The Moment of History and the History of the Moment: Ian McEwan's on Chesil Beach
2011; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoAccustomed to directing our attention to long-ranging consequences of choices, we understand Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs not only may have rescued United States from total economic collapse but also preserved capitalism and forestalled both fascism and radical socialism. Just as significant are conscious decisions not to act, as future may come to regard our refusal to take bold steps to combat global warming until decades after problem had been recognized. Occasionally novelists, considered since genre arose as historians of a kind, also illuminate how an impulsive decision, or in some eases a decision not to act, can dramatically determine a character's future. And as readers are brought imaginatively into empathy with that character we may come away with some sense of how our futures can be radically changed, rarely for better and most often for worse, by decisions we make. McEwan is just such a novelist-historian. This is not to say he earl be classified as an novelist, since that term is usually reserved for authors who write novels based in earlier times. It is to say that McEwan's interest in representing a particular moment in history and history of moment has had an especially strong claim on his consciousness in past dozen years or so as his fiction has moved away from writing that earned him nickname Ian Macabre. That McEwan is particularly evident in stories of First Love, Last Bites (1975), such as Solid Geometry, in which a man apparently kills his wife after she smashes jar in which he keeps a pickled penis. Recently McEwan has focused on narratives in which impulse of moment can chart course of a life. Although my focus will be recent novel On Chesil Beach, it might be useful to look even briefly at its predecessors and note that emphasizing long-range consequences of decisions is nothing new in his writing. Enduring Love (1997), for example, is powerfully grounded in the moment of history. A picnic, planned by a science writer to propose marriage, is interrupted by his attempt to rescue a boy in hot-air balloon, broken free of its moorings; rescue fails, but a fellow rescuer fancies himself in love with writer and stalks him until his life is almost destroyed. In Amsterdam (1998), two friends impulsively agree to rescue each other from an agonizing death in future, but each resorts to euthanasia, when they become enemies. The first long section of Atonement (2001) ends with viewpoint-character Robbie Tanner facing a long prison term for a rape he did not commit, his only crime being his impetuous decision to ask young sister of Cecilia, woman he loves, to deliver what turns out to be an earlier, rejected draft of a letter in which he shares with Cecilia his fantasy of cunnilungus (80). Atonement's second section is set in 1940 retreat of British forces to Dunkirk, where Robbie will die of blood poisoning; later that year, Cecilia will die in bombing of London. Saturday (2005) is set on a single day on which an eminent London neurosurgeon's encounter with a gang of thugs precipitates a home invasion with threats of injury and death, in midst of a family celebration. Again and again, McEwan shows how decision of a moment can determine future, and in his novel On Chesil Beach he further narrows focus to a man's decision to do nothing, locking himself and his new wife out of a future they might have shared. The opening lines of On Chesil Beach announce its sense of an historical moment, wedding night of Edward and Florence in July of 1962: They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy (3). The operative term is time, for if they had met and married a few years later, disaster might have been averted. …
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