Ways of Seeing, Remembering, and Forgetting in the 21st Century: Unreliable Narrators and Narrative Parodox in Julian Barnes’ and Ian McEwan’s Novels

This research project aims to explore the paradoxical nature of ways of seeing, remembering, forgetting, and unreliable narrators in Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan’s recent novels, such as Love, etc. (2001), The Sense of an Ending (2010), and The Noise of Time (2016), and Atonement (2002), Saturday (2005), Sweet Tooth (2012), and Nutshell (2016). This project is inspired by the current debate about the relationship between British novels today and modernism. Gabriel Josipovici criticizes that contemporary British novelists are not living up to the legacy of modernism, in which the great authors (Woolf, Eliot, and Joyce) in the 20th century disenchant the world with their pained and knowing struggles to make sense of art’s precarious status and responsibilities. On the other hand, David James and Urmila Seshagiri argue that the 21st century aesthetics, or “metamodernism,” is distinguished by an inventive and self-conscious relationship with its modernist inheritance. “Metamodernism” refers to an oscillation “between and beyond” opposed poles of feelings, thoughts, and beings, and it embraces paradoxes and juxtaposition of modern and postmodern values, such as irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, affect and apathy. Drawing on these features of metamodernism, this project will focus on these three themes: (1) Memory and Visibility/Visualization Barnes and McEwan often portray the troubled mentality in the 21st century by representing an oscillation between memory and forgetting, what is visible and what is invisible. I aim to discuss how they represent the malleability of memory, the politics of forgetting, and the tangled relationship between visual perception and recollection in terms of the concept of “flashbulb memory,” Kate Flint’s “photographic memory,” and Julia Shaw’s memory illusion. These concepts facilitate our exploration of traumatic memory, forgetting as part of memory, as well as the elusive nature of visual perception and reconstructed past in literature. (2) The Unreliable Narrator Not only through the oscillation between two poles thematically, but also through a narrative paradox do the two novelists create a disturbing literary space for readers. Their narratives often betray the absence of what is described (for instance, memory vs. misremembering; the visible vs. the invisible). Through the voice of unreliable, unlikely, impossible, or multiple narrators, Barnes and McEwan make the sense of conflict and uneasiness vividly felt in their writings. When forgetting is turned to be a kind of legitimate memory, not getting things may add up to be a kind of true understanding, and absence is perceived to be a powerful presence, what kind of truth are we facing? (3) 21st Century British Novels: Metamodernism and Beyond How do we respond to the criticism of shallowness and self-indulgence of contemporary fictions, which fail to follow the steps of their modernist ancestors? Do we witness an acceleration of the modernist poetics of inexpressibility today? Is “metamodernism” a satisfying term to describe the new trends, potentials, and discontents of the 21st century British novels? This study will provide a timely, comprehensive, and in-depth response to the existent scholarship on the contemporary British novels, ways of seeing, and memory studies.