What Violently Elects Us: Filiation, Ethics, and War in the Contemporary British Novel

What Violently Elects Us: Filiation, Ethics, and War in the Contemporary British Novel by Cynthia Quarrie A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto © Copyright by Cynthia Quarrie 2012 What Violently Elects Us: Filiation, Ethics, and War in the Contemporary British Novel Cynthia Quarrie, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Department of English, University of Toronto Abstract This dissertation examines the trope of filiation in novels by three contemporary British writers: John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The trope of filiation and the related theme of inheritance has long been central to the concerns of the British novel, but it took on a new significance in the twentieth century, as the novel responded both thematically and formally to the aftermath of the two world wars. This study demonstrates the ways in which Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro each situate their work in relation to this legacy, by means of an analogy between the inheritance structures figured within their novels and the inheritance performed by their engagement with the genre itself. This study relies on an instructive analogy to similar treatments of the larger problem of cultural filiation by the theorists Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Levinas exposes in his work the ethical and political problems of modernist temporality by critiquing modernity’s rejection of filiation, a rejection modeled also in the lost children, and barren and celibate men and women of modernist novels. Derrida meanwhile provides a way forward with his representation and performance of inheritance as a critical and transformative act, which is characterised on one hand by an ethical injunction, and on the other, by a filtering or a differentiation which changes the tradition even as it reaffirms it. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank, first of all, the members of my dissertation committee — Linda Hutcheon, Jill Matus, and Julian Patrick — for their patience, thoroughness, and all- around support during this process. Their questions and comments encouraged me to strive for greater clarity and precision, and by their examples they motivated my sense of enthusiasm and purpose for this project, and for intellectual endeavors in general. I would also like to thank Jude Seaboyer and Tony Thwaite of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, where I spent a term as a Visiting Scholar in 2007; and Derek Attridge and Naomi Morgenstern, examiners at my defense. All of these scholars have demonstrated through their commitment, warmth, and generosity what it is to be ethically engaged as teachers, and I hope to be able to inherit and perform everything I have learned from them in my own work in the future. Bob Gibbs of the Jackman Humanities Institute and Melissa Williams of The Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto — which institutions jointly funded the Symposium on Ethics and Narrative that took place in the Fall of 2008 — were incredibly supportive of the larger project of which this dissertation is a part. And to the participants in that event — J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Michael Valdez Moses, Jan Zwicky, and everyone who read and prepared for the discussions that took place there — I would like to extend my gratitude and admiration. I would also like to recognise all the readers of parts of this dissertation at its various stages of coherence: Aine McGlynn, Romi Mikulinsky, Agnieszka Polakowska, and Ricky Varghese; the Graduate Associates at the Centre for Ethics; the participants in the “Ethics and Narrative” workshops that I ran over the year 2008-2009. They helped to make this dissertation what it is. Finally, I would like to thank all the friends and family members who have lent their warmth, wisdom, and moral support, including my parents, to whom I am gladly in filial debt. I am especially grateful to my husband, Stephen Yeager, my closest reader and the one I rely on to discern my saying from my said, and to Samuel and Clara, who teach me firsthand every day what it means to be reconstituted as a parent, and what joy there can be in such a commitment. iii Table of Contents Introduction What Violently Elects Us 1 Chapter 1 Biography Interrupts Philosophy: Representation and Filiation in John Banville’s Shroud 44 Chapter 2 Ian McEwan: Heir Apparent (Chosen Son) 75 Chapter 3 The House We Live In: Inheritance, Hospitality, and the Idea of Atonement 126 Chapter 4 Dreams of Tenderness: Responsibilities to and of Childhood in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction 155 Conclusion: The Agency of the Heir 216 Works Consulted 220 iv INTRODUCTION What Violently Elects Us: Filiation, Ethics, War, and the Contemporary British Novel Whether it’s a question of life or work or thought…I have always recognized myself in the figure of the heir.… It is necessary to do everything possible to appropriate a past even though we know that it remains fundamentally inappropriable, whether it is a question of philosophical memory or the precedence of a language, a culture, and a filiation in general. What does it mean to reaffirm? It means not simply accepting this heritage but relaunching it otherwise and keeping it alive. Not choosing it (since what characterizes a heritage is first of all that one does not choose it; it is what violently elects us), but choosing to keep it alive. — Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow Filiation, ethics, and war may seem an incongruous grouping or rubric through which to read the contemporary British novel. Filiation, to begin with our first term, for most readers will connote patriarchy and linearity, and appeal to notions of authority and origin. For these reasons Roland Barthes urged us decades ago to do away with the “myth of filiation,” and instead read for the text within a web of disseminated signification and intertextuality; as opposed to the work, he argued that the text could and should “be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy” (195). But as Derrida suggests in the excerpt above, there is an ethical dimension to the reaffirmation of a heritage, besides it being simply an unavoidable feature of the progress of history and generations. The myth of filiation is not so easily, or ethically, sloughed off as such. We might argue that filiation and inheritance, in a more expansive sense, designate responsibilities to the past as well as to those to come, and more so that narrative, in mediating our experience of temporality through the construction and performance of genealogies and figures of heirs and inheritances, participates in the construction of these responsibilities. The 1 2 three novelists at the centre of this study — John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro1 — all in their various ways query the ethics of taking up an inheritance marked, even constituted, by violence and war. They write about the world wars from at least a generation’s remove, and they find themselves caught between competing imperatives: on one hand, these writers are plainly aware of the ethical call to remember, to witness the suffering of war and to testify to the roles the wars have played in their lives, and in the culture at large. On the other hand, they betray an anxiety about the form this testifying takes, an anxiety about the novel itself as an inheritance that carries with it its own burdens and responsibilities. Their novels are peopled with inheritance tropes — orphans, lost children, missing parents, and stories of filial transgressions — that speak to the difficulty, and the necessity, of taking up this inheritance at this historical moment. Inheritance tropes have long played a part in the English novel tradition, from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones to Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and as Allan Hepburn observes, they are “central to the British and Irish imagination” (22). Inheritance, Hepburn writes, can “variously signif[y] national belonging, literary affiliation, class identity, heredity, and kinship.… [S]tories about inheritance therefore concern the meaning of ownership and genealogy, both of which can be disturbed by the disinherited or those who refuse their inheritances” (3). As he also argues, “inheritances are cultural as well as material. Writers, for instance, choose their literary forebears as a way of declaring affinities and asserting authority” (3). The canonical status of the English novel has for a long time relied upon filial self-perpetuation, according to which singular works are assured of their generic coherence through their identification with the tradition that preceded them. 1 Specifically, I will focus chapters on Banville’s Shroud; McEwan’s Black Dogs, Saturday, and then, treated separately, Atonement; and Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and The Unconsoled. 3 We could also argue, however, that the continued longevity and prominence of the filial trope actually testifies to a kind of long-term, low-grade crisis of inheritance that is constitutive of the genre itself. In The Origins of the English Novel, Michael McKeon argues that the early modern novel was born out of a conflicted and self-negating desire to stabilise notions of inheritance, especially insofar as these notions were wrapped up in concepts of enduring truth and moral value. As a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the day, the novel took on, dialogically, the idea of truth in narrative at a time when “truth” no longer seemed eternal and unchangeable, just as it took on the issue of virtue, both in the individual and in the social order, at a time when nobility of character was no longer guaranteed by birth and bloodline. The novel thus mediates between the generic and epistemological imperatives of medieval and early modern romances and histories.

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