An ethics of decomposition: Ian McEwan’s early prose

Abstract

While in the last few decades Ian McEwan’s prose progressively moved towards a sort of ‘emancipated realism’, McEwan’s early works – the short story volumes First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978) and the short novel The Cement Garden (1978), in particular – seem to operate under a rather different representational convention. Horrific imagery apparently borrowed from sources as diverse as the traditional Gothic novel, modern horror films or violent pornography is almost blinding at the surface level – and, in fact, every level of the narrative progresses steadily towards dissolution in a manner reminiscent of the violent strategies of decomposition of avant-garde movements such as Dadaism, surrealism or expressionism, or of the Theatre of the Absurd. These strategies denounce the seemingly realist construction of the texts as a no longer consequential carcass that can only serve as an object of mockery. As the historical avant-gardes have done before him, McEwan offers to his readers, in his early texts, the Enlightenment notion of the consistency and relatability of human experience as a hideous, grinning head on a stick. This article will discuss the correlation between horrific imagery and various narrative and linguistic strategies of textual decomposition in McEwan’s early prose, in an attempt to elucidate McEwan’s particular type of ethical engagement at that point in his career as a writer.