Mcewans View On The Role Of Fiction

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The only defence that the victims could put up against their attackers, as if to counterbalance the latter’s dearth of empathy, were those "snatched and anguished assertions of love" made on their cell phones.

The point that McEwan misses when he invokes imagination and empathy as being "the core of our humanity" in his response to the terrorist attacks is the possibility of imagining himself into the terrorists’ situation. He identifies with the victims of the terrorist attack, but fails to stretch his imagination to the other side, refraining from reflecting on the terrorists’ motives and thus arguing only from the perspective of his Western thinking.

Yet McEwan’s essay is best construed not as a theoretical account of violence and terrorism, but rather as a persistent commentary on the functions and limitations of novels, the key question in his essay–"What if it was me?" −alluding not only to real-life events, but also to the problems novels raise about literary empathy and engagement. The novelist had previously elaborated on the redemptive powers of literature and on fiction as an activator of ethical awakening in an interview where he explained that

McEwan’s view on the role of fiction disproves of an ethical guidance that imparts incontestable or universal models of conduct to substantiate its legitimacy and cogency: "I don’t think the novel is particularly good or interesting when it instructs us how to live, so I don’t think of it as moral in that sense," the novelist explains in another interview. Morality, as he understands it, does not reside in enforcing precepts or demands; instead, of paramount importance in his standpoint is the emotional partaking in an experience, the insistence on the novelist’s task to create opportunities for imaginative participation by shaping vivid and compelling fictional universes to which the reader can connect. Storytelling provides a vehicle for representing ethical complexity and, as Wayne Booth suggests, the process of reading fiction involves our experience of the "full ‘otherness.’" The novel is a laboratory where ethical questions are examined through the lenses of aesthetic categories, particularly by providing surrogate life experiences that can serve as material for exercises in empathy, grasped as a fundamental quality of reciprocity.

Fictional truth, the novelist Brian Hall argues (referring to a passage from a short story by Tim O’Brien that features his famous statement "If a story seems moral, do not believe it"),

is always moral, regardless of the morality, immorality or amorality of the lives the fiction portrays. To help you see through another’s eyes, to undermine parochial certainty−how could that not bear on morality? [...] [E]nlightened transformation goes to the heart of the artistic goal of literature. [...] [F]iction can teach you again and again what you think you already know.

Fiction expands the readers’ instinctive propensity for empathy, kindling their engagement in someone else’s situation or mental and emotional state. By taking readers into the minds of people unlike themselves, fiction elicits from them an understanding of the perspectives of people who, in different circumstances, might be perceived as less than human. This exercise in empathy, this attempt of making sense of their world, is part of what it means to be moral.

Conversely, empathy becomes an effective instrument for the readers’ ethical improvement, since, through empathy, they can ethically profit from literature, by making an imaginative leap and living through the (textual) other, while maintaining a distance and reflecting on complex situations. Vicarious reading refines our ethical savvy in real life, empowering us with an awareness of the singularity of restricted universes and particular situations, as Cynthia Ozick explains in her commentary on the functions of literature:

In steady interpretive light we can make distinctions; we can see that one thing is not interchangeable with another thing; that not everything is the same; that Holocaust is different, God knows, from a corncob. So we arrive, at last, at the pulse and purpose of literature: to reject the blur of the "universal"; to distinguish one life from another, to illumine diversity; to light up the least grain of being, to show how it is concretely individual, particularised from any other, to tell, in all the marvel of its singularity, the separate holiness of the least grain. Literature is the recognition of the particular.

Considerations about the significance of empathy as a core responsibility of fiction, nonetheless, are bound to give rise to the unavoidable question of the author’s legitimacy and morality in displaying a character’s most intimate life experiences, in dissecting another’s feelings. Booth raises this problem when he asks: "What Are the Author’s Responsibilities to Those Whose Lives Are Used as ‘Material’? Are there limits to the author’s freedom to expose, in the service of art or self, the most delicate secrets of those whose life provide material?" These questions lead to the problem of authorial empathy, even more complex through its cultural implications. Authors who empathise with their characters are sometimes criticised for assuming an aesthetic power to which they are not entitled, since literary discourse is deemed to be the product of social identity. Nonetheless, undermining the writers’ authority presents the cultural danger of discrediting a basic supposition about the character of representation−the capacity of the literary to express empathy−a belief deeply-embedded into human consciousness.

Political scientist James Q. Wilson discusses the correlation between our social selves and our ethical selves:

Man is by nature a social animal. Our moral nature grows directly out of our social nature. We express sympathy for the plight of others both because we value their company (and so we wish to convince them of our companionable qualities) and because we can feel the pain of others even when not in their company.

This innate sensitivity to the feelings of others−a sensitivity that, to be sure, varies among individuals−is so powerful that it makes us grasp not only the feeling of friends and family members but also those of some strangers, many fictional characters, and even animals.

People operate from an empathetic stance because they are members of a community, and the initial choice of empathising with another functions as an ethical basis for further engagement in empathetic acts.

Booth constructs a similar argument around the duality of self and society and insists on the idea of altruism ("the service of alterity") as being not the result of duty towards others, but an expression of "‘self’-preservation." These opposing tendencies are also contained by language, at once a solitary and social experience: each speech act is fundamentally private being spoken and developed by a single individual; yet it becomes language only when other individuals, i.e. the reader or listener, identify it as such. The question then is no longer one of the writer’s or reader’s entitlement to communicate empathy, but that of reconciling the tendency to assert one’s individuality with the desire to relate to another. The foremost ethical dilemma they must face occurs when deciding to what extent they are to stretch their engagement with the other in initiating an empathic process. Ideally, empathy resides in differentiated identification with the other, a paradox that is indicative of the joint bounds of which we must be aware but which we should not transgress, both in real life and in fictional worlds.

Considering the currency of the notion of empathy in texts discussing ethics, we might be surprised to learn that the word ‘empathy’ is relatively new. It has its origin in the idea of Einfuhlung (literally, ‘in-feeling’ or ‘feeling-into’), which dates back to the 1880s, when Robert Vischer used it in a discussion about the psychology of aesthetics to refer to "a projection of the self into the object of beauty," though psychologists attribute it to the German psychologist Theodore Lipps, who is said to have coined it to describe the emotional appreciation of someone else’s feelings. Notably, the concept was established from the very beginning as an aesthetic category, which signals its importance in the creative and imaginative processes.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Einfuhlung was imported into English by the British psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener, who, in 1909, coined it as ‘empathy,’ stemming from the Greek word empatheia, and meaning "affection or passion," and a few years later defined as an innate "tendency to feel oneself into a situation." It is significant that, in his discussion about empathy in Beginner’s Psychology (1915), the British psychologist illustrates it with an account of a "reading experience": "We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we feel or imagine. As we read about the forest, we may as it were, become the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger; everything is strange, but it is to us that strange experience has come."

Expanding the literary implications of the concept, the English novelist Vernon Lee fashioned her own aesthetics of empathy, arguing that people empathise with works of art by recalling memories and making associations that often determine involuntary changes in their breathing and posture. Describing the function of art as "the awakening, intensifying or maintaining of definite emotional states," Lee places empathy at the core of our collaborative responsiveness. She claims that empathy

enters into imagination, sympathy, and also into that inference from our own inner experience which has shaped all our conceptions of an outer world, and given to the intermittent and heterogeneous sensations received from without the framework of our constant and unified inner experience, that it to say, of our own activities and aims.

The ethics of otherness formed the basis of the theory of one of the foremost ethical thinkers in continental philosophy, Emmanuel Lévinas, who, in his 1972 essay "Ideology and Idealism," explained why sameness prevails in our society:

The contemporary world, scientific, technical, and sensual, is seen to be without issue, that is to say, without God, not because everything is permitted and is possible by means of technology, but because everything is the same. The unknown immediately becomes familiar, the new, habitual. Nothing is new under the sun. The crisis described in Ecc1esiastes is not of sin, but of boredom. Everything is absorbed, sunk, buried in sameness. In the enchantment of places, the hyperbole of metaphysical concepts, the artifice of art, the exaltation of ceremony, the magic of rites–everywhere one suspects and denounces theatricality, transcendence that is purely rhetorical, games. ‘Vanity of vanities’

As the best remedy for the egocentrism of Western culture, the philosopher invoked the assumption of ethical responsibility for the other, whom he pictured in terms of distance and exteriority. Lévinas used the face as an image for the empathic acknowledgement of the other, and suggested that it is during the face-to-face encounter between people that the other is revealed to the self in his or her distinct being. The face of the other is fundamentally different form the face of the self, and if we want to be credited as ethical, any attempts by the self to approach the other must respect this infinitely unknowable and inassimilable alterity, openness to the other being a prerequisite for ethical interaction. According to Lévinas, the self and other are in a non-mutual relation, and they come together only as strangers to each other, otherness being absolute:

[I]n the very heart of the relationship with the other that characterises our social life, alterity appears as a nonreciprocal relationship. [...] The Other as Other is not only an alter ego: the Other is what I myself am not. The Other is this, not because of the Other’s character, or physiognomy, or psychology, but because of the Other’s very alterity.

The other remains enigmatic, beyond comprehension, radically different from the self who endeavours to contain him/her.

Furthermore, the thinker makes a distinction between the face and the mask, indicating that social life consists mainly of masks. It is imagination, particularly an ethical imagination, that allows "the eye to see through the mask," and enables us to place social attributes upon the ‘blank slate’ that the other embodies. It is our receptiveness to the other’s stories, our ability to engage into a "veritable conversation" −the aim of any ethical relation.

Paul Ricœur, hailed as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, embraced a similar perspective of morality. In Oneself as Another (1992), a collection of lectures examining the meaning of personal identity, he explored the dialectic of the self and the other. Ricœur distinguished between ethics and morality, by defining ethics as a personal undertaking, and morality as the expression of this undertaking in social conventions. The philosopher also contended that the sense of value stemming from the impulse of being ethical is more vital for the growth of individuality than that deriving from compliance with social conventions. Individual ethical aspirations are defined by obligation to respect moral norms, but respect for norms can take effect only if it is rooted in respect for others. Therefore, the self-respect attained by conformity to authoritative standards means valuing oneself as another, and this is a form of empathy and concern for others. Ricœur’s term for this empathy and concern for others as the basis of morality is "solicitude." He also draws on the term "alterity" to refer to various realities, his ethical theory embracing the possibility that diverse communities and traditions may enter into mutual dialogue. In particular, his ethics presents an outlook of the moral life that is rooted in practice and founded on the basic human capability of dialogue and imaginative moral mediation.

Though Ricœur’s theory is obviously indebted to Lévinas’s ethics of otherness, it also departs from it in its insistence on reciprocity, which Lévinas fails to conceptualise. In Ricœur’s opinion, individuality involves otherness to such an extent that the two cannot be conceived as separate. He claims that if we are interested in our relationships with other people, the other cannot be envisioned as totally different, as there is no relationship without a common point.

In a similar vein, the American philosopher and professor of literature Richard Rorty turns to the aesthetic and the literary, and emphasises the redemptive value of fiction, arguing that literature cures us of our self-sufficiency, helping us to understand the human condition better and, accordingly, lead more meaningful lives. When we read literature, novels in particular, the philosopher explains, we "are seeking redemption from insensitivity rather than from impiety or irrationality [...] [and] worry about whether [we] are sufficiently aware of the needs of others." He gives narrative a pivotal place in the content of morality and considers the ascendancy of ethical fiction over ethical modern philosophy, arguing that the novel as a genre is "a safer medium than theory for expressing one’s recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures." To him, the novel is the privileged form of moral discourse as it best articulates particular moral practices, which carry the weight in ethics, rather than universal principles:

For novels are usually about people−things which are, unlike general ideas and final vocabularies, quite evidently time-bound, embedded in a web of contingencies. Since the characters in novels age and die−since they obviously share the finitude of the books in which they occur−we are not tempted to think that by adopting an attitude toward them we have adopted an attitude toward every possible sort of person. By contrast, books which are about ideas, even when written by historicists like Hegel and Nietzsche, look like descriptions of eternal relations between eternal objects.

The novel has taken over the ethical tasks previously performed by philosophy, being better suited to represent the essence of our being. It is an essentially open and pluralist literary form because it makes no claim to universality, truth or stability, favouring stories that explain small practices, which are always situational, contingent. Its ethos is one of complexity, encompassing and pooling all intellectual resources to give the finest insight into the human nature. If we admit that the subject is provisional and contingent, then ethics can be assumed to share these characteristics.

Nevertheless, Rorty argues, to establish fresh concepts that capture the meaningfulness of life, literary criticism needs the unambiguous "vocabulary of moral and political reflection," its experience in investigating human nature. The complex world of possible courses of action, at odds with one another, becomes more comprehensible when it is couched in terms that attempt to frame the unknown. Yet there is no ‘metavocabulary’ that takes into account "all possible ways of judging and feeling," that wholly and forever shields us against the contingency of a world replete with confusing concepts. The plurality of the literary discourse comes closest to evoking the complexity and singularity of human life and of the contingency of all frameworks of meaning, laying open what the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to as "the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer difficulty of actual human deliberation." If we are to find further concepts to capture a complete and complex human life, we should resort to "such texts as novels, texts engaged in the shaping of the language of particularity."

In a volume of essays entitled Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Nussbaum, like Rorty, shows an interest in the capacity of literature to address and examine the ethical, and claims that the novel is the only adequate literary genre for expressing moral views. To support her preference for the novel as the foremost form of moral enquiry, she first calls attention to the length and complexity of novels, to their appropriateness to represent the consequences of our moral choices, which make them a great deal more effective than moral philosophers’ concise narratives. In her opinion, all philosophical examples expanding "the particularity, the emotive appeal, the absorbing plottedness, the variety and indeterminacy of good fiction" would, as a result, become works of literature. These attributes endow literary texts with the capability of mediating certain ethical aspects that philosophy fails to appreciate fully. In her words,

literary forms call forth certain specific sorts of practical activity in the reader that can be evoked in no other way [...] We need a story of a certain kind, with characters of a certain type in it, if our sense of life and of value is to be called forth in the way most appropriate for practical reflection [...] This practical conception is most adequately expressed [...] in texts that have a complex narrative structure

Nussbaum emphasises the emotional response to literature, and praises the enormous potential of novels to render the richness of our emotional lives. Moreover, the philosopher argues, it is only when we experience certain feelings, such as love, that we gain access to some forms of knowledge. Love and knowledge are in a mutual relationship: we love people by virtue of what we know about them, but we also improve our knowledge about them because we love them.

She goes on by making a distinction between an ethics based on general principles, which are applied more or less automatically, and an ethics that takes into account the specificity of situations. She associates the first approach to ethics with Plato, and the second with Aristotle, and points to the contrasting aesthetic views that the two perspectives have produced. The Platonist emphasis on the objective and general character of moral principles entails the rejection of feelings in ethical decisions, as emotion is bound to affect only particular situations and individuals and bring about unethical decisions. Nussbaum argues that literature’s main reason for existence is to represent particular situations, this representation enabling readers to refine their own emotional and ethical responsiveness to the particularity of these specific situations. Ethics does not rely solely on general principles, but should rather be judged for each specific situation, and the transforming power of literature expresses itself primarily through the reading and defamiliarising process it implies. In this respect, all literary works are committed to responding to an ethical concern which is inseparable from human experience.

The capacity of fiction to contribute to our understanding of morality did not go unnoticed in the British literary and philosophical landscape either. In 1961, Iris Murdoch remarked: "[W]e require [...] a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being. [...] Through literature we can re-discover a sense of the density of our lives."

Referring to the functions of the novel, Professor Dominic Head, University of Nottingham, explains that the new advocates of ethical criticism "reclaim the novel as a key site for the exploration of the human domain and moral being." In his view, the novel is a genre which has "the capacity to achieve a unique form of moral philosophy, particularly through its investigation of character, dilemma and moral agency."

Narrative ethics, as understood by these critics, steers clear of an abstract and unworldly intellectual isolation and looks for a sensible philosophy that furnishes a conceptual basis, while leaving room for the diversity of postmodern alternatives that cannot claim their universal validity and keeping its distance from metaphysical misconceptions. To them, literature offers only provisional conclusions, inevitably involving the persistence of the moral investigation and evaluation, prerequisites of a meaningful and ethical life.

In line with the proponents of the new narrative ethics, Ian McEwan believes that the novel is able to express important matters, especially matters at the heart of morality, much better than other forms:

The novel acts as a repository of ethical awareness by evoking the experience of alterity, the moral investment being the assumption of empathic engagement through imaginative projection, without running the risk of explicit moralising.

A self-confessed atheist, McEwan does not ground moral sense on religion, which he regards as "a morally neutral force," but, as his numerous assertions prove, on humanist, universal values like empathy. And what makes the novel, more than any other literary form, a moral space is precisely "that quality of penetration into other consciousnesses," of "revealing, through various literary conventions, a train of thought, or a state of mind" so that "you can live inside somebody else’s head," or even "inside many different people’s heads, in a way that you […] cannot do in normal life," as we attempt to illustrate below, while engaging in the analysis of two of McEwan’s novels of the new millennium, Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005).

The Destructive and Healing Powers of Storytelling in Atonement

Atonement was reviewed extensively upon its release and received a few of the most appreciative appraisals of McEwan’s career, evoking a novelist in his heyday. It was hailed as "a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama," and "as easily his [McEwan’s] finest" novel. Geoff Dyer lauded its "scope, ambition and complexity," comparing it to the great novels of the mid-twentieth century (especially the works of Virginia Woolf, whose literary influence on the writing of the heroine of Atonement is overtly mentioned in the novel, and of D.H. Laurence), whereas Robert Mcfarlane drew attention to "its richness of detail, its gravitas and its length." Martyn Bedford remarked that Atonement revived his appreciation of McEwan, who regained his intellectual vigour through the portrayal of Briony Tallis, the novel’s writerly (anti-)heroine.

Many critics were perceptive in noting the novel’s treatment of the theme of writing and storytelling. David Sexton, for instance, who, like Kermode, regarded the book as "McEwan’s best novel, so far, his masterpiece, […] the product of many years of steady development of his craft," a narrative "always alive with the thoughts of the characters, as if it were a transparent medium into other minds," read it as "a meditation on the impulse of storytelling itself, on the wish to give shape to experience which deceives no less than it illuminates." Claire Messud commented that the novelist, "a vivisectionist of the human psyche […] is painfully aware to the dangers of […] the pernicious power of fine storytelling." Discussing the novel’s concern with literary history, Hermione Lee states in her review that Atonement poses "interesting questions about writing," asking "what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now." Lee gives an original answer that alludes to the role of feminist concerns in contemporary fiction, suggesting that "[o]ne of the things it can do […] is to be androgynous," in McEwan’s case, in a book "written by a man acting the part of a woman writing a ‘male’ subject."

The novel’s main theme is concisely and pertinently stated by Dominic Head in his survey of Ian McEwan’s works, as being that of "guilt and atonement […] inextricably linked to an investigation of the writer’s authority, a process of self-critique conducted through the creation of the writing persona Briony Tallis." An extended study of its own composition, the book follows Briony (held by McEwan to be "the most complete person [he]’d ever conjured"), from adolescence till old age as she reconsiders the terrible crime she committed at the age of thirteen with disastrous consequences on the lives of the people around her, misrepresenting it, accounting for it, and eventually attempting to atone for it, looking for comfort in the act of storytelling. The coda written in first person reveals old Briony to be the narrator of the first three parts, and the readers must alter their belief that the narrator is omniscient in the previous parts of the novel, a complete understanding of the narrative technique being thus retrospective. Briony, whose descriptive powers (as a young teenager, she congratulates herself on her ability to shape the world in words, reflecting that "there was nothing she could not describe") turn out to be, as the critic Peter Childs points out, "both [her] gift and her curse," has spent her entire life writing drafts of this book as atonement (or "at-one-ment," "a reconciliation with self," as McEwan told The Observer) for her crime.

The epigraph, the dialogue between Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey in which the young man reprimands Catherine for entertaining unfounded suspicions about General Tilney, signals a concern that will resonate throughout the novel−the tendency to overdramatise and fictionalise real events, while it also encourages us to apply more general parallels between the two novels. In an interview with Jeff Giles, McEwan describes Atonement as his "Jane Austen novel," and in another interview, he explicitly comments on the analogy suggested by the epigraph:

What are the distances between what is real and what is imagined? Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, was a girl so full of the delights of Gothic fiction that she causes havoc around her when she imagines a perfectly innocent man to be capable of the most terrible things

As Brian Finney points out, the epigraph acts as both "a warning and a guide" to how the reader is to approach Atonement. Indirectly, the reader is invited to compare Catherine Moorland to Briony with her excessive imagination. Like Catherine Morland’s, Briony Tallis’s judgment is warped by literature and by a flawed knowledge of the world, a weakness that will lead the heroine to push her convictions beyond acceptable limits. At the same time, the epigraph shows how aged Briony as narrator distances herself from the naive thirteen-year-old Briony (there are three Brionys in the novel corresponding to three stages in her life: thirteen-year-old Briony, eighteen-year-old Briony, and seventy-seven-year-old Briony).

The first thing that we learn about young Briony is that she is an ambitious writer, who spends her time browsing dictionaries to increase her word stock and who channels her entire spirit into writing a play (The Trials of Arabella, a melodrama intended to "inspire […] terror, relief and instruction, in that order" −an allusion to Aristotle’s Poetics), "in a two-day tempest of composition" that caused her to miss two meals, for which she has also "designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper." These early details, presented from Briony’s self-absorbed and pretentiously literary perspective, establish the extent of her dedication to (and even obsession with) not only her writing, but also its reception, betraying her concern with how she is perceived by other people.

Considering the novel’s conflation of the image of the child with that of the writer, Peter Childs notes that "the child and the novelist both specialise in fashioning worlds of their own imagining, are both ‘daydreamers’ in the novel’s terms." For young Briony, writing is a form of extrasensory perception, of conjuring, a sleight of hand that grants her access to the marvels of the world, even "a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination," and a vehicle for projecting herself into the minds of her readers, her programmatic convictions about fiction being remarkably (and ironically) similar to those claimed by McEwan in his interviews:

Yet for young Briony, the idea that other people’s inner lives are as "vivid" as hers is worrying, endangering her uniqueness with "irrelevance" and making the social world seem "unbearably complicated." While she realises that it is improbable that she might be "surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feelings she had," she does so "only in a rather arid way: she didn’t really feel it."

Apparently, Briony’s character experiences a literary evolution, as she shifts from fairy tales to romance, in an attempt to produce her story: while witnessing a scene between her elder sister Cecilia and her father’s protégé Robbie Turner at the Tallises’ fountain and misinterpreting what she has seen, she envisages the prospect of more complex writing than her moralistic tales and begins imagining herself as a mature writer, in "her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew." This appears to be a rite of passage, marking her progress from childhood and romance to adulthood and realism. Misinterpreting yet again the content of a letter that Robbie, in a Freudian slip, mistakes for another letter and then gives the young girl to take to her sister, Briony realises that, for the first time, she has a secret to share, her false certainty that she is growing up prompting her to reveal "the secret" to her cousin Lola, a fifteen-year-old girl who likes to appear more mature than she is (hence the allusion in her name to that of the female protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, another novel that raises ethical questions), partly to "show the older girl that she too had worldly experiences."

Her emerging "adulthood" also causes her to feel "responsible […] for everything that was about to happen." Nevertheless, as the novel progresses, as Briony wonders "whether having final responsibility for someone, even a creature like a horse or a dog, was fundamentally opposed to the wild and inward journey of writing" and concludes that "[p]rotective worrying, engaging with another’s mind as one entered it, taking the dominant role as one guided another’s fate, was hardly mental freedom," it becomes clear that she is not yet ready to assume responsibility. Moreover, by the end of the novel, as we learn that she is a successful novelist (whose fiction is "known for its amorality" −another indication that she might still be not much unlike her young self), we also discover that there is one story to which she keeps returning and that she has drafted and redrafted throughout her life, the only one that counts for her, the one that she must make sense of in order to come to terms with her life.

It is the early portrayal of Briony as a committed and somewhat precocious writer, rounded off by her characterisation as a girl "possessed by a desire to have the world just so," with a "passion for secrets," a liking for harmony, a rigid tendency for control and order, a fascination with words (of which she often makes clumsy use), and a "taste for the miniature" (stories enable this "busy, priggish, conceited little girl," as older Briony labels her adolescent self in the novel’s coda, to turn reality into a miniature representation of the world that she can arrange, discard and stage-manage at will), which offers the first clues that her self-conscious fictionalising may prompt self-delusion and the denial of truth, carefully laying the basis for the spiral of events leading to the inevitable crisis of the novel. Coupled with these inclinations, with her immaturity and with her lack in the ability to empathise with the others, "the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you" (for instance, she has no sympathy for her distressed cousins, victims of their parents’ broken marriage, and will not mind the suffering of Robbie’s mother when her son is taken away by the police), her overindulgent imagination will create the misunderstandings that not only wreak havoc on the lives of those around her, but also force her to understand, though not fully, as it is revealed at the end of the novel, the irreversible and adverse effects of inventing stories and modelling her behaviour on a constructed world.

A great deal of the first part of the novel is concerned with outlining the context for Briony’s misconstructions, through the painstaking account of the convergence of characters and of the events that occurred on a very hot day of the year of 1935. McEwan includes several crucial scenes where external influences generate misunderstandings, such as those where Briony interprets a few adult gestures through the distorted lens of her adolescent feelings and confusion, lies becoming tools to block the harsh reality setting in. Many of the events are glimpsed through different framing devices (window frames, skylights, mirrors), through the haze caused by the heat wave, or through the darkness, and often appear to be staged from above as if from a director’s perspective. The aim of this narrative strategy is to heighten the sense of elusiveness and visual confusion as well as of dramatic exaggeration. Briony runs into Lola and her attacker in the darkness and sees only his receding figure, yet she infers that the figure is Robbie’s and concludes that "[h]e was a maniac after all," allowing her interpretive judgment to prevail over her moral one: she is convinced that the silhouette she saw withdrawing from the scene is Robbie’s only because her interpretation matches the story that she is piecing together following her previous encounters with Robbie (McEwan exposes her judgements as false through several scenes that present Robbie as a worthy young fellow who nurtures a passionate love for Cecilia.). Once she has voiced her story, it becomes impossible for Briony to back it up or soften it, as the passage below reveals:

As early as the week that followed, the glazed surface of conviction was not without its blemishes and hairline cracks.

The other protagonists of the novel are not free from misapprehensions either: duped by class prejudice, Cecilia is convinced that Danny Hardman, a worker on the Tallis estate, is her cousin’s rapist, with no more proof than Briony had when she held Robbie responsible for the sexual assault on Lola (no one considers voicing any suspicions against Paul Marshall, the unpleasant and arrogant chocolate manufacturer who marries his victim to keep his crime secret, ironically ennobled as Lord Marshall by the end of his life). Cee’s discernment difficulties, suggesting her family resemblance to Briony, are also alluded to when she sees her appearance distorted and "Picasso-like" in a mirror. Emily Tallis, Briony and Cecilia’s mother, views herself as all-knowing and clear-sighted, as a controlling presence in the house who senses all that is happening, but her actions (and their absence, for that matter) suggest the opposite and expose her as being complacent, socially myopic, and just as bound by prejudice and prone to fabricating truth as the other characters. Even Briony’s victim, Robbie Turner, portrayed as a selfless and genuinely likeable person throughout the novel (his compassion and generosity is apparent especially in Part Two, in the evocation of the retreat of the British army to Dunkirk), ponders for years about Briony’s motives of her accusation which secured him the imprisonment and separated him from the women he loved, misinterpreting her childish thoughtlessness and confusion (an understanding of which she ironically appeared to have reached just a few hours before committing her crime in her remark about literary genres: "It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding") as deliberate cruelty and revenge for his preference for her sister. Even though he is aware that she is at a "stage in her life [when she] inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and re-crossed unpredictably," it never occurs to him that an imaginative thirteen-year-old girl might have a view of the world very different from that of a young adult, and reinvents the past by reinterpreting the events that led to his imprisonment in the light of his conviction that Briony fostered unrequited love for him. These misinterpretations offer a plethora of evidence of the novel’s concern with the difficulty of clarifying the motivation behind another’s actions, with the recognition of another’s consciousness and the dangers of misreading, aspects that are central to McEwan’s fiction and its preoccupation with morality.

McEwan inserts into Briony’s account proleptic details that, with the benefit of hindsight, signal the outcome of the novel. For instance, at the end of the novel’s second section, Robbie’s last words are "I promise, you won’t hear another word from me." In other words, at this stage of the novel, the readers do not find out whether Robbie gets evacuated or dies. Although the novel’s third section seems to clarify that dilemma by showing Robbie reunited with Cecilia, in retrospect, the flash-forward at the end of the second section of Atonement seems to prepare the readers for the realisation that Robbie did not stay alive until the retreat. Another key fragment in the third section, describing the real Briony going back to the hospital, while her other self, "no les real," her "imagined or ghostly persona," continues her wander towards Cecilia and Robbie’s place, traces the fine distinction between what is real and what is unreal, between what is true and what is false, but cannot be fully understood until the last chapter. The beginning of the coda, where Briony states that she has "always liked to make a tidy finish," anticipates the end by putting the readers on their guard that what they are reading may not be compliant with the truth and that the self Briony is trying to atone through an entire life of writings and re-writings is the self whose need for order causes her crime.

In the economy of the novel, the theme of atonement is inextricably linked to that of guilt. The sense of guilt extends through the novel, in the war, to the entire society, Briony’s personal guilt being juxtaposed with ubiquitous, collective guilt that imbues her war writing in the second part of the novel. Everyday guilt−Cecilia feeling culpable for not looking after the twins and Briony being remorseful for opening the letter addressed to her sister−foreshadows Briony’s tremendous guilt that "refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime." Even Robbie, the most guiltless of the characters, depersonalised as "Turner" in Part II, feels guilty for the people he has not saved, the dead he has not buried, as he reflects during his march to Dunkirk where he was to be evacuated with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force: "What was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was […] there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts. The witnesses were guilty too." The effects of the war are not limited to its direct participants, the whole society being guilty of allowing war to happen. Guilt causes Briony to break off all contact with her family, to engage into wartime nursing in a London hospital instead of pursuing university education, and to keep experiencing and writing over again that disastrous day in the summer of 1935 when her imaginative error became lie and crime, bringing about dramatic consequences.

The Limits of Empathetic Imagination in Saturday

While Atonement is the most acute of McEwan’s novels in its exploration of ethics, particularly the ethical impact of storytelling, the novels that succeeded it also foreground the problem of (authorial) moral responsibility and empathic understanding. Though set against an entirely different backdrop, that of terrorism and the looming war in Iraq, Saturday (2005), McEwan’s a-day-in-the-life novel, further examines the limits of empathic engagement and identification, personified by the novel’s protagonist, Henry Perowne, an accomplished, liberal-minded, and down-to-earth middle-aged neurosurgeon.

Standing wide awake at the window of his bedroom in the small hours of the morning of Saturday, 15 February 2003, having been inexplicably drawn from his bed, Perowne (himself an imaginary, invented being and thus part of the literary project) reflects on the role of fiction in contemporary culture and concludes that he does not "want to be a spectator of other lives, of imaginary lives, [...] and [that] it interests him less to have the world reinvented. He wants it explained. The times are strange enough. Why make things up?" This passage sets the tone and frames the ‘policy’ of the novel, anchoring it in a world that presents us with such appalling spectacles as that of 9/11, a world in which the dream of a peaceful order has shattered as destruction, terrorism, and war make the headlines of the new millennium, and trauma permeates the contemporary collective consciousness. All of a sudden, Perowne ponders, "the nineties are looking like an innocent decade," and this state of the world lends legitimacy to Perowne’s query about the power of narratives to act as reliable sources of knowledge.

Nevertheless, Perowne’s lack of interest in having the world reinvented also betrays an imaginative inability, and his unwillingness to imagine outside the bounds of his own experience has serious consequences in the novel. He is indisputably right that literature cannot furnish absolute answers or totalising explanations of the world. What it can still do, as McEwan suggests by orchestrating the culminating scene of the novel, where his protagonist is taught a lesson on the storyteller’s power over the mind of the reader/listener, is shape the chaos of human experience, articulate the moral confusion of our lives by communicating ideas through the unique mediation between storyteller and reader, and, in the words of the American critic Kenneth Burke, provide us with "equipment for living."

Perowne’s philistine reflections before the window, triggered by his glimpse of an apparently burning cargo plane from his bedroom window, mistaken, out of an excess of rationalism, for a meteor or a comet travelling across the London sky, establish him from the outset as an individual with a narrow view of the world and limited vicarious sympathy. At the sight of the plane ablaze, Perowne is not moved by any feelings of compassion for the passengers, but merely witnesses the scene "from the outside, from afar," as a spectator of other lives, reminiscing about his unease during his post 9/11 travels, when "[l]ike most passengers, outwardly subdued by the monotony of air travel, he often lets his thoughts range across the possibilities while sitting, strapped down and docile, in front of a packaged meal" and "[p]lastic fork in hand, he often wonders how it might go." If in Atonement most of the key events in the first part of the novel are glimpsed through a window, a mirror, dim light, or heat haze, and the narrator of Enduring Love spends much time looking out the window for his mad stalker, in Saturday, McEwan also makes Henry watch the plane scene (and other subsequent events) through his bedroom window, a framework that symbolically (and literally) encloses his vision, further filtered by the low light before dawn, thus adding to the impression of the protagonist’s limited perception. Moreover, Henry is convinced of the accuracy of his vision, which, we are told, "seems to have sharpened"; and, a few pages later, we learn that "he doesn’t immediately understand what he sees, though he thinks he does." Besides blurring Henry’s vision, the window places a physical and metaphorical screen between the world and the hero, faced with dangers still abstract and distant, but soon to turn concrete and personal.

Even though reviews of Saturday were almost all favourable (Peter Kemp states in The Sunday Times that "written with superb exactness, complex, suspenseful, reflective, and humane, this novel about an expert on the human brain by an expert on the human mind reinforces his [McEwan’s] status as the supreme novelist of his generation," and Mark Lawson in The Guardian praises "the global dimension" that McEwan gives to "the textures of everyday life" and deems the novel "subtle enough to be taken as a warning against either intervention or against isolationism"), a few reviewers have assumed that Henry’s self-serving stories are identical to those to which the novel subscribes. John Banville, for instance, dismisses Saturday as "a dismayingly bad book," mainly because he takes the protagonist’s self-indulgence as being favoured by the author of the novel. In a similarly scathing review, Jennifer Szalai argues that McEwan "has written a profoundly flawed book," "a narrative shuffled along by a hyperrational protagonist," also mistaking Perwone’s tendency to rationalise events for the author’s outlook. And in yet another negative review, Keith Gessen calls the novel "a product of liberal guilt−the idea that things are more real and more painful elsewhere and that our actions don’t have much to do with them," and the novelist one who, "like the surgeon, […] does not make it his business to reach outside the bounds of his particular task" of creating "carefully structured novels in which characters receive their comeuppance" and that of being "the consummate professional novelist" he has become.

What these critics fail to acknowledge when they ground their understandings of the novel on the author’s implicit acceptance of his hero’s parochialism is the skilfulness of McEwan’s employment of free indirect speech, which combines features of third-person with first-person direct speech and takes us into the protagonist’s mind in a manner evocative of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses (novels with which Saturday also shares the one-day time frame). By all means, McEwan depicts the particulars of Henry Perowne’s everyday existence rather warmly at times, not concealing from the reader that he finds Perowne agreeable enough (he confesses in an interview that, although he does not identify with his hero’s mindset and surely does not share his loathing for literature, he gave Henry Perowne a few of the details of his own existence: his house, his fish stew recipe, the squash games, attributes of his wife and children, his relationship with his mother, etc.).

Nevertheless, the split focalised narrative (half internal, half external) used by McEwan throughout the novel calls not only for our understanding for and familiarity with Henry’s feelings, but also for our detachment from and questioning of them. Our possible fondness of Henry is only the effect of our identification with his restless urge for self-justification and hypothesis-testing (he is characterised in the novel as "an habitual observer of his own moods," prone to musings about his mental processes), and not of our endorsement of his mindset. If his free-associative reflections strike a chord with us, it is because they lay bare a human being haunted by the impulse of justifying his life. If McEwan has chosen Perowne as a focaliser-protagonist for his novel, it is not out of appreciation for his ways, but to expose the human beings’ habit of telling self-persuasive stories about their lives that account for the people they have come to be.

Set in central London, the novel is tied into the British reality, though it makes a claim to cosmopolitanism from the outset by drawing on a passage from Saul Bellow’s Herzog which acts as its epigraph. In the passage, Bellow’s protagonist raises the universal question of "what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanisation. After the late failure of radical hopes." As Hezog concludes, it means living "in a society that was no community and devalued the person," "made the self negligible," and "permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities." It also means becoming more liberal, and benefiting from "the beautiful supermachinery" of scientific breakthroughs. But above all, it means assuming responsibility for being "a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest." The burden of these rights and responsibilities subjugates both Bellow’s and McEwan’s protagonists. Herzog has frequent visions of being crushed and is anguished "[b]ecause he let the entire world press upon him." Likewise, Henry Perowne is distressed by the persistent infringement of public events upon private life, and sceptical about the possibility "to enjoy an hour’s recreation without this invasion, this infection from the public domain." Yet, as Saturday evinces, cutting oneself off from the world is both unwise and hazardous.

Confronted by the chaos of the external world, Perowne, like Herzog, moves towards unburdening himself. He takes refuge in nostalgia for earlier, simpler times, when people could indulge in an attitude of credulity:

How restful it must once have been, in another age, to be prosperous and believe that an all-knowing supernatural force had allotted people to their stations in life. And not see how the belief served your own prosperity−a form of anosognosia, a useful psychiatric term for a lack of awareness of one’s own condition. Now we think we do see, how do things stand? After the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century, after so much vile behaviour, so many deaths, a queasy agnosticism has settled around these matters of justice and redistributed wealth.

He also seeks shelter in the small, simple, private pleasures of life: in a game of squash with his co-worker; in music−Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Coltrane, and Miles Davis, artists to whom he attributes "a ruthless, nearly inhuman element of self-enclosed perfection"; in the works of Rothko, Parker, Hodgkin, and Einstein, betraying his penchant for the abstract; in cooking his favourite recipe of fish stew; in the "biological hyperspace"of love-making with his wife; in his son Theo’s playing his latest song; in performing neurosurgery, which gives him "the pleasure of knowing precisely what he’s doing" and allows him to live in a "pure present," in "a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time"; in Darwin’s Origin of Species. He is not totally devoid of aesthetic sense, but his preferences reveal his taste for perfection, harmony, faultless mechanisms (such as the brain), for attaining "a coherent world, everything fitting at last."

While running his errands around London in his comfortable cream-upholstered silver Mercedes S 500 ("a sensuous part of what he regards as his overgenerous share of the world’s goods"), "shamelessly [...] enjoy[ing] the city from inside [...] where the air is filtered and hi-fi music confers pathos on the humblest details," secluding himself within a bubble of unreality and blocking whatever is not desired out of his world picture, he nevertheless seeks his moral compass by making an effort to deal with the complexity of living in a modern city, but fails to reach a truly empathic understanding of the people around him, his endeavour being partly hindered by his lack of appreciation of artistic genius and his tendency to understand other people through neurological knowledge and rational observation rather than imaginative compassion.

Theo, his more artistic son, is much more perceptive and can intuit the threat in his father’s encounter with Baxter (a street tough whom Perowne diagnoses as suffering from the neurodegenerative disease−Huntington’s chorea, and with whom he has a hostile confrontation because of a minor car accident that occurs while he is driving to meet a colleague for their weekly squash match). He reminds his father: "You humiliated him. You should watch that. […] These street guys can be proud."

His daughter Daisy, an aspiring poet, does not keep secret her belief that he is "a coarse, unredeemable materialist [...] lack[ing] an imagination." She does her best to refine his literary understanding by recommending classic novels like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary to him, but literature, in Perowne’s opinion, possesses only a referential function, and Daisy’s reading lists do nothing more than convince him that "fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling and hit-and-miss to inspire uncomplicated wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved," lacking the purity and abstraction of music, painting, and science. He relegates fiction writing to the field of fantasising, regarding it as merely an undertaking through which "a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages−bottled like homemade chutney."

Against the study of literature, he pits his rationalist outlook of life, and what he believes to be the supremacy of scientific discovery. His explanation is that "[a] man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain–consciousness, no less… [H]e knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs." To his mind, science is the grand narrative that maintains stability; therefore, he relies on his scientific knowledge to make sense of the world out of its chaos in an attempt to alleviate his anxiety, but his scientific reasoning narrows his perspective and makes him susceptible to a deficit of empathy. Noticing from the window two teenage girls quarrelling in the square, he can only read the scene from a medical viewpoint, describing one of them as having "amphetamine-driven formication" or "exogenous opioid-induced histamine reaction."

His profession as a neurosurgeon serves as a metaphor for a world suffering from a terminal disease which needs curing. McEwan’s accurate descriptions of Perowne’s consummate skill in neurosurgery evoke the power that science has to explain, relieve, and cure serious maladies. Surgery can even have unexpected powers as it facilitated his encounter with his wife Rosalind when he was a young intern. Yet science cannot secure total success: his mother suffers from vascular dementia which gradually degenerates her mental faculties, and Baxter’s Huntington’s disease is a neurological condition that is only granted a short remission through surgery. Science does not hold all the answers, and it inevitably comes into conflict with other ‘truths,’ such as those valued by art and religion.

Nonetheless, Perowne debunks religious faith as being, like literature, merely "a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your need, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance." He is a "professional reductionist" who believes that bad luck is stencilled in "invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules," and that no social justice can make amends for misery. His feelings about politics and ethics are ambivalent: reflecting on the march against the 2003 invasion of Iraq upon which he comes across on the street during his errands in the city and from which he chooses to turn away, he becomes aware of his inability to "feel, as the marchers themselves probably can, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment." Daisy intuits his double standard, blaming her father of equivocation: "You’re saying let the war go ahead, and in five years if it works out you’re for it, and if doesn’t, you’re not responsible." His hesitations are those of a cultivated man who is aware of the risks of both action and non-involvement. He is worried about the fate of Iraqis through his friendship with a former patient, an exiled Iraqi professor, and also takes seriously his children’s concerns about the war, but, as Andrew Foley points out in his critical essay, in spite of his "concern about the state of the world," Perowne remains dissociated from the dangers and tribulations of contemporary reality, as if he lacked "a genuine sense of imaginative empathy for those less fortunate than himself."

Safe within the walls of his comfortable apartment in Fitzrovia, he feels insulated from the violence that suffuses the world beyond his window. He looks down on the square with god-like detachment, noting with surgical precision the anxieties of the people who "often drift into the square to act out their dramas." From this vantage point, he believes that he can shield himself and his family from such traumatic incidents as those of 9/11, which he perceives as external. He is distrustful of the young academics from Daisy’s college who "like to dramatise modern life as a sequence of calamities," for whom, he argues, "happiness is a harder nut to crack," as they find "the idea of progress old-fashioned and ridiculous," and prefers to celebrate the evident advance in the lives of the greater number of people:

The street is fine, and the city, grand achievement of the living and all the dead who’ve ever lived here, is fine too, and robust. It won’t easily allow itself to be destroyed. It’s too good to let go. Life in it has steadily improved over the centuries for most people, despite the junkies and beggars now. The air is better, and the salmon are leaping in the Thames, and otters are returning. At every level, material, medical, intellectual, sensual, for most people it has improved.

Nevertheless, despite his contentment with his privileged upper middle class life and confidence in scientific progress, Henry Perowne’s experiences a state of anxiety, fuelled, on the one hand, by his disengagement with the fates of other people, and, on the other, by living in a world replete with incidents of violence, his false sense of security being shaken as soon as he is out on the streets: "He feels culpable somehow, but helpless too. These are contradictory terms, but not quite, and it’s the degree of their overlap, their manner of expressing the same thing from different angles, which he needs to comprehend. Culpable in his helplessness. Helplessly culpable."

His anxiety parallels a general, collective one, manifested through the close focus on London, which, in spite of its apparent robustness and glitter, is portrayed as a vulnerable, fear-ridden city, under the constant menace of terrorist attacks (thus anticipating the London bombings that took place in July 2005, only a couple of months after the novel’s release). This latent violence threatens to destabilise the order of Perowne’s comfortable life, which is exposed as precarious, and throw him out of his almost complacent contentment.

When he eventually realises that the fiery object he sees in the sky is, in fact, the wing of an airplane, Perowne is horrified, the scene evoking images of large-scale catastrophes, as he starts to imagine details of the victims’ last moments on board, "the screaming in the cabin partly muffled by that deadening acoustic, the fumbling in bags for phones and last words, the airline staff in their terror clinging to remembered fragments of procedure." The plane incident reminds him of Schrödinger’s Cat, which, "hidden from view in a covered box, is either still alive, or has just been killed by a randomly activated hammer hitting a vial of poison. Until the observer lifts the cover from the box, both possibilities, alive cat and dead cat, exist side by side, in parallel universes, equally real"; nevertheless, he dismisses the experiment as just "another example of a problem of reference," and rather cynically concludes that "whatever the passengers’ destination, whether they are frightened and safe, or dead, they will have arrived by now."

Theo manages to control his anxiety about world affairs by embracing the philosophy of ‘small thinking,’ concentrating on the immediate pleasures of having a new girlfriend, makin