Beyond 'The Limits and the Terms': Narrative Technique

BEYOND ‘THE LIMITS AND THE TERMS’: NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE AND ETHICAL READING IN THE FICTION OF IAN MCEWAN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the University of Canterbury Harris Neil Williamson University of Canterbury New Zealand 2021 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ ii Abstract . ................................................................................................................................. iii Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Strange Encounters ........................................................................................ 6 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 6 The Value of Narratology and Questions of Authorship ................................................... 8 ‘I Have to Pretend’: “Conversation With a Cupboard Man” ........................................... 10 By the Book: “Homemade” ............................................................................................ 15 Murder by Numbers: “Solid Geometry” ......................................................................... 19 Innocence and Experience: The Cement Garden ............................................................. 23 Voices on Loan: McEwan Behind the Text .................................................................... 31 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 32 Chapter Two: The Limits of Genius ................................................................................... 34 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 34 Degrees of Separation ...................................................................................................... 36 Thinking Small ................................................................................................................ 38 The Fallen Scientist ......................................................................................................... 44 Reading the Readers ........................................................................................................ 51 Critical Reception and Authorial Responsibility ............................................................. 59 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 60 Chapter Three: True Lies .................................................................................................... 62 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 62 The Dilemma of Metafiction ........................................................................................... 63 Surrogate Authors ............................................................................................................ 64 Representing the Other .................................................................................................... 73 Ethical Judgements .......................................................................................................... 77 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 84 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 86 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................... 90 Acknowledgements ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Though this thesis was written over the course of one year, I would not have had the opportunity to write it were it not for the love, support, and encouragement of many people: far too many to name here. For the sake of brevity, I extend my thanks to all family, friends, teachers, lecturers, and fellow students—both past and present—who have helped me get to this point. I am immensely grateful for all you do, and all you have done. I would be remiss, however, if I did not offer some words of thanks to those who have been especially helpful during the writing of this thesis. Firstly, I thank my supervisors, Christopher Thomson and Paul Millar, for their guidance, feedback, critical insight, and, finally, for being such passionate readers of Ian McEwan’s work; your enthusiasm made our discussions all the more enjoyable. I also thank the University of Canterbury for the scholarship that enabled this work to go ahead. Many thanks to the team at Linwood Law and the Awareness Canterbury Network, both of whom have shown a keen interest in my work and provided a welcome distraction from the day-to-day task of writing. Thank you to Kerry Armitage for the encouraging comments, proofreading, and great conversations about literature and life. To my extended family—on both the Williamson and Jones sides—thank you for your support during the last year, and during my many years in the wilderness. Special thanks to Marian Jones for hosting many wonderful dinner nights, and to Maree Williamson, surely the most remarkable matriarch of the modern era. Finally, to Jerome, Sue, Genevieve, and Jordan: thank you. I can only offer what McEwan aptly refers to as ‘the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen’. Even they seem hopelessly insufficient, but a full account of my gratitude might well extend beyond the length of the thesis itself, so I will leave it at that. Abstract iii ABSTRACT In this thesis, I explore the link between narrative technique and ethical reading in the fiction of Ian McEwan. Specifically, I use narratological concepts to examine the way in which McEwan encourages an ethical approach to reading: one which does not seek to “interpret” via hermeneutic systems, but rather reads with an attitude of humility and openness. Furthermore, I explain how McEwan thematises the acts of reading and writing in order to investigate the ethical tensions present in the production and receipt of narratives, literary or otherwise. Finally, I discuss the moral dramas that McEwan stages throughout his fiction, suggesting a connection between his characters’ epistemic outlooks—the way they “read” the world—and their ethical conduct. I analyse these features of McEwan’s work through a number of close readings of his texts, including his first short story collection, First Love, Last Rites (1975), and his novels The Cement Garden (1978); Saturday (2005); Solar (2010); Enduring Love (1997); and Atonement (2001). Ultimately, I argue that McEwan’s fiction advocates for, and lends itself to, ethical reading: a practice which, while potentially unsettling and destabilising, rejuvenates our old modes of thinking about literature, and, indeed, the world around us. Introduction 1 INTRODUCTION Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love opens with a startling account of a man falling to his death from a hot air balloon suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The narrator, Joe Rose, who had let go of one of the balloon’s ropes during the preceding rescue attempt, tells the reader that he has ‘never seen such a terrible thing as that falling man’ (16). As is typical of McEwan, moral questions come into sharp focus almost immediately, lending the text its initial narrative momentum. Later, Joe recounts the thoughts he had when gazing at the man’s dead body: [t]he skeletal structure had collapsed internally to produce a head on a thickened stick. And seeing that, I became aware that what I had taken for calmness was absence. There was no one there. The quietness was that of the inanimate, and I understood again, because I had seen dead bodies before, why a pre-scientific age would have needed to invent the soul. (23, italics in original) Joe, though seeing the body for the first time, finds the sight eerily familiar. He understands again, as though he had since forgotten, the explanatory power possessed by the concept of the soul. He “reads” the dead body with both his senses and an in-built cultural script, bearing witness to McEwan’s statement that ‘literature flourishes along the channels of [an] unspoken agreement between readers and writers, offering a mental map whose north and south are the specific and the general’ (“Literature, Science, and Human Nature” 6). In other words, literature presents us with a range of novel phenomena—images; cultural contexts; moral dramas—that somehow also strike us as familiar. McEwan’s vision calls to mind that supplied by Derek Attridge in The Singularity of Literature. Attempting to account for the ‘singular’ experience of reading literature, Attridge proposes that [s]ingularity exists, or rather occurs, in the experience of the reader… understood not as a psychological subject… but as the repository of what I have termed an idioculture, an individual version of the cultural ensemble by which he or she has been fashioned as a subject with assumptions, predispositions, and expectations. (Singularity 67). Attridge envisions readers bringing their own cards to the table—consciously or otherwise— when reading literary works, generating

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