THE LIES OF LIBERALISM IN IAN MCEWAN’S NOVELS

Text topic: Lie in Art and Culture

Text author: Предраг Ковачевић

The paper locates moments of exposure of ideological lies of liberalism on a corpus of three novels by Ian McEwan (Cement Garden, Black Dogs and Saturday). In spite of Ian McEwan’s reputation as a liberal intellectual, the paper demonstrates that the novels which are often read as homage to liberalism can in fact be interpreted as a critique of liberalism. In McEwan’s novels one can find moments of fierce critique of the nuclear family as the ideological bedrock of liberalism. Moreover, the novels also establish close links between liberalism and fascism and point to the existence of what Eco called “ur-fascism” in Western Civilization. Also, the paper sheds some light on the paradoxical feeling of a chronic lack of freedom in liberal societies and ends by giving examples of McEwan’s pessimistic attitude towards the future of the liberal society or the modern Western civilization encumbered by the historical baggage of fascism as well as the structural inability to overcome it within the bounds of liberal ideology.