Responsables de l’atelier
Vanessa GUIGNERY (ENS de Lyon, Présidente de la SEAC)
Gerald PREHER (Université d’Artois, directeur de publication de The Journal of the Short Story in English)
Camus, Solène, Université Lumière Lyon 2, <solene.camus1@univ-lyon2.fr>
A Talisman and a Promise: The Issue of Emancipation in Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know
“‘A Corona For Vivien’ remains precious for those who care, a talisman to the survivors and a promise of a better future. A poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet.” These are the words of Tom Metcalfe, a scholar and one of the protagonists of Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know. This statement, made in 2119, reflects the enduring fascination surrounding “A Corona For Vivien”, a poem written by Francis Blundy for his wife, Vivien. Recited on the occasion of her birthday in 2014, the poem was never published and has since been lost, a disappearance that has only contributed to its mythical status over time. For Tom, as for many scholars of his era, this vanished text embodies both a literary enigma and a symbol of hope, crystallizing projections of a better future precisely through its material absence.
This paper aims to examine how Ian McEwan uses the disappearance of Blundy’s poem to develop a reflection on textual emancipation. Both characters and readers are, in effect, denied any access to the poem. Through this absence, McEwan dissolves authorial authority and liberates the text from interpretive constraint. However, this very freedom is quickly placed under tension: while the poem’s absence opens a space conducive to imaginative exploration, it simultaneously provokes an institutional process of reappropriation, as academic circles attempt to reconstruct its meaning and thereby impose a new form of interpretive control.
This paper intends to consider how Ian McEwan situates these questions within a broader meditation on our relationship to the past and our ability to break free from it. This reflection is notably embodied in the shift of narrative voice in the novel’s second part, which is taken over by Blundy’s wife, offering a different perspective on memory. At the same time, McEwan interrogates our relationship to the present, particularly through his portrayal of contemporary social and political constraints. This interrogation unfolds within the framework of what the author himself describes as a “science fiction novel without the science”, centered on the challenges of climate change.
Solène Camus currently teaches English at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, where she works as a Teaching and Research Assistant. She is a member of the research unit Lettres et Civilisations Étrangères (LCE) and she completed her PhD in 2025, in Université Lumière Lyon 2. Her work focuses on the notion of monstrosity in contemporary British and Irish fiction.