A Reader's Responsibilities

Ian McEwan's recent letter in The Guardian points to an aspect of criticism that is perhaps underestimated by those advocating a turn away from academic approaches towards more 'aesthetic' or 'literary' responses. In reply to a reviewer who attributed one of his character's views to him, McEwan writes,

As for Saturday - a character in a novel who expresses hostility towards novels in general should not be seen as an entirely trustworthy mouthpiece of his novelist creator. For example, the pro-Iraq war views Henry Perowne expresses in an argument with his daughter are not mine and nor, for that matter, are her anti-war opinions. On the other hand, I would agree with Perowne that some - not all - peace protesters are naive. Who can forget those daft and earnest English folk parading through central London last summer with placards that read, "We are all Hizbullah now"?

I sometimes wonder whether these common critical confusions arise unconsciously from a prevailing atmosphere of empowering consumerism - the exaltation of the subjective, the "not in my name" syndrome. It certainly seems odd to me that such simple precepts need pointing up: your not "liking" the characters is not the same as your not liking the book; you don't have to think the central character is nice; the views of the characters don't have to be yours, and are not necessarily those of the author; a novel is not always all about you.

The complaint that readers too readily conflate characters or narrators with biographical authors is a familiar one to students of the novel (Jane Eyre, anyone?); in part McEwan is asking that his artistic freedom be respected. But he is also demanding that his work be read properly, with due attention to its technical complexities, so that, to use his own example, it is not assumed that because his protagonist in Saturday is (cautiously) in favour of invading Iraq, either the author or the novel takes the same position. Particularly if a reader is going to make public pronouncements about a novel (as in a review), the reader should be skilled enough--knowledgeable enough--to avoid misreading. And it is possible to misread: a reader's response can be wrong, misguided, confused. All opinions are not equal: some represent a fuller, more careful, better-informed engagement with all the elements of the work. Henry Perowne, to stick with the Saturday example, is a compelling but flawed character: his world view has limits not shared by the novel overall, which, among other things, self-evidently values literature more highly than the neurosurgeon does. One of the things the novel is about is the limitations of Perowne's materialist view of the world--though at the same time, the novel is filled with respect for the "grandeur" in that view of things (a Darwinian phrase with rich implications for McEwan's novel). In some of the anti-academic discussions, the reader's responsibility to the text and author in question gets sidelined because of the emphasis on responding to, rather than analyzing, a text. A responsible (rather than just responsive) reading requires, just to give one example, attention to point of view, which can include recognizing when a thought or opinion not in quotation marks nonetheless represents the views of a character ("she was only Anne," we read in Austen's Persuasion, but a reasonably alert reader will promptly understand that this dismissive attitude belongs to Anne's foolish family, and one of the novel's main points is that their inability to appreciate her signals their broader moral disabilities). Unreliable narration is another technical issue that must be rightly understood for a good reading of many books: Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, for instance, would be radically misrepresented by a reader who accepted the narrator's deference for authority as the novel's own. While these days nearly anybody can read a novel, that does not mean everybody reads it equally well. Academic scholarship may be of questionable public value in its more erudite forms (though it may also be of intrinsic interest and therefore arguably worthwhile nonetheless), but in my own experience at any rate, English professors spend a lot of time trying to equip their students, not with politics or Theory but with the knowledge and tools to be better readers. If we do value literature, than this kind of expertise is surely worth promoting, even demanding.

Recent discussions about Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read prompt some of the same thoughts. While I can see many occasions on which you might be in a conversation about a book you have not read, I don't accept that there is any value in your pronouncing on it in any way. For example, I have not read Bayard's book myself, only reviews and commentaries on it, such as Leah McLaren's in this week's Globe and Mail. So I can talk about it in a limited way, and I might even get passionate about what I take to be some of its claims. But I can't responsibly judge or review the book without reading it for myself. I think it's outrageous if it is true, as McLaren's column states, that Bayard "admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to open"--unless (and you see, I can't know this without reading more) he lectures solely on context, literary relations, historical significance, or other issues that do not depend on specific textual evidence or close reading. If he talks about the specifics or the qualities of the books themselves, he is a fraud. As McLaren points out, we live in an "era of crib culture" in which people seem ready to accept "intellectual shortcuts" whenever possible. But substituting someone's report about a book for your own reading of it is shoddy as well as risky, and our readiness to give up on "heavy reading" is not necessarily something to be complacent about. Required reading lists have the merit of motivating students to struggle on with things they find uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even boring. As McEwan says, "a novel is not always all about you," and in that respect education differs substantially from other 'consumer' products. To consider my own experience again, it's remarkable how many students are capable of learning to like a novel, or (since 'converting' them to like things is not really the point of teaching them) learning to appreciate the merits, qualities, or significance of a novel, as a work of art and a contribution to pertinent cultural, social, aesthetic, or political discussions, even if their first response was boredom or confusion. Again, some expertise is required, some technical terms useful, some precision in analysis as important as visceral responses. And again I think that as readers, or as serious and responsible readers, we have an obligation to the texts and authors to study our primary source carefully before we arrive at (much less publish) our conclusions.

Ian McEwan, Saturday

I approached Saturday with caution because of its rave reviews, but I found this novel entirely engrossing, genuinely interesting, original, and moving. Part of the surprise it held for me was Henry Perowne's cautiously supportive attitude towards the war in Iraq. I've become so accustomed to anti-war perorations from literary luminaries that I had no expectation that McEwan would offer anything different (I should have known better); the enormous uncertainty, the high stakes, the intolerable complacency of a pacifism that is content to leave Saddam in power, the difficulty of separating ends from means when responding to the call to arms made by leaders whose real motivations are surely mixed...I think McEwan did justice to the complexity of the judgments--the mental and moral balancing acts--called for by these circumstances. I thought the use of "Dover Beach" as a frame and model was brilliant: I can't believe I didn't recognize Perowne's situation at the beginning as analogous to that of Arnold's speaker until the poem appeared directly in the action. I'm curious about how or whether the initial encounter between Perowne and Baxter stands as its own analogue to the international situation: surely it does, and so Perowne's feelings of responsibility for the violent consequences also have some application to the wider issues, including perhaps his stance towards the invasion of Iraq. Why is he a neurosurgeon? At what level is the fascinating issue of the relationship between physical and mental states raised by Perowne's work on the brain also part of either the problem or the solution he posits for the world that lacks 'certitude' or 'help from pain'? The turn from the window to the lover in "Dover Beach" has been criticized as an objectification of the companion, sought not as an individual but as solace, as a solution to the ignorant clash of armies. Has McEwan avoided that solipsistic impulse on the part of his protagonist? Does his family have the solidity Arnold's love lacks? It is not credible in a simple realistic way that Baxter should be turned aside from violence by poetry, but how far is McEwan appealing to us to see some poetic essence (yearning, as Henry considers it?) as the saving grace in a world racked with 'confused alarms of struggle and of flight'? The novel seems far too political to be satisfied with an aesthetic turn away from the clash itself. McEwan's writing here seemed flawless to me, with all the richness of detail that made Atonement dazzling in its own way, but without the tendency I felt in that novel to abstraction or aesthetic self-indulgence: this book reads as if all of its details are necessary, and as if it is equally necessary that they be clear and concrete.