices that are silenced in culture, or ideas that cannot be

formulated in rational communication. As a result, for Lyotard, James Joyce’s

Finnegans Wake and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past are the best

examples of postmodernism and modernism respectively.

This theoretical standpoint that Lyotard adopts in order to analyse the major

trends in the contemporary epoch excludes him from the current sceptic thinkers who

attack and reject postmodernism. In other words, Lyotard’s epistemology is not arisen

either in defence of, or in opposition to, different speculations about postmodernism.

In fact, he assiduously avoids a schematization that ontologically deals with doubt and

uncertainty about the existence of postmodernism. Although postmodernism as a

movement of thought is highly sceptical in its orientation, Lyotard cautiously selects

and uses the word “incredulity” in his widespread definition of postmodernism—

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward

metanarratives1” (xxiv). “Incredulity,” according to Stuart “is what marks out the

postmodern condition for Lyotard, the general lapse in belief that he argues has

occurred in the later twentieth century with regard to political and institutional

1
L'incrédulité à l'égard des métarécits” is the English translation of Lyotard’s definition of
postmodernism, “ incredulity toward postmodern metanarratives” which is done by Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi in their translation of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge.
 Habibi 8

authority”(Lyotard Dic. 102), and that is why Lyotard saw incredulity as a widespread

phenomenon. Lyotard completes his description of postmodern world by elaborating

“his incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress

in turn presupposes it” (xxiv).

Highlighting various aspects of postmodern incredulity in terms of those select

novels, this study attempts to present those unrepresentable aspects of McEwan’s

fiction which not only thematically connote disbelief to those metanarratives

underlined by Lyotard (“the metanarratives of emancipation” and “the speculative

metanarratives”) but also stylistically indicates uncertainty even at the level of

narrative. Jean- François Lyotard basically belongs to the poststructuralist school of

thought and, as Brian McHale has put it well, “poststructuralism and postmodernism

are more like cousins than parent and child” (Nicol 6). Lyotard’s major contribution

to postmodernism is his monumental work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge (1984), especially his doctrine of ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ as a

definition of postmodern society. Like Michael Foucault who also upholds local

narratives, Lyotard believes that big stories are bad and small stories are good. In fact,

for Lyotard the grand narratives have become associated with political programs and

parties and small narratives with localised creativity (Sarup 146). In the later stage of

his scholarly perusal, he expands his doctrine and elaborates the role of art in modern

and postmodern periods. He later comments on justice and truth and introduces the

concept of “deferend.”

For Lyotard, narratives are the stories that communities tell among themselves

about their present, their past and their future. Although the term “‘narrative” is

commonly associated with literary fiction, all forms of discourses employ narratives

in one way or another. In the same way, scientific statements are presented through
 Habibi 9

certain types of narrative that describe the physical world. Even mathematical

sciences are forced to turn their equation into narratives in order to explain the

implication of their findings. Therefore, narratives stand at the basis of human

experience and society as they tell us who we are, and allow us to express what we

believe in and aspire to.

Lyotard constructs his speculative narratives existing in human discourses

based on the notion of “language game” formulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his

Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1976). As Stuart explains, “for the later

Wittgenstein, language was a matter of learning how words are used and then

deploying them in the approved fashion (as he saw it, a case of asking not for the

meaning but the use).” Therefore, as Stuart puts, “we come to regard this [language]as

a fixed system of communication, the natural order of things, but in fact it is only one

‘game’ among many other possibilities that could be instituted. The rules and

procedures of any game were to be considered as conventional only, and could be

changed to encompass different worldviews” (Lyotard Dic. 121). Lyotard in The

Postmodern Condition makes three significant observations about the activity: “their

rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a

contract, explicit or not, between players”; “if there are no rules, there is no game”;

“every utterance should be thought of as a ‘move’ in a game” (10).

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that different discourses or

language games have different narratives with different rules. In Lyotard’s view,

metanarratives set the rules of narratives and language games which mean that

metanarratives organize language games and determine the success or failure of each

statement or language ‘move’ that takes place in them. For Lyotard, the metanarrative

of pre-modern culture was based on the relationship between past and present, while
 Habibi 10

the metanarrative of modernity is based on human progress and it points toward the

future. In sum, in the words of Stephens and McCallum, “metanarrative is a global or

totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and

experience” (4). In this regard, Lyotard believes that there are two types of modern

metanarratives: speculative metanarrative and emancipating metanarrative.

Lyotard’s “speculative metanarrative” comes from Hegel’s essay “The Truth

Is the Whole”, in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1977). Hegel believes that the human

life or ‘spirit’ progresses by incremental knowledge and all the different language

games can be brought together by philosophy in order to present a “universal history”

of “spirit.” In the speculative grand narrative, therefore, all possible statements are

brought together under a single metanarrative and their truth and values are judged

according to its rules. As a result, the truth or falsity of any system or language game

is determined by its relationship to the whole of knowledge and this whole of

knowledge is the speculative metanarrative.

“The metanarrative of emancipation” is based on human freedom. For

Lyotard, this metanarrative begins with the French Revolution in 1789 when the idea

of universal education was seen as a means for setting free all citizens from the

shackles of mysticism and domination. In this metanarrative, knowledge is the basis

of freedom from oppression, and development of knowledge is valued because it

liberates humanity from suffering. In fact, in this metanarrative, knowledge is no

longer the subject but in the service of the subject. This metanarrative has taken

multitudinous forms over the last few hundred years. One such metanarrative is the

project of Enlightenment which emphasises the idea of the freedom of people from

religious superstitions, or Marxism which focuses on the freedom of the workers from

exploitation by their employers and on the development of their abilities to control

 Habibi 11

their own destiny. Thus, the aim of this grand narrative is the emancipation of an

enlightened humanity from dogma, mysticism, exploitation and suffering.

In his critique of postmodern condition, Lyotard argues that nowadays

knowledge is no longer organized towards the fulfilment of universal human goal.

Instead, postmodern knowledge is valued in terms of its ‘efficiency’ and

‘profitability’ in a globally market-driven economy. This transformation of

knowledge is marked by incredulity towards metanarratives. In “Apostil on

Narratives,” Lyotard argues that the global spread of capitalism and the rapid

development in science and technology since the Second World War have put an end

to the grand narratives and “the project of modernity ... has not been forsaken or

forgotten but destroyed and liquidated” (Lyotard 18).

Regarding incredulity toward metanarratives, Lyotard discusses that truth and

justice which are the bases of the speculative metanarrative and the metanarrative of

emancipation respectively have no longer the universal appeal. Therefore, the

identities of individuals are dispersed because of getting located in the multiplicity of

language games that no longer follow a single metanarrative. With the destruction of

the grand narratives, there is no longer a unified identity for the subject or society.

Instead, individuals are sites where ranges of conflicting moral and political codes

intersect, and the social boundary is fragmented. The manifestation of this incredulity

and fragmentation are traceable throughout the novels of Ian McEwan.

Lyotard’s analysis of the postmodern condition has been criticized as being

internally inconsistent. For instance Alex Callinicos in his book Against

Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique or Jürge Habermas in his article “Modernity Vs.

Postmodernity” argues that Lyotard’s description of the postmodern world bears an

 Habibi 12

“incredulity toward metanarratives”, which in itself can be seen as a metanarrative.

According to this view, the poststructuralist thinkers including Lyotard criticize

universal rules, yet postulate that postmodernity contains a universal scepticism

toward metanarratives. Thus, the postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives

could be said to be self-refuting. In other words, they discuss that if we are sceptical

of universal narratives such as “truth”, “knowledge”, “right”, or “wrong”, then there is

no ground for believing the “truth”, that metanarratives are being undermined.

Setting those philosophical counterarguments aside, Lyotard severely criticises

the Capitalist world for judging all knowledge in terms of its financial value and its

technological efficiency; however, he is not a Marxist either even though once he

joined the Marxist party in Algeria to fight against the French colonizers. In fact, the

essence of Lyotard’s argument is the re-evaluation of the "emancipatory" narratives of

Marxism and liberalism, and the consideration of new bases for aesthetic, moral, and

political judgments and actions. When modernism in art and modernity in technology

led to Auschwitz and the Soviet gulags, allegiance to one universal standard by which

all are judged generates a murderous hostility towards the different.

In this circumstance, unlike Habermas, Lyotard appreciates and respects

diversity, local differences and plurality of ways in which human beings choose to

live. Habermas in his essay “Modernity: an Unfinished Project” -- like Emanuel

Kant’s view in Critique of the Power of Judgment-- argues that the aim of art is to

bridge the gap between various language games, like epistemology and ethics, in

order to achieve the political consensus of rational communication action. However,

Lyotard in “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” discusses that

Habermas’s view is only a “transcendental illusion” (15-16). He argues that the task
 Habibi 13

of art is to resist the terror of totalitarianism through its employment of Kant’s notion

of the sublime.

Apart from Lyotard’s theory, it seems Ian McEwan’s fiction is also consonant

with Umberto Eco’s theory of postmodernism expressed in his Reflections on the

Name of the Rose. Eco suggests that some writers like Beckett, Borges, and

Burroughs are working in the immediate aftermath of the avant-garde when art

realizes it has to turn back, or end up unable to express itself at all. Referring to one of

these writers, Eco suggests that if writing continued in the same vein all we would

have is ‘the destruction of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence,

the white page’ (qtd. in Nicol 52).

Therefore, the fiction of Ian McEwan comes after the dying embers of the

avant-garde, and turns back to the established conventions of fiction like plot,

character, theme which have developed from the mid-1980s. A generation of

postmodern novelists like Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch and Martin Amis in British

Literature try to represent the recurrent themes and thoughts of the postmodern milieu

like Jean-François Lyotard’s “‘metanarrative,” or Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreal”

rather than skilfully manoeuvre those stylistic techniques such as ‘cut-up,’ ‘fold-in,’

‘frame-breaking’ or ‘frame-foregrounding’ practiced by the postmodern avant-garde

writers.

1.3 Background of the Study

To present a synopsis of “what has been done” on these six select novels

(Enduring Love, Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, Black Dogs and Solar) within a

span of twenty years, instead of a novel wise summery of the literature in a

chronological order, a theory (or theme) based review sounds more functional.
 Habibi 14

Categorizing all the insightful observations and comprehensive analyses of the novels

into three broad frameworks (there are several subcategories for each of them), this

study firstly begins with some critical readings as majority of them are to some extent

“theory-less” analyses such as aesthetic studies, thematic investigations, and moral

inquiries. Then the thesis moves towards two of the major branches in literary theory

namely feminist and psychoanalysis; finally the study rounds off by a recapitulation

of various postmodern studies including intertextuality, narrative studies and reader-

response on McEwan’s fictional oeuvre in order to facilitate a summation of the

divergent readings which are centred around a narrow definition of postmodernism as

“incredulity towards metanarratives.” The advantage of this taxonomy of review is

that it makes manifest how the present research has codified a “thematic niche”

among the major criticisms on these novels.

The aesthetic approach that Albers Stefanie and Torsten Caeners apply on

Atonement in their insightful paper “The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ian McEwan's

Atonement”can be an appropriate opening for presenting a selective literary criticism

on McEwan’s novels. Focusing on the aesthetic aspects of Atonement, they attempt to

shed light on the poetics of the text and “the effects of these on the discourse and the

reader”(707). According to them aesthetics in terms of Atonement “function both on a

constructive and reflexive level, that is they support the novel’s structure but also

serve as a commentary on the meta-level. Thus, aesthetics are to some extent the

novel’s syuzhet while simultaneously being negotiated—if implicitly—on the

discourse level”( 714).in other words, for them aesthetics and aesthetic discourses

“play a significant role on the story level as they are subtly incorporated as part of the

novel’s syuzhet, that is they are unquestionably part of the plot”(718).

 Habibi 15

Peter Mathews’s thoughtful article “The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian

McEwan's Atonement” is another major study within the category of literary criticism

in respect to McEwan’s most acknowledged novel Atonement. Focusing especially on

the problem of the relationship between the form and content of a secret, and the way

that this transforms the act of testimony into a problematic discourse, Mathews

attempts to show that McEwan makes use of everything to suggest “that the novel in

its entirety may be a formal and empty secret” (157). Accenting the scene where

Briony meditates on why the moths are drawn toward light and the answer “to seek

out the darkest place, on the far side of the light,” Mathews assumes moths as the

central paradox of the formal secret: “they fly into the symbolic light of reason,

exposing themselves to a likely annihilation, all in pursuit of a deeper but illusory

darkness” (149). Indeed, the focal point in Mathews’s study “in ethical terms” is

difference “between two manifestations of the unknown: the mystery and the secret”

(149). Besides, he sheds light on the relationship between knowledge and innocence,

and remarks that this relation “cannot be broken down into the simple either/or of a

binary” (150). Referring to Brinoy’s crossing of this line from innocence to

experience, Mathews argues, “intense psychological transformation in her character

by suggesting that, sixty years later, Briony remains unsure whether or not the

melding of the advent of experience and the scene by the fountain could be just a

convenient fictional reconstruction of her memory” (156). Finally, Mathews remarks,

“for a novel that draws from some of the key historical events of the twentieth-

century, however, there is surprisingly little discussion of the Nazis or the rise of

fascism” (154).

Kiernan Ryan invites our attention to the theme of “fall” in terms of Enduring

Love and remarks, “almost everything that transpires in Enduring Love takes place in
 Habibi 16

the wake of the fatal fall that expels its hero from the Eden of innocence in which his

story begins”(45). This is how Ryan in his article “After the fall,” traces the footprints

of biblical allusions, particularly the idea of “fall” in Enduring Love and examines Joe

Rose’s narrative in respect to “the seeds sown and revelations contained in the

opening pages. Indeed, Ryan attempts to show that the novel deals with “the idea of

the Fall from innocence and God’s grace extends to Joe and Clarissa, who become

fallen lovers, cast out of their Edenic existence into deeply troubled lives. This is the

guilty world of which Joe has gained knowledge through the ballooning accident and

its aftermath” (Ryan 44). The opening scene of the novel for Ryan contains “ominous

intimations” of its “central lovers’ imminent fall from their relationship’s security.

Finally, Ryan argues that the circumstances of Logan’s fall, like that of Adam and

Eve’s fall from innocence in Eden, can be assumed as “an objective correlative for

the emotion the reader should feel over the fate of Joe and Clarissa’s love”(45).

Elaborating the relation between science and fiction in Enduring Love, David

Malcolm reads Enduring Love differently. As he argues in his book, Understanding

Ian McEwan the “questions of knowledge—epistemological questions, how much one

can know, how one can know anything—are frequently in McEwan’s novels” and

here , in terms of this novel, it becomes “a probing in a fresh context of certain

concerns”: “a love story of sorts” (157). Labelling Joe a “materialist and a

rationalist”(167) and philosophically “empiricist”(167), Malcolm explicates the

different discourses that took place between him and other two characters Clarissa

with her literary background and Jed who has “a sense of the Christ within him” and

concludes, “the picture the novel paints of Joe seems foursquare and solid—a

rationalist, a materialist, a man of science who speaks with confidence and

certainty”(169). The novel, for Malcolm, has three important aspects: the
 Habibi 17

psychological aspects ( which emerge in its analysis of the secondary central

characters, but above all in its very detailed and ambiguous portrayal of its narrator

and principal character” (170-171); the social and historical aspects of characters’

lives (which show their social class) (171); McEwan’s perennial romantic theme

(Love is, indeed, one of the novel’s main focuses— largely pathological love or the

pathology of love, but love nonetheless”)(172).

Paul Edwards’s philosophical approach to Enduring Love can also be added to

those two previous readings of the novel. Beginning his article “Solipsism, narrative

and love in Enduring Love,” with a label of “solipsism” attributed to the narrator-

author, Joe, Edwards refers to the philosophical definition of Solipsism as a theory

that indicates that the self can know nothing but its own modification and the self is

the only existent thing. Then in a smorgasbord of psychology, philosophy and

psychobiology, he substantiates the relationship between Joe’s ideology and the

British empiricist tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers such as

John Locke, David Hume and George Berkeley. Counting on this backbone, Edwards

explicates subjectivity and narration in terms of the novel. According to him “If

implicitly, through McEwan’s narrative style, the novel celebrates the subjective

contribution to our experience of reality, explicitly it seems to do the opposite, as it is

almost a compendium of the distortions subjectivity apparently causes, and a lament

over our inability to perceive objectively”(80).

The “thematic study” of McEwan’s select novels can be subsumed under the

category of literary criticism and I have brought some exemplary ones ascribed to

Solar, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, and Amsterdam. Ron Charles in his review on

Solar remarks that the novel’s “real subject is the slippery nature of truth and the very

fallible people who claim to pursue it,” or James Heartfield in his notes “The power of
 Habibi 18

Solar” points out, “one of the underlying themes in Solar is of undeserved success,

built on plagiarism, of individuals always on the verge of being uncovered as a sham.

This rehearses one of the things that McEwan has been criticised for [.]” Regarding

Black Dogs, Ioana Stoica’sthematic approach in his article “Multiple Faces of Reality

in the novel Black Dogs by Ian McEwan” sounds suitable. In her reading of the novel

she underlines different perceptions of reality by different characters or a character’s

change of apprehension of reality in time. She believes in differentiation between

“what the reality is in fact and how the characters perceive” (696). According to her

“what the reality is in fact and how the characters perceive it are different things”

(696)

With respect to Enduring Love, Peter Childs’s thematic enquiry can be added

as an atypical example. According to his article “‘Believing is seeing’: the eye of the

beholder” Childs assumes a reversal of the conventional phrase “seeing is believing”

and attempts to show how perspectives, prejudice, conviction and faith can affect

perception and Joe’s narrative is one of the best examples of that. Focusing on the

veracity and subjectivity of Joe’s narration, Childs examines more closely some of the

“similarities between Joe, Clarissa and Jed as well as the ways in which the three

main protagonists are wrapped up in different narratives” (107). The last example of

thematic approach to McEwan’s select novel is Ingersoll’s reading of Amsterdam.

“Sailing to Amsterdam,” according to Ingersoll who assumes Amsterdam city is

“McEwan's symbolic city of endings”. Focusing on the various types of endings for

the major characters, Ingersoll guides his argument toward this conclusion that

Amsterdam for this narrative turns to become a "city of endings": “a deeply ironic and

complicated metaphor the narrative has constructed”.

 Habibi 19

Apart from the previously mentioned heterogeneous readings of the said

novels, the literatures dealing with the study of ethics can also be assumed as part of

the category of literary criticism. Among these six select novels, McEwan’s

Amsterdam has been more the centre of attention in terms of accentuating its moral

issues and Malcolm’s reading of this novel is an example of this type of literary

enquiry. For Malcolm, Amsterdam “centers on the moral dilemmas confronting two

successful, middle-aged friends, a composer [Clive] and a newspaper editor [Vernon].

One of these dilemmas involves a decision whether to publish photographs that reveal

an eminent Conservative Party politician to be a transvestite”(190). As Malcolm

infers, “if Clive and Vernon are, in a sense, hollow men, then, the novel suggests, so

is their whole generation. This is amply borne out by the action of the text”(193-4).

Malcolm traces the moral decadence typically in the characters representing their own

classes: “The Conservative politician who stands for traditional family values and

rigid social and penal codes is a closet cross-dresser. Quality newspapers are to be

dumbed down for the cause of greater circulation figures. The aging, self-absorbed,

slightly inert protagonists choose self-interest over decency and moral conduct. They

also have outrageous delusions of grandeur, Clive seeing himself as a latter-day

Beethoven (143) and Vernon as one of the great newspaper editors of his day”(194).

Finally Malcolm writes, “a whole generation (or at least its men, for there are almost

no women in this novel) within an important section of society is being mocked (sic)

in Clive’s and Vernon’s moral shabbiness and delusive self-esteem” (194). Malcolm

summarizes, “the men who come out on top are as corrupt as the losers”; “the world

of the great and the good is a foul place in Amsterdam” (195).

In line with Malcolm’s ethical assessment of McEwan’s Amsterdam, Tsai Jen-

chieh analyses the novel in his article “Question of Reception Ethics: Amity and
 Habibi 20

Animosity in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam.” Tsai argues that two temporal structures are

juxtaposed in Amsterdam: “the time of mundanity for the characters and a time that is

messianic and affranchising, thus stressing an ethical vision, possibly beyond what

the self- centered British society in the novel can foresee”(1). Focusing on Derridean

theory of “hostipitality” and analysing the ideas of friendliness and enmity in the

interaction between the four male characters of the novel, Tsai attempt to show that

the ethical terrain as depicted in Amsterdam. According to Tsai “all the underlying

attention to temporal expressions and the foregrounded contingency of life only

reinforces the author’s call for moral inquiries and search for accountable, ethical

stances in an era of flux and disintegration”(1).

McEwan’s Solar has also been partially scrutinized by the reviewers from the

moral perspective. For instance, Jennie Yabroff ,by referring to the novel as a novel

which is not a standard whodunit, in her review explains that the most intriguing

quality of the novel is “the way it subverts the reader's assumption that no crime can

go unpunished, that justice must be served.” She justifies her observation thus: “we

live in a culture where moral ambiguity often seems more threatening than violence

itself, and where much of our art tells us that good triumphs over evil, even if real life

suggests otherwise.” However, Geoff Nicholson in his review remarks, “satirists

always have to be moralists at some level, but the moral dilemmas that occur in

‘Solar’ never seem quite real or urgent enough.” Nevertheless, McEwan in an

interview with Mick Brown does not appreciate those readings that trace a moral

position in Solar: “The thing that would have killed the book for me, I'm sure, is if I'd

taken up any sort of moral position, I needed a get-out clause. And the get-out clause

is, this is an investigation of human nature, with some of the latitude thrown in by
 Habibi 21

comedy.”This moral enquiry can be a finale to a presentation of miscellaneous literary

criticisms on McEwan’s select novels.

The link that can connect the literatures dealing with major literary criticism

on McEwan’s novels to the various approaches of literary theory is Butler’s

influential article “The Master's Narrative: Resisting the Essentializing Gaze in Ian

McEwan's Saturday.” “Racist, sexist, and cultural essentialisms deny people

subjectivity” are the agendas which Butler elaborates in her study. According to her

observation, some of the post-9/11 literatures including McEwan’s Saturday suggest

methods for resistance in terms of denied subjectivity. She believes that the white

protagonist of the novel, Henry Perowne, “may initially seem more likely to uphold

rather than resist class, gender, and racial stereotypes.” Butler, however, argues,

“Perowne’s objectification of three of the novel’s nonwhite characters demonstrates

how essentialisms reinforce the “master narratives” of financial wealth, professional

success, and family bliss, and, in an unexpected twist, indicates how such pervasive

stereotypes might be undermined” (101). According to her perspective, “social master

narratives govern the characters in McEwan’s Saturday, a novel whose white

protagonist easily essentializes two nonwhite characters but is ultimately frustrated by

an adolescent Nigerian girl” (102). She remarks, “in constructing a consciousness that

shapes the world to fit his own expectations, Perowne reduces nonwhite characters to

racial Others” (102).

Butler’s assumption of “Essentializing Gaze” in terms of McEwan’s Saturday

paves the way for introducing other critical works which can be subsumed under

feminist readings of those select novels and Rhiannon Davies’s essay “Enduring

McEwan,” is one of them. Scrutinizing the presentation of masculinity in Enduring

Love, she explores the novel in terms of ‘the gaze’, as the unreconstructed male, Joe,
 Habibi 22

is objectified by the unwanted attention of his admirer, Jed. According to her reading,

“it is in fact Jed Parry’s unwavering gaze which unsettles Joe and plunges him into

emotional turmoil” (70). Explicating the central relationships between the lovers, the

stalker and the stalked, and the storyteller and his audience, Davies examines Joe’s

“given script” for his scheme of thought behaviour and narration and asserts, “what

the reader is witness to in Enduring Love are the projections of one man, Joe Rose,

insisting on his own authority, sovereignty and influence” (67). Commenting on

McEwan’s Englishness and masculinity, besides, she explores the male literary

psyche in the last decades of the twentieth century. Finally, Davies proceeds to argue

that Enduring Love concludes with the breakdown of Joe’s “strategies of masculine

self-fashioning” since this protagonist tries to assert the heroic triumph of his male

adventure-ideal in the display of machismo that characterises his gun-toting victory

over the “madman” threatening “his woman.”

The feminist reading of McEwan’s novels now deviates toward his Amsterdam

with Dana Chetrinescu’s article “Rethinking Spatiality: The Degraded Body in Ian

McEwan's Amsterdam” who attempts to bring home the view of the “interdependence

of space and gaze in the way they work upon the human, bodily” (164). According to

Chetrinescu, “spatiality is a lived and liminal experience that any individual needs in

order to be able to communicate with the outer world, to survive as a social being”

(164). Employing some geometric terminology such as “closed space in the middle of

a larger space” or “concentric circles around the ‘secret’ that has to be protected, ”

Chetrinescu elaborating the various aspects of essential personal “space” and

extending toward the feminist discourse. In fact she introduces the framework of her

studies constructed on “gaze” particularly “male gaze” in the sense that this type of

contemplation transfixes the object of gaze (generally female) and there is “no
 Habibi 23

possibility to protect it (her)self from the male gaze as she could not move further

away, hide, find a barrier between herself and the direction of gaze, change her

territory. The relationship between gaze and space was, thus, the result of a combined

need for secrecy and voyeurism” (157). The point that she underlines in her essay is

“the process of bodily regression starts with Molly Lane’s funerals” (160). Indeed,

according to her observation, “Molly’s involution is explained in terms of loss of

intimacy and personal space. After she is confined to a limited space in her apartment,

she starts to suffer from isolation because her husband would not let her friends visit

her or communicate with her” (160). As Chetrinescu adds Amsterdam is a “novel

centered around the modern myth of the body, focusing on the notion of pain and

disease in connection with the space surrounding the victims” (160).

Following Chetrinescu’s feminist reading of McEwan’s Amsterdam, Earl G.

Ingersoll also prefers to look at the novel from this perspective but from a different

angle. In his essay “City of Endings: Ian McEwan's Amsterdam,” Ingersoll right from

the beginning, after introducing masculine and feminine narrative paradigm, makes it

clear that Amsterdam is “a brilliant novel in terms of “exploiting the resources of this

[masculine narrative] Paradigm--with a vengeance”. Exploring the issue of “gender

construction,” Ingersoll remarks “ the ‘masculine’ in my term Masculine Narrative

Paradigm replaces ‘male’ to unmoor gender from sex, since women have employed

the Paradigm in their fiction for centuries, just as male writers have explored its

alternatives without running any risk of unsettling their sexual identities with such

artistic ‘cross-dressing’”. Later, Ingersoll directs his argument toward the role of “the

joke” which “functions as an analogue for the Masculine Narrative Paradigm itself”

and explains that Flieger’s “brilliant study The Purloined Punch Line is helpful in this

unmooring of gender from sex when she examines Jacques Lacan's debt to Freud's
 Habibi 24

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to theorize the joke as a paradigm for

narrative.” Indeed, Ingersoll refers to Flieger as the one who “reminds us how the joke

has traditionally been an expression of sexual aggression--against a woman, or against

a man who is ‘feminized’ through his position as the butt of the joke.” Applying this

assumption to Amsterdam, Ingersoll remarks that the joke framework in the novel

offers a reminder of how the “feminine” in its more conventional sense is to be

positioned as vulnerable and, therefore, powerless in this power structure of desire. In

this context, Molly is the centre of “femininity,” the butt of the locker-room joke of

the "fast" woman who tries to be as sexually liberated as the traditional male.”

Ingersoll’s study of gender construction and masculine-feminine narrative

paradigms in terms of Amsterdam that overlaps some psychological discourses can

put forwards the next cluster of the literature reviews dealing with psychoanalytical

readings of the select novels. Jonathan Greenberg’s informative article “Why Can’t

Biologists Read Poetry?: Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love” is an example of them.

According to Greenberg, Enduring Loveengages contemporary debates about neo-

Darwinism by representing a series of interrelated conflicts between scientific,

literary, and religious worldviews. He believes that both ““the novel's neo-

Darwinian narrator [Joe] and his primary antagonist[Jed], an anti-Darwinian

religious stalker, become prisoners of their own narrative constructions and thus

illustrate Jacques Lacan’s insight that in paranoia narrative or fantasy acquires the

capacity to structure facts”(95). As Chetrinescu puts,“because Lacan's theory of

paranoia derives directly from de Clérambault 's thinking about erotomania, Joe's

“normal” Lacanian-style paranoia and Jed's de Clérambault 's syndrome are related

diagnoses, and it is hardly accidental that the two antagonists share so much”(113).

Chetrinescu concludes his argument by answering the question raised in the title of
 Habibi 25

his paper “The biologists can't read poetry because “ they become triumphant

rationalists, refusing to acknowledge the origins of their ideas in their interests--

economic, psychological, or corporeal”(114) and “conversely, literary critics can't

read science when, like Clarissa, they attend solely to an instinctual or emotional

register and dismiss reflexively the legitimacy of science and reason”(114-115)

Analysing McEwan’s novel based on psychological principles now reaches

Saturday where Elizabeth Wallace Kowaleski tries to pinpoint the postcolonial

melancholia. Though her reading is an amalgamation of postcolonial and

psychological perspectives, I prefer to highlight the psychological aspects of his

crucial study. According to Kowaleski, McEwan’s Saturday “is less an anxiety about

personal safety in a world of destabilized politics and more a psychological condition

that sociologist Paul Gilroy, in a recent, provocative monograph, has called

“postcolonial melancholia” (466). She argues that McEwan’s novel continually

“glances at a multicultural and cosmopolitan society with which it resists engagement.

On the rare occasions when Saturday acknowledges London’s multiethnic

inhabitants, it reads the men as intruders on, and monopolizers of, public space (148),

and the women as victims of oppression (124)” (467). Moreover, Kowaleski attempts

to show, “Saturday selectively describes a world that demands more attention than

either the hero or its author give it” (467).

To conclude, the summaries of the major psychological readings having been

done on the select novels, Christina Byrnes’s dissertation entitled The Work of Ian

McEwan: A Psychodynamic Approach can be a fitting reference. Among the novels

selected for study here, Black Dogs and Enduring Love are two that have been

included in her study. In respect to McEwan’s Black Dogs, among the various

psychological issues (such as interpretation of the protagonist’s [Jeremy] psyche and

 Habibi 26

discrepancy between his in-laws’ mental attitudes, etc.) which Byrnes touches upon,

the issue of Jeremy’s mid-life crisis sounds more significant. Byrnes argues, “Black

Dogs deals in depth with the transitional phase of middle life” (160). Highlighting the

mid-life crisis that Jeremy encounters, she applies Jung’s who “takes a special interest

in the second half of life and has developed a sophisticated system of ideas” (160). As

Byrnes quotes “the death of the father then has the effect of an overhurried almost

catastrophic - ripening. (MM, p. 121)” (157): a case with Jeremy in Black Dogs.

Byrnes also pinpoints, “the Oedipal theme is dealt with by killing off both parents

before Jeremy's adolescence” (157). In terms of McEwan’s Enduring Love, Byrnes

does her psychodynamic reading in the light of Carl Jung’s theory and pins point

some archetypal instances in the novel. As she remarks “all archetypes are morally

ambiguous and can be experienced from their positive or negative side. The archetype

most intimately connected with McEwan's concept of evil is the negative aspect of

The Great Mother”(196).

Martin Ryle’s essay “Anosognosia, or the Political Unconscious: Limits of

Vision in Ian McEwan's Saturday” is a study which can help us to keep the

consistency of thought from different psychoanalytical readings of McEwan’s select

novels to the recurrent postmodern appreciations of his works. For Ryle “anosognosia

seems to acknowledge, fleetingly, the formative repression that preserves the

protagonist’s, and arguably the text’s, coherence as subjects of their kind of

knowledge precisely by refusing to know more” (38). Setting anosognosia which

signifies “lack of awareness of his own condition” at the back of his essay, Ryle

assumes the phase articulated by the son of the protagonist, “think small,” and

attempts to answer this question whether the reader is able to judge and accept “the

restricted perspectives of its protagonist”(26). He believes that, the major concern of

 Habibi 27

the novel is the question of class or in other words privilege and inequality within the

nation. Contrasts drawn with other novels (by Hardy, Gissing and Ishiguro) highlight

how Saturday figures progress, and how its back-story of social mobility places

Perowne as a deserving member of the professional classes. As a concluding

theoretical reflection (with reference to Marxist critics, and again to Gissing), Ryle

argues that although the novel's figures of anosognosia and ‘thinking small’ seem to

declare and police a limit to what it wants (us) to know, they in fact excite and require

a fully contextual reading.

The appreciation of McEwan’s novels from postmodern perspectives

centripetally revolves around Atonement since it is located at the junction of three

major movements in the world of literature: realism, modernism and postmodernism.

Stefanie and Caeners’s study of Atonement on one hand and Alistair Cormack’s

critical reading on the other are two examples of disagreement among the critics for

labelling this novel as postmodern or otherwise. According to Stefanie and Caeners,

“it is hard to label Atonement as either a postmodern or realist narrative, because it

shrewdly plays with narrative devices which undercut classification (any)”. They

believe, “in many respects, the novel holds an indeterminate position between the

classic, closed narrative and the open and experimental narratives of

(post)modernism, a position which is similar to the dichotomy presented in Krieger’s

essay ‘An Apology for Poetics’” (708). Employ’s Murray Krieger’s theory of poetics

which is “between the New Criticism and certain elements of post-Structuralism”

(708), they attempt to show that this theory is applicable to Atonement. The point

which has to added in terms of their theoretical framework is that Krieger’s theory

concerns with poem and poetry rather than fiction; but these two critics apply it on

Atonement by referring to Roman Jacobson observation: “Any attempt to reduce the

 Habibi 28

sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be

delusive oversimplification” (708). Stefanie and Caeners attempt to “delineate the

novel’s inherent tension between realist and postmodern narrative” (707). As they

declare, “McEwan’s Atonement, though frequently labelled postmodern, does not

belong to this category. Rather, the novel appears in many ways to return to

techniques of classic realist fiction; it can be considered as a hybrid narrative that

contains both realist and postmodern elements” (711)

This hybrid nature of Atonement is also stressed but in another way. As

Robinson puts, “Atonement declines to recognize how—in the prose of Gertrude

Stein, of The Waves, of Finnegans Wake or of The Unnameable—the modernist novel

dismantled the grandeur of its constitutive mimetic language, brick by brick.

Atonement, in bridging the gap between the modernist and postmodernist novel,

inherits a healthy replenishment of the genre as if that threat of dissolution had never

occurred.” Robinson believes, “Atonement puts what Joyce called ‘cutanddry

grammar and goahead plot’ (Letters 3:146)—the instrumental language of the novel's

narrative—above the exuberance or opacity of the signifier” (489). Finally Robinson

writes, “Atonement is not a modernist nor a neomodernist novel. For a text so clearly

designed to raise the ghosts of the English canon, and one that negotiates between the

literary taxonomies of twentieth- century theory, this obvious point should be

emphasized”(491).

Alistair Cormack in his essay “Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in

Atonement” offers a critique of the realist novels, particularly its method of disguising

its nature as fiction and argues that McEwan’s novel represents a “return to the heart

of the Great Tradition’ of English novelists” (79). Cormack believes that McEwan's

novel does not allow a postmodernist interpenetration of real and fictive: “there is the
 Habibi 29

world of the real and the world of literature, and woe betide those who confuse the

two” (82).

Peter Childs in his reading of Atonement chooses another direction and

remarks that the novel “places itself in a realist tradition of deep, rich characterization

and social breadth, but displays a modernist concern with consciousness and

perspective. Ultimately though it emerges as at least in part a postmodernist novel,

because it questions its own fictive status, exposing itself as a construct; yet, it also

stretches beyond this by foregrounding questions of morality that belong to a pre-

postmodern humanism” (143) this comment sounds accurate and problematic.

Setting aside those discrepancies, Richard Robinson’s adaptation of

intertextual paradigm for shedding light on the interconnection between Atonement

and the works of four major modernist writers can be an opening for summarizing the

postmodern- oriented critical works on McEwan’s novel. Comparing and analysing

Atonement in terms of four prominent Modernist novelists including, Virginia Woolf,

Henry James, Rosamond Lehmann and James Joyce, Robinson looks at the

“assumptions the novel covertly makes about modernism, both as a literary period and

a poetics, and what remains of modernism in the finished text”(474). According to

him, Atonement “seems to ventriloquize modernism and then to silence it”(474).

Besides, Robinson believes, “Atonement pretends to be a modernist palimpsest that

has undergone continual erasure” (475). Referring to Brian Mchale’s view in which

postmodernism shifts from the epistemological preoccupations of modernism toward

an ontological, Robinson accentuates the review which the famous modernist critic

C.C. (that is Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon) writes on Briony’s Two Figures by

the Fountain, and remarks, “Connolly's letter brings just such an ontological jolt,

violating the boundaries between real and fictional worlds well before the
 Habibi 30

metafictional adjunct of the epilogue”(476). According to Robinson,” the most

conspicuous strain of modernism in Atonement is Woolfian”, especially her novel The

Waves (477) which is, according to Robinson, apparent “on the descriptive style of

‘Two Figures’ as well as in Connolly's letter to Briony (481). Pinpointing the direct

allusion to Lehmann’s Dusty Answer in the novel, Robinson highlights the fragments

of Lehmann's style in the novel. In terms of Henry James, Robinson remarks,

“Atonement particularly benefits from [James’s]What Maisie Knew in exploring the

idea that "point of view" is not a merely visual perspectivism but a moral way of

looking at the world—and thus one that can be exploited”(484). Moreover, according

to Robinson, “There is an inverse correlation between the powerlessness expressed by

James's narrator” [in What Maisie Knew] and the guilty power to which the narrator

admits late in Atonement”(487). Robinson also refers to James Joyce whose absence

“from Atonement's conversation with the modernist novel is not surprising but it is

instructive” (487). According to him, the famous quotation of Atonement, “How can a

novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she

is also God?” (371) echoes Stephen Dedalus’s more well-quoted aesthetic credo in A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which derives from Flaubert’s axiom, “refined

itself out of existence” and his comparison of the artist to “the God of the creation . . .

within or behind or beyond his handiwork, paring his fingernails” (488). Eliot’s

“notion of the extinction of the artist's personality” (489) also underlines by Robinson

while he brings the examples that the novel “at the same time”, moves away from

Eliotian modernism (489). The conclusion which Robinson arrives at is that we

should set aside as postmodern and modern readings of the novel and “we can

remodel our sense of Atonement democratically containing competing poetics and

underline that modernism is subordinated (rather than dominant) in the text” (491).
 Habibi 31

He believes, “the modernism that it consequently constructs is a straw figure:

ethically neutered, disengaged from history, lacking in pragmatic morality” (492).

In accordance with Robinson’s intertextual analysis of Atonement, Ingersoll in

his comparative study identifies the textual similarities between this novel and L. P.

Hartley's The Go-Between. In fact his intertextual enquiry is Barthesian (in Roland

Barthes’s terminology intertextuality is déjà lu “already read”) rather than the

“straitjacket of linear” “influence study” which was dominant in Comparative Studies

in literature before Barthes and Kristeva arrived on the scene. Focusing on the

narrative progress in terms of the author-narrator Leo Colston in The Go-Between,

Ingersoll pinpoints the shared assumptions between him and Briony Tallis the author–

narrator in Atonement and remarks, “what is central to The Go-Between is the

sensibility of a child on the brink of puberty in a culture that has insulated children

from the ‘facts of life’” (241). As an example of this intertextual relationship,

Ingersoll points to the “sense of ‘plotting’ or dissembling, which is appropriate to

McEwan’s strategies in Atonement as they replicate Leo’s dissembling, his

performance of ‘innocence,’ as the narrator, or ‘author’ of The Go- Between.” For

Ingersoll, the “author” or “narrator” of Atonement also “dissembles an innocence that

imposes on its readers an ignorance, of fundamental truths that presumably even the

most brilliant readers would be unable to reason their way to”(248).

Within the theoretical framework of intertextuality, D'Angelo claims two new

literary predecessors of Atonement, including The Female Quixote by Charlotte

Lennox and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Emphasizing on the allusion--a

technique on which the meaning of the novel is grounded -- D’Angelo remarks that

“while The Female Quixote serves to underscore the imaginative power that texts

have upon their readers (as well as the potential dangers of misreading), Jacob’s
 Habibi 32

Room is a text in which narrative itself becomes the sole means for recovering the

dead”(89). These textual allusions, according to D’Angelo“ reflect Briony’s

development, but they also offer insight into McEwan’s stance on the reader’s role

within the text”(90).

The lists of various intertextual readings of McEwan’s Atonement can be

terminated by Mary Behrman’s informative article “The Waiting Game: Medieval

Allusions and the Lethal Nature of Passivity in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” though

there are other intertextual studies such as Finney’s work which refers to

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night , Richardson’s Clarissa (73) for instance. According to

Behrman, McEwan does not limit himself to just mining the works of his nineteenth

and twentieth century predecessors, he makes use of the literary production of the

Middle Ages.(453). As she argues, McEwan in Atonement refers to the medieval

characters found in “ Chaucer’s oeuvre and in Arthurian Romance, such as Trilous

and Criseyde, Griselda, and Tristan and Isolde”(453-453). Besides, Behrman points

to the allusions in which “McEwansubtly evokes King Arthur by having Briony, the

youngest member of the self-involved Tallis family, mimic the legendary Briton in

her desire to wait for a pre-dinner miracle”(454). Behrman finds fault with the critics

who consumed with the work’s status as a novel, look at the medieval narratives as

simply belonging to the “wrong genre” (545). The allusions to the medieval works, as

Behrman puts, which come to the fore by the end of Part One and continues through

Part Two during Robbie’s perilous retreat to Dunkirk, moves Atonement away from “

the world of the everyday—the concern, as Richard Bradford notes, of novels both

modernist and realist(4)—to shadowy recesses of romance, a landscape fit, as

Northrop Frye contends, for analysing an imperilled psyche and one integral to the

medieval narratives upon which McEwan relies (Frye 102)” (454-455). According to
 Habibi 33

Behrman, McEwan relies on the literature of the Middle Ages to develop one of the

dominant themes of the novel which is “the nature of writing” (455). Besides,

Behrman connects McEwan’s allusions to medieval characters and his use of Eliot’s

The Waste Land topos to “Arthurian romance” (455).

McEwan’s Solar also has been tested by the intertextual principles: an

investigation performed by Leo Robson. Beginning with the epigraph of Solar, which

is a quotation from John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Robson claims, “McEwan is

unable to adapt Updike's example to his customary purposes.” According to him,

“Updike is prissy, sunny and theological where he is pragmatic, apprehensive and

secular. McEwan's narrative strategy depends on a mixture of the essential and the

extraneous, with a couple of details assuming an unexpectedly decisive role. But

Updike worships detail for its own sake.” Later Robson argues that the novel contains

“a great deal of determined perversity. Usually so temperate in his prose habits, Mc-

Ewan exhibits a fondness for gimmickry of all kinds. There is bogus metaphor, lame

allusion (to Larkin, Donne and Greene), mock-heroic diction ("the diminutive ancient

kingdom across the ocean"), and idiomatic wordplay: ‘The physicist knew much

about light, but about forms of public expression in contemporary culture he was in

the dark’.” For Robson in Solar “irony generally takes the form of sarcasm. We read

about ‘Ronald Reagan's celebrated insight that ketchup was a vegetable’; Beard's

ignorant thoughts on the Bush-Gore election are described as ‘his informed opinion’.

So the prose in Solar is destroyed by McEwan's desire to be two things he isn't: John

Updike and funny.”

Reader-response is another branch of contemporary literary theory which is

applied on Atonement by D'Angelo. Referring to the relationship of the reader to the

text, she articulates that if Atonement is a novel concerned with the “making of fiction
 Habibi 34

[according to Finney],” it is also a novel concerned with the reading of fiction, as well

as the reading of experience” (89). For her, McEwan in Atonement is “against earlier

narrative models that were also concerned with the author-reader relationship,

specifically the 18th-century novel and the modernist novel” (89). “The adult Briony

has learned the value of reading, and she constructs a narrative that continually

reminds the reader of this crucial role” (89). She believes that McEwan in Atonement

“presents an implicit argument about the ethical responsibility for readers of

contemporary fiction. Readers hold the final power of interpretation, judgment, and

atonement,” (89) and this is who that grants or withholds the atonement that Briony

seeks. D’Angelo hypothesizes two roles of the reader within the text: “Readers must

participate in “solving” the crime at the heart of the novel, with McEwan directing

them toward particular practices that will produce “good” readers, and readers must

feel the impact of Briony’s transgressions. It is only through this final act, in which

readers are pushed toward empathy and feeling, that they may be positioned to grant

or withhold Briony’s atonement” (90)

The journey of postmodern understanding of McEwan’s select novels arrives

at Saturday, where Molly Clark Hillard in her article “‘When Desert Armies Stand

Ready to Fight’: Re-Reading McEwan’s Saturday and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach,”’

attempts to redefine postmodernism as “Neo-Victorian.”In fact she examines the

climactic scene in the novel in which the protagonist's pregnant poet daughter fends

off a home invasion by reciting Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." The focal point in

her study is to demonstrate that McEwan constructs not a nostalgic longing for a

Victorian past, but rather a moment of neo-Victorianism: one that turns to Victorian

reflections upon domestic and foreign politics, history, and the literary form in order

to make meaning in a contemporary literary or cultural text. The essay explores the
 Habibi 35

phenomenologies (and politics) of reading and re-reading, and works toward the idea

that certain acts of postmodernist re-reading lead to a kind of reflection on literary

influence that originates (at least for McEwan) with nineteenth-century literature.

McEwan's scene of the reading and rereading of “Dover Beach” in Saturday presents

the Arnold poem as an always already reread text — in the sense that it is both a text

that rereads itself (containing within the space of the poem oppositional readings of

the self and the community), and that it is a text that rereads other, prior texts.

Along with Hillard’s reading of Saturday, there is Joanna Kosmalska’s

analysis of the novel in the light of the paradigm of binary oppositions. As she argues

in her article “Dichotomous Images in Ian McEwan’s Saturday: in Pursuit of

Objective Balance,” “depiction of the reality in terms of binary oppositions

introduces, more or less successfully, objective balance to the narrative [of Saturday]”

(269). In fact, she attempts to conceptualize “objective balance” within the context of

the novel to connote “the narrator’s ability to describe the events that he witnesses or

even participates in with detachment, and his aptitude for detecting the ambiguities of

the outside world, being aware of his own biases and emotions. Consequently, the

moral judgment is left to readers” (269). In her mind, “Saturday sets out to depict the

contemporary world with its ambiguities and paradox. In the novel, like in a mirror

painting, every event, character and conflict is highlighted from diverse, often

contradictory, angles by the narrator’s extensive commentary, flashback and reference

to other books”(268). Moreover, for Kosmalska, McEwan’s dichotomous description

of the world “echoes Barthes’s binaries, not only in the duality itself, but also in the

fact that the juxtaposition of contradictory images constitutes a more complete

depiction of an event or a person” (269).

 Habibi 36

The last portion of this literature review is allocated to those major critical

works which have been exclusively dealt with assorted narrative studies on

McEwan’s novels including heterogeneous aspects of narrative such as self-

referentiality, metafictionality, unreliability, relativity or multiplicity. To begin with

the idea of “narrative self-consciousness,” Brain Finney’s reading on Atonement

sounds appropriate. Concentrating on the self-conscious use of narrative in the novel,

he decides to answer those critics who believe that the novel is “an essentially realist

novel that at the end inappropriately resorts to a modish self-referentiality” (69).

Finney treats the novel “as a work of fiction that is from beginning to end concerned

with the making of fiction” (69). Finney’s argument deals with the misreading of the

critics who treat Part One of the novel as a “strictly realist narration” (70). According

to Finney, “the literary self-consciousness about which these British reviewers

complain is present from the opening page of the novel and serves throughout the

book to undermine the classic realist mode of narration” (70). In other words, the

narrative self-consciousness is not limited to the chapter “London 1999”; it permeates

throughout the novel. He asserts that the text’s narrative structure actually supports

Briony’s final admission from the first page. Besides, Finney argues that McEwan

makes use of other narrative devices to alert his reader to the status of his text as a

literary artifact. For instance, there is his modulation of prose styles” (74) and he

comments of the syntactical structure of the three parts of the novel. Another point

which Finney brings to attention is “McEwan employs what Gérard Genette calls

“variable internal focalization” in Part One, that is, narrative where the focal character

changes” (74). Finally, Finney points to McEwan’s “attention to the constructed

nature of the narrative by employing parallel or symmetrical motifs” (75).

 Habibi 37

O'Hara in his PhD dissertation entitled Mimesis and the Imaginable Other:

Metafictional Narrative Ethics in the Novels of Ian McEwan takes up the idea of

narrative self-consciousness in Atonement and directs it toward the ethical issues.

Indeed, considering the metafictional aspect of Atonement, O’ Hara attempts to show

“how metafictional devices are sometimes used, not as a means of deconstructing the

language of realism, but in order to disclose and thereby reinforce the dialogical role

of mimesis.” According to his observation, “McEwan’s use of metafiction can,

ultimately, be seen as an extension of the same ethical explorations he has made at the

level of his plots”(iv).

The scrutiny of the various functions of self-conscious narrative in terms of

McEwan’s Black Dogs is performed by David Malcolm. Observing narration,

language, genre, narrative, and literary allusion, Malcolm attempts to show that Black

Dogs “vacillates, as does much of McEwan’s later fiction, between a conservatism, a

traditionality of technique which aims at transparency of the text and lack of any kind

of problematization, on one hand, and a technique which foregrounds text and draws

attention to the textual nature of what is before the reader, on the other” (141-142).

According to Malcolm, interweaving these contradictory elements “creates an

interesting dynamism in the text” (142). To reach this conclusion, Malcolm attempts

to highlight where Black Dogs stands in relation to McEwan’s earlier fiction including

The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers and The Child in Time) and remarks

that these novels “enhance the verisimilitude of the novel” while Black Dogs calls

“attention to the text itself and its linguistic substance” (137). Highlighting the “self-

conscious” aspect of the text, Malcolm argues, “the reader is never in this novel

allowed to forget that he/she is being told a story” (139). Indeed, he believes, “other

features also draw sharp attention to the novel as artifact and text. First, there are
 Habibi 38

frequent overt literary allusions in the text” (139). According to him, the second way

in which the text foregrounds its textuality, its status as a story, is “by simply being

such an obviously carefully assembled piece of craftsmanship on the part of the

implied author” (139-140).Third, “the novel advertises its own technique through a

constant and teasing building of suspense” (140). Finally he writes, “Fourth, in

common with some of McEwan’s other novels, Black Dogs is a novel of fragments

(carefully integrated, but still clearly fragments)” (140).

Multiplicity of narratives concerning events shared among a group of people--

the ballooning accident in Enduring Love-- is the theme which Randall wants to bring

home in his essay “‘I don’t want your story’: open and fixed narratives in Enduring

Love.” Referring to the novel as “a text defined by the construction and articulation of

narratives,” (56) Randall attempts to show the competing viewpoints and versions of

events. According to him, “these ‘distortions’ of narrative though are accepted as

essential ingredients and as necessary aspects to (sic) the ways in which the novel’s

characters speak of the world and achieve, or fail to achieve, some kind of self-

understanding”(57). The different viewpoints of the six men holding down the balloon

are the prototypes of individual attitudes both within and without, affecting a larger

group. Underlining the ballooning accident and restaurant scene and remarking

“different things to different people,” Randall examines the narratives of Joe, Jed,

Clarissa and Jean Logan on the incidents and highlights how heterogeneous their

narratives are since each of them gives importance to one aspect of those shared,

identical events. Finally, he says, “McEwan in fact unsettles any sense of a neat

binary opposition by showing how all narratives are open to alternative readings,

misreadings and amendments” (60)

 Habibi 39

Taxonomic categorization of various types of unreliability in McEwan’s

Enduring Love performed by Sean Matthews in his article “Seven types of

unreliability”is another interesting investigation in the field of narrative study vis-à-

vis McEwan’s fictional oeuvre.In an analogy to William Empson’s famous book

Seven Types of Ambiguity , Matthews dissects the novel based on seven types of

inconsistencies as well as unreliability and puts Joe’s narrative under acid test in

terms of “his knowledge, self-knowledge, veracity and self-delusion”(92). In fact,

Matthews illustrates the ways in which McEwan has constructed a deceptively

complex narrator who, far from revealing a case of authorial unreliability, might

himself be disturbed to the extent that he is the chief source of his unusual

problems”(92). Mathews’s categorization includes: (1) deliberate unreliability: Joe’s

falsehood and inconsistently; (2) discrepant unreliability: Joe’s withholding the

information and revealing later; (3) candid unreliability: referring to the many

occasions when Rose fails to notice, remember or understand events around Joe, a

fact to which he consistently draws attention;(4) controlling unreliability: indicating

fundamental characteristics of Rose’s organisation of the story, the extent to which he

manipulates both events and the narrative to his own ends; (5) uncanny unreliability:

elements of the narrative which ‘break frame’, constituting forces within the story

which disrupt or undermine its own plausibility; (6) authorial unreliability: the novel’s

appendix I which shift the responsibility from narrator to author and remind the reader

that It is a work of fiction by McEwan;(7) psychotic unreliability: the novel’s

appendix II which refers to Joe’s sanity.

1.4. Organization of the Study

To lay bare the existence of incredulity in manifold metanarratives embedded

in Ian McEwan’s later fiction, the thesis is structured into five chapters. The first
 Habibi 40

chapter is introductory in nature. It is subdivided into three parts: a) an overall

summary of McEwan’s oeuvre for the last twenty years, b) an exclusive thematic

review of the critical literatures written on those select novels—Enduring Love, Black

Dogs, Saturday, Amsterdam Atonement, Solar—and finally c) the general elaboration

of the theoretical framework adopted for this study.

The second chapter entitled “Metafiction and Narrative Unreliability” deals

with the manifestation of postmodern incredulity at the literary narrative and it covers

McEwan’s Atonement and Enduring Love. Accentuating the metafictional aspects of

Atonement in the first novel in this chapter and reading it as a postmodern novel pave

the way for representing how incredulity towards the tenets of the previous literary

movements, realism and modernism, gets gelled throughout the novel. Pinpointing the

narrator-author’s trespass of three demarcations including past/present narrative, first

person/third person narrator and history/fiction discipline, the argument is ushered

toward the significance of the narrator’s self-consciousness in terms of her own

narrative and the very act of fiction writing in the postmodern world. The closing

section of this argument is based on the hypothesis that in such a metafictional novel,

the more the narrator becomes self-conscious, the less her narrative is reliable.

The second part of this chapter deals with the speculation that essentially

man’s narrative is unreliable since it is rooted in his desire and the seriousness of this

issue is specially accentuated in the metafictional text of Ian McEwan’s Enduring

Love (1992). To bring home this hypothetical speculation, the argument begins with

the epistemological nature of narrative including its contribution to human life with

reference to the novel and the theories of narrative psychology. The argument is

followed by the elaboration of metafictional aspects of Enduring Love through

scrutinizing the eligibility of this novel in carrying the title of a postmodern novel.
 Habibi 41

Then, the issue of the unreliability of narrators in metafictional novels is argued and

the discussion proceeds with focusing on man’s desire as the origin of the

unreliability of his narratives. Finally, the affinity between narrative unreliability and

biology is elaborated through the Darwinian evolutionary theory and E. O. Wilson’s

theory of sociobiology which have been referred in Enduring Love

Chapter three of this research work entitled “Contesting History and Science

as Signs of Authority” centres around the idea that how McEwan’s novels contest the

authority and reliability of history and science in the contemporary era and among his

novels Black Dogs and Solar have been chosen. In the context of Black Dogs, the

emphasis is substantially on the unreliability of memory-oriented narrative in respect

of memoir writing and the framework of the study is the phenomenon of

“confabulation” that is a result of memory impairment and the confabulator in the

different way produces unreliable narrative: either by making up narratives with its

details to fill in the gaps in his memory or by falsifying his memory in the absence of

deceitfulness occurring in clear consciousness in association with amnesia. The

argument is comprised of several interconnected segments. Having explained the

memory-based narrative of Black Dogs in the introductory section of the discussion,

the initial part is concerned with the elaboration of “the reconstructive theory of

memory” and a certain type of memory error that is a ramification of the said

theoretical speculation on memory. The argument proceeds by underlining various

types of discrepancies between the major characters’ narratives which throw doubt on

the central incident of the novel and puts forward the assumption that the narrative of

those horrific black dogs can be a fabricated narrative or “confabulation” that is

reconstructed and consequently the entire narrative of the novel, because of those

inconstancies and contradictions, is confabulative. Disclosing the narrator-author’s

 Habibi 42

real intention behind his composition of a confabulative memoir, is the benefit of

composing a confabulative memoir for him and to some extent for the other two

major characters. The last portion of the argument is allocated to the relationship

between confabulation and postmodern metafiction vis-à-vis McEwan’s Black Dogs.

McEwan’s Solar is dissected in the second part of chapter three for portraying

incredulity toward the practicality of scientific summits conducted on disastrous

cosmic issue such as Global Warming, particularly when these congregations

challenge the utter selfishness of man as a capitalist homo-sapiens in the twenty-first

century. The select tool for this fictional dissection is Lyotard’s expression of

postmodern incredulity towards the speculative metanarrative. Indeed, science not

only provides the theme for Solar, it also supplies a pattern interwoven into the whole

process of the transference of the story from the author’s mind to the reader’s. Solar is

the novel in which the roles of the author, the characters, and even the reader are

actually parallel as they can be best illustrated based on the simple scientific fact of

synthesis: an approach that can be subsumed under ecocriticism. For its survival,

Solar relies on three types of synthesis: natural photosynthesis, artificial

photosynthesis and what this thesis would call accordingly “imagosynthesis.” To

comprehend the parallelism of these syntheses, the equilateral triangle which Powell

has assumed for Derrida’s concept of “dissemination” is introduced.

Solar’s triangular is a multilayer construction with natural photosynthesis at

the base, artificial photosynthesis at the upper layer, and imagosynthesis at the apex.

The base is the reign of the author since undoubtedly when selecting artificial

photosynthesis as the major concern of his fictional world he had the very natural

process of photosynthesis in mind as a model. The middle section belongs to the

characters as artificial photosynthesis is their primary mission. Finally the apex is

 Habibi 43

the area of readers’ role where through a critical reading similar to the natural

photosynthesis they determine a meaning from the text. In such reading the reader

goes through a personalized, pseudo-natural synthesis that this study refers to as

imagosynthesis. In sum, this approach in a broader sense compares the process of

creating, reading and comprehending a narrative fiction with photosynthesis in terms

of six metaphorical units.

The portrait of ethical and political disbelief in McEwan’s novels is the focal

point in the fourth chapter where the ramification of these types of postmodern

distrust is accented in Amsterdam and Saturday. As one of the recurrent themes in the

literature of the last half of the twentieth century, moral decadence is skilfully

interwoven at various levels of McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998). Having an eye on

Deleuze and Guattari’s taxonomy of four major types of multiplications based on the

actual root types in botany discussed in their book A Thousand Plateaus, this section

attempts to show that the dissemination of the moral turpitude in Amsterdam follows a

particular mode of multiplication. Instead of the patterns of pivotal taproot,

dichotomous root, fascicular root, moral decadence in this novel spreads wildly in

rhizomatic root. To substantiate this claim, the six principles of the rhizomatic

expansion (i.e. connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture,

cartography and decalcomania) are examined vis-à-vis Amsterdam: Distributed in a

rhizomatic pattern, immorality, for McEwan, is a critical issue in the British society

on the verge of the new millennium that should be dealt with immediately and

properly.

Laying bare simulacrum–oriented aspect of the western democracy in the

contemporary world within almost a single day--15 September 2003—is highlighted

in the ninth novel of McEwan, Saturday (2005). To substantiate this hypothesis, two
 Habibi 44

clusters of supports have been sought. The thematic one includes Lyotard’s definition

of postmodernism, especially his notion of incredulity towards metanarrative of

emancipation that is taken as the theoretical backbone to animadvert the

contemporary assumption of democracy. Dramatizing the terrorized and terrorizing

life of Henry Perowne, Saturday reveals the real blank face of democracy, the fact

that democracy in its postmodern veil has lost its traditional essence and has shrunk

into a hollow mask which is the simulacrum. The concluding section of this study

discusses t the ramification of this dominating “simulative democracy” as nothing but

hegemonic control, a phenomenon, which according to Baudrillard, begets terrorism.

The stylistic supports of the argument cover the notable contribution of Saturday’s

free, indirect discourse as well as simple-present tense narrative to the enquiry.

Indeed, the stylistic support is accompanied by one of Rene Magritte’s paintings that

serve as an illustration of McEwan’s narrative technique.

The fifth chapter of this study entitled Conclusion brings to account all the

findings and limitations together to reconsolidate the present research. Indeed, the

terminal chapter of this dissertation, which is an interwoven summary of the

investigations performed on the six select novels, is a final attempt to accentuate that

Ian McEwan in the light of his later novels is eligible to carry the label of a

postmodern novelist whose preoccupation has been more or less the various types of

incredulities operative in the contemporary world.

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 Habibi 45

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