What We Can Know, Ian McEwan, Psychoanalysis, What Can We Know?, Philosophy of Science, Psychology, limits of knowledge
Ian McEwan titles this book with a statement, but it is
implicitly a question, and the cover representation, with the font clear on the
outside but fuzzy inside the mirror/window, clarifies that this is a meditation on what
is, to my mind, a very central question to psychoanalysis, to science, and,
especially given that the book takes place in various liberal arts institutions,
the human condition. What can we
know and how can we know it? In
particular, what can we know of others – what is their character, but ultimately,
also, what can we know of ourselves.
I have recently started working with a patient whose hope is
that psychoanalysis will help him with this very question. He is hoping that it will help him make
contact with the sensory world, which currently feels blurry or inaccessible to
him. Even more centrally he wants to
have more direct contact with his feelings – to know, with much more certainty
than he currently does, what he feels.
We could see his, and the characters in McEwan’s book, uncertainty about what they know as symptomatic of a depressive personality style – of being repeatedly
disappointed by a world that does not line up with what we expect to be, indeed
feel entitled to be, knowable.
Seeking help, my patient is looking to break through the
miasma that separates him from the world and from himself. The characters in the first half of this book
seek this clarity through scholarship, something their students have little
faith in, and their efforts to engage their students in understanding the value
of what they are trying to do only adds to their sense of ennui.
In order to tread a line between enticing those who have not
read the book and engaging in a conversation with those who have, I will be
intentionally vague in this post. This
book is filled with delightful twists that feel more like reveals of what we already
knew than surprise turns. There is a
sense of opening a Russian Doll to find another version, smaller but still the
same, inside the first. Or perhaps, to
follow the analogy, it feels like moving towards the heart of the matter and
gaining more and more clarity about what sits at that heart; and feeling more
and more satisfied that what we are coming to know (which will still contain
mystery) is what we have been in search of.
To reiterate, then: This book does not so much lead us into
new spaces (though it does do that) as it unfolds, opening up the spaces that
were hidden by the folds, letting light into them, helping us move closer to
something that feels deeply true – but also something that is deeply human, and
thus more mysterious the more we know about it.
Part of the power of this book is that the movement towards
clarity occurs on multiple levels simultaneously. Just getting oriented at the beginning of the
book is tough. Where are we? What is the time frame? Even though the years are there in black and
white, we are both in more or less current times and we are one hundred years
in the future, in a world that feels familiar, but also very different from the
one we live in. The dystopian world of
the near future feels organic. Yes,
there were catastrophes, but we have, more or less, recovered from them. If the world is not what it once was, it is
not uninhabitable, by any means, nor is it unrecognizable, even if it is vastly
different. And it is recovering,
slowly. And one of the exercises of that
recovery is the study of what the world was before it became what it is now,
just as has always been the case.
So, we join a world of scholars who are interested in a prior
world of scholars. Just as Woody Allen
imagined a world of artists that he would have liked to live with (in Midnight
in Paris), the focus of the central scholar is on a particular evening –
when the coolest of the cool in the world of poetry and scholarship gathered
for the (second) immortal dinner. What
took place there?
When I was in college in the late 1970s, the cool places
were CBGBs and Studio 54. Especially during
my year in Maryland, kids would go up to New York to one or the other of these
places. One friend, who was particularly
thin, would buy very skinny jeans then sit in a bathtub with the hottest water
he could stand so that the jeans would shrink to fit hoping that this would
lead to his being picked out of the line of wannabes to be admitted to Studio
54.
The world of scholarship creates similarly exclusive clubs
that people want to belong to. The
original version of this club cited in the book was the first immortal dinner of
1817. John Keats, William Wordsworth and
Charles Lamb attended it. The second
immortal dinner, imagined in this book, was Vivien Blundy’s 54 birthday party
in 2020 at which her husband, Francis Blundy read his Corona poem – a gift to
her memorializing his love for her. He
had written the poem on a piece of vellum – and had destroyed all drafts and
other copies of it and, after reading it, he presented it to her. It has not been seen since.
The immortal dinner at which the poem was read has become
legendary. The dinner itself, and speculation
about the poem is the focus of Robert Metcalfe’s scholarship in 2119. We learn about Metcalfe in part through his
understanding of the dinner – an understanding culled from the preserved email
records between all of the attendees.
The details clarify that the dinner was not quite as exciting as it
appeared from a distance.
Metcalfe is driven to understand both the dinner, but also
to try to discover the poem. If he were
able to do that, it would clearly make his career – a career that is, at best, dreary as he tries to engage the interest of halfhearted students in their
studies while simultaneously maintaining the interest of his halfhearted lover
Rose Church, in himself.
Thomas and Rose are like the youtubers who have posted
videos of Studio 54 in its heyday, remembering a decadence that they never had
a chance to live in. Frances and Vivien
are, then, like Andy Warhol and the other glitterati, including Liza Minnelli,
who populated Studio 54 – or the Ramones and Debbie Harry at CBGB. Theirs was a world that we pine for – enhanced,
in this case, by Thomas and Rose’s life in a post-apocalyptic world that has less
biodiversity, land mass, and economic and political stability. Those were the days, my friends…
But were they? What
are the qualities of a lived life? Are
they what they seem? When I have taught the
history
of psychology, I show Hamilton
at the beginning of class – to illustrate that Lin Manuel Miranda uses the
current hip hop vernacular to lend emotional life to the actions of the
founding fathers. They (and the folks
who founded and shaped our science) were passionate people. As were Vivien and Francis Blundy, and the
others who attended that immortal birthday party.
In the first telling of that party, pieced together by his
scholarship, Thomas Metcalfe paints a picture of those around Blundy and their
experience of the party – and we discover Blundy’s passion to be directed
primarily towards himself. He is a
generational poet, able to use his words to entrance multitudes and to describe
the human condition. This gift sets him
apart – he belongs in the pantheon.
Vivien, his wife, gave up her own promising academic career
to tend to his needs. And she appears to
have become subservient to him, and to feel, on some level, that the poem does
not really capture her or their love together, but is, instead, a testament to
his poetic genius, and it is. A corona
is a poem that is made up of stanzas – a long corona would be seven stanzas
long – with each last line being the beginning line of the next stanza, and the
last stanza being a simply a reiteration of first/last lines, now in a stand-alone
stanza that has integrity. Francis’s corona
for Vivien is 15 stanzas long. It is an
heroic poem.
This book is about a lot of things. It is about the period we are living in – and
it is a cry for us to preserve it because it is a tremendous period but also one that is threatened by, among other things, climate change. I regularly thank my stars that I have lived
during this period. Could the world be a
better place? Has it been? Will it be?
It is pretty darn great right now and, as I tell my students, we have
more information in our pockets than emperors, kings, and presidents have ever
had, we have more personal mobility than they ever did and (relevant to this
story) we haven’t yet destroyed the environment. Wow.
But the question the book asks – What can we know? – is not
really about the kind of knowledge in our pockets, but the kind of knowledge
that is in our heads. It is the knowledge
of who we are and who the people around us are – the people that we care about
and rely on. And that question gets
honed here to what can we know about ourselves and what can we know about each
other in terms of our fidelity. There is
a lot of unfaithfulness in this novel.
Rose is unfaithful to Thomas, the members of the supporting cast of the
second immortal dinner have been unfaithful and faithful to themselves and to
each other in a whole variety of ways.
As an example of faith, one of the guests at the dinner is
an unlikely member of the group – he sticks out, in fact, like a sore thumb. He is a carpenter and general handy man. We think at first he is there because his
wife belongs in this circle, but later we learn that he was not initially
welcomed at the Blundy’s – Francis almost banished him for his use of the word hopefully. At his next visit, he used it again, and
Francis went into high dudgeon mode about what an unlearned fellow this
carpenter was, and the carpenter started talking about adverbs and Blundy said
he didn’t need a lesson on adverb’s from him – a carpenter – but the carpenter
insisted that he did, gave him the lesson, and from that point forward was
welcome at the table. He had, in fact, through personal fidelity - showing himself to be equal to the bully - earned
his place at that table, even if we did not know that initially.
I was impressed, in my reading of this novel, with the
variety of infidelities and fidelities that emerged across the course of it. Some interpersonal disloyalties were forgiven
– some did not seem to matter at all, even if my sensibility was
disturbed. The central infidelity seemed
to be the corona. It seemed not to be a
record of Francis’s love for Vivien at all – though it was presented as a present
to her – and I was fully committed to the belief that she was offended by its
failure to acknowledge her as a person independent of who Francis was.
As we later came to understand the poem, it was offensive –
sort of in the way that imagined it – but, at least to my read, Blundy turns out
to have been, in Vivien’s view, a romantic who yearned for something from her
that he could not have, not because she did not have it to give and would have
given of it freely, but she did not give it because he could not adequately receive
it, the poem articulated that. It was, in a weird way, a testament to Vivien's autonomy and Blundy's inability to match it. In addition to it being about a Vivien, who was not the Vivien of the relationship with Blundy, it was so much about the true kernel of their relationship that Vivien
rejected it because it spoke all
too directly to what bound them together.
Across the life of a couple, what binds us together, what
helps us maintain what fidelity we can, is complicated. In Vivien’s mind, and, I think, in most of
our minds, there are ties that are not to be spoken of, even in they are
known. The ties may be shameful in and of themselves, but I think also, once those ties
are verbalized, there are a host of other ties that become visible – ties that
we don’t want to know.
One of the many levels of knowledge and self-knowledge that
this book touches on includes the self-knowledge of the author. This book could easily be dismissed as a thinly
disguised roman a clef with Francis Blundy as the author’s alter ego. After all, McEwan is as accomplished as
Blundy if in a parallel field. As much
as he admires the corona as a poetic device, McEwan’s vehicle (and I’m guessing
his more highly valued art form) is the novel – prose. He can get just enough distance writing about
a poet to indulge in some pretty serious, and self-congratulatory navel gazing.
McEwan has previously written an intentional roman a clef –
the book Sweet Tooth – in which he wrote about the 1970s, which he thought of
as the best time in his life, but embroidered the story in a variety of ways
that weren’t consistent with his life. In
so far as this is a roman a clef, the second half of the book goes a long way
towards rehabilitating the author’s perceived narcissism – a perception shared
by the reader.
If you grant the roman a clef premise for a moment, the
second half of the novel both redeems the author, but it also clarifies the
depth of his guilt. This man has
committed (or thought about committing – which, in order to write this book he
mast have done) some heinous acts. He is
a bully who feels that the ends justify the means, and he values his profession
over personal relationships, something that is ironic because much of what he
is writing about is the value of relationships.
Frankly I think many psychoanalysts and therapists of many stripes could
identify with aspects of this man’s character, myself included.
So, how does the second half redeem him? His self-knowledge and the knowledge of the
impact of what he does on others allows him to come across as warm, concerned,
and caring; again, therapists would be able to identify with this, again, myself
included. We are complicated
critters. As self-knowledgeable as Blundy
and Vivien are – and for that matter, Thomas and Rose – the historian and his
lover who go off in search of the corona – their self-knowledge does not
protect them from living complicated and, in many ways, dreary lives.
My next thought, you may be anticipating, is to apply this summary
statement to the lives of those lucky few who made it through the ropes at
Studio 54 or were hip enough to be in the mosh pit of CBGB’s. And you would be detecting a note of schadenfreude;
joy or pleasure at other’s displeasure. You
wouldn’t be wrong, but I think most importantly, that opens the door to the
realization that we all; Rock Star Poet, glitterati of the non-nerdy variety, or lowly blogger, are vulnerable to
both moments of incredible hubris – where we miss those around us (as Vivien
was missed, but then moved to center stage in the second part of the book (though
Blundy still loomed large)), but also that, despite our hubris - our narcissism, we are decent blokes,
at least at heart.
To state that differently.
McEwan is a proud climate change activist. This book can (and has been) read as a
climate sensitive book. Yet he casts
Blundy as a climate change denier. In so
far as Blundy reflects McEwan, he reflects the things about McEwan (and
me) that he (and I) would most like to deny and distance ourselves from. I am a climate change activist who booked around trip flight to New York just to see a play that I wanted to see… ye Gods! And we, famous or not, have to wrestle with
how to integrate – how to know – those parts of ourselves that we least want to
acknowledge.
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