McEwan Paper

Why Can't Biologists Read Poetry?

Jonathan Greenberg

Assistant Professor, Department of English

Montclair State University

--But what is beauty? Asked Lynch impatiently.Ý Out with another definition.Ý Something we see and like?Ý Is that the best you and Aquinas can do?

--Let us take woman, said Stephen.

--Let us take her! said Lynch fervently.

--The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty.Ý That seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape.Ý I see however two ways out.Ý One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.Ý It may be so.Ý The world, it seems, is drearier that even you, Lynch, imagined.Ý For my part I dislike that way out.Ý It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetics.Ý It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lectureroom where McCann, with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours. (Joyce, Portrait 226)

The appearance of The Origin of Species in Stephen Dedalus's famous exposition of his neo-Thomist aesthetics is one of the few critically neglected moments in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.ÝÝ Stephen imagines his friend McCann arguing that in spite of their variability, all forms of female beauty derive from basic biological functions, the tasks of bearing and sustaining progeny.Ý Stephen, however, rejects this idea.ÝÝ And significantly, he rejects it not because it fails to lead him out of the labyrinth of cultural relativism--that is, not because it is wrong--but rather because it is boring.Ý Casting Lynch as his Horatio, he upends Hamlet's dictum: "The world, it seems, is drearier that even you, Lynch, imagined."Ý

ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ In Stephen Hero, however, the first draft of the work that eventually became A Portrait, a similar passage fails to mention The Origin.Ý In defining the now famous concept of "epiphany" to a different companion, Stephen rejects what he calls "the lantern of tradition":

--No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the lantern of tradition.Ý What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition.Ý Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both.Ý It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic appreciation whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black.Ý We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar.Ý The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinized in action. (Stephen, 212)

As he explains elsewhere, "the lantern of tradition" "transform[s] and disfigure[s]" the object under investigation; Stephen favors a "modern" approach he calls "vivisection" which "examines its territory by the light of day" (186).Ý Why certain cultures like certain kinds of beauty may be relative, but how people perceive beauty--the mechanism of aesthetic appreciation--is not.Ý This is indeed an important distinction, one often lost in the current vogue of a historicist literary criticism that takes the fact that aesthetic standards vary to imply the factitiousness of the aesthetic itself.Ý But my point is that in the revised version Joyce felt a need both to recognize and to reject a Darwinian explanation for what he clearly takes to be a cross-species universal--the aesthetic sense.Ý His rejection of McCann's early evolutionary psychology[1] on the grounds that it makes the world "dreary" appears less as an argument than as a declaration of party affiliation.Ý McCann's Darwinism is a theory of aesthetics that somehow doesn't give you the aesthetic itself.Ý

Now, since this isn't the International James Joyce Symposium, let me move fromÝ University College, Dublin, circa 1902 to Harvard University, Cambridge, a century later, where the most eminent members of the Harvard University faculty seem to be restaging the debates of Dublin's precocious undergraduates.Ý Example one is Marjorie Garber's Manifesto for Literary Study, which takes issue with Darwinian forays into the cultural--most notably those of Garber's colleague E.O. Wilson--for reducing human nature to "the level of the gene" (21).Ý Like Stephen rejecting McCann, however, Garber does not dispute Wilson's arguments so much as she seems simply to dislike them. ÝHer aim is not to engage a scientific debate, but rather to read the recent explosion of evolutionary psychology in academic and journalistic discourse as what she has elsewhere called a "symptom of culture."Ý Garber's reading focuses on two primary phenomena: (1) the surrender by literary critics and humanists of the analysis of human nature to their colleagues in the natural sciences--a surrender motivated in part by a skepticism in the humanities toward falsely universalizing claims; and (2) the relegation of the literary by scientists such as Wilson to a purely ornamental or decorative function, the use of the literary as a pithy punchline rather than the legitimate object of study in its own right.Ý

For example, Garber chides Wilson for his citation of Shakespeare as evidence for the evolutionary hazards of sexual infidelity.Ý Here is Wilson:

Selection will discriminate against the individual if cheating has later adverse effects on his life and reproduction that outweigh the momentary advantage gained.Ý Iago stated the essence in Othello: "Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls." (Garber 28)

Here is Garber's response:

There is no mention of Iago's position as the most arrant hypocrite in all of Shakespeare, nor of his own contempt for "good name" as compared to more material and vengeful rewards.Ý Arguably "cheating" by Iago himself has later adverse effects on his life, since once his machinations are discovered he is led off in chains to be tortured at the play's close, but this does not seem to be the intent of the citation, which rather seems to aim at an endorsement of the sentiment expressed, despite the bad faith with which it is offered [Ö] to the credulous Othello. (Garber 28)

It may be accidental that a question of sexual jealousy underlies the example over which Wilson and Garber skirmish, or it may indeed be a telling symptom in its own right.Ý But I want to suggest that Garber's response to Wilson taps on a slightly different sort of jealousy, a possessiveness toward the realm of the aesthetic, and that this jealousy is itself a symptom of culture.Ý

ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ A second example is Louis Menand's unfriendly 2002 review of the most recent book by our keynote speaker, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.Ý Like Garber, Menand never challenges any fundamental tenets of Darwinian theory (although he does challenge certain of its applications by evolutionary psychology).Ý What Menand takes strongest issue with is his Harvard colleague's attack on modernism in literature and the arts.Ý Menand disputes Pinker's reading of Virginia Woolf's "Character in Fiction," arguing that modern art was itself strongly Darwinist, positioned against the social reformism that Pinker decries, and invested in what Menand calls "the intractability of human aggression" (101).Ý Menand chides Pinker for superficial interpretations of works by artists such as Chris Ofili and Andres Serrano, who have gained notoriety for offending right-wing politicians and religious philistines.Ý And one of his primary "arguments" against evolutionary psychology is that it fails to explain is the opera of Wagner: "No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates. [Ö] It is a long way from there to 'Parsifal'" (97).Ý Now, a more neutral way of framing the argument between Pinker and Menand is to point out that they are interested in different questions.Ý Pinker wants to know why human beings make music.Ý Menand wants to know why Wagner writes Parsifal.Ý In this battle over turf, Menand may cede a little territory--"Music appreciation [Ö] seems to be wired in at about the level of 'Hot Cross Buns'" (97)--but it's a tactical retreat, aimed at protecting the high ground of high culture.ÝÝ The scientists can have the three-note melodies, but the good stuff belongs to the humanists.

An interdisciplinary conference such as this surely is the proper place to ask about the sources and the meanings of such turf wars.Ý In the current intellectual landscape, literary criticism and neo-Darwinian theory have come to occupy opposite ends of a spectrum.Ý Literary critics have been in the vanguard of social constructionism, finding culture even where we thought we had seen nature, showing how language, politics and power can invisibly shape our ideas of the scientific, the objective, and the natural.Ý Evolutionary psychologists have moved in precisely the opposite direction, attempting to genetic determinants in even the most complex artifacts of culture.Ý In evolutionary theory, the new Darwinists are trying to explain not only the functioning and development of the eye or the hand, but also of the mind.Ý Thus as the literary critic Joseph Carroll argues in his recent book Literary Darwinism, because the adapted mind is the source of all literature, it follows that Darwinian analysis can be profitably extended first to human cognition in general and then to the specific case of literature.[2]Ý Yet, as Carroll points out, "contemporary literary theory has not only failed to assimilate evolutionary theory, it has adopted a doctrinal stance that places it in irreconcilable conflict with the basic principles of evolutionary biology" (15).

ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ We would do well to acknowledge the charged political subtext to all this.Ý Humanists, with an eye to history, remind us that Darwinian theory has been used to sponsor the most reactionary views on race, class, and gender, and therefore we need to guard against its extension into the social, and be wary of conflating the descriptive with the prescriptive.[3] In response, the scientists--who are busy defending Darwin from religious irrationalists and are probably annoyed to find themselves labeled as conservatives--portray humanists as sloppy and lax, complicating simple subjects with their Communist, feminist, racially utopian agenda.[4]Ý To witness the peculiar political valences of Darwinian theory in contemporary culture, we need only to read a recent New York Times article, which reports that right-wingers such as Rich Lowry of the National Review and film critic Michael Medved have claimed the avian protagonists of the documentary, The March of the Penguins, as exemplars of monogamy and other so-called "family values."Ý At the same time, however, the same right wing calls the elaborate reproductive rituals of the penguins an argument for the creationist confection, "intelligent design."

This charged political subtext has served, I believe, to obscure some powerful affinities between Darwinian thought and contemporary literary criticism: both fields have in the last several decades been rethinking such terms as difference, structure, selfhood, agency, humanism, embodiment, and information.Ý Such affinities go beyond the question most frequently asked by neo-Darwinian raiders into the English departments, the question Paul Hernadi has asked, "Why Is Literature?"--that is, what evolutionary advantage might literature, or a mind capable of making literature, confer?Ý For if one follows Daniel Dennett, and takes Darwin as a philosopher as well as a biologist, then the Darwinian overthrow of natural theology means a seismic shift not only in the way we think about the origins and development of life, but in the way we can think about almost everything.Ý The claim can be made that much of literary theory both descends from and parallels Darwin's thought, and while it would require another paper entirely to lay out the points of contact and lines of influence, I might mention the theoretical work of Ellen Spolsky, as well as works of intellectual history such as Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman and Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.ÝÝ Figures such as Nietszsche, Freud, William James, and Thomas Kuhn, were all profoundly influenced by Darwin, and in turn profoundly influenced the current literary-critical scene, for better or for worse.

For now, however, I want to turn to one particular literary text that stages dramatically this conflict between the disciplines, Ian McEwan's 1998 novel, Enduring Love.Ý If James Joyce and the Harvard English professors share something in their wariness of Darwin, it is the still not-fully-articulated conviction that the theory can't explain everything.Ý Whether it's beauty or Othello or Parsifal, the humanists want, or need, something to escape explanation by evolutionary needs.Ý McEwan's novel stakes out, I think, a similar position to those I've sketched, though in this text what Darwin can't seem fully to account for is love: precisely, enduring love.Ý

Joe Rose, the narrator of the novel, is a middle-aged popular science writer married, by common law, to a Keats scholar named Clarissa Mellon, who cannot bear children as a result of a medical accident.Ý During a picnic, Joe attempts to save a boy being borne away in a helium balloon by an unexpected gust, and in the rescue attempt--which results in the death of another would-be rescuer, John Logan--he meets a born-again Christian named Jed Parry, who becomes obsessed with Joe and stalks him, professing the undying quality of both his own love and God's love for the atheistic Joe.Ý ("A secret gay love affair with a Jesus freak!Ý I can't wait to tell your science friends" (60), jokes Clarissa, and already we get a hint of the disciplinary clash: scientists apparently don't have gay friends.)

From this initial incident arise several tangled plotlines: Joe's reciprocal obsession with his stalker, which makes his own behavior appear increasingly desperate, irrational, and even paranoid; the resurgence of Joe's old doubts about the value of his work as a journalistic popularizer rather than a legitimate academic; an awakening of Clarissa's deep grief for the loss of the phantom children she can never bear, and her growing impatience with Joe's inability to understand such feelings; and, finally, resulting from these individual crises, a joint one--the disintegration of the love between Joe and Clarissa, a love that Joe describes as exquisite and precious--"just the kind to endure" (170).Ý

ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ You don't have to be an English professor to see that Joe and Clarissa represent, rather schematically, opposing principles, as well as opposing academic disciplines: science and literature, Darwin and Keats, reason and emotion, male and female, nature and nurture.[5] Although Joe's academic training is as a physicist, his most recent hobbyhorse is evolutionary psychology, and his narrative is filled with sociobiological excursions into the origins of phenomena as diverse as religious belief, amnesia, the tonal intervals of names called out at Heathrow Airport, and the male inability to read the newspaper during sexual intercourse.Ý Another phenomenon he explains is the infant's smile:Ý

The word from the human biologists bears Darwin out: the way we wear our emotions on our faces is pretty much the same in all cultures, and the infant smile is one social signal that is particularly easy to isolate and studyÖIn Edward O. Wilson's cool phrase, it "triggers a more abundant share of parental love and affection." (74)Ý

Clarissa the humanist resists such an explanation, and rejects the entire discipline of evolutionary psychology as "rationalism gone berserk" (74), a "new fundamentalism" (74) that offers "a reason for everything" (75):

Everything was being stripped down, she said, and in the some larger meaning was lost.Ý What a zoologist had to say about a baby's smile could be of no real interest.Ý The truth of that smile was in the eye and heart of the parent, and in the unfolding love that only had meaning through time. (75)

Joe in turn dismisses Clarissa's muddled argument as a consequence of reading too much Keats, whom he calls "an obscurantist" (75) for fearing the rise of science.Ý (Joe has earlier, tellingly, joked about Clarissa's scholarly obsession with Keats as her "love [for] another man" (8), and it is particularly suggestive in this novel that the study of poetry should be equated with sexual betrayal.)Ý Joe responds with a series of alternative hypotheses, some of which, however ludicrous, suggest a literary side to Joe that we see too little of:

If we value a baby's smile, why not contemplate its source?Ý Are we to say that all infants enjoy a secret joke?Ý Or that God reaches down and tickles them?Ý Or, least implausibly, that they learn smiling from their mothers?Ý But, then, deaf-and-blind babies smile too.Ý That smile must be hard-wired and for good evolutionary reasons. (75)

But Clarissa is not interested in the evolutionary argument: "Clarissa said I still did not understand her, she was talking about love" (75).Ý Clarissa is with Stephen Dedalus and the Harvard English Department, arguing less against the sociobiologist's logic than against something more vague: his worldview, his professional discipline, even his moral character.[6]Ý Joe feels that Clarissa is refusing to engage the argument, but Clarissa is sensing that the argument itself is a sign of something else.

And indeed, although he does not voice the insight at the time of the argument, Joe is able, at the point in time from which he narrates, to step back from this debate about Wilson and identify an emotionally laden personal issue underlying the whole debate: "We had had this conversation in different forms on many occasions.Ý What we were really talking about this time was the absence of babies from our lives" (75).Ý Joe's casual insertion of "really"--"what we were really talking about" (my emphasis)--betrays a hermeneutic approach to human motivation that is subtly psychoanalytic, or at least surprisingly less mechanistic, than the formulaic evolutionary psychology we have gotten used to hearing from him.Ý And, as perhaps befits a book so preoccupied with Darwinian imperatives, a crucial motif in this novel is the desire for children; the story, we should recall, begins with a child's near-death.ÝÝ Joe tells us that Clarissa has compensated for--adapted to, we could say--the absence of her own children with an almost saintly love for and generosity toward "[n]ephews, nieces, godchildren, the children of neighbors and old friends" (34).Ý He recognizes that the courageous death of Logan (if it indeed was "courageous" at all, or whether, as Joe suggests, perhaps just a slight eccentricity in genetic coding) has awakened profound feelings of loss in Clarissa, who sees in Logan "a man prepared to die to prevent the kind of loss she felt herself to have sustained" (35).Ý And Logan's own children also play a crucial role in the story.Ý Joe's first encounter with them reminds him of the value of his and Clarissa's mutual and now endangered love; they reappear in the final chapter of his narrative as wide-eyed disciples dazzled by the wonder of science that Joe shares with them.[7]ÝÝ Indeed this final encounter seems to suggest that Joe is beginning to overcome the "uneasiness" (127) he confesses to feeling in the presence of children, and hints at emotional growth and a willingness to become a father.ÝÝ If, then, the disciplinary debate over the origin of the infant's smile is "really" about love, as Clarissa suggests, then this more abstract debate about love is in turn "really" about the future of a childless couple.

ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ All of these interpretive levels, however, are further complicated by Joe's status as an unreliable narrator.[8]Ý How do we know Joe is unreliable?Ý I won't take you through the volumes of narrative theory on the topic, but we get a strong clue when he is doing research in the London Library.Ý Joe thinks:Ý

The science collection here was laughable.Ý The assumption appeared to be that the world could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories, and biographies.Ý Did the scientific illiterates who ran this place, and who dared call themselves educated people, really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilization? (45-56)

There may exist novelists who don't have much regard for literature, and perhaps Joe's creator Ian McEwan has deep doubts about the value of novels: a professional crisis of his own.Ý But the hysteria of Joe's tone is surely a signal to the reader.Ý Joe, despite his allusions to Wagner, his ability to quote Chesterton, and his mild interest in Clarissa's Keats, here reveals himself as the philistine that the literary critic secretly believes or desires all scientists to be.Ý His humanistic learning, like E.O. Wilson's, is purely ornamental, like the tailfeathers on a peacock.[9]Ý

ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ McEwan further undermines his narrator's authority by including letters from Parry to Joe and from Clarissa to Joe, as well as with a fictional academic case history of the Parry's erotomania.Ý (The case history is co-written by Wenn and Camia, whose names anagrammatically hide that of Ian McEwan.)Ý And although most of McEwan's readers will regard Parry's effusive professions of his love for Joe and faith in a benign loving God as lunatic or ludicrous, there are moments where Parry's response to Joe seems to touch a chord, as when he comments on Joe's professional work:

There's never a moment of doubt or hesitation or admission of ignorance.Ý You're there with up-to-the-minute truth on bacteria and particles and agriculture and Saturn's rings and musical harmony and risk theory and bird migration.[Ö] It's all shopping.Ý You buy it all, you're a cheerleader for it, an ad man hired to talk up other people's stuff.Ý In four years journalism, not a word about the real things, like love and faith. (147)

Parry's critique of Joe resonates in part because it echoes Clarissa's comments about Joe's failure to understand love, and in part because it echoes Joe's own worries that his journalistic work is valueless, made of "other people's stuff," market-driven, mere "shopping."

ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ ÝIndeed Joe himself is at times suspicious of his own Darwinism, not so much because he thinks it threatens God or love or faith but because he thinks it makes him an amateur.Ý Joe as it happens is writing a magazine article about the decline of narrative in scientific discourse.Ý He links the use of narrative in science to "the nineteenth-century culture of the amateur" (51) and the Victorian novel; as modernism rose in the arts, he argues, so science became the domain of experts and disdained storytelling for "hard-edged theories" (52).Ý Joe of course recognizes that this article is itself "a narrative in itself" (51)--and a flawed one at that--and he even concedes that his own career rests on the creation of narratives, a skill he disdains: "People say I have a talent for clarity.Ý I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, backtrackings, and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs" (79).Ý This critique of amateurs and anecdotes interestingly echoes a complaint that biologists themselves have made about the social-psychological application of Darwin's thought.Ý Here is the biologist H. Allen Orr describing "a serious problem with evolutionary psychology" in the New York Review of Books:

[I]ts research program shows a curious tendency to invert itself.[Ö][T]he fact that we can conceive of an adaptive tale about why a behavior should evolve becomes the chief reason for suspecting it's genetic.[Ö] And so the inversion occurs: the evolutionary story rings true; but evolution requires genes; therefore, it's genetic.Ý This move is so easy and so seductive that evolutionary psychologists sometimes forget a hard truth: a Darwinian story is not Mendelian evidence.Ý A Darwinian story is a story. (18)

Orr articulates the critique that Stephen Jay Gould and R.J. Lewontin made some years back in calling sociobiological explanations, after Kipling, "Just So Stories," and it is fitting that they invoke the literary in order to diminish the validity of the science.Ý Orr's argument, like Joe's self-critique, values narrative less than "evidence."Ý (Joe's academic work, importantly, was in physics, not the armchair stuff he does now.)Ý Thus Joe's professional crisis is figured here as a fear of narrative, a return to 19th century amateurism, a loss of hard-science rigor, and a fall.Ý It is a fall not into some existential abyss, but into the murky swamp of humanistic thinking.

Indeed, unlike his postgraduate work in quantum electrodynamics, evolutionary psychology appears to Joe as mere "armchair science," a term he invokes while offering a Darwinian etiology of self-persuasion:

Self-persuasion was a concept much loved by evolutionary psychologists. [Ö] It was pure armchair science, and it went like this: if you had lived in a group, as humans have always done, persuading others of your own needs and interests would be fundamental to your well-being.Ý Sometimes you had to use cunning.Ý Clearly you would be at your most convincing if you persuaded yourself first and did not even have to pretend to believe what you were saying.Ý The kind of self-deluding individuals who tended to do this flourished, as did their genes.Ý So it was we squabbled and scrapped, for our unique intelligence was always at the service of our special pleading and selective blindness to the weakness of our case. (112)[10]

Joe's very attention to the problem of self-deception of course suggests a broader thematic resonance to the issue; Joe is in fact giving something like an evolutionary account of unreliable narration, and this is probably one of McEwan's clues that Joe himself is unreliable.Ý However, there is also an immediate reason for this little genealogy in Joe's narrative; he offers it to explain why he searches through Clarissa's desk.Ý Joe has become jealous because Clarissa has failed to sympathize adequately with his concern about Parry's persistent attention; spurred by the Iago of his own fantasy, Joe imagines this failure as a consequence of her love for another man -- only now that sexual rival is not the long-dead Keats but rather, in Joe's heated phrase, "Some hot little bearded fuck-goat of a postgraduate" (114).Ý

By this point all but the most obtuse reader will have pegged Joe as McEwan's stooge, and the jealous husband soon begins to seem nearly as mad as his stalker Jed Parry.Ý Just as Cervantes' Duke and Duchess, seeking entertainment, are pulled into Don Quixote's absurd fantasies, so Joe mimics the madness of his pursuer, stalking his own stalker.Ý In an attempt to bait Parry into making a violent threat that will give Joe grounds for legal action, Joe goes so far as to speak Parry's imagined secret language, leaving coded "signals" for him in the rain-covered hedges.Ý Significantly, Joe's decent into paranoia, just like his professional crisis, is a descent into the literary--for in order to decode the hidden signs and symbols of Parry's veiled threats, Joe realizes that he needs a literary critic of Clarissa's skill:

I was attempting to compile a dossier of threats, and while there were no single obvious examples, there were allusions and obvious disjunctures whose cumulative effect would not be lost on the mind of a policeman.Ý It needed the skills of a literary critic like Clarissa to read between the lines of protesting love, but I knew that she would not help me. (162)

The tortured overreadings of the humanist will save him when his clear-eyed scientific logic seems to leave him in the lurch.Ý What he really needs is Clarissa herself, of course, her love as much as her skills in reading.Ý His acknowledgement of the value of her professional work becomes an unconscious lament for the loss of her love.[11]

But if Joe is unreliable, the reader, far from being able simply to dismiss his judgment Joe, is instead left without clear bearings on how to assess the events of the novel--not only on the evaluative level of judging the ethics of Joe or Clarissa's behavior, but also on the fundamental factual level of determining the reality of reported events within the fictional world of the novel.Ý On the one hand we are suspicious of the extremity of Joe's scientism, the weakness of his basis for suspecting Clarissa, and his own potential for paranoia; on the other, the very coolness and precision of his narrative tone, as well as the power with which he renders the unsettling encounters with Parry, foster our trust.ÝÝÝ Joe, like many the hero of a Hollywood thriller, finds (or believes) himself the only sane and rational person in the universe, discounted by his wife, police officers, and even acquaintances and professional contacts; Clarissa even hints that Parry's letters might be written in Joe's own hand, and Joe himself feels it is as though Parry almost doesn't exist.Ý The reader wonders: will Joe's scientific rationalism be vindicated in the end, or will it be exposed as a massive self-delusory defense mechanism that creates a story of persecution in order to avoid the emotional complexities raised in the novel's opening scene?ÝÝÝ

The answer is ingeniously inconclusive.Ý One of the novel's many delightful twists is that Joe, as paranoid as he seems, turns out to be correct about Parry's murderous aims, and an appendix even provides a psychiatric case history of Jed Parry (mistaken by early reviewers for a real, nonfictional academic publication).Ý Yet even after Parry is apprehended, Clarissa can still write: "I was completely wrong and I'm sorry, really sorry. [Ö] But what I was also trying to say last night was this: your being right is not a simple matter" (233).Ý Joe's vindication isn't the end of the debate, and despite what Joe calls Clarissa's "clammy emotional logic" (239), the narrative continues to suggest some imprecise truth in her claim that Joe's reaction to the accident and the stalking caused or hastened the disintegration of their love.ÝÝ For what we don't trust in Joe is not so much his Darwinism as his deployment of that Darwinism to avoid other questions.Ý If his professional crisis and his fear of Parry both reduce to a repression of the literary, this repression of the literary in turn seems linked to Joe's stubborn doubts about being a husband and being a father.

ÝThus McEwan's implicit critique of Joe's Darwinism may after all be simply a new version of an old complaint, that which Socrates levels in the Phaedo against Anaxagoras, whose materialism answers everything but the important questions:

[W]hen he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and my bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture--that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me. (136)

There is a powerful irony in the omission, amid the careful scientific detail, of the looming death-sentence; Socrates's scathing description of the Anaxagoras's materialism is less of a critique of scientific explanation, Darwinian or pre-Darwinian, than of a trap that lies in wait for all who seek to explain the world around them.

Yet the end of the novel contains another twist as well: whereas Joe's narrative proper ends with only the most tentative reconciliation between himself and Clarissa, the first appendix, the case history of Jed Parry, tells us obliquely of a happier ending: "While in this case R and M were reconciled and later successfully adopted a child, some victims [of de Clerambault patients] have had to divorce or emigrate, and others have needed psychiatric treatment because of the distress the patients have caused them" (259).ÝÝ The obliquely mentioned adoption subtly rebukes sociobiology, since adoption entails a love uniquely free from immediate Darwinian motives.Ý Joe and Clarissa take the chance on a parental love that offers no hope of ensuring the survival of their genes, wagering that they will be able to detach themselves from their genetic imperatives.Ý But if this case history suggests that Joe ultimately surrenders his Darwinian "fundamentalism" (in Clarissa's phrase), it also solves a major narrative or literary problem for McEwan, a problem that the novel has already obliquely raised: how to stage a reunion without melodrama.Ý For if McEwan has crafted an exquisite novel to give us the quality of Joe's emotional experience in precisely the way that the case history cannot, it is the impersonality of the discourse of the case history, and the indirection with which the adoption is communicated, that in the end comes to the rescue of a love story apparently destined for either a disappointing estrangement or a sentimental scene of reunion.Ý The literary and scientific discourses are thus nicely complementary.ÝÝ McEwan has staged a battle between the disciplines in which neither wins outright; each disturbs the other's certainties, but each also compensates for the other's limitations, and thus he makes compatible the often warring wisdoms of both Darwin and the poets.Ý