Disrupted Intersubjectivity

Paralysis and Invasion in Ian McEwan's Works

Andrei Ionescu

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501362453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Disrupted Intersubjectivity investigates two classes of phenomena creating failures of understanding in social interaction, referred to as 'paralysis' and 'invasion.' Both can be understood as disrupted forms of intersubjectivity, the former being characterized by a lack/deficiency of ways of relating to others, and the latter by an unnecessary surplus. By studying the literary accounts of these phenomena in a selection of Ian McEwan's literary works ("Homemade, " On Chesil Beach, Enduring Love, and Atonement ), Andrei Ionescu sheds light on the epistemological potential of literature and the structure of human relationships in general. Part of the developing field of cognitive literary studies, Disrupted Intersubjectivity not only uses cognitive scientific theories in order to clarify literary issues, but also investigates to what extent can literature itself contribute to the process of understanding the workings of the human mind. By investigating the metacognitive issues staged and reflected upon in literary works, Ionescu challenges and refines contemporary cognitive and philosophical approaches to intersubjectivity and opens directions for further theoretical and empirical research.

1

Ian McEwan’s Intuition Pumps

One possible and plausible, even if rather simplistic, way to characterize Ian McEwan’s work is by claiming that it consists of a series of literary investigations of various forms of pathology. From his first collections of short stories written in the 1970s to his latest novel, Machines Like Me (2019), the reader repeatedly stumbles upon pathological cases, ranging from sexual dysfunctions including sadism, masochism, or erotomania (and occasionally verging toward psychopathy, as in the short story “Butterflies”) to neurological disorders such as dementia or Huntington’s disease (to give just a very brief list of examples). This recurrent and obsessive concern with madness, or to put it less strongly, with deviance, brought him the (in)famous nickname of Ian Macabre and made critics like Kiernan Ryan characterize his work as an “art of unease” (cf. Ryan 1994: 1–5).

Although no systematic and comprehensive study of pathology in McEwan’s works has yet been performed, it is not the aim of my study to do this either. Instead, what I plan to focus on are cases lying somewhere in-between mental health and full-blown psychopathology. In particular, I will explore two classes of phenomena creating failures of understanding in social interaction, which I will refer to as “paralysis” and “invasion.” As I will argue, both paralysis and invasion should be understood as disrupted forms of intersubjectivity, the former being characterized by a lack/deficiency of ways of relating to others, and the latter by an unnecessary surplus. One of my leading hypotheses is that paralysis and invasion are complementary both theoretically and experientially: since paralysis refers to a lack and invasion to a surplus, the two concepts are theoretically complementary; however, since paralytic ways of dealing with alterity often breed invasion during concrete social encounters, the two classes of phenomena are also experientially complementary.

By studying the literary representation of these phenomena in a selection of Ian McEwan’s literary works, I will shed more light on (1) the nature and functions of literature and (2) the structure of human relationships in general. This project can be considered, theoretically and methodologically, as part of the developing field of cognitive literary studies. In contrast to most of the research done in this field until now, though, my study not only aims to use cognitive-scientific theories in order to clarify literary issues, but also aims to investigate to what extent literature itself can contribute to the process of understanding the workings of the human mind. By employing what Marco Caracciolo (2016) calls a cognitive-thematic approach to literature, that is, an investigation of the metacognitive issues staged and reflected upon in literary works, I aim to challenge and refine contemporary cognitive and philosophical approaches to intersubjectivity and give directions for further theoretical and empirical research.

In the following section, I will discuss in more detail the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of a cognitive-thematic approach and situate it within contemporary literary studies. After discussing the figure-ground relationship characterizing literary interpretation in general, where interpretations (figures) can be placed in dialogue with different sets of theoretical frameworks (grounds), I will briefly summarize the ground against which I will place my interpretations of McEwan’s novels, that is, a set of developmental and philosophical accounts of intersubjectivity. I will argue that although these theories have already been used for explaining both successful cases of social interaction (e.g., empathy, emotional attunement) and highly pathological ones (e.g., autism, schizophrenia), they have not yet been employed in addressing cases lying between health and pathology, such as those I gather under the conceptual headings of “paralysis” and “invasion.” In the two major chapters of this study, by analyzing how (1) sexual breakdowns and (2) clashes of worldviews are staged and reflected upon in a selection of Ian McEwan’s works (the short story “Homemade” and the novels On Chesil Beach and Enduring Love), I will argue that literary works can be used as “intuition pumps” (cf. Dennett 1991, 2013) in order to shed more light on aspects of intersubjectivity contemporary cognitive science and philosophy did not yet systematically address.

Thus, I stress the epistemological potential of the literary medium by exploring how a close reading of a selection of McEwan’s novels and stories can offer invaluable insights into extraliterary matters—in this case, the ubiquitous failures of understanding and disrupted ways of interaction haunting social relations. In other words, I show how literature can be said to “think” in a certain sense, sometimes even deeper and in more complex ways than science and “philosophy proper.” Although I employ scientific and philosophical theories of intersubjectivity in order to shed light on forms of intersubjectivity McEwan stages and reflects upon in his works, I do not consider these theories to necessarily reflect universal truths, but rather to be open to revision. In fact, I argue that a close engagement with McEwan’s multilayered rendition of intersubjective dynamics enables us to complexify contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of social interaction. Thus, my monograph stages what I consider to be a proper form of dialogue between literature, science, and philosophy, where each of the three participants has equal status in the production of knowledge.

1.1 Theoretical and Methodological Framework

In his phenomenological investigation of the “literariness” of literature, The Singularity of Literature (2004), Derek Attridge criticizes what he calls literary instrumentalism, which he “crudely summarize[s]” as “the treating of a text . . . as a means to a predetermined end: coming to the object with the hope or the assumption that it can be instrumental in furthering an existing project, and responding to it in such a way as to test, or even produce, that usefulness” (7), resulting in “the diminishing of careful attention to the specificity of the literary within the textual domain, and to the uniqueness of each literary object” (10). Thus, he calls for an approach that does justice to the specificity of the literary medium and the uniqueness of individual literary works, and that tries to clarify the nature of the reading process in general as well as of particular reader responses to particular literary texts.¹

My attitude toward Attridge’s position is ambivalent. On the one hand, I admire, agree with, and see the relevance of his project: my own extensive and intensive engagement with literary works too, in both my personal and professional life, made me clearly realize the importance of paying attention to their particularity, as well as to the uni que experiences of reading and reflecting upon them. And although a large amount of stylistic, narratological, and phenomenological work has already been done in order to increase our understanding of what precisely this specificity entails, I believe that as long as new events of literary writing and reading occur, our work in this area can never be considered complete. However, I would not refrain from completely banishing what he calls instrumental readings.

The main reason for this is quite simple: literature does not exist in a vacuum. Neither its writing and reading, nor its subject matter is isolated from other social and cultural practices. On the contrary, they all exist and acquire significance as parts of highly interconnected webs of meaningful activities. Attridge recognizes this when he claims that “there is no doubt that [literature] has had a role to play in significant, and frequently laudable, social changes [and that it] functions, and is made to function, as a powerful and invaluable instrument of individual and social advancement” (8), as well as when he admits that it “would be naïve to think that reading could be innocent of exterior motivations and goals” (9).

However, by repeatedly stressing the dangers involved in using literature instrumentally in dealing with “political, moral, historical, biographical, psychological, cognitive, or linguistic” projects (7), he becomes to a certain extent blind, in my opinion, to the benefits such a use could bring to the development of such projects, and shies away from a full understanding of the complexity, power, and functions of literature (and perhaps even of the precise nature of the Grail he seeks for, that is, the medium’s specificity).² Furthermore, an obsessive focus on the specificity of reading experiences might also ignore how such experiences are related to other types of experiences, that is, how our involvement with literature is both influenced by and influences various other facets of our “being-in-the-world” (cf. Heidegger 1927).³

I believe one area in contemporary literary criticism in which instrumental readings could prove to be extremely productive is what Marco Caracciolo describes, in his article discussing the status of interpretation in the cognitive literary studies, as cognitive-thematic approaches to literature (2016: 196–202). Although literary studies have always been to a certain extent interdisciplinary, the past three decades witnessed the emergence and development of what Crane and Richardson called a “new interdisciplinarity” (1999), that is, cognitive literary studies, a field defined by Alan Richardson in 2004 as “the work of literary critics and theorists vitally interested in cognitive science” (2).⁴ As Richardson acknowledges, this is a highly interdisciplinary venture, especially given the fact that cognitive science is a strongly interdisciplinary field too.⁵ This is the main reason why, according to Lisa Zunshine, a “dialogic, decentralized view has shaped the trajectory of cognitive approaches to literature over the last decade,” and why cognitive literary scholars do not generally feel the need either “to iron out differences among their ‘potentially conflicting aims and methodologies’” (2015: 1) or to “give their differences sharper definition” (4).

Although both Richardson and Zunshine celebrate the “dynamic, relational nature” (Zunshine 2015: 1) of this field of research, together with its “openness and unpredictability” (3), and argue that its definition should not focus “on the boundaries, goals, or methods” that characterize it (1), I find such a lack of (meta-)theoretical reflection and clarity quite problematic. While I agree that in such interdisciplinary approaches theoretical and methodological eclecticism is necessary and even unavoidable, I nevertheless think that much confusion can emerge when scholars unreflectively “borrow” concepts, theories, and methods from certain academic disciplines and transfer them to other disciplines without carefully reflecting upon the differences between these disciplines and, consequently, upon the validity and relevance of their approaches.

As Jackson (2003) and Caracciolo (2016) argue, such problems emerge most pointedly when cognitive literary scholars are trying to interpret particular literary texts by using various concepts and theories from the cognitive sciences, without reflecting upon the precise relationship between hermeneutics and science, and thus, upon the validity of such interpretive “moves.” In Caracciolo’s opinion, “Literary interpretation is . . . a far cry from any scientific project, because it relies on argument as opposed to empirical testing, because it cannot be falsified, and because it seeks to shed light on a specific text or corpus of texts as opposed to some general question about the world or human psychology” (188; emphasis in original). This incommensurability between hermeneutic and scientific approaches makes Caracciolo (as well as Jackson before him) initially argue that there are other, more productive and less problematic, ways of integrating literary studies and cognitive science, such as what he calls the “processual” and the “functional” approaches to literature.

In processual approaches, the act of reading becomes the focus of attention. Instead of interpreting particular literary texts, scholars in this field investigate, often from empirical perspectives, how actual readers make sense of texts, that is, they try to discover the underlying neurological and psychological processes involved in reading literature. As Caracciolo admits, such a line of research can be seen as an extension of “classical” reader-response theories,⁶ this time, however, strongly informed by current cognitive-scientific paradigms and methods and (at least potentially) open to experimental testing and validation (188).⁷

Functional approaches, on the other hand, seek “to shed light on how engaging with literary texts can play a role in broader psychological processes” (194). The main presupposition behind these approaches is that cognition and culture (including literature) are intrinsically related and that literary works can play an important role in the acquisition and development of various cognitive abilities. Reading is understood as a “cognitive workout” (194) that can increase the readers’ capacity of o rganizing their present and past experiences, of “fine-tuning” their social skills through enhancing their capacity of ascribing complex mental states to others, and even of refining their moral frameworks.⁸

Both the processual and the functional approaches are seen by Caracciolo as highly important and productive ventures within cognitive literary studies, where “literary study and scientific investigation may find a genuine, and potentially mutually advantageous, point of convergence” (195; my emphasis), and open thus pathways toward more appropriate, that is, bi-directional, interdisciplinary exchange.⁹ Whether the focus is on the reading experience (in processual approaches) or on the interplay between cognition and culture (in functional approaches), Caracciolo believes that “literary scholars can bring to the table of these projects a unique sensitivity to the nuances of texts and contexts that may lead to new hypotheses and, possibly, enrich scientific understanding” (195).

However, as he further argues, one aspect of these approaches that might appear problematic to literary scholars is that there is a strong tendency to marginalize, or even sidestep completely, what in literary studies has generally been seen as highly important and central—“a key component of literary study as a profession and institution” (195), that is, interpretation. “Should we conclude that cognitive approaches to literature prefigure a different model of literary scholarship,” Caracciolo asks, “one where interpretation is marginalized and ultimately supplanted by empirical methods lifted from the mind sciences” (196)? The two cognitive literary ap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Ian McEwan’s Intuition Pumps
• 2 Sexual Breakdowns
• 3 Clashes of Worldviews
• 4 Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright