Thinking about Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, I cannot help but relate it to Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen.
When I saw Copenhagen in 2002, at the Kennedy Center, it was much-buzzed as the play to see. I remember leaving the theater befuddled at the buzz: "boring" was the word I would've applied, followed by "repetitive."
The play three times enacts the famous walk that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg took in 1941, during which they had a conversation -- the substance of which remains unknown -- which fundamentally altered their relations for the rest of their lives. At the time, I recognized fully that the repetitive enactment of the walk-and-conversation was a dramatization of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is colloquially (though controversially, from a physicist's point of view) understood to mean that our understanding of any situation is always limited by our perspective; shift the perspective, and the content changes.
However boring Uncertainty might be to learn in the classroom, Copenhagen didn't make the case that dramatizing it improved the learning experience. On the contrary, I found the physics lesson to get in the way of Frayn's proper task: storytelling.
The number one priority in telling a story, so far as I'm concerned, is maintaining interest, entertaining the audience. This imperative is among the most difficult of the novelist's tasks. "Most novels incredibly boring. It's amazing how the form endures. Not being boring is quite a challenge." That's McEwan talking, quoted in a recent New Yorker piece (at p. 48).
But McEwan appears as vulnerable as the rest of us to recognizing principles that we don't apply in our own lives. The Child in Time makes the same blunder as Copenhagen (although, seeing that Copenhagen post-dates The Child in Time by a decade, perhaps it should be the other way around.) The entire plot line involving Thelma and Charles Darke, Thelma's long physics lectures, Charles' regression into childhood, as well as the lorry accident and Stephen's near-miss driving around it -- these some hundred pages or so are all peripheral to the story of Kate's disappearance, and Stephen's reuniting with Julia.
These irrelevancies are not in the book to advance plot. They're in the book to illustrate physics principles about the nature of time. McEwan is elaborating in prose on his intellectual love affair with physics. These passages are all cerebral masturbation. And, while admittedly they're more masterfully done than Frayn's tiresome redundancies, these diversions are as disruptive to McEwan's storytelling in The Child in Time as Uncertainty was to Frayn's in Copenhagen.
The irony, of course, is that nothing illustrates the importance of perspective to determining content, or the elasticity of time, better than a well-told story. With a page-turner in hand, the content of the world of the page is determined wholly by the author's perspective, and time flies.
My belief is that the world is fundamentally indifferent to any individual's presence. Our course in life is mapped, not by design or fate, but by a combination of individual resource and luck. As individuals, we should care if we're enjoying ourselves (indeed, I believe that joyfulness is an aspect of moral responsibility), but the world itself is as indifferent to our pleasures as it is to our sorrows.
Not everyone shares my perspective. If you were to have asked me why -- what accounts for differences in world view -- I would've guessed that a combination of experience and temperament accounted for the variance. Reading Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, I discovered a new explanation: world views correspond to our styles of lovemaking.
The Child in Time includes a sex scene between Stephen, the protagonist, and his wife, Julie, during which Stephen wonders:
how anything so good and simple could be permitted, how they were allowed to get away with it . . . . [M]atter itself had dreamed this up for its own pleasure and perpetuity, and this was exactly what you were meant to do, it wanted you to like it. . . . Surely the, he thought . . . surely at heart the place is benevolent, it likes us, it wants us to like it, it likes itself.
(p. 68.) The passage brought an abrupt halt to my reading, as I mused that I'd never found sex to be "good and simple," nor did the pleasure of an orgasm suggest (to me) the fundamental benevolence of the world. On the contrary, the humiliating complexity, searing ecstasy and basic irrationality of sex has always implied a world that, if not indifferent, was sardonic. (My own preference for indifference over sardonicism relates to the my temperament: I'm not a pessimist.)
I nonetheless appreciate McEwan's insight. I recognize intuitively the correctness of his observation: what we like to do in bed, how society responds to those preferences, and how we deal with the societal response, colors our world view. Unlike Stephen, I myself have never experienced the word "home" repeating itself in my mind during intercourse. The sex Stephen and Julie share derives its joys from the habitual: "the known dip and curve [leading to] a deep, familiar place." (p. 68.) The societal approprobation that accompanies such a domestic delight in sex no doubt supports a benevolent world view.
That our behavior in our most primal moments should correpond to the fundaments of our world view is logical, but not necessary. In fact, the correspondence might -- at the opposite extreme -- be viewed as silly. Why should a personal fetish, for example, complicate one's understanding of something universal, like matter (to use McEwan's formulation)? The fact that it so clearly does, however, is yet another instance of the world's indifference to what we think.
In Black Swan Green, David Mitchell writes, "If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, 'When you're ready.'" (p. 183.) Funny that creative writing should make the author so vulnerable, but my own experience confirms his observation. The act of writing a novel, for example, seems to arm everyone around the author, while transforming the surroundings into a battleground where the pen is not mightier than the sword.
I recalled the Black Swan Green quote when reading Too Close to the Sun, Sara Wheeler's biography of Denys Finch-Hatton. Wheeler is open about her dislike of Karen Blixen, who -- by memorializing her love affair with Finch-Hatton in Out of Africa -- is the only reason anyone recalls Denys Finch-Hatton today.
Wheeler's distaste for Karen Blixen spills over into gratuitous pot shots about her writing: "[Karen Blixen] liked sweep and grandeur, and later imbued her tales with it (often with little substance beneath the glittering surface)." (p. 125.) This remark is typical of Wheeler's regard for Karen Blixen, and every time I stumble on another Wheeler's tossed-off, untutored literary judgments, I feel more empathy for Karen Blixen, lying in her coffin, with Wheeler gleefully wielding the stake overhead.
On the other hand, I also feel sympathy for Wheeler. Her subject, Mr. Finch-Hatton, died without leaving any substantive written record of his existence. While this silence might be one reason why no one previously published a biography of him (despite the lapse of more than 70 years since his death and Wheeler's biography), Wheeler isn't dissuaded. She grunts through three years of research, until she comes "to see the lack of material not as a biographical handicap but as a cipher for the unknowability of anyone else's inner life." (p. 3.)
In other words, she begins a process of rationalization to stave off the certainty that she's been wasting her time, chasing a phantom. Thankless task, biography writing. As thankless, no doubt, as literary criticism.
I love reading novels for three reasons, primarily. The first is relief of boredom. The second is the pleasurable stimulation I experience when I'm engaged in a story. And the third is the comfort I derive from novels. Learning from Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, for example, that the contours of generation struggle have changed remarkably little since the nineteenth century made me feel wonder at the consistency of human travails throughout time and the support we can find in the written records of our forebears.
That said, I didn't expect to find comfort in novels for the irritation and insecurity occasioned by the current state of the publishing industry. The decline in reading rates, the competition from the Internet and video games, the market preference for memoirs/how-to's/biz books, the current economic downturn -- these harbingers of the death of the novel I took to be burdens I'd have to shoulder without aid from authors of an earlier era. How often I'd thought my publishing woes would be solved if only I'd been writing during the heyday of Grove Press, in the years of Max Perkins . . .
But Jane Austen set me straight. "[I]f the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. . . . Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body," Austen writes, taking her stand in Northanger Abbey. "Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers."
Ah me. To be assuaged with such thorny balm -- the assurance that writing novels would be a miserable pursuit whenever I'd be born; to be comforted with the knowledge that reports of the death of the novel are greatly exaggerated -- and have been so for some two hundred years; I can only love reading novels even more.
Notwithstanding the tremendous differences in style, setting and story between Gone with the Wind and Emma (as well as the 121 years between their publications), Scarlett O'Hara and Emma Woodhouse are remarkably similar. They are both strong-willed and rich. They are both treated by society as beautiful, but handled by their authors somewhat less deferentially. (The first clause of Gone with the Wind is, "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful." And Emma, though pretty, is second in beauty to Harriet Smith.) They are both quick witted but narrowly focused in their interests. They are both selfish and lack self-awareness. And, perhaps most importantly, at the time we meet them, they have -- neither of them -- been in love.
"I never have been in love: it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall," says Emma (at page 75). The fact that, by the end of the book, she has fallen in love with Mr. Knightley is what salvages her from perpetual bratdom. In gaining self-awareness of her own heart, she grows up. Most significantly, she ventures beyond the safety of her self-sufficient life, willing to risk the ever-present failure that lurks when any of us trades our solitary satisfactions for the hope of greater bliss in pairs.
Scarlett, on the other hand, thinks she's in love with Ashley, but her love for him has always struck me as false. Ashley doesn't possess any of the qualities -- pragmatism, forthrightness, gumption -- that Scarlett prizes most highly, and perhaps it is for this reason that she can't comprehend him. Ashley's function is not as the love of her life, but as the shield to protect her from ever truly falling in love.
For all the horror that Scarlett confronts, the one thing she fears is falling in love. Scarlett, who reacts to the atrocities of war by committing passionately to survival, equates that survival with self-sufficiency. She can envision (indeed, tolerate) a survival that burdens her with dependents for whom she must provide; but she cannot fathom a survival in which she is dependent -- even in a situation of mutual and reciprocal dependency, as (presumably is possible) in marriage. Falling in love would deprive her of the independent self-sufficiency that she feels is necessary for her existence.
A woman who doesn't want to fall in love is a challenging character. Jane Austen remarked that Emma was a character that only she could like, and Scarlett is far from sympathetic. And yet both characters are compelling, both books masterpieces and -- not incidentally -- popularly acclaimed.
Perhaps that combination of tough character and popular appeal arises from the humiliation both women endure. Emma is mortified when Mr. Knightley criticizes her sharp treatment of Miss Bates. Scarlett is humiliated so profoundly and so frequently that Margaret Mitchell appears almost sado-masochistic.
That audiences can endure strong female characters as long as they get their comeuppance is received wisdom. But maybe audiences are also warming to an uncomfortable truth fundamental to both tales: openness to the humiliations and tribulations of dependency is a prerequisite to falling in love; but a refusal to countenance such indignity is no protection against it.
