Dystopian Vision in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love

This paper argues that the novel Enduring Love projects a dystopian vision through the portrayal of failed and embittered lives of major characters. The novel is about the characters’ futile search for utopian life. Joe, through scientific rationalization, Clarissa through literary imagination and love, Jed through religious belief want to live a fulfilling and blissful life but fail due to various reasons related to misplaced values and beliefs or the social realities. None of the ways they adopt, leads them to the fulfillment of utopian ideals. Success through science, religion, or imagination is just a chimera that causes people to hallucinate. The narrative of enduring love interweaves subverted utopian lives of the characters from different fields of life thereby dramatizing the idea that life is dystopian and people’s attempt to live an ideal life is only a mirage. This paper analyzes the novel Enduring Love with the help of ideas about utopia and dystopia borrowed from writers like Krishan Kumar, R. Carter, Robert C. Elliot, and others.


Introduction
This article analyzes Ian McEwan's novel, Enduring Love in the light of dystopia view of life as the novel tries to show the subversion of utopian thinking by challenging scientific rationalism and romantic sentimentalism by Joe who is the narrator and science Journalist, and Clarissa who is Keats scholar and an expert of romanticism respectively. The utopian world of love envisioned by them is brought down by their condition of childlessness which is worsened further due to the balloon accident and other subsequent troubles that lead the protagonists towards a melancholic world of frustration, despair, and overall devastation.
Though Jed parry envisions a blissful life through his homoerotic obsession with Joe it doesn't last long due to Joe's indifference and hatred towards him. His apparently religious attachment to Joe breaks into pieces as he ends up in a lunatic asylum. The marriage between Joe and Clarissa doesn't guarantee long-lasting happiness due to hostility and lack of understanding. Thus the novel destabilizes utopian ideals of blissful life and ideal friendship.
Revolving around the tragic balloon accent that brings strangers together, the novel dramatizes the trauma of the characters and presents multiple causes behind the chaotic and disordered life of people. The lives of these characters are marked by various anomalies despite their restless efforts to live a life of joy and hope. The narrative of the novel moves around the lives of three protagonists with three different world views. Joe Rose, the narrator, and the science journalist represents a rational world view whereas his beloved Clarissa, Keats scholar, and professor of literature stands for romantic sentimentalism. Jed Parry, a lonely young man, and a devout Christian represents a religious worldview. Throughout the novel, Joe interprets everything rationally and wants to create a utopian world dominated by science and technology.
Clarissa Mellon focuses on love and a good relationship over everything else for a happy life. As a scholar of romantic poets and literature, she chooses sentimentalism as the SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406 VOL. 8, ISSUE 11, NOVEMBER 2020 www.ijellh.com 17 remedy for all kinds of problems. Her view clashes with the rational world view of her lover, Joe. Jed wants to establish a utopian life through his homoerotic relationship with Joe.
Though he is religious, the kind of relationship he wants to create is not sanctioned by his religion. The situation of his life deteriorates due to his own misplaced ideals. Jean Logan's attempt to prove his fatherhood by saving the child results in his own death. In this sense, the Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy. In bed, only an hour and a half before, we had been unconvincing somehow, as though there lay between our mucous membranes a fine dust or grit or its mental equivalent, but as tangible as beach sand.
Sitting in the kitchen after Clarissa had left I conjured a morose causal sequence shading from psyche to soma -bad thoughts, low arousal, minimal lubrication -and pain. (149) Joe realizes that his rationalistic mind destroys the happiness that he could otherwise experience in his relationship with Clarissa. It has even robbed him of sexual pleasure. This conflict between Joe and Clarissa leads them to frustration as they cannot strike any point of compromise and understanding. It serves to illustrate that utopia is possible only in imagination and speculation, not in real-life situations. It is incompatible with human integrity, individual sanity, and a decent social system since no society can be completely flawless and faultless. This is because utopia entails inherent contradictions and incompatibilities in itself. This kind of dystopian fiction fails to provide "full opportunity to develop an intimate and satisfying personal relationship" (Elliot 130 Joe is a character who is fact -oriented, materialist, rational, and distrustful of emotions and what cannot be discussed logically, and extremely authoritative and confident in his pronouncements on the world. he is also a character who has a strong sense of failure and disappointment and is prone at times to irrational behaviour and ways of thought. (166) Joe's scientific materialism and rationalism prevent him from writing love letters to Clarissa, as he says, "all that sincerity would permit me were the facts and they seemed miraculous enough to me" (7). Joe finds it unbelievable that a beautiful lady like Clarissa  Aldridge remarks that these kinds of worlds are, "sour utopias in the apocalyptic mode" and "negative quasi-utopias" (5).
Enduring Love subverts utopian vision of life and underlines dystopian realities. The 'enduring love' of the title has multiple meanings. It may refer to strong and lasting love between Joe and Clarissa which ultimately erodes due to pressure from outside. It may also mean unrelenting passion Parry feels for Joe which is a kind of obsessive affection that Joe must endure for a long time. The novel dramatizes an intriguing tension between science and religion, logic, and emotion. The fiction of anti-utopian type represents a disruption of various kinds as "dystopian literature refers to the decadence of people reflected in acts of violence, sexual immorality and use of drugs" (Whissen 65 McEwan's Enduring Love looks critically at different kinds of obsession and the resultant failure of characters to achieve a blissful and successful life. Joe's obsessive belief in science and rationalism separates him from others and creates anxieties for himself.
Clarissa's study of romantic literature and sentimentalism cannot bring her the kind of life she desires for herself. Jed Parry's unrelenting passion for Christ and religion lands him into unwanted trouble and leads to wretchedness. Logan's desire to prove his fatherhood by rescuing a child results in his own death. In this way, the novel subverts the utopian ideals of the main characters and presents a dystopian vision of life. It is a portrayal of the condition of a modern people destined to live in a world devoid of meaning, joy, and purpose.