How Modern Tradition Is : Sweet Music & the Remix
was yo prose genetic structure, one
wonders
Perhaps, one such
situation finds Serena snooping on Tom’s work-in-progress. On principle, he
does not believe in revealing his current writing. Serena is either overly
curious or unreasonably responsible with regard to her professional task.
Either way, secretly reading her lover-writer’s works, she discovers an aspect
of storytelling that reinstates some of the postulates helpful in sustaining
the constancy of awareness in an encounter with a piece of literature. First,
she finds a story told by a specter apish narrator presenting musings about his writer-lover.
She is trying to cope with the hindrances obstructing the advancement of her
second novel. Serena finds herself in an eddy of storytelling. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: “Only on the last page did
I discover that the story I was reading was actually the one the woman was
writing” (224). What a story!
She then decides to
switch to another guilty reading. She picks Tom’s piece entitled From the Somerset Levels. It turns out
to be a story about father and daughter in pursuit of the mother. Not only the
fact that they do not find her is devastating. Not even their ending up dying
in each other’s arms is what colors the narrative in an irredeemable
apocalyptic shade. What constitutes the backbone of the story is the journey
itself. It is a nightmarish struggle with dystopian scenery generated through a
wicked collaboration of social ills, corrosive relationships, and a radically
antieco environment. Instead of concrete, the streets are glazed with feces. It
seems that everything is upside-down in that doomdom including sewage which
appears to be overground – exposed and freely pouring the content readily
available to whoever happens to be around. No wonder father and daughter are
infected by bubonic plague.
Lethal filth rules
urban spaces that not only incorporate the very notion of decay, but are one.
It is a society with no societal institutions, system with no functioning
infrastructure. It is an urbanity with no denizens. It is a dysfunctional,
totalitarian state thriving on vague memories of the times when electricity
meant something and served the inhabitants, when telecommunications existed and
mattered. It is the world climaxing in the triumph of nihilo-cannibalist
orgies. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: “All that functions, though
barely, is government itself” (225). It is an image of what once was
civilization and now is in the state of irrevocable agony. Haley makes a
decisive move in the narrative line contextualizing it within recent history.
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: ”It’s made
clear elsewhere that civilisation’s collapse began with the injustices,
conflicts and contradictions of the twentieth century” (226).
Later, when she can
freely discuss the novella with T.H. Haley, Serena asks if things get better in
this anticapitalist tale of toxicity and is given an unshakably negative
answer. But, that’s Haley’s story. Later, in the coda in absentia, one is
reminded about the aspect of reading-writing Serena discovered previously when
nosing the ape story. Ian McEwan, Sweet
Tooth:
There was, in my view,
an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single
element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to
dissolve on authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as
self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
(224)
When that contract was, one wonders. One would be
prone to ponder if it is still in power, even if Haley knows no sleepless
nights. How early summer sunshine smile-showers the cottage of his imagination,
one wonders. Perhaps, part of the answer can be sensed via the reflections of
the character of Joe Rose in McEwan’s novel Enduring
Love:
I saw the same joy, the
same uncontrollable smile, in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped
Scottish granny, and a pale, correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their
trolleys in and recognized a figure in the expectant crowd. Observing human
variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness. (4)
Whether Joe’s imagination generates the same
gleaming outpour as Haley’s does might not be decipherable. But, one thing is
pretty certain : Joe is no stranger to restlessness spanning the space from
sunset to dawn. Were he a writer, would the consistency of his fiction be the
same as that of the actual world? Could those two be different kinds of
consistency? If so, is it still possible to talk about the consistency of each
without identifying them? Were Joe a writer, what kind of universality could be
ascribed to the genetic structure of the characters of his stories?
The impalpable substantiality of such an ethereal inquiry
may be perceived via a meditation about the impossible music played in McEwan’s
novel Saturday:
There are these rare
moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found
before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or
technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as
friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of
our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you
have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. (176)
A glimpse might easily be of the guardian signpost
smile so sovereign in its humbleness, as it fills the cottage from the memories
of the times bygone and casts rays on whatever fallible context one might find
oneself in.
Perhaps,
one such situation is indicated in the supposed coda in absentia in McEwan's novel Sweet Tooth. In the letter
to his reader, after the publicized scandal about the Sweet Tooth operation,
his being funded by an intelligence service, and his lover being an undercover
agent, Tom retrospectively observes the relationship between him and Serena. As
much as he acknowledges numerous untruths of hers, he admits a number of
secretly paid visits, talks, and exchange of information. The visit to his
family now including corrected details. The visit to her family. Disagreeably,
pot fuelled conversation with Serena’s sister and her partner. Attending the
service of their bishop father. Upon his return to London, being fed from the
source of information provided by Max--Serena’s colleague, former lover,
co-worker at the Information Research Department. Prior to the trip back to
London, tipsy days and nights in a hotel room, so he could digest all the heavy
nourishment he was given. Avoiding her that Christmas. Because there was too
much to filter. And to sift, to process, it takes a bit of time and insulation.
To purify the communication channel, disambiguation is needed.
The
character of Tom is identified negatively--apparently, he is unlike Othello (Ian McEwan, Sweet
Tooth 354).
Tom confesses that the acquired cognizance about Serena’s identity of an
intelligence agent makes him assume a similar role: he spies on her and reports
back about her. Thus, he contributes to establishing a relationship based on
mutual betrayal, and yet, the paradox of it being that there was no single
aspect of it that was not authentic. Amid the narrative of radical mistrust,
out of the whirlpool of the oscillations between doubt and suspicion, sustained
is the inexpressible, yet unbeatable, indisputable presence of the persevering
allegiance.
If
there is a layer of toxicity in McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth, it is in the service of travesty. If travesty has
significance in this book, it is in the service of learning how to read :
invigorating critical / creative capacities. If such a process is challenging,
it is because a piece of literature calls for an engaging attitude. It is
perhaps the reason why learning how to read such a demanding piece equips one
with a vocabulary with which to approach cultural realities. One is provided
with a vocabulary serving both as a form of peaceful/peaceable resistance to
stupefyingly cacophonic amalgamation and as the way of worshipping the aspects
of radiant inspiration. It is also a stunningly friendly source of subversive
lyrical interjections—quirky genre-bending enclaves--sustaining the much needed
alertness and, simultaneously, alleviating the hardship of such a strenuous
task.
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