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摘 要

《在切瑟尔海滩上》是当代英国作家伊恩·麦克尤恩（1948-）在2007年出版的小说，以1962年的英国社会为时代背景，讲述了新婚夫妇爱德华•梅休和佛罗伦斯•庞廷在切瑟尔海滩度蜜月时因种种误解导致争吵并最终分道扬镳的故事。对于这部小说，学者们大多聚焦人物的内心世界，研究维多利亚时代的特殊背景或者主人公之间的观念差异，对于其中的食物叙事和沉浸效果关注不多。

在通俗文化崛起和认知科学关注情感的大环境下，沉浸叙事成为了目前叙事诗学的讨论热点。本文将以玛丽劳尔·瑞恩的沉浸理论为主要研究框架，从食物叙事的视角切入，从空间、时间和情感三个维度探讨小说《在切瑟尔海滩上》中的沉浸效果。

首先，空间沉浸围绕情景设置中出现的食物展开，通过分析食物带给读者的多样化感官体验、食物在故事中的位移以及制造出的空间感，来说明小说中的食物描写为读者提供了真实体验。其次，时间沉浸强调食物在悬念设置中发挥的作用。通过食物的前后变化以及角色对食物的表现，读者可以预测未来发生的事件，而多重悬念中食物的反复出现又强化了这种不确定性。最后，情感沉浸通过研究读者对小说中食物的反应来探讨读者与文本的关系。同时，通过分析不同食物背后的多种文化背景寓意，我们可以揭示这对夫妻最终分手的真实原因。

综上，通过沉浸叙事，作者可以将读者从现实世界带入到小说所构造的虚拟世界中。通过各个场景、情节、以及文化观念中的食物叙事，读者能够进入小说所营造的虚拟世界中，真实感受其中的社会问题。

关键词：伊恩·麦克尤恩；《在切瑟尔海滩上》；食物叙事；沉浸效果

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

Abstract ii

摘要 iv

Introduction 1

Ian McEwan and On Chesil Beach 1

Literature Review 2

Theories of Immersion 6

Thesis Structure 8

Chapter One Spatial Immersion through Food Narrative 10

1.1 Presence of Food in the Story’s Setting 10

1.2 Diversified Sensory Involvement of Food 12

Chapter Two Temporal Immersion through Food Narrative 15

2.1 Food Description and Anticipation of Future Events 15

2.2 Food in Metasuspenese 17

Chapter Three Emotional Immersion through Food Narrative 20

3.1 Reader’s Response to the Fictional Food 20

3.2 Food Narrative as a Cultural Code 24

Conclusion 28

Works Cited 30

Introduction

Ian McEwan and On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan is one of the most influential writers of his generation, and among the most controversial. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945” and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture”. His novel On Chesil Beach (2007), was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and winner of the British Book Awards Book of the Year and Author of the Year Awards.

McEwan is resolute, quick-thinking and good at sketching people’s inner anxiety and fear through delicate and sharp writing. And the style of his works is dark, irregular and even gothic, and also set many suspense to reflect the moral themes and narrative techniques. In other words, He often explores the issues of violence, death, eroticism and good and evil. Most of his novels are odd and absurd, which are good at showing people in the details, and reflecting the power of human beings and the distortion of human nature under the influence of sexual desire. Themes about intimacy, murder and violence in his works are exacerbated by his special narrative framework so that the moral perspectives in his pieces are revealed and overturned. This is the reason why the reader can be attracted by the characters in the textual world and calls him “Ian Macabre”.

One of his work which draws the reader into sensation involvement with characters is On Chesil Beach. The story about Edward and Florence happens in Britain in 1962, and “they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible” (McEwan 3). Edward Mayhew, a graduate student in history, and Florence Ponting, a violinist in the string quartet, just got married and are on a honeymoon at a small hotel next to Chesil beach. McEwan’s ingenious narrative brings the reader back and forth in the minds of this couple, depicts their timid and innocent love, from their first meeting to their wedding. On Chesil Beach has five chapters, where the author sets lots of suspense to create different social backgrounds and to explore the essence of human nature. And this paper discusses how the immersion in On Chesil Beach reveals this moral standard disrupted through food narrative.

Literature Review

Researchers discuss the narrative techniques in On Chesil Beach mainly in terms of two protagonists’ conflicts including their represented their disputes and dialogue between two characters, their intramental minds on this wedding night, intimacy and historical background—Victorian period’s implied meaning.

When discussing the conflicts and intensity between two protagonists through their dialogues in the novel and two different cultural backgrounds, Alice Spitz analyzes the authenticity of the dialogue between two protagonists in the final section of the novel by exploiting the underlying mechanisms of real-life talk. She first traces the arguments of Edward and Florence, showing how the conflict breaks them up—relying on what their original intentions might have been. She also finds the various opposing actions taken by the characters in the process of dispute to present that characters are from completely different family backgrounds. The conflicts and disputes between the two indicate that through the dialogues and actions of the characters, the cultural background and values of the two people are contradictory, which eventually leads them alone. It appears that the intensity of the argument and the importance of its topic have an important impact on the effectiveness of the attempt to terminate the dispute, the effectiveness of humor, and the trajectory of interaction. In addition, another research, David Herman, uses On Chesil Beach as a case study to explore the function of the action-modelling capacity in dialogue between two characters through the cognitive sciences. He displays and manipulates a complicated molecule or architectural structure in virtual space by an advanced computer graphics program to configure or reconfigure the narrative practices, such as the character’s behavior in McEwan’s story from different aspects of time, space and evaluation. Therefore, through building models of action as a system, his paper demonstrates that narrative is relevant to the philosophy of mind.

Another narrative technique is about intramental fictional minds, which is proposed by Karam Nayebpour, relying on the terminology offered by Alan Palmer—fictional minds. Alan believes that the reason why the initial fragile intermental units of the selected narratives eventually disappears is that when confronted with conflicts, the fictional minds tend to disagree in their own hearts. Therefore, these narratives can be interpreted as a fictional process of the fictional minds disintegration. When their common inner thoughts are replaced by their stubborn intramental dissents, the development of the small intermental unit between Edward and Florence stops. In this case, the fictional minds become a view that fails to go beyond themselves, which is critical for construction and maintenance of the intermental units. And the analysis of Karam’s paper shows that the intramental orientation of the protagonists’ psychological operations prevent them from going beyond their narrow perspectives, even though they strive to maintain their fragile intermental units.

Janine Utell suggests that Ian McEwan uses Fordian elements and techniques in his novel On Chesil Beach. The representation of intimacy is reflected in virtue of Ford’s impressionism as an epistemological and narrative technique, and particularly at the level of narrative discourse such as order, progression and time. Janine analyses Florence and Edward’s mistaken cognitions and judgments as well as McEwan’s knowing presentation of details to produce a much different situation than made by two protagonists themselves regarding each other, and his usage of Ford’s impressionism is to explore the problem of intimacy and to call forth the necessity of the ethical reading.

Researches on narrative technique focus on the historical moments and explores the tragedy of this couple in Victorian period—a period when intimacy is hard to talk about. It is the age of sexual revolution. Peter Mathews examines the moral implications within the notion of a historical turning point. He believes that McEwan persists to use the turning point to see the story of Edward and Florence as a qualified continuation of the Victorian trajectory rather than a break. He takes several McEwan’s fictions as an example of the ethics of the turning point—an underlying set of moral prejudices. Each of these occasions is considered as a turning point that evokes people’s reaction of the moral violation. Moreover, Earl G. Ingersoll argues that McEwan carefully chooses 1962 as the time setting to show the desire for the sexual liberation. And this special background makes Edward’s dramatic “first night” a product of a particular culture in this special era, especially when the sex ability of a man is qualified to measure personal value. At the same time, Florence is a victim of too much self-confidence dominated by the modern marriage manual. Because of her talent, she is often required to deal with everything just right, but in terms of sex, Florence’s unspoken frigidity makes this couple finally break up near the Chesil beach. This novel offers a stunning rendition of those moments where the history of life is unchangeable fixed.

Some Chinese scholars also explore the importance of the time setting in On Chesil Beach. Chen thinks that Edward and Florence’s tragedy is a metaphor for the fate of a whole generation. Their characteristics have been decided by their different social class and their family backgrounds, which implies that their conflicts will never be solved. She also proposes that their unsolved argument finally brings them to their different endings. Guo believes that two protagonists are the victims of this era. Although Edward and Florence hold different values on life from their fathers, but they ultimately are unable to transcend the limitations of the times. And differences of their family backgrounds, growth experiences and personality are also the root of this tragedy. In his eyes, On Chesil Beach has not only opened a window for readers to understand the history and insight into the world, but also provided the necessary clues and suspense for the reader to analyze the causes of this tragic marriage.

Present researches have studied the narrative techniques from various aspects, including their contradictions and conversations, their intermantal fictional minds, intimacy under the Victorian period and the time setting, but there is no research on food to explore the immersion in On Chesil Beach. Therefore, this paper will focus on three aspects of immersion—spatial, temporal and emotional immersion through food narrative to bring the reader into the fictional world to understand the real feelings of these characters.

Theories of Immersion

The term of “immersion” in this paper is from Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Marie-Laure Ryan is a prominent literary scholar and critic. She has written several books and articles on narratology, fiction and cyberculture, and has been awarded several times for her work. The concept of immersion promoted by virtual reality bears thought-provoking affinities to recent theories of fiction based on the notions of possible worlds and of game make-believe. Immersion in literary works is also supported by the research of cognitive psychology. The theory of Walton’s novels of virtual reality and its immersive concept lies in his insistence of enabling readers to participate in the fictional world. As Joseph Conrad says in Preface to Nigger of the Narcissus, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” (Conrad 116) In today’s world, moving images are the most immersive things. According to Fischlin and Taylor’s Cybertheater, immersion in a book can be compared to “cinema in your head”, because of the combination of the spatial extension and the completeness of detail of vivid pictures with the temporality, the power of narration, mobility of moving across space and the flowing of language. When the reader imagines the story, his or her mind accordingly becomes the stage of a flexible flow of images.

Ryan shows the changing narrative strategies that are characteristic of the development of art and a key shift in the form of psychological contact with the readers. She concludes that two main forms of response—immersion and interactivity—have driven key paradigm shifts in narrative and human cultural history. In immersion, the reader is entirely immersed in the artwork and ignores the surroundings, so his or her consciousness is now relocated in the fictional world. In order to let readers to experience the text as world, the textual level of medium becomes a transparent textual interface.

In order to set out a poetics of immersion, some related theoretical concepts in empirical and phenomenological studies of narrative, and some key points across the terrain of “possible worlds theory” mentioned in Ryan’s previous books such as Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991), need to be paid attention to. According to “possible worlds theory” proposed by philosophers including David Lewis, the idea of the relativity of worlds and the process of relocating one world to another can be also applied to the immersion journey of the reader from the reality to the textual world. In Ryan’s poetics of immersion, she focuses on three key aspects that contribute to the ability of a narrative fiction to attract the reader into the textual world. J. Hillis Miller describes in Topographies that, spatial immersion refers to the ability of the text to allow the reader to create a mental map of the fictional world, and to promote the reposition in virtue of strategies of the deictic shift. According to Price’s Dictionary, temporal immersion concentrates on the key of suspense. Ryan has conceptualized different definitions of suspense, including the reader’s anticipation of future events and variation gaps between two events. And metasuspense is another kind of suspense that the narrator engages the reader to collect clues through the whole text. The third strategy is emotional immersion which concerns the remarkable capacity of narrative fiction to make readers respond to the fictional characters as if they were real, instead of seeing them simply as semiotically anthropomorphized textual entities. And this initiates a stimulating debate of the key issue of whether realistic narrative is another culture, which makes widespread use of immersion.

Ryan believes that not only photographs but also the selected features can enable the readers immerse in the fiction. Food as a necessary part of people’s real life, has the applicability of using the theory to analyze the novel and is able to bring the reader to the fictional world. The narrator often uses food to convey important information related to setting, plot, emotion or motivation to the reader; food also has a strong metaphorical meaning and can help reveal themes concerning social problems and cultural meanings.

Thesis Structure

In light of what is stated above, this paper investigates the effect of spatial, temporal and emotional immersion in terms of food in On Chesil Beach. Namely, readers will be completely immersed in the world presented by the text, and their cognition will be re-recognized in this fictional world. Three main chapters will be devoted respectively to the exploration of spatial, temporal and emotional roles of the food representations in the novel to show Ian McEwan’s excellent narrative technique. The first chapter discusses spatial immersion in terms of the presence of food in the story’s setting and the diversified sensory involvement of food, which intends to invite the reader to the narrative scene. The second chapter analyses different suspense of food narrative set in the text shows the temporal immersion by implying the future outcome. The third chapter illustrates the emotional immersion through food narration by means of analyzing the reader’s response to the fictional food and the realistic narrative of food as a cultural convention. Through the analysis of three aspects, McEwan’s excellent narrative can be interpreted more specifically and impressively.

Chapter One Spatial Immersion through Food Narrative

Ryan believes that the degree of the reader’s spatial immersion depends on his or her attention to the setting. There is a fact that it is impossible for the reader to be controlled only by the first glance, since the reader only sees what the narrator shows in the fiction. However, through the spatial immersion, the narrator’s sensation, to some extent, becomes the reader’s. The reader then can see, or even can feel the virtual food in the text. So this chapter will take a closer look at the setting of fictional food and a variety of sensation provided by food in the text.

1.1 Presence of Food in the Story’s Setting

The presence of food in On Chesil Beach has illustrated its ability to promote a reluctant sense of the existence of a spatial setting and a distinct vision of its landscape. This kind of mental map, whether attractive or repugnant, becomes a home to the audience.

To create a permanent world, the novel needs to turn to its medium. For On Chesil Beach, it is the food that transports its audience into a narrative trail through the textual world, guiding them from plate to plate and helping them discover each of the features of the meal. Contrary to the videos of the electronic kind, which rely on the quantity of the details, the immersion of space in the textual description is more likely to depend on the emphasized objects—the cooking vessels of the food in On Chesil Beach and on the capability of descriptive words to build an imaginary space of the novel. This meal is a parabolic reflection. It traces out the movement of their dinner from place to place spatially, as the discrepancy of their relationships slowly forms a mental space. The corridor, silver dishes and candle-heated plate warmers all represent not so much the individual protagonists as the complicate relations and mixed feelings amongst them. The description of the meal, letting the shift of the food go through the reader’s mind, creates the feeling of the expectation and impatience of their wedding night.

Spatial immersion is therefore the outcome of “the formal meal” (McEwan 5), which is decided more on the occasional resonance between the text and the reader’s own memory than on the usual content. The spatial immersion of Ian’s description is measured by the atmosphere that has been built in the first few pages and will promote the process of psychological simulation and enrich the mental representations of all the episodes to come. With the beginning of “the normal meal”, the candle-heated plate is a sign not only to warm their silver dishes, but also to warm up their weeding night, thus their relationship is transported into a higher point. A single word, a dish or a plate warmer can send a reader to an expected world. Now the reader’s personal landscapes combine with the text.

There is an efficient way to create an immersive space, that is not to use redundant words but proper names. Since every object has a special label in the world, instead of defining a certain object, the function of proper names is to attract its presence to the reader and to raise it to his or her mind. For On Chesil Beach, the first mention of “wine” then becomes the symbol of showing their romantic love near the beach. Thus Edward and Florence dream that they could “seize the wine bottle by the neck and run down to the shore” (McEwan, 22). The mention of the wine lands the reader in their relationship, or rather, lands “wine” in the mind of the reader. The purpose of the mention of concrete object “wine” is not to show the reader a kind of drink at the meal but to jog the love and joy from this new couple by cultural connections, literary awakening and personal memories, which enables the reader to create an accurate map of the textual reference world and to see the alterative environment as the dishes move from plate to plate.

Therefore, the spatial immersive quality transports readers into their mental maps by using the proper names of the food to jog their personal memories.

1.2 Diversified Sensory Involvement of Food

One of the techniques of the narrative art Ian McEwan has shown in On Chesil Beach is that he gives the reader several sensory involvements through transporting the reader onto the scene, thus reducing the imaginative distance between the narrator and the reader to near zero. Various sensory perceptions of the reader are located on the scene, which fuse so smoothly that the events seem to have been recorded in the mind.

To create a sense of place, the narrator opens with meticulous setting of the meal, so that the reader can trace the sense of orientation through the story-world. Unlike the language, which can only afford a gradual approach to the textual world, the movement of food in this novel becomes a medium to evoke the spatial thoughts and bring the imagination to mimic sensory perception.

The waiters were arriving with their plates of beef, his piled twice the heights of hers. They also brought sherry trifle and cheddar cheese and mint chocolates, which they arranged on a sideboard. (McEwan 21)

A variety of verbs such as “arriving”, “brought” and “arranged” are all symbolic expressions of an intimate connection to a tiny and delicate environment: their plates and a sideboard. Then this intimate relation becomes an emotional bond between Florence’s shyness and the small world of the dinner table where the narrator can create a sense of atmosphere within a narrative structure. A sense of place is not the same as a mental map, because from the latter they locate themselves on the map of the textual world, and they follow the characters to change their routes in the imaginative landscape, while from the former the audience can inhale an atmosphere.

Another strategy of involving a sense is to engage the reader to the scene. According to Mary Louise Pratt’s “natural” storytelling situation in Coming to Terms, the narrator engages the reader of events that takes place at a spatial distance from the location in reality, he knows the facts, and he shows their vision for the information of the audience. So in On Chesil Beach, McEwan, as a narrator, is able to see what happens, while the reader does not literally see Florence is offered by Edward “his glazed cherry with an ironic flourish” (McEwan 13). However, by means of the delivery of the representation of the psychological process, he or she directly perceives the perception of Florence. Relying on identification with the virtual body of Florence, the reader reaches a firm platform on the scene and a sensory entrance to the textual world. The sense of flow makes the narrative scene become as close to the reader as Florence sucks and chews the cherry to her tongue. The backgrounding of the act of offering a cherry eliminates the imaginative distance between the present location and the story-world, and blends the consciousness of the narrator and the audience of events into the same act of sensory perception. Space is perceptively experienced by reader’s concrete and bounded body, but this perspective decides that the virtual body which is perceived in the fictional world belongs to both the narrator and the reader. Space can be conceptualized as a whole, but the reader needs to build individual relation to some of its specific points, so that the spatial immersion can be perceived.

On the whole, Ian has invited the reader to the narrative scene with diversified sensory involvement in virtue of transporting the reader from the present location to the fictional world within the modifiability of the distance between the narrated events and the reader’s perception.

Chapter Two Temporal Immersion through Food Narrative

While spatial immersion lets the audience read in a slow pace so that they can linger on a special sensory scene, temporal immersion motivates the reader to rush across the text toward the ending that the reader desires for. According to Marie-Laure Ryan, in general, the definition of temporal immersion is a person’s experience of time, contrary to the objective time. In other words, human time is a personal experience where the present is a stage that involves memories of the past and foreboding of the future. Frankly speaking, when the reader participates in the process by selecting the potential branch as the actual one in the advancement of narrative time. The reason why the passing of time is important to the reader is that it is more than an accumulation of time, it is a process of revealing. This chapter will discuss the suspense, “the technical name for this desire” (Ryan 141), and show the temporal immersion by perceiving the further outcome.

2.1 Food Description and Anticipation of Future Events

The tension in the story is usually connected to the reader’s interest in the destiny of the character, because the enjoyment of the reader comes from the fact that he or she expects to see the outcomes when it is preferable to others, so readers participate in the story. That’s why suspense happens when the protagonist is in a critical situation as well as the reader expects a favorable ending.

Moreover, the intensity of suspense increases as the range of potentialities decreases. Everything can happen at the beginning of the virtual scripts, and there are too many branches of the forking paths into the future. The future begins to shape as a problem shows up and fights with the character as little action as possible. When this happens, the reader approaches a state of complete temporal immersion. Suspense depends on the construction of the fictional events. The potentialities which trace evident roads into the future constrain the reader’s horizon, such as the underway processes and the expectation of characters, so that the reader can imagine scenarios for the events to come and make strategic decisions for the range of the possibilities. So the narrative devices like temporal immersion through food narrative which builds the horizon of possibilities help the reader create the paths.

Just before dawn he got up and went through to the sitting room and, standing behind his chair, scraped the solidified gravy from the meat and potatoes on his plate and ate them. After that, he emptied her plate—he did not care whose plate it was. Then he ate all the mints, and then the cheese. (McEwan 194)

At the beginning of the text, the fresh and warmed food such as the roasted beef, can still be remembered as the expectation of their marriage, while at the present in the text, the remained food now is “emptied” by Edward, as well as their relationship is “emptied” at the same time. Is their marriage going to the end, or will Edward try to save it? The focus of curiosity in this suspense is the forthcoming resolution of an alternative sequence: will good or bad happen to their marriage? This attention premises an emotional involvement in Edward’s fate and a strong desire for a consequence beneficial for him. Since “What will happen next?” is the main question that the reader focuses on, the suspense stands by an order of food presentation that adjoins to the perception of events. In order to promote the anticipation of future events which constrains suspense, the text will show more descriptions of food than of Edward to the reader without disturbing the time order. Through the description of food and anticipation of event, the reader lives the unfolding episode moment by moment and participates in the perspective of the protagonist whose destiny is being played out.

Although the reader’s attention to the suspense which is controlled on the discourse level by the narrator’s revealing information is always correlated to the story level of narrative, it seems that the importance of surprise may be ignored when this kind of suspense as an experience relies on food anticipation, but surprise comes to be revealed only at the moment when its outcome shows up, instead of a part of the construction of suspense.

2.2 Food in Metasuspenese

Metasuspense is proposed by Ryan, and is to describe a kind of suspense where an object or an event that appears in the text many times. In metasuspense the reader’s concern concentrates on how the narrator is going to tie all the clues together and use the proper narrative in the text. A relevant phenomenon which can arouse metasuspense is “the ability of stereotyped genres” (Ryan 146). For the reader of immersion, one of the most attractive aspects of narrative suspense is anomalous experience. The reader’s involvement is the purest form of the temporal immersion in the action, and time has become nearly concrete. Repeated suspense in literature is as critical as in movie, since some readers may have the same anxiety through seeing the same thing, like “oranges” in On Chesil Beach over and over again. Here is an example of such suspense about Florence’s oranges.

This is the first scene of “oranges” in the text. “She knew his hours, and had taken an early train and walked from Henley toward the Stonor Valley, with a one-inch-to-the-mile map in her hand and a couple of oranges in a canvas satchel.” (McEwan 156-157) Florence takes some hours to see Edward, and spends some beautiful days with him. Here these “oranges” give the reader a sense of expectation to their happy life. In the next scene this couple begin to enjoy their lovers’ world. “After she peeled her remaining orange for them to share along the way, her hand was sticky in his.” (McEwan 158-159) Here the “oranges” implies the sweetness of this couple’s situation. At the end of the story, “Or he would pause by a view over the Stonor Valley and wonder whether this was where she stopped to eat her orange.” (McEwan 201) They have parted for several years, and Edward still remembers and loves Florence. The author uses the oranges to evoke the memories between Edward and Florence as Edward comes to the same way Florence passed forty years ago, thus revealing that “he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much” (McEwan 201). However, the outcome of this couple is still a tragedy. After experiencing three perceptions to the fate of this couple, the reader is supposed to start to guess what will happen then.

Fictionally the reader is genuinely worried about this couple’s fates and attentively participates in the events as they unfold. As Carroll proposes that suspense involves uncertainty, which is a necessary situation for suspense. When uncertainty is distilled from a condition, suspense fades away. That is why the gripping power of temporal immersion through food narrative cannot lose uncertainty. If the reader pretends that the asserted facts in the fiction are true though they are not true actually, and can enjoy from this act of pretense, then he or she can experience the intensity and pleasure of the outcome of the text. When the reader sees the “oranges” for the second or third time, he or she experiences a temporal immersion that places him or her at the beginning of narrative time and let him or her share the prospective outcome. The reader lives the development of the event and the unfolding of the character’s fate in the real time of a shifted present, instead of being barely told what happened in a virtual past.

The repeating of the suspense is a matter of knowledge being replaced by a more instant concern, namely, the reader’s involvement of emotions in the destiny of the character, rather than a matter of self-induced memory loss or of pretended ignorance. To explain how the readers can repeatedly experience excitement of the fate that has already been written in their memories, they should first understand how they come to invest their expectations in the destiny of the fictional character.

To conclude, the suspense in temporal immersion is reflected on the food narrative through engaging the reader’s tension to the anticipation of the future events, as well as repeating the symbolic object like the “oranges” to remind the reader of the uncertain fate of this couple.

Chapter Three Emotional Immersion through Food Narrative

Who is likely to be moved to tears by emotional immersion? Since Aristotle’s definition of the effect of tragedy is catharsis or purification through terror and pity, people generally think that literary fictions can cause the same extent of emotional reactions as situations in the reality, such as joy, sorrow, empathy, depression, relief, fright, hatred, admiration, and even sexual arousal. Tears from the audience are wept by the destiny of the character in Victorian as Edward and Florence eventually break up in the end. Ryan suggests that emotional immersion in the fate of this couple can be accepted as a normal response to literature, since textualism replaced realism and divided the protagonist’s human essence into the actantial roles or collections of specified features in the fiction. This chapter will discuss the emotional immersion through analyzing the reader’s response to the fictional food and food narrative as a cultural code.

3.1 Reader’s Response to the Fictional Food

According to James Phelan’s Reading people, readers can regard the character as a real person, but the textualism emphasizes the “mimetic dimension” which testifies emotional responses among three components of the character, and the pseudo-persons make these responses problematic, since these responses have to maintain an ontological boundary between readers in the reality and imaginary individuals in the fictional world in order to attach themselves to pseudo features.

A comment from People says that the novel On Chesil Beach is heartbreaking and “No one can unpack a single frozen moment better than McEwan”. Another comment from Chicago Sun-Times is that McEwan’s “finely honed prose is a deep pleasure to experience”. The feeling of empathy and personal pleasure for their fate expressed by readers are directed towards the suffering of favorite characters in the novel. There are good reasons for the power of fiction to produce this kind of response. Readers are indeed more likely to be touched by the real events than by fictional ones. That is to say, they are more likely to be influenced by what happens to those they know in reality than by the destiny of a stranger in a make-believe world. However, by means of the narratorial omniscience and emotional immersion, the readers know certain fictional protagonists—Edward and Florence—better than they know themselves.

In the meanwhile, it is obvious that different readers show various feelings for different experiences, and these emotions can be explained as a collection of differences between the reality and the make-believe. The reader’s resonance with the miserable character partially comes from the description of the food which is closely related to the real-life quality of the representation, and which is capable of erasing the distinction between the real and virtual world. When the author focuses on food—roasted beef, morsels of potato, cheddar cheese, or mint chocolates—the reader is projected as a diner of the meal and even becomes a potential victim of the failure of this wedding. The purely imaginative possibility of emptying the remained meal creates a sensation closely correlated to the desperate ending of this marriage.

From the perspective of the reader, if it can happen in the fictional world, it can also happen in reality; if it can happen in reality, then it can happen to the reader herself. Furthermore, when it comes to more personal feelings like anxiety or pleasure, it will combine with the phenomenon of heartbreaking for characters. Currie observes that emotions are connections of relationships between feelings, beliefs and desires. For example, the reader’s belief that their quarrel on the beach destroys their relationship, coupled with the desire for the maintenance of this couple’s future, will result in pity. Because the readers’ suggested attitudes towards imaginary characters and situations which only exist in the fictional world cannot be beliefs and desires, and in reality they have beliefs and desires, then in make-believe, they will have make-beliefs and make-desires leading to parallel feelings. Their emotions concerned about fictional situations affect them in actually the same way as their emotions concerned about real events. Namely, the feelings generated by the text do not prevent empathy, and do result in the same reactions as emotions generated by real-world states of affairs.

However, the psychological school believes that emotional responses to the fictional events only put the reader’s beliefs into the background of consciousness. Crying for this couple’s fate does not make the reader sad, and his or her heartbreaking, whatever causes it, does not lead to sink in the sadness and the denial of eating food at the dinner, since the reader’s concentration is torn between two worlds and he or she is never totally soaked in the fiction. For instance, the beliefs that regulate the assessment of “roasted beef” at a distance cannot infiltrate the psychological process that generates the utmost emotional responses when holding the subject. This illustrates a clear ability for the readers to experience strong feelings that are not improved by beliefs. The psychologists also argue that the validity of beliefs can be affected by variations, because this variability is the discrepancy between different types of emotions to this couple’s ending from the readers. Thus the reader’s mind can be emotionally affected by thinking of the purely fictional affairs. It is on the stage of mental simulation, where feelings work but do not count, that the readers learn about their emotions and prepare themselves for the trials of life. Besides, the knowledge is also backgrounded in the relevant phenomenon of suspense. In the case of both first-time and repeated suspense, the reader contemplates the imaginary event that the marriage of Edward and Florence is at a stalemate, and the depth of this contemplation produces the emotional response of desperation and pleasure. But if the reader decides to imagine in mind, it is not the point that whether the perceived events of this couple’s ending is true or false, or its unfolding story about their dating known or unknown, because this kind of mental simulation makes it temporarily exist in the present, since the reader never knows what will happen in the future.

Therefore, the presence of the scene in the fictional world creates emotional responses that lead to a sensation of food in a certain boundary, but the background of consciousness which is all virtual and does not influence the reader’s real life controls the boundary within the limits of heartbreaking and pleasure.

3.2 Food Narrative as a Cultural Code

Emotional immersion splits the reader into two worlds—reality and make-believe, which is to make the reader contemplate in the fictional world, but this immersion depends on a realist configuration of the fictional world. Then readers’ sensations and emotions will be intensively affected when their imaginations descend into their hearts.

Edward’s emotion can be interpreted by the following range of food. “During that summer he[Edward] ate for the first time a salad with a lemon and oil dressing and, at breakfast, yogurt—a glamorous he knew only from a James Bond novel.” (McEwan 144) The narrator conceives the food—salad and yogurt in the text as realistic which depicts situations that can be actualized in reality. “He was surprised, even a little put out, on his first visit when Violet served as a first course a bowl of undercooked peas.” (McEwan 145) In general, the textual world also obeys physical and logical laws, it follows some basic conceptions of mental and physical causality, and the plot does not present too many extraordinary coincidences. Edward’s surprise and curiosity are revealed by the “glamorous” in Ponting’s family, considering that Edward was born in a village and he has never been abroad, it is normal for him to know this “glamorous” food only in novel and to be surprised for a bowl of undercooked peas.

Meanwhile, the stance of philosophical realism cannot be ignored.

His hard-pressed father’s cooking and the pie-and-chips regime of his student days could not have prepared him for the strange vegetables—the aubergines, green and red peppers, courgettes and mangetous—that came regularly before him. (McEwan 145)

This example shows that the reader’s mind can at least have partial access to reality which can be represented through the comparison of food, such as the pie-and-chips that Edward is used to eating on those student days, while the strange vegetables for him is not familiar before.

A realistic text is also dependent on the way of food representation, since it creates a believable, seemingly self-governed and language-independent society, where the style of description makes it exist, and the readers imagine themselves as a part of the textual world to become another Edward to encounter the “rare” delicious and sense more than the shape of food, the thoughts of Edward or the time and space the text displays to them.

He[Edward] encountered for the first time in his life muesli, olives, fresh black pepper, bread without butter, anchovies, undercooked lamb, cheese that was not cheddar, ratatouille, saucisson, bouillabaisse, entire meals without potatoes, and, most challenging of all, a fishy pink paste, tarama salata. (McEwan 145)

Although the narrator does not use lots of special descriptions to show how luxury they are, these representation of food, only with a range of uncommon names, have told the reader that Edward never belongs to Pontings and will hardly integrate into upper class.

Besides, a literary text is realistic at the cost of the production of a conversation or discourse in real-world speech acts whose felicity situations adjust to a real human being, especially when Edward calls a baguette a croissant in front of Pontings as well as readers. That’s why the power of realism can let the textual world come into presence and characters come into life.

Ryan believes that the “reality effect” can be reflected on the narrative techniques—omniscience narration, free communication and changeable focalization. According to Goodman’s Reality Remade, it is easy for the reader to be familiar with a kind of representational techniques, and this ease from the realism is not a matter of resemblance but decoding. But once perspective has been introduced into narrative techniques and readers have learned to read it, will the return to two-dimensional manifestation be more realistically transported to life, or is the perspective itself more suitable for creating a reality effect?

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