Second, Wenn and Camia’s article gives McEwan’s audience a much
clearer understanding of erotomania than Joe offers in his narrative. The arti-
cle includes the history of de Clerambault’s identification of the syndrome,
summaries of what other (actual) researchers have found about its symptoms
and possible treatment, and an analysis of the case of “P.” As a result, the
article persuasively accomplishes its purpose of establishing erotomania as a
“nosological entity” (i.e., a distinct, classifiable disease), and that accomplish-
ment in turn guides McEwan’s audience to reconfigure Jed and his behavior
within that psychiatric framework. Third, the article further validates Joe’s
interpretive judgments about Jed. Despite the deficiencies in some of Joe’s own
responses to Jed, McEwan assures his audience that in one important sense,
Joe correctly read Jed. Indeed, if Joe were to come across the article at a time
when he was in Clarissa’s company, he would immediately hand it over to her.
He wouldn’t even have to say “I told you so” because the article implicitly says
that as loudly as any implicit saying can. In all these ways, McEwan invites his
audience to say “Yes” to the article’s view of Jed and his condition.
Nevertheless, McEwan uses the interaction between Joe’s narrative and
Wenn and Camia’s article, including the affectively jarring transition from one
to the other, to guide his audience to add an emphatic “but” to that “Yes.”^3
Because that audience moves from an account that values the concrete par-
ticularity of narrative to one that values the intellectual mastery of science and
its penchant for classification, the audience has reason for some skepticism. To
put this point another way, the interaction of the two tellings leads the audi-
ence to automatically translate Wenn and Camia’s “P,” “R,” and “M” to “Jed,”
“Joe,” and “Clarissa,” and the gap signified by this different naming suggests
that Wenn and Camia miss as much as they capture. They reduce the com-
plex interplay between Jed’s obsession and Joe’s responses to them—and then
Clarissa’s responses to Joe’s responses—to such descriptions as “within days
this relationship [between R and M] was under strain from P’s determined
onslaught. Later they separated” (254). Yes, the psychiatric explanation does
help McEwan’s audience to understand P and his behavior, but it also radically
oversimplifies Jed, Joe, and Clarissa. In a sense, the interaction McEwan sets
up between Joe’s narrative and Wenn and Camia’s article demonstrates the
problem of fully subordinating mimetic interests to thematic ones.^4 Further-
- Here I depart from David Malcolm’s assessment of the Appendix as primarily a valida-
tion of Joe’s perspective. My position is closer to Greenberg’s when he argues that the validation
of Joe’s interpretation of Jed does not resolve all the conflicts among worldviews. - At the same time, McEwan maintains his audience’s interest in the mimetic compo-
nent of the novel by shifting the focus of that interest from the characters to the essay itself,
and he solidifies that interest by giving it the marks of a plausible contribution to the actual
studies of erotomania listed in the “References” section. But he also gives his audience a not-
250 • CHAPTER 1 3