INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056

EXOTICISM IN THE WRITINGS of IAN McEWAN

J.Ramona, Research Scholar Dr.J.Uma Samundeeswari, Assistant Professor of English Department of English, AVVM Sri Puspham College, Poondi, India. Email id: [email protected]

ABSTRACT: Exoticism in English Literature is primarily understood as the charm of the unfamiliar. One of McEwan’s goals is to “incite an explicit hunger in the readers.” In his writings every turn and glimpse is another tightening of the noose. His lines are wrapped in the essence of exoticism which makes his novels beautifully alive to the fragility o happiness and all forms of violence. He remains at the top of his game – assured, accomplished and ambitious. His novels are brilliantly engineered and marvelously entertaining. They are compassionate without resorting to sentimentality, clever without ever losing its honesty, an undistinguished novel of ideas. KEY WORDS: Exoticism, Excitement, Suspense, Narrative, Emotional alertness.

McEwan believes that something stirring and striking should happen in a novel. Though he is animated by ideas, he would never plop two characters and have them expound rival philosophies. The opening of “Enduring Love” offers a crisp illustration of game theory: when a balloon becomes untethered, each of the five men holding a rope is forced to make a decision without knowing what others will do but most readers enjoy it as a thrilling set of piece. McEwan has cited twice that Henry James’s dictum that the only obligation of a novel” is that it ought to be interesting.” Later, McEwan declared that he finds “ most novels incredibly boring. It’s amazing how the form endures. Not being boring is quite a challenge.”

McEwan’s 1992 novel “Black Dogs” is about a terrible event that sunders a husband wife. After June Tremaine escapes an attack by dogs --- “spirit hounds, incarnations” --- she is left “convinced of the existence of evil and of God.” She declares, “Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless.” Her husband, Bernard, a doctrinaire rationalist, cannot abide the “ lengthening roll call of June’s certainties: unicorns, wood spirits, angels, mediums, self – healing, the collective unconscious, the ‘Christ within us.’ McEwan renders their falling out with admirable equipoise. At the novel’s end, he offers a lyrical description of June in a meditative trance:

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She was delivered into herself, she was 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….. the smooth darkening summer air, the scent of thyme crushed underfoot, her hunger, her slaked thirst, the aftertaste of peach, the stickiness on her hand, her tired legs, her sweaty, sunny, dusty fatigue. ( P.169 )

Galen Strawson, a philosopher who lives in Oxford, said that the breakup freed McEwan to “become radically more scientific than any one of us.” McEwan’s next novel was “Enduring Love” whereas in “Black Dogs” the intellectual war is between equals, Joe Rose’s logical mind clearly shows up that of his girlfriend, Clarissa. A Romantic scholar, she doubts his evidence that he is being stalked, and nearly ends up dead. McEwan remembers that not every reader accepted the point.

In his novel, “Cement Garden”, he has marvelously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow and the extraordinary seems rather common place.

A.Alvarez said that, “It is the most original prose talent to emerge from England for a generation.”

As McEwan has grown more outspoken in his rationalism, his books have become fully anchored in old – fashioned realism. “It’s enough to try and make some plausible version of what we’ve got, rather than have characters sprout wings and fly out the window,” he says. Although “Atonement” ultimately makes the reader uncomfortably aware of its status as fiction, McEwan achieves the effect in a manner often associated with Hollywood thrillers. The fact that Robbie’s story is a romantic fantasy invented by Briony, the person who betrayed him, is presented as a twist ending. More than anything, the structure of “Atonement” resembles one of those psychological studies which McEwan so admires.

No reader will begin “The Comfort of Strangers” and fail to finish it; A black magician is at work. – New York Times.

“The Comfort of Strangers”, is Ian’s another novel in which Colin and Mary are a couple whose intimacy knows no bounds. Away on a holiday together in a nameless city, they get lost one evening in a labyrinth of streets and canals. They happen upon Robert, a stranger with a dark history, who takes them to bar and ushers them down into a subterranean land of violence and obsession.

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“Saturday” was an even more personal statement --- a direct assault on the modern novel’s skepticism toward science. This novel presents technology in a far more sanguine light. The book’s rapturous cameras ---- which strike some readers as blindly consumerist --- suggest Perowne’s appreciation of the human ingenuity behind even incremental invention. Postmodern novelists have suggested that the contemporary world is an enveloping mystery, a dark chain of conspiracies. For McEwan, though we live in a widening cone of light --- a time of the decoded genome, the Hubble telescope, the illuminated brain. Such glories might best be appreciated by a novelist with an Augustan spirit.

When McEWAN does begin writing, he tries to nudge himself into a state of ecstatic concentration. A passage in “Saturday” describing Perowne in the operating theatre could also serve as McEwan’s testament to his love of sculpting prose:

For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness. It’s a little like he feels himself in another medium, but it’s less obviously pleasurable, and clearly not sensual. This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can’t bring him to this…. This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It’s a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep and muted joy. (P.258)

For McEwan , a single “dream of absorption” often yields just a few details worth fondling. Several hundred words is a good day. At one point, we spoke of a line from ‘The Child in Time.” Stephen Lewis, watching his wife give birth, muses, “This is really all we have got, this increase, this matter of life loving itself.” Such whispers are McEwan at his best. “You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be.”

Thus taut with narrative excitement and suspense , the aroma of exoticism overflows with rich diversity in the novels of Ian McEwan that triumphantly integrates imagination with intelligence, rationality with emotional alertness.

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REFERENCES:

Malcolm David. 2002. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. McEwan Ian. 1993. Black Dogs. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan Ian.1998. Enduring Love. London. Random House. Vintage Books. McEwan Ian.1997. The Cement Garden.London. Random House. Vintage Books. McEwan Ian. 2007. Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan Ian. 1997. The Comfort of Strangers. Random House. Vintage Books. McEwan Ian. 2006. Saturday. Random House. Vintage Books.

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