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.

Keywords

• political unconscious
• morality
• Fredric Jameson
• Ian McEwan
• Amsterdam

Lan McEwan'ın Amsterdam Romanında Siyasal Bilinçdışı: Soğuk Savaş Sonrası Paradigma Değişimi ve Geç Kapitalist Pazar Çağında Ahlak

Öz

Amsterdam, hem yazarın önceki romanlarından ve kısa öykülerinden farklı oluşu hem de ona Booker Ödülü başarısını getirmesi sebepleriyle, Ian McEwan’ın yazarlık kariyerindeki yeni bir aşamanın başlangıcını işaret etmektedir. Her ne kadar ilk eleştirmenler bu romanı yazarın daha ciddi çalışmalarından bir sapış olarak tanımlasa da McEwan bu görüşleri ciddiyetle reddetmiş ve o döneme kadar yazmış olduğu romanlarından farkını kabul ederek yine de bunun romanın önemini azaltmadığını söylemiştir. Bu makale McEwan ile aynı görüşü benimsemektedir; Amsterdam gerçekten de Soğuk Savaş sonrası paradigma değişimini ve 1990’larda yaşanan küresel politikadaki eski iktidar konumlarını zorlayan iki kutuplu dünya düzeninden tek kutuplu dünya düzenine geçişi fevkalade bir şekilde yansıtan ve yeniden üreten önemli bir romandır. McEwan’ın romanı bu sosyo-politik dönüşümü yansıtır ve anlatısı içerisinde yarattığı ‘ahlaki yükümlülük mü yoksa kişisel çıkar mı’ gerilimi üzerinden, ahlaki yükümlülüğün sol siyasetle, kişisel çıkarın ise sağ siyasetle örtüştüğü sembolik bir yaklaşımla güç, otorite ve yönlendirme krizlerini ele alır. Bu makale ayrıca romanın yalnızca tarihsel-siyasi bağlamı yansıtıp yeniden üretmediğini, aynı zamanda, metinlerin siyasal bilinçdışını ortaya çıkarmayı vadeden Fredric Jameson’un anlamsal zenginleştirme yöntemi kullanılarak yorumlandığında, o tarihsel-siyasi bağlama sembolik bir çözüm sağladığını da ileri sürmektedir. En nihayetinde McEwan’ın Amsterdam’ı, bu köklü değişim döneminde güç, otorite ve yönlendirme krizlerini ele almaya çalışan sembolik bir eyleme dönüşür.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• siyasal bilinçdışı
• ahlak
• Fredric Jameson
• Ian McEwan
• Amsterdam

Kaynakça

1. Allen, B. (1999). Illustrations of inertia & compromise. The New Criterion, 17(8), 60. https://newcriterion.com/article/illustrations-of-inertia-compromise/.
2. Begley, A. (2010). The art of fiction CLXXIII: Ian McEwan: Interview by Adam Begley. In R. Roberts (Ed.), Conversations with Ian McEwan (pp. 89-107). University Press of Mississippi.
3. Bentley, N. (2005). Introduction: mapping the millennium: themes and trends in contemporary British fiction. In N. Bentley (Ed.), British Fiction of the 1990s (pp. 1-18). Routledge.
4. Bobbio, N. (1996). Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction (A. Cameron, Trans.) Chicago UP.
5. Bold Type. (1998, December). Bold Type interview with Ian McEwan. Retrieved July 15, 2021, from https://web.archive.org/web/20041019170554/http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1298/mcewan/interview.html.
6. Carlisle, R. P. (2005). Encyclopedia of Politics: The Left and The Right. Sage.
7. Childs, P. (2006). The Fiction of Ian McEwan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
8. Cojocaru, M. (2012). Misinterpreting the other: Music as conflict in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach. East-West Cultural Passage, 12(1), 9–22.

9. Donaldson, T. (1982). Corporations and Morality. Prentice-Hall.
10. Forecasts: Fiction. (1998, November). Publishers Weekly, 245(47), 60.
11. Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history?. The National Interest, 16, 3-18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184
12. Gaddis, J. L. (1992). The Cold War, the long peace, and the future. Diplomatic History, 16(2), 234-246. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24912152
13. Gray, P. (1998, December) The moral low ground. TIME Magazine, 152(23), 225.
14. Hazelton, J. (2005). The amorality of public corporations. Essays in Philosophy, 6(2), 366-384, https://doi.org/10.5840/eip2005624
15. Henry, P. (2008). Review of Amsterdam by Ian McEwan: Atonement by Ian McEwan: Saturday by Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, Modern Language Studies, 38(1), 75-84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40346981
16. Highet, G. (1972). The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton University Press.
17. Ingersoll, E. G. (2005). City of endings: Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. The Midwest Quarterly, 46(2), 123-138.
18. Jameson, F. (1981). The Political Unconscious: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act (1991). Ithaca: Cornell UP.
19. Jameson, F. (1987). Foreword. In A. J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (P. J. Perron & F. H. Collins, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
20. Kohn, R. E. (2004). The fivesquare Amsterdam of Ian McEwan. Critical Survey, 16(1), 89-106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41557252
21. Lezard, N. (1999, April 24). Morality bites: Ian McEwan’s five-finger finesse. The Guardian, Retrieved September 20, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/apr/24/fiction.ianmcewan
22. Lukes, S. (2005). The grand dichotomy of the twentieth century. In T. Ball & R. Bellamy (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (pp. 602-626). Cambridge UP.
23. Malcolm, D. (2002). Understanding Ian McEwan. University of South Carolina Press.
24. Marks, J. (2013). Ethics without Morals: In Defense of Amorality. Routledge.
25. McEwan, I. (1998). Amsterdam (2005). Vintage.
26. Moore, G. (1999, January 3). Booker blew it with improbable novel. Sunday Star-Times, D4.
27. Moseley, M. (1999). The world we live in. Sewanee Review, 107(4), 600–612.
28. Pratt, A. (n.d.). Nihilism. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/
29. Quigley, W. (2003-2004). Catholic social thought and the amorality of large corporations: Time to abolish corporate personhood. Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law, 109-134. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/loyjpubil5&div=11&id=&page
30. Scruton, R. (1986). A Dictionary of Political Thought. Macmillan.
31. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2019). Moral Skepticism. In E. N. Zalta (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/skepticism-moral/
32. Sobel, J. H. (1987). Kant’s moral idealism. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 52(2), 277–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4319919
33. Stephens, B. (2002). The amorality of profit: Transnational corporations and human rights. Berkeley Journal of International Law, 20(1), 45-90. https://www.berkeleyjournalofinternationallaw.com/_ files/ugd/277ac3_03e280c1be984e7396d675c2ccd69ad0.pdf
34. Superson, A. M. (2009). The Moral Sceptic. OUP.
35. Vine, B. (1998, November 21). Booker winner readable but rather lightweight. The Southland Times, 26.
36. Wells, L. (2010). Ian McEwan. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.