An unborn child, the narrator expands readers’ sympathies.
Is the narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell a fetus, or is he an unborn child? The critics can’t agree. In a review for the New York Times, Siddhartha Mukherjee calls him “an unborn baby.” But the Times’s Michiko Kakutani describes the book as “a tale told by a talking fetus.” The Guardian explains that “the story is narrated by the foetus inside [the] womb.” The Australian refers to him as a fetus in one paragraph and a baby in the next.
Describing what we are before we’re born can be a delicate thing. Remember the trouble Hillary Clinton found herself in when she said that “the unborn person doesn’t have rights”? Using the word “fetus” signals the correct liberal views on abortion but makes the conceit of Nutshell seem ridiculous. Conversely, the term “unborn child” makes the plot seem plausible and the narrator more sympathetic — in short, more human — but signals icky pro-life sentiments. McEwan’s choice of narrator puts reviewers in a difficult position.
A very loose modernization of Hamlet, Nutshell comes complete with a Shakespearean epigraph and references to the play throughout: The narrator learns early on that his beautiful mother, Trudy, is having an affair with his boorish uncle Claude (who, given his penchant for clichés, also has something of Polonius about him) and that the two are plotting to kill his poet-publisher father. Like Hamlet, our hero in utero ponders the best way to deal with the situation and even soliloquizes on suicide before frustrating their plans by making an early entrance onto the world’s stage, mewling in his mother’s arms at an especially inconvenient time for her.
It’s a funny, compelling, and suspenseful novel, and the unusual narrator, weeks away from his due date, is what makes it all work. Kakutani aptly describes him as “a kind of less diabolical Stewie from ‘Family Guy.’” A budding sommelier with impeccable taste in poetry (“Most of the modern poems leave me cold. Too much about the self, . . . too many gripes in too short a line. But as warm as the embrace of brothers are John Keats and Wilfred Owen”), he holds a conventionally liberal European worldview (America is “helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchangeable as the Koran”). Because he’s still in Trudy’s womb, he cannot fully sense what’s going on around him, which makes his keen observations and sharp insights all the more interesting.
You’d think that the broader cultural implications of this narrative choice would be obvious, but McEwan was somehow caught off guard. In an interview, Michael Miller of the Wall Street Journal noted that, “given the charged debate over abortion, a preternaturally sentient unborn child could strike some readers as a pro-life argument” and asked, “Is that your intention?” McEwan shot back:
I only get this question from America. I’m not going to enter into the charged debate about this. I’m from a generation that largely took for granted a woman’s right to make a decision on this, provided that this is done early enough. But in the whole of writing this book, the issue of pro-choice or pro-life didn’t even cross my mind. I don’t think it crossed the mind of any European who came near the book either.
Later, in a BBC interview, McEwan said that he had to ask Miller to “unwrap” the question for him, “because I didn’t understand what he was talking about. . . . It didn’t cross my mind when I was writing it. . . . And anyway he gets born, you know, like many fetuses do. It’s not about that, but in the States, opinions come in packages — in squadrons even.” Only Americans could think of such a criminally vulgar question.
While the novel will never be confused with a placard outside an abortion clinic, it seems very strange for McEwan to overlook that it could be reasonably interpreted as a pro-life work. It may not be “about that,” as he says, but it may still point in that direction. That’s because of the powerful way literary fiction can affect how readers think about the people and things they’re reading about.
The rise of the novel in Britain during the 18th century coincided with a philosophical interest in sympathy, a topic explored by such major figures as David Hume and Adam Smith.
An enduring defense of fiction-reading is that it helps expand our sympathies. The rise of the novel in Britain during the 18th century coincided with a philosophical interest in sympathy, a topic explored by such major figures as David Hume and Adam Smith. The 18th century’s cult of sensibility celebrated one’s ability to show emotion over the sufferings and joys of others, a capacity that could be refined through works of art, including literary fiction.
A version of this belief lives on. In his much-ballyhooed interview with the novelist Marilynne Robinson last year, President Obama explained that “the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy,” including “the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.” A recent study gives scientific heft to this presidential testimony, finding that reading fiction helped subjects understand the mental state of others.
Or take the influence of a specific novel, albeit a didactic one. A few years ago, NPR celebrated the 100th anniversary of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, which features a horse as the narrator, and invited the novelist Jane Smiley to comment on its significance as “both a children’s classic and an animal rights manifesto.” Smiley explained that the book was important in part because it helped readers expand their sympathy. “Black Beauty helped people see animals in a new way,” Smiley said. “As soon as you say that an animal has a point of view, then it’s very difficult to just go and be cruel to that animal. . . . [It showed] readers that the world is full of beings who should not be treated like objects.” Smiley likened it to the influence of 18th-century novels that showed that women had “inner lives, points of views, and opinions. Then the idea of what women were for in society began to shift.” (Smiley cites Pamela and Clarissa — two novels by Samuel Richardson that convey a woman’s perspective, the sort of cultural appropriation that can get you into trouble nowadays.)
When we apply this common belief about sympathy to McEwan’s novel, it doesn’t seem outrageous to conclude that Nutshell may affect how readers think about unborn children. McEwan humanizes the narrator — no, he associates him with one of the greatest characters in the history of world literature. He Hamletizes him. He gives him consciousness and intellectual depth, has him deliberate and plot, feel love and anger, seek vengeance and justice.
In short, the novel gives readers pleasure in expanding their sympathies to include a category of people about whom they are often encouraged to be callous and unfeeling. And it does so without proselytizing. I don’t expect it to change a million hearts and minds, but it could very well make many readers more sympathetic to the pro-life argument — something quite unplanned by the author.