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Ian McEwan has a way of making each sentence feel more real to you than your own lived experience. More tangible than the couch you sit on, more emotionally meaningful than your last interaction. To me, this is what makes his books both affecting and important--the best of what art can do--but also, at times, deeply problematic. Because you are intertwined with his stories, woven into the fabric of not just the sensibility, but the plot itself, you are also complicit in them. And this works extremely well in books like "Saturday" and "Atonement," for example, where your life is complicated and convicted by the deep internal debates and tragedies, the national and personal heartbreaks, that plague everyday life.
But in his collection "First Love, Last Rites," you are wrapped in(to) a series of vignettes in which you are no longer a complicit participant, but a compromised voyeur. It may be, in part, the brevity of these stories that makes it harder to find the moral center (by which I do not mean some certain shared morality), but it's also the subject matter--more male-focused, for one, and suggesting that (male) sexuality is shameful, dangerous, and, frankly, creepy. The stories largely focus on men/boys who can only express themselves and/or their sexual/personal awakenings (and these are coupled in these stories) in a variety of unhealthy ways--the most troubling of which are through rape, incest, and violence against women. The stories haunt you in part part because of McEwan's ever-haunting prose, but also in part because the stories they are telling are somewhat shock-value stories, stories that seem morally empty, or, in a way, surprisingly incomplete.
It matters to me, too, that the stories in which boys/men rape, assault, or kills girls/women don't seem to be problematized at all--and the girls/women themselves are largely symbolically (and in one case, literally) erased from the narrative.
***vague spoilers below***
A different story serves as a good counter-explanation of what I mean: in one story, an older, charmingly eccentric (possibly bi-polar) Aunt creates a world of silly decorum for her nephew (the point-of-view), who suffers the idiosyncrasies of his Aunt and her world, but dare not share them with his friends. But one day, when he goes to "dress" for dinner as he always must, the outfit is that of a girl, and the Aunt's outfit that of a boy/man. The nephew is confused, ashamed, angry, but compliant, and when the Aunt asks him to sit on her knee, the narrative fully expresses his discomfort and reluctance, painting a scene of an-almost-sexual-assault that does not happen (she doesn't actually cross any lines here), but that DOES happen on the emotional level. It does this while never fully victimizing the nephew or demonizing the Aunt. It's a delicate balance, and a powerful stroke of storytelling.
The stories where a girl is raped by her brother, or where a girl is first assaulted and then (sort of accidentally) murdered by a neighbor boy, or where a nagging wife is folded into non-existence by her theorizing husband, these, on the other hand, lack the nuance in which both characters get to be real, or in which there is moral complication about what is being done TO women and girls, or that they are anything more than the canvasses on which sexual shame and make fantasy get played.
Like all his work I have read, his prose are masterful. Over what they have mastery, however, is the central issue here for me and what that ethical obligation is to the characters the author draws into life, or, in the case of the women/girls, into half-life. One must not paint morality tales to address issues of sex, violence, rape, and incest, but when the complications of these actions are only seen as they affect (or don't) the male psyche, the stories themselves (as opposed to the plot) become complicit in a culture of the general erasure of women, an erasure that, of course, leads to violence, rape, and incest against women. We're all complicit in that culture in our lived lives; I look to fiction, particularly that of someone as effective as McEwen, to consider that, complicate it, question it, reveal something about it, say *something* about it... not just to participate in it.
But in his collection "First Love, Last Rites," you are wrapped in(to) a series of vignettes in which you are no longer a complicit participant, but a compromised voyeur. It may be, in part, the brevity of these stories that makes it harder to find the moral center (by which I do not mean some certain shared morality), but it's also the subject matter--more male-focused, for one, and suggesting that (male) sexuality is shameful, dangerous, and, frankly, creepy. The stories largely focus on men/boys who can only express themselves and/or their sexual/personal awakenings (and these are coupled in these stories) in a variety of unhealthy ways--the most troubling of which are through rape, incest, and violence against women. The stories haunt you in part part because of McEwan's ever-haunting prose, but also in part because the stories they are telling are somewhat shock-value stories, stories that seem morally empty, or, in a way, surprisingly incomplete.
It matters to me, too, that the stories in which boys/men rape, assault, or kills girls/women don't seem to be problematized at all--and the girls/women themselves are largely symbolically (and in one case, literally) erased from the narrative.
***vague spoilers below***
A different story serves as a good counter-explanation of what I mean: in one story, an older, charmingly eccentric (possibly bi-polar) Aunt creates a world of silly decorum for her nephew (the point-of-view), who suffers the idiosyncrasies of his Aunt and her world, but dare not share them with his friends. But one day, when he goes to "dress" for dinner as he always must, the outfit is that of a girl, and the Aunt's outfit that of a boy/man. The nephew is confused, ashamed, angry, but compliant, and when the Aunt asks him to sit on her knee, the narrative fully expresses his discomfort and reluctance, painting a scene of an-almost-sexual-assault that does not happen (she doesn't actually cross any lines here), but that DOES happen on the emotional level. It does this while never fully victimizing the nephew or demonizing the Aunt. It's a delicate balance, and a powerful stroke of storytelling.
The stories where a girl is raped by her brother, or where a girl is first assaulted and then (sort of accidentally) murdered by a neighbor boy, or where a nagging wife is folded into non-existence by her theorizing husband, these, on the other hand, lack the nuance in which both characters get to be real, or in which there is moral complication about what is being done TO women and girls, or that they are anything more than the canvasses on which sexual shame and make fantasy get played.
Like all his work I have read, his prose are masterful. Over what they have mastery, however, is the central issue here for me and what that ethical obligation is to the characters the author draws into life, or, in the case of the women/girls, into half-life. One must not paint morality tales to address issues of sex, violence, rape, and incest, but when the complications of these actions are only seen as they affect (or don't) the male psyche, the stories themselves (as opposed to the plot) become complicit in a culture of the general erasure of women, an erasure that, of course, leads to violence, rape, and incest against women. We're all complicit in that culture in our lived lives; I look to fiction, particularly that of someone as effective as McEwen, to consider that, complicate it, question it, reveal something about it, say *something* about it... not just to participate in it.
