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Ian McEwan's use of Fordian elements and techniques in his novella On Chesil Beach - specifically allusions to The Good Soldier; impressionism as an epistemological and narrative strategy; and elements of narrative discourse such as perspective, time, and order - direct our attention to the narrativization of intimacy, what is sayable and unsayable in the representation of intimacy, and to what kinds of knowledge narrative provides access. These moves teach us a form of ethical reading generated by the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas: how to navigate McEwan's representation of desire, intimacy, and alterity in order to recognize the epistemological and ethical commitments and problems engendered by narrative.
Keywords: Ian McEwan / Ford Madox Ford / Emmanuel Levinas / impressionism / ethical reading
What epistemology has established is that a person can only form an impression of another human heart.
- John G. Hessler,
"Dowell and The Good Soldier " (55)
To put it differently, just for the fun of switching perversities, one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together.
- Gérard Genette,
PalimPSeSTS (399)
Talking about his novella On Chesil Beach (2007) in a 2008 interview, Ian McEwan said, "It's less the power aspects of the [sexual] relationship that appeal to me . . . and more the intricacies of misunderstanding, and breakthrough into self-knowledge" ("A Thing" 188). Much of McEwan's fiction deals with the narrative and ethical complexity of erotic relationships; through depictions of sex and intimacy, he examines how people try to speak what cannot be spoken, the difficulty of getting below the surface, the problems of conjecture and perception. As a body of work, his novels and short stories grapple with the ethical implications engendered by intimacy as an epistemological problem and sex as a way of knowing.
In On Chesil Beach, McEwan uses intertextuality, particularly a kind of impressionism drawn from Ford Madox Ford, to prompt reflection on questions of intimacy and epistemology, bringing us to a Levinasian practice of reading ethically. McEwan himself has noted James Joyce's story "The Dead" (1914) as a key intertext for On Chesil Beach for this very reason. About the conclusion of "The Dead," McEwan remarks, "It's one of the most beautiful representations of two...