The Limits of Development?

Narratives of Growing Up / Growing Old in Narrative

Author(s): Heike Hartung
Source: Amerikastudien / American Studies , 2011, Vol. 56, No. 1, Age Studies (2011), pp.
45-66
Published by: Universitätsverlag WINTER Gmbh

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23317638

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The Limits of Development?
Narratives of Growing Up / Growing Old in Narrative

Heike Härtung

ABSTRACT

Human time entered the genre of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth-cent

ing the categories of youth and age to concepts of individual development. I wil
in emphasis from an initial focus on youth and growing up to the later stages
ropean and American novel. I argue that the lengthening of the average human
late twentieth century provides a new focus for representing possibilities to gr
old. In their inversion of the developmental model of the Bildungsroman, Siri H
Loved (2003) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) address this questi
by depicting children who grow up to 'never' grow old. Both show in different
the implications of an endless enlargement of possibility and its limits with refer
pathology and to biomedical progress, respectively. Turning from Bildungsrom
to the question of the functions of narrating dementia, a further consequence
developmental models is addressed in the narrative connection between mem
narrating the self. This connection will be traced in a comparison of the metapho
dementia in Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) and Don DeLillo's Falling Man

1. The Bildungsroman and the Beginnings and Ends of Storyte

According to the evolutionary model of the European novel

Bakhtin, time and history have entered the genre of the novel du
teenth century. Bakhtin elaborates his idea of the chronotope, of
mension of time in the novel, with reference to the Bildungsroman
the genre's introduction of a spatial dimension into narrative time,
es the Bildungsroman by its depiction of the "image of man in the
coming" ("Bildungsroman" 19; emphasis original). Thus, he argues,
troduced into man, enters into his very image, changing in a fundam
significance of all aspects of his destiny and life" (21). In contrast t
time" of the classical adventure novel in which "nothing changes [
not even age," he defines the individual emergence of man as being
for the first time in literary history, in "real historical time" ("Forms
In spite of its teleological view of the Bildungsroman and of liter
Bakhtin's theory nevertheless draws attention to the link between the g
novel and conceptions of time and aging as a universal process. He
Enlightenment as a starting point for "visualizing historical time,
possible this visualization by popularizing themes that highlight na
cal time and aging like "times of the year," "agricultural cycles," an
man" ("Bildungsroman" 26).

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46 Heike Härtung

In this paper I will explore the connection between a specialized, medical, so

cial, and cultural discourse on aging emerging in the eighteenth century and the
ways in which the Bildungsroman and its contemporary transformations narrate
age difference. I analyze Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved (2003) and Kazuo Ishigu
ro's Never Let Me Go (2005) as two exemplary case studies of such contemporary
rewritings. By looking at the predominantly European genre of the Bildungsro
man from a comparative perspective, I will draw on the transnational perspec
tive prevalent in American Studies while taking the principle behind the idea
"that the development of American culture has taken place under conditions of its
own" (Fluck 60) and applying it to British culture. I then turn to a comparison of
two contemporary American and British novels which use the topic of dementia
in their narratives, providing a different perspective on the theme of development;
namely, Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) and Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001).
Both the Bildungsroman rewritings and the narratives of dementia trace a trajec
tory, I will argue, from the beginnings to the ends of storytelling, thus examining
the limits of development.
Age will be analyzed in terms of two related meanings: the meaning of ag
ing as a universal process of development throughout the life course inherent in
Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, and the binary construction of age as 'youth'
versus 'old age.' In what ways is aging configured in the narrative construction
of contemporary novels with reference to models of process and development,
and what forms and images are used for age representation on the levels of plot,
character, and narrative voice? While chronological development is still a point of
reference both in narrative theory and psychological models,1 conflict, crisis, and
the reversal of life stages frequently motivate storytelling and shape its narrative
form.

2. The Bildungsroman and Constructions of Youth and Age

During the eighteenth century, more specific meanings for the binary con
struction of age form part of a new discourse on age, while the meaning of aging
as development throughout the life course is a defining feature of the Bildungsro
man genre emerging at the end of the century. Youth achieved a new meaning in
the late eighteenth century as a social concept related to processes of moderniza
tion. This reorientation can also be observed in literary and aesthetic contexts,
as in the ideally beautiful and youthful body of neo-classicist aesthetics or in the
conflation of youth with the figure of the artist in romanticism (Oesterle 9). Simi
larly to old age, youth was increasingly defined in chronological terms, referring to
the life span between twelve and seventeen or eighteen years (Oesterle 11; Porter

1 A recent edition of the psychological handbook Adult Development and Aging (2004)
describes "contextualism" as a metatheory of human development that accounts for non-linear
ideas of development: "Contextualism seems to reflect a contemporary world in which notions
of orderly progress have broken down, the universe (science tells us) is in flux, the planet Earth
is becoming an interdependent global village, and people's life choices are dynamic, ever-chang
ing, and highly individual" (Papalia et al. 42).

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 The Limits of Development? 47

and Porter 82). As a coming-of-age novel, the Bildungsroman has primarily been
concerned with the first half of life rather than with old age. Its protagonists are
often young, like Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, or they
look back at their youth from early adulthood, like Pip in Charles Dickens's Great
Expectations. The genre itself has been associated with modernity, mobility, and
interiority; its historical origins have been related to the collapse of traditional
status societies in which the life course, in terms of profession and marriage, was
inherited rather than chosen (Hillmann and Hühn 9).2 Franco Moretti has linked
the Bildungsroman as the symbolic form of modernity, explicitly with youth and
the new meaning attached to it in the late eighteenth century. Being young, in
his reading, is no longer a question of biological differentiation or chronological
age. Instead, youth has become marked as culturally significant in itself: "Youth
is both a necessary and sufficient definition of these heroes. [...] But at the end of
the eighteenth century the priorities are reversed, and what makes Wilhelm Meis
ter and his successors representative and interesting is, to a large extent, youth as
such" (4).
This inscription of youth with a multitude of cultural meanings is matched by
a shift in the meanings of old age. The eighteenth century is regarded as a turn
ing point for evaluations of old age in the context of Enlightenment attitudes and
the discourse of feeling.3 Idealized representations of old men and old women
proliferated in Enlightenment pedagogical discourse in which they functioned as
illustrations of reasonable rule or exemplary middle-class behavior (Göckenjan
149). In France, the figure of the honored old man was part of revolutionary cel
ebrations of generational continuity (Troyansky 205-06). As with the cultural sig
nificance attached to youth, the idealized representations and exceptional figures
of old age often masked missing social status and influence. In the United States,
the disciplining of old age by medical definitions of the aging body diminished its
meaning as an integral part of the life course: "Old age was removed from its am
biguous place in life's spiritual journey, rationalized, and redefined as a scientific
problem" (Cole xx).
While the Bildungsroman focuses mainly on youthful male development or,
in Bakhtin's terminology, on the transitional stages of historical emergence along
with the world ("Bildungsroman" 23), this focus has been challenged from the
perspectives of feminist literary history4 and postcolonial studies5 respectively,

2 For an analysis of age-stratified societies from a historical and sociological perspective,

see Kohli.
3 See de Beauvoir 232-33 and Borscheid 111-12.
4 On the 'female' Bildungsroman, see Abel, Hirsch, and Langland as well as Ellis, both of
which, however, focus on the deficiencies of female development in comparison with the un
marked or male Bildungsroman. See also Bannet, who argues that social reeducation of female
readers becomes the main strategy of the female Bildungsroman: "In the eighteenth century
education serves both as the means and language for social transformation" (199).
5 On the 'black' Bildungsroman, see Kester, who argues for a "doubleness" of African
American texts drawing on both an African American and a European American literary tra
dition, and focuses on "the distinctly African American features of the genre" (2). She distin
guishes her chosen contemporary texts from the classic European Bildungsroman, which she
defines as founded on the belief in progress and the coherent subject, by their sharing "a histori

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48 Heike Härtung

which are already well-documented and on which I will not draw here. Inste
will turn to the cultural signification practices concerning youth and old age,
ied first from the perspective of American Age Studies. Margaret Morganro
Gullette posits a connection between narrative and age identity in her argum
that narrative structures shape attitudes towards age, which she distinguishes
'narratives of decline' and 'narratives of progress.' In Aged by Culture (2004) s
relates the possible directions which narratives of development may take as p
of a culture's age ideology to the Bildungsroman, which she defines as restric
to the period of youth:
In the earlier era, from Tom Jones through most of the novels of Austen, Dickens,
Eliot, and up through the Harlequin Romances, the novel's main characters have bee
young, and the crucial event that has served as the marker of adulthood has been th
courtship or (if male) their travels. By the marker I mean the event that spelled forwar
movement in the life course if you achieved it, and implied failure for life if you didn
The so-called Bildungsroman was actually a Youth Bildungsroman. (65)

Gullette has furthermore drawn attention to a direction taken in contempora

American fiction which focuses on the experiences of the middle of life, redr
ing the predominant focus on youth in the Bildungsroman: She describes th
genre which develops an age identity around this focus as the "midlife prog
novel" (Safe xxi). The genre has emerged along parallel lines with a conse
in psychological theory on the continuity of developmental processes: "Deve
mental models are becoming kinder toward adult needs, much less likely to
them 'regressive,' much more likely to see regression as a preliminary to con
ued growth" (xxiii).
Constance Rooke observes a pronounced focus on old age in twentieth-cen
ry fiction, which she describes with reference to the Bildungsroman as the "n
of completion" or "Vollendungsroman" (245). She argues that both genres "ca
profitably be studied together," since "there is nearly always some recapitulat
and reassessment of the matter of the bildungsroman in the Vollendungsrom
Both are concerned with basic identity themes, with the relationship of the
dividual to society, with an assessment of what living well means, and with
question of what comes next" (245). Rooke ascribes various social and liter
functions to the concern with old age such as a reflection on the "advantages
penalties of disengagement" from social life and power, and on the intrinsic r
tionship between writing and death, thus making the whole life span availabl
storytelling (247, 248). Rooke's comparison between the "novel of completion
and the Bildungsroman reinforces the notion that youth and old age may be
ly related in contemporary fiction.
Drawing on the binary construction of youth versus old age, Kathleen W
ward analyzes the intrinsic value attached to youth in Western culture as an
ternalized strategy of the self, which exiles old age from its self-conception
a continuous temporal displacement (Aging and Its Discontents 6). Woodw

cal and a literary doubleness as well as a sense of the subject as a divided phenomenon" (9)
American tradition of the Bildungsroman is, in her view, characterized by a "suspicion ag
organized society" (9).

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 The Limits of Development? 49

describes age as a flexible marker, which makes it possible to expand the category
of youth throughout the individual life course. Chronological and functional age
are thus invested with meaning by the cultural value attached to them. In Wood
ward's analysis, the hierarchical construction and binary conception of age is ulti
mately translated into the concept of aging as a developmental process.
In a similar vein, Susan Sontag in "The Double Standard of Aging" draws on
the cultural binary of youth versus old age, which she transcends by distinguishing
between 'old age' as a stage at the coming end of life and 'growing older' or aging
as a continuous process throughout life. On this latter process of aging—which she
describes as, above all, an imaginary ordeal—the double standard of aging comes
to bear, turning aging into a particularly cruel experience for women: "Old age
is a genuine ordeal, one that men and women undergo in a similar way. Growing
older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathol
ogy—intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men."
By drawing attention to the use made of 'youth' in industrialized societies as a
"metaphor for energy, restless mobility, appetite: for the state of 'wanting,'" Son
tag shows how old age is inverted or repressed in the cultural narrative of aging.
As Rüdiger Kunow has argued on the specificity of the difference marked by age
in distinction from race, class, and gender: "The teleology which lies at the basis
of representing age as the difference that time makes endows 'the ontic differen
tial' (Spivak 149) at stake here with an index that is temporal without being tem
porary" (305). This focus on the temporal rather than the temporary difference
brings me back to my starting point; namely, to Bakhtin's argument about the
introduction of historical time into literary history with the Bildungsroman. The
unidirectionality of the age difference, or the irreversibility of the aging process,
is the specific characteristic which it has in common with "real historical time."
As Kunow points out, "[i]n this way, the age difference returns us to questions of
nature vs. culture, the material vs. the ideational, biological 'essence' vs. cultural
construction" (306). By linking a concern with individual development and matu
ration to the unidirectionality of time, the Bildungsroman and its transformations
or rewritings may serve as an exemplary literary genre in which to explore age
difference.

3. The Bildungsroman, Growing Up and Growing Old in Contemporary Fiction:

Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved (2003) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
(2005) both play with a number of narrative genres and rewrite the Bildungsro
man from their respective positions. As a twenty-first century Bildungsroman,
What I Loved is concerned with the possibilities of growing up and growing old in
American society as well as with the limits of generational continuity. As an old
man in his seventies, the narrator Leo Hertzberg looks back at his middle years,
thus combining the two subgenres of the Bildungsroman described by Gullette
(midlife fiction) and Rooke (novel of completion). The five main adult characters
focused on in the novel's first part live in the same building in SoHo, work in the

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50 Heike Härtung

art scene, or are academics. Leo teaches art at Columbia, his wife Erica Stein is
professor of literature. William Wechsler paints and works construction jobs u
he can make a living of his art. His first wife Lucille Alcott is a poet, and his
ond wife Violet Blom is a cultural historian who writes books on hysteria, eat
and personality disorders. Lucille and Erica are pregnant at about the same tim
Their two boys Matthew and Mark become friends. The second part of the no
opens with the death of Leo and Erica's son Matthew and is concerned with th
coming to terms with their grief. The third and final part deals with Leo's cop
with his friend Bill's death and with his ultimate failure to understand Bill and
Lucille's son Mark.
The novel also has features in common with the reminiscent mood of the 'life
review'—such as the first person narrator's retrospective analysis of his and his
friends' lives focusing on turning points, losses, conflicts, and crises. Kathleen
Woodward characterizes the life review, with reference to the American geron
tologist Robert Butler, as "a psychological process, undertaken under the pres
sure of the coming ending of one's life, in which one strives to see one's life as a
whole, as if it were a coherent narrative" (Telling Stories x). Leo provides a sense
of an ending to his life in his reference to his approaching blindness: His story
is told against the backdrop of his own diminishing vision while, ironically, the
visual approach marks his access to the world. Nevertheless, he regards "poor
vision" as "preferable to senility" (20) and has adjusted to his handicap by replac
ing his visual approach to life with a catalog of visual memories and a reliance on
touch. Leo's failing eyesight leads him to reflect on his age and on the life review
he is about to engage in, explicitly stating his sense of being at the end of his life:
"The circle of a lifetime has begun to close, and I've been thinking more often
about my early childhood" (21). By briefly looking back at his childhood in old age
at the outset of his narrative, Leo self-consciously reflects on memory processes
and their questionable reliability: "What is memory's perspective? Does the man
revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static [...]?" (21). An insight he
has gained in his old age shapes his midlife narrative: "The longer I live the more
convinced I am that when I say 'I', I am really saying 'we'" (23), which highlights
Leo's concern with interrelated selves and empathie connections rather than with
the isolated, autonomous individual. This communal aspect of his life review is
expressed by the plural form of his first-person narrative.
Leo is also a distanced narrator, almost a distanced observer of the intertwined
life stories he tells. He is not at the center of his narrative but gives his finding of
Violet's letters to Bill as his motivation for storytelling. In his mythical evocation
of the letters as independent sources, Leo stylizes himself as the archetypal story
teller who is endowed with the authority of death6: "When I held the letters in my
hands, I felt they had the uncanny weight of stories that are told and retold and

6 In his evocation of the letters Leo not only distances himself from the story he tells, but
he also invokes the authority of the oral storyteller described by Walter Benjamin as motivated
by death: "Der Tod ist die Sanktion von allem, was der Erzähler berichten kann. Vom Tode hat
er seine Autorität geliehen" (114). Leo evokes this authority in his story of the deaths which
motivate his narrative.

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 The Limits of Development? 51

then told again" (3). Here, Leo moves away from the individualist protagonist of
the Bildungsroman and life review to the oral storyteller who repeats the stories
of others.
As a distancing device he opens his story by recalling an encounter with one
of Bill Wechsler's paintings which is concerned, in Leo's reading of it, with the
multiplication of selves. Proceeding by indirection, the stories of his best friend
Bill and his second wife Violet become the focus of Leo's narrative, which then
provide the mirror for his own life and his relationship to his wife Erica. Leo goes
about his project of storytelling by indirection, using letters and the painting to
reach marked moments or turning points in his life.
Leo's roles as an old, almost blind narrator, as an archetypal storyteller autho
rized by the deaths he narrates, and as a distanced, self-reflexive mediator of the
(textual and visual) expressions of his close friends' lives, overdetermine his nar
rative and open up the Bildungsroman structure of an individual's development
in interaction with society to a more general cultural analysis. The broad claims
of the narrator make the story readable as a cultural analysis of the possibilities of
growing up and growing old in American culture as well as pointing out the limits
of individual development. These are circumscribed, as we shall see, by liberal
middle-class values, which are endangered both by the contingencies of life and
death and by the subcultural dismissal of the humanist progress narrative.
While the voice in What I Loved develops a complex repertoire of narrative
functions, the narrator Kathy H. in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, by con
trast, announces in a straightforward address to the reader: "I'm thirty-one years
old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years" (3). The unnerving effect of
the frequent direct appeal to the reader in this novel lies in the eventual revelation
that Kathy H. is a human clone, and the readerly 'you' she addresses is that of a
fellow clone: "I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don't get half
the credit. If you're one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful
[...]" (3).
The novel can be described with reference to clone and transplantation novels,
but it departs from other examples of this genre which make use of the thriller's
suspense structure, by its reference to mainstream genres like the Bildungsroman,
the boarding school tale, and the psychological novel (Krüger-Fürhoff 151). Never
Let Me Go is divided into three parts, the first of which looks back to Kathy H.'s
childhood and youth at Hailsham, a private boarding school; the second part de
scribes her early adulthood at the Cottages; and the third part is concerned with
her present work as a "carer." The first part in particular resembles the genre of
the boarding school tale with its emphasis on practical jokes, fights among friends,
and speculations about the world outside (Krüger-Fürhoff 151).
According to Irmela Krüger-Fürhoff, the clones in Never Let Me Go differ
from those in other clone fictions in that they are aware of their destiny: Between
their schooling and their dismembering as "donors" they work as "carers" for
their fellow clones.7 As a carer, Kathy H. accompanies her fellows through the

7 The neologisms "donor" and "carer" are introduced by Ishiguro to denote the principal
subject positions available to the clones. Like the euphemism "completing," they also signify for

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52 Heike Härtung

different stages of donation, convalescence, further operations, and eventua

death, which is euphemistically called "completing." Thus she reinforces a sys
which will destroy her in the end—a situation in which she and her friends a
esce. As Krüger-Fürhoff points out, the work of the clone as carer allows for n
lusions about her own destiny, which is deprived of individuality since it is marked
as the repetition of what she herself as carer has witnessed (152).
While the Bildungsroman, according to Marianne Hirsch, is founded on th
belief in progress and the coherence of selfhood, striving to inscribe a view of
subject as a unified and singular identity, and chronicling its progression fr
immaturity to maturity (297-98), both Hustvedt's and Ishiguro's novels depa
from this agenda in significant ways. Hustvedt's narrator Leo aims at construc
his self in the interplay with others: He tries to evade the artificiality and 'p
humanity' he encounters in the adolescent Mark by trying to develop a sens
self in his reaction to the extreme event of his son's premature death and by
constructing individual emotional responses through art and history. Ishigu
novel, by contrast, introduces a 'post-human' narrator: In his adaptation of
structures of the classic Bildungsroman he employs this narrator to achieve
canny effects of identification with the human clone in the reader. Kathy H.'s
rative is, like Leo's, a review at the coming end of her life: She will stop bein
carer and become a donor soon. Even though Kathy is only thirty-one, in te
of the social world of the clones she is close to the end of her life. This means that
Kathy's life history, though she has barely entered 'middle age,' entails a confron
tation with death. From the beginning, she is aware of the approaching end of her
life, which gives pointedness to her storytelling. Without approaching old age,
without having the prospect of growing old, she confronts death. Her preparation
for the coming end of her life, which is unsentimentally stated in the switch from
being a carer to becoming a donor, is given as her motivation for storytelling:
I won't be a carer any more come the end of the year [...]. I'm sure it's at least partly to
do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I've been getting this urge
to order all these old memories. (37)

The passage is also an example of the uneasy feeling of evasion and the euphemis
tic approach to the clone's life story, where the deadly consequences of becom
ing a donor are not spelled out and death is renamed as "completion," a strategy
which marks Kathy as one of Ishiguro's unreliable narrators.8 This evasiveness is
explained in the narrative by her apparently protected childhood and the privi
leges of her growing up at Hailsham. In spite of being aware that the clones were
made to donate their vital organs and that their lives are already predetermined,9

the clones a dehumanizing deviation from the humanist values and narrative in which they have
grown up.
8 While Frank Kermode describes the narrative voice of Never Let Me Go as different from
Ishiguro's earlier polite and formal first person narrators in that it favors "a familiar, chatty
style" ("Outrageous" 21), Ruth Scurr points out Kathy's familiarity as "another of Ishiguro's
un-reliable narrators."
9 One of the guardians at Hailsham, Miss Lucy, is singled out as being unusually outspoken.
She tells her pupils: "Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old.

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 The Limits of Development? 53

this knowledge recedes into the background in order to make Kathy's individual
narrative possible.
In her account of her childhood in the first part of the novel, Kathy points out
that she and her fellow clones "had only the haziest notions of the world outside"
(66) and that they were being "told and not told" (82) of their ultimate destiny.
Two events mark turning points in the narrative of Kathy's childhood at Hailsham,
which is emplotted as an individual's maturation from adolescence to adulthood.
The first scene describes the moment of a first crucial awareness of difference.
The students at Hailsham are instructed to do creative work, the best of which i
selected for "the Gallery." A formally dressed lady called simply "Madame" by
Kathy and her friends comes to Hailsham and takes this work away with her t
the world outside. The students are in awe of Madame, and they decide to con
front her, to cross her path in a seemingly accidental way when she next comes t
Hailsham. Madame's reaction, her freezing and her seeming dread that any of th
students might brush against her, initiates a first crucial awareness of othering i
the Hailsham pupils:
Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about
ourselves—about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the
people outside—but hadn't yet understood what any of it meant. [...] So you're waiting,
even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really
are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you
or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how
you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brush
ing theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's
a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life,
and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange. (36)

The mirror is cited here not in order to describe the basic Lacanian moment of
identity construction, i.e. the mirror stage as the projection of the self in answ
to the glance of the other (Lacan 3-9). By contrast, Kathy describes a moment
of estrangement as a transformation from the mirror image of oneself which h
become familiar into "something troubling and strange." Madame, as a represe
tative of the "people outside," is described here as the other that is confronted b
Kathy and her friends. As Monika Fludernik has pointed out for narrative iden
ty, "[t]he psychological processes involved in the confrontation with the other (o
more correctly: the Other, in Lacanian terms) [...] serve to expel the Other mor
successfully from the self" (264). This process works only indirectly for the human
clones: Their confrontation with Madame's otherness does not serve to strengthe
their identity. Instead, her glance has the effect of dissolving the clones' subjec
position by making them aware of their alterity. The act of differentiation through
which the clones' subjectivity is constructed here proceeds in a reversal of wh
Judith Butler has described as "its [subjectivity's] constitutive outside, a doma
of abjected alterity" (45). The cultural context into which the clones are placed
by Madame's glance is that of the abject. The effect of seeing oneself as the ab

before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of y
was created to do" (80).

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54 Heike Härtung

jected alterity that is guarded against or brushed off, however, is again uncan
subverted by the readerly "you" address. Kathy uses her empathie address to
reader in order to turn this experience of othering into a reassertion of self again
Madame's alterity.
The second event recalled by Kathy as an important moment in her grow
up introduces her favorite song titled, like the novel, "Never Let Me Go." Sh
describes what makes the song special to her as her own associations with the
and refrain, which she imagines as being about
a woman who'd been told she couldn't have babies, who'd really, really wanted them
her life. Then there's sort of a miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby v
close to her and walks around singing: 'Baby, never let me go...' partly because she's
happy, but also because she's so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get
or be taken away from her. (70)

Kathy is eleven years old at the time of her infatuation with the song and when sh
experiences an unsettling encounter with Madame. While she listens alone to h
favorite song, she grabs "a pillow to stand in for the baby" (71), dancing and
ing along. When the song is almost over, she realizes that she is not alone, tha
dame is watching her from the doorway and is crying. She departs without tal
to Kathy, leaving her confused, shocked, and unsure as to how to behave. She
Madame's glance, which reminds her of the first encounter, the glance that m
her feel her difference. But she also feels "something else, something extra in
look I couldn't fathom" (71). Kathy returns to this scene several times through
her narrative: The tape with the favorite song gets lost; she is given a replacem
by Ruth but of a different tape, and later on she finds an identical second
together with Tommy. Both replacements are rare occasions for emotional c
nection with her two friends. The song and its title further express a longing
belonging while at the same time stressing the impossibility of its attainment
the human clones. Generational continuity is not possible for the clones since
cannot reproduce, as she will find out a few years later when she recalls the s
in her conversations with Tommy. Kathy's emotional involvement with the t
and the song gives it the status of what Kathleen Woodward has called "evoca
objects," which enable the projection of possible futures and age selves that
beyond mere identification with another, older self and forge generational li
beyond family kinship ("Generational Models" 155, 165). Kathy's relationship
the tape as evocative object becomes meaningful in the narrative iterations i
which her emotional and identificatory projections of the song serve to highli
moments in her aging process.
Towards the end of the novel, in a confrontation scene between Tommy, Kat
their former head guardian Miss Emily, and Madame, Kathy again recalls th
scene with the song. This confrontation scene takes the shape of an existent
test—comparable to that of Magwitch's revelation to Pip at the end of Great
pectations or of the tower scene in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre—thus again st
ing the similarities between Ishiguro's novel and the Bildungsroman. It is als
confrontation with their creators in which Kathy and Tommy question their h
guardian about their own life options and challenge her to justify to her pu
the way in which they were brought up. Tommy and Kathy have decided to tr

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 The Limits of Development? 55

get in touch with Madame about a "deferral": a rumor has sprung up among the
clones that it is possible to get a deferral from the donations for a few years if one
can prove to be part of a couple who are in love with each other. They come to
Madame because of her collection of artwork, her "gallery," which they think can
make Madame decide whether they really are in love, since the art "would reveal
[their] inner selves" (248). The former head guardian of Hailsham Miss Emily,
whom they encounter at Madame's house, makes it clear to them that the deferrals
were only rumors. Registering a spirit of rebellion for the only time during her life
recollections, Kathy asks the existential question: "Why did we do all of that work
in the first place? Why train us, encourage us, make us produce all of that? If we're
just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those
books and discussions?" (254).
Miss Emily justifies the idea of Hailsham as a boarding school for human
clones with her intention to prove to the world outside that they "had souls at all"
(255) and were not merely "shadowy objects in test tubes" (256). Even if they were
not allowed to grow old, if their own lives were shortened to prolong the lives of
humans, she tells them that they were given a good childhood, a good upbringing,
and good memories to fall back upon, something nobody could take away from
them: "Look at you both! You've had good lives, you're educated and cultured"
(256). She also explains to them her view that the idea of providing them with
good surroundings for growing up depended on a protective sheltering from the
world outside and from their eventual destination. Before they leave, Kathy asks
Madame why she had cried when she watched Kathy dance with her pillow to the
song "Never Let Me Go." Madame replies that she had seen

a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she
knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her
go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw
you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten. (267)

What Kathy felt to be the inexplicable "extra" in Madame's look turns out to be,
in her own description, an impersonal kind of compassion for the human clones.
She reacts to what she imagines to be the clones' plea for sentiment, for kindness
and belonging. This is set in contrast with the demands of a world which reduces
the human clones to their vital organs. The use of the Bildungsroman genre and,
particularly, the focus on Kathy and her friends' humanistic upbringing points
out the paradoxes of a 'posthumanist' world which creates human-like beings but
refuses them the right to grow old.
Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go makes use of the Bildungsroman structure
in that it presents the growing up of the human clone Kathy H. and that of her
close friends Tommy and Ruth. It is also a kind of life review in that it provides an
overview of Kathy's entire life story from its beginnings to its approaching end.
It departs from the genre of the Bildungsroman in that it tells a predetermined,
not an individualized life: The destiny of the human clones is to donate their vital
organs. Even though Tommy and Kathy rebel against this idea, the confrontation
with their 'creators' only reinforces the inevitability and uniformity of their ends.
Never Let Me Go is also a dystopian clone novel in that it describes a society

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56 Heike Härtung

which depends on the human clones and their vital organs for curing disease and
prolonging the life of human beings. This aspect, however, recedes into the back
ground with the euphemistic, often unemotional, style of the unreliable narrator
Kathy. Kathy is also a figure of premature age, since she looks back at her life in
her early middle age in a matter-of-fact and settled manner.10 The novel, finally,
treats the related topics of death and old age by constructing a life narrative in
which the protagonists are not allowed to grow old but derive their motivation for
storytelling, nevertheless, from the authority of death.
What I Loved also deals with the human possibilities of growing up and not
growing old by depicting the traumatic event of a child's premature death; namely,
the death of Leo and Erica's only son Matthew in a sport accident. As Margaret
Morganroth Gullette has pointed out, the depiction of children's deaths in fiction
has emotional as well as cultural implications for constructing age identities:
Plots in which children die [...] emphasize the vulnerability of everyone concerned. They
heighten the sense of risk that comes from proceeding even this far in the life course.
[...] The high level of anxiety in these novels gets transformed by the plot of death and
its sequelae into fear of time. [...] In our age culture, this can be recognized as the an
ticipation that something awful and uncontrollable will happen in one's personal future.
(Aged 68-69)

In Hustvedt's novel, the narrative of premature death is concerned with the pro
cesses of mourning and with how the traumatic event shapes the lives of the adults.
It also juxtaposes the absence of Matthew—and of his potential as an artist as well
as an intelligent and sensitive adolescent—with the presence of Bill and Lucille's
son Mark, who 'develops' into a sociopath, frustrating all attempts of the adults at
understanding his way of life.
Matthew's death is a crucial event for Leo who reacts by withdrawing emotion
ally. In contrast to his wife Erica he is unable to express his grief, unable to cry. He
represses his emotions and denies his loss; he turns his "body into a memorial—an
inert gravestone for him" (149). Months later Leo is taken out of his entombment
when a Chardin painting takes him by surprise in the middle of a seminar on still
life. His visual approach to life is important for his coming to terms with his grief,
absence, and loss, turning the painting into an "evocative object":
On the table in front of me I had my notes and a reproduction of Chardin's Glass of
Water and a Coffee Pot. [...] I began by pointing out how simple the painting was, two
objects, three heads of garlic, and the sprig of an herb. I mentioned the light on the pot's
rim and handle, the whiteness of the garlic, and the silver hues of the water. And then
I found myself staring down at the glass of water in the picture. I moved very close to
it. The strokes were visible. I could see them plainly. A precise quiver of the brush had
made light. I swallowed, breathed heavily, and choked. (146-47)

This "resurrection" (148) achieved by the painting constitutes an attack on Leo's

senses which brings him back to life. The effect of the painting as evocative ob

10 For the figure of the prematurely aged narrator/protagonist, see also Siegfried Lenz's
essay "Die Darstellung des Alters in der Literatur," where he describes the protagonist of Italo
Svevo's Senilità, who at the age of thirty-five expresses 'old age' in his attitude towards life (Lenz
76-77).

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 The Limits of Development? 57

ject is that it breaks through Leo's stupor of grief and restores him to a sense of
self: The abstract and unsentimental contents of Chardin's still life provide the
projection screen for Leo's emotion. The scene is significant as a turning point,
as an individual strategy for coming to terms with grief, and is thus part of the
Bildungsroman's humanist model of aging as (midlife) development, which as
similates even traumatic moments. The limits of this humanist approach, however,
are shown in the novel's focus on Bill's son Mark, whose 'borderline personality'
is depicted as being outside the reference frame of development. Rather, his rela
tionship to the adults escalates to different stages: It turns into a repeated pattern
of confrontation, denial, apology, and forgiveness. Mark resists understanding by
the adults and inhabits a culture that is out of reach for the middle aged. While
Leo's story is concerned with challenges to selfhood, it relies on humanist ideas of
understanding, of development, and of wholeness. Even though he is a peripheral
narrator who sees himself very much in the third person, Leo consciously takes
up that position which distinguishes clearly between self and other. Mark's state
of mind and his inability to remain fixed in his personality are described in terms
of a cultural pathology, "defined by a fundamental inability to separate between
the inside and the outside" (Berressem 274). The juxtaposition of the death of
Matthew, the sensitive and promising child who dies in adolescence, with Mark,
who lives on as Bill's "blank son" and "Ghosty Boy" (365), combines the Utopian
potential of the dead son with the reality of the sociopath. Thus a very bleak cul
tural prognosis is linked with the midlife fear of aging, the symptoms of which are
presented in a narrative of the premature death of children (Gullette, Aged 61).
Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Hustvedt's What I Loved both make use of
the chronotope of developmental time and depart from it in significant ways: Nev
er Let Me Go places the telling of the predetermined lives of the clones against
the individual narrative of maturation, thus highlighting the inhumanity which
determines the premature end of the clones' life, which in many ways closely re
sembles that of their human teachers. What I Loved narrates the premature death
of a child as still containable within the narrative of midlife development, while
the surviving child's development into a sociopath departs from this model and
turns it, ultimately, into the antihumanistic escalation of different stages of con
frontation and denial.

4. Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease as Metaphors for the "Sense of an

Ending": Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Ian McEwan's Atonement

Both Hustvedt's and Ishiguro's novels are concerned with the limits to aging
and to storytelling—taking the form of premature death or 'completing' in Never
Let Me Go and of the end of transgenerational dialog in What I Loved—while
these limits are themselves depicted using a rewriting of the Bildungsroman's
chronotope of human development. I will now turn to the different approaches
to narratives of aging employed in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) and Ian
McEwan's Atonement (2001). Both novels use senile dementia as metaphors for
premature endings in the forms of approaching death through incurable illness

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58 Heike Härtung

or terrorist attacks as well as in their narrative restructuring of the relationships

between memory, guilt, and (fictional) life writing.
In Don DeLillo's novel, Alzheimer's is juxtaposed with the protagonists' re
actions to 9/11. Both Alzheimer's and the terrorist attacks can be read as meta
phors for the end of individual agency and responsibility, highlighting the fear
America's dissolution as a democratic state in the aftermath of 9/11 (Greif 20
The unnamable and thus uncontrollable fears triggered by the terrorist attac
are expressed by an early-stage Alzheimer's patient who contrasts them with
parently self-inflicted illnesses:
If he has a heart attack, we blame him. Eats, overeats, no exercise, no common sense.
That's what I told the wife. Or he dies of cancer. Smoked and couldn't stop. [...] If it's
cancer, then it's lung cancer and we blame him. But this, what happened, it's way too
big, it's outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can't get to these peopl
or even see them in their pictures in the paper. You can see their faces but what does
mean? Means nothing to call them names. (80)

The diseases singled out are given as examples for an individual's responsibilit
where "blame" can be attached to someone who is dying.11 This is not possible
with the suicide attackers, where individual accountability is submerged into th
unnamable and incomprehensible. Coming to terms with the equally incompre
hensible illness of senile dementia, which resists the "blame" of individual resp
sibility, is part of the novel's plot. The disease figures prominently in the life of on
of the novel's main protagonists: Lianne has set up storyline sessions for peop
in the early stages of Alzheimer's in order to come to terms with her father's s
cide after his own Alzheimer's diagnosis twenty years earlier. Her engagemen
with these group meetings takes on a new intensity "after the towers fell" (3
By elaborating the topics of storyline sessions for Alzheimer's patients, the no
places the 'natural' or expected deaths in American society—heart disease or A
zheimer's disease—against the new fear of dying in a terrorist attack.12
The novel ends with a circular movement, thus placing its structural arrang
ment against the idea of the linear decline in memory, the dissolution of narrat
and language that is associated with Alzheimer's disease. This structural circul
ity, however, is far from reassuring: It places the novel's other main protagonis
Lianne's estranged husband Keith, in a close connection with the terrorist Ham
mad, a "soldier in Saddam's army" (97) who prepares for the suicide attack on
the Twin Towers. The book is divided into three parts, each of which ends wi
a narrative detailing the movements and thoughts of Hammad. The last of thes
passages, which is also the end of the novel, narrates the inside view of the pla
crash from the perspective of the terrorist Hammad. At the moment of impact the
narrative switches to the ground and to Keith, who witnesses the crash as one

11 For an analysis of the social and cultural implications of the pressure put on the individua
subject for his or her illness in American society, see Sontag, Illness and Davis.
12 As Mark Greif puts it in his review of the novel: "I take it that this is meant to be t
standard terror of the affluent and secure First World: to grow old, to forget too early, to f
into inanition. We were not due to be struck with death from the sky like inhabitants of des
countries" (19).

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 The Limits of Development? 59

the few survivors from inside one of the buildings. Thus the ending of the novel
is linked in a circular movement to its beginning, in which Keith is moving away
from the crumbling building, connecting the survivor Keith with the dead terror
ist. This circularity, which turns Hammad's story into the story of Keith, not only
links the beginning and end of storytelling to death, it also makes it possible to
think of Keith as Hammad's double, as an "alter-terrorist" (Greif 20).
The third-person narrative alternatively focuses on Keith Neudecker's and Li
anne Glenn's perception using a stream-of-consciousness technique. They are an
estranged couple with a son who come back together after Keith's escape from
the crumbling towers. While Lianne gets more deeply involved with her storyline
sessions for Alzheimer's patients, Keith begins his journeys as a semi-professional
poker player, turning into a gambler in response to the trauma of surviving 9/11.
Keith's and Lianne's different approaches to life are thus summarized: "There
was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the
world and he did not" (275).
Lianne's motivation for conducting storyline sessions for Alzheimer's patients
is her attempt to come to terms with her father's suicide as well as with her own
fear of witnessing the disease's gradual dissolution of memory and language:
Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the
grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the
adhesive friction that makes an individual possible. It was in the language, the inverted
letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence. It was in the handwriting that
might melt into runoff. (36)

Lianne's description of the effects of the disease link the definition of an individual
to its ability to tell its life in the form of a coherent narrative.13 This existential di
mension of narrative places the Alzheimer's patient at a disadvantage. However,
against the losses DeLillo places the moments of happiness which Lianne and the
group members experience in the meetings: "But there were a thousand high times
the members experienced, given a chance to encounter the crossing points of in
sight and memory that the act of writing allows. [...] [A]nd how natural it seemed
to do this, tell stories about themselves" (36). These moments of success are de
scribed as intrinsic to the writing process, pointing out the 'naturalness' of the
process of telling stories, which is at the same time made precarious by the illness.
One of the topics of the sessions already referred to above are stories about
9/11. The group's talk is rendered in interrupted, half-finished, fragmentary sen
tences because of the emotional impact of the theme rather than on account of
the participants' receding narrative capabilities. Nevertheless, the novel connects
the topic of 9/11 to that of dying slowly of Alzheimer's disease. One of the group
members contrasts the sudden death in a terrorist attack with the slow dying pro
cess in a modern hospital, regarding the former as preferable: "I would say to
someone at least he didn't die with a tube in his stomach or wearing a bag for his
waste" (80).

13 For a philosophical discussion of the meaning of narrative for defining human life, see
Thomä, who summarizes the consensus in narrativist philosophy: "Wer nicht (mehr) erzählen
könnte, dem würde man ein menschliches Leben nicht (mehr) zuschreiben" (12).

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60 Heike Härtung

In the group's consecutive meetings its members are brought gradually to the
limits of expression. They dwell on lapses of memory and problems in daily activi
ties. While some of the reactions are humorous, the repetition of these moments
of insecurity leads to a sense of failure. The group members give examples of hu
miliating moments of not being able to put their trousers on in the morning, get
ting lost in the subway, or mislaying a wristwatch and being unable to put it on. As
the disease progresses, the storyline sessions are represented increasingly from
Lianne's perspective, while the members' stories retreat into the background.
When the attempts at producing coherent narrative become more and more dif
ficult, the group members ask Lianne for her story and where she was when the
planes crashed down. She tells them how Keith came back to her apartment after
surviving the crumbling tower; she focuses on consecutive events and details of
that day, making her story seem incoherent. She switches from walking with Keith
to the hospital to visit their son Justin, to watching him in his sleep. She feels the
need to tell her story and to be listened to, which is matched by the group mem
bers' need for her "to make sense":

She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were mo
ments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some
funneled stretch of recent past. [...] They were depending on her to make sense. They
were waiting for words from her side of the line, where what is solid does not melt. (160)

The idea of narrative order and coherence as part of a definition of the individual
is questioned in the novel in various ways. On a structural level, the novel's circu
larity counteracts the notion of linear narrative. Further, the topic of 9/11 makes
it difficult to tell coherent stories, which is shown in the storyline session where
the emotional upheaval of the topic rather than the dissolutions of language due
to the illness disrupts narrative order. This is also true for Lianne's own attempt
to narrate her experience of 9/11, during which her sense of coherence is coun
teracted by the temporal order taking over her speech in her sensation of "fading
into time, dropping back into some funneled stretch of recent past" (127). And
finally, the storyline sessions themselves dissolve into incoherence and meaning
lessness. After the last session, Lianne recalls the ending of the last story of one
of the group members as: "Do we say goodbye, yes, going, am going, will be go
ing the last time go, will go" (197). She reads this deliberate language use with its
"extended versions of a single word, all the inflections and connectives" as a kind
of protest, "a kind of protection perhaps, a gathering against the last bare state,
where even the deepest moan may not be grief but only moan" (197). The story
line sessions end with the novel's second part, documenting Lianne's immediate
response to the events of 9/11, while the third part picks up on Lianne and Keith
three years later. Thus her confrontation with the disease and what it means for
her is related to her reactions to the sudden deaths in the terrorist attack on 9/11.
While in DeLillo's Falling Man Alzheimer's can be read both at the meta
phoric level of a national fight against forgetfulness or incoherence in the face
of the events of 9/11 as well as at the literal level of coming to terms with the
threat against individual identity posed by the slowly developing disease, in Ian
McEwan's Atonement dementia is used to foreground questions of representation.

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 The Limits of Development? 61

The novel highlights the impact of different perceptions and points of view on the
narrative of intertwined lives, focusing on the uses and abuses of memory as well
as on the manipulations of the writer.14
The first part is written mainly from the perspective of Briony Tallis at the age
of thirteen. Her ambition it is to become a writer, and her early writings explore
an adult world which she cannot understand. In the summer of 1935 a number of
young people gather at the Tallis' family home, among them Briony's older sister
Cecilia and the cleaning lady's son Robbie Turner, who has returned from Cam
bridge where his studies were financed by Briony's father. A love affair develops
between Cecilia and Robbie, which is misread by Briony as a form of sexual ag
gression. Partly due to this misreading and partly due to jealousy, Briony bears
witness against Robbie as the rapist of her fifteen-year-old cousin Lola. His be
longing to a lower class than the other characters gathering at the Tallis family
estate suffices to discredit him in the eyes of the police and the other family mem
bers apart from Cecilia and his own mother. Part two focuses on Robbie, who has
spent three years in prison by the time World War II has started. He is released on
the condition that he enlist in the army. Cecilia, who has cut off all contact with
her family and has become a nurse, meets him once before he is sent to France.
The section focuses on the retreat of the army to Dunkirk. Robbie is injured, but
his memory of his one meeting with Cecilia keeps him walking. The third part
again focuses on Briony, who has begun training as a nurse in London as part of
her atonement for her incriminating lie. She now remembers that it was her broth
er's friend Paul Marshall who raped her cousin Lola, not Robbie. She has realized
the full extent of her crime and eventually meets Cecilia and Robbie at her sister's
place. Both refuse to forgive her, but she nevertheless promises them to begin the
legal procedures to exonerate Robbie. The final section is told in the first person
voice by the writer Briony Tallis at the age of seventy-seven, sixty-four years after
the events narrated in part one.15 The novel thus brings together the beginnings
and the endings of writing in a very literal sense by projecting them onto the life
story of the imagined author. The sense of an ending is made poignant because
Briony has been told that she will lose her memory to vascular dementia.
The final section reveals Briony as the author of the preceding parts of the
narrative. It also reveals her departure from the 'real' lives she has narrated in her
novel: Both Cecilia and Robbie have not survived the war, Robbie dying from sep
ticemia on the beaches of Dunkirk and Cecilia in a bomb attack in London. The
first person narrative has the mood of the confessional, and it begins with Briony's
announcement of her illness, thus making this her last novel. She compares h
gradual development towards "dying" and "fading into unknowing" (355) with
the "reluctant process of letting go" (353) at the end of a novel after the man
script is finished. She contrasts the advent of an illness like vascular dementia—

14 For a reading that highlights the difficult distinction between 'who speaks?' and 'who
perceives?' in McEwan's novel, see Kermode, "Point."
15 As Brian Finney has pointed out, McEwan has broadened the scope of his narrative fro
"the sexual and social aberrations of adolescent mentalities" in his earlier novels to the emp
ment of the narrative voice of a seventy-seven-year-old woman in Atonement (68).

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62 Heike Härtung

which memory loss is followed by the loss of language and, finally, the compl
deterioration of the autonomous nervous system—with the 'normal' aging pro
in which identity is still intact:
However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always be
Hard to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separ
tribe. In the next year or two, however, I will be losing my claim to this familiar prote
tion. The seriously ill, the deranged, are another race. I won't let anyone persuade m
otherwise. (356)

By arranging all her papers and bringing her drafts in order, Briony prepar
against this coming time of oblivion and the loss of identity: "I've always like
make a tidy finish" (353). Briony is on her way to the celebrations for her seve
seventh birthday, which take her back to her family home that has been turn
into a hotel. One of her relatives' small children recites her dramatic text The Tri
als of Arabella with which the novel starts. Thus Atonement brings the approach
ing end of Briony's life back to her early adolescence and connects the novel's end
to its beginning in a circular movement. The aspect of romance in The Trials of
Arabella reminds her of her narratives of Cecilia and Robbie, which she connects
to the circular movement of her own life:

There was a crime. But there were also lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on
my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me
that I have not travelled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I've
made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. (370)

She explains that it is only in her last draft of the novel that her lovers end well; and she
gives as her reason for this her advanced age: "I'm too old, too frightened, too much
in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting,
and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism" (371). Apart
from this consideration for her dispositions, she intends the novel, when it is finally
published after her death, to replace the more pessimistic 'real' version of events. She
wants the lovers to "survive and flourish" (350), to have an alternative life in her fic
tion. In this sense, Briony's novel acts as an alternative life narrative for Cecilia and
Robbie. It partakes of the existential dimension of narrating one's life, which regards
the act of narration as a characteristically human symbolic action (Thomä 12). By ar
ranging for her final version of the text to be published after her death, she subverts
the dissolution of her illness, preparing an alternative fictional version of her own
life. The selectivity that is necessary for narrating, as well as the fictional status of her
narrative, does not make it invalid as an existential narrative (Thomä 13). Even if she
has the power to circulate this fictional version of events, she is not able, as a novel
ist, to achieve atonement: "There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has
set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or for novelists, even if they are
atheists" (371). However, she ends her narrative with the reiteration of her attempts at
gaining forgiveness by hinting at a new version of conjuring them up at her birthday,
so that the novel closes with another turn of the screw: It remains open to the fictional
author's continuous attempts at rewriting a life.
Both DeLillo's and McEwan's novels thus provide endings which counteract a
sense of closure with the circularity of their narrative structures, departing from

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 The Limits of Development? 63

ideas of linear development underlying the Bildungsroman genre and introducing

the different time-space or chronotope of memory loss and dementia instead. In
Atonement, the hopefulness which lies in the reiteration of the crucial events—the
rape and the perjury—as well as the continuous rewritings of these events in the
fictive author Briony Tallis's alternative life stories for the lovers are set in relief
against the writer's failure to find atonement. The ultimate impossibility of re
writing the 'real' is further stressed by the writer's descent into dementia. In Mc
Ewan's novel aging is not a continuous process or a linear narrative; instead, the
fictional life stories revolve around the crucial events occurring in Briony's ado
lescence and provide parallel alternative narrations. Briony describes her identity
as unchanged by the aging process, while she regards the dementing illness as
transforming her into "another race." The dementing illness which Briony faces
thus symbolizes the end of a process of narrative revision which has replaced ideas
of development and highlights, instead, the limits of manipulating the real.
In Falling Man the circularity which counteracts the sense of an ending identi
fies one of the victims of 9/11 with one of the terrorists in a bleak political diag
nosis. The idea of development is replaced by the juxtaposition of two different
strategies of coming to terms with the irruption of violent death: Keith's reaction
is gambling while Lianne's is the pursuit of safety in storytelling. In the novel,
Alzheimer's disease is turned into a parallel narrative juxtaposed with the sudden
death in a terrorist attack. The lack of narrative linearity and the departure from
the notion of development is shown both with respect to the emotional upheaval
constituted by the terrorist attacks and by the novel's representation of dementing
illness as the end of the individual self.
Siri Hustvedt's and Kazuo Ishiguro's novels are more closely related to the
Bildungsroman with its idea of human development, while both novels illustrate
different limits to this idea. What I Loved juxtaposes the premature death of a
child with the 'development' of an adolescent away from humanist approaches to
mutual understanding and empathy. In presenting the limits of the dialog between
the generations, the novel also diagnoses cultural fears of aging. Never Let Me Go
presents a human clone as the central protagonist of a narrative which is close to
the concerns of the Bildungsroman in its detailing the development, the thoughts,
and the emotions of the clone. In restricting the clone's life to early middle age,
the novel highlights the costs of biomedical developments in advancing human
longevity, which mean producing human-like beings that are not allowed to grow
old.
Read from the perspective of age studies, all of the novels analyzed here are
concerned with different obstacles to growing old. By pursuing ways in which
narrative time shapes the image of man and woman in the "process of becom
ing," these novels highlight the constraints on this idea of temporal development
and, thus, the precariousness of the humanist value of the progress narrative. The
limits of development take the shape of a cultural pathology and the end of the
dialog between generations in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved. These delimitations
are represented in the posthuman subject of the clone, its premature death, and
the denial of the possibility of growing old in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me
Go. In Don DeLillo's Falling Man, development is denied in the metaphoric end

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64 Heike Härtung

in dementing illness as a death in life. The novel's structural denial of linearity

places the sudden death in a terrorist attack in juxtaposition with its narration of
dementia. Dementing illness also represents the limit to the reiteration of fictional
versions of events as existential life narrative in an ultimately illusionary attempt
to achieve atonement in Ian McEwan's novel.

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