"A boy stepped out': Migrancy, visuality, and the mapping of masculinities in later fiction of Ian McEwan

Abstract

If the figures of mobility and displacement have become leitmotifs for redressing the future for gender agency and autonomy, how do the formal devices of Ian McEwan's later fiction predict the implications of directing such critical metaphors at masculinities in fields of social visibility? What does it mean for his aesthetic to perform this kind of emblematic function for "masculinity studies' anyway? And can it do so without anachronism: without merely affirming the abstractive practices of theory's intrusion into literary fiction in search of answers? This article addresses the dialogue between contemporary gender politics and fictional technique in a novelist who remains a far from straightforward figure for feminist ethics today--not least because of his (in)famously spare and elusive narrative register. Tailoring alternative frameworks to three key novels from his later oeuvre , it agues that the possibility of complicating the dialectically constitutive and constituting model of human agency is actively re-envisioned through McEwan's use of literary realism. For if masculinity is irreducible to visual regimes of legitimation, then it is the unfinished and aesthetically promiscuous idiom of McEwan's realisms in which an open-ended account of male subjectivity finds its narrational dynamism. Reading becomes viewing, and Derrida meets Percy Lubbock, in this portrait of a tricksterish McEwan whose later experiment tackles the complex mapping of masculinity's creative formation as it emerges between, if ultimately collapsing, the poles of compulsory inherence and wishful voluntarism, bodily inscription and recuperation.