Ian McEwan and the Aftermath of the Enlightenment

Abstract

One of the most characteristic marks of Ian McEwan’s work is the critique of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and of modernity. The gradual modification of his attitude toward this ambitious project and its aftermath coming from the unshakable faith in reason and knowledge is explicitly embodied in his two short-story collections and thirteen novels. Accordingly, dividing his work into three phases to examine how his thought undergoes a dramatic transformation from accusation and condemnation of the unfulfilled promise of the Enlightenment in his early stories, going through more holistic and historical understanding of modernity in his middle-period writing, eventually to his valiant attempt to salvage the uncompleted project of the Enlightenment in his most recent novels, is what this dissertation sets out to explore in three chapters. McEwan’s first four books, First Love, Last Rites, In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, and The Comfort of Strangers, whose stories are characterized by the gruesome accounts of desperate and perverted lives, are highly representative of his counter-Enlightenment viewpoint. McEwan not only denies the ideals of social progress on account of freedom and knowledge, overturns the Kantian connection between morality and rationality, but also demolishes all the boundaries that are established to define humans as solely rational and moral beings. In this world created and illustrated in his early work, the promising picture of better future are ruthlessly swept away by the portraits of dilapidated industrialization, amoral aloofness and violence, and irrational perversion. However, the following five novels, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, which help him remove the sobriquet of “Ian Macabre” originating from his early writing career, expand his horizon and widen the scope of his stories to give a more comprehensive diagnosis of modernity. His indignant denial of social, moral, and rational progress gives way to the in-depth analyses of the problems that plague the modern society. The rampant bureaucracy, selfishness and insensitivity in the name of modern liberal individualism, and the “iron cage” of rationality choking the breath out of people are pinpointed in his novels to hold up a true mirror to the world we are living in. When it comes to the novels written in the new millennium, Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach, Solar, Sweet Tooth, and The Children Act, another change of his attitude toward the Enlightenment is too obvious to ignore, that is, his ambitious attempt to salvage this unfinished project. McEwan uses the theories of Michel Foucault and Nietzsche to give out his prescription to realize the true maturity and progress promised by the Enlightenment thinkers. The Amor Fati, the strength and determination to love one’s fate, no matter what vicissitudes he might have to bear, literature in place of religion to hand out hope to the hopelessness, and intellectual conscience to see through the misleading appearance to elevate ourselves to the height of “Overman”, are what characterize and distinguish those novels from the stories of previous phases. This transformation of attitude toward the Enlightenment happening in McEwan’ stories is what this dissertation tries to sufficiently reveal and prove using various ideas and theories of the great minds, which may shed light on a more precise and critical understanding of the Enlightenment and modernity.