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The Interplay of Trauma and the Sublime in Four Fictions by Ian Mcewan

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The Interplay of Trauma and the Sublime in Four Fictions by Ian Mcewan The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis The interplay of trauma and the sublime in four fictions by Ian McEwan Steven Havis School of Humanities Department of English and Creative Writing The University of Adelaide April 2015 The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis Table of contents Introduction 1 1 ‘Moments of crisis’: traumatic engagement and 1 narrative point of view in McEwan’s fiction 2 The sublime: Kantian and Burkean frameworks 8 3 ‘“[T]oo large” to be contained’: trauma, the sublime, 12 and discursive interplay 4 Selection of McEwan novels and thesis overview 15 Chapter 1 The traumatic sublime and ‘malevolent intervention’ 28 in The Child in Time Introduction 28 1.1 A ‘malevolent intervention’: trauma and working through 29 1.2 Traumatised consciousness, focalisation and the ‘middle voice’ 33 1.3 ‘[A]porias of time’ and the Kantian sublime 37 1.4 The ‘traumatic sublime’ and sacralising counterforces 44 to working through Conclusion 47 Chapter 2 Epistemic instability, the Burkean sublime and the 50 traumatic ‘aftermath’ in Enduring Love Introduction 50 2.1 ‘[F]rom th’Ethereal Sky’: the Burkean sublime and ‘terrible 52 objects 2.2 Traumatic dissociation and the response to ‘meaninglessness’ 58 2.3 Epistemic instability and warping ‘prism[s] of desire and belief’ 65 Conclusion 71 2 The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis Chapter 3 ‘[T]he nature of their fate’ and ‘the nature of their tragedy’: 74 ironising trauma and the Wordsworthian sublime in Amsterdam Introduction 74 3.1 Molly’s ‘muffled shrieking’ and the non-representation of 75 traumatic experience 3.2 Narrative ironies, tragic resonance and the allure of fate 79 3.3 The ‘thrusts and counterthrusts’ of the Wordsworthian sublime 86 Conclusion 94 Chapter 4 The ‘obliging imagination’: empathy, September 11 96 and the Burkean sublime in Saturday Introduction 96 4.1 ‘[M]ediatized witnesses’: September 11, secondary trauma 98 and empathy 4.2 Consciousness, narrative point of view and Saturday’s 106 neurological model of perception 4.3 The Burkean ‘position of safety’ and the sublimation of terror 109 4.4 A sublime ‘of different kinds’: Kant, Burke and the limits of 115 consciousness Conclusion 121 Conclusion 123 Bibliography 136 The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis List of abbreviations The following abbreviations are used throughout the thesis for references to the corresponding works. Details on the specific editions are listed in the bibliography. Am Amsterdam, Ian McEwan CIT The Child in Time, Ian McEwan CPJ Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant. EL Enduring Love, Ian McEwan HIT History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra IA The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton OFBS Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Immanuel Kant OL “Only love and then oblivion,” Ian McEwan Sat Saturday, Ian McEwan SV Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Terry Eagleton UE Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth 4 The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis Thesis declaration I certify that this work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my name in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. In addition, I certify that no part of this work will, in the future, be used in a submission in my name for any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of the University of Adelaide and, where applicable, partner institutions responsible for the joint award of this degree. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. The author acknowledges that copyright of published works contained within this thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of those works. I also give permission for the digital version of my thesis to be made available on the web, via the University’s digital research repository, the Library Search and also through web search engines, unless permission has been granted by the University to restrict access for a period of time. Name: ___________________________________________ Signature: ___________________________________________ Date: ___________________________________________ The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis Acknowledgements Firstly I would like to thank Dr Heather Kerr. Her support, generous spirit and rigorous criticism have been vital for my research and writing. I would have come a very short way indeed in this journey without her help. Similarly, I must thank Prof Amanda Nettelbeck, who has brought her expertise and keen critical eye to my project at critical moments, and always in a refreshing and timely way. My thanks also go to my friends and colleagues among the English and Creative Writing department, and to those from markedly different backgrounds who have been unafraid to offering suggestions and support. Among those nearer my own critical background, I must single out Shannon Lambert. As my devoted friend, colleague and fellow bibliophile, she has offered the support that can come only from those who are in the same figurative boat, and who must encourage one another to keep rowing. My special thanks to my family, particularly my parents Sue and Simon, and my parents-in-law, Tanya and Frank. I almost feel ready to talk about the thesis now. Finally, my loving thanks to Sofie, my beautiful and patient wife. Having become married halfway through writing this thesis, I have been blessed with her undimming support and understanding – as she has been blessed, I am sure, with a new appreciation of the verb ‘cherish’. 6 The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis Introduction 1 ‘Moments of crisis’: traumatic engagement and narrative point of view in McEwan’s fiction Ian McEwan has received popular and critical acclaim since his earliest publications in the 1970s, and has been associated with several other key figures in contemporary British fiction, such as Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Graham Swift (Head 2). In 2009, McEwan was identified in The New Yorker as having ‘edged past his peers to become England’s national author’ (Zalewski). During the first decade of his career, he was noted as ‘a writer of quality with a penchant for controversial or disturbing plots’ (Roberts ix). Of this period, McEwan has stated that he was attempting to resist what he saw as ‘the prevailing grayness of English style and subject matter’, that he ‘looked for extreme situations, deranged narrators, obscenity, and shock’, and sought to ‘set these elements within a careful or disciplined prose’ (Begley 91). McEwan broke from the ‘claustrophobic world’ of his early work and into ‘a more public arena’ with his 1987 novel, The Child in Time, which led onto further commercially successful and critically acclaimed works (Roberts x). Despite this shift, McEwan’s fiction has continued to describe ‘moments of crisis’ (Begley 97) that in various ways open onto trauma and the sublime. In this thesis, I will examine how McEwan represents trauma and the sublime in a selection of four novels; these are, in order of publication, The Child in Time (1987), Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam (1998) and Saturday (2005). The novels I have selected evoke traumatic experience and various versions of the sublime, 1 The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis particularly the eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime described by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. These evocations of trauma and the sublime often coincide in the novels. I argue that McEwan harnesses the vocabulary and intellectual heritage of the sublime in order to describe traumatic experience. Various narrative techniques serve to evince this relationship between trauma and the sublime. Key among these is narrative point of view, through which the consciousness of the novels’ characters is represented. In my analysis, I will also consider the narrative structure of the novels, with regard to point of view and the representation of trauma and the sublime. A crucial question underpinning these concerns is how McEwan configures the protagonist in relation to the external world in his fiction: for example, how close is the individual to a traumatic event within the narrative, or how might this traumatic event figure structurally throughout the novel? Across all of the chapters, I address the role of the protagonist, where it helps to illuminate issues of narrative structure, point of view, trauma and the sublime. Burkean and Kantian discourses on the relationship between subject and object also inform my discussion, not only in the context of the sublime but also the representation of consciousness and traumatic experience. In addition, I will examine narrative features that are particular to each individual novel: for example, the aberrant function of narrative temporality in The Child in Time, perspectival shifts in Enduring Love, certain resonances with tragedy in Amsterdam, and the limitations of consciousness and empathy in Saturday. 2 The interplay of trauma and the sublime Steven Havis The connection between Ian McEwan’s fiction and extreme forms of experience – even beyond those represented in his early work – is well established1 in the critical literature on McEwan. The author himself has claimed that the ‘moments of crisis’, often taken as a hallmark of his work, are a means of exploring and testing character. How we might withstand, or fail to withstand, an extreme experience, what moral qualities and questions are brought forward, how we live with the consequences of our decisions, how memory torments, what time does, what resources we have to fall back on.
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