Ian McEwan's Enduring Love in a secular age.(Critical essay)

Article from:Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 

Article date:March 22, 2009

Author:Walker, Maxine E.

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enduring love"There are always antecedent causes. A beginning is an artifice, and what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what follows"--Joe Rose in Enduring Love[1] "[Jed Parry is] dreamily vague on the specifics of doctrine ... a self-made affair, generally aligned to the culture of personal growth and fulfillment." (1) So says Joe Rose, free-lance science writer, about Jed Parry's religion in Ian McEwan's 1997 novel Enduring Love. Although Jed Parry is hopelessly embedded in his erotic fixation with Joe Rose, the quotation aptly describes how many see the contemporary state of religious belief. The encounter between Joe's scientific rationalism and Jed's highly individualistic Christianity seems to summarize the inevitable march of secularization. The novel's conflicts between pathology and rationality, between the theories of evolutionary psychology and Romantic intuitions about truth and beauty, between linear narration and postmodern fragmentation--all show the difficulties in finding adequate and sufficient causes for "enduring love."[2] Literary critic, Jonathan Greenberg c argues that McEwan's novel represents a series of interrelated conflicts between scientific, literary, and religious worldviews. Greenberg maintains that "despite its multifaceted critique of neo-Darwinism, Enduring Love does in fact hold out hope for a rapprochement between the sciences and the humanities. (2) This essay poses a similar kind of interdisciplinary critical analysis informed by Charles Taylor's monumental study, A Secular Age.Enduring Love will be interpreted and critiqued in light of Taylor's philosophical work on how persons live their moral/spiritual life with a certain moral/ spiritual shape in a particular time and place, a secular age.[3] Charles Taylor in A Secular Age identifies three ways in which persons inhabit a secularized society: "secularity" is viewed as the emptying of religion from autonomous social spheres," "the falling off of religious belief and practice," and

"articulating the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place. (3) Taylor adamantly explains that secularization is neither a total loss of faith nor a triumph of atheism; scientific understandings co-exist with a sense of the sacred or the transcendent in wide varieties of expressions. Throughout his lengthy, complex, and nuanced argument, Taylor focuses on the conditions of experience and search for the spiritual that emerge in new self-understandings and related practices. The stories of modernity that Taylor calls "subtraction stories" are rejected consistently because these accounts explain secularity as liberation from illusions, horizons, or limitations of knowledge to reveal "perennial features of human life" (Taylor 22).

[4] At first reading, the novel might work as a major subtraction story on the impossibility of objective knowledge, but if this is true we are left with pathological madness as an essential human trait. (4) A closer reading of the novel shows that the lived experiences and practices of the characters exemplify, to limited degrees, something beyond themselves, something within themselves that is strangely transcendent, even within an immanent frame. Taylor poses the issue this way; "instead of asking whether the source of fullness is seen/lived as within or without ... we could ask whether people recognize something beyond or transcendent in their lives" (Taylor 16).

[5] McEwan's novel is set in five major "public" spaces, i.e., where more than one character is involved: the meadow where the balloon accident occurs, Joe Rose and Clarissa Mellon's apartment, the widow Jean Logan's Oxford house, the restaurant where the shooting occurs, and the house where Joe buys his gun. In each space, a vestige of a higher world is present in some form of signal. The signal acknowledges, anticipates, and then frustrates the intrusion of something more than the signal itself.

[6] Taylor makes clear that a search for fullness characterizes all periods of human history. Whether in the pre-modern enchanted world with carnival and hierarchical order or in the following centuries of growing exclusive humanism and materialism, a sense of the extraordinary breaks through the ordinary and orients moral and spiritual life. (5) The striking difference is that the power to reach fullness in the pre-modern era requires reference to God, a vertical Transcendent, and for moderns, the power to arrive at fullness happens within an immanent and horizontal landscape.

[7] Thus the question, do the characters in the novel, in some way or another, find such "fullness"?Enduring love? Taylor also creates the opening for such an interpretative question: "[w]hat we need to do is to get a sense of the difference of

lived experience" (Taylor 8). Narrative calls attention to this "lived experience," and the novel becomes a significant way to see persons living in a particular time and place and making sense of their experience. (6) Paul Ricoeur puts it this way: [r]eflections on narrative manifests "the social dimension [sic] of human being in time" ... as well as disclosing the ethical orientation of human being in time toward the good.... Narrative embodies the same complex temporal structure as an actual self." (7)I. Reading the signals in an immanent framework:

[8] In the opening scene of the novel, Jed Rose and Clarissa Mellon are having a picnic in the Chilterns. Suddenly they notice a balloon with a young boy floating off alone despite the desperate attempts of the child's grandfather to hang on. The child seems certain to be electrocuted on the nearby high-voltage power lines. Joe and several others race towards the balloon and try to anchor it by hanging on to the ropes. Only one man, John Logan, continues to hold the ropes as the balloon soars upward; Logan falls to his death. Who first let go of the ropes is very uncertain. The child is safe, but Joe finds he has attracted the affections of Jed Parry, who suffers from de Clerambault's syndrome, a delusional belief that the object of his passion is in love with him. Jed obtains Joe's phone number and makes calls, stalks Joe outside his apartment, and sends Joe over thirty letters which combine ardent proclamations of love and equally fervent religious arguments.[9] The freak balloon accident that launches the plot of Enduring Love initiates a series of signals that are both repeated and modified throughout the novel's major episodes. As figures of speech, signals of experience may become either metaphors or metonymies. In metaphor, there is a conceptual mapping between the source and the target domain. Each belongs to two different experiential domains. (8) Metonymies also map conceptual entities between fields; however, in this figure of speech the vehicle (one conceptual entity) provides access to the target within the same sphere. Metaphors involve two conceptual domains; metonymies only one. (9)[10] These two kinds of cognitive processes, as experienced in the novel, identify how characters know their world, and these narrative forms of "lived experience" foreground Taylor's arguments on transcendence and immanence. From the outset, Taylor explains that transcendence (human-transcending spiritual reality) and immanence (sources of power found in Nature or in the inner depths of self, or both) existed in a kind of tension in societies prior to the Reformation (Taylor 9-11). Significantly, Taylor notes that during the post-Reformation era, the great disembedding had no room for these "ambivalent complementarities." Taylor clarifies "disembedding" in this way:

The compromise between the individuated religion of devotion or obedience or rationally understood virtue, on one hand, and the collective often cosmos-related rituals of whole societies, on the other, was broken, in favor of the former. Disenchantment, Reform, and personal religion went together (Taylor 146).

[11] In the novel, this "disembedding" occurs in the blocking of metaphors so the signals that come to Joe Rose point to an immanent domain. Throughout, there are intimations of higher times intruding, but these moments fade, and Joe sustains a sense of the contiguous on his own. Joe moves between "pinpricks" and "prisons." As first-person narrator, Joe says the story's beginning is a "pinprick on the time map." Joe and Clarissa's apartment is equally a "pinprick of warmth in the vastness" (McEwan 37) while simultaneously their apartment represents the "high-walled infinite prison of directed thought." (10)

[12] These incipient metaphors that might open Joe to an external transcendent ("vast" and "infinite") are not sustained. Unlike the fall of Satan and the angels as poetically portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost (an allusion made by Clarissa once she and Joe reflect on the accident in their apartment), the balloon in the meadow goes no higher nor falls no deeper than the persons involved in a kind of "mathematical grace" (McEwan 3). Only a buzzard sailing higher than the balloon can view the five tiny forms below silently running. When Jed Parry asks Joe Rose to kneel with him and pray after the accident, Joe responds nonchalantly: "[t]here's no one up there" (McEwan 29). What causes the fall is nothing other than ruthless gravity. The spatial relationships of these material signs that hint at something higher/vertical remain grounded on a horizontal plane. The phone becomes the sign of relationship whether plugged in or not, whether thirty-three messages are listened to or not, whether disruptive to Clarissa and Joe's lives or not. Noticing a spilt jar of marigolds placed at the site of a policeman's murder, Joe turns the jar upright; he hints at an enchanted world, and then he dispassionately returns to his books:

[On] such hopeful acts of propitiation, fending off mad, wild unpredictable forces, whole religions were founded, whole systems of thought unfurled.

Then I went back indoors to the reading room (McEwan 48).

[13] Another signal that ruffles (no pun intended, reader!) Joe Rose's equilibrium and Jed Parry's mad watchfulness is a curtain. The curtains become some kind of tremulous clue according to Jed Parry standing outside, but exactly what the clue is remains vague. That curtains might be metaphor or even symbol for something

abstract, even transcendent, Joe Rose cannot fully grasp it. He merely edges toward metaphor and backs away.

It was a quarter memory, a niggle, a faint connection rooted in a forgotten bout of reading, irrelevant to my purposes at the time but lodged in me like an enduring fragment of a childhood dream.... The key word was curtain [sic] ... (McEwan 95-96).[14] This mental "niggling" fades until he hears Parry shouting along the rainy street and suddenly two words--"signals" and "curtain"--mate to spawn an elementary syntax in Joe's thought current. These fragile associations have no connection with seeing through a glass darkly, or the rent Temple curtain, or Polonius behind the curtain, or the thin veil between madness and sanity, or the blind Oedipus who now can see: Joe's mind moves metonymically from curtains to his study, to the black boxes filled with clippings, to the hard disk drive that might "build a bridge between ... these two words" (McEwan 98). The bridge is not built because curtains remain curtains; widow Jean Logan's children wrap themselves playfully in the curtains, French psychiatrist de Clerambault identifies the pathology of a female Parisian stalker who believed George V was sending her coded love signals by the way he moved the curtain (McEwan 133). She lived her life in this delusion that curtains were something other than curtains.[15] Following the shooting in the restaurant when Joe realizes that Jed Parry may have contracted to kill him, Joe has a flash of insight about connections:

I was about to say something to her [Clarissa] when I got it, I understood completely, it came to me without effort, in that same neural flash of preverbal thought that comprehends relation and structure all at once, that knows the connection between things better than the things themselves (McEwan 186).

[16] Taylor refers to this kind of insight as noted in Heidegger's pre-ontology, "... the implicit, largely unfocussed background of this experience and search," (Taylor 3), i.e., Joe has momentarily glimpsed the complex web of interaction; he is a person entangled in everything going on. According to Joe, this inchoate awareness quickly "[shrinks] into one's core, shrinking so deeply that everything else ... appeared as though on the other side of a thick glass panel" (McEwan 193).

[17] In the North Downs house filled with a motley collection of "intellectuals " and where Joe buys his gun, the drug dealers' assorted moral and psychological deliberations break the "glassy continuum of [Joe's] selfhood" by throwing out statements as "[e]verything's connected ... it's a society ... basically holistic" (McEwan 215). Alongside the dealers' "negative equity," Joe finds a moral stance; he decides he is equally a "bad" person and declares, "suddenly I was set free"

(McEwan 216). Free to do what? Joe's reading of the signals just points to next accessible referent.

[18] When Joe returns to the meadow after visiting Logan's widow, he traverses the field noting where each part of the incident occurred. These remembered particulars are, he interprets, "my stations of the cross," places of pathological love and morbidity, a "failed extension into mental space" (McEwan 136, 137). The structure of the novel even moves metonymically as the final meadow scene gives way to a case study and then to the letter which itself leaves space for something else. These spatial relationships occurring in various scenes of the novel cluster material artifacts together so that the parts remain as such, and as Luc Ferry, French philosopher, notes about life in a secular age, "the meaning of meaning--the ultimate significance of all these particular meanings--is lacking." (11)II. "Living" carnival; "living" disembedded

[19] Early in the novel, as Joe tries to get Jed Parry's words on tape, Joe makes some striking observations about his nemesis' "prison of self-reference." Ironically, Joe explains that Parry's delusional state harks back to a kind of early enchanted world: He crouched in a cell of his own devising, teasing out meanings, imbuing nonexistent exchanges with their drama of hope or disappointment, always scrutinizing the physical world, its random placements and chaotic noise and colors, for the correlatives of his current emotional state--and always finding satisfaction. He illuminated the world with his feelings, and the world confirmed him at every turn his feelings took (McEwan 153).

[20] If Jed Parry's world is perpetual carnival manifested in a form of continual madness, then Joe Rose's world is rational, secular, disenchanted, disembedded. (12) Jed Parry's foray into his pre-axial world includes a merging of the material with the spiritual. The carnivalesque, according Mikhail Bakhtin, does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators; there is no life outside Carnival; the very idea embraces everyone; and in carnival time, the carnival laws of freedom become the special condition of everyone (Bakhtin 7-8). Jed makes little, if any, distinction between the material and the spirit world, nor does he make a clear distinction between himself and Joe Rose. Of course, the delusion lies in Jed's belief that all persons and things are living Carnival as well.

[21] Immediately after the balloon accident, Jed tells Joe that "'[s]omething passed between us up there on the hill, after he fell. It was pure energy, pure light?" ... The fact that you love me,' he continued, 'and that I love you is not important. It's just the means ... I know that Christ is within you ... and that [Christ] is you" (McEwan

70). Jed Parry's letters also continue this theme of the oneness of the material and the spiritual: there is a "pattern woven through the skein of God's sensuous creation unfolding in a scorching sense of touch" (McEwan 104). Jed is referring to the "glow" on leaves of the hedge that burns his fingers when he touches the same leaves that Joe has touched.[22] Taylor puts it this way: "in the enchanted world of our medieval ancestors for all that the God they worshipped transcended the world, they nevertheless also had to do with intra-cosmic, and they dealt with causal powers which were embedded in things: relics, sacred places and the like ... even the high gods are often identified with certain features of the world" (Taylor 150). Joe Rose says of Jed's religion: "God was undeniably 'within' rather than in his heaven, and believing in him therefore was a license to respond to the calls of feeling or intuition. ... Parry listened only to the inner voice of his private God" (McEwan 164). Without question, Parry's private God is not the socially-binding Transcendent Divine of ancient Carnival, nor even the "common action" of modern approximations of Carnival. Parry's solitude does not fuse into a powerful common feeling of togetherness with a vast group (Taylor 582). Joe Rose is his god.

[23] In Carnival landscape, certain acknowledged places become the omphalos, the axis mundi, the navel, sacred places where heaven meets earth. The balloon incident and his meeting Joe, the point of beginning, serves as the axis mundi for Jed Parry, but for Joe Rose, this cosmic axis is his narrative that might determine self-identity and thereby his innocence in the tragedy as well as any complicity in Jed's delusions. Joe Rose is his god.

[24] "Hanging a few feet above the Chilterns escarpment, our crew enacted morality's ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me" (McEwan 15). Is he innocent or not of letting go of the rope and causing the calamity? What was / is the right thing to do? Joe Rose the modern individual- in-the-world is constituted to search a moral imperative for himself. Taylor says that moral agents, freed from the ontological status of larger hierarchical orders, aim to secure mutual benefits of freedom, a reinterpretation of society and the self in horizontal rather than vertical terms (Taylor 171). This notion is essential to Taylor's definition of "secularization," i.e., the absence of a transcendental basis on which to legitimize self and society by something other than existing for itself. Not bound by a valorizing transcendental / vertical source for moral action, Joe Rose finds a norm, however unstable, for his action in his own unfolding narrative account of the balloon incident and embedded scientific narratives.

[25] Throughout the novel, Joe presents brief scientific accounts of how persons and their practices are grounded in a naturalistic framework. As research-

physicist-turned-popular-scientific writer for magazines, Joe offers scientific and rational explanations for responses and reactions, his as well as others. The Hubble telescope, the evolutionary development of a smile, the story of 19th century Phoebus Levine who dismissed the DNA molecule as relevant, the triumph of the Genome Project, de Clerambault's syndrome, dinosaurs, chaos theory, black holes, consciousness, evolutionary psychology, adaptability of creatures, "emotions that duck the higher reasoning process"--examples all--are embedded in Joe's personal narrative.

[26] These scientific explanations are essential for what Taylor might call "human flourishing," an ethic of beneficent order writ both large and small. Large, in the sense that a buffered self, (13) disengaged from a world anchored in enchantment, is a rational agent who can debunk the control of ignorance and the influence of the false.

The buffered self is the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces. More radically, these no longer impinge; they don't exist for him; whatever threat or other meaning they proffer doesn't 'get to' him (Taylor 135).

[27] The weaving in of these scientific bits is small in the sense that ordinary lives may know a rational truth about the world. Joe Rose says of himself:

People say I have a talent for clarity. I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, backtrackings, and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs. It's true, someone has to go between the researcher and the general public, giving the higher-order explanations that the average laboratory worker is too busy, or too cautious, to indulge (McEwan 79-80).

[28] That scientific explanations advanced against the claims of Christianity as the ages moved through the Reformation and the Enlightenment toward secularization, Taylor argues is a woefully inadequate subtraction narrative. A more adequate account, according to Taylor is as follows: "[w]hat this view reads out of the picture is the possibility that Western modernity might be powered by its own positive visions of the good, that is, by one constellation of such visions among others, rather than by the only viable set left after the old myths and legends have been exploded" (Taylor 571).

[29] Co-existing with Joe's scientific, rational explanations in the novel is Clarissa Mellon's academic passion for Romanticism. Clarissa, Joe's partner for eleven years, is a scholar on Keats (1795-1821), the 19th century poet who imaginatively pursues beauty as truth and truth as beauty. The couple's respective responses to

Jed Parry's intrusion in their lives largely result from the rational vs. the romantic. Clarissa notes early in the novel that neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and genetics are "rationalism gone berserk. 'It's a new fundamentalism'" (McEwan 74). Clarissa believes that "larger meaning is being lost" when a reason can be given for everything. Only "unfolding love" has meaning through time (McEwan 75).[30] Taylor notes that finding meaning to life in humanist terms within the individual and within nature for the romantics was a way to find fullness in the ordinary. Taylor calls this "expressive individualism" (Taylor 473). Rational order had divided reason and emotions, and poetic beauty "required the harmonious fusion" of the two. Keats's predisposition toward receptive intuition in his description of "negative capability" ('The concept of Negative Capability is the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.' describes resistance to a set of institutional arrangements or system of knowledge and categorization of the world and human experience. It explains the capacity of human beings to reject the totalizing constraints of a closed context, and to both experience phenomenon free from any epistemological bounds as well as to assert their own will and individuality upon the world. Used to critique those who sought to categorize all experience and phenomenon and turn it into a theory of knowledge. 

allows "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." (14) The lived experiences of Joe Rose and Clarissa Mellon, on the other hand, are not fused in some kind of harmonious blend of feeling and reason as the novel progresses. For example, Clarissa cannot understand that Joe's terror at Jed's presence may be a completely rational response. Joe describes Keats as a "genius no doubt, but an obscurantist too, who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder when the opposite was the case" (McEwan 75).

[31] A third-person narrator at this moment in Joe and Clarissa's gradually eroding relationship offers a bird's eye view much as the buzzard saw the balloon falling into the meadow below (McEwan 2). In this spatial relationship between narrator and the couple, the narrator's voice serves as another "internal transcendent" within the framework of the novel. (15)

The trouble with Joe's precise and careful mind is that it takes no account of its own emotional field. He seems unaware that his arguments are no more than ravings, they are an aberration and they have a cause. He is therefore vulnerable, but for now she [Clarissa] cannot make herself feel protective. Like her, [Joe] has reached the senseless core of Logan's tragedy, but he has reached it unaware. Whereas she wants to lie quietly in soapy hot water and reflect, he wants to set about altering his fate (McEwan 89).

[32] As the door slams and Joe leaves Clarissa in the apartment, the omniscient narrator fades away, and Joe, first person narrator, starts the mental niggling intuitions about signals once again. (16)

III. Violence and love[33] Undoubtedly, the violence that ensues in the novel's concluding chapters can be attributed to the paranoia, madness, and revenge that have been building between Joe and Jed. Interestingly, Taylor offers intriguing ideas about a secular age and eruptions of violence that cut across both believers and unbelievers. Violence is not a behaviour that can be easily relegated to sin and depravity as denoted in a Christian consciousness but may be viewed as human self-affirmation with its distorted forms. "[In this] complex interweaving, the moves towards God (a repudiation of our wild side) and the resistance to him are often hard to disentangle" (Taylor 657). Joe Rose might agree with Taylor's clarification that violence can be understood in biological, evolutionary processes "wired" into us (Taylor 657), or from another stance, Joe Rose might also agree that violence (his own of course) has a kind of numinous meaning. That is to say, aggression, however sufficiently explained by strictly evolutionary theories, may lead to something higher in one's life (a protest for human or environmental rights for example).

[34] In regards to Joe's decision to rescue Clarissa from the pathological Jed Parry, Taylor might note this as "moments of fusion in a common action/feeling, which both wrenches [Joe] out of the everyday, and seems to put [him] in touch with something exceptional, beyond [himself]" (Taylor 482). The discussion between Johnny Wells and Joe Rose as they drive to the drug dealer's home to buy the gun anticipates such a "moment of fusion." Joe's reaction to Johnny Well's report that these drug dealer/addict types are "intellectuals" who think they're Bertrand Russell is curious: Joe retorts that he hates them already (McEwan 206). Why is this allusion to philosopher Bertrand Russell illuminating?

[35] In Taylor's discussion of "providential deism," Taylor cites Bertrand Russell's idea of universal benevolence through disengagement, i.e., "there is an opening to the universal which is not based in some way on a connection to the transcendent." (17) Taylor notes there can be a confidence within that can be self-stabilizing even as the illusions give way in a disenchanted world, and Bertrand Russell was first to note the possibility of this new mode of moral life (Taylor 257). These alternative sources for moral life may be the charter of modern unbelief, according to Taylor, and the varieties of unbelieving positions today are still marked by this point of origin (Taylor 259).

[36] This idea of a mutual benefit and human good in a secular age that does not point to the Transcendent but still seeks harmony and unity echoes in Clarissa's final words to Joe about the way he treated Jed Parry:

He [Jed] brought out something in you. From day one you saw him as an opponent and you set about defeating him, and you--we--paid a high price. Perhaps if you had shared more with me, he might not have got to the stage he did. ...

You went your own way, you denied him everything, and that allowed his fantasies, and ultimately his hatred to flourish. ... You were right; you acted decisively and you're right to take pride in that. But what about the rest? (McEwan 235).

[37] The rest, so to speak, Joe, Clarissa, Jean Logan (John Logan's widow), the children Leo and Rachel, Professor James Reid and Bonnie Deedes (the lovers who were silent witnesses to the balloon accident) gather again for the novel's last episode in the meadow. The matter of forgiveness returns: Reid and Deedes ask for forgiveness for not coming forward sooner; Jean Logan seeks forgiveness for believing that her husband was having an affair. Joe Rose, however, claims he does not "know" about the rationality of forgiveness:

This breathless scrambling for forgiveness seemed to me almost mad, Mad Hatterish, here on the riverbank where Lewis Carroll, the dean of Christ Church, had once entertained the darling objects of his own obsessions. I caught Clarissa's eye and we exchanged a half-smile, and it was as if we were pitching our own requests for mutual forgiveness, or at least tolerance, in there with Jean's and Reid's frantic counterpoint. I shrugged as though to say that, like her in her letter, I just did not know (McEwan 247-48).

[38] The appendices in this postmodern novel, one that moves between narrative voices, epistolary and expository fragments, erotomania and rationality, poetry, passion, and paranoia, fiction and non-fiction, include a psychiatric case study on de Clerambault's syndrome and a final letter from Jed Parry written from his mental institution. Jed is still deeply in love with Joe, and the last line of his letter is the last line of the novel, "faith is joy!" (McEwan 262). Regardless that Joe believes "religion is shed, like an old skin, and we have moved into the sunlight of reason," Jed lives in a sense of fullness, a deeper meaning if you will, that can break out "in the light of a certain understanding of the place of the spiritual in [his] life" (Taylor 769-70). Such seems to be true for Jed even though disquietly he has made Joe into a religious idol.

[39] There is a kind of moral predicament and power in both of the novel's appendices that echoes what Charles Taylor argues throughout his work. Taylor's pervasive thesis as he works toward a definition of a secular age is that the rise of scientific facts and the power of materialism do not account completely for contemporary lack of belief nor do they explain the sustenance of ethical values and human flourishing (such as Joe Rose and the Logan children returning to a kind of innocence in the meadow and the suggestion of an adopted child in the future for Joe and Clarissa). Equally, Jed Parry who lives without creeds and traditional religious beliefs holds a spiritual vision that sustains him in his isolation and even madness.

[40] Taylor is not arguing for a superficial kind of complementarity of these two narrations, but he does wonder if they might be two sides of the same coin within the immanent framework. Each position can be challenged, questioned, chosen, yet neither one must remain a "closed world structure." (18) The struggle for either is never completely won or lost; nor is enduring love.Maxine E. Walker

Professor of Literature, Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, CA Affiliated Scholar, Religious Studies, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH

Notes

(1.) All Enduring Love references and quotations are from Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (New York: Anchor/Random House), 163.(2.) Jonathan Greenberg, "Why Can't Biologists read Poetry? Ian McEwan's Enduring Love," Twentieth Century Literature 53.2 (Summer 2007): 2.(3.) All A Secular Age references and quotations are from Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007)., 2-3.

(4.) As a telling comment on dilemmas with objectivity, Joe Rose says after the shooting scene in the restaurant: "Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves was always a doomed social strategy. ... There could be no private redemption in objectivity" (Taylor 196).

(5.) Charles Taylor takes an example of "experienced fullness, of joy," From Bede Griffiths' autobiography. Using Griffith's experiences of "fullness," Taylor identifies three varieties of such experiences: 1. A sense of the presence of God or some external force such as nature so we are deeply moved; 2. A sense of absence

and exile, even a negation of fullness; 3. A stable middle condition so there is regular contact with meaning in daily activities (Taylor 5-7).

Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian philosopher and literary critic, comments on the world of Carnival and its totality of fullness:

[Carnival] occasions 'built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated more or less, in which they lived during a given time of the year. If we fail to take into consideration this two-world condition, neither medieval cultural consciousness nor the culture of the Renaissance can be understood. To ignore or underestimate the laughing people of the Middle Ages also distorts the picture of European culture's historic development. (Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 6.

(6.) Unpublished handout, Susan Stephenson, Sarum College, UK, "Narrative, Identity, and Spirituality," 15 May 2008.

(7.) David E. Klemm, "Individuality: The Principle of Ricoeur's Mediating Philosophy and Its Bearing on Theology of Culture," in Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur, ed. David E. Klemm and William Schweiker (Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1993), 283.

Ricoeur says something similar in Time and Narrative, "Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence." (Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52.

(8.) Antonio Barcelona, "On the Plausibility of Claiming a Metonymic Motivation for Conceptual Metaphor," Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective, ed. Antonio Barcelona (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003) 32.

(9.) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 35-38.

(10.) Another example of metonymic contiguity, according to Joe Rose, is the moment when the balloon incident/narrative begins: "this pinprick is as notational as a point in Euclidean geometry" (McEwan 19).

(11.) Luc Ferry quoted in Taylor 677; Man Made God: The Meaning of Life, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 7.

(12.) Taylor defines the term "disembedded" as the "growth and entrenchment of a new self-understanding of our social existence, one which gave an unprecedented primacy to the individual" (146). "Disenchantment" is a part of Taylor's understanding of the "great disembedding"--promoted from the Reformation onward--located ordinary life in secular time.

(13.) Taylor defines "buffered self" as "the self which is aware of the possibility of disengagement. And disengagement is frequently carried out in relation to one's whole surroundings, natural and social" (42).

(14.) Letter to George and Tom Keats 27/12/1817. Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 193.

(15.) Taylor defines "internal transcendent" in the following way: "exclusive humanism tends towards a rejection of the aspiration to transcendence; and yet it has trouble setting it aside altogether.... [In] modern belief [there is] an analogous tension between human flourishing and the demands of God" (656).

(16.) See pp. 3-5 above. The impossibility of finding meaning in a signal also happens to Clarissa: "[Joe] you even left the drawer open so I'd know when I came in. It's a statement, a message from you to me, it's a signal. The trouble is, I don't know what it means" (141).

(17.) Taylor considers Russell's ideas, "even if we think that this appeal is insufficient, because it leaves something important out, we have to recognize that the development of this purely immanent sense of universal solidarity is an important achievement, a milestone in human history" (Taylor 255).

(18.) Taylor 589. "[W]hatever the equilibrium point which dominates in any milieu, it will always be fragile. Some will want to move further 'inward.' towards a more immanentist position, for all the reasons rehearsed earlier in this book; and some will find the present equilibrium confining, even stifling, and will want to move outward" (Taylor 770).

Why can't biologists read poetry? Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.(Critical essay)

Article from:Twentieth Century Literature 

Article date:

June 22, 2007 Author:

Greenberg, Jonathan More results for: 

enduring love novelSince the reinvention of social Darwinism as sociobiology in the 1970s, and particularly since the reinvention of sociobiology as evolutionary psychology in the 1990s, the deployment of Darwinian ideas and models has been steadily on the rise in a wide variety of academic fields--Brian Boyd offers a list that includes ethology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, anthropology, analytic philosophy, and psychology (2). (1) Yet literary study has been curiously reticent in engaging this intellectual trend. A recent review of the prominent journal of theory Critical Inquiry reveals that while Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud vie for position with Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault among the journal's most frequently footnoted thinkers, Darwin is, apparently, nowhere to be found (Stevens and Williams 217). To be sure, a small and determined group of scholars has attempted to ground the study of literature in evolutionary psychology, and others have investigated Darwin's impact on, and debts to, the literature and culture of his own era. (2) But literary criticism--in part because of its investments in historicizing and relativizing cultural norms, in part because of a healthy suspicion of the ways in which Darwin's name has been used to justify reactionary views on race, class, and gender--remains wary of the neo-Darwinian vogue, with its axiom, taken from entomologist Edward O. Wilson, that "the genes hold culture on a leash" (167).

Barbara Herrnstein Smith's recent discussions of human-animal relations, for example, are so trenchant in their attacks on the neo-Darwinist linguist Steven Pinker--for his reckless application of metaphors from the human realm to the animal, for his apparent disdain for literature and the arts--that her reader might fail to notice that she is, in fact, arguing for the recognition of neo-Darwinian insights about the permeability of the human-animal divide. Similarly, although Marjorie Garber challenges neo-Darwinists, most notably her Harvard colleague Wilson, for their reduction of human nature to "the level of the gene" (21), she does not dispute Wilson's arguments so much as simply dislike them. Rebuking Wilson for his relegation of the literary to a purely ornamental or decorative function, she points out that he quotes Iago's endorsement of "good name" as evidence for the evolutionary hazards of sexual infidelity but utterly neglects "Iago's position as the most arrant hypocrite in all of Shakespeare, [and] his own contempt for 'good

name' as compared to more material and vengeful rewards" (28). It may be accidental that a question of sexual jealousy underlies the example over which Wilson and Garber skirmish, but Garber's response to Wilson, and Smith's to Pinker, partake, I suggest, of a slightly different sort of jealousy, a possessiveness about the realm of the literary.

Thus in asking why biologists can't read poetry, I want to address both senses of the question--I want to ask not only why masterly scientists like Wilson prove to be clumsy and undergraduate-sounding when they talk about Shakespeare but also why literary critics like Garber and Smith (and myself) want them to be bad readers. Why can't biologists read poetry? At the same time, however, I pose the converse question: Why can't poets (or literary critics, or humanists) read science? What cultural strictures or habits of thought make us regard the invocation of Darwin's name--especially when it comes to explanations of culture--with suspicion? In answering these questions I do not propose to stake out a position on exactly how far Darwinian thinking can usefully be extended to the social sciences and humanities. My inquiry into both the new Darwinism and the resistance to it will remain largely within my own disciplinary territory--literary criticism. In short, I aim to offer less a Darwinian reading of culture than a cultural reading of Darwinism.

This reading will proceed through a detailed analysis of Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love--anovel that engages contemporary debates about neo-Darwinism by representing a series of interrelated conflicts between scientific, literary, and religious worldviews. The novel seeks not to pronounce authoritatively on the validity of neo-Darwinism but--as novels tend to do--to imagine human beings with conflicting temperaments and beliefs placed in situations of crisis. Through these crises, the novel investigates and tests the legitimacy of the characters' different worldviews. (3) The major themes of the novel are, moreover, important Darwinian themes, and thus what may initially look like mere disciplinary disputes between the "two cultures" play out in a range of surprising ways--as conflicts about sexual fidelity, childbearing, self-deception, and the power of narrative. (4)I maintain that the narrator's neo-Darwinist beliefs are taken quite seriously by the novel, and there is good reason to find in the novel an implicit endorsement of neo-Darwinism by the author himself. (5) However, these neo-Darwinist beliefs, even if held by McEwan the thinker, are complicated and at times even subverted in various ways by McEwan the novelist. In section 1 of this essay I aim to show how Enduring Love presents ideas and people, minds and bodies, values and facts as thoroughly bound up with one another and thus forces us to see the beliefs of

the novel's characters in the context of their interests. In section 2 I develop this point in three ways: (1) by showing how the noveloffers an implicit critique of the narrator's excessive rationalism, which divorces ideas from people; (2) by exploring how the narrator's beliefs are motivated by economic forces (among other interests), and how neo-Darwinism itself is represented as a phenomenon of the publishing market as much as of science; and (3) by examining the novel's attention to the problem of self-deception, which has parallels to the narrative problem of unreliability, and which reminds the reader that Darwin's own theory, seen here through Nietzsche's idiosyncratic reading of it, asserts the bodily origin of what appears as--but never fully attains the status of--the will to disinterested knowledge. Finally, in section 3, I turn to the novel's foregrounding of its own narrative structures and strategies and its implication that narrative and interpretation are inescapable. Both the novel's neo-Darwinian narrator and his primary antagonist, 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. Here the critique of neo-Darwinism emerges once again, if more subtly; the novel's illustration of the ways in which rational faculties can be controlled and directed by fantastic desires serves to undercut the triumphalist aspirations of the neo-Darwinist worldview. In concluding, I argue that, despite its multifaceted critique of neo-Darwinism, Enduring Love does in fact hold out hope for a rapprochement between the sciences and the humanities.The infant's smile

Enduring Love presents a troubled marriage of science and literature: Joe Rose, the narrator and a science journalist, is married--by common law only--to Clarissa Mellon, a Keats scholar. (6) Joe and Clarissa represent, fairly schematically, not only opposing disciplines but also opposing worldviews, even opposing principles: science and literature, reason and emotion, nature and culture. More specifically, they represent opposing attitudes toward Darwin, or at least toward the applicability of Darwin's thought to questions of human behavior and values. Joe has taken up the hobbyhorse of evolutionary psychology and sees the world through the eyes of a sociobiologist, offering Darwinian genealogies for phenomena as diverse as religious belief, amnesia, and the tonal intervals of names called out at Heathrow Airport. Clarissa, in contrast, has "taken against the whole project" (74) of neo-Darwinism, which she regards as "rationalism gone berserk," a "new fundamentalism" that offers "a reason for everything" (75). By staging a debate between Joe and Clarissa over neo-Darwinism, McEwan inserts in the novel, quite seamlessly, a kind of philosophical dialogue, a dialogue in which he can articulate two sides of a Darwinist/humanist debate without overtly

championing either. What seems beyond debate for McEwan, however, is that there is a conflict: science and literature are antagonists, and Darwinism somehow threatens the values of the literary critic.The details of this debate merit attention. An argument between Joe and Clarissa erupts when Joe invokes a neo-Darwinist explanation for an infant's smile:

The word from the human biologists bears Darwin out: the way we wear

our emotions on our faces is pretty much the same in all cultures,

and the infant smile is one social signal that is particularly easy

to isolate and study. [...] In Edward O. Wilson's cool phrase, it

"triggers a more abundant share of parental love and affection." (74) Not surprisingly, Clarissa the poetry scholar finds such thinking reductive:

Everything was being stripped down, she said, and in the process

some larger meaning was lost. What a zoologist had to say about a

baby's smile could be of no real interest. The truth of that smile

was in the eye and heart of the parent, and in the unfolding love that only had meaning through time. (75) Joe in turn dismisses Clarissa's position as a consequence of reading too much Keats, whom he calls "an obscurantist" (75) for fearing the rise of science--a fear most famously articulated in lines near the end of "Lamia": "Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine-- / Unweave a rainbow" (924). (7) Contra Keats, Joe asserts that philosophy does not and cannot unweave the rainbow:

If we value a baby's smile, why not contemplate its source? Are we

to say that all infants enjoy a secret joke? Or that God reaches

down and tickles them? Or, least implausibly, that they learn

smiling from their mothers? But, then, deaf-and-blind babies smile

too. That smile must be hard-wired and for good evolutionary

reasons. (75)

Yet Clarissa is not interested in the evolutionary argument: "Clarissa said I still did not understand her, she was talking about love" (75). Like Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Marjorie Garber, Clarissa argues not against the logic of Darwinism but against something more vague: the very way of seeing the world that makes such an explanation satisfactory. Neo-Darwinian discourse appears to make no room for a value--whether it is sensitivity to metaphor as it is for Smith, appreciation of literary irony as it is for Garber, or, in this case, simply love--that the humanist holds dear. (8)McEwan, it could be claimed, thus only succeeds in evading the central challenge of neo-Darwinism because he articulates objections to it without engaging it on its own scientific terms. By dramatizing the debate over Edward O. Wilson as a lovers' quarrel, he avoids choosing sides and instead merely gives voice to the different positions involved. Yet fiction of necessity claims the liberty to engage with ideas in a more open, fluid, and imaginative way than does philosophy. The questions that the Darwinist/humanist debate raises may prove more interesting to the novelist than any answer he could provide, and the hypothetical may offer more to a literary imagination than the actual. (McEwan's own comments lend some support to this stance: "I wrote the book in a spirit of investigation, rather than try to give a lot of answers to either how people should live or whether one could live a good life by scientific method" [Interview].) In fact, it is precisely because McEwan has created novelistic characters rather than the mere mouthpieces of a philosophical dialogue that his engagement with neo-Darwinism is distinguished from the kind of popular science journalism that Joe Rose writes. By setting particularized characters within a narrative framework, McEwan is able to suggest the necessary connection between the characters' intellectual positions and their emotional investments, to demonstrate that the philosophical clash matters primarily as a symptom of deeper temperamental or intrapsychic conflicts.

Whatever his commitment to neo-Darwinism, then, McEwan never loses sight of the fact that Joe and Clarissa are, within the fictional world of Enduring Love, not only people but also lovers, and that any disagreement between them will carry significant emotional freight. Most obviously, Clarissa's insistence that the "truth" of the infant's smile can only be found in a love that "unfold[s]" over a period of time suggests her belief in the existence of the "enduring love" of the novel's title. Somewhat less obviously, her insistence also implicitly questions whether Joe

shares this belief, and thus hints at a fundamental instability in their marriage. Clarissa's scholarly quest for some hypothetical last letters which she conjectures Keats to have written but never sent to Fanny Brawne similarly indicates such an underlying conflict. She believes these "lost" letters might articulate in a last burst of eloquence the doomed poet's enduring love, what Joe calls "a cry of undying love not touched by despair" (238); Joe suspects that his wife's fascination with the letters "ha[s] something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect" (7)--and thus with his own inability to express his love to her in a letter. Hence the significance of Joe's irrational ad hominem attack on the long-dead Keats and his attribution of Clarissa's anti-Darwinist position to her immersion in her literary studies, which suggest a covert resentment of Clarissa's work. Joe has joked about Clarissa's obsession with Keats, describing her as "in love with another man" (8), but his levity cannot quite conceal a sexual jealousy latent in the relationship--a jealousy provoked by the ghostly Keats. Hence also Joe's birthday gift to Clarissa, late in the novel, of a rare edition of Keats's poetry; Joe in this instance enlists Keats to articulate what he himself cannot. The value of the literary in this novel then seems to be that it offers access to love. If Joe, who knows "little about Keats or his poetry" (7), seems jealous of Keats, or desirous of his help, it is because the poet, even speaking from beyond the grave, can do what the scientist cannot. The poet can do more than merely describe love: he can enact it, call it into being. Joe is jealous, one might say, of literature itself.The fact that the philosophical differences between Joe and Clarissa betray deeper emotional struggles between them is not lost on Joe. Joe the narrator, who is sometimes more perspicacious than Joe the character, identifies a personal conflict underlying the whole debate about the infant's smile: "We had had this conversation in different forms on many occasions. What we were really talking about this time was the absence of babies from our lives" (75). Joe's casual insertion of "really" betrays a hermeneutic approach to human motivation that is subtly psychoanalytic, or at any rate less mechanistic, than the often formulaic evolutionary psychology that the reader has gotten used to hearing from him. (9) He recognizes that his and Clarissa's philosophical positions might result less from logic than from unspoken, even unconscious, motives. And to be sure, the desire for children does prove a crucial subtext in the novel, as befits a book so preoccupied with Darwinian imperatives. For the novel intimates that the inability of Joe and Clarissa to reproduce poses a threat to the endurance of their love. Such a view would conform to a fairly widespread neo-Darwinist view of marriage and heterosexual love, a view that sees monogamy primarily as a mechanism for ensuring the paternal care of offspring. The journalist Robert Wright, for example, offers this description oflove: "The genetic payoff of having two parents devoted to

a child's welfare is the reason men and women can fall into swoons over one another, including swoons of great duration" (59). That McEwan, who cites Wright's book in his acknowledgments, should echo the last word of this description in his own title may be coincidental, but it suggests that the novelist shares the journalist's conviction about the importance of the questions raised by a Darwinian account of love.Children after all play a crucial role in the novel. At the outset, Clarissa appears to have comfortably adapted to the lack of children of her own with an almost saintly generosity toward "[n]ephews, nieces, godchildren, the children of neighbors and old friends" (34). But the death of a man named John Logan in the effort to save a child's life has (Joe believes) awakened feelings of loss in Clarissa for the children she has been unable to conceive, as she sees in Logan "a man prepared to die to prevent the kind of loss she felt herself to have sustained" (35). Logan's own children function in the story as surrogate offspring for Joe: his first encounter with them reminds him of the value of his and Clarissa's mutual but endangered love, and they reappear in the final chapter of his narrative as wide-eyed disciples dazzled by the wonder of science that Joe shares with them. (10) Indeed this final encounter not only suggests that science might help one appreciate the aesthetic (rather than destroying it) but also hints that Joe is overcoming the "uneasiness" (127) he confesses to feeling in the presence of children. The final chapter, in other words, discloses, albeit hesitantly, an increased desire on Joe's part to become a father. (The reader learns of the fulfillment of this desire, significantly, only through the novel's first appendix--a point to which I will return.) In sum, the subtext of the Darwin debate between Joe and Clarissa proves to be the unanswered question of whether their love, like Keats's for Fanny Brawne, can endure without the immediate Darwinian motive of shared offspring who perpetuate a genetic line. (Keats died childless.) The debate over neo-Darwinism may mask a deeper and more particular interpersonal conflict, but that conflict in turn hinges on questions of love, sex, and procreation central to neo-Darwinist theory.Rationalism gone berserk

To review: in Enduring Love the reader's effort to evaluate the theoretical claims of evolutionary psychology is complicated, even frustrated, by a novelistic form in which philosophical positions appear as symptoms of underlying emotional conflicts--emotional conflicts that, moreover, themselves are founded on questions essential to neo-Darwinism. George Levine claims that "[f]eeling and valuing are never far from objective and disinterested science, and feeling and valuing are inevitably tied closely to the culture in which the scientist, willy nilly, is immersed" (Darwin Loves You 169). If for "culture" we can comfortably substitute

"character" or "psychology," then Enduring Love seems to endorse this view. But such an endorsement is not a statement that neo-Darwinist claims are null and void; putatively disinterested views may be tied to feeling and valuing, but the novel itself suggests that such feelings and values originate in the same basic motives for survival and reproduction on which Darwin and his sociobiological successors put such great emphasis.If this recursivity were not enough trouble for a reader, McEwan further complicates the reader's task by undermining his narrator's reliability and his character's lucidity. (11) Enduring Love is saturated with the voice, character, and worldview of its narrator, Joe. In its very style it displays his meticulous memory for and attention to detail, his cool and often fastidious regulation of emotion, and (as noted) his careful interpolations of scientific explanations for narrative events. The result is a picture of events, but also a picture of Joe. (12) Initially, the narrative voice performs this characterizing function without undermining the reader's basic trust in the narrator; the novel's much-discussed and brilliantly rendered initial catastrophe provides a perfect opportunity to display how Joe's neo-Darwinist worldview not only presents and evaluates events but also characterizes Joe himself. An attempt to rescue a man and a child during a ballooning accident poses a stark moral question--when do you risk your life in the hope of saving another's?--and Joe's evolutionary psychology neatly frames the conflict between obligation to oneself and obligation to another. Yet at the same time his Darwinian perspective allows him to disburden the problem of its moral freight and restore to it some of the "comforting geometry" that belongs to "the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table" (3). Rather than try to assess moral credit or blame for the failure of the rescue (in which John Logan dies), Joe presents morality as a mere phenotypic manifestation of an evolved genetic program, "a deeper covenant, ancient and automatic, written in our nature" (15). In his account, all the would-be rescuers, faced with a crisis, are thrown back on a premoral instinct--or more precisely, a clash of instincts, between "cooperation," which Joe describes as "the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language" (15), and "selfishness," which "is also written on our hearts" (15) and which constitutes the most fundamental of Darwinian motives, survival.Thus, although Clarissa insists on characterizing Logan as a "good man" (34), Joe tends to see his sacrifice as merely the consequence of an eccentricity in genetic coding; Logan is a man "in whom the flame of altruism must have burned a little stronger" (16). In Joe's neo-Darwinist view, morality in any sense other than self-interest seems to disappear altogether: "Mostly, we are good when it makes sense" (15)--a claim that echoes Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson: "Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our

reproductive ends" (510). Thus while Joe acknowledges the "horrified shame" (16) and "the nausea of guilt" (35) that he felt after Logan's death, his account, in its clinical precision, leaves little room for examination of such feelings. Joe's Darwinism, which reduces human motives to an unconscious and biological calculus among inborn instincts, appears as avoidance or displacement of the emotional horror of Logan's death. At this point, whether or not one considers Joe fully unreliable as a narrator, we see that he--both in the past as a character and in the present as a narrator--tends to divorce ideas from people, to theorize what Levine calls a "split between the intellectual and the affective" (Darwin Loves You 34). Yet this split is precisely what Enduring Love, as a work of imaginative fiction and psychological realism, will not--indeed cannot--posit, its very mode being to situate its intellectual conflicts within psychological contexts.If such extreme scientism initially makes a reader suspicious of Joe's judgments, it is only as the novelprogresses that Joe displays the quality by which Clarissa describes the discourse of evolutionary psychology itself: "rationalism gone berserk" (74). As the crises in Joe's life mount--he is convinced that one of the other rescuers, a Christian homosexual named Jed Parry, is stalking him, and that Parry suffers from a mental illness called de Clerambault's syndrome--he appears, both to those in the text and those reading it, increasingly irrational. For example, when frustrated by the inadequate science collection in the London Library, Joe thinks:

The science collection here was laughable. The assumption appeared

to be that the world could be sufficiently understood through

fictions, histories, and biographies. Did the scientific illiterates

who ran this place, and who dared call themselves educated people,

really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual

achievement of our civilization? (45-46)

Joe, despite his occasional allusions to Wagner, Meredith, and Chesterton, here reveals himself as the philistine that the literary critic might secretly believe all scientists to be; his little learning, like Edward O. Wilson's quotation from Othello, is purely ornamental. If, following Wayne Booth, we understand unreliability as a narrator's divergence from the "norms of the work" or "the implied author's norms" (158), then this passage might seem to be a smoking gun, clear evidence that

McEwan (the "implied" McEwan) is critical of Joe's worldview. Novelists who don't have much regard for literature are rare, and the reader of this passage is likely to assume that Joe's judgment on the value of literature is at odds with that of his creator. As Timothy Bewes remarks: "This, after all, is an imaginative work of fiction; the text therefore colludes with Clarissa, the literary scholar, over Joe from the outset" (431; Bewes's italics). And once Joe has taken such a dubious position on the value of literature, the reader will naturally suspect his other judgments as well.

Joe's authority is further undermined by the presence of other characters' voices, in particular a letter from Parry. Although most readers, even the religiously or mystically inclined, will regard Parry's professions of his love for Joe and unquestioning faith in a benign and loving God as at worst lunatic and at best naive, his words at times still touch a chord. (13) He comments incisively on Joe's professional work, which, he claims, never doubts itself for a moment:

You're there with up-to-the-minute truth on bacteria and particles

and agriculture and Saturn's rings and musical harmony and risk

theory and bird migration. [...] It's all shopping. You buy it all,

you're a cheerleader for it, an ad man hired to talk up other

people's stuff. In four years of journalism, not a word about the

real things, like love and faith. (147) Parry's critique of Joe echoes Clarissa's earlier comments about Joe's failure to understand love, but it also points out the degree to which Joe's journalism is driven less by a scientific pursuit of truth than by what Joe elsewhere calls a "standard [of] readability" (54)--that is, the imperatives of the publishing market.Representing Joe as nothing more than a middleman who "shop[s]" for "other people's" trendy ideas, "talk[s] [them] up," and then sells them to the consumer at a profit, Parry indicts not only Joe's belief in science but more specifically his career as a journalistic popularizer. As McEwan himself has noted, the genre of science writing in which Joe makes his living has become significant in the contemporary publishing market. (14) The volumes cited in McEwan's acknowledgments include texts by Edward O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Antonio Damasio, Robert Wright, and Walter Bodmer and Robert McKie--all written for an audience of nonspecialists, many of them in a frenzy of publishing surrounding the much-hyped human

genome project. Joe's narrative in fact often reads like McEwan's pitch-perfect imitation of the confident, pedantic tone that such books tend to adopt. Parry's critique, furthermore, finds validation in Joe's own account of his work:

A few years ago, science book editors could think of nothing but

chaos. Now they were banging their desks for every possible slant on

Neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and genetics. I wasn't

complaining--business was good. (74)

Even as he bemoans his academic failure, Joe concedes, "I've made a lot of money swinging spider-monkey-style on the tallest trees of the science fashion jungle" (80). Joe is, as Bewes notes, "himself already a commodified form of rationalism in its pure state" (431), a professional who turns ideas into best sellers. Parry's critique of Joe's neo-Darwinism, then, overlaps with the implicit critique rendered through the narrative voice; by exploring how the narrator's beliefs are motivated by economic forces and how neo-Darwinism itself is represented as a phenomenon as much of the publishing market as of science, McEwan once again contextualizes the abstract debate--here less in a psychological context than in an economic one, though the two are not in this case easily separated.

Joe not only derives immediate financial benefit from marketing neo-Darwinist ideas, he also derives an important secondary benefit: like the primary readership of this genre, and like McEwan himself, Joe Rose is a wealthy white man--a member of precisely that group which has the most to gain (or preserve) by the neo-Darwinist tendency to ratify existing social advantages as "natural." As Louis Menand has written in a critique of neo-Darwinism, "the sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them" (96). Menand continues: "In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired." (15) Such a critique, it should be emphasized, does not reject scientific knowledge but rather calls attention to the potential for biases and blindnesses that render it less disinterested than it purports to be. Our sciences can (and do) serve our own interests, Menand suggests, and he notes that while the biases of scientific discourse may be obvious when we consider a foreign sociopolitical milieu--the Soviet Union, apartheidera South Africa--they are likely to be less obvious when we regard a contemporary Western democracy.

But to give the screw one more turn, this very obliviousness to the ways in which our beliefs are entangled with our interests is, ironically, a favorite theme of neo-Darwinism. Joe explains the concept of "self-persuasion," which, he says, is "much loved by evolutionary psychologists":

It was pure armchair science, and it went like this: if you had

lived in a group, as humans have always done, persuading others of

your own needs and interests would be fundamental to your well-

being. Sometimes you had to use cunning. Clearly you would be at

your most convincing if you persuaded yourself first and did not

even have to pretend to believe what you were saying. The kind of

self-deluding individuals who tended to do this flourished, as did

their genes. So it was we squabbled and scrapped, for our unique

intelligence was always at the service of our special pleading and

selective blindness to the weakness of our case. (112)

Joe's explanation of self-deception is an evolutionary account of narrative unreliability itself, and such an account may be taken as a not-so-subtle way of suggesting that Joe himself is unconsciously at the mercy of his own interests. Joe returns to the evolutionary value of self-persuasion later in the novel, after what he believes was an attempt on his life by Parry: "We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too" (196). This recognition does not change Joe's firm belief that Parry's intentions are murderous, but he does concede to himself that "Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy." (16) Indeed, at this moment, Joe the narrator realizes fully the theoretical basis for the excessive trust that his earlier self placed in his own account of the attempted killing, but Joe the character is too entrenched in his own need to prove Parry's murderous aims to concede that his account might be mistaken.Curiously, whether he knows it or not, Joe here echoes the philosopher whom Daniel Dennett calls "the second great sociobiologist [after Hobbes]" (461),

Friedrich Nietzsche. Though Nietzsche did not read Darwin himself, he was familiar with Darwinian theory and was, as Dennett notes, a pointed critic of Herbert Spencer's interpretation of it. On the Genealogy of Morals, which describes a sociocultural "evolution" of Christian morality from a premoral state, begins with the identification of a paradox: "We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge [...] we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves" (15). The will to knowledge, ironically, impairs self-knowledge and promotes self-deception.

In Nietzsche's evolutionary account, our instrument for acquiring knowledge, the intellect, did not develop as a means of seeking the truth; instead, from its beginnings it has been--to use Joe's own nicely Nietzschean formulation--"always at the service of our special pleading and selective blindness." In "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" Nietzsche describes the evolution of the intellect and its utility as a tool for cunning in plainly Darwinian language:

The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual,

unfolds its principal powers in simulation; for this is the means by

which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since

they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with

horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation

reaches its peak: here deception, flattery, lying and cheating,

talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being

masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and

before oneself--in short, the constant fluttering around the single

flame of vanity, is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing

is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth

could make its appearance among men. (43)

For Nietzsche, if one begins with the fact of the animal's desire for self-preservation, the real problem is not how to account for cunning or deception--that much is almost self-evident, for "simulation" (Verstellung, perhaps better translated as "dissimulation") (17) is the primary function of the intellect, which is itself an evolutionary adaptation on the part of a physically disadvantaged species. The real problem, rather, is how to account for the intellect's desire to seek the truth in the first place, "how an honest and pure drive for truth could make its appearance among men." Joe reaches almost exactly the same insight, though with a radically different value judgment; for him, the servitude of the intellect to the instincts is precisely "why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture" (196). To attempt disinterested knowledge is to overcome a deeply inbred penchant for self-interest and self-deception. But whereas Joe sees such striving as heroic, Nietzsche sees it as merely continued self-delusion. Nietzsche, in sum, invokes evolution not to argue for the supremacy of the human being as a creature more advanced than others (that is, "evolved" in a teleological, non-Darwinian sense), but on the contrary to indict what we could, with only slight anachronism, call the narcissism of the intellect. The intellect so values itself that it forgets its necessary service to the bodily interests that produced it in the first place. As he writes in On the Genealogy of Morals (again using a metaphor from biology): "[O]ur ideas, our values, our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts, grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit" (16).

Nietzsche's reading of Darwin, by asserting the bodily origin of what appears as--but never fully attains the status of--disinterested knowledge, thus points up a paradox in contemporary neo-Darwinism, or at least in Joe's variety of it: in its very rationalism it forgets its corporeal origins, corporeal origins that are of course essential to any evolutionary, materialist account. The novel's attention to the question of self-deception, and to that of the reliability of narrative, perception, and memory, implies the very connection on which Nietzsche insists: between "our ideas [and] our values" and the entire organism.Such a connection is of course the point with which I began--that McEwan, as a novelist, consistently presents his characters' intellectual positions as merely the fruit (Mellon?) or flower (Rose?) of their entire organic, psychological, physiological selves, including their unconscious interests. Joe's advocacy of empiricist investigation and rational inquiry, his "honest and pure drive for truth," then, is perfectly valid--except that it fails to recognize the ruses of reason itself. As Clarissa notes, Joe seems unable to apply to himself "those powers of rational analysis [he] take[s] such pride in" (235). McEwan's novel, in short, offers a Nietzschean critique of the intellect, which, while deriving from Darwinism, trains

its attention on precisely that oxymoronic phenomenon which Clarissa decries in her attack on sociobiology: "rationalism gone berserk." Such excessive rationalism, an intellectual "new fundamentalism" or dogmatism, is an intellectualism that has forgotten its origins in the instincts and, believing itself disinterested, transmutes into a kind of blindness or even madness. Out of Joe's rational, neo-Darwinist account of self-deception emerges the very grounds for suspecting Joe's rational neo-Darwinism. Indeed what emerges is something like what Levine, in another context, calls a "critique of triumphant rationalism" (Darwin Loves You 101)--with the critique leveled as much at the triumphalism as the rationalism.The attractions of narrative

Joe's genealogical account of unreliability thus undercuts the very authority of his own intellectual position like a snake eating its own tail, and this circularity suggests that its inclusion in the novel is of paramount importance on a thematic level. In addition to this thematic reason for the digression, however, there is an immediate narrative reason--Joe has just searched, in paranoid fashion, through Clarissa's desk, seeking evidence of infidelity. Jealous because Clarissa has failed to sympathize with his concern about Parry's attention, spurred by the Iago of his own fantasy, Joe imagines Clarissa to be in love with another man--only now he envisages his sexual rival not as the long-dead Keats but rather, in Joe's heated phrase, as "Some hot little bearded fuck-goat of a postgraduate" (114). Far from being feminized (either as Clarissa herself or as the frail, dying Keats from whom there is little to fear), the literary is now figured as a threatening and emasculating rival.Ironically, Joe represents his descent into paranoia as a descent into the literary--for in order to decode the hidden signs and symbols of Parry's veiled threats, Joe realizes, he needs a critic of Clarissa's talents:

I was attempting to compile a dossier of threats, and while there

were no single obvious examples, there were allusions and obvious

disjunctures whose cumulative effect would not be lost on the mind

of a policeman. It needed the skills of a literary critic like

Clarissa to read between the lines of protesting love, but I knew that she would not help me. (162) No longer disdaining the value of literary interpretation, Joe now believes that the tortured overreadings of the humanist can save him when his clear-eyed

empiricism leaves him in the lurch. Once again, less conscious motives are plainly visible: Joe desires Clarissa herself, her love as much as her skills in reading, and his acknowledgment of the value of her professional work becomes a displaced lament for the loss of her love. But Joe, reading Parry's love letters, also needs the ability to make meaning out of incomplete or riddling texts, to supply narrative coherence over and above the empiricist gathering of data.Thus it is that Enduring Love, for all Joe's discussion of science, contemplates, as Childs says, "the stories people tell in order to make sense of the world" (110) and even suggests, at its conclusion, "a common ground for fiction and science in their joint reliance on narrative" (116). But while science surely relies on narrative just as literature does, Joe is generally suspicious of what he calls "the power and attractions of narrative" (44), particularly in science. In a magazine article he is writing, Joe links the use of narrative in science to "the nineteenth-century culture of the amateur" (51) and the Victorian novel; as modernism rose in the arts, he argues, so science became the domain of experts and dispensed with storytelling in favor of "hard-edged theories" (52). Yet he soon recognizes that his own article is also a "narrative in itself"--and furthermore, a "tired one" (51), one in which he does not even believe, and which he eventually discards because "it wasn't science. It was journalism" (54). Again Joe's own amateurism, his role as a writer rather than a scientist proper, troubles him. Even the way he describes his own marketable skills betrays a certain disdain for the construction of narrative: "People say I have a talent for clarity. I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, backtrackings, and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs" (79). (18)Joe explains that he regards "the power and attractions of narrative" warily because they cloud scientific judgment. And while the precise role that narrative plays in scientific thought is far from simple, it is worth pointing out that one of the most frequent complaints made against neo-Darwinism is exactly this excessive dependence on narrative. The biologist H. Allen Orr writes that "a serious problem with evolutionary psychology" is that its

research program shows a curious tendency to invert itself. [...]

[T]he fact that we can conceive of an adaptive tale about why a

behavior should evolve becomes the chief reason for suspecting it's

genetic. [...] And so the inversion occurs: the evolutionary story

rings true; but evolution requires genes; therefore, it's genetic.

This move is so easy and so seductive that evolutionary

psychologists sometimes forget a hard truth: a Darwinian story is

not Mendelian evidence. A Darwinian story is a story. (18)

Orr's complaint is a version of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's longstanding critique of sociobiology for telling "adaptive stories" (581)--fictions that it then takes as facts. Orr's critique, like Joe's, places narrative in a secondary role to "evidence." Thus if Joe's professional crisis is a fear that he is somehow tainted by the literary, or by narrative, then his desire for Clarissa's help in decoding the threats from Parry is a belated recognition of a need for narrative that had been denied or repressed.

The entire novel in fact is saturated with references to story and narrative. Joe describes his initial rush toward the balloon as "racing into this story and its labyrinths" (1); he notes that retelling and shaping the account of Logan's death makes it less frightening (39); Jean Logan's belief in her husband's infidelity is "a narrative that only grief [...] could devise" (132); an anecdote about Keats's visit to Wordsworth in 1817 is said to be inaccurate yet valuable: "It isn't true but it tells the truth" (183). And so on. Moreover, despite Joe's neo-Darwinist attribution of countless phenomena to "human nature," he betrays an awareness of the way in which narratives, including his own, are shaped by the cliches of popular culture. During the initial, failed rescue, Joe likens his situation to a cartoon twice (3, 16), to a soap opera (23), and to a dream in which the language of his thoughts scrolls "across a screen" (21). At another moment, he tries to resist Hollywood formulas that "beguile us with happy endings" (231). Recounting a fight with Clarissa, he notes his own "exaggeratedly slow" manner of speaking and even questions his own Darwinism: "Where do we learn such tricks? Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies?" (93). This power of cultural narratives to shape the way in which we see the world is a problem that McEwan the novelist faces along with Joe Rose the narrator. Critics have noted, not always happily, McEwan's debt to pulp formulas: (19) Joe, like many endangered male heroes of Hollywood thrillers, finds (or believes) himself the only rational person in the universe, discounted by his wife, police officers, acquaintances, and professional contacts.Despite Joe the narrator's awareness of the seductions and distortions of narrative, Joe the character, by the middle of the novel, is narrativizing everything; every event in his world is assimilated to the story of Jed Parry, the sufferer of de

Clerambault's syndrome. Just as the pre-Darwinian Jed sees the signs of God's love and presence everywhere in the world, so the ultra-Darwinian Joe sees everywhere the signs of Jed's love and presence. Overreading in this sense has been seen as a sign of madness in the novel since Don Quixote. As Foucault writes in his famous pages on Cervantes, Quixote's "whole journey is a quest for similitudes: the slightest analogies are pressed into service as dormant signs" (47). Thus in modern times "the madman fulfils the function of homosemanticism: he groups all signs together and leads them with a resemblance that never ceases to proliferate" (49; Foucault's italics). Just as Cervantes's Duke and Duchess, seeking entertainment, are pulled into Don Quixote's lunatic fantasies, so Joe becomes mad by mimicking the madness of his pursuer, stalking his own stalker; in order to bait Parry into making a violent threat that will give Joe grounds to involve the police, Joe goes so far as to speak Parry's imagined secret language, leaving coded "signals" for him in the rain-slicked hedges. Joe's "rational" attempts to protect himself thus come to mirror Jed's irrational, religious belief in Joe's love. Clarissa even notes, "His writing's rather like yours" (108). Such madness corrodes the reader's belief in Joe's reliability not only on an evaluative level but also in his presentation and interpretation of fundamental narrative facts. Clarissa hints that Joe might have "invented" Parry (90, 93), and Joe himself feels of his elusive stalker, "It was almost as if he didn't exist" (158). The fact that Joe the narrator occasionally does acknowledge his earlier self's emotional blindnesses only confounds the issue further. The reader, far from being able simply to write off Joe as "unreliable," is instead left without clear bearings on how to assess the events that he describes. (20)One of the novel's many narrative twists is that Joe, as paranoid as he seems, turns out to be perfectly correct about Parry's violent aims, and the first appendix provides a psychiatric case history of Jed Parry, confirming Joe's amateur but empiricist diagnosis of de Clerambault's syndrome. Although this confirmation can be read as an authorial endorsement of both Joe's judgments about Parry and his confidence in his scientific epistemology, it cannot resolve the novel's conflicts among worldviews: Joe proves to be reliable on a factual level, but any larger evaluation of events remains up for grabs. (21) After Parry is apprehended, Clarissa can still write to Joe: "I was completely wrong and I'm sorry, really sorry. [...] But what I was also trying to say last night was this: your being right is not a simple matter" (233). Despite what Joe scorns as Clarissa's "clammy emotional logic" (239), the novelcontinues to intimate some imprecise truth in her claim that Joe's reaction to the ballooning accident and the stalking was the source of the disintegration of their love.In other words, for Clarissa and (I would argue) for the novel as a whole, the factual vindication of Joe's triumphalist rationalism does nothing to negate the

significance of his paranoia. Lacan's famous axiom about the paranoid is wholly applicable here: even if the jealous husband is right about his wife's infidelity, such a fact in no way means that the husband is not paranoid. As Slavoj Zizek writes:

[E]ven if all the facts [the husband] quotes in support of his

jealousy are true, even if his wife really is sleeping around with

other men, this does not change one bit the fact that his jealousy

is a pathological, paranoid construction. (Sublime 48)

Such a counterintuitive thesis holds, according to Zizek, because "pathological jealously is not a matter of getting the facts false, but of the way these facts are integrated into the subject's libidinal economy" (Enjoy 220). For Lacan, in Zizek's words, it is not the facts but fantasy that "gives support to that which we call 'reality'" (Sublime 44). A perfect example of the way in which fantasy so operates is the apocryphal story, told at the fatal birthday lunch for Clarissa, about Keats's visit to, and rejection by, Wordsworth--a story that is said to "tell the truth" even though it isn't "true." Whereas the commonplace reading of this idea would be that literature extracts a "higher" truth than history--as Aristotle says, it tells of universal truths rather than particular ones (54)--Lacan's notion is exactly the opposite. For Lacan, the Keats story would be "apocryphal" even if it were true, because it meshes so neatly with the ideological needs of its audience. It confirms a reality that is in the first place structured by fantasy, by story.

In this sense, Joe's paranoid knowledge about Jed is wrong even though it is factually quite right--much as Clarissa suggests in her final letter. Such a Lacanian analysis of Joe's pathology, a pathology in which the facts will always confirm the symbolic fantasy structure, suggests de Clerambault's syndrome itself, the illness with which Jed is diagnosed. For in de Clerambault's cases, we learn, the obsession of the patient is completely invulnerable to any response he or she might receive from the object of the obsession. This invulnerability is what makes Jed's love, according to the case history, "a most lasting form of love" (250) and also what makes it so terrifying. As the case history puts it:

The fact that the object is already married is likely to be regarded

as irrelevant. His protestations of indifference or even hatred are

seen as paradoxical or contradictory; her conviction that he

"really" loves her remains fixed. (250)

Such an analysis conforms perfectly to Zizek's Lacanian understanding of ideology: "An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favor" (Sublime 49). Indeed, according to one historian of psychiatry, "Clerambault described erotomania as a representation of reality that though insane was 'logical'" (Roudinesco 25). Such an overlap between Lacan's thinking and de Clerambault's should not be a surprise: the thinker whom Lacan called his "only master in psychiatry" (Lacan 5n5; Roudinesco 25) was neither Freud nor Lacan's own analyst Rudolph Lowenstein but an early supervisor at the Paris Police Special Infirmary for the Insane, a mentor who proved enormously influential on Lacan's first theoretical work in paranoia and psychosis, a teacher who even fell out with Lacan over the similarity of their theoretical work--Gaetan de Clerambault. (22)

Because Lacan's theory of paranoia derives directly from de Clerambault's thinking about erotomania, Joe's "normal" Lacanian-style paranoia and Jed's de Clerambault's syndrome are related diagnoses, and it is hardly accidental that the two antagonists share so much. Clarissa after all calls Joe's neo-Darwinism a "new fundamentalism," suggesting a parallel to Jed's fundamentalism of the old, Christian variety. As Morrison points out, Parry is, at least in Clarissa's view, "the kind of phantom that only I [Joe] could have called up, a spirit of my dislocated, incomplete character" (McEwan, Enduring Love110)--in Morrison's words, an image of "the neurosis implicit in Joe's own consciousness" (260). (23) This is not to claim that Joe is every bit as mad as Jed, but to emphasize the continuity between the pathological love Jed feels for Joe and the "normal" love of Joe and Clarissa. One of the more unsettling suggestions of the novel is that love always courts pathology. "De Clerambault's syndrome was a dark, distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane" (137), Joe thinks, and the psychiatrists Paul Mullen and Michele Pathe quoted in appendix 1 confirm his judgment: "the pathological extensions of love not only touch upon but overlap with normal experience, and it is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology" (259). Thus appendix 2, in a final gothic flourish, offers the reader a last letter from an institutionalized Jed, a letter that Joe never sees. In this final intrusion of the epistolary on Joe's generally monological narrative, Jed's last, "lost" letter eerily parallels the (apocryphal?) lost letters of Keats so desperately

sought by Clarissa. Jed's is the letter that proves to be the "cry of undying love not touched by despair."Both the rational scientist and the insane religious man can equally become prisoners in their own symbolic constructions. This symmetry does not suggest that science is itself a faith (or any similar vulgarism), but it does imply a critique of neo-Darwinism by showing the ways in which rational faculties can be controlled and directed by fantastic desires. Lacan's point about paranoia, historically derived from de Clerambault's study of erotomania and one of the main topics of Enduring Love, is the priority of fantasy in structuring the way reality is understood. In this regard, the endurance of Jed's love serves to undermine (once again) the triumphalist aspirations of Joe's neo-Darwinist worldview.A happy marriage?

The end of the novel contains another twist as well: Joe and Clarissa's reunification and adoption of a child, a narrative resolution of which the reader learns in only the most oblique manner--buried in a subordinate clause that is buried in appendix 1, a dry, technical case history of Jed Parry, where Joe and Clarissa appear merely as initials: (24)

While in this case R and M were reconciled and later successfully

adopted a child, some victims [of de Clerambault patients] have had

to divorce or emigrate, and others have needed psychiatric treatment

because of the distress the patients have caused them. (25) (259)

The obliquely mentioned adoption suggests that despite the threats to it, Joe and Clarissa's love does indeed endure. The reunion and adoption, occurring outside Joe's narrative, stand as a subtle but unmistakable rebuke to the evolutionary psychology that Joe has been promulgating for the entirenovel: adoption entails a love uniquely free from immediate Darwinian motives. Joe and Clarissa take the chance on a parental love that offers no hope of ensuring the survival of their genes, wagering that they will be able to free themselves from the tyranny of their Darwinian inheritance--snapping the leash on which culture is held by the genes.In this last detail, Enduring Love holds out hope for a rapprochement between the disciplines. To return to the title question of this essay: biologists, it turns out, can't read poetry because (or, more charitably, when) they become triumphant rationalists, refusing to acknowledge the origins of their ideas in their interests--economic, psychological, or corporeal. (26) 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. And finally, adherents of both the neo-Darwinist and the religious worldview fail as readers when they become delusional Quixotean overreaders--whether de Clerambault's sufferers like Jed or mere garden-variety Lacanian paranoiacs like Joe--for whom the external world is effortlessly subsumed into a fantasy structure, a story, or a novel. If a happy marriage is to exist, McEwan's novel ultimately suggests, it must exist somewhere between these failures.Notes

1. As Robert Wright observes, most current-day academics applying Darwin's ideas to the social sciences prefer the label evolutionary psychology to sociobiology because of the right-wing political connotations that Wilson's sociobiology acquired during the 1970s. This is not to deny that "doctrinal differences" (Wright 394) exist between the two subschools. According to Joseph Carroll, "Evolutionary psychologists emphasize proximal mechanisms of adaptation" whereas "sociobiological thinkers [...] place a greater emphasis on the direct and immediate pursuit of reproductive advantage" (107); the newer school allows for a more flexible understanding of the mechanisms by which particular traits might lead to evolutionary advantage. With this in mind, I will favor the term evolutionary psychology, though not with exceptional rigor, since the doctrinal differences are relatively inconsequential for my argument. I should also distinguish between my uses of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. Darwin, famously unaware of Mendelian genetics, lacked a causal mechanism for the inheritance of characteristics; not until the synthesis of Darwin and Mendel in the early twentieth century did the language of evolution become spiraled around the language of genetics. In this essay, then, I will use neo-Darwinism to refer to the schools that have emerged over the last 30 years or so; Darwinism will refer to a broader invocation of Darwin's thought.

2. Among the major books in this field are Carroll, Dissanayake, and Storey. Special issues of Philosophy and Literature (25.2, Oct. 2001) and Poetics Today (23.1, Spring 2002) have have been published on the topic. Articles by Brian Boyd and Harold Fromm offer overviews. On Darwin and the Victorians the most lasting works are by Gillian Beer and George Levine (Darwin and the Novelists). Margot Norris and Paul Sheehan explore Darwin's impact on modernism.

3. Critics have noted and analyzed the conflicts among science, religion, and literature in EnduringLove, but they have paid relatively little attention to the novel's engagement with neo-Darwinism in particular. Timothy Bewes reads Enduring Love in the context of "philosophical honesty," asking whether its

philosophical questions are genuinely engaged or decided in advance. Rhiannon Davies and Jago Morrison both read the novel as an attempt by the narrator to reassert his masculine identity as a subject in the face of multiple threats. Olga Cameron's Lacanian reading also sees the initial incident as a symbolic castration that unravels the narrator's identity and the rest of the narrative as an attempt to reconstitute that identity even as it reveals its dissolution. David Malcolm and Peter Childs offer more general thematic studies.4. McEwan has returned to these themes in his most recent novel Saturday, where he stages a similar conflict between literature and science and explores the links between mind and brain. The main character is a brain surgeon who repeatedly quotes from the final paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species ("there is grandeur in this view of life") but happens to be a philistine when it comes to literature, unable to find value in Anna Karenina; his daughter is a poet. The plot hinges on the recitation of Arnold's "Dover Beach," a poem whose emotional power alters the mind (and hence the brain) of a criminal character who, like Jed Parry, is pathological and violent.5. McEwan's comments in interviews suggest a strong sympathy for neo-Darwinism. See notes 14 and 20.

6. A brief summary: Joe Rose, the novel's narrator, is a middle-aged popular science writer married by common law to a Keats scholar named Clarissa Mellon, who cannot bear children as a result of a medical accident. During a picnic, Joe attempts to save a boy being borne away in a helium balloon by an unexpected gust, and in the rescue attempt--which results in the death of another would-be rescuer, John Logan--he meets a born-again Christian named Jed Parry, who becomes obsessed with Joe and stalks him, professing the undying quality of both his own love and God's love for the atheistic Joe. From this initial incident arise several plotlines: Joe's reciprocal obsession with his stalker, which makes his behavior appear increasingly desperate, irrational, and even paranoid; the resurgence of Joe's old doubts about the value of his work as a journalistic popularizer rather than an academic scientist; an awakening of Clarissa's deep grief for the loss of the phantom children she can never bear, and her growing impatience with Joe's inability to understand such feelings; and, resulting from these individual crises, a joint one--the disintegration of the love between Joe and Clarissa, alove that Joe repeatedly describes as exquisite and precious.7. Susan Wolfson cautions against decontextualizing these lines too hastily, since the rainbow can also suggest the illusoriness of the aesthetic. Denise Gigante points out that this view was widespread among the British romantics.

8. Levine, in Darwin Loves You, attempts to negotiate the conflict between recognizing the validity of an often disenchanting science and retaining the values of an enchanting humanism by attending to the affective qualities of Darwin's prose and the sense of wonder that he often found in nature. Contemporary neo-Darwinism often assumes a rhetoric of disenchantment, but Darwin's own writing retains a romantic enthusiasm for the natural world.

9. The relation of evolutionary psychology to psychoanalysis is ambivalent. Freud's interest in instinct, his view of the self as a battlefield of warring desires, and his recognition of the capacity of the conscious mind to deceive itself, all anticipate the views held by current-day neo-Darwinists. Yet neo-Darwinism seems often to disdain the inadequately scientific methods of Freud's research and speculations. Joe, despite his flashes of psychoanalytic insight, refers to psychoanalysis as "fabulation run riot" (53), dismisses the value of "professional listener[s]," calls "the talking cure" a "genteel fraud" (107), and, even when his marriage is on the brink of dissolution, suggests that "[t]oo much [is] made in pop psychology [...] of talking things through" (155).

10. Joe by the end of the novel is no longer so rationalistic that he can't find a mystical quasi divinity in particle physics. He describes the mystery of the electromagnetic force that holds together a water molecule as "a mysterious powerful force" (243); later in the chapter, another witness of the balloon accident says, "These things bind you together, you know" (247). Childs points out the obvious parallel to the force of love binding a couple together as well as the less obvious ambiguity of the metaphor: the triangular model of the water molecule could represent a child binding together parents or it might suggest a more violent love triangle involving the dangerous Jed Parry (116). The notion of finding wonder through science rather than by denying it is a major theme for both Levine (Darwin Loves You) and Adam Philips.11. The first-person form tends to encourage unreliability: first, because the knowledge possessed by a particularized, embodied human narrator has limits that a disembodied third-person narrator logically does not; and second, because the voice of a first-person narrator inevitably performs a characterizing function beyond the presentation of narrative data. Michal Glowinski (104) and Franz Stanzel (115) emphasize the logical differences between first- and third-person narrators; David Goldknopf (38-39) suggests that first-person narrators always have an implicit "confessional" motive; and Dan Shen discusses the characterizing function of unreliability. My use of the term unreliable deserves some explication. Felix Martinez-Bonati distinguishes between narrators' "unreliability as persons" and their "structural [un]reliability as narrators" (115), between unreliable

evaluation and unreliable presentation of narrative facts that constitute the fictional world in which the narrator exists. Joe's unreliability is largely of the first variety: to the extent that he (as a narrator) loses the reader's trust, it is generally through his judgments rather than his basic presentation of narrative data. But at times--as I will discuss--this evaluative unreliability slides into factual unreliability; the reader comes to suspect the fundamental narrative facts that he presents, a suspicion whose importance is by no means nullified when his version of the facts is ultimately validated. But if Joe's judgments as a narrator are sometimes unreliable, his judgments as a character are also sometimes questionable--and questioned, if indirectly, by his own (later) narrating self. Thus Joe's narrative may be aptly described in Dorrit Cohn's terms as "dissonant self-narration": "a lucid narrator turning back on a past self steeped in ignorance, confusion, and delusion" (145). Yet even here the problem is subtle and complex, for Joe as a narrator is rarely explicitly judgmental about his former self, and when Joe the character makes aberrant judgments, Joe the narrator often withholds his own qualification of them. In these instances the self-narration is more consonant than "dissonant," and a greater degree of explicit mental distance--more dissonance--between narrating Joe and narrated Joe would likely stabilize the reader's interpretation and generate more confidence in the judgments of the narrator. In this essay, where relevant, I distinguish Joe the narrator from Joe the character.

12. Malcolm emphasizes the characterizing function of Joe's language and worldview and discusses Joe's character at length (164-69). He calls Joe a "substantially reliable first-person narrator" (160) but concedes that "his rationalist, materialist approach to things can seem reductive" (170). Davies notes the self-consciousness with which Joe presents his narrative, particularly the opening scene, and though she does not use the term unreliable, she interprets this self-consciousness as a sign of a "masculine self-fashioning" (109) through which Joe writes himself as a hero, even if a failed one.

13. Davies concurs: "Whatever Parry's mental problems, his analysis of Joe seems astonishingly sane and very accurate" (118).

14. McEwan cites these works with unadulterated praise:

I think we've been very fortunate--we've had a golden age in science,

for 15 years. The number of highly literate scientists writing for an

intelligent lay public is extraordinary. There's a kind of science

writing that seems to bridge the gap between informing laymen but also

informing other sciences. To take an immediate example--Steven

Pinker's book on language certainly addresses not just lay people like

myself but other scientists outside his immediate field. Similarly, my

own particular intellectual hero is E. O. Wilson. He's a biologist. He

wrote The Diversity of Life, and that was just genius. The thing that

really interested me was the extent to which scientists are now

trespassing into other areas. (Interview)

15. The degree to which applying Darwin to the social sciences necessarily implies social Darwinism or laissez-faire economics has always been controversial, but a certain homology does exist between the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith and the blind "agency" of natural selection, a homology that can lead in both cases to the naturalistic fallacy--a slippage in both cases between the is and the ought.

16. In an argument nicely compatible with Joe's recognition of the impossibility of objectivity, Ellen Spolsky argues that the deconstructive view of language as necessarily ambiguous has a strong basis in evolutionary theory: language has acquired a near-optimal or "good enough" balance between vagueness and rigidity, either of which quality alone would make language an adaptation less effective in the struggle for survival.

17. My thanks to J. D. Minninger for his help with Nietzsche's German.

18. Most of the commentators discuss the the novel's self-consciousness about narrative. Morrison maintains that narrative functions as a "means of containment and control" (257) in Joe's attempt "to constitute and to defend his embattled masculinity" (255) but also concedes that "the instability and disjunction potentially implicit in narration are constantly foregrounded" (257). Davies similarly reads Joe's self-consciousness about his own narration as a sign of an underlying awareness of the fragility of his own masculine identity.19. James Wood, for example, dislikes the novel for its close adherence to the formula of a Hollywood thriller (qtd. in Childs 107).20. What further complicates any judgment on Joe's reliability are the extrafictional comments of the author. McEwan has described E. O. Wilson as "my

own particular intellectual hero" and acknowledged that while Joe's scorn for literature is meant to be "provocative," he shares Joe's belief that many humanists undervalue the sciences (Interview). Yet even if the extranovelistic McEwan actually endorses Joe's neo-Darwinist views, Joe might still be said to be unreliable. McEwan could be lying or joking or posturing; and his comments in interviews can support a range of interpretations. He has said, for example, "There is something about Clarissa's take on the world that Joe badly needs" (Interview); but also that he "wanted [...] to write a book somewhat in praise of rationality" (qtd. in Childs 109). One should also note that while Booth himself measures a narrator's reliability against "the implied author's norms" (158), he also takes pains not to equate the implied author with the actual author (71-76). One can thus, without regressing to New Critical orthodoxy, still invoke D. H. Lawrence's old injunction, "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale," and set out "to save the tale from the artist who created it" (2). McEwan might, in other words, be seen as a critic of neo-Darwinism in spite of himself--his novelist's instincts overcoming the intellectualism of the novel's philosophical content.21. Interestingly, readers who focus on the construction of Joe's masculinity (Davies, Morrison) tend to be suspicious of his Darwinism and his rationality, while others (Childs, Malcolm) incline to the judgment that the novel itself ultimately endorses his values.22. Cameron does not discuss this connection despite her detailed articulation of Lacanian theory. For biographical details of de Clerambault's influence on Lacan, see Roudinesco 22-25. Roudinesco writes of de Clerambault:

Despite his conservatism regarding theory, he agreed with Freud that

madness was close to truth, reason to unreason, and coherence to

delirium. Clerambault's influence was evident in Lacan's first

theoretical text, published in July 1931 [...] "Structures of

Paranoid Psychoses." (24)

23. The doubling of Joe and Jed also conforms to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's discussion of "male homosexual panic" in many respects. Sedgwick writes:

Because the paths of male entitlement, especially in the nineteenth

century, required certain intense male bonds that were not readily

distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and

ineradicable state of what I am calling male homosexual panic became

the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement. (185)

Men acquire a privileged social position only at the risk of straying from the homosocial to the homosexual, making the threat of identification as homosexual a threat to one's identity in a social sense. That one can never know whether one is in fact truly homosexual only increases the anxiety under which male power is exercised. Thus accumulates "a reservoir of potential for violence caused by the self-ignorance that this regime constitutively enforces" (186; Sedgwick's italics)--a reservoir that overflows at the end of Enduring Love. Joe and Jed's bond, forged in the masculine homosocial activity of a physical rescue, leads to a doubling whereby Joe is under increased anxiety to distinguish his heterosexual identity from Jed's homosexual one. Not coincidentally, then, does Enduring Loveborrow from the tradition of the gothic, "the literary genre in which homophobia found its most apt and ramified embodiment" (Sedgwick 186). Therefore when Clarissa hears Joe's first reports on Parry's phone calls and letters, she jokes, "A secret gay love affair with a Jesus freak! I can't wait to tell your science friends" (60) and asks whether the two men are getting married. While a traditional psychoanalytic reading would say that her joke expresses the unconscious truth of Joe's latent homosexual desire, a Sedgwickian reading would claim, with somewhat different emphasis, that Clarissa indicates the shifting terrain on which male homosocial relations must always be enacted.24. Like the news of Lolita's death that Nabokov hides in the fictional preface to his novel, here essential narrative information is deliberately concealed from the uncareful reader. McEwan apparently shares Nabokov's interest in word games too; as Nabokov planted anagrams of his own name in his novels, so the authors of appendix 1, Wenn and Camia, anagrammatically recombine to spell Ian McEwan. Other parallels abound between Lolita and Enduring Love, particularly between Humbert Humbert's relation to Quilty and Joe's to Parry: the temporary uncertainty about the reality of the narrator's persecution by his "double," the culmination of the conflict between the men in gun violence ostensibly in defense of a beloved woman, and the gothic stylings and homosexual panic described by Sedgwick (see note 23).25. Of the critics cited here, only Cameron and Childs seem to note the significance of the adoption.

26. This is a trait in neo-Darwinism that Levine critiques at length; he quotes William Connolly on the tendency of the rationalist/scientific worldview to "misrecognize itself and [...] to advance dismissive interpretations of any culture or ethical practice that engages the visceral register of being" (qtd. in Darwin Loves You 35).

Works cited

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Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Bewes, Timothy, "What Is 'Philosophical Honesty' in Postmodern Literature?" New Literary History 31 (2000): 421-34.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Boyd, Brian. "Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature." Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 1-30.

Cameron, Olga Cox. "A Lacanian Look at English Elegance: Some Reflections on Ian McEwan'sEnduring Love." International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83 (2002): 1153-67.Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Childs, Peter. "Rationality Is Its Own Kind of Innocence: Enduring Love." The Fiction of Ian McEwan: A Reader's Guide to the Essential Criticism. Ed. Peter Childs. Hampshire: Macmillan, 2006: 104-17.Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Representing Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.

Davies, Rhiannon. "Enduring McEwan." Posting the Male: Masculinities in Postwar and Contemporary British Literature. Ed. Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene. New York: Rodopi, 2003: 105-23.Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon, 1996.

Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1995.

Fromm, Harold. "The New Darwinism in the Humanities, part 1: From Plato to Pinker." Hudson Review 56.1 (Spring 2003): 86-99.

______. "The New Darwinism in the Humanities, part 2: Back to Nature, Again." Hudson Review 56.2 (Summer 2003): 315-27.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1970.

Garber, Marjorie. A Manifesto for Literary Studies. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2003.

Gigante, Denise. "The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life." PMLA 117 (2002): 433-48.

Glowinksi, Michal. "On the First-Person Novel." New Literary History 9 (1977): 103-14.Goldknopf, David. The Life of the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972.Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard C. Lewontin. "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 205.1161 (1979): 581-98.

Keats, John. "Lamia." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D, the Romatic Period. 8th ed. Ed. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 909-25.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 3, the Psychoses, 1955-56. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1993.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. New York: Viking, 1968.

Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

______. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World. Princeton: Princeton UP 2006.

Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002.

Martinez-Bonati, Felix. Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature. Trans. Philip W. Silvers. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. New York: Doubleday, 1997.______. Interview with Dwight Garner. "Salon Interview." Salon 31 March 1998. .

______. Saturday. New York: Doubleday. 2005.

Menand, Louis. "Doing What Comes Naturally." Rev. of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. New Yorker 25 Nov. 2002: 96-101.

Morrison, Jago. "Narration and Unease in Ian McEwan's Later Fiction." Critique 42 (2001): 253-68.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random, 1967.

______. "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense." The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1968. 42-47.

Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.

Orr, H. Allen. "Darwinian Storytelling." Rev. of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. New York Review of Books 27 Feb. 2003: 17-20.

Philips, Adam. Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories. London: Faber, 1999.

Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Ruse, Michael, and Edward O. Wilson. "The Evolution of Ethics." Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Philip Appleman. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001. 507-11.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Sheehan, Paul. Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Shen, Dan. "Unreliability and Characterization." Style 23 (1989): 300-11.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. "Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15 (2004): 1-23.

______. Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Spolsky, Ellen. "Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-structuralism." Poetics Today 23 (2002): 43-62.

Stanzel, Franz. A Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Stevens, Anne H., and Jay Williams. "The Footnote, in Theory." Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 208-25.

Storey, Robert. Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996.

Wilson, Edward O. On Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.

Wolfson. Susan. Personal e-mail communication 23 May 2006.

Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Random, 1995.

Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2001.

______. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

Enduring Love

Article from:The Stranger 

Article date:November 11, 2004

 Author:

Anonymous More results for: 

enduring love novelIan McEwan's novel Enduring Love opens with one of the most riveting chapters in the history of the written word. The scene it sets--of a lovers' picnic being interrupted by the unlikely appearance of a hot air balloon in mid-crash complete with grown men chasing after it, trying to bring it down, with tragic results--is both ludicrous and utterly credible thanks to McEwan's titanic imagination and deathless execution. While the rest of the novel eventually earns out the credit advanced by its staggering intro, it's the force of that first scene that sets the tone for the implausible events that follow it. If the novel has a difficult time living up to the majesty of its own opening, imagine how hard it might be for a film adaptation.The problem with the film of Enduring Love isn't so much the film itself; if you haven't read the book, chances are you'll enjoy the adaptation just fine. If you know the book, however, you'll know that there's little room for improvement. The story concerns a professor for whom love is little more than an abstract idea--one he rejects, despite his long-term relationship with a sculptress who obviously loves him. The professor's romantic diffidence is put to the test when a freak accident (the aforementioned balloon crash) puts him in the way of a deranged young man who falls hopelessly, obsessively, and bizarrely in love with him.The cast is superb. The steely Daniel Craig excels as the cold-hearted intellectual who can't give up his anti-love argument until it's nearly too late, Rhys Ifans is the ideal choice to play a man whose unbalanced behavior doesn't quite diminish his seemingly docile nature, and as the girlfriend, Samantha Morton is, well, Samantha Morton (which is to say, unimpeachable and mesmerizing at all times in all films). Moreover, the adaptation is largely faithful. Aside from a few tweaks (Ifans' stalker, for example, is no longer wealthy, nor is the medical reality of his affliction ever mentioned), it's exactly as the book intended. As a study of the often-perverse trajectory of love, it's a compelling little British independent film with a dark bent. Unfortunately, the literalization of the images serves to undermine, rather than strengthen, the novel's disturbing insights about long-term intimacy--i.e., that the people to whom we are closest are often those we know the least.Article copyright Index Newspapers LLC.

Daily Mail Book Club; November's book: Enduring Love by Ian McEwan.

Article from:Daily Mail (London) 

Article date:November 26, 2004

 More results for:

enduring love novelByline: KATHERINE WHITBOURN

THERE ARE two reasons for reading a book, says the philosopher Bertrand Russell: 'One, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.' Boasting is perhaps a rather strong iword, but substitute 'talk about' instead and you have the reaction of Daily Mail Book Club members to our November selection, Ian McEwan's powerful novel, Enduring Love.The depiction of the novel's three main characters - the married couple Joe and Clarissa and the obsessive stalker Jed Parry - proved a major talking point on our busy website, along with the merits of the book's opening and closing chapters.'I liked the contrast in the different characters,' writes one reader.

'Joe's rational mind was very convincing, and frustrating, while Parry was so emotive, but with his own twisted logic.

There is so much to this novel I could carry on all day.' A different reader was struck by the 'analytical approach of Joe in contrast to the irrational thinking of another character - essential for the plot.' 'I couldn't wait to get through the book and see what happened next,' says another online Book Club member.'One gripe, though, was that the love between Joe and Clarissa was meant to be solid, and they had been married for seven years. Why, then, did she doubt him so quickly?' Many of you agreed with the critic and novelist Rachel Billington, who wrote when the novel first came out in 1997:'EnduringLove has the most gripping first chapter I've read' - although others felt that the rest of the novel had failed to live up to its opening.'The end gave me mixed feelings,' adds a third member.

'I was relieved that Parry had revealed himself to Clarissa, so that doubt was resolved.

But I didn't like the appendix or the last letter.The appendix was a clumsy device to tell us what became of Joe and Clarissa. Would a medical case history really include that sort of information?' Several of you comment on the novel's style. 'This is just the kind of book I love,' writes one Daily Mail reader.'The style is different from my usual authors, but gripping.' 'The style takes a bit of getting used to - is this what they mean by literary fiction?' asks another. 'But the story line had me really interested.' What do you think of our choices so far?

Postlapsarian will and the problem of time in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.(Critical essay)

Article from:Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 

Article date:March 22, 2009

Author:Levy, Eric P.

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enduring love novelACCORDINC to Peter Childs, Ian McEwan (born in 1948) is "the foremost British novelist of his generation (144). McEwan's eligibility for such distinction rests on the nine novels which he has written to date. A highly thematic writer, McEwan instills his fiction with problems and preoccupations that are both topical and perennial, transitory and abiding. David Malcolm provides a serviceable summary: "a movement in and out of metafictional concerns, a complex interest in feminist issues, an interplay of moral relativism and moral judgment, and an enduring love of psychological fiction" (19). Perhaps the most fundamental topic--what might be termed the lowest common denominator of McEwan's fiction-concerns the intrusion of the psychologically deviant or disordered into the mimesis of character--a feature which Malcolm refers to as "the role of the irrational in his characters' lives" (14). In moral formulation, this intrusion entrains the notion of evil, in the guise of psychopathology. Yet, with equal cogency but perhaps less resonance, such dysfunctional deportment can also be construed in sociologically pejorative terms as the depiction of a modern wasteland whose denizens are animated by what Jack Slay, Jr., labels "haunting desires and libidinal politics" (1). From either perspective--the ethical or the societal--McEwan's novels ground their behavioral dynamics in what J. B. Bury, in a different context, terms "the delinquencies of frail humanity" (2.416).McEwan's fiction has undergone a signal evolution from the macabre and audaciously, even brazenly, repulsive to modulations of malfeasance that are at once less shocking and more sophisticated. The first four novels--The Cement Garden (1978), The Comfort of Strangers (1981), The Child in Time (1987), and The Innocent (1990)--respectively foreground such abhorrent events as incest, sadistic homicide, child abduction, and dismemberment. The fifth novel, Black Dogs, deploys a countryside encounter with the two eponymous and savage canines as a device for opposing and interrogating two constructions of human life:

the rational and the religious or mystical. Here, as Malcolm observes, McEwan eschews "the grisly horrors of his earlier fiction" (131). The subsequent novels--EnduringLove (1997), Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2001), and Saturday (2005)--similarly avoid graphic emphasis on abomination, and instead probe the interface between the rational and the irrational (to cite just one level of signification) in more subtle ways. Yet crime and deviance continue to influence the plot, though in more attenuated form. Amsterdam turns on the ingenious stratagems of two men to kill a third who eventually achieves revenge. Atonement concerns guilt regarding false accusation of rape. Saturday in part concerns the protagonist's extrication of himself and his family from mortal threat posed by an incensed man whom the protagonist, with the help of his son, throws downstairs and on whom he must, a few hours later, operate to repair the resultant brain injury. Enduring Love, as we shall see, hangs on the stalking of the protagonist by a victim of De C1erambault's syndrome--an affliction which obsesses him with a homosexual love of his own invention and illusion. But let us turn now to deeper matters in the text.ENDURING Love begins with reluctance to start: "What idiocy to being into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak" (McEwan 1). For the event which the beginning concerns concludes a cherished period in the life of the first person narrator, Joe Rose: "At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my life closed" (8). The pivotal event or watershed moment involves the desperately futile attempt of Joe--and four other men who have viewed the same predicament from adjacent places--to rescue a terrified boy accidentally stranded in a touring balloon that had just broken free of its moorings due to the incompetence of the pilot, the boy's grandfather. Once converged at the site of distress, the men try to help the grandfather hold down the balloon by clinging to ropes dangling from its sides. Yet a sudden series of gusts lifts the balloon off the ground. One by one, the men release their respective grips and fall earthward, leaving only one potential rescuer, John Logan, still hanging on, as the balloon continues to rise. Eventually, he too lets go--from exhaustion, not choice--and falls to his death, as Clarissa, Joe's common law wife--with whom he had, until rushing to the rescue, been picnicking--watches in "horrified helplessness" (80).This inaugural event foregrounds and conflates two concerns central to the text: the notion of the Fall (whether of Lucifer or Adam) and the notion of time. With respect to the Fall, Clarissa quotes Milton's description of the fall of Satan: "Hurl'd headlong flaming from th'Ethereal Sky" (29), while Joe, in a passage already quoted, subtly links (a) his running from the picnic toward the balloon with (b) the decision provoking the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden: "sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak" (1).

Later, he explicitly invokes the notion of the Biblical Fall and consequent expulsion, when thinking about the estrangement of Man from "natural dependency" or complete participation in the cycles of nature: "We were no longer in the great chain. It was our own complexity that had expelled us from the Garden. We were in a mess of our own unmaking" (207). The notion of time is similarly central to the balloon passage and its aftermath. During the attempted rescue, the passage of time, moment to moment, becomes the vital focus of attention: "Every fraction of a second that passed increased the drop, and the point must come when to let go would be impossible or fatal" (14). But in narrating the "quick succession" (17) constituting this implacably progressive passage, Joe repeatedly invokes his reluctance to let it continue, and foregrounds his nostalgia for the period before his heightened awareness of temporal passage began: "I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible ..." (2). Thus, in narrating one time series in the past, he superimposes a second time series in the present: "Best to slow down. Let's give the half minute after John Logan's fall careful consideration ..." (17). The second series involves retrospective examination of the first series. Whereas, with respect to the prior series, the headlong pace of time pre-empted the prerogative of personal choice, in the second series the will is free to determine or choose the pace of events--in this context, the steps of "careful consideration." But it is an illusory freedom. Though he can control the pace of rememoration, by lingering over moments of his choosing, he cannot control the compulsion to remember. Moreover, that which he remembers concerns the occasion when the irreversible movement of time, proceeding at its own unalterable pace, forced him to let go and abandon the rescue attempt, before the balloon rose too high for his safety. As a result of this decision due to temporal duress, Joe is thereafter preoccupied with guilt regarding the past and foreboding regarding the future: "As guilt was to the past, so, what was it that stood in the same relation to the future? Intention? No, not influence over the future. Foreboding. Anxiety about, distaste for the future" (43).

Thus the balloon "catastrophe" eventually distorts awareness of time, such that the present is beset by past and future: "Guilt and foreboding, bound by a line from the past to the future, pivoting in the present--the only moment it could be experienced" (3, 43). In these circumstances, the will, whose choices are sometimes made for the sake of consequences in the future and whose motives are sometimes derived from influences in the past, surrenders its initiative to the importunity of time. Our task now is to analyze the effect of temporal awareness on the efficacy of the will, in the world of thenovel. The investigation will first clarify the predicament of the will in the novel, and then relate that dispensation to the alternative constructions of time operant in the text. Our goal is to clarify how

the unique contribution made by Enduring Love to understanding the problem of free will concerns the linking of choice with the construction of time. Conversely, altering the construction of time liberates the will to act more freely. (1)THE first step toward clarifying the predicament of the will concerns explication of the notion of the Fall--a central thematic principle or topos in the novel, as noted earlier. The key to the doctrine concerns the opposition between the state of human nature before (prelapsarian) and after (postlapsarian) the event. Prelapsarian man (Adam before the Fall) enjoyed what J. N. D. Kelly terms "supernatural blessedness"-a condition characterized by faultless functioning of the two faculties of the rational soul: reason and will (253). According to St. Augustine, the Church Father who most embellished the doctrine of prelapsarian perfection, human nature in Adam, the first man, transcended all the limitations, such as physical disease, mental error or perplexity, and moral culpability, which have afflicted it ever since the Fall. Kelly elaborates: "Adam, he holds, was immune from physical ills and had surpassing intellectual gifts; he was in a state of justification, illumination and beatitude" (362). In contrast, as Kelly indicates, postlapsarian man languishes in a state of guilt, confusion, and misery, epitomized by "enslavement to ignorance, concupiscence and death" (364). The Fall disordered the human soul such that its two constituent faculties, reason and will, are in conflict, entailing, as Louis Duchesne indicates, "perpetual strife within us [between] the consciousness of the Law and the promptings of concupiscence (3.143). Etienne Gilson expands, with reference to the pronouncement of St. Thomas Aquinas: "His [Man's] will has been wounded by Original Sin with a consequent disordering of his concupiscence which no longer allows him to act always as his reason prescribes" (St. Thomas Aquinas 339).Further investigation of the term Original Sin, denoting the act by which Adam precipitated the Fall, will enhance our understanding of the doctrine concerned. Two points merit special emphasis. The first involves the consequence of the sinful act provoking the Fall; the second concerns the cause of the act itself. According to Christian doctrine, the Fall of Adam is simultaneously the Fall of Man or human nature; for the fault that the sin entailed is inherited and congenital. Kelly elaborates: "[A]s a consequence of Adam's rebellion which, as we have seen, is ours too, human nature has been terribly scarred and vitiated" (364). The degradation and disruption of human nature entrained by the Fall, through the misuse of free will in choosing inappropriately, is often termed the loss of innocence. In this context, loss of innocence entrains disruption of intrinsic nature or mode of operation, through a misuse of free will that chooses inappropriately. Kelly elaborates, with reference to Athanasius: "It was through the fault committed by their free volition that the disintegrating forces in any case latent in our nature were released" (347). Thus, the doctrine of the Fall is both biographical and

anthropological. That is, it both concerns an event in the life of one man (Adam) and one woman (Eve) and stipulates the cause of disorder in human nature, whenever and wherever that nature is instantiated in actual human beings. The disastrous consequence of the Fall flows immediately from its cause: pride, construed theologically as a transgression of boundaries whereby Adam sought, according to St. Ambrose, "equality with his Creator" (Kelly 353). Hence, the pride engendering Original Sin entails disobedience--in this instance, a turning away from subservience to divine precept in order to privilege personal will instead. Kelly clarifies, with reference to the teaching of St. Augustine: "[T]he latent ground of the act was pride, the desire to break away from his natural master, God, and be his own master" (362).

The moral site of the Fall is the will--the faculty by which the soul or inner principle of rational awareness inclines toward what is deemed desirable or appropriate and avoids what is undesirable or inappropriate. Kelly elaborates: "Any blame must lie exclusively with his own will, which, though inclined towards goodness, had the possibility, being free, of choosing wrongfully" (362). Here the imagery of spatial falling, invoked by the term, "the Fall," emerges most strongly. For what is entailed is a lapsing of the will, a releasing of its grip on righteous principle in favor of attachment to baser preferences. Gilson expands, with reference to Augustine: "This fall--for that is what it was--was not the natural and necessary fall of a falling stone, but rather the free fall of a will letting itself go [and forsaking its proper attachment to divine commandment]" (St. Augustine 148). The implications of Augustine's image of the falling stone emerge more clearly once the definition of the will is clarified. For Augustine, as Gilson indicates, "willing means making use of free choice, for in Augustine the definition of free choice is always identical with that of the will" (St. Augustine 157). Hershel Baker corroborates: "Adam sinned when he was free to choose either good (obedience) or evil (disobedience)" (173). As the faculty of free choice, the will can elect or choose according to its own motives. If it chooses wrongfully, as a result of allowing an inappropriate motive to reduce it to act, then the will declines from its proper operation. With respect to Original Sin, the will chose that which vitiated its own functioning; for it renounced attachment to righteous motive for choice. In proper configuration, the will responds to the promptings of reason, as Gilson explains (with reference to Thomistic dictum): "[W]ithout Original Sin our will would be naturally capable of complying with the orders issued by our reason" (St. Thomas Aquinas 339). But after the Fall and the loss of innocence which it entails, the will turns away from the transcendent and immutable good disclosed by reason and succumbs to concupiscence, which entails desire for gratification through that which is transient and mutable. Kelly explains: "In Augustine's

vocabulary concupiscence stands, in a general way, for every inclination making man turn from God to find satisfaction in material things which are intrinsically evanescent" (364-365).

IN invoking the motif of the Fall, Enduring Love inverts its terms of reference. Whereas the Fall, as we have seen, hinges on the role of free will in the exercise of choice, the fall depicted in the novelsystematically removes the relevance of choice, even as the issue of moral choice is emphasized. Initially, the attempt to rescue the boy stranded in the balloon is framed as a moral struggle between "selfishness" (McEwan 14) and "altruism" (15): "Our mammalian conflict--what to give to others and what to keep for yourself" (14). Yet that construction is immediately deconstructed. For as the balloon continues to rise despite the ballast provided by his body, Joe perceives the futility of hanging on: "Being good made no sense. I let go and fell, I reckon, about twelve feet" (15). Hence, at bottom, his decision to let go and fall to the earth is predicated on the absence of a viable alternative and not on a choice between compellingly competing alternatives: "Suddenly the sensible choice was to look out for yourself" (15). This deconstruction of the relevance of choice continues in the case of the last man to fall--John Logan. His falling was involuntary. It was not his will that lapsed, but the muscles of his body. He did not choose to let go; he just could no longer hold on. But holding on was also not a choice, in the sense of deciding between alternatives. For once the other men had let go, enabling the balloon to soar ever higher, Logan's original purpose in holding on no longer applied. Thus his fall remains outside considerations of morality, because it was not determined by a free will exercising its power to choose. Whereas, as we have seen, the prelapsarian state entails adhesion of the will to proper principles by which to choose, Logan's fatal fall foregrounds the irrelevance of choosing. Paradoxically, his fall is exempt from the moral factors applying to the Biblical Fall.The balloon episode problematizes the notion of choice in other ways. The obverse of irrelevance of choice (associated with Logan) is inability to choose (associated with Harry Gadd, the child whom he tries to rescue). Just as Logan is reduced to a state where choice is irrelevant, so Harry, overcome with fear and confusion, succumbs to "paralysis of will, a state known as learned helplessness, often noted in laboratory animals subjected to unusual stress" (11). In that terrified state, Harry loses the conative power to choose. Paralysis of will analogously affects Clarissa while watching Logan plunge to the ground; for she is reduced to "horrified helplessness," where the power of the will to choose--or, more precisely, to incline the self toward action through the exercise of choice--is nullified by traumatic circumstance (80).

The problematizing of free will in the exercise of choice ramifies throughout the novel, on various levels of signification. The first of these levels concerns, as we have already begun to see, key events or moments in the plot. Brief recapitulation will position us to excavate the deeper strata. As a direct consequence of Logan's fall, Joe involuntarily becomes the object of Jed Parry's equally involuntary obsession. Like Joe, Parry was one of the men who coincidentally happened to be near the balloon and tried to bring it back to the ground by hanging onto its dependent ropes. Following the "catastrophe," Joe and Parry, by separate routes, converge near Logan's broken body (3). There, as their gazes momentarily meet, Parry falls in love with Joe--a reaction determined, not by choice, but by latent neurosis, termed De C1erambault's syndrome, which predisposes him to displace loneliness by "the inception of a delusional relationship," founded on the fantasy that its amatory object reciprocates a love which, in fact, he abhors and rejects--and desperately tries to understand in order to protect himself from it: "Parry caught my glance and became stricken with a love whose morbidity I was now impatient to research" (239, 127). Thus, to the extent that Parry is motivated by psychopathology beyond his control, he approximates the status of "an automaton," driven by factors that pre-empt the faculty of choice (41).Ironically, through this unwilling relationship with Parry, Joe is rendered similarly vulnerable to impulses that compromise free will. The next day, following an unexpected telephone call from Parry in the middle of the night, Joe is overcome by the need to tell "the full story" to "a radio talks producer" who has no interest in the tale: "I pressed on because I could not stop" (40). During the ensuing days, Joe succumbs increasingly to both obsession and compulsion. Regarding obsession, Joe several times refers to helpless susceptibility to the uncontrollable momentum of his own thought: "Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought. Get them to let me out" (58, original italics), "And driven, obsessed, undersexed? Who wouldn't be? Here was a diseased consciousness clamouring to batten itself to mine" (222). Regarding compulsion, Joe repeatedly acts without self-control--without, that is, the initiative of choice. A short list of references will illustrate: (a) arguing with Clarissa about his own preoccupation with Parry: "But now they seem cast in a play they cannot stop, and a terrible freedom is in the air"--here "freedom" paradoxically concerns the compulsion to express whatever hostility each is feeling (86); (b) losing sense of direction or purpose, while succumbing to the impulse to move: "I had no idea where I was going" (89), "As I crossed the kitchen, I could honestly have said that I had no idea where I was going" (104), "My motives in coming were no longer clear" (106); (c) halting to observe Parry, while wanting to avoid him: "But his rage was compelling and I was forced to look on" (91); (d) reacting instinctively to a presumed threat (Parry's unseen presence) before being

able consciously to choose a response: "It's a system so ancient, developed so far back along the branchings of our mammalian and pre-mammalian past that its operations never penetrate into higher consciousness" (51).

As the last example indicates, the problem of compromised or preempted free will extends beyond the manifestation of obsession and compulsion, where thought and action are respectively prompted by internal factors resistant to conscious control, and reaches into other contexts, deepening its implications. One such context, already implicit in Joe's reference, cited above, to "our mammalian and pre-mammalian past," involves the notion of intrinsic nature, construed here as congenital constitution predisposing each member of the human species to develop in predetermined ways: "We come into this world with limitations and capacities, all of them genetically prescribed. Many of our features, our foot shape, our eye colour, are fixed, and others, like our social and sexual behaviour, and our language learning, await the life we live to take their course. But the course is not infinitely variable. We have a nature" (69-70).

Another context entrained by the problem of pre-empted free will concerns not intrinsic nature but extrinsic event or, more precisely, the special pattern of events that involves coincidence. The issue of coincidence centers on Joe's connection to Parry--the character who suffers from De C1erambault's syndrome. Meeting Parry in circumstances perfectly suited to activate his amatory neurosis is an obvious coincidence: "On a country walk he [Parry] was initiated into a makeshift community of passers-by struggling to tether a balloon caught in strong winds. Such a transformation, from a 'socially empty' life to intense team-work may have been the dominating factor in precipitating the syndrome" (239). The coincidences multiply. A spectacular one concerns Parry's botched attempt to have Joe murdered by a hired assassin who erroneously shoots the wrong man (Colin Tapp) in a crowded restaurant. Yet Colin Tapp, by coincidence, survived an assassination attempt eighteen months earlier in Addis Ababa (180), with the result that the police at first ignore Joe's insistence that he himself was the intended target: "All I needed at a time like this was a meaningless coincidence" (180). Several hours later, Parry invades Joe's apartment and holds Clarissa hostage, forcing her to telephone Joe with instructions to return home. Having obtained a gun earlier that day in order to protect himself from Parry, Joe is fortuitously armed when entering his flat and finding Clarissa held at knifepoint. Joe shoots Parry, wounding him, with the result that Joe must go to the police station for the third time in twenty-four hours: "My third visit to a police station in twenty-four hours, the third in my life. More random clustering" (214, my emphasis). The preceding two visits respectively concerned attempts to interest the police in (a) a harassment complaint

and then (b) an attempted murder accusation, both concerning Parry. Joe first invokes the term, "random clustering," when referring to his second visit to the police station: "Statisticians call this kind of thing random clustering, a useful way of denying it significance" (174). Here, in using the term, he simultaneously debunks it, replacing the notion of "meaningless coincidence" (180), which he invoked earlier, with that of significant conjunction--a notion ultimately associated with "fate" (83, 86, 136, 177) or at least with the purveying of hidden meaning.

JOE'S ambivalence regarding the meaningfulness of events rewards further investigation. As we shall see, coincidence or "random clustering" does have a meaning--one that concerns neither of the two alternatives already suggested: sheer fortuitousness or fateful predetermination. Instead, the meaning of coincidence pertains to its heuristic function in emphasizing the reality of occurrence--the fact that events actually happen. That is, coincidences underscore the happening of the events constituting them. This point can be better understood once Joe's difficulty accepting the reality or actual occurrence of events in his life is clarified. He has a tendency to construct alternative versions of the actual situation that his own freely chosen actions and decisions have constructed for him. The primary example of this tendency to contemplate a different result of his own exercise of free will concerns his career--a science writer revisited by his prior ambition to be a physicist: "[M]y thoughts returned to how I came to be what I was, and how it might have been different and, ridiculously, how I might find my way back to original research and achieve something new before I was fifty" (78, my emphasis). Joe is not comfortable with the consequences or "outcomes" of his choices (2, 43), and prefers to replace them mentally with more favorable ones. This tendency can be explicated through reference to what Alfred North Whitehead terms "hypothetical alternatives" or "abstract notions, expressing the possibilities of another course of history" (Process and Reality 185). Joe's own recourse to hypothetical alternatives involves recasting the choices made at some time in the past in order to imagine alternative consequences that would have flowed from them: "he wants to set about altering his fate" (McEwan 83). In Joe's case, this enterprise is a recurrent practice--indeed a cyclic syndrome: "In fact, the last time round, a real crisis two years ago, he ended by concluding that he was reconciled to his life, and that it wasn't a bad one after all" (81).

The conflict between addressing reality as it is and reconstructing it mentally according to preferred variants is epitomized by Joe's reaction to Logan's fall: "I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible" (2, my emphasis). This is a highly ironic statement, since the "aftermath" of balloon event is, for Joe, precisely the time when other outcomes are possible--

but only as hypothetical alternatives, desperately formulated in his mind (2). Indeed among the consequences generated by the "explosion of consequences" (17) resulting from the event are those entertained in the hypothetical alternatives that Joe constructs, as when imagining himself propelled into the future in order to warn fellow customers in the restaurant of the attempted murder about to occur in their midst: "It was a mistake, it doesn't have to happen. We could choose another outcome" (169, my emphasis).

This very clear linking of hypothetical alternatives with the exercise of free will or the faculty of choice has important implications. As noted earlier, the Biblical Fall vitiated the intrinsic nature or mode of operation of the will such that, in its postlapsarian state, the will is apt to incline toward inappropriate choice. A similar degradation of function pertains to Joe's faculty of choice after Logan's fall, though with some overlap of before and after. That is, after Logan's fall Joe tends to engage more urgently in the conative (i.e. involving the will) exercise to which he resorted earlier: namely, choosing hypothetical alternatives to the actual course of his own life. But frequency or intensity of recourse is not the main issue. Something has changed with respect to Joe's use of hypothetical alternatives or "abstract notions, expressing the possibilities of another course of history" (to retrieve Whitehead's phrasing). He has become consciously fearful of outcomes: "A fear of outcomes" (McEwan 43). Consequently, he seeks not alternative outcomes so much as protection from outcomes. Fear of outcomes entails fear of the future--the tense in which outcomes of present circumstance will occur or be made manifest: "Anxiety about, distaste for the future" (43). Thus protection from outcomes requires protection from the future. For this security, he will have to inhabit or construct a temporal dispensation that wards off the future. He does this through obsession with the past: "the time of obsessive re-examination that followed: the aftermath, an appropriate term for what happened in a field waiting for its early summer mowing" (2).

In "the time of obsessive re-examination," the examining present becomes a perspective on the re-examined past which concerns a series of events whose occurrence is interrogated in terms of why they had to happen and how they might not have happened--or, having happened, not have generated such devastating consequences. At bottom, the purpose of re-examining the past is not to clarify the present which results from the past, but to keep temporal focus on the past so that the future recedes from attention. Joe does this, for example, through his sense of guilt, which perpetuates in the present preoccupation with the past. Clarissa does it through accusation, blaming Joe in the present for his response to the problem of Parry in the past: "I can't quite get rid of the idea that there might have been a less

frightening outcome if you had behaved differently" (216, my emphasis). Here blame--the attribution of fault to another person-serves as the means of replacing the past with a hypothetical alternative expressing the possibility of another course of history. Moral judgment becomes the means of altering the content of the passage of time toward the future. This is very clear in Clarissa's reaction when Joe suddenly draws a gun to shoot Parry, who is preparing to cut his own throat: "She was on her feet and staring at the gun in my hand with an expression of such repulsion and surprise that I thought we would never get past this moment" (214-15, my emphasis). Here Clarissa's intense and involuntary censure of Joe is associated with a stopping of time or, more precisely, a halting of the temporal movement into the future. Joe, of course, is aware that something--perhaps a clandestine affair--is skewing Clarissa's moral judgment of him with respect to his reaction to Parry: "It occurred to me that Clarissa was using Parry as a front" (103). Clarissa, as Joe confirms by rifling her desk for compromising correspondence, is not being unfaithful. Yet there is indeed a hidden (though unconscious) motive for her negative judgment of Joe's behavior with respect to Parry. Blame sustains notions of what Joe should and should not have done: it enables the proliferation of hypothetical alternatives whose purpose is to avoid the reality of what actually occurred. This unwitting project to undo the past, to replace the past with an alternative version, serves the need to gain control over the unfolding of the future. For, as we have seen, the most traumatic result of Logan's catastrophic fall is the "explosion of consequences" it produced (17).

DEEPER probing of this matter will tighten our grasp of the postlapsarian will and the problem of time in Enduring Love. Joe conspicuously construes the operation of the will in terms of the project to control the future: "intentionality, intention, tries to assert control over the future" (43, original emphasis). In the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition from which the notion of intentionality is derived, intention pertains to the tending of the will toward its end or purpose. Etienne Gilson confirms: "[t]his movement of the will which moves itself ... toward its object is called intention" (St. Thomas Aquinas 252). But in Joe's assessment, as we have just seen, the meta-motive moving the will--the motive, that is, underlying all particular instances of intentionality--is the project to influence the movement of time or, more precisely, "to assert control over the future." Indeed, we found the same to be true of guilt and blame. Yet the will to control the future presupposes a conception of the future. As a tense, how is the future understood? What distinguishes it from the other tenses? Brief recapitulation of relevant aspects of the philosophy of time will give us access to some answers that, in turn, will facilitate our study of the novel. The effort to grasp basic distinctions enunciated in

the philosophical analysis of time will be rewarded by the precision that they accord to examination of time in the novel.In The Nature of Existence (1927), John McTaggart undertook a celebrated analysis of the concept of time, identifying the dual ways in which "positions in time" are conceived (2.10). The first way orders temporal positions from the distant future to the present to the distant past. McTaggart labels this series of positions the A-series: "I shall give the name of the A series to that series of positions which runs from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present through the near future to the far future or conversely" (2.10). In this schema, any event or moment in time successively passes through the positions in the series, proceeding from the remote future toward the present and thence toward the remote past. The second way construes positions in time in terms not of changing tense (as with the A-series), but of what Philip Turetzky labels "a permanent order of succession," characterized by the relations of earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than (151). McTaggart elaborates: "The series of positions which runs from earlier to later, or conversely, I shall call the B series" (2.10). Whereas changing tense is the hallmark of the A-series, unchanging order of sequence characterizes the B-series, as Oaklander explains: "if one event is ever earlier (later) than another event, then it is always earlier (later) than the other event; events do not change their positions in the B-series which runs from earlier to later" ("Introduction" 158).

The balloon episode in Enduring Love provides a spectacular example of the distinction between the A-series and the B-series. Let's begin with its relation to the A-series, and then proceed to the B-time correlation after our investigation has reached the appropriate point. In McTaggart's formulation, movement along the A-series occurs from future to present to past. But transition along the A-series can also be construed from the perspective of an ever-moving present, continually advancing toward what has not yet occurred (the future) and continually moving away from what has al ready happened (the past). The balloon episode is presented in these terms, as the transit, that is, of the present moment toward a future event whose pull it cannot resist: "The encounter that would unhinge us was minutes away, its enormity disguised from us not only by the barrier of time but by the colossus in the centre of the field that drew us in with the power of a terrible ratio that set fabulous magnitude against the puny human distress at its base" (McEwan 2, my emphasis). As experienced event, the balloon episode constitutes a superb example of what Donald C. Williams describes as "the whoosh of process, the felt flow of one moment into the next" (108-109). This is A-time (time experienced as an A-series) par excellence, characterized by the impression of relentless impulsion beyond the status quo of the present. Clifford Williams elaborates: "One feature of

our experience of time that A-theorists of time appeal to is the inexorability of the movement of time" (364). A superb description of the whoosh of passage concerns the act of hanging onto a runaway balloon which gains altitude each moment. Here the passage of time is depicted from instant to instant, even from "neuronal pulse" to neuronal pulse (McEwan 13). In this context, the passage of time, as the continuous transition from present to future, has drastic import. One instant to the next can mean life or death--or loss of the ability to choose between life and death: "A delay of one second would have been enough to close his options" (15).In the balloon scene, the future is fearsome because of the catastrophe it threatens. But, as we have seen, in the aftermath of this experience Joe fears the future itself: "Anxiety about, distaste for the future" (43). To understand the implications of this aversion, we must first deconstruct the notion of the future implicit in the doctrine of the A-series. Brief analysis will position us to grasp the link between time and free will in Enduring Love more firmly.In McTaggart's construction, the future has, in one sense, already happened, even as it approaches the present. That is, events are construed as already constituted and occupying their respective positions in the A-series. The only change which occurs to events in the course of moving along the series concerns the dropping and acquisition of temporal properties (futurity, presentness, and pastness). George Schlesinger explains: "A typical event, on this view, is in the distant future to begin with; then it becomes situated in the less distant future; it keeps approaching until it becomes an event occurring in the present. As soon as this happens, the event loses its presentness and acquires the property of being in the near past. The degree of its pastness continually increases" (214). Yet, by construing the future in terms of the implacable continuity of movement of that which already subsists, McTaggart's schema of the A-series does not capture the utter novelty of the future. Moreover, it puts the future on a par with the present and past, with respect to ontological status or degree of reality. The only distinction between the future and the past is that the events subsisting in the future have not happened yet. But they are no less real as a result.

C. D. Broad, the first and still one of the most illuminating critics of McTaggart's temporal philosophy, attacked the assumption of the preexistence of the future. In his view, the future has no reality: "the future is simply nothing at all" (66). It is not the repository or zone harboring events which have not yet occurred. According to Broad, the occurrence of new events is explained not by the procession of future events toward the present, but by the process of absolute becoming whereby events which had never before been suddenly occur: "But, when an event becomes, it comes into existence; and it was not anything at all until it had become" (68, original emphasis). Le Poidevin clarifies: "We should not think

of there being events located in the future and destined, as it were, to become present. Rather, we should think of the future as being unreal. As events come into being, the sum total of reality--i.e. the past and present--increases" (19).

The distinct notion of the future unfolded in Enduring Love can be brought into focus through reference to the discrepant constructions respectively expounded by McTaggart and Broad. Insofar as Joe's awareness of the future is, as we have seen, animated by "foreboding," it suggests the approach of a future event already constituted, as in McTaggart's formulation (McEwan 43). Yet insofar as Joe's account of the balloon catastrophe suggests the eruption in the present of an event which only the accidental convergence of diverse factors--"coincidences of time and place"--enables, the notion of the future entailed seems to approximate that propounded by Broad (McEwan 10). Actually, as we shall now consider, Joe's notion of the future entrains a third option--one linking the future with the exercise of will. Here the future is construed as the zone of consequences of present choices. The consequences do not exist until after the choice is made. They come into being later. But present choice prepares them, though choice itself is conditioned or limited by antecedent and contemporaneous factors. The balloon rescue attempt foregrounds these considerations.It begins as a contest of wills and confusion of purposes: "No one was in charge--or everyone was, and we were in a shouting match" (11). The boy whom everyone is trying to save is incapacitated, as we have seen, by "paralysis of will," induced by conditions which overwhelm his humanity and reduce him to the passivity typical of "laboratory animals subjected to unusual stress" (11). The incompetent pilot, who attempts to re-enter the balloon's basket when all the other men are trying to keep it on the ground, is characterized by intention that no one at the time understands: "What he was doing seemed ridiculous, but his intentions, it turned out, were completely sensible. He wanted to deflate the balloon by pulling a cord that was tangled in the basket" (11, my emphasis). The overwhelming of individual will by factors depriving it of efficacy culminates in the plight of Logan whose original choice to hold onto the ropes of the balloon eventually deprives him, as noted earlier, of the choice to let go until exhaustion fatally compels him to release his grip, while Clarissa watches in "horrified helplessness" (80).

But human will, in the novel, is not as thwarted, constrained, programmed, or helpless as it seems. Its choices--though hampered and influenced by conflict, conditioning, and circumstance--nevertheless lead to results. Except in circumstances of paralysis (as with the child in the balloon), extremity (as with Logan clinging to the rope), impotence (as with Clarissa powerlessly witnessing the fall), or compulsion (as with Parry in his madness), the will is free to choose,

but it cannot choose the situation in which it makes choices or the factors influencing its own exercise of choice. Of course, the notion of the will choosing within a restricted field of choice, conditioned by factors which constrain it, whether the willing agent is aware of them or not, is not unique to this novel. An Existentialist philosopher, for example, would say that the will is "situated"--engaged, that is, with the resistance and impulsions of the given, in all their ramifications. Paul Tillich provides a representative example: "But freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision" (2.42-3). Here the human individual achieves authenticity through accepting what H. J. Blackham terms "the necessity of freedom"--the responsibility, that is, to determine the meaning of personal existence through constructing and enacting projects and choices that at once acknowledge and transcend the sheer "facticity and historicity of the embodied self in a situation" (162). Yet, at bottom, the Existential situation with which the human individual must deal concerns not the constraints constituted and imposed by concrete circumstance, but what Robert G. Olson terms "the anguish of being" which recognizes that the individual must, through decisions, become "the source of value and intelligibility" with regard to "the radical contingency and ultimate meaninglessness of both man and the world" (37). While Enduring Love is not an Existential work, as it does not, to invoke I. M. Bochenski's criterion, treat "existence as the supreme object of inquiry," nevertheless the novel does isolate and probe the relation between situation and free will, especially insofar as the ultimate factor determining situation concerns involvement with time (159).The crisis or turning point in Joe's relation to his own free will or faculty of choice occurs after Parry's botched attempt to have Joe shot to death in a restaurant. The event shows Joe that he is alone with the problem of survival, regarding both his own life and the future of his "enduring love" with Clarissa: "Clarissa thought I was mad, the police thought I was a fool, and one thing was clear: the task of getting us back to where we were was going to be mine alone" (McEwan 161). Recognizing his "isolation and vulnerability" (177), Joe resolves to obtain a gun, acutely aware that the choice he has made will generate consequences beyond the reaches of his own will to control them: "Back in my study I sat with the phone in my lap, considering the moment, this turning-point. I was about to step outside the illuminated envelope of fear and meticulous daydreaming into a hard-edged world of consequences. I knew that one action, one event, would entail another, until the train was beyond my control, and that if I had doubts this was the moment to withdraw" (188, my emphasis). Here Joe moves from "fear of outcomes" to the decision to unleash them (43). Yet his efforts to obtain the gun, by visiting some seedy characters on the outskirts of London, foregrounds his own confinement

within physiological and emotional compulsions which he cannot control, but only defer with extreme difficulty. During negotiations with the sellers of the gun, Joe's nervousness causes him to laugh involuntarily, forcing him to mask the sound "behind a yodeling shouting sneeze" (196). Later, while standing in a copse to practice shooting the gun with Johnny, his gun-purchasing assistant, Joe succumbs to an urge to defecate which he forestalls temporarily only with "constant and conscious effort" (206).Then, while squatting to release his bowels, he contemplates the "inhabitants of the microscopic realm" under the earth: "The blind compulsion of these organisms to consume and excrete made possible the richness of the soil" (207). Here Joe invokes the notion of the Biblical Fall, interpreting it in evolutionary terms as the exclusion of man from "the great chain" by which all organisms are linked to the irresistible promptings of reflex and instinct (207). This is the moment of supreme irony in thenovel. On the one hand, according to Joe, "[i]t was our own complexity that had expelled us from the Garden" (207). But on the other hand, this complexity--this transcending of the innocence of biological compulsion through the morally complicated faculty of will--enables and constitutes a felix culpa--a fortunate fall. For it liberates the will to make its own choices, not always in thrall to that which nature and circumstance dictate. (2) Ironically, the character who forces Joe to act on his own and make the decision to buy a gun, accepting the consequences which might follow, is Parry--the figure who almost incarnates susceptibility to compulsion. Parry remains trapped in compulsion, manifested not just through the psychopathology of De Clerambault's syndrome, but also through uncontrollable movements, as when holding Clarissa hostage inside the apartment she shares with Joe: "He tossed his head from side to side. It was an involuntary spasm" (211, my emphasis).A further irony follows. Though the mind separates the human species from what Joe terms "the great chain" connecting other life forms to modes of compulsion, the mind is itself a site of compulsion: in this case, concerning obsessive thoughts which confine the thinker within their own importunity--a state which Parry, "crouched in a cell of his own devising," virtually incarnates and to which Joe and Clarissa in a less extreme way respectively succumb: "the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought" (143, 48). The essence of the prison--that which makes thought a "little cage of reason"--is the need to interpret experience by means of prior concepts or logic which enable a "framing of reality" (133), so that the facts of experience might be rendered intelligible. Parry's neurosis, of course, constitutes a grossly "distorted" framing of reality (91). But similarly the police are unable to understand Joe's grievance regarding Parry unless it is "poured into the available bureaucratic mould"--that is, unless it is construed in terms of a framing of reality: "Parry's behaviour had to be generalized into a crime" (73).

Yet the "framing of reality" most profoundly linked with "the prison of directed thought" and the "little cage" constructed by reason concerns the concept of time. Brief recapitulation will position us to take one more step. As discussed earlier, the balloon incident precipitates in Joe--and to some extent, in Clarissa--a "distaste for the future," stemming from "[a] fear of outcomes" (43) and resulting in a need to wall off the future or to keep it at bay. Modes of warding off the future include blame, guilt, and recourse to hypothetical alternatives--all of them ways of displacing awareness of the future with what Joe terms "the time of obsessive re-examination" (2). Events eventually force Joe to overcome his "fear of outcomes" and accept the necessity of acting, even though action will provoke consequences that can be neither foreseen nor forestalled: "I was about to step outside the illuminated envelope of fear and meticulous daydreaming into a hard-edged world of consequences" (43, 188). Here very clearly, Joe prepares to leave the prison or "illuminated envelope" which his mind has constructed to protect him from the future. That is, the fundamental function of his "prison of directed thought" is to defend against the unknown consequences of the movement of time away from the present moment.

THERE is, however, a more profound and subtle means by which Joe overcomes fear of the future--one that can be clarified by juxtaposing the end and the beginning of the novel. At the end of thenovel proper, Joe and Clarissa are preparing to separate as a result of differences and grievances that arose during the period when Joe was pursued by Parry. Yet though the story constituting thenovel ends at that point, the novel itself includes as one of its two appendices a case history ostensibly published in the British Review of Psychiatry (233). Here the sequence of events constituting Joe's episode with Parry is rendered in the dry prose of a clinical record, concluding with the information that Joe and Clarissa (identified respectively as R and M) were eventually "reconciled and later successfully adopted a child" (242). What are the implications of this post facto extension of the event-series constituting the plot of the novel? A preliminary answer is that sufficient time elapsed between the ending of Joe's narration and the writing of the case history in the appendix for the case history to include reference to the marital reconciliation and child adoption which, in Joe's narration, had not yet occurred. But a deeper answer emerges if we turn our attention from the appendix following the end of Joe's narration to the very beginning of that narration.There Joe refers to time as a map: "This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man's shout" (1, my emphasis). He reinforces this spatialized conception of time--time, that is, construed as spread out like the

locations or positions on a two-dimensional map--by also referring to "the buzzard's perspective" from which movement of time toward the balloon event can be halted or detained: "I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible; the convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard's perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table" (2). Thus the opening of the novelentails a remarkable opposition of two different schemas of time, corresponding respectively to the A-series and B-series formulated by McTaggart. In the first schema, time is construed as inexorable temporal flow whose constituent moments continually move from future to present to past. But in the second schema, time is construed as a static manifold whose moments are arrayed in unchanging order, like points on the longitudinal-latitudinal grid of a map.The image of a time map which Joe invokes corresponds precisely to the figure frequently used by philosophers of time to describe the B-series. Just as, to interpolate the phrasing of D. H. Mellor, "the space of maps [identifies] places without reference to spatial present (here)," so the B-series identifies temporal place or position without reference to a temporal present (now) or to the other two tenses, past and future (48). Moreover, just as on a map all points are displayed simultaneously at different locations of the same extended space, regardless of when or from what point of view the map is looked at, so in the B-series, as Delmas Kiernan-Lewis observes, "all temporal items are stretched out in a tenseless array," a continuity of succession whose elements are ordered according to the unchanging relations of prior to, simultaneous with, or subsequent to each other (322). That is, instead of locating moments in terms of ever-changing position in tensed time, the B-series construes moments, as Oaklander indicates, as arranged "tenselessly in the network of earlier than, later than, and simultaneity temporal relations" which never change ("On the Experience of Tenseless Time" 345). This term, "tenselessly," is crucial to the construction of time pertinent to the B-series. For in this context, time is not formulated as a movement in which the relation of a given moment to the transient properties of futurity, presentness, and pastness inevitably changes. Instead, in the construction of time pertinent to the B-series, as Oaklander notes, "the world is intrinsically tenseless, in that events and things are not in themselves past, present, or future," anymore that any given point on a map is intrinsically "here" or "there" when no one is looking at it ("A Defense" 58). Clifford Williams clarifies: "We do not think of hereness as a mind-independent property of objects in addition to their being in the proximity of the places we occupy or in addition to their locations" (363). In this dispensation, as Quentin Smith indicates, "events are not really future, present, or past; they merely sustain unchanging relations to each other of simultaneity, earlier than, or later than, such that the obtaining of these relations is describable in a tenseless

language" (38). Most crucially, the future does not exist in its own right, as a tense with its own special properties. Instead, as Adolf Grunbaum explains, "To be future at time [t.sub.0] just means to be later than [t.sub.0], which is a tenseless relation" (206).

The novel opposes contrary constructions of time. In one, temporal awareness is threatened by futurity--the inexorable approach of consequences that cannot be forestalled: "fear of outcomes" (McEwan 43). In the other, temporal awareness achieves the bird's eye perspective from which, properly speaking, there are no tenses--no present, future, or past. Instead, there is simply a permanent sequence or succession of moments and events comprising "the time map" (1). These contrary constructions of time are linked with the image of the river which Joe, in the company of Jean Logan's two children, contemplates at the end of the novel--the end, more precisely, of his narration which, in turn, is followed by the Appendix. Here Joe invites the children first to think of the river as comprising an indefinite number of water molecules ("Two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen atoms") and then to think of the fiver as constituting an elongated container along which those innumerable water molecules flow toward the sea: "think of the river bed as a long shallow slide, like a winding muddy chute, that's a hundred miles long stretching to the sea" (225). The river image combines both A- and B-time. If we construe the fiver in terms of the continuous flux of water it contains, we retrieve an archetypal symbol of A-time--time, that is, construed as the continuous passage, from some perspective in the present, of events or moments (corresponding to water molecules) from the future to the past. Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses epitomizes this construction: "Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past" (238). But if, following Joe's suggestion, we construe the river as an elongated, sloped container or "chute," whose topographical contours can rendered as fixed points on a map, we reach a symbol of B-time--time, that is, formulated as a static order of succession whose terms or moments remain in fixed relation to each other, with respect to precedence and simultaneity. Mellor clarifies: "[T]enseless facts, unlike tensed ones, are facts at all dates" (56).The opposition of A-time and B-time--or time as continuous transition of tense vs. time as unalterable succession of moments, ordered according the permanent relations of before and after--is central toEnduring Love. At the core of this opposition is the relation of the will to time. As we have seen, Joe's vivid sense of the passage of time hampers his will by making him reluctant to exercise choice, lest that election unleash consequences rendering the future even more ominous than it seems. But the bird's eye perspective which perceives "the time map" is disengaged from the passage of time, if by passage we mean awareness of time in terms of transition of tenses or, more intimately, in terms of what Clifford

Williams, in a description of A-time, calls "the sense of being swept along against our wills," the feeling "of being taken to later times, and when we get to them, [feeling] ourselves taken to still later ones" (364). The bird's eye perspective which perceives "the time map" corresponds to the view of time constructed or formulated by philosophers of B-time (known professionally as B-theorists). From this viewpoint, no tense is real, in the sense of being mind-independent or unrelated to the point of view considering it. In this formulation, time is neither a flow nor a force, but simply a B-series whose direction, as Oaklander indicates, "is based on the unanalysable [or irreducible] temporal relation of succession" ("McTaggart's Paradox" 196).As we have seen, this notion of a B-series series based on the temporal relation of succession and not on transition of tenses emerges prominently in the novel in connection with "the time map" on the first page of Joe's narration and the riverbed on the last page. The third and culminating representation of B-time concerns the case history in the Appendix, which both reduces Joe's narration to a mere sequence or succession of events and extends that sequence beyond events included in Joe's own account. In the context of the first two representations of time as a B-series, the ultimate implication of the case history is perhaps that the perspective on time which Joe expressed in his narration (the perspective, that is, construing time in terms of the fearful progression of the present into the future) has been superceded by another which accepts inevitable succession and no longer either dreads or attempts to forestall it. At bottom, this acceptance of inevitable succession constitutes the tragic perspective--or gives us a new way of understanding the tragic perspective. Catastrophe occurs. It is a fact of life. Its consequence can be either deepened immersion in the sense of A-time, with emphasis on dread of the future and regret or guilt concerning the past, or emancipation from preoccupation with tense, and heightened engagement with the inevitable succession by which events follow one another. This engagement with succession overcomes negative "intentionality" whereby, according to Joe, the will "tries to assert control over the future," and fosters positive intentionality whereby the goal or end of the will is to facilitate adaptation to emergent circumstance, not to resist the arrival of that which cannot be controlled (McEwan 43). Ironically, after internment in an insane asylum, Parry parodies the liberation of the will enabled by positive intentionality: "I feel more purpose than I've ever known in my life. I've never felt so free" (245). But this is a bogus freedom. The first principle of genuine freedom is determination of purpose or end. But Parry's purpose--reunion with Joe--is the product of his "well-encapsulated delusional system" (238). Hence, it is not purpose but delusion. Thus Parry's freedom is freedom from freedom--exemption, that is, from the task of determining purpose and choosing the means to achieve or fulfill it. In Parry's predicament, the passage of time serves only to

perpetuate the same delusion--in this case, the fantasy that Parry's reunion with Joe will be synchronized with Joe's own religious conversion: "Now you know that every day I spend here brings you one tiny step closer to that glorious light" (344-45). Ironically, of course, the conversion which Joe undergoes concerns not religion, but self-determination: recognition, that is, of the responsibility to exercise the will in the task of enacting choices in life and accepting the consequences as the ground and foundation of new decisions that will be enabled or required successively, as time unfolds.Works Cited

Baker, Hershel. The Image of Man: A Study of the Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. New York: Harper & Row, 1947.

Blackham, H. J. Six Existentialist Thinkers. New York: Harper & Row, 1952.

Bochenski, I. M. Contemporary European Philosophy. Trans. Donald Nicholl and Karl Aschenbrenner. Berkeley: U of CA P, 1965.

Broad, C. D. Scientific Thought. New York: Humanities P, 1952.

Bury, J. B. History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius 1 to the Death of Justinian. 2 vols. 1923. New York: Dover, 1958. Childs, Peter. Ed. The Fiction of Ian McEwan. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006.

Duchesne, Louis. Early History of the Christian Church From Its Foundation To the End of the Fifth Century. 3 vols. Trans. Claude Jenkins. London: John Murray, 1924.

Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine. Trans. L. E. M. Lynch. New York: Random House, 1960.

--. The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. L. K. Shook. New York: Octagon, 1988.

Grunbaum, Adolf. "The Meaning of Time." Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Time. Ed. Eugene Freman and Wilfrid Sellars. Lasalle, IL: Open Court, 1971. 195-228.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Intro. Declan Kiberd. London: Penguin, 1992.

Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Kiernan-Lewis Delmas, "Not Over Yet: Prior's 'Thank Goodness' Argument." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 322-327.

Le Poidevin, Robin. "The Past, Present, and Future of the Debate About Tense." Questions of Time and Tense. Ed. Robin Le Poidevin. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. 13-42.

Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia, SC: U of SC P, 2002.

McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1997.McTaggart, John. The Nature of Existence. 2 vols. Ed. C.D. Broad. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1927.

Mellor, D. H. "The Unreality of Tense." The Philosophy of Time. Ed. Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. 47-59.

Morrison, Jago. "Narration and Unease in Ian McEwan's Later Fiction." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.3 (Spring 2001): 253-268.

Oaklander, L. Nathan. "A Defense of the New Tenseless Theory of Time." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.5768.

--. "Introduction: McTaggart's Paradox and the Tensed Theory of Time." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 157-162.

--. "McTaggart's Paradox and the Infinite Regress of Temporal Attributions: A Reply to

Smith." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 195-201.

--. "On the Experience of Tenseless Time." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 344-350.

Olson, Robert G. An Introduction to Existentialism. New York: Dover, 1962.

Rice, Eugene E Jr. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. New York: Norton, 1970.

Schlesinger, George. "Temporal Becoming." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 214-220.

Slay, Jack, Jr. Ian McEwan. New York: Twayne Publishers; London: Prentice Hall International, 1996.

Smith, Quentin. "Problems with the New Tenseless Theory of Time." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 38- 56.

Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. 3. vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963.

Turetzky, Philip. Time. London: Routledge, 1998.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W Sherburne. 1929. New York: Free P, 1978.

Williams, Clifford. "The Phenomenology of B-Time." The New Theory of Time. Ed. L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. 360-372.

Williams, Donald C. "The Myth of Passage." The Philosophy of Time. Ed. Richard Gale. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities P, 1978. 100-116.

Notes

(1) Enduring Love has not yet elicited extensive critical comment, and only one prior critic, Jago Morrison, has addressed the notion of time in the novel. However, his study treats time only tangentially, in connection with what he terms Joe's "sense of temporal dislocation" or awareness of the exclusion of his personal life from the historical continuity of "medical-scientific discourse"--an enterprise in which he formerly participated as a student of physics (Morrison 260, 259).(2) Joe's notion of the exclusion of man from "the great chain" constitutes a modern version of the argument of Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1498). There Pico ascribes to man the choice of any link on the chain, according to the moral quality of his will. Eugene E Rice, Jr., explains: "Man is an autonomous moral agent, containing in his own nature the possibility of the most varied development, who can by free choice become akin to any being, become like a rock or plant or beast if he turn toward evil, like the angels or like a mortal god if he turn toward good" (Rice 78).

Attributions of madness in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.

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Article date:September 22, 2009

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Palmer, Alan More results for:

enduring love novelThis essay will consider the treatment of madness in fiction from a cognitive perspective. It will do so by exploring three theoretical issues in particular: narrative thinking, attribution theory and intermental thought. After introducing these concepts, I will apply them to the two key relationships in my example text, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love. I have chosen this novel because it focuses specifically on the question of attributions of madness. The character-narrator, Joe, is a popular science writer who, following a hot air balloon accident in which a man dies, is being stalked by a young man, Jed Parry. Jed is in love with Joe and believes that Joe is in love with him. Joe comes to understand that Jed is suffering from de Clerambault's syndrome or erotomania (a real complaint) which causes the sufferer to fall in love with someone who is usually older and of a higher social status, and who, sufferers often think, sends them signals of their love, for example by drawing their curtains. Sufferers typically stalk their victims and often attack them when they are rejected. Joe's partner, Clarissa, however, does not take Jed seriously, is sceptical of Joe's concerns and thinks that Joe should have handled Jed better. The police are also unhelpful. After an unsuccessful attempt on Joe's life, Jed threatens Clarissa with a knife and Joe shoots and wounds him. Jed is then detained in a psychiatric hospital. At the end of Joe's narrative he and Clarissa are separated. The novel ends with an academic paper on the case (apparently thought to be genuine by some reviewers) which mentions briefly and in passing that Joe and Clarissa are later reconciled.After analysing the nature of the attributions of madness to Jed by Joe, I will discuss the effect of Jed's madness on the perfectly sane intermental unit of Joe and Clarissa. (I will explain this term in the following section.) I start with a very marked characteristic of the text: the emphasis in it on the characters' need to narrativize (that is, the need to understand an event or a situation in terms of a narrative). I will then show that Joe and Clarissa narrativize Jed differently. Putting

the point another way, the novel explores what happens to their relationship when the two individuals within an intermental unit narrativize the same behavior differently (that is, intramentally).The term cognitive approaches to literature can be rather misleading if it gives the impression that it is one alternative approach amongst a range of others: psychoanalytical, historical/cultural, feminist, rhetorical and ethical criticism and so on. I do not see it like that at all. In my view, the cognitive approach is the basis of all the other approaches. It does not stand alongside them; it sits underneath them. It is the means by which critics gather the evidence that allows them to make their various generalizations. We are all cognitivists, in my view. The difference is between those who acknowledge the fact and those who do not. It follows then that the cognitive approach is not necessarily an end in itself and so cognitive analyses will tend to drift into these other fields. For example, significantly, the cognitive theorist Lisa Zunshine calls what she does "cognitive cultural studies" and has applied cognitive insights to a range of traditional historical/cultural concerns. In order to take my cognitive analysis of Enduring Love a stage further, I will be considering one specific issue, Clarissa's attributions to Joe and to Jed, within a number of different contexts: characterization theory, empathy, gender studies and, most important of all, rhetorical and ethical criticism. It is in this way that I will be looking at the process by which attributions (a cognitive term) become judgements (an ethical term). For a masterly analysis of this issue from a specifically rhetorical perspective, see James Phelan's chapter in this volume.Theoretical Framework

One of the concerns of cognitive narratalogy is the relationship between consciousness and narrative. The philosopher Daniel Dennett stresses the essential "gappiness" of the various "multiple drafts" of consciousness. According to him, it is an illusion that we experience a unified and uninterrupted stream of consciousness. As a result, according to the science writer Susan Blackmore,

Every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction and

not the same "me" who seemed to exist a moment before, or last

week, or last year. This is tough, but I think it gets easier with

practice. (81)

The philosopher Galen Strawson has a similarly "gappy" view of consciousness. As a consequence, he resists attempts to bind the notion of the self together by means of the concept of narrative. Strawson criticizes in refreshingly blunt terms

what he calls the psychological Narrativity thesis and the ethical Narrativity thesis. The former is the "widespread agreement that human beings typically see or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories" ("Against Narrativity" 428). It is associated with such thinkers as the psychologist Jerome Brunet. The latter is the connected view that "experiencing or conceiving one's life as a narrative is a good thing; a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood" ("Against Narrativity" 428). It is particularly associated with the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In Strawson's opinion, these two views are both wrong. They

hinder human self-understanding, close down important avenues of

thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly

and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and are

potentially destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts. ("Against

Narrativity" 429)

In Strawson's view, we would do better to accept the gappy nature of consciousness and the transitory and ephemeral nature of the self. Enduring Love makes a contribution to this debate by repeatedly and explicitly referring to its characters' attempts to make sense of and control their experiences by turning them into narratives.Attribution theory is the study of how attributions of states of mind are made. (See Heider, Kelley, and Wilson.) It involves such questions as: How do narrators attribute states of mind to characters? How do characters attribute mental states both to themselves and to other characters? How do readers make attributions and thereby build up a sense of a character's whole personality? We are able to make attributions of states of mind to others because we have what is called a theory of mind. This is the term used by philosophers and psychologists to describe our awareness of the existence of other minds, our knowledge of how to interpret other people's thought processes, our mind-reading abilities in the real world. Readers of novels have to use their theory of mind in order to try to follow the workings of characters' minds. Otherwise, they will lose the plot. The only way in which the reader can understand the plot of a novel is by trying to follow the workings of characters' minds and thereby by attributing states of minds to them. This mind reading involves trying to follow characters' attempts to read other characters' minds. Anyone who has a condition such as autism or Asperger's Syndrome, and who therefore suffers from what is called mind blindness, will find it difficult to

understand a novel.Novel reading is mind-reading. (For more on this, see Zunshine and Palmer Fictional Minds, "The Lydgate Storyworld," and "Attribution Theory").Intermental thought is joint, group, shared or collective thought, as opposed to intramental, or individual or private thought (see Palmer "Intermental Thought" and Social Minds). It is also known as socially distributed, situated or extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity, Intermental thought is a crucially important component of fictional narrative because much of the mental functioning that occurs in novels is done by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends, families, couples and other intermental units. It could plausibly be argued that a large amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development and breakdown of these intermental systems. This aspect of narrative, however, has been neglected by traditional theoretical approaches to focalization, characterization, story analysis and the representation of speech and thought.

It is hardly surprising that the group of people including Joe and Jed who are suddenly thrown together in the hot air balloon accident at the beginning of the novel do not form an intermental unit. What is more surprising, however, is the fact that the narrative explicitly draws attention to the absence of intermentality. Joe states: "I should make something clear. There may have been a vague communality of purpose, but we were never a team" (10). The point is clearly an important one, because Joe repeats it a few pages later: "But as I've said, there was no team, there was no plan, no agreement to be broken" (14). Nevertheless, significantly, the academic article following Joe's narrative speculates that Jed's participation in this loose social unit, however fleeting and ephemeral it may have been, has a profound psychological effect on him. The authors suggest that, "Such a transformation, from a "socially empty" life to intense team-work may have been the dominating factor in precipitating the [de Clerambault's] syndrome" (239, my emphasis). Putting it rather crudely, the article is suggesting that Jed's participation in what he thinks of as an intermental unit (although Joe does not agree and it is doubtful whether any of the other participants would either) is the proximate cause of his descent into madness. Whether or not this is a plausible theory in this specific case, it is a telling acknowledgement of the power and importance of intermental units.Narrative Thinking

Four different perspectives on the storyworld of the novel are directly presented in the text:* Joe (the bulk of the text consists of his first person narrative);

* Clarissa (one chapter is written by Joe but focalized through her; and also her letter to Joe is reproduced within Joe's narrative);

* Jed (two of his letters to Joe are also reproduced); and

* the authors of the academic article that follows Joe's narrative.

These perspectives comprise narratives that, in very different ways, account for and try to make sense of the events that occur in the storyworld. The point that emerges is that life is aspectual: the significance of any event or situation on the aspect under which it is viewed. It is significant that the words narrative and story recur continually, even rather heavy-handedly, as ever-present reminders of aspectuality throughout the text. A minor character, Mrs Logan, has a "story" (122), "a narrative that only grief, the dementia of pain, could devise" (123). Joe asks whether Jed believes "in his private narrative" that he was sparing Clarissa's feelings (144). "It was only when they reached us that our story could continue" (173). "I had my story" (196). "'I want to hear this story at first hand'" (224). There are references to the "narrative compression of storytelling" (213) and "Lacy's story" (220). And this is just a selection. Given this plethora of stories and narratives, an objective view of the aspectual events of the storyworld is clearly going to be impossible. Indeed, the impossibility of such objectivity is twice explicitly referred to: "There could be no private redemption in objectivity" (181); and, "Besides, there isn't only ever one system of logic" (214). This point becomes particularly important when Joe's reliability as a narrator of the events in the storyworld is called into question.

Joe's need to create narratives is shown in several different contexts:

* the hot air balloon accident;

* the murder attempt in the restaurant;

* the history of science; and

* the need to account for Jed's behavior as mad and also as criminal. I will take each of these in turn.

Joe and also Clarissa obsessively retell the story of the accident. They turn it into a narrative. They are shown to be "circling it, stalking it, until we had cornered and began to tame it with words" (29). Reinforcing the need to "tame" events by means of narrative, Joe says later that, "Over the days and weeks, Clarissa and I told our story many times to friends, colleagues and relatives" (36). During this period, "our

story was gaining in coherence; it had shape, and now it was spoken from a place of safety" (36). (Incidentally, this process is rather reminiscent of Briony's continual and self-conscious retellings and reshapings of the events in another of McEwan's novels, Atonement.) When describing Jed's request that they pray together, he tells "the prayer story as comedy" (30). The need to narrativize the accident lessens when the event has been tamed: "Talking the events over with friends no longer seems to help because, she thinks, she has reached a core of senselessness" (80). Joe also likes to narrativize other events. Just before the murder attempt in the restaurant, Joe confesses that "l would have liked to tell the story of my encounter with Inspector Linley, spice it up a little and squeeze some amusement from it" (164). His need to narrativize is also apparent after the restaurant shooting:

A day or so later it became a temptation to invent or elaborate

details about the table next to ours, to force memory to deliver

what was never captured ... It also became difficult to disentangle

what I discovered later from what I sensed at the time. (166)

So much so, in fact, that some of the details that he gives to the police are later contradicted by others.

As a popular science writer, Joe's job consists of narrativising science: "I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, back-trackings and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs" (75). But he is ambivalent about his work because he wants to be a "real" scientist and occasionally makes unsuccessful attempts to get back into serious science. In particular, he feels revulsion at his attempt to narrativize his subject: "Narrative--my gut tightened at the word. What balls I had written the night before" (56). He feels guilty about his dishonest methodology: the use of a small number of convenient examples, his ignoring of many other counter-examples and so on. As with his urge to spice up and tell as comedy his narratives of the events in his life, he is imposing an arbitrary and aspectual framework on the inchoate flux of facts and events.

Because of his occupation, Joe has a tendency to consider scientific explanations for events. Some of these relate to the question of attribution. For example, when Joe is waiting at the airport for Clarissa and looking at the other people in the crowd, he decides that the expressions on their faces confirm "Darwin's contention that the many expressions of emotion in humans are universal, genetically

inscribed" (4). Later, there is a long, very general scientific discussion on the age-old question of whether we can attribute behavior to nature or nurture (70-77). These discussions form a context for the specific attributional difficulties that are caused by madness. The notion of madness arises from the difficulty in reliably attributing mental states to others. Saying that behavior is obsessive, mad or insane is saying that it is unattributable--it is not possible to attribute reliable motives, reasons and intentions for actions, and so other explanations must be found. When the usual attributional process does not work, the default explanation is: "he must be mad." In Porter Abbott's phrase, mad people have unreadable minds. The difficulties involved in attributing states of mind to a mad person are illustrated by the significant emphasis in the text on madness as a complete, self-contained, solipsistic world that sane people are not able to enter: Jed's "world was emotion, invention and yearning" (147); "His was a world determined from the inside, driven by private necessity, and this way it could remain intact... He illuminated the world with his feelings, and the world confirmed him at every turn his feelings took" (143); and "He was inviolable in his solipsism" (144). The scientific paper explains that, as a "well-encapsulated delusional system" (238), "erotomania may act as a defence against depression and loneliness by creating a full intrapsychic world" (239).

Joe and Jed

Joe is initially unable to narrativize Jed's behavior according to the usual attributional rules. He then characteristically seeks a scientific explanation. At the first mention by Jed of Joe drawing his curtain, it is clear to Joe that the curtains have an attributional significance for him. "A curtain used as a signal. Now I was closer than before. I almost had it" (92). Joe has a faint memory of the importance of the signal from the "lover" for de Clerambault sufferers, but cannot quite place it at first. Finally he remembers the existence of de Clerambault's syndrome:

The name was like a fanfare, a clear trumpet sound recalling me to my own obsessions. There was research to follow through now and I knew exactly where to start. A syndrome was a framework of prediction and it offered a kind of comfort. I was almost happy ... It was as ill had at last been offered that research post with my old professor. (124, my emphasis)

He is clearly deeply relieved when he is able to attach a scientific label to this disruptive and inexplicable event in his life. He sees Jed's behavior as "a love whose morbidity I was now anxious to research" (127, my emphasis). The point is reinforced even more strongly a little later: "Studying Parry with reference to a syndrome I could tolerate, even relish, but meeting him yet again, in the street,

especially now that I had read his first letter, had frightened me" (130, my emphasis). Although "relish" is an odd word to use in this context, it is clear why he should use it. He feels reassured by his knowledge: "I had read the literature and knew the possibilities" (153). He feels that he now has some control over the situation. Also, he states explicitly that part of the reason for his frantic scientific study of Jed's madness is to bring him closer to Clarissa again: "What could I learn about Parry that would restore me to Clarissa?" (128). And he feels better even though the conclusions are not necessarily reassuring in themselves, and do not appear to suggest that any such control is going to be possible: "Well over a half of all male de Clerambaults in one survey had attempted violence on the subjects of their obsessions" (142).Having found a coherent narrative that can serve as an explanation for Jed's behavior, it is also important for Joe that, in addition, it be narrativized as a crime. Joe stresses that "Parry's behavior had to be generalised into a crime" (73). However, it is noticeable that this move is continually resisted by everyone else associated with the case. Clarissa certainly does not see Jed as a criminal. Significantly, she never takes seriously the possibility that Jed might become violent. Also, the official narrative differs from Joe's. He is told by a policeman that it is not possible to label Jed as a criminal. After Joe describes Jed's behavior to a policeman, the response is that "There's nothing here that's threatening, abusive or insulting as defined by Section Five of the Public Order Act" (157). Joe's control over the situation is thereby reduced.

Joe's theoretical or scientific interest in Jed's mental illness may in part explain his dilemma over how to deal with the madman. Joe frequently engages with Jed and then immediately experiences a marked wish to disengage. Their encounters are strongly characterized by a continual see-sawing of move and then withdrawal. "'What do you want?' Even as I said the words, I wanted them back. I did not want to know what he wanted, or rather, I did not want to be told" (59). Sometimes Joe gives in to his undeniable feelings of curiosity and also pity. At other times he withdraws and refuses to humor him in any way. He agonises a good deal over this recurring pattern. The most common reason for it is simple curiosity. For example: "l was quite interested to know, although I also wanted to get away" (64); "I should have walked on, but his intensity held me for the moment and I had just sufficient curiosity to echo him" (65); and "l had decided to say nothing more to him, but I couldn't help myself" (68). Joe's ambivalence has serious consequences for his relationship with Clarissa when she accuses him of leading Jed on. Joe's willingness to maintain relations with Jed sometimes reveals a self-conscious preoccupation with the issue of attribution. Joe links the two issues of scientific curiosity and attributional failure when he says that, "When this story was closed it

would be important to know something about Parry. Otherwise he would remain as much a projection of mine as I was of his" (60). There is a laudable awareness here of one of the chief pitfalls in the attribution process--the temptation to project the self onto others. It could even be argued that Joe goes too far in this direction because, when encounters with Jed go badly wrong, he seems to imagine himself "accused" of "a failed extension into mental space" (128). He appears to feel guilty that he does not realize immediately that Jed is mad. But why? This seems to me to be an overreaction. It is surely praiseworthy to be reluctant to attribute madness too quickly.

It is noticeable that the meetings between the two men revolve around the issues of control and intimacy. Jed remarks, "It's all about control, isn't it?" (62). Joe is understandably disturbed at the apparent intimacy of their relationship. He finds himself "talking to a stranger in terms more appropriate to an affair, or a marriage on the rocks" (67). To his horror, he thinks, "I'm in a relationship" (73). In an oddly intimate form of words, Joe refers to Jed as "my de Clerambault" (207, my emphasis). The use of the possessive when referring to Jed strikes a jarring note. The issues of power, control and intimacy become an important element in the conflicts between Joe and Clarissa when, as described in the next section, Clarissa begins to have doubts about Joe's handling of the situation:

Was I giving her the impression that I was secretly flattered by

Party's attention, or that I was unconsciously leading him on, or

that without recognising the fact, I was enjoying my power over

him, or--perhaps she thought this--my power over her? (102)

Joe and Clarissa

At the start of the novel, Joe and Clarissa form a fairly well-functioning intermental unit. Initially, their attributions of states of mind to the other appear to be accurate and successful. There was nothing, Joe says, until the Jed affair, that "threatened our free and intimate existence" (8). However, as with most relationships, there are some fine, potential fault-lines. One is Joe's desire to become a real scientist again. Clarissa finds Joe's occasional unsuccessful attempts to do so rather upsetting because they are doomed to failure and they disturb the equilibrium of their relationship. Another is Clarissa's inability to have children. Both of them would like to have a family. When these fault-lines crack wide open on the impact of the invasion into their lives of a madman, Joe and Clarissa cease

to be an intermental unit. The reason for the split is that they attribute different states of mind to Jed. They narrativize him differently or, in my terms, intramentally. They never achieve a stable intermental consensus on this issue. Joe's attributions, as we have seen, construct a threatening, dangerous, potentially violent madman. Clarissa initially denies that Jed is mad at all. She narrativizes him as a joke, implies that Joe is unreliable in his accounts of Jed's behavior, and trivializes the matter as a nuisance. Then, once she does accept the reality, she sees him as capable of being, in effect, tamed and domesticated. She also alleges that, in any event, it is all Joe's fault (5658). (Clarissa's views are developed in more detail later in the essay.)Clarissa's views on Jed, are, on the whole, focalized through Joe. To put the point another way, Joe is exercising his theory of mind on what Clarissa thinks of Jed. Clarissa is only able to speak for herself directly when she writes her letter to Joe, but this letter is placed very near the end of Joe's narrative. Joe refers frequently to what he thinks (reliably, in my view) is Clarissa's view of Jed, and tries hard to be convinced by it: "Clarissa was right, he was a harmless fellow with a strange notion, a nuisance at most, hardly the threat I had made him out to be" (61). Whilst in general Joe sees Jed as dangerous, he is constantly aware that Clarissa views him as harmless and pays careful attention to her views.

Then he [Jed] represented the unknown, into which I projected all kinds of inarticulate terrors. Now I considered him to be a confused and eccentric young man who couldn't look me in the eye, whose inadequacies and emotional cravings rendered him harmless. He was a pathetic figure, not a threat after all, but an annoyance, one that might frame itself, just as Clarissa had said, into an amusing story. (69, my emphasis)

Later. Jed's first letter to Joe appears to Clarissa to be "such an unfaked narrative of emotion" (101, my emphasis) that she is convinced that it is Joe who is at fault. Note the stress in here on the power of narrative. Both Joe and Clarissa are constructing Jed as a narrative or story. However, despite Joe's attempt to reconcile the two narratives they soon diverge. Trying on Clarissa's attributions does not work for Joe for long. In the next passage, written by Joe but focalized through Clarissa, the note of scepticism is unmistakable: "She thinks she understands Parry well enough. A lonely inadequate man, a Jesus freak who is probably living off his parents, and dying to connect with someone, anyone, even Joe" (81, my emphasis). She has constructed a detailed narrative or life story for Jed that is, in fact, fairly accurate, but what she leaves out is his potential for violence.

Joe's awareness of Clarissa's ambivalence about Jed's madness is well caught in this passage:

She seemed to agree with me that he was mad and that I was right to

feel harassed. "'Seemed" because she was not quite whole-hearted,

and if she said I was right--and I thought she did--she never

really acknowledged that she had been wrong. I sensed she was

keeping her options open, though she denied it when I asked her.

(100)

The reliable mind reading on which any successful intermental unit is based is clearly under threat here. It has become dangerously patchy. Joe knows that something is not quite right, but he is simply not sure of the extent to which Clarissa's views on Jed diverge from his own. In particular, he is not sure what Clarissa's "options" might be. Perhaps the divergence with the greatest impact on their relationship is Clarissa's insistence on holding Joe responsible, at least in part, for Jed's obsession. Joe thinks that Clarissa is fooled by Jed's "artful technique of suggesting a past, a pact, a collusion, a secret life of glances and gestures" (100). In other words, Jed has constructed a (non-existent) narrative that Clarissa finds plausible. Multiple levels of theory of mind result: Joe thinks that Clarissa believes that Jed knows that Joe loves him too. In a key statement in her letter near the end of thenovel, Clarissa writes to Joe: "I accept that Parry is mad in ways I could never have guessed at. All the same, I can understand how he might have formed the impression that you were leading him on" (218). This is in part because: "You went your own way, you denied him everything, and that allowed his fantasies, and ultimately his hatred, to flourish" (218). These first-person views show that Joe was right all along to think that Clarissa had strong reservations about his handling of the affair. Both these statements put a good deal of the blame for the harm caused by Jed's actions on Joe. What is noticeable about them is how intolerant they are of Joe's perceived shortcomings. Clarissa certainly cuts Joe no slack whatsoever. I will come back to this point later.As a result of these intramental divergences, the unit is put under great pressure. The two individuals start to separate. They both acknowledge that it is Jed that has caused the divide. Joe says of the period before he invaded their lives: "Now I could not quite imagine a route back into that innocence" (127). Understandably, he is reluctant to talk to Clarissa about Jed: "Another reason for not talking now of our problem was that we would be bound to let Parry into our bedroom" (145). Clarissa also knows that they are drifting apart: "She remembers too that they love each other and happen to be in very different mental universes now, with

very different needs" (82). However, intermentality is still a factor in their relationship. During their row, she realizes that, despite her best efforts, "She has let herself be drawn into Joe's mental state, his problems, his dilemmas, his needs" (85). Nevertheless, Joe refers to "the fine crack of estrangement that had appeared between Clarissa and me" (99). Their attributions of states of mind to each other become judgemental and confrontational. In Joe's words: We were hardly at war, but everything between us was stalled ... To

her I was manic, perversely obsessed, and, worst of all, the

thieving invader of her private space. As far as I was concerned

she was disloyal, unsupportive in this time of crisis, and

irrationally suspicious. (139)

Any attempts at communication are inconclusive because they have less knowledge of the other's mind than they used to: Joe "felt that we had been denied a conclusion ... I thought that there remained between us an unarticulated dispute, though I wasn't certain what it was" (101). Joe's illicit and totally unjustified reading of Clarissa's letters seems to her to be "a statement, a message, from you to me, it's a signal. The trouble is, l don't know what it means" (132). Clarissa tells Joe that a "stranger invaded our lives, and the first thing that happened was that you became a stranger to me" (218). However, it is noticeable from these statements that some vestigial traces of intermental thought remain, even though the gaps between them widen. They know what they do not know. In Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, these are known unknowns. What would be even worse, I suppose, would be unknown unknowns: not knowing that they do not know what the other is thinking, and assuming that everything is still fine when it is not. Given these pressures, it is inevitable that, towards the end, they drift apart. Joe refers to the "speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person" (221). He talks very slightingly of her letter: "I disliked its wounded, self-righteous tone, its clammy emotional logic, its knowingness that hid behind a highly selective memory" (222). As far as both of them are concerned, "The matter of our differences was unbroachable" (223). (However, as stated in a brief aside in the academic paper, they are eventually reconciled and adopt children.)

Joe's State of Mind

A very powerful irony operating in the novel is the fact that, when the perfectly sane Joe is faced by the mad Jed, both Clarissa and even Joe himself develop doubts about Joe's own sanity. At one point Joe feels like a "mental patient at the end of visiting hours. Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought" (58). Clarissa feeds these fears. In the chapter in which Joe speculates about what Clarissa thinks about how his mind is working, he writes (from her point of view): "The trouble with Joe's precise and careful mind is that it takes no account of its own emotional field. He seems unaware that his arguments are no more than ravings, they are an aberration and they have a cause" (83, my emphasis). It is clear that Clarissa is wondering hard about Joe's mental health: "Perhaps Parry, or the Parry as described by Joe, does not exist" (86). During their row, she says: "You were so intense about him as soon as you met him. It's like you invented him" (86). "You ought to be asking yourself which way this fixation runs" (86). During another exchange, she says: "I'm talking about your mind" (148). When Joe replies: "There's nothing wrong with my mind," she responds: "Don't you realise you've got a problem" (148). Joe decides that "Now it was settled in her mind I was unhinged" (150). Clarissa thought that her emotions were the appropriate guide, that

she could feel her way to the truth, when what was needed was

information, foresight and careful calculation. It was therefore

natural, though disastrous for us both, that she should think I was

mad. (150)

That "therefore" is surely a stretch. Why should Clarissa relying on her emotions and feeling her way to the truth necessarily cause her to think that he is mad?

His alleged mania is linked to his growing sense of loneliness. It is emphasized on a number of occasions that, because the intermental unit has been broken and Clarissa has doubts about Joe's sanity, he is on his own: "We continued to live side by side, but I knew that I was on my own" (149). "Clarissa thought I was mad, the police thought I was a fool, and one thing was clear: the task of getting us back to where we were was going to be mine alone" (161). "I was on my own" (175). "I felt my isolation and vulnerability" (177). This isolation is self-reinforcing. The more alone he feels, the more Clarissa feels it too: "Your being right is not a simple matter ... Shoulder to shoulder? You went it alone, Joe" (216). "You were manic, and driven, and very lonely" (217). These discussions about Joe's sanity and

the emphasis on his aloneness will clearly reinforce any doubts about the reliability of Joe's narration.

Clarissa's Behavior

This novel is an instructive lesson in the aspectuality of narrative and of life generally that I referred to earlier. It turns out that Joe was right all along to think that Jed was a dangerous madman and that Clarissa was wrong not to take Joe's views seriously. He was a reliable narrator. Clarissa does not know at the time that Joe is right. Fair enough--we all make mistakes. But for me, the issue is not Clarissa being wrong. It is whether or not she should believe in Joe more at the time and trust in him more than she does. From her aspectual view of the storyworld, what she undeniably does know is that they have a loving, trusting relationship and that he is intelligent and reliable. So why does she not believe him? Why does she not accept his narrative and, instead, create one of her own? Why does she not accept his attributions to Jed and replace them with hers? To put the point theoretically: What evidence (what T. S. Eliot called the "objective correlative") is there that this character, Clarissa, would behave in this way? What would justify such a breach of faith by such an intelligent person within such a trusting relationship? How likely is it that this character, Clarissa, would think that this character, Joe, would wish to lead Jed on or even make it all up? How likely is it that she would be so unyieldingly critical of him? Why did she not make allowances for the fact that he is being stalked by a madman? Putting the question even more tendentiously: Is Clarissa's why-didn'tyou-just-invite-this-homicidal-maniac-in-for-a-cup-of-tea? strategy meant to sound as utterly stupid, inadequate, and pathetic as it does to me?This discussion of Clarissa's behavior, and in particular the talk of evidence for the workings of characters' minds raises interesting questions about the notion of characterization. The evidence that I have been discussing is the data that readers slot into the cognitive characterization frame that they create for the Clarissa character. My frame is as follows: a highly intelligent, sensitive, self-aware and conscientious person who loves her partner, tries hard to behave well, and has a considerable degree of insight into herself, other people and the mechanics of relationships generally. So, can I account, with in this frame, for a person who would immediately be so utterly distrustful of the man that she loves that she instantly jumps to the conclusion that he is making things up? Would not the character that I have created give him some considerable benefit of the doubt? So, what happens next? Should another frame be created? But I am not sure what that other frame would be, given that it would contain data that, to me, seems inconsistent with what is already there. So perhaps we simply say that this is a

characteristic of the text of this novel that we should simply accept. OK, people are inconsistent, they are complex. We are not robots. But even though I know that to be true, why do I find it unsatisfying as an answer in this case?It might be helpful to explore this question further by summarising Clarissa's criticisms of Joe as follows:

(1) Joe may be making it all up.

(2) Joe is guilty of leading Jed on.

(3) Joe does not show sufficient empathy for Jed: if, for example, Joe had invited him into the house he may not have become violent.

(4) Joe cuts himself off emotionally from Clarissa and goes his own way.

(5) Joe reads her letters.

The last point is easily dealt with. He is wrong to read her letters. This is something that Joe should not have done. It was a morally indefensible act. However, her lack of trust in him had begun before then. The other criticisms deserve closer examination. For example, (1), (2) and (3) appear to be contradictory. If he is making it up, then the possibilities of leading Jed on and not dealing with him properly do not arise. In addition, (2) and (3) are equally contradictory. Surely, showing more empathy and inviting him into the house would be the clearest possible case of leading him on. As for the substance of (2), Joe is, as shown above, certainly ambivalent about how best to deal with Jed, but whether or not he can then be said to be "leading him on" seems to me to be debatable. With regard to Joe going off on his own (4), this looks like a chicken-and-egg situation in which, if Clarissa had been more supportive, Joe would not have felt the need to go it alone.

The relations between men and women can be made difficult by the fact that they are often governed by two completely different impulses: men by shame and women by fear. This framework might be applied to this case by suggesting that Joe feels shame at the growing closeness and intimacy of his relationship with Jed, and Clarissa feels fearful that Joe is drifting away from her and she is losing the person she loves. "It's always been a fear that she'll live with someone who goes crazy. That's why she chose rational Joe" (83). In addition, there are the underlying tensions in the relationship that I referred to earlier: Joe wanting to go back into real science while Clarissa knows that he has left it too late; and Clarissa's inability to have children. Perhaps these latent conflicts can explain Clarissa's behavior,

especially if she perceives Joe as irresponsibly attempting to avoid the problems in their relationship by throwing himself into the research into Jed's condition?

It may help at this point to focus on one particular event: Jed's first phone call. Joe makes a big mistake in not telling Clarissa about it at the time and waiting for a day or two before he mentions it. "It may have been exhaustion, or perhaps my concealment was protective of her, but I know I made my first serious mistake" (37). He also explains the delay by saying that it was because he could not cope with it at that time so soon after the balloon accident and he did not want to disrupt the intermental equilibrium that they had only just managed to find following this accident. ("Would it have been right then ... to intrude upon our happiness with an account of Parry's phone call?" [53].) Let us consider this issue first in terms of empathy (Keen). If I were to put myself in Clarissa's position, I would find Joe's explanation satisfactory. I suppose this is because I do that sort of thing myself. I sometimes wait before I tell someone something because I need time to process it myself first. But it seems to me that this is not what empathy is: it is not me trying to imagine being myself in that position; it is me trying to imagine being Clarissa in that position. And to do that, we have to ask: What caused her to behave in the way that she did? In other words, the reader must attribute reasons, causes, motives and intentions to her actions, bringing us back, once again, to the question of evidence. So we need to return once more to attribution theory.

When considering the attribution of reasons for actions (,either first or third person), psychologists distinguish between those that focus on the individual ("he did that because he's that kind of person") and those that focus on the context ("he did that because that's what people tend to do in that kind of situation"). Indeed, they refer to our well-researched tendency to overvalue the former and undervalue the latter as the fundamental attribution error (Palmer Fictional Minds, 244-46). (To digress for a moment here, there is an intriguing tension between the psychologists' concept of the fundamental attribution error and the need for novelists to focus on the specificity and individuality of their characters. A novel in which characters behave just like everyone else does not sound like a compelling page-turner.) Within this attributional framework, it is possible to see Joe's decision not to report the call in situational or contextual terms. That is: "Well, anyone in his situation--tired, stressed, wanting a little respite--would have done the same." It is equally plausible, though, to see the decision as an example of a dispositional fallibility: his need to control the narrative. The combination of Joe's dispositional flaw and Clarissa's understandable fear of loss of intimacy might form the beginnings of an ethical justification of her behavior. But is it enough to set against the contrary case? Is not her distrust a distinct overreaction

both to her fear of Joe drifting away and to Joe's apparent faults? After all, there are much worse things to be than someone who is rather controlling. In any event, how much of a control freak is Joe? As established above, he uses narrative as a controlling device, but don't we all? He may have an ambivalent attitude towards Jed because he is curious about the syndrome, but this hardly seems to me to amount to an illegitimate exercise in power and control. And the careful and respectful attention that he pays to Clarissa's initial views on Jed are anything but controlling.At this point I have a confession to make. When I read this novel for the first time, and again when I was studying the novel for the purpose of writing this essay, I found myself getting angry with Clarissa. This is shaming to admit, but it is true nevertheless. I thought to myself: How dare she distrust and undermine Joe and leave him, a man alone (but for his gun?) to face this homicidal maniac. Why was she not by his side? And so on. On the other hand, l have also been equally conscious of a parallel, contradictory response: this is to doubt that Clarissa's behavior is sufficiently motivated by McEwan the novelist. I have discussed some of the possible reasons for her behavior--her fear of losing the man she loves, her concern over Joe's desire to be a serious scientist, her pain at not being able to have children with Joe. Nevertheless, I personally am not convinced by them. For me, they do not fully explain her behavior cognitively (as well as not justifying it ethically). These instabilities do not seem to me to constitute sufficient causes for the dramatic widening of the hairline cracks in their relationship under the impact of Jed's madness. And, in particular, I simply do not see what evidence Clarissa has for thinking that it may be Joe who is the madman. So. if I cannot find the evidence to explain or justify Clarissa's behavior, then it seems to me that the choices are these:* I am an incompetent reader;

* McEwan is an incompetent author; or

* Clarissa is an unethical character.

In other words, the evidence is in the text but I cannot see it, so I am incompetent. Or the evidence is not there and this lack is unintended. This is therefore an aesthetic fault in McEwan the novelist and so he is incompetent. Or the evidence is not there, this is intended and it therefore shows that Clarissa behaves in an unethical way. She is unjustified in behaving as she does.

To summarize: the question to ask can be simply put: Does Joe do enough wrong? On balance, I would say: no. A more nuanced question is this one: Does McEwan

miscalculate in trying to set up a context within which Clarissa's mistrust of Joe can be understood and even forgiven? I would say: yes.

Conclusion

I wish to end my essay with a tentative speculation that will take what is already a wide ranging discussion into the area of gender studies. It is that l suspect that there may be a gender divide in readers over Clarissa's behavior. That is, I suspect that women readers may tend to sympathize with Clarissa's concern over what she perceives to be Joe's erratic behavior and her fear of losing him; while men may be more likely to identify with Joe and his anger at what he perceives to be Clarissa's disloyalty. Put in my terms, the aspectual view of the novel's storyworld adopted by most women readers may have more in common with Clarissa's aspectual view of it than Joe's, and vice versa for male readers. This hypothesis might benefit from some empirical investigation.Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maria Bachman, Lars Bernaerts and, especially, James Phelan for their comments on this essay.

Works Cited

Blackmore, Susan. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford up, 2005.

Brunet, Jerome. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1986.

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

Heider, Fritz. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley, 1958.

Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.Kelley, Harold. "The processes of causal attribution," American Psychologist 28 (1973): 107-28.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1981.

McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. 1997. London: Vintage, 2006.Palmer, Alan. "Attribution Theory." Contemporary Stylistics. Ed. Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell. London: Continuum, 2007.

--. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004.

--. "Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind." Style 39.4, (2005): 427-39.--. "The Lydgate Storyworld." Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Ed. Jan Christoph Meister. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. 151-72.

--. "Social Minds in Little Dorrit." Columbus: Ohio State UP, forthcoming.

Strawson, Galen. "The Self." Journal of Consciousness Studies 4.5-6 (1997): 4O5-28.

--. "Against Narrativity." Ratio 16 (2004): 428-52.

Wilson, Timothy. Strangers to Ourselves." Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 2002.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.

Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction. Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.Zunshine, Lisa. "Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency." Narrative 16.1 (2008): 65-92.

Alan Palmer

Independent Scholar

ENDURING LOVE

Article from:The Village Voice 

Article date:October 27, 2004

 Author:

Park, Ed More results for: 

enduring love novelENDURING LOVEDirected by Roger Michell

Paramount Classics

Opens October 29

THE BALLOONATIC

Substituting stalker tropes for crisp prose, adaptation lets the air out of Ian McEwan's novelFantastically front-loaded, Enduring Love climaxes early. Joe Rose (Sylvia's Daniel Craig), college lecturer and pop evolutionary theorist, is about to picnic with his partner, rising sculptress Claire (Samantha Morton), in a resplendent tree-framed expanse outside London. They barely have time to bring out the bubbly before a tumescent hot-air balloon lumbers into view, red as murder and surreal in its proximity. A boy is in the basket; a man on the ground desperately tries to bring it to heel. The pace shoots through the roof, and suddenly the game is on: Joe dashes to help secure the balloon, and two other men, seemingly conjured from distant quarters of the landscape, converge to grab the available ropes. But the thing ascends, three of the men let go, and the fourth hangs on, only to fall to his death.If anything, Roger MichelPs adaptation of Ian McEwan's 1997 novel handles this sequence with even greater adrenalized economy than the source. It nails the instant panic, the silent vertigo, the horror-filled pause as the wind gathers for its fatal pushas if all the commas have been turned into dashes. When respectable, bespectacled Joe and another would-be savior, the Cobainmaned Jed Parry (Rhys !fans), come across the devastated body of the last to let go, Jed suggests they pray. Joe declines, but kneelsenough to start his momentary comrade on the path of obsession, the enduring, baseless, home-wrecking love of the sinister title.Encouragingly, the film follows the balloon fiasco with a candlelit fillip in which Joe and Claire recount the episode for friends, real tragedy instantly recycled as dinner conversation. Joe's discomfort at the anecdote ripens-Craig is adept at registering quick mental repositionings-and it's clear the disaster, the death, will have repercussions. But not in the way he thinks.

Jed stakes out Joe's bleakly sunlit digs, causing friction with Claire, whose kiln creations resemble Easter Island heads slammed in a vise. Alas, as Jed's erotomania-the delusion that someone is in lovewith you, a/k/a de Clerambault's syndrome-swells, the typical stalker tropes get trotted out, and slackness sets in. The camera goes swirly with paranoia. Jed intones a creepy cover version of a beloved chestnut ("God Only Knows "). Joe breaks into Jed's lair only to find the inevitable wall of psycho news clippings/outsider art. These tired scenes are abad

substitute for McE wan's clean, even quotable lines. Craig keeps Joe Rose on a hair trigger, but Mort on is wasted as Claire; !fans simply looks stoned.Judiciously streamlined, the film also has a gnarlier showdown than the original. But the sense of nightmare, so vivid at first, vanishes like the wind. "Where do we learn such tricks?" asks McEwan's narrator, dissecting the tactics employed in a domestic argument. "Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies?" Such razor-walking self-consciousness (or just plain braininess) is perhaps impossible to depict coherently on-screen, and the someone's-watching-me vibe is otherwise overfamiliar to moviegoers. If only !fans could have bottled the quiet, eyewidening intensity of dental hygienist Andrea, who on the current season of TAe Bachelor rigidly proclaims her love for Byron despite little evidence of reciprocation. Andrea, will you accept a Rose? Id love to.

Inner space; Two novels show that in a small span of time - an evening or a day - rich internal musings can relive a life, revisit a lost love or reshape the future.(ENTERTAINMENT)(Review)

Article from:Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) 

Article date:November 8, 1998

Author:Waddington, Chris

 More results for: 

enduring love novelEvening

- By: Susan Minot.

- Publisher: Knopf, 288 pages, $23.

- Review: A dying woman recalls her life - and a long lost love - in a splendidly written novel about the enduring power of memory, the dangers of regret and the possibility of redemption and change.- Event: Minot will read from her new novel at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Hungry Mind, 1648 Grand Av., St. Paul.Conventional wisdom says that we die alone, but in Susan Minot's crisply limned third novel, nothing could be further from the truth. "Evening" is crammed with 65

years' worth of husbands, lovers, children, friends and vividly recalled places from the life of Ann Lord, a well-to-do Bostonian who spends the novel in bed, sifting memories altered by time and pain medication.For this stoical matron, death is simply another occasion in a life that "would not hold any more surprises for her. . . . All that was left was for her to get through this last thing." Yet from the first page, it's clear that death is not the sole force driving this story. An old, lost love has reared in Lord's thoughts, leading her and the reader back to the summer of 1955, to a wedding in Maine and to the brief emotional blossoming of a woman who has always treated her feelings "as if they were unruly children who ought to be tamed."Like twin threads, the book's past love and present illness twine around each other, providing a cord of narrative on which Minot strings revealing vignettes from her heroine's various marriages, the troubled relationship of her parents and her life as a mother - vignettes that do much to explain her emotional reserve.Although "Evening" revives one of literature's hoariest narrative schemes - a dying character's life passing before her - it transcends cliche by evoking accurately the odd course of memory as events in the sickroom and chains of association drag Ann Lord from past to present.

Unsparing about the clinical details of illness and the waning of consciousness, the book and its heroine - avoid melodrama as the past floods her thoughts: "She had no task in front of her, no living room to redo or tickets to pick up, no dinner party to plan, no children to be fetched or novel to be read or phone to be answered, no blue suit to try on when she got home. She stared upward and the ceiling stared back. Stick with the concrete, she told herself. It helped ward off the pain."The concrete also abounds in Minot's writing, which eschews metaphor and high-flown language and achieves its best effects by accumulating detail. Thus, her heroine tries to recall her first jobs as a young woman in New York City and seizes upon "a punch-out clock in the basement of Scribners', a navy wool jacket she wore, the slippery rugs in Mrs. Havemeyer's foyer." Such details "were the props of her life but she had no more sense of them than one does for the stage scenery of a play one saw ages ago then forgot. . . . Now most of them gave off neither heat nor cold and she watched them drop into the gaping dark hole of meaningless things she had not forgotten, things one level up from the far vaster place where lay all the unremembered things."

Ah, but "Evening" is also a love story, and like all great romantic tales it involves a passion that crashes against the fixed circumstances of the lovers' lives. Anne Lord hadn't planned to fall in love at her friend's wedding - nor had the handsome man from Chicago, the groom's old Army buddy, a doctor who happened to be engaged

to another woman. Despite all this, passion flared between them and "there was nothing to keep in herself. She took his face in her hands and kissed him feeling so near that it was like her face looking out at her own self and her spirit opened wider to him. It could not stop. That's what love was, she thought, throwing open everything and not having it matter if it would go on afterwards."When that afterwards arrives, Lord finds herself alone in the night, the wedding over, the party scattered. She strips and swims into the cold sea off Maine, turning her loss in her mind: "He had given her a great thing. He has gone, said her heart. She would not let this defeat her. Her heart swam on ahead. She would keep going, she would never speak of it. Her heart went on without her."

"Evening" traces Lord's attempt to reclaim her heart before dying - and her passion transforms a cool recounting, a mere string of events, into something resembling the actual texture of time and memory.

Given its setting, "Evening" may seem a kind of historical novel to certain readers, dredging the privileged, upper-middle-class world of America after World War II. That same world provided rich material for writers such as John Updike and John Cheever, but Minot's intensely focused look at the workings of one woman's consciousness - its tracking of inner states and the free-associative play of the mind - sets her apart from those happily earthbound American satyrs.With a vision akin to that of Virginia Woolf and other early 20th-century modernists, Minot has delivered a novel about consequences, about the enduring power of memory, the dangers of regret and the possibility, however provisional, of redemption and change.1/3

Chris Waddington is the Star Tribune's new books editor. Waddington, 43, has worked as both a journalist and fiction writer; his work has appeared appeared in the Quarterly, the Oxford American, Exquisite Corpse and other national literary publications.

Born in New York City, he grew up in North Dakota, where his father ran a public library. He has a history degree from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.

Waddington's previous position was with the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans, where he was visual-arts critic since 1992. As an art critic, he has published in the Star Tribune, Art In America and Art & Antiques. He ran the campus gallery at St. Olaf College in Northfield and wrote the keynote essay for a book on artist Russell Chatham.

He is married to artist and writer Shelley Holl.

ate, romance and Enduring Love

Article from:University Wire 

Article date:October 8, 1998

 Author:

Kama Leier More results for: 

enduring love novelKama LeierUniversity Wire10-08-1998(McGill Tribune) (U-WIRE) MONTREAL, Quebec -- The idea that every single moment in our life counts and that everything can change because of one split second is a complex and frightening thought. Living with this sort of mental awareness means constantly second guessing every minute detail, from which corner to cross the street at to which pair of underwear you choose to wear in the morning. Ian McEwan's latest novel, Enduring Love, takes this notion and expands it into a psychologically twisted love story and heart-racing thriller. 

The author dives right into the story in the first chapter, leaving the reader little choice but to immediately become involved in the unlikely events. A romantic picnic lunch between a husband and wife, who have recently been reunited after a business trip, is the setting for a bizarre episode involving a hot air balloon. A tragic accident occurs which leads to a relationship between two men who have nothing in common except for fate, placing them at the same time and the same place. McEwan's use of colourful and descriptive wording allows the story to flow, even as he jumps from present to past tense, and paints a vivid picture of the scenario. 

The isolated and random events soon lead to a seriously disturbing and increasingly threatening series of encounters. An obsession is born and soon the lines of sanity and insanity become blurred and even the reader is forced to second guess the narrator's sense of reality. (For all of you who believe that the mailman is

really on a top-secret mission to log your daily activities for the CIA, FBI, or IRS, this may be a story you can easily relate to.) Is a psychotic lunatic really stalking the narrator, or does the truth lie with his wife, who believes this mania is a downward spiral to mental incompetences? McEwan's story unfolds in such a way that little emotional attachment is felt towards the main characters. The fact that sympathy is hard to conjure up for the husband leaves room for the seed of doubt to be planted in the reader's mind. The story does not answer the pressing question of delusion versus reality until much later in the plot when the situation explodes into a fury of panic and madness.

The story also takes on another subject, as the title Enduring Love may suggest. After seven years of a peaceful and mundane life, the husband and wife are forced into a world where their faith andlove for each other are put to the ultimate test. Communication between the two parties shuts down, and each submerges into the depths of their own private terror. Suspicion begins to rise and the couple finds themselves in a battle with each other when they should be focusing on more imminent dangers. Enduring Love's illustration of how precious trust and truth are to a relationship only helps to build upon the scary power a human obsession can wield. 

All in all, Ian McEwan combines fear and love into a dramatic piece of literature. The passion between the characters eclipses that of any Harlequin romance even without the steamy sex scenes, and the suspense keeps the pages of the book flipping at a burning pace. Enduring Love provides a nice and sometimes much-needed escape from the "boring predictable class at 10:00" day most students live by. Give it a shot; if nothing else you will learn of a cool, little-known mental disorder with which you can diagnose your baffled friends. 

Cognitive narratology, rhetorical narratology, and interpretive disagreement: a response to Alan Palmer's analysis of Enduring Love.(Critical essay)

Article from:Style 

Article date:September 22, 2009

 Author:

Phelan, James More results for: 

enduring love essayAlan Palmer's essay, "Attributions of Madness in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love," amply demonstrates how productive his cognitive approach to narrative can be. His focus on aspectuality and on intermental and intramental thinking leads to many sharp insights into Joe Rose's relationships with Jed Parry and with Clarissa Mellon, and, thus, into McEwan's novel. In addition, Alan's effort to link the cognitive analysis to rhetorical theory's concerns with ethical and aesthetic judgments is not only theoretically sound but also provocative. I find it salutary that Alan talks candidly about his own affective responses to the novel ("I found myself getting angry at Clarissa" [306]) and that he is willing to find fault with McEwan, since that move breaks with the still common assumption that the task of criticism is to explain the writer's success: "the question to ask can be simply put: Does Joe do enough wrong [to justify Clarissa's mistrust of him]? On balance, I would say: no. A more nuanced question is this one: Does McEwan miscalculate in trying to set up a context within which Clarissa's mistrust of Joe can be understood and even forgiven? I would say: yes" (307).Even as I admire Alan's essay, I find that I disagree with his concluding judgments about Clarissa and McEwan's treatment of her character. In my view, McEwan handles the difficult task of making Clarissa's responses to Jed and to Joe both plausible and sympathetic, and, thus, I make a positive ethical judgment of her and a positive aesthetic judgment of McEwan's handling of this element of the novel. But my high regard for Alan's analysis leads me to one kind of response rather than another. Rather than simply trying to demonstrate that the novel contains more evidence to support my judgments than it does to support Alan's, I also want to delve beneath our interpretive disagreement by exploring two other questions. (1) What is it about Alan's cognitive and my version of the rhetorical approach that would lead Alan and me to disagree as we do? (2) What are the particular elements in McEwan's design of the novel that contribute to this disagreement?In posing the first question, I do not mean to imply that our different theoretical commitments inevitably lead us to our different judgments. Neither Alan's cognitive approach nor my rhetorical one wholly determines its practitioners' conclusions. Both approaches still regard interpretation as an art that can be performed more and less skillfully on any given occasion. Nevertheless, I do want to suggest that because our theoretical commitments influence our respective conceptions of McEwan's novel, they also play a significant role in Alan's finding fault with McEwan's representation of Clarissa and my finding that representation to be successful. This suggestion also means that, although I accept Alan's point that "we are all cognitivists" (292) in the sense that the findings of cognitive narratology are highly relevant to rhetorical theory, I do not see that acceptance as entailing the methodological consequence that rhetorical reading must start with

cognitive analysis. Indeed, I shall try to show that our interpretive disagreement arises in part because we start in different places.

Before proceeding to demonstrate this point, I need to lay out more clearly the basic principles of my rhetorical approach. The rhetorical definition of narrative emphasizes narrative as a communicative act and highlights the roles of tellers, audiences, and purposes: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened. I also regard narrative as a multi-layered communication, one that typically engages the audience's intellect, emotions, ethical values, and aesthetic sensibilities. Consequently, I am interested in the experience of reading literary narrative and in the ways that authors use textual (and sometimes intertextual) phenomena to guide their audiences to respond to the communication in one way (or one set of ways) rather than another. My method for analyzing this authorial guidance is to focus on the interrelationship between narrative progression and narrative judgments. (1)

I define narrative progression as the synthesis of a textual dynamics governing the movement of a narrative from beginning through middle to end and a readerly dynamics consisting of the authorial audience's trajectory of responses to that movement. Textual dynamics are generated by the introduction, complication, and resolution (often only partial) of two sets of unstable relations: (1) those between, among, or within characters, which I call instabilities; and (2) those among the implied authors, narrators, and audiences, which I call tensions.

Narrative judgments are the bridge between textual dynamics and readerly dynamics because they are encoded into narrative texts but generate the reader responses that also influence authorial choices about the textual dynamics. Narratives with surprise endings provide a handy example of both the interaction of textual dynamics and readerly dynamics and the role of narrative judgments as the bridge that makes that interaction possible. In such narratives, the author's interest in surprising her audience influences her construction of the textual dynamics even as the readerly surprise is a function of those textual dynamics. Furthermore, the surprise depends on a sequence of guided interpretive judgments about the likely trajectory of the narrative that turn out to be wrong, even as the final judgments in that sequence provide the corrective--and in narratives with effective surprise endings a positive aesthetic judgment of the readerly experience.

I see three types of narrative judgment as central to the rhetorical experience of narrative: interpretive judgments about the nature of events and other elements of the narrative, including its trajectory; ethical judgments about the moral value of

characters and actions; and aesthetic judgments about the artistic quality of the narrative and of its parts.

Furthermore, as Alan's discussion illustrates, (1) narratives typically ask their readers to judge characters' judgments and (2) the three kinds of judgments are often interrelated. Alan judges Clarissa as interpretively challenged and ethically deficient--in his words, her failure to accept Joe's narrative about Jed and her insistence on an alternative narrative is "stupid, inadequate, and pathetic," (303) and, as noted above, he becomes angry at her. (From my rhetorical perspective, Alan's admission of his anger is not "shaming," [306] but nicely indicative of how he has entered the novel's narrative audience and engaged with the mimetic component of the narrative. (2)) Alan's negative judgments of Clarissa's interpretive and ethical judgments also lead him to his ultimately negative aesthetic judgment of McEwan's handling of Clarissa.

Finally, my version of the rhetorical approach notes that readerly dynamics involve our developing interests in and responses to three analytically distinct but often mutually influential components of narrative: the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic. Responses to the mimetic component involve an audience's interest in the characters as possible people and in the narrative world as like our own, that is, hypothetically or conceptually possible; responses to the mimetic component are typically associated with our affective responses to the progression--the way in which our interpretive and ethical judgments influence our desires, hopes, expectations, satisfactions, and disappointments. Responses to the thematic component involve an interest in the ideational function of the characters and in the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by the narrative. In situations where an overarching thematic issue gets treated in different scenarios, the interpretive and ethical judgments we make about one scenario will typically influence the interpretive and ethical judgments we make about the others, and this influence will have consequences for our affective responses. I shall argue below that this principle is especially relevant to Enduring Love.Responses to the synthetic component involve an audience's interest in and attention to the characters and to the larger narrative as artificial constructs. In realistic fiction such as EnduringLove, the synthetic component typically remains in the background, while the mimetic and thematic components stay in the foreground. More generally, the relationship among an audience's relative interests in these different components will vary from narrative to narrative depending on the nature of its progression. Some narratives are dominated by mimetic interests, some by thematic, and others by synthetic, but developments in the progression can generate new relations among those interests. Furthermore, some progressions

make two or even all three interests central to the achievement of their narratives' purposes.I now return to my first question: why would Alan's and my different theoretical commitments lead us to our different judgments of McEwan's representation of Clarissa? The primary reason, I believe, is that these commitments lead us to different understandings of, to quote Alan, the "context within which Clarissa's mistrust of Joe can be understood and even forgiven" (307). Alan's approach with its accompanying article of faith that "the cognitive approach is the basis of all the other approaches" (212) and his particular interest in fictional minds leads him to view the following set of characters and issues as the center of McEwan's performance in the novel: Joe, Jed, and Clarissa; aspectuality and its link to the importance of narrative; intermental and intramental thinking as they contribute to the unraveling of Joe and Clarissa's relationship. Just as important, Alan's focus leads him to assume that the relevant context for judging Clarissa's behavior is our common-sense understanding of what an intelligent person in a trusting relationship would do:

But for me, the issue is ... whether or not she should believe in

Joe more at the time and trust in him more than she does. From her

aspectual view of the storyworld, what she undeniably does know is

that they have a loving, trusting relationship and that he is

intelligent and reliable. So why does she not believe him? ... What

would justify such a breach of faith by such an intelligent person

within such a trusting relationship? (303)

Because Alan is unable to find compelling answers to these questions within his conception of the novel, he finds fault with both Clarissa and McEwan.

My rhetorical interest in progression, judgments, and the components of readerly interest leads me, first, to be grateful for Alan's analysis because it teaches me much about these issues. Nevertheless, my interests also lead me to include in my initial conception of the novel's overall workings some characters and issues that Alan gives little or no attention to. In this respect, my interests lead me to think that Alan's analysis is excellent as far as it goes but that it does not go far enough. More specifically, I want to add to Alan's list of key characters and issues the following: John and Jean Logan, James Reid and Bonnie Deedes, Joe's role as

retrospective narrator, and especially the thematic issue alluded to by the title, the problem of lasting love. As the progression develops, this thematic issue gets more precisely (though still broadly) defined as one involving the relation betweenlove, with its passionate, often irrational, emotion and the logic of rational thought. Furthermore, the progression indicates that McEwan does not endorse a single and definitive view of this relationship but rather explores multiple perspectives on it so that the only firm conclusion we can make about the relationship is that it is vexed. The value of McEwan's treatment, then, is tied to fictional narrative's ability to move between the concrete (the various situations in which the relation between love and logic is relevant) and the general (the overall exploration of that relation) and the value of fiction's ability to engage its audience in that movement.More specifically, from the rhetorical perspective, the progression develops along two main and frequently intersecting tracks of instabilities between and among the characters: the track Alan so richly analyzes, the one on which Jed Parry's erotomania threatens and then disrupts the relationship between Joe and Clarissa, and the track tracing the relationship between Jed and Joe. Indeed, because of the disruption of the erotomania, the resolution of the instabilities on the second track does not lead to resolution of the instabilities on the first track. I will come back to this point, but for now I want to add and to emphasize that the progression of instabilities along both tracks develops within the context of McEwan's ongoing exploration of the central thematic issue. Our readerly interest in that exploration is generated and complicated by Joe's narration early in the narrative, by the progression of the main instabilities themselves, and by McEwan's representation of other couples in the novel, especially John and Jean Logan and James Reid and Bonnie Deedes. (3)

The second section of the first chapter is largely given over to exposition about Joe and Clarissa's relationship at the moment just before it gets disrupted by the balloon accident that brings Jed Parry into their lives. The first section puts Joe and Clarissa on the scene in the Chiltern Hills as they begin the picnic Joe has planned to celebrate their reunion after a separation of six weeks, their longest separation in the seven years they have been together. This second section is a flashback to earlier in the day, tracing Joe's activities from buying the food, to meeting Clarissa at Heathrow and finally to taking her to the picnic site. Joe's narration beyond the report of the events covers four especially significant topics: (1) the many reunion scenes he witnesses at Heathrow while waiting for Clarissa; (2) his elation at the way their reunion combines the new and the familiar; (3) Clarissa's report on her thoughts about the John Keats-Fanny Brawne relationship and Joe's reflection on those thoughts; and (4) his own thoughts about loving Clarissa.

The progression of Joe's observations about the reunion scenes deftly introduces the thematic interest in the relation between love and logic even as it remains focused on the mimetic component of Joe's experience. At first, Joe's observations draw on science to underline the commonality of human emotion: "If one ever wanted proof of Darwin's contention that the many expressions of emotion in humans are universal, genetically inscribed, then a few minutes by the arrivals gate at Heathrow should suffice ..." (4). Then those observations lead to a detachment that makes Joe question the authenticity of the emotions he is witnessing: "mostly it was smiles and hugs ... [until alter thirty-five minutes] I began to feel emotionally exhausted and suspected that even the children were being insincere" (5). Then, however, when Clarissa arrives, the detached scientist becomes as emotional as any of the subjects he has been watching: "I was just wondering how convincing I could be in greeting Clarissa when she tapped me on the shoulder.... Immediately my detachment vanished, and I called out her name, in tune with all the rest" (5).Joe's emotion--and McEwan's emphasis on the mimetic--continue as Joe comments that "what was familiar about her--the size and feel of her hand, the warmth and tranquility in her voice, the Celt's pale skin and green eyes--was also novel, gleaming in an alien light, reminding me of our very first meetings and the months we spent falling in love" (5). But McEwan's title also cues his audience to the thematic import of Joe's commentary. Does a longstanding love fade with familiarity until it gets renewed by absence and reunion? How might the relation between love and logic play out here? In this connection, McEwan's decision to set the action when Joe and Clarissa have been together seven years is apt. Seven years brings the famous Itch, but more than that, it means that their love is no longer new but not so deeply established that it can withstand all possible threats.Joe reports that Clarissa's research has led her to believe in and search for an unpublished letter from Keats to Brawne, written in his ten-day remission period from tuberculosis just before his death: hislove was such, hypothesizes Clarissa, that "it's easy to imagine him writing a letter he never intended to send" (7). Joe's conclusion is different: "I thought it possible that in his hopeless situation, he would not have wanted to write because he loved her so much" (7). Neither McEwan nor Joe shades the narration in favor of either Clarissa's hypothesis or Joe's. (I shall return to Joe's role as active agent of the narrative's design.) McEwan and Joe do, however, implicitly link this contrast to another difference between Clarissa and Joe: she believes that love that did not find its expression in a letter was "not perfect," and she had written "passionately abstract" explorations of the "way in which [their] love was different from and superior to any that had ever existed." Joe, for his part, cannot get beyond the facts, which seemed to him simply "miraculous": "a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large,

clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck" (7). Joe's thoughts end the section, and, to echo Clarissa, "it is easy" to see how tar we've traveled from the scientific observation that all human emotion is the same to Clarissa's view that theirs is unique and Joe's that it is fundamentally mysterious. Again, neither McEwan nor Joe shades the narration to favor one view more than the other. More generally, at this stage, McEwan has juxtaposed multiple views of love and logic in a way that indicates none of them is the whole truth. In this way, he provides an appropriate frame for his exploration of this thematic component in the rest of the novel.When McEwan introduces Jed's erotomania, he introduces a love that has no rational basis at all. Indeed, it is in the very nature of the disease that it defies logic, and its very absence of logic is a central reason that it can endure. Even after Joe shoots him and Jed is confined to a mental institution, where he is given medication, Jed remains confident that Joe's love "for him was undiminished and that through his suffering he would one day bring [Joe] to God" (255). Jed is like a literary critic--and I daresay we've all met someone like him (I've occasionally seen someone like him in the mirror)--who refuses to acknowledge the existence of evidence recalcitrant to his interpretive hypothesis. Joe's declarations that he wants Jed to go away, Joe's denials of his interest in being saved, even Joe's shooting him: to Jed, these phenomena are not even inconvenient truths. Instead they are merely signs that, when properly read, confirm his view that Joe requites his love. Jed is also like the literary critic who finds confirmation of his hypothesis in what everyone else would regard as irrelevant or, even nonsignifying, data: he reads messages in the movement of the curtains in his flat or in Joe's brushing against the hedges along his walk. Because McEwan juxtaposes Jed's reading of Joe's behavior with Joe's reading of Clarissa's, and, to a lesser extent, Clarissa's reading of Joe's, he invites us to compare and contrast these readings. The contrasts are real, precisely because Clarissa's and Joe's feelings do have some logical relation to their respective behaviors, but the narrative also shows that looking for the logical relation is often the wrong response. It is sometimes the wrong response because there is sometimes the kind of gap between emotion and reason that leads Joe to his conviction about the mystery of the love between him and Clarissa. At other times it is the wrong response because the effort to reason from the evidence to the correct feeling is doomed to fail.One of the functions of Jean Logan's presence in the story is to illustrate this latter point. In a sense, with her story, McEwan gives us the flip side of erotomania, a woman who thinks she is, however painfully, giving up any delusions in the face of the logical inferences that follow from the evidence she confronts after John's death. Food and drink for a picnic, another woman's scarf, John's being in the Chilterns instead of in London at the conference he said he was attending: these

signs, Jean reasons, can only mean that John is having an affair. Furthermore, Jean reads the signs to explain why John was the only one to hang on to the balloon when the others let go: "he was showing off to a girl" (132). But Jean's logic, which leads to "the slow agony of [love's] destruction" (121), turns out to be erroneous. And McEwan brilliantly uses the mechanism of an illogical (though well-known kind of) loveto reveal her errors: the relationship between the fifty-something James Reid and the undergraduate student Bonnie Deedes. McEwan calls even more attention to the illogicality of the love--from Reid's position at any rate--by having him note that he will have to resign from his position as the Euler Professor of Logic at Oxford.McEwan uses Joe's narration--indeed, he uses the language of the relation between love and logic--to call attention to the fact that the resolution of the Joe-Jed track of the progression does not bring about a happy resolution of the Joe-Clarissa track. After Joe shoots Jed in the elbow, simultaneously preventing his suicide and freeing Clarissa from his grasp, Joe comments: In a world in which logic was the engine of feeling, this should

have been the moment when Clarissa stood, when we moved toward each

other and folded into each other's arms with kisses and tears and

conciliatory murmurs and words of forgiveness and love.... But such logic would have been inhuman. There were immediate and background reasons why the climax of the afternoon could not have been in this particular happiness. (230-31)The next chapter of Joe's narration gives some of those background reasons from Clarissa's perspective in the form of her letter to Joe, prompted by their "row" after the resolution of the Joe-Jed set of instabilities. This row stems entirely from their different ways of connecting logic and emotion as they dealt with Jed's intrusion into their lives, differences that Clarissa's letter continues to demonstrate. The letter, which serves as the penultimate chapter of the novel, makes a striking contrast with the first section of the first chapter. Where that section focuses on the moment of happy reunion just before Jed's appearance, Clarissa's letter focuses on (a) the row that replaced any happy reunion after Joe returns from his night in jail after shooting Jed and (b) how their different responses to Jed have led her to question her belief that "their love was the kind that was meant to go on and on" (236).The final chapter, set a few weeks later, focuses primarily on Jean Logan and James Reid, but it also includes some possibility that the now estranged Joe and Clarissa may be reconciled. After James and Jean ask for forgiveness in a way that

Joe finds "almost mad, Mad Hatterish" (248), Joe notes that "I caught Clarissa's eye and we exchanged a half-smile, and it was as if we were pitching our own requests for mutual forgiveness, or at least tolerance, in there with Jean and Reid's frantic counterpoint. I shrugged as though to say that, like her in her letter, I just did not know" (248).

Looked at from the rhetorical perspective, then, Alan's question about Clarissa, "What would justify such a breach of faith by such an intelligent person within such a trusting relationship?" would receive the following answer: according to the progression, the vexed nature of the relationship between loveand logic. To put the answer in a slightly different way: in the broader context of this narrative, it makes great sense that two intelligent people in a trusting relationship would be thrown into doubt and confusion by their different efforts to make logical sense of the irrational attachment of a third person to one of them.This conclusion is given greater weight by much of the rest of the novel, especially the way in which aspectuality works in conjunction with Joe's and Clarissa's different experiences of Jed to lead them to their simultaneously plausible and incompatible understandings of him. Clarissa sees much less of Jed than Joe does, and what she sees, until the final episodes, is relatively harmless. In addition, as we learn in Chapters Nine and Twenty-Three, Clarissa sees Joe in a way that Joe does not see himself at the time of the action. As she says in Chapter Twenty-Three, "A stranger invaded our lives and the first thing that happened is that you became a stranger to me" (235). It is a strength of McEwan's novel that he uses Joe's narration to show that Clarissa's interpretations of Joe's behavior are both plausible and too limited. If I had more space, I would work through this evidence at greater length, but since my concern is less with the details of my disagreement with Alan than with the underlying causes of that disagreement, I want to turn to my second overarching question: what are the particular elements of McEwan's design that would contribute to that disagreement?

The main element, I believe, is Joe's retrospective narration, because it requires a difficult balancing act from McEwan as he uses that narration simultaneously to signal Joe's purposes in telling and his own different purposes. Early on McEwan emphasizes Joe's retrospection and his self-consciousness as a writer, a self-consciousness that is well-motivated by Joe's career as a science writer and reflected in the frequent references to narrative that Alan has perceptively noted. Joe's very first sentence. "The beginning was simple to mark" (1) signals both Joe's retrospection and his awareness of the act of storytelling. He continues to mark both dimensions of his narration throughout the chapter. "I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time,

when other outcomes were still possible" (2). "[The shout] was a baritone, on a rising note of fear. It marked the beginning, and, of course, an end. At that moment, a chapter--no, a whole stage of my life--closed" (8). Although Joe never explicitly announces his purpose, these early comments and the overall trajectory of his narrative--from the moment of happy reunion right before the balloon accident to the moment of Joe and Clarissa's asking for mutual forgiveness without knowing whether they can grant it--suggests that he wants to record the story of their movement from union to separation. Because Joe is a self-conscious retrospective narrator with this purpose of telling the story of how he and Clarissa lost their love, we can infer that Joe not only writes Chapter Nine with Clarissa as focalizer but that he also is responsible for including Clarissa's letter as Chapter Twenty-Three. (4) He has a double motive for these inclusions: to be fair to Clarissa's perspective and to show the gap between their two perspectives as a way to help his unspecified narratee understand how they came apart.McEwan's purpose includes Joe's--he, too, wants to trace the story of Joe and Clarissa's unraveling--but it is larger than Joe's. He wants to engage us emotionally in the story of their decline, to engage us ethically in the complex judgments that follow from his exploration of the vexed relation between loveand logic, and to use both of those engagements as the basis for our satisfying aesthetic experience of his narrative. McEwan succeeds in using Joe's narration to achieve these purposes because he carefully balances Joe's self-consciousness with dimensions of the narration that elude Joe's self-consciousness such as the establishment of the thematic stakes of the narrative in the second section of chapter one. At that point, Joe is primarily interested in recording what happened and explaining it in his own idiom. (5)So far so good. But now consider how Joe's situation at the time of the telling plays into his purpose. Because Joe is writing at a time when he and Clarissa are still estranged and because the estrangement is connected to each one's sense that he or she is more right than the other, his narration clearly gives preference to his view. In that respect, even as he wants to tell the story of their loss of love, he also wants to show that he is more sinned against than sinning. More generally, this dimension of Joe's purpose raises the question of his reliability. As Alan notes, Joe turns out to be reliable on the major issues, especially his interpretation of Jed as suffering from de Clerambault's syndrome. The combination of Joe's privileging his interpretations and McEwan's making him ultimately reliable in his interpretation of Jed means that McEwan has an especially difficult job in using Joe's narration to convey his authorial judgment that both Joe and Clarissa make plausible responses to Jed and that both Joe and Clarissa get things wrong. As my previous analysis has attempted to show, I believe that McEwan uses the broader context of the progression to counter the risk of his technique. I add here that the risk is worth

running because the technique itself is crucial to the achievement of McEwan's purpose: constructing Joe as self-interested yet striving to be fair to Clarissa and simultaneously reliable about Jed's condition gives the audience a vivid understanding of one relation between love and logic, even as that narration includes so much other exploration of that relation. Nevertheless, the risk inherent in the technique's combination of privilege and reliability means that it is all but inevitable that even sensitive and intelligent readers such as Alan will side with Joe and respond to Clarissa as interpretively challenged and ethically deficient.As I turn to conclude my response, I want to consider one larger question that it is likely to raise in the minds of some readers. Does my unpacking of this particular disagreement and my own interest in being more right than Alan constitute a more general argument for the superiority of rhetorical theory to cognitive narratology? I answer with a resounding no, and I do so for several reasons. First, as noted above, I agree with Alan that "we are all cognitivists," and I reiterate that I find much of his analysis very helpful to my understanding of the novel. Second, I do not think it is legitimate to go from one case study to the broader conclusion--such a move would be an unwarranted induction. Third, a consequence of these first two reasons: the rhetorical and cognitive approaches are ultimately compatible because they share an interest in how authors use the tools of narrative representation and communication to provide audiences with rewarding reading experiences. Fourth, I am confident that Alan could read this response and use what he found on target in it in a more expansive cognitivist reading of Enduring Love, even as he could explain why, from his perspective, some of my analysis would be unpersuasive. Fifth, I am acutely aware of the fallibility of my analysis, especially because, as I say about Alan's, there is more to McEwan's novel than I account for here. But I will venture that the unpacking does point to one general virtue of the rhetorical approach: its commitment to working in a posteriori fashion, which means its interest in letting individual narratives set the relevant terms by which they should be understood and evaluated. More generally, I would hope that the essay gives some sense of the continuing utility of rhetorical analysis and, even more, of the value of putting the rhetorical and cognitive approaches in dialogue with each other. In that spirit, I end by expressing my gratitude to Alan for his initial effort to put the approaches together in his essay and for his invitation to respond to that effort.Works Cited

McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. 1997. New York: Random House, 1999.Palmer, Alan. "Attributions of Madness in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love." Style. 43.3 (2009): 309-:21.Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1996. 291-308.

--. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1997.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. 1987. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998.

--. "Truth in Fiction: A Re-examination of Audiences." Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): 121-41.

James Phelan

Ohio State University

Notes

(1) For a much fuller discussion of these principles, see Experiencing Fiction.

(2) By narrative audience, I mean the observer position within the diegetic world that the actual audience takes on. Thus, one difference between the narrative audience on the one hand and the actual and the authorial audiences on the other is that in realistic fiction such as Enduring Love the narrative audience takes the characters to be real people, while the other audiences retain the tacit understanding that they are not. I will say more about the mimetic component of the narrative shortly. For more on the model of audience in my version of rhetorical theory see Rabinowitz ("Truth in Fiction" and Before Reading) and chapter 6 of my Narrative as Rhetoric.(3) Other couples--or triangles--with less central roles in the progression, also add to the thematic context: Clarissa's brother Luke who was leaving his wife and two children to move in with an actress he had known for only three months; Xan, Steve, and Daisy, the people from whom Joe buys the gun he uses to shoot Jed, and who play out an extreme version of the odd relation between emotion and logic.

(4) Similarly he is responsible for including Jed's letters in Chapters Eleven and Sixteen, as a way of dramatizing the instabilities along that track.

(5) In this connection, McEwan's choice to reveal that Joe and Clarissa are together again in the Appendix is especially revealing. Joe's purpose, and, thus, much of his narration, would likely be very different if he were writing from the temporal vantage point of their ultimate re-union. That vantage point would not work for McEwan because it would undercut at least to some degree his emphasis on the complex role of the relation between love and logic in the effort to achieve an enduring love. At the same time, the fact that he brings them back together

after the main action also signals that he is not totally pessimistic about the possibility of enduring love with some rational basis.