Restricted view: the problem of perspective in the novels of Ian McEwan

Abstract

In this paper, I posit restricted view as a new way of describing literary focalisation in contrast to omniscient, or panoramic, perspectives. I read McEwan's oeuvre in order to describe his sustained interest in narrative perspective, and to explore what is at stake in the different approaches to focalisation across his novels and in the critical accounts of them. Critics have praised McEwan's graduation from earlier modes of narrative restriction to the ‘widening scope’ of his later ‘panoramic’ work. I question this automatic valorisation of the bigger picture and suggest instead that a Nietzschean perspectivism is at play in McEwan's early novels, where narrative is depicted as a treacherous glimpse work. This resonates with psychoanalytic and Derridean (de)constructions of subjectivity, which I suggest can be seen as contiguous explorations of self-blindness and restricted view. Finally, I argue that the metanarrative gestures in McEwan's recent work (Sweet Tooth (2012)) recursively figure the pleasures of literature as the pleasures of surveillance, reporting back on the impossibility of a literary point of view that is non-ideological or non-tendentious: writing is here depicted as a decidedly dirty pleasure, where politics are always in play and artistic freedom is an illusion; where ‘all writers are spies’ serving a secret regime and narrative is the product of a pointedly restricted view.