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“I see us from three hundred feet up”: The Eye and the Mind in Enduring Love, Atonement and Machines Like Me

« I see us from three hundred feet up » : œil et corps dans Enduring Love, Atonement et Machines Like Me
Cécile Beaufils

Résumés

Cet article propose d’examiner trois romans écrits par Ian McEwan entre la fin des années 1990 et 2019 (Délire d’amour, Expiation et Une machine comme moi), et la façon dont dans ces textes la représentation des corps est liée à la question du visuel. C’est d’abord l’image des corps qui est envisagée, en ce qu’elle est imprégnée de violence et dominée par la fragmentation, que cette image soit humaine ou non, et qu’elle soit imaginée ou perçue par la réalité matérielle d’un œil ou d’une caméra. La façon dont les corps sont montrés, décrits, mis en avant est ensuite l’objet d’une analyse qui se concentre sur la présence des contraintes et caractéristiques du matériel, selon la définition proposée par Lisa Blackman (celle-ci considère que le corps est un entrelacs qui met en relation cerveau, corps et monde, et donc un procès, « brain–body–world entanglements » [Blackman 28]). On considère ensuite la distinction opérée par McEwan entre optique et vue dans les trois romans, avant d’interroger la façon dont le lien entre les images et le corps met en avant l’intention éthique du romancier britannique. Enfin, c’est le refus de McEwan de mettre en place une stratégie purement esthétisante et qui appartiendrait à l’ère du « post-medium » (Krauss) qui est lu comme une façon d’incarner l’écriture, de l’ancrer dans le corps par le biais du visuel.

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Entrées d’index

Mots-clés :

vision, corps, médium, éthique

Auteurs cités :

Ian McEwan
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Texte intégral

  • 1 See for instance Adèle Cassigneul and Elsa Cavalié, “‘And above all to make you see’: Vision, Imagi (...)

1“She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you” (A 40). In the third chapter of Atonement (2001), the thirteen-year-old protagonist and focaliser, Briony Tallis, suddenly realises upon witnessing an exchange between her sister Cecilia and her soon to be lover Robbie Turner that her own consciousness is no more real than other people’s. This epiphany is triggered by a visual cue (the conversation and the breaking of a vase), as the aspiring author decides to write the same scene from three points of view: the character’s discovery of empathy only happens because she observes what she calls a “tableau” (A 39), thereby drawing on visual representation and theatricality. Ian McEwan’s texts, from his early production onwards, have been characterised by their striking visuality and the author’s interest in the visual domain also manifests in his interest in the moving image; this has of course led to an abundance of critical analysis.1 The descriptions of bodies, allusions to eyes, characters gazing at themselves in mirrors, all seem to stress the importance of optics and visuality in the formation of empathy and affect. Even Jed Parry’s mental illness in Enduring Love (1997) is explicitly compared to the visual, “a dark, distorting mirror that reflect[s] and parod[ies] a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause [is] sane” (EL 128). Pascal Nicklas, in Ian McEwan: Art and Politics, explains that empathy is crucial in McEwan’s works, through the use of a visual metaphor: [a]t the heart of McEwan’s poetology is the desire to look through the eyes of someone else” (9). Indeed, in Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001) and Machines Like Me (2019) specifically, the visual representation of bodies (as well as the representation of bodies as visual interfaces) emerges as a correlative element to the construction of intellection and affect. The three novels showcase complex links between vision and sight, between the eye and the mind from the angle of remanence and connectedness. In Enduring Love, the sick body (and sick mind) comes into play, while Atonement delves into the intricacies of guilt, and Machines Like Me envisions the complexities of the artificial body as an interface for a new form of intellect. In questioning the point of view of the characters, McEwan brings about a specific fictional ethos with vision and embodiment (of the characters, and of course the readers of a material text potentially read as a book, or an electronic book, which was our case) at its core. This essay will then observe the way images of the body and the eye in the three novels are based on showing distance, disconnection, the better to foreground McEwan’s approach of affect.

  • 2 On the topic, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and (...)
  • 3 On the topic, see for instance James M. Mellard. “‘No Ideas but in Things’: Fiction, Criticism, and (...)

2Atonement alone has been the subject of many informed studies on the relationship between sight and knowledge, especially in the field of trauma studies, which are not the lynchpin of this essay, yet constitute an important step in understanding the visuality of McEwan’s writing, particularly in this novel. For instance, Georges Letissier connects the novel’s self-reflexive structure to the constant repetitive pattern characteristic of trauma. He also explains: “Briony, the adult novelist aware of the refinements permitted by the recent Bergsonian theories of consciousness, propounds a relativistic approach to perception. Such relativism proves to have devastating consequences because it articulates the tension between “seeing” and “knowing”, which is seminal in trauma theory” (Letissier). Letissier also argues, using Cathy Caruth’s foundational study of trauma,2 that one of the most striking paradoxes of the novel is that the act of seeing is connected to an absence of conscious knowledge, as Briony witnessing the violent event (the rape scene) is unable to process it, which is where belatedness comes into play. Despite such a slanted approach of sight, the novel is still fuelled by a distinctive voyeuristic drive, which is also to be found in Enduring Love, as evidenced by the incipit of the novel with its graphic depiction of a balloon crash. Although the novel has been studied extensively as an interface between science and fiction,3 it questions the connection between the body and vision quite explicitly. Machines Like Me (with its subtitle And People Like You), which is set in an alternative version of 1982 Britain, is a variation on classic science-fiction tropes like artificial intelligence and the interaction of man and machine. Tackling the subject of the posthuman body (Adam, the ironically-named android, soon sleeps with Miranda, Charlie’s partner) leads McEwan to describing what Marcel Theroux’s Guardian review calls a “bloodless world” (Theroux). The world might be “bloodless”, but it still involves several ethically crucial elements, including Miranda’s lie (the existence of which is revealed early on by Adam) and Adam’s rejection of lying as a human foible. The three novels then point at the multifaceted dimension of vision, and the problematic representation of bodies as belonging to the realm of affect.

“she was looking at a disembodied human leg” (A 161): bodies and images

3In her study of the interaction of embodiment and affect, Immaterial Bodies, Lisa Blackman explains: “bodies are seen to always extend and connect to other bodies, human and non-human, to practices, techniques, technologies and objects which produce different kinds of bodies and different ways, arguably, of enacting what it means to be human” (x). She later adds: “Work on the body and embodiment has been recognized as increasingly important for the study of areas and practices which now recognize that sensemaking cannot be confined to meaning, cognition or signification” (x). Blackman’s definitions then appear to be essentially centred on connectedness, and she moves on to explain that “bodies are not considered stable things or entities, but rather are processes which extend into and are immersed in worlds. That is, rather than talk of bodies, we might instead talk of brain-body-world entanglements, and where, how and whether we should attempt to draw boundaries between the human and non-human, self and other, and material and immaterial” (Blackman 28). Such takes on bodies (from a broad perspective) as interfaces help us understand how in texts like McEwan’s novels, bodies are represented as a nexus of embodied thought: physicality becomes the core of the creation of intellection and affect.

4In the three novels under scrutiny, the readers are led to envision the materiality of bodies as crucial, and highly visual. Bodies might be described as fragmented, either because of violent events, or because the description is partial. One of the most often-studied examples of this perspective is to be found in Atonement; in chapter 13, a few pages before Briony witnesses Paul Marshall assaulting her cousin, she is faced with an unusual image:

It was only after she had covered another fifty yards that she understood that she was looking at a disembodied human leg. Closer still, and she grasped the perspectives; it was her mother’s of course, and she would be waiting for the twins. She was mostly obscured by the drapes, and one stockinged leg was supported by the knee of the other, which gave it its curious, slanting and levitated appearance. (A 161)

  • 4 On embodiment, prosthetics and visuality as metaphors, see Sobchak 209-210.

5Briony, who a retrospective reader knows is reconstructing the traumatic memory in part to assuage her adult guilt for having wrongfully accused Robbie Turner of the crime, uses the image of the “disembodied leg” quite strikingly. The horrific image points at the violence to come and appears both in the assault and in the second part of the novel where Robbie Turner (in Briony’s voice), now an enlisted soldier during the Second World War, spots “a leg in a tree. A mature plane tree, only just in leaf. The leg was twenty feet up, wedged in the first forking of the trunk, bare, severed cleanly above the knee” (A 192). Robbie describes the effect of a bomb, and even the syntax mirrors the horrors happening around him. Such lexis of war relating to the body is to be found in Machines Like Me too; Miranda’s father is described with his multiple ailments: “It was his body that had turned against him, against itself, with the ferocity of a civil war” (MLM 77). When bodies are described or represented, they are frequently the seat of conflict and violence, and the way one sees other bodies, or their own, is often shown as a problematic idea.4 Briony’s partial perception (and recollection) in Atonement is doubled by her correction with “the perspectives” (A 161) in the plural form; she has realised that her vision of the body is necessarily incomplete. This passage is not merely an exercise in foreshadowing as it contains an allusion to the limitations of perception and subjectivity, especially when representing the human body. The embodiment at work in the two scenes is then based on incompleteness and disconnectedness; part of the uncanny effect of the two scenes is rooted in the dehumanization of the bodies, following Blackman’s earlier definitions.

6This uncanny representation of bodies is mirrored more obviously in Machines Like Me, since one of the characters’ body is entirely artificial. The uncanniness of the similar-yet different body of Adam the android is a science-fiction trope, yet McEwan uses this expected image to rework the representation of the posthuman, much like he re-worked the modernist focus on distinct perceptions in Atonement. McEwan pursues his connection of sight and the human body in Machines Like Me; Charlie, the protagonist and narrator, describes the excruciating wait, and observation, of Adam the android’s body as the machine has yet to boot up for the first time: “At last, with cardboard and polystyrene wrapping strewn around his ankles, he sat naked at my tiny dining table, eyes closed, a black power line trailing from the entry point in his umbilicus to a thirteen-amp socket in the wall” (MLM 11). Adam is immediately described as an eery combination of human body and machine, “We knew from the excited publicity that he formed sounds with breath, tongue, teeth and palate” (MLM 11). Charlie describes most of Adam’s body in detail, starting with the genitalia—especially since he expresses his frustration with not having been able to purchase a female android, an Eve, on several occasions. The android’s body itself is fragmented by the narration, from the start of the novel, and as the quote exemplifies, his hybrid nature is at the root of the uncanny. McEwan seems to pursue his “art of unease” (Zalewski) by delving into genre fiction although he denied the classification of Machines Like Me as science-fiction in explaining that he was calling for the exploration of “ethical decisions” in fiction with science (Adams).

7Machines Like Me also opens under the (expected) tutelage of a spectral Mary Shelley and the underlying presence of Frankenstein deserves a few words since Shelley’s work is marked by its emphasis on sight, and the lack thereof. In the first chapter of Machines Like Me, as Adam, like Frankenstein’s nameless creature, awaits the effects of electricity as he gains awareness: “Miranda, a doctoral scholar of social history, said she wished the teenage Mary Shelley was here beside us, observing closely, not a monster like Frankenstein’s, but this handsome dark-skinned young man coming to life” (MLM 13). This is the only time the Frankenstein intertext is mentioned explicitly in the novel and the programmatic effect of the reference is all the stronger for it. At the end of the novel, as Charlie has killed Adam with a blow to the head (which is not the only instance of violence between them, Adam having broken Charlie’s wrist as he tried to get to his off switch in a fit of jealousy), the android asks to be taken to the still-living Alan Turing. The ending of the novel also echoes the ending of Frankenstein. Charlie has been lectured by Turing for having murdered a sentient being: “I turned away from Adam and walked the length of the lab at a pace without looking back. I ran along the empty corridor, found the emergency stairs, took them two at a time down into the street and set off on my journey southwards across London towards my troubled home” (MLM 412). This reverses the ending of Mary Shelley’s novel, with Robert Walton (the explorer who finds Victor Frankenstein before his death, and later the creature) describing the creature’s disappearance from view, after having declared his desire to end his own life: “He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance” (Shelley 283). Charlie having already been mistaken for the android upon meeting Miranda’s father earlier, the pattern of reversal shows the reader that the boundaries between the two characters are delicate at best. The reversal was made explicit by McEwan in a 2019 interview to the Guardian, when he declared: “There the monster is a metaphor for science out of control, but it is ourselves out of control that I am interested in” (Adams). Technology appears to function as an interface above all else.

“bring[ing] marvels to our retinas” (EL 39): eyes, technology and affect

8Enduring Love showcases, from its opening scene, the complex interplay of vision as a biological process and image as an aesthetic element; the novel’s opening pages are a gruesome depiction of a balloon accident, told with complete clarity of vision: “The beginning is simple to mark. We were in sunlight under a turkey oak” (EL 1). The narrator’s eye is both unified and multiple, subjective and kaleidoscopic: “I see us from three hundred feet up, through the eyes of the buzzard we had watched earlier, soaring, circling and dipping in the tumult of currents” (EL 1). Joe’s vision is both clearly embodied by the bird and dissociated from the character’s own body, and the horror of the events is foregrounded by the multiple movements of the bird of prey and the multiple points of view it has access to. The novel, much like Atonement and Machines Like Me, posits a striking representation of vision as the result of a process in which the body becomes part of the interface between the world and one’s affect. It is clearly embedded in the narrator’s deep-seated rationality (Joe is a scientific journalist) and the resulting affect springs from distinct processes.

  • 5 The readers learn in the first appendix of the novel the details of the syndrome, with the presence (...)
  • 6 On the topic, see Childs 11, and Mellet’s analysis of hermeneutics in the novel (45-53).

9The novel’s fourth chapter weaves a delicate connection between the eye, technology and affect; as the narrator writes a paper on the failure of the Hubble telescope, he explains the purpose of the telescope and the characteristics of the rescue mission taking place in distinctly aesthetic terms: “the rescue operation was technologically sublime” (EL 39). The vocabulary belongs not to the body as a concept, but rather to the connective capability of the body, and the eyes in particular as the telescope “[was] set to bring marvels to our retinas” (EL 39). The striking turn of phrase underlines the active role of the telescope (itself a giant eye), the anatomically precise part of the eye on which the image is ‘projected’ and the physicality of the process as the image is indeed brought to the inner part of the eye. The aesthetic impact is therefore de-personalised by Joe as he explains the function of the mirrors in the telescope and the scope of the images it was set to capture. In the same chapter, Joe describes an unusual experience he has in the London Library reading room, the narrator contemplates fellow readers who have fallen asleep and describes an unusual sensory experience: “I could not stop looking at the door. It may have been an illusion caused by visual persistence, or a neurally tripped delay of perception, but it seemed to me that I was still slumped in my smooth leather chair staring at that door even while I was moving towards it” (EL 44). The narrator then proceeds to chase the ghostly image and feeling, before returning to the reading room. This time again, there is an element of fragmentation. Joe also tries to provide a rational experience by formulating hypotheses, then foreshadowing his attempts at using analytical arguments on Jed who suffers from de Clérambault syndrome.5 And yet, the experience of looking (which in the quotation is even involuntary) seems to lead to an experience when Joe separates from his own body. Staring at the door is, for Joe, the beginning of a moment of uncanniness, much like the projection into the buzzard’s point of view was. David Malcolm described the novel as an “epistemological thriller” (157) and we can connect the core of the novel to the acquisition of knowledge, and the fragility of the connection between seeing and knowing.6

10Machines Like Me, Enduring Love and Atonement connect sight as a scientific fact and empathy as a deeply human experience; Charlie, faced with Adam, is highly troubled upon meeting the android’s eyes:

I had little idea of what passed along my own optic nerve, or where it went next, or how these pulses became an encompassing self-evident visual reality, or who was doing my seeing for me. Only me. Whatever the process was, it had the trick of seeming beyond explanation, of creating and sustaining an illuminated part of the one thing in the world we knew for sure—our own experience. It was hard to believe that Adam possessed something like that. Easier to believe that he saw in the way a camera does, or the way a microphone is said to listen. There was no one there.

But as I looked into his eyes, I began to feel unhinged, uncertain. Despite the clean divide between the living and the inanimate, it remained the case that he and I were bound by the same physical laws. (MLM 177)

11The narrator admits his own ignorance of the bodily process of sight, while stressing the almost-transcendent experience of considering how visual information is transformed into individual feedback. By stressing the personal pronouns, Charlie makes it clear that to him, Adam is nothing but a conduit, devoid of agency. Much like Briony in Atonement, Charlie experiences an epiphany where an observation connected to sight (a conversation witnessed from afar, an android’s eyes) directly leads to the tautological conclusion that individual experience is subjective, and that other people’s subjectivity is as real as ours. Adam’s mechanical eye is considered as a mere recording device as opposed to the human eye, and yet Charlie’s certainties are shaken by his final observation. His attempt at rationalizing the experience with scientific vocabulary still leads to imbalance. Similarly, Joe attempts to comprehend what is visible to the human eye, a physical reality, as he comments on the experience of seeing a dead body:

I understood again, because I had seen dead bodies before, why a pre-scientific age would have needed to invent the soul. It was no less clear than the illusion of the evening sun sinking through the sky. The closing down of countless interrelated neural and bio-chemical exchanges combined to suggest to a naked eye the illusion of the extinguished spark, or the simple departure of a single necessary element. However scientifically informed we count ourselves to be, fear and awe still surprise us in the presence of the dead. (EL 23)

12Joe, through the use of scientific terms, rationalises his confrontation with a limit situation and distances himself from the experience. His attempt at removing the affect component from the scene ultimately fails as he admits to feeling “fear and awe”, much like Charlie’s observation that the creation of a “self-evident visual reality” (MLM 177) remains “beyond explanation” (MLM 177). We might also note the importance of the “naked eye” (EL 23), which seems inferior to the scientifically-enhanced eye. This strategy is coherent with the way Joe uses his scientific background to understand his environment through a screen, even regarding Jed’s medical condition, which rationalises excessive, obsessive affection.

13Both protagonists try to understand how the eye registers information, beyond the strictly mechanical reality of optics, and still rely on affect to understand the importance of subjectivity and agency. It then appears that McEwan’s strategy comes close to what film critic Vivian Sobchak calls the “lived body” (1) as she argues that films not only show bodies, they can have viewers experience how to “live one’s body” (2, original emphasis). When Adam declares as he expires “[m]y entire being is stored elsewhere” (MLM 375), he of course points at a data storage system and at the familiar dichotomy between body and mind (already pondered by Joe Rose, see above): the key to his existence is not physical and his true self is recorded—saved, even. We can also add to that equation the issue of visuality from a phenomenological perspective as Adam’s body truly exceeds its representation—Charlie’s description might be as factual as possible, the narrator is occasionally lost between the strictly descriptive and speculations on the nature of the cogent mind. As Vivian Sobchak argues when considering the interface of embodiment and images,

despite the academic embrace of our so-called visual culture as an object of study, it is much more accurate to suggest that we actually live in the reductiveness of a “visible culture.” This is no small distinction—for if we are to understand vision in its fullest, embodied sense, it seems imperative that we move from merely thinking about “the” body (that is, about bodies always posited in their objective mode, always seen from the position of another) to also feeling what it is to be “my” body (lived by me uniquely from my side of it, even as it is always also simultaneously available to and lived by others on their side of it). (Sobchak 187)

14Keeping this analysis in mind as we read McEwan’s novels (at least the three novels which are under scrutiny here), we can argue with Sobchak that embodiment is intrinsically linked to what she calls “visible culture” and therefore the question of the medium.

“An image on some internal screen” (MLM 109): body images

  • 7 On vision and framing the gaze in Atonement, see Mellet (45-58).

15Machines Like Me leads the reader to consider a complex relationship between embodiment as characters living in their own body and observing other bodies too, and visuality. Charlie constantly reminds his reader that Adam’s body is a reality, especially in opposing his own fallible body and Adam’s efficiency, since the android broke his wrist, going against his programming (MLM 165). After having learnt about Miranda’s secret (she lied about being raped as revenge for her friend Miriam), it is to be noted that Charlie describes his rival as “too-solid” (MLM 176). Ironically, before being hurt by Adam, Charlie ponders about the nature of human experience and connects being alive to experiencing sensory perceptions and to interacting with the world in its material aspect: “Hands assembled in sterile factory conditions must get dirty. To exist in the human moral dimension was to own a body, a voice, a pattern of behaviour, memory and desire, experience solid things and feel pain” (MLM 123). While there is no strict visuality here, the mention of bodies as essentially sensory allows us to understand that McEwan presents the readers with aestheticized images which are not always traumatic or fragmented; instead, these images of the body convey the weight of corporeality thanks to visually framing devices. In Atonement, the play on visual perceptions corresponds to windows or mirrors. For instance, as Cecilia dresses and undresses in chapter 9, she comes into contact with three mirrors: “the gilt-frame mirror at the top of the stairs” (A 96), “the dressing-table mirror” (A 96) and “the public gaze of the stairway mirror” (A 96). As she considers the right dress for the occasion (a dinner party with her friends and family), she moves from childish outfits to “a woman on her way to a funeral” (A 97) in order to find a costume which fits her liberated young woman persona. The conclusion to her doubts is satisfactory: “it was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her own full-length mirror” (A 9). In a novel so full of mis-identified bodies, whether they are partly obscured by darkness or a framing default,7 dismembered, or covered, it is quite significant that Cecilia achieves full recognition of herself after only seeing herself as a series of characters.

16On the contrary, Charlie is “unmoored” by the contemplation of Adam’s eyes as a so-called “mirror of the soul”:

In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once—towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time, into the ancient past of an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields—for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took. (MLM 178)

  • 8 Here too, we can observe the presence of the Frankenstein intertext, especially in Victor Frankenst (...)

17He foregrounds the colour of Adam’s eyes, using poetic clichés, as the syntax dissolves into metaphysical musings. The visual load of the sentence shows us how McEwan plays on the interaction of grounded sensory perceptions and the experience of knowledge in an uncanny form.8 Charlie’s loss of bearings when contemplating the nature of Adam’s existence as an independent being stems from the contemplation of the android’s own gaze. The uncanniness of the scene, and the constant superimposition of materiality and imagination (present in the unusual comparison made in Atonement between Cecilia and a mermaid) points the reader towards the artificiality of fiction (playing with artistic tropes), and the nature of the text itself as a material object which is paradoxically devoid of images. The novels are indeed not intermedial, and do not intentionally play with the materiality of the book—any difference in the visual aspect of the book is editorial, not a part of the text itself.

  • 9 Although the alternative timeline envisioned by McEwan is nowhere near as informed by the Foucauldi (...)

18Issues of materiality in the body and visuality coincide with the way we understand the literary medium in contemporary artistic productions. In The Art-Architecture Complex, Hal Foster reflects on the importance of the medium in the context of fairly recent evolutions: “An important struggle is waged between practices [...] concerned with embodiment and emplacement and a spectacle culture that aims to dissolve all such awareness” (xi). Foster focuses on the importance of what has been called by and large “spectacle culture” by critical theorists taking after Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulacra and Simulation. Whether it is Machines Like Me’s near dystopian9 (and image-obsessed) British landscape, Enduring Love’s actual focus on optical processes and the subjectivity of delusion from several points of view, or Atonement’s clever manipulation of the gaze, readers are given to see a kaleidoscope of images and representations of bodies with close attention to materiality.

19There then seems to be a certain degree of plurality taking place in the interface of embodiment, images and affect in McEwan’s fictional productions which are under scrutiny here. I borrow this idea from Rosalind Krauss, who, in A Voyage on the North Sea, explains the way in which Frederic Jameson understands the place of art in postmodern society: “One description of art within this regime of postmodern sensation is that it mimics just this leeching of the aesthetic out into the social field in general” (Krauss 56). Krauss does not quite agree with Jameson, but her take on his argument may be of value to us as well as her dismantling the idea of ‘proper’: the medium can be—and is—displaced, fluid. Krauss wants to reconsider the notion of medium in the way the American art critic Clement Greenberg used it and calls it “critical toxic waste” (Krauss 5). As we consider the combination of materiality and aesthetics in McEwan’s recent novels, we must keep the question of the problematic concept of “medium” (and therefore the link between visuality and affect) in mind: contemporary literature exists in this “post-medium condition”, where I would like to posit that the texts in themselves exist, take place.

Vision, embodiment, and affect

20It then seems that McEwan attempts to reflect on the interaction of materiality and images, with ethics at the core of his novels. Doubling back on the issue of empathy, it seems that the various strategies elected by McEwan hint at a distinctly embodied vision of empathy. In a 2007 interview, McEwan declares “[f]or me the moral core of the novel is inhabiting other minds. That seems to be what novels do very well and also what morality is about: understanding that people are as real to themselves are you are to yourself” (Appleyard, emphasis mine). This is especially striking both in Enduring Love and Atonement, as the reader is led to consider the exposition of several subjectivities and the way they mesh in the body of the novel; in terms of literary history, Atonement leaves the reader to consider the evolution of Briony’s storytelling as a miniature of British literary history through issues of embodiment, as she speaks through the voice of others. As David James explained,

Atonement demonstrates that McEwan aims to do more than simply ironise his own literary heritage by betraying the amorality of high modernism. Instead, the novel typifies how he writes at the confluence of what seems like extremes: where Victorian realism’s commitment to character and modernism’s commitment to sensory experience intersect with the breed of postmodern self-reflexivity that McEwan […] has never been drawn to anyway. Atonement remains, in McEwan’s own words, his most visible ‘attempt’ yet on behalf of the post-millennial novel to ‘discuss where we stand’ (Zalewski, id.). (James 146)

21Briony indeed learns that inhabiting minds, which are just as real as hers, and pretending to have lived in other people’s bodies, is at the root of her creative drive, even though at first she fails to notice the ethical component of her aesthetic choice, hence her endless rewritings, multiple manuscripts and self-censorship. She quite literally gradually learns how to walk in other people’s shoes, thereby exemplifying the connection between physicality and affect Blackman alluded to. For instance, the ‘Triton fountain scene’ is not the only example of a retelling from several points of view. In the second chapter, the reader sees Robbie removing his shoes and socks to enter the Tallis house from Cecilia’s point of view: “Intolerable. He had come to the house and removed his shoes and socks—well, she would show him then” (A 30). However, we later learn in chapter 8 that Robbie’s transgression is grounded not in disdain, but respect: “Kneeling to remove his work shoes by the front door, he had become aware of the state of his socks—holed at toe and heel and, for all he knew, odorous—and on impulse had removed them” (A 84). In the end, Briony’s ethical education turns into an intrinsic connection between writing and empathy: “She longed to have someone else’s past, to be someone else, like hearty Fiona with her unstained life stretching ahead, and her affectionate, sprawling family, whose dogs and cats had Latin names, whose home was a famous venue for artistic Chelsea people” (A 288). Along with Dominick LaCapra, we can then posit that “[e]mpathy is bound up with a transferential relation to the past and is arguably an affective aspect of understanding that both limits objectification and exposes the self to involvement or implication in the past, its actors and victims” (LaCapra 135).

As the readers of Enduring Love access Jed’s frame of thoughts, they are shown a distinctly embodied representation of empathy: “I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable. I close my eyes and thank God out loud for letting you exist, for letting me exist in the same time and place as you, and for letting this strange adventure between us begin” (EL 93). The chapter is a letter from Jed to Joe, and this opens the mentally ill character’s mind to the reader, quite physically. As posited by Begley, the novels display “the sensuous, telepathic capabilities of language as it transfers thoughts and feelings from one person’s mind to another’s” (Begley 59). This embodied empathy, it should be stressed, cannot exist without the ethical core of the novel: Jed’s limited responsibility, Miranda’s crime and revenge on justice, and Briony’s attempt at redemption.

Conclusion

22The compelling aspects of visuality and embodiment at work in the three novels display broken links between vision and sight, between the eye and the mind which embody trauma through remanence and rupture. As McEwan plays on perceptions, along the well-trodden paths of modernist and post-modernist narrative manipulations, he builds a specific fictional ethos which is deeply rooted in the experience of living in one’s body. The texts also show us images of various traumas, whose “belatedness” and circularity appear to revolve around issues of embodiment. Enduring Love, Atonement and Machines Like Me all have at their core an examination of affect which is matched with images of body trauma. Far from remaining examples of a mere spectacular, aesthetic tour de force, they hint at the remanence of material images in an era where the idea of a “post-medium” condition might have come into question. As McEwan’s own writing is deeply rooted in visual concerns, and film adaptations of his works are produced on a regular basis, we can only call forth further study of the hypothesis of an interplay of embodiment and intermediality.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 See for instance Adèle Cassigneul and Elsa Cavalié, “‘And above all to make you see’: Vision, Imagination and the Aesthetics of Montage in Atonement”, Études britanniques contemporaines 55 (2018): http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ebc/5294 [accessed 20 April 2022].

2 On the topic, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

3 On the topic, see for instance James M. Mellard. “‘No Ideas but in Things’: Fiction, Criticism, and the New Darwinism.” Style (University Park, PA) 41.1 (2007): 1-28.

4 On embodiment, prosthetics and visuality as metaphors, see Sobchak 209-210.

5 The readers learn in the first appendix of the novel the details of the syndrome, with the presence of a fictional scientific paper (AL 233-243) followed by a letter from Jed to Joe, written after three years spent in an institution (AL 244-245). Jed demonstrates the accuracy of the novel’s title, since his obsessive love for Joe has not faltered. The final dialogue between false scientific discourse and letter provides an ambiguous ending to the novel; we learn the fate of the protagonists through clues (Joe Rose is merely referred to as ‘R’ in the first appendix). As Emily Horton points out, McEwan even goes as far as including his own name as an anagram in the doctors’ names (“Wenn” and “Camia”). Such interplay of fiction and culturally authoritative discourse is common in Ian McEwan’s writing, and to be found in Atonement too, with mock-historical documents, for instance the false Cyril Connelly letter (A 311-315). On the topic of Atonement and historical sources, see for instance Nick Bentley, “‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding?’ The Retrieval of the Second World War in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan’s AtonementExoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction, Elodie Rousselot (ed.), Houdmills, Basingstoke (Hampshire), Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 138-159.

6 On the topic, see Childs 11, and Mellet’s analysis of hermeneutics in the novel (45-53).

7 On vision and framing the gaze in Atonement, see Mellet (45-58).

8 Here too, we can observe the presence of the Frankenstein intertext, especially in Victor Frankenstein’s conversation with one of his professors, Mr. Waldmann in Vol. I, chapter II (Shelley 69); one of the unusual characteristics of the scientist’s method is the combination of past and future scientific methods.

9 Although the alternative timeline envisioned by McEwan is nowhere near as informed by the Foucauldian Panopticon control displayed in Ishiguro’s Klara in the Sun, which was published in 2021 and also features androids at the core of the narrative, the world of Machines Like Me is suffused with screens, and they are generally referred to as negative fixtures and constraints (cf. MLM 36). On the link between dystopia, utopia and visuality as political and social control in contemporary fiction, see Wrobel’s forthcoming 2022 article on Jenni Fagan.

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Référence électronique

Cécile Beaufils, « “I see us from three hundred feet up”: The Eye and the Mind in Enduring Love, Atonement and Machines Like Me »Polysèmes [En ligne], 27 | 2022, mis en ligne le 29 septembre 2022, consulté le 13 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/polysemes/10258 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/polysemes.10258

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Auteur

Cécile Beaufils

Cécile Beaufils is Associate Professor (maître de conférences) in Contemporary British Literature at Sorbonne Université. Her research focuses on contemporary literature seen through the lens of book studies and cultural studies. She has published peer-reviewed papers on the literary magazine Granta as a cultural phenomenon, and on the recent evolution of publishing in Britain. Her current projects involve nature writing as a publishing phenomenon, as well as the construction of new modes of reading.

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