love. Indeed, the affective power of these last paragraphs contributes to the
judgment that Joe’s narrative would make a fine stand-alone novel.
But McEwan continues this way:
Appendix I
Reprinted from The British Review of Psychiatry
Robert Wenn, MB BCh. MRCPsych, & Antonio Camia, MA, MB, DRCOG,
MRCPsych
A homoerotic obsession, with religious overtones: a clinical variant of
de Clerambault’s syndrome
The case of a pure (primary) form of de Clerambault’s syndrome is
described in a man whose religious convictions are central to his delusions.
Dangerousness and suicidal tendencies are also present. The case adds to
recent literature supporting the view that the syndrome is a nosological
entity. (249)The audience’s sudden leap from the deep affective and ethical engagement
with Joe’s immersive narrative to Wenn and Camia’s abstract academic dis-
course produces the jarring effect. The journal name and the listing of Wenn’s
and Camia’s advanced degrees signal the radical change in voice and tone.
The article’s very formal title (which is also formulaic in its main title–colon–
subtitle structure), followed by the passive voice and clumsy abstractions of
the summary (“Dangerousness and suicidal tendencies are also present”) then
deliver that change, and the article itself sustains it.
In sustaining that change, the article has three major interrelated effects
on the responses of rhetorical readers. First, it creates significant affective
and ethical distance between McEwan’s audience and Joe, Jed, and Clarissa.
Instead of having access to the felt experience of the events, the audience gets
an explanation of those events via the frame of a psychiatric “syndrome.” On
this first page of the article, Jed becomes a “case,” and Joe and Clarissa all but
disappear (we can perhaps dimly perceive them beneath the inelegant vague-
ness of “dangerousness”). When all three appear later in the article, they are
only “P,” “R,” and “M.” In this way, the move from Joe’s narrative to Wenn
and Camia’s article is one from a reading experience in which the audience’s
mimetic interests in the characters and events are foregrounded to one in
which those interests are set aside in favor of a thoroughly thematic view.
Although Wenn and Camia indicate that “P,” “R,” and “M” refer to actual peo-
ple, what is important about them is not their individuality but the way they
perform representative roles in an illustrative narrative about erotomania.
FUNCTIONS OF NARRATIVE SEgMENTS • 249