“The rest is silence”

Ian McEwan’s claim that, like Conrad, he writes novels “to make [us] see” can seem problematic when applied to his 2016 novel Nutshell. The novel both illustrates and complicates the author’s self-assigned task, as its foetal narrator is essentially blind but still insists on conveying a view of the world outside the womb. It is further complicated by the fact that Nutshell is meant as a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play, and therefore implies a transition from stage representation to novelization, “from the showing mode to the telling mode” (Bandín and González). Ian McEwan did not renounce his visual ambitions when writing Nutshell (Guignery) but instead “the book [...] is clearly generated by the technical challenges implicit in the opening sentence, rather than a story that McEwan urgently needs to tell” (Tayler). Therefore, the following questions must be asked about Nutshell: how is such visuality, or visibility, made possible in a novel whose narrator is blind? Exactly what tricks do the narrator and writer rely on to transform blindness into images? And what is the reader really given to look at? This article argues that Nutshell fails to transition “from the showing mode to the telling mode”. It attempts instead to picture blindness by relying on what can be called echographic writing-the translation of sounds into images-as well as incomplete staging of the foetus’s condition. These inappropriate mechanisms threaten the integrity of the novel, eventually leaving narrator, reader and writer in the dark

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Physics · Silence · Visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Samuel Beckett and Modernism

• Ian McEwan Celebrates Shakespeare

  Elena Bandín Fuertes, Elena Bandín et al.•Critical Survey•2021

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