A Study of Ian McEwan’s Novels and Their Ethical Values

Ian McEwan holds an outstanding place in contemporary literature. As a prestigious British novelist, he is in the foreground of critical attention. Dominic Head points out that “McEwan is at the forefront of a group of novelists who reinvigorated the ethical function of the novel, in ways that embody a deep response to the historical pressures of the time” (Head 1). Critics have reached a consensus that Ian McEwan, who is intent on dealing with family and social relationships, emphasizes the moral values of literature. Lynn Wells holds that “While McEwan tries to avoid prescriptive moralism in his novels, he has definite attitude toward the relation between ethics and fiction” (30). Numerous articles and books are published across the world to investigate the ethical vigor of Ian McEwan in his novels and short stories. Among the notable critical achievements, Biwu Shang’s A Study of Ian McEwan’s Novels and Their Ethical Values is an excellent model of recent studies on the ethics of the narratives in Ian McEwan’s novels.Biwu Shang is a leading narratologist in China and a well-established scholar with international fame. A Study of Ian McEwan’s Novels and Their Ethical Values is his great endeavor to put theories of ethical literary criticism into practice and blaze a new trail in the ethical study of Ian McEwan’s novels. The journal of Style is a good academic platform for the discussion of ethical criticism. It is demonstrated by a thematic cluster of papers published in the summer of 1998, among which we can find Marshall W. Gregory’s “Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters” and Wayne Booth’s “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple.” As a strong current in China, ethical literary criticism has attracted more and more attention over the past two decades. As early as 2015, William Baker and Biwu Shang already claimed, “In the past few years, ethical literary criticism has become one of the most vibrant and productive critical theories in China. It has received increasing recognition from eminent scholars including Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, Geoff Hall, James Phelan, Peter Hajdu and others” (Baker and Shang 15). Numerous papers are published, and many conferences are held to push forward the frontiers of the study of ethical literary criticism. Special issues or columns are organized by journals like Arcadia, Foreign Literature Studies, Forum for World Literature Studies, and Kritika Kultura. Tian Junwu justifies the rise of ethical literary criticism in China in this way: “The sudden emergence of ethical literary criticism in the twenty-first-century Chinese critical field is said to have emanated from Chinese critics’ eagerness to cure their ‘theory aphasia’ and the Western ‘ethical turn’ promoted by Wayne C. Booth” (Tian 402). In this sense, A Study of Ian McEwan’s Novels and Their Ethical Values is also a fruitful endeavor by a Chinese scholar. Funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China, this book is Biwu Shang’s latest academic accomplishment. Concentrating on the ethical values of Ian McEwan, he tries to approach Ian McEwan’s twelve works from the perspective of ethical literary criticism.Apart from a 35-page-long introduction, a substantial conclusion, and a postscript, this monograph consists of twelve chapters, each of which is dedicated to the study of one of McEwan’s works. In the introduction to this book, Biwu Shang touches upon four important issues, including the biography and chronology of Ian McEwan, the recent developments in the study of McEwan’s novels, the translation and research of Ian McEwan’s works in China, and the methodology and significance of this book. Biwu Shang gives a succinct but comprehensive summary of recent developments in the study of McEwan’s novels. He focuses on the critical advancements over the past 50 years in the fields of cognitive science, narratology, postmodernism, new historicism, biography criticism, and ecocriticism. This section traces the rise of the literary reputation of McEwan and some of the critical controversies in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1980s witnessed the booming of literary criticism, whereas the first decade of the twenty-first century entered a golden age of diversified trends of criticism. In the year 2008, The Times featured McEwan as one of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” In the second decade of the twenty-first century, four main critical trends are clearly visible: political criticism, medium criticism, ethical criticism, and affect researches (15). Biwu Shang argues that the following six dimensions still need to be explored: corpus study, ecocriticism, feminist study, biographical criticism, the history of criticism of the study of McEwan’s novels, transnationalism, and world literature.The first three chapters of this book deal separately with three short stories in Ian McEwan’s first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975). Cohering around the sensational themes of incest, sexual abuse, murder, and feminism, First Love, Last Rites sets, in an interesting and predictive way, a basic tone for McEwan’s writing career (6). Chapter 1, “Anecdotes of Virginity in the Fleshly Grail in ‘Homemade,’” looks at the beginning of Ian McEwan’s writing career, focusing on the short story “Homemade” (1972), which forms the leading story in First Love, Last Rites. It adopts the concepts of ethical literary criticism like “ethical identity,” “ethical judgment,” and “ethical consciousness” to reveal the ethical considerations hidden under the surface of this short story: the loss of innocence and virginity on the part of “I,” the narrator of this story, which reflects the perplexity, trouble, and confusion of adolescents and draws attention to the potential problems of moral decline and ethical deficiency (38). This chapter employs concepts like “outsider,” “irrationality,” and “Sphinx factor” to shed new light on elaborations of the ethical dimensions of this short story.Chapters 2 and 3, entitled separately “‘Butterflies’: the Art of Unease” and “‘Solid Geometry’: the Mystery of M’s Disappearance,” continue to present insights into the innate moral judgments of the short stories in First Love, Last Rites. Taking “Butterflies” as a fable of moral failures, Biwu Shang analyzes and deconstructs the “ethical knots” in the text, which are formed with ethical environment, ethical choice, ethical identity, and ethical consciousness (58). He points out that there is a clear ethical line of pedophilia and murder in the story of “Butterflies.” In the theoretical horizon of ethical literary criticism, the ethical lines are threaded by ethical knots. “Ethical knots are the main manifestations of contradictions and conflicts in the structure of literary works. Ethical knots consist of ethical predicaments, revealing the basic ethical issues of literary works” (Nie 220). In the textual world of “Butterflies,” we can find the traces of amoral choice, alienation of ethical identities, and the contradictory existence of life as a game. In the following chapter, “‘Solid Geometry:’ the Mystery M’s Disappearance,” unnatural narratology, a specific theoretical perspective of postclassical narratology, is adopted to investigate Ian McEwan’s reflections on the ethics of science and human nature. Under the surface of the mysterious disappearance of M and the complicated narrative layers of the described events, there lies the narrative truth of a story that waits for inquiry and interpretation. Unnatural narratology is employed as a sharp analytical tool to analyze the hermeneutic indeterminacy in ethical dimensions.Chapter 4, “The Cement Garden: The Unbearable Lightness of Growth,” is devoted to studying McEwan’s first novel from the perspective of ethical literary criticism. Shang argues that this novel, by representing a series of sensational events like patricide, burial of the mother, and incest, reveals the difficult situations of moral judgment, confirmation of identity, and ethical choice in the process of children’s growth and maturity. David Malcolm has noticed that The Cement Garden pays special attention to psychological tensions and “charts family relationships and tensions: between father and son, between mother and children, and among siblings” (Malcolm 51). In this chapter, Biwu Shang moves forward to the perspective of ethical literary criticism and explores the relationship of the identity between individuals and the social ethical environment, reexamines the combination and deviations of the “Sphinx factors,” and investigates the disjointed situations of ethical identities. Ethical literary criticism holds that a “Sphinx factor” “is composed of the human factor and the animal factor. The human factor refers to ethical consciousness traditionally located in the human head, a result of humanity’s natural selection in the evolution from savagery to civilization; while the animal factor suggests human beings’ animal instinct, mainly under the influence of primitive desires” (Nie 29). The notion of “Sphinx factors” is mentioned repeatedly as an important tool to explain the paradoxical and inevitable coexistence of good and evil in human beings.Chapter 5, “Atonement: Narrative Focalization and the Ethical Responsibility of the Novelist,” takes a strictly narratological approach to address the classical issue of truth and fictionality. McEwan’s novel is self-conscious of the function of the novel, which, in the mind of Biwu Shang, is highly relevant to the motif of ethical literary criticism, which “holds that literature, originating from ethics, is an ethical expression in specific historical times. The value of literature lies in the function of moral teaching” (Nie 217). This section goes on to discuss how the embedded structures of the manuscript of another novelist and the subsequent revision of a historian enable Atonement to achieve a specific manner of focalization. In this way, McEwan succeeds in emphasizing that the major duty of a novelist is, instead of the factual details of history, to reveal the ethical and moral truth of the society (115).Chapter 6, “Saturday: The Conflicts and Integration of ‘Two Cultures,’” revisits C. P. Snow’s famous proposition about the split of two cultures in an experimental sense. It holds that on Saturday McEwan faces the seeming exclusiveness of two cultures and explores the possibility of their complementarity. Going beyond the obvious but labeled category of a “9/11” novel, this chapter makes efforts to reevaluate and transcend the clear distinction between a mundane daily life and a great historical moment. Whereas this chapter deals with the conflicts and integration of the sciences and humanities in Saturday, the next chapter is entitled “Sweet Tooth: The Ethics and Emotions of Forgiveness” and treats the connections between ethics and emotions in textual, intertextual, and contextual worlds. Both Saturday and Sweet Tooth share a similar pattern of ending by adopting a style of meta-fiction and a motif of ethics. This section argues that the key word for Sweet Tooth is forgiveness, which, endowed with ethical values and emotional elements, enables readers to see through the surface text of the political theme of a detective novel and perceive the hidden under-text (145).The Child Act was a timely literary response to the famous Ashya King case that happened in 2014. In this novel, Ian McEwan addresses a series of intensive religious, medical, and legal conflicts that are, put in a nutshell, ethical issues. With a view to approaching these conflicts from the perspective of ethical literary criticism, Chapter 8, “The Child Act: The Meaning and Protection of the Child’s Welfare,” tries to explore the difficult situations for ethical choices in family crises. It holds that the reason for Fiona Maye, a judge in the Family Division of the High Court, who protects children’s welfare in her public life and suffers from family crises in her private life, lies in her perplexity of ethical identities. After the case of Adam Henry, she achieves an ethical epiphany about her dogmatic understanding of her duty as a judge and her moral obligation as a human being. By depicting the process of Fiona Maye’s efforts, insistence, regrets, and remorse, Ian McEwan reveals the true meaning of the child’s welfare and brings warnings and ethical enlightenment to readers (182). This section is an exemplary reading of The Child Act from the perspective of ethical literary criticism.Chapter 9, “Nutshell: The Prisoner in the Ethical Predicament,” focuses on the notion of ethical predicament, which “refers to the intractable contradictions and conflicts inflicted by the ethical confusion of characters in literary works. Ethical predicaments are often caused by paradoxes of ethical choices common in literary works” (Nie 214). McEwan rewrites Hamlet in an uncanny and highly innovative way by adopting the narrative voice of an unborn child. Biwu Shang deals with the issue of discrepancy between ethical judgments and real actions. This chapter makes an ethical and rhetorical reading of Nutshell by interpreting the notion of “nutshell” in three ways: the nutshell of selfish desire, the nutshell of poetry, and the nutshell of the womb (184). Just like Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet, the selfish desires of Claude and Trudy push forward the story line of deceit and murder in Nutshell. The “Sphinx factors” drive them to lose the consciousness of ethics, whereas the dislocation of ethical identities gives rise to the ethical tragedy.Ian McEwan published his short story “My Purple Scented Novel” in the New Yorker in 2016. The central event in the story is the wrongdoing of plagiarism, which is addressed in the light of ethical literary criticism in Chapter 10. This section concentrates on the elements of Ian McEwan’s textual clues and tries to find out his narrative strategies to make “My Purple Scented Novel” a moral warning for the professional writers as well as for readers. The ups and downs of the two characters involved in the event of plagiarism reveal the discrepancy between ethical consciousness and real actions.Chapter 11, “Machines Like Me: Artificial Intelligence and the Tension of Brain Text,” adopts a creative perspective of ethical literary criticism to discuss the worries surrounding digital revolution and artificial intelligence. It analyzes digital text in the programming of a robot and its conflict with brain text which determines the mind and behavior of human beings (234). Brain text can be understood as “the memory of humans’ activity or sensory experience of the world as stored in human brain” (Nie 16). Roberta Ferrari clarifies the central theme of Machines Like Me as “By exploring the intriguing field of AI in its ethical implications, pointing to a more or less near future when our perception of ourselves and the world will be inevitably complicated, if not radically changed, McEwan offers his readers a story that compels them to wonder not only about science and technological progress, but also about their own lives” (Ferrari 267). In his book, Biwu Shang moves on to state that this novel, by taking the shape of a science fiction story, reiterates the important belief that literature should provide experiences and moral lessons for the progress of human civilization.The final chapter is entitled “Cockroach: Some Savage Laughter in the Dark.” It contends that through the unnatural narrative of a metamorphosis, Ian McEwan takes Cockroach as a political satire to express his ethical judgments on the historical event of Brexit. This section discusses the theoretical issue of identity cognition by analyzing the technique of unnatural focalization. It touches upon the phenomena of the coupling of de-narration and the unnatural mind to demonstrate the nature of “revengelism” under the cover of “reversalism.” The grotesque and uncanny metamorphosis from human being to cockroach evokes the satirizing power of Kafka’s classical work. Ian McEwan explores the new situation of the alienation of human beings in the historical context of Brexit and political strife.In the concluding part of this monograph, Biwu Shang offers a creative and enlightening summary of Ian McEwan’s works and tries to approach his writing career by taking an analogical interpretation of different situations of life: loss of ethical consciousness in adolescent years, ethical predicaments in middle age, and ethical redemption in old age (272–273). It investigates the point of departure in McEwan’s early novels, the middle field through important novels like Atonement and Saturday, and his recent novels, including My Purple Scented Novel, Machines Like Me, and The Cockroach, covering a substantial part and great variety of McEwan’s works.A Study of Ian McEwan’s Novels and Their Ethical Values resonates with Kiernan Ryan’s famous judgment of McEwan’s works: “the secret of his appeal lay in his stylish morbidity, in the elegant detachment with which he chronicled acts of sexual abuse, sadistic torment, and pure insanity” (2). This book, nevertheless, moves on to address important issues in light of ethical literary criticism, examining the ethical considerations and insinuations in the works of Ian McEwan. By analyzing the “Sphinx factors” and other ethical elements, it demonstrates the complexities of human nature in the works of McEwan.In The Novel and the New Ethics, Dorothy Hale holds that “the humanist virtues are valuable to McEwan strictly because they fulfill the novel’s ethico-literary capacity to bring other people to life as knowable fictional characters” (Hale 32). A Study of Ian McEwan’s Novels and Their Ethical Values adopts ethical literary criticism as the major theoretical perspective. In this way, this book differs from previous studies on Ian McEwan in a meaningful sense. This book aims, as Biwu Shang clarifies at the end of his “introduction,” to avoid the tendencies of “theoretical complex,” “preordained theme complex,” and “term complex,” and stresses that “literary criticism must serve for textual analysis” (35). Occasionally, it seems that there are some inconsistencies or even contradictions to common sense or widely accepted notions in modern criticism. These rational and emotional reactions are not problems with the author, instead, they are merits of his creativity. The origin of these deceiving perceptions lies in the great innovating power of his critical tools, namely ethical literary criticism. Approaching and understanding the theoretical framework and textual analysis of this book in the light of ethical literary criticism, we will find that it is theoretically consistent and practically the study of a collection of McEwan’s Biwu Shang demonstrates his great in narratology, good for textual and for ethics in a A Study of Ian McEwan’s Novels and Their Ethical Values is a valuable monograph that addresses the important issue of ethical values in McEwan’s works from the perspective of a Chinese scholar with a international