Utell 2016

On Chesil Beach and Fordian Technique: Intertextuality, Intimacy, Ethical Reading
Author(s): Janine Utell

Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter 2016), pp. 89-104
Published by: Indiana University Press
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On Chesil Beach and Fordian Technique:
Intertextuality, Intimacy, Ethical Reading
Janine Utell
Widener University
Ian McEwan’s use of Fordian elements and techniques in his novella On Chesil
Beach — specifically allusions to The Good Soldier; impressionism as an epistemo-
logical and narrative strategy; and elements of narrative discourse such as perspective,
time, and order — direct our attention to the narrativization of intimacy, what is say-
able and unsayable in the representation of intimacy, and to what kinds of knowledge
narrative provides access. These moves teach us a form of ethical reading generated by the
thinking of Emmanuel Levinas: how to navigate McEwan’s representation of desire,
intimacy, and alterity in order to recognize the epistemological and ethical commitments
and problems engendered by narrative.
Keywords: Ian McEwan / Ford Madox Ford / Emmanuel Levinas / impressionism /

ethical reading
What epistemology has established is that a person can only form an

impression of another human heart.
— John G. Hessler,
“Dowell and T he Good
Soldier” (55)
Janine Utell (janine.utell@gmail.com) is professor and chair of English at Widener

University. Her current research focuses on the study of nineteenth and twentieth century
narratives of couplehood and intimate life, with a broader interest in the application of
narrative theory and postmodern ethics to literary, visual, and digital texts. Utell is the
author of James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire (2010) and Engage-
ments with Narrative (2015). She also serves as editor for the journal The Space Between:
Literature and Culture, 1914–1945.
Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 39, No. 2 • Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.39.2.06
06-39_2 Utell (89-104).indd 89 All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 3/28/16 1:50 PM
90 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 39, Number 2
To put it differently, just for the fun of switching perversities, one who
really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two
together.
— Gérard Genette,
Palimpsests (399)
T
alking about his novella On Chesil Beach (2007) in a 2008 interview, Ian
McEwan said, “It’s less the power aspects of the [sexual] relationship that
appeal to me . . . and more the intricacies of misunderstanding, and break-
through into self-knowledge” (“A Thing” 188). Much of McEwan’s fiction deals
with the narrative and ethical complexity of erotic relationships; through depic-
tions of sex and intimacy, he examines how people try to speak what cannot be
spoken, the difficulty of getting below the surface, the problems of conjecture
and perception. As a body of work, his novels and short stories grapple with the
ethical implications engendered by intimacy as an epistemological problem and
sex as a way of knowing.
In On Chesil Beach, McEwan uses intertextuality, particularly a kind of
impressionism drawn from Ford Madox Ford, to prompt reflection on questions
of intimacy and epistemology, bringing us to a Levinasian practice of reading
ethically. McEwan himself has noted James Joyce’s story “The Dead” (1914) as
a key intertext for On Chesil Beach for this very reason. About the conclusion of
“The Dead,” McEwan remarks, “It’s one of the most beautiful representations
of two people’s minds running along entirely different lines” (“Shadow” 184).
Ford, another important modernist figure, serves much the same function, made
visible through McEwan’s borrowings from, parallels with, and allusions to the
The Good Soldier (1915) and Fordian impressionism more broadly.1 McEwan’s use
of Fordian elements and techniques — specifically allusions to The Good Soldier;
impressionism as an epistemological and narrative strategy; and elements of nar-
rative discourse such as perspective, time, and order — direct our attention to the
narrativization of intimacy, what is sayable and unsayable in the representation of
intimacy, and to what kinds of knowledge narrative provides access. These moves
teach us a form of Levinasian ethical reading: how to navigate McEwan’s repre-
sentation of desire, intimacy, and alterity in order to recognize the epistemological
and ethical commitments and problems engendered by narrative.
The story concerns the honeymoon night of Florence Ponting and Edward
Mayhew, a narrative that unfolds over the course of an evening in 1962, begin-
ning with dinner and climaxing, literally and figuratively, with sexual embar-
rassment (the groom’s “arriving too quickly” all over his horrified bride). This is
a catastrophe in every sense of the word, as we shall see; the novel ends with the
just-married couple parting forever on Chesil Beach as a result of the humiliation
as night overtakes the strand. Part of Florence’s story is the unacknowledged,
unsayable, sexual abuse perpetrated upon her by her father, which is only hinted
at, never mentioned by either Florence or Edward, and complicates their ability
On Chesil Beach and Fordian Technique 91
to respond to each other. Just before they separate, Florence suggests that the two
stay together and pursue an open marriage, a proposition taken by Edward to be
profoundly insulting, and he rejects her. Interwoven throughout are flashbacks to
the couple’s meeting and courtship as well as their family lives growing up (includ-
ing those hints of abuse), meant to account for, possibly even to predetermine,
how it is that their wedding night goes so horribly wrong.
The presence of other texts creates a portal to other narrative worlds, simul-
taneously opening the hermetic, and hermeneutic, world of On Chesil Beach,
thereby transforming our reading practice. Intertextuality, as formulated by Julia
Kristeva, permits a crossing of subject and narrative boundaries that mirrors
certain processes of intersubjectivity (Orr 21): the interpenetration of texts and
subjects mirrors McEwan’s interest in literal and figurative penetration. These
textual revenants create a further kind of strangeness, a double exposure where
other texts and other subjects penetrate the claustrophobic honeymoon suite of
Florence and Edward and their increasingly strained dyad. Even in their love, they
are other to each other, and their failure is depicted as a sexual failure in order to
remark upon a greater failure to recognize otherness in a loving and ethical way.
McEwan’s use of intertextuality and impressionism in the service of exploring
intersubjectivity, specifically intimacy as an epistemological problem, calls forth
an imperative of ethical reading, one informed by the thinking of Emmanuel
Levinas. As we read ethically, placing texts in conversation with each other
and holding spaces open for multiplicity and doubt, we model what McEwan’s
characters might not be able to do: moving below the surface, moving beyond
misperception, and rejecting the impulse to reduce the other to a single meaning.
Intertextuality thus becomes both device and metaphor, recalling us to the con-
nection made by Kristeva between intertextuality and intersubjectivity: the inter-
penetration of texts, what Sarah Dillon has called “palimpsestuousness,” allows
us to talk about the nature of intimacy, of intimate penetration both literal and
figurative. For Dillon, this is “a simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation
. . . a metaphoric coupling” (3, 5).
Fordian impressionism, as well as the coupling of texts about coupling (spe-
cifically here The Good Soldier, with its many permutations of coupling) permits
McEwan a wide range of textual and narrative tools with which to consider the
epistemological and ethical problem of intimacy. In Dillon’s reading, intertex-
tuality functions itself as a mode of intimacy. Andrew Gibson offers another
way of thinking about this issue in his writing on Levinas: “The other always
and definitively overflows the frame in which I would seek to enclose the other”
(25). McEwan’s understanding of intimacy, his use of sexual overflowing as a
metaphor — an embodiment — of the challenge of being with the other, and our
reading of it through Levinas, calls for much the same thinking: the acceptance
that the other has being through her own essence, one that cannot be reduced,
which we learn through resisting the impulse to read a text as just one thing. The
hypotext of The Good Soldier is allowed to infiltrate the space of McEwan’s novel,
expanding the latter’s narrative and intersubjective frame of reference, permitting
us to establish a hermeneutics of human connection. The characters themselves

think of themselves as clearly defined and bounded entities: being confronted,
literally, by the “overflowing” of “the other” is deeply traumatic, as Florence is on
her wedding night, or even as Edward is by Florence’s own past overflowing into
their present. The text enacts this further by overflowing its own frame through
allusions to other texts, as its characters overflow the “frame” of the boundaries
they have constructed to contain their own subjectivity even in the face of the
demands of love.
This theme of alterity and ethical reading has been foundational to a great
deal of writing on McEwan, especially commentary on Saturday (2005), the novel
immediately preceding On Chesil Beach. Theresa Winterhalter and Tammy Amiel-
Houser, for instance, draw from Martha Nussbaum in their analysis of McEwan
to suggest that literature creates the opportunity for sympathy, identification,
and intimacy. While sympathy is certainly important to our reading of On Chesil
Beach, considering intimacy in the novel through the lens of Levinas’s thinking
allows us access to the trauma engendered when such sympathy, and sympathetic
reading, fails. Further, reading On Chesil Beach with a handle on impressionism as
a tool helps us see the mechanism by which this occurs. Thom Dancer has argued
that McEwan’s novels, particularly Atonement (2001) and Saturday, advocate for a
kind of “epistemological modesty”: an awareness of “the pervasive human struggle
to ‘grasp the simple truth’ that ‘other minds are equally alive’ and ‘other people are
as real’ ” (202; Dancer quoting from Saturday). Characters such as Edward, but
also other McEwan creations like Briony Tallis in Atonement or Henry Perowne in
Saturday, must learn this epistemological modesty, which I posit as a Levinasian
ethical move. To read in an ethical manner, to develop a Levinasian stance as a
reader, looks very much like what Dancer calls a “modest criticism,” wherein a
critic with “good faith, sincerity, and generosity . . . join[s] with the text instead
of mastering it from afar” (206). A character practicing a kind of epistemological
modesty rejects the impulse to master the other, particularly in love. On Chesil
Beach, however, has not been given the same kind of attention regarding the sub-
ject of such ethical reading, leading some critics unjustly to dismiss the novella as
limited (Head 121–22), or to focus on it simply as an allegory of sexual liberation
(Locatelli 236).
While McEwan has claimed outright “The Dead” as an influence and fore-
bear, particularly in its depiction of intimacy as an epistemological problem, it has
fallen to others to note the echoes of Ford. David James makes convincing claims
for McEwan’s engagement with modernism via Ford as well as Henry James and
Virginia Woolf. James takes McEwan’s use of impressionism, inherited from Ford
and Joseph Conrad, as his crux writing, “impressionist methods of rendering
consciousness have become the expressive medium for McEwan’s epistemologi-
cal and ethical concerns” (137). Frank Kermode, in a review of Atonement (2001),
suggests that Ford would have been one of McEwan’s “best readers,” given the
ways the book is “a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it
has to imagine if we are given the false assurance that there is a match between
our fictions and the specifications of reality” (n.p.). Nowhere is that “false assur-
ance” more real than in love and desire. For both The Good Soldier and On Chesil
Beach, erotic life functions as the site through which the epistemological problems
of intimacy and alterity are explored. Furthermore, the probing of the fictions we
tell about those intimate and erotic lives — and the trauma of the revelation that
we can never know the other in love — is illuminated here by a Levinasian lens,
rendering visible the value of an ethical reading of and through intertextuality.
In an essay on The Good Soldier, Julian Barnes highlights the use of intertex-
tuality towards thematic ends, and the two novels certainly share a number of
themes.2 He offers the following:
I was talking to Ian McEwan, who told me that a few years ago he’d been staying in
a house with a well-stocked library. There he found a copy of The Good Soldier, which
he read and admired greatly. A while later, he wrote On Chesil Beach, that brilliant
novella in which passion, and Englishness, and misunderstanding, lead to emotional
catastrophe. Only after publishing the book did he realise that he had unconsciously
given his two main characters the names Edward (as in Ashburnham) and Florence
(as in Dowell). He is quite happy for me to pass this on. (Barnes)
The Good Soldier as intertext appears on the surface in the choice of characters’
names, and the conversation with Ford’s writing can be extended to McEwan’s
narrative strategies, deeply indebted to Fordian impressionism, especially via
perspective and time. Most significant for my concerns here, both authors engage
with the theme of intimate knowledge. Samuel Hynes, writing about The Good
Soldier, offers, “The techniques by which a novelist controls our contact with his
fictional world, and particularly his choice of point of view and treatment of time,
combine to create a model of a theory of knowledge” (225). By hearkening back
to the earlier modernist writer, McEwan provides his narrator and his reader with
the tools to fulfill a particular epistemological task.
McEwan’s deployment of Fordian impressionism manifests itself in two
forms — Florence and Edward’s mistaken perceptions and judgments, and the
narrator’s knowing presentation of details that allows us to generate a much dif-
ferent picture than that made by the characters themselves regarding each other.
Beginning with the internymic “Florence” and “Edward” (Florence Hurlbird and
Edward Ashburnham in Ford’s novel), The Good Soldier offers us cues for reading,
and suggests taking up Ford’s critical work as well. Rather than the vulgar harlot
Florence Hurlbird, who comes to her marriage with narrator John Dowell already
“experienced,” McEwan gives us Florence Ponting, an upright, serious, loving girl
whose past trauma is read by her new husband as utter bewilderment when it comes
to “how to be with a man,” in his words (Chesil 176). Where Dowell characterizes
his unfaithful wife as “poor Florence,” an epithet that becomes increasingly ironic
with persistent use, McEwan’s Florence is “straight” and “strong.” In Edward’s
eyes, “she appeared to glow before him, and she was lovely — beautiful, sensuous,
gifted, good-natured beyond belief ” (Chesil 14). Both Dowell and Edward grossly
misjudge their wives, a failure that shows how traumatic ignorance of the other
can be. Yet McEwan’s Florence remains inviolable and unviolated by her husband
in order to show that, even with the knowledge brought by love, that is even if one
can recognize that the beloved person will be subject to alterity, love is simply a
mirroring of one ego through the other.
In Florence’s own impressions of Edward as seen in On Chesil Beach, we hear
echoes of “the good soldier”: “She adored his curious mind, his mild country
accent, the huge strength in his hands, the unpredictable swerves and drifts of
his conversation, his kindness to her, and the way his soft brown eyes, resting
on her when she spoke, made her feel enveloped in a friendly cloud of love” (12).
Ford’s Edward, through the eyes of Dowell, is not dissimilar: “Have I conveyed to
you the splendid fellow that he was — the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the
extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-
dealing, fair-thinking public character?” (Good 108). In both cases, the attentive
reader, learning more and piecing together further impressions, will notice some
slippage, some infelicities of interpretation. While Florence experiences Edward’s
“affectionate” gaze as cozy, Edward thinks of watching with desire Florence play
the violin, certain that this woman holds “knowledge of the path to pleasure”
(Chesil 18). Dowell, in conveying the “public character,” leaves out, at least for
the moment, the thwarted young gentleman who daydreams about servant girls
because he has come to find his wife, Leonora, cold and unsympathetic. The read-
ing of the manifestation of Edward’s desires as monstrous late in On Chesil Beach
echo Leonora’s (mis)reading of her husband in The Good Soldier. Dowell tells us,
“She imagined that Edward was carrying on intrigues with other women — with
two at once; with three. For whole periods she imagined him to be a monster of
libertinage” (Good 207). The reality, as we learn, is that Edward Ashburnham is
a sentimentalist who winds up desperately in love with his ward, Nancy Rufford,
and his own sense of honor prevents him from pursuing her. Both texts represent
the desire of the other as not only misunderstood but monstrous, perverted. In
On Chesil Beach, Edward does not become explicitly monstrous until both he and
Florence are confronted with their erotic failure, Edward has been humiliated,
and Florence realizes how badly she herself misjudged the situation. Yet the
potential for that monstrous desire lies always under the surface, unspeakable
except through metaphor and narrative slippage.
On Chesil Beach uses the internymic also to represent a sort of ontological
excess. Florence and Edward are themselves, but they are also different versions
of themselves. The pair is transformed by marriage and the space of the honey-
moon (a process discussed brilliantly by Helena Michie in her work on Victorian
honeymoons), and transformed by functioning as refractions of Ford’s Florence
and Edward: innocence and experience.3 The honeymoon itself is meant to func-
tion as a liminal space wherein innocence is transformed into experience through
sexual consummation. The experience of themselves before and after marriage is
one of selves in different versions, an ontological shift that needs to be managed.
McEwan’s Florence and Edward are also echoes of the previous Florence and
Edward of Ford’s novel, adulterous lovers who remain unknown and unknowable
by the narrator of their story, the notoriously slippery Dowell. The spilling over
of the characters beyond the frame of McEwan’s novel parallels the spilling over
of their desire (literally), “a desire without satisfaction which, precisely, under-
stands the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other” (Levinas 34).
The corporeality of Florence and Edward, the intense emphasis placed on their
(erotic) bodies particularly as the novel progresses, performs this spilling over.
Their bodies — for all the ways they are catastrophic in that moment of climactic
nonconsummation, that climactic moment of nonclimax — actually serve as a site
for connection, not with each other, but with the reader, as we shall see.
Ford’s impressionism offers strategies for McEwan, and for us as readers,
to negotiate these questions of alterity, providing a means towards ethical read-
ing practices. Part of how this is accomplished is via a certain strangeness, a
“queerness,” that impressionism generates. In “On Impressionism,” Ford writes:
I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are
like so many views seen through bright glass — through glass so bright that whist
you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface,
it reflects a face of a person behind you. . . . In that way you would attain to the sort
of odd vibration that scenes in real life really have. (Ford, Critical 41, 42; italics mine)
Stories of intimacy are themselves predicated on strangeness, on entering a world

of mystery. In love, the potential to be wrong is great, the stakes for misperception
and misreading, painfully high. As Emma Kafalenos asserts, story is the falling
into something not normal, and falling in love is one of the most not-normal
scenarios one can find oneself in (80–81).
Such strangeness is evident in the first lines of the novel: “They were young,
educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time
when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is
never easy” (Chesil 3). The tone of this narrator is worldly, able to make universal
assertions predicated on some kind of unseen experience: “But it is never easy.”
The narrator also prefigures a sexual catastrophe by bringing up “sexual difficul-
ties” on this, their (characters as yet unnamed) wedding night. Why bring up
sexual difficulties at such a moment? Why assume we are going to have to have
a conversation about them? Our entry into the novel — our penetration into the
inner sanctum of Edward and Florence’s intimate space as yet not quite fully
formed, the liminal space of the honeymoon night in a hotel — is based on a series
of impressions: what the glimpse of the bed (“whose bedcover was pure white and
stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand” [Chesil 3]) might tell
us, the two young waiters who may or may not be giggling at the honeymoon
couple, the overcooked food consumed in a desultory manner by bride and groom
with other things on their mind.
Even in the early days of the relationship, told in flashbacks, Florence and
Edward form impressions of each other based in strangeness that are not entirely
accurate. Moreover, they never quite get to the point where those impressions
are revised, where the true self of each is recognized, and we never quite see the
sharing of meaningful stories, that “spontaneous narrative reciprocity” (Cava-

rero 109). McEwan’s Edward Mayhew, in forming his impressions of Florence
Ponting, recognizes the oddity of the experience, not only the peculiarity of
falling in love but also the particular strangeness brought on by a lack of experi-
ence, erotic and otherwise. Toward the end of the novel, as detumescence and
denouement come together to account for what has occurred and to determine
what is to come, Edward recalls his visits to the Ponting home, a very differ-
ent world from the lower-middle-class home he comes from, made chaotic and
unstable by his brain-damaged mother. Through Florence, Edward is introduced
to classical music, duck confit, books by Iris Murdoch: “How could he pretend
to himself that within his narrow existence these were not extraordinary experi-
ences?” (Chesil 146–47). The narrator, in his worldliness, realizes that duck confit
is not especially remarkable; but he also recognizes that the swirl of impressions,
heightened by the erotic excitement of first love, is ushering Edward into a new
way of looking at the world. In this regard, McEwan’s narrator is more equipped
to understand how another subject might be thinking and responding than the
characters being narrated. Furthermore, by manipulating time in order to show
these impressions on the part of Edward after his humiliation, McEwan enables
us to see how open Edward was and how incorrect in his judgment of who or
what Florence was: a subject, not merely a collection of moments and sensations
for him to experience.
The impressions that Florence and Edward generate over the course of their
relationship, and that shape their understanding of each other and their couple-
hood, turn out to be wholly wrong. They demonstrate an inability to narrate each
other to each other, to create a coherent story that the other can share: a lack of,
again, “spontaneous narrative reciprocity” (Cavarero 109). And, they — Edward
in particular — subsume all of their limited understanding of each other into a
totality that is the marriage and what it means, namely, consummation. Like lov-
ers do, they share the “private mythology” of their first encounter (Cavarero 71),
but the story never moves forward. Moreover, Edward, in his desire to possess
Florence, to penetrate, only reveals to her her own strangeness to herself. This
defamiliarization does not reveal to Florence the infinite possibilities made avail-
able by love and its radical openness to the new. Instead, Florence wants to shut
down, to be closed rather than open, psychically and corporeally. The narrator
describes her thinking:
Falling in love was revealing to her just how odd she was, how habitually sealed off
in her everyday thoughts. Whenever Edward asked, How do you feel? or, What are
you thinking? she always made an awkward answer. . . . All these years she had lived
in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to
look back. (Chesil 75–76; italics mine)
“Falling in love” has revealed Florence to herself, even as she becomes aware of
the reality that the person she loves best might not know her at all. We see here
the strangeness of Florence, of the erotic encounter, of one’s own subjectivity.
The “interrogative moment of an intersubjective encounter” (Handwerk 128) is

actually deeply traumatic for Florence. Furthermore, it is unfulfilling for Edward
because there is no opening for relationship and recognition, only his craving to
fill that space with sex. In this realization on the part of Florence, the narrator
notes, “her problems with Edward were already present” (Chesil 76). Their inability
to know each other, and the ways that failure predetermines the collapse of their
relationship, is sadly only knowledge for the narrator, and for us.
Ford’s impressionism depends upon perspective and perception, and reveals
the epistemological crisis at the core of narrative and of intimacy: it thus becomes
a valuable tool for McEwan. As Ford’s narrator John Dowell says, “Who in this
world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any
other heart — or of his own?” (Good 182). Many readers of The Good Soldier have
considered Dowell from the point of view of epistemological crisis, beginning
with Samuel Hynes’s classic essay already mentioned. In particular, we might take
Paul Armstrong’s reading, with an emphasis on what he calls Dowell’s “theory
of love” (244), and apply similar thinking to On Chesil Beach and its deployment
of impressionism. According to Armstrong, this theory “describes how the quest
for intimacy seeks to release the self from the prison of its private consciousness”
(244). Impressionism is the means by which this might occur, but characters are
always caught in a double bind. Impressions and perspective are necessary to
access another, and see into another, perhaps even from her point of view; but
those impressions are limited by the phenomenological experience of the one
doing the seeing, forming, and interpreting. Armstrong brings together Ford’s
method and his philosophical concerns thusly: “By manipulating the epistemology
of representation, Ford’s novel also seeks to initiate its readers into the myster-
ies of perspectival relation between knower and known” (249). We see this in
McEwan’s Florence and Edward, and their attempts to access and understand
each other within the intimate space. For Ford, much of the work of impression-
ism is being incorrect, misjudging, misreading, and re-evaluating over the course
of the chronicle:
You must go on in the same way — arguing, illustrating and startling and arguing,
startling and illustrating — until at the very end your contentions will appear like a
ravelled skein and then, in the last few lines, you will draw towards you the master-
string of that seeming confusion, and the whole pattern of the carpet, the whole
design of the network will be apparent. (Ford, “On Impressionism” 48)
The method is described even more aptly by Dowell, the narrator of The Good
Soldier:
And, when one discusses an affair — a long, sad affair — one goes back, one goes
forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them
all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention
them in their proper place and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false
impression. (Good 213)
Stages of misapprehension lead to clarity as further nuances and facets of char-

acter are revealed, and confusion is rendered into design. Thus for both Ford and
McEwan the narrator is of utmost importance, as well as being a slightly terrifying
figure, for the narrator alone has the power to reveal.
The Good Soldier performs a great deal of its imaginative work by drawing
attention to the telling of the story. Dowell imagines his ideal audience and
conjures the perfect setting in which to tell his story: “So I shall just imagine
myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a
sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the
sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright
stars” (Good 17). This image is repeated in Part IV of the novel, near the end: “I
have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing
between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as
it comes” (Good 213; italics mine). Dowell imagines not only a story but a teller;
the tale he has to share is intimately connected to the person he conceives as
hearing it. The teller and setting are remarkably like the ones chosen by McEwan
for his own story, with his wise and ironic narrator regarding this couple on the
beach, bringing us into the tale and facilitating judgment the characters could
not possibly have.
However, McEwan’s narrator sexualizes that setting in a way that is simply
unavailable to Dowell, and does a great deal to draw attention to the gap between
what we and the narrator know, and what Florence and Edward cannot even
begin to acknowledge: “The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its
profusion, an effect heightened by the gray, soft light and a delicate mist drifting
in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of
gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles” (Chesil 6). The garden
puts forth the same sense of erotic expectation in the “sensuous” vegetation, fur-
ther detailed in the giant rhubarb “with swollen stalks” and “dark, thick-veined
leaves” (Chesil 6). The waves advancing and withdrawing replicate the rhythm of
sex, as the vegetables take on an explicitly phallic cast. The narrator here plays
with perception, establishing tone and creating the story world we are about to
enter with the characters. Furthermore, the narrator uses these images to say what
remains unsayable to Florence and Edward: the sexy vegetation metaphorizes
desire, displacing it into the realm of the unsayable.
Dowell notes early on that his story, “the saddest story,” has a design; it is a
minuet, a four-square house (Good 10, 11). The narrative zigzags across the past
and present, covering about two decades, seeking to account for trauma in the
present by illuminating the past as a shaping force. McEwan creates a similarly
Fordian design for his novel that depends on manipulating time, moving, as
David Herman has noted, between a present in the hotel on Chesil Beach and
the pasts of Edward and Florence, episodes meant to explain their situation while
illuminating the ways they remain mysterious to each other (45). On Chesil Beach
is arranged in five parts (one more than The Good Soldier); I and III are located in
the “present,” and II and IV focus on their background and their coming together.
Part V is also partly in the present, but then looks forward proleptically to the
aftermath of Florence and Edward’s breakup. Florence and Edward never fully
progress because we are continually moving backwards analeptically into their
formation. By the time they are ready to move forward, they have moved out of
sight, especially Florence, who is only seen through Edward’s imagination at the
very end of Part V after she has left. McEwan also draws attention to design and
pattern using music. Like Dowell’s four-person minuet, Florence has her chamber
quartet: “With the quartet, the work was so intense . . . the music so beautiful
and rich, that every time they played a piece through, they found something new”
(Chesil 151). This group, with Florence at its center, works well and in harmony,
unlike the dyad of her couplehood with Edward. Ultimately we perceive the
design that the characters themselves cannot perceive until it is too late.
At the same time, while McEwan’s novella is deeply indebted to Fordian
technique, particularly at the levels of order, progression, and time, there is
another aspect of design that must be noted in order to fully grasp the author’s
project of ethical reading. On Chesil Beach maps onto classic plot structure, with
the analeptic interruptions previously noted, of rising action, climax, and falling
action, a structure that textualizes the corporeal arc of desire: tumescence, orgasm,
detumescence. Furthermore, it does so from a specifically male perspective. It is
highly masculinized, and highly totalizing, and it creates the space wherein the
deeply unethical nature of Edward’s interaction with Florence is made visible.
McEwan’s use of a Fordian impressionism lead us to see, in a cumulative fashion
over the course of the novella, how misreading is counter to ethical reading.
In McEwan’s world, here and in his other works, first love and erotic desire
are in some respects phenomenologically totalizing impulses; they color all aspects
of existence, and generate a need to subsume everything into the experience, made
most manifest in the craving for sexual union. In this sense, love can foster a sense
of ethical intersubjectivity, but also destroy it. In evoking “one of the exquisite
moments of their early love,” the narrator of On Chesil Beach describes Florence
and Edward out for a walk. It is a beautiful day, and they are out in the country
where they are free to be their most natural and authentic selves. The narrator
offers Edward’s perspective: “He had never seen her so happy, or so pretty. . . .
As they walked toward the cottage she kept tugging on his grass-stained arm for
another kiss, though of the lightest sort, and for once he happily, or at least calmly,
accepted that they would go no further” (Chesil 158; italics mine). The narrator
gives insight into Edward’s desire through these seemingly minor qualifications:
though, at least. They puncture the appearance of idyllic early love, pushing
Edward’s unmet, unsayable needs into the foreground and creating a distance with
Florence. In his theorizing of intimacy, Niklas Luhmann argues that love is not
simply the “reciprocity of perspective” but the “concept of interpersonal interpen-
etration”: “One can only act in love in such a manner that one can live with what
the other person experiences inside. . . . What is important is to find meaning in
the world of someone else” (174–75). Luhmann defines interpenetration in this
context as “lovers conceding each other the right to their own world and refraining
from integrating everything into a totality” (176). For Edward in this scene, the
totality is sexual consummation; any experience he might have with Florence, or
of Florence and her subjecthood, is subsumed into his desire to possess her, to
violate her. Or rather, his utterly natural desire, in its capacity to blind him to
seeing her clearly, becomes a violation because it prevents him from recognizing
her alterity. Likewise, as the novel progresses towards the catastrophe, Edward
becomes increasingly monstrous and other to Florence; she regards him through
the dark lens of perversion, as his body and its desires make him strange to her.
She is incapable, in the moment of crisis, to reconcile the Edward she loves with
the body she rejects, and can only hate him.
McEwan’s narrative work is grounded not only in the mind but in the body.
Corporeal experience determines the working of the mind, and because Florence
and Edward are experiencing such separate things over the course of their wed-
ding night, for McEwan this leads to a failure of intermental empathy. As Edward
strokes Florence, she begins to get excited in spite of herself, and then immediately
attributes the unfamiliar sensation to some kind of disorder; Edward mistakes
it for “eagerness” (Chesil 105). Even as their bodies begin to do sort of the same
thing, their minds are separate, making connection impossible — an impossibility
that becomes clear a few moments later. When the narrator reports her confessing
to being scared, she imagines “trust[ing] him utterly,” only to promptly revise:
“But this was fantasy” (104). Words related to mental activity, cognition, know-
ing, perceiving, understanding — and misinterpreting — abound. Florence thinks,
“What possible terms could she have used when she could not have named the
matter to herself?” (11); “She was alone with a problem she did not know how to
begin to address” (13). Both Florence and Edward pursue silent hypothetical lines
of thought as they remain inscrutable to each other: “might have suggested” (23),
“he thought he understood” (34), “she made herself remember” (35). An evening
that is supposed to be about union, the coming together of bodies and minds,
instead begins with separation and involves increasing mental distance even as
bodies draw nearer.
Unity with an ultimately unknowable other recedes infinitely, as Florence
recedes down the beach from Edward after the crisis; to grasp after it is to commit
a form of violence. For Levinas, this becomes how we think about other people,
and the process of reaching and recognition forms the foundation of his ethics.
The catastrophe, or denouement, is the moment in any plot granted the most
significance by Levinas as a reader, as noted by Roland Champagne, because it
is at that moment that laughter or crying occur; these physical manifestations
of feeling connect text and reader, transcending the distance between them and
prompting empathy (6). On Chesil Beach literalizes and corporealizes the “catas-
trophe” of the wedding night. Catastrophe has its origins in ancient Greek, mean-
ing the final climactic act of a drama, literally, an “overturning,” a “sudden end.”
Such is Edward’s premature ejaculation: it is the climax of the story, followed by
detumescence and denouement, and it is the overturning, here the overturning
of the couplehood.
As noted earlier, in Levinas’s thinking, the self overflowing its boundaries

can be horrifying unless met with compassion, with a welcoming of the other.
The literal and figurative catastrophe is marked by the leading up to the bed: “The
final act could not be endlessly deferred. The moment was rising to meet her”
(Chesil 41). The double entendre should be duly noted. Time is lengthened as the
couple makes its way to the bedroom after dinner, and the progression is slowed
down even further by the interruptions created by analepsis. The catastrophe is
prompted by a very specific and literal act of misreading on Florence’s part: her
marriage manual informed her that it would be “acceptable for the bride to ‘guide
the man in’ ” (129). The touch of Florence’s fingers prompts ejaculation and mutual
horror: McEwan employs phrases such as “primal disgust,” “visceral horror,” “cry
of revulsion”; words such as “alien,” “stench,” “shameful” (131). In response to
her terror of being penetrated — “her composure and essential happiness were
about to be violated” (10) — Florence rejects everything that is intimate, bodily,
and vulnerable about Edward. At the same time, Edward can only respond to
Florence with humiliation and rage: she has not followed the script. They each
respond to the other’s subjectivity, in body and mind, with shame and anger. An
attentive reader has been prepared for this moment by an awareness of the subjects’
misreading via impressionism, but Edward and Florence cannot read each other
in the same way we do.
In On Chesil Beach, the “self-reflexive examination of the manipulative art of
storytelling” (Mathews 89) takes the form of a narrator letting us into the private
world of Florence and Edward, and giving us insight into their pasts and presents
to which, tragically, the characters themselves never have access. We return to that
beach at the end of the novel, as Florence disappears: “He [Edward] stood in cold
and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore,
the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she
was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleam-
ing in the pallid light” (Chesil 203). This moment occurs after we have seen the
60–year-old Edward, after his realization that “love and patience — if only he had
had them both at once — would surely have seen them both through” (202–203).
The segue from this mature realization, this awakening into the compassion nec-
essary for love, into a final vision of Florence, is a rewinding back to that horrible
moment on the beach, the instant of his rejection of her: “He did not know, or
would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him . . . she had never
loved him more” (202). Despite what we learn about Edward’s maturity, and the
uncovering of his own knowledge, we are brought back in endless recurrence to
the instant of callowness, willful not-knowing, and the tragic refusal to recog-
nize love. This instant is on that fateful beach, where stories are made and heard.
Through the designs of the narrator, that story moment continues to reverberate
through narrative past, present, and future.
Edward’s crisis shows just how utterly separate he and Florence are, as Flor-
ence runs out onto the beach, then departs from Edward forever. While a con-
nection is lost between Edward and Florence as a result of this catastrophe, a
connection is created between Edward and the reader, as we get to see what he
has lost in her. We persist in a kind of narrative knowledge that Florence will
never have: she not only departs from Edward on that beach, she departs from the
novel entirely, except as a fantasy. Florence remains a phantasm, “that girl with
her violin” (Chesil 202), amplified by Edward’s imagining of the daughter they
might have had, wearing a headband like her mother, a “loved familiar” (203).
The novella ends with Edward’s partial self-recognition of his own emotional and
ethical shortcomings, his failure to appreciate the subject, and the gift, that was
Florence. At the same time, one is left to wonder if Edward has truly done the
work of recognizing Florence. In his final thoughts, she is unchanged, static, rec-
reated in the person of a daughter, sentimentalized through the lens of nostalgia.
Where is the real Florence? Is she to be found in the gaps between the tesserae of
Edward’s impressions, even at the last?
The tragedy of Florence and Edward then becomes their inability to rec-
ognize other possibilities, other ways of knowing, either in their situation or
in themselves and each other. Misreading has profound ethical implications
for McEwan as they do for Ford, made corporeal, manifest, even incarnate,
in Edward’s humiliation (and Dowell’s, similarly). The mind of the other is
impenetrable. Indeed, in the world conjured by On Chesil Beach, the very act of
penetration is a violation. A more ethical kind of penetration is imagined by the
interpenetration of texts and an intersubjectivity that depends on the fruitful cre-
ation and navigation of impressions. In his rewriting of the modernist precursor
performed by On Chesil Beach, McEwan facilitates our recognition of the multiple
worlds co-existing via intertextuality, and our re-cognition, our revising of our
own reading of worlds and others, is a more viable ethical model.
Notes
1. McEwan is a notoriously intertextual writer; to catalog his methods and the critical discussion
around this topic is beyond the scope of this essay. Sebastian Groes offers a succinct encapsulation
of McEwan’s “intertextual engagement”: direct citation and borrowing, the use of parallels, and
echo and allusion (102). Several other texts are put to work by McEwan in On Chesil Beach: Shelagh
Delaney’s A Taste of Honey; D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Women in Love, the latter
referred to in the guise of one of Florence’s friends named Hermione; James Joyce’s “The Dead,”
explicitly as McEwan has suggested and also in another of Florence’s friends named Greta; a third
friend named Lucy, which could be a reference to Bram Stoker’s Dracula; as well as a number of com-
posers — Mozart, Haydn, etc. — and Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” the latter a subversion
of Florence’s love of classical music.
2. The only other reader to mention a connection with The Good Soldier — in passing — is Claire
Kahane.
3. And of course the title of the novel echoes another honeymoon text — Matthew Arnold’s 1867
poem “Dover Beach.” One could certainly read On Chesil Beach as an ironic reversal of the poignant
line “Ah, love, let us be true / to one another!” (381, ll. 29–30).
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On Chesil Beach and Fordian Technique: Intertextuality, Intimacy, Ethical Reading

Author(s): Janine Utell

Keywords: Ian McEwan / Ford Madox Ford / Emmanuel Levinas / impressionism /

What epistemology has established is that a person can only form an

Janine Utell (janine.utell@gmail.com) is professor and chair of English at Widener

us to establish a hermeneutics of human connection. The characters themselves

Stories of intimacy are themselves predicated on strangeness, on entering a world

sharing of meaningful stories, that “spontaneous narrative reciprocity” (Cava-

The “interrogative moment of an intersubjective encounter” (Handwerk 128) is

Stages of misapprehension lead to clarity as further nuances and facets of char-

As noted earlier, in Levinas’s thinking, the self overflowing its boundaries

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