A Lacanian look at English elegance: some reflections on Ian McEwan's enduring love

This paper makes use of certain thought-provoking ideas from Lacan's seminars in the years between 1959 and 1962 in order to engage with the very subtly conveyed inner drama that subtends the plot of Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love. Freud, in his 1914 paper 'On narcissism', had referred to theories on the earliest moments of subjectivity as 'nebulous, scarcely imagined concepts'. In 1959 Lacan created a concept that he called the o-object to make incursions into theories on the lasting impact of the anxiety-ridden passage of the small pre-subject into subjective existence. In particular, the seminar on Anxiety (1962-3), for all the convolutions of syntax and sense that render it so difficult to read, opens up reflections on this topic that are not dissimilar to those stimulated by McEwan's accomplished prose. Both Lacan and McEwan explore the problematic dissolution of the everyday distinction between subjectivity and objectivity attendant on the upsurge of anxiety driven by unconscious forces.