For a generation of well-established postmodernist writers in Britain, the exploration of narrative as the containment and control of temporal experience is of central importance. What makes Ian McEwan's writing especially worthy of attention is the way in which his experimentation with time and narrative is interlinked with the rethinking of gender identity. The early stories First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1979) contained troubled and claustrophobic examinations of emergent masculinity. However, his novels from the 1980s onward contain an increasingly confident investment in gender as the central problematic through which the agency of the male writer can be reimagined in relation to both time and social space.

Perhaps the starkest example of this strategy can be traced in McEwan's anti-nuclear oratorio Or Shall We Die? (1983). Here the key mother-and-child image iconic to the oratorio form is set up directly against the paradigm of “mastery” and war. A working opposition is clearly established between a masculine-identified trajectory toward destruction, epitomized by the experience of the Cold War, and the promise of salvation in “womanly times” (23), characterized as an amalgamation of maternal empathy and (in an unexamined paradox) the post-positivistic Einsteinean legacy in science. Femininity, however, is not naturalized through conventional characterization but is broadened and abstracted as an alternate paradigm of temporal and social understanding. Thus gender becomes the focus in McEwan's work for a distinctive response to existing political and historical conditions:

Shall there be womanly times, or shall we die?
[…]
Can we have strength without aggression,
without disgust,
strength to bind feeling to the intellect?

(23)

In The Child in Time this stylized use of gender as an approach to the political is developed much further, with the ideological obsessions of the Thatcherite right ironically reduced to the pathos of prepubescent male anxiety. In this novel again, a feminine principle of empathy or insight and the New Physics are clearly conflated, most obviously through the figure of Thelma, a woman scientist. In a far more complex way than was possible in the oratorio, however, the quantum notions of complementarity and relative time have in this text become an organizing principle for the rethinking of masculinity in relation to the dissolution of the nuclear family. For example, the key confrontation between the protagonist Stephen and his mother is narrated at a moment before his own birth, when he is both adult and foetus combined. The loss of Stephen's daughter at the beginning of the novel and the subsequent breakup of his marriage are similarly framed around themes of temporal disjunction: catatonia, obsession, and infantile regression on the part of the male-identified characters, contrasted with a therapy through music, landscape, and study schematically identified as a “womanly” alternative. The Child in Time, therefore, can be seen as establishing very clearly in McEwan's work the development of a gendered framework for understanding social and personal time, with this negotiation written through the experimental form of the narrative itself as well as through its particular thematic foci.

In this essay I explore the way in which McEwan extends this distinctive engagement with time, narrative, and gender within his texts in two of his most recent novels, Enduring Love and Black Dogs. In Enduring Love, with Joe Rose's precious picnic of focaccia, black olives, and 1987 Daumas Gassac, we are aware almost immediately that here the stake in McEwan's wager on narrativity will be the constitution of a moneyed, successful masculinity. Indeed, the novel opens with the symbolic emasculation of its protagonist, his heroic impulses immediately revealed as banal and redundant in a bungled attempt to save a child from a ballooning accident. Like McEwan's earliest writings, the focus of Enduring Love is personal and claustrophobic. In Black Dogs, however, McEwan's canvas is much larger. With a narrative that spans the experience of two generations, there is a much stronger concentration here on the notion of femininity as a possible response to the vaster impasse of time and historicality associated with the postmodern. Moving alternately in and out of the linear writing conventions of biography, history, and chronology, the structure of McEwan's writing in this novel forms a spiral of meaning as much as it forms the familiar continuity of linear narration. At the same time, as the novel draws on the postmodernist thematics of dislocation and fragmentation, however, there is also an assertion of the risks or the costs implied by the epistemological breakdown and relativity with which postmodernist writing seems often to be so comfortable. Thus in the postwar setting of McEwan's novel, the all-too-canonical suggestion of amnesia as a defining feature of the postmodern condition is at the same time thrown into sharp and uncomfortable relief against the political and historical imperatives of the Holocaust and of neo-Nazi resurgence in Europe.

I

In contrast to the explicit political engagement of some of his earlier works, Enduring Love is striking for what seems like a loss of confidence in relation to the broad discourses of politics and history, a narrowing of narrative horizons and a return to personal obsessions. Certainly, in its negotiation of narrative form and of masculinity alike, Enduring Love is not a text of affirmation. Instead, its articulation of unease about the efficacy of both is everywhere apparent within the novel. The focus is on a successful writer whose comfortable family and professional life is challenged by the attentions of a fanatical male admirer. Above all, the novel depicts a scrabbling for security, as the protagonist seeks to bring the force of the law and of psychiatric medicine to bear on his unwelcome pursuer. However, the surge of panic that structures and consumes this text does not arise from any threat to his material security. Rather, the intruder needs to be seen as the catalyst for a panic that emerges from the more basic crisis that the novel discloses in the relationship between its privileged male subject and the public narratives of science, medicine, and law that are supposed to constitute and to defend his embattled masculinity.

At the end of the text, McEwan appends case notes and a fully reproduced and referenced journal article on de Clérambault's syndrome, the condition with which the “fanatic” Parry is ultimately identified. With its trappings of medical-scientific legitimacy, this appendix seems, on one level, to provide a sense of security and closure for the text. Such scientifically ratified documentation should represent an epistemological anchor for the narrative, locating its exploration and confirmation of masculine identity within the real. Approaching this documentation from our retrospective position as readers, we see the function and meaning of McEwan's novel very clearly on one level. Within the legitimizing discourse of science, both the standard of a “normal” masculinity and narrativity as a privileged mode of its articulation have been secured.

On another level, however, the text specifically invites our incredulity toward this grand narrative of male affirmation. As Umberto Eco suggests in his commentary Reflections on “The Name of the Rose,” it is necessary to distinguish between the possibility of what we might call the naïve and informed readings simultaneously facilitated by postmodernist writing. In Eco's scheme, the more informed reader might usefully be thought of as a “meta-reader,” who reads not only through the text but also above it, who is alive to quotation, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and epistemological insecurity. To read Enduring Love in this sense, then, is first of all to identify the spuriousness of McEwan's appended documentation. From the moment we start to dig around in the text, the very specificity of the references in McEwan's appended article invites the realization that these case notes and this entire academic journal are dissimulated continuations of the main fiction. In that sense Enduring Love mirrors directly the “scholarly” appendix that concludes Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, which invites us to consider both the problematic status of Offred's account as a document and the violence implicit in her “historicization” within academic discourse. Similarly, the insertion of these fake fragments of psychiatric medicine in Enduring Love appears to an informed reader as a strangely overdetermined gesture of legitimation. With a characteristic postmodernist duplicity, McEwan's protagonist himself has already explicitly allowed for this possibility: “De Clérambault's syndrome was a dark, distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane. […] In other words, what could I learn about Parry that would restore me to Clarissa?” (128).

Taking those reading possibilities together, McEwan-Joe's appendices must be considered as presenting us both with the neutrality of information and with the knowledge of its duplicity. On a simple level, the novel educates us about a pathology of gender. As Joe suggests: “For there to be a pathology there had to be a lurking concept of health” (128). In that sense, these discursive fragments work to articulate in reverse the notion of a stable and healthful masculinity, a hegemonic narrative of gender identity within which the protagonist is able to reappear as the privileged subject. On a second level, however, in relation to his domestic status as a successful heterosexual male, the citation of a spurious psychiatric discourse in McEwan's text illustrates the instrumentality of that discourse in resecuring the privileged professional male as the standard of psycho-sexual normalcy. In terms of our informed reading, the reverse side of this coin is the destabilizing effects those appended fragments introduce into the narrative fabric of the novel. Understood in Eco's first sense, they seem to represent within the broader structure of the text a confirmation of the fruitful continuum between the writing and reading of literary narrative and the understanding of the world of the real. In Eco's second or “meta” reading, however, by disclosing the epistemological crisis on the underside of narration, they seem rather to display the opposite. Over the shoulder of the narrator, against the grain of their own intentionality, they precipitate a knowledge of narrative dislocation, mirroring exactly the dislocation of a privileged masculinity with which the novel is centrally concerned.

Throughout McEwan's text, narrative, symbolized and encapsulated in the appended, concentrated text of this case study, is clearly foregrounded as the means through which rationality, identity, and especially a sense of temporal coherence repeatedly try to establish themselves. At the beginning of the text, as Joe and Clarissa attempt to come to terms with the ballooning accident and death they have witnessed, there is an instant tension between the forces of narration and those of meditation or repetition, specifically polarized along gender lines. Narrativization is implicitly posed as the means of containment and control that represents one half of this dichotomy: “so much repetition that evening of the incidents, and of our perceptions, and of the very phrases and words we honed to accommodate them that one could only assume that an element of ritual was in play, that these were not only descriptions but incantations also” (28). In a refiguration of the gendered opposition set up in McEwan's earlier work, moreover, we can see in place here, from the outset, the idea of a schism between the (male) protagonist's reliance on a therapy through narrative and his (female) partner's quite different desire to envision an encapsulating image:

A little later we were back in our seats, leaning over the table like dedicated craftsmen at work, grinding the jagged edge of memories, hammering the unspeakable into forms of words, threading single perceptions into narrative, until Clarissa returned us to the fall, to the precise moment when Logan had slid down the rope, hung there one last precious second, and let go. This was what she had to get back to, the image to which her shock had attached itself.

(30)

Narrativity is strongly identified as the medium through which Joe articulates his own masculine knowledge and agency. A science writer, his journalistic work is alternately a narration of scientific advances for popular understanding and an exploration of the death of narrative in science. Through narrative, very consciously, he both succeeds and fails to address the disruption precipitated by the fanatic Parry. Indeed, the text presents itself on a literal level as the record of that highly self-conscious struggle of narrativization. At the same time, however, the instability and disjunction potentially implicit in narration are constantly foregrounded: “I've already marked my beginning, the explosion of consequences. […] But this pinprick is as notional as a point in Euclidean geometry […]” (17). In Joe's intricate attempts to defend and justify his hegemonic subject positioning through narrative, we witness at the same time the increasing erosion and destabilization of his psychic and social world.

This text, then, is engaged in unpacking the assumption of a continuity between the socially legitimized grand-narratives of legality and medicine and the positioning of the privileged male subject. The public discourse of criminality, Joe painfully discovers, is not invoked as easily as he presumed against a diffuse and enigmatic threat to his person. The narrative of psychiatric knowledge requires articulation and ratification within the overdetermined frameworks of case study, public record, and predictability before it can be deployed as a weapon of policing and confinement. Instead, in the ironic twist of the novel's main text, we unwillingly discover that only the banal narrative of male violence can be engaged with ease. In The Innocent (1990) McEwan plays with and discards the genre of the spy thriller, with a tunneling project in postwar Berlin whose sexual overtones become increasingly and alarmingly apparent within the novel; in Enduring Love the generic quotation we encounter is that of the hard-boiled investigator, of a masculinity that is both orthodox and marginal, operating on the edge of the social, whose legality and stability are constantly in question:

Clarissa thought I was mad, the police thought I was a fool, and one thing was clear: the task of getting us back to where we were was going to be mine alone.

(161)

The very banality of this pivotal plot line—Joe rescues his frightened partner from the clutches of the knife-wielding erotomaniac by blowing off his elbow with a handgun—foregrounds what we might usefully denote as the postmodernist dynamics of this text, in relation to which our assent as readers is simultaneously demanded and withdrawn. At the moment we are encouraged to empathize, we are also encouraged to recoil and critique. On a simple level, Enduring Love narrates the triumph of an orthodox masculinity in restoring the protagonist's own identity and position within the nuclear family. At the same time, however, it also illustrates the breakdown within a text of the narratives of legality and mental health of which the professional, rational, solvent male is supposed to be the subject.

II

For Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, the function of narrative in relation to the everyday living of social and personal lives is to reflect and to affirm the coherence of temporal experience. Thus, according to Ricoeur, “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (1:52). Between the vast scheme of cosmic time, the meaning-laden scale of the historical, and the private, fluctuating experience of personal time, there is the potential for discordance. The task of narrative is to cement a continuum between those three orders of time perception. It could be argued that narrative in Ricoeur's scheme has a fundamentally conservative function. Arising out of “a pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources” (54) and mediating between those and the experience of the reader, narrative over and over rehearses and reproduces the hegemonic time frame. It ensures a comfortable continuum between our understanding of the cosmic or absolute, our sense of our historical placing, and the texture of our everyday experience.

Ricoeur's analysis becomes a problem in terms of the relatively unreconstructed commitment he frequently retains both to the universalistic properties of literature and to a notion of the author as auteur, self-determined designer of a work and of the readerly experience. Both of those critical tendencies emerge strongly, for example, in the analysis of Mrs Dalloway in volume 3. By the same token, there is little admission of the possibility that literary texts might also be deemed valuable and important for their articulation of ruptures, shifts, and discontinuities within the cultural and ideological fabric. Considering the negotiation of time in Enduring Love, however, it is nevertheless possible to see the usefulness of Ricoeur, not least in terms of his tripartite structure of understanding for time. The challenge posed by Parry to the security of the protagonist Joe can certainly be read on three levels, broadly mirroring the analysis proposed in Time and Narrative. First, Parry's stalking and harassment disrupt the fabric of Joe's personal life, in terms of his habitual work patterns and day-to-day routines. That threat on the one hand erodes his capacity to deploy the hours of the day usefully and, as important, on the other hand threatens his capacity to escape this level of consciousness into that other fundamental temporal experience, a necessary, undistracted state of intellectual concentration, “the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought” (48). Second, Parry's insistent intrusion precipitates pivotal crises in the larger narratives of Joe's family life and particularly in his professional life, the level at which personal experience interfaces with the public sphere. The stable relationship with Clarissa breaks down, and Joe finds himself compelled to re-assess the direction and value of his vocation as a writer. Finally, on a third and higher level, Parry's powerful imposition of a Christian teleology functions as a direct challenge to the temporal constitution of Joe's larger scientistic and evolutionary belief system.

The response Joe's narrative initially articulates toward this complex onslaught, moreover, can be seen as an attempt at a closer marriage between the levels of his temporal consciousness. That appears most obviously in the move to abandon his career as a journalist—a mere mediator of knowledge—in favor of a re-entry into the metanarrative of scientific research, “carrying my own atomic increment to the mountain of human knowledge” (75). The continuum between his science-defined cosmic understanding and the narrative of his professional life is thus to be cemented more firmly. As a journalist, Joe's meditation on the role of narrative in science has raised some uncomfortable questions, not only about the sanctity of scientific knowledge in relation to the history of the cosmos, but also about the status and meaning of his own career in relation to the history of science. The attempt to abandon that and to re-enter the research community offers an easy refusal of both those sets of questions, precisely because it offers the possibility of re-establishing a narrative coherence between the different levels of his temporal world.

The ultimate failure of Joe's attempt at ontological self-defense, through the failure of his research bid, leads to the necessity for the alternate strategy that dominates McEwan's text—the more violent narrativization of Parry himself. It is in this sense that Enduring Love is “about” de Clérambault's syndrome. Through the syndrome, the novel identifies the power of medical-scientific discourse as a guarantor of temporal and epistemological security. In a social sense, the appended documents are significant because they cast Parry into a ratified linear-narrative framework that carries the force of juridical and disciplinary power. On a personal level, moreover, what de Clérambault offers Joe is a surrogate solution to his own sense of temporal dislocation:

The name was like a fanfare, a clear trumpet sound recalling me to my own obsessions. There was research to follow through now and I knew exactly where to start. A syndrome was a framework of prediction and it offered a kind of comfort. I was almost happy. […] It was as if I had at last been offered that research post with my old professor.

(124)

Nevertheless, it is within this process that the affinity between the urges of narrativization and those of obsession is gradually and inexorably suggested in the text. In his journalistic role, Joe's own discursive practice involves a deployment of narrative as mediation: “People say I have a talent for clarity. I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, back-trackings and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs. It's true, someone has to go between the researcher and the general public, giving the higher-order explanations that the average laboratory worker is too busy, or too cautious, to indulge” (75). In the course of the text, however, that professional penchant for the ordering and rationalization of the disordered becomes radically extended. While Joe labors with the enigmatic and allusive discourse of Parry's letters, cutting and pasting them into the deepening narrative of a threat (which he can then take to the police), the parallel suggestion is developed of the symbiotic relationship between Parry's intrusion and the neurosis implicit in Joe's own consciousness. For Joe, Clarissa's perception of Parry is cast in precisely those terms. “He was the kind of phantom that only I could have called up, a spirit of my dislocated, incomplete character, or what she fondly called my innocence” (102). Parry needs to be assimilated and contained within the narrative of criminality, and later of psychiatric disorder, before he can be policed and contained on a bodily level. On one level, the novel is the story of Joe's success in that endeavor. What emerges in his attempts to articulate Parry's deviancy is, nevertheless, as strong a conviction of his own obsessionality:

Three times I crossed the street towards him with my hidden tape recorder turning, but he would not stay.

“Clear off then!” I shouted at his retreating back. “Stop hanging around here. Stop bothering me with your stupid letters.” Come back and talk to me, was what I really meant. Come back and face the hopelessness of your cause and issue your unveiled threats. Or phone them in. Leave them on my message machine. […] I daydreamed violent confrontations that always fell out in my favour.

(143-44)

III

In her essay “Women's Time,” Julia Kristeva offers a critical perspective for understanding time and narrative through gender, providing a clear context to the narrative strategies that we see in McEwan's writing. In parallel with the experimentation, we can identify in The Child in Time and Enduring Love, Kristeva develops a clear association between the notion of narrative linearity and the notion of obsession. She argues that feminists have articulated a problem with the dominant “conception of linear temporality, which is readily labelled masculine and which is at once both civilizational and obsessional” (447). Outlining the possibility of a number of alternative feminist responses to hegemonic ideas of national and personal identity, she sets out a clear gender framework for understanding temporal organization. In relation to Black Dogs in particular, Kristeva's implied schematic opposition between intuition, mystical vision, and female subjectivity on the one hand and “male-stream” linear rationality on the other—an opposition she finds in need of significant renegotiation—offers clear lines of critical engagement:

In return, female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition becomes a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression and arrival-in other words, the time of history. It has already been abundantly demonstrated that this kind of temporality […] renders explicit a rupture, as expectation, or an anguish which other temporalities work to conceal.

(446)

For Kristeva the understanding of Europe in particular needs to be reconsidered in terms of its constitution in memory and historicality. Just as we can see with McEwan's protagonists, Kristeva suggests that for a new generation of feminists there is a need to negotiate between the time of narrative and history associated with the male and the problematic of the matrix space and the temporalities of repetition and eternity associated with the female.

In novels such as Black Dogs and Enduring Love, which center on the epistemological and existential problems of masculinity, the kind of gendered understanding of narrative, history, and biography that Kristeva proposes is highly applicable. With a far broader narrative scope than that of Enduring Love, McEwan's novel Black Dogs can be read directly in terms of its exploration of the problematic of historical memory through an explicitly gendered framework. More specifically, we see again in this novel an oscillation between the poles of intuition and rationalism, personified through the relationship of two of its central characters. Characteristically for McEwan's fiction, a male narrator becomes the focus of the text's attempt to negotiate a new understanding of personal and social time by mediating between these feminine- and masculine-identified modes of seeing and remembering:

Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest.

(19)

The ability of narrative itself to articulate successfully and to preserve what needs to be remembered, as in both The Child in Time and in Enduring Love, is explicitly questioned in Black Dogs. Through the medium of a memoir, the novel follows its narrator Jeremy and his struggles to find or force coherence between radically disparate strands of temporal understanding: not only the biographical past of his mother-in-law June and the larger historical frame of World War Two but also the Holocaust and its legacy, the deterministic historicism of her postwar socialism and the universalist, visionary consciousness that remains her final, most defining feature. As Angela Rogers argues in “Ian McEwan's Portrayal of Women,” to read McEwan's treatment of femininity in terms of authenticity of characterization may well be to find his work wanting—indeed Rogers's essay is oriented toward precisely such a conclusion. The serious limitation of that critical approach, however, is that it fails to recognize fully the role and use of gender in McEwan's writing, not as the medium of naturalistic narration but rather as the structural focus for a broader spiral of temporal and historical concerns. The strategy of McEwan's text is to pivot a plurality of narrative threads on a clear central moment. Indeed, Black Dogs turns on the simplest of parables, a girl frightened on a country path by a pair of dogs; all other narrative concerns are twisted and woven around that central motif.

Drawing again on Ricoeur, I have already implicitly characterized the task of narrative here, of Jeremy's memoir, as that of needing to find simplicity, security, and coherence between the dislocated levels of the temporal—the historical, the cosmic, and the personal. McEwan's text continually discloses something less reassuring: not the ease and potency of narrative as a guarantor of memory and of knowledge, but rather that it is barely adequate for this task. According to Ricoeur, historical narrative itself needs to be understood only as a “knowledge by traces” (3: 120). The construction of historical meaning must be conceived as the retrospective inscription of causal sequence on otherwise enigmatic marks of passage, a summary appropriation of traces or vestiges of something that has passed or is past. In Black Dogs even more strongly than in Enduring Love, we see in Jeremy's memoir the problems and the labor of forming that narrative chain, as well as the enigmatic quality of the trace itself.

First, the articulation of June's life as a linear development is constantly frustrated by the complexity and discontinuity of her consciousness, within which not biographical or historical causality but the coordinating force field of a central image or parable, the black dogs, dominates the alignments of her life and understanding as powerfully as a magnet under paper:

As far as June was concerned, it was to be the centrepiece of my memoir, just as it was in her own story of her life—the defining moment, the experience that redirected, the revealed truth by whose light all previous conclusions must be rethought.

(50)

Within the distinctive mode of June's understanding through insight and revision is an attempt to encapsulate in the central parable or vision something that is simultaneously meaningful on a personal, historical, and cosmic level. But the success of that endeavor is never clear. Second, in Bernard's Berlin experience we find an attempt to negotiate between those same elements, between the historicality of the Wall's demolition, the mystic identification between the young girl Greta and his dead wife, and the personal consummation represented by his courage in standing against racism at the close of an era. His experience is not offered as one of affirmation, however, but one closer to humiliation.

The progression of the various episodes of the novel, from Berlin in 1989 to Majdanek in 1981 to the Bergerie in 1989 to St Maurice de Navacelles in 1946, offers not a chronological or even a coherent narrative progression but rather a spiraling reorientation of temporal perspectives, through the disparate connections of history, of family, of intuition and recollection. In the midst of that complex or spiral of concerns in Black Dogs, moreover, only through the motif of the dogs, only in a vision or a dream, is any suggestion of closure found or durability, any possibility of encapsulation of the novel's vast concerns—on a historical level of racism's resurgence in Europe, on a political level of the danger of institutional and governmental complicity, on a biographical level of the possibility for making meaning out of an individual life, and on a spiritual or even visceral level of the understanding of evil. Paradoxically, nevertheless, part of the basic quality of that encapsulating vision or dream is to remain both transparent and enigmatic:

They are running down the path into the Gorge of the Vis, the bigger one trailing blood on the white stones. They are crossing the shadow line and going deeper where the sun never reaches, and the amiable drunken mayor will not be sending his men in pursuit for the dogs are crossing the river in the dead of night, and forcing a way up the other side to cross the Causse; and as sleep rolls in they are receding from her, black stains in the grey of the dawn, fading as they move into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time.

(174)

Within the text of Black Dogs, the framing of narrative in relation to the multilayered fabric of the temporal, refracted through the prism of gender, is a central concern. Around the axis of feminine identification, the dissident temporality of dreamtime is celebrated and privileged within the time-gender framework of the novel. However, that mode of seeing and understanding is also presented as problematic. June's consciousness is trenchant and visionary in its convictions but also fractured and riven with amnesia and the threat of temporal vacancy. “She cleared her throat. ‘Where was I?’ We both knew she had peeped into the pit, into a chasm of meaninglessness where everything was nameless and without relation, and it had frightened her. It had frightened us both” (49). By the same token, moreover, the novel offers a strong articulation of the inadequacy of conventionally ordered narrative, schematically identified with the male, for the task of social and personal remembering. On the opposite axis of McEwan's gender divide, the male-identified investment in a leftist historicism is presented as equally problematic. Against what are presented as the scientistic and deterministic contours of socialism in the postwar era, the mediation of historical time itself here precipitates a sense not of affirmation but of disillusionment and dislocation: “The news we didn't want to hear was trickling through. […] Finally the contradictions are too much for you and you crack” (89).

As in Kristeva's essay, the novel presents us not with a choice between linear rationality and the temporalities of repetition and eternity but rather the need for a third way, or to put it differently, the challenge of imagination posed by the insufficiency of plot or of vision alone. In June's struggle for coherent understanding and in Bernard's, along both of these axes of McEwan's gendered scheme, the problem of incoherence, framed again as a disjuncture between the levels of temporal understanding, is central. On the one hand, the novel is enthralled and disturbed by June's investment in the immutable and her oscillating disclosure of vision and amnesia; but, on the other hand, there is an unwillingness to relinquish the sense of agency and the different promise of redemption held and withheld by Bernard's socialist and scientistic rationality. Against the enormity, the vast backdrop of that schism of understanding, what we seem to understand is the weediness of words in the novel, a sense of inadequacy around the writing of narrative, which surely will not be able to effect its task of synthesis and reconciliation. What finally anchors the novel, however, despite that canonical suggestion of narrative insecurity or inadequacy, is the presence of a balancing imperative, represented by the quiet and dominating presence of the Holocaust and the reality of neo-Nazi resurgence in Europe. Within the duplex and discordant framework of the novel, therefore, both the problem of historical memory and its absolute necessity are forced into our consideration.

In the Berlin section of Black Dogs, we see a self-conscious transposition of the parable of the black dogs from its place in June's visionary understanding to a scenario of concrete historicality in which Bernard becomes the protagonist. The decommissioning of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the accompanying citywide celebrations are only the background for an attack on the elderly Bernard by a group of young neo-Nazis. These skinheads, bunched in a pack with their hot breath and lolling tongues, are explicitly paralleled with June's dogs. The connection is clearly drawn between the central vision of the dogs, who attack and are wounded but then are ultimately reprieved by public complacency or complicity, and the continuing threat of neo-Nazism. In a characteristic strategy of resolution, not the Berlin authorities but a highly sexualized representation of young femininity—Greta, explicitly revisioned as June herself “the one on the left. Didn't you see?” (84)—is alone able to force a transformation of violence into impotency, reducing the racists to the status of “naughty children” (98). “She was a contemporary, an object of desire and aspiration. […] The force of her disgust was sexual” (98).

Later in the text, after June's honeymoon attack, the thematic importance of patriarchal complacency and complicity is most clearly foregrounded in relation to the challenge of femininity, with the inaction of the local authorities in St Maurice to the black dogs, whose wildness and ferocity stand both symbolically and actually as a reminder of their fugitive Gestapo owners. There is a persistent rumor of their use during the war in the sexual humiliation of an independent, unmarried woman in the village; now in the war's aftermath, the text suggests an unspecified reluctance on the part of the Maire and his men to eliminate this threat by having the dogs exterminated. Similarly, in the scene in Berlin in 1989, there is an undertow not just of inaction but of complicity within the public sphere in relation to the violence of the young neo-Nazis, who first attack a young communist revolutionary before turning their attentions to the respectable establishment figure of Bernard. Two “business types or solicitors” (96) begin the violence and whet the appetite of the crowd and of the young Nazis for a beating. Moments later, “amazed by what their own violence had conjured up [they] had retreated deeper into the crowd to watch” (97). A hatred marginalized on one level is conceived and endorsed at another by the faces of a public and respectable masculinity. Moreover, not institutionalized authority but the moral-sexual force of the young Greta-June alone offers the possibility of its negation. In a scene whose focus and anchor should apparently be the weight of historicity itself, suggested jointly through the breaching of the wall and through the signal appearance of the neo-Nazis, McEwan's text instead becomes polarized between the sense of a more elusive and diffuse and recurring danger, suggested on a broader level than simply the presence of a few underprivileged thugs, and the insurgence of a specifically feminine agency that seems to provide its only effective counter-argument.

IV

In the Berlin section of Black Dogs, the text does not invite us to witness the historical confirmation of the end of Nazism's legacy and of the Cold War, with the decommissioning of the Wall and a concomitant moment of liberation. Instead there is a clear suggestion of historicization itself as a dissolution of meaning. As Jeremy and Bernard encounter the city's excavation of the Nazi terror, the idea of digging up the Gestapo headquarters, like framing an extracted fingernail in a museum case, renders each not so much preserved as “neutralised” (93). Similarly, in McEwan's portrayal, the excitement and expectation of the masses around the Brandenburg Gate dissolve to a recognition that “nothing was going to happen” (88). The threat and the confrontation are not here but elsewhere. Only the symbolic face-off between the young woman Greta and the pack of Bernard's neo-Nazi assailants provides any possibility of closure to this event, whose historical monumentality McEwan's text works systematically to resist and deny.

For Ricoeur in the third volume of Time and Narrative, what makes this whole notion of the monument open to suspicion is precisely its pretension to finality, and the elision of its imbrication with politics and power. In Black Dogs, all of Nazism's legacy as a “warning from history” is seen as subject to mutation, dissolution, and appropriation. The integrity of the monument is supposed to reside in its brave immutability, as Ricoeur suggests. But what if that appearance of immutability and integrity turns out to be a chimera? In the section “Majdanek, Les Salces and St Maurice de Navacelles 1989” not the Berlin wall but the concentration camp at Majdanek becomes most illustrative of this sense of the duplicity and mutability of the monument that is supposed to be a stand against history.

As Jeremy and his partner Jenny approach the gates of the concentration camp, their first confrontation is with an official sign in commemoration of the dead. But this monument, this publicly legitimized document, provides a sense not of security or of affirmation or even absolute condemnation of “our universal reference point of human depravity” (37) but rather a sense of threat and unease, a clear suggestion of the imbrication of the place with politics, institutional complicity, and power:

“No mention of the Jews. See? It still goes on. And it's official.” Then she added, more to herself, “The black dogs.”

These last words I ignored. As for the rest, even discounting the hyperbole, a residual truth was sufficient to transform Majdanek for me in an instant from a monument, an honourable civic defiance of oblivion, to a disease of the imagination and a living peril, a barely conscious connivance with evil.

(109-10)

In Berlin, as we have seen, historicization becomes neutralization, with the symbolic demolition of the legacy of World War Two painted in terms not of euphoria but of blankness. The attempt by neo-Nazism symbolically to appropriate Germany's reunification is neutralized by the insurgence of a feminine agency that is simultaneously moral and sexual. At Majdanek, on the other hand, the distortion and appropriation of the monument are offered with even darker implications. Each, it is implied, contains within it a different form of connivance that subverts and appropriates the possibility of a benign historicality. Each contains a threat that we cannot afford to ignore.

Within and around the questioning of the historical monument comes a necessary questioning of the narrative fabric that constitutes and surrounds it. It is easy to see that, through the motif of Jeremy's memoir, Black Dogs constantly foregrounds its own status as a document in preparation, a negotiation, and an articulation. Clearly, a potential paradox exists between the novel's disclosure of itself as a made text, as something both compromised and unfixed, and the sense of the need to witness something more absolute—for the preservation or encapsulation of a point of durable meaning in relation to the threat of Nazism and its legacy. For Ricoeur, the critique of the monument is also that of the document, whose status is no less suspect and compromised in relation to power and knowledge:

Conversely, the document, even though it is collected and not simply inherited, seems to possess an objectivity opposed to the intention of the monument, which is meant to be edifying. [But f]or criticism directed against ideology […] documents turn out to be no less instituted than documents are.

(118)

In a sense that is precisely the problem with which McEwan's text is grappling self-reflexively. Through June's memory and dream of the black dogs, instituted as it is into the family memory, through the witnessing of Nazi depravity first hand at the site of the concentration camp and the recognition of the continuing and institutionalized complicity in its project, through the documentation of the end of the Berlin Wall and the signal presence there of young neo-Nazis, what is at stake is the possibility of capturing in a document, through narrative, some durable sense of a threat that we should and must continue to take seriously.

The compromised status of the historicized past is a crucial part of the way in which that threat is constituted. On a different level of temporal perception, moreover, the possibility of a biographical discourse framed around June's life founders on Jeremy's difficulties in negotiating between the security of a linear-rational exposition and the more enigmatic and ungraspable structures of meaning disclosed within her vision and amnesia. In Ricoeur's scheme the classical function of narrative is clearly that of a guarantor of ontological and epistemological security. Its task is to mend discordance and to supply a structure of coherence that affirms the order and meaning of social and personal life. On a variety of levels, McEwan's text bears witness not to that process of coherence but rather to the insecurity or discordance of the biographical, historical, and metaphysical themes of which it is woven. Whether its central narrative motif of the black dogs is able to transfigure that discordance into a moment of durability or encapsulating meaning remains radically in question.

Both Enduring Love and Black Dogs are concerned with the struggle of narration. Each reveals in the center of its focus the craftedness of narrative and the difficulty with which narrative may be constructed as a coherent chain of meaning. To that extent McEwan's writing can be seen as symptomatic of a broad tendency in contemporary fiction. The unusualness of his work, however, is its distinctive use of gender as a focus for renegotiating those well-established concerns. For Julia Kristeva, the opposite pole to “women's time” of repetition, eternity, and the matrix space has often been seen as a masculinist temporality characterized by linearity, control, and obsessionality; and the task for a newer feminism becomes to transcend that kind of limiting dichotomy. In Enduring Love and Black Dogs, similarly, it is possible to see the ways in which an alternative to either of those gender polarities is explored on a number of different levels. McEwan's texts characteristically involve close identification with the problems and perceptions of their male narrators, but what we see in them is far from an attempt to rehabilitate some older, masculinist mode of authorship. On the contrary, McEwan's fiction might be better characterized in terms of its struggle to articulate the possibility of a narrative voice that is self-conscious in its refusal of full coherence or control and unable or unwilling to disguise the extent of its own instability and unease.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. 1985. London: Vintage, 1996.

Eco, Umberto. Reflections on “The Name of the Rose.” Trans. William Weaver. 1983. London: Secker, 1985.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women's Time.” Feminisms. Ed. Robyn R. Warhal and Diane P. Hernde. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. 443-62.

McEwan, Ian. Black Dogs. London: Cape, 1992.

———. The Child in Time. London: Pan/Picador, 1987.

———. Enduring Love. London: Cape, 1997.

———. First Love, Last Rites. London: Cape, 1975.

———. In Between the Sheets. London: Cape, 1978.

———. “Or Shall We Die.” A Move Abroad. 1983. London: Pan/Picador, 1989. 1-24.

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. 1983. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

———. Vol. 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. 1985. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Rogers, Angela. “Ian McEwan's Portrayal of Women.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 32 (1996): 11-26.