“Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan (post 5): Three additions to the theme of the protagonist’s self-dividedness

After the first twelve chapters, I have three additions to the theme of the protagonist’s self-dividedness. One is Clarissa’s criticism that Joe is emotionally cut off, because “You’re making calculations that I’ll never know about. Some inner double-entry bookkeeping…” (1, p. 111).

The second is the issue of bisexuality, whose possible relation to multiple personality I discussed recently. So far, nobody has raised the issue of homosexuality as it relates to Jed Parry’s psychotic delusion of mutual love between him and Joe (the protagonist).

Why hasn’t Joe asked Jed if he is homosexual? Why hasn’t Joe told Jed Parry to leave him alone because he, Joe, is not homosexual? Why hasn’t Clarissa raised the issue of why this man is harassing Joe, the man she lives with? Why hasn’t Joe asked Jed Parry if homosexuality is consistent with Jed’s avowed religious beliefs? In short, why hasn’t the issue been raised by any of them, unless they all tacitly assume that everyone is bisexual?

The third possible addition to the theme of the protagonist’s self-dividedness is the question he raises about his own memory. He says he has “a quarter memory” (1, p. 95) having to do with the “the key word…curtain” (1, pp. 95-96). He doesn’t know what it means. And when Jed Parry makes the psychotic allegation that Joe is sending “signals” to him, Joe thinks that maybe there is a connection to curtains, “a curtain used as a signal” (1, p. 98). I don’t know what will be made of this later in novel, but a puzzling inaccessibility of memories, as if a person had multiple memory banks, is a basic issue in multiple personality.

Added June 28, 2019: In chapter 14, Joe (protagonist) suddenly recalls that the curtain as a signal was part of a case report by French psychiatrist De Clerambault, regarding a French woman who had never met, but loved, King George the Fifth. She had the delusion that the king loved her in return, and thought that he used the curtains in the windows of Buckingham Palace to signal to her. Thus, the prototypical case of de Clerambault’s syndrome was heterosexual, and the object of the delusion was a king (1, p. 133), not a freelance writer.

1. Ian McEwan. Enduring Love. New York, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1997.