Registering Trauma and the Construction of Narrative in Ian McEwan’s The Innocent

ABSTRACT

This essay will explore the (anti)representation of traumatic wounding in Ian McEwan’s Cold War novel The Innocent, arguing for a different understanding of McEwan’s well-known employment of metafictive techniques. I demonstrate how McEwan shines a critical spotlight on narrative re-construction of the past in order to confront an unnarratizable core, which is the effect of traumatic occurrence on identity as manifested through storytelling. Using the critical vocabulary of psychoanalysis and its relationship to trauma theory, I argue for the ethics of an encounter with an otherness so painful it tears apart language and material reality, knowledge and experience. This meeting with otherness encapsulated in trauma alters a critical trajectory that locates narrative ethics in McEwan to be a benign transaction between consciousnesses. This essay argues for the radical impact of a relationality with that which exceeds and precedes the self, and how this event precipitates negatively in McEwan’s narrative technique through dissonance, fragmentation and indeterminacy. The registering of the traumatic encounter in narrative will thus allow me to compare how the novel delineates McEwan’s narrative style and pursues an incomplete reckoning with personal and collective history, which signals an ethics of the inadmissible and unpresentable.

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Ian Tan

Ian Tan is Assistant Professor of English at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. He is the author of “Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity” (2022), as well as numerous articles on contemporary fiction and literary theory.