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. The crises instigated by the secularisation and destabilisation of social categories that were concomitant with the onset of modern capitalism were not so much overcome by as they were negotiated through the novel, which both thematised and formalised the inheritance practices where these crises played out. The novel has continued to mediate inheritance practices over the long span of its existence, suggesting that, in one way or another, crises of inheritance are as old as the novel: for centuries the form has worked to explore and quell anxiety about cultural change, and to reassert and reinscribe notions of stability and continuity of national, familial, and generic structures.

However, the continuity of the novel in the modern era should not be overstated, particularly in the twentieth century. As Edward Said argues, the modernist avant-garde of the early twentieth century posed a unique challenge to this model, in that they rejected the filiative 4 process of observing genre imperatives, and thus the authority of the literary canon itself. He notes that in texts by such writers as Joyce, Eliot, Mann, and Proust, "[c]hildless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties of filiation" (“Secular” 17). Following Said, Hepburn argues that "modernists prefer to disrupt genealogy and defy the claims of family over individual identities.... The genealogical imperative of realist narrative — the need to assert cohesion when relationships within a family are threatened by disruptive strangers and outsiders — yields in modernism to more limber relationships and communities than the genealogical model allows" (19). This makes possible a number of valuable ethical and political gains: "the renunciation of inheritances and self- dispossession from the past allow for new, politicized identities to emerge for women, the working classes, and the Irish" (Hepburn 19).

The writers at the centre of this study, though, are not so much “unregenerate” as they are anxious about or labouring to regenerate in the shadow of the modernists. The tropes they employ are similar to the ones Said calls attention to, but with subtly crucial distinctions — the absent parents and missing children are sought for, the aborted children are mourned. Without disregarding the modernist rejection of filiation, these writers respond to the contemporary ethical imperative to inherit by returning to the filial trope, in an effort to rethink it. By taking up a novel tradition, they effectively define themselves as heirs of one kind or another. What makes these three writers in particular stand out is their attention to all that is implied — ethically, politically, and formally — in identifying themselves as heirs, and in deploying figures of heirs.

At the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, to identify oneself as an heir to a 5 tradition, whether English or Irish, continental or international, is to stake a claim in the perpetuation of that tradition, and to assert certain rights of ownership. But it is also, more troublingly for the writers in question, to mark oneself at the intersection of inheritance and injunction, to acknowledge an inheritance that for better or for worse is always already there, an inheritance that shapes them before they ever take up a pen to re-shape it. In fact, “ownership” becomes a slippery idea the more an inheritance shows itself to be multiple, contradictory, elusive, even secretive, to both readers and writers, and the moment we accept that an inheritance chooses us, not the other way around.

In the following study, I will read these novelists as they read their various inheritances, and as they use the figure of the heir to work out what the structure of that relationship between inheritance(s) and heir might be. All of them use the figure (or figures) of the heir in the novel to explore their relationship to the generic or cultural traditions. My first chapter is a reading of

John Banville’s Shroud. Banville is an Irish writer who identifies with a continental tradition, which Shroud both aspires to and deconstructs. I read Shroud as an allegory of what it is to live in denial of certain inheritances, and what, finally, the injunction to inherit is about. The novel is a fictional exploration of the scandal surrounding the discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime writing for a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium, had the critic lived to see it come to light. In

Banville’s version, the critic is himself Jewish (de Man was not), a fact he hides from the public and, as much as possible, from himself. He finally acknowledges his debt to this history when he learns he is to become a father, so that parenthood is figured as disruptive and transformative, and as an opening to the past as well as to the future, a kind of ruthless contiguity, if not exactly continuity. Since this novel explores its relationship to a philosophical tradition (through 6 intertexts such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and de Man), I use it to construct and historicise my methodology — a sort of allegory for reading, to almost borrow a phrase from de Man. In real life, the de Man scandal brought the discussion of ethics to the forefront of the deconstructive debate (and to the wider cultural debate surrounding the ethics of deconstruction); indeed, it inaugurated by necessity the “turn to ethics” within academic discourse, and my reading thus assumes the ethical imperative of reading deconstructively, and asks what it is to inherit deconstruction, and to continue to apply this methodology in this “post-Derridean” moment.

In the next two chapters I look at three novels by Ian McEwan, who began his career on the maverick fringe, but with his last half-dozen novels has moved steadily towards the centre of cultural legitimacy; as a recent profile in the New Yorker put it, “[i]t is now a commonplace that

McEwan has edged past his peers to become England’s national author” (Zalewski). McEwan seems to have taken up the mantle, at least insofar as he has consciously taken on the tradition of the English novel, and has become something of a national spokesman for enlightenment values, or a “rationalism … mediated by emotional wisdom” (McEwan 1995). In Black Dogs, the earliest of the three novels, the question of inheritance is still very open, as McEwan uses metafictional techniques and the figure of the “postmodern orphan” to examine the problem of historical understanding of the Holocaust from an English perspective. Saturday, the most recent of the three novels, is written as a response to the events of September 11, 2001, and in dealing with this more recent cultural trauma, the novel falls back on certain conservative notions of inheritance. I argue that Saturday reifies tropes of filiation in order to assert control and ownership over the narrative, and to reinscribe notions of continuity and belonging, even patrimony. 7

Though it was published in between the other two novels, I treat Atonement separately in the next chapter. Formally a very different novel than either Black Dogs or Saturday, Atonement enacts its own filiation of the novel tradition, so that inheritance is less of a thematic consideration — as it is in the other two novels — than it is a formal performance. The novel inhabits the inherited form of the country-house novel in order to explore issues of guilt, forgiveness, and responsibility. I argue that the novel works, ethically, to the extent that the voices in the novel are not under the author’s estimable control; it speaks of the difficulty of inheritance, to be sure, but in calling up the specters of the country-house novel, and having them mingle with the war dead, it speaks as and through its inheritances as well.

My final chapter examines two formally experimental novels by Kazuo Ishiguro — The

Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans — which place him on something of an alternate novelistic trajectory from McEwan, his contemporary. Ishiguro also figures our relationship to post-war culture in terms of orphan figures, but instead of finding ways to overcome this predicament, Ishiguro’s unreliable narrator-protagonists are trapped in dream-like states in which childhood fantasies meet with philosophical and political desolation. Ishiguro uses the figure of the child, and the idea of nostalgia for both childhood and the novel genre, to explore the difficulties of inheritance and mourning, with their complex formal and political ramifications.

For the remainder of this introduction, I will introduce concepts that underpin this study by historicising the two thinkers who have most clearly and forcefully articulated the ethical imperative of inheritance: Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. I will argue that Levinasian filiation is a potentially fruitful and ethically-charged, though not unproblematic, counterpoint to the trope of filiation in contemporary British fiction. Levinas emerged out of a post-war 8 historical moment analogous to that of these novelists, and he also turns to the filial relationship as one that models ethics and a certain temporal re-orientation. Levinasian filiation may thus offer us a way of refiguring the problems of modernist temporality, or what Levinas thought of as the atemporalising energies of a modernism obsessed with newness and the now (what he called

“a freedom upon which no past weighs” [Time 124]). Especially in his response to his teacher,

Heidegger, Levinas provides a model of filiation that might help us to understand what is going on with the use of this trope in the contemporary British novel. Since I am using Levinas to frame my discussion of ethics in this study, I will also discuss Levinas’s infamous resistance to the aesthetic. This resistance is part of a wider trend of anti-representational or anti-mimetic discourse that is in large part a response to the revelations of the atrocities of the Holocaust. The novelists at the centre of this study are not unaware of these trends, or of the ethical and political ramifications of their literary-formal choices, and they approach the idea of realism from the standpoint of skepticism (although to various degrees in their respective novels).

I will then turn to Derrida’s writing on inheritance, especially as it is outlined and performed in Specters of Marx. This study of Derrida’s filiative relationship to one of the defining thinkers of modernity has been described as a “critical inheritance” (Cavallini) or

“transformative inheritance” (Pepperell 222), and though this idea is “never completely developed by the French philosopher in a systematic way” (Cavallini), it provides a theoretical point of departure for my discussion of the filial trope and the inheritance of the (modernist) novel tradition. For Derrida, inheritance is textual-philosophical, and thus he provides a helpful way to conceive of inheritance in literary terms; for him, the responsibility of the heir is 9 primarily one of mourning and critical interpretation, so that to inherit is to become part of a tradition by changing it.

To begin, though, I will first sketch a broad outline of the twentieth-century history behind the contemporary crisis of inheritance, by tracing the development of the inheritance trope between and after the two world wars. My argument is a simple one: after the modernists and the First World War, it became impossible to inherit; after the catastrophe of the Second

World War, it became impossible not to. The various texts analysed in this study employ the trope of filiation to engage with precisely this impossibility.

Afterwardsness: War and the Filial Trope in the Twentieth Century

The question of the postmodern in its most far-reaching implications, which are nonetheless the most concrete, is the question of survival, of living on after the dead. A postmodern consciousness is indissociable, for demonstrable, concrete reasons bearing on the recent past as they affect the possibility of a future, from the consciousness of being a survivor, of living on. The consciousness of being as presence as being somehow or the other belated, nachträglich, après coup, may be the consequence of our deconstructive activity. It is also, I argue, a matter of decisive historical consequence. — Andrew McKenna

Like all men, you are the offspring of the novel. —E. M. Cioran

The notion that the British novel after the Second World War has been concerned with its own belatedness is perhaps somewhat overdetermined. For centuries British literature helped to define the culture of a global empire, so that in the novel, issues of global import played themselves out even in the most domestic scenes, manifest for example in the presence of colonial power uncovered by Said in his reading of Jane Austen’s country-house novel, Mansfield Park.2

Ishiguro is only one contemporary author to be self-aware about what the dissolution of the

2 Said makes this argument in Culture and Imperialism, pp. 84-97. 10 empire has meant for British novelists: “For a long time writers who wrote English literature felt they did not need to think consciously about whether they were international or not. They could write about the smallest details of English society and it was, by definition, of interest to people in the far corners of the world because English culture itself was something that was internationally important” (January). There are any number of events that could be said to chart the decline of Britain as a colonial power, including, most prominently, the fight for Indian

Independence, granted in 1947, and the huge loss of symbolic power represented by the Suez crisis in 1956.3 The two world wars, however, represent major turning points in this history to an extent that is difficult to overstate,4 which is why their narratives remain contentious to this day.

The British were able to position themselves as victors at the close of each war, but they were indelibly marked by the trauma of so much violence and loss, traumas which threatened (and continue to threaten, after the fact) those very narratives of personal and national triumph. Most fundamentally, the two world wars, and especially the Second World War, threw Western

Enlightenment narratives of progress, rationality, and moral authority — narratives which legitimated English hegemony, and gave shape to the novel form itself — radically and irrecoverably into question. The contemporary novels I will be reading here thus return to the wars not only as events of material and psychic suffering on both personal microcosmic and

3 Other events which chart this decline — wars, political conflicts, and the ceding of colonial authority — include the Anglo-Irish War (which started in 1919 and ended in 1921 with a stalemate and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, creating the Irish Free State); the Amritsar Massacre in India (1919); the granting of formal independence to Egypt (1922), Burma and Ceylon (1948), Cyprus (1960, following a guerrilla war), Jamaica, Trinidad, and other West Indies territories (1961, 1961), and Rhodesia (1965); and the Imperial Conference of 1923, which recognised the ability of the Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland) to set their own foreign policy, independent of Britain. Finally, while Britain won the battle to retain the Falkland Islands in 1982, in 1997 Britain handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese, and for many this represented the end of the Empire that once comprised a quarter of the globe.

4 Indeed, we define our literary periods in terms of the wars, as in this representative quotation from the Longman Anthology of British Literature: “The quarter century from 1914 until the start of the war in 1939 is now conventionally known as the modernist period” (1993). 11 unimaginably macrocosmic scales, but also as moments of narrative crisis in which the form of the novel and the idea of its inheritance come under scrutiny.

Central to my discussion of these historical traumas is an understanding of traumatic temporality that Freud termed Nachträglichkeit, or “afterwardsness.”5 According to this model, which Freud elaborated most systematically in his famous case history of the “Wolf Man,”6 one does not simply recover a lost memory so much as one restructures the past in retrospect, so that, as Peter Nicholls insists, “the original site […] comes to be reworked” (qtd. in Crosthwaite 17).

Nicholls describes Nachträglichkeit as follows:

Its retroactive logic refuses to accord ontological primacy to any originary moment. Since the shock of the first scene is not felt directly by the subject but only through its later representations in memory we are dealing with, in Derrida’s words, ‘a past that has never been present.’ Belatedness, in this sense, creates a complex temporality which inhibits any nostalgia for origin and continuity — the ‘origin’ is now secondary, a construction always contained in its own repetition. (qtd. in Crosthwaite 17)

Although the writers under discussion in this dissertation are not directly victims or survivors of the wars themselves, the same complex temporality is at work in their novels, whether they are recounting traumas experienced by fictional others, or performing the narrative loops and folds that point to the construction and repetition of story and memory in the wake of those traumas.

Indeed, the inheritance trope itself has to be understood in terms of this kind of afterwardsness.

5 This is Laplanche’s translation of Freud’s term, a full explanation of which can be found in his “Notes on Afterwardsness.”

6 The neuroses suffered by this man, according to Freud, arose from the delayed response to his having witnessed, as a small child, the unintelligible sight of his parents having sexual intercourse. It is “only twenty years later, during the analysis, [that he is] able to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him” (Freud qtd. in Crosthwaite 17). 12

The question of how to inherit a war, or how to inherit after a war, is very much caught up in the question of how to construct an event and therefore one’s relationship to it after the fact.7

Each of the world wars prompted a crisis of inheritance that was specific to the events of that war. This in itself is not surprising, as these crises are at base grounded in a brutal materiality

— war literally disrupts genealogical time by violently severing filial chains and interrupting lines of inheritance — and each war was itself a historically specific event, materially, politically, ideologically, and philosophically. The First World War was fought between traditional European nation-states on conventional battlefields, the Second World War by totalitarian empires, nation- states, and democracies on a global scale. In the First World War, deaths were mostly limited to combatants and unlucky bystanders: there were over 8 million military deaths in Europe, almost

1 million of which were British, with over approximately 7 million civilian deaths across Europe besides (Brzezinski 10). The Second World War dwarfed these already unimaginable figures,

7 This attention to afterwardsness has to be understood in the context of contemporary discourse about trauma, for example the work of Cathy Caruth. Another leading trauma theorist, Shoshana Felman, describes trauma this way: “Psychological trauma occurs as a result of an overwhelming, uncontrollable and terrifying experience, usually a violent event or events or the prolonged exposure to such events. The emotional damage often remains hidden, as though the person were unharmed. The full scope of the symptoms manifests itself only belatedly, sometimes years and years later.... It is understood today that trauma can be collective as well as individual and that traumatized communities are something distinct from assemblies or traumatized persons.... Oppressed groups that have been persistently subject to abuse, injustice, or violence suffer collective trauma, much like soldiers who have been exposed to war atrocities. The twentieth century can be defined as a century of trauma” (171). She goes on to call trauma “the confrontation with ‘an event that is itself constituted...by its lack of integration into consciousness’ [Freud TEM 152],” continuing: “Yet the event (as Freud observes in the life of individuals as well as of communities) registers a belated impact: it becomes precisely haunting, tends to historically return and to repeat itself in practice and in act, to the precise extent that it remains un-owned and unavailable to knowledge and to consciousness. Like the traumatic nightmares of returning soldiers that, years after the war, continue to repeat themselves and thus repeatedly relive the pain, the violence, the horror, and the unexpectedness of the original traumatizing scene, history is likewise subject, Freud suggests, to compulsive forms of (immemorial yet commemorative) traumatic repetitions. Freud thus shows how historical traumatic energy can be the motive-force of society, of culture, of tradition, and of history itself” (173). My interest in afterwardsness draws on this idea of “historical traumatic energy” but prioritizes self-consciously retrospective accounts of trauma; it takes a narrativist view as opposed to a deterministic view which places the burden of causality on events in the past. Though to a point this is a semantic distinction, I make it in order to distinguish the three writers I read here from those who have been directly traumatized by the Holocaust and other events of the war; these writers are not Holocaust survivors themselves, and their relationship to this event is thus always already mediated by narrative. While the three do have personal connections with traumatic events of the war — McEwan’s father survived the retreat to Dunkirk, and Ishiguro’s parents survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki — their novels’ interest in the war and the Holocaust is expressed primarily as an interest in cultural narratives. 13 causing an estimated thirty-six and half million deaths in Europe between 1939 and 1945 (Judt

17-18), and effectively erased the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, since

“civilian populations, captive peoples, and arbitrarily designated internal enemies accounted for more than half the total dead” (Rabinbach 11). And with the full extent of the persecution of the

Jewish people revealed after the war, the moral enormity of that crime overshadowed all thought of recovery and regeneration. In short, if the First World War was experienced as a catastrophe, it was not one that precluded a new beginning; the Second World War, however, was a

“nonredemptive apocalypse” (Rabinbach 10), and one that flowed from the new beginnings envisioned by the modernists: “To put it in a convenient formula, World War One gave rise to reflections on death and transfiguration, World War Two to reflections on evil, or on how the logic of modernity since the Enlightenment, with its legacy of progress, secularism, and rationalism, could not be exculpated from events that seemed to violate its ideals” (Rabinbach 9).

But even if it weren’t for these material and political differences, the crisis of inheritance that followed from each war would have been affected by one major structural difference between them: simply put, World War Two came after. During and after the Second World War, there was in the culture as a whole, perhaps in writers especially, a sense of belatedness, even of the uncanny, that only magnified the war’s traumatic effect: the Great War was meant to end all wars, yet it was happening again. Post-World War Two writers were and still are caught in a kind of double-bind with regards to their modernist inheritance: to reject it is to repeat its strategy of renouncing the past, and therefore is effectively to inherit it, while to choose to inherit it, one must reject it as the burden of history it defined itself against. 14

The divergent approaches to the trope of filiation in the art of the two periods is representative of this difference. The modernist anti-filiative sentiment that followed from the

First World War is connected, at a deep structural level, with their experience of unprecedented, wide-scale, mechanised warfare. Sarah Cole argues “that literary modernism was fully entangled, in its deepest commitments, not only with the war, but also with a long history of violence, [and] that its works were grouped and polarized around the question of whether violence can stand as the bedrock of a culture’s artistic accomplishments” (1633). The war, she writes, was so central in shaping the aesthetic consciousness of the early decades of the century, because it “most powerfully calls forth … dichotomized understandings of death” (1632), the two modes of which she describes as “enchantment” and “disenchantment” with violence and the wounded body.8

Enchantment frames violence and death, and especially death in battle, in terms of fecundity and fruitfulness, and relies primarily on “metaphors of growth and germination” (1634), so that

“violent death is transformed into something positive and communal, perhaps even sacred” (1634). Against this general premise, disenchantment is “the active stripping away of idealizing principles, an insistence that the violated body is not a magic site for the production of culture” (1633).9

Teresa Heffernan also discusses the modernist sense of the impossibility of renewal and regeneration that arose in response to the war, and she puts this predicament in terms of a breakdown in (among other things) genealogical structures. She cites Frank Kermode, who

8 Cole allows that not all works break down according to this strict dichotomy. In fact, her essay ends with a reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land, through which Cole argues that Eliot manages to engage both: “It is precisely this willingness to offer a poetic of enchantment that at the same time ruthlessly disenchants its own origins, that sets Eliot’s work off from many other engagements with violence in the period — especially those that grew out of the war, with its dichotomizing energy” (1645).

9 Cole cites Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as exemplary of the aesthetic of disenchantment. 15 writes that, before the war, by establishing a community through a shared genealogy, each life

“might require a meaning beyond itself in the interval between its beginning and its end”:

It was not just a simple progress towards one’s own death, not just one damned thing after another. Instead of remaining at the mercy of the passage of ordinary time a life could be felt as making sense in terms of a far more universal system of counting; and a lifespan is thus given significance by solidarity not only with those who shared membership of one’s particular epoch but also with ancestors and descendants. (Kermode qtd. in Heffernan 34)

With the rise of modernity, however, this sense of a shared and continuous temporality becomes increasingly untenable.10 Heffernan argues that although belief in the actual end of the world as foretold in Revelations receded, secular teleological narratives, especially the “prominent and interconnected Enlightenment narratives…of…History, the Nation, and Man,” were still animated by the same spirit, which posits an origin and a more-or-less deliberate movement towards “an end that will make sense of all that has come before it” (4). With the First World

War, however, faith in this teleological model of progress diminished rapidly:

Many modernists feel in some way not only that the catastrophe has already happened but also that the ‘sense of an ending’ implicit in the narratives of modernity, is, for various reasons, no longer viable. In other words, it no longer secures the dream of the future, and the idea of apocalypse is widely associated in these works not with revelation and renewal but with disaster and a sense of exhaustion with the model itself. (Heffernan 7)

Modernists conceived of themselves living in an end-of-times scenario, in other words, but one without the consolation of regeneration, or a future made possible out of this traumatic past.

They are left with “the Nietzschean challenge to either cower in terror at the randomness of the future, a future without a definitive course and without an end, or to embrace this liberation as from a chain… [which] makes possible the charting of an alternate direction” (Heffernan 42).

10 And this is, in fact, the argument that Kermode makes, with regards to apocalypticism in D. H. Lawrence’s work (Heffernan 42). 16

By liberating themselves from their filial chains, then, modernist artists and writers sought to create an art that would neither enchant nor console with visions of spiritual plenitude and regeneration out of violence. Theirs would be an art that was ruthlessly new and responsible to nothing but itself and its own historical moment — warts, dismembered bodies, and all.

However, modernists do not make a mere liberatory break from filiative authority; as Said and

Hepburn both point out, artists substitute affiliative for filiative connections, which then become as authoritative as the ones they replace. Mary DiBattista goes a step further in arguing that these purportedly affiliative relationships were in fact mere adaptations of the “family ties that bind and secure a human patrimony” (220). As she explains, “the modernist determination to make everything, including human relationships, new was often baffled by the question of who would inherit their vision of a transformed humanity and ensure that it would survive the tumult and hazards of change” (220). Though they imagined new forms of moral and spiritual kinship in an effort to preclude the foreshortened future that is a result of genealogical impasse, modernists often returned in their narratives to “fretful benefactors and dazed parents” (220) as a model they could not entirely escape.

More crucially, this affiliative impulse leads to a contradiction at the performative level: it is impossible for an art that “charts a new direction” not to rely on metaphors of regeneration, at the very least because it enacts them. As Cole recognises, both dichotomised responses to the violence of war are aesthetic: “[e]nchantment would seem exuberantly aesthetic, disenchantment only unwillingly so; but, as we look at them, we find instead that each draws on an extensive literary tradition and each is ambivalent about its own stance on violence” (1634). Instead of seeing them as “anti-aesthetic,” then, purveyors of a “disenchanted” modernism should be 17 understood as forwarding a new kind of aesthetic, and therefore of actively performing a kind of cultural regeneration. As Mark Rawlinson puts it, the idea that “war produces the kind of art which its occurrence proves to be wanting” (10) effectively equates new experience with new forms, as if “Great War writers were made by war experience and were, in a sense, another of war’s by-products” (9). Under these descriptions, he points out, “war paradoxically comes to function as an agent of cultural regeneration” (10), determining its own representation and functioning as a touchstone of a material reality divorced from its literary-cultural inheritance.

The aesthetics that developed over the decades following the First World War were diverse in form, but in general they shared a vision of temporality unmoored from conventions, both social and literary, with an emphasis on nowness and newness. Consider Ezra Pound’s famous dictum, which is now a commonplace that signifies our contemporary understanding of the basic tenets of modernism as such: “Make it new!” 11 Consider also the language of the

Futurists and the Vorticists. F. T. Marinetti claimed in his 1909 “Futurist Manifesto”: “We are on the furthest promontory of the ages! ... Why should we be looking back over our shoulders, if what we desire is to smash down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are living already in the realms of the Absolute, for we have already created infinite, omnipresent speed” (14). In 1914, Wyndham Lewis wrote of Vorticism in Blast: “Our vortex is not afraid of the Past: it has forgotten it’s existence [sic]. Our vortex regards the Future as as sentimental as the Past…. With our Vortex the Present is the only active thing. Life is the

11 As Kurt Heinzelman makes clear in Make It New: The Rise of Modernism, “Pound’s phrase is often cited by both scholars and practitioners of all the arts (and not just of poetry) to explain modernist principles. The phrase is almost always understood to call for a creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, without regard for tradition but with the highest regard for individual talent and craftsmanship” (13). Heinzelman points out that the phrase was not actually used by Pound in 1914, as has been erroneously claimed; it did not appear until 1934 as the title of his book, Make It New. Whenever it appeared, however, the salient point here is that this kind of newness has for decades been widely associated with modernism, even if it is in a largely retrospective way. 18

Past and the Future. The Present is Art” (147). And in The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster — a writer much less given to manifestos — “‘Let them die out’ is the rallying cry … that suggests certain lineages need not continue merely for the sake of continuance” (in Hepburn 19). All of these variegated approaches, dedicated as they are to breaking with the past, perform a fruitfulness of a sort, a flowering of new forms that today we celebrate as the great works of the modernist period.

Though many did turn to the past for inspiration or solace, it was simultaneously a past from which they were irrevocably severed12 and a past to which they had an unmediated access: a contemporaneous or synchronous past, an effect of a subject-centred temporality with little room for the discontinuities that might undermine the present.13 Stephen Connor writes that “[i]n working so hard to wake up from history, modernists sought to know history, reduce its alterity, and produce something divorced from it and new. This was a cognitive process of subsuming history — consider as paradigmatic the notion of Eliotic tradition, which is filtered through the poet and catalyzed into the poem” (19). So, to the extent that we can group together the extremely disparate writers and artists of the First World War and interwar period, we might say that the present is the ultimate referent, even simply as indicated by the assignation (and sometimes self-assignation) of the term ‘modernism’ itself.

12 Recall Virginia Woolf’s famous statements about the Great War: “Then suddenly, like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came” (The Leaning Tower 167), after which “we are sharply cut off from our predecessors" (Essays III 35).

13 In her book on Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and war, Helen Wussow writes (somewhat uncritically) of the two writers’ belief in their abilities to “enter the spirit of the past”: “[Woolf] perceived the past as part of her present. In her works she frequently depicts the contemporaneity of time. For her, the simultaneity of history could take on physical qualities” (17). And Lawrence, in the paradigmatically-titled Apocalypse, advises the reader how to “appreciate the pagan manner of thought... [by] allow[ing] the mind to move in cycles” (qtd. in Wussow 17). “The synchronicity of time,” writes Wussow, “is displayed throughout his work” (17). 19

In this upheaval of filial models, it is perhaps not surprising that substitutive parental figures emerged, most notoriously in the charismatic forms of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin

(known, indeed, as “Father Stalin”). These figures rejected the democratic tradition that was their cultural heritage, celebrating in its stead a fantastic combination of mythic past and technological utopian future. And while I don’t wish to argue that anti-filial movements opened up a void that made these particular figures inevitable, I think it is fair to suggest that modernist aesthetics, with its authentication of and through violence, is widely perceived to have helped to create the necessary conditions of possibility for the success of totalitarianism, which has made perpetuating those aesthetics even more problematic after the Second World War than it already was. As Mark Antliff argues, while modern art once seemed reassuringly opposed to fascism, scholars now recognise their forms as in many ways mutually constitutive. Antliff notes that

“concepts associated with the modernist aesthetics — including regeneration, spiritualism, primitivism, and avant-gardism — were integrated into the anti-Enlightenment pantheon of fascist values, with the result that many artists found common ground with these new movements” (149). The apocalyptic and utopian strains of modernist writing likewise can no longer be read as politically innocent.

The contemporary novelist attempting to rethink the trope of filiation, then, is caught in a complex and historically-specific double-bind: on one hand, filiation is still associated, as the modernists felt it was, with a history of violence, patriarchy and linearity, and after World War

Two, with blood and soil ideologies that underwrote the fascist movements that led to the war.

On the other hand, filiation connotes a duty to inherit the personal and cultural memory of survivors of the war, and especially of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. It might also offer a 20 way, therefore, of rewriting the allegory between personal and cultural inheritance, of figuring filiation as something always already discontinuous and potentially disruptive. Modernist writers may have inverted the traditional trope of filiation, both by figuring broken lines of inheritance and by inventing new forms for them to inhabit, but we should note that with them the allegory itself, between genealogies in the novel and genealogies of the novel, remains intact: if one is broken, so is the other. The contemporary writers I will be reading here attempt to reconfigure that relationship: the idea that filiation is, or ever was, continuous, is brought under the microscope. These novelists, after all, are looking for a way to structure temporality that would preclude, or at least disrupt, totalising and totalitarian visions of mythic origins and utopian futures, without recapitulating the injustices that the modernists rejected in the first place.

If the Second World War prompted a new kind of crisis of inheritance, the Holocaust specifically prompted a crisis of witnessing, and therefore of representation, that is crucial to our understanding of inheritance in turn. There are a number of theories that have developed in the wake of the Holocaust under the rubric of trauma studies that hold that this event produced a crisis in witnessing unlike any event before it.14 We can take psychoanalyst Dori Laub’s famous statement as exemplary of this perspective: he argues for “the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses. Not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime, but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims” (Testimony 80). Sandor Goodhart counters this view, holding that both survivors and

14 For seminal works in the area of trauma studies and Holocaust studies, especially with regards to its crossover with literary theory and theories of representation, see: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History; and Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma. 21 non-survivors, and in fact much of post-war Western culture, display symptoms of a post- traumatic ‘acting out’ that is in effect a kind of witnessing. Thus he argues against conceiving of witnessing according to a purely objective-cognitive model of remembrance and representation.

As he explains,

the uniqueness or unprecedented status [of the Holocaust] has less to do with the singularity of the suffering of the survivors as earlier views maintain (monstrous as that suffering was), or with the appearance on the world-historical stage of an event that defies notice … (traumatic as that unmonitored event was for its victims), than it does with the collapse of the modalities by which we were accustomed in Europe to noticing human relation at all, and in particular the unpredictability of such massive premeditated infliction of categorical torment within a humanistic framework designed expressly since romanticism to exclude such onslaught. (216)

The impossibility of representation after the Holocaust is thus not only about a crisis in witnessing, but about a crisis of cultural inheritance. After the First World War, inherited forms may not have been adequate to the task, but after the Holocaust, ‘form’ itself seemed to be part of the problem. This may bring to mind Adorno’s oft-quoted remark about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. Often read as an indictment of all art after the Holocaust,

“Adorno’s pronouncements were never meant as silence-inducing taboos, but rather as concrete theoretical reflections upon the moral status of art in the aftermath of the Shoah and as warnings of the moral peril involved in the artistic rendering of mass extermination” (Martin 2).15

Nevertheless, the frequency with which Adorno’s statement has been misrepresented speaks to a widespread cultural orientation to which this view testifies as an exemplary truism. Adorno does argue, after all, that the Holocaust was not a blip in an otherwise progressive culture, but that it should be seen rather as “a part and parcel of the civilising process itself” (Martin 6). Maurice

15 The aporia is more apparent in Adorno’s original, which reads: “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (162). 22

Blanchot testifies similarly to the impossibility of narrative after the Holocaust: “At whatever date it might have been written, each narrative henceforth will be from before Auschwitz” (qtd. in Goodhart 201). Narrative, poetry, literary and aesthetic form itself belong to the world before, a world of describable events in which some nominal rules of representation hold, and in which cohesion and aesthetics as such aren’t themselves culpable of terrible crimes.

Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro take this crisis very seriously, and they pay particular attention to the ethics of taking up an inheritance or “a filiation in general” that is marked by war, an ethics which is especially complicated because it is so ideologically conflicted. After the traumatic break of a war, the world that existed in this “before” can seem innocent of the horrors that were to come, but it can also seem collusive. Most upsettingly, it can seem both — collusive in its innocence — prompting a sense of deep epistemological and ontological instability, and provoking questions such as: How is it that we were on this path and did not know it, or did not know how to stop it? What betrayals continue to lurk in the tradition we believed would save us from atrocities such as these? And how can we ethically take up our inheritance when we are no longer sure what the nature of that inheritance is, nor what kind of people it makes us out to be?

As I mentioned earlier, Levinas’s writing about filiation, paternity, and fecundity emerge out of exactly this post-war context. Levinas was one of the earliest thinkers to critique, from the standpoint of ethics, modernist representational strategies, and the kinds of temporalities that these strategies assumed. He recognised what was dangerous about them even before the full- scale rise of fascism in Europe, and long before the homologies among rationalism, metaphysics, totalitarianism, and aesthetics were more widely understood. While Levinasian paternity and filiation are not unproblematic constructions (as I will outline shortly), and while Levinasian 23 ethics in general are not unproblematic when applied to a reading of literature (given his antipathy to aesthetics), these ideas help us to understand the ethical imperative behind the necessary rethinking of the central literary trope of filiation that takes place in the novels studied here.

Between Mourning and Fecundity: Levinasian Filiation and Derridean Inheritance as Ethical Critique

The transmission of philosophy, the transmission of his philosophy, is for Levinas, first of all, a question of filiation. — François-David Sebbah

[A]lthough Levinas’s rejection of the literary is unwavering, there is, even for Levinas, an art that makes an ‘ethical difference,’ namely, the art that follows upon and engages the Holocaust, although such art ‘can no longer be conceived as aesthetic.’ — Sandor Goodhart

Levinas’s work can be summarised as his response to the Western philosophical tradition that made the Holocaust possible, or at the very least, failed to make it impossible. His ethics cut

“radically across what [he] calls the naive, arbitrary, spontaneous dogmatism of the self which insists on reducing exteriority to the terms of cognition” (Gibson 17), and forms the basis of his critiques of the legacy of totalising impulses of western philosophy, itself characterised by

Levinas as an onto-theological discourse oriented towards war. At the heart of this larger project is his critique of modern temporality. For Levinas, the modern, Enlightenment tradition emphasises synchrony and sameness, and believes in “the present of its absolute knowledge, where nothing is any longer exterior to consciousness” (“Old” 126). He writes:

According to our European tradition, all spirituality is indeed knowledge: everything that comes about in the human psychism finishes through knowledge and through self- knowledge…. The exteriority, alterity, or antiquity, of what is ‘already there’ in the known, is taken up again into immanence: the known is at once the other and the property of thought. Nothing preexists: one learns as if one created. Reminiscence and imagination secure the synchrony of what, in experience bound to time, was doomed to the difference 24

between the old and the new. The new as modern is the fully arranged state of the world. (“Old” 124-5).

In these terms, the founding of the Self is a circular or round-trip movement, so that the ego moves outward through sensory experience and enjoyment until the Self bumps up against otherness — not necessarily in the form of another person, but any object that can be assimilated into understanding — before it returns to what Levinas calls “the Same.” Levinas argues that this idea, that the Self is constituted as self-affirming self-knowledge, and objectifiable knowledge of otherness, is based on a repression of the authentic founding of the Self, which is much more traumatic and disruptive than this classical ontological and epistemological model would have us believe. According to Levinas, the Self as such is diachronic: its trip outward from the ego is one-way, for once it confronts otherness in the form of the face of the Other (the other individual person), it is confronted with an unassailable command (which Levinas puts in the form of a biblical commandment, “thou shalt not kill”) that renders it responsible for the fate of the Other.

The self does not return to the same entity that existed before this encounter, for it skips or jumps and finds itself traumatically out-of-step with itself, on the “hither side” of the Other. The self must choose either to give up his or her sovereignty in a redistribution of resources, or to aggressively move to annihilate the alterity of the other, through cognitive comprehension that seeks to pull the other into the economy of the Same, as in colonisation or war. Because this necessary original choice must precede ontological and epistemological reasoning, ethics is for

Levinas a first philosophy.

From these presumptions, Levinas critiques the modern Self on the basis of its presumed freedom from the burden of history; Steven Connor describes Levinas’s critique of “the affirmation of freedom from the past that inaugurates the modern” (19), a freedom with which 25

“no memory interferes, a freedom upon which no past weighs” (Levinas, in Connor 19). As

Connor explains, for Levinas, “[t]his is driven by ‘the exigency of extreme lucidity’ [“Old” 126], but increasingly [by the twentieth century], the process of this self-reflection and self- differentiation from the past, or from the past in the present, is detemporalised, accelerated to the merest flicker, in which knowledge and present self-identity annul in advance all possibility of what lies before or beyond them” (19).

Even though it is not always made explicit, Levinas’s work responds particularly to the influence of Heidegger, his teacher and the thinker who makes his own work possible, as Levinas himself admits. Levinas lost most of his extended family to the Holocaust; given Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism, Levinas’s critique of Heideggerian ontology is inflected with a sense of personal, political and deeply ethical betrayal. Levinas describes Heideggerian ontology as

“[a] philosophy of power… , which does not question the Same,…[and which is therefore] a philosophy of injustice. Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relation to the other human being [Autrui] to the relation to being in general... persists in the obedience to the anonymous and leads, fatally, to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny” (Totality

38). Thus, Levinas’s Heidegger epitomises the “modern” and its problems.

The crucial element of Levinas’s critique here is his tendency to describe the parental relationship as the exemplary ethical relation to which all relationships should aspire. As he puts it, the “love of the father for the son accomplishes the sole relation possible with the very unicity of another; and in this sense every love must approach paternal love” (Totality 279). The filial relationship literally embodies the dynamic that is central to Levinasian ethics in general, wherein one recognises in the face of the singular other, his or her absolute and unassimilable 26 alterity, and his or her nakedness and vulnerability. The encounter between parent and child is where the alterity of the Other is most radically experienced, since one’s child is both other and one’s self: “My son is a stranger, but a stranger who is not only mine, for he is me. He is me a stranger to myself” (Totality 267). This is not a relationship of power, but of renunciation and responsibility, wherein the other’s future becomes more important to “me” than “my” own. Even in the erotic relationship, Levinas tells us, the real ethical movement is in the yearning for a child; it is this orientation towards the future that opens the lovers to something beyond themselves, and which Levinas calls fecundity: “Both my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other, of the Beloved, my future does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity” (Totality 267). What Levinas emphasises is the discontinuity of the process, the way the self is interrupted and reconstituted differently, as fundamentally diachronous — a split self, unable ever to coincide with itself or to assert its presence on its own ego-bound terms.

Levinas’s fullest explanation of the intertwined concepts of fecundity, paternity, and filiation and their relationship to his ethics come in a section of Totality and Infinity called

“Beyond the Face.” This is the first time Levinas makes it clear that the face-to-face relationship, while it is immediate and primary, is yet not sufficient to grant subjectivity to the self. Paternity is what makes time happen because it is through the son that the endless cycle of hypostasis, the return of the ego to itself, is interrupted, and the self is constituted in terms of his responsibilities to the future, which for Levinas is what constitutes authentic subjectivity. Although the ego does return to itself, it is differently structured as a parent, or as one who has experienced oneself as a 27 parent, because one is no longer at the centre of one’s own concerns. François-David Sebbah puts it most clearly:

[A]nyone who has had children cannot fail to hear in Levinas’ argument the explication of their apparently contradictory feeling: for the first time I feel directly, and irremediably, responsible for another, and yet with this new weight I experience a lightness which is bestowed by the decentring of self — I no longer must bear myself, I have taken leave of the obsessional exclusiveness of the caring of the self for the self. (264)

The parent recognises him- or herself in the child, and finds him- or herself completely invested in its future, even though that future will be the child’s alone: the parent has no ultimate control over it, and it remains unforeseeably other. Parenthood thus construed also invokes the passivity and the sense of the ineluctable that is integral to Levinasian ethics, for the parent is chosen by the child. The parent also chooses each child, however (“each son of the father is the unique son, the chosen son” [278]), as the parent accepts that their subjectivity is reconstituted as parental, as one who is responsible for another. The endless cycle of the ego’s return to itself, which is legitimated in Heideggerian ontology, is thus interrupted by parenthood, since the ego no longer comes first. Subjectivity is reconstituted as diachronous, as the child’s future displaces and contends with one’s own; this is why Levinas asserts that paternity makes time happen: “It is not according to the category of cause, but according to the category of the father that freedom occurs and time is accomplished.… Paternity is not simply a renewal of the father in the son and his confusion with him. It is also the exteriority of the father in relation to the son. It is a pluralist existing” (Time 91-2). Indeed, Levinasian filiation exemplifies the ethical relationship because it embodies diachrony, with inheritance operating as a kind of self-interruption.

Levinas represents this model as a challenge to Heideggerian notions of thrownness and being-towards-death, which are both exemplified in the modernist crisis of filiation summarised 28 above. The Heideggerian subject finds him or herself “thrown” as if at random into his or her historical situation, with no power or control over that ground as any basis or foundation for his or her existence.16 We can seize authenticity from this situation only by facing the reality of our own death. Death for Heidegger is the individuating experience, and the only authentic horizon of meaning for the subject: others, though we can choose to live beside them and care for them, are ultimately a distraction and a source of inauthenticity. As Kaja Silverman writes,

‘Being-towards-death’ is anticipatory; it orients the subject toward the future from which its present might be said to issue. It is also individuating. Death is that one moment when each of us is irreducibly alone; it is an event which we can share with no one, and of which no one can absolve us. Being-towards-death consequently isolates the subject from the ‘they’ in which it has been previously absorbed. In so doing, it singularizes Dasein [the Heideggerian subject] ‘down to itself.’ (308)

For Levinas, on the other hand, one is attached to history through people, not place. One is not thrown into existence so much as one is always already related. Levinas distinguishes this also from the Heideggerian notion of rootedness, wherein authenticity has to be won through violence and death, since Dasein has no attachments otherwise. And while mortality does open the dimension of the future in Heidegger, it follows that the future is meaningful only from the horizon of death as the innermost essential possibility. By contrast, for Levinas, as Sebbah puts it, the subject is “less the Heideggerian being-for-death as [it is] a being-for-birth, ceaselessly renewable” (266).17 Levinas, in fact, practically ignores the death of the self as a philosophical construct, to focus instead on filiation and fecundity.

16 For my sources on Heidegger, please see Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks; Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger; Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction; and Silverman, World Spectators.

17 According to some critics, Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘natality’ embodies the same critique of Heidegger. See, for example, Vatter’s “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt.” 29

There are two major problems with Levinas’s model worth addressing here. The first is the target of feminist critique, the substance of which is made obvious from Levinas’s gender- specific terminology in the quotations above. Even in his later works, when his emphasis switches from paternity to maternity as the trope for our relationship with the other, the mother is valorised for the extent to which she suffers on behalf of the other, even to the point of substitution: of giving her life up for her child’s survival — obviously problematic in its own way.

Feminist responses to Levinas are varied, but they tend to agree on two things: that

Levinas’s notions of filiation and fecundity are central to his ethics, and that his theorising of paternity and maternity, and his consistent tendency to refer to the child as the son instead of the daughter, are deeply problematic. However, even those (like Luce Irigaray, Sonia Sikka, and

Kelly Oliver) who argue that these problems render Levinasian ethics flawed beyond recuperability, see value in Levinas’s critique of Heidegger. Heidegger argued that it is impossible to distinguish beings from Being, subordinating all difference, including sexual specificity, to the drama of the self and his or her death. Levinas asked whether the tie between what exists and its existing is indissoluble; he answers by way of paternity, maternity, and filiation, or in other words, in terms of sexual difference. Hence a number of feminist critics

(Tina Chanter, Ewa Ziarek, Catherine Chalier, Alison Ainley) argue that it might be possible to exploit Levinas’s original contribution of the idea of the ethical signification of the flesh. Ziarek even argues that “the necessary interdependence of responsibility and incarnation paves the way

… to the feminist ethics of sexual difference” (19). Perhaps the Levinasian critique of modernity can extend past the paternal logic of his texts and form the basis of theorising an ethics of 30 embodiment. Besides sexual difference, this would be an ethics that would follow Levinas in taking the pains and pleasures of the body, or what he calls sensibility, into account, along with our historical situatedness with regards to our specific responsibilities to the others around us.18

Though the issue raised by feminist critiques of Levinasian filiation are beyond the scope of this study, they exemplify a second, larger problem with his formulation — the gap between ethics and politics inherent in any filial model. Though they created many problems in the process, the modernists upset the filial model largely in order to open up new ways of thinking about political organisation, to make room for the traditionally disenfranchised and disinherited, or those without traditional filial privileges: women, minorities, and in terms of the modernist

English novel, the Irish. Levinas’s reliance on filial tropes runs the risk of undoing the political gains made by these and other groups.

Levinas does theorise in terms of fraternity the relation between the experience of subjecthood in filiation and the apprehension of one’s political responsibilities. As I noted earlier, the father chooses the son as the son chooses the father. He argues that by recognising oneself as chosen, and unique and uniquely loved, one also recognises all the others as similarly chosen, as sons, and recognises thus the fraternity between them:

The unique child, as elected one, is accordingly at the same time unique and non-unique. Paternity is produced as an innumerable future; the I engendered exists at the same time as unique in the world and as brother among brothers. I am I and chosen one, but where can I be chosen, if not from among other chosen ones, among equals? The I as I hence remains turned ethically to the face of the other: fraternity is the very relation with the face in which at the same time my election and equality, that is, the mastery exercised over me by the other, are accomplished. (Totality 279)

18 For arguments in this vein, see Tina Chanter’s introduction, as well as essays by Irigaray, Sikka, Oliver, Ziarek, Chalier, and Ainley, in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. 31

But we have to ask of Levinas: is it not disengenuous to say that my son — or for the sake of moving beyond Levinas’s terminology, my child — is a sibling to all other children when it comes to a moment of danger? And is this not what politics are ultimately about delineating: how to ascribe rights and privileges to some and not others in a moment of danger, or under threat of violence of one kind or another? If one recognises oneself as a child before one recognises oneself as a sibling to all other children, doesn’t the status of having been chosen by a particular parent, with a particular national, ethnic, political identity, come before a fraternity that might disrupt this relationship?

This gap between the ethics of filiation and the politics of fraternity is manifested in the secondary scholarship regarding Levinasian filiation. That is, critics who talk about filiation in

Levinas write about it in terms of its ethics, much as I did in my description. In the last several years, much attention has been paid to the relationship of Levinas to politics, or to the potential of Levinasian ethics to theories of the political. But Levinasian politics is almost always explored in terms of fraternity, and rarely ever (that I have seen) does it work backwards to include a discussion of filiation, from where fraternity derives.19 So if there is a gap between the experience of filiation and the ethical imperatives of political agency and situatedness, it is only exemplified and widened by this gap in the theorisation of these issues.

For Levinas, then, the gap between ethics and politics is a necessary structural one: justice can only be achieved in the realm of the political, but the political works by effacing particular others; ethics, as first philosophy, precedes politics and is the higher standard by which politics should be critiqued. The challenge is to mobilise ethics in service of this critique: how

19 See Howard Caygill’s discussion of the ways in which Levinas historicises and politicises ethics through his notion of fraternity in Levinas and the Political. 32 we might do this via the filial-fraternal model still needs to be theorised more fully, perhaps by taking on the feminist project of extending the potential in Levinas’s writings beyond the closure of their limitations. But for the present purposes, my aim is not to resolve and move past the issue within the discourse of philosophy, but to look at the ways in which British writers have approached the same issue in the discourse of the novel. In order to do so, I will now move on to read Levinas as an “author,” and look at his textual filiation with the author Heidegger, to reframe the discussion in literary terms. I will then move on to look at Derrida’s description of the “figure of the heir” to incorporate his vocabulary into my theoretical approach.

Levinas makes clear on more than one occasion that the paternal/filial relationship is not limited to biological relations, but can function as a kind of trope:

The fact of seeing the possibilities of the other as your own possibilities, of being able to escape the closure of your identity and what is bestowed on you, toward something which is not bestowed on you and which nevertheless is yours — this is paternity. This future beyond my own being, this dimension constitutive of time, takes on a concrete content in paternity.… [B]iological filiality is only the first shape filiality takes; but one can very well conceive filiality without the tie of biological kinship….Filiation and fraternity — parental relations without biological bases — are current metaphors in our everyday life. The relationship of master to disciple does not reduce to filiation and fraternity, but it certainly includes them. (Totality 71)

Some critics write about filiation in Levinas almost exclusively in terms of textual filiation

(Llewelyn, Miller and Attridge), which is certainly an integral element of his thought; as Sebbah makes clear, however, there is finally no distinguishing between the symbolic and phenomenological application of filiality (263). Levinas himself makes it difficult to divide one from the other, as he insists on returning to the phenomenological experience of paternity and maternity in his writing. 33

In order to read Levinas’s ambiguous use of the filial trope, we must address his notorious and extreme distaste for art. In an early essay, “Reality and its Shadow,” Levinas gives us his most emphatic and sustained critique of the aesthetic. As might be obvious from the

Platonic resonances of the title, the aesthetic for Levinas distracts us from the world of our responsibilities, and encourages passivity by engaging us in a shadow world of representation.

As Robert Eaglestone has shown, this essay is largely a response to the particular claims made by

Heidegger in his essay, “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” Where Heidegger sees the work of art as having an unconcealing function, Levinas sees it as “an event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow” (“Reality” 132). While both thinkers see art as having an

‘opening’ function, Levinas does not believe that it opens onto the world, and the origins of the world, as Heidegger does; rather, he speaks of art as opening into a false reality. “Art,” he writes,

“bewitches us into involvement, but specifically not with the world as reality, but with something else, with non-being” (qtd. in Eaglestone 105). Art is disengaged from the world, and most importantly, gives us a re-presentation of the face instead of the thing itself, which amounts to a fundamental disavowal of responsibility. In art, Levinas writes, the “world to be built is replaced by the essential contemplation of the shadow. This is not the distinterestedness of contemplation but of irresponsibility. The poet exiles himself from the city. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague” (“Reality” 142, in Eaglestone 108). Eaglestone points out how this passage echoes Adorno’s dictum about the impossibility of art after Auschwitz, and a similar cultural logic is at work here: “Art and the beautiful are not, for Levinas, capable of reaching 34 beyond the world. They are firmly located in the understanding of the world constituted by war,

‘fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates western philosophy’” (Eaglestone 111).

While Levinas never retracts anything he puts forth in “Reality and Its Shadow,” his work evolves in ways that problematise some of the tensions at play in this essay. In Totality and

Infinity, written thirteen years later, Levinas continues his discussion of the problem of representation and his distrust of art, arguing against what he deems to be the false transcendence that art offers, as in a kind of poetic rapture. But as Eaglestone points out, when Levinas argues for the important role criticism plays in orienting art once more towards the world, the distinctions between literary and critical uses of language are not so clear. There is further tension in Levinas’s attempts to establish a contrast between types of representation, differentiating between what Robert Bernasconi calls ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ understandings of the face, when he argues that the ‘face’ is a true representation in the way that art only ever represents falsely (in Eaglestone 122).

By the time of his second major work, Otherwise than Being, which was written largely in response to Derrida’s deconstruction of Levinas’s use of ontological and totalising vocabulary in Totality and Infinity,20 Levinas is more sensitive to the problems of language, and his work from here takes what is widely known as his ‘linguistic turn.’ He speaks of the fact that ethics occurs in discourse, that the face of the other speaks to the subject in language, and that speaking itself is a call to responsibility. This speaking is what Levinas calls “the saying”; he describes it as “the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification…. The original or pre-original saying, what is put forth in

20 See Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics.” 35 the foreword, weaves an intrigue of responsibility. It sets forth an order more grave than being and antecedent to being” (Otherwise 5-6). Saying comes first, but by virtue of being spoken, it moves into language, where it is subordinated to theme and trope, or representation: “The correlation of the saying and the said, that is, the subordination of the saying to the said, to the linguistic system and to ontology, is the price that manifestation demands. In language qua said everything is conveyed before us, be it at the price of betrayal. Language is ancillary and thus indispensable” (Otherwise 6).21

By rooting ethics firmly within the discursive realm, and with this new vocabulary of the saying and the said, Levinas inadvertently opens the way for an ethical literary criticism: “As he maintains that the said contains a trace of the saying, and insofar as literature and art are said products, by implication, they also carry the trace of alterity and its address. Hence, the ethical is within the said of art” (Eppert 74). A number of critics have been quick to exploit this development and point out the relationship between ethics and theory: writers like Drucilla

Cornell, Simon Critchley, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Andrew Gibson, and J. Hillis Miller22 have drawn connections between the discursive nature of ethics and the insights of post-structuralism and contemporary narratology, which recognise the prevalence of representation even in the most ordinary uses of language, and do not view narrative as corresponding to cognitive behaviour, or as an essentially homogenising or totalising venture.

21 He also connects the said with war: “Is not the inescapable fate in which being immediately includes the statement of being’s other not due to the hold the said has over the saying, to the oracle in which the said is immobilized? Then would not the bankruptcy of transcendence be but that of a theology that thematizes the transcending in the logos, assigns a term to the passing of transcendence, congeals it into a ‘world behind the scenes,’ and installs what it says in war and in matter, which are the inevitable modalities of the fate woven by being in its interest?” (original emphases, Otherwise 5)

22 Specifically, see Cornell’s “Towards a Modern/Postmodern Reconstruction of Ethics”; Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas; Harpham’s Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics, and Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society; Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas; and Miller’s The Ethics of Reading and Theory Now and Then. 36

Despite these affinities, though, Levinas did not provide a critical methodology, leading most critics to focus on the act or event of reading itself as a performance of ethics,23 emphasising the reader’s responsiveness to a text that overflows modes of comprehension. But as

Eaglestone makes clear, assigning the critic to the work of making the text “say” poses the problem of distinguishing clearly the saying from the said. Jill Robbins points out the many attempts, following Levinas, to construct an ethical poetics, a problem which leads her to ask the same question: “do we ever know we are in the presence of the saying?” (12). Instead of a poetics, Robbins posits the textual gesture of self-interruption as a moment wherein the saying of the text speaks, or can be made to speak: it “is the trope for a form of ethical discourse in which the interruption is not reabsorbed into thematization and totality, namely, an ethical discourse that performs its own putting into question” (145). To interrupt the beautiful, in other words, is to interrupt the self-sufficiency and the irresponsibility of aesthetic experience, by demanding responsiveness and therefore responsibility of the reader. Steven Connor theorises in a similar vein about the addressive function of language: the ‘vocavity’ of discourse, like the saying, is open towards the other in language. He writes: “This force operates against attempts to reduce others to the condition of discursive objects. Speaking of others is always pulled away by speaking to others” (Connor 9).

It is to the discussion of these ethics of reading that the problem of the filiative trope belongs. Levinas both thematises and performs a filiation with Heidegger, his teacher. Levinas tells us that the master-student relationship is very close to the filial relationship, that the teacher has a responsibility to the student as if to his or her child. In essentially rewriting Heideggerian

23 Take, for example, J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading; Jill Robbins’ Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature; Roland A. Champagne’s The Ethics of Reading According to Emmanuel Lévinas; and Eaglestone’s Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. 37 ontology, Levinas gives us a performance of filiation as intellectual debt, thus taking up a thread of history so that it is not continuous and paternal, and relaunching it otherwise, towards the other who is the student or the child.

I stated earlier that modernists represented broken filial lines as a trope, and performed new novelistic forms as an analogous way of breaking the filial lineage of the novel. I have also suggested that contemporary writers aim to do something different with the filial trope, just as

Levinas aimed to do something new with phenomenological discourse after Heidegger. The questions, then, can be phrased as follows: How exactly should we characterise the novelists’ revisions to their genre? Does the trope of filiation operate as an allegory for a relationship to history, as it clearly did for the modernists? What is the new relationship between literal, empirical filiation and textual, cultural filiation, and how do these authors perform these filiations? Whom are they addressing: other heirs, the disenfranchised, or some new category in between?

Levinas’s literary performance of filiation provides a template for asking these questions.

For Levinas, it is the lived, affective relationship between parent and child, or teacher and student, that disrupts textual lineage; it is the embodied other that makes time happen and that differentiates Levinasian ethics from Heideggerian ontology. These novelists are perhaps attempting something analogous: by rewriting the novel’s inherited figures like the lost child and the missing parent as embodied others for whom we are responsible, they disrupt the closure of the legacy of the modernist novel, and reconfigure modernist notions of time. Or more precisely, they use the figure of the heir to introduce diachrony into our reading of this history, so that we 38 might inherit it by relaunching it otherwise. I will now describe this figure in more detail, in terms of Derrida’s treatment of the subject.

The idea of relaunching a tradition otherwise is at the heart of Derrida’s project of inheritance, variously described as a performance of “critical” (Cavallini) or “transformative inheritance” (Pepperell), which he outlines and enacts in Specters of Marx. In this text, Derrida gives us a “vision of inheritance as an active, tranformative performance, rather than a transparent transmission of inherited content to its heirs” (Pepperell 223).

Derrida opens his discussion (in the “Exordium”) with the enigmatic announcement that

“I would like to learn to live finally” (xvi). He connects the “wisdom” — what it is “to learn to live” — with “ethics itself” (xvii), and later with justice and politics as well. This entails learning

to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them. No being-with the other, no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us. And this being- with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations (xvii-xviii).

Derrida goes on to describe this mode as “hauntological” as opposed to ontological, in that it is grounded in a work of mourning and is necessarily ethical (so that, like Levinas, Derrida privileges ethics before an ontology of self-presence — just one example of Derrida’s performance of his inheritance of Levinas).

Several of the ideas Derrida goes on to outline will prove useful to this discussion. First,

Derrida describes “the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance” (Specters 18): every inheritance is plural and differential, constituted by dissimilar components. He adds that

“[a]n inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing” (Specters 18). This critical or 39 transformative inheritance is never transmitted transparently, but is always an act of interpretation; and if there is reaffirmation, it is always a reaffirmation through difference and deferral. This necessity is in fact constitutive of the inheritance: “If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause — natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret — which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’” (Specters 18).

Secondly, inheritance is always multiple, and as such, it is irreducible to any one reading.

As Roberto Cavallini puts it, to frame inheritance as a secret has “nothing to do with a sudden revelation or unveiling. The secret kept hidden by and within an inheritance will remain a secret insofar as what one inherits will not simply disclose the definitive presentation of inheritance as such” (Cavallini). The enactment of any inheritance is of a necessarily limited nature (what

Derrida calls “finitude”): “The infinite does not inherit, it does not inherit (from) itself. The injunction itself (it always says ‘choose and decide among what you inherit’) can only be one by dividing itself, tearing itself apart, differing/deferring itself, by speaking at the same time several times – and in several voices” (Specters 18). The heir does not place him- or herself in an antagonistic or oppositional position, but is rather another voice — “in combinatorial and contiguous correlation” (Cavallini) with his or her inheritance. The heir as such does not passively accept a transparent inheritance, but actively decides to excise certain aspects and creatively enact, or reaffirm, others.

In her essay on this text, Nicole Pepperell describes transformative inheritance as

“impure,” asking: “What does it mean to inherit impurely? What sort of inheritance does not 40 proceed by means of a burial — by means of an attempt to determine with certainty the location and the identity of the remains?” (224).24 This idea of the impure is meant to “destabilise the apparent self-identity of the present time” (224). She goes on: “Derrida links this ability with our capacity to form constellations between our own time and other times, our own generation and other generations, by recognising the implications of the dead and the not yet living in any present moment” (224).25

Pepperell points out the connection Derrida makes between inheritance and mourning:

“[P]roduction is itself generative of non-identity, a position that leads Derrida to propose a very different vision of critical work — in this case, a work of mourning that seeks, not to overcome the spectre, but rather to remain in communication with it” (230). This is, essentially, one way to pose the question at the heart of the contemporary inheritance of the novel tradition, which is the problem of writing as a work of mourning, of writing from the position of afterwardsness. The challenge that contemporary novelists face is how to place themselves in dialogue with the novel tradition, not in order to overcome it (as the modernists attempted so resolutely to do), but in such a way as to remain in communication with the multi-voiced and heterogeneous association of specters that comprise it.

24 Cavallini makes a similar point about the “impurity” of inheritance in this etymological investigation of the idea of tradition itself: “Tradition derives from the Latin noun ‘traditio,’ deriving from the verb ‘tradére (to give, to hand over). Especially in the Italian language, from the Latin verb “tradére’ derives both the term ‘tradizione’ (that is, tradition, literally ‘delivery’) and another term that shares the same root ‘trad-’: ‘tradire’ (to betray) or ‘tradimento’ (betrayal). Therefore, the term tradition brings forward two meanings not strictly in opposition between them. On the one hand, tradition is concerned with the act of giving, transmitting, handing over and, on the other hand, this giving, transmitting and handing over refers to an act of betrayal…. Critical inheritance is therefore affected by this double meaning of tradition: an already but not yet betrayed and betraying form of transmission.”

25 Ricoeur makes a similar claim when he speaks of the duty of memory: “The idea of debt is inseparable from the notion of heritage. We are indebted to those who have gone before us for part of what we are. The duty of memory is not restricted to preserving the material trace, whether scriptural or other, of past events, but maintains the feeling of being obligated with respect to these others, of whom we shall later say, not that they are no more, but that they were. Pay the debt, I shall say, but also inventory the heritage” (Memory 89). 41

This proves to be difficult in practice, at least in part because these writers resist being held in thrall to the past, and to a version of trauma that would render them completely passive; and indeed, this is the tension that their novels explore. Shroud dramatises this predicament, as

Banville’s protagonist defies his past in order to circumvent the passivity and guilt that follows from a certain version of afterwardsness, only to confront the ultimate futility of this manoeuver; it is no coincidence that the specters from his past are given voice once Vander realises he is to be a father, linking parental subjectivity with the injunction to mourn and inherit. In Black Dogs,

McEwan looks to the experience of parenthood as an ambiguous way of getting over the philosophical torpor of “postmodern orphanhood.” In Saturday, meanwhile, the fresh trauma of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, prompts McEwan to revert to a kind of patrimony, as this novel calls up the literary tradition in an attempt to gather and reinforce authorial and generic identity. By contrast, Atonement works so brilliantly because it is so hospitable to the many voices of this same tradition, with their competing imperatives, that the novel’s generic stability and its associated idea of authorial coherence are challenged by the specters it welcomes in.

Finally, Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans both present us with visions of what it would mean, psychologically and politically, to exist for an extended time in this state of near passive thrall to the past. The former novel explores the nightmarish implications of the impossibility of mourning and inheritance, while the latter comes to the point of acknowledging the need for both, without knowing exactly how to proceed with doing so.

Pepperell closes her discussion of the Specters of Marx by arguing that the effect of some of Derrida’s excisions and creative enactments of Marx’s text elide a degree of political specificity in favour of certain ontological arguments. The challenge she poses is one I hope this 42 dissertation takes part in answering. She asks: “Is there, perhaps, another way to inherit Derrida, so as to retain a certain spirit of sympathetic deconstructive engagement with Marxism, while moving selectively beyond Derrida’s particular vision of dry messianic critique?” The challenge is to consider “more deeply how we might take up Derrida’s challenge to inherit Marx in a way that captures a certain non-dogmatic and anti-essentialist spirit, while also opening the possibility for a more determinate engagement with the political challenges of our own time” (232). A similar challenge faces not only the novelists of this study, but their critical readers as well.

How does a writer approach the problem of war a generation after it has passed in a way that is not self-serving, and that might further historical and moral comprehension, even if only by delineating where and what it is impossible to comprehend? How does the way in which a writer frames his (or her) relationship to his inheritance reframe that inheritance, so that it addresses those who have been traditionally excluded? What representational modes does one take up, not because they are completely new and correspond to an unprecedented historical moment, but because they open the conversation to ghosts from the past, and hopefully also to others in the present, and even the future, as well? These are the questions the contemporary writer is faced with, and which this dissertation takes on in turn.

The three novelists I will be reading in the following chapters are by no means representative of the variety of voices that comprise contemporary British literature, or even the contemporary

British novel. As writers who grapple with associated concerns, though, and as celebrated

Booker Prize winners all, they are fairly representative of a mainstream concern or interest, in

Britain and in their much wider readership internationally, with the problems of inheritance and 43 war, and with the formal novelistic conventions through which we understand and mediate these problems. The bulk of the following study focuses on the parallels and divergences between Ian

McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, especially in terms of their approaches to these conventions. I will open my discussion, however, with a reading of Shroud, a novel by their lesser-known contemporary, John Banville. This text provides a ideal departure for the larger project of this dissertation, not only because Banville addresses the idea of the inheritance of the Holocaust directly, through the figure of a survivor and conflicted escapee of the conflagration, but because he tells the story that is also the background to my critical methodology: the critical turn to ethics, and its entanglement with the trope and performance of filiation. CHAPTER ONE Biography Interrupts Philosophy: Representation and Filiation in John Banville’s Shroud

Some things, real things, seem to happen not in the world itself but in the gap between actuality and the mind’s apprehending; the eye registers the event but the understanding lags. — John Banville, Shroud

John Banville’s novel Shroud is inspired by the controversy surrounding the case of deconstructive theorist Paul de Man, whose secret past of collaborative journalism in war-time

Belgium was unearthed after his death. While the novel does not attempt to establish a parallel to the real life, work, and scandal of de Man in any comprehensive way, the divergences between fact and fiction are telling: de Man died four years before evidence of his articles for a Nazi-run newspaper surfaced, while Banville’s protagonist is not only still alive, but is also Jewish, whereas de Man was not. Banville’s real interests in the story are in the existential and ethical implications of living a lie for so long, and so successfully. Axel Vander, the novel’s narrator- protagonist and the theorist’s stand-in, is a solipsistic and loathsome character who all his life has sublimated his existential anxieties and his desire for redemption through his commitment to the project of deconstruction.1 As a colleague of Vander’s puts it in the novel: Vander “holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic’s task to nose out” (222-3).2 What makes Vander

1 We should note that “deconstruction” is never named as such in the novel, and that Banville’s version of the theoretical approach is designed to illuminate character more than it is a precise portrayal of de Man’s thinking.

2 These themes will be familiar to readers of Banville’s other fictions. As John Kenny put it in a review: “Shroud may seem like more of the same from Banville. Much of the ground is thematically and figuratively familiar: a tired but ferociously articulate narrator; a fascination with inauthenticity and masks; dipsomania and clairvoyant drunkenness; red-haired Doppelganger-like phantasms; commedia dell'arte atmosphere and stage metaphors. Banville has, however, successfully combined these elements in a renewed focus on the organically related themes of death, destruction and salvation” (“Beautiful”).

44 45 compelling, for Banville as for the reader, is how these anxieties and desires come to the surface now that his secret has been revealed.

In Banville’s novel, the theorist flies to Turin, home of the (in)famous shroud,3 to meet his accuser, Cass Cleave,4 and as he does so he knows that he is leaving his American home in

Arcady for the last time. Ancient and unwell, Vander may say he is looking forward to the dual prospect of his academic and mortal demise with a “jaunty fatalism,” but we quickly come to see that he loathes his carefully constructed façade of easy cynicism even as he continues to define himself by it. Vander, and Banville’s narrative likewise, are also haunted by discourses concerned with the nature of authenticity: Rousseau’s and Nietzsche’s excursions on the relationship of self to history; the sometimes only slightly less esoteric arguments regarding faith and the shroud; and of course, the discourse surrounding the exhumation of de Man’s wartime writings, and the necessary though often polemical re-appraisal of his theoretical work that followed in its wake.5

Haunting is also literalised in the narrative, and Vander is a man pursued by ghosts of all kinds: the dead (his late wife Magda) and the living (he sees Cass Cleave enter rooms and then

3 The “Shroud of Turin” is “a length of linen that for centuries was purported to be the burial garment of Jesus Christ; it has been preserved since 1578 in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy. … Scholarly analyses—attempting to use scientific methods to prove or disprove its authenticity—have been applied to the shroud since the late 19th century.” Though carbon-dating tests in the 1980s showed the shroud to be a hoax dating from the 13th or 14th century, “the Vatican encouraged scientists to conduct further investigations of the shroud’s authenticity and recommended that Christians continue to venerate the shroud as an inspiring image of Christ” (Encyclopedia Britannica).

4 Cass Cleave also appears in Banville’s previous novel, Eclipse, as the protagonist’s daughter.

5 Turin seems somewhat overdetermined as a setting given Banville’s choice of intertexts. Turin is where Nietszche began his descent into madness, where he rushed to the aid of a horse being beaten and was kicked in the head (supposedly), all of which Vander acknowledges (“N. went off his head here, thinking himself a king and the father of kings and stopping in the street to embrace a cabman’s nag” [3-4]). Turin is also where Rousseau lived as a servant in an aristocratic household when he blamed his theft of the ribbon on a fellow servant, a lie to which he confesses in the Confessions, and to which de Man in turn devotes so much attention in Allegories of Reading. 46 disappear). For Vander, both women are figures of an authenticity he is unable himself to achieve

— they are people who seem almost preternaturally able to coincide with themselves.6

Besides these ghosts, Vander’s/Banville’s narrative is haunted by the spectre of history in which Vander is implicated: the Holocaust, the form in which it has haunted most historiographic discourse in the latter half of the twentieth century. Whether it is spoken of directly or not, it is ever present: voices murmur in Vander’s head and visit his dreams; the narrative bears the afterimage of its trauma as the shroud bears its own ghostly form. In an eerily prescient moment

Cass even notes that the blurry image on the shroud looks like Vander, “just like [him]” (199). As well, the fact that despite their efforts Vander and Cass never see the shroud itself, only its reproduction, echoes popular discourses about the “unspeakability” of the Holocaust. From

Adorno and Elie Wiesel to an entire academic community, the ways in which we choose to talk about and represent the Holocaust have been ethically and politically problematic from the beginning. It still seems, as Vander is quoted in my epigraph as saying, to have happened in the gap between actuality and the mind’s understanding.

Shroud situates itself in this gap — the ambiguity of the metaphoric title suggests as much in its resistance to direct reference: is it a revered object of questionable authenticity, a veil concealing secrets, or a death shroud for someone else, known or unknown? Banville himself has suggested that all of his novels are attempts to understand language, not as a system, but as a phenomenon. In an interview he has also stated that he considers all novels previous to the one he is working on at the time to be “failures” that he “hates,” and that he wishes would go

6 Given Derrida’s discussion of Hamlet as a haunted heir in Specters of Marx that I allude to in my introduction, we should note that self-coincidence also eludes Shakespeare’s hero, though it seems to come maddeningly easy to his friend, Horatio. This seems to imply that to be open to one’s inheritance is already to experience oneself as split, but it also suggests that self-coincidence is really only ever available to others — or in other words, as a mirage that Vander and Hamlet are both compelled to conjure up, even as they express little faith in it. 47 magically blank so that he could start again (“To Make Fiction” 24) — his own personal unspeakable history, if you will. Vander, of course, literalises the trope of unspeakability by erasing his past, sublimating it through his theorising, which is driven by de Manian figures of aliases and effacement. The novel, however, is to an extent Vander’s confession (there is some ambiguity surrounding the sections written in the third person which I will discuss later), and as such it is a convoluted and contradictory attempt to speak the truth and lift the shroud. As he is always already aware, though, the metaphor of story as shroud is complicated: a shroud masks the identity of the dead, and insofar as Vander’s family, and even Vander himself, remain nameless, the work of mourning that the narrative performs lacks in a certain sense an object, and this may be good or bad. For the shroud too is a symbol of the funeral rites Vander’s family never received, and some shrouds, like the one at Turin, tell a story, even when we are unsure what the story is or how it is meant to be read.

The urgency that Vander, near death, feels in coming to terms with his own past is arguably analogous to the urgency that is propelling the theorisation of memory and trauma at this moment in history. These theories are inextricably enmeshed with thinking about the

Holocaust and its representation, and right now the last of our witnesses to this conflagration are dying out. A discourse of “postmemory” has arisen in an effort to cope with this complex predicament. According to Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term, postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection (4). She uses the term not only to understand the memories of the children of survivors, but the process of cultural memory itself — and both, arguably, are very personal problems for Vander, since his recollections are inseparable from his imaginative and theoretical investment in them, as both are 48 the impetus for the narrative itself. As Ronit Lentin argues, when speaking of the Holocaust it is

“imperative to remain reflexive in the face of historical and unfolding events” (4). In its probing of the ethic and affect of deconstruction (or at least, Banville’s version of deconstruction),

Shroud performs this kind of reflexivity, and asks how our theorisation of history affects the psychic spaces we inhabit. It enquires after all the intertexts here, from post-war novels of existential adventure to the lives and writings of Rousseau and Nietzsche, as inheritances. The novel seems to recognise that

[t]o be heirs of the writings of Rousseau and Nietzsche is to be the inheritors of two of the most powerful and disturbing critiques of civilization that the modern period has produced…. Rousseau’s spirit of rebellion comes down to us via the bloody excesses and terror of the French Revolution, while Nietzsche’s spirit of rebellion comes down to us through the unspeakable evil of the attempted master of the earth by Nazism. (Ansell- Pearson 1)

With all these inheritances saturated in so much suffering and death, the idea that they are, as

Derrida puts it, “what violently elects us” seems, especially in this narrative, almost uncannily apt.7 By inviting all these multiple inheritances in and through its treatment of the trope of inheritance itself, Shroud becomes much more than an existentialist novel about a deconstructionist searching for authenticity; despite whatever Banville’s ostensible intentions for it are, his novel effectively dismantles the idea of existentialist authenticity itself.

7 “[W]hat characterizes a heritage is first of all that one does not choose it; it is what violently elects us.” For the full quotation, please see the epigraph to the introduction of this dissertation. 49

Will the Real Paul de Man Please Stand Up: A Hermeneutics of Suspicion

[There are] grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II. — Jeffrey Mehlman, quoted in Lehman

History is a hotchpotch of anecdotes, neither true nor false, and what does it matter where it is supposed to have taken place? — Shroud

The issues that Shroud takes on are complex; it is, after all, a historical novel about a theorist of literary history, whose own writings became “historical” as soon as his personal history was unearthed. The actual case of Paul de Man, therefore, requires some examination if we intend to unravel some of these knots and weaves.

As Ian Balfour writes, when de Man’s wartime journalism was discovered, it prompted a surprisingly public debate, with many claiming that “these texts lead…to the ‘heart of the ethical debates’ surrounding de Man, and further, the ethics of deconstruction in general” (6). David

Lehman remembers that “from one quarter, expressions of shock and dismay could be heard; from another, the distinctive note of Schadenfreude”(5), with Lehman distinctly belonging to the latter camp himself. An all-out dismissal of de Man and his work, though, is really the only categorically defined response to these texts; the responses to which Lehman refers as rallying in support of de Man are much more variegated than he lets on. Even Derrida, an intimate friend to de Man and in many ways his intellectual heir, initially called what de Man had done

“unforgivable,” an indictment he later admitted regret for having uttered, since “one does not have the right to forgive unless one is directly its victim,” and because he never meant to suggest that de Man’s acts were unforgivable in any absolute sense (“Forgiveness?” 2).8

8 Since this moment of “misspeaking” or of miscategorisation, Derrida has gone on to write at length about the difficulty and indeed impossibility of forgiveness, which discussion is explored more thoroughly in my chapter on Ian McEwan’s Atonement, pages 139-147. 50

The fallout from this debate would seem to linger on in the popular consciousness, since, judging from the book reviews, responses to Shroud break down roughly according to the same binary (if one can call a binary one that is composed of outright detractors and everyone else).

There are those, like Bruce Bawer of The New York Times, for whom the novel is a not-so-thinly veiled excoriation of de Man, in that it exposes the “ideological consistency between de Man’s youthful support of Nazism and his later zeal for deconstruction.” He also identifies the shroud as a symbol of Vander’s corruption, “at once a fake and an object of veneration,” such strict appropriation of symbols being, ironically, a mode of reading de Man cautioned against. (It is perhaps not surprising that Lehman, whom Bawer cites almost as much as he does Banville, seems to be his only source for analysis of the de Man debate.) Others, like the Guardian’s Alex

Clark, see Shroud as exploring “the possibility of redemption and the difficulty of judgement” and so hold off on making judgements themselves. In fact, Clark sees alliances between

Banville’s project and deconstruction, suggesting that such an intensive examination of Vander’s self-conscious shiftiness serves to investigate “the protean nature of the self-inventing fugitive, but also to question the authority of the narrative itself — the subject, broadly speaking, of de

Man’s writing.”

This more nuanced reading seems closer to the task of representing a figure as recondite as de Man. As Ian Balfour points out, because many of de Man’s articles for the collaborationist press also celebrated certain Jewish writers, his writings “become…difficult [to read] indeed if one is trying to form a composite psychological and political profile, for not only does de Man have several ‘pasts’ even as a young man, he has different pasts at the same time” (9). Banville literalises this analysis in Shroud, where our protagonist’s pasts are even more plural than de 51

Man’s: a young Jew who has assumed the name and identity of a recently and mysteriously deceased gentile friend, the man we know as Axel Vander9 both is and is not himself, both outspoken anti-Semite and persecuted Jew. Although Shroud is also not not a condemnation —

Vander is a fraud, after all — many of Vander’s insights into the literally and radically unstable nature of his identity are not untrue, as we watch him deal with the ethical ramifications of the self he has constructed, deliberately, around an empty centre.10 Banville is much too aware of the fallibility of language, perception and memory to simply dismiss an issue as thorny as this one.

So, Vander’s story diverges from de Man’s, not, as Bawer suggests, because the latter

“was rather too straightforward a narrative of intolerance and deceit to suit Banville’s taste for nuance and ambiguity.” Rather, Banville complicates what is already complicated — the issue of the theorist’s guilt — by making Vander Jewish,11 and more importantly by keeping him alive to confront his existential lot, and to ask of himself what it is to come to terms with his past.

Jonathan Arac notes that the good that has come from the revelations about de Man is that “they assure suspicion rather than reverence” will guide our readings of his criticism, especially apt since Arac finds in de Man’s writing “a pathos of betrayal: his work seemed a program to prevent literature from exercising the power to mislead” (122). For Banville, this hermeneutics of suspicion not only guides his protagonist but structures his narrative as well, as exemplified in the other ways in which it diverges from the story of de Man.

9 For clarity’s sake, from here I will refer to Shroud’s protagonist as Vander, and the young man whose name he borrowed as Axel.

10 These double negatives are necessary precisely because Banville’s text is so intricate that a simple positive would amount to a distortion: on one hand, the novel does hold Vander accountable for his bigotry and self-loathing, but on the other, it resists polemic at every turn (even if some readers are unable to see this). And as Derrida makes clear in his writings on forgiveness, guilt, blame, and absolution do not circulate in a symmetrical or quantifiable economy.

11 Though Vander is Jewish, this identity does not necessarily carry with it a predetermined attitude to Jewish apostacy; it does, however, complicate the issue of Vander’s cultural and familial inheritance. 52

Firstly, de Man actually wrote the articles in question: over 160 for collaborationist papers, although only two of them contain explicitly anti-Semitic content, and his supporters say he committed himself to making up for his grave indiscretion for the rest of his long and ethically committed career. Vander did not write the articles — wherein phrases like “the aestheticisation of national life” (137) have a distinctly de Manian ring — but he insists that he would have, and what’s worse, “I whisper it:…I still would” (143). Vander’s borrowed identity thus brings the issue of memory and personal responsibility to the forefront: for whose self are we accountable? Are we responsible for our ethical, aesthetic and political impulses, or only those that we act on? And who has the authority to forgive whom?

Suspicion, then, is directed inwards as well as out, as Shroud enacts both ontological and epistemological uncertainty: suspicion is directed inwards in a constant revaluing of the status of the self, and outwards into the world wherein judgments are made. Both Vander and Cass, in fact, are suspicious of the figures who people their landscapes, from the flower seller and the mysterious red-haired man to the woman who is hit by a truck after she seems to recognise

Vander and the child singing to herself in the hallway (25, 31, 34, 118) — all of them seem to have personal messages they want to communicate. This kind of suspicion is contagious, and the reader is left wondering not only what that man was trying to tell Vander, but also how all these omens function in the narrative. And although Vander and Cass are set up as opposites of a sort

— he is the cynic who believes there is no structure to our lives, much less to the universe, and she finds herself unwittingly at the centre of cosmic forces in which everyday events practically throb with significance — Cass is not the only one who requires the random to cohere into a pattern. Despite himself Vander, along with the reader, does too. 53

It is difficult on many levels to separate the idea of Vander-the-narrator from the narrative itself, since so much of the narrative is about the mode of consciousness that Vander pursues.

Thus, although it is impossible on several accounts to agree with Vander, it is also impossible to completely disagree with him. He gives us his unstable self and begs the question: aren’t selves unstable? Despite the arrogance and mendacity with which he flaunts the tangle he has made of his life, his theories, like Cass’s more deluded ones, are built around a “hard grain of simple, sane, commonplace reality” (204). And like his theories, his narrative (to the extent that it is his) works against itself in deconstructing the binaries he knowingly — ever the Harlequin — sets up.12

Not surprisingly, perhaps, these issues have many similarities with those “raised by

Adorno’s dictum13 [that] have come to shape historical and contemporary debates about

Holocaust representation. These often centre on dichotomies: representation vs. silence; figuration/realism vs. abstraction; past vs. present or “before” vs. “after”; memory vs. forgetting; modernism vs. postmodernism” (Vinebaum 4). Vander tends to see his self in terms analogous to these: the man that existed before the Holocaust, before the day his family was taken away, was another man altogether, with a different name. Similarly, as it was in discussing the before and after of the revelations about de Man, so Vander confronts the ramifications of the real possibility of his exposure:

12 There are analogues for this mode in de Man’s writing, as in this example: “Within the epistemological labyrinth of figural structures, the recuperation of selfhood would be accomplished by the rigor with which the discourse deconstructs the very notion of self. The originator of this discourse is then no longer the dupe of his own wishes..." (Allegories 173).

13 “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (162). See my brief discussion of this quotation in the introduction, page 39. 54

I had the certain sense of having crossed…an invisible frontier, and of being in a state that forever more would be post-something, would be forever an afterwards .…On one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new I, a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar. (9)

Like Lyotard’s comment that the Holocaust was an earthquake that destroyed the instruments used to measure it (56), the new world Vander inhabits is deeply unheimlich — in a literal sense as well, for he experiences most succinctly a sensation he carries with him throughout the narrative he gives us, that he will never feel at home anywhere. If we already have two points at which Vander is severed from his former selves, we have many more at which he tries to blur the lines, often successfully.14 “The name, my name, is Axel Vander, on that much I insist” (5). This is patently false, of course, except that it is also true — it is the only name we have for him, and the only epistemological option we as readers are given.

Nietzsche’s Animals and the Burden of History

Nietzsche’s ruthless forgetting…captures the authentic spirit of modernity. — Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight

Do we not on countless occasions every day step effortlessly into other selves without even noticing it? — John Banville, Shroud

From the novel’s opening pages, Vander tells us that he is hoping for some kind of redemption in telling his story (he tells it to an absent you that we come to know by the end of the novel is

Cass) and so he is going to tell only “what I know, what I can vouch for” (5). What follows, however, is a story of fabrication, evasion, and “ruthless forgetting”; he will start down a path and then will himself to stop, saying “no, no, I do not want to start remembering all that, I am

14 To be clear, the two points to which I refer are firstly, when Vander takes on his friend’s identity in order to escape Nazi pursuit, and secondly, when he receives Cass’s letter and realises that this identity has been “found out.” 55 sick of all that” (68). In his own eyes he is a genius fabricator, on par with Rilke and Shelley, the artists he has built his career out of reading, suggesting that the fiction that is his own life is enough of a supplement to his prose to grant him at least a status as great as theirs. He maintains a certain consistency within the confines of this fiction, and he outlines the code of ethics that he would adhere to were his entire secret ever outed: he would take responsibility for the anti-

Semitic articles Axel wrote, claiming that he’d asked Axel to put his name to his own writing to lend it more credibility. This recalcitrant anti-Semitism is really what sutures his identification with Axel; in fact, Vander believes he would have made a better anti-Semite than Axel would have, complaining that “I was tougher than Axel, more relentless, more daring, more vicious” (136). His ethic, in other words, is fidelity to the past that should have been.

The driving force behind his self-negating anti-Semitism seems to be his narcissistic love for and jealousy of Axel and his upper-middle-class family. Relegated to the periphery by both his ethnic and lower socio-economic status, Vander longed to have access to the “smoking innards of the times” (135), and experience the immediacy of history as it was happening, at the centre of cultural politics, to play a role in the shaping of the “Great European Heritage” (136).

Aesthetically, Axel’s family appeals to the young Vander as well, for even their cruel caricatures of a Jewish couple (that he calls their “good-humoured mimicry” [132]) are evidence to him of their complete ease with themselves and their place in the world, the way his own family, whom he remembers as self-conscious, “smiling worriedly and not knowing what to do with their hands,” never is. Had his family been much poorer than they were, there might have been the

“romance [of] the shtetl people” (132) about them, but as members of the middle class, they are 56 difficult to aestheticise, their role in the history unfolding around them being passive and unambiguously unromantic.

It may very well be that Vander has internalised what Sander Gilman identifies as Jewish self-hatred, which results from the marginalised Jews’ “acceptance of the mirage of themselves generated by their reference group — that group in society which they see as defining them — as a reality” (2). According to Gilman, “one of the red threads of Christian anti-Semitism has been the view that Jews possess a polluted and polluting discourse” (313), so that they are bound by their Jewishness never to fully comprehend or partake of non-Jewish culture. This myth of a hidden language, Gilman argues, provokes in Jewish writers a fear of using a second-rate language, especially in those for whom writing is a means not only of self-representation, but of validation. The book is an “object that not only provides status for the Jew as writer in a society that values writers… but also contains the legend of his or her own inability to ever command the discourse of that culture” (313). We might note that Gilman’s configuration mirrors a very

Irish anxiety with regards to its colonial language and literature: English. Though Banville has conflicting things to say about his own Irishness, as do his critics,15 he identifies primarily as an international writer who draws on an international inheritance. In an early interview he declared that “I’ve never felt part of any movement or tradition, any culture even. … I’ve always felt outside…. I feel part of my culture. But it’s purely a personal culture gleaned from bits and pieces of European culture of four thousand years. It’s purely something I have manufactured” (qtd. in Powell 199).16 Almost twenty years later, however, Banville admits the

15 For an overview of various critics’ takes on the Irish dimension (or lack thereof) in Banville’s work, see Powell. For more in-depth treatments of the same issue, see Kiberd, Imhof, McMinn, Hand, Kearney, and John Kenny.

16 Of the Irish language, Banville has said that “[f]or the Irish, language is not primarily a tool for expressing what we mean. Sometimes I think it is quite the opposite” (qtd. in Powell 201). 57 pull of the Irish tradition, declaring that “every Irish writer inevitably has to choose whether to follow a Joycean or a Beckettian direction” (Powell 199).17 This is only, at this stage, to point out that there is some irony here (and perhaps empathy and identification as well) in the idea that

Vander, like Banville, denies one inheritance in order to take up another. The much more severe lengths to which the young Vander is willing to take this denial is evident in the war cries that he recalls fifty years later, and in which we can hear an appeal against memory and self- consciousness altogether, a cry of overcoming and willed self-forgetting — “Aestheticise, aestheticise!” (142). Vander identifies this younger self as one of the “we” who “were sick of mere life, all that mess, confusion, weakness. All must be made over — made over or destroyed…. Only let the Idea triumph, the great instauration begin!” (142-3).

A key figure in the novel for understanding Vander’s zeal is Nietzsche, for although the philosopher’s anti-Semitism remains a matter of debate,18 some of the other correspondences between Vander’s and Nietzsche’s obsessive explorations, narrative and philosophic, are foregrounded throughout the novel.19 In de Man’s essay, “Literary History and Literary

Modernity,” he tackles the paradox that Nietzsche sets up in establishing history and “life” as opposites. He cites this passage from Nietzsche’s “Use and Abuse of History for Life”:

Man says “I remember,” and envies the animal that forgets at once, and watches each moment die, disappear in night and mist, and disappear forever. Thus the animal lives

17 Though Banville claims to be “a follower of a Beckettian path,” he has also acknowledged complex filial feelings towards Joyce, declaring: “When I think of Joyce I am split in two. To one side there falls the reader, kneeling speechless in filial admiration, and love; to the other side, however, the writer stands, gnawing his knuckles, not a son, but a survivor” (qtd. in Powell 201).

18 For discussions of Nietzsche, Jewish culture, and anti-Semitism, see Golomb; Santaniello; Golomb and Wistrich; and Bambach.

19 The novel’s epigraph is from Nietszche’s Will to Power. Also, Vander is particularly famous for a chapter of his on Nietszche’s last days in Turin, “Effacement and Real Presence,” which he reads aloud at the conference he attends there (partly because he cannot be bothered to write anything new, but perhaps mostly because he knows almost everyone in attendance will have read it, and will thus be insulted by his flagrant disregard for them) (96). 58

unhistorically: It hides nothing and coincides at all moments exactly with that which it is; it is bound to be truthful at all times, unable to be anything else. (149)

It is this coincidence with self that Vander imagines Axel, in his beauty and self-satisfaction, and his family, with their social ease, are capable of, and that he is so desperate to experience himself. He also imagines that both Magda and Cass inhabit themselves in this almost paradoxically numinous way; he describes them both as animals more than once.20 De Man goes on to analyse modernity as “the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure” (150). At the risk of drawing too close a parallel structure here, this passage describes with precision the desire that Vander realises when first he finds that his family has been taken away, and then steps into the name Axel Vander as if it had been meant for him all along. He describes his ecstasy as

the all-excluding prospect of freedom….I could at last become that most elusive thing, namely — namely! — myself. I sometimes surmise that this might be the real and only reason that I took on Axel’s identity. If you think this a paradox you know nothing about the problematics of authenticity. (165)

The feeling fades eventually, but he finds he can’t go back, that he has severed himself from his past: “I am done with the past; at a certain point when I look back a line is drawn stark across the view, as if a landslide had happened there” (68). He spends the rest of his life in search of this same feeling of freedom and promise by holding onto the name. In her preternatural way, Cass explains why this is so: “A name is hard to speak. To name another is somehow to unname oneself” (90). Vander’s past is undone: he has unnamed his original self irrevocably — in all his confessions to Cass he doesn’t once let her know the name that he was born to.

20 Magda is referred to throughout as “mute” and “slow,” and at one point as “remote and inaccessible as some large, harmless herbivore” (39). Cass is “a rare and high-strung creature of the wild” (61), “birdlike, swanlike” (63), with “lemur eyes” (72), who watches Vander “with a kind of savage surmise, like an animal” (203). 59

He admits that the name change was an effort to escape “my own individuality, the hereness of my self, not the thereness of my world” (181). Although he tells us his choice had less to do with Axel than with acting — any role, so long as it was not his self — the choice is in many ways overdetermined. Axel is someone he never really knew, who existed in the “realm of the third person” — his death, and therefore his life, has remained ever mysterious — but Axel stood for something: authority, place, animal self-coincidence. To achieve his apotheosis by acting this role in particular is “a fantasy born of my longing to belong” (47).21 His only hope of achieving authenticity, according to this schema, is through total emergence in fantasy recognised as such. To become more fully himself, in other words, he must stay faithful to the event of his unnaming, and inhabit the role, the subject-position, as it were, of the third person.

Vander is not unaware of the paradox of this equation — it is part of what he refers to as

“the problematics of authenticity” (165) — and neither was de Man. In the same essay (“Literary

History and Literary Modernity”) de Man quotes Nietzsche again, who writes that we are the

result of earlier generations…of their crimes; it is not possible to loosen oneself entirely from this chain. Afterwards, we try to give ourselves a new past from which we should have liked to descend instead of the past from which we actually descended. But this is also dangerous, because it is so difficult to trace the limit of one’s denial of the past, and because the newly invented nature is likely to be weaker than the previous one…. (152)

A close reader of Nietzsche, the young Vander seems not to have heeded this warning (unless he welcomed the danger of it), and longed for a newly invented nature of “pure existence…, [to be] an affectless point moving through time, nihilism’s silver bullet” (183). The paradox for Vander

21 This quote is actually an adaptation of a passage from Althusser’s The Future Lasts a Long Time (Acknowledgements, Shroud 258). 60 is that, in his desire to live in the moment, in history, he severs himself from his particular history, his inheritance.

De Man ends this same essay with a sentence that has often been taken out of context by his detractors, and at any rate has had to have been re-evaluated by his relative supporters. After explaining that literary interpretation is in fact literary history, he writes: “If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions” (166). Without entering into detailed debate about this article, we can see here evidence of what Barbara Johnson notes in her essay on this piece: at this early stage in his career, de Man’s focus shifted from an existential to a rhetorical vocabulary, and from problems of consciousness to problems of language (174). Vander’s intellectual career followed a similar trajectory, and from his current height he disparages his earliest intellectual proclivities and the writing that first propelled him into the academic limelight: “Identity was the general obsession, then; identity, and authenticity, all that; the existential predicament, ha ha. Yes, yes, I convinced them” (65). Despite literally laughing it off, however, his own rhetoric is still uncomfortably entwined with an existential vocabulary, in which he often finds himself ensnared. He chastises himself for referring to his self as such — “What self? What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?” (27) — and at one point he is stricken to imagine that the genre into which his confession might fall would be as “one of those third-rate, so-called philosophical novels that were so popular in the post-war years” (150). 61

His fixation on issues of authenticity and agency attest to the existential — or more properly, ontological — mode by which he continues to operate, despite himself. He wonders

“when a tree would feel most like itself…at what stage of its yearly cycle would it say, now, now

I am what I am, now at last I am in my total treeness” (33), and of the hotel manager, “out of costume like this and in slight dishevelment, was he, I wondered, more himself, or less?” (27).

Vander himself is beset by doubles that disturb the idea of himself as a single unified self, from the “shadowy otherself” that approaches him in the reflective glass doors (18), to the “crude parody of [him]self” as a “life-sized marionette” that he imagines he leaves behind in a café (30).

At one point, when he has the sensation “of shifting slightly aside from [him]self, as if [he] were going out of focus and separating in two…. adrift in time,” he wonders what his “true source and destination” (44) is, as if there must be a source, somewhere just off stage, where his true self resides. Throughout the narrative, both Vander and Cass (or Vander’s Cass, perhaps) identify

Vander with the figure of the Harlequin; Vander wonders whether, had he been openly an entertainer, people might have been forgiving: “Harlequin is always forgiven, always survives” (7). But this presupposes an actor under the mask, whereas Cass, in her dream of

Vander as the Harlequin, envisions removing the mask to find only another mask. Near the end of the novel is a long, italicised passage on the Harlequin, which Banville acknowledges is adapted from two scholarly texts,22 but which we might assume was written by Vander. Both poet and executioner, this Harlequin is a public figure, but is shunned by all. He “is not a criminal and yet no tongue would say of him that he is virtuous, that he is honest, that he is admirable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, since this would suppose a relation with

22 This passage “is a combined adaptation of passages from The Italian Comedy, by Pierre Louis Duchartre, translated by Randolph T. Weaver (New York, 1966), and St. Petersburg Dialogues, by Joseph de Maistre, translated by Richard A. Lebrun (Toronto, 1993).” (Acknowledgements, Shroud 258) 62 other human beings, and he has none. He has none, this Harlequin” (242). Though this passage undercuts the equation Vander makes earlier between survival and forgiveness, it reinforces the idea that, for the greater part of the novel, and for the greater part of his life, to be without human relation is a state Vander has been eager to achieve.

With Cass, Vander must admit that he hopes to solve the question of his true self for himself: “she was my last chance to be me” (210); she will be the guarantor of his authenticity.

They seem to recognise something in each other from the beginning: the “dark playfulness” of his work seems to speak directly to her, and he recognises her “madness” (202), even suggesting that they suffer from the same illness. In the same paragraph Vander describes first the state of over-consciousness that being sober for too long puts him in: “I had that heightened sense of self-awareness, that scarcely bearable feeling of being open to the world like a wound,” and then the look that comes over Cass as being indicative of “the intolerable difficulty of being uniquely and inescapably herself” (213). At one point Cass describes the two of them as “survivors” (76), and although the allusion to the Holocaust is obvious, the question remains: survivors of what?

Cass suffers from a schizophrenia-like disease called Mandelbaum’s — Mandelbaum being, ironically, a philosopher who postulated a form of historical objectivism.23 The problem is that reality, for Cass, is so objective that she is completely subjected to it; the sphere of her agency is relegated to wondering “whether the signs were really signs, and meant especially for her, or if they were parts of the thing itself, the thing for which she had no name, yet…,” and to simply

“perform[ing] the rites” as they are presented to her (124-5). The drugs used to treat the disease:

Oread, Lemures, Empusa and Lamia, all allude to nymphs and ghosts of ancient myth—the

23 Maurice Mandelbaum, author of The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism, wrote that “the concrete structure and continuity to be found in every historical work is not the product of valuational judgments, but is implicit in the facts themselves” (183). 63 haunted, the haunting, the slightly other than human. Vander, too, is haunted by the prospect of an objective history and performs his own more literary rites — rites that he, at least, sees as completely empty, but which are about guaranteeing emptiness, of “ ‘spirit’,… reason,… thinking,… consciousness,… soul,… will,… truth” (5).

Both Cass and Vander, then, are survivors of, or are in the process of surviving, the burden of too much responsibility for the world, which they do by evacuating the human scale from it. Jonathan Arac describes de Man’s work this way (although it could apply equally well to

Cass as to Vander): “the technique of combining minutiae with generalities produces vertigo, a scaling from micro to macro that omits the middle ground, the human scale” (125). We notice that the so-called human scale is missing for Vander from the moment he discovers his family has been taken — although he describes being in shock, in what follows there is a notable absence of anything like grief. He only brings up that emotion in relation to Axel, whose funeral he never attended: he wonders if moments of stress and suicidal urgings aren’t symptoms of a state of “suspended mourning” (153) for his friend. When, prompted by the most trivial plangency, he suddenly feels “something as good as grief” well up, he censures himself: “But why should I think myself special — which amongst us has not his private Hades thronged with shades?” (153). Underlying this reaction is an assumption that one postulates a unique subjectivity in order to mourn, and for Vander, to admit his grief would be to admit his guilt about both surviving and then denying his family. Further, to admit his guilt would be to acknowledge his desire for forgiveness, and this would be hugely destabilising to his sense of self. It is a privilege to mourn, in other words, and he hasn’t earned it. 64

When he tries to employ the same logic in ducking responsibility for falling in love with

Cass, however, Vander has to admit it is not adequate to the task: “The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves? Ah, see how I seek to wriggle out of my culpability: since all lovers really love themselves, I am only one among the multitude. It will not do; no, it will not do” (210). What stops Vander’s deconstructing brain in its tracks is the unique kernel of self in which Vander maintains an enduring faith despite his most rigorous efforts to unseat it. He recognises it in Cass and finds himself “dazzled by the otherness of her” in all her “impenetrable mysterious-ness” (214). This apprehension is symptomatic of Vander’s problematic investment in the idea of ‘feminine mystique,’ but it also, perhaps, represents for him an inkling that there is another self beyond the realm of his own solipsism. The desire he feels for her is not, he hastens to explain, just bodily:

“What I lusted after and longed to bury myself in up to the hilt was the fact of her being her own being, of her being, for me, unreachable beyond. Do you see? Deep down it is all I have ever wanted, really, to step out of myself and clamber bodily into someone else” (214). He can’t, of course, use Cass to escape from his own skin, but neither does he really want to let her go (as

Kristina Kovacs believes), and his confrontation with this brute fact exposes a dilemma for

Vander. It is Cass who exposes, as a good student of deconstruction should, the unstable binary that Vander has constructed — a choice he has set up for himself between a responsibility to history or a responsibility to freedom — since she inhabits, for him, the space beyond the choice as he has construed it. Vander finds that it is not Cass’s body, finally, but her baby’s, that opens up for him another kind of embodiment, and with it the possibility for redemption. 65

Rousseau’s Children: Narration, Fecundity, Responsibility

To lie without intent and without harm to oneself or to others is not to lie: it is not a lie but a fiction. — Rousseau, Fourth Rêverie.

The radical irresponsibility of fiction is, in a way, so obvious, that it seems hardly necessary to caution against its misreading. — de Man, on Rousseau’s Confessions.

Human occasions, how strange they are. And yet, why do I say so? What are the unstrange occasions against which I measure them? The human is all we have. — Banville, Shroud

Vander tells us that Cass is the one who prompts him to tell his story, one that he had “thought to think of no more” (129) until she comes along and makes it necessary. He is not, however, compelled merely by survivor etiquette (“Story is right” [42]), but rather is driven to tell his story by a compulsion he doesn’t understand, to the extent that he questions his own agency in the matter. His opening words, the opening words of the novel, are: “Who speaks? It is her voice, in my head. I fear it will not stop until I stop. It talks to me as I haul myself along these cobbled streets, telling me things I do not want to hear” (3). Vander is confronted by a story that is at once his own and more than his own — is Cass the speaker he alludes to? And if so, for whom is the message intended, since the narrative surely also functions as a confession made to her, or on her behalf. Vander admits from the beginning that he is hoping for some kind of redemption, but the question remains of whether or not his narrative will be enough to bring it about, which prompts the next question: what kind of narrative would be enough?24 The idea of the novel’s genre, in fact, is held in suspension for its duration, especially as the intrusions of the third person interrupt and problematise the larger confessional structure of the text. Do these sections represent Vander’s imaginative engagement with what he thought was going on in the convoluted

24 This is the same question, in fact, that Atonement explores, in its scrutiny of the idea of authorship, and authorial performances of atonement and forgiveness. 66 and cryptic mind of Cass Cleave? Are we being given a traditionally omniscient narrative point of view? Two of the most jarring moments in the book occur at the end of the first section, just before Vander begins his narrative of remembrance, when the narrative disrupts identifying conventions and slips from the third person into the first within the space of a single sentence.

The context of the first instance is telling, as Vander holds up his hand for Cass to see: “‘With this I wrote those articles that you found,’ he said. ‘Not a single cell survives in it from that time.

Then whose hand is it?’ He, I, I saw again the empty bottle on its side, the mauve pills in my palm” (122). The pills he sees are the ones he gave Magda, the pills that killed her (or so the story insinuates, but never pursues).25 According to the logic of this passage, the hand that wrote the articles is in the third person (“he said”), whereas the hand in the room now, the one that killed Magda, is in the first (“I saw again…”). This highlights the perspectival fallibility of the speaking voice, and undermines its authority; it also, more blatantly, focuses the point of subjectivity in the man who would escape responsibility for his youthful past — which Vander wants off the hook? That Vander, me.

The second slip between speaking persons does more to emphasise the intersubjectivity implied in the manoeuvre. We know that at this point Vander is falling in love with Cass — turn the page and he begins his confession to her — and the fluidity of the passage implies a lack of discrete boundaries between the lover and the beloved: “She bent and put her mouth against his ear, saying something in a hot whisper, saying something I could not make out. Her burning breath. Saying something” (125). Also emphasised in this passage, paradoxically, is the impossibility of traversing subjectivities, as Vander’s “I” interrupts to insist that he doesn’t

25 Banville’s allusion is to another controversy attached to a contemporary radical theorist, Louis Althusser, who confessed to killing his wife by strangling her in 1980. 67 understand. Is he inserting himself to regain narrative control here, or the opposite, to assert the importance of the speaking subject who is not him, and whom he cannot comprehend?

Keeping these instabilities in mind, let us turn to another realm of ambiguity that the confusion here points to — generation and filiation. There are a number of generational transgressions in the novel, from the age difference between Cass and Vander (he is “old enough to be [her] great-grandfather” [71]), to Cass’s suggested sexual love for her father, for whom

Vander is in many ways an obvious substitute (both of them being actors — one professional and one habitual, and their names, Alex and Axel, being anagrams, and thus linguistic substitutes, for each other).26 While these relationships adhere to a relatively traditional linearity, they still work to upset the notion of direct succession, especially once Vander “sucks at [Cass’s] breast like a child” (84), and later when she must nurse him back to health as if she were his mother. Most significant though, is Vander’s insight that in his mind his parents, given their age when he last knew them, just before they died, are young enough now to be his children. But not just that; they become in his mind “not my parents at all but my children, rather, grown to sad adulthood

— the children, I hasten to say, that I never had, so far as I know” (155). This otherwise throwaway observation is striking in the context of ambient generational confusion: for whom is

Vander a parent, and to whom a child? And does this conflation mean that Vander has responsibilities towards his dead parents as he would to his own children?

This question has a certain resonance for the reader when we consider that Vander and his circle of peers are all, as far as we know, childless; and in fact Kristina Kovacs tells Vander that her inability to have children is “the tragedy of her life” (104). This has never, apparently, been a

26 The names are not just anagrams, but near homonyms also: Alexander / Axel Vander. Also, uncannily, if we consider Cass/Vander or Cass Vander, we have a near homonym for Cassandra, whose prophecies, though true, are never believed. 68 concern of Vander’s before, for he only mentions in an embarrassingly brief aside that Magda was unable to bear children because of a botched abortion (211). Cass, however, is expectant from the beginning — she needs her meeting with Vander to be fruitful in some way: “There was something to be desired, certainly, she felt it inside her, like a vague and not unpleasurable distress; it was the feeling she imagined of being newly pregnant” (21). Her concern with children is evident in the substance of her unfinished thesis, on Rousseau’s children, as well.

Though Vander sees in this pursuit merely a reflection of Cass’s own “spiritually orphaned plight” (204), his reading is certainly not the only one; Rousseau’s abandoned children are also the victims who, although their mistreatment is confessed to, have no speaking parts in the narrative that is their only legacy.

Cass has read Vander on Rousseau, “of whom he disapproved” (77), and her own thesis is in part a response to Vander’s work, making de Man’s writing on Rousseau an important intertext here. De Man’s essay on Rousseau in Allegories of Reading is a sustained reading of the

Confessions, a slippery genre of which Shroud is a (fictional) example. The incident de Man focuses on is one in which Rousseau, employed in an aristocratic household in Turin (another factor in overdetermining Banville/Vander’s choice of setting for his own confession),27 steals a ribbon and blames it on his friend and fellow servant, Marion. De Man highlights the conflict

Rousseau’s text suppresses, which is that it does not suffice to confess, one must also excuse as one does so: “The only thing one has to fear from the excuse is that it will indeed exculpate the confessor, thus making the confession (and the confessional text) redundant as it originates. Qui s’accuse s’excuse; this sounds convincing enough, but, in terms of absolute truth, it ruins the

27 See footnote 5, page 46 of this chapter. 69 seriousness of any confessional discourse by making it self-destructive” (Allegories 280).

Because of this, de Man reasons, ten years later in Rousseau’s Fourth Rêverie, “the excuse presented in the Confessions was unable to satisfy Rousseau as a judge of Jean-

Jacques” (Allegories 283). Vander is painfully aware of his doubleness as confessor and confessant, and while he generates blame and shame about himself in equal measures, he can’t help but be aware that this is another way of asking for the forgiveness he desires above all. As

Bartoli says of Vander’s methodology, “every text conceals a shameful secret…which it is the critic’s task to nose out” (223).

The shameful secret that the text conceals, for Cass, includes the responsibilities that lie beyond or outside of narrative, and that are ignored or occluded by it. Cass’s obsession with

Rousseau’s abandoned children speaks to her interest in the lives that are interrupted, neglected, even destroyed, as Rousseau imagines Marion’s likely was, in pursuit of “higher ideals.” These lives are left on the margins not just of philosophy, but by philosophy, as Vander’s own family was made abject by his subjection to the “one dark, radiant idea” of self-forgetting, of self-hatred

(131). In his pursuit of Harlequinism, or a life without human relations, Vander has had to disavow his parents and siblings; there is an obvious connection here between the children

Rousseau dropped at an orphanage without an afterthought, and the parents and siblings Vander has spent a lifetime pushing to the edges of his own consciousness, especially if we consider the reversal of generations that Vander imagines.

Cass’s concern for other voiceless children surfaces again when she reads an account of

Shelley’s death in her guidebook: it bothers her that it names everyone who was there, even the boat, without naming the boy who tended the sail (244). She thinks of him along with her own 70 unborn child before she takes her life: “She put her hands over her womb, feeling the warmth that was not hers. If only she knew the boy’s name, the boy on the Ariel. He was drowned too.

All the lost ones” (245). With this, her own child that will drown with her becomes one of the nameless ones — whether this is completely narcissistic or not we can’t know, since we can’t know what the boundaries of her solipsism are, but there are indications that her imaginative empathy stretches beyond the borders of herself. Although often delusional, she is obsessed with that which exceeds consciousness: “How could there be so many people in the world, she wondered, so many lives? Not to mention the countless dead” (115). We sense that Vander’s dismissal of Cass’s concerns as being merely narcissistic is disingenuous, and is only a reflection of the disaffected attitude he tries so desperately to strike himself when he is haunted by analogous considerations. He too is concerned with what exceeds consciousness; he also hears the voices of all the lost ones murmuring: “The past, my own past, the past of all the others, is still there, a secret chamber inside me, like one of those sealed rooms, behind a false wall…. My eyelids lift. A breath. All gone, all of them; gone” (151-2).

All of these voices, arguably, are embodied for him in one of the first thoughts he has when he learns of Cass’ pregnancy, which is worth quoting in full:

For once, perhaps really for the first time, it was others I was thinking of. Growing already inside this girl was the enfolded bud of what would be a world reclaimed. Out of the unimaginable complex coils in the hollow heart of the blastula I had set swelling in her belly there had already sprung the new beginnings of my people, my lost people. It was as simple as that. My gentle mother, my melancholy father, my siblings put to summary death before they had lived, all would find their tiny share in this new life. Oh, fond old man! How could I have thought this world would allow for such redemption? (240)

This is one of the most affecting passages in the novel, as we are made aware for the first time of the exuberance and depth of Vander’s emotional investment in his lost family, but of course he 71 never achieves his redemption, because the baby dies with Cass. The tragedy of Cass’s death, though, is not that it wrecks Vander’s chance for redemption, but that she dies because she does not know the extent of Vander’s love for her. She rationalises her suicide by telling herself that

“[t]he world was letting her go, as he had let her go” (242). She has to die to complete the pattern, when Vander could have made the whole thing signify completely otherwise. His failure is not a failure of love, but a failure of philosophy, even one as purportedly open and anti- foundational as deconstruction — or at least Banville/Vander’s version here — to make room for the idea of love and fecundity. Or perhaps it is a failure of love to overcome the strictures of philosophy altogether, since that is what it must do — what, arguably, it is ethically obligated to do in order to fulfil itself. As Geoffrey Harpham writes: “ethical rigour is achieved precisely insofar as a strictly conceptual or logical rigour is suspended” (29). This is a call that the text makes to both Vander and the reader: for all the suspicion and epistemological instability it generates, the exigencies of narratives, generic and philosophical, still work to assert themselves, to carve the ontological landscape into something known and habitable. Perhaps we have to consider Cass’s death the result of the failure of story. She died because her version of “what they called reality” (80) was a totalising narrative, and because she was never given that part of the story that we are given; she didn’t know what Vander was willing to do for her, that he was willing to take responsibility of the story for her.

Vander’s thwarted redemption-through-regeneration is, to a degree, a moot point anyway, since there is no material way to bring back his dead family, or to wake from the nightmare of that history. His dreams tell him as much:

Then from out of the darkness — I note the increasingly ecclesiastical sonorousness of these formulations — a great voice spoke, the voice of Yahweh himself, it might be. 72

Here, it said, here are interred all the Abrahams and Isaacs; here is their tomb. That is all I remember: the darkness, the high place, the dim horizon, and that voice. And a great feeling of sorrow, too, not the sorrow of mourning or loss, but of being present at some grand and terrible, unpreventable tragedy. (152)

Here we are confronted with the indissoluble kernel of trauma — not mourning and loss, through which one overcomes, but the “being present” at the ongoing, unstoppable tragedy, the witnessing that may be “as good as grief” (53). Vander’s quest for authenticity, which he equates with an experience of freedom, of being “an affectless point moving through time” (183), is effectively derailed when he commits to witnessing this history, by telling his story, first to Dr.

Zoroaster, and then in the form of this confession. Cass, who opened him up to the necessity of witnessing his history, also opened him up to an ethical impulse, as for the first time, it is others

Vander is thinking of.28 Though Shroud refuses to reify into a conversion narrative, at the end of the novel Vander is assiduously attending to his dying friend — not because she is any great friend, but because she is dying. As Derrida might have it, Vander is “learn[ing] to live finally” (Specters xvi): learning to live in conversation with the ghosts from his past, which is also to “live otherwise, and…. more justly” (Specters xvii) in the present. He enters into this conversation by attending to his narrative — this narrative, his novel-confession — replete with its internalised suspicions and conflicting inheritances. As he tells his story, he is remembering the future: he has a responsibility to the narrative now, as he would have had to his child, as he has towards his parents as if they were indeed his children, the new beginning of his people. The world that allows for his redemption, if he ever does attain it, turns out to be the world of the narrative, but the question of who speaks and why remains deliberately unresolved.

28 For my discussion of the ethics of witnessing, and its connection with the ethics of inheritance, please see my introduction, pages 38-44. 73

The novel’s last lines are telling: “The city is quiet this time of year. The dead, though, have their voice. The air through which I move is murmurous with absences. I shall soon be one of them. Good. Why should I have life and she have none? She. She” (257). With allusions to both Shakespeare and Joyce here, Banville signals his own multiple inheritances: the English playwright and the Irish novelist, the early modernist and the high modernist.29 As in Joyce’s

“The Dead,” the dead cast a shadow on the living, and seem more real than “the solid world itself” (Joyce 69). The allusion to Shakespeare, though, is perhaps more revealing, for although

Vander has imagined himself throughout the narrative as the fool and the Harlequin, in the end he echoes King Lear, grieving over Cordelia.30 This echo transforms the way we read the

Harlequin motif, for we have to consider the possibility that in fact, Vander has been Lear all along. Indeed there is a certain amount of confusion between the fool and the king in

Shakespeare’s play,31 all stemming from the fact that Lear has a kingdom and a family, and gives them up, making him a fool. The idea that Lear is a Harlequin “without human relation,” though, is only a half-truth, and at the end of the play he feels that all his sorrows would be redeemed if only Cordelia would live and he could have his daughter (and heir, and future) back.32 Vander as

Lear, then, is always already related, relational, and these are the responsibilities he has had to ignore to play the part of the fool. In this way, diachronous filiation offers a corrective to the relentless chasing after self-coincidence, as the body needn’t be either an impediment or a

29 And of course these two inheritances themselves are porous, overlapping and “impure,” as is obvious from the many direct and indirect references to Shakespeare in Joyce, especially in Ulysses.

30 “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?” (King Lear, 5.3.359-360)

31 See, for example: “Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy? Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; / that thou wast born with.” (1.4.140-142). “Lear: No rescue? What, a prisoner? I am even / The natural fool of fortune” (4.6.179-180).

32 “Lear: This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt” (5.3.263-5). 74 vehicle to authenticity, but rather the locus for these human relationships, and human responsibilities. These final lines tell us so by answering the novel’s opening question, “who speaks?” — the dead, the other, she. CHAPTER TWO Ian McEwan: Heir Apparent (Chosen Son) Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot. — Black Dogs

Many critics have noted the “turn” in Ian McEwan’s career, from his claustrophobic early stories of incest, sadomasochism, and murder (which earned him the dubious moniker “Ian Macabre”), through a brief flirtation with mysticism and intuitionism, to an increasingly ethical concern with the intersection of private and public narratives, and the imbrication of the personal with the social and historical. When asked in an interview about this marked shift in his work, McEwan admitted that his preoccupations were bound to change as he got older, and he began “to feel a little more delicate.” He explains this development, notably, by way of parenthood and filiation:

“You have children, [and] you find that whether you like it or not, you have a huge investment in the human project somehow succeeding” (TNR).

There are distinct Levinasian echoes in this statement, especially with regards to the passivity and inevitability (“whether you like it or not”) of parental responsibility. But, as with

Levinas, we have to ask how these responsibilities are framed, how they extend into the world the child will enter into, and thus to all the other children as well, in the realm of politics and history, or what Levinas would call “fraternity.” In other words, what exactly is this “human project” in which McEwan finds himself invested? What is it he sees himself as having inherited, and how does he figure both his retrospective filial and future-oriented parental duties towards it? What would constitute this project’s “success”?

The three novels I will be reading here— Saturday, Black Dogs, and Atonement—form a triptych of a sort, in that each deals quite prominently with ideas of filiation and inheritance, and

75 76 each is a metafictional working-through of its relationship to the novel tradition. Each novel also takes on the question of war, asking how it interrupts and displaces certain continuities, and how it brings to light the tensions between conflicting or contradictory inheritances. There is also a trajectory established in these three novels that, we might argue, is increasingly centrist or even conservative; this reading is especially convincing if we read backwards from Saturday, the most recent and conventional of the three. Before moving on to readings of the novels, I would like to discuss the elements that make up this trajectory, in order to chart what McEwan might mean by

“the human project,” and to see how we might read his novels both in this context and against it.

It would seem, first of all, that for McEwan the “human project” is more or less consistent with the Habermasian “unfinished project of modernity,” or a pursuit of progress according to

Enlightenment ideals of social rationality, justice and morality.1 As any look at McEwan’s non- literary output makes clear,2 McEwan has become, over the last decade or so, an increasingly prominent and vocal spokesperson for evolutionary science, atheism, and liberal universal humanism, and for the role of the novel as a privileged site in all this: “Fiction is a deeply moral form in that it is the perfect medium for entering the mind of another” (Études). To this end, his fiction has become increasingly invested in the idea of transparent mimetic representation. As

1 Habermas outlines his theory of the continued rational potential of modernity in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. For responses and commentary, see d’Entreves and Benhabib’s collection, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

2 See especially: “A New Dawn.” The Wall Street Journal, 8 November 2008 (about global climate change and the election of Barack Obama);”The Day of Judgement.” The Guardian, 31 May 2008 (on end-time thinking); “A Parallel Tradition', The Guardian, 1 April 2006 (on the thirtieth anniversay of Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene); “Hello, Would you Like a Free Book?” The Guardian, 20 September 2005; “Faith v Fact”, The Guardian, 7 January 2005: 6; “Ambivalence on the Brink of War,” Open Democracy Website, 12 January 2003, and reprinted in a longer version as “Strong Cases For and Against War - But We Don't Hear Them,” Daily Telegraph 10 February 2003; and “Move Over, Darwin...,” The Observer (London), 20 September 1998: 13. 77

Daniel Zalewski put it in a recent New Yorker profile, “As McEwan has grown more outspoken in his rationalism, his books have become fully anchored in old-fashioned realism” (Zalewski).

Perhaps by virtue of this combination, McEwan has come to occupy a central place in the

English novel tradition; Zalewski notes that it is “now a commonplace that McEwan has edged past his peers to become England’s national author.” Putting aside the question of what it means to be a “national author,” there is an understanding, throughout Zalewski’s profile and indeed in much critical writing on McEwan, that the tradition McEwan more and more securely inhabits endorses a certain “Englishness” defined by its psychological realism, moral seriousness, and deep investment in rationalist empiricism. In fact, Alistair Cormack reads McEwan’s novel

Atonement in the context of the influential mid-century critic F. R. Leavis, suggesting that the

“historical layers of English fiction” (70) to which the novel alludes are actually consonant with the somewhat narrowly-defined English tradition as Leavis construes it in The Great Tradition

(1948). Cormack sees echoes, in McEwan’s investigation of realism and practical morality, of

Leavisian humanism, empiricism, and even Leavis’s “distaste for the ‘aesthetic’” (71). Cormack argues that “[a]gainst the dangers of relativism and self-delusion implicit in postmodern poetics

Atonement pits a tradition of English empiricism” (82). In a similar vein, Dominic Head argues that “McEwan is [Iris] Murdoch’s natural heir,” (11) in that he effectively takes up her

“manifesto for the kind of novel that will foster a complex moral and social identity,” (12) a novel modelled after both eighteenth-century Enlightenment individualism and nineteenth- 78 century English realism.3 In taking up the project of the novel in the way he does, in other words, it would seem that Ian McEwan has become the English novel’s heir apparent.

There are, of course, certain continuities between this McEwan and his early manifestations as “Ian Macabre:” as the novelist himself points out, “some of the dark-hearted stuff from those short stories still lives on” (TNR).4 There is a certain mixture of suspense and moral and psychological discomfort that Kiernan Ryan calls McEwan’s “art of unease,” which has been a constant throughout his career. In fact, Ryan explicitly argues against the “moral fable” that casts McEwan as a “kind of Prodigal Son” who matures into “a responsible adult novelist” (4). Dominic Head writes that, “[w]hile crediting it with a degree of plausibility, Ryan resists the ‘contrived and reassuring’ air implicit in ‘the exemplary tale of moral maturation,’ which obscures the ways in which ‘nightmare and despair’ return to undercut McEwan’s evolving engagement with history and society” (7). While I agree with Ryan that we should be wary of taking comfort in this turn, I think we have to be cognisant of the shift in narrative focus over the course of McEwan’s career, especially as it elucidates some of McEwan’s struggles with his own sense of inheritance and belonging. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Ryan casts this narrative in terms of a Prodigal Son returning to the fold, but for this reason we have to be aware of the ways in which we, along with McEwan, construct the inheritance that he finds there.

3 The “manifesto” to which Head refers is Murdoch’s famous 1961 essay, “Against Dryness.” In it she writes: “Our inability to imagine evil is a consequence of the facile, dramatic and, in spite of Hitler, optimistic picture of ourselves with which we work. Our difficulty about form, about images — our tendency to produce works which are either crystalline or journalistic — is a symptiom of our situation. Form itself can be a temptation, making the work of art into a small myth which is a self-contained and indeed self-satisfied individual. We need to turn our attention away from the consoling dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards the real impenetrable human person. That this person is substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable is after all the fundamental tenet of Liberalism” (294).

4 Though even Zalewski, who argues for the continuity of McEwan’s presiding interest in psychology, admits that “he has shifted intellectual allegiances. At first, he studied perversity; now he studies normality. His first god was Freud. Now it is Darwin.” 79

McEwan’s friend, Christopher Hitchens, insists that McEwan’s hostility to mysticism and irrational thinking has “‘something of the zeal of the convert.’” Hitchens goes on: “‘Ian has gone from someone who was a little bit promiscuous and flirtatious when it came to Gaia—slightly overawed impressions of the numinous—to someone who has, very sternly and brilliantly, committed himself to the integrities of objectivity, evidence, reason, and investigation’” (qtd. in

Zalewski). McEwan puts the shift in more formal terms, by distancing himself from his early experiments with “shock” fiction. “I began to feel that I had written myself into a corner,” he says. “As I got older, the rather reckless pessimism of my early fiction deserted me” (qtd. in

Zalewski). He describes the narrators in his early stories as

alienated figures, outsiders, sociopaths. They must all, I have to admit, bear some relationship to myself. I think they were dramatisations of my sense not only of exclusion, but of ignorance, profound ignorance about the world. I had no clear idea of where I stood in relation to British society generally. Nor did I have an artistically worked up romance about myself as an outsider; in fact, I wanted to join in. (Études)

As McEwan points out, his initial lack of literary (af)filiation is also mirrored in his biography. His background, as he puts it, “was rather déclassé” (Études), hard-working, undereducated, and poor. His father was a commissioned officer stationed abroad, which meant a childhood of geographical and social displacement, and as a teenager he was sent to a rural boarding school for bright working-class kids, which he describes as “a kind of vacuum” (ibid) of another sort. Most uncannily, though, for an author whose works toy obsessively with tropes of filiation and inheritance, is the fact that although McEwan was raised as an only child, he had three siblings living with other families. The first two were children from his mother’s first marriage, which McEwan’s father did not desire to raise; they were sent to live with their paternal grandparents before Ian was born. The third sibling McEwan only found out about as an 80 adult, through a family-tracing service, after his mother was already succumbing to dementia.

This brother was born to McEwan’s parents before they were married, when his mother’s first husband was serving in the Second World War, and was given up for adoption. McEwan has stated that this discovery prompted a painful “recalibration” of his family history, explaining in retrospect, for instance, his mother’s decision when McEwan was seven to adopt another son, named Bernard (the name, coincidentally, of the father-in-law in Black Dogs). The adoption fell through, but McEwan continued to play with his imaginary friend, “his first fictional character” (Zalewski), the sibling that never was. At the same time as he was being touted as

England’s national author, then, McEwan also discovered that he had been, in a very literal and discomfiting way, his parents’ de facto chosen son.

Here we have two narratives through which we might read McEwan’s move to the putative centre of the novel tradition. According to the first, McEwan, having written himself out of the cul-de-sac of experimentation and alienation that was his early work, has become more and more invested in a relatively centrist tradition he could belong to and champion. This could plausibly be underwritten by the second biographical narrative, according to which McEwan uses his fiction to retroactively make sense of his own personal history of abandoned children, mothers losing their memories, long-lost brothers, and ghostly children that never materialised. Having himself become a parent, we could argue, McEwan is constructing his own work as part of a coherent tradition that would be his legacy. It would be quite possible to trace this trajectory through the novels, from the “postmodern orphan” (Pedot 71) who narrates Black Dogs, through the self-reflexive country-house novel and commentary on the English novel tradition that is 81

Atonement, to Perowne, the self-satisfied neurosurgeon at the centre of Saturday’s relatively insular narrative.

James Wood, however, offers up a third narrative of McEwan’s trajectory that helps to complicate this situation. He notes, alongside a number of critics,5 that McEwan’s work increasingly betrays an anxiety about storytelling itself. Wood argues that this anxiety is in fact an arraignment of McEwan’s propensities towards “narrative manipulation.” McEwan’s novels, he writes, “seek, at a formal level, to contain and control the vivid, traumatic happenings that originate their plots…. McEwan is addicted to the withholding of narrative information, the hoarding of narrative surprises, the deferral of revelations; this manipulation of secrecy, apart from its obvious desire to keep the reader reading, seems to incarnate a desire to repeat the texture of the originating trauma, and in so doing, to master and contain it” (14). For McEwan,

“[s]torytelling is corrupt and corrupting,” but, says Wood, “McEwan exaggerates the dastardliness of fiction’s manipulations, and conflates his kind of storytelling with storytelling in general” (15).

Wood’s thesis doesn’t necessarily discredit the trajectory established above: what is

McEwan’s retrospective figuring of his own inheritances, literary and biographical, but the record of a process of containment and “putting-into-place.” What I’m interested in pursuing here, though, is the idea that McEwan’s anxiety about (or even, by some readings, his hostility towards) fiction and fiction-making is an effect of the tensions between kinds of inheritances, and the ways in which war and violence trouble too-easy alignments with Enlightenment ideals.

McEwan’s novels, after all, offer a celebration of Enlightenment modernity on one hand, and a

5 Dominic Head writes, for example: “Accurately registering the trend towards increasing anxiety about fiction- making, Jago Morrison observes that ‘in all of McEwan’s work after The Child in Time, the whole idea of the possibility of narrative (and psychic) resolution becomes a central question’” (18). 82 metafictional critique of it on the other. The question is, how much do McEwan’s texts conform to the above narrative, essentially an overdetermined lineation of the heir apparent and prodigal son? To what extent do they perform this process of encapsulation, and to what extent do they undo it?

In an essay on Black Dogs, Marc Delrez expresses a wish that “McEwan’s work would… respond to its own in-built pressures, since it does bring into play a repressed lucidity that could be subversive of its very self-confirming premises” (22). For Delrez, McEwan never achieves this kind of subversiveness, but his article was written before the appearance of Atonement, which I believe does exert the pressure of scrutiny on its seeming transparencies; in Atonement, the premises of narration are themselves at the crux of its ethical debate. If we read the three texts together we can see that Black Dogs sets up, schematically, an allegorical relationship between history and filiation which Atonement then complicates, through its use of the novelistic sub-genre of the country-house novel, and that Saturday, with its relentless contemporaneity, both represses and reifies. I would thus like to examine the “in-built pressures” in these novels in terms of the figure of the heir, and the extent to which this figure interrupts (or fails to interrupt) the established tropological field.

This figure is employed self-consciously in Black Dogs, as the orphan-narrator weighs his allegiances to the contradictory inheritances that developed in response to the Second World

War. Themes of mourning and atonement, as modes of performing inheritance, are explored allegorically through this figure of the heir. In Saturday, McEwan’s response to the events of

September 11, 2001, the filial trope narrows to the province of the nuclear family and its

(inherited) home and fortress, and mourning and atonement are not thematised or performed so 83 much as they are repressed. Though a number of critics have tried to produce subversive readings of the novel,6 I argue that it remains obstinately closed to ethical re-reading; this may be indicative of the volatility of the filial trope, and its tendency towards containment and continuity, especially when deferred to in times of trauma and imminent threat. Consider this lukewarm review of the novel, which forgives it its imperfections (“pedantry” and “topicality”) because it represents a culmination “of McEwan’s belief, increasingly evident in his work, in the virtues of tradition and stability as embodied in the family, the microcosm of civilization.”

McEwan, the writer goes on,

knows what a luxury it is for a 20- or 30-something writer full of youth’s arrogance and unearned cynicism to write bleak and pessimistic fiction, and how that impulse to nihilism becomes reductive and shallow and, ultimately, meaningless when life hands you the next generation in the form of your own children, to whom your duty is to try to bequeath a better world. To Ian McEwan, only the universal values represented in the family unit—love, loyalty, trust, stability—stand between us and barbarism. Better than that of any other living writer in English, his fiction enshrines the belief that these family values must also be the values of society, if we are to survive. (Boylan)

Saturday thus represents the dangers that are perhaps inherent in the filiative model, wherein the family can represent a retreat from danger, a universal value system that stands between us and the barbarism of the other, instead of an interruption and the starting point of an other-oriented ethics and politics. In Black Dogs, McEwan’s first attempt to work through that inheritance and its repercussions through allegory, the filial trope is self-consciously employed as much more unweildy and problematic, and is much more riven with contradiction than it is in Saturday.

Despite the fact that these two novels were written before and after Atonement, then, I would like

6 See Richard Brown’s “Politics, the Domestic and the Uncanny Effects of the Everyday in Ian McEwan’s Saturday”; Kathleen Wall’s “Ethics, Knowledge, and the Need for Beauty: Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Ian McEwan's Saturday”; and Molly Clark Hillard’s “‘When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight’: Re-Reading McEwan’s Saturday and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach.’” At a conference on Mourning and Its Hospitalities in Brisbane in 2007, Judith Seaboyer presented a paper, “Misreading is General all over the World,” on the difficulty of an ironic reading of Saturday. 84 to treat them here together, as filial allegories about World War Two and “The War on Terror” respectively, and look at Atonement, which I believe explores and performs inheritance in a very different way, in the next chapter.

It is the Future They are Innocent of: Orphanhood, Parenthood, and Allegory in Black Dogs “No, you clot. Not symbolic!” I can hear her correcting me. “Literal, anecdotal, true.” — Black Dogs

Black Dogs, as I have said, allegorises the problem of cultural inheritance a generation after

World War Two. The novel’s narrator, Jeremy, lets us know from the novel’s opening line that he is an orphan: “Ever since I lost mine in a road accident when I was eight, I have had my eye on other people’s parents” (xiii). Jeremy has been asked to write the memoir of his mother-in-law,

June, which is to focus on one pivotal event: her encounter with a pair of vicious black dogs while hiking in France on her honeymoon, just after the war. What he writes is, ostensibly, Black

Dogs, an achronological account of his life, his relationships with his estranged parents-in-law, and the competing inheritances they bring to the table: June has used her encounter with the dogs to signal her break with conventional rationality, and to withdraw from the political realm to pursue a life of post-secular spiritualism; Bernard, on the other hand, has stayed committed to a life of science, historical materialism (he and June were both members of the communist party before they were married), and a life of public service. To identify with either version of the event, or indeed with either version of what happened to the marriage, is to take up a historical- ideological inheritance as much as a familial one, and Jeremy finds himself unable to accept either of his parents-in-law’s competing historiographies. In mediating between them, and between their accounts of each other, Jeremy “metaphorises” his status as orphan and self- 85 consciously takes on the task of moulding his inheritance. He is what Richard Pedot calls “a postmodern orphan,” left to make sense of the legacies of the Second World War, from the

Holocaust to the Berlin Wall, in the absence of grand narratives and foundational beliefs.

Dominic Head writes that in this context Jeremy’s “orphan mentality acquires a generalized significance, denoting the collective hunger of the post-war generation for social and political stability in Europe” (2008 23).

The allegory as McEwan sets it up is thus almost deceptively transparent; indeed, Jeremy fashions himself as something of an ideological “free agent” by virtue of his orphanhood: “I had no attachments, I believed in nothing... no good cause, no principle, no idea...” (xxii). His lack of a family name seems to imply that he has no baggage, no constraining markers of identity. He also makes the claim that by the time he gains parents through marriage, he has no real psychic need for them anymore. (“And just when I no longer had need of them, I acquired parents in the form of in-laws, June and Bernard Tremaine” [xxii].) This statement is disingenuous, of course, since the book is a working-through of Jeremy’s relationships with his late-in-life parent figures, making his ‘need’ for them moot, but it does establish Jeremy’s sense of rational agency in the matter. He will only take on an inheritance if it makes sense to him, if in some ways it makes things better.7 The novel as a whole is thus a serious and sustained attempt to represent the problems of storytelling, inheritance, and responsibility in a post-Holocaust moment; it is

McEwan’s first attempt to deal with the issues he takes up later in Atonement. But despite his plainly earnest efforts, Black Dogs does not work as well as the later novel does; its postmodern

7 As a publisher of text books, Jeremy actively shapes a cultural inheritance to pass on to the next generation, presumably for their education and betterment. 86 allegorical method proves insufficient somehow, for it allows for a kind of narrative innocence, and therefore also readerly innocence, to be maintained.

On one hand, the narrative is self-reflexively allegorical. And as both de Man and

Benjamin suggest, this is effectively what makes allegory such an “authentic” mode, as it expresses an awareness of the limits of language and form. De Man writes that allegory is

“determined by an authentic experience of temporality, which, seen from the point of view of the self engaged in the world, is a negative one” (Blindness 266). For de Man, the self constituted through allegory is an ironic or discontinuous one, aware that its linguistic self comes at the expense of its empirical self. Benjamin similarly argues that allegory discloses the “negative content” of experience by exposing it as fragmentary and enigmatic. Once experience is deconstructed as such, he says, “it is imperative that it be brought back into the definition of allegory…, chastened and shriven of its hubristic dream of self-sufficiency” (paraphrased in

Cowan 112). Both de Man and Benjamin are here responding to the Romantic valuation of the symbol over allegory, the latter of which was disparaged precisely for its artificiality.8

By contrast, Benjamin argues that the symbol is “an artificial isolation of the nostalgic impulse within allegory” (Cowan 111), a desire for unity that the tensions of allegory cannot sustain. Jeremy-as-writer is certainly aware of the symbol-making propensities of allegory, and of his own need to code his experience as both allegorical and symbolic. Indeed this is a central theme of the novel — besides the obvious orphanhood allegory, there are the symbolic black

8 This view is expressed most comprehensively (and authoritatively) by Coleridge in the 1816 Stateman’s Manual: “An allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a symbol … is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative. The other are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter” (437-438). 87 dogs of the title. What they “mean” is not entirely clear, especially in terms of Jeremy’s

(allegorical) inheritance, and the discourse about them pervades the text; it may be that they were trained by the Gestapo to intimidate, possibly even sexually assault, their victims. For June they are an embodiment of the evil that was unleashed by the war. For her husband Bernard they are a convenient symbol, and their prominence in June’s narrative of self-fashioning is evidence of her propensity to “magical thinking” (57). For Jeremy and for the reader, the dogs come to represent exactly what is at stake in this matter of interpretation: the legacy of the war, our response to it, and ways in which this response shapes how we figure our responsibilities to the present and the future. Jeremy (and McEwan) seems to be aware of the reifying power of the symbol, but hopes that a certain reflexivity will suffice to keep them relatively mobile. After all, Jeremy recognises his own biography as such, as a process of construction: “turning points are the invention of storytellers,” he says (27), though he clearly employs them here. When he traces the hike June and Bernard made on their honeymoon decades earlier, and he is forced to take a different route, he tells himself that “[i]f I were to make a symbol out of an overgrown path,” he would tell himself that his own life-path must likewise diverge from theirs (100). Later, a scene at a hotel unfolds as “a drama that seemed to be enacted for me alone. It was an embodiment… of my preoccupations…; it represented a purging, an exorcism, in which I acted … and took [my] revenge” (101). In some ways these moments are exemplary of the Benjaminian idea that

“[t]ransforming things into signs is both what allegory does — its technique — and what it is about — its content” (in Cowan 110).

The question, as Benjamin might have it, is whether Jeremy is at all shriven of consolation and self-sufficiency by the process? An astute review of the book tells us that 88

“McEwan explores the personal consequences of political ideas in this remarkably precise little novel. His lapidary prose neatly disguises his search for transcendence” (Kirkus). Jeremy’s free- agent status is uncompromised by all this scrupulous neatness, and where he is compromised, he seeks to contain the fall-out. His search for transcendence — of history, of his linguistic self — betrays itself in the precision of the novel’s allegorical structure, and perhaps as well in its ultimate nostalgia for the self-sufficiency and translucence of the symbol.

Kiernan Ryan has observed that there is a self-confirming Manichean neatness to June’s use of the dogs: in externalising their evil, she is able to maintain a faith in her inner goodness and in humanity in general. While this split is ironised to an extent (and I will return to this shortly), it is also echoed first of all in McEwan’s bifurcation between Bernard’s Enlightenment rationalism and June’s romanticist spiritualism — a split that keeps them both fairly neatly intact

— and then echoed again in Jeremy’s suspicion of both of these stances, which creates a division between his stark unbelief and their vivid belief, according to what Jude Seaboyer calls the

“grand narratives of scepticism and faith” (23). And against and beyond all of this, finally, in the outermost Chinese box of ambivalences, Jeremy offers the redemptive power of love. All these dichotomising energies produce an allegory that is almost too schematic, in that it works to contain its own fragmentation. The dogs are identified too closely with evil to be anything but,

June and Bernard are entrenched in their mutual estrangement, and Jeremy is relatively at ease moving between them.

This crystalline structure has something of the well-wrought urn about it, and indeed the

New Critical catchwords “paradox” and “ambivalence” seem apt descriptors. Terry Eagleton writes that these terms “suggest the economic fusion of two opposite but complementary 89 meanings: the New Critical poem is a taut structure of such antitheses, but they never really threaten our need for coherence because they are always resolvable into a closed unity” (45). Of course, as David E. Chinitz suggests, “[t]here is nothing ‘delicate’ or ‘serene’ about ambivalence in lived experience, where it is often an intense, unsettling, and even painful condition” (9).

Jeremy’s wife and her brother certainly find it so — they have both turned their backs on their parents “in the interests of self-preservation” (xxiv) — but Jeremy seems to take some comfort in the broader, allegorical, view. Though he finds June and Bernard frustrating, he engages with them as a means of answering some big questions about his relationship to the past.

The explicit question of the moral dimension of the inheritance of war is voiced through

Bernard (who is also, we should remember, one of Jeremy’s “characters”), as a realisation he has during his honeymoon after the war; it mirrors June’s epiphany about good and evil brought about by her encounter with the dogs. It is worth, I think, quoting in full.

As they drank from their water bottles, he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than any one could ever begin to comprehend…. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of postwar reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling — all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly returned to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture? (140). 90

This is, in effect, Jeremy’s burden and his project: how to take up these stories of suffering so that some “possible good” might come of them. It is important that Bernard, in this scene, has just found out he is to become a father, because for him, too, the question of possible good is framed in terms of the future, of the way he will pass on this “deep apprehension” to his heirs, including Jeremy’s wife Jenny, and Jeremy himself. It is also important that this central question is attributed to Bernard and not June, since Jeremy frames the problem of his own inheritance as a choice between Bernard’s rationality and June’s spirituality. By attributing this affective insight to Bernard, he resolves a certain amount of ideological tension between them. In interview McEwan has admitted that “[i]n Black Dogs, my heart was really with the character,

Bernard, the rationalist. But I gave the best lines to June, the mystic. At some point, I'd like to redress the balance. I'd like to write a novel in praise of rationalism – rationalism as I understand it, mediated by emotional wisdom” (Études). Saturday, written thirteen years later, is evidently this novel in praise of rationalism, but what is interesting here is that McEwan felt that there was an imbalance he needed to correct. While Bernard is an imperfect character (in a way that

Saturday’s Henry Perowne is not), in the above passage, his rationality is clearly one mediated by emotional wisdom (besides the fact that these are some of the novel’s “best lines”). Jeremy’s neutrality as an heir seems grounded in his own rationality similarly tempered, making Bernard his model and (post facto) progenitor, and effectively resolving the question of his inheritance.

Marc Delrez castigates McEwan for his refusal to make a political commitment through the novel, arguing that he offers love and a state of “blissful ahistorical innocence” (Müller-

Wood and Wood, paraphrasing Delrez, 45) as a solution to the “shrunken, crippled ‘reality’ [that we have] inherited from the Holocaust” (Delrez 20). Delrez’s main contention hinges on a 91 problematising of the filial, or at least familial, trope; he writes that Jeremy “finds a sanctuary, on this scrap-heap of otiose philosophies, in the essential kernel of the family” (Delrez 18). Delrez argues that the point of Black Dogs seems to be that

human love is in short supply and should be apportioned accordingly, between selected recipients; otherwise, there is no possible understanding of Jeremy’s statement of ‘belief in the possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life’ [20]. Whose life is very much the moot point here, of course, for it goes without saying that love, taken as the highest human value, yields a world view that consistently elides issues of sociopolitical concern. (18)

In answer to Delrez, Anja Müller-Wood and Carter J. Wood claim that Black Dogs represents

“more than just a call to remember, [it] also emphasises the moral dimensions of remembering: the inescapability of the past, our responsibility to face it (in the name of the future) and our inevitable failure to ever completely come to terms with it” (45). I agree that McEwan makes his argument in moral terms, and that our responsibility towards the past is framed in terms of the future; as I will argue, this aspect is figured largely in terms of parental obligations. But these tensions, between Delrez’s and the Woods’ arguments, are at the heart of the problem with the contemporary use of the filial trope.

This is where the structure of the allegory gets interesting, since the degree to which

Jeremy asserts control over his past, and over history in general, is roughly coextensive with his self-identification as a parent. He tells us that he “never had any doubts about it: at some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself” (xiv), and later that “the simplest way of restoring a lost parent was to become one yourself, that to succor the abandoned child within, there was no better way than having children of your own to love” (xxii). He doesn’t need June and Bernard, or their idiosyncratic (yet representative) responses to the war, in other words, because having a family provides him with a sense of 92 purpose and self-sufficiency: the parental present displaces or renders moot the need to make sense of his inheritances. The novel is most compelling where it exhibits a tension between these orientations, where invocations of purpose and responsibility threaten to stretch or break the self- sufficiency of both Jeremy and the narrative he constructs. To see how this works, we need to return to the central symbol of the black dogs.

June tells Jeremy that the dogs are not symbolic, but are “[l]iteral, anecdotal, true!” (6).

By “literal” June means to say that the dogs are not figural, and that she refers to them without metaphor or allegory, and by “anecdotal” she means coincidental, part of the accident of experience. When she adds that they are “true,” however, June actually means that they embody an idea of evil in the Platonic sense, as transcendental signifiers, for this is how she uses them throughout, and by grafting this idea onto experience, she is quite precisely making a symbol out of them. Insofar as this is June speaking, this drive to symbol-making is ironised, as I suggested earlier. Insofar as Jeremy and the narrative itself make use of the dogs-as-symbol, however, the irony is more suppressed. In the novel’s closing paragraph, Jeremy tells us that the black dogs

“trouble me when I consider what happiness I owe them, especially when I allow myself to think of them not as animals but as spirit hounds, incarnations” (148). He means, in the first case, that he owes to them the way they have literally transformed the path of history leading up to his present-day happiness: their role in the story are a large part of “the world historical and personal forces, the huge and tiny currents, that had to align and combine to bring [June’s bergerie] into our possession” (148). They trouble him because they have led to, and thus potentially upset, his sense of possession, and his innocence in coming into this possession. But Jeremy also owes to them what June owes to them, as figures: “I’ve made use of them,” June tells him. “They’ve set 93 me free” (36). For Jeremy the dogs are an organising conceit, a device that has set him free to consider love and family as a bulwark against everything they represent. The novel’s final image is of the dogs receding into the mountains, “from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time” (149). This sonorous passage9 fixates on the idea of the dogs as symbol, beautiful and beautifully apropos, so that despite its ironising impulses, the narrative seems ultimately invested in their affective and unifying power. Bainard Cowan writes:

Pervading Benjamin’s writing about history is an awareness of the all-too-human propensity to forget the past and in so doing to look away from the truth of oneself; to be fascinated by the image of a symbolic other that is free from all real conflicts, to be fixated by the ‘beauty’ of this image — actually a kind of Medusa — and fail to recognize one’s own face, the face of history, with all its marks of suffering and incompleteness. (112)

The novel proper opens with a photograph of the young June and Bernard, taken before their honeymoon, which prompts a comparison to June’s aged weathered face, profoundly altered over time, as if a “metempsychosis [were] mapped in [its] transformation” (5). Jeremy/McEwan seems to be taking Benjamin’s warning quite literally in this scene: June’s face is marked by her personal confrontations with historical forces, and it seems to convey to us that she will not let us forget the marks of suffering. But in figuring the face as sensitively and eloquently as he does

(and he does — McEwan is an exceptional stylist), this passage is representative (as it were) of one of the problems of the novel, which is its assiduous thematisation of presence, experience, and encounter with “history.” June’s is a face given in prosopopoeia. The passage continues: “In

9 The full quote reads: “June told me that throughout her life she sometimes used to see them, really see them, on the retina in the giddy seconds before sleep. They are running down the path into the gorge of the Vis, the bigger one trailing blood on the white stones. They are crossing the shadow line and going deeper, where the sun never reaches, and the amiable drunken mayor will not be sending his men in pursuit, for the dogs are crossing the river in the dead of night and forcing a way up the other side to cross the Causse; and as sleep rolls in they are receding from her, black stains in the gray of the dawn, fading as they move into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time” (148-9). Note the rhythm and parallelism of “They are running… They are crossing… the dogs are crossing… they are receding… fading as they move… from where they will return….” 94 repose her face had a chiseled, sepulchral look; it was a statue, a mask carved by a shaman to keep at bay the evil spirit” (6). June’s face functions as a symbol itself, frozen and timeless (as if she had confronted the Medusa, in fact), and Jeremy is clearly responding to its beauty, which carries a self-assertive authority that could “match the elderly Auden’s” (5). The African mask

(conjured by the word “shaman”)10 both is June and hides the “real” June underneath: it is a figure of a figure. To what extent we are to read this ironically, as a projection of Jeremy’s need to forget the past and look away from the truth of himself (as Cowan put it above), is hard to discern. Despite any frustrations he has with her, June remains intelligible to Jeremy, and Jeremy remains the author of her biography, with all the power over her that this implies.

Jeremy comes back to the same photo later, and makes these observations:

The innocent time! Tens of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the extermination camps still a news story, not yet our universal reference point of human depravity. It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. (14)

The Holocaust, and our awareness of it as a “universal reference point” or master rupture, marks a historical fall from innocence that both is and is not an illusion. June and Bernard are innocent of the way this apprehension will mark their lives: the photo was taken before June’s emblematic encounter with the dogs and Bernard’s revelation about the spores settling on and infecting all of

Europe. But it is also suggested elsewhere that their innocence is real, and that it is something of an ethical burden: June and Bernard have decided to spend part of their honeymoon as volunteers at a Red Cross station in Italy to “atone… for their comfortable war” (113). This equation, that

10 In fact, the image conjured is of the African tribal masks certain modernist painters found so fascinating, as in Picasso’s famous “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” June’s face becomes thus almost iconic, and a marker of a kind of modernist Orientalist exoticism and primitivism that carries an analogous kind of authority from the “spiritual” realm. 95 one must atone for not suffering as others do, signals one of the novel’s more muted premises, especially in light of the titular preoccupation of the novel under discussion in the next chapter,

Atonement, which ironises the idea of textual innocence much more thoroughly. This particular action of June and Bernard’s is unsatisfying to them both, but in their subsequent responses to the war, the ideological investments they make in its wake, we see their more protracted performances of this atonement, as their respective philosophies are means of sublimating feelings of guilt and ineffectiveness. (June does so by universalising it, Bernard by managing it programmatically.)

Despite implicitly problematising the notion of innocence, though, the novel is still invested in maintaining it; nowhere is this more manifest than in a scene in a hotel restaurant in southern France, in which Jeremy witnesses a father’s violence against his young son. This is the same hotel to which June and Bernard retired after June’s run-in with the black dogs, so that they hover like an apparition in the distance. When no one else will, Jeremy stands up to the brutish, tattooed man, calling him an animal and challenging him to a fight; the violence he unleashes on him, and the elation he feels doing it, have “nothing to do with revenge and justice” (108) however, and he must be called off with a cry of “Ça suffit!” (108), the same phrase, he notes deliberately, used to call off dogs. This scene is clearly intended to complicate Jeremy’s neutrality and self-sufficiency, and to reassert the problem of the inheritance and psycho- pathology of violence. But while Jeremy’s moral authority is coloured by this event, it is not really strained in any but the most abstract way. He tells us that he acts impulsively, “I had made no decision, no calculation” (107), and that he initially acts out of a sense of revenge for “the loneliness of [his] childhood” (101) and on behalf of his niece Sally, now grown, but once an 96 abused youngster herself, as well as for the boy in question. His crime, then, might be too much empathy with the consummately innocent; there is anger in Jeremy, certainly, but the length of the narrative is about mediating and rationalising that anger. His act may in the first place be considered political — he steps in to distribute justice, after all — but in the end, he learns that he must temper his empathetic impulses (his ethical impulses, even) with rationality and circumspection. Despite intimations about the insinuations of evil and violence, then, Jeremy’s outburst does not threaten the “inviolable, private space” (106) of his own family, nor the

“primacy of private life” (47) that he so cherishes.

Jeremy’s niece further complicates this notion of self-preservation. In the preface Jeremy tells us about his “affair of the heart” (xix) with Sally, whom he looked after as a teenager, while he was living with his sister and her abusive husband. Sally was three when Jeremy left for university, but he never went back to see her because his “sense of [his] betrayal” (xxi) of her was too deep; when he discovers later that Sally was also a victim of abuse at both her parents’ hands, he is surprised that he hadn’t discerned this earlier. Jeremy tells us that the story of Sally has nothing to do with the narrative that follows in the body proper of the book. At the time of

Jeremy’s narration, Sally is an abusive alcoholic whose own son has been taken away by the state, and Jeremy and his wife have decided they can’t come to her aid any more, because of all the upset and discord she brings into their lives. So even if Jeremy tells us that his emotional life started with marriage and family, it is clear that his obligations did not: he is “still a kind of father” (87) to Sally, and even though he can’t house her or care for her child, he can’t “rid

“[him]self of the idea that her unhappy life was [his] responsibility” (46). Jeremy’s identity as a parent of a self-sufficient family depends on a repression of his obligation towards Sally, and his 97 happiness, as much as he insists on it, is thus provisional; this becomes quite apparent when

Jeremy is provoked to fight an abusive father on Sally’s behalf. Jeremy’s guilt is complicated: he didn’t know she was being abused when he left, he didn’t know what this would mean for her life — we might say that it was “the future he was innocent of.” Insofar as he is unwilling to care for Sally now, or for her nameless son who has inherited the unhappy legacy of Jeremy’s abandonment, Jeremy can retreat into an idea of that innocence, that it is not his responsibility, because it was never his fault. The book, which is dedicated to Sally and to his wife, is Jeremy’s unacknowledged textual atonement for leaving her to her own psychic and material inheritances.

Any anxieties Jeremy has about coming into his own much happier inheritances are sublimated, in large part, through a fixation with June’s bergerie, which Jeremy and his wife take over after June’s death. The bergerie is associated through June with safety and presence, and her own hankering after a kind of primal innocence; when she first discovers it, June feels as if she is

“delivered into herself, she [is] changed. This, now, here. Surely this was what existence strained to be, and so rarely had the chance: to savor itself fully in the present, this moment in all its simplicity” (144). Jeremy, who after all has “written” the above passage, constructs his own relationship with the bergerie as having been visited with a kind of (barely secular) grace. On a visit there after June’s death, he thinks about the pattern of his life, “from the age of eight until

Majdanek, and how I had been delivered. A thousand miles away, in or near one house among all the millions, were Jenny and our four children, my tribe. I belonged; my life was rooted and rich” (99). Both June and Jeremy are thus “delivered:” June into herself, and from a kind of split consciousness that she would have had to maintain in order to remain, alongside Bernard, politically active. Jeremy got together with his wife in Majdanek, after they visited a 98 concentration camp there, so that he is both delivered from his life of loneliness, and on the tropological level of allegory, as it were, he is delivered from intimations of evil and into the bosom of family.

During this visit to Majdanek, Jeremy is upset most at his fundamental inability to take it all in. “As we walked in, my emotions died. There was nothing we could do to help…. We were strolling like tourists. Either you came here and despaired…or you found that you had taken one step closer to the dreamers of the nightmare. This was our inevitable shame, our share in the misery” (88). A number of critics have pointed out the way that Bernard, and the way he deals with the aftereffects of war, are implicated in Jeremy’s “bleak wonder” at the “obsessive neatness” of, and energy and dedication to, the camps (88-9). Kiernan Ryan, for example, notes that there is something similarly “arid and alienated about Bernard’s masculine rationality — the detached, abstract gaze of the superior Cartesian self analysing and correcting the external world

— which is plainly part of the problem” (in Gauthier 117). But Jeremy also shares a strong affinity with Bernard in this scene, for he approaches the problem of apprehension in much the same way that Bernard does in the passage about the spores: one can understand the war in terms of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, or one can be dismayed into silence by the scale of the

“feeling” of all those innumerable deaths. Once again a choice is established between inhuman forgetting and tortured memory, where innocence is both longed for and is something of which to feel ashamed. Jeremy hints at the need to atone for collapsing the victims of the war into numbers, for washing away particular histories, for not being able to adequately mourn the lost, many of whom would not have left anyone behind to remember them. The narrative Jeremy 99 constructs is a kind of witnessing and elegiac mourning, but in this way it also performs and, to an extent, recognises its limitations.

However, if Jeremy feels answerable to the unjustness of these deaths, he is unable to enter fully into the despair this call elicits, precisely because to remember is to put one’s sense of self in peril. As R. Clifton Spargo puts it, “[w]hat mourning imparts to ethics is a view in which the subject is signified precisely as one who is answerable to the unjustness of the other’s death, as the very being chosen by the other for responsibility” (Ethics 28). Ethical mourning, in other words, is a constant undoing, a constant torture, unmitigated by the fact that the other is no longer here. Jeremy, by contrast, plainly chooses a life of “tranquil self-sufficiency” (99), even at one point “congratulat[ing]” himself on his “rich and interesting life” (49). In summoning his sense of rootedness and belonging, he recalls “his tribe” to himself, and whether this is in contradistinction to or in affinity with the Jews, known colloquially as “the tribe,” and the many families that perished in the camps, it is impossible to say. Jeremy certainly stresses that he is grateful to have been so delivered, but his insistence on his own happiness and security suggests an uneasiness: Whom is he trying to convince? Which spectres threaten that rootedness?

Jeremy tells us that when no one is there, “June’s spirit, her many ghosts, might stealthily reassert possession” (91) of the bergerie. When he is there, he hears June and Bernard’s voices in his head, arguing incessantly, and he tells us that “[t]o take immediate possession of the bergerie you had to arrive with children” (92). Children and their concerns displace and disperse the ghosts, apparently, for they surrender the right of possession to the living and rightful heirs. This seems innocent enough — “the spirit gracefully conceded to the energies of the living” (92),

Jeremy insists — but what of the other ghosts, the spectres of the Holocaust that supposedly 100 haunt the narrative? Are they dispersed as well, or do they not factor into Jeremy’s inheritance, even as an allegorical figure for post-war loss and disorientation? It was war, after all, that brought the bergerie into June’s and then his possession.

Mourning is also thematised (and similarly partially contained) through the figure of the dolmen, a prehistoric burial mound found a few miles from the bergerie. This place represents a species of mourning which is so ancient that there is no tangible shame or even responsibility connected to it, only a “chain of flesh” stretching back over six thousand years, a kind of continuity of place and civilisation. It is also the setting for two of the novel’s pivotal scenes: it is where June first realises she’s on a different path than Bernard, and where Jeremy recalls his deliverance into his “tribe.” It seems therefore to call up a kind of mourning which recalls oneself to oneself, and it is unclear why this should be so, allegorically speaking. Is it the hope of the narrative that in time the Holocaust and other crimes of the war will fade into the landscape in the same way? That it may remind us of a common humanity of mourning and suffering, but not in such a way that compels self-interruption? Or is it a more provocative marker than this: the dolmen after all is a communal or mass grave, and the absence of names there give little or no purchase at all to the potential mourner. How are we to witness these deaths, distanced from us in time and incomprehensible in sheer number, and then how is mourning for them to be possible? In a sense the dolmen and its associated spectres might open up a void in memory, much like the one that June faces when for a moment she “peep[s] into the pit, into a chasm of meaninglessness where everything was nameless and without relation” (26). Witnessing June’s panic, Jeremy is also drawn into this vacuum and shares in June’s sense of vertigo, and from this 101 position reflects that the symbol of the black dogs is “too comforting,” in that they offer too much unwarranted security (27).

Despite the fact that the novel closes with the vision of the dogs, then, we have at least been warned not to take comfort in them. We might likewise be wary of taking comfort in the idea that June and Bernard represent equal and opposite extremes, or that the novel, despite its protestations, be taken for a less troubled allegorical metafiction than it is. There are critics who have argued that the novel’s representation of the fall of the Berlin Wall is emblematic of

McEwan’s investment in a comforting “end of history” scenario, a belief, pace Francis

Fukuyama, that the collapse of communism would lead to a new post-ideological era (see

Müller-Wood and Wood 43). While less critical of McEwan, Peter Childs holds in a similarly optimistic vein that “the pulling down of [the Wall] in Black Dogs is symbolic of the breaking down of a barrier between June and Bernard’s seemingly irreconcilable perspectives” (Childs

164). But neither of these readings fully takes into account the way the wall and its destruction are emblematic of the dismantling of the allegory’s crystalline structure, or of the structure that the novel strains to keep from breaking. A barrier is broken down, yes, but that does not reconcile the various voices in the novel; if anything, it makes for more friction between them. The violence that erupts at the wall, between a young Turkish man carrying a communist flag and a group of neo-Nazi skinheads, in many ways keeps the allegory mobile. (And it is unlike the scene of Jeremy acting out against the abusive father in that it cannot be resuscitated in moral terms.) If this is a “sign” from the real world of experience, Jeremy and Bernard do not know how to interpret it; they stay holed up in an apartment until they can flee Berlin the next day.

Historical forces are overwhelming, threatening, not just physically, but cognitively too, as they 102 overflow our categories for understanding them, much like the spores that Bernard apprehends as having settled all over Europe. As the London cabbie provokes the two men before they take off for Berlin: “‘Where’s yer stability?…. Where’s yer balance of power?’” (51); Bernard has no answer for him.

We can read Black Dogs as a provocatively unstable and unmasterable allegory for our inheritance of the war, and for the idea of inheritance after the fallout of such a war, with its enduring post-genocidal anxieties.11 In McEwan’s struggle to make some “good” out of it,

Delrez may be right in that the narrative seeks sanctuary in the family, but Jeremy is also uneasily aware of himself as the mediator of this history as it passes between generations, as his role as a publisher of textbooks makes clear.12 He is, after all, “alarmed by what the recent past tells him about the European culture with which he so readily identifies” (Gauthier 130). And even if he can construct a distance between himself and the perpetrators of historical crimes, there are intimations throughout the novel that innocence may be what we are atoning for. Not just as survivor guilt, but also guilt about our ongoing need for innocence, our need to escape culpability, and to construct an inheritance that we can feel blameless about passing on to our more patently innocent children.

It may be that the text poses this problem performatively without acknowledging it, while still striving towards a lucid and stable allegory that culminates in the “self-evident” symbol of

11 J. Hillis Miller, discussing de Man, writes that “‘[t]he relationship between the allegorical sign and its meaning (signifié) is not decreed by dogma.’ There is no available code by which the relationship can be made certain, masterable. It occurs, necessarily, but not in a predictable or rational way. It does not occur in a way based, for example, on the similarity between the allegorical sign and the earlier sign to which it refers. In allegory anything can stand for anything. No ground whatever, subjective, divine, transcendent, nor even that of social convention, supports the relationship” (Reading 163).

12 Textbooks for students, after all, represent “a production of two formidible branches of what Louis Althusser would call the ‘ideological state apparatuses’: education and publishing” (Krips 23). 103 the black dogs. If so, McEwan has at least given us, in Black Dogs, an allegory for the recalcitrance of the filial trope. A recalcitrance that is less forgivable, perhaps, in the historical context of an ongoing war, which is the position of the next novel under discussion, Saturday.

Possession, Belonging, Repetition: Literal and Literary Filiation in Saturday “What would it take not only to apprehend the precarious character of lives lost in war, but to have that apprehension coincide with an ethical and political opposition to the losses war entails?” — Judith Butler, Frames of War

In Precarious Life, and then again in Frames of War, Judith Butler argues that “specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living. If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense” (Frames 1).

The questions that arise from this issue of framing seem to me central to a discussion of

McEwan’s Saturday, and of the popular and scholarly reception that followed its release. These literary and critical discourses together function as both historical commentary and historical event, by enabling and inhibiting the ways in which understand the responsibilities of our post

9/11 (and since the novel was published, also our post 7/7) predicament. The issue is ethical and political at once, since these texts all implicitly pose the problem of war, asking, as Butler puts it,

“why and how it becomes easier, or more difficult, to wage” (Frames 2).

Saturday gives us a day in the life of Henry Perowne, successful London neurosurgeon.

Set on February 15, 2003, the novel relives the day of mass protest against the invasion of Iraq, as experienced from the point of view of a man who chooses to drive around it. Perowne’s day begins when he wakes before dawn to see a plane in flames as it crosses the London skyline before his window. His fears of a terror attack turn out to have been premature, but the double 104 threat of war and terrorism hang over the rest of the narrative, as Perowne continues through the series of relatively discrete episodes that constitute his day, including a minor accident and consequent stand-off with a thug named Baxter, in whom Perowne recognises the signs of a neurological disorder, the knowledge of which he exploits in order to make his escape. When

Baxter returns at the novel’s climax to threaten Perowne’s family during a long-anticipated gathering at their home, we find we have been expecting this, just as we expect to be able to allegorise this home invasion as a representation, on a domestic level, of the persistent threat of terrorism on the national level.

For a novel that takes on, quite self-consciously, the political realities of life in the West in a post-9/11 world, its initial public reception was remarkably uncontroversial. This may be in part because McEwan’s narrative concerns itself primarily with the seat of ethics – the localised conscience. As a neurologist, Perowne explores the vagaries of consciousness and the accidental nature of opinion-formation – he explains that his own ambivalence towards the war in Iraq is a consequence of having taken on as a patient an Iraqi professor of archaeology, who suffered imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein. Perowne is self-described as a “coarse, irredeemable materialist” who believes that “the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs” (67). In his laudatory review in The Nation, Lee Siegel tells us that this “extraordinary book is not a political novel [but rather] a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics” – a statement which is emblematic of this quelling of controversy and which this novel positively enables.

The novel is also obsessively contemporary; besides taking place within a single day within recent memory, narrated entirely in the present tense, Perowne muses on everything from 105 the “community of anxiety” television has created, to life without god and the beauty and banality of taillights at rush-hour. Reviewers of the book clearly responded to how the novel reflects their, or “our,” relationship with the present. Donna Seaman writes: “McEwan is as provocative, transporting, and brilliant as ever as he considers both our vulnerability and our strength, particularly our ability to create sanctuary in a violent world” (our world) (emphases mine). The question we have to ask, then, is whether the novel doesn’t explore the idea of sanctuary in a writerly way, which might puncture or ironise the idea, so much as it creates one.

John Banville certainly believes the latter is the case. In one of the only negative reviews

Saturday initially received, he notes the otherwise ecstatic reception that greeted the novel, asking if we in the West are “so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?…. The post millennium world,” he adds, “is baffling and dangerous, and we are all eager for re-assurance.”

But if the novel is placating in the way in which it reveals our world to ourselves, then who exactly is this we? In her New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani tells us:

Mr. McEwan has not only produced one of the most powerful pieces of post-9/11 fiction yet published, but also fulfilled that very primal mission of the novel: to show how we—a privileged few of us, anyway—live today.

This qualification – “a privileged few of us anyway”—is especially relevant if we consider how unstable the notion of the we actually is. As Steven Connor suggests, “the question of how we currently live in and reflect on the present, on ‘our time,’ must always now dispose itself as a question of the problem of the ‘contemporary,’ or in other words, of whose time our time is” (15). Butler expresses a similar sentiment in terms of the necessary difficulties of living 106 socially, in that our precarious lives both depend on and are beset by “the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (14), others who may be familiar or completely unknown and anonymous.

These are not necessarily relations of love or even of care, but constitute obligations toward others, most of whom we cannot name and do not know, and who may or may not bear traits of familiarity to an established sense of who ‘we’ are. In the interest of speaking in common parlance, we could say that ‘we’ have such obligations to ‘others’ and presume that we know who ‘we’ are in such an instance. The social implication of this view, however, is precisely that the ‘we’ does not, and cannot, recognise itself, that it is riven from the start, interrupted by alterity, as Levinas has said, and the obligations ‘we’ have are precisely those that disrupt any established notion of the ‘we.’ (Frames 14)

For the reviewers and reading public that were, at first and in general, so eager for reassurance,

Saturday’s appearance on the scene constituted an act of interpellation (à la Althusser) that seemed to conjure this much desired ‘we’ — one which might make our obligations, in a post-9-11 context, clear. Saturday fulfilled this role so well in part because it constructs its literal and literary filiations, and the relationship between them, as seamless. This might be what enabled Kakutani to write that the novel fulfilled its “primal mission,” to speak to us about our time in a way that is somehow “out of time,” and not hampered by the political in any

“topical” (as Boylan put it) sense.

Academic critics who have since taken up the novel, not surprisingly, have tended to react very differently. As Molly Clark Hillard puts it, they “have manifested considerable difficulty in liking Saturday” (185). Many scholarly articles have focused on introducing irony into a text that is “apparently without a trace of authorial irony” (Banville). While all acknowledge that it is a mistake to collapse Perowne with his creator, Saturday “is complicated by the striking absence of any specific clues that Henry [Perowne] warrants anything less than the reader’s full engagement and consideration. In light of that absence, the novel seems to imply that the author 107 endorses Henry’s perspective” (Wallace 466). In an attempt to complicate this situation, a number of scholars have hinged their readings on the novel’s intertexts, most notably Matthew

Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” but also Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Joyce’s “The Dead” and Ulysses, and

E. M. Forster’s Howards End.13 Hillard makes perhaps the most persuasive argument that

Saturday’s intertexts rescue it from stolidity and naïveté, and a kind of wilful apoliticism. She contends that the novel is in various ways about misreading, and that therefore “the entire third- person narration should be re-read ironically” (190). “Dover Beach,” she argues, does not simply reinforce the conservatism of McEwan’s narrative, as if both were “triumphs of personal intimacy and withdrawal from the world, maneuverings of a liberal individualist agency” (187).

Hillard holds that instead, conflict over how to read Arnold is part of the technique of his poetry, and that “Dover Beach” specifically “moves uneasily between self and society, vacillating between the singular and the collective” (190); as a pivotal intertext, the poem thus suggests that we re-read Saturday in a similarly uneasy and vacillating manner.

To assess this claim, we must examine the moment of the poem’s appearance: at the novel’s climax, Baxter and a friend have broken into the Perownes’ home and force Henry’s daughter Daisy to strip bare in front of them and the assembled family. This prompts the discovery that she is pregnant (“surely in her second trimester,” thinks her father the clinician

[219]), and Baxter shifts his attention from a probable rape to Daisy’s proof-copy of her book of poetry on the coffee table (“squirm-makingly entitled My Saucy Bark,” as Banville puts it).

13 See, for example, Molly Clark Hillard’s “‘When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight’: Re-Reading McEwan’s Saturday and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’”; Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace’s “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday”; Richard Brown’s “Politics, the Domestic and the Uncanny Effects of the Everyday in Ian McEwan’s Saturday” (in which he reads the novel through New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, and the “largely forgotten” poet Victor Taite Perowne, as well as Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway; and Michael L. Ross’s “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England Novel,” in which he traces the parallels between Howards End and Saturday. 108

Baxter demands she read from it, but Daisy instead recites “Dover Beach” from memory at her grandfather’s prompting. This recitation, which she performs twice (enabling both Perowne and the reader to “re-read” the text), transforms Baxter from a “lord of terror to amazed admirer. Or excited child” (223). Henry, meanwhile, doesn’t recognise that the poem is not Daisy’s, and neither is he moved by it the way Baxter is. Baxter hears “what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy’s attempts to educate him” (278). The poem thus performs a crucial structural role in the allegory, both in terms of what it represents, and in terms of Baxter’s and

Perowne’s (mis-)apprehensions of it.

By most critical interpretations, in this scene McEwan has “with one stroke created a scene of richly layered chauvinism, in which the nation — rendered concomitantly as the female body shielded by male literary heritage — deflects an attack by forces rendered simultaneously as philistine, anarchist, and terrorist” (Hillard 188). Instead, Hillard argues that Perowne and

Baxter’s shared “misreading” of the text is a “catalyst for Perowne recognizing, if not realizing, a wider community from which he has shielded himself” (192). She concludes by claiming that

Saturday is not a linear but an interlineated day; Daisy Perowne’s re-reading of “Dover Beach” is a metaphor for the novel as a whole. In a novel about heritage and inheritance, Perowne is prevented from seeing this, or merely seeing this, as a poem about his pregnant daughter; rather, he must acknowledge a more generally pregnant moment in British history. The novel, like the poem, is an argument with itself: an act of imprisonment and misprision (204).14

This argument is much like the one I will make in the next chapter about Atonement, where I will claim that its intertexts and metafictional energies work against the notions of authority and lineation that are directly figured as such in the novel. But while the case that Hillard puts forward is sensitive and productive, it is not finally a convincing reading, if only because it

14 By “misprision” Hillard means “to refuse to apprehend, to prevent another’s apprehension, or to apprehend one thing in place of another” (184). 109 hinges on Perowne coming to “acknowledge” rupture on some level. In Atonement, a fictional author-figure makes the question of authorial consciousness itself a metafictional concern, so that there is no possibility of an undifferentiated narrator/narration. In Saturday, our desire to have

Perowne acknowledge even a fraction of the historical guilt that is a measure of his privilege reflects our need to rescue the author from concomitant charges of complicity. McEwan makes such a rescue difficult to enact: Perowne’s singular and insistent interiority normalises his limitations and forecloses the novel, so that we either read the whole of the narrative as ironic, or we admit that we can only scrape together enough of a contrapuntal reading to deal the narrative a glancing blow.

As Hillard points out, Saturday is a novel about heritage and inheritance, and it is true that these things do not have to be figured as disruptive in order to disrupt. But nonetheless, we have to ask: to what extent does the novel function as an apologia for Perowne, even a kind of manifesto for neo-liberal atheist humanism, ratiocination, and good parenting? After all, Perowne is very cognisant of, and even somewhat humbled by, his good fortune; he believes and finds comfort in “possession, belonging, repetition” (40). He is prudent, intelligent and self-astute; he loves and is faithful to his equally successful wife; he has raised two talented, liberally-educated children whom he invites to challenge his politics (to a point); and he spends his days saving people from fatal or debilitating neurological problems. He believes that “to know the difference between [sleep] and waking, to know the boundaries, is the essence of sanity” (4). He is a serious man, who takes his decisions seriously—he thinks the war protesters should not be laughing as much as they are, when such a weighty resolution is obviously at stake. He fends off irony at every turn; indeed, his name is a homophone for a famous South American dictator, with the 110 spelling modified to include the word ‘own.’ Is his then a consciousness that rules absolutely over its narrative, that exerts the rights of ownership? Or is there any tension between the way

Perowne is presented as an heir and as a father, and the ways in which the text performs its own filiations, from source texts and intertexts, to its own transmission to the next generation (as it were) of readers?

There are a number of motifs common to Saturday, Black Dogs and Atonement, the most obvious being the trope of the inherited home.15 There are two in Saturday: Henry’s wife’s mother has left them their large Fitzrovia town-home, and their daughter Daisy stands to inherit her maternal grandfather’s chateau near the Pyrenees in France (and though there is some worry that an argument between the two could cause the old man to leave the place to his current love interest, this is more or less resolved by the novel’s close).16 McEwan lavishes precise (even fetishistic) detail on the hushed comforts of his London home, from the sash window, which despite “being many feet taller than him,… slides easily upwards, hoisted by its concealed lead counterweight” (4), to the corner it looks out on: “a triumph of congruent proportion; the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden — an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre- optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting” (5). It is difficult to read this passage unironically, however it was intended: the

15 See my discussions of inherited homes in Black Dogs (95-98) and Atonement (123-131).

16 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace notes that “[t]his back-story of familial insecurities, in-fighting, and nastiness not only counters the idea of a perfect nuclear family but also contextualizes the idea that property flows smoothly from one generation to the next. Inheritance, whether it takes the form of a house in France or a poetic talent, is contested and bitter. While one might argue that the depictions of these dark secrets rendered the family portrait more realistic, the novel lacks narrative clues to indicate that the multiple ironies are intentional, or that they pressure the reader to move away from Henry’s complacency” (473). 111 architect and designer Robert Adam, as a representative of the English Enlightenment (though he actually hailed from Scotland), is a figure here for the perpetuation and longevity of those principles, which depends upon the same systematic and routine forgetting of the Kristevan abject that bears Perowne’s sewage away.17 Indeed, this repression registers as a kind of uncanny foreboding when the locks on Perowne’s front doors “suddenly loom before him strangely” (36).

Perowne’s modern sanctuary does not come without a price, and is heavily fortified against the forces of the world outside: “three stout Banham locks, two black iron bolts as old as the house, two tempered steel security chains, a spyhole with a brass cover, the box of electronics that works the Entryphone system, the red panic button, the alarm pad with its softly gleaming digits” (37).

At one point Perowne remembers packing up and throwing out his mother’s things after having moved her to an old people’s home, and he muses that “no one owned anything really. It’s all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we’ll desert them in the end” (284). It is unclear at first whether this melancholy reflection on the swiftness of time will lead him to further contemplate his own possessions, and his deep investment in them.18 Later, when Baxter enters the scene, Perowne tries to see his place through Baxter’s eyes: “the belittlingly high ceiling and its mouldings, the Bridget Riley prints flanking the Hodgkin, the muted lamps, the cherry wood floor beneath the Persian rugs, the careless piles of serious books, the decades of polish in the thakat table” (207). It is a little disingenuous of Perowne to suggest that he has not done this before, and habitually — it is the reason for the litany of locks on his double front

17 As we shall see in the next chapter, the Tallises’ home in Atonement was itself originally an “Adam-style” country house, though by the time of the novel it has burned down and been replaced by something much more “crude.”

18 In her article about postcolonial melancholia in Saturday, Wallace also suggests that this scene is full of potential, in that it might imply that “the nation is due for a thorough and relentless housecleaning” (475); however, she also argues that this possibility is foreclosed when the novel narrows “to a single case of home invasion” instead. 112 doors, after all — and this passage reads more like a blazon to (cultural) capital than anything else. It betrays no tremors of cognitive dissonance (not even an awareness that Baxter would likely have no idea of either the referential or cultural signification of Perowne’s objects thus labelled), and no sense that his earlier insight into the aleatory nature of material possession and accumulation is much more than a cavalier truism. Indeed, the idea that “we can’t take it with us” justifies keeping the door bolted against “the city’s poor, the drug-addicted, the downright bad” (37). What is at stake is precisely our comfort, for the short time we are able to enjoy it.

This leads us to the second trope common to the three novels: an elderly woman losing her memory. Perowne’s mother Lily suffers from dementia in an elder care facility, June

Tremaine is also in a home in Black Dogs,19 and Briony Tallis in Atonement has just learned of her diagnosis in the novel’s coda. What does this repetition mean? Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace suggests Lily Perowne’s memory loss is synecdochic: “the plight of [Perowne’s] mother captures the psychological dislocation of all those citizens who can no longer construct a coherent narrative about their past” (474).20 If this is true of Saturday and by extension also Black Dogs, the surviving son or son-in-law at the centre of the text must take responsibility for this narrative construction himself. His narrative self-consciousness thus takes on an element of filial as well as historical responsibility, so that it is impossible to separate one from the other.21

19 And in fact, June Tremaine has retired to a converted Victorian country-house, which choice is echoed again in Atonement’s conversion of the Tallis country-home into a hotel by the end of that novel. See my discussion of June’s memory loss of page 101, of Briony’s impending dementia on pages 153-54, and of the figure of the country house in Atonement on pages 127-136.

20 Wallace argues, however, that instead of confronting this loss and dislocation directly, Saturday works by “diminishing, denying, and actively forgetting the unsettling history that produced the melancholia in the first place” (466).

21 In Atonement there is no heir to take over, and again, I think this narrative is the most successful of the three precisely because it is then incumbent upon the reader to take up this filial duty him- or herself. See the following chapter. 113

However, if we follow the implications of Wallace’s argument, to read Perowne’s mother as a figure for “those citizens” displaced by England’s history of colonial exploitation and appropriation,22 this is complicated by the way McEwan structures filiation here as pointedly and self-consciously continuous, and indeed as moving to incorporate affiliative relationships under its umbrella as well. The novel’s epigraph, from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, tells us that “what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass” is to recognise one’s fraternity with “innumerable mankind:” “You — you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot.” This is Perowne’s dilemma. Brother or ingrate: which way will he go? The community Perowne belongs to is carefully enumerated for the reader, and it comprises a pointedly diverse group of friends, associates, and patients: besides his

American co-surgeon, Jay Strauss, there are the two registrars at the hospital, “Rodney Browne from Guyana” and “Gita Syal” (7); the fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl they will operate on; the

Iraqi professor of Ancient History, also a former patient; and Perowne’s son’s band-mate Chas from St Kitts, his “favourite among Theo’s friends, and the most educated too” (152). The novel’s vision of the ethnically diverse London of the twenty-first century casts a rosy glow on

Bellow’s “innumerable” masses, for the group is friendly, well-educated, and successful (even the Nigerian girl, Andrea, who is churlish and unruly at first, is soon won over and wants to join ranks and become a doctor herself), a circle of ready helpers and the grateful-to-have-been- helped. The colonial presumptuousness of this scenario is best exemplified in Theo’s friend

Chas, for despite the odds (in this case a suicidal mother and strictly religious father),

22 See Wallace’s “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” 114

“something about the name St Kitts” has made him a profusely kind young man, which in turn has provoked in Perowne “a vague ambition to visit the island” (152) as a tourist.23

Early on in the novel, before his run-in with Baxter, Perowne drives by a man sweeping the gutter, and their eyes meet: “For a vertiginous moment Henry feels himself bound to the other man, as though on a seesaw with him, pinned to an axis that could tip them into each other’s life” (74). Such erosion of boundaries is the peril of too much brotherhood, especially of a brotherhood that includes the unfortunate. Later, at his squash game, and feeling especially vulnerable after the accident, Perowne desires only to shut out the world: “It seems to Perowne that to forget, to obliterate a whole universe of public phenomena in order to concentrate is a fundamental liberty. Freedom of thought” (108). Perowne asserts this freedom by battling it out on the squash court, in an attempt to reassert mastery over phenomena as such, public or no. This is how he individuates himself and keeps the larger “community of anxiety” (176) at bay.

These eruptions of Perowne’s repressive impulse are all prelude to his final confrontation with the universe of public phenomena in the form of Baxter. But if the figure of Baxter is meant to challenge Perowne’s strict regulation of his liberal idea of brotherhood, he also has an entire discourse on family inheritance and genetics to overcome. Perowne is reading a biography of

Darwin — Darwin’s phrase “there’s grandeur in this view of life” is something of a refrain throughout the novel — and at one point he even compares himself to the scientist (who like

Perowne, found Shakespeare unimaginably dull). In a certain sense, evolutionary theory might

23 This kind of mild imperialist attitude saturates the text, as it does some of McEwan’s nonfictional writings. As Hillard notes, “McEwan’s comments about ethnic and religious freedom seem especially reactionary.” She quotes McEwan in a 2005 interview with Der Spiegel: “‘[t]here is no refuge and if you want to be in a city like London, with its relatively successful racial mix, it’s impossible to defend’; and ‘[w]e have been caught too much by a sense that we can just regard (radical clerics) as being like English eccentrics at Hyde Park Corner.’” The associations, Hillard remarks, “are disturbing: immigrants make England unsafe, and white religious dissenters are ‘eccentric,’ while those of color are ‘awful lunatics’” (186). 115 itself represent a kind of discontinuous filiation, and its evolutionary steps or jumps, as accident and mutation, could be filled with productive and disruptive potential. For Perowne, however, genetics serves an explanatory and delimiting function: “There is much in human affairs that can be accounted for at the level of the complex molecule” (91). This is especially true when it comes to Baxter, whose behaviour can be comprehensively explained by his neurodegenerative disease: “Here is biological determinism in its purest form. More than forty repeats of that one little codon, and you’re doomed. Your future is fixed and easily foretold” (93-4). Evolutionary theory, and science in general, are explicitly poised throughout the novel as a counterpoint to religion and “the primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined,” or what Perowne and his colleagues call “a problem… of reference” (17). And yet Perowne admits that for him, evolution functions as a creation myth and religion: “An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter… and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities — and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true” (56). Daisy calls him out on this, describing his faith as a kind of “genuine old-time religion” (56), but her criticism doesn’t seem to blur the lines at all for Perowne, and the narrative moves swiftly on. Then later, when Perowne catches Baxter off guard with his accurate diagnosis of his condition, the two of them are described as existing together “in a world not of the medical, but of the magical. When you’re diseased it is unwise to abuse the shaman” (95). Here, the magical thinking is all Baxter’s, and Perowne exploits it in order to escape from him and his friends. Thus the final distinction between Perowne and Baxter is that Perowne has the power of science, and the luck of genetics, on his side. 116

This difference informs their respective genealogies, for while Baxter is doomed to suffer the same demise as his late father, Perowne is free from such a fixed and overdetermined fate, with only one mention of his absent father, whom he grew up without and “didn’t remember” (46). While Perowne muses that he has inherited a certain physical prowess from his mother (who was a swimmer), as well as her meticulous disposition (“Surely it was because of her that Henry feels at home in an operating theatre” [155]), there is no sense that his father’s genes exert any kind of influence in his absence. This lack of a father figure effectively makes

Perowne a self-made man, especially when it comes to performing as a parent himself, with no model of fatherhood to aspire to.24

Of course, Perowne is indirectly in contention with his father-in-law Grammaticus, especially as the older man has taken on a fatherly responsibility for Daisy’s literary education himself. Perowne is affronted when his father-in-law behaves as though at home when he comes to visit. He tells us that this is because he has “no place in his constitution for a father figure” (196), but he also seems sensitive to the idea that the house may not be legitimately his, and perhaps rankled that he has to consider the idea of “legitimacy” at all. Grammaticus is, as the name implies, a figure for language itself, but perhaps not only that: Saxo Grammaticus, whose name means “lettered” or “learned one,” was a twelfth-century Danish cleric who wrote the

Gesta Danorum, a heroic history of the Danes, which contains analogues to Beowulf and was a source text for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Correspondingly, the inheritance that Grammaticus seems to represent is a kind of heroic and lettered lineage, with the authority of the canon behind it.

Though Perowne has only married into this lineage, his children reap the benefits. As artists

24 While the idea of the free-agent status of the orphan is somewhat undermined by the metafictional elements in both Black Dogs and Atonement, it seems relatively untroubled here. It almost seems, in fact, that we are meant to feel as territorial about his rights to free-agency as Perowne does himself. 117 launching promising careers — Daisy is a poet and Theo a musician — his children are writers themselves, and authors of their own fates (in a way Baxter never will be; as Perowne says of his fate: “It is written. No amount of love, drugs, Bible classes or prison sentencing can cure Baxter or shift him from his course. It’s spelled out in fragile proteins, but it could be carved in stone, or tempered steel” [original emphasis 210].).

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Perowne’s relationship to this artistic (and especially literary) heritage has been widely discussed, mostly as critics mine it for its ironic potential — of which there is plenty. When Perowne tells us that this “notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t ‘live’ without stories, is simply not true. He is living proof” (68), our attention is drawn to Perowne’s status as fictional creation, who wouldn’t “live” but for the story that gives him life. McEwan also draws our attention to his own body of work as ironic intertext when he has Perowne complain to Daisy about “the so-called magical realists” (67), and, besides

Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, he references a magic-realist moment from one of his earlier novels, A

Child in Time (“One visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him” [67]25). Such moments are antithetical to Perowne’s scientific materialism, and he protests that “the supernatural was a recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible” (67-8). But even though these authorial intrusions invite the reader to share a knowing wink with the author, they provide scarcely an opportunity for much more. In this novel that works so assiduously to

25 This moment marks an early interest of McEwan’s in the filial trope, as the protagonist of that novel travels back in time to witness his parents’ decision to keep him. A Child in Time in general explores the uncanny sense of stasis experienced by a father who has lost his child, and who is only able to enter again into the present once his wife gives birth to another baby. Though it does not deal explicitly with the inheritance of war (which is why I am not exploring it at length here), a reading could be made which would tie the filial trope in this novel to the Thatcherite exploitation of Britain’s Victorian past. 118 chronicle a day in a contemporary life, McEwan’s writerly responsibilities to mimesis are clear, and clearly moral in this context; these moments act to distance the author of this novel from his former experiments with magic realism, and re-orient the reader to his current concerns, figured as more pressing, more politically urgent, and more grown up.

With her persistent attempts to sensitise Perowne to the powers and pleasures of literature, the character of Daisy attempts to enact within the novel the rehabilitative gesture attempted by Saturday’s more sympathetic critics: she functions as Perowne’s writerly conscience, and it seems, the novel’s too, as when she points out the fatuity of her father’s neat bifurcation of the material world from the imaginative realm (68). But even here, the novel resolutely grounds itself in its own “steady, workmanlike accumulation” (67), and sets out anxiously to circumscribe the event of its own reading, to control its dissemination, as it were.

Indeed, Daisy causes Perowne a fair bit of anxiety. He finds her poetry too “wanton,” and worries that it celebrates “restless novelty” over faithfulness (184); her pregnancy suggests that the subsequent production (and reproduction) of meaning will be beyond Perowne’s control, and will exert its own kind of agency and authority beyond him (“A woman bearing a child has her own authority,” he says [277]). This clearly disturbs Perowne, who must “contend…with his fatherly thoughts, with nascent outrage at this unknown Italian’s assault on the family’s peace and cohesion, at his impertinently depositing his seed without first making himself available for inspection, evaluation…. Daisy’s pregnancy…rises before him in clear light, a calamity and an insult and a waste” (240).

Of course Perowne does express a provisional acceptance of the pregnancy by the end of the novel, for he is pragmatic above all, and has decided that this will make everyone happy. He 119 warns us, in fact, not to be so hungry for calamity and disaster, in life as in reading: “There are always crises,” he says, and we should not be so “foolishly apocalyptic” about them (77). He warns us against fashionable trends in the humanities, and Daisy’s literary-critical sensibility, which try to convince us otherwise: “The young lecturers [at Daisy’s college] like to dramatise modern life as a sequence of calamities. It’s their style, their way of being clever. It wouldn’t be cool or professional to count the eradication of smallpox as part of the modern condition” (77).

He exhorts us not to follow this example simply because we are looking for something “more amenable to analysis [since] happiness is a harder nut to crack” (78). Perowne’s self- congratulatory acceptance of Daisy’s pregnancy thus works to contain his fatherly apprehensions as well as any writerly anxieties we might have about the “otherness” of the text and its disruptive potential.

Perowne’s other child, his musician son, produces an unambiguously positive aesthetic experience for his father, and yet it is exactly the kind that Levinas would critique as being passive and smugly self-referential. At his son’s band practice, Theo sings what is perhaps the novel’s moral: “Baby, you can choose despair,/ Or you can be happy if you dare./ So let me take you there,/ My city square, city square” (170). Happiness is a choice, indeed it is the daring as well as the responsible choice—made much easier if you happen to live in a comfortable house on a city square, and are inside looking out at it. Theo’s music, Perowne insists, is about “giving us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself” (171). Up to the last clause, this has the ring of a Levinasian ethical imperative about it, but Perowne ultimately resists this

“impossible” ethical encounter precisely because he cannot envision losing something of himself 120 in the bargain.26 In fact, he cautions us against such idealism, equating it with all kinds of dangerous extremism.

Out there in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever — mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it’s tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes. (171-172)

Just as his music is less threatening than Daisy’s poetry, Theo’s politics are also much more restrained than his sister’s. Perowne muses that “[n]aturally, Theo is against the war in Iraq. His attitude is as strong and pure as his bones and skin. So strong he doesn’t feel much need to go tramping through the streets to make his point” (151). So even if Perowne’s artist children have political beliefs, here, in a novel that locates itself in the midst of pressing political decisions, and where “Dover Beach” is the most subversive intertext, the artist and the art that are shown to be most powerfully affective are withdrawn from the political sphere altogether.

Not only that, but Theo literally embodies his politics in his physical makeup, which is as

“strong and pure” as Baxter’s is defective and anarchistic. With respect to this genetic crapshoot,

Perowne muses that it is “a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence,” and that while this “can be quite an affront to parental self-regard,” it can also “let you off the hook” (25). A gesture of humility with regards to his own supremely talented children perhaps, but with more insidious implications when it comes to Baxter and everything he might be made to stand for. Indeed it comes close to licensing a mild form of social

Darwinism, not without its noblesse oblige.

26 Note that Levinas and Derrida also characterise the ethical encounter as impossible, but in the sense of being infinite, and therefore of enacting an imperative that can never be met or definitively answered. In this way, the encounter is traumatic, and one does lose something of oneself in the bargain, namely a stable and bounded sense of identity and subjecthood. 121

On the level of allegory this is certainly disturbing, for if Baxter personifies the terrorist, the anarchist, or even just the generalised chaotic forces of the other to whom we are beholden, his actions are circumscribed and he cannot be fully granted either agency or alterity. But then how are we to read what Perowne’s final face-to-face confrontation with this figure? Levinas tells us that any movement provoked by the face of the other is in some sense violent: either the self suppresses the other in order to preserve its identity, or the self puts its identity at risk by heeding the call of the other towards absolute responsibility for it. This violence, according to

Levinas, “shatter[s] any possibility that thought might ever embrace or encompass totality” (Caygill 108). One of his most striking images of this engagement is taken from an essay of his on Blanchot, in which he writes “[t]he other—the sole point in which an outside is opened. He plants a knife in my flesh” (Blanchot 169). This metaphor is literalised in the novel, when Baxter holds a knife to Perowne’s wife’s throat. Later, she tells her husband that she experienced the knife against her flesh as a moment in “no time…out of time” (268): a pure present, without duration, in which her sense of self temporarily, temporally, did not exist. Of course, it is not a physical violence that Levinas speaks of, and Rosalind understandably desires retribution after this threat to more than her identity has passed; however, as a mimetic representation of and a metaphor for the one-on-one encounter with the face of the other,

Perowne and McEwan do have a lot to say about the idea of responsibility. Once Baxter has been overtaken by Perowne and his son, and rushed off to hospital with head injuries, Perowne decides he will be the one to operate, and he will convince his family not to press charges against him. He isn’t sure if this constitutes forgiveness, exactly, because what he experiences is a sense of his own guilt and responsibility towards Baxter: for having crossed the police line in the first 122 place, and for using his medical insight to embarrass Baxter in front of his friends, setting the chain of events into motion. While this is clearly a generous and humane response to his attacker,

Perowne also makes this motion once Baxter is no longer a risk, and his family are safely ensconced in their urban fortress again. The next knife we see is the scalpel, which Perowne uses to open up the back of Baxter’s head. Here we are given another experience of “pure present”:

Perowne has no sense of time in the operating theatre, but he is the one wielding the knife, and his identity is not at risk. Besides, Perowne is able to forgive his assailant only after he recognises something more sensitive, more civilised, than himself in Baxter’s response to the poem. Because Baxter is ultimately more on the side of culture than anarchy, he can be gathered into the economy of the same without too much awkward resistance.

None of this is to deny that the novel represents ethical openings by asking us to witness this confrontation and by prompting important questions. There are calls to a kind of ultra-ethical responsibility here: with reference to Schroedinger’s cat, the hidden reality of which we have no access to, Perowne wonders “How can we trust ourselves” with important decisions (39)? When his family is under siege, he gives us a motto for living as ethical agents: “When anything can happen, everything matters” (207). But in giving us these questions, and the story of Perowne’s decision-making, the novel gives us the image of the knife, but not the puncture. Levinas describes what he calls an ontological courtesy that we extend to the other, when “the self relinquishes its own place in the sun – its imperialism – ceding its place to the other in a putting into question of the self” (Robbins 151). Perowne purports to extend this courtesy to Baxter, but narratologically, performatively, the novel never does. Indeed it is precisely because this is a novel about cognition and decision-making that Baxter is pushed beyond the frame. As Judith 123

Butler puts it, “[d]ecision fortifies the deciding ‘I,’ sometimes at the expense of relationality itself” (Frames 183).

Perowne is open to the experience of relationality, clearly, as in the scene I mentioned earlier of the street-sweeper with whom he exchanges glances, and who provokes in him a queasy and even vaguely traumatic sense of permeability. But Perowne (and thus the narrative) regains his ground and reinforces his epistemological framework by thinking this:

After the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century, after so much vile behaviour, so many deaths, a queasy agnosticism has settled around these matters of justice and redistributed wealth. No more big ideas. The world must improve, if at all, by tiny steps. People mostly take an existential view — having to sweep the streets for a living looks like simple bad luck. It’s not a visionary age. The streets need to be clean. Let the unlucky enlist. (74)

By this logic, and under the aegis of evolution, the atrocities of the past century would seem to grant us licence to promote the status quo, in a way that is suspiciously analogous to the genetic determinism that lets Perowne “off the hook” as a parent. And if by the end of the novel,

Perowne is humbled and somewhat shaken, his convictions are not: as he looks out over the characters roaming his city square, he thinks: “No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public places of every town. … [A]ll you can do is make them comfortable somehow, minimise their miseries” (272). Perowne is determined to frame his relation to the other in this way, without proximity or interruption; indeed he is in all senses exactly where he started out, in a mirror image of his morning and the book’s beginning, looking down from his window before climbing back into bed.

More than anything else, perhaps, these passages mark the novel’s philosophical divergence from Black Dogs, where the death of grand narratives is at least a legacy to be struggled with and against, an aporia we are uncomfortably and precariously bound up in. It may 124 be that the relative mobility of Black Dogs is an effect of generational agon, a kind of willful struggle against the conforming powers of historical legacy, easier to discern than traumas that are still clearly that: traumatic. Or it may be that in constructing an inheritance or lineation from such a history, Black Dogs was bound to be more complex, if only because, as J. Hillis Miller puts it, long lines can’t help but become “knotted, repetitive, doubled, broken, phantasmal” (“Line” 232).

But perhaps the major difference between Black Dogs and Saturday has as much to do with the context of its reading as with the context of its writing. In fifty years it may be possible to look back and perform a more provocative interpretation of the novel than I have felt capable of performing here. By way of contrast, I return to Molly Clark Hillard’s article on misprision as a largely convincing reading of Saturday through its provocative intertexts. For example, she turns to an allusion to Joyce’s “The Dead” that closes the novel: Perowne kisses his wife and thinks: “There’s always this…. And then: there’s only this. And at last, faintly, falling: this day’s over” (279). Hillard wonders if, in giving space to Joyce’s story, “the victims of England’s imperial endeavors are allowed to walk free in the text” (203). As a reader and a critic I am torn, because while I believe she is right to argue that its intertexts open the novel up beyond its self- confirming borders, I can’t help seeing this pastiche of an epiphanic moment as much more than a kind of smug anticipatory canonicity. In working to contain trauma and alterity at every turn, the novel will not allow those victims much purchase in the narrative, and because this criticism is so proximate to the events of two still ongoing wars, there is too much at stake in terms of the epistemological framework that Butler describes. To put it quite bluntly, it may be that this novel 125 enables the kind of thinking (possession, belonging, repetition) that makes war that much easier to wage.

In a way, whether or not Saturday achieves closure is a moot point, since the task of the critical reader (and therefore of any active inheritor of this novel) is to provoke an unsettled and unsettling reading by examining the forces towards closure, and their disequilibriums, both within and exterior to the text. Though the novel’s final clause is “this day is over,” what we must feel as teachers and critics is that this day (in which anything can happen, and everything matters) is never over, and must never be allowed to close. CHAPTER THREE

The House We Live In: Inheritance, Hospitality, and the Idea of Atonement

She wanted to leave, … and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. —Atonement

As many critics and reviewers have noted, Ian McEwan’s Atonement seems to have been intended as his contribution to, or comment on, the great secular tradition of the British country house novel. Integral to that comment is the novel’s final twist: in the novel’s coda, ostensibly written almost fifty years after the novel proper is set, it is revealed that the character Briony is the author, and that the novel itself attempts to perform the titular act of atonement for her crime.

As I will show, the novel constructs this crime as representative of the artist’s position after

World War Two, and employs the trope of filiation in its exploration of the possibility of forgiveness.

The temporality Atonement offers is caught up in its metafictional and intertextual gestures, especially in tropes of filiation and inheritance, via the country-house novel tradition and otherwise; at the same time, it is equally caught up in the idea that the novel might function performatively as an ethical gesture that, while necessarily coming too late, might also enact a heterogeneity of temporalities. For these reasons it is less unified than Briony—or perhaps even

McEwan—might want it to be. This essay will explore the possibility that Atonement, as Steven

Connor writes with regards to The Satanic Verses, might also be

caught up by what Levinas calls the powers of temporal “intrigue” against the inertia of temporal “concordance,” powers which make it possible to begin imagining the conditions under which a kind of justice may be framed and effected, a justice in and to our own time, as well as to the other times, that bear upon it – in short, to the contemporality of the contemporary. (33)

126 127

Though the novel is ultimately framed, via the coda, in terms of the novel’s present in (almost)

‘contemporary’ Britain, this present is never at one with itself: the novel’s metafictional explorations of the country-house genre as an inheritance that is burdened with its own crimes, along with revelations of Briony’s authorship, work to undermine the notion of this kind of self- present identity. The liabilities and dispensations of authorship become impossible to disentangle from the times of all the others that impinge upon and transform it, as the victims of Briony’s crime mingle with and indeed become victims of the war, and, through the novel’s shifting perspectives on the country-house genre, these times mingle with those of the historically dispossessed, and finally with the dispossession of English history itself in turn. There is no reconciling these various times, for as I will show, in calling the reader to assume the position of moral arbiter and heir, Briony’s crimes and her inheritances ultimately, uneasily, become ours as well.

Like other country-house novels, the setting in Atonement exerts the presence of a character, though a ghostly one. Over the course of the novel’s long and carefully paced first section,

McEwan invites the reader to roam the grounds and take in the view, rich as it is with allusions to its predecessors in the genre, from Richardson, Fielding and Austen, to James, Waugh, Woolf and

Forster.1 While this isn’t the only novelistic tradition that McEwan references or partakes in

1 Besides the obvious and explicit references to the first three of these authors (Richardson, Fielding, and Austen), E. M. Forster’s “house novel” of fatal social misunderstanding, Howards End, is also alluded to, as is the pivotal fountain scene from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and the dinner scene at the Ramsey summer home in To the Lighthouse. (Indeed the structure of Woolf’s novel is to some extent mirrored here — an idea I will return to in this chapter’s final section.) Two of the genre’s great contributors from the interwar period, Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen, are also referred to in the text. 128 here,2 it is a tradition that puts the idea of tradition itself into question, and this is of particular importance in the novel. Alistair Duckworth, in his classic study of the genre, wrote of Mansfield

Park that “the estate as an ordered physical structure is a metonym for other inherited structures

—society as a whole, a code of morality, a body of manners, a system of language” (2). In

Atonement, McEwan’s “Jane Austen novel,”3 the idea that the Tallis family home is an

“inherited” country estate is thus somewhat inescapably a comment on the form of the novel today. As Hermione Lee notes, “Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now.” By placing itself at the emblematic centre of the country-house tradition, McEwan’s novel also asks what ideas of inheritance the novel itself has inherited, what its foundations and landscapes, its burdens and responsibilities might be, and what this might have to do with the problem of atonement.

In her book about early-modern country-house discourse, Kari Boyd McBride writes that by the end of the seventeenth century, country houses signified wealth though they were no longer sources of it, and as such, that the business of signifying status shifted from the house itself to representations of it, in literature and painting. She argues that

[although] the social order, the disposition of the countryside, and the definition of nationhood had changed profoundly since [the first country-house] poems were written, the tropes of country house discourse, like spectral shadows of a defunct culture, were repeatedly summoned – long after the world they invoked had ceased to exist (in any form, however backward-looking and nostalgic), long after that world had ceased even to

2 Judith Seaboyer also notes the novel’s affiliation with other novels about novel-reading and novel-writing, including Clarissa and Lolita (31).

3 McEwan himself refers to Atonement as “my Jane Austen novel” in interview with Jeff Giles in Newsweek. He notes the ways in which the novel rewrites Northanger Abbey’s theme of a naively literary-minded young heroine whose inability to distinguish between reality and fantastical projection causes havoc in the world around her. The novel’s epigraph, as discussed below, is taken from this novel. Other critics have noted McEwan’s use of free indirect speech, a technique Austen pioneered, as well as the novel’s echoing of Mansfield Park’s motifs of the play that is never performed, the sexually aggressive outsider who is welcomed into the fold, not to mention the absent father and supine mother (Hidalgo, Childs). 129

represent the ideal. The discourse became a kind of shell, the carcass of a venerable house through which a series of social commentators passed, renting the empty rooms to stage nostalgic social scenes before moving on to other discourses – of nation, empire, capital, and urban development. But country house discourse remained an obligatory station on some kind of ineluctable pilgrimage to the relics of the past, a necessary stop in the quest to establish legitimacy (171).

Though I will argue that Atonement ironises this quest, it is important to note that it does so without disinheriting itself. The novel doesn’t move on to other discourses so much as it chooses to live with the spectral shadows, and meditate on inheritance, mourning and hospitality, all structural features of the novel tradition that it chooses to keep alive. And indeed, the ironies that saturate the country-house tradition are necessary to Briony’s ethical project, which has her bring the lovers back to life in a self-consciously mournful gesture, as ghosts in a house already haunted.

One of the central tenets of the ethos or code of morality to which Duckworth refers above, and which has been celebrated since the country house poems of the seventeenth century, is the idea of the estate as a centre of care and “bounteous hospitality to all who sought it” (Kenney 5).4 What nature—that is, the land and its folk—provided, landowners put to good use as landlords and hosts (mostly, it must be noted, hosts to other landlords). However, as any careful reading of the country-house tradition will show, and as Derrida reminds us, hospitality is inherently contradictory, in that there is no hospitality “without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home, [and] since there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence” (OH 55). By definition, then, the entire country house genre has always been riven with these kinds of exclusions.

4 Virginia Kenney identifies the three fundamental values lauded by country-house poems: hospitality, independence from the court and court intrigue, and frugality, or ‘right use.’ She cites such early poems as Aemelia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-Ham” (1611), Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (1616), and Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” (1651). 130

Atonement enacts a crisis of hospitality, and therefore a crisis of ethics and justice, that brings these generic tensions to the surface. In Part One, Briony Tallis, a precocious thirteen- year-old and budding writer, wrongly accuses her older sister Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, of a crime.

Robbie is a guest at the house for a dinner party, but he is also a long-term guest on the land: he and his mother live in a cottage that Mr Tallis has gifted to them, and Robbie’s education has been funded by Mr Tallis. The novel’s orphan-character, Robbie’s gypsy figure of a father left without a trace when he was very young, and he grew up spending much of his time at the Tallis home. Now, back from Cambridge with a first in English, he is set to inherit this cultural tradition and all the opportunities an elite education provides, when, after Briony’s accusation, he is forcibly expelled from the house in a violent reversal of the hospitality he had been shown until then. Part Two jumps ahead five years. Having been released early from prison on the condition he enlist as a private in the Second World War, Robbie is part of the retreat to Dunkirk.

In Part Three, which is contemporaneous with Two, Briony, who is now eighteen, has come to grips with the ramifications of her crime and seeks to atone for it by working as a nurse in a

London hospital. She acknowledges that this penance “would never undo the damage” (285), but its particular form is at least etymologically apt.5 Briony tracks down her estranged sister to ask her and Robbie for their forgiveness. In the Coda, however, which is set in 1999 and written in the first person by Briony, now an acclaimed novelist, we discover that Atonement is her fictionalised creation, and that her attempt at reconciliation dramatised at the end of Part Three never happened: both Robbie and Cecilia were casualties of the War before she was ever able to ask their forgiveness. In an act of substitution that is itself ethically problematic, Briony’s writing

5 Hospital derives from the latin hospitalis, “of a guest or host,” derived from the root hospes (OED). The modern “hospital” has a long history, however, and first appears in Middle English as hospitalum, “a place of protection or succor, a refuge, asylum” (MED). 131 is meant to perform her atonement. We also learn that Briony is now on the verge of death herself, and that the novel is to be—or has been, since we are reading it—published posthumously.

This scenario creates several dilemmas for the reader. The ostensible author of both the crime and the book is dead, as are the crime’s two victims. As Derrida might have put it, “[t]he story, and the true subject of the story—and the book now, because the three people involved are dead —is a survivor.”6 Posthumous publication makes the text the survivor, raising the question of the book’s title: Who is to decide whether the novel atones? Who inherits responsibility for the crime? As Derek Attridge suggests in “Posthumous Infidelity,” the very structure of surviving entails an act of mourning that is a kind of posthumous infidelity. Briony certainly commits infidelities with her novel: she brings the lovers back to life, for one, and arguably, her somewhat critical relationship to the country house genre is another. For if Briony situates herself as an heir to this tradition, it is as “one who respects the logic of the legacy enough to turn it upon occasion against those who claim to be its guardians, enough to reveal, despite and against the usurpers, what has never yet been seen in the inheritance” (Derrida qtd. in Attridge 27). For the reader,

Briony’s inheritance of the country-house genre is inseparable from her project as a whole, as the ethics of fictionalising Robbie and Cecilia’s stories are caught up in the discordant temporalities that Briony summons via the novel tradition. It is then up to the reader to ask whether Briony’s infidelities are a kind of fidelity, or if they are self-serving in the end? Is this mourning ultimately narcissistic and appropriative, or does it perform the more difficult work of remaining unfinished

6 In fact, Derrida did say this in interview, in reference to another novel: Le Parjure by Henri Thomas. The original reads: “The story, and the true subject of the story – and the book now, because the two men are dead – is a survivor” (life.after.theory, 16-17). 132 and open to everything it cannot authorise? What, by implication, is this novel’s relationship to its generic inheritance, and what are the implications for the genre?

Pilar Hidalgo argues that McEwan’s use of the country-house motif is surely ironic, as “the Tallis family background is anything but distinguished (the grandfather had kept an ironmonger’s shop and made the family fortune with patents on padlocks and bolts), and the house itself is not only ugly but something of a fake” (84). The original Adam-style house was probably built in the early or mid-eighteenth century—around the time, in other words, that Richardson and Fielding were publishing, so that its origins coincide fairly neatly with the inception of the genre of the country-house novel. By the time Atonement begins, though, this history is pointedly discontinuous. The original building on the Tallis property burnt down in the late 1880s and was replaced by a heavier, squatter and unfortunately orange example of baronial Gothic, a modern pastiche of a country house full of its own inauthenticities, from the staircase stained to look like mahogany to the fireplace that has never worked to the portrait of the unknown, vaguely aristocratic family that the grandfather has installed in the dining room, presumably to impart a sense of history and inheritance to the place.7

These ironies are best exemplified in the derelict island temple, a folly that is an example of the kind of neo-classical garden architecture that was popular in the late eighteenth century.

The temple’s surrounds are the setting for crucial decisions and misapprehensions on Briony’s part: they are where she decides she is no longer a playwright, but a writer of psychological realism and where she indulges in fantasies about her Olympian prowess yet decides she is no

7 In Saturday, the Perownes also live on a square designed by Robert Adam — an authentic “triumph of congruent proportion” that seems perfectly continuous with that “eighteenth-century dream” (Sat 5). 133 longer a child and will not go chasing after her brother in the trap (73-77). It is also where she stumbles upon Paul Marshall and Lola Quincy in the dark, and decides to play the avenging angel for both her sister and her wronged cousin (164-68). In other words, it is one of the spaces from which the tragedy of the novel stems. When McEwan first describes it, he tells us that from the beginning it had “of course no religious purpose at all.” We understand—the “of course” is a nod to the reader—that this is a secular age, and that our ideas are housed within secular philosophies. The temple was intended only as “an eye-catching feature to enhance the pastoral ideal” (72) of the Adam-style house and its bucolic, rolling grounds.

As examples of Greek revival, both structures were designed to commemorate a fallen civilization, an irony reinforced by the absent house and the neglected status of the temple, which is

the orphan of a grand society lady, and now, with no one to care for it, no one to look up to, the child had grown old before its time, and let itself go…. The idea that the temple, wearing its own black band, grieved for the burned-down mansion, that it yearned for a grand and invisible presence, bestowed a faintly religious ambience. Tragedy had rescued the temple from being entirely a fake. (73)

The temple is “supposed to embody references to the original Adam house” (73), and as such is a self-conscious appendage to a self-consciously literary mode—much as Atonement appends itself to the country-house tradition, itself derived from the conventions of classical pastoral poetry. It is significant that no one in the Tallis family knows what those architectural references are, and that the temple is thus figured as an orphan who does not know how it resembles its parents. An orphan’s inheritance is at most indirect, and in worse cases only yearned for. Orphans are also significant because they have played a role in the “crisis of inheritance” narrative that has been central to the novel since Tom Jones – a foundling who, it turns out, is related to the lord of the 134 manor after all. With many country-house novels that follow, inheritances pass through spiritual heirs: Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Brontë’s Jane Eyre are impoverished middle-class women of innate nobility who marry into their estates. By the twentieth century, in Forster’s Howards

End, the house’s spiritual heir inherits the property without having to marry into it; after that, it seems, the genre “degenerates” into mournful nostalgia (Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited), critique

(Huxley’s Crome Yellow and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover), and critical nostalgia

(Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day), novels in which the idea of legitimate lineage is either broken, or ought to be. If Atonement’s relationship to the country-house genre (that “grand society lady”) is analogous to the temple’s relationship to the house, then by positioning itself as an orphan,

Atonement cannot but relaunch the tradition in full awareness of its discontinuities, recapitulating its conventions in order to critique them, and “mourning” or inheriting them in that sense.

We might also say that though the country-house novel had no explicitly religious purpose, now that we are left with its absence, our mourning for it has an aspect of the sacred about it, at least insofar as this image isn’t simply bathetic—because of course, while these allusions are McEwan’s, they are also Briony’s. On one hand, they are a projection of her childhood desire for tragedy as a consecrating rite—a desire which plays out with devastating consequences. On the other, they are a projection of the adult Briony, the celebrated author of

“amoral novels” who, now close to death, might hope that her own modern adjunct to the disappeared tradition has been rescued from being “entirely a fake.”8

But if Briony’s pursuit of legitimacy via country-house discourse is always already undermined because of these discontinuities, the novel does not content itself with being a

8 This may also reflect McEwan’s anxieties about his own development as an author of “macabre” fiction, who has turned to more weighty topics to rescue his career from a felt lack of moral seriousness. 135 simple exercise in genre. Instead, it poses the question of its own title to itself, self-reflexively:

Can any story Briony might write ever atone for the transgressions it represents?

Fearful Symmetry: Authorship, Inheritance, and Forgiveness

Forgiveness is thus mad. It must plunge, but lucidly, into the night of the unintelligible. —Derrida, “On Forgiveness”

Once control of thirteen-year-old Briony’s play is usurped by her cousin Lola, she wishes imaginatively to “go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began” (14); this is exactly the desire that drives her Atonement narrative. In trying to locate the moment of her guilt, Briony tries to find a way back to an original innocence through her writing. Looking back on herself as a child, she acknowledges that this moment is a fiction:

“she felt obliged to produce a story line ... that contained the moment when she became recognisably herself” (41). Even as a fiction, however, what she gives us is a moment of non- self-coincidence. The point she returns to is framed quite self-consciously in this scene, when the young Briony contemplates the movement of her own hand in a moment that is emblematic of the complexities of self-contact:

The mystery was in the instant before [her hand] moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. (35)

Briony here performs what J. Hillis Miller describes in “Absolute Mourning”: “I never make contact with the other, and I never even make direct contact with myself, as the Western tradition of ‘humanualism’ falsely assumes” (320). Humanualism is Derrida’s term for the tradition that grants primacy to touch and sees the human hand as the primary organ of touch, through which 136 analogy it also presumes that self-knowledge, self-presence, and self-“touch” are possible.9

Briony bumps up against the limits of this tradition when she acknowledges that “there was no catching herself out” (36). Unable to fix on the moment she made the decision to do wrong, neither can she fix on the moment of innocence before — we might say that this is the precise

“failure” of the novel.

This scene of the hand is followed closely by another, so that the two seem paired to spotlight exactly this tradition of ‘humanualism:’ as Briony observes her flesh-and-blood hand,

Robbie, preparing for the evening ahead, briefly considers his own anatomical drawing of the bones of the hand. It lies on his desk alongside a still-life made up of a muddle of books of poetry, photographs and letters from his undergraduate days, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, and “a message from Jack Tallis agreeing to help with fees at medical school” that signals a change to

Robbie’s life as momentous as Briony’s own (90). The image is explicitly tied back to the novel, when, in the same scene, Robbie thinks: “Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall—this was the doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too. He was thinking of the nineteenth-century novel” (93). Robbie has these thoughts while striding confidently towards the Tallis house, filled with the experience of freedom and self-determination. His model for self-coincidence, however, is tellingly nostalgic for the well-rounded humanism of the Victorian novel. He has modeled himself as the hero of his own life, but the model is out of date and his freedom is about to be violently curtailed by the young Briony’s competing novelistic pretensions, and the class system that abides by similar conventions. The elderly Briony drops an ambiguous hint for the reader here by placing a copy of A Shropshire Lad on Robbie’s desk: both a portent and an irony, this

9 A tradition which Derrida problematises in On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, which is where he coins the term. In the French, it is less unwieldy: humainisme combines humanisme and main, or hand. 137

Victorian poem-cycle celebrates pastoral England while it mourns nostalgically for the deaths of young soldiers and the passing of youth.

These two scenes featuring hands connect these two heirs to the novel tradition. The drama of Atonement is therefore how one heir usurps the other: Robbie is not given the chance to live out his inheritance, in terms of his dreams of being a doctor, as Briony is able to live out her dream of being a writer. Robbie is in many ways the “spiritual heir” to the country house: well- educated and more than sufficiently cultured, he is familiar with its grounds without feeling entitled to them, to the extent that he considers a career as a gardener so that he can tend to them in the manner in which they are historically accustomed. Briony is the house’s material heir, and her performance of her inheritance through the country-house genre is also a performance of her usurpation. The novel’s questions of authorship, responsibility and forgiveness are thus all inextricably bound to the problem of inheritance, as they mediate the problem of the sovereignty and ownership of the storyteller — of the heir and survivor who is alive to tell the story.

If Briony’s hand is an emblem of her responsibility, for the moment when the future was still “in her hands,” as it were, it is also an emblem for her power of creation as a writer, and the two touch on each other without coinciding.10 That is, the same hands are responsible for the crime and for the novel that is her atonement for it, but one can never really make up for the other. If this impossibility is what opens the way for ethics, and for a kind of irresolvable or absolute mourning, perhaps we can read Briony’s comment in the coda that “the attempt is all” in this light (371). Robbie’s hand might be read as an emblem for his dedication to learning and

10 As J Hillis Miller reminds us, there is a more complicated aspect to these hands, not in terms of humanualism so much, but of the ethics of touch and touching. Moving beyond truisms about non-self-coincidence, Miller shows us that the truly radical step Derrida takes is in arguing that, “[p]aradoxically, … this inaccessibility is what makes it possible for me to ‘make contact’ with the other as other” (“Absolute” 318). Self-touch is not doomed to failure so much as it is always already a constitutive impossibility, but one that is the opening of everything we most value, the movement of ethics towards the other. 138 reading (since he links it to the Victorian novel), even perhaps of the self-coincidence he seeks there. And though retrospectively imbued with dramatic irony, there is a generosity in this scene for all that Robbie could have been. Robbie’s hand also implies his desire to touch, literally to caress Cecilia, and Briony likewise shows us this appetite, as tender as it is lustful, with a hospitality that she was not capable of as a child.

As a child, Briony’s fastidious need for order is evident in her desire for and approach to narrative. The stories that attract her are bound, contained, controllable, and lend a sense of invulnerability to their author. When she tries to stage her play, and other needs and other minds intrude, she finds the process so maddening that she gives up on being a playwright after the first rehearsal. This young Briony wants control over and symmetry in her writing, but her later desire for atonement through fiction, or for fiction that can perform an act of atonement, would ostensibly be rendered impossible on this account. In his essay “On Forgiveness,” Derrida connects the problem of forgiveness to the sovereign self who desires a certain “symmetry between punishing and forgiving” (37).11 For Derrida, forgiveness is necessarily an asymmetrical act, one that defies common sense and narrative closure; otherwise, the gesture is merely caught up in a therapeutic and normalising economy. To this end, Briony’s early stories come under scrutiny — by Briony herself, as well as by the reader — for the degree to which they adhere to a certain authorial sovereignty and common sense.

Briony’s first attempt to tell the story of her crime is a short story entitled “Two Figures by a Fountain,” which we hear about only second-hand, in Briony’s descriptions and in the

11 For both Vladimir Jankélévitch and Hannah Arendt, Derrida argues, “[f]orgiveness must rest on human possibility — I insist on these two words, and above all on the anthropological feature which decides everything (because it will always be about, at the end of it, knowing if forgiveness is a possibility or not, or even a faculty, thus a sovereign ‘I can,’ and a human power or not)” (37). And later he comments: “One returns regularly to this history of sovereignty. And since we are speaking of forgiveness, what makes the ‘I forgive you’ sometimes unbearable or odious, even obscene, is the affirmation of sovereignty” (58). 139 rejection letter she receives from the editor of Horizon, a literary magazine. She first describes the story as a purely aesthetic venture, and measures its success in terms of its literary modernity, a contemporaneity which defines itself in spatial terms:

What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots….To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design – this would be an artistic triumph. (281-82, my emphases)

Both she and “CC” — for Cyril Connolly, the real-life editor of Horizon at the time12 — recognise her debt to Virginia Woolf in this approach, but as he points out to her, “[s]uch writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement.” He suggests that the story needs “an underlying pull of simple narrative,” since this “static quality does not serve your evident talent well” (312-13). Briony feels she is implicated ethically by her aesthetic choices: the “hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen – none of this could conceal her cowardice….It was not the backbone of a story she lacked. It was backbone” (320).

Briony’s self-critique is thus also a critique of the modernist novel. As Blakey Vermeule comments, despite the several streams of consciousness that Briony explores in “Two Figures,” her consciousness overrides them, and from this we infer a notion of “how morally dubious it was to let…the modern novel become modern” (153). In Briony’s own words, “[t]he novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past” (282). According to Levinas, modernity—at least the literary kind to which Briony’s novella adheres here—is absolutely suspect in this regard, as it abolishes diachrony by prioritising the new over all the other temporalities that intersect with

12 It is telling of McEwan’s reading of the modernists that contemporary reviews of Horizon called it a magazine with a political bent, though McEwan has CC say outright that “artists are politically impotent.” This seems to look ahead to Saturday, and McEwan’s portrayal of the artist’s role there. 140 it.13 While Briony’s story is based on memory, we might argue alongside Levinas that this early attempt works too assiduously to aestheticise those memories, in the process flattening out the multiple temporalities that Levinas would say are integral to ethics as such. As I stated above, readers eventually learn that Part One of the novel is Briony’s final version of the story she has written and rewritten over the course of her career, so that the whole novel in its present form is haunted by this early, modernist short story, just as her life has been haunted by it, and by the way that representations of it are intermingled with and inseparable from the events of that terrible day. Thus we find two competing stories here, one host to the other: the first is the story

Briony wants to tell about crime and forgiveness, and the second is the story of inherited form that houses it, weighty with memory and mourning.

The idea of forgiveness as Briony thematises it makes its first appearance in the relatively capricious thought that Cecilia has about Robbie, as she climbs into the water to fetch the broken piece of vase: “Denying his help, any possibility of making amends, was his punishment” (30).

This economy of withholding gives us a simple equation: it is punishing to live without forgiveness. At the end of Part One, the young Briony imagines for the second time a conversation between Robbie and Cecilia as seen from a window; in this one, Cecilia forgives

Robbie his transgressions towards both Lola and herself:

Briony was touched by her sister’s capacity for forgiveness, if this was what it was. Forgiveness. The word had never meant a thing before, though Briony had heard it exulted at a thousand school and church occasions. And all the time, her sister had understood. There was, or course, much that she did not know about Cecilia. But there would be time, for this tragedy was bound to bring them closer. (185)

13 See my discussion of Levinas on modernist temporality in the Introduction, pages 20-28. 141

The ironies are multiple. The crime in this second scene is Briony’s, not Robbie’s; it will drive

Cecilia from her, not bring her closer; and though Briony imagines forgiveness will come easily to her sister, she proves resolutely unforgiving. Briony’s idea of forgiveness enters into another economy here, but this time it is characterological or narratological in nature: the former in the sense that Cecilia’s magnanimity is a necessary part of her role as Briony imagines it, a role she has been writing since the moment of the scene at the fountain. This Cecilia is a damsel in distress, who is nonetheless able to appreciate the sacrifices Briony is willing to make on her behalf. A narratological economy governs Briony’s plan for this rescue, which will have the consecrating effect of tragedy, a grand and ordered catharsis that she has been able to orchestrate.

Forgiveness in this case is thus subsumed by the logic of story, and again takes on a kind of symmetry—one that cannot be sustained by the actual tragedy Briony has set in motion. Already, forgiveness is symbolic of everything Briony cannot control, as an artist and as a person.

The theme persists: by Parts Two and Three the weight of Briony’s actions are evident, and she is clearly described as “unforgivable.” Part Two is focalised through Robbie, and while he can imagine reconciling with Cecilia’s parents (and even urges Cecilia to do so) (233), “he did not think his resentment of [Briony] could ever be erased. Yes, she was a child at the time, and he did not forgive her. He would never forgive her. That was the lasting damage” (234). The ambiguity of that last sentence poses a question for both Briony (as the author) and the reader: what damage, and to whom? To Robbie, for being a victim of a crime so heinous as to be unforgivable, or to Briony for being considered, at one with her crime, unforgivable herself? Or, even before that, does the damage reside in Robbie’s refusal to forgive, a sign of Robbie’s loss of innocence and the way he has been ‘spoiled’ by his resentments? If so, it is also a testament to 142

Briony’s moral courage, in creating a man so destroyed by her crime, for clearly Robbie holds

Briony responsible here, and in Part Three, Briony agrees: “she would never undo the damage.

She was unforgivable” (285). By the coda, Briony-the-author admits that while she was able, through her narrative, to give Robbie and Cecilia happiness, she was “not quite so self-serving as to let them forgive [her]” (372).

Signs of this older Briony’s moral-authorial consciousness ironise her portrait of herself as a child, particularly in her need for geometry in narrative: the idea that Robbie is the guilty party comes down to “common sense…the truth was in the symmetry” (169). She is not the only one implicated here—everyone from the police officers who demand that she stick to her story, to Leon and Mrs. Tallis, who accept it without challenging it, are prey to this same conforming logic.14 A contiguity is established here between the crime and its later representations, and as readers we should remain aware of the extent to which the entire novel is also implicated. There are signs of Briony’s authorial self-awareness scattered across the surface of the narrative, markers perhaps of her uneasiness that this artifice is ultimately self-serving, a textual trail of breadcrumbs that lead back to the scene of the crime.

The least obvious of these signs are simply related to issues of precision of reference, or are images that recur in different contexts, each of which signals the presence of a shaping consciousness. Once our attention is flagged, even the presence of Amo bars seems artful, designed to implicate Marshall in the story and in the way in which it unfolds—he’s there in the

14 Others are also implicated in the need for the narrative to come together. In supposing that Briony must have been harbouring love for Robbie, and that she acted as she did out of bitter disappointment and rancour, Robbie imposes his own logic of motivation to the story—he too has to make it make sense. Of course, this is Briony’s version of Robbie’s thoughts, leaving us to wonder whether anyone in Briony’s world can escape the logic of narrative. 143 packs of soldiers at Dunkirk, he’s in the pockets of dying soldiers in the hospital in London.15 We know from the coda that much of Briony’s (and McEwan’s) material has been gleaned from or suggested by letters in the Imperial War Museum and through correspondence with soldiers present at Dunkirk, as well as from Robbie’s and Cecilia’s letters. There is also something uncanny about these doublings and overlaps, because in a sense, Briony was there in Dunkirk, just as she was there at the fountain and in Robbie’s bedroom in the cottage; the only real access we have to the events is through Briony, and they would not exist for the reader without her.

Evidence of this kind of self-referentiality is also unsettling because the terms of mediation that the reader believes herself to have accepted have shifted, and she finds herself suddenly, if retrospectively, within a metafictional mise en abîme. No longer readable within a realist frame, fictitious events produced by the text operate as events within its own story, and in order to have effects within that story, in order to alter it.

Briony’s authorial will becomes problematic on another level when, in an entirely fabricated scene in Part Three, she has Robbie request a long letter to explain, moment by moment, how she came to accuse Robbie as she did, retrospectively making Part One of the novel the fulfillment of a request he never made. In this light, perhaps Lynn Wells is right to suggest that “Briony’s entire narrative,…up to her joyous reintegration into the family around the performance of her play, is constructed as a fantasy text that elevates her self-interest over genuine concern for the other” (125).16

15 “Nettle...had a bottle of wine and an Amo bar which they passed around” (Atonement 239). Also: “[Briony] came the closest she would ever be to the battlefield, for every case she helped with had some of its essential elements — blood, oil, sand…or damp sweaty battledress whose pockets contained rancid food along with the sodden crumbs of Amo bars” (304).

16 Of course, Wells is also reading Atonement in light of her reading of Saturday, as a fiction which obfuscates its own social implications. 144

But the reader’s desire for the closure of a marriage plot is also put to the test by the false happy ending which is then snatched away by the revelations in the coda. Briony-the-author demands of us: “What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account?

Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism?” (371). That the lovers would die is simply not in order; that their deaths should result from the literary pretensions of a young girl even less so, making the outcome far from satisfyingly symmetrical. As Briony-the-nurse says once she sees Robbie alive in Part Three, the possibility that he might have been killed seemed outlandish: “It would have made no sense” (338). As readers we have the option of two endings, and to the extent that we prefer the fictional one, in which Robbie and Cecilia live out a lifetime together, whether or not they can in the end forgive Briony, we bear some of the burden of Briony’s “sense-making” narrative desires. She makes her crime ours.

In her coda, Briony frames the problem of atonement as a problem of authorial consciousness:

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. (371)

This is a complicated and, understandably, much discussed paragraph, because it refuses to acknowledge, one way or another, whether Briony, McEwan, or the reader does or should believe that the novel performs the act its title signifies; it refuses to tell us if this act of atonement is meant to work. On the one hand, Briony tells us that atonement is “an impossible task,” but as 145 we know from Derrida, impossibility may be the condition of true forgiveness in the first place.17

Besides, Briony tells us that this impossibility is the point and that the attempt “is all,” again muddying the issue of what exactly the novel resolves.

In “On Forgiveness,” Derrida reminds us that “it is…necessary to think about an absolute victimisation which deprives the victim of life, or the right to speak, or that freedom, that force and that power which authorises, which permits the accession to the position of ‘I forgive’” (59, original emphasis). While Briony did not will or directly cause Robbie and Cecilia’s deaths, they are her victims, and she has assumed for them their right to speak. In coming up against the real limits of Briony’s authority and authorship – that she can’t make them forgive her – the question is nonetheless left open: who can? We know from the coda that everyone directly involved in the crime is gone, and that they have left no children of their own behind. All of which asks: what happens to the crime? Who inherits it? If the novel is Briony’s act of mourning and atonement, how is the reader implicated? We may find that we want to forgive Briony, but this raises the problem of our own sovereignty over the text; we may decide that the crime should die with her, even if its story lives on; either way, some sort of response is required of us. What sort of afterlife, or “afterwards,” do we give to this text?

This question can be rephrased metafictionally: if Atonement is an attempt to rethink the problem of the novel beyond the geometrical, modernist model, what kind of temporality is at work here? As Briony admits herself in the coda, the novel does constrain to “make sense,” and to the degree that it does, is it obliged to fit the genre of well-plotted realism? The novel’s omniscient narration is not disrupted or intruded upon in any obvious way until we reach the

17 Derrida writes, quoting Jankélévitch: “‘Forgiveness died in the death camps,’ he says. Yes. Unless it only becomes possible from the moment that it appears impossible” (“On Forgiveness” 37). 146 coda. To this extent, the entire narrative Briony constructs—of her crime, its results, and the path to her restitution—maintains a certain sense-making geometry that adheres to the logic of punishment and forgiveness. As she recognises, the problem Briony faces in constructing a novel-as-atonement is at the same time a problem of identity, a problem of how to author a novel that authorises an act of forgiveness. The remainder of this chapter will show how the tropes of filiation, biological and textual, play a role in the novel’s exploration of this problem.

Afterwords and Afterwards: War, Filiation and Mourning

Mourning’s capacity to dwell in failure always also signals the task of responsiveness.

—R. Clifton Spargo

One way of modelling the novel’s temporal structure is to think of it in terms of a temporal loop: once we have reached the end of the revelatory coda, we have to begin again, at least in the sense that the entire narrative as we have understood it (as apparently heterodiegetic) demands to be reconfigured. After that, and on subsequent re-readings as well, the metafictional folds only become more complicated, not less. The “point before the destruction began” becomes more and more elusive on each reading, as the various temporalities overlap and seep into each other; the novel’s beginning recedes into the distant past, and the impending destruction seems already to be in motion, underwriting every sentence.

This sense of imminent destruction is inseparable from the sense, early in the novel, that the war that has not yet begun is nonetheless inevitable: Mr. Tallis spends his days calculating the number of war dead, and war-profiteering Paul Marshall is already counting on his Army Amo bars to make his fortune. Also in Part One Cecilia expresses a sense that events are retrospectively fated: standing by the pool with Paul and her brother, she feels that “it had 147 happened a long time ago, and all outcomes, on all scales—from the tiniest to the most colossal

—were already in place” (53). This whole first section of the novel proleptically reinforces the sense that events must play out the way they do, most dramatically in the moment just after the rape, when Briony decides she will identify Robbie as the aggressor, and we speed ahead to find that she refuses to rethink the matter until she is well into her teens. The reader is then inserted right back into the ongoing narrative, to experience, in excruciating detail, Robbie’s now overdetermined demise.

Taken together, the intimations of war, Cecilia’s sense of fatedness, and the narrative prolepses underline the sense that the entire novel is nachträglich, enacting an “afterwardsness” in which “it is only—indeed will only have been—afterwards, later, in the future, that the significance of a past event can emerge” (Guild 56). This sense is reinforced by the way the novel’s structure mirrors that of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: the languorously-paced and relatively pastoral first section is interrupted by war, after which its concerns and even its form have to be re-evaluated and recalibrated (especially in terms of the artist’s goals and desires, voiced through the character of Lily in Woolf’s novel). Because of Atonement’s metafictional temporal loop, the future in which this recalibration can take place is continually deferred, so that the atonement the novel might purport to achieve is reduced to a kind of traumatic repetition.

Indeed, what distinguishes this novel from To the Lighthouse is the way in which it repeats the latter novel, and all its other antecedents as well, therefore also repeating the trauma of the first war in its invocations of the second: a kind of double doubling-back, as it were, each war and each text introducing at least one other fold in time. 148

Paul Ricoeur has argued that narrative unites otherwise disparate temporalities, bringing phenomenological experience, both the personal and the historical, together with the cosmological (4).18 There are forces in the novel that lean towards an understanding of the story as a kind of “at-one-ment” that achieves this purported unity.19 In fact, McEwan’s proposed title for the novel, “An Atonement,” suggests that it does in fact achieve an atonement; we should be thankful to the friend who suggested he leave off the indefinite article, as the current title opens wider the possibility of reading the novel as a discourse on atonement, on the idea or the question of atonement.20 But even as a question, the desire for atonement, real and achieved, is there and palpable, and necessarily so: if “the attempt is all” it needs to be genuinely longed for and sought after. Briony’s desire to unite her many narratives is evident, for example, when she acknowledges that her crime has been compounded by the war, but hopes that a narrative atonement might reconcile them both, or at least make sense of her story alongside her experience of the war, and Robbie’s too. This yearning for transcendence is one thing, the achievement of it another, and to the extent that Briony thinks she might have achieved it, we might argue that she is being a little disingenuous. After all, she is at least as good a writer as

McEwan is, and Briony at seventy-seven is no longer the young girl who decided she preferred fiction to drama because she could have “the pages bound” into a “neat, limited and controllable

18 Jago Morrison writes about this with regards to Black Dogs: “Between the vast scheme of cosmic time, the meaning-laden scale of the historical, and the private, fluctuating experience of personal time, there is the potential for discordance. The task of narrative is to cement a continuum between those three orders of time perception. It could be argued that narrative in Ricoeur's scheme has a fundamentally conservative function. Arising out of ‘a pre- understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources’ [54] and mediating between those and the experience of the reader, narrative over and over rehearses and reproduces the hegemonic time frame. It ensures a comfortable continuum between our understanding of the cosmic or absolute, our sense of our historical placing, and the texture of our everyday experience” (260).

19 In fact, some scholars see the book this way; see Claudia Schemberg’s Achieving 'At-one-ment': Storytelling and the Concept of the Self in Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, and Atonement.

20 “In 2001, Garton Ash persuaded McEwan to drop the ‘An’ from the title of his new novel, ‘An Atonement’” (Zalewski). 149 form” (37). Whatever her original intentions for Atonement, in making it an afterword to the country-house novel, this narrative has no neat beginning, and no secure place within a continuing tradition. The temporalities it summons remain disparate, so that what the novel gives us is not so much a transcendent realm outside of time where atonement might be achieved, but rather the very discontinuities of time itself in the novel’s metafictional folds: not an outside, but an inside, the very texture of time, and the ways in which history is what need not have happened.

This irreconcilability is clearest in the coda, where the fate of the Tallis estate makes it clear that we are no longer in a country-house novel, as the grounds have been converted to a golf course and the home to a hotel, open to anyone willing to pay. The temple has been torn down and is nothing but a story of a memory of what was essentially (neoclassical) nostalgia in the first place. Given the reader’s unstable relationship to Briony and her narrative at this point, these kinds of retreating ironies place us, and Briony, in a very wary relationship with these shifting histories.

Looking back, though, it seems that this breakdown of direct inheritance was latent from the beginning. In Part Three we learn that three families of evacuees from Hackney—a socio- economically deprived London borough to this day—have been billeted in the Tallis home, where one of the children has broken off the Triton’s horn and arm, and another of the mothers is writing to an MP to have the fountain and the lake drained for safety’s sake. The park is to be ploughed up for corn, iron fencing (also dating from the 1750s) is taken away to be melted down for Spitfires (pointlessly, as the metal is unsuitable), and a cement and brick pillbox is installed by the river, destroying the wildlife habitat there. History thus interrupts the pastoral landscape 150 envisioned in A Shropshire Lad, reminding us that our mourning for Robbie, as its avatar, is not reducible to this kind of nostalgia either.

The hotel is called “Tilney’s,” a metatexual reference to Atonement’s epigraph, which is taken from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. There, Henry Tilney admonishes Catherine

Morland for her preference for Gothic rather than realistic narrative resolution: “What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are

English: that we are Christians.” The latter (understood in this context strictly to mean

Protestant) follows from the former, and together they ground a perspective from which both moral and narratological judgements might be made. As the epigraph continues, the discontinuity between Austen’s age and the historical and historiographical context of Atonement is implicit:

“Consult your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.

Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?” For Briony and for the reader, these questions are not simply rhetorical: our education could not and cannot prepare us for the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries because they continue to exceed the bounds of the observable and the probable. As to whether our laws connive, this is an issue of ongoing and retroactive justice that the novel, in tackling the problem of historiography and atonement, also implicitly engages, without resolution. However we inherit these questions, the house named for the man who asked them no longer occupies a patrilineal position of authority

As I discussed in my last chapter, Black Dogs raises the question of bearing witness to a blank tomb, and of the possibility of mourning in the absence of specificity of identity or location. I would like to suggest that the country house in Atonement functions as both haunted 151 host and tomb, by asking us to consider the atrocities of the Second World War, and the responsibilities left to those who survived it. Both Robbie and Cecilia left, never to return; we do not know where their bodies lie, but presumably neither is buried on the estate. But this only helps to make the house a fitting blank tomb. Scarred by his experience of war, Robbie bitterly denounces “[a] dead civilisation. First his own life ruined, then everybody else’s” (217). As

Duckworth suggests, the country house is a metonym for the inherited structures of that civilisation, and while neither Robbie nor Cecilia were at home there any more, it is the locus of their commemoration. They join the other spectres that continue to haunt the genre of the country-house novel.

In this light, I propose a counterpoint to Wells’s argument that Briony’s return home overwhelms and negates the possibility of considering the novel as an ethical speech-act.21 Yes,

Briony is the centre of a family celebration of her and her writing career, and yes, she does feel the thrill (“ridiculous vanity!”) of her audience’s appreciative laughter, but she is also aware that this performance of her play comes “sixty-four years late” (369). Indeed, this performance is emblematic of her failure, as a writer and as a sister, to have intervened in time. (We can take this phrase quite literally, to say that Briony cannot intervene in time, play with time or change the way time happens.) If the novel is an example of what R. Clifton Spargo refers to as “wishful intervention,” or “the wish that events had been and might still be otherwise” (Ethics 24), the fact that Briony uses the coda to admit to her failure and to the limitations of writing means that in the end, this narrative is a piece of mournful realism that insists upon the failure of wishfulness, however ethically motivated it might be. As Spargo argues, “when a mourner’s ethical fantasy of

21 The argument that Briony’s narcissism closes out this possibility is made quite convincingly by Lynn Wells in her article, “The Ethical Underworld: Ian McEwan’s Fiction.” 152 protection fails (as it must), the sense in which she has been called to responsibility is not diminished by what she has been unable to accomplish” (Ethics 30). Though the novel closes with an image of Robbie and Cecilia, still alive and still in love, smiling through the performance of Briony’s play, this is explicitly a fantasy that Briony does not have “the power to conjure” (372). She does add that the idea “is not impossible,” suggesting that if she were to write them into the scene at the party in 1999, they would, in a way, exist. She doesn’t, however, and so for the reader Robbie and Cecilia are conspicuously absent, and Briony’s hand in their separation and death cannot be ignored by the narrative.

Without entirely denying Briony’s narcissism, we should also recognise that this world, of which she finds herself again briefly at the centre, has changed irrevocably from the world in which she grew up. Briony admits that she has “no idea these days what the significance is of a glottal ‘t’” (367), and with regard to her West Indian cab driver, that she finds it “quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music” (362). She seems ambivalent about these changes to the

England of her childhood. As with the house, England has already been inherited; it is no longer hers. Whatever her desire to control the narrative and its reception, it will be entering into and circulating in this world that she’s about to leave for good. Briony’s impending dementia signals that even before her death, and possibly, for intervals during the writing or rewriting of the manuscript of Atonement itself, she has experienced gaps in the narrative, and has or will take her own peeks into the void that causes June (and Jeremy, by proxy) in Black Dogs so much anxiety. There is a sense in which Briony knows she will not control circumstances under which 153 the book will be inherited by future readers, and even that she may only barely be in control of the events of its production in the first place.

This unease about textual inheritance (or afterwardsness) is again modelled in terms of biological filiation. Briony herself wonders early on if having children might not be incompatible with the writing life she desires (159). She also tells us that during the war when she is cut off from family, home and friends, “writing was the thread of continuity” (280). While writing may not exactly be Briony’s substitute for children, she does offer her story in place of the children

Robbie and Cecilia would never have. These substitutions are ethically complicated even further when we consider the letter I mentioned earlier, in which Briony has the ghost of Robbie demand one kind of legacy in place of another.

We are told that Robbie desired children. He had once thought that never knowing his own father enabled a certain freedom from inheritance, an opportunity to be self-made, but as an adult he experiences this freedom as rootlessness and futility, which is exacerbated by the chaos and violence of the war. “When the wounded are screaming,” he tells us, “you dreamed of a family line, connection” (241). But though he says he wants children in order to establish lineage and become his father’s son, this desire seems to respond also to the desires of all the other

English and French soldiers who would not survive the disastrous retreat to Dunkirk or the evacuation to Britain, or by implication those who would not survive the rest of the War.

Thinking of them, Robbie mourns the idea that “[t]hey would never be counted, all the dreamed- up children” (242).

Of course, on rereading, we know that Robbie’s thoughts are imagined by Briony. So we have to ask why she would choose to implicate herself like this, not just in the deaths of Robbie 154 and Cecilia, but also in the lost lives of their children. If, as Lindsay Tuggle writes, anxieties about mourning resonate around the unburied dead, Atonement betrays an additional anxiety for the unborn, not just the dead in all their potentiality and futurity, but also those other others in the radically unforeseeable future. Tuggle interprets Abraham and Torok’s concept of the transgenerational phantom as “a shared phenomenon” that becomes embedded in cultural memory, passing “not only from parent to child, but also across national and cultural generations” ([10]). When the dead include wished-for unborn children, the directions from which these phantoms come are conflated: are they from the past, or from the future? By inviting the ghosts of the unknown dead into the narrative, along with their unrealised futures, the mourning the novel seeks to perform is infinite and unrealisable. As such, these ghosts are a figure—but not just a figure, a real absence or an impossible presence—for Levinasian asymmetry, and Derridean mourning, and our responsibility for them is impossible to measure.

Briony reminds us that she was “not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet” (372). This “not yet” is the burden the reader takes away from Atonement. We inherit everything embedded in this novel, the whole history; we cannot choose which parts to inherit, because as Derrida writes, heritage is what violently elects us.22 This “not yet” leaves us with choices. How do we choose to mourn for and grant forgiveness to these characters, and to what extent do we believe ourselves to be in a position to do so? How do we do justice to their stories, when we find that they are more and more implicated in the stories that went before them? If

Atonement works as an ethical gesture, and this is always an open question, it is only to the extent that it leaves these questions unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable.

22 Please see the epigraph to the introduction for the full quotation from which this is excised. CHAPTER FOUR

Dreams of Tenderness: Responsibilities to and of Childhood in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction

“Even these days,” Mrs Hoffman said beside me, “early in the morning, I have these dreams. Always early in the morning. The dreams are always about … about tenderness.[…] As soon as the day starts, this other thing, this force, it comes and takes over. And whatever I do, everything between us just goes another way, not the way I want it.[…] By the time I go down to breakfast, all the things I felt in the dream, they’ve long since gone.” — The Unconsoled

If, as I argued in the preceding two chapters, Ian McEwan increasingly paints his authorial self as a kind of father-figure, we might argue that Kazuo Ishiguro does the opposite, figuring his narrators increasingly as children, or at least as adults who never manage to fully accede to the mores and norms of rational (and emotional) adulthood. As I will show, this is emblematic of a more fundamental difference between the two writers, for while McEwan has moved more and more to the centre of the (putative) canon, self-consciously representing the rational, mimetic, scientistic, and paternalistic, Ishiguro has, in general, moved increasingly and just as self- consciously to confound his readers and critics, by giving us worlds of nightmare and dream logic, unstable allegories that frustrate expectations of correspondence and coherence.1

1 To clarify this observation with regards to McEwan’s Atonement, while Briony isn’t necessarily ‘paternalistic’ as such, and while she is obsessed with an event from her childhood that she is unable to fully move past, the novel as a whole performs her accession to adulthood, in that it is a coming to terms with her past, her memories and her guilt, and a taking of a kind of adult responsibility for them, at last, in order to atone for them. The fact that, as I argued, the novel does not ever unambiguously accomplish this ethical feat is sort of a moot point here, as is the idea that this “failure” is what makes the novel work. What the difference comes down to is that while Briony is, for all intents and purposes, responsible for the injustices that befall Robbie and Cecilia, Ishiguro’s narrators desperately wish they were responsible for the various disasters and crises that they find themselves caught up in. Furthermore, the more they pursue their moments of reckoning, the more these moments recede, or are exposed as never having been “moments” at all. In When We Were Orphans, for example, the narrator Christopher Banks relentlessly pursues the idea that he was somehow responsible for his parents’ disappearance when he was a child, and for their recovery now that he is grown, but it turns out he had nothing to do with it; instead, their disappearances had everything to do with much more ‘adult’ concerns, far beyond his purview as a child: empire, corporate power, and sexual jealousy.

155 156

The two authors are united, though, in their earnest pursuit of what it means to be an

English writer after World War Two; as Natalie Reitano notes, Ishiguro’s novels have

“consistently plumbed the turbid shallows surrounding the Second World War” (364) in order to respond “to a certain dilemma facing the direct heirs of Enlightenment universality — English writers” (366). Ishiguro’s narrators find themselves caught up in the same allegorical structure as

Jeremy from McEwan’s Black Dogs: orphans in a literal as well as metaphoric sense, and in “the wake of the failure of universal history promised by Enlightenment ideology and the imperialist projects it legitimised” (Reitano 366), these narrators are desperate to construct a provisional history they might take up and make their own. Ishiguro’s “histories,” though, are even more tentative than the ones sketched out in Black Dogs. Unlike Jeremy, Ishiguro’s narrators have not given up the search for their parents. Though Jeremy admits that one “remain[s] an orphan for life” (xiv), he is able to move beyond this impasse by accepting his loss, constructing a narrative of it, and taking on the very adult responsibilities of parenthood. Ishiguro’s narrators are adults as well, and are ostensibly defined by their successful careers — Ryder from The Unconsoled is a world-famous concert pianist at the height of his artistic powers, and Christopher Banks from

When We Were Orphans is a world-famous detective who sets out to find his parents and, it is suggested, stop a war — but they both work much harder than Jeremy ever does to convince themselves of their achievements and sense of belonging. (And as parents, both of Ishiguro’s narrators are responsible for abandoning their children at some point along the way.) The psychic burden of orphanhood not only weighs on Ishiguro’s narrators, but infects the overall texture of their narratives; unlike Jeremy, they cannot sustain objective, detached, realistic modes of representation, even to the extent that Black Dogs is any of these things. Since Ishiguro’s 157 narrators are unable to let go of their desire to re-experience the joys and to understand and heal the wounds of childhood, they pursue irrational “dreams of tenderness” in which they hope to meet, finally, with all the parental comfort and recognition they need.

This chapter will examine two of Ishiguro's most formally experimental novels — The

Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans — in terms of the author's obsession with childhood as a land his narrator-protagonists have never left. James Wood has said that the highest achievement of When We Were Orphans is “the gentle way it offers Christopher’s tale as a surreal allegory of the ways in which we are the prisoners of our childhoods, the criminals of our pasts, always guilty with memory” (in Beedham 134). I would like to expand the notion of allegory presented here, and argue that both this novel and The Unconsoled figure childhood not just in terms of a personal past, but as the past of a broader historical legacy and a filiative process in which the genre of the novel—as a Derridean kind of textual inheritance—partakes.

Both novels present dream-scape narratives which function as historical allegories: The

Unconsoled for the philosophical desolation of post-World War Two Europe, and its desire for consolation through art, and When We Were Orphans for British Imperialist ties to China at the outset of the Sino-Japanese war (and by extension, the Empire’s culpability with regards to the

Second World War as well). Ishiguro’s fascination with childhood is central to these allegories.

In both novels, the narrators are orphans, either literally or metaphorically, and they are motivated primarily by the need literally to find their parents, and to recover a sense of their parents’ love for them. These personal quests are connected with overcoming broad public crises: bringing consolation to the people of an unnamed central European city (in The Unconsoled), or getting to the heart of evil in a world on the brink of another world war (in When We Were 158

Orphans). This desire is certainly ironised: both narrators are patently unreliable and actively repress all notions of instability and alienation from their memories of their pasts, and their quests are disproportionately ambitious and quixotic. This desire is also, however, an earnest driving force of narrative, as each novel exhibits a complicated nostalgia for the plenitude experienced or imagined in childhood.

For Ishiguro, childhood represents a way of imagining a better world, a utopian vision worth working towards, perhaps in the manner of Fredric Jameson's idea that “the origin of radical or ‘revolutionary’ action lies in the plenitude of psychic gratification – in happiness – experienced early in life” (Sim 76). But it is also more complicated than this, for if the child represents futurity, a fecundity and a responsibility we work towards (as it is with Vander’s unborn child in Shroud, and with the narrators’ children in Black Dogs and Saturday), the child, or childhood, also represents a cultural past (as Briony’s pre-war, country-house childhood might in Atonement). And Ishiguro is far from suggesting that we might recover a sense of psychic plenitude in our history. In fact, the childhoods that Ishiguro’s narrators remember are never quite in synch with the idealised English childhood they feel they ought to have had, and this dissonance works to deconstruct ideals of childhood as nostalgia for national origin. As Ishiguro has said of himself, but which might as easily be applied to both Banks and Ryder, “[n]obody’s history seemed to be my history” (Boundary 115).

No One’s History: The Figure of the Child

Childhood is a lost realm somewhere in the past of our lives and the past of our culture. — Robert Pattison

Though usually we conceive of inheritance as passing from the older generation to younger ones, the child in literature has also been made to stand in metonymically for ideas of nation, heritage, 159 and continuity, just as often representing a conduit to the past as a guarantor of the future. In his classic 1978 study of the child figure in English literature, Robert Pattison notes that since

Rousseau and Wordsworth, childhood has been seen as a condition which “for the vast majority of men is irretrievably lost as soon as completed,” and that it represents “a lost realm somewhere in the past of our lives and the past of our culture” (58). The sentiment the child evokes, however, “is not for our own lost youth, but for immediate transcendence and joy available to us as adults through the vision of childhood” (62). As Derrida might put it, this version of the child betrays a “nostalgia for origins… and natural innocence” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 93), wherein the origin of the child coalesces with the provenance of a culture or a nation, each exemplifying a hopeful sense of untrammeled possibility. This explains to an extent why the child Pattison traces is not associated so much with parents and family, but is usually detached, a

“solitary, isolated figure… [set] against backgrounds of social and philosophical melancholy” (Pattison ix). The child represents a past that is mythic and ahistorical, inaccessible to the adult world of politics and historical contingency.

In contradistinction to this idyllic fantasy of the child, Ellen Pifer finds in contemporary fiction more fragmented and disturbing images. She cites the child figures in Toni Morrison’s

Beloved, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Salman Rushdie’s

Midnight’s Children, which do not function as vessels for ideals of self and memory, but rather as dramatic embodiments of historical forces. That these writers all “construct images of childhood radically cut off from the myth of original innocence is hardly coincidental” (2). Whatever particular histories they confront,2 Pifer writes, “these novelists construct images of childhood

2 Pifer describes Morrison, Kundera, and Rushdie as confronting “the history of the African Americans sold into slavery, the Czech people held in thrall under Soviet communist rule, or the colonization of the Indian subcontinent by the occupying forces of the British empire,” respectively (2). 160 that reflect the experience of a subjugated people or nation. Each of their literary children, in other words, proves ‘handcuffed to history’ at birth [Rushdie 3]” (Pifer 3).

The child figures in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans occupy a space somewhere in between these romantic and post-colonial visions, mainly because they vacillate between them. In this way, Ishiguro’s novels undermine the ground that supports both the grand narratives of Empire and the petit counter-narratives of oppositional politics. Ishiguro’s child figures, and their latent content or allegorical referents, or what they might be made to “mean,” are impossible to pin down largely because they are constructed through a particularly extreme sort of unreliable narration.3 In both The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans the epistemological unreliability of the narrator spills over into the ontological world of the narrative. In The Unconsoled, Ryder’s memories, fears, and anxieties are externalised when he comes into contact with people who (it becomes increasingly apparent) represent versions of himself at various stages in his life, from childhood through senescence — Ishiguro calls them

Ryder’s “appropriations” (qtd. in Oliva 123). All of these “appropriations” point to the roots of

Ryder’s current neuroses and unhappiness, but he never for a moment considers that they are anything but discrete, external, unrelated individuals, and neither do they. In the world of this narrative, they are not merely effects of the narrator’s psychological projections, but rather they represent fantasies not contained by the bounds of mimetic realism.

In a similar vein, in the first half of When We Were Orphans it is clear that the childhood

Banks has constructed in memory is not the childhood his friends remember him having lived, a

3 As Else D’Hoker points out, “[c]ritics are remarkably unanimous...in their interpretation of [Ishiguro’s narratives] as typical examples of narrative unreliability and many reviewers too call Ishiguro’s narrators unreliable as a matter of course. Yet, this apparently self-evident interpretation masks the considerable differences that exist between Ishiguro’s I-protagonists” (147). 161 disjunction that reveals him as an unreliable narrator more or less in the traditional sense. By the second half of the novel, however, cognitive dissonance bleeds into narrative dissonance, as reality itself seems to bend to Banks’ emotional needs. As Ishiguro put it in an interview given after the publication of When We Were Orphans, “[t]he traditional unreliable narrator is that sort of narrator through whom you can almost measure the distance between their craziness and the proper world out there…. [Banks] is perhaps not quite that sort of conventional unreliable narrator in the sense that it’s not very clear what’s going on out there. It’s more an attempt to paint a picture according to what the world would look like according to someone’s crazy logic” (January). (The young orphan girl that Banks adopts is also, if not quite an appropriation in the same sense in which they exist in Ryder’s world, subject to his projections; he is unable to see her situation or needs clearly until he has solved the mystery of his own orphanhood by the end of the novel.)

The child figures in both novels, then, can be understood at least to some extent (and it is never quantifiable, so never to an ‘exact’ extent) as explicit fantasies and projections of the adult narrators. The narrators’ recollections of their childhood selves function more like manifest dream content than as reliable memories, and in this sense they function also as figures of figures or as comments on the figural, and on the use of the child figure in narratives that construct national identities, and continuities and discontinuities between past, present and future.

Ishiguro’s obsession with memory, trauma, and inheritance, which persists across all of his fiction in one way or another, has found a particularly potent and self-reflexive, if ambiguous, vessel in the figure of the child. 162

In The Presence of the Past, Valerie Krips outlines how post-World-War-Two Britain found a symbol for selfhood in the fictional child written about in fiction by adults for children, and in so doing, indirectly describes the child figure Ishiguro’s narrators hold up as ideals for themselves. Krips explains that in Britain after the war, “certain ‘structures of feeling’ — to use

Raymond Williams’ term for the flux of social experience as registered in its immediacy — were coalescing around heritage” (1-2). Krips uses Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, according to which an object or monument operates as a synecdoche for a past that has receded beyond living memory, to describe how children act as conduits to encapsulated moments in, and certain versions of, British history. The child figures Krips examines have no historical memory

— they simply have not been alive long enough to develop one — and so they stand in for a culture experiencing rapid social, cultural, and economic change. These children then discover objects (as with the centuries-old treasure in Minnow on the Say) or places (as with the eponymous garden in Tom’s Midnight Garden) which operate as lieux de mémoire by giving them access to the past, access which allows them (and the reader) to celebrate Britain's imperial past, but by focusing upon its eccentricities and idealized "images from Victorian and Edwardian

England" (51). These excursions into history are “driven by a romantic, ideal image of the child that transcends the specifics of history and cultural change even as that child is pressed into service to remind us of specific historical moments” (126). As one reviewer of Krips’ book put it,

“on the one hand, the proverbial trip down memory lane is innocently driven by a desire to pass onto a younger generation a knowledge of the past. But, just as the desire to relive past imperial moments in the present obviously suggests more sinister adult agendas, so does the reliving of ideal and idyllic childhoods: if the nostalgic journey back is an attempt to recapture a lost 163 childhood, the childhood captured … is a fiction invested with ‘adult desires and needs’” (Woljcik-Andrews 126).

Banks’ and Ryder’s narratives are driven by these exact adult desires and needs as they work obsessively to secure a space for their idealised childhoods in the present. Both narrators make constant efforts to superimpose on their memories an orthodox version of British childhood that lines up with the nostalgic vision described above. Ishiguro’s narrators desperately want to belong, and they feel that if they are only English enough, it will somehow alleviate the tensions afflicting their families, and concomitantly the world at large. They both struggle to align the future their (re)constructed memories make possible for them with the tumultuous personal and political situations they find themselves confronting. Indeed, their respective abilities to conflate these two possible futures in narrative accounts for the forward momentum of the novels: the reader is driven to ask not only whether the two narrators will recover their parents and bring an end to war and desolation, but also into what kind of reality the narrative will eventually resolve itself. That is, what kind of reading will we eventually be able to give to these nightmarish dreams, and will the narrators be allowed to wake up from them with us?

ISHIGURO’S FLOATING CHILDHOOD

With these two novels, especially with regards to their experimental rigour, Ishiguro may have been trying to work his way out of a proscriptive metanarrative of national identity he felt increasingly written into. Because Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, and because his first two novels were set in Japan (A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World), Ishiguro was initially pegged as a “Japanese writer.” Though he insisted from the beginning that the Japan 164 represented in these early works is a mixture of a very young child’s memories with images and associations gleaned from film and other cultural products available to any Westerner,4 the books were celebrated primarily for their documentary qualities, and their ability to capture a “Japanese spirit” or sensibility. In fact, Ishiguro was so welcome a spokesman that, even though he had not set foot in the country since he left at the age of five, he was invited to speak on a current events program to discuss the Japanese point of view after the bursting of that country’s economic bubble. (He turned down the offer.)

Although this identification with Japan helped Ishiguro’s nascent career take off – the literary climate in Britain at the time was such that it actively celebrated non-native and multi- cultural English writers – Ishiguro was understandably frustrated by these overly literal readings of his books, and with his next novel, The Remains of the Day, he set out to out-British the

British. Unreliably narrated by Stevens, a repressed head butler at an English country house, as he tours the countryside in his master’s car, the novel explores heritage and inheritance, duty and

English identity, memory and self-denial. Set in 1956, the novel makes no mention of the Suez crisis, but the idea that the Empire is no longer sustainable underwrites much of the tension in the novel. As Stevens’ insistent nostalgia for the grand old days he spent serving the lord of the manor wears thin, he must confront the sinister and humiliating aspects of his past: Lord

Darlington was a Nazi sympathiser, and Stevens’ wholehearted dedication to him looks in retrospect less like dignity than like a kind of cosmic joke. Despite the fact that the novel works on a number of levels to skewer contemporary Thatcherite nostalgia for the “Greatness” of the

English empire (the novel was published in 1989), many commentators at the time praised the

4 The way he put it in one interview is that “[t]his very important place called Japan which was a mixture of memory, speculation, and imagination was fading with every year that went by. I think there was a very urgent need for me to get it down on paper before it disappeared altogether” (Ishiguro qtd. in Krider 150). 165 book for its documentary qualities, often in the same breath remarking that its narrator exhibited a notably Japanese disposition.5 This kind of response led Ishiguro to joke at the time that if he had written a book like Kafka’s The Trial, reviewers would have remarked on the strangeness of the judicial process in Japan (Lewis 9). His frustration is explicit in this interview from 1991: “If there is something I really struggle with as a writer … it is this whole question about how to make a particular setting actually take off into the realm of metaphor so that people don’t think it is just about Japan or Britain” (Mississippi 140).

Ishiguro’s next two novels, the ones under discussion here, unapologetically and undeniably take off into this unlocatable realm of metaphor.6 The Unconsoled works assiduously to reference numerous other middle-European and other locales, in order to make it quite clear that it is not in fact set in any of them,7 and in When We Were Orphans, characters’ responses are increasingly conditioned by the conventions of detective fiction more than they are by any recognisable world-historical moment. Ishiguro is writing to deliberately avoid clichéd and overly literal references to nation, but he is still writing about nationhood and nationalisms as cultural forces. This confusion is perhaps understandable, but as Reitano clarifies with regards to

The Unconsoled, “[i]t is the novel’s world, and not the novel itself, that is strangely — and impossibly — ahistorical” (363). In these two novels Ishiguro has created decidedly literary landscapes, defined more in terms of genre and oneiric repetition than by geographic realities,

5 Wai-chew Sim notes that “The Remains of the Day was construed as a novel where ‘the alien eye of the Japanese immigrant writer’ helps to disclose ‘a once-present but now lost essential Englishness’ [Connor 111]” (29).

6 Though the continuity between the novels is subtly alluded to in Ishiguro’s choice to give the narrator-protagonist of The Unconsoled the same name as the narrator-protagonist of Waugh’s nostalgic country-house novel, Brideshead Revisited: “Ryder.” The fact that the name is also a near homophone for “writer” just adds a layer of irony to the meta-fictional reference.

7 “In a process of gradual elimination the place is denounced as neither Switzerland (5), nor Italy (22), nor Holland (24), nor Germany (65), nor Sweden (92), nor the US (137), nor Austria (166), nor Japan (249), nor England or France (379), nor Russia (308) or the Ukraine (464), nor Poland (313), nor Finland (504)” (Havskov 60). 166 and yet through these genres the novels have inherited and are haunted by spectres of nation and nationalisms, played out through nostalgia and the figure of the child.

Again, this disjointed sense of time and place, Ishiguro’s enduring fascination with the looping temporalities of memory and childhood, intersects with Ishiguro’s personal narrative. As

I mentioned, Ishiguro left Japan for England with his parents at the age of five, so that his father, an oceanographer, could take part in a research project there. Ishiguro had to sever ties with his paternal grandfather, with whom he had lived and whom he describes as a kind of father-figure, and he never saw him again, despite his parents’ repeated assurances that the family’s move was temporary and that they would eventually return to Japan. Every year, his grandfather would send Ishiguro a “care” package full of Japanese comic books, as if to keep the young boy up-to- date with children’s pop culture on the event of his return, but the family never did return;

Ishiguro only briefly visited the country again in his thirties, as a cultural emissary, long after his grandfather was dead. This idea of a hazily remembered but emotionally charged early childhood, cut off from later experience almost completely, as if it were another world or even a dream, is a motif that to a great extent structures much of Ishiguro’s writing. But on top of this, because the family only decided to settle for good once he was a teenager, one could argue that

Ishiguro’s sense of identity was held in a kind of endlessly deferred limbo state throughout his formative years; unable to file his memories away as such, perhaps he had to treat them for a long time rather as a narrative temporarily interrupted and soon to be taken up again. Though we have to be wary not to merely impose a new proscriptive biographical narrative onto a reading of

Ishiguro’s writerly concerns, it is helpful to see how one reading might interrupt the other.

Though they are not quite incompatible, this personal narrative is at least more compelling than 167 the national one based on Ishiguro’s Japanese-English identity, but perhaps only because the idea of childhood signifies as ambiguously in the author’s biography as it does in his novels.

Connected to this desire to transcend the specifics of time and place, Ishiguro has articulated more than once his aspiration to be considered an “international novelist” who writes about universal human concerns.8 This is in part a marker of the writer’s ambition; he has spoken in interview of the waning of the importance of the English novel on the world stage, and one can understand his desire to not be considered parochial.9 The desire to be successfully international is also rooted in very practical concerns: Ishiguro’s novels are now routinely translated into over thirty languages, and with an eye to this process and to his eventual non-

English readers, he is careful to avoid localisms and colloquialisms in his prose. He always has to ask himself, he says, “‘Does the line have substance? It's not just a clever line, is it? Does its value survive translation?’” (“Idealism” 316). The obvious question is, what is this ‘substance’ that can exist independently from any given language, and what is its value? What is the

“abstract vision of life and the world” (“Idealism” 310) that Ishiguro is trying to communicate in these novels, and can it really be divorced from the particularities of a time and place?

And so, to return to my starting point, it may be that Ishiguro approaches his key preoccupations through tropes of childhood precisely because they provide Ishiguro with a way to convey a kind of universal experience. He has spoken of his use of orphan figures in When We

Were Orphans, and he insists that they are to be read metaphorically in terms of the “condition of

8 See Ishiguro’s interviews in, for example, Boundary 2 (1991), Mississippi Review (1991), January Magazine (2000), and Clio (2001).

9 Ishiguro has remarked that at about the time he started to write, the British “came to this realization: We're not the center of the universe. We're just this little backwater in Europe. If we want to participate in the world, culturally speaking, we've got to find out what's happening in the rest of the world. Similarly with the literature. It's no good anymore just going on about the difference between an upper-middle-class Englishman and his lower-middle-class wife, you know. That's just purely parochialism” (January). 168 being orphaned” (“Idealism” 319). He explains that this condition is something we all have in common: “I was interested in exploring ... the journey that we all must have made out of a protective childhood bubble where we didn’t know about the harsher world. As we get older we come into the wider world and learn that bad things happen. And sometimes, that process occurs gently and softly; sometimes to some people it happens very suddenly or very violently” (“Idealism” 319). What makes Ishiguro’s vision of a universal loss-of-innocence narrative more complicated are his attendant thoughts on the importance of nostalgia; he insists that nostalgia is too often considered only in its negative sense, the kind that is “peddled by tourist industries around the world, [for] some sort of sweet or cozy past when we lived in a more innocent preindustrial time or something” (“Idealism” 320). For Ishiguro, nostalgia for one’s childhood is more “pure” and can be “a very positive force, as well as a very destructive force, because like idealism is to the intellect, that kind of nostalgia has the same relationship to the emotions” (“Idealism” 320). That is, Ishiguro believes that if we still carry some memory of a time when the world was a nicer place, we may also “have an urge to reshape the world, heal the world, to make it the way we once thought it was as children” (“Idealism” 320). There may be, in other words, an ethical or political dimension to nostalgia that Ishiguro’s novels also explore.

But as has already been established, and as Ishiguro is well aware, nostalgia for childhood can be neither pure nor innocent, and in these two novels it is constructed as an especially problematic, recursive and dissembling force. What makes Ishiguro’s take on the positive aspects of nostalgia so interesting, then, are the complicated ways in which we must struggle to see them at work, despite or alongside the very damaging effects the same nostalgia elicits. Furthermore, because these novels are set securely in literary landscapes, nostalgia for the 169 narrators’ childhoods is conflated with a nostalgia for the enabling fictions of art and genre. In brief, in The Unconsoled, Ryder and all the people he meets are guilty of an abiding and normative nostalgia according to which music once had the power to define them as citizens of their unnamed city, to bring them into concert (as it were) with their history, and so to console them. Ryder’s concert is meant to both reunite him with his estranged parents and bring about a transformative moment in the history of the city. In a related vein, When We Were Orphans enacts a kind of nostalgia for the Golden Age English detective novel, the sort that takes place in a sleepy English village or an isolated country house, and at the close of which the mystery is solved and peace and normalcy are restored. Banks patterns himself as a Great Detective in the style of Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey,10 and the people around him increasingly conform to the conventions of the genre, even as the plot they inhabit diverges wildly from it. This genre offers its own fantasy of consolation, as Ishiguro has pointed out: tremendously popular in the interwar years, these novels are “filled with a pining for a world of order and justice that people had once believed in, but which they now know full well is unattainable…. It’s escapism, but escapism of a particularly poignant kind” (Ishiguro, Random). However, though When We Were

Orphans conforms to generic convention insofar as Banks solves the mystery of his parents’ disappearances, it is a disquieting resolution that blurs the line between good and evil almost beyond Banks’ ability to cope, and certainly beyond the confines of the genre. Thus, both novels exhibit the same kind of poignant nostalgia for an art that consoles, while at the same time patently offering no consolations themselves.

10 Detective characters from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, respectively. 170

I believe that what enables these novels to operate as multi-valenced explorations of nostalgia, and not simply one-sided critiques of it, is the enigmatic figure of the child and its ability to inhabit this in-between space, as both an emotional ideal and a troubling spectre of a traumatic past. Ishiguro’s nostalgia for substance — his own yearning for an art that translates, that is univeral, that even perhaps consoles — is taken to task in these two novels. The precise ways in which these child figures operate, however, is particular to each novel. As Ishiguro himself has stated, every novel he writes is in some way a rewrite or a rethinking of his last novel, making each iteration into a kind of unfaithful self-inheritance through which he complicates and repositions himself in an increasingly abstract landscape; as Nathalie Reitano puts it, “Ishiguro, who is so often gotten wrong, does not want to get it right” (365). Let us move on, then, to an exploration of nostalgia for childhood as it operates in the melancholy “no place” of the city of the unconsoled.

A Place of Sunshine and Laughter: Nostalgia and Melancholy in The Unconsoled

“He’s such a delight at the moment. So full of openness and trust. I know it’s impossible for him to go through the whole of his life like that, perhaps it’s not even desirable. But still, at his age just now, I think he should have just a few more years of believing the world to be a place of sunshine and laughter.” — Gus, about Boris (28).

Though The Unconsoled is set in a deliberately unlocatable middle-European city, numerous reviewers and critics have nonetheless tried to solve the mystery of the novel’s setting; its lack of definable place appears to have been a real bugbear for these readers, and for their understanding 171 of Ishiguro’s oeuvre.11 In his essay, “Nowhere, in Particular,” Richard Robinson divides critical responses to the novel according to three rough categories, based on their reactions to the unnamed city: those in the first category did not attempt to place it and derided it for its lack of cultural specificity; the second attempted to solve the mystery of its place and have it named; and the third felt that its vague central Europeanness was critical for understanding the novel. Placing himself in the last camp, Robinson argues that “central European history is a latent content which we can profitably ascribe to the dreamwork of the narrative,” but that at the same time, the novel’s ultimate atopic “[f]eaturelessness can… be seen as a guilty expunging of history: local colour is disposed of as evidence. Individual guilt, displacement, forgetting — this is the primary

‘landscape of feeling’ which Ishiguro consistently aims for” (117-118). Robinson finds it helpful to think of the citizens of the unnamed city as either “overrun by big neighbours who are responsible for a nightmarish World-History,” or else as “more complicit, guiltily repressing a mitteleuropäisch History for which they themselves feel accountable” (127). Thus, he historicises and allegorises what otherwise might have seemed detached from social and political determinants.

A related but thornier and perhaps more compelling problem than the novel’s ambiguous setting is its fractured and looped, traumatically-repetitive sense of time, such that an elevator ride can take over twenty minutes, or even that Ryder meets versions of himself and his parents at various stages of their lives, in such a way that they express both his past and his fears of the

11 Novelist Amit Chaudhuri, for example, calls The Unconsoled ahistorical: “[I]t is a novel without any discernible cultural social or historical determinants (surely fatal to any novel).” Further, he rebukes it for its “refusal to allow its allegory to be engaged, in any lively way, with the social shape of our age” (qtd. in Reitano 379). James Wood critiques the novel on similar grounds, adding that the novel “invents its own category of badness” (in Beedham 104). The novel, of course, is set in a recognisable time; its references to the World Cup and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey locate it at least a generation or so after the end of the Second World War. 172 future. More than simply oneiric,12 these patterns give the novel its overriding paradoxical consciousness, that its inhabitants feel both that they are too late — for what, we are never sure

— and that they are anxious to fulfill a promise of potential before it disappears forever. As such they are caught in a strange moment of stasis, which exists somehow both before and after a traumatic and radical break, the precise nature of which remains unclear (and unnamed, perhaps unnameable, like the city itself).

The novel’s strange stasis can best be understood through a consideration of the construction of childhood in the novel. As I mentioned in the last section, Ishiguro self- consciously manipulates the figure of child so that it reflects what Valerie Krips sees happening in post-war children’s fiction, wherein the child represents an unadulterated conduit to an idealised past. Helpful here is Krips’ application of Pierre Nora’s concept of the anticipatory gaze, which reflects an adult’s fear of an increasingly unpredictable and unknowable future, but which is displaced onto the child who will have to face that future him- or herself. For Nora, the

“solidarity of past and future has been replaced by the solidarity of memory with the present — but a present riveted to the obligation of remembrance by the anticipatory gaze from which we cannot escape” (qtd. in Krips 11). According to Krips, “the anticipatory gaze of the child, as imagined by adults in Britain, had established the power of a memory whose solidarity was with the present soon after the end of World War II” (11). The narrator’s childhood is located vaguely in this same era, and the city’s citizens likewise seem obsessed with understanding and refiguring the High Modernism (especially in terms of music) of this moment.

12 Ishiguro has said that, although he “did consciously refer to dream a lot” in this novel, there are consistent rules that govern the novel, though very different from the ones the govern realistic fiction (“Rooted” 152). He also expresses frustration at people who call Ryder “mad or amnesiac,” since “over the course of a lifetime, we [make promises and forget them] the whole time…. It’s only when you look at it from a certain perspective and compress it into a few days that it starts to look like very strange behaviour” (“Rooted” 153). 173

However, the anticipatory gaze of the child functions slightly differently in The

Unconsoled, as all of the child figures in this novel represent the narrator-protagonist, so that the past they represent is at once a personal past and the locus of personal fears, as well as being the repository of all the larger anxieties about history and memory that circulate in the world of the novel. This fragmented and redoubled temporality is enacted on both major planes of the story

— Ryder’s private family drama, and the city’s public crisis — and in fact they are conflated in such a way as to be virtually inseparable. Ryder’s concert is the place where these two narratives come together most explicitly: on the personal level, it will be where Ryder will reconnect with his parents, where they will be “united in astonishment” (386) at the talent they have had too little faith in, and where they will give him the love and respect they have withheld for so long.

On the public, or national-historic level, the concert is where the inhabitants of the city will be redeemed in a grand transformative gesture — but not just redeemed, as from a past crime or fault: their future potential will be realised, finally, by someone capable of unleashing it to them.

This fear is precisely what is expressed by the foreshortened form or method of the novel, in which everyone is running out of time and is already too late. The novel’s multiple concurrent childhoods exemplify the sense that the substance of history itself is disappearing, if it hasn’t already: all of Ryder’s pasts and futures are stacked, one on top of another, smothering the present more than they ever lend him or anyone else anything like historical perspective.13

Hence, before moving on to a discussion of the wider crisis of history that the novel allegorises, we must examine the anxieties reflected in Ryder’s relationship with his childhood,

13 Ishiguro described the novel’s relationship to time this way: he differentiates his method from that of the conventional flashback, by describing the former as “like shining a flashlight into the darkness of your past, and illuminating bits of it to decipher,” and his method in The Unconsoled as “more like a completely dark room where someone moves along with a torch like this…[He moves his hand along the length of the coffee table as if reading with a magnifying glass]. See, there’s a little patch of light you can see, but you can’t see what’s before it unless you move back to see what you just passed” (“Rooted” 152-153). 174 and with his own (step-) child, Boris. A number of critics have shown how Ryder’s anxieties are the product of childhood wounds that demand consolation, and this certainly seems clear enough14 — as we know both from his memories and from the scenes that play around him (his

“appropriations”), his parents were disappointed in him: his father was largely absent and anyway ignored him for years; his mother was depressive and mostly disconsolate. Nonetheless, he believes it is possible to return to the moment before everything went so wrong. When Ryder arrives in his hotel room, he realises it is actually the very room that had been his bedroom for two years as a young child in England. This is Ryder’s first reminiscence, and also signals the novel’s first patently surreal moment, for Ryder takes the two rooms to be one and the same place, despite being a continent apart. Finding himself in his “childhood sanctuary cause[s] a profound feeling of peace” to come over him (17); later though, when he is obliged to change rooms, he disavows this “peculiar” attachment (122), though the disavowal creates a “powerful sense of loss” that he seems unable to place (157).

Ryder’s “method” is illustrated to us during this first scene in his rediscovered bedroom, when he reminisces about playing with plastic soldiers on a mat while his parents “raged on” downstairs. He remembers realising that a tear in the mat that had always bothered him could represent bush terrain for his soldiers, so that “the blemish that had always threatened to undermine my imaginary world could in fact be incorporated into it” (16). This seems to suggest that although he may not be in complete control of his nostalgia or his melancholic attachment to his past, he is to some extent wilfully manipulating this world of fantasy. The scene exemplifies

Beedham’s point, that Ryder “takes more of a conscious role than the term ‘displacement’

14 Carlos Villar Flor writes that the novel’s major theme is “the neglect of family relationship, with special emphasis on the plight of children deprived of the love of one or both parents, and the aftermath in adult life of such emotional injuries” (qtd. in Beedham 114). 175 implies. To some degree this is a novel about manipulating reality” (116). And yet, Ryder’s memories, fears and anxieties are externalised in such a way that they operate as wilful agents on their own; Ryder exerts only as much control as an ego exercises over its more vast and unruly unconscious, once that unconscious has literally taken on a life (many lives, in fact) of its own.

Ryder makes a similar improbable discovery later in the novel, when he happens upon his old family car, and then realises he has been holding it in an embrace. He reacts as he did to the room: despite the “deep restfulness” he feels, he disavows the connection (laughingly exclaiming, “In love with this? You have to be joking…. What a disgusting heap!” [262]), and is visited by memories, ostensibly of his peaceful childhood, but which reveal the extent of his already disturbed psyche. In his first memory, he is gripped with dread upon realising that, for an old woman they are visiting with, his family “represented an ideal of family happiness” (264), but that she would soon realise the “enormity of her error” and “freeze in horror” at the sight of what his family actually were: unhappy (264). His second memory is of seeking sanctuary in the car during one of his parents’ fights, but of leaping up and pretending to be lost in play when his father (as if on cue) storms from the house and down the lane. In both scenes, it seems integral to the young Ryder that he keep the ongoing fantasy intact: he must represent a happy family to the outside world and a happy child to his parents. His internal state is already conflated, at this early stage, with its perception and reception in the world; the fact that he is thoroughly invested in this fantasy, however, does not indicate that he is exerting control over reality. Far from it, in fact: the reality of his parents’ unhappiness threatens the coherence of his fantasy at every turn.

The unhappiness evidenced in these memories also undercuts the idea that there is a moment of plenitude to return to or recover. 176

The triangular family dynamic, between father, mother, and son, glimpsed in these scenes is repeated a number of times in the configurations of people Ryder meets in the novel’s present.

We meet a version of Ryder’s younger self in Boris, who may or may not be Ryder’s son, and whose mother, Sophie, may or may not be Ryder’s wife and is a stand-in for Ryder’s mother. The father-figure in this scenario is initially played by Sophie’s estranged father Gustav, but Ryder steps in and incrementally comes to play the role himself, also becoming estranged in the process. We also meet the unhappily married Hoffmans and their son Stephan, a young man at the outset of his career who is set to play the opening piece at Ryder’s concert, and who hopes to bring his own parents together in the process. Finally, there are also the estranged Brodsky, Miss

Collins, and Brodsky’s dog, Bruno, an explicit substitute for the child they never had.

With Boris and Sophie, the sense that time is running out is heightened: Sophie is anxious to find them an apartment they can call a home, but more so than this, she is anxious to give

Boris the happy childhood she feels he has not yet fully experienced, largely due to Ryder’s intermittent presence in their lives. Her refrain throughout the novel is that Boris’s childhood is slipping away,15 though what it is she hopes for him exactly is never made clear. Even when

Sophie admits to Ryder that Boris’s life “isn’t so bad,” she insists that it is not “what it should be like” (250), according to her own memories of growing up, seen from a nostalgic distance as the time before her own childhood trauma brought loneliness and uncertainty into her life. Ryder’s responsibilities to Sophie and Boris are constantly pitted against his responsibilities as an artist to

15 Sophie implores Ryder: “‘But how much longer can you go on doing this for people? And for us, I mean for me and you and Boris, time’s slipping away. Before you know it, Boris will be all grown up’” (37). And later: “‘Soon he’ll be grown. We don’t have much time….This is his childhood, now, slipping away. Soon he’ll be grown and he’ll never have known anything better…. [T]his is his childhood. I know what it should be like. Because I remember, you see, the way it was. When I was very small, before Mother got ill. Things were good then…. I want something like that for him…. You don’t realise how little time there is. Look at us. We’ve hardly started’” (250). And again, “‘Other people….They just carry on like there’s all the time in the world. I’ve never been able to do that’” (451). 177 his public. He explains his constant travelling to Boris this way: “I have to keep going on these trips because, you see, you can never tell when it’s going to come along. I mean the very special one, the very important trip, the one that’s very very important, not just for me but for everyone, everyone in the whole world…. It’ll come soon, the very important one, then it will all be done,

I’ll be able to relax and rest then” (217-218). It becomes obvious later in the novel that the important trip and concert Ryder refers to will be the one which his parents finally attend; thus his responsibilities to his current family suffer because of his commitment to his fantasy of reunion in which he heals his damaged past. In this way, the artist is in a constant bid for consolation from an irrecoverable history, which disables engagement in the present and with present responsibilities, and closes itself off to the future.16

Rebecca Comay’s explication of the relationship between melancholy and fetishism is a helpful template for understanding the psychic and temporal logic at work here. She opens her essay on the topic with a critique of the recent valorisation of melancholia as a kind of ethical mourning that does not appropriate or assimilate one’s grief into a normalising economy. She warns us not simply to invert Freud’s hierarchy between normalising mourning and pathological melancholia, reminding us of Freud’s conceptual link between melancholia and narcissism, and pointing to another link between melancholia and fetishism. The melancholic preoccupation with a traumatic loss, she writes, is a “way of staging a dispossession of that which was never one’s to lose in the first place” (89), which is to say, with an originary loss. The perversion of melancholy is that it occludes what is a structural lack by treating it as a determinate loss, in an effort to assert a relationship with the non-relational. In this way,

16 The contrast with McEwan is striking in this regard, since the latter explicitly equates adulthood, and mature novel-writing, with enlightened rationalist principles. 178

[the] structure of melancholia … begins to bleed into that of fetishism — the compensatory construction of imaginary unities in response to a traumatic loss (‘castration’) which structurally can be neither fully acknowledged nor denied. Perversion not only names the simultaneity of recognition and disavowal: it hints at the deeper paradox that the very recognition is the disavowal. There is no acknowledgement of trauma which in its claim to adequacy (a claim implicit in the very protestation of inadequacy) does not efface the loss it would concede.… The fetishistic split which maintains the contradiction between knowledge and belief — traumatic loss, on the one hand, redemptive totality, on the other — provides no protective containment of its antitheses, but rather implicates both within a contaminating porosity and oscillation of one term into the other. (90)

The analogy is helpful: “the defiant exhibitionism of the melancholic reveals a streak of luxurious enjoyment matched only by the severity of the fetishist’s commitment to a jouissance which in its workmanlike assiduity displays a discipline and focus verging on the ascetic. Both loss and jouissance present themselves here as symmetrically and reciprocally traumatic…. The manifest opposition between the experiences of lack and excess is thus ultimately less decisive than the structures of fantasy which pre-emptively sustain them” (93). Both melancholy and fetishism, in other words, are almost indistinguishable at the structural level; Ryder’s paradoxical ability to fetishistically mark the loss of a childhood plenitude he may or may not have experienced at the time testifies to the “porosity and oscillation” to which Comay refers.

Indeed, this structure of fantasy is the constant that sustains The Unconsoled and all the people within it; it is what led one reviewer to remark that the novel “achieves coherence only at such great length that [its] remarkably sustained and complex inner order and direction remain opaque for an inordinate amount of the time required to read it” (Cusk, qtd. in Beedham 105).

The vagueness of the novel’s crisis and of the corresponding solution is what makes this “inner order” so baffling for so long — it is ambiguously described by one citizen as “dozens of sad cases…. lives blighted by loneliness…. families despairing of ever rediscovering the happiness 179 they’d once taken for granted” (113), which many characters believe will be put right simply by

Ryder’s presence (“the mood in this town has altered simply at the news of your arrival,” he is told [114]) — but this vagueness, and the fact that it is never resolved, is also what makes its substance as fantasy qua fantasy finally unmistakable. For some in the city, Ryder’s intervention is in vain: “It’s too late. We’ve lost it. Why don’t we resign ourselves to being just another cold, lonely city?… The soul of this town, it’s not sick, Mr Ryder, it’s dead. It’s too late now” (107).

But even as they fetishise the idea of the upcoming concert, and the vague but incontrovertible transformative moment that they see taking place there, there is a melancholic attachment to a loss whose nature is so indeterminate that it can only be described as structural or originary. They themselves, of course, spend the length of the novel arguing about what or who is at the root of this loss, implicitly insisting that it is locatable in both time and space, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The same can be said of Ryder’s “lost” childhood, as manifest in his relationship to Boris.

Although Ryder resists Sophie’s pleas that he is responsible for giving Boris the childhood she imagines for him, he becomes extremely defensive and sentimental if anyone else threatens to wreck Boris’s ostensible childhood innocence. In one scene at an apartment complex, Ryder peers through a window into a room that happens to resemble exactly part of the house in which he had lived with his parents for several months as a nine-year-old; a neighbour expresses relief that the family has moved out, for they argued violently, and the husband was cruel and often drunk, when he wasn’t away. Ryder angrily tells the man to keep quiet in front of Boris, and a sudden, heated exchange develops: the man tells Ryder that “‘[i]t’s not good to over-shelter them. He’s got to come to terms with the world, warts and all.’” And Ryder answers back: “‘He 180 doesn’t have to yet! Not just yet! Besides, I don’t care what you think…. Not for a few years yet!

He won’t, he won’t hear about such things….’” (216). The argument climaxes as Ryder flees with Boris, and the man yells: “‘You’re fighting a losing battle! He has to find out what it’s like!

It’s just life! There’s nothing wrong with it! It’s just real life!’” (216). The argument is more about Ryder than it is about Boris, and the scene is indicative of Ryder’s oscillation between melancholy for the loss of, and fetishistic attachment to, the idea of his childhood. He remembers that, as a child, this apartment had “quickly [come] to represent not only an exciting change, but the hope that a fresh, happier chapter was unfolding for us all” (214), and he is still unwilling to puncture this childhood fantasy, along with the concomitant fantasy of Boris’s sustained innocence.

The scene is repeated in Ryder’s argument with an old friend, who argues that “‘a boy his age … should be making a proper contribution to things by now…. He should be learning about wallpapering, say, or tiling’” (50). Though Ryder loudly protests that Boris is “‘just a small boy’” and that his friend is an “‘idiot’” (50), in the next scene, Boris suppresses tears as he complains that if he only knew how to tile, he wouldn’t have made his mother cry. Soon thereafter, Ryder buys Boris a manual for doing such things around the house that belonged to the grown son of an old woman — someone Ryder’s age, perhaps (we might surmise) Ryder himself. Much later, once the process of Ryder’s self-inflicted estrangement from his family has begun, Boris pleads with Ryder not to ignore him, that he will “‘learn to do everything’” that’s in the manual (335); by the end of the novel, Ryder snaps at Boris that the manual is useless, and that “‘no thought, no affection’” went into this gift, and he takes the book from the boy’s hands and hurls it across the room (471-2). 181

Matthew Beedham points out that the manual “is critical to understanding the novel; as

Boris asserts, ‘It shows you how to do everything’ [287]. Indeed it does, because it shows Ryder how to tile over and wallpaper over the painful moments of his past” (116). The book is an absurd manual for becoming an adult, but it is a metaphor for more than just “tiling over” a painful past; it is a reminder of Ryder’s failures, and Boris’s too, and therefore threatens to rupture their fantasies of family togetherness. Neither of them keeps his mother from crying, or his wife, and Ryder does not build a home with his family, much less decorate it. The manual signifies the domestic expectations of the adult world, of a husband and a father who is no longer an innocent child, and it is no wonder that once Ryder throws it away, he “immediately [feels] calmer” and can take a deep breath (472). Ryder wavers between resentment toward and tenderness for his family, as between recognition and disavowal of his senses of loss and responsibility, and the manual is a red thread that traces this oscillation over the course of the narrative.

We cannot say that Ryder’s attachment to his family is merely melancholic or fetishistic: he is driven by his sense of the loss of his parents’ happiness and approval, but he also fetishises objects and places from his childhood, and imagines the decisive transformative moment that will reunite him with it.17 This undecidability is precisely the source of the novel’s temporal confusion: the model of the father estranged from the child is played out by Gustav with Sophie, and then by Ryder with Boris, as with Stephan and Mr Hoffman, just as Ryder was estranged

17 It is always a place or an object that occasions Ryder’s recollections of his past: the hotel room, the car, and the apartment. We might think of these things themselves as fetishes to which Ryder always has the same response: a deep sense of peacefulness or plenitude, which is subtly disturbed by an unhappy memory, all of which he half- heartedly disavows or simply forgets about. (He does not remember why he had been attached to his first hotel room the day after he has been moved out of it, for example.) Their intermittent appearances in the narrative help Ryder to uphold the fantasy of his happy childhood, but not because they occasion happy memories. Rather, each memory points to the roots of Ryder’s fantasy-making — see my discussion of this on page 185. 182 from his father, and this repetitive and overlapping structure interrupts the linear continuum of experience.18 Comay’s insights are helpful here again: “The melancholic fixation on the past may explode the nostalgia to which it simultaneously seems committed, just as the perverse temporality of suspense or ‘lingering’ may undermine its own implicit consecration of an embalmed or reified present” (95). She goes on to explain that melancholia pre-empts trauma by insisting on its “absolute anteriority” — it is always already “too late” — whereas fetishism

“displays the same temporal logic in reverse: loss is warded off as always already in the future” (95). The resulting stasis is a reassuring fantasy, the likes of which Ryder labours to maintain over the course of the novel. As Comay explains, “[m]elancholia and fetishism would thus seem to collude to produce the illusion of an intact present — solitary, sufficient, immune from past or future threat. Indeed they come to coincide: postponement of a death forever pending consummates itself in the pre-emptive fantasy of a death always already accomplished” (96). Thus Ryder and all his appropriations are constantly (and, one imagines, endlessly) in the process of becoming estranged, so that it is both not yet accomplished and

18 All of the ‘triangular’ family units in the novel act out analogous repetitive patterns: Mr Hoffman is caught throughout the novel muttering “an ox, an ox, an ox!” to himself, and it only becomes clear by the novel’s final moments that he has been rehearsing the scene wherein he will finally leave his wife, blaming himself for what has become of them. Brodsky and Miss Collins, as well, are doomed to come together and be driven apart as they have been in the past, all because of Brodsky’s obsession with his wound, which Miss Collins points out is Brodsky’s main source of consolation (498). Even with Ryder, his estrangement from Sophie and Boris seems fated, as Sophie predicts early on that Ryder will “never feels towards [Boris] like a real father” (95), and repeats the phrase almost verbatim when she leaves him at the novel’s close (though this time it is meant, heart-breakingly, for Boris: “He’ll never love you like a real father” [532].) 183 already too late. In some ways, even the novel’s present tense does not coincide with itself:

Ryder is always catching himself sobbing, or in an embrace, once it has already begun.19

The traumatic repetition that structures the novel, then, in fact maintains a kind of temporal stasis that wards off the moment of actual trauma. If Ryder had a traumatic childhood, he nonetheless also sees childhood as a time of irrecuperable and pre-traumatic innocence. Of course, from Ryder’s few, disjointed memories, it is clear that he cannot locate a moment of innocence before things started to fall apart; even with Boris, Sophie insists that the loss of his childhood has not happened yet, but that they have to find and fix on a moment of “sunshine and laughter” so that he has a “before” to return to after its inevitable loss. The temporal structure of the novel, however, refuses any forward movement at all, as “before” and “after” coalesce.

Natalie Reitano makes use of Ryder’s memory of training himself as a child not to run to his parents, especially in moments when his need for them was quite acute; overcoming this panicky urge would give him a “strange thrill” of detachment (Unconsoled 172). She notes that

The training sessions quite literally and comically illustrate Freud’s repetition compulsion as he delays reaching a goal which is also an origin: home. But origin and telos are identical in the training sessions, whereas their inevitable and necessary noncoincidence in the Freudian scheme opens difference within repetition, that is, a future. Ryder’s absolute equation of origin with telos precludes Freud’s ‘complicated detours’ and results in chronic impasse. (371)

This impasse is evidenced in the text’s deliberate lack of resolution (and consolation). The emblematic performance the novel builds towards never happens; even though Ryder senses that not to perform up to standard would be to “open some strange door through which I would hurtle

19 When Ryder experiences an emotional jolt of any kind, it is always conveyed the moment after, as in: “Only then did I realise I was holding the car in a virtual embrace” (262); “I collapsed into a nearby chair and realised I had started to sob” (512); and “I realised I was sobbing” (532). We might describe this mode as a sort of foreshortened future anterior — it has already happened, even though it is happening now. As Derrida writes of the future anterior proper, it is charged with both anxiety and anticipation of the unknown, but it brings together the to-come and what is in a way that represses difference/differance, and ensures the continuity between them. See his discussion of this mode in “The Politics of Friendship.” 184 into a dark, unknown space” (The Unconsoled 518), once the evening is over, he sidesteps this potentially traumatic failure (but also the possibility of difference) by telling himself that “if a community could reach some sort of an equilibrium without having to be guided by an outsider, then so much the better” (524). Likewise, though Ryder breaks down when he realises his parents will not be there to see him perform, he allows himself to be comforted by hazy, third- hand accounts of a visit they made to the city years earlier. As Reitano notes, these kinds of recalibrations suggest that Ryder “does not wish to regain the ‘origin,’ but to sustain his distance from it,” so that “ground is never ‘recovered,’ only ‘lost,’ deliberately, in order to begin again without beginning” (371). And indeed, just as we never see Ryder actually arrive in the city, neither do we see him leave it; in the end he tells us he will move on to Helsinki, but from a tram on which, we imagine, he might circle the city indefinitely, on a loop, without difference.

What happens when we consider the objects and places that occasion Ryder’s recollections of the past — the hotel room, the car, the apartment — as lieux de mémoire in the sense in which Valerie Krips writes about them, so that the child is a vessel for nostalgia, with privileged access to an ideal history? The differences between Krips’ model and the way they function in The Unconsoled are telling: Ryder is not a child, but rather an adult who functions as the child does within Krips’ framework. Like Krips’ child figures, Ryder has no historical memory, and a foreshortened anticipatory gaze into the future; however, all his fears about his personal future are externalised in the form of other characters in the novel, and the lieux de mémoire he accesses represent a past that is entirely personal and largely repressed. Not only that, but each memory points to the roots of Ryder’s fantasy-making: the blemish in the carpet that can be incorporated into the fantasy, the play-acting for his parents and his desire to 185

“represent” a happy family to outsiders, and his insistence on hopefulness in what was clearly not a hopeful situation for his parents. These memories do not present us with access to his childhood so much as they function almost as fetishes for Ryder’s ability to perpetuate a world of fantasy, in which he has a happy childhood worth recovering.20

According to Krips’ theory of allegory, however, the child as lieu de mémoire must have a referent, even if it is idealised, and Ryder’s childhood, besides seeming far from ideal, is in non- simultaneous co-existence with his adulthood in the foreshortened present of the narrative; any difference a memory might provoke is disavowed. If Ryder’s childhood is meant to provide access to an ideal history, what does this mean for the citizens of the world of the novel that this childhood is irretrievable even as memory? Ryder’s fantasy of a psychic plenitude that might be recovered is mirrored in the belief shared by the people of the city that there is a moment from their communal history that might be recovered wholesale and restore for them a sense of their origins. Their trouble seems to stem from not knowing how best to represent these origins to themselves — the conflict between Christoff and Brodsky, two former conductors who each met with disgrace in their own ways, encapsulates their difficulty, as does the notorious Sattler monument, also shrouded in some unidentifiable historic shame. Given the chronic and diffuse nature of the city’s crisis, we see that it is impossible, in the world of the novel, to construct a childhood in keeping with Krips’ model that could plausibly give us access to a recognizable history as such. Childhood, as a figure for our nostalgic longings or a portal into an idealised past, is itself evacuated of its potential, and concomitantly, according to the narrative logic

20 The one child in the novel who does access one of these lieux is Boris with the DIY manual, and through him we are confronted with an absence of content and an evacuation of memory. The manual represents Ryder’s inability to maintain the fantasy, and though it is suggested that the manual belonged to Ryder as a child, it occasions no recollections, happy or otherwise. It is the one object to actually circulate in his adult world; because the manual now belongs to his son, he is cognisant of it as a parent, and as such it threatens to unravel the fantasy that the other objects, whose significations are designated solely by him, help him to maintain. 186 established here, even the myth of the city’s origin is out of reach. In other words, the conflation breaks down in both directions, so that longing for a knowable history is displaced onto a longing for a knowable childhood, and vice versa. Ishiguro manipulates our expectations of the child figure in order to refuse the notion of an idealised past — he refuses it for himself, for us, for Ryder, and for the people of the unnamed city.

The Way a Country Dreams: Sattler as a Parable of Impossible Inheritance

[I]t seems to me a nation's myth is the way a country dreams. It is part of the country's fabulized memory and it seems to me to be a very valid task for the artist to try to figure out what that myth is and if they should actually rework or undermine that myth…. To a certain extent, I suppose I was trying to do a similar thing with the English myth. — Ishiguro, Mississippi

In the above quotation, Ishiguro is speaking about The Remains of the Day, which is playing with a much more palpably English myth (the cultural centrality of the country house, and the unflappable butler figure that Wodehouse made a British icon) than is his subsequent novel, The

Unconsoled. But with the latter novel, Ishiguro is surely in the realm of myth again, only this time one which was conceived of more directly, so to speak, as an inchoate state or as a dream dreamt by the unconsoled. Ryder’s dreams of tenderness, his longing for a family, find their allegorical referent in the people’s desire for nation, place, and myth; the crisis all of them face together is a crisis of origin, of the representation of origins, and of inheritance. Ryder’s inability to connect the past with the present stems partly from a problem of critical interpretation, in that he is unable to parse events in terms of their significance, but it is also a problem of active forgetting that everyone around him partakes in. As Reitano argues, their discourses on loss “not only encrypt a common destiny in some unfathomable past, they also reproduce the nostalgia upon which such myths have been founded” (371). In this section, I will build on Reitano’s claim 187 to show that this myth, whether dangerously enabling (in terms of fascist or neo-fascist ideologies) or merely enabling (in terms of moving into a future at all), is out of reach because the possibility of performing a critical inheritance of the past is out of reach also.

The myth of nation that is the object of this nostalgia is like that discussed by Pierre Nora in his treatment of Ernest Renan’s conception of the nation. Renan argues that the nation as heritage (“to have done great things together”) and the nation as project (“to want to do more”) are inextricably associated. Nora responds that because these elements are now definitively dissociated, “[t]he nation as Renan understood it is dead and will not come back to life.” He continues:

It will not come back to life because the dissolution of the national myth, which closely linked the future to the past, has had the almost mechanical effect of making each autonomous of the other: the future, once again entirely unpredictable, has become an obsession; and the past without the organising coherence of a history has become entirely patrimonial. The nation will not come back because the substitution of the memorial for the mythical implies that a profound change has taken place: the historical consciousness of the nation has been replaced by a form of social consciousness, so that history as action has been replaced by history as a completed tale. The past is no longer the guarantee of the future: that is the main reason for the promotion of memory as dynamic agent and sole promise of continuity. (634)

In the world of The Unconsoled, history may be a completed tale, but never comfortably so: the many cries of “too late!” and “there is still time!” attest to the extreme apprehension that the idea of history’s reification incites. History is both not knowable as memory and too knowable at the same time, as it incites a vague but powerful sense of shame. As such, patrimony itself is exposed as a kind of myth in crisis, and the citizens both do not know and know too well what is theirs to inherit. As I’ve discussed, most of the father-figures in the novel are estranged (or are becoming estranged) from their children. The one exception is Gustav, who, while he is estranged from his daughter, Sophie, is very close with his grandson, Boris. And yet even this 188 patrimony is revealed to be parodic, when in a mock-heroic scene, Gustav performs the “Porter’s

Dance” as a crowd of his peers spurs him to balance increasingly heavy suitcases on his shoulders; Ryder describes the unlikely scene as full of “drama and dignity” (397) and Gustav as

“profoundly wise” (398). Boris is the only one to show concern for his aged and struggling grandfather, and when the dance is through Gustav makes the boy promise that one day he will take his place as the strong one in the family, and, it is suggested, as a porter in the dance as well, making the notion of inheritance both burdensome and absurd at once.

Meanwhile, the novel is haunted by a national father-figure, the notorious Sattler. Feared, admired, and abhorred, he is a figure of mythic proportions whose monument looms over the city and the imaginations of its inhabitants. Reitano quotes one city resident, who notes that Sattler

“‘holds an attraction for certain people precisely because he’s so distant, a piece of local myth’ [375, emphasis in original]” (370). She argues that “Sattler, attractive only in his remoteness, is a seeming origin shrouded in a forgotten past where meaning and value is [sic] thought to reside but who himself could never have overcome the ‘deeply embedded things’ of the city’s truly originary history — whatever that may be. Sattler was too late, a fact at once obscured and made evident in his monumentality” (370).

Sattler himself was heir to the city’s misfortunes, but held out a promise of change, however disastrously unrealised, and the question of Sattler as inheritance remains charged. As a figure of origin, Sattler recalls both Stalin (or Father Stalin, we should remember) and Hitler (as

Reitano points out, “Sattler” is a combination of the two names), but also Marx, whose theories of history they both inherited, and who shaped the landscape of twentieth-century Europe, and especially post-World-War-Two Europe, the imaginative space in which The Unconsoled is set. 189

(And though the former figures are certainly more demonic than Marx is, the idea of Marx is in some ways more threatening to free-market capitalism, precisely because he has never been demonized in the same way.) The figure of Sattler is an elusive spectral thing, much like the multiple and heterogeneous specters of Marx described by Derrida, and he haunts the city and the novel according to much the same logic: multiple and heterogeneous himself, there seems to be no agreement as to what exactly he stands for.

Despite this, Sattler is a powerful figure in the world of the novel, because his presence

— or more precisely, his absence — is in a Derridean sense hauntological. First, there is the necessary anteriority of the crime; next, the terror it provokes; and finally and above all, the injunction, despite all this, to inherit. Derrida discusses Marx’s “specters” by analogy to the ghost of Hamlet’s father, in terms that are instructive:

There is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime — the crime of the other, a misdeed whose event and reality, whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized. One does not, for all that, bear any less responsibility… to repair an evil. (Specters 24)

Such a responsibility, he continues, “can only come after the crime, or simply after: that is, in a necessarily second generation, originarily late and therefore destined to inherit” (24). Derrida puts this in context of the tragic, though if anything, The Unconsoled is a parody of a tragedy (to the extent that, as if in a perverse take on Aristotle’s three unities of action, place, and time, every event in every subplot actually happens to different versions of the same person, it all happens in a no place, and a lifetime repeats itself over and over in the course of three days, without advancing at all in time). The unconsoled citizens certainly feel they are on the verge of an irredeemable and tragic fate, but in the end the novel sidesteps the tragic — there are no self- 190 recriminations, no suicides, poisoned chalices, or gouging of eyes. This side-step is possible because it constitutes the novel’s temporal structure: it is all side-stepping, nothing but lateral movement, but it is all necessarily in the space of the “after.” The logic of Derridean haunting, thus, still holds true: Sattler variously is blamed for the current state of crisis and was a victim of it, both the originator of a crime and the victim of a more originary crime, and the citizens are destined to inherit it all, bearing responsibility for it whether they want to or not.

Derrida also speaks of the terrified hostility the specter provokes, and of the desire to

“exorc-analyze” — or exorcise by analysing — the “spectrality of the specter” (58). This response is consonant with the controversy surrounding the newpaper picture of Ryder posed in front of the Sattler monument. Though the citizens insist that Sattler is securely a part of their past, “an irrelevance” who would “never have changed anything fundamentally” (374), they

“panic [and] recoil” (375) at the idea of Ryder’s link with him. The people resent precisely

Sattler’s spectrality, the idea that he never did completely die, and that the apparition might reappear when they were just getting comfortable with ignoring it (and its moans and jangling of chains).

But as Derrida tells us, people would be willing to accept the return to Marx (or in this case, Sattler), “on the condition that a silence is maintained about [his] injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering … into a transformation that ‘changes the world’” (38). This injunction is at one and the same time an injunction to inherit, though critically so:

This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. Such a reaffirmation would be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx’s appeal — let us say once again in the spirit of his injuction — and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general. Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It 191

remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be…. (67)

This injunction holds true irrespective of the nature of the inheritance in question, and in Sattler’s case, we do not know what that nature is. But this is the problem he poses: whether they admit it or not, the city is desperate for an heir to Sattler, one who will either overthrow and thus exorcise him for good, or will make good on his promises. They seem to hope (again, without hoping it) that Ryder will be that heir, but he is only part of a pattern of potential heirs that preceded him, including most notably Brodsky and Christoff, two conductors whose warring reputations attest to the heterogeneous nature of the specter they inherit. To see where Ryder fits in, we need to briefly compare him to these two figures (or alternate versions of himself, as heir).

Derrida speaks of both inheritance and hauntology as performative, as the performance of

“an interpretation that transforms what it interprets” (Specters 63). Brodsky, Christoff, and Ryder are literally performers who interpret the music they perform, and they are all also outsiders who are celebrated as messianic saviours once they arrive in the city — Christoff’s name bearing the obvious allusion. They must come from outside the city in order to bring with them the possibility of an end to history. As Derrida describes it, an heir who is bound to be a redresser of wrongs can only do so “by castigating, punishing, killing. The malediction would be inscribed in the law itself: in its murderous, bruising origin” (25). He suggests that a justice “removed from the fatality of vengeance” would necessarily be “a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi- messianic day” (25). This would seem to account, to an extent, for the strange, suspended temporality of the novel: this is not a “quasi-messianic” time, but a time in wait for such a day, suspended in the stuff of history, as “out of joint” as Hamlet’s prevarications about his own impossible inheritance. 192

These three men — all versions of Ryder and his hopes and fears for his possible futures

(his own specters, coming from the future instead of the past, if you will) — all perform, in their own ways, an interpretation of history, encoded in the formal characteristics of modern music that is also an inheritance of Sattler (for the simple reason that the city has no history without

Sattler — he is the specter that needs to be exorcised). Christoff is the current conductor, but is in the process of being ousted, as Brodsky was before him, since neither of them was able to alleviate the people’s continued “widespread misery” (99). Christoff and “everything he has come to represent must now be put away in some dark corner of [their] history” (100), and the people now look to Ryder to help them “build a new mood, a new era” (112), in part by restoring

Brodsky’s damaged reputation. This oscillation between the two conductors, from Brodsky to

Christoff and back to Brodsky (and, it is insinuated, back to someone “not so different from Mr

Christoff” [522] after Brodsky’s disastrous and provocative performance at the end of the novel), is indicative of the citizenry’s inability to either recognise or choose an heir, and their refusal not just to settle on an interpretation, but to choose to interpret at all. Christoff seemed the safe choice at one time: his work “celebrates the mechanical [and] … stifle[s] natural emotion,” and he is, he admits, “a mediocrity” (190).21 Brodsky, on the other hand, is inspired by Sattler, and seems to believe he is the figure’s true heir: “All the way, take it all the way! Hold nothing back!.

… [They’ll] see who I really am, who I was all along! The Sattler monument, that’s it!” (365).

Brodsky’s performance that evening does indeed take it all the way — his conducting is

“impassioned” to the point of seeming “manic,” the music “veer[s] dangerously towards the realms of perversity,” and provokes “incredulity, distress, even disgust” in musicians and

21 In this way, though, perhaps his work did have something aesthetically in common with the Sattler monument, at least in terms of its analogously formalist High Modernism, which is described as “a tall cylinder of white brickwork, windowless apart from a single vertical slit near the top” (182). 193 audience members alike (494). After the concert, people complain that Brodsky cannot be allowed to set an example for their children (502) — that is, he cannot be an heir that would then be theirs to inherit — since his performance was not just “tasteless” but “bordered on the immoral” (502). They blame this lapse on his allegiance with Sattler: “Apparently… Brodsky believes Max Sattler had it right…. That explains a lot about what we just heard” (502).22

Ryder, on the other hand, gives no performance at all — over the course of the evening and into the early morning, his father-in-law and sometimes porter (or the other way around)

Gustav, dies in a dressing room at the concert hall; Stephan gives an inspired and triumphant recital, but his parents are not present, and his father (ashamed of his own mediocrity and, ostensibly, that of his son) ends up leaving his mother in a corridor; Brodsky, whose leg has had to be amputated (though it turns out it already had been, and the doctor had removed merely a wooden prosthesis), collapses midway through his perverse performance; and Ryder discovers that his parents have not made it to the concert after all. Ryder, then, is multiply distracted by the various versions of his own disappointments playing around him, and effectively refuses to interpret and perform for the people, despite his avowed wish that he do that very thing.

So, Christoff neutralises the idea of Sattler by giving the people order and mediocrity, and the people are ashamed of him; Brodsky witnesses and acts out his inheritance of Sattler, and he is reviled for it; and Ryder, it seems, denies both the ideal and the criminal pasts of the city by refusing to inherit at all. None of these options is acceptable to the unconsoled citizens, but after the “unmitigated disaster” of the concert (503), they allow themselves to be temporarily

22 The two figures might even be made to represent the terms through which we understand our inheritance of modernism: Neitzsche gave us the Apollonian and the Dionysian (Christoff and Brodsky, respectively), but we might also consider Christoff’s ordered Christianity (and indeed, his name is Christ-off) in contradistinction to Brodsky’s impassioned paganism. We might even (loosely) understand the failed messiahs as figures for Lenin and Trotsky, two heirs to Marx who had their own infamous differences. 194 comforted by one man’s impromptu speech on “the splendid heritage of this city, [and] all the things [they’ve] got to be proud of,” a self-congratulatory and watered-down official history in which “all the awful problems other cities are blighted with [they] never have to worry about” (516).

It may be that Brodsky is the only one in the city to bear witness to traumatic loss in his obsession with his wound; the fact that he undergoes an amputation of a prosthetic leg points to the wound that preceded it as a more originary trauma. It is not merely an accident of metaphor that Derrida describes inheritance according to the same image of the wound. The fact that any inheritance, with its many faults and injunctions, is always itself multiple, he writes, is “the originary wrong, the birth wound from which [the heir] suffers, a bottomless wound, an irreparable tragedy, the indefinite malediction that marks the history of the law or history as law” (24). Inheritance, in other words, is in essence traumatic, and when Brodsky seeks consolation from the wound through the wound, he is a least returning to the scene of the crime as such. Whether the art he creates from it is good or bad is open to interpretation, but it is, at least, a reckoning. Reitano’s reading of Brodsky’s final aborted performance is perceptive: she writes that the originary loss that the city of the unconsoled evokes “reflects the resentment

Ishiguro describes as England’s post-war inheritance,” in terms of its loss of an “international history,” and that this finds expression in Brodsky’s performance (375). Brodsky alone does not turn back, but rages on precisely because it is too late: he “suffers no illusions about a wholesale revival of the past” and “envisions his world as one in which a radical break with the past has come and gone, a belief he finds liberating” (376). Her take on his wound is that its literalness

“subverts any metaphoric significance the reader would like to attach to [it]…. Meaning is 195 prosthetic,… is the creation of consoling versions of a world, a present world toward which we feel the absence of relation” (377). The fact that Brodsky’s wound — sustained over a generation ago during the war (a victim of Sattler’s crimes, in other words) — never heals, tells us that “it is original rupture, and not unity, that orients our longing.” Brodsky “is nostalgic, but he is perversely nostalgic for the very limitations, and not the promise, of possibilities he may now interpret without the impending burden of their fulfillment” (377).

Reitano’s point is that Ishiguro takes on the burden of nostalgia for what was never his to mourn in the first place: the English novel. We could take this a step further and argue that, precisely because it is bogged down in this kind of nostalgia or memory-work, The Unconsoled effectively performs a kind of mourning, perhaps for the form, or the idea, of the “international”

English novel, but also for modernism in general, and High Modernism in particular — the kind figured in the modern music Ryder and the other musicians are obsessed with, a “universal” modernism of pure form. If we return to the idea of the Sattler monument, the image that haunts

Ryder’s reputation and the novel as a whole, we see that the novel inscribes another theory of memory and history within it. Comay, returning to Nora’s reading of the monument, reminds us not to assume that memorials simply displace and externalise memory, and asks us whether memory itself might have always been “defined as expropriation.”

The memorial which usurps or pre-empts our memories not only assumes the subjective attributes of its now reified consumers but inscribes the limits of the possibility of inscription. If every fetish is a mnemonic registration of a loss which is simultaneously repudiated (both a victory monument over and the stigma indelibile of castration, says Freud), then the fetishized memorial ambiguously commemorates not the lost object per se but the loss of loss: in staging the coincidence of memory with its own evacuation the memorial performs an impossible mourning rite for mourning itself and thereby demonstrates our irreducible eviction from our own experience. It is mourning as such which is now, ‘impossibly,’ being mourned. (92) 196

After this fashion, the novel may be a testament to Ryder’s inability to mourn, which is also and at the same time Ryder’s inability to inherit. He refuses to accept the history his real father has passed on to him, and is doomed to repeat it without difference; he refuses to accept responsibility for his step-son, Boris, and denies himself the rupture that comes from choosing to become a parent; and he is unable to mourn the death of his father-in-law and Boris’s beloved grandfather, Gustav. Sophie accuses him of this much when she leaves him at the end of the novel (or when he leaves her — there is such an inevitability about it that it defies characterological or agential determination): “You were always on the outside of our love. Now look at you. On the outside of our grief too.” And to Boris’s protests, she adds: “He’ll never love you like a real father” (532). Ryder can never be a father nor a son, never a messiah (which is also necessariliy a son), and the novel parodies the idea that, as an artist, he might ever have had the power to intervene on such a grand scale with matters of historical debt (the idea of such an intervention being itself a holdover of the modernism of manifestoes discussed in my introduction). The novel performs a work of mourning nonetheless; through its multi-valenced critique of nostalgia and melancholy, it mourns our ability to mourn, and thus inherit, and open up a possible future for the novel — the only ethical movement Ishiguro may have felt possible at that point in his career.

The Orphan Figure and the Question of Genre For those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm. — When We Were Orphans 197

If The Unconsoled is a parable of impossible inheritance, When We Were Orphans sketches an idea of an inheritance — whose responsibilities are also ultimately unrealisable, perhaps — that is at least grounded in a more recognisable world, in which the (il)logics of global politics and history obtain. The curious temporality of the novel’s title hints at this change in orientation from the world of the unconsoled: it refers to a time, in the past, when we were all orphans, and suggests also, therefore, that that time is not now. Christopher Banks is the novel’s central orphan figure, and though there are other orphans in his story — the young girl Jenny, whom he adopts, and his love-interest, Sarah — they are never so fully realised as others that we can assume the

“we” of the title refers to them. It is, instead, an interpellating “we,” and functions thus on the level of allegory: Ishiguro is asking us to consider the historical moment in which we might have been orphans, and to consider what it means that we no longer are. The nature of this inheritance,

Ishiguro seems to suggest, is one which concerns us all, and which demands action in the political sphere, a near impossibility in the world of The Unconsoled. In The Unconsoled the political collapses into the solipsistic because Ryder’s childhood fantasies, and the lieux de mémoire that lead him back there, are intensely private. In When We Were Orphans, by contrast,

Banks’s childhood fantasy aligns with the detective fiction that also gave consolation to a national reading public in the interwar years, so that he embodies a much more pronounced, public desire. And while some critics even see the novel as proto-utopian in its nostalgia for transcultural understanding, I will argue that this reading is undercut by the novel’s metafictional exploitation of the detective genre and the orphan trope, both of which are turned on their heads.

Though Orphans is rooted in historical events in relatively specific times and places —

London in the interwar years, Shanghai’s International Settlement at the outset of the Sino- 198

Japanese War, the warrens of Chapei where most of the fighting occurred, and London again in

1958 — we are still very much in a realm of metaphor, as the novel’s many continuities with The

Unconsoled make clear.23 Most obviously, like Ryder, Banks is still trapped in a fantasy constructed in childhood, in which he plays a world-famous detective who finds his parents after their disappearances. Almost thirty years later, he maintains that they are both well and alive, having been kept, in comfort, by their kidnappers in Chapei. As in The Unconsoled, this personal fantasy is conflated, through Banks’s “vocational imperative” (Spark 132), with issues of pressing global importance. Once Banks arrives in Shanghai, he appropriates others around him into this fantasy: they conspire with his belief that not only is his parents’ safe return a likely result, but that in doing so he will put a stop to the great evil at the heart of the conflict there.

Like the city of the unconsoled, the landscape of Shanghai seems increasingly to be one projected by Banks, to the extent that some readers felt they had been jolted out of the relatively realist narrative mode of the novel’s first half (set in London), where Banks seems merely like a classic unreliable narrator. But the first sign that Banks inhabits a reality analogous to that in The

Unconsoled comes early on, when he meets first the Somerset Inspector and then Canon Moorly, who each urge him, unprompted, to slay “the heart of the serpent” (135) at the “heart of the storm” (138) — which, the Canon has to convince him, lies in the Far East, “Shanghai, to be exact” (138). Banks’ personal narrative demands that he return to Shanghai, but his vocation demands that he be compelled by external demands for justice to do so; his appropriations conspire to make both come true, so that any final distinction between realism and a world of

23 There is even mention early on of Sarah having left her fiancé, a conductor, after a concert that is described, third- hand, as a “complete travesty,” and “a violation” [17], recalling not just Ryder’s/Brodsky’s disastrous (non-) performance, but also Christoff’s and Hoffman’s wives, whom the men fear will leave them now that their reputations have collapsed. 199 fantasy and projection has been undermined from the novel’s beginning. Both Ryder and Banks thus play similar kinds of messiah figures, to themselves and to the people around them, who carry the burden of saving the world, either through a single spectacular concert in The

Unconsoled or a brilliant feat of ratiocination in When We Were Orphans. Ryder’s and Banks’s respective worlds conspire in these fantasies, to an extent, as the people around them desire saving as much as their putative rescuers desire to be the saviours to do so.

No matter how many people seem to partake in them, however, these desires are always presented in both of these novels as fantasies qua fantasies. In When We Were Orphans, this aspect is made clear through Ishiguro’s use (and Banks’s appropriation) of the detective fiction genre. As I explained earlier, Ishiguro was drawn to the genre for its “poignant” nostalgia for a more innocent time, a time before the horrors of war, when order and justice were still thought possible. Unlike its relatively cynical, hard-boiled, and almost exclusively urban American counterpart, the English detective mystery of the interwar “Golden Age” is structured around an upset — the Vicar in a quiet Dorset village has been poisoned — and then, once the perpetrator is ascertained through logic and acumen, a restoration of pastoral innocence and normalcy. This nostalgia, which at heart is a nostalgia for the idealised Victorian England of Sir Arthur Conan

Doyle, is undercut, in When We Were Orphans, by its juxtaposition with the horrors of twentieth- century mass warfare; as Ishiguro describes it, he had “this rather comic idea of a detective going about high society London with his Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass, who by the end of the story is examining dismembered corpses in a war-zone, with the same magnifying glass, desperately wondering 'who-dunnit’” (“Conversation”). Despite the patent absurdity of this image, though, “Ishiguro stops just short of parody, and though he won’t let his readers surrender 200 to the genre, he doesn’t condescend to it either. For by placing its clichés in Banks’s mind,

Ishiguro makes their slight pomposity an essential part of the man’s character, a mark of both his limitations and of the psychic necessity that moves him” (Gorra 12). The cliché Banks clings to is not just about being a detective, but expressly one who embodies the same undeclared nostalgia for an idealised Victorian past — note that Banks’s apartment, which has been “chosen

… with some care,” is lovingly described, on the novel’s first page, as furnished “in a tasteful manner that evoked an unhurried Victorian past,” which he feels will represent him well when he finally receives his first visitor (3). He desires to inhabit not just a genre, but a genre as lieu de mémoire to a more innocent, unhurried past. (We might even argue that Banks’s magnifying glass is a lieu de mémoire as Krips described it, one that gives Banks access both to a past imagined in terms of a genre, and to a childhood constructed according to the same fantasy of restoration of innocence.)24

A number of critics (Sim 77; Beedham 129; Spark 132) have pointed out some of the ways in which Orphans thwarts various conventions of the genre, the most obvious being the fact that we never actually witness Banks using his powers to solve a case. Many previous jobs are referred to and remembered (like “the Trevor Richardson affair” [9] or “the Studley Grange business” [31]), but the details which would make up the substance of these narratives, and which provide the most pleasure for the reader of mysteries (from the gathering of seemingly innocuous clues to the astounding leaps of deductive insight they inspire), are absent.25 We are provided only with the most basic outlines, if that, and a vision of the grateful public that Banks

24 Beedham has another reading of the magnifying glass, which has on it an inscription too tiny to read with the naked eye, so that a second glass is required to read it — an image, he says, of the “sleuth’s myopic mind,” and of the need for another reader to detect what really needs detecting: Banks’s psychic life (135).

25 This was obviously a very conscious decision, for at one point in the drafting process, Ishiguro threw out a 150- page case-within-a-case that he had written (Sim 131). 201 has served, all of which has the effect of concentrating our focus on the outcome, which is neat and bounded, and on the desire of all involved to put the case behind them. The way these crimes are narrated, then, accentuates the essential conservatism of the way they are framed by our narrator, Banks. Franco Moretti argues that the genre of the detective novel “exists expressly to dispel the doubt that guilt might be impersonal, and therefore collective and social,” and which therefore helps to reinforce status quo individualism (qtd. in Sim 77). This seems to hold true for

Banks, for even when a case is so heinous as to suggest the possibility deeper roots — the children murdered in Somerset are killed not just by “some madman who was passing, [or] something of that order,” after all — he responds to the inexplicable nature of the crime by urging us to “accept it…. hold strong… [and] carry on” (135). As Wai-chew Sim concludes,

“[r]esponsibility, exculpation, redemption, forgiveness and hope cannot be posed as public interest issues because detective fiction redirects our attention somewhere else” (77).26

But this is, of course, Banks’s plight: he is committed to a genre that he believes will bring solace to his personal life and to the world at large, but he strains against its confines from the moment he is most committed to it, when he arrives in Shanghai.27 The night Banks is first introduced to the “gathering of Shanghai’s elite” (154) at the Palace Hotel penthouse, he frames the experience as being one of “frustration with …[its] inordinately crowded nature” (154) — a

26 Sim himself argues that Orphans challenges this view through its experiment with form, showing that “artistic experimentation is important in its own right” (77). This does not quite get to the heart of the matter, especially given Ishiguro’s critique of the idea of art as consolation in his previous novel.

27 In another echo of The Unconsoled, there is a sense of fated inevitability about Banks’s return to Shanghai, where the unacknowledged fantasy-narrative has been heading all along. When Sarah tells him that she and Sir Cecil are headed for Shanghai, Banks feels relief, as their conversation has “a strangely familiar ring, as though [they] had rehearsed [it] somewhere many times already” (144). As he puts it himself to a man from the British Consulate in Shanghai, “my arrival here isn’t a starting point, but the culmination of many years’ work” (155). In this way When We Were Orphans enacts the same static temporality as we have seen in The Unconsoled, where origin collides with telos and allows for no forward movement. The difference is that by the novel’s close, Banks comes to realise that his fantasy has been just that all along. 202 banal observation in light of what comes next. He and his companions watch, through opera glasses, as smoke rises across the river where the fighting rages. Banks comments, in a tone that is strikingly light: “So that’s the war. Most interesting. Are there many casualties, do you suppose?” (161). Banks then responds to someone’s comment about how the detective will clear up the whole confusing mess by urging them not to “raise false expectations,” though he is optimistic for a happy conclusion (161). The speech is largely ignored (and given his absurd hopes, comes off with an edge of false modesty), because at that moment, dancers take to the floor, and Banks feels a a “wave of revulsion” that one entertainment should so easily be substituted for another (162). He describes himself as shocked by “the refusal of everyone here to acknowledge their drastic culpability,” adding that he has “not witnessed — not once — anything that could pass for honest shame” (162).

Gordon Spark calls this a “key episode in the novel,” wherein Banks’s “principles of good triumphing over evil, upon which his sense of vocation is founded, clashes with the murky realities of imperialism, whose ideology he has previously reconciled with his own moral sensibilities. Banks’s previously easy and unquestioning assimilation into the hegemony of empire is undermined by his first-hand experiences in Shanghai” (131). This observation certainly holds true, for the novel is about the nature of colonial responsibility, and contemporary

England’s inheritance of responsibility to former colonies and pseudo-colonies (which is how the situation is described by Uncle Philip at the novel’s close: with the Chinese “in chaos, drug- addicted, unable to govern themselves properly…[,] the country could be run virtually like a colony, but with none of the usual obligations” [288]). The complexity of Banks’s narration, however, complicates any easy understandings of the nature of this responsibility. Besides simply 203 marking the progress of his cognitive dissonance, this passage introduces us to the idea of

“honest shame,” an irony given that moments earlier, Banks was a complacent spectator of the violence himself (so that while he is watching, he is distracted by and identifies with a boatman on the river below, who like him is so “utterly absorbed by the fate of his cargo,” they both

“quite [forget] the fighting” [160]).

There is also the question of how much Banks’s disgust is prompted by the fact that his speech is ignored, and the deeper question of the roots of his own sense of responsibility, which may be grounded in his own barely acknowledged guilt at having failed his parents when he was a child. He was, after all, only induced to leave China out of a sense of social obligation to his aunt (“‘She’s expecting you, don’t you see? Can’t very well let the lady down at this stage, can we?’” [26]), when he felt a superseding moral obligation to stay behind and help investigators find his parents. The question of whether or not this shame is “honest” is murky, since he was obviously a child with little to no say in the matter, and the idea of his child-self cracking the case at any rate is absurd. Still, it raises the question that has obviously dogged Banks since childhood, which is in essence a question of agency and of tragic responsibility (and recalls

Briony’s more conscious dilemma in Atonement): what does it mean to be responsible for something you did not do, or did not intend to do? It may be that Banks is trying to dodge this question by assigning his shame to the people around him.

Bernard Williams describes the manoeuvre this way:

Shame need not be just a matter of being seen, but of being seen by an observer with a certain view. Indeed, the view taken by the observer need not itself be critical: people can be ashamed of being admired by the wrong audience in the wrong way. Equally, they need not be ashamed of being poorly viewed, if the view is that of an observer for whom they feel contempt. Hector [of Homer’s Iliad] was indeed afraid that someone inferior to 204

him would be able to criticise him, but that was because he thought the criticism would be true, and the fact that such a person could make it would only make things worse. (82)

Though Banks assures the crowd that he is optimistic about solving the case, he is fearful of a possible failure, about repeating without changing his childhood experience. If he fails, he invites criticism which would make his (childhood) shame manifest. So, he both wants and does not want to be admired by the people around him: he wants their praise to mean something, and their disappointment not to. His contempt for them is so strong, it seems, not just out of an awareness of his colonial culpability, or his desire to regulate that shame as also theirs, but out of a desire to displace a shame that is more private and inarticulate. Beedham says that in The Remains of the

Day, Ishiguro “demonstrates [the] falsity in believing that one individual can change history” (131); the same is true of his next two novels, and here, the specter of agency, and of the consistent subjectivity thought necessary for it, has been raised. By the end of the novel, when

Banks finally enters the house where he believes his parents are being kept and finds only a young girl surrounded by the corpses of her family members, his fantasy of agency finally collapses. He examines the body of the girl’s mother with his magnifying glass, which Spark notes, is “usually a symbol of his status and his ability to impose a degree of agency upon the world, [but] stands now as a symbol of impotence, as he finds himself unable, in his own words, to ascertain a great deal from the larger historical forces in operation all around him” (129). The point I’m making here is that Banks’s confusion about the limits of his own agency is not his alone; just as he is not a classic unreliable narrator who operates in a world we can recognise, so his narration, and his relationship to Shanghai, distorts what we do know about the world and about what our relationship to it is. 205

One of the ways Ishiguro makes our relationship to this world more clear is through his use of the orphan trope (in which we are all implicated, if we accept the premise I forwarded earlier, that at one time, we were all, collectively, orphans ourselves). Childhood in Orphans is structured in much the same way as it is in The Unconsoled: both narrator-protagonists suffer from a traumatic childhood wound, which for Banks is far more sudden and pronounced, for which they compensate with fantasies of acheivement and reunion that they maintain into adulthood. Ryder and Banks also maintain the more primary fantasies that underwrite them: the idea that their childhoods were perfect in the first place. As Shaffer points out, “Banks’s golden childhood in Shanghai before the Japanese bombing campaign and before the mysterious disappearance of his parents was far less happy or stable than he would like (and like us) to believe. This is hinted at not only in the hesitantly revealed facts about his parents’ less-than- ideal relationship but also in the details of the other marriages depicted in the novel, all of which are failures, and all of which, we come to understand, mirror that of Christopher’s parents” (qtd. in Beedham 127). While this account could apply equally well to Ryder, there is a difference: we might describe Ryder as a metaphorical orphan, in that he spends the novel also searching for his parents in one way or another, but Banks is literally orphaned, a fact made salient for the reader through his obsession with the idea of “connectedness.” As a schoolboy in England, Banks hounds his friend Osbourne about what it means to be connected, and when they meet again as adults, Osbourne invites him to a ball organised by a family member, where he shows Banks what being well-connected really means: profiting from the benefits of class privilege and the

“old boys” club that goes with it. 206

Wai-chew Sim points out that the idea of “connectedness” is “the organizing rubric of the book” (72), as it gives Ishiguro a way to rewrite the same figure as it is mapped out in Dickens’s

Great Expectations. In that novel, Pip is stunned to learn that his social ascent has been financed not by the genteel Miss Havisham, but by Magwitch, an ex-convict who has made his fortune in the penal colony of New South Wales, all of which parallels Banks’s discovery that his own upbringing has been subsidised, not by his aunt, but by Wang Ku, the Chinese warlord who has kept his mother in captivity all the intervening years. Just as Dickens indicts Victorian class society, Sim argues, by revealing how it is “underpinned by tainted colonial spoils, by a less than genteel logic where transportation (of offenders overseas) and the debtor’s prison await large numbers of the struggling masses,” so Ishiguro shows us what those connections are today (70).

Ishiguro thus “provides a cosmopolitan or transnational vector to British cultural identity by following a logic [of connectedness] already embedded in Dickens’s novel” (72). Sim goes on to give Ishiguro’s novel a mildly utopian reading:

[T]he novel uses this oddly jejune question — what is connectedness? — to offer an alternative social network, to prefigure its ending and to challenge the idea that our sympathies and sense of fellow feeling must be tied to fixed geographical boundaries. It calls on us to imagine in a different way our customary attachments and affiliations. (72)

This appeal certainly represents one aspect of Ishiguro’s text, and chimes with the author’s expressed investment in the emotional idealism of nostalgia for childhood, and for the better world we once thought possible. Indeed, some of the most commented-on scenes in the novel have to do with the idealistic metaphoric content of the idea of childhood: Akira’s advice to

Banks that children are like the twine that holds the slats of the blinds together, keeping not just the family but the whole world from falling apart (73) (an image Banks repeats to Uncle Philip

[76], and again in adulthood, to illustrate the importance of the crime-fighter to society as a 207 whole [135]); and Philip’s suggestion that if Banks is “a bit of a mongrel,” the world would be a better place if more boys grew up “with a bit of everything” (76). As Sim comments, “Philip’s remarks about Banks being a bit of a mongrel echo Akira’s counsel about the responsibility of children because they both contain the idea that childhood is different from the status quo” (74).

Connectedness, however (and as Sim would perhaps not deny), is a more complicated concept in this novel, a sentiment echoed in Philip’s response to the young Banks’s image of the twine, which he seems to have misinterpreted to be about the difficulty of living without a sense of nation or identity: “People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise… [t]his civilisation of ours, perhaps it’ll just collapse. And everything scatter” (76-77). Although Banks may be a mongrel and an orphan, he is not simply free to fashion himself however he chooses: his filial ties are what drive him, and are what incite him to affiliate himself the way he does, sometimes despite conflicting (and more realisable) desires. This conflict is most obvious when, after agreeing with Sarah that “it’s not up to us to do anything other than what we choose” (222), he leaves her, effectively renouncing the possibility of a future together, in order to pursue the fantasy of his parents’ retrieval. In this case, of course, Banks’s “filial” ties are also to genre, as he is unable to suddenly pursue another narrative trajectory before the one he is committed to has achieved its denouement. Banks works this out himself, when Sarah first suggests they run off together: he feels an “almost tangible sense of relief,” and tells himself that it is “as though this suggestion of hers … carried with it a huge authority, something that brought me a kind of dispensation I had never dared hope for” (212). What Sarah offers him is a glimpse of an alternate narrative, essentially a dispensation from the burden of genre. Almost immediately, though, he remembers himself: “The difficulty is my work here…. After all, the world’s on the 208 brink of catastrophe. What would people think of me if I abandoned them all at this stage? …

What would you think of me?” (212). The real question, of course, is what Banks would think of himself, since like Ryder he appropriates those around him to fulfill his psychic needs. His fear is obvious: he would be nothing outside the strictures of genre, which in this case, are grounded in a particular ennobling version of Englishness. For the literary figure of the orphan, filial ties are both literal and figurative, according to its metaphorical function, and Banks is bound to both of them.

Like the figure of the (unorphaned) child, the figure of the orphan has its own history and inheritance to which it is tied, and Ishiguro makes self-conscious use of this history in his novel.

In Orphan Texts, Laura Peters argues that in the Victorian period, the “family and all it came to represent — legitimacy, race and national belonging — was in crisis: it was at best an unsustainable ideal. In order to reaffirm itself the family needed a scapegoat. It found one in the orphan figure" (1). Peters calls on the same “Romantic notion of childhood as before time, out of history” (5) that I outlined earlier, and turns also to Freud’s articulation of the melancholic longing for home in order to explain it. This condition is that of “one removed from home, an exile, a homelessness, a separation from family that untimately implies being without family, or at least outside of it…. [It is] metaphorically that of the orphan” (Peters 6). As such, the orphan presents a threat to the family that needs to be expelled. Peters’s conceptual model here is that of the Derridean pharmakon, which she says combines “Freud’s notion of the uncanny as being both foreign and of the known … with Derrida’s notion of the supplementary double in which sameness always contains its difference” (18). According to Freud, she continues,

the uncanny is often simultaneously associated with novelty and with fear — terms used by the Victorians themselves to define the orphan.… The orphan then can be read, in his 209

or her relationship to the family and home, as occupying the same relationship of the uncanny or unheimlich to the heimlich; the orphan is unfamiliar, i.e., not of family, strange, and outside the dominant narrative of domesticity. Thus, in a narrative which … conflates individual family home with class position and national belonging, the unheimlich orphan comes to embody the foreigner; a 'dangerous supplement’ that comes to disturb the structure of home, identity, nation and discourse. (19)

She argues that, as both threat and as supplement that guarantees the centrality of the family, the orphan plays a pharmakon-like function in Victorian culture: “the orphan embodies a surplus excess to be expelled to the colonies. This expulsion works to reinforce notions of belonging in

Victorian culture” (19).

Although Ishiguro is not explicitly working to rewrite the orphan trope he inherited from

Victorian novels per se, the narrative’s metafictional ties with Great Expectations, and the nostalgia for the imagined innocence of the pre-war period that it plays with in evoking the

Golden Age detective novel, make the connection an apt one. In fact, Orphans works to undermine its borrowed generic nostalgia by exposing it as a longing for a set of figures and tropes, and not for a more essentially innocent time as such. The novel takes the idea of the orphan as colony or colonist, and as uncanny or unheimlich, and turns it on its head by having

Banks declare at the end of the novel that Shanghai’s International Settlement has always been his only “home village”: “All these years I’ve lived in England, I’ve never really felt at home there. The International Settlement. That will always be my home” (256). Though Banks is orphaned in Shanghai (we might even say by Shanghai and the politics of pseudo-colonisation, to some extent), the International Settlement is home, and England is its uncanny other.

This is not a matter of a simple reversal of the trope, however, for the idea of difference is latent in the idea of home, even in Banks’s remembered “halcyon childhood” (Sim 68): when his parents are not speaking to each other, Banks worries that they are disappointed in his being “not 210 enough Englishman” (72), as his friend Akira puts it to him. After their disappearances, when he gets to England, this worry is exacerbated — not because Banks considers himself not English enough, but because he accepts so deeply that being English is what he is and should be. He is a dedicated and conscientious mimic on the playground and into adult life, evidence of his desire to domesticate the uncanny and make it his home. He practically succeeds, at least in convincing himself: when Osbourne remembers him as an “odd bird,” Banks counters that his “own memory is that [he] blended perfectly into English school life” (7), and when, later in the novel, another school friend remembers Banks as being something of “a miserable loner,” Banks refuses this memory too: “you must have me mixed up with someone else, old fellow. I was always one for mucking in” (184). The stiffness and artificiality of Banks’s person are mirrored in his prose, which is pedantic and periphrastic; as James Wood puts it, it is “almost a spoof, something between a pastiche of Conan Doyle and a parody of the kind of gossipy, metropolitan, highly

‘English’ prose written by Anthony Powell” (in Beedham 126). Banks’s world, Wood continues,

seems to have been borrowed from an English novel, and this is surely Ishiguro’s intended effect. Christopher is producing a masquerade of a style that is already something of a masquerade; he is not entirely real — not to himself, not to those who encounter him, and not to Ishiguro’s readers. It is not that Ishiguro is postmodernistically concerned to suggest that this kind of ‘Englishness’ does not exist, though the stability of the entity is certainly a casualty of his novel. It is more, I think, that he wants us to see Christopher as a man deformed by the effort of conformity — deformed into genre, into unreality, and, if necessary, into falsehood. (Wood TNR 47)

Whether or not it is Ishiguro’s intent to “postmodernistically” undermine the idea of Englishness as something that exists outside of or beyond the text, this is effectively what the novel does (and what Wood almost admits to). The idea of Englishness that Ishiguro is nostalgic for exists only within the confines of this metafictional recreation of the detective genre. Though certainly 211

Banks is not a reliable narrator, we have to ask what sense of Englishness the text gives us that is the ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ against which Banks’s ‘unreality’ and ‘falsehood’ stand?

The Englishness Banks embodies is not unified in itself, for his inheritances are double and split at the very least, even on the most literal level. Though Banks would like to believe that his father disappeared after finally working with his mother to out his company’s involvement in the opium trade, the truth is more sordid and disappointing: while his mother was a morally admirable, vocal opponent of his father’s company’s corporate and colonial project, his father was complicit in the same project. The idea of doubleness — of multiple inheritances and multiple responsibilities, and of being out of temporal step with oneself — haunts Banks’s narrative all the way down. Wandering through the warrens, Banks periodically hears the anguished screams of a man he eventually discerns are actually two: one is shouting in

Mandarin, and the other in Japanese. This disturbs him:

The realisation that these were two different men rather chilled me. So identical were their pitiful whimpers, the way their screams gave way to desperate entreaties, then returned to screams, that the notion came to me this was what each of us would go through on our way to death — that these terrible noises were as universal as the crying of new-born babes. (259)

Though he frames this apprehension as being about a kind of universalism, it is a universal that is the uncanny obverse of the notion of a universal nostalgia for childhood — suffering and death

— but also, paradoxically, the uncanny obverse of that: the idea that life, and difference, persist through and despite suffering. What seems to chill Banks in this case is an intimation of the uncanny, unbounded nature of suffering — an intimation he has been working to keep at bay over the course of the narrative, though it invades even the most sacrosanct realms of nostalgia. 212

It is there in his fantasies of home and origin, evident in the two scenes that Ryder longed for and never experienced: the return to the childhood home, and reunion with his mother.

In a novel that is about allegorising one’s nostalgia for childhood, it is no surprise that when Banks is taken to his old family home, now inhabited by a Chinese family named Lin, what is enacted is a literalisation of the relationship between heimlich and unheimlich. The home is both familiar and not familiar, his and not his; it triggers some tender and intimate recollections of time spent with his mother, but it is also where Mr Lin’s father died, and where two of his grandchildren were born. Mr Lin also leads Banks into his wife’s boudoir, at the intimate heart of the home; it is where he asks Banks about his plans and hopes for his own family, so that one intimacy is effectively proffered as a substitute for another. Banks expresses relief that Mr Lin be someone “so immediately understanding” (194), as indeed the whole family is, about his apparent imminent repossession of the house — though the matriarch tells him, through a translator, that she was angry and resentful at first, seeing the emotion on Banks’s face, she “now feels in her heart that the agreement” to hand the home over to him “is correct” (189).

As he did earlier with his wish to return to Shanghai, Banks externalises his desires so that his need to take back his home is displaced by the family’s desire to give it to him; in doing so he domesticates the uncanny otherness that might threaten the feeling of apolitical sanctuary that his home represents. His desire to recapture childhood is neither apolitical nor out of time, but as he moves forward in this world, he is able to keep at arm’s length notions of his own complicity in the colonial project. This cannot, of course, be sustained indefinitely, as it is always already present as part of his inheritance, just as the uncanny inhabits the home itself. Citing Freud’s

“analogy between the family and a pond under which there lies a hidden spring which might 213 reappear at any moment,” Peters observes that “in the heart of the family there is a latent living secret which might reappear at any moment thus making the family both untrustworthy and unstable.” In other words, it is not only “that the unheimlich manages to make itself known and conscious, but rather that heimlich ultimately coincides with unheimlich” (22).

Like Ryder in The Unconsoled, Banks depends on maintaining a kind of temporal stasis within which his childhood is suspended, but the house, with all the alterations the Lin family has made, and all the alterations Banks proposes to do to correct them (in order to cover over the

“hidden spring”), is not suspended out of history. Mr Lin also calls attention several times to all the changes going on in the world around them, presaging that the “most terrible changes may yet overtake us” (191). Once his parents, Sarah and Jennifer, and even his old amah are installed in the home, Banks hopes to make it a sanctuary, where his past and future come together without ever engaging in, or becoming vulnerable to, the present — a present in which political realities threaten him not just with violence, but with a sense of responsibility for that violence.

It is here that we find the major structural difference between When We Were Orphans and The Unconsoled. Where Ryder is able to sustain his fantasy of stasis until the end (if we can even say that that novel has “an end”), once Banks enters the warrens of Chapei to finally recover his parents, his fantasy quickly starts to unravel. When he reaches the house where he expects to find his parents, and they are not there, he is surprised to find himself sobbing (in the same manner in which Ryder’s emotional lapses always take him by surprise), and admits, with great understatement, that he is “too late” (274). Shortly thereafter, he admits to a Japanese colonel that childhood, for him, is not a foreign land, but is “where I’ve continued to live all my life. It’s only now I’ve started to make my journey from it” (277). The journey is ushered along 214 dramatically by Philip’s revelations about the circumstances of Banks’s parents’ disappearances, and about the true nature of Banks’s inheritance.28 By the time we catch up with Banks, years later, it is suggested that he has experienced some kind of psychic break, which Jenny nurses him through. When he meets his mother, remants of the fantasy remain — he asks her forgiveness because he still feels that he should have been able to do something — but what he discovers is that the plenitude he felt he was missing was real, and that it never depended on him or his committment to generic convention to realise it. As he puts it, “all the rest of it, all my trying to find her, trying to save the world from ruin, that wouldn’t have made any difference either way.

Her feelings for me, they were always just there, they didn’t depend on anything” (306). What he confronts is the almost uncanny nature of his mother’s persistent love for him: it exists beyond the realm of fantasy and outside of symbolisation — a kind of Lacanian “Real,” impossible to represent, but traumatically impossible to deny once it is confronted in its materiality.

Orphanhood in this novel is both a burden and a liberation: the latter because as long as

Banks is unaware of the nature of his inheritance, he is free to imagine himself as self-made; the former because he is driven to know in what ways he is always already bound to it. Once he is made of aware of the multiple and contradictory nature of his inheritance, the question of burden versus liberation is moot — it is what is, or as Derrida puts it, it is what violently elects us. If there was a time when we were orphans, it may be, culturally speaking, the interwar period of the

Golden Age detective novel, even the time of the modernists who wished to shrug off the burdens of filiation, a liberty that Ishiguro at least is very wary of taking. We can see, in The

Unconsoled, what a nightmare it is to live without history, to long for historicity and for an

28 The “tall narrow house” that Banks has bought with his inheritance, which “overlooks a [modestly prestigious] square” (127), recalls Perowne’s inherited home on the square in Saturday. That Banks’s home is explicitly tainted by colonial spoils points to the gap between the way the two authors figure their senses of cultural inheritance. 215 inheritance that one can at least begin to read, and perhaps begin to imagine otherwise. In When

We Were Orphans, in the years after World War Two, Banks has to come to terms with what has been left to him, but how he is going to live with it, by the end of the novel, is still an open question. If anything, it is more of a question than it was in Ishiguro’s early novels, when he first began to ask it. Conclusion: The Agency of the Heir

We are simultaneously more free and less free than we think: we are thoroughly passive, determined by and dependent on the past, but we have the freedom to determine the scope of this determination, that is, to (over)determine the past which will determine us. — Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes I am not pretentious enough to say that there is some kind of transcendental system of ethics. But I think we need to behave as if there were one. — James Orbinski, Former President of the International Council of Médecins Sans Frontièrs, speaking at the Centre for Ethics’ Ethics of Catastrophe conference in 2008

As is obvious from its title, this dissertation is about the overlapping or collision of three forces that violently elect us: filiation, ethics, and war. Over the length of this project, I have described the ways in which our inheritances—whether intellectual, genetic, or generic—choose us before we can choose them, though we may choose how to read, criticise, and repeat them with a difference. Ethics, as well, in the Levinasian sense, is traumatic and irreducible; through the face, it presents to us a primordial imperative not to harm the other, but to be responsible to him or her in a way that disrupts our ego-bound interests and our capacity for reason and philosophy. And finally, this particular ethical imperative has been shaped by the wars of the twentieth century.

War violently elects its participants and its victims, and we are never immune from this history, even or especially as it continues to happen around us and through us.

Taken together, all of these formulations are characterized by a certain passivity, a sense that we are ethically responsible to history and to violence before we can even conceive of ourselves as agents at all. But as Žižek makes clear in the quotation above, and as Levinas,

Derrida, Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro all attest to in their various ways, there is a kind of agency in acknowledging one’s debts and responsibilities, and in taking up an inheritance as such. As Derrida puts it, “an heir is not only one who receives, he or she is someone who

216 217 chooses, and who takes the risk of deciding” (Tomorrow 8); if we are “less free” because we are heirs whether we want to be or not, we can be “more free” according to the ways in which we choose to interpret and perform what we inherit. There is agency, in other words, but it does not belong to the sovereign subject of Enlightenment philosophy. It may be, rather, the benighted but obligatory agency of the heir, who is at the mercy of a “contradictory and uncomfortable double injunction” to reaffirm the past without repeating its crimes, and to remember the past while remaining free from conservatism (Derrida Tomorrow 4).

The figure of the heir is at the locus of this injunction, as is manifest in the work of these three novelists. In Banville’s Shroud, the “problematics of authenticity” (165) are refigured in terms of the question of agency and responsibility towards one’s ancestors and heirs, and heirs as ancestors. Vander’s lifelong project of evading responsibility is thwarted, finally, when he must figure himself as a father and an heir in the confession that is his narrative. Likewise, the freedom he pursued through another man’s name comes itself to feel circumscribed and overdetermined once he begins — still without a name, or still according to the invention of his own name — to tell his story and take up some of his responsibilities to the people around him.

McEwan’s Black Dogs explores the agency of the orphan and of the writer to make what he can of the “grand narratives” left to him in a state of dissolution. Saturday also explores the limits of agency in the wake of traumatic experience, but by shoring up those same grand narratives; a novel “in praise of rationalism” (McEwan Études) and self-coincidence, Saturday leaves little room for the specters that might open it up to some of its less appealing and more demanding debts, and that might upset the sovereign self at the centre of the narrative.

Atonement, though, complicates the notion of the sovereign self (and sovereign author) through 218 its engagement with the country-house novel genre, and by making the reader responsible to the question it implicitly poses: the reader is the ultimate heir to the problem of guilt and forgiveness as it is figured through the novel tradition, and agency therefore lies with her. How the reader figures his or her relationship to this history, in other words, determines the scope and success of this novel, which we might also frame in terms of its failure to atone.

Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, finally, is a parable of passivity and overdetermination; if it mourns our ability to mourn, and thus inherit, it also performs the difficulties of inheritance and mourning, with their complex formal and political ramifications. In When We Were Orphans,

Ishiguro demonstrates the poignancy of the attempt to come to terms with one’s inheritance: despite one’s best intentions and with all the agency a person can muster, not knowing what to do in the face of a guilty and contradictory inheritance. I have discussed how in these two novels

Ishiguro has created decidedly literary landscapes, defined more in terms of genre and oneiric repetition than by geographic realities. It is striking, therefore, that in Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, he has moved into speculative fiction. I will end here with a brief discussion of this novel, to think about the ramifications of this study beyond the literature of war.

The novel follows the fate of a group of clones from their childhood at an idyllic (and very English) boarding school, to their eventual “completion” as they die once they are harvested for their organs. In this novel, Ishiguro literalises the orphan metaphor, as clones have no parents even to search or mourn for; their loss as such is not existential but truly originary. Through this conceit, Ishiguro examines the discourses that Judith Butler (in Frames of War and Precarious

Life) notes have been circulating since the traumas of 9/11, discourses about which lives are 219 worth living, and therefore which lives are worth mourning; which lives, in short, are considered truly human. The novel is therefore a close counterpart to MacEwan’s Saturday, though it approaches these discourses in a strikingly different manner.

On one hand, Ishiguro uses the idea of art as the guarantor of what it is to be human — the children produce art, and one guardian hopes that this will be enough to sustain an argument that they should be granted some leniency, or even rights. Ishiguro presents this as a real possibility — their art is creative and productive, though not everyone’s is up to the same ideal.

But proof of the children’s humanity also comes in the scene from which the title derives: Cathy, the narrator-protagonist, is glimpsed singing these lyrics (“Never let me go... Oh baby, baby...

Never let me go...” [64-65]) along to a recorded song, while she dances with a baby doll in her arms. Though she knows she will never be a parent herself, the child’s desire is manifest, signifying the impulse to be responsible to another that Levinas would call “fecundity.” So if it is neither purely in art nor purely in filiation, the humanity of these children adheres somewhere in between.

The clones’ acceptance of their fates is perhaps the most eerie thing about the novel—on the one hand, it is so cannily unlike us, that they do not rail against their unjust fates; but on the other, it is so uncannily like us, to accept our fates as we assume they have been inscribed. But in fact the only difference between these clones and humans conventionally defined is their lack of parents; to imagine a world where clones are humans therefore requires a radical rethinking of the structures of filiation, which necessity has already been long apparent in Ishiguro’s writings, as in the other novelists and thinkers addressed in this study. 220

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