‘The two cultures’: science in Ian McEwan's novel Enduring love

This paper looks into the ‘uneasy’ relationship between a work of fiction and scientific knowledge. Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love (1997) serves as an example of this tendency in the late 20^th century literature. The first clearly marked signs of incorporating science into fiction can be found even in John Donne’s ‘alchemic’ poems, in the Enlightenment novels, but especially evidenced in the naturalistic trend (Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Gerhardt Hauptmann, and in a certain sense, George Moore and Thomas Hardy) at the turn of the 20^th century. Novelists looked up to science in search of answers to the eternal question: why do human beings manifest such different characters? They looked into natural philosophy, biology, sociology and psychology.

As a very young and promising science at the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology, especially its branch – psychoanalysis – was crucial not only per se , but also in the way fiction writers employed it for their artistic goals. In the late twentieth century it was widely assumed, as Judith Ryan states, that psychology ‘studied how human emotions functioned, and could be best pursued by examining great writers and the way they present the feelings and actions of their characters’ [Ryan 2003: 326]. It was also a firm belief at the time that the thoughts and emotions of others could be understood through their actions and behaviour. That trend was reflected by the nineteenth century realist novel, binding the external signs with the inner motive, the character with a set of descriptive characteristics. ‘It would have been hard to guess, before 1880,’ writes Ryan, ‘how radically the new psychologies, already waiting in the wings, would change all this’ [Ryan 2003: 327]. Freudianism was the first move in this change. As David Lodge states, ‘artists did not have to be personally familiar with Freud’s theories’ [Lodge 2002: 59] to make active use of them in

shedding light on what B. C. Byrnes calls ‘the more obscure aspects of the mind and provide a language that makes it possible to think and write about the hidden processes that explain the irrational and bizarre’ Byrnes 2002: 3].

C.P. Snow in his famous 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ very strictly polarized ‘literary intellectuals’ and the scientists, the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension – sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other [Snow 1959: 4].

Even though Snow did not have strictly the psychological science in mind, still, as Lodge writes,

His argument was that in Britain the potential of science to transform the world for the greater good was being impeded by ignorance of science among the political establishment, most of whom had been educated exclusively in the humanities [Snow 1959: 16].

Hence the accusation of literature’s ignorance and neglect of science. On our own end of the timeline is a writer who reconsiders the role of scientific knowledge in fictional texts: Ian McEwan. What D.H. Lawrence earlier discarded as a ‘laboratory of corpses’ (meaning psychology), McEwan seems to incorporate in his fiction, but in a highly ambiguous and playful manner.

It has been a tendency of modern fiction in recent decades to explore, explain, correct, modify and mystify those psychological concepts to which natural sciences have not found any definite answer. Thus, Pat Barker in Regeneration (1991) makes use of the clinical psychoanalysis and the works of a famous British psychiatrist to highlight the war trauma leading to severe psychosomatic disturbances. Jonathan Coe sets out to explore and fictionalize the psychological study of narcolepsy (a chronic sleep disorder, characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness in which a person experiences extreme fatigue and possibly falls asleep at inappropriate times, such as while at work or at school) and cataplexy (a sudden and transient episode of loss of muscle tone, often triggered by emotions) through the misadventures of his most eccentric characters in the novel The House of Sleep (1997). In a similar vein, Lodge in the novel Thinks… (2001) builds a fictional case on his brilliant study of the cognitive theory of mind, only to conclude, with the main character’s point of view, that it has ever been left to literature to describe and transfer the ungraspable and vague qualia of human sense experience. Mark Haddon in the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) explores autism1, and Richard Powers in The Echo Maker (2006) treats facial agnosia. In his turn, Ian McEwan in his novel Black Dogs (1992) explores ‘the black dog’ syndrome, and what is known in medicine as Huntington’s disease (a neurodegenerative genetic disorder and dementia) in Saturday (2005).

The popularity of psychology in fiction has given way to neurobiology and cognitive science, i.e., the study of consciousness. According to Marko Roth, what has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness, or the psychological or confessional novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind – has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain [Roth].

Touching very much upon sexuality, aggression, the impact of Victorian morality on the psychic life of further generations, McEwan uses new psychological and scientific knowledge to probe deeper into the unconscious depths of consciousness, as the example of his novel Enduring Love might prove. This novel is not only a distinctly psy-chopathological case study, but also the extension of the range of the novel itself, which now freely incorporates marginalized and narrow theories, professional knowledge and existing concepts from other areas of study. As Roth observes, ‘today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology’ [Roth]. As David Malcolm points out about the novel, it is

‘a version of the kind of fiction that explores characters’ minds and feelings in respect of each other’ [Malcolm 2002: 162]. The reasons for this seem to be rooted in cultural exhaustion of the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities. Enduring Love shifts attention from the analysis, or rather informal psychological explorations, to neurology, which might offer a much more reliable and convincing answer, if not treatment, of a pathology.

McEwan employs an individual case study against the assumptions of ‘normality’. The story opens against the backdrop of a seemingly Edenic scene: two loving partners, Joe Rose, a popular science writer, and Clarissa Mellon, a John Keats scholar, are having a picnic in an open field, when a hot-air balloon flying nearby suddenly goes out of control and the life of a boy inside is threatened. Several male witnesses run to the rescue and catch on the trailing ropes in an attempt to keep the balloon down. But one by one each of them lets go, causing the balloon to rise so that the final fall is fatal.

At this very point, a ‘serpent’ intrudes into this idyllic milieu. Deeply traumatized, Joe unwittingly accepts a stranger’s suggestion to pray for the dead man. And this very stranger, Jed Parry, will play a devastating role in Joe’s life. Several days later Joe starts getting dozens of telephone calls, amorous letters and even has to face the lengthy physical presence of his stalker in front of his house. No dissuasion, or anger, or protest, or threats could shake the persecutor with the latter’s arguments being, ‘I’m just the messenger’ [McEwan 1998: 25] or ‘My love – which is also God’s love – is your fate’ [McEwan 1998: 136]. Joe finds himself virtually haunted by emotional blackmail of a psychologically unbalanced, deluded and mentally deranged young man (all these facts become evident much later, only in the psychiatric institution). In its general content the novel seems to be the response to a type of psychic delusion, or erotomania, in which the affected believes that another person, usually a stranger or someone famous, is in love with him or her. Peter Childs notices in particular:

Critics have shown little inclination to explore this aspect of the novel, preferring to dismiss it as another example of fiction unwisely overstepping its boundaries, like McEwan’s concern with theoretical physics in the Child in Time. This is partly a matter of science and art remaining largely separate spheres… [Childs 2007: 22].

Jed in Enduring Love is judged as ‘normal’ according to behavioural, visible symptoms of normalcy that are made evident by the policeman’s inquiry through a set of questions:

You are being harassed and threatened by this character….

The harassment consists of…? …Obscenities? … Lewd suggestions? …Insults? ….Sexual sort of things then. … [McEwan 1998:155].

The answers Joe is capable of giving – ‘No’, ‘Not really’ – allow for a judgment of Jed’s normality.

Neuroscience that replaced psychology (or rather started to compete with it) at the end of the twentieth century struggles to discover a biological, clinical explanation of the pathology the persecutor suffers from. Jed employs his own self-constructed theory of love whose discourse does not differ from any lover’s discourse. McEwan treats the scientific claim to vivisect Jed’s troubled mind with sarcasm embodied in Clarissa’s words:

Twenty years ago you and your friends were all socialists, and you blamed the environment for everyone’s hard luck. Now you’ve got us trapped in our genes, and there’s a reason for everything! … Everything was being stripped down, she said, and in the process some larger meaning was lost [McEwan 1998: 70].

Via a misleadingly reliable narrator, McEwan exposes science (including psychology) for its inability to resolve a single human psychic puzzle. McEwan continues the Keatsian discourse of science as ‘robbing the world of wonder’ [McEwan 1998: 71]. McEwan’s characters carry out this inexhaustible debate between science and the irrational and mystical worldview.

Joe’s aim is, with the help of scientific explanation, to get to the core of the problem, to see possible reasons why and due to which behavioural patterns the erotomanic affection struck Jed Parry. However, ‘There are certain mistakes that no quantity of astronauts can right’ [McEwan 1998: 4], concludes Joe seeking for these unknown causes. Like Lawrence early in the century, McEwan is cautiously skeptical about a mechanistic application of science to individual, unique cases. For Joe, love can be reduced to a logical quality, a set of rules and formulas. Joe is not capable of Keatsian ‘negative capability,’ because he struggles for certainties, strives to find an adequate theory to explain love and perversion, mind and religion:

… a man who had a theory about pathological love and who had given his name to it, like a bridegroom at the alter, must surely reveal, even if unwittingly, the nature of love itself (our italics). For there to be a pathology there had to be a lurking concept of health. De Clerambault’s syndrome was a dark, distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane. <…>. Sickness and health. In other words, what could I learn about Parry that would restore me to Clarissa? [McEwan 1998: 137].

What seems to be at stake in Joe’s painstaking research of De Clarembault’s syndrome and from this point onwards – looks like the impotence of either psychology or neurobiology to actually explain one single life story, not to mention to resolve the puzzle and cure the ailment. Joe has always been skeptical of Clarissa’s (and McEwan’s) assumption that ‘the world could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories and biographies’ [McEwan 1998: 46]. As a revelation to the ‘Doubting Thomas’, come Joe’s reflections on his own fear using the discursive parlance of neurobiology:

Wasn’t it an elemental emotion, along with disgust, surprise, anger and elation […]? Was not fear and the recognition of it in others associated with neutral activity in the amygdala, sunk deep in the old mammalian part of our brains from where it fired its instant responses? […] I was afraid of my fear, because I did not know the cause [McEwan 1998: 47].

The novel progresses into the inquiry: to what extent fiction and psychology as a science have changed our perception of reality and when and where did they merge? Reflecting on this point, Joe (McEwan?) gives another piece of theoretical digression from the immediate actions of the novel:

The dominant artistic form (speculates Joe about the history of human thought from the 19th century onwards) was the novel, great sprawling narratives, which not only charted private fates, but made whole societies in mirror image and addressed the public issues of the day. Most educated people read contemporary novels. Storytelling was deep in the nineteenth century soul.

Then two things happened. Science became more difficult, and it became professionalized. It moved into the universities, parsonical narratives gave way to hard-edged theories that could survive intact without experimental support and which had their own formal aesthetic. At the same time, in literature and in other arts, a newfangled modernism celebrated formal, structural qualities, inner coherence and selfreference. <…> Likewise in science <…> The theory was already in the textbooks from the twenties onwards. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist.

So the meanderings of narrative had given way to an aesthetics of form, as in art, so in science. <…> theory accepted for reasons of elegance [McEwan 1998: 52–53].

Working at his scientific articles, Joe is scornful of the ‘typical products of the twentieth-century scientific or pseudo-scientific mind’ [Ibid]. Even Freud, in Joe’s belief, used ‘the highest methods of storytelling and all the arts of priesthood’ [Ibid.] staking his claim on the veracity of science. In his righteous conviction in the triumph of reason, Joe easily recognizes De Clerambault’s syndrome. Paradoxically, his hard scientific evidence, no matter how true, authentic or verified agaist theory it may be, breaks down: Clarissa refuses to accept his evidence and considers him mad, thinking he faked the letters and imagined the stalking; the police think he is a fool, for he cannot produce a clear enough point to prove threat or assault from Jed. ‘The novel is emphasizing competing ways of making sense of reality and the fact that different versions may be equally plausible’ [Childs 2007: 36].

It appears that there is no reliable enough mechanism of thought to explain love. Poets are too obscure, while science has a long way to go to get to the core of love. Jed Parry, the unfortunate, deluded young man, in his letters voices the discourse that resembles an ordinary romantic attachment: ‘God brought us together in this tragedy’; ‘I understand what you are feeling. I feel it too. I love you’ [McEwan 1998: 40]. McEwan quotes Paul Mullen and Michelle Pathé: ‘The pathological extensions of love not only touch upon but overlap with normal experience’ [Ibid]. As a result, love as the most valued human experience may resemble psychopathology.

As Childs points out,

While rationalism and knowledge are valorized in Enduring Love […], McEwan is deeply interested in the stories people tell in order to make sense of the world, and also in the nature of ‘truth,’ which may have a poetical as well as logical quality [Childs 227: 33].

The action of McEwan’s novel has an open ending. And in this sense the novel does cross the zone of merely intellectual inquiry, producing a parodic caricature of scientific endeavours to ‘explain’ psychological mysteries. Jed’s letter from the clinic (included as an appendix to the novel) ends as any typical love letter would. McEwan makes it clear that he does not base his work on psychological formulations to create a ‘narrative shelter.’

As an artist-psychologist McEwan works towards individualizing human consciousness, deeply informed in the newest scientific discoveries in this area. He has come to be associated with psychological narrative, which probes into the most sensitive area of human consciousness – love. McEwan ‘is often seen as a writer who argues for the redeeming power of human love, [but also]… suggests love’s fragility’ [Malcolm 2002: 156]. He has expressed his scorn at the attempts of psychology to universalize our knowledge of human feelings and questioned the stance of ‘normality’ in the face of mass consciousness and group psychology. He comes up with striking paradoxes about a free-thinking individual viewed as ‘imbecile’ by a ‘neurotic’ society, and a psychopath regarded normal by a rationalistic society. The novel may serve as a dynamic proof of fiction’s evolution towards the fusion of ‘the two cultures.’ It seems very apt to conclude with McEwan’s words from his oratorio Or Shall We Die :

One can only speculate about a world-view that would be entirely consonant with the discoveries of the scientific revolution of this century. It hardly seems possible that what is now orthodox in science should continue forever to be so much at odds with what we now hold to be common sense [McEwan 1983:13].