Recommended Reading
‘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. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.’ (IAN McEWAN)
Discuss the power afforded to the imagination by Ian McEwan and Iris Murdoch.
Throughout his fiction Ian McEwan explores the implications of imaginatively engaging with other lives. The highly self conscious narrative frameworks of Enduring Love (1997), Black Dogs (1998) and Atonement (2001) repeatedly call the readers attention to the active influence of an author upon our perception of events. Yet as these novels make uncomfortably apparent, there is a highly ambiguous line between the imaginative appreciation and the imaginative appropriation of other’s lives. It was this ambiguity that McEwan’s emphatic statements in response to the attacks September 11th appear to idealistically underestimate. For McEwan, the crimes committed on September 11th revealed a fundamental ‘failure of the [attackers’] imagination, of the moral imagination’, because
‘If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality’[1]
Writing only three days after the attacks, it seems unsurprising that McEwan is searching for hope, even a potential method of prevention, in the cognitive process with which the novelist is so familiar. Yet in a 2002 Television interview he was equally emphatic in his assertion of the imagination's key role: ‘Imagining yourself into the minds of other people is, I think, a fundamental human act of empathy, which lies at the base of all our moral understanding’[2]. What leads these absolute statements to sit so uncomfortably with both his own fiction and Iris Murdoch’s philosophy is the ease with which McEwan implies such imaginative immersion may be achieved. Although Iris Murdoch’s death in 1999 means that she may never express an opinion on the attacks of September 11th, she endeavoured to emphasise the dangers of imaginative indulgence throughout her philosophical career. McEwan and Murdoch share the core belief that ones humanity is enhanced when one appreciates the existence of lives outside the self. For Murdoch however, this process of appreciation can never be equated with empathetic self comparison.
Murdoch believed that, by devoting detailed attention to the complexity of others, self would become a ‘correspondingly smaller and less interesting object’[3]. As a result such attention proved fundamental to Murdoch’s theories of moral freedom. ‘Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves’[4]. In respect to Murdoch’s conception of dynamic human being ‘knowing and understanding and respecting’ must always be posed in the active present tense. We can know neither ourselves nor those ‘quite other than ourselves’ in any constant, complete sense because ‘Human lives are essentially not to be summed up, but to be known, as they are lived, in many curious, partial and inarticulate ways’[5].
Murdoch allowed no scope for attention that is directed inwards: ‘It is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not scrutiny of the mechanism itself that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism often merely strengthens its power’ (GG,66). The introverted analysis of self is synonymous with stagnation because it turns the ‘rich, receding background of reality’[6] into a self-reflexive bi-product. In contrast, the dynamic act of ‘knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves’ loosens the rigidity of our inner world by encouraging an equally dynamic understanding of our own imperfect humanity. Both Murdoch and McEwan see art as the best medium to set this dynamic process in motion. Yet, as the title quotation taken from Atonement implies, and McEwan’s statements in his September 11th article made emphatic, there is a crucial difference in the value that each writer places upon imaginative involvement with one’s subject.
In terms of an achievable end, Murdoch’s stance is far less accessible than McEwan’s. She believed that art may enlighten our inner world to the nature of external reality because it potentially provides ‘the clearest experience of something grasped as separate and precious and beneficial’. Consequently ‘Our relation to [good] art though “probably never” entirely pure is markedly unselfish’ (FS,77). While the nature of subjectivity ensures that we may ‘probably never’ achieve an unselfed connection with either the art work or the world, the significance of art lies in its vivid illumination of an unselfish compromise: the capacity ‘to know oneself in the world (as part of it, subject to it, connected with it) [which Murdoch believed] is to have the firmest grasp of the real’[7].
Murdoch remained unclear about the possibility for an absolute unselfing. In this respect it is much like her conception of ‘absolute good’ - which ‘…moves, and possibly changes, us (as artist, worker, agent) because it inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy…And this …must occur, without our having the sovereign idea in any sense ‘taped’[in fact] it is in its nature that we cannot get it taped ’(GG, 60). To commit either state to a finite definition would be to close off the ambiguous gaps that she believes are an essential aspect of dynamic human existence. Instead Murdoch fundamentally values the process by which one interrogates, and so enhances, ones own perpetual effort to achieve such ideals.
In contrast, McEwan’s September 11th article implies that once one has opened oneself to an imaginative connection with other human beings, the transition to an absolute understanding of that being is automatic. This proves so controversial because the opinion based form of a newspaper article strips away all the potential ambiguity that is allowed an author of a work of fiction. The narrative framework of Atonement takes full advantage of this ambiguity, allowing the quotation of the essay title to hold a number of different implications depending upon the stance from which we assume it is being expressed. This is especially true at the end of the work, when Briony’s narrative role is revealed and the reader is pushed to re-assess their perception of the entire novel. One is led to actively recognise assumptions that would otherwise have been accepted as implicit, immaterial ‘facts’ of the narrative.
This proves particularly challenging in a novel that pivots upon the dangers of flawed perception; the false accusations against Robbie Turner leading the reader into an acute awareness of how easily reality may be shaped and distorted by assumption. Yet Briony’s revelation pushes us recognise the difference between an acute awareness of other people and an active appreciation of their otherness. Thus her struggle as a naïve thirteen year old to fully comprehend the reality of others– ‘Though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn’t really feel it’[8] – suddenly becomes our own.
This is the great challenge with which McEwan repeatedly intrigues his reader: is an imaginative conception of another human being ever valid, or always a violation of their independent existence? What makes his emphatic article so disappointing is the way its overly positive approach to the powers of the imagination closes off the uneasy implication, flowing throughout his fiction, that we might never fully know another human being. When Briony asks at the very end of the novel ‘Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love…except in the service of the bleakest realism?’ and then admits that ‘when I am dead…and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions’(371) she paradoxically allows the characters within her novel an existence that is independent of her words. Rather than be consumed by this ‘bleak realism’, Briony poses it as a possibility and then places it in parallel with the self defining power of the human imagination. Neither is given an absolute advantage over the other. Instead we are encouraged to recognise that the deliberately incomplete ‘attempt’ to bring them into a more accurate relation ‘was all’(371).
By appreciating the value of Atonement as a repeated re-evaluation of ones first impressions, the reader is encouraged ‘to know oneself in the world (as part of it, subject to it, connected with it) [which Murdoch believed] is to have the firmest grasp of the real’. Enduring Love achieves a similar end, as we are presented with an array of increasingly paranoid impressions until the right, ‘real’ view point becomes effectively unperceivable. Unsurprisingly, the most disturbing aspect of the novel is Jed Parry’s love for Joe. Yet this is not merely due to Jed’s extreme determination to prove the reciprocity of his love. Rather, it is the way in which his fanatical certainty undermines Joe and Clarissa’s confidence in their own ability to ever know, in absolute terms, the thoughts and feelings of another human being.
Parry’s confidence in his connection to Joe is presented as a direct extension of his fanatical faith in God. Un-attached to any particular church, ‘his belief was a self-made affair, generally aligned to the culture of growth and self fulfilment…Often God was a term interchangeable with self’(152). Rather than disparaging religion in its entirety, this description attacks Parry’s exploitation of faith in order to assert the self and deny the value of any outside, alternative mode of thought. It is for this reason that McEwan felt justified in his evaluation of the September 11th crimes as a ‘failure of …the moral imagination’. McEwan, a firm atheist, doesn’t ‘believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a God. ... It's human, universal, [it's] being able to think our way into the minds of others’. Thus he is not suggesting that the attackers failed to consider their actions carefully, but rather that their cruelty to those killed on the planes required a suppression of the natural human instinct to identify and understand. At first it seems that McEwan is wholly underestimating the capacity for Religious belief to be seen as a higher form of identification with - indeed knowing of - humanity. However, as the article extends one realizes that it is not merely religious zeal that McEwan objects to, but rather any belief system that deals in dangerous absolutes:
‘I don't know, quite honestly, whether the world suffers from people not believing enough in things, or believing too much in things…what we need more in the world is doubt; more scepticism, less crazed certainty. I feel that religious zeal, political zeal, is a highly destructive force. People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people’.
In Enduring Love Parry’s exploitation of religious faith is balanced against Joe’s equal and opposite exploitation of scientific knowledge. The more Joe depends upon scientific studies and ‘rational’ thought in order to out think his devotee, the less significant Parry becomes as a thinking, feeling human being. Instead, he increasingly represents a phantom upon which Joe may project his fears and insecurities, and through which Joe can justify his burning need to ‘get beck into science’. Indeed, when his attempts to pursue a research post fail, Parry becomes the excuse for Joe to extend his scientific knowledge – forming the sole motivating factor in his research of ‘De Clerambault’s syndrome’.
Joe description of discovering the syndrome is loaded with the language of revelation: ‘The name was like a fanfare, a clear trumpet sound recalling me to my 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…It was as if I’d been offered that research post with my old professor’(124). The terms are so charged because of the narrative stance from which Joe is recollecting this moment. The reader is encouraged to recognize the delusive quality of such certainty by a narrator who realises, when his predictions are finally proven ‘right’, that absolute, uncompromising ‘truth’ diminishes ones understanding of humanity. ‘the accumulation of horrible certainties borne out by events brought no immediate comfort in vindication. Instead I felt cramped by a flat and narrow sense of grievance…I intuited that being right in this case was also to be contaminated by the truth’(214). The ‘truth’ reveals little about Parry’s dangerous potential. Instead it confirms Joe’s obsessive investment in the Parry phantom and intimates how, in his search for self fulfilling certainty, he has sacrificed his human connection with Clarissa.
McEwan regards this as the most valuable connection one can make in life. The fact that so many of the September 11th victims last words were ‘I love you’ gives him immense hope: ‘There was only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers’. Of course, in a certain death situation, the instinct to say these three words need not be interrogated. For those who are left behind however, the value of knowing that human beings cling to love in their final moments is wasted if we assume that such love expounds a self explanatory truth. As Iris Murdoch fundamentally emphasised in her philosophy, and Enduring Love and Atonement ambiguously explore, loving someone involves continually appreciating and attending to their independent existence. The scope for imaginative identification to become an imposition even, and perhaps especially, through love, is a danger of which McEwan’s novels suggest he is acutely aware, yet which his celebration of the ‘human, universal, [ability] to think our way into the minds of others’ in the wake of September 11th unfortunately underestimates.
[1] ‘Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers’ Ian McEwan, (The Guardian, September 15, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,,552408,00.html). All future references ill be this article and will be included in the text.
[2] Frontline, April 2002, with producer Helen Whitney.
[3] Iris Murdoch, ‘On ‘God and Good’’ in The Sovereignty of Good (London,2001) p.66. All future references will be to this edition and will be included in the text
[4] Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature (London,1999) p.284. All future references will be to this edition and will be included in the text.
[5] Iris Murdoch in Iris Murdoch a Life, by P.J.Conradi, (London, 2001)p.529.
[6] Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in Existentialist and Mystics: Writings on philosophy and Literature (London, 1999)p.294
[7] Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, Why Plato banished the artist (Oxford, 1977)p.84.
[8] Ian McEwan, Atonement, (London, 2001) p.36. All future references will be to this addition and will be included in the text.
