David K.
O'Hara
Mimesis and the Imaginable Other: Metafictional Narrative Ethics in the
Novels of Ian McEwan
David K. O'Hara is a writer and a recent graduate of the English Literature and
Creative Writing PhD program at Bath Spa University in the UK. His thesis, Mimesis
and the Imaginable Other: Metafictional Narrative Ethics in the Novels of Ian
McEwan examined the relationship between narrative and ethics in McEwan's work
by relating it to the philosophies of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney. More recently,
he presented a paper, From Mimesis to Ethics: The Case of Ian McEwan’s Atonement,
for the 2009 Narrating the Human Subject Conference in Oxford.
Below is an excerpt from the thesis introduction provided courtesy of the author.
© David K. O‟Hara
Excerpt is reprinted on the Ian McEwan Website
with permission of the author.
Introduction
The present study seeks to examine a peculiar style or mode of metafiction, of
which the later works of Ian McEwan can offer a useful example. That is to say, the
following will attempt to identify an unusual brand of self-conscious narrative by
focussing on two of McEwan‟s novels—namely, Black Dogs (1992) and Atonement
(2001). What makes this minority metafictional style especially unique, however, is
not only its presence in the work of one of the late twentieth century‟s pre-eminent
British novelists, but also its ethical character. For this reason, the kind of metafiction
being discussed should not be conflated with more traditionally ideological forms
which attest to their own fictionality in the name of undermining „realist‟ illusions.
Rather, it will be argued that self-conscious narrative, in the case of McEwan, is
oftentimes utilised in order to reassert an ethical complex that lies between author and
reader, text and world. The fundamental differentiation being made, then, is that
between a properly postmodernist metafiction and what might be considered a
restorative metafiction that works, in a self-justifying manner, towards an affirmation
of mimetic claims. For this latter style of metafiction, storytelling does not mark the
beginning of a free-play of signifiers or a dispersal of constituting fictions, but rather
the beginning of a dialogical and ethical relationship between texts and readers; of
stories not just being told from one to another, but by one for another.
I feel it important to stress that the following thesis seeks not to overturn
postmodernist readings of British literature—nor, for that matter, of metafictional
literature—but purely to set forth an opinion that other, less ideological modes of
metafiction exist, and that one such mode, as utilised by Ian McEwan, can be seen to
serve an exploration of narrative ethics rather than of postmodernist politics.
Let us, for the moment, approach the focus of this thesis via the work of
another critic. Towards the end of Dominic Head‟s illuminating Cambridge
Introduction to Modern British Fiction (2002), he discusses the ambivalent place of
postmodernism in the contemporary novel.
Certainly, some postmodern[ist] attributes have had a considerable influence.
The questioning of metanarrative, the decentring of cultural authority, and the
ironic disruption of the self-contained fictional world have all figured
prominently, making writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Salman Rushdie, Martin
Amis, and Angela Carter sometimes representative postmodernists. But these
are also writers whose works have also conveyed a conviction about the moral
and emotional function of narrative, and its ability to make readers re-engage
with the world they know. [Head 2002, 221]
Head, following critics like David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, and Marguerite
Alexander, suggests that the contemporary British novel may in fact be a hybrid form;
the postmodernist element, rather than ironising or repudiating the referential claims
of „realism,‟ in this case restricts itself to a mere „reworking of the realist contract‟ in
light of postmodernist critiques (221). He then qualifies his terminology in the hope
that the two sides—„realist‟ and „postmodernist‟, respectively—might be made to
cohere. „If postmodernist expression is conceived as a reworking of realism, rather
than a rejection of it, and as a mode capable of generating an emotional response,
beyond the distractions of self-conscious tricksiness, then it has a good deal of
relevance to writers in Britain‟ (221).
However, in his later survey of McEwan‟s work, Head is forced to situate the
work of Ian McEwan in far more delicate way than the category of „postmodern
realism‟ would seem to allow. He begins his study with the assertion that „[McEwan]
is probably the most significant of a number of writers (including Martin Amis,
Kazuo Ishiguro, and Graham Swift) who have resuscitated the link between morality
and the novel for a whole generation, in ways that befit the historical pressures of
their time… reconnect[ing] narrative fiction with moral sense‟ (2008 1,7). However,
recognising such a restoration—of which it should be agreed that McEwan serves as
an exemplary case—begs the question: who or what banished the „moral sensibility‟
of the novel in the first place? Head is ambivalent, but comes teasingly close to
pointing a critical finger when he explains:
There is [an] aspect of postmodern[ist] expression that cannot be found,
unequivocally, in McEwan, and this may help to pin down his distinctiveness.
I am thinking of Linda Hutcheon‟s classic account of postmodern[ist]
narrative as a mode that [metafictionally] combines realist reference and
modernist self-consciousness, deploying and questioning these features
simultaneously. Where such a hybrid often develops a newly intensive form of
self-reflexiveness that emphasises textuality over reference, diluting the
novel‟s capacity to illuminate the social world, McEwan, by contrast, is very
much pre-occupied with ways of knowing. [Head 2007, 14]
But can this be the true extent of the disparity? Can this vague epistemological
difference pinpoint, as Head claims it does, the divergent aims of a „poetics of
postmodernity‟ and the work of Ian McEwan—that he is „preoccupied with ways of
knowing‟ (14)?
Given that Head appreciates the way in which Hutcheon‟s concept of
postmodern metafiction endorses textual solipsism, it is unfortunate that he stops short
of exploring just how McEwan‟s own self-conscious narratives instead entrain a
distinctly ethical momentum.1 Head, in other words, refrains from holding
postmodernist ideologies accountable. He leaves unexplored the ways postmodernist
discourse has worked to restrict the very same moral imperatives he rightly discerns
in McEwan‟s novels. Why does he hesitate? Perhaps, when it comes down to the
metafictive elements in the work of McEwan and others, the hybrid form Head
proposes is insufficient and unhelpful as it obscures the ethical drive behind this
particular brand of self-conscious narrative.
The concept of a „postmodern realism‟ is both a pervasive and persuasive one
because it accommodates some of the stylistic complexities inherent in self-conscious
British fiction. But it also maintains an inner tension: that between postmodernism
and realism, an antagonism itself based upon distinctly postmodernist preconceptions.
So, simply melding these two categories together into a split-personality or hybrid
does little to overcome the already preconceived opposition of postmodernism versus
realism. One side of the equation is active while the other remains passive. One is
enacted, the other acted upon. Nor is there a truly democratic commingling of fictive
techniques. The postmodernist side still monopolises metafictional practices, co-
opting „experiment,‟ while realism is yoked with anything that can be deemed
stylistically „conservative‟ or „traditional‟. Consequently, a hybridised „postmodern
realism‟ can only ever be postmodernist in its values.
1
This oversight is doubly unfortunate as Head is so keenly aware of the ethical engagement embodied
in McEwan‟s novels. See below for his own acknowledgement of McEwan‟s relationship to narrative
ethics.
So what, then, does one do about Ian McEwan when, as I hope to illustrate in
the following study, it is often the metafictive thrust of his novels which serves both to
disclose and reinforce their ethical structures, and thereby mark a divergence from
postmodernist ideological tendencies? It is the contention of this thesis that the brand
of metafiction found in the work of McEwan will be more usefully judged outside of
a postmodernist rubric (or, for that matter, any „stock realist‟ context) in order to be
fully appreciated. The unique narrative ethics of these two novels is at stake, and that
is no small matter.
To recapitulate, McEwan can sometimes be self-conscious without being
particularly postmodernist about it. And in a field that categorises anything
metafictional in the contemporary context as necessarily postmodernist, this poses a
problem.
Thus far, in the critical discussion of how best to situate, or to characterise,
metafiction in the ethically-engaged British novel, the role of mimesis has been
conspicuously overlooked.2 It will, however, be one of the key arguments of the
present thesis that the valuation of mimesis is precisely where some key metafictional
attributes of McEwan most decisively part ways with postmodernist metafiction.
Amy J. Elias has already noted something similar occurring at the
metafictional level of other contemporary British novels. In her article „Meta-
mimesis?: The Problem of British Postmodern Realism‟ (1992), Elias examines those
works that, for her, are „less a metafictional comment on Realistic narrative than a
mirroring reflection of the postmodern condition‟ (16). That such novels themselves
appreciate the problems and shortcomings inherent in that supposed „mirroring‟ is
also part of Elias‟s point; as in the case of McEwan, the metafictional element in such
novels is mimetic in inclination.3 The „baring of the works‟ in such cases allows for a
2
Frustratingly, paradoxically, and somewhat anti-climatically, Head is, in fact, an exception. Near the
end of The Cambridge Companion to the Modern British Novel, he writes:
I have chanced upon different brands of formal hybridity, where „innovation‟ can embrace
tradition, and where the reworking of realism can be just as insightful as its rejection…(As
Paul Ricoeur‟s theory of mimesis implies, the self-conscious text can emphasise the mimetic
effect—conceived as „representation‟ rather than „imitation‟—especially well.) [259]
It may, rightly, be seen as the purpose of this thesis to expand this profound statement beyond the
limits of Head‟s parenthetical gesture.
3
Though, it must be said, Elias‟s language, here and elsewhere, does insinuate that „mimetic‟ aims are
those which treat reality merely as objective, empirical fact—in other words a misunderstanding of
mimesis as representational transparency (or naturalism). Along with Head, I prefer to follow Aristotle,
dissection of distinctly mimetic processes—hence, meta-mimesis, a term which Elias
coins in order to account for „the odd mixture of experiment and verisimilitude,
metafiction and realism‟ in some recent British fiction (28).4 Citing Graham Swift‟s
Waterland, Martin Amis‟s Money, and Julian Barnes‟s Flaubert’s Parrot, Elias
explains how „each of these novels provides a realistic rationale for the action that
takes place within its pages, and yet the world—either psychological or physical—
each records is distinctly postmodern‟ (14). Such novels are sensitive to what might
loosely be called the „postmodern experience‟ of the world, and they both approach
and describe that experience through a mode of realism. In this way, Elias locates the
„postmodern‟ content of these particular novels both at the textual, or metafictive,
level and in the worlds they realistically describe. Instead of a postmodernist critique
of realist claims, here we are nearing something like a realism of postmodernity.
Elias importantly follows George Levine‟s The Realistic Imagination (1981)
in conceiving of realism as „a literary mode in flux,‟ one that has changed along with
contemporary world-views and socio-political shifts (Levine 11). According to
Levine, the supposedly „naïve realism‟ of the nineteenth centuryone that took for
granted a transparent correspondence between text and worldnever existed. Instead
realism, as a literary mode, was always self-reflexively aware of its own limitations,
distrustful of cultivating conventions, and composed of multiple, competing forms.
The attempt to represent life sincerely, to create a dialogue for and about
contemporary life, was always in process so long as notions of what constituted
human experience evolved.
Elias, however, goes on to build from Brian McHale‟s classic description of
the respective ontological and epistemological „dominants‟ of postmodern and
modernist literatures.5 Where modernism, for McHale, foregrounded questions such
as how the self can understand the world, postmodernism focuses on questions of how
to construct or define a world as well as one‟s being in that world. Postmodernist
fiction, according to McHale, deploys various means of engaging with questions like
„Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is doing it?‟
Paul Ricoeur, and Richard Kearney in thinking of that supposed „mirroring‟ instead as creative re-
description, in other words, entirely malleable but always referential. (See below.)
4
One wonders if the implication, here, is that these terms—experiment/verisimilitude,
metafiction/realism—are typically thought to be mutually exclusive or just sufficiently at odds.
5
As is evident from his use of these terms, McHale bends slightly the natural definitions of „ontology‟
(a philosophy of the nature of being) and „epistemology‟ (a philosophy of the root and structures of
knowledge). See McHale‟s Postmodernist Fiction (1987).
(McHale 10). Elias agrees, but also offers a further, „realist‟ agenda for postmodern
(as opposed to postmodernist) literature:
Traditional Realism attempts to duplicate the world and docket society in
order to fathom it. On the other hand, postmodern Realism might be
understood as mimesis with an ontological dominant. In postmodern Realism,
the world has become textualized. Postmodern Realism records the multiple
worlds/texts within contemporary culture and recognizes the inability to
evaluate society‟s conflicting values; it mimics the multiple selves of
characters (or more accurately, the self as a subject within textualized culture)
and recognizes the problem of articulating an essential Self in this social
context. Both of these goals and limitations are realistic; postmodern Realism
is true to new definitions of self and society in a postmodern culture. [Elias
1992, 12]
Elias, then, offers us an alternative to the understanding of contemporary metafiction
as, necessarily, a subversion of traditional realism.6 And, like Head, she conceives of
a hybridised conception of the British novel as a substitute: the metafictional elements
in those novels she is concerned with offer less a parody of realist techniques than a
self-conscious working-through of realist aims in light of postmodernity. This is a
realism that is „postmodern‟ chiefly for the sake of the milieu which it seeks to
examine, as opposed to any talisman postmodernist ideology. And yet, Elias‟s use of
McHale‟s ontological/epistemological opposition—something she herself admits is
reductive—might, in practice, be said both to confuse and indeed to raise severe
limitations for the application of her rather more evocative term, meta-mimesis. For
instance, are we to take „mimesis with an ontological dominant‟ to mean the same
thing as meta-mimesis? And, if so, is meta-mimesis therefore only to be applied to
fictions which pose ontologically postmodern questions about existence? More
fundamentally, one is left wondering whether Elias has simply predefined meta- as
6
See below as well as Linda Hutcheon‟s Narcissistic Narrative (1984) and Poetics of Postmodernism
(1988), Alison Lee‟s Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (1990), and Patricia Waugh‟s
Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984) for examples of a view that
holds most, if not all, contemporary metafiction to be subversively postmodernist in motivation. See
also Colin McCabe‟s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1978, reprinted 2002) and
Catherine Belsey‟s classic Critical Practice (1980, also reprinted 2002) for works that posit an
insidiously hegemonic „realism‟ in need of overthrowing.
postmodernist and mimesis as realist and fused the two together, a la „postmodern
realism‟.
Here we find that Elias gets confounded by the residual postmodernist rubric
through which she interprets the metafictional techniques used within some
contemporary British novels. We are ultimately offered new terminology, all of it
heavily qualified and overly strained, as a means of grasping what is beyond the reach
of the old postmodernism/realism dichotomy.
The present study will therefore argue that meta-mimesis as a term becomes
more useful—indeed, more true to its name—when re-focussed by Paul Ricoeur‟s
Aristotelian understanding of mimesis as a creative re-description of human action
(praxis). Mimesis in this reading is not geared towards Platonic verisimilitude, servile
representation, or some naturalistic ideal of „mirroring‟ reality. Instead, mimesis
functions as „“invention” in the original sense of that term: invire means both to
discover and to create, that is, to disclose what is already there in light of what is not
yet (but is potentially). It is the power, in short, to recreate actual worlds as possible
worlds‟ (132, Kearney 2004). It should therefore be clear that, in this sense, mimesis
is as equally applicable to any „postmodernist‟ fictions as to „realist‟ ones. It is true
that both postmodernist and realist literary modes seek to say something about the
world and human experience—so to imply that the postmodernist novel is absolutely
self-reflexive is overstating the case. Mimesis is not a realist trope any more than
metafiction is postmodernist one.7
Taken in this way, a term like meta-mimesis can further account for
tendencies in novels like McEwan‟s which ultimately provide self-conscious
illustrations of mimetic processes. These are novels which reinforce, rather than
undercut, a threefold relationship between narrative, reader, and world, by describing
that dynamism self-consciously within their storylines. This is not to say that mimesis
itself can not (or should not) be sensitive to postmodern/post-structural critiques, but
to take this sensitivity as a sufficient definition for the meta-mimetic is to lose track of
what distinguishes meta-mimesis from postmodernist metafiction in the first place.
At this point, one might still argue whether a term like meta-mimesis is
necessary. One might even ask if meta-mimesis is a redundancy given what has
7
The difference is that postmodernist fictions tend to obscure or delimit the mimetic nature of narrative
in order to turn self-reflexively inwards, whereas, in the case of realism, mimetic aims have always
been taken for granted.
already been covered by flexible notions of the postmodernist novel per se. Indeed,
many have already dealt with a latent mimetic impulse in otherwise „experimental‟
novels. Discussing Garcia Marquez‟s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Larry
McCaffery explains that such a novel „has become a kind of model for the
contemporary writer, being self-conscious about its literary heritage and about the
limits of mimesis…yet managing to reconnect its readers to the world outside the
page‟ (264, emphasis mine).8 There may, however, be something terribly short-
sighted about such an undervaluing of mimesis within the context of larger, less
inclusive categories such as „historiographic metafiction,‟ „fabulation,‟ „crossover
fiction‟ or the „writerly‟ novel. As we have already seen, such convenient
generalisations run the risk of reasserting the predominance of an anti-conventionalist,
postmodernist rubric for interpreting mimetic goals. In other words, such terminology
misconstrues mimesis as being quintessentially „realist‟ in a context where realism
can only ever be approached—in the „experimental,‟ metafictive novel—through
postmodernist means (rather than vice-versa). Instead of an affirmation of mimesis,
therefore, we can only have an affirmation of its limits. Instead of reinforcing the
dialogical and ethical relationships between selves-and-others that are inherent both in
Ricoeur‟s concept of a „circle of mimesis‟ and in the novels of Ian McEwan, we are
stuck with self-reflexive irony.
For it is purely the deconstructive aims of metafiction which, according to
critic Patricia Waugh, „offer extremely accurate models for understanding the
contemporary experience of the world as construction, an artifice, a web of
interdependent semiotic systems‟ (9). Metafiction, in this sense, offers up a means to
disclose the preconceived illusions of a supposedly hegemonic „realism‟:
Metafiction sets up an opposition, not to ostensibly „objective‟ facts in the
„real‟ world, but to the language of the realistic novel which has sustained and
endorsed such a view of reality…[It] thus converts what it sees as the negative
values of outworn literary conventions into the basis of a potentially
constructive social criticism. [Waugh, 11]
8
I have lifted this quote whole-sale from Linda Hutcheon‟s A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988).
Postmodernist metafiction undercuts the matter-of-fact language of a stock „realism‟
in order to both reveal the unacknowledged gap between the world and our
representation of it, and to underscore the written-ness, the fictionality, of that world
as well. This „metafictional deconstruction‟ is parodic in that it both installs the very
„outworn literary conventions‟ it seeks to criticise, then subverts them from within
(Waugh, 9, 11). Yet as Alison Lee points out, while metafictional texts do subvert the
„language of realism,‟ they do so „from within precisely those conventions which they
are clearly trying to undermine‟ (36).9
This anti-conventionalist, or postmodernist, strain of self-conscious narrative
is what Linda Hutcheon has defined under the more general heading of
historiographic metafiction. Outlining her thesis in A Poetics of Postmodernism she
writes, „postmodernism is a fundamentally contradictory enterprise: its art forms (and
its theory) at once use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention in parodic
ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and
provisionality and, of course, to their critical and ironic re-reading of the art of the
past‟ (23). The metafictive element in „historiographic metafiction‟ therefore
functions as a stylistic tool to help subvert „conventional‟ discourses like that of
„realism.‟10
But does all metafictional self-consciousness have to be read as necessarily
deconstructive? Must contemporary metafiction be wholly postmodernist, that is to
say, subversive and anti-conventionalist in its convictions? Can self-reflexive irony
and the free play of fictionality really be the sole motives of all self-conscious
narrators? Does the very ground of a narrative‟s ethical engagement with the world
not become untenable, given post-structural critiques? The present study will argue
9
The „language of realism‟ here implying a naïve language that was supposedly more than self-assured
in its „transparent‟ relationship to the real. Lee, however, is quick to point out the manner in which
many postmodernist subversions of traditional realism are based in large part on a misrepresentation of
that tradition. According to her, „postmodern texts are both the inheritors and the perpetrators of this
radical undermining [of realism‟s attendant humanist values]. Like linguistic theorists, they posit a
straw man of Realism, while at the same time, they unravel the fabric of their own language…‟ (27-8).
10
Hutcheon, however, makes sure to qualify this metafictive demystification/provocation as
necessarily neither „revolutionary or even progressive‟ (183).
It is perhaps liberal to believe that any undermining of a system of thought is healthy and
good, but it would also be naïve to ignore that art can just as easily confirm as trouble received
codes, no matter how radical its surface transgressions…Nevertheless, it has become almost a
truism of postmodern criticism today that the deconstruction effected by metafictional self-
consciousness is indeed revolutionary…[Hutcheon, 183. Emphasis mine.]
that each of these questions may be answered in the negative by acknowledging the
prevalence of meta-mimesis in the work of Ian McEwan and, by implication, the
contemporary British novel.
Having introduced the role of meta-mimesis as it will later relate to the work
of McEwan, the primary question left to consider is how such a focus might attend to
the ethical concerns in his novels—in other words, how to bridge the gap between the
mimetic inclination of the metafiction and the ethics?
As has already been mentioned, Dominic Head is keenly aware of the ethical
import in the novels of Ian McEwan.11 Throughout his survey of McEwan‟s work for
the Contemporary British Novelists series, he argues for a deeper appreciation of the
ethical exploration that the novels of McEwan embody, particularly as they relate to
storytelling. Having noted a burgeoning trend in literary criticism which has
approached the ethical character of narrative in light of—and in response to—post-
structural arguments, he further proposes that „this is a critical climate which now
lends credibility to McEwan‟s project‟ (13). Indeed, Head goes so far as to say that
the work of Ian McEwan may be seen as analogous to the critical work of those
attempting to frame an ethics of narrativity. McEwan‟s novels, argues Head, are „the
creative equivalent or counterpart of narrative ethics, making explicit an intellectual
journey that [has governed] McEwan‟s career‟ (24). Needless to say, it will be the
purpose of this thesis to explore the nature of this ethical structure as it functions in
self-conscious narratives like McEwan‟s. Most importantly, this study will argue that
it is precisely within the metafictional, meta-mimetic framing of McEwan’s novels that
the author codifies his narrative ethics.
Claudia Schemberg has also noted a correspondence between the field of
narrative ethics and the work of McEwan, and she pays particular attention to the way
this engagement with ethics functions at the level of McEwan‟s plots. In her thesis,12
Schemberg relates this ethical engagement to the various quests for selfhood that are
dramatised in McEwan‟s novels. She is struck by the way many of McEwan‟s
protagonists „aspire to a unity and wholeness in their lives,‟ establishing a search that
11
The predominant place he holds in the present thesis is largely because of this ethical focus.
Furthermore, it would seem that Head is aware of all the work that the present study builds from—Paul
Ricoeur and Claudia Schemberg, Metafiction and Narrative Ethics—yet, he never finds an organising
principle through which to synthesise these points of view.
12
Achieving ‘At-One-Ment’: Storytelling and the Concept of the Self in Ian McEwan’s The Child in
Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love and Atonement (2002).
both „presupposes some kind of telos or aim…[and] a positioning of the self in moral
space‟ (39). And that moral space, she finds, is largely rendered by McEwan‟s
characters via narrative, through their telling of a story: „narrative serves as a tool
wielded by the protagonists to invest their lives with meaning, to connect the self with
the world, in fact, to (re)create themselves by constructing their personal story from
the abundant material on offer‟ (33).
An equivalent understanding of the primary roles of narrative and imagination
is to be found in the hermeneutic philosophies of both Paul Ricoeur and Richard
Kearney (philosophies that will be referred to in greater depth throughout this thesis).
Like Schemberg, Head, and McEwan himself, both Ricoeur and Kearney are
interested in the way narrative both orders our experience of the world and establishes
an ethical framework for our selfhood. Not only does narrative help to configure our
being-in-the-world—providing a sense of self that perdures over time—it is also that
which puts the self into meaningful and moral contact with the world:
Finally, Ricoeur powerfully demonstrates how narrative serves ethical
phronesis in its power to empathize. In addition to its capacity to envision a
new project, evaluate its motivations, and initiate a viable course of action,
narrative enables us to identify with others. There is neither love nor hate, care
nor concern, without [narrative]. It could be said that this last point challenges
a certain postmodern assumption that poetics has no truck with ethics. What
Ricoeur claims is that narrative understanding provides us both with a poetics
and an ethics of responsibility in that it propels us beyond self-reference to
relation with others (via analogy/empathy/apperception). This extension of the
circle of selfhood involves an „enlarged mentality‟ capable of imagining the
self in the place of the other. [Kearney 2004, 173]
And it is precisely this same ethical propensity of narrative that McEwan‟s novels not
only dramatise in their plots, but self-consciously illustrate at the level of their
metafiction. They self-consciously express George Eliot‟s belief that the function of
art is to „amplify experience and extend our contact with our fellow men beyond the
bounds of our personal lot‟ (270).13 Art, for Eliot, engages the „sympathetic
imagination,‟ and McEwan‟s novels can be said to wear this same engagement on
their narrative sleeves, revealing it in-process. By showing how the configuration of
narrative is necessary to the formation of selfhood and, further, by offering the novel
form itself as an embodiment of that necessity, McEwan‟s work may be seen as
ethically engaged; through his self-conscious narratives, he follows mimesis through
to its ethical destination. Both Black Dogs and Atonement highlight the capacity of
narrative to bring us imaginatively nearer to others, and how essential this capacity is
to ethical awareness. Indeed, McEwan explores this matter himself (in an article that,
much like his recent fictions, displays an attempt to make sense of traumatic events):
„imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our
humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality‟ („Only
Love and Then Oblivion‟).14 And it is also an effort, a moral imperative, that his
novels have seen fit to reproduce both fictionally and metafictionally. Indeed, it is the
metafictional framing of both Black Dogs and Atonement that ultimately details for us
not only what narrative can do but, in a self-justifying manoeuvre, what it might also
be used for.
***
Works Cited
Elias, Amy J. „Meta-Mimesis? The Problem of British Postmodern Realism .
Postmodern Studies 7: British Postmodern Fiction. ed. Theo D'haen and Hans
Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1994. 9-31.
Eliot, George. Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. London: Penguin,
1990.
---. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 7 Vols. London: Oxford
University Press, 1954-56.
13
For Eliot, as with McEwan, novel-writing is fundamentally about exercising our sympathetic
imaginations. In a letter to Charles Bray in 1859, she explains that, „the only effect I ardently long to
produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and feel the pains
and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring
human creatures‟ (Letters 3, 111).
14
Published in The Guardian on the one month anniversary of 11 September, 2001, an event which
happened to closely coincide with the publication of Atonement.
Head, Dominic. Cambridge Companion to Modern British Fiction. Cambridge:
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