state’s actions are appropriate, but there’s something profoundly sad about the
intractability of Jed’s delusion and the conditions of his day-to-day life.
The gap between rhetorical readers’ view and Wenn and Camia’s view of
the new information about Joe and Clarissa is even wider. This new informa-
tion comes as part of their concluding discussion about the range of outcomes
among those afflicted by sufferers from de Clerambault’s syndrome: “While in
this case R and M were reconciled and later successfully adopted a child, some
victims have had to divorce or emigrate, and others have needed psychiatric
treatment because of the distress that patients have caused them” (258–59).
Thus, for Wenn and Camia, the reconciliation is important only because it
represents a relatively rare positive outcome. For McEwan’s audience, how-
ever, the news brings some modicum of satisfaction and relief: Joe and Clar-
issa’s love, whatever its flaws and defects, has been strong enough for them to
reunite and to act on Clarissa’s desire to become a mother. The information
also leads McEwan’s audience to reconfigure the significance of Joe’s bonding
with the Logan children: that experience gives him—and McEwan’s rhetori-
cal readers—the confidence that he can be a good parent. At the same time,
the audience’s affective response to this outcome is muted both by McEwan’s
tucking it into a subordinate clause in this academic article and by all that the
audience does not know about the reconciliation, the adoption, and Joe and
Clarissa’s current life.
McEwan wants this muted response because of his thematic emphasis on
the vexed relation of love and logic rather than on a mimetic marriage plot
involving Joe and Clarissa. I can extend this point by reflecting on McEwan’s
choice for the occasion of Joe’s narration. Why not have Joe narrate after the
reconciliation, when the complications that followed Jed’s “onslaught” had
been resolved? For reasons having to do with the interrelation of the mimetic
and thematic components of the novel. If Joe were to narrate after marriage
and parenthood, he would have a wholly different perspective on his experi-
ences with Jed, and that perspective would necessarily alter his purposes in a
way that would not serve McEwan’s purposes nearly as well. Joe’s implicit title
would change from “How Clarissa and I Came Apart and Why It Is Mostly
Not My Fault” to something like “How Clarissa and I Weathered a Crisis in
Our Relationship and Are Now Happier Than Ever.” McEwan, I’m sure, could
have Joe write an appealing narrative with that purpose, but he would have a
much harder time shaping that narrative to explore the relation of love and
logic and especially to generate the multiple “Yes, but” responses to the explo-
ration that Joe’s current narrative evokes.
252 • CHAPTER 1 3