By Jon Cogburn
The main gimmick in Ian McEwan's newest novel Nutshell is that the narrator is a fetus who has learned about the world from his mother's penchant for falling asleep to talk radio. If the book were written by an American author the point of the gimmick would be to humorously illustrate the manner in which the epistemic bubble of talk radio damages people. But McEwan's narrator's mother lives in London and is mostly listening to BBC World Service, so the narrator is preternaturally informed about current events, history, and the way ordinary people live their lives. The narrator is also able to hear nearby conversations, sense what his mother is feeling, and enjoy the food and wine that she imbibes. Since one of the shows she falls asleep to involves wine and since her boyfriend drinks good wine, the fetus narrator is a convincing oenephile to boot.
The main conflict involves his mother's and uncle's plot to murder his father so they can sell the decaying family mansion, which his father isn't living in due to his parents separation. His father is a poet and publisher and his uncle is comicly pedestrian real estate agent. Some of the best writing in the book involves the uncle's overwhelming banality, the way he constantly whistles little bits of music recycled through advertisements, the way he repeats himself and ends sentences with the word "but," the fact that the only coherent thoughts he seems to express concern things such as what clothing to wear. This at least initially contrasts with his sad sack and somewhat saintly father reciting poetry in attempts to win his mother back.
The narrator is trying to figure out who the villains are and what he might do to prevent the murder or avenge his father if the murder goes through. As with McEwan's best works, there are some extraordinarily executed plot twists that would constitute spoilers were I to share them. In any case, it's a wonderful read. The narrative conceit gives you something like a more humane version of Kurt Vonnegut's Martian anthropologist, with a smidgeon of the outsiderism of Adrian Mole and wisdom of Ishmael thrown in. But the novel does suffer from a pretty severe flaw, one that I think is of significant aesthetic and philosophical interest.
The big problem with the book is that when the narrator engages in his penchant for worrying about the state of the world he is going to be born into the judgements are (for the narrator) themselves uncharacteristically banal. This is clearly not an attempt by McEwan to find commonality with the banal uncle. The writing just rings false in these passages. Not necessarily empirically false, as the judgments are things that reasonable people can disagree about, but rather out of character. The narrator sometimes makes lists of pros and cons. With respect to being born now, the pros include painless dentistry and (assuming, as the author does, that Steven Pinker is correct) the decline of murder worldwide. The cons include global warming and a set of seemingly intractable cultural, religious, and political conflicts. But in doing the latter, McEwan slips sometimes and has his narrator reveal that he doesn't think these disagreements are so intractable after all. For example:
More narrative tension in subplots of local interest: Will the Middle East remain in frenzy, will it empty into Europe and alter it for good? Might Islam dip a feverish extremity in the cooling pond of reformation? Might Israel concede an inch or two of desert to those it displaced? Europa's secular dreams of union may dissolve before the old hatreds, small-scale nationalism, financial disaster, discord. Or she might hold her course. I need to know. Will the USA decline quietly? Unlikely. Will China grow a conscience, will Russia? Will global finance and corporations? (p. 129)
In the space of a blog post, I can't convey how jarring this is. Readers of McEwan will get a sense of it if they imagine taking paragraphs from a Thomas Friedman editorial and splicing it randomly into Atonement. What you get here is that, like all of us in our unguarded moments, McEwan himself thinks that all of these issues have pretty simple Friedmanesque solutions (Islamic Reformation! Chinese democracy! Two State Solution! The Power of Techmology! etc. etc. etc.) and couldn't resist putting it into the voice of his oracular narrator. But if McEwan were to write a novel thematizing any of these things he would get to their tragic hearts, not dole out a set of Friedmanesque directives to those he takes to be the bad guys.
I think at some level he's aware that he's done this, as the narrator later envisions becoming an intellectual and not being so opinionated. But then he ends these musings with this:
I'll feel, therefore I'll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I'll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only ture possession, my access to the only truth. The world must love, nourish and protect it as I do. If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I'll press my face into the vice chancellor's lapels and weep. then demand his resignation. (145)
Once again he engages in the very thing he was trying to take back, here by way of what passes for humor with the National Review set, not what passes for worldly wisdom at the New York Times. Those Millennials! Ha! Again, if McEwan were writing a novel about millennials it would be full of understanding for everyone involved. But here he can't resist using his narrator to push an unreflective grudge.
I can think of two other cases in fiction where this has happened as clearly and to such detrimental effect. Ann Rice (imho) officially jumped the shark (I think it's in Memnoch the Devil, but might be misremembering) when she had a jaded thousand year old vampire go into swoony panegyrics about Gary Oldman's movie portrayal of Beethoven. It was clear that Rice really, really loved the movie but utterly implausible that her character would share the enthusiasm to that extent. Her vampire novels never recovered. And Jack Kerouac very nearly ruins Big Sur, his only novel that is nearly as good as On the Road (for my defense of that book from a particularly destructive type of criticism, please read THIS), by having the narrator conclude at the end that his problem all along was that he was drinking sweet California wine and from now on will only stick to the dry stuff. It just almost works as a portrayal of a deluded fool, but doesn't really. Through the overwhelming majority of the bookK erouac is brutally honest about displaying how awful alcoholism is, and then in the very end, after the delirium tremens, the dead fish, the ruined relationships, he intrudes on his narrator and just uses him to enact some of that very awfulness. As with Rice and McEwan, he's can't help putting his own goofy unreflective opinions (My Problem All Along Has Been Sweet Wine!) in the mouth of a narrator who in his to that point astonishingly well drawn fictional world was not a mouthpiece for goofy unreflective opinions.
I think there's an interesting philosophy of religion issue here as well. Religious people (when we're doing it right at least) fervently pray to be an instrument of God's loving-kindness and understanding. But this involves a radical transformation from our own depravity. Is this analogous to the kind of bad authorial intrusion I've been considering here? Is such a thing plausible? Or is God constrained to guide the world such that the true stories we tell about it and our place in it make for good novels? I actually think God might be so constrained because (pace the unfortunate focus on fictional truth in both aesthetics and metaphysical fictionalism) the importance of fiction is that it is one of the primary ways that we get knowledge about the actual world. If fictions are gedankenexperiments, then true fictions are the ones where the actual world could plausibly evolve the way the fictional world does in the novel, were the actual world set up that way (Mark Ohm, Mark Silcox, and I have developed this view in two papers: Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Sense Making after Speculative Realism, and Against Brain in a Vatism).* I think that authorial intrusion is something well worth thinking about both with respect to how we learn actual truths from fictional texts and with respect to God's possible intervention in the actual world.
[*Brief note. I haven't really considered this before, but this morning it seems to me that David Chalmers' work on possible worlds, the a priori, and two dimensionalism is in part so important because it shows how David Lewis' account of fictional truth in terms of possible worlds lends itself to a good account of how we get actual truth from fictional texts. The actual truth we get from fictional texts concerns how the actual world would evolve were it set up in the manner of the fiction. Chalmers' refinements of Lewisian views on the a priori if correct provide a unified account addressing the semantic problem of fiction (the main problem discussed in the literature) and the epistemic problem of how we get actual truth from fictional texts. This is no small achievement. Even those of us who reject the underlying metaphysics of possible worlds need to realize that Chalmers/Lewis set the success conditions for a theory of fiction. I would be very interested if the Waltonian approach of fiction as a game of make believe answers both the semantic and epistemic challenges. One could read the literature in metaphysical fictionalism coming out of Waltonia in terms of the extent to which the Lewis/Chalmers success condition has been met. My long term hope is that the account of fiction as a gedankenexperiment weds naturally to a proof theoretic semantics for modal discourse. Contra Robert Brandom's approach, I think that the trick is to make sense of what the eigenvariables signify in properly normalizable natural deduction formulations of modal systems. See this old newapps post of mine on this.]
Excellent thoughts. I think this kind of thing is sort of common in bad writing. I think I hated Stranger in a Strange Land partly for this sort of move. Anyway, if at all possible there is a principle of charity that says we must not assume the author is doing this unless it is too obvious to ignore. I think I read American Pastoral differently than most people I talked to because I didn’t assume Roth was making the characters or the whole situation a mouthpiece, but he might be (although still more successfully, artistically, than most I think).
As for the God analogy i’m not sure I get it, Would this mean all prophets are false?
Ooh, Heinlein’s a really good example. I remember the jarring bit in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where one of the characters gives a little speech about a Randian outpost on the moon. He just has to plunk down this utterly implausible little excrescence and then double down by having the character make sure and tell us that it is not in fact implausible. I really loved Stranger in a Strange Land in High School, but my impression is that I would find its sexual politics ridiculous were I to reread it now. I remember it as that kind of hippy drippy “if we al just got past our hangups man, this could be beautiful” type thing that’s really just adolescent men wanting women to be cooler with having sex with them with no attachments, carrying with it all of the awful dishonesty about how easy it would be for human beings to just get over being destructively jealous and how sexual norms of fidelity (for all of the problems) can’t be wholly chucked, because among other things (such as sorting out the fact that men should help raise children) they keep us from one another’s throats. Some of the best post Altamount fiction about the 1960s, such as TC Boyle’s Drop City and some of the stories in Ken Kesey’s Demon Box, explore these themes adroitly without being didactic in the sense of an awful (and equally if not more dishonest than Heinlein) William Bennett lecture.
Ayn Rand’s novels (which I read the same time I was reading Heinlein) have to be at the top of this kind of dishonesty. With the possible exception of We the Living, every one of them is nothing but authorial intrusion into the life of her characters. The poor creatures are trying to go about their lives, but she puts in completely implausible facts such as someone building a railroad with only private equity (the person she thought did this, really didn’t; in addition to the public goodies he received, he bought at a massive discount distressed railroads that had already been built on the public dime). And she makes them give these horrible speeches that wouldn’t be out of place in a meeting of rural Bolsheviks, where the big guy from Saint Petersburg is harranguing them about how they aren’t stealing enough grain from the kulaks. And she imposes her own warped sexual norms on the characters and presents them as normative for the rest of us. And the Paul Ryanesque dualism of moocher/takers versus the makers involves falsifying just about everything distinctive of humanity and our culture.
I end up feeling sorry for the characters in Rand’s novels. What a drag to be written that way. Most of their lives are lived off the page, but this godlike being keeps interjecting herself and making them do horrible things.
As far as the religious conceit I was just trying to play with the trope that God is the author of creation and we are characters in the story she’s writing. Is God constrained to write a plausible story? In one sense, yes by definition, because (going along with the conceit) the actual world is the measure by which we determine if something is plausible, and the actual world is God’s story. But this isn’t quite right because implausible things do actually happen. This very fact at least renders sensible the idea of a non-trivial plausibility condition on God’s novel writing.
This being said, I think it’s a pernicious and widespread philosophical error to think that the actual world resembles a text. If I’m right about this the whole conceit probably falls apart or would need to be discussed with much greater subtlety and a lot of caveats.
I haven’t read Roth’s American Pastoral yet! I found his academic novel The Human Stain (which came out I think the same year as Francine Prose’s Blue Angel) surprisingly non-didactic. If someone told you the plot you would think it was some kind of screed against political correctness, but at least to me, the shows the compassion he shows for all of his characters completely blunts any didacticism.
I think there’s a very interesting issue about whether an overly didactic novel can be honest. Assume that the moral or political points the author is trying to get across are true. Then one might argue that the novel is be true but nonetheless an aesthetic disaster. I don’t *think* this is right though. What makes a novel true or not is whether reality could plausibly evolve, were it set up the way it is in the novel. But look at how we respond to overly didactic people in real life. There’s a reason that most people don’t like academics. Our experience in front of classrooms makes us take the world in as something to be lectured to, and it’s at best a humorous part of our foibles at worst something pretty destructive. In didactic novels you often have characters that lecture one another without the natural (and sometimes beneficial) pushback that lecturers get in the real world. Or (as in McEwan’s new novel) the narrator is lecturing the reader, but we’re not supposed to react the way normal people should react to being subject to the loudest drunk at the bar. In either case it doesn’t scan.
I want to think more about prophecy as a genre and the extent to which the manner in which we learn actual truths from fictional texts apply to prophecies. I suspect that you are right that the kind of account I’m gesturing at (fictions as gedankenexperiments) won’t do justice to the role of prophetic voices. The copout would be for me to say that prophecy is not a species of fiction, but that just seems false to me. The number of atheists rightly moved by the prophetic books in the old Testament has to be legion. A success condition on a workable theory of fiction should be that it not entail that they are fools for having been so moved.