What We Can Know

“That morning I lifted the parchment from the desk and brought it close to my nose. No smell of blood or flesh. Only the faint memory of a boarding-school inkwell sunk into a lidded desk of gouged obscenities. I felt the friendly weight of the skin in two hands. I don’t remember when I last felt so innocently, serenely, unambiguously pleased with myself.”

An early passage taken from Francis’s journal offers a glimpse into his indulgent, egotistical character. Describing the vellum scroll on which he has written Viven’s gift poem, he attempts to neutralize the allusions to its violent creation with an idyllic recall of childhood. The use of multiple adverbs to qualify how pleased Francis is with himself underscores the self-congratulatory tone of the passage.

“As our dean once said in a speech, we have robbed the past of its privacy […] We know their voices well, their clothes and their faces changing through time. The differences between their private and public selves are apparent. Scholars see, hear and know more of them, of their private thoughts, than we do of our closest friends.”

Thomas describes historical scholarship as a transgressive act, one that tramples on the idea of privacy for the sake of new knowledge. When Thomas suggests that scholars feel more intimate with their research subjects than they do with the people in their lives, he is hinting at the parasocial relationship he has with the Blundys and their ilk. He may feel like their friend because their thoughts resonate with his own, but he is ultimately just another fan.

“The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter—it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis.”

Thomas’s assertion that the crisis of the humanities is a perennial issue suggests some of the philosophical concerns that underpin the theme of Living with Hope in Times of Crisis. Thomas suggests that the issue is inherent to thinking, which implies that no amount of research will ever conclusively resolve the crisis. While this renders his efforts moot, Thomas is not deterred from continuing his endeavors for reasons that tie to his existential relationship with the past.

“The dead hand of academic neutrality would cause these characters to wither. I tell her that my duty is to vitality, to convey the experience of lived and felt life, to what it was to live in a certain time, however remote. Rose replies that my only duty is to the truth.”

As Thomas’s foil, Rose constantly reminds him of the objective of his academic work. This drives Thomas to expose his honest convictions on the role that scholarship plays in his life, as demonstrated by this passage. Thomas is not a classical academic who sees knowledge as an end; instead, he uses scholarship to address emotional needs in his life.

“This is the feeling I’m attempting to describe. The waiting figure on the modern bridge is me. The collapsed bridge downstream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represent the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved.”

Thomas uses the extended metaphor of Richard Holmes’s experience on the ruined bridge to articulate his relationship to the past. Earlier in the chapter, he described his feeling as being “beyond nostalgia.” In this passage, he breaks down the elements of that metaphor to give it enough nuance to distance the feeling from nostalgia, which relies heavily on lived experience. In his case, Thomas longs to return to an experience that is impossible for him to have.

“We lacked diversity! There was no tension of ideas or ways of life, or of understanding life, no opposition to the moribund orthodoxies we lived by, nothing radically new or interesting to challenge us or prompt discoveries. If we weren’t crushed by the past, we were terrified by it. Our finest achievement was not to be at war.”

In this passage, it is revealed that Thomas’s obsession with the past is deeply tied to his dissatisfaction with the present. When Thomas complains that there is no diversity of thought in his time, he is subtly expressing his era’s capacity to move beyond a focus on preservation. The world has rehabilitated enough for Thomas’s frustration, amplifying the idea that his predecessors may not have had the luxury to yearn for progress because they prioritized the resistance against annihilation.

“The imagined lords it over the actual—no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work […] Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.”

This passage explains how “A Corona for Vivien” has retained its relevance despite its lack of publication. Thomas posits that an object becomes more powerful when it invites the imagination to speculate on its true nature. The ambiguity of a mysterious object will always raise questions over an object that is fully known. Consequently, Francis’s poem becomes something akin to a religious phenomenon for someone like Thomas, whose emotions thrive from the quest for the poem, rather than from its recovery.

“[The national artificial intelligence service] knows about a respondent’s life in intimate detail and its memory, of course, is long. The kids like that. They feel important, known and cared for.”

McEwan drives the discourse surrounding the popularity of artificial intelligence by focusing on its capacity to evoke human responses of care and attention. The wording he uses in this passage is reminiscent of the previous passage in which he described the parasocial intimacy between scholars and their research subjects: Where scholars are closer to their subjects than their closest friends, artificial intelligence behaves like a close friend might, holding onto intimate details and using them to provide sharp insight into the user’s life.

“We’re tired of your anger and nostalgia. This is where we live. We’ve got more future than you and that’s what we want to talk about […] We’re not interested in the value of historical thinking and the screwed-up past and we won’t be attending your course.”

This passage concretizes the crisis of the humanities as Thomas speaks of it in his time. Kevin’s speech frames the past as irrelevant knowledge, a reaction born not out of caution or wisdom but negative feelings like anger. His speech also underscores the superiority complex of the youth over their elders. Rather than learn from the past, Kevin’s generation wants to surpass the capabilities of their predecessors, ironically bringing them closer to the reckless generation of the past that Thomas longs to join.

“I didn’t ask him how he knew this because I guessed the answer would be some variant of ‘common knowledge’. I would have liked to challenge him on the Citizens Committees, but I didn’t have the background and I hadn’t been following events. I never do. It was my old problem. I preferred the past.”

In this passage, the novel critiques Thomas’s obsession with the past by exposing the limits of his knowledge. Because he has immersed himself so much in the Blundys’ time and concerns, he is wholly oblivious to the social needs of the world around him. This makes his scholarly work feel even more irrelevant to his time, except that Thomas merely suffers from a lack of purpose. His scholarly work only serves his emotional needs, rather than the needs of his world.

“It was wider than I remembered from photographs. But the same stream, holding a tenuous line between present and past […]

To understand my joy at the discovery, a stranger would have needed to share my obsession. My surprise and delight were misplaced. A hundred years was nothing in the life of a river.”

McEwan advocates for the need to preserve the natural world as a link to the past. Unlike the ruined bridge in Thomas’s extended metaphor, the metaphor of the stream makes Thomas feel communion with Vivien’s memory by bringing him into the very same world that she inhabited a century earlier. To walk the same paths that Vivien did partially satisfies Thomas’s longing to return to an inaccessible path.

Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this was what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending or, Vivien, Rose and I, teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk and the rest.”

As the novel wraps up Thomas’s narrative, it offers an insight into the theme of living with hope in times of crisis by framing Thomas and Rose’s work as proof of humanity’s persistence. Hope, Thomas suggests, is self-sustaining, and his studies of the past show him that Blundy’s generation felt the same way that Thomas’s generation does about the precarious state of the world. The fact that they went on living and survived reassures Thomas that humanity will carry on.

“There can never be any proof. Instead, you choose the story that fits neatly or gives most comfort.”

Vivien’s theory of her father’s continued influence on her life carries this insight, which resonates with the discrepancy between Thomas’s imagined version of her and the reality of Vivien as a historical person. The lack of evidence that enables Thomas to reach the latter Vivien forces him to invent the former, a version of her that addresses Thomas’s emotional needs.

“I’ve kept journals at different times and I have never been able to set down this story until now. The boy left at the station was also forbidden. Nightmares of abandonment have pursued me. I could not confess to my journal, but I could tell Percy.”

Vivien prefaces the story of Diana with this passage, which frames the subtheme of privacy within the context of the archive. Vivien is hinting at the function of the journal as a surrogate audience, an outlet for her experiences that will allow her to feel seen and cared for, much like the national artificial intelligence service in Thomas’s time. However, she also treats the journal like a confessional priest, someone who might accept the disclosure of small failures but judge her for her worst sins with its silence.

“Its central conceit was that an affair or marriage that ends resembles a whole life. He and his lover do well to stop short of blundering senility. After a small-hours brawl they decide on ‘mutual euthanasia’, though they ‘forgot to slaughter the regret’. Now it is too late to go back, for that life is done. Regret is all they have.”

The first poem that Vivien hears Francis read foreshadows Percy’s murder and the state of their relationship when Francis writes the corona. The poem becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that underscores Francis and Vivien’s failure to escape a tragic fate. Where Thomas idealizes the Blundys as great figures of history, this passage exposes their foolishness.

“I had been an unfaithful wife—again. More seriously this time. If Blundy and I had had a night of wild sex, I could not have betrayed Percy more. I had told another man my most important story, my core of shame, the story that my husband could not retain. I came as close to Blundy as I was to my sister.”

Vivien considers the confession of Diana’s story the height of her betrayal against Percy because it establishes intimacy between herself and Francis. The trauma of losing Diana is so powerful that Vivien cannot bring herself to even record it in the confessional of her journal. However, she wants to impress Francis so much that she offers that vulnerability to him, believing it will earn his approval.

“I began to worry about the future of my journals after I was dead. I did not want Peter as an adult to know how weak I was. At the end of my life, I might not have the strength of mind to destroy an extended record of myself. But if I was going to destroy it, no point writing it. Subtly, my journals were becoming the report of a better self. I would have denied it, but over time the entries ceased to be private. I had a reader in mind.”

Vivien expands her earlier discussion on the journal as a surrogate audience by explicitly referring to the external readers who may take an interest in her writing. Where she previously saw the journal as an abstract confessional, the novel evokes the idea of Thomas, a future reader who relies on the journals to reconstruct a knowledge of Vivien’s life. What concerns Vivien in this passage is how the judgment she fears from her journal will extend to the judgment of people whose opinions she might value. Consequently, Vivien starts idealizing herself for the sake of her imagined reader, influencing Thomas’s idea of her.

“He dominated people with his own style of reasoned kindness. There was no scheming. He did not even know he was doing it. He was logical and he cared. It was obvious to him that the one he cared for should do as he suggested. I thought of him then, not as a poet—that was a side issue—but as someone determined to have what he wanted, and I felt a little afraid, and at the same time exhilarated, a mix I had not experienced since my early twenties.”

This passage represents the first time that Vivien registers the sinister nature of Francis’s character, part of the novel’s theme of Dispelling the Myth of the Great Artist. She understands that Francis is naturally controlling and determined to indulge his desires, which does not strike her as inherently amoral, especially since it is balanced out by qualities like kindness and innocence. These lay the foundations for their later dynamic, in which Vivien becomes suspicious of his performative goodness.

“With these thoughts, our project, our life beyond the unnameable ceased to be a pleasant fantasy. It became a lifeline, sensible, necessary, profoundly desirable.”

Vivien increases the stakes of her affair by reversing the dynamics between her relationships with Francis and with Percy. Initially, her affair with Francis was framed as a threat to her marriage to Percy. In this passage, Vivien reframes her affair as the only escape she has from the imprisonment she feels in her marriage. These stakes heighten the severity of Francis’s offer to murder Percy just moments later in the memoir.

“What I felt now in church and whenever I had passed through that station was a longing to comfort the abandoned boy, draw him onto my lap, hold him in my arms and ask his forgiveness. Squashed into the front row of pews with friendly strangers, no one knew that my tears were not for Martha but for my lost girl who would have been my lifelong friend, in her early twenties now, at the dawn of her exciting adult life. The boy on the platform was her sad emissary, her brother come to make me reckon again for what I did.”

In this passage, Vivien clarifies the significance of her encounter with Christopher by drawing an explicit connection to the trauma of losing Diana. Christopher makes Vivien feel guilty about Diana’s death because he reminds her that she has the capacity to act and intervene, saving the lives of those whose lives are more precarious than hers. Having saved Christopher, it is all the more damning that she couldn’t save Diana. This passage becomes crucial to The Value of Failure as a theme.

“Out of that idea grew the thought, or the reverie, of sending Percy’s Guarneri violin into the future with an explanatory page or two describing its maker and how he would have wanted the instrument to end up one day in the possession of a fine professional player.”

In this passage, Vivien invests Percy’s violin with greater symbolic meaning, turning it into a motif for living with hope in times of crisis. Vivien previously looked at the violin as a symbol for the memory of Percy before his illness. Rather than resign herself to the idea that everything she loved about Percy is lost to the past, Vivien sends that symbol into the future, hoping that it will benefit someone whose talent deserves such a finely constructed instrument.

“They make all this fuss, but most of these people haven’t even read the stuff of his they can buy in the bookshops.”

In this passage, Jane points to the irony behind the reputation of “A Corona for Vivien.” She criticizes people for flocking to the missing poem instead of turning to Francis’s published work for an alternative in the poem’s absence. The latter, she implies, can help to satisfy what curiosity exists for what can never be obtained. Instead, people are driven more by mystery than by resolution.

“If there is to be a confession, it will be on my terms. No hiding in a mist of poetics, no symbolic figures, no buried meanings. What I’ve hoped for is the clarity Albert Camus proposed for troubled times. I should be among the last to say it, but there are occasions when prose must eclipse poetry. The verdict is clear. Francis and I deserve to be hanged, preferably from the same gallows, one straight after the other. I should go first.”

In this passage, Vivien explicates that the intention behind her memoir is to set the historical record straight and acknowledge her true legacy. Rather than allow herself to become known by association to Francis, Vivien reveals herself to the world on her own terms, even if it means her implication in the crime of Percy’s murder. This suggests that Vivien embodies the value of failure, taking responsibility for her inaction in order to make up for her past mistakes.