The Political Unconscious in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam: The Post-Cold War Paradigm Shift and Morality in the Era of the Late Capitalist Market

Abstract

Amsterdam opens a new phase in Ian McEwan’s writing career both for its differences from his earlier novels and short stories and for its Booker Prize success. Although the novel’s early critics designate the novel as a lightweight diversion from McEwan’s more serious subject matter, he earnestly dismisses these views and argues that while Amsterdam indeed differs from his novels written up to that point, this does not minimise the novel’s significance. This article takes up McEwan’s side in this debate in that Amsterdam is indeed a significant novel which reflects and reproduces perfectly well a post-Cold War paradigm shift in the world from a bipolar to a unipolar socio-political global order with which the previous power positions are forced, in the 1990s, to transform. McEwan’s novel reflects this socio-political transformation, and it symbolically addresses the crises of power, authority, and direction by way of creating a tension, in its narrative, between moral obligation and self-interest, where moral duty aligns with left-wing politics and self-interest with right-wing politics. This article further argues that the novel does not only reflect and reproduce that historical-political context but also, when it is interpreted using Fredric Jameson’s interpretative model for exploring texts’ political unconscious, serves as a symbolic resolution of its given historical-political moment.