Thoughts of and prompted by a McEwan

Arising from one of the Royal Institute’s evening discourses (see reference 1), a discourse called ‘Examining the self’ given by Ian McEwan. I was there in part because I had been prompted to read his novel ‘Saturday’ by its coverage in a book by one Jens Brockmeier, a noted narratologist. See references 2, 3 and 7.

I imagine that the Institute’s auditorium could be rather intimidating for a lecturer, all rather intimate with its old brown wood and steeply tiered circles of stalls. With its ghosts of eminences past. The lecturer marches in at 1950 on the dot, to the sound of a small bell, and is supposed to finish exactly an hour later when the small bell is rung again. McEwan managed that bit rather well, getting through what he told us was 8,000 words spot on time – an average of a bit more than two words to the second. Perhaps there were some options he could tweak as he wound up. I associate to the lecture scene near the beginning of Chekov’s ‘A Dreary Story’, a lecture which was given in a similar auditorium.

It was the first such discourse which I have been to where the lecturer read his talk, something which is difficult to do without sounding very dull, and where he managed without any kind of visual aid. He did take a while to get into the swing of it, but get into the swing he did, giving us what I thought was a very good lecture, even if I did not agree with some of the points he was making. But it was quite a dense lecture and one did need to pay attention or stuff just passed one by.

It was built around the thesis that western literary coverage of the inner workings of human minds – what McEwan called subjectivity – has been steadily increasing since the onset of the Reformation, with only very sporadic coverage before that time and with virtually none at all before the appearance of Homer’s Odyssey. Ancient Sumerians, at least in their surviving writings, were a lot more interested in tribute & taxation than in psychology.

He illustrated his point with various examples plucked from Western literature. Penelope getting in a state because she did not instantly recognise Odysseus, returned to home and hearth after so many years. Montaigne’s essays generally. (I was reminded at this point of my long-owned and quite unread copy of same, once the property of one K. Joy Timberlake, with my attempts to recover her identity being blocked by that of some pop singer). Hamlet displaying the sort of virtuoso introspection which had not previously seen the light of literary day. Pepys being very honest about himself when recounting a serious quarrel with his wife to his diary (January 9th 1663, an example which McEwan lifted from the diary, via Claire Tomalin, via a review in the Guardian, a newspaper with which he seems to have some sort of relationship). Leopold Bloom going about his daily business. With the examples getting steadily thicker on the ground as time goes on.

He speculated a little on the nature of self. He quoted Polonius talking about being true to one’s self, talk which both asserted the existence of self – something which some other peoples, in other times and places, have not been that bothered about, bothering more about the community than the individual – and the stability of self. Not necessarily something which never changed, but certainly something which changed, if at all, quite slowly. It was something that one could be true to, this in itself being an idea which would not have occurred to a Homeric hero. A notion which, as it happens, looks to be developed in a recent pick-me-up from the Wetherspoon’s library at Tooting: ‘Sincerity and authenticity’, the printing of a series of lectures by one Lionel Trilling, somebody of whom I had not previously heard, but whom wikipedia knows all about and who appears to have been cut from similar cloth to that used for Alfred Kazin, whom I have noticed in the past. See references 5 and 6. I might have more to say about Trilling in due course.

Contrariwise, McEwan made a rather wry remark to the effect that some authors really disliked being asked about novels which they had written some years previously. A book written a long time ago was written by a different person altogether and it was often terribly hard to say what that different person had been thinking of. One might even be embarrassed by what was down on one’s charge sheet, as it were.

And then there are people who decide what sort of person that they want to be, that they are going to be. Maybe the necessary changes can be effected by changing one’s clothes, changing one’s opinions or changing one’s diet & exercise regime. One might take drugs of various sorts – people with certain mental illnesses certainly do take drugs to change aspects of their self which they, or perhaps others, do not like. One might drink. But there are limits: the brain might be very plastic, but there are obvious limits to the plasticity of the body – so if one has smoked for forty years one is not going to be able to put one’s lungs back to their native condition. One is stuck with being born tall. One is stuck with the parents one started with. And there are limits to what can be done with the brain too: plasticity can only go so far towards working around gross damage like, for example, knocking out some region of the cortex or the separation of the two hemispheres.

One also thinks of actors and the way that they can put on someone else’s personality rather as us lay people might put on someone else’s clothes. I associate to the layers of packages like PhotoShop. So I might overlay my own personality with some other personality, and set transparency of this other personality to 33%: I want the other personality to come across loud and clear, but I also want some of me to be left. Or perhaps it is not like that at all, I don’t need to give this other personality house room at all; it is all just an act and my own personality is alive and well throughout the performance. But I think it is like that; part of the attraction of being an actor is being able to play at being someone else, but being someone else in what we IT people call sand-boxes. It is all quite safe. Or at least fairly safe.

McEwan was sound on free will, although he did not put it quite as I have at reference 4.

He was not sound on obscenity, appearing to believe that the curtains of censorship and evasion were steadily being pulled back and that the world was a better place in consequence. He cited James Joyce was one of the pioneers in the crusade to dwell on what had previously been unmentionable in polite society. Whereas I believe that there are many things which are better left off-stage or obsceana – a notion which I had thought that the Greeks were signed up for, it being their word, but I have quite failed to confirm that thought. That said, I am not altogether sure that McEwan quite believes what he said. He writes about plenty of unmentionable things, but manages to sound, to my mind, rather awkward while he is about it; as if he has to force himself to do it. And while I am on the subject, I think there are plenty of things in the public sphere which are best left private. While many of us are, to my mind unhelpfully, forgetting how to forget – in which, computers with their very good memories are a rather mixed blessing.

A nice touch in dry wit.

He attracted two rather tiresome questioners, one picking up on a remark about choice of gender and one picking up on one about choice of race. Well handled by the mistress of ceremonies.

All in all, a very good talk. The best arty talk I have been to for a very long time.

PS: I am now on ‘Atonement’, the film of which I have seen at least twice (on telly that is), but not having read the book before. I was impressed by his extensive account, at the end of Part 1, of how Briony Tallis came to do the dreadful deed, came to perjure herself; how she talked herself into it and then found herself trapped in the lie. But had the intelligence and power to sustain that lie. A subjective account which it would be hard to get into a film, and as far as I can remember, they did not really try. An account which made it entirely plausible that such a thing might actually happen.

Reference 1: http://www.rigb.org/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/it-is-forbidden-to-blow.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/a-spark-from-anvil-of-academe.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/free-will-1.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Trilling.

Reference 6: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=brownsville.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/a-tale-of-london-life.html.