Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 289 References Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1998). The Signifying Monkey. New York [etc.]: OUP. Hossain, Shah Ashna (2000). “‘Scientific Racism’ in Enlightened Europe: Linneaus, Darwin, and Galton.” [Online] http: / / serendip.brynmawr.edu/ exchange/ node/ 1852 (17 Sep 2008). Lovejoy, Arthur (1976). The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mar Gallego Department of English Philology University of Huelva Möller, Swantje. Coming to Terms with Crisis. Disorientation and Reorientation in the Novels of Ian McEwan. (Anglistische Forschungen 415). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011. Johannes Wally Post-modernism has often been thought to equal the notorious slogan “anything goes,” especially when it comes to questions of how one should lead one’s life. The emphasis on contingency as a shaping factor of life as well as the awareness of the constructedness of human sense-making has earned postmodernism the reputation of being inherently anti-ethical, incapable of producing anything more substantial than moral relativism. After 9/ 11, this alleged lack of moral orientation even became a matter of political concern. On 22 September 2001, cultural critic Edward Rothstein (2001: online) published a piece in the New York Times in which he blamed postmodernism (as well as post-colonialism) for challenging the value of “truth and ethical judgement” and thus for indirectly justifying the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This article started a substantial public debate and although Rothstein’s position is an exception, the term post-modernism often seems to smack of something negative, such as the loss of centre, the dissolution of any bonds holding between signifier and signified and limitless subjectivity. What such an understanding of post-modernism overlooks is that “[p]ostmodernism, implicitly or explicitly, is about ethics before it is anything else” (Eaglestone 2004: 183). If one has to manoeuvre through a world where once well-established patterns offer no orientation anymore, the questions what is right and what is wrong do not simply become meaningless. They become all the more important. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 290 The importance of ethics in post-modern times has also left its marks on literary criticism. After two decades which were characterised by the focus on the linguistic materiality and self-referentiality of literary texts, literary criticism took up the issue of ethics again in the 1980s. 6 To date a substantial body of criticism examining the relationship between ethics and literature has emerged. It is in this tradition of literary criticism that Swantje Möller’s monograph Coming to Terms with Crisis (2011) stands. By drawing on philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, Möller develops a notion of ethics which, instead of rules, places the dialogical self at its core. As she writes: “Ethics in Levinas’s conception is not a preconceived set of rules, but an originary response to the face of the other, from which arises an immediate responsibility for the other” (40). Ethical behaviour is thus understood as a dialogue between the self and the other, which means that identity construction is “inseparable from ethical evaluation” (28). This perspective on ethics has also come to inform literature, in particular the representation of characters. McEwan’s novels can be seen as a case in point. Indeed, how characters in McEwan’s novels orient themselves or fail to orient themselves respectively in the face of a sudden crisis and which notion(s) of ethics can be derived from their behaviour is the major focus of Möller’s monograph. The study is divided into six chapters plus a bibliography. After a brief introduction, Möller offers a very good overview of ethics in postmodernity and develops the philosophical basis for her study. Chapters three through five are devoted to a discussion of McEwan’s novels. In this discussion, Möller resorts to an analytic structure. Hence, McEwan’s novels are not analysed chronologically but according to a thematic focus. There is a methodological advantage to this. Through this structure, Möller succeeds in demonstrating that questions of orientation and thus questions of ethics have been central to McEwan’s writing from the very beginning, in spite of the shock quality of his early publications, which earned him the notorious nickname Ian McCabre. Furthermore, it allows Möller to group texts together whose similarities are sometimes overlooked. A prime example, and perhaps the best section of the book, is chapter 4.1, in which the two consecutive novels The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992) but also the much later novella On Chesil Beach (2007) are discussed. Möller shows how the ability to negotiate various viewpoints is a central ethical value in McEwan’s writing. Failure to communicate always results in a catastrophe. Since McEwan’s fiction has sometimes been criticised for unambiguously favouring certain ideological positions (cf. for instance Beattie 2007: 157f.), Möller’s reading rightly highlights the polyphony of McEwan’s work. However, abstaining from a chronological dimension also has a disadvantage. It obfuscates how much McEwan has developed and even changed as an author during a writing career which spans well over thirty years. 6 Cf., for instance, the special issue of New Literary History 15/ 1 (1983), which titled Literature and/ as Moral Philosophy. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 291 McEwan has predominantly been a writer of novels of ideas who has analysed human behaviour, as one critic ironically puts it, “with more scientific rigor than the job strictly speaking requires” (Zawalski 2009: online). Hence, if Möller concludes that McEwan’s characters often resort to “frameworks of orientation which are explicitly subjective and often prove to be provisional” (189), this is only part of the story. Although characters might represent various frameworks of orientation, one needs to bear in mind that the characters themselves (as well as their predicaments) are always developed with reference to scientific master-narratives, most prominently psycho-analysis in McEwan’s early fiction and evolutionary psychology - “the study of how the Darwinian principle of natural selection continues to affect our mental processes and behaviour to serve the ends of survival and reproduction” (Childs 2007: 21) - in his later work. This dimension seems to largely escape Möller’s analysis. A minor detail may serve as a case in point. In her discussion of Atonement (2001), Möller quotes Briony’s startling reflection on the ontology of her own hand (54). Does her hand, Briony asks herself, “this fleshy spider on the end of her arm”, really belong to her or does it have “some little life on its own” (McEwan 2002: 35). As Möller argues, this reflection causes Briony to formulate the question of alterity, the novel’s central philosophical concern. This is certainly true. However, what Möller misses is that Briony’s reflection on her hand is not the intriguing but somewhat random association of a sensitive child trying to make sense of the world. Rather, Briony’s thoughts allude to a neurological disorder, the so called “alien-hand-syndrome” or “autonomous hand-syndrome”, a neurological disorder which causes people to no longer recognise their own hand as a part of their body (cf. Harris 2012: 139, 279). This reflection, which arguably is out of keeping with the character of a 13 year-old-girl in the year 1935, points to a clear ideological bias in McEwan’s character conception. By having Briony allude to a neurological condition, the universal human question ‘Who am I and who am I to others’ is framed in neurological, Darwinian terms and not, for instance, in terms of Christian ethics or post-modern ethics of alterity. Hence, for all the ambiguities and ambivalences that abound in McEwan’s writing (and which render a simple categorisation impossible), the clear scientific bias of his fiction cannot be denied. It is no coincidence that from Enduring Love onwards, characters who suffer from neurological conditions populate McEwan’s fiction in abundance. To McEwan, consciousness (and thus all behaviour including ethical behaviour) is a matter of the brain. As the novel Saturday (2005) demonstrates unambiguously, if the brain does not function properly, we do not function properly; we might even lose our very sense of self. This is, I think, an unambiguous stance on metaphysics, which cannot be disconnected from ethics and thus relativises Möller’s conclusion that McEwan’s novels are informed by “anti-essentialist, non-universalist ethics” (189). 7 7 There is a direct link between Briony’s work as a nurse in Atonement and Henry Perowne’s work as a neurosurgeon in Saturday. Both professions can be seen as symbolising a materialist worldview, which is clearly expressed in Atonement. Re- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 292 Möller’s conclusion might also stem from a focus which is somewhat narrow. In her analysis, much of McEwan’s extra-fictional writing is not taken into account. This is unfortunate, since McEwan has been exceptionally outspoken about his socio-political views and about how his literary output interacts with these views. Among others, he has contributed to the criticism of religion as voiced by the so called New Atheists (cf. e.g. McEwan 2007: 361- 365); he has published an essay in favour of evolutionary literary criticism, in which he expressis verbis denounced the “Standard Social Science Model”, or as it is sometimes referred to ‘social constructivism’ (cf. McEwan 2005: 5-19); and he has made an attempt at establishing a “scientific literary tradition” (cf. McEwan 2006: 4). Although I agree with the widely accepted notion that an author’s interpretation of his or her text is not necessarily any truer than that of a reader, I think that an application of Möller’s model of an ethics of dialogue to McEwan’s entire oeuvre - fictional and extra-fictional - would have yielded interesting results. Such an analysis would have supported Möller’s conclusion that McEwan’s novels are informed by “postmodern ethics, [which] acknowledges the existence of a plurality of systems of value and explanatory patterns” (188). It might, however, also have shown that such a co-existence of explanatory patterns is not at all free of friction, paradoxes or preferences. Indeed, all of this might have helped refute the claim that post-modernism equals disinterested relativism. In spite of these reservations, Coming to Terms with Crisis offers a series of intelligent readings of McEwan’s novels and a wealth of interesting details. It thus is an insightful contribution to the growing body of secondary literature on Ian McEwan. References Beattie, Tina (2007). The New Atheists. The Twilight of Reason & the War on Religion. London: Darton Longman & Todd. Childs, Peter (ed.) (2007). Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Routledge Guides to Literature. London & New York: Routledge. Eaglestone, Robert (2004). “Postmodernism and Ethics against the Metaphysics of Comprehension”. In: Steven Connor (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge: CUP. 182-195. Harris, Sam (2012 [2010]). The Moral Landscape. New York: Black Swan. McEwan, Ian (2001/ 2002). Atonement. London: Vintage. McEwan, Ian (2005). “Literature, Science, and Human Nature.” In: Jonathan Gottschall/ David Sloan Wilson (eds.). The Literary Animal. Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Forewords by E.O. Wilson and Frederick Crews. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 5-19. McEwan, Ian (2006). “A Parallel Tradition”. The Guardian Review (1 Apr 2006). 4. membering a war patient with a severe head injury, Briony realises “that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended” (McEwan 2002: 304). For a detailed analysis of the manifold links between McEwan’s fiction and neurology cf. Salisbury 2010: 884-912. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 293 McEwan, Ian (2007). “End of the World Blues.” In: Christopher Hitchens (ed.). The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. London: Da Capo Press. 351-365. Rothstein, Edward (2001). “Attacks on U.S. Challange the Perspective of Postmodern True Believers”. The New York Times (22 Sep 2006) [Online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2001/ 09/ 22/ arts/ connections-attacks-us-challengeperspectives-postmodern-true-believers.html? pagewanted=all [1 Aug 2012] Salisbury, Laura (2010). “Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan’s Mother Tongue”. Textual Practice 24.5. 883-912. Zalewski, Daniel (2009). “The Background Hum”. The New Yorker (23 February) [Online] http: / / www.newyorker.com/ reporting/ 2009/ 02/ 23/ 090223fa_fact_zalewski [10 Feb 2011] Johannes Wally Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz