1. Introduction
The present thesis will analyse Ian McEwan’s late novel Enduring Love in light of the theories of postmodernism. The aim is to reveal postmodernity as the subject matter of the given novel. Enduring Love ’s inherent debate over the change of the approach to science in aftermath of the demise of the pro Enlightenment modernity will be identified. The main protagonist’s tendency to suppose an “objective” truth, his relentless endeavouring of rationalizing the reality and providing a unified account of it, will be described, along with the related postmodernist interest in deconstructing notions of truth and rationality. The thesis supposes the central character’s liking for a “universal” judgement, his tendency to “totalize.”
Besides, the notions of subjectivity, the “self”, and knowledge’s relation to power will be touched upon. The postmodernist idea of Enduring Love is that no kind of knowledge has a privileged access to reality and its explanation. That is to say, postmodernism’s central values are multiplicity and difference. Therefore the ethical subsoil of postmodernity takes into account the need for tolerance of heterogeneity. The present paper will consider the main protagonist Joe Rose’s approach to this postmodern “obligation.” Does he value diversity entirely? Rose’s treatment of the “other” (characters) will be outlined. Postmodernism’s distrust of the modernity’s project of rationality becomes the leitmotif of Enduring Love .
The thesis will attend to the “schizophrenia” of Enduring Love ’s narration. The narrating charater Rose will be considered ambivalent, hence “unreliable.” The aim is to suggest inconsistencies in Rose’s thinking and the consequent subversion in the narration. The narrator’s purposeful telling in retrospect bears importance. The simultaneous prominence of contradictory discourses pervades Enduring Love . Nevertheless, the disunity of Rose’s train of thought throughout the text initiates the character’s ethical confusion. That is to say, with the coming of postmodernity, the former idea of morality is altered. Rose’s mind is used to the comforts of the “totalities” of modernism, in which the supposition of objectivity freed
1 individuals of ethical responsibility. However, he is not released from the feeling of guilt he experiences with mere scientific explanation. In other words, the final plan of the present paper is to consider Enduring Love ’s nostalgia for the tragic outlook.
2 2. Ian McEwan’s Late Fiction
The immediate subject matter of Enduring Love , the subject of the present thesis, but also other McEwan’s late novels, Amsterdam , Atonement and Saturday , is postmodernity. The issues of the life in the postmodern age and society are what these novels are clearly concerned about. The settings of McEwan’s recent novels carry postmodern features and the writer’s descriptions often evoke knowledgeability of the theoretical accounts of postmodernism (e.g. implicit comments on “hyperreality” in Saturday ). Ian McEwan is a re creator of the postmodernist experience in fiction. Moreover, McEwan’s own narrative voice is affected by the dilemmas of postmodernity. The author himself is interpretable as a truly postmodern character, who oscillates between a “return to realism” and the metafictional postmodernist writing; a rather schizophrenic figure, indeed. Notable is the hybridity of
McEwan’s fiction, its simultaneous use of literary realism and inclusion of the postmodern era’s issues in terms of his novels’ content. It can also be claimed that McEwan packs his nostalgia for modernism in a clearly postmodernist wrapping.
The author’s late novels constitute a new phase in his oeuvre. McEwan abandons the classic relishing of his “trademark” shocking subject matter – the pathologies of modern life.
Nerve racking scenes and “tragic clashes” do not completely vanish from his fiction; yet, they are credited less detailed attention in the framework of any of the late novels. The rather favorable description of the family in Saturday positively contrasts The Cement Garden ’s portrait of a disintegrating family. The shocking subject matter is practically transformed, recycled, no longer playing the central role; the need to “disgust” the reader no longer permeates McEwan’s writing. Nevertheless, vexing moral questions become leitmotifs of all mentioned late novels all the same, even though McEwan is not sympathetic to the tragic outlook. McEwan is still one foot in modernist convictions, but is moving away from them at the same time. The balloon accident in Enduring Love , for example, does not “mean”
3 anything but a deepening nuisance, in the end. In this, McEwan affirms postmodernity, as theories of postmodernism allow for Nietzschean notion of the death of tragedy. Yet, Joe in
Enduring Love cannot stop thinking about his moral “failure” – letting go of the balloon’s rope. The main character of the novel is driven by a dubious sense of guilt. Ethical considerations quietly centre the novel’s train of thought. The characters’ behavior becomes unjudgeable in postmodernity; the ethical confusion arises. Enduring Love is set in the post humanist, post masculine world, but still echoes the ideas of humanism and superiority of masculinity. The novel is a contemplation of the concept of paranoia (well accommodated in the postmodernist literary writing). The protagonists of the postmodernist novels sometimes suspect that they are trapped at the centre of intrigue, often with justification. Enduring Love ’s
Joe Rose is haunted by the possessed character of Jed Parry and his homoerotic obsession.
However, Rose’s “paranoia” is resolved in the end of the novel as justified, in which the validity of rationality is established. Besides, the principle of paranoia features also the narration of the novel. McEwan hints his narrating character’s unreliability, only to deny it in the end. The metafictional impulse is well present in Enduring Love , whose narrator frequently comments on the writing process.
The critique of Enlightenment universals is central to the thinking of the philosophers of the post modern period. Enduring Love happens to scrutinize its main protagonist’s rationalist thinking. The novel is a contemplation of the modernity’s strategy of unity against the postmodernity’s strategy of plurality. Enduring Lov e reveals McEwan’s new preoccupation: the fascination with the scientific thought and the related rationality. The novel investigates the scientific mind of its main protagonist Joe Rose, and, at the same time, McEwan juxtaposes different ways of thinking in individual characters that are introduced.
Interestingly, the main intellectual antipole of the rational main protagonist Rose is a female protagonist. As a matter of fact, Clarissa has affinities with literature; she is a scholar on
4 Keats. McEwan puts emphasis on the fact of existence of diverse worlds – and the related plurality of acceptable ethics that should be taken into consideration. One of the basic questions McEwan posits in Enduring Love is – what if the “other”, whom I do not want to oppress in any way and whom I am ready to consider an equal, despite his or her difference, refuses to play the game of the acceptability of variety and tries to claim his or her superiority? The peaceful mind of the tolerant man is threatened, in that case. Rose is almost vividly unable to cope with Jed Parry’s authoritarian persuasion. His rooted supposition of solidarity makes him unable to efficiently contradict, face and “fight” the psychotic intruder.
What he does, at first, is accept the neurotic’s rules of the game, in which his impulse to tolerance is noticeable. However, Rose’s tolerant postmodern self is accompanied by a
“modern” and oppressive alter ego, which overwhelms Rose’s consciousness.
In his late fiction, McEwan comes to question the purpose and value of literature. The suggestion goes that writing fiction is an unnecessary and frivolous occupation. The author provides his novels with criticism of literature, however paradoxical this might seem.
McEwan never completely diminishes his own art, though; a certain tolerance is always admitted. The latent condemnation of the moral validity of literary writing is never fully completed. In this pervading polemic, the author’s moral ambiguity takes place. McEwan’s hesitation mirrors in the characters of his novels. Perowne in Saturday resents literature, but it is a Victorian poem, in the end, which practically saves his family’s further assault. In
Atonement , the literary creativity’s destructive impulse is outlined, as its main character’s compulsion to narrate becomes the source of a crime; but is she to be blamed? In Enduring
Love , Rose, even though he succeeds in making sense of Jed Parry’s extraordinary behavior by means of classifying it as a pathological condition, “de Clerambault’s syndrome”, is left with his partner’s incomprehension. Ambivalence is maintained and the postmodernism of the texts confirmed. “McEwan’s fiction might be better characterized in terms of its struggle to
5 articulate the possibility of a narrative voice that is self conscious in its refusal of full coherence or control and unable or unwilling to disguise the extent of its own instability and unease” (Morrison). The idea of the tragic echoes in all McEwan’s late novels. The characters are no longer capable of being tragic heroes, but sense the potential in themselves, all the same. The trouble is that the times they live in do not allow for truly tragic feelings.
In Atonement , Briony “recycles” her family’s tragedy in writing. The narrator utilizes the feeling of guilt as a framework for “her novel.” Atonement can be described as a nostalgic recollection of the ethics of humanism. What is implicitly mourned by McEwan here is the postmodernist preference for aesthetics over ethics (i.e. Briony’s relentless aestheticization of experience as a postmodern impulse). Atonement attempts a “re memory”, re writing of history. 1 The leitmotif in Briony’s characterization is the urge to rationalize the disordered
(which is not dissimilar to the rational thought of Perowne in Saturday or, more importantly for the present paper, Rose in Enduring Love ). The character’s psyche is fragmented in the aftermath of the realization of guilt. Briony’s “orderly spirit” makes her constantly re invent the self evident world by means imposing order upon it. The metafictional comment here is that an author is the authority, the controller of a text. Yet, Briony’s longing for definiteness, her want for dramatization, is shown as harmful. Joe Rose in Enduring Love has the same compulsion as Briony, and his is also, in a sense, understandable as harmful (e.g. to the relationship between Rose and his partner Clarissa). Enduring Love prefigures the conclusions made in Atonement in many and significant ways.
6 3. Enduring Love
3.1 An Overview of the Relevant Postmodernist Notions
Fractions of postmodernity are scattered throughout Enduring Love . A selection of those postmodernist notions relevant for the upcoming analysis of postmodernity in McEwan’s
Enduring Love will lay the foundation for the reasoning of the paper. McEwan seems to be profoundly interested in the counter enlightenment impulse in postmodernism, its open anti rationalism. In Enduring Love , McEwan reconsiders the postmodernist disillusionment with the enlightenment values and the related critique of humanism. As a matter of fact, the author’s preoccupation with the scientific mind is clearly observable not only in the analyzed
Enduring Love , but also in the latest novelist contribution to his oeuvre called Saturday .
Enduring Love concerns itself with the conflict between rationalism, emotionalism, and religion, which, in the postmodernist language, are considered different, but equally considerable ways of thinking. There are three prominent characters in the novel, each of them exemplifying one of the suggested types of thought, respectively: Joe Rose, Clarissa, and Jed Parry. McEwan’s apparent passion for science causes the novel’s implicit empowering (in terms of postmodernist ethics hardly tolerable), and in that privileging, of Joe
Rose’s rationality, his “pursuit of truth”. In a sense, the novel takes sides with the modern age’s idea of the superiority of rationalism, or science. Nevertheless, Enduring Love remains governed by what Michael Drolet coins as the “creative power of schizophrenia” (28), in which the seeming victory of scientific thought cannot be sustained. According to Mike
Featherstone, schizophrenia is one of the key features of the postmodern culture (74). As a matter of fact, McEwan’s leitmotif in the novel is the contemplation of the validity of grand narratives; what is important, the scepticism towards them pervades the postmodern condition. The scientific thought, that is to say, is susceptible to being seen as a grand narrative, too, and in that prone to deconstruction, as well. Despite the final pretentious
7 affirmation of Joe Rose’s viewpoint at the end of Enduring Love , the novel has irrevocably questioned the rationalist stance throughout the course of its narrative. Because of that, the train of thought of McEwan’s novel remains truly postmodern, despite its foregrounded favoring of its main protagonist Joe Rose and his rationalism.
The poststructuralist thinker Jean Francois Lyotard took into consideration both scientific and narrative knowledge. The conclusion he arrived at was that the scientific knowledge was actually marked by a contradiction because “scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all. In short, there is a recurrence of the narrative in the scientific” (Sarup 136 7). The scientific knowledge, so to say, can only prove its superiority with the help of the narrative. In other words, “Lyotard showed that science was like all other human activity” (Drolet 25). The postmodernist conduces science’s
“degradation”. Furthermore, to yet again base the present argument on Lyotard theoretically, in John Docker’s perception, “[i]n the postmodern age we no longer have a positivistic science that claims to know the truth; rather, science, as in the new quantum mechanics associated with Chaos Theory, now tells stories, competing stories, as in any other area of knowledge” (109). The view of the present thesis is that substantial change has affected science in postmodernity. Among other alterations, science thus will be considered as descended from its privileged status. What Enduring Love takes as its theme is the contemplation of the scientific reasoning’s limits. It is fruitful to consider at this point that the other poststructuralist taken into the debate, Jacques Derrida, also stands up against the
Western tradition of rationalist thinking and its premise of reason, formed by the search for certainty and termed “logocentrism” (Appignanesi 77). Logocentrism is, also in the postmodernist vision, seen as invalid and subject to deconstruction. Though Joe Rose,
Enduring Love ’s main protagonist, primarily affiliates with the logocentric way of seeing the
8 world, his reasoning inevitably simultaneously involves the deconstructive impulse the tendency to subvert itself.
The present analysis of postmodernity in Enduring Love utilizes the poststructuralist notion of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. Related to the already mentioned notion of schizophrenia, the thinker’s concept of “différence” is the dominant feature of the novel.
McEwan has created an aestheticized exemplification of this concept in the narration of
Enduring Love , in which its postmodernity can be detected. What underlies différence 2 is the assumption that texts are never uniform as they include also those possibilities that contradict their attestations, which is even the authors’ intention; in other words, “[m]eaning encompasses identity (that, which is) and difference (that, which is not) and, therefore, is ceaselessly “postponed”. Derrida invented a new term for this process – différence”
(Appignanesi 80). The present paper will attempt to describe the subversive foundation of
Enduring Love’s text. “Deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings, and the
‘violence’ between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis.
Derrida argued, however, that deconstruction is not a method or a tool, but an occurrence within the text itself” (“Postmodernism”). The subversive distortion of unambiguous meaning is to be observed in the text of McEwan’s, or rather, Joe Rose’s, Enduring Love . In Derrida’s own words, “any apparently coherent system of thought can be shown to have underlying irresolvable antimonies, such that there are multiple and conflicting readings that must be held simultaneuosly” (qtd. in Drolet 23). Postmodernism’s deconstructive stance pervades Ian
McEwan’s Enduring Love . That is to say, the present paper takes into account the category of the “unreliable narrator.” The talk is about the “literary device in which the credibility of the narrator, either first person or third person, is seriously compromised” (“Unreliable”). The unreliability of Rose as a narrating character unfolds throughout the novel.
9 While Enduring Love centers a rationalist narrating character, a scientist, and because of that cannot avoid supporting the validity of science as a superior way of explaining the world, it also lets this character doubt the legitimacy of “narratives”. The postmodernist theoretician
Michel Foucault “was most interested in directing his genealogical method against what he called the ‘totalising discourses’, those great systems, syntheses or ideologies that dominate modern thought” and described “a constant struggle between different powers which try to impose their own ‘will to truth’” (Drolet 20). In the postmodern realm, Joe Rose is considered a “believer”, too; besides, his will to truth equals the scientific explanation. This protagonist’s creed inevitably comes into confrontation with other versions of truth, be it, particularly,
Clarissa’s romantic belief in the value of emotion or Jed Parry’s religious fanaticism. The dramatic point of the novel is that its main protagonist is revealed as unable to reconcile with the fact of these competing strategies. In that, Rose defies the postmodernist ethics of multiplicity. As has already been suggested, a lot of Joe Rose’s thinking adheres to the
(idealist) idea of the certainty of meaning. Rose’s structuralist “hyper rationalism” is at stake, though, after his normally affirmed racionalism has been disturbed by the experience of watching another man’s tragic death. Presumably, Joe Rose, for once, is supposed to leave his usual, nearly dogmatic, imagery of the certainty of his reason, and rather thoughtlessly yield to the enjoyment of helplessness. The abandonment of the scientific reasoning constitutes an option for Rose, in terms of dealing with the feeling of despair. This, however, he is unable to accomplish. Instead of actively facing the un admitted emotional unease that has been troubling him since the balloon incident, which would be unattainable by reason alone, Rose inadvertently suppresses it, concentrating instead on being stalked by the (psychotic?) Jed
Parry. That is to say, it is perfectly plausible to take Rose’s intensified irritated interest in
Parry as a front. With Parry, Rose can easily employ reason and render the stalker “madman”, which is a convenient imposition of totality onto the situation, resulting in Rose’s feeling of
10 superiority. Rose thus prefers to adhere to the trouble which can be resolved through reasoning and repress the one that exceeds his rationalist understanding. Later on in Enduring
Love , Rose, even though he succeeds in making sense of Jed Parry’s extraordinary behavior by means of classifying it as a pathological condition (“de Clerambault’s syndrome”), and in that, “wins the battle”, is left with his partner’s incomprehension and rejection. The logical reason for Clarissa’s stance is her awareness of not being “tolerated” enough by Rose. In
Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “tolerance as such is possible only in the form of solidarity: that is, what is needed is […] a practical recognition of the relevance and validity of the other’s difference, expressed in a willing engagement in the dialogue. Tolerance requires the acceptance of the subjectivity […] of the other who is to be ‘tolerated’” (“Intimations” xxi).
The rationalist Joe, however, is initially unable to see this obligation, which makes him a very
“modern” character, indeed. In the postmodern ethics, “the modern faith in the power of reason to free the human spirit from bondage” is seen as “arising out of ignorance and prejudice” (Drolet 4). Rose relies on the power of reason to help him overcome the emotional unease he has been facing after witnessing the accident, but the rational explanation does not help this time. The justification of his anxiety brought about by Parry’s presence fails to untangle Rose’s and Clarissa’s troubled relationship, because the justification is mere part of
Rose’s own will to truth and intolerant in relation to Clarissa’s need to be recognized as differently understanding. Assuming that “we gain true self awareness or become conscious of our selfhood when we face death”, while “the rational principles associated with the
Western philosophical tradition, the principles conjoined to modernity itself […] erect barriers against conscious selfhood and therefore [are] obstacles to individuals’ self awareness”
(Drolet 8 9), we have an explanation for Joe Rose’s troubled psyche, for the difficulties of coming to terms with the unusual situations that accompany Rose. Rose’s rationalist basis of thought prevents him from properly dealing with the extraordinary experience. Clarissa, his
11 partner, is less susceptible to intellectual depression after the accident, because she is able to accept her feeling of despair after the extraordinary “spectacle” of death. Rose, on the other hand, merely suppresses his idea of the man’s death as meaningless as impossible to rationalize. Rose’s stubborn insistence on “truthfulness” of scientific knowledge (defied by postmodernism) deprives him of the chance to deal with the (ethical) confusion that has overwhelmed him lately.
Barry Lewis, trying to identify the dominant features of postmodernist literature, proposes fragmentation and paranoia as examples of the characteristic derangements the postmodern novel. Both can be spotted in Enduring Love , and thus help us display McEwan’s postmodernist agenda. The notion of fragmentation in literary writing concerns the difficulty of the determination of the given novel’s theme. “The postmodernist writer distrusts the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories, and prefers to deal with other ways of structuring narrative” (Lewis 127). The narrative of Enduring Love is structured with the principle of schizophrenia, which defies the notion of wholeness. An unambiguous completion of this novel’s narrative is not accomplishable, due to its postmodern project. The guiding principle of the narration thus becomes distortion. The “uncertainty principle” (127)
Lewis comes to mention is undoubtedly part of the style of Joe Rose’s narrating strategy, as explained above. Moreover, paranoia, the other prominent concept in terms of the postmodernist literature’s critique, is a clearly visible ingredient of Enduring Love . “The protagonist of the postmodernist novel sometimes suspects that he or she is trapped at the centre of an intrigue, often with some justification” (Lewis 130). Joe Rose dreads the threat that he sees in the figure of Jed Parry. The main protagonist is afraid of being engulfed in
Parry’s persuasion. Rose’s difficulties inherent in his attempts to persuade the authorities of
Parry’s threat can be seen as a notion of the conspiring society. The police seems to be tolerant of Parry’s conviction. All in all, Rose is paranoid in this respect indeed. He
12 experiences the feeling of being a victim of an intrigue accomplished by Parry and the officials.
13 3.2 The Novel’s Structure: An Outline
The analysis of the postmodernity in Enduring Love shall start with a brief, yet critical reading of the novel’s course. The aim is to outline the structure of the novel’s train of thought, which will be further analyzed later in the paper. The actual sequence of the notions discussed in the present thesis in terms of Enduring Love will be described here. To begin with, the suspensefullness of Enduring Love ’s opening chapter has been marveled at by multiple literary critics. It has a way of extraordinarily absorbing the reader into the story of the novel. As Sven Birkerts concisely observes, “the ideal course of the classic novel: complications of character and situation creating a ‘rising action’ that culminates in a climatic moment” (7) does not fully concern Enduring Love . The novel’s specialty resides in the fact that its climatic event is introduced at the beginning of the narrative. The reader should better note this divergence as revealing. Suspicion about the normality of the novel’s form is to take hold. McEwan himself admits: “I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building” (“Ian McEwan”). The divergence cloaked in the novel’s untraditional opening with a climax signals the novels’ further destabilization. The
“fundamental balloon situation” is rendered in still the same chapter, while the central character’s nature starts revealing itself. (Joe Rose, the main protagonist of the novel, is its first person narrator, which gives the reader of the text a misleading feeling of being close to the story told. The true significance of the first person narration in Enduring Love will only take shape later in the novel. Ian McEwan has a reason to give his main protagonist the controversial first person voice.) In the balloon incident, a man tragically loses his life. And, already in the first chapter, Rose is shown as a person who does a lot of rationalist thought.
Naturally, the confrontation with tragic death affects Rose’s ability to take life as a series of facts. The second chapter of the book is dedicated to Rose’s sorrowful reminiscence of the
14 immediate aftermath of the accident. The third chapter lets Rose’s partner, Clarissa, voice the idea that Rose in fact suffers from the accident even more than she does, because he is unable to account for this recent experience, bound to always rationalize what happens around him.
Rose cannot somehow make sense of his own stirred emotional state or does not even realize it.
In the fourth chapter, Rose is seen writing and thinking about the narrative in science.
While he argues against excessive fabulation, the narrative exaggeration in science, he finds himself believing his intuition, rather than the available factual realm. It is unusual for Rose to be so sure about having been followed by Jed Parry in the library. He has not “seen” him, so he cannot base his assumption upon a fact. But this does not prevent him from believing that
Parry was there. (Does the reader already sense an inconsistency in Rose’s thought at this point?) In the fifth chapter, Rose still thinks of the narrative in science and its flaws. In the meantime, he fails to tell Clarissa about Jed Parry’s phone call last night. He tells the reader it is because he does not want to spoil a nice evening of the two of them together. However, what is the true reason, the reader will never know. This is where the counter postmodernist intolerance of Clarissa starts. (Yet, it is the privilege of the first person narrator to choose interpretations.) Not fully realizing he does that, Rose actually describes how his normally rationalist self exceptionally believes in intuition, where Jed Parry is concerned. Rose
“knows” Jed Parry is dangerous and tries to explain this assumption to the police. Importantly for the point of Enduring Love , the police doubts Rose’s sanity in return. Rose’s autonomy falls now because of the lack of facts that would convince the police. Yet, Rose is a scientist.
Normally, he would agree with the police on that the absence of factual subsoil denies an assumption’s validity. His standard reasoning is somersaulted. Does he realize this? McEwan has created an extremely complicated and readable novel in which a mind of a person who is confronted with his habitual understanding of the world being challenged is followed. A mind
15 in transition, so to say, is investigated. The question is: will the transition come full circle? Or will the character end up in denial? Moreover, the ninth chapter of the novel brings the reader more effectively to the realization that the narrator is susceptible to being seen as unreliable. It must not be forgotten, though, that the narrating character’s drawing attention to, admitting of the fact that it is him who “provides” the narration, is a manifestation of his own, latent doubt about himself. The eleventh chapter introduces Jed Parry’s voice. His letter to Rose shows
Parry’s psychosis’ complexity and that the argumentation of his reasoning is elaborate. In the next chapter, Rose realizes that Jean Logan’s conviction is startingly convincing and logical, but strangely groundless. Does he also realize that, in the very same way Jean Logan’s mind is fixed on a definite interpretation of her husband’s death, everyone is always inevitably slave to their personal convictions?
In terms of the twelfth chapter, Rose admits that, even though he might have seen it differently at the moment he did it, he probably went to see Jean Logan in order to “explain, to establish [his] guiltlessness, [his] innocence of his death” (107). The feeling of guilt, however suppressed, is there, without Joe Rose being fully aware of it. Joe Rose finds himself unwilling to conform to Jean Logan’s vision. Moreover and significantly, the fourteenth chapter explicitly voices the notions of “moral relativism” and “believing is seeing”.
Consequently, the great paradox occurs. Just after explaining that he did not trust Jean
Logan’s elaborate interpretation of the circumstances of her husband’s death exactly because of the exactitude of her reasoning, Joe Rose comes across the idea of “de Clerambault’s syndrome”, a psychiatric concept, which rather “too smoothly” explains the behavior of Jed
Parry. Typically, Rose is apparently not aware of the contradiction. Having defamed Jean
Logan’s rationalization, he comes to present to the reader a paradoxically similar rationalization of his own. The sixteen chapter gives us Jed Parry’s assumptions again, one of which is the opinion that Joe Rose needs to be set free from “his little cage of reason” (133).
16 The reader has to start tracking Rose’s interpretation with a suspicious eye, after Rose has let other voices be heard. Parry’s letters as well as Rose’s reminiscences of Clarissa’s utterances become part of the narration. When Clarissa points out that she has not seen Parry outside their house, though Rose claims he is always there, the reader’s suspicion widens. The eighteenth chapter describes Rose’s repeated unsuccessful try to persuade the police of
Parry’s threat. It shall be noted that the “evidence” Rose brings to the police station to support his thesis is a careful and pragmatic selection of “revealing” passages of Parry’s letters, rather than an “objective” proof. In this, again, Rose contradicts himself. In chapter nineteen,
Clarissa, Rose and Jocelyn Kale have a conversation about how a scientist became a victim of an invalid personal persuasion. Subsequently, another incident comes to be part of Rose’s and
Clarissa’s life. There is an attack in the restaurant where they are having lunch, after which
Rose “knows” the attackers were supposed to attack him, rather than the person sitting at the next table. The trouble is, again, the lack of evidence. The police has a different view, and, what is more – a grounded one. Joe Rose becomes desperate. Nobody believes his account of
Parry’s threat to his persona. And, as Regina Rudaityte suggests, “we are tempted to assume that all the story is the deluded narrator’s own invention” (35). The reader doubts Joe Rose’s credibility, indeed. Subversion is in operation.
How peculiar that, suddenly, beginning with chapter twenty one, things start coming
Rose’s way. Rose’s fears become “substantiated”. He receives a call from Jed Parry, who is in his flat, with Clarissa, threatening her with a knife. The following chapter sees Jed Parry committing suicide in Rose’s and Clarissa’s presence, Rose being arrested and, shortly after that, released, on grounds of his previous triple testimony at the police station. The narrating character allows for Clarissa’s opinion to be heard, in chapter twenty three. She apologizes for not having trusted Rose’s assumption of Parry’s threat before Parry’s violent visit to their home. However, there is something she cannot accept and she enforces a separation from
17 Rose. Rose, feeling justified by Parry’s attack, does not accept Clarissa’s right to feel wronged. After all, the facts proved the “truth” – his truth. Moreover, the twenty fourth chapter proves Jean Logan’s conviction wrong. Joe Rose comes out as the person, who “was right” in all, while the following appendixes only confirm this statement. “[T]he reliability of his narrative is finally proved only in Appendix I which is claimed to be reprinted from the medical journal the British Review of Psychiatry” (Rudaityte 35). The first appendix’s psychiatric report on “de Clerambault’s syndrome” includes a case study, which is a concise recapitulation of Rose’s story. Rather notably, this case study has the couple, which evidently is the couple of Rose and Clarissa, reconcile. (Isn’t this merely Rose’s wishful thinking? After all, it is in his powers, as the narrator of the text, to make things happen in favor of his preference.) The second appendix provides another letter from Parry, which now seems rather too unambiguously unreasonable. “It's disappointing that a book that begins so full throatedly should end with stagy confrontation, then case history, references and appendixes” (Mars
Jones). There is something disappointing about Enduring Love ’s ending, indeed. It is not quite fulfilling for the reader to be suddenly so unambiguously subject to Joe Rose’s truth. The reader’s disappointment in the end is part of McEwan’s agenda. It has been engineered by the novelist in order to even further destabilize his main protagonist and the narrating character in one person.
The at times ironical tone of the present description of the novel’s flow is intentional.
The above account of the narrative’s chronological winding off exemplifies its competing tendencies and foregrounding of contradictory meanings. There is a lot of the paradoxical going on in Enduring Love ’s narration. Rose’s paranoia only gets substantiated at the end of the narrative. Significantly, though, this resolution’s reliability is unsure. In the narration of
Enduring Love , McEwan has taken steps to ensure his first person narrator’s dubiousness. It is not insignificant that McEwan combines the description of the story of Jed Parry’s stalking of
18 Joe Rose and the simultaneous disintegration of the relationship between Joe and Clarissa with Rose’s extensive philosophizing about the precarious usage of narrative in science.
McEwan’s project in Enduring Love is the destabilization of his characters’ righteousnesses.
Joe Rose internalizes the Nietzschean “will to truth” concept. The notion pervading the text, in a form of a question, is: “What is the proof that my proof is right?” The novel is an exemplification of how “believed proofs” are seeming and how just about any interpretation can be shown as invalid, in a sense. All can be viewed from a different perspective and be contested. To add, in McEwan’s own words, “[t]he reader is supposed to be wondering whether he can trust this narrator (Joe)” (Schoeck). Also, about an excerpt from McEwan’s
The Innocent , Alice Truax says the following: “The scene is vintage McEwan in its suspense, its violence, and the sickening swiftness with which it unfolds. But perhaps its most emblematic characteristic is its ability to provoke a flustered and ambivalent response in the reader”. The vintage Ian McEwan postmodernizing, pervading his fiction, is described here rather well.
That is to say, McEwan devotes Enduring Love to the debate over the postmodern condition, in a very specific way. McEwan’s foregrounding of Joe Rose’s figure also becomes a study of subjectivity. The first person narration, accomplished by this character, is purposeful. The resulting increased, yet misleading subjectiveness of the text is evident.
Tammy Clewell, in his contribution to the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism dedicated to the discussion of “subjectivity” in the postmodern era, assumes that:
The postmodern conception of subjectivity can be distinguished by its opposition to the Cartesian notion of the subject: a strongly bounded agent of rational self legislation conceived in traditional epistemology (from Descartes to Kant) as the counterpart to the object. Despite diverse and sometimes oppositional formulations, postmodernist and poststructuralist critics share an impulse to ‘deconstruct’ the humanist subject as the intending source of knowledge and meaning. Such accounts redefine the human self as an entity constructed by, and not simply reflected in a culture’s social discourses, linguistic structures, and signifying practices. (381 82)
19 McEwan, in a clearly postmodernist way, makes Joe Rose’s humanist subject dissipate. Joe
Rose is an evidently contradictory individual. Moreover, his authority as an author is established, but subverted. All in all, the notion of schizophrenia is already present in the book’s title: “Indeed, there is a blatant irony in the double meaning of the term enduring : the adjective giving a positively toned meaning to love as long lasting, defying time, the verbal gerund suffering an unpleasant, painful or imposed experience—a meaning that negates pleasure. Thus the very title alone seemed to destabilize the meaning of love and the narratives that support it” (Kahane 3). Similarly destabilized main protagonist and his ambivalence permeate Enduring Love .
20 3.3 Postmodernism’s Distrust of Totality: The Main Protagonist’s “Scientific” Mind
Versus Other Minds
Postmodernism has been identified as a continuation, that is, a late phase, a successor, of the previous formation called modernism. For that matter, this shift is implied in the obvious term post modernism. It is postmodernism’s fate to be defined in opposition to modernism.
The two grand notions are often posited as contrastive and follows what is an attempt to identify the major notions of their variance. Antony Easthope, for instance, contrasts “the confident, iconoclastic affirmations of modernism and a postmodernism founded on ambivalence” (17). Here, one of the basic principles of the difference between modernism and its successor, postmodernism, is outlined. While modernism is affirmative, confident, or, in other words, interested in totalizing, postmodernism, on the other hand, favors ambivalence, that is the diversion from the totalizing tendency. In Robert Barsky’s words, “there is a postmodern suspicion about totalizing social programs, attempts at solving all of society’s ills with an overriding ideology or agenda” (305). The division of interests implies modernism’s belief in autonomy as opposed to postmodernism’s affirmation of diversity and relativity. In yet other words, and this time, along with a consideration of the postmodernist literary writing:
One of the most significant differences between modernism and postmodernism is the concern for universality or totality. While modernist artists aimed to capture universality or totality in some sense, postmodernists have rejected these ambitions as ‘metanarratives’. This usage is ascribed to the philosophers Jean François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. […] Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's critique of the possibility of absolute and total knowledge, Lyotard also further argued that the various ‘master narratives’ of progress, such as positivist science, Marxism, and Structuralism, were defunct as a method of achieving progress. Writers such as John Ralston Saul among others have argued that postmodernism represents an accumulated disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment project and its progress of science, so central to modern thinking. (“Postmodernism”) Furthermore, Michel Drolet reminds us of the fact that the poststructuralists, including Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, took part in the assault on what Foucault called “totalizing
21 systems”, in which they rejected “the structuralist claim that there is any deep or final truth that such discourse can uncover” (Drolet 18). This notion presents the basic standpoint for the present description of postmodernity in Enduring Love . McEwan’s agenda is to destabilize
Joe Rose’s belief in the existence of a “final truth”. As has been suggested in the above quote, to discriminate modernism and postmodernism, the question of their individual attitudes toward the Enlightenment project, the belief in the rationalizing powers of science, takes on significance. What happens in the postmodernist discourse is that the scientific knowledge, formerly privileged, in the modern era, experiences certain degradation. Lyotard’s famous
The Postmodern Condition (1979), a foundational text of postmodernism, addresses the question of the status of science in the postmodern world. “Lyotard produces a radical and unsettling review of how knowledge has operated in the West since Renaissance, starting from the viewpoint that for us today science has come to be deeply involved with language”
(Easthope 18). The present analysis of Enduring Love adheres to the understanding of postmodernism as “a movement whose conscious purpose was to overrun ideas integral to modernism, in particular those of narrative and representation” (Drolet 3). Lyotard, the postmodernist theoretician, comes to doubt the validity of science. According to him, the scientific knowledge cannot be seen as superior to other discourses. That is to say postmodernism downgrades science and, in that, posits it as being tantamount to other ways of explaining the world. The claim of the postmodernist theoreticians that “‘truth’ and
‘reality’ are obsolete ideas, that knowledge is always and everywhere a function of the epistemic will to power” (Barsky 308), is also one of Enduring Love ’s central claims. To even further elaborate on the assumption outlined, “[t]he last third of the 20th century developed under the sign of ‘post,’ which signaled the demise of such concepts of modernity as ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’” (Epstein). The understanding of the postmodern age as involving
22 a certain denial of rationalism and science’s priority as an explaining force is common to a plentitude of thinkers, which is even further confirmed by the following quote:
Vast sectors of the humanities and the social sciences seem to have adopted a philosophy that we shall call, for want of a better term, ‘postmodernism’: an intellectual current characterized by the more or less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a ‘narration’, a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others. (Sokal) Postmodernism clearly distances itself from the “absoluteness” of the grand narrative, and
“[t]he absolute […] appears under various names: ‘totality,’ ‘canon,’ ‘center,’ ‘logocentrism,’
‘metaphysics,’ etc.” (Epstein). Problematic, from the postmodernist point of view, must be
Joe Rose’s apparent logocentrism.
The criticism of an individual’s adherence to a totalizing explanation of the world is an evident leitmotif of Enduring Love . The talk permeating the novel is about what Ian
Buchanan, in his account of Fredric Jameson’s theorization, identifies as “false consciousness” (195). At a point in the novel, Rose considers the nature of faith, naming it a
“passionate conviction, the brute strength of single mindedness […] bringing cohesion and identity, and a sense that you and your fellows were right, even – or especially – when you were wrong” (159). Elsewhere in Enduring Love , other possible instances of unlucky adherence to one’s own persuasion are outlined, in which the presence of the motif in the narrative yet again strengthens. For instance, in the conversation at Clarissa’s birthday lunch with Jocelyn Kale, the “Miescher story” gets mentioned. The talk is about the inscrutability of science’s discoveries. Sometimes even revolutionary revelations can go unnoticed: “He was absolutely certain that DNA was a boring irrelevant molecule containing random sequences of those four letters, ACGT. He dismissed it, and then, in that peculiar human way, it became a matter of faith with him, deep faith. What he knew, he knew, and the molecule was insignificant” (165). The described scientist, believing too much in the unimportance of his discovery, happened to overlook its actual significance. Strong faith, that is strong persuasion
23 in a single direction, is not useful or advisable. The twentieth chapter thus provides a fitting summary of the book’s principal issue. Rose, the narrator, gives here a lot of thought to the concept of “self persuasion”, that is, the existence of totalizing, exclusive and subjective narratives:
[W]e lived in the mist of half shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We’re descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves […] when it didn’t suit us we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. (180 81) Joe Rose arrives at the partial realization of the impossibility of objectivity. By drawing attention to the fact that we “all” are “tellers of half truths”, the protagonist subverts also the credibility of his own voice.
McEwan is demonstrably interested in showing how different people, or characters, out of pragmatic reasons, depend upon different personal grand narratives. In Enduring Love , a whole multitude of structuralisms compete for the reader’s trust. An individual’s devotedness to a particular world view or interpretation of his or her life is governed by expediency. The notion of an inadvertent manipulation of reality, in order to “explain” it in the given individual’s preferred way, arises. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon designate the “personal grand narrative” as a “universal”: “‘Universals’ are discursive constructs with which particular groups seek to legitimate their own particular interests. […] In the postmodern world there is no single truth. There are, at best, more or less comprehensive and convincing versions which carry with them particular social implications. Truths are discursive constructs” (547). Especially Rose’s science based world view, his “truth”, which reckons with the possibility of objectivity, is bound to come out as problematic, then. Already Martin
Heidegger
went on to argue that Western thinking was dominated by a subjectivism or humanism in which individuals defined and manipulated reality according to
24 their needs […] He believed humanism to be a […] psychologically consoling strategy, and he devoted much thought and energy to attacking its principal aspects associated with the modern age – science and technology – which he believed to be the worst and most alienating aspects of Western thought because they objectified reality and constrained thought to instrumental thinking. (Drolet 17) A part also of the postmodernist agenda is to alter science’s status as the most reliable of worldviews. Rose’s scientific objectifying of reality, his lingering, though fading, lack of awareness of his own “instrumental thinking”, makes him a modern character lost in the context of postmodernity.
Joe Rose does not avow the dubiousness of his scientific reasoning. Instead, he focuses on the invalidity of other characters’ views. In the other protagonists, he is able to observe
“obsessive” tendencies, stubborn perseverance of a particular logic. Yet, Rose’s gaze, at least at first, does not take account of his own judgements’ vulnerability. This notion arises, for example, when Rose outlines himself as cautious when talking to Jean Logan, because he senses her “grand narrative”, her “paranoia”, and is afraid that he could provoke its unnecessary flourishing. When she asks about her husband’s car, Rose thinks: “[t]he summoned image held both doors open, but I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to mislead her.
There was something at stake here, perhaps a powerful fantasy. I didn’t want to feed it” (113).
Later on, he still finds himself trying hard not to accede to Jean Logan’s vision: “I felt I was being pedantic, but I thought I ought to continue to resist the suggestive power of her fantasy”
(115 6). In the end, after all the hesitation, Rose is made to accept Jean Logan’s rules of the game anyway, out of politeness, and even agrees to try to help her try to “verify” her assumption. However, he does complain: “Was my life to be entirely subordinate to other people’s obsessions?” (121). Here, McEwan points at the very existence of people’s tendencies to totalize, and, through developing Rose’s complaint, criticizes this. McEwan’s agenda is to deconstruct the validity of personal grand narratives. The narrating character is very often granted realizations that a personal persuasion is doomed to be mislead: “I also
25 knew the old cautionary tag from my distant laboratory days – believing is seeing” (122).
Rose comes to assume that whatever a person believes is possibly far from the “truth”. What is more, he sees that there is a certain parallel between Parry’s argumentation and Jean
Logan’s and draws a link between them. Besides, when Jean Logan discloses her belief in that her husband would not let go of the rope only to show off to a girlfriend of his, Rose gives it a thought and attempts to question its rightfulness: “This was a theory, a narrative that only a grief, the dementia of pain, could devise. ‘But you can’t know this,’ I protested. ‘It’s so particular, so elaborate. It’s just a hypothesis. You can’t let yourself believe in it.’” (123).
Rose openly questions Jean Logan’s personal conviction and even provides reasons for thinking it mislead. After all, as Barsky assumes, “postmodernity involves a radical questioning of the grounds upon which knowledge claims are made” (304). McEwan thus apparently makes his character walk the path of the postmodern reasoning.
The main protagonist of Enduring Love , Joe Rose, who also has the privilege of being the narrating character of the text, has a way of always rationalizing the world . What is more, his civil occupation is popular scientific journalism. In yet other words, his is a “scientific” mind.
In his world, objectiveness is supposed to exist. His stance could be described as what Robert
Barsky formulates as “the modernist search for authority, progress, universalization, rationalization, systematization, and a consistent criteria for the evaluation of knowledge claims” (304). The character’s scientifically oriented mind is signaled in the very first chapter, already. As the character waits for his partner at the airport, so he can collect her, his thoughts are captured by this reasoning: “If one ever wanted a proof of Darwin’s contention that the many expressions of emotion in humans are universal, genetically inscribed, then a few minutes by the arrivals gate in Heathrow’s Terminal Four should suffice” (4). The main protagonist’s preoccupation, his reading of the reality through the prism of a scientifically based thought, is outlined. Later on in the novel, when Rose tries to make sense of what
26 actually happened in the field, the location of the balloon accident, and figure out what his and the other people’s behavior meant, his rationalization goes as follows: “No human society, from the hunter gatherer to the post industrial, has come to the attention of anthropologists that did not have its leaders and the led; and no emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process” (11). Rose’s determination is to narrate any event in the light of his own rationally based interpretation of what had happened. McEwan also shows
Rose’s mind as rather over scienced when he describes what kind of thoughts can accompany
Rose’s having sex with his partner, Clarissa: “The act of reading and understanding engages a number of separate but overlapping functions of the brain, while the region that controls sexual function operates at a lower level, more ancient in evolutionary terms and shared by countless organisms – but still available to the intercession of higher functions – memory, emotion, fantasy” (160). Joe Rose’s compulsion to interpret the happenings in his life
“scientifically” is manifest. As Claire Kahane observes, “his [McEwan’s] protagonist idealizes the achievements of science” (5). The character’s adherence to the scientific explanations is interpretable as exaggerated.
Peculiar is Enduring Love ’s author’s mirroring in the novel’s main protagonist of Joe
Rose. That is to say, McEwan affirms the assumption of a certain superiority of the scientific thought himself, claiming in one of his published articles that “[s]cience […] as an intricate, self correcting thought system, advances and refines its understanding of the thousands of objects of its study. This is how it derives its power and status” (“Parallel”). The novelist presumably thinks of science as possessing an empowered status. Wittily, Zadie Smith uncovers “a truth about McEwan: he is not a dilettante or even a natural, neither a fabulist nor a show off. He is rather an artisan, always hard at work; refining, improving, engaged by and interested in every step in the process, like a scientist setting up a lab experiment”. Moreover,
McEwan’s demonstrable fascination with the scientific thought could have an origin in his
27 son’s choice to study biology. 3 Apparently, there are reasons to see McEwan as an apologist of science. Nevertheless, ambivalence pervades, supposedly, both Joe Rose’s and Ian
McEwan’s account of science. Rose, rather inadvertently, allows for science’s deficiency, when he admits to his inclination to polish the often uncanny, or even ambiguous, scientific vindications: “People say I have a talent for clarity. I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, back trackings and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs” (75). McEwan points at the fact of science’s dubiousness here, too.
Joe Rose’s main intellectual occupation in the novel is to rationalize the behavior of his stalker – Jed Parry. He repeatedly suspects that there is a way to account for the troubling situation around Parry. The upcoming appendix of the novel, which is given in the form of a psychiatric account of the actual content of the narrative of Enduring Love , presents a final vindication of Rose’s anticipation of an explanation. What Rose craves is the chance to
“name” Parry’s condition. Labeling concepts, excavating terms for them and identifying them means the overpowering of the given concepts. What has been tamed through the act of being given an appellation has become less threatening. The unnamed or unidentified pieces of reality pose a threat. The related notion of the more eloquent or educated person’s implicit superiority will again be touched upon by McEwan in Saturday . At a point in Enduring Love ,
Rose finally remembers this suitable explanation of Jed Parry’s weird acting, that is “de
Clerambault’s syndrome”: “The name was like a fanfare, a clear trumpet sound recalling me to my own obsessions. There was research to follow through now and I knew exactly where to start, a syndrome was a framework of prediction and it offered a kind of comfort” (124).
Firstly, Rose uncovers here his liking for the scientific explanation, again. Also, and more importantly, it evidently gives Rose joy to come across frameworks of reference, from which it is possible to re examine and narrate what is happening around him. As Kathleen Wheeler points out, “a central character of our real lives is our constant narration of what happens, our
28 textualizing of experiences to make them intelligible, meaningful” (212). McEwan makes the accentuated human need to back up actions with explanations the determinant of his main protagonist’s characterization. Secondly, Rose utilizes the scientific thought to secure his superiority in relation to Parry. That is to say, another postmodernist theoretician whose assumptions are confirmed by the text of Enduring Love is Michel Foucault. 4 Foucault claimed that “knowledge and power are essentially interdependent” and “the reason of racionalism requires – or even creates – the social categories of madmen, criminals, and deviants, to be able to be defined in opposition to them. In practice, it is, therefore, sexist, racist, and imperialist” (Appignanesi 83). Rose is troubled as long as he is unable to convince the authorities of Parry’s threat. Only after Parry is officially recognized both as a madman and a criminal is Rose made happy and his rationalist reason’s validity strengthens. “The reason’s certainty represents tyranny, which can only be sustained through the suppression or exclusion of the unsure, which does not come in useful and is different. Reason is indifferent to the different” (Appignanesi 78). The sustenance of power relations is part of human rationalization and the subconscious agenda of Joe Rose, particularly Rose’s intolerance of
Clarissa.
Jed Parry is the extreme case of a person viewing the world through a prism, which, in his eyes, is not impugnable. The totalizing mind is implicitly proposed dangerous in Enduring
Love , which is all the more true in Parry’s case, who, struck by “de Clerambault’s syndrome”, is completely unable to understand his own single mindedness. As Rose, the narrator, appositely formulates:
[t]he pattern of his love was not shaped by external influences, even if they originated from me. His was a world determined from the inside, driven by private necessity, and this way it could remain intact. Nothing could prove him wrong, nothing was needed to prove him right. If I had written him a letter declaring passionate love, it would have made no difference. He crouched in a cell of his own devising, teasing out meanings, imbuing nonexistent exchanges with their drama of hope or disappointment, always scrutinizing the physical world, its random placements and chaotic noise and colours, for the
29 correlatives of his current emotional state – and always finding satisfaction. He illuminated the world with his feelings, and the world confirmed him at every turn his feelings took. (143) In yet other words, “Parry listened only to the inner voice of his private God” (153). In
Enduring Love , McEwan scrupulously discusses the human compulsion to impose meaning, often very specific meaning, upon the surrounding world. Symptomatic for the present idea is the Nietzschean notion that “truths are illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten”
(qtd. in Wheeler 215). McEwan is determined to show the traps of the described urge. Even though man cannot help rationalizing his or her life, he or she should be able to be fully aware of the limits of his or her type of rationalization. That is to say, “when Joe [Rose] points out that his stalker is bound within ‘love’s prison of self reference,’ he is also making a point with a broader human application. We all have a tendency to filter events through the narrow lens of self, especially when those events are terrible and seemingly random” (Nesson). The advice, it follows, is to take care and listen to the other voices as well. “Joe makes sense of
Parry's infatuation by classifying it as an instance of a pathological condition, ‘de
Clérambault’s syndrome’, one of whose peculiarities is, ironically, that it can last indefinitely, since it isn't dependent on reciprocation” (Mars Jones). The cited critic points at an important aspect of any totalizing urge – its factual disinterest in reciprocality. A totality’s validity is ascertained “from within”.
Joe faces Jed Parry’s “grand narrative” and, even though he is aware of its deconstruction’s possibility, is intrigued by it. In this, McEwan accentuates the notion of a convincing narrative as prone to being accepted despite its falseness. Rose admits not unequivocally rejecting Parry’s point of view. As he is thrown into a conversation with his stalker, he realizes that he is actually influenced by Parry’s persuasion, even though perhaps on a much lower level than Parry would desire him to be. Talking to Parry, the following
Rose’s thoughts arise:
30 It was as if I had fallen through a crack in my own existence, down into another life, another set of sexual preferences, another past history and future. I had fallen into a life in which another man could be saying to me, We can’t talk about it like this, and My own feelings are not important. What also amazed me was how easy it was not to say, Who the fuck are you? What are you talking about? The language Parry was using set off responses in me, old emotional sub routines. It took an act of will to dismiss the sense that I owed this man, that I was being unreasonable in holding something back. In part, I was playing along with this domestic drama, even though our household was no more than this turd strewn pavement. (67) Rose comes to imagine another life, in which different rules apply, as hypothetically possible.
The narrating character describes Parry’s “language” as influential; it has, after all, created response in Rose. What Rose calls “old emotional sub routines” happens to come into existence in his psyche, despite his categoric rejection of acclaiming Parry’s suggestions. Any narrative of a substance, that is any narrative that manages to appear cogent, can “set things in motion”. Rose’s partner Clarissa senses Rose’s being influenced by Parry, despite the protagonist’s clear rejection of his stalker: “Joe’s partner Clarissa is not entirely sympathetic to Joe’s plight. In some ways she sees him as complicit, partly to blame, for Jed’s obsession”
(Schoeck). Joe Rose’s trouble with Jed Parry is the resultant destabilization of Rose’s all encompassing trust in his usual rationalist viewpoint. Regina Rudaityte, in fact, summarizes our present assumption, “[t]he stalker Jed Parry’s homo erotic obsession becomes destructive not only for his own personal integrity but it does test to the limits the protagonist Joe Rose’s mental stability and scientific rationalism” (34). Moreover, the critic reminds of another salient feature of the “totalizing” mind, which is its liking for complexity, perfection, or beauty.
As a matter of fact, McEwan makes the reader consider that the very “perfection” of a creed, its evident elaborateness, is suspicious, influential, and in that, potentially dangerous.
Enduring Love repeatedly raises the question of the beauty of an idea overwhelming common sense. Importantly, this notion also gained extensive attention of the critics. One of the multiple examples of McEwan’s cultivation of the notion would be the following. The
31 narrating character of the novel goes on to explain how even science can depend on attractiveness, rather than reliability, of a theory:
In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data was in.[…] Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate and inconvenient data was overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory […] Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially these years of practical striving were irrelevant. The Theory was already in the textbooks from the twenties onwards. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist. (48 49) The temptation to blindly adhere to a “nicely unified” narrative, a narrative of symmetry and appeal, is repeatedly suggested throughout Enduring Love . Alice Truax also comments on this motif and provides further examples of its occurrence in the narrative, as follows:
Joe muses that Dirac's early theory of quantum electrodynamics was slow to gain acceptance because it was aesthetically unappealing—‘Acceptance withheld on grounds of ugliness’ and this phrase could well serve as the novel's ironic motto, for its plot is littered with examples of this prejudice. When the balloonist yells perfectly reasonable instructions to his would be helpers in the field, they all ignore him because he appears incompetent. The police dismiss Joe’s warnings about Parry because they have a neater theory. Logan’s widow becomes convinced that her husband was adulterous because, after his death, she finds a woman’s scarf in his car. But is the elegant embodiment of an idea ever the entire story? Moreover, Rose’s spotting of perfection in the scientific explanation is also touched upon by
Claire Kahane: “Joe, the rationalist son, himself faithfully holding onto the ideal of the autonomous ego, drawn to Clarissa’s physical beauty but even more drawn to the absolute abstract beauty of mathematical formulations that are clear of the muddy waters of the body and its affect loaded perceptions, or so he would think” (12). This is clearly a sign also of
McEwan’s aesthetic interest in science. The idea of the irresistible beauty of a thought is possibly McEwan’s favorite. In an article of his own, he explains that “there is something of the luminous quality of great literature when the 29 year old Charles Darwin, just two years back from his Beagle voyage and 21 years before he will publish The Origin of Species , confides to a pocket note book the first hints of a simple, beautiful idea” (“Parallel”). In “A
Parallel Tradition”, McEwan debates the scientific literary tradition. Evidently, the novelist
32 has been giving a lot of thought to science. Rudaityte goes further in her assuming, saying about Enduring Love that “hierarchization of the ‘reality value’ of the two intertexts reproduces the novel’s preference for the ‘truth of beauty’ over the ‘truth of science’. In fact, the novel does not do much with romantic poetry, neither does it play with or parody its conventions; it simply pits it, as a superior option, against rationalism” (36). This critic’s interpretation confirms our prior statement that the text of Enduring Love is permeated by the
Derridean différence . It poses as faithfully adhering to the scientific reasoning, but allows for
Rudaityte’s interpretation, which assumes otherwise.
Joe Rose’s constant oppugning of other people’s creeds is one thing. Yet, Enduring Love ’s agenda is to question every single personal attempt to totalize, any subjective grand narrative.
And in that philosophy, Joe Rose, even though he is the narrating character, cannot present an exception. The validity of his personal vision also has to become a subject of scrutiny. This has to be considered in order to be able to show McEwan as an author who is interested in exemplifying an individual’s dilemma inherent in the transition from the realm of modernism to that of postmodernism. The description of how his main character, Joe Rose, comes to doubt his own vision is vital for the main argument of Enduring Love . The very subject of the novel is the impeachment of subjective grand narratives, as explained above. The subsequent main protagonist’s hesitation, his uncertainty about himself, becomes a leitmotif of the book.
For instance, Rose admits, from time to time, the existence of a realm that escapes the scientific explanation: “However scientifically informed we count ourselves to be, fear and awe still surprise us in the presence of the dead” (23). Rose admits here that his life is governed by the logic of the scientific knowledge. And at the same time, the character doubts the monopoly of science, when the explanation of the world is to be given. Elsewhere, the character allows for the acknowledgement of the existence of something as unreasonable as deja vu: “In the second or two it took for Logan to reach the ground I had a sense of déjà vu”
33 (18). Not everything can be taken into account by means of scientific explanation. The character of Rose is able to question, that is subvert, himself even explicitly: “[T]he matter of our differences was unbroachable. I glanced at her and thought she looked beautiful and sad.
Or was the sadness all mine?” (223). The discussed idea of people’s projection of their own understanding into what they observe is voiced here, and what is even more important, Rose uncovers this in relation to himself alone, which does not happen many times throughout the novel. His anticipation of Parry being present in the library, where Rose is writing an article, is well described, but there is no way the narrator can clearly “prove” his point; he has not
“seen” Jed Parry. All he can do is closely describe his feelings of the strange anticipation. The reader cannot be sure about the narrator’s reliability. “I had sensed him behind me even before I saw him. The unreliability of such intuition I was prepared to concede. But it was him” (47). Joe Rose, in fact, is surprised at his newly acquired ability to believe things that have not been grounded on fact. Where Jed Parry is concerned, Rose is even willing to trust his intuition. Rose’s mind, as has been outlined, inadvertently imposes the scientific explanation to happenings: “Some people find their long perspectives in the stars and galaxies; I prefer the earthbound scale of the biological […] What I thought might calm me was the reminder that, for all our concerns, we were still part of this natural dependency”
(206 7). Importantly here, Rose admits the reassurance he draws from his scientific understanding. The character would expect the scientific look negate the emotional turmoil he acquired after witnessing the accident. However, as is hinted in the above quotation, this time, the usual strategy does not work. With the facing of death, Rose’s mind becomes slightly more aware of its scientific basis’ limits. It is a disappointment for the rationalist Rose. He would expect being spared the feeling of guilt by means of rationalizing the incident.
The function of the minor characters in the novel, Clarissa and Parry, is to contest the main protagonist’s, Joe Rose’s, vision. Joe Rose is the first person narrator of the given story. It is
34 the sign of his generosity, then, to allow for other voices to be heard. Or, in other words, it is a sign of the gradually pervading postmodernity of this character, his latent openness to and acceptance of diverse interpretations. As Regina Rudaityte claims, “the author resorts to literary history (life stories of the Romantic poets John Keats and William Wordsworth) as well as to the facts of sciences, medicine, of psychopathology to be more exact, thus moving among heterogeneous discourses incorporated into the narrative. This sets the rules of the interpretative game” (33). Rose’s voice, naturally, is dominant in Enduring Love . Yet, it comes to subvert itself at times, by means of venting other voices. Significantly, Rose, the narrator, dedicates three complete chapters to Parry’s voice. Three chapters in their entirety follow Parry’s thought, as they are taken over by letters addressed to Rose, written by Parry.
In Claire Kahane’s words:
Joe is the reliable narrator of a realistic discourse about love and its breakdown through traumatizing contingencies. But McEwan breaks Joe’s control of the narration by giving us verbatim the letters of Jed, the letters of a madman that are saturated with affect, with the power of his love, and which contain perceptive criticisms of Joe’s narcissism that can’t be readily dismissed by the reader. McEwan thus casts a particle of doubt on Joe’s subjectivity, or rather objectivity, even on his point of view as narrator, a doubt that is voiced within the novel by Clarissa, who has distanced herself from Joe’s love through her doubt of the truth of his story. (12 13) Jed Parry’s second letter, which takes hold of the thirteenth chapter, discusses Rose’s career in journalism, based on the popularization of the scientific thought, which he so keenly adheres to. Parry pities Rose’s “sad dry thoughts” and expresses his wish to “set him free from his little cage of reason” (133). Moreover, Parry proposes: “[h]ow is it possible to love
God and love you at the same time? Through faith alone, Joe. Not through facts, or pretend facts, or intellectual arrogance” (134). The assumption that the scientific thought has its limits is voiced. Apparently, Parry’s vision is also afflicted by a concrete grand narrative, his belief in God, and thus is also in itself prone to be seen as totalizing. However, it manages to confront and resists Rose’s personal grand narrative of the superiority of the scientific rendition of the world, all the same. Parry even implicitly alludes to the concept of différence :
35 “Somewhere in among your protestations about God is a plea to be rescued from the traps of your own logic” (135). What McEwan draws attention to is the fact that anyone’s personal logic entails “traps”, and thus all logics must become the subjects of disputation. The aim is to prove also Rose’s assumption of the superiority of rationalism wrong. The resultant ambivalent picture of the protagonist impresses us as rather postmodern. To resume the poststructuralist stance, in Clewell’s wording:
When applied to the human self, différance [Derridean coinage] suggests a discursively constructed subject that never coheres to form a complete or non contradictory individual. Foucault has similarly proclaimed the death of both the Cartesian subject and the traditional idea of the author, giving special prominence to the concept of ‘discourse’ as the primary medium in the constitution of subjectivity, knowledge, and power. (382) Joe Rose is an evidently contradictory individual. His authority as an author is established, but unsure. In his contribution to the debate over ethics in postmodernity, Arik Evan Issan mentions that “[o]ne’s [postmodern] self is without underlying coherence, hierarchy, or core and is but an unstable combination of opposing underdeveloped selves randomly and multiply formed” (115). Joe Rose’s instability is a postmodern stance, the sign of a postmodern identity. In a certain way, and a different sense, Joe Rose represents science in Enduring Love .
The postmodernist Jean Francois Lyotard claims that “‘[s]tepping over Benjamin’s and
Adorno’s reticences, it must be recalled that science and industry are no more free of the suspicion which concerns reality than are art and writing. To believe otherwise would be to entertain as excessively humanistic notion of the mephistophelian functionalism of sciences and technologies” (76). Joe Rose’s falling under suspicion is a metaphor of the science’s superiority’s weakening in the postmodern era.
The twenty third chapter gives scope to a letter to Rose from yet another character of the novel Clarissa. Again, the narrator lets another point of view affect the reader’s understanding of the story. Clarissa’s letter, in fact, summarizes what Rose has been trying to account for throughout the novel. Significantly, her point of view contests that of Rose.
36 Notable is Rose’s reaction on this letter from Clarissa. In the subsequent chapter, that is to say, the character strictly rejects her assertions: “her letter seemed to me simply unreasonable.
I disliked its wounded, self righteous tone, its clammy emotional logic, its knowingness that hid behind a highly selective memory” (222). Rose, the narrator, is not yet capable of completely accepting the equivalence, that is un superiority of his own subjective grand narrative, in relation to the others. Even though he undoubtedly comes to doubt his own vision, he resents accepting its validity’s relativity. In this resides the very ambivalence of the text of Enduring Love . The narrative is a string of opposing tendencies. The narrating character is in control of the text, inevitably, because he is the first person narrator.
Importantly, his “truth” overcomes all the other truths outlined throughout the novel in the end. However, it has to be admitted that his urge to totalize is not all embracing, after all, and that he takes care to subvert himself on the way enormously. Throughout Enduring Love ,
“[w]ithin the legitimizing discourse of science, both the standard of a ‘normal’ masculinity and narrativity as a privileged mode of its articulation have been secured […] On another level, however, the text specifically invites our incredulity toward this grand narrative of male affirmation” (Morrison). The apprised schizophrenia of the novel is confirmed.
McEwan gives us a key to the interpreting of his Enduring Love with postmodernist theories in mind. That is to say, an indirect mention and contestation of Jean Francois
Lyotard’s postmodernist theory occurs in Enduring Love . When Rose speculates about
Parry’s vision and wonders why this keen follower of his has not recently talked about
Clarissa, his idea is formulated as follows: “Did he believe in his private narrative that he was sparing her feelings? […] Or did the story require no consistency at all?” (144). Notable is the usage of the terms “narrative” and “story”, here. The talk is about the subjective vision again; the adherence to a personal understanding that has been outlined above, the insistence on one’s own grand narrative. In the foreword to Lyotard’s treatise on postmodernism, Fredric
37 Jameson, the other grand figure of the postmodernist thought, explains that “narrative also means something like teleology” and proposes that, nowadays, “the rhetoric of totality and totalization that derived from what I have called the Germanic or Hegelian tradition is the object of a kind of instinctive or automatic denunciation by just about anybody” (xix). It is the common postmodernist belief that the totalizing impulse in narratives is to be contested.
Namely, Rose contemplates that science has ceased to employ narratives in its enterprise, which is an assumption formerly held, but lately abandoned by Lyotard: “I wanted to write about the death of anecdote and narrative in science, my idea being that Darwin’s generation was the last to permit itself the luxury of storytelling in published articles” (41). The postmodernist theoretician has a slightly different view in this respect: “Lyotard argues that scientific knowledge never legitimated itself because it always relied on what he terms
‘narrative knowledge’ to support it” (Easthope 19). Denise Roman, in the contribution to the
Encyclopedia of Postmodernism , dedicated to the concept of poststructuralism, states that
“[u]ltimately, poststructuralism critiques linguistic and structuralist theories by arguing that knowledge, truth, and reality do not originate in experience, but in language, an unstably structured system, thereby relativising and demystifying the meta narratives of Western modernity and thought” (310). In disagreement with the poststructuralist notion, Joe Rose, the novel’s main protagonist, still believes in the validity of science. Unlike Lyotard, the postmodernist thinker, Rose is not ready to admit that all science is dependent upon language.
Yet, he gradually comes to understand that even science inevitably makes use of narrating and in that is prone to deconstruction, and such a realization troubles him greatly. Rose considers science self sufficient, independent of language, and so laughs at the conclusions of a writer of a letter to Nature in 1904, who attempted to investigate consciousness in animals: “What I liked here was how the power and attractions of narrative had clouded judgement. By any standards of scientific enquiry the story, however charming, was nonsense. No theory
38 evinced, no terms defined, a meaningless sample of one, a laughable anthropomorphism”
(41). In fact, perhaps without him even realizing this, as he speculates about the early twentieth century scientist narrator, Rose expresses a doubt about his own job. Rose’s
“business”, popularizing science, necessarily includes covering up for inconsistencies in a scientific research, to make the reader marvel at the science’s effort. The character of Rose is still trying to take sides with science, attempting to draw a line between the scientific and narrative explanations, however misbelieved such an intention might be. Yet, gradually, Rose understands the interconnectedness of narrative and science, despite still regarding it fallacious:
And what in fact were typical products of the twentieth century scientific or pseudo scientific mind? Anthropology, psychoanalysis – fabulation run riot. Using the highest methods of storytelling and all the arts of priesthood, Freud had staked his claim on the veracity, though not the falsifiability, of science. And what of those behaviourists and sociologists of the nineteen twenties? It was as though an army of white coated Balzacs had stormed the university departments and labs. (50) Rose marvels here at the science’s extensive use of the narrative. Thereon, the character realizes the following, in which a certain shift in his perception is to be seen: “[w]hat I had written was not true. It wasn’t written in pursuit of truth, it wasn’t science. It was journalism, magazine journalism, whose ultimate standard was readability” (50). Rose outlines here the easiness of using language and narration for proving a mendacious point. What he actually does is a deconstruction of both his own journalistic efforts and what he has been claiming in terms of Enduring Love . The narrating character Rose thus contests his own narrative as misleading, in which he admits his tending to untruthfulness. How can the reader be sure that the narrative of Enduring Love does not follow the same route as Rose’s accounts of the scientific exploration’s “accurateness”? The powers of rhetoric could as well be guiding his account of the situation around Jed Parry. Rather revealingly, McEwan mentions Voltaire in one of his articles, and explains how this writer “placed himself between a scientist and an interested public and offered superb expositions of Newton's theories of optics and
39 gravitation, which still stand today. If you want to know what was daring and original in what
Newton said, read Voltaire. He communicates the excitement of a new idea, and sets the highest standards of lucidity” (“Parallel”). McEwan’s Joe Rose in Enduring Love definitely is, at least in the respect just described, very similar to Voltaire, as a matter of fact. As Joe Rose has said about himself: “[p]eople say I have a talent for clarity” (75). It is precisely narrative that makes the scientific thought so authoritative, as well as it is narrative’s fault that science has accommodated such an enormous amount of respect. Joe Rose’s occupation, perhaps without him even being aware of this stance, is advocating, not merely recording, of science.
To sum up, there is a different reality for each character in the novel. Rose is tolerant, as the narrating character. All things considered, Rose’s alter ego (the other half of his schizophrenic self) does presuppose the existence of different minds, and thus, in the text which he controls, also allows for contrasting minor narratives to co exist. Nice is the juxtaposition of his point of view and the Clarissa’s viewpoint he is generous enough to take into consideration: “To her I was maniac, perversely obsessed, and worst of all, the thieving invader of her private space. As far as I was concerned she was disloyal, unsupportive in this time of crisis, and irrationally suspicious” (139). The confrontal of these two characters’ subjectivenesses becomes a visible theme of the novel, despite the fact that Joe Rose enjoys the privileged position in the text, as a consequence of being chosen by McEwan as the narrator: “Joe is a jack of all sciences, while Clarissa is an academic whose specialty is Keats.
McEwan can't resist equipping Joe with a full expressive panoply of language. In theory, he and she occupy different worlds, in practice he inhabits both one chapter is even done from his imagining of her point of view, with Joe presented in the third person” (Mars Jones). In the course of the novel, that is to say, McEwan describes the gradual disintegration of the harmonious partnership of Rose and Clarissa that is outlined at the beginning of the novel.
Their inability to reconcile each other’s understanding of what is happening causes the
40 gradual alienation they go through. Clarissa’s way of thinking is frequently shown as fundamentally different from Rose’s. “Clarissa thought that her emotions were the appropriate guide, that she could feel her way to the truth, when what was needed was information, foresight and careful calculation. It was therefore natural, though disastrous for us both, that she should think I was mad” (150). This quote even acknowledges the fact of the fatality of the partners’ disagreement. Yet, the description of the difference in their thinking is commenced a lot earlier in the novel:
[S]he had written me some beauties, passionately abstract in their exploration of the ways our love was different from and superior to any that had ever existed. […] I had tried to match hers, but all that sincerity would permit me were facts, and they seemed miraculous enough to me: a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck. (7) The narrator outlines the essential diversity of mentalities, and the consequent differences in personal interpretations of the world. Even two people drawn together by love are more than likely to think of their relationship diversely. It is the narrating character’s insistence on the factual explanation of what is happening that causes the growing disagreement between him and his partner, his intolerance. Also the third chapter elaborates on the difference of Rose’s and Clarissa’s way of thinking: “‘It must mean something,’ she said dully” (32). When
Clarissa suggests that the balloon incident bears some significance, Rose is unable to react.
This is not his understanding. A minor disagreement arises between them. Clarissa summarizes this moment of dissension with the following, and at the same time the nature of
Rose’s incomprehension is outlined: “‘You’re such a dope. You’re so rational sometimes you’re like a child…’ Did she mean that rationality was a kind of innocence?” (33). McEwan comes to point at the inevitability of ignorance in case of one sided perception. It is only through the presentation of Clarissa’s, that is another protagonist’s, statements that Rose comes to explicitly describe himself as a “rationalist”: “‘I love you more now I’ve seen you go completely mad,’ she said. ‘The rationalist cracks at last!’” (35). The narrating character
41 thus makes the reader sense the possibility of observing him “through other eyes” through
Clarissa’s world view, for instance. It is Clarissa’s arguments that, in confrontation with Rose, help to undermine the narrating character’s credibility:
A few years ago, science book editors could think of nothing but chaos. Now they were banging their desks for ever possible slant of neo Darwinism, evolutionary psychology and genetics. I wasn’t complaining, business was good, but Clarissa had generally taken against the whole project. It was rationalism gone beserk. ‘It’s the new fundamentalism,’ she had said one evening. ‘Twenty years ago you and your friends were all socialists and you blamed the environment for everyone’s hard luck. Now you’ve got us trapped in our genes, and there’s a reason for everything!’ […] Everything was being stripped down, she said, and in the process some larger meaning was lost. (70) Clarissa’s disagreement incites a dispute between the partners, which even further illustrates the difference in Rose’s and Clarissa’s thinking:
I told her I thought she had spent too much time lately in the company of John Keats. A genius no doubt, but an obscurantist too who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder, when the opposite was the case […] Clarissa said I had not understood her. There was nothing wrong in analyzing the bits, but it was easy to lose sight of the whole. I agreed. The work of synthesis was crucial. Clarissa said I still did not understand her, she was talking about love. (71) Clarissa is the main counterpoint of Rose’s rationalism in the novel. Jed Parry also confronts
Rose’s science, but his opinion’s validity is less credible, for it is undermined due to the reader’s sensing of the character’s madness.
42 3.4 The Ambivalent Narrating Character Joe Rose: Schizophrenia in Enduring Love ’s
Narration
Joe Rose is narrating the story of Enduring Love in retrospect. This is a rather crutial fact.
“It may have been exhaustion, or perhaps my concealment was protective of her, but I know I made my first serious mistake when I turned on my side and said to her, ‘It was nothing.
Wrong number. Go to sleep.’” (37). First in retrospect is Rose able to see his former behavior as wrong. The past tense of the narration is significant and it is fruitful to consider the fact that the narrator narrates “backwards”. From the present standpoint, he gazes into the past. The immediate understanding of the happenings that affected his life gets reconsidered. Rose’s present, that is, distanced in time, description of the past events is already carried out in light of pieces of knowledge formerly unknown. The narrating character is re reading, re understanding his story. Joe Rose could also be interpreted as a metaphor of the postmodern reader, “who, while reading a text, metaphorically writes and re writes it, according to the socio discursive agreements rendering the text intelligible” (Roman 309). McEwan makes his narrating character draw attention to the fact that it is him who is narrating, in which the reader is somehow warned. Rose comments on his choices in the process of narrating, is communicative about his storytelling technique. The reader senses the foregrounded narrator’s inexperience in terms of fiction writing. Joe Rose, after all, is originally a scientist.
The narrating character is “atoning” for not having seen formerly what he came to understand lately, and attempts not to overlook other protagonists’ viewpoints. The sense of discrepancy between the way he saw the happenings before and the way he is able to see them now, evoked in the narration, forms the silhouette of ambivalence that pervades the novel. The narrator is not authoritarian, for he allows the reader to question his legitimacy. McEwan manages to slightly subvert the autonomy of this character’s position and his privileged influence upon the reader, despite the first person narration. The narrating character’s caution
43 can be well illustrated with the excerpt from the beginning of the second chapter, where Rose happens to be clearly concerned about being careful as to the recollection of the past events:
“Best to slow down. Let’s give the half minute after John Logan’s fall careful consideration.
What occurred simultaneously or in quick succession, what was said, how we moved or failed to move, what I thought – these elements need to be separated out. So much followed from this incident […] that a little reflection, even pedantry, can only help me here” (17). Rose’s approach to narrating is considerate. Taking into account the former paragraph’s subject,
Enduring Love can also easily be interpreted as Rose’s, the narrator’s, attempt to reconcile his former understanding of his being haunted by Jed Parry with his partner’s, Clarissa’s, viewpoint. He is, possibly, trying to recollect the past with sensitivity to Clarissa in mind.
A significant stage of the novel, in case we are to search for metafiction in the text, is chapter nine, which is, extraordinarily, given in the third person narration. It is here that the narrating character rather explicitly comments on “his own” storytelling, his factual command of the narration. The shift in the mode of narration here is intended by the narrating character as a platform for a more “objective” point of view, as he himself affirms: “It would make more sense of Clarissa’s return to tell it from her point of view” (79). Positing himself as a character on seemingly the same level as the other protagonists, however, does not effectively support the aim at objectiveness (a hopeless sentiment in itself). As a matter of fact, it only draws attention to the artificiality of his rendering of the past events. It takes effort from the reader to imagine the narrating character of Enduring Love as a tantamount partaker in the story. The narrator here comes to subvert himself, instead of proving his desired objectivity.
From this point in the novel on, the reader becomes more alert to the narrating character’s statements. After all, Rose has expressed a doubt about his own credibility as a narrator, by deliberately introducing his ninth chapter in the third person narration, to approximate
Clarissa’s point of view, which, nevertheless, must be essentially un penetrable to him. Mere
44 distancing himself from the centre of the description, by means of artificially transforming himself into an “observed”, rather than “observing”, figure, does not enhance the objectiveness of the whole story: “The narrative is conducted in the first person point of view, and the narrator is identified with the protagonist who is presenting his own version of his staggering experiences. Thus the question arises: to what extent can his narrated story be objective, plausible and reliable?” (Rudaityte 34). Recognition of the narrator’s subjectiveness as a totalizing tendency is at hand (Rose’s misguided belief in his ability to give an objective viewpoint) and postmodernity’s essential distrust of the totalizing entity reports. The first person narration gives Rose, the first person narrator, a certain kind of authority, which is, at the same time, deconstructed throughout the text.
The very first sentence of the book illustrates the narrator as being reflective and sensitive to his role as the provider of the story: “The beginning is simple to mark” (1). The sense of the narrator being a lot more informed of the happenings than we, as readers, are, is insinuated straight away as well: “We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running towards it. The transformation was absolute” (1). The information about the danger he spots, or towards what he is actually running, is simply postponed and only signaled for the time being. The retention of information is then what permeates the whole novel. The novel is based on this tension, the principle of suspense, the accentuated sense of the approaching of the unexpected. “Knowing what I know now, it’s odd to evoke the figure of Jed Parry directly ahead of me” (2). The narrator explicitly proposes his detainment of knowledge – for the reader to realize that, unlike Rose’s narrative voice, he or she cannot know this “now known”; Joe Rose has the power over the reader. Besides, it is “odd” to evoke
Jed Parry’s figure for reasons typically adherent to reminiscence, Rose’s reminiscence. The discrepancy between the vision of the character as he was experiencing the described in the past and the way he is able to think of it now is established. The explicitness, with which the
45 narrator draws the reader’s attention to the fact of his high handedness, his power over the narration’s holding back of certain pieces of information and subsequent disclosures, is enormous: “I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible” (2). What permeates Enduring
Love is its narrating character’s manifest admission of the (postmodern) “consciousness of
[his] own status as a maker of fictions” (Tabbi 122). Normally, a story of suspense gets narrated without this acknowledgement of the narrator’s being in control of it. The sense of his or her presence usually is felt, but not practically addressed by the narrator the way Rose does that. Enduring Love ’s narrator constantly alludes to his will to suspend the narration:
“We were running towards a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes” (3). The awareness of a “catastrophe” is established, without the reader being informed immediately about its contents. On the first three pages, the narrator stretches the happenings of a few seconds. The action and its description clearly lie in disproportion. The narrator evokes the confusion of a moment, to excite the reader, and only after that returns to what preceded this moment and starts the main narration; beginning to describe his journey on the airport to meet Clarissa who was flying in.
Later in the chapter, the narrator even extends this suspension, practically repeating the same pattern of withholding of information: “It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my life, closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia” (8). Not only does the narrator linger on a moment indiscernible to the reader; he also allows for speculation about the possible eventualities of his behavior then. The reader has to wait to receive the information about “it” being primarily a balloon, secondarily a change of life, approaching the protagonists who are about to have a picnic in the field. The striking suspense fullness of the introductory chapter of Enduring Love does not go unnoticed by the critics: “Although the
46 straightforward statements in the initial fourth and fifth sentences (“we heard a man’s shout”;
“saw danger”) alert the reader to a catastrophe, however, the author prefers to withhold the information as to what has really happened, playing hide and seek with the reader”
(Rudaityte 34). Undoubtable is the narrator’s initial reluctance, his hesitancy and factual repudiation of a straightforward, unproblematic account of the events.
To further elaborate on the claim of subversive narrator, the following should be mentioned. When Joe Rose is interviewed by the police after the attack at the restaurant, his recollection of the flavor of the ice cream he and his company had for dessert is suspicious.
The policeman in charge spots that his testimony is inconsistent with those of his companions.
A reviewer of Enduring Love explicitly mentions Joe Rose’s unreliability as a narrator: “[t]o introduce at this stage an unreliable narrator is perverse: it recapitulates on the level of gimmick, the novel’s central theme, that unreliability is an ineradicable part of what we are”
(Mars Jones). The novel’s preoccupation with the questions of (the unattainable) objectivity, connected to reliability, is evident. In postmodernity, unreliability is counted on. Joe’s determination to prove his point with the help of “facts” is rendered almost ridiculous when
McEwan lets his character dwell on speculating which sections of Parry’s letters should be copied and showed to the police to make the police believe Rose’s statement of being subject to assault. This is, unfortunately for Rose’s respectability, an evident step to censorship. Rose takes his time to select convenient passages from Parry’s letters that would convince the police of Parry’s deviation: “I was attempting to compile a dossier of threats, and while there were no single obvious examples, there were allusions and logical disjunctures whose cumulative effect would not be lost to the mind of a policeman” (151). Rose imagines the policemen reading suspicious parts of Parry’s letters out of context, without realizing their actual un objectiveness. Under these circumstances, the police will only be yielding to Rose’s pre established “truth” reading his concise compilation of Parry’s disjunct sentences. Going
47 back to Joe Rose’s inauspicious ice cream slipup, Mars Jones’ elaboration on the subject shall be foregrounded:
Immediately before he lies to the police, or to himself, or merely the reader, Joe has been thinking about a truth free of self interest, doubting whether a willed objectivity can save us from our engrained habits of mind, and has even asked explicitly, in a sentence standing alone as a paragraph: ‘But exactly what interests of mine were served by my own account of the restaurant lunch?’ The reviewer agrees with the assumption that Rose comes to doubt the possibility of an objective point of view, despite the fact that he still somehow believes in it (he attempts to pass his narrative off as objective by means of trying to appropriate Clarissa’s point of view).
The idea of the schizophrenic stance of the character is yet again taken into account here.
The narrator’s ambivalent approach described above inevitably results in a schizophrenic pattern taking hold of the whole text of Enduring Love ; a happening which, in terms of the postmodern logic, has to be seen as ethical. That is to say, the equivocal vision successfully eliminates totalizing:
The postmodern shift to the approach to the mind is palpable, in that it rebuts the formalist or behaviorist dreams of systematic and predictable results, in favor of a lack of center, ‘deterritorialization’ and connections through ‘rhizomes’. These terms are explored in the complex work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who, for example, celebrate schizophrenia (schizoanalysis) for its inventiveness and refusal of totalizing approaches. (Barsky 306) Rose’s juxtaposition of his former understanding and the present understanding of the story being told has the schizophrenic stance in itself. The two Rose’s viewpoints do not stand in hierarchy, they are almost equally prominent. Even though the ending of the novel donates the
“truth” to Joe Rose, the one, who craved his theory’s vindication, the narrator’s simultaneous and consistent address of the fact of any personal narrative’s dubiousness is still aloft.
Competition of different versions of truth, all of them trying to win the reader over for itself, guides the narration: “To be sure, Joe's narrative is intelligent and persuasive, but then again, so are Parry's letters two of which are included in the text for our inspection and we know that he's insane. Baffled and disoriented, we pick our way among these versions of the truth, straining for a synthesis that would permit some hope for the couple's future” (Truax). Yet
48 another reviewer comments on the simultaneous prominence of contradictory discourses in the text of Enduring Love : “The process of appropriating other discourses is also conducive to establishing the intentional and foregrounded artificiality, the performance aspect of late 20th century fiction and, it seems to me, the instrumental mode which Ian McEwan has opted for in Enduring Love ” (Rudaityte 33). The idea of the competing meanings’ presence in Enduring
Love is agreed on by multiple critics.
The fragmentation of the subject, taking place in Enduring Love through the schizophrenic narrating strategy, is a postmodern notion. According to Michael Drolet, already poststructuralism “sought not to constitute the subject, but to dissolve it” (3). Also important for the present thesis is the poststructuralist assumption of the need to “emphasize multiplicity of interpretation, perspectivism and limitedness of any one point of view” (Wheeler 213).
Furthermore, to remind us of the preceding and related discussion of rationalism’s place in terms of Enduring Love , “[p]oststructuralism is integral to a broader critique of rationalism and subjectivism” (Roman 309). What is questioned by post structuralists is the possibility and validity of an unambiguous determination of the meaning of a text. Multiple interpretations are seen as inevitable. The concept of the both pragmatic and inevitable projection of a person’s interest into his manifest understanding of reality is clearly being addressed by the narrator of Enduring Love . According to post structuralist theories,
“individual readers or writers are revealed as projecting themselves into the thematics of the text when they are least aware of such autobiographical activity” (Wheeler 211). This is where Joe Rose’s schizophrenia originates. Even though he implicitly proposes that his narrative of Enduring Love is supposed to be as objective as possible, it is clear that there is no chance of him providing an objective account of his story, for such a score is universally unattainable. His objectiveness is doomed to be subjective, no matter how hard he tries to include other characters’ viewpoints in the discussion. Rose stubbornly resists the assumption
49 of the inevitability of his projection into the narrative; sincerely believes that he can give the reader “facts”, and in that, make them see the “truth”. The appendixes of the novel, firstly the
(fake) article presumably taken from the British Review of Psychiatry , which is, by the way, the most elaborate piece of an “objective posing” writing in terms of Enduring Love , and secondly the final sample of Parry’s letter writing to Rose, are meant to even further confirm
Rose’s interpretation. Especially the second appendix seems rather redundant, though. At this point of the novel, the reader has been convinced by Rose about the rightfulness of his distress caused by Parry’s intrusion into his life. The second appendix thus seems to be more of a manifestation of Rose’s unwitting stubbornness, which insists on displaying facts to prove the point. To follow Rudaityte’s train of thought, on the top of it, “[t]he fact that the medical text
[Appendix I], with all its appearance of rationalism, scientific objectivity and finality, is a made up one works along Foucauldian lines in order to suggest that all discourses, including scientific ones (or especially scientific ones) are “artificial” in the sense that they have been carefully constructed in order to participate in the power game” (36). Truly, the first appendix only passes off as authentic. 5 The power of subversiveness of McEwan’s appendix is magnificent, for many readers of his book have risen to the bait and believed its authenticity.
Rose’s only regret is that Clarissa is not made happy by means of being provided with facts. Factuality is just another grand narrative to be contested, even though Rose would like to think otherwise. Clarissa needs Rose to allow for her dissatisfaction. Rose encounters difficulties, as to tolerating his partner’s distrust of mere factuality. Yet, in that, he fails to be ethical in the postmodern way. 6 Maryanthe Malliaris relatedly assumes that, “[s]ince postmodernity is a time of visible plurality, the rational reaction is no longer active hegemony but the awareness and appreciation of difference” (31). But is Joe Rose fully able to accept
Clarissa’s right to have a different point of view (one that does not find Rose’s “factual truth” convincing enough to forgive him)? The postmodern realm values the ideas of pluralism and
50 democracy. The need for objectiveness no longer applies. Independent interpretations shall coexist, tolerating each other. As, once again, Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, it is necessary to take into account the “diversity of human kind”, for “[v]ariety and coexistence have become
‘cultural values’” (“Intimations” 18). It could be alleged that the “character of modern attributes Joe Rose” is spotted by McEwan at the moment of his coming to terms with the postmodern logic. Moreover, McEwan’s making of Enduring Love metafictional along the way in which the whole subversion of Joe Rose as a narrator aims to pose questions about the act of narrating as such is a classic postmodernist technique.
Joe Rose’s agenda in writing the text of Enduring Love is to “do away with” what
Zygmunt Bauman identifies as the “horror of indetermination” (“Ambivalence” 56). As
Giddens proposes: “It is made clear that self identity, as a coherent phenomenon, presumes a narrative: the narrative of the self is made explicit. Keeping a journal, and working through an autobiography, are central recommendations for sustaining an integrated sense of self. It is generally accepted among historians that the writing of autobiographies (as well as biographies) only developed during the modern period” (“Self Identity” 76). The very text of
Enduring Love , in the sense of “Joe Rose’s creation”, is undertaken by the narrator for the purpose of ensuring himself a coherent self. Giddens mentions autobiography’s originating in modernity. The primary aim of Rose’s Enduring Love is the preservation of a unified personal identity. Yet, Rose’s postmodern alter ego does not stay out of the game and sees about the distortion of the desired integrity. The intention is modern, the result postmodern. Rose’s schizophrenic base overcomes. Joe Rose has taken to writing Enduring Love with the aim of the re construction of his identity in mind. It is his personal agenda to resurrect his scientific mind’s validity. “The well functioning relationship […] is one in which each person is autonomous and sure of his or her self worth” (“Self Identity” 93). Rose has been disturbed by the balloon accident to such a degree that he needs an affirmation of his autonomous self.
51 For that reason, he undertakes the writing of Enduring Love . It is for the preservation of the harmonious relationship with Clarissa, which preceded the unhappy experience of watching another man’s death, that Rose attempts a reconstruction of his “scientific” identity. Joe
Rose’s insistence on the scientific explanation of the happenings is related to his want for preservation of the privileged masculinity. The present paper has seen the postmodern as negation of modernity, whose wish was to impose clarity on human life, with the help of reason. The postmodern times brought the realization that the modern belief cannot be sustained. The ambivalence of the surrounding world, which modernity sought to eliminate by imposition of totalizing explanations, the so called grand narratives, is taken as acceptable in postmodernity. Perhaps the “Enduring Love” McEwan is talking about is the enduring wish to conceptualize, rationalize, which could constitute the author’s nostalgia for modernism.
52 3.5 The Ethical Confusion in Postmodernity: Rose’s Dilemmas
Inseparable part of Joe Rose’s schizophrenic impulse is his latent ethical confusion. At this stage of the present analysis of postmodernity in Enduring Love , the novel’s climatic, horrifying and foundational moment is to be recalled. As Clarissa’s voice insinuates in her final whole chapter entrance into the novel, addressed to the narrating Joe, “[y]ou were troubled by the thought that it might have been you who let go of the rope first […] your feelings after the accident were real enough. Isn’t it possible that Parry presented you with an escape from your guilt?” (217). Attention is yet again drawn to the main protagonists’ witnessing of the unfortunate death of John Logan in the fields. This scene both starts the narrative of Enduring Love , and is actually the very reason for the narrative’s coming into existence. This particular experience, that is to say, resulted in Joe Rose’s mind’s intellectual turmoil. Joe’s being influenced by Jed’s persuasion has something to do with the circumstances under which the characters met. Was it not for the extraordinary and terrifying encounter of the two, simultaneous with the encounter with tragic death, Rose’s impermeable rationalism would not allow for any succumbing to Parry’s influence. Yet, it is a matter of human condition to be touched by the unexpected and “horrifying” experience:
[w]e, too, tend to assign a mythic significance to every bad thing that happens, so that we can say, as Jed does, that we have been brought closer to God; or, more likely, that each grievous misfortune brings us more in touch with our emotions. […] [T]o the extent that we look for redemptive meaning in the horror of Enduring Love , we are just as solipsistic as the stalker who believes that the balloon accident was heaven sent. Like him, we believe in better living through tragedy. (Nesson) Rose cannot help the reminiscence of tragic feelings after the balloon accident. The human compulsion to unconsciously desire tragedy, in order to reach different levels of consciousness, and in them, altered subjectivity, is present in his mind, too; despite the fact that he will not admit it neither to Jed Parry nor Clarissa. The reason is his mind’s tendency to totalize, discussed previously. More importantly, as the above quote indirectly suggests, it is also counted on by McEwan that the reader is prone to expect a justification of Clarissa’s and
53 Parry’s claim that the accident “meant” something, in which also the reader’s increasing doubt about Joe’s reliability is laid. Especially in terms of a classic literary novel, a tragedy, if included, is supposed to bear special significance. Also from this derives the interpretative game of Enduring Love . Joe’s narration, in a way, goes against the reader’s expectations, in a clearly postmodernist way. Yet, let us consider Michael Drolet’s point, taken from his introduction to The Postmodernism Reader : “Bell also attacked values he believed to be rooted in what he called ‘the pseudo moralities of science’. The faith in scientific objectivity and progress he thought left individuals spiritually weak, and emptied life of metaphysical wonder” (5). This notion is what is elaborated on by McEwan in Enduring Love . “The fully authentic experience of life was no longer possible in Western civilization because its intellectual and spiritual orientation was overly rationalized. Western civilization was obsessive and relentless in intellectualizing all human experience” (Drolet 7). The accident makes Rose aware of this “limitation” on his humanness, this spiritual weakness, inherent in his scientific reasoning habit. In that, John Logan’s death makes Rose abandon modernity and face postmodernity. As a result, the narrating protagonist of the novel, though factually insisting on the possibility of an objective narration of the world, points out an important notion concerning the supposed assurance of modernist grand narratives: “metaphysics and science were courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn’t save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity” (180). Rose’s realization here, patiently observed by McEwan’s knowingness, is that the modernist certitude, derived by the trust in grand narratives, is an illusion. By claiming that “objectivity” does not allow an individual’s “redemption”, Rose inadvertently signals to the reader that what he seeks is a deliverance from a feeling of guilt.
In that, Rose admits that his rationalist search for objectivity is misguided. It shall be noted
54 here that the unequivocal ethical judgements are rather incompatible with the postmodern mentality, as opposed to their prominence in modernity. Along with his doubt about the invalidity of objectivity, Rose arrives at the realization that, in case he is to account for the accident in the field, he needs to employ subjectiveness. Zygmunt Bauman provides the basic standpoint for the present statement:
I suggest that ethical choice and moral responsibility assume under the postmodern condition a totally new and long forgotten significance; an importance of which modernity tried hard, and with a considerable success, to divest them, moving as it did toward replacement of ethical discourse with the discourse of objective, translocal and impersonal truth. Modernity was, among other things, a gigantic exercise in abolishing individual responsibility […] The authorship of moral rules and the responsibility for their promotion was shifted to a supra individual level. With societies (institutionalized as nation states) losing interest in the promotion of cultural uniformity and renouncing their role as spokesmen of universal reason, agents face ethical confusion. (“Intimations” xxii) Rose is not only haunted by the psychopathic Parry. His other great enemy is his actual repudiation of the formerly sustained belief in universality of moral choice. 7 Rose’s feeling of guilt is the cause of his doubt about his own primarily modern thinking, shown in his insistence on the superiority of the scientific rationalization. As a consequence, the main protagonist comes to acknowledge that there are, ultimately, more standpoints from which to judge morality of the human action.
That is to say, Joe Rose cannot help seeing himself as guilty of John Logan’s death. Rose assumes: “I had let go of the rope. I had helped to kill John Logan” (32). Many chapters thereafter, his fright reappears: “I thought about John Logan and how we had killed him ” (55).
Naturally, it is hardly appropriate to term the action of the men in the field, among whom
Rose happened to be on that unlucky day, as “killing”. The wording here signals Rose’s terrible lack of composure, where the balloon accident is concerned. Always the glimpse of the unfamiliar, which is impossible to account for by means of one’s habitual framework of thought, disturbs the troubled individual’s perception. In postmodernity, ethical confusion, uncertainty or insecurity arises. Formerly, as has been suggested above, modernity had
55 replaced the ethical discourse with the discourse of the objective truth, in which individual responsibility got abolished; however, “the ethical paradox of the postmodern condition is that it restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility while simultaneously depriving them of the comfort of the universal guidance that modern self confidence once promised […] individuals are thrown back on their own subjectivity as the only ultimate ethical authority” (“Intimations” xxii). Rose’s personal reliance on the security of science’s objectivity is put into crisis the moment John Logan falls of the balloon. The character tries hard to excuse himself: “But letting go was in our nature too. Selfishness is also written in our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict – what to give to the others, and what to keep for yourself. Treading that line, keeping the others in check, and being kept in check by them, is what we call morality. Hanging a few feet above the Chilterns escarpment, our crew enacted morality’s ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me” (14 15). Rose supposes that the protective wing of the scientific explanation will release him from the obscure feeling of responsibility for his own action, which has come to haunt him. Nevertheless, subconsciously, he senses that it will not. “This, though, is the novel's painful point, as shown by the repercussions of the tragedy, that knowing more about the factors that determine your behavior is not the same thing as becoming either freer or wiser” (Mars Jones). Even though he rationalizes his behavior at the balloon accident as complacent with a theory of general human behavior, he does not escape blaming himself for letting go. The assumption of the
“mammalian conflict” does not release him from the feeling of guilt he experiences. Rose seeks to free his mind of the guilt he feels and the option is to blame the very nature of humans. But even after he has rationalized his failure to save the life of John Logan with an anthropological reasoning, somehow, he does not feel re assured about his moral integrity.
Truly, Rose is not only haunted by Jed Parry. He also identifies an obscure feeling, which is our presumed “feeling of guilt”, that starts to accompany and bother him after the balloon
56 incident: “What bothered me that morning as I typed up my piece was a disquiet, a physical sensation I could not quite identify” (39). Consequently, “[i]t was, of course, not a squeaking floorboard, or the library management that agitated me. It was my emotional condition, the mental visceral state I had yet to understand […] I couldn’t find the word for what I felt.
Unclean, contaminated, crazy, physical but somehow moral” (43). Presumably, the novel’s main protagonist internalizes the postmodern ethical confusion. Joe Rose’s mind, which is used to the comfort of the “totalities” of modernism, suddenly cannot cope with the newly discovered feeling of guilt.
In order to get rid of the feeling of guilt that inhabits his mind now, that is in order to un blame himself, Rose needs to adhere to subjectivity. Rose’s blamelessness is, for Rose rather
“fatally”, relative. “Modernity was not merely the Western Man’s thrust for power; it was also his mission, proof of moral righteousness and cause of pride. From the point of view of reason founded human order, tolerance is incongruous and immoral” (“Intimations” xiv).
Rose cannot help himself and keeps “hearing” contradictory opinions in his mind on his prospective guilt. He cannot see how to accept, how to tolerate, his failure. His modern thinking still permeates his reasoning. Joe Rose understands his letting go of the balloon’s rope as failure, indeed. Other characters try to re assure him, reminding him of the fact that it was plausible to let go of the rope, because it was the means to his own life’s preservation.
This is exactly what, for instance, the wife of the deceased John Logan claims. Jean Logan is, quite on the other hand, blaming her husband, rather than the other men that were present at the balloon incident, for his death, because she believes her partner was responsible for his own well being. Truly, the tragic idea of a sacrifice is no longer at home in the postmodern environment. Always the subjective viewpoint is privileged. What is rather unsettling for
Rose is that the men’s acting there in the field can easily be interpreted in diverse ways. The rendering of it determines either a culprit or the absence of anyone being responsible. It is not
57 possible to determine the universal meaning of the whole accident. There are many parallel interpretations, all of them equal. And it is Rose’s task to choose the one that will make him blameless, so that he can safely return to his protected life. Yet, his scientific mind cannot accept that there is no explanation of binding force, that no verification can be undertaken to solve his moral dilemma: “Had we killed him really? Or simply refused to die with him?”
(56). In order to let Zygmunt Bauman’s voice in again, in postmodernity, “[i]n a cacophony of moral voices, none of which is likely to silence the others, the individuals are thrown back on their own subjectivity as the only ultimate ethical authority” (“Intimations” xxii). Joe Rose should interpret the circumstances of the accident for his own sake.
Lyotard’s affiliations here would seem to be with the Anti-Oedipus of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who also warned us, at the end of that work, that the schizophrenic ethic they proposed was not at all a revolutionary one, but a way of surviving under capitalism […]the dissolution of the self into a host of networks and relations, of contradictory codes and interfering messages, is prophetically valorized. (Jameson xviii xix) The preceding section of the present paper addressed the issue of Enduring Love ’s schizophrenic pattern as a dominant of the text. The novel’s structuring of thought complies with the notion of fragmented morality, arising in the postmodern era. Joe Rose adopts a schizophrenic stance to his behavior at the site of the accident, he cannot decide on his blame or blamelessness. The uncertainty of his morality strikes him as unpleasant. This uncertainty was despised by the totalizing frameworks of modernity, but has become acceptable in terms of postmodernity. Enduring Love suggests that perhaps both options, this uncertainty’s rejection or its acceptance, have flaws.
Enduring Love represents McEwan’s late fiction, but the question of morality is not a newcomer to McEwan’s oeuvre. The concern for morality and the attempt to devaluate it has been part of McEwan’s authorial voice since the beginning of his novelist career. In connection with McEwan’s collections of short stories and his early short novel The Cement
Garden , Sean Matthews assumes that: “McEwan evokes a disquieting sense of inevitability in
58 the unfolding of these events, generating an odd suspension of standard moral and narrative expectations.” Alice Truax similarly attends to the subject of morality in McEwan’s fiction:
“Thomas Hardy was another great master of morality, psychology, and circumstance, but his tragedies never make you nervous. McEwan makes you nervous”. Truax draws a link between the author’s suspenseful narrative voice and the tragic subject matter he employs in his novels. Nicholas Nesson takes the notion even further, associating the morality’s presence in
Enduring Love with its inclusion of a tragedy. First, he describes Aristotle’s making a distinction between horror and tragedy, in which “[h]orror just happens, and we learn nothing from it”, while “tragedy is morally instructive because we follow the story of the tragic protagonist, and can see where he goes wrong and why”. The critic then comes to arrive at a crucial realization, which will help us identify McEwan as a posmodernist thinker:
But while Aristotle was making a distinction between different forms of drama, McEwan takes that formulation one step further, by applying it to life. […] [There is] a difference between the two men that can be expressed in Aristotelian terms: Jed has a tragic outlook, whereas Joe believes that life is sometimes marked by plain bad luck and unredeemed horror. It's clear that Ian McEwan is not sympathetic to the tragic outlook. It is certainly clear that McEwan is less sympathetic to the figure of Jed Parry than to his narrating protagonist of Joe Rose. Rose resists the fullness of the tragic look, indeed (in which his postmodernity resides). He senses it, though. Enduring Love ’s “schizophrenia” is determined also by Rose’s oscillation between yielding to the tragic vision and resisting it with the help of the rationalist discourse. Rose’s scientific mind takes the final hold of the narrative of Enduring Love , in which also the annihilation of the tragic feeling takes place, as that has fully been displaced by Rose’s concern for Jed Parry. Though McEwan denies the tragic outlook this way, it cannot be considered altogether missing from the text. It has been given a lot of subconscious thought by Joe Rose and it has been the subject of the reader’s expectations. The ambivalent exposure of Rose’s latent tragic outlook has been part of the narration. The tragical world view, accompanied by the aura of morality, has lost validity in
59 the postmodern context. The “moral” of Enduring Love is that there is no definite morality.
Rose’s vision does not, at least on the basic level of his consciousness, allow for “tragic” insight. His rendering of John Logan’s death is strikingly factual, but aware of its lack of the tragic insight: “We watched him drop. You could see the acceleration. No forgiveness, no special dispensation for flesh, or bravery, or kindness. Only ruthless gravity” (16). Rose’s account of the poor man’s fall is bluntly factual, but allows for the idea that it lacks
“something” it should include. There is a sense of resentment, but supposition, of the sentimental outlook. It can only be Clarissa, whose voice is firstly let in the peculiar ninth chapter of Enduring Love , not Joe Rose, who discloses Rose’s actual being impressed emotionally by the experience of the balloon accident:
The trouble with Joe’s precise and careful mind is that it takes no account of its own emotional field. He seems unaware that his arguments are no more than ravings, they are an aberration and they have a cause. He is therefore vulnerable, but for now she cannot make herself feel protective. Like her, he has reached the senseless core of Logan’s tragedy, but he has reached it unaware. (83) As Michael Drolet aptly outlines, “the rational principles associated with the Western philosophical tradition, the principles conjoined to modernity itself, which governed the way individuals thought and made sense of their surroundings, alienated them from it. These principles, concepts and categories erected barriers against conscious selfhood and therefore were obstacles to individuals’ self awareness” (9). Joe Rose’s rationalist mind prevents him from a smooth reconciliation with what he had to experience. As Clarissa appositely confirms,
Rose has difficulties realizing his emotional assets, in which the lack of his self awareness resides, identified by Drolet as a modernist “handicap”. The postmodernism’s solution for this unfortunate lack of self awareness is the return to subjectivity. The death of tragedy in the postmodern era is outlined by Mikhail Epstein, as well:
The tragedy of the division between the individual and the absolute, between the individual and society, and between consciousness and reality, becomes as impossible as the avant garde utopia and ecstasy of overcoming that division. What kind of alienation is possible for a theory (postmodern) that does not
60 accept anything as one's ‘own’ and ‘originary? There is nothing left to become alienated from. The cause of tragedy has thus disappeared, just as has the possibility of utopia. In Joe Rose’s mind, as well as in the text of Enduring Love , a doubt about morality in the postmodern era is voiced. If tragedy has ceased to be important in the world, where does it take the ethics? The relativity of ethics makes universally valid morality impossible, which confuses Joe Rose, indeed. “The collapse of ‘grand narratives’ (as Lyotard put it) – the dissipation of trust in supra individual and supra communal courts of appeal – has been eyed by many observers with fear, as an invitation to the ‘everything goes’ situation, to universal permissiveness and hence, in the end, to the demise of all moral, and thus social order”
(“Ambivalence” 251). Enduring Love expresses a doubt about the morality’s shape in postmodernity. Joe Rose, the novel’s main protagonist and narrating character, adheres to the modernist style of thought for he senses the dissipation of the traditional morality in the postmodern order.
Enduring Love directly concerns the notion of postmodernism’s questioning of modernism’s foundational idea of rationality. The novel practically comments on the circumstances of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. In the postmodern times, relativism gains new importance. Universalism, the modernism’s insistence on grand narratives, has been abandoned. The postmodern age is sceptical to the modern era’s “ideas of progress, objectivity, reason, certainty and personal identity” (“Postmodernism”). The ideals of modernism, which are, in many respects, also Enduring Love ’s narrating character’s, the
“primary Joe Rose’s” (as there is a secondary, postmodern, one, as well), ideals, no longer apply in postmodernity. Enduring Love comments on the after modern situation; it is an illustration of the troubles the (post)modern individual faces in the aftermath of the change of the cultural logic. Enduring Love is clearly concerned with Lyotard’s famous resolution to
“fight” totality. The grand narrative of the truthfulness of science is lost. What Joe Rose goes through is the nostalgia for modernity and its elevation of science, as well as the latent
61 nostalgia for the tragic outlook. To recall the postmodernist theoretician’s assumption once again, “Lyotard stresses that in the postmodern condition you cannot found science in truth and so distinguish it from ideology (science itself being a discourse whose attempt to prove its own truth results in continual regress)” (Easthope 20). In Enduring Love , Ian McEwan made his central protagonist Joe Rose a metaphor of the “falling” science. The character’s obstinate agenda is to prove himself right, to enforce his own truth. However, unfortunately for his psyche, Rose’s difficult story that has begun with a strange experience he came across in a field outside the city takes over his “sanity” for a while. The disturbing accident Rose and his life long partner Clarissa have to witness affects their lives. Certain things arise that Joe is not able to “name” immediately. His ability to rationalize temporarily fails and he comes to face postmodernity’s “trap” of relative ethics. The modernist conceptions decided to ignore, defy, the vulnerability of the human psyche: “The kind of society that, retrospectively, came to be called modern, emerged out of the discovery that human order is vulnerable, contingent and devoid of reliable foundations. That discovery was shocking. The response to the shock was a dream and an effort to make order solid, obligatory and reliably founded” (“Intimations” xi).
In Rose’s modern thinking, his vulnerability is not acclaimed, which is why he encounters troubles coming to terms with it. Rose’s substantiation of Jed’s threat, Joe’s intensive paying of attention to Jed, roots in his rejection of the meaninglessness of the death of John Logan:
“This wasn’t ‘some poor fellow’. It was a man bound to me like the farm laborers by an experience, and by a shared responsibility for, or at the very least, a shared involvement in, another man’s death. This was also a man who wanted me to pray with him” (58). Rose’s incomprehension of the fact of death itself, however surprising, as his is a rational mind, which is supposed to make sense of dying easily, causes his inability to cope with Parry the intruder. Perhaps Rose also craves a “purpose” behind the senseless tragedy in the field, which would constitute his nostalgia for the tragic outlook.
62 In his foregrounding of modernity’s structure of thought in his main protagonist’s thinking,
McEwan attempts a re evaluation of modernity and the simultaneous questioning of postmodernism. Nevertheless, “postmodernism is ambivalent and ambiguous as a transitional mode of thinking. In its closure vis à vis Enlightenment, postmodernism has much to contribute to the deconstruction of certain authoritarian forms of thought and practice, including its own” (Flax 191). As Nigel Watson appositely affirms, the “[c]ritics of the postmodern perspective have pointed out that it can lead to an unprincipled emphasis upon personal and individual gratification at the expense of our responsibilities to others” (63).
Perhaps this is what McEwan comes to debate in terms of Enduring Love . His Joe Rose feels insecure, and somehow unwilling to accept his blamelessness in relation to the death of John
Logan. The character doubts not being responsible for this dying. Partially, Joe Rose rejects the “personal gratification” ingrained in the very interpretation of the accident which he is to accept – the interpretation that makes him blameless. Besides, the very behavior of the couple of Rose and Clarissa after the accident is truly postmodern. After they have shared a bottle of wine and talked the accident over, they need to invite their friends, in order to have somebody to inform about their experience. Having friends around provides Rose and Clarissa with the chance to repeatedly recycle, narrate the experience, in which the accident becomes
“hyperreal”, in Baudrillard’s language. The postmodernist stance presents distancing from the actuality. While yielding to the postmodern outlook in many ways, McEwan is quite likely to be challenging its foundations all the same. “The critics charge that the postmodern vision of a tolerant, pluralist society in which every political ideology is perceived to be as valid, or as redundant, as the other, may ultimately encourage individuals to lead lives of a rather disastrous apathetic quietism” (“Postmodernism”). McEwan perhaps is a bit of critical of this plurality, the “crippling radical subjectivism.” Apparent is McEwan’s dislike of people’s attempts at the proliferation of their own personal creeds. What is seen as wrong by the author
63 is to try to impose personal conviction on others. Personal adherence to it is perfectly acceptable, but only as long as it is not seen by the believing individual as something, which is worth convincing other people of. In McEwan’s own words: “[a] variety of sky god worshippers with their numerous, mutually exclusive certainties (all of which we must
‘respect’) appears to be occupying more and more of the space of public discourse.
Increasingly, they seem to want to tell us how to live and think, or inflict upon us the strictures they choose to impose upon themselves” (“Parallel”). Revealing is also how Jean
Logan, saying that she would kill her husband’s (phantom) lover, gives impetus to Rose and her children discussing the subject of moral relativism . McEwan nicely hints at the paradox of this concept. The little girl ingeniously states that horse eating is “wrong” in England, but not in France (120). Rose concludes: “‘So,’ I said. ‘Aren’t there any rules the whole world can agree on?’” (120). It might follow that Rose wishes for a universal morality, in fact. Yet, the children’s answer to his question, coming up with the idea that “killing” is what all societies condemn, only pours oil on Rose’s flame of the feeling of guilt for the death of the children’s father – John Logan. The universal is established that killing is unacceptable. But was Rose’s behavior in the field an act of killing? This must be answered by him, only; or, alternatively, by the text’s reader. All in all, it is also a matter of choice how the reader reads the narrative.
It can easily be read as a mind of a person who fights other people’s distrustfulness; who becomes a victim of unlucky circumstances and never gets enough understanding from the characters surrounding him. Yet, other readings, such as the deconstructive reading of the present thesis, are available. Ultimately, the whole text of Enduring Love is governed by a schizophrenic pattern and grants the readers the freedom to select the way of reading the text they personally favor. Yet another interpretation of the protagonist of Joe Rose comes to mind, as Tyler Roberts’ notion is considered that Nietzsche
never simply rejected enlightenment, but he constantly sought to identify and disrupt the limits of reason and consciousness. His thought oscillates,
64 therefore, between the promise of enlightenment and its impossibility, leading some to condemn his thought as nihilistic and others to celebrate his liberation from the metaphysics of conceptual, ethical, and religious foundationalism. (264) Joe Rose, in a very specific way, might remind of the Nietzschean thinking, and be considered the metaphor of the “ideological father” of postmodernism.
65 4. Conclusion
McEwan’s fiction can be characterized as “cleft,” for its reasoning is carefully ambivalent and interpretation endlessly varies. The author’s narrative voice avoids being univocal, while this schizophrenic stance of the author’s writing makes it postmodern. The subject of the present conclusion thus shall be the identification of the (postmodernist) schizophrenia of
Enduring Love . A rich series of opposing notions resides in the novel. While Enduring Love is set in the post humanist, post masculine world, it still echoes the ideas of humanism and the superior masculinity. “Certainly, in its negotiation of narrative form and of masculinity alike,
Enduring Love is not a text of affirmation. Instead, its articulation of unease about the efficacy of both is everywhere apparent within the novel” (Morrison). Enduring Love is a text of destabilization, indeed. Rose’s less prominent, but definitely present, tolerant postmodern self is accompanied by a “modern” and oppressive alter ego, which actually overwhelms Rose’s consciousness. The narrating character tends towards the logocentric thinking of the traditional scientific reasoning, but senses its invalidity (especially in terms of the postmodern ethics of plurality). He attempts throughout the text to grant other characters, that is, other agents participating in his story, freedom of speech, but denies their “truths” towards the end of the narrative. Joe Rose stands halfway between modernity and postmodernity. His text of
Enduring Love shows striking symptoms of difference , Derrida’s notion of the deconstructive impulse’s occurrence in texts. The novel is an embodiment of a subversive play. McEwan takes sides with his scientist character, the author’s sympathy to Joe Rose is evident; yet,
McEwan simultaneously proposes Rose an unreliable narrating character and equips him with inconsistent thinking, on the top of it. Ambivalence is Enduring Love ’s main structuring principle. The postmodernist disillusionment with Enlightenment, connected to Foucault’s repudiation of “totalizing discourses” and Lyotard’s definition of postmodernity as
66 “incredulity towards metanarratives,” and the modern faith in “the power of reason to free us” collide in the novel.
The narrating character of Enduring Love , Joe Rose, adheres to the rational thought, rather excessively. The outcome is his weakened ability to account for his and the surrounding characters’ feelings. Rose’s emotional realm is strangely activated, when the character encounters another person’s death. From this climatic moment on, Rose’s “scientific” mind undergoes a series of disillusionments. Without the character being fully aware of it, his standard rational reasoning often happens to be somersaulted and in that subverted throughout the narrative. McEwan juxtaposes, in a way, the two parallel selves of Joe Rose, one of them tolerant (in the postmodern way), the other oppressive (modern). The character becomes a metaphor of science, which, being used to the privileged status in the modern era, experiences certain degradation, diminishing of its official importance, in postmodernity (due to the postmodernists’ talk about the science’s dependence upon “narrative”). Postmodernism downgrades science’s “objective truth,” as Lyotard explains its involvement with language.
The trouble with the conscious Joe Rose is that he is only able to identify other characters’ adherence to “totalizing discourses.” His affiliation with the scientific thought makes him suppose his own privileged access to the (illusory) objective truth. As a result, Rose criticizes other characters’ (inadvertent) projection into, the pragmatic manipulation of, reality. The trouble is that Rose in unable to see his own “appropriation” 8 of the world. The point is postmodernism’s faith in multiplicity, diversity, and relativity. Truths are discursive products and Rose’s fallible attempts at objectifying reality display his being unaware of his own ignorance. 9 At first, Joe Rose is threatened by the stalker Jed Parry. Nevertheless, he manages to label the stalker’s infatuation with “de Clerambault’s syndrome”, convince the police of
Parry’s dangerousness, and in all that, rehabilitate both his rationality and masculinity. Even though Joe Rose is able to describe the flaws of other characters’ reasoning, their personal
67 narratives, identifying their “misguided beautiful convincingness” and lack of interest in being validated other than “from within”, he is unable to see the same deficiencies in his own reasoning. This, in the least, concerns the “primary” Joe Rose. The opposed, secondary Rose, that is to say, also present in the narrative, constantly subverts the obvious voice, and admits
Rose’s factual intolerance of Clarissa, the partner, who is, rather between the lines, granted tolerance throughout the novel despite being presented as Rose’s antithesis along the way.
The postmodernist “moral” arising in Enduring Love is that of the necessity of solidarity. Joe
Rose’s relationship with his partner went through a crisis, because of his inability to tolerate
Clarissa’s distrust of his insistence on factuality. Enduring Love , on a certain level, manages to approach Clarissa’s point of view, in which Rose “atones” for his intolerant modern attitude that caused the couple’s separation. It is the postmodernist intent to question concepts of universal truth and rationality. There are many co existing kinds of knowledges, and postmodernism seeks the positive affirmation of all of them. Waging a war on totality and the simultaneous activation of validity of differences is part of the postmodern ethics.
The duplicity of the narration touched upon above, that is the ambivalence of the central narrating protagonist, takes shape in the notion of schizophrenia controlling Enduring Love .
The autonomy of the narrator is constantly subverted. Rose’s present recollection of the past, which he is narrating, carries latent sensitivity to the character of Clarissa. All things considered, the narrator is conscious of his own status as a maker of fiction (a postmodernist stance, indeed), and his being doomed to subjectivity. Rose’s subconscious sees that there is no truth free of self interest, in which it acknowledges the unreliability of also Rose’s text of
Enduring Love . Rose tries hard to include other characters’ viewpoints in the text, ensure the simultaneous prominence of contradictory discourses in the narrative, in which its totalizing urge is eliminated and plurality affirmed. The resultant appreciation of difference pervading the text, its schizophrenic impulse, makes Enduring Love ethical in the postmodern way, in
68 which variety and co existence exceed as cultural values. 10 In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “the language of necessity, certainty and absolute truth cannot but articulate humiliation – humiliation of the other, of the different, of the not up to the standard. The language of contingency, on the contrary, creates a chance ‘of being kind, by avoiding humiliation of others’” (“Ambivalence” 235). This is how Joe Rose’s compulsion to the “absolutist” scientific explanation causes his insufficient acceptance of Clarissa’s right for her autonomy.
Rose needs to respect Clarissa’s otherness, to comply with the postmodernist requirement.
To add to the debate over the ethics in postmodernity, as mirrored in terms of Enduring
Love , another Joe Rose’s ambivalent standing needs to be addressed. Rose’s obstinate faith in scientific objectivity made him unable to cope with the experience of being one of the actors in a scene of accidental death of a man. The encounter with death, which he feels he could have prevented, if he had not lacked moral courage, initiates Rose’s disillusionment with his
“scientific mind.” Rose’s dilemma is whether to adhere to the postmodern ethics, in which individuals are “thrown back on their own subjectivity as the only ultimate ethical authority”
(“Intimations” xxii), or not. Rose’s mind is used to the comforts of the “totalities” of modernism, in which the supposition of objectivity freed individuals of ethical responsibility.
Yet, the scientific explanation does not release him from the feeling of guilt he experiences.
To un blame himself, Rose needs to take to subjectivity, for his blamelessness is relative.
Postmodernity bears the idea of tolerance, which happily accommodates diversity. The postmodern is tolerant to Rose’s “moral failure” at the balloon accident, because it recognizes his personal interest in that stance. What McEwan comes to (indefinitely) mourn in Enduring
Love is the loss of tragedy in postmodernity. That is to say, the tragic discourse bears moral judgement, and with the demise of tragedy, the (objectionable) postmodern fragmentation of morality takes place. Even though McEwan opposes the tragic outlook, he makes it the subject of Enduring Love ’s latent nostalgia. The novel’s “schizophrenia” is thus also
69 determined by its main protagonist’s oscillation between yielding to the tragic vision and resisting it with the help of the rationalist discourse. McEwan is perhaps more sympathetic to the postmodern discourse, which does not “erect barriers against conscious selfhood” (Drolet
9). Yet, a doubt about morality in the postmodern era affects Enduring Love ’s narration, at the same time. Joe Rose, the novel’s main protagonist and narrating character, adheres to the modernist style of thought for he senses the dissipation of the traditional morality in the postmodern order. What Joe Rose goes through is the nostalgia for modernity and its elevation of science, as well as the implicit nostalgia for the tragic outlook. The character’s dilemma is whether to accept postmodernity’s “trap” of relative ethics or not. Rose wishes for a universal morality, but resents it on grounds of wanting to escape the feeling of guilt.
70 4. Notes
1 This complies with Linda Hutcheon’s term “historiographic metafiction,” used to describe the postmodernist literature. For detailed description of the term, see Marshall pp. 147 78. 2 For the description of the term, see also Marshall pp. 147 78. 3 See Garner, for affirmation of both notions. 4 For a detailed account of Foucault’s thought on “The Subject and Power,” see Wallace. 5 As confirmed by Laura Miller, who dedicates her article “Ian McEwan Fools British Shrinks” to this fact. 6 For, as Alison Lee explains, “postmodernism shares concerns with those who, because of class, race, gender, or sexual preference, are ‘other’ than, and have been marginalized by, the dominant tradition” (xi). 7 For another account of the newly arisen “responsibility” of an individual in postmodernity, see Tester, pp. 102 26. 8 For this Nietzsche‘s term, related to the notion of “power agenda,” see Wheeler, pp. 214. 9 See also Zygmunt Bauman: “Systems of knowledge can only be evaluated from ‘inside’ their respective traditions. If, from the modern point of view, relativism of knowledge was a problem to be struggled against and eventually overcome in theory and in practice, from the post modern point of view relativity of knowledge […] is a lasting feature of the word” (“Legislators” 4). 10 In other words, “we are confronted by a plurality of competing narratives, none of which can be privileged” (Jordan 548).
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76 1 This complies with Linda Hutcheon’s term “historiographic metafiction,” used to describe the postmodernist literature. For detailed description of the term, see Marshall pp. 147 78. 2 For the description of the term, see also Marshall pp. 147 78. 3 See Garner, for affirmation of both notions. 4 For a detailed account of Foucault’s thought on “The Subject and Power,” see Wallace. 5 As confirmed by Laura Miller, who dedicates her article “Ian McEwan Fools British Shrinks” to this fact. 6 For, as Alison Lee explains, “postmodernism shares concerns with those who, because of class, race, gender, or sexual preference, are ‘other’ than, and have been marginalized by, the dominant tradition” (xi). 7 For another account of the newly arisen “responsibility” of an individual in postmodernity, see Tester, pp. 102 26. 8 For this Nietzsche‘s term, related to the notion of “power agenda,” see Wheeler, pp. 214. 9 See also Zygmunt Bauman: “Systems of knowledge can only be evaluated from ‘inside’ their respective traditions. If, from the modern point of view, relativism of knowledge was a problem to be struggled against and eventually overcome in theory and in practice, from the post modern point of view relativity of knowledge […] is a lasting feature of the word” (“Legislators” 4). 10 In other words, “we are confronted by a plurality of competing narratives, none of which can be privileged” (Jordan 548).
77