tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca-fr/topics/ian-mcewan-44044/articlesIan McEwan – La Conversation2022-10-24T03:29:02Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1901332022-10-24T03:29:02Z2022-10-24T03:29:02ZIan McEwan’s Lessons, his most autobiographical novel, is a new experiment in vulnerability<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490506/original/file-20221018-26-ct0gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C0%2C5168%2C3445&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Markus Gjengaar/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/lessons-9781787333987">Lessons</a> is Ian McEwan’s most autobiographical novel to date. It is the story of a man’s life, but it is also the story of a man making his life into a story. It exemplifies the risks and rewards of living a life shaped from within by the logic of literature. </p>
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<p><em>Lessons – Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape).</em></p>
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<p>Anyone familiar with McEwan’s extensive, award-winning oeuvre will know that his resort to personal material is not for lack of imagination. He is, by any standard, a master of style and invention. It is hard to class his novels within a genre because he has forged his own – one that combines crisply realist surfaces with sudden excursions into the darkest corridors of the mind. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489911/original/file-20221016-24-1fgiiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>These hallmarks persist in Lessons, but the inclusion of autobiographical details – like McEwan, the novel’s protagonist grows up in North Africa in a British military family and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/books/18mcew.html">discovers late in life that he has a brother</a> – is a new experiment in vulnerability. </p>
<p>The novel’s central character, Roland Baines, reveals a writerly consciousness at work. Roland is attempting to make sense of his life as lessons – stories of cause and effect. The solipsism and pathos of this project are on display, along with a glimmer of grace. </p>
<h2>A labyrinth of cold sorrow</h2>
<p>Lessons begins with a piano lesson remembered with sensory immediacy. Bach’s prelude seems to the 11-year-old Roland “like a pine forest in winter […] his private labyrinth of cold sorrow. It would never let him leave.” His piano teacher, Miriam, pinches the boy’s thigh, slips her fingers towards his crotch, and strikes his knee with the edge of a ruler. She styles this abuse as a lesson. </p>
<p>As an isolated and obsessed 14 year old, Roland seeks out Miriam during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He wants to experience sex before he is “vaporised” by nuclear war. But the world goes on, and so does their intoxicating and destructive relationship. </p>
<p>A narrative leap locates these memories in the mind of the adult Roland, a sleep-deprived father to a young infant. His wife Alissa is missing and he is a suspect in her disappearance. Who is to blame? And what is the point of the pain? From these formative betrayals by women – one a controlling sadist and one an absconder – Roland tries to extract some answers. </p>
<p>There is something suspicious about this narrative set-up. In their physical absence, Roland invents the power of these female characters. Like witches in fairy-tales, they carry the destructive drives. </p>
<p>This displacement frees Roland to present himself as a talented person living an inconspicuous existence. He commits to the loving labour of raising their son, while Alissa goes on to become an award-winning novelist. The writerly consciousness is thus split across two very different kinds of life choice, but it is disappointingly conventional that the female characters are made to carry the destructive ego traits. Somehow Roland’s story gets told, but it costs him far less than Alissa to tell it. </p>
<p>But there is a dark edge to Roland’s writerly mind too. A poem in a notebook the police took from his desk refers to murder and burial. Roland explains to the detective that this is figurative language used to express the end of a different relationship – the liaison with Miriam – and scoffs at the clumsy intrusion by the police:</p>
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<p>The street-level forces of law and order were long-ago typed into the culture as Shakespeare’s Dogberry. This visit would be an exquisite tale, one that Roland would work up and tell, as he had before.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490488/original/file-20221018-7176-c1t3p7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Dogberry – Henry Stacy Marks (1853)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
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<p>The passage throws suspicion on Roland. In <a href="https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/much-ado-about-nothing/">Much Ado About Nothing</a>, Dogberry’s police force does apprehend the villains, albeit accidentally. Moreover, Roland’s propensity to “work up” tales is laid bare. McEwan lets the author’s hand flicker into view. </p>
<p>Even more disconcertingly, Roland says to himself: “The grave containing her remains did not exist.” The plain meaning is clear: there is no grave. But the word-order puts “the grave” before the reader’s imagination before making it disappear. What, we wonder, is the extent of the damage done inwardly to Roland? Can this keeper of secrets keep secrets from himself? The sliver of doubt is thickened by self-questioning: “Why even tell himself this?”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/philosophy-obsession-and-puzzling-people-julian-barnes-new-novel-explores-big-questions-179092">Philosophy, obsession and puzzling people: Julian Barnes' new novel explores big questions</a>
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<h2>A storytelling habit</h2>
<p>Roland’s storytelling habit entails a desire for narrative epiphanies, as for sex, with unknown limits. Alissa’s wry comment – “this piano teacher […] rewired your brain” – raises the possibility that the novel’s shaping consciousness is indelibly damaged. </p>
<p>Roland might not be a murderer with a mind half in shadow, but he has a compulsive habit of burying and exhuming the past to make the present bearable. He is trying to mitigate life’s painful confusion. He shares this habit with most human beings, of course. The key difference is that Roland’s life, because it is a narrative invention, has more returns and more plot resolution than most real lives.</p>
<p>He eventually catches up with both Miriam and Alissa. From Miriam, he receives a pleading apology. He takes control of their story by deciding that he won’t bring a case against her because “this wasn’t the same woman”. Alissa, with her amputated foot and morbid addiction to nicotine, offers another scene of pathetic resolution. Roland sees that her choice of a writing life has cost her a relationship with their son. Both women are diminished by the narrative – a point sharpened by the title of Alissa’s award-winning novel: Her Slow Reduction. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489931/original/file-20221017-21-kz5osu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489931/original/file-20221017-21-kz5osu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489931/original/file-20221017-21-kz5osu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489931/original/file-20221017-21-kz5osu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489931/original/file-20221017-21-kz5osu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489931/original/file-20221017-21-kz5osu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489931/original/file-20221017-21-kz5osu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Ian McEwan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fronteiras do Pensamento/Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Surprise returns trigger new hope and old pain. Roland is reunited with his lost brother – a plot point implausible enough to be from real life. The eager, awkward regard in which the two ageing men hold one another is depicted with great gentleness. </p>
<p>Daphne, the stalwart friend of his early single-parent days, also returns when they are in their sixties. One night as they sit “shoeless by the fire”, Roland asks her to marry him. The epiphany seems to have arrived: </p>
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<p>Everything glowed […] This was how to steer life successfully Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson.</p>
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<p>But this instant of empowering volition is eclipsed only 24 hours later when Daphne tells Roland she has received some test results: </p>
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<p>It’s cancer, grade four […] It’s everywhere! I don’t stand a chance. I’m so scared. </p>
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<p>The very next page begins: </p>
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<p>He lifted it from the drawer where he kept his sweaters and placed it on his desk. It was a weighty ceramic jar. </p>
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<p>The leap from Daphne’s living fear to Roland handling a jar of her ashes is a cruel jolt. It is two years after her death and he is preparing to return to Scafell Pike to scatter her ashes. Skipping the pain seems a cowardly, solipsistic design – no one in the novel gets to be as complex and concentrated a consciousness as the protagonist. Daphne’s last chapter of life unfolds through Roland’s memory. The narrative follows the contours of his mind, not the sequence of days. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489933/original/file-20221017-25-zslasf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Illustration for Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat by Leonard Leslie Brooke (1910).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
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<p>Roland’s granddaughter Stephanie enters late in the novel. As a new character, she permits fresh returns. Their shared story-within-the-story is Edward Lear’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43188/the-owl-and-the-pussy-cat">The Owl and the Pussycat</a> – a “beautiful impossible adventure” – which Roland had read to his son Lawrence, who in turn reads it to his seven-year-old daughter. Stephanie begins to learn and recite the poem during a COVID lockdown. </p>
<p>In the novel’s closing pages, Stephanie’s obliviousness to a heavy-handed message in a different bedtime story makes Roland reflect that it is a “shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson”. He then confides in her that</p>
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<p>there’s a pretend book I want to read. It’s very interesting and so enormous that I don’t think I’ll ever get to read it all. </p>
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<p>He tells her that it has “everyone in it, including you”. </p>
<p>Here is the familiar McEwan coup: a narrative bent back on itself. Before he is led off the stage of his own story by Stephanie, Roland (or McEwan) shows that the controlling hand of the narrative retains masterful control even when letting go.</p>
<p>The final return comes after the story is complete. In a postscript, McEwan reveals another inter-generational story of reading and writing: “Finally, my thanks to my English teacher, the late Neil Clayton, who insisted that I used his name unchanged”. Clearly, the lesson that has shaped McEwan’s literary imagination is the one same that sticks for Roland: in the patient processes of living and writing, epiphanies arrive rarely and unbidden. They are less like a lesson and more, like McEwan’s novel, a gift.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190133/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Flaherty works for the Australian National University.</span></em></p>Ian McEwan has forged his own genre – crisply realist surfaces mixed with sudden excursions into the darkest corridors of the mind. In Lessons, the central character reveals a writerly consciousness.Kate Flaherty, Senior Lecturer (English and Drama), Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1313422020-02-18T10:26:09Z2020-02-18T10:26:09ZFan of sci-fi? Psychologists have you in their sights<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315915/original/file-20200218-11023-1k78m5f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C0%2C3988%2C1706&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Liu zishan via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Science fiction has struggled to achieve the same credibility as highbrow literature. In 2019, the celebrated author Ian McEwan <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/14/ian-mcewan-interview-machines-like-me-artificial-intelligence">dismissed science fiction</a> as the stuff of “anti-gravity boots” rather than “human dilemmas”. According to McEwan, his own book about intelligent robots, Machines Like Me, provided the latter by examining the ethics of artificial life – as if this were not a staple of science fiction from <a href="https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2020/01/02/asimov-at-100/">Isaac Asimov’s robot stories</a> of the 1940s and 1950s to TV series such as Humans (2015-2018).</p>
<p>Psychology has often supported this dismissal of the genre. The most recent psychological accusation against science fiction is the “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4651513/">great fantasy migration hypothesis</a>”. This supposes that the real world of unemployment and debt is too disappointing for a generation of entitled narcissists. They consequently migrate to a land of make-believe where they can live out their grandiose fantasies.</p>
<p>The authors of <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0142200">a 2015 study</a> stress that, while they have found evidence to confirm this hypothesis, such psychological profiling of “geeks” is not intended to be stigmatising. Fantasy migration is “adaptive” – dressing up as Princess Leia or Darth Vader makes science fiction fans happy and keeps them out of trouble. </p>
<p>But, while psychology may not exactly diagnose fans as mentally ill, the insinuation remains – science fiction evades, rather than confronts, disappointment with the real world.</p>
<h2>The case of ‘Kirk Allen’</h2>
<p>The psychological accusation that science fiction evades real life goes back to the 1950s. In 1954, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1956/02/28/archives/robert-lindner-psychologist-41-author-of-rebel-without-a-cause-must.html">psychoanalyst Robert Lindner</a> published his case study of the pseudonymous “<a href="https://harpers.org/archive/1954/12/the-jet-propelled-couch/">Kirk Allen</a>”, a patient who maintained an extraordinary fantasy life modelled on pulp science fiction. </p>
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<span class="caption">Case studies from the edge.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Schnoodles blog</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Allen believed he was at once a scientist on Earth – and simultaneously an interplanetary emperor. He believed he could enter his other life by mental time travel into the far-off future, where his destiny awaited in scenes of power, respect, and conquest – both military and sexual.</p>
<p>Lindner explained Allen’s condition as an escape from overwhelming mental anguish rooted in childhood trauma. But Lindner, himself a science fiction fan, remarked also on the seductive attraction of Allen’s second life, which began to offer, as he put it, a “fatal fascination”. The message was clear. Allen’s psychosis was extreme, but it showed in stark clarity what drew readers to science fiction: an imagined life of power and status that compensated for the readers’ own deficiencies and disappointments.</p>
<p>Lindner’s words mattered. He was an influential cultural commentator, who wrote for US magazines such as Time and Harper’s. The story of Kirk Allen was published in the latter, and in Lindner’s book of case studies, <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-40852-020">The Fifty-Minute Hour</a>, which became a successful popular paperback.</p>
<h2>Critical distance</h2>
<p>Psychology had very publicly diagnosed science fiction as a literature of evasion – an “escape hatch” for the mentally troubled. Science fiction answered back, decisively changing the genre in the following decades.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=948&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1191&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1191&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315504/original/file-20200214-10985-1lgrnuq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1191&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">What if Hitler had written science fiction?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
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<p>To take one example: Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) purports to reprint a <a href="http://airshipdaily.com/blog/06052014-the-iron-dream">prize-winning 1954 science fiction novel</a>. The novel is apparently written, in an alternate history timeline, by Adolf Hitler, who gave up politics, emigrated to the US, and became a successful science fiction author and illustrator. A fictional critical afterword explains that Hitler’s novel, with its “fetishistic military displays and orgiastic bouts of unreal violence”, is just a more extreme version of the “pathological literature” that dominates the genre.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/1/leguin1art.htm">her review of The Iron Dream</a>, the now-celebrated science fiction author Ursula Le Guin – daughter of the distinguished anthropologist Alfred Kroeber – wrote that the “essential gesture of SF” is “distancing, the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better”, including “our desires to lead, or to be led”, and “our righteous wars”. Le Guin wanted science fiction to make strange the North American society of her time, showing afresh its peculiar psychology, culture, and politics.</p>
<p>In 1972, the US was still fighting the Vietnam War. In the same year, Le Guin offered her own “distanced” version of social reality in The Word for World is Forest, which depicts the attempted colonisation of an inhabited alien planet by a macho, militaristic Earth society intent on conquering and violating the natural world – a semi-allegory for what the USA was doing at the time in south-east Asia.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315794/original/file-20200217-10976-1j60atc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Vietnam War reimagined.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>As well as repudiating the worst parts of the genre, such responses implied a positive model for science fiction. Science fiction wasn’t about evading reality – it was a literary anthropology which made our own society into a foreign culture which we could stand back from, reflect on, and change.</p>
<p>Rather than ask us to pull on our anti-gravity boots, open the escape hatch and leap into fantasy, science fiction typically aspires to be a literature that faces up to social reality. It owes this ambition, in part, to psychology’s repeated accusation that the genre markets escapism to the marginalised and disaffected.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131342/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gavin Miller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Psychologists have stigmatised science fiction fans as losers who retreat into fantasy worlds. This is unfair.Gavin Miller, Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1155202019-04-17T09:16:48Z2019-04-17T09:16:48ZIan McEwan’s Machines Like Me and the thorny issue of robot rights<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269573/original/file-20190416-147483-ccs9ce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ian McEwan’s latest book, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1117889/machines-like-me/9781787331662.html">Machines Like Me: A Novel</a> offers an alternative history: Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher is waging an election campaign against Tony Benn and Alan Turing survived homophobic persecution to achieve breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. </p>
<p>The novel paints a picture of 1980s London that is at once familiar, but at the same time very different – and in doing so it raises some pressing questions. Central to the plot are the world’s first synthetic humans, put on sale for the public to buy. With this device, McEwan questions what it means to be human – if these machines are just like me, does that mean they have rights, like me? </p>
<p>It’s tempting to dismiss this as a ridiculous notion. When the question comes up with friends in the pub (usually after a few drinks), a common response is that we have human rights because we’re human. Robots aren’t human, so they can’t have the same rights as us. But if you think about this, it’s a circular argument. The same logic was used against women’s suffrage – they can’t have the vote, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43740033">because they’re women</a>. Slaves can’t have freedom, because they’re slaves. Machines can’t have rights, because they’re machines.</p>
<h2>Being human</h2>
<p>But before this can be dismissed as whimsical science fiction, we need to think more about why humans have rights and what it means to be human in the first place. Some might highlight the importance of our births – the fact that we are naturally procreated, whereas machines are made by humans. But if this is true, where does this leave the eight million people who have been born as a result of <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180703084127.htm">IVF treatment</a>? </p>
<p>You could highlight our organic nature to sidestep this problem – we are biological beings, whereas machines are made of component parts. But this would mean that people with prosthetic limbs are “less human” – which is clearly not the case. Nor are people “less human” who have commonplace hip and knee replacements. Scientists at my own university have 3D printed the first <a href="https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2018/05/first3dprintingofcorneas/">artificial cornea</a>, and this week Israeli scientists 3D printed <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/.premium-israeli-scientists-print-world-s-first-3-d-heart-1.7124321">an entire human heart</a>. Nobody is suggesting that patients receiving these artificial organs are less human – even though they are no longer 100% organic. </p>
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<p>Consciousness may also be a place to look – as humans are able to act on reasons beyond natural impulse or programming. But we are not alone in this ability – other animals can also engage in <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44654098">sophisticated planning and tool usage</a>. And this argument would mean that babies and late-stage dementia patients are in effect “less human” because they lack this feature – which is clearly not the case.</p>
<p>Ultimately, all of these lines of argument have problems that only lead to deeper levels of abstraction. Maybe then what’s required is the ability to be open to a change in how we see the world and ourselves. </p>
<h2>Conflict and consciousness</h2>
<p>Although the level of machine consciousness portrayed by McEwan is, for the time being, still fiction – <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened-should-we-be-of-ai">many believe that it will be a reality by the end of the century</a>. And as technology develops and machines become more like us, then they may also need to be recognised as having rights like us.</p>
<p><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/">Alan Gewirth</a>
was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He claimed that the reasons humans have rights is because we are prospective agents, able to choose what to do beyond natural impulse or reflex. So if this autonomous agency is the foundation of our rights, and robots are also autonomous agents, consistency requires us to recognise that they too have the same basic rights to freedom and well-being that we claim for ourselves. </p>
<p>This is not to say that robot rights cannot be overridden – all rights conflicts lead to the rights of one party being prioritised over the other. It merely requires us to see that robots are equal parties in any rights dispute. Mistreating a robot agent would not be the same as mistreating a printer for example, it would be more similar to mistreating another human. </p>
<p>Granting legal rights to robots clearly remains a complicated subject, but experiences from other fields shows how the problem is only practical and that it can be overcome. Legal systems have recognised that things as diverse as <a href="https://www.quora.com/Why-are-idols-regarded-as-legal-persons-under-Hindu-law">idols</a>, <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/in-argentina-freedom-still-distant-for-sandra-the-orangutan/">orangutans</a> and even <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-being">rivers</a> can have rights – so why not robots? It’s clear then that, like McEwan, the law should start thinking about these questions now instead of playing catch-up once the robots have arrived.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115520/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Jowitt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A legal expert looks at the issue of robot rights and what makes us human.Joshua Jowitt, Teaching Fellow in Law, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/847182017-10-03T13:24:49Z2017-10-03T13:24:49ZThe difficulties of translating Ian McEwan’s books to the screen<p>Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most successful living writers. His books are well received by both readers and critics, and he has won numerous literary prizes including <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/fiction/backlist/1998">the Man-Booker</a> in 1998. </p>
<p>Much of his fiction has been adapted for the screen. From his controversial first novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cement-Garden-Ian-McEwan/dp/0099755114">The Cement Garden</a>, featuring an incestuous relationship, to the broad canvas and high-budget <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783233/">Atonement</a>, a country house period drama and tragic war romance.</p>
<p>This year, three more works are making the transition. The BBC recently adapted <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b096k75c">The Child in Time</a>, while <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667321/">On Chesil Beach</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6040662/">The Children Act</a> are due for cinema release before the end of 2017. </p>
<p>So what is it about McEwan’s fiction that makes it such a rich source for adaptation? And how successful has the move from page to screen been?</p>
<p>McEwan learned his craft at the influential Creative Writing MA Programme established at the <a href="https://www.uea.ac.uk/literature/creative-writing">University of East Anglia</a> in the 1970s by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. The same course <a href="http://www.uea.ac.uk/literature/creative-writing/alumni">produced the likes</a> of Anne Enright and Kazuo Ishiguro.</p>
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<p>Perhaps as a result of this experience, McEwan’s novels are always well-crafted and stylish. They combine rich insights into the human condition with plots that comment on public anxieties and concerns. They tell stories of members of the comfortable middle class – writers, university lecturers, judges, quantum physicists and neurosurgeons. </p>
<p>On the face of it, one might not think that McEwan’s literary approach lends itself to screen adaptation. His characters tend to be thoughtful, questioning individuals who are presented in a prose style that draws heavily on interior monologue and reflective contemplation. </p>
<p>The lack of face-to-face dialogue must make it difficult for screen writers to capture the internal intellectual and emotional worlds of these individuals. </p>
<p>So there is perhaps an inevitable reduction of this element in some of the translations from novel to film. The interior reflections of Briony Tallis in <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Atonement-Ian-McEwan/dp/0099429799">Atonement</a> wonderfully evoke a 13-year-old’s contemplation of the coming complexities of adult relationships, and her internal dialogue includes authentic adolescent philosophising. She wonders:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Was everyone else really as alive as she was? … If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is Briony’s attempt to establish order in response to the complexities of the adult world that results in her wrongful accusation of sexual assault against her sister’s lover, and the subsequent upheaval of the whole family’s comfortable existence. </p>
<p>Briony’s thought processes are central to understanding the development of the novel’s plot. In Joe Wright’s film adaptation, the complexities of these contemplations have to be conveyed through other means – by transferring thoughts to dialogue, or the use of close-up camera shots.</p>
<p>In the BBC’s recent adaptation of The Child in Time, much of the novel’s emotional power and sense of panic about losing a child is achieved in a similar way. Quick cutting, the use of close-ups and the manipulation of sound all enhance superb performances by Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald as grieving parents Stephen and Julie. </p>
<p>There are, however, less successful aspects of this adaptation. One of Stephen’s closest friends suffers a nervous breakdown that manifests itself as a return to childish behaviours. This is a symptom that is perfectly credible in the novel, but seems awkward on screen. Conversations in the book about scientific discoveries and quantum physics were perhaps deemed too intellectual for the small screen – and were simply cut.</p>
<h2>Style and substance</h2>
<p>For filmmakers (and readers) McEwan’s style can often be unsettling in its mixing of genres and disruption of literary convention. </p>
<p>In one sense, his novels produce convincing portrayals of everyday lives in extraordinary circumstances, placing him in a long tradition of literary realism following Jane Austen and George Eliot. Yet several of his novels also include <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metafiction">metafictional</a> or magic realist elements. </p>
<p>Both Atonement and Sweet Tooth, for example, include epilogues that undermine the veracity of the story that is being read. The reader is unable to make straightforward assumptions about where the truth lies. </p>
<p>The Child in Time, which explores the complexities of our experience of time, includes fantasy scenes that move us between past, present and future. In fact, the non-realistic aspects of the novel were the source of much <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-child-in-time-review-benedict-cumberbatch-confusing_uk_59c8aecee4b06ddf45f8d524">criticism on social media</a> immediately following the broadcast version. This might well be due to the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the seriousness of the subject matter with the “playfulness” of such postmodern gimmicks.</p>
<p>Perhaps, then, the overriding aspect of McEwan’s fiction that lends itself to adaptation lies not in its intellectual aspects, nor in its (overly) clever commentary on the very nature of storytelling. It is instead the powerful evocation of our shared human sympathy for others experiencing extreme emotional situations. </p>
<p>McEwan’s characters are ordinary people plunged into situations in which they have to re-address the ways in which they have previously thought about the world. These situations raise moral, ethical and political questions and dilemmas, which attract the reader’s and viewer’s interest.</p>
<p>McEwan has said that for him, the value of fiction lies in its power to extend sympathy between individuals. This might be best suited to the contemplative nature of his introspective style of narrative fiction. But it is also clear that such extension of sympathy can, in the best hands, be translated effectively to the screen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84718/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Bentley is affiliated with The Labour Party. </span></em></p>This year three of his stories are being adapted for viewers.Nick Bentley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.