46 pages • 1 hour read
Ian McEwanLessons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Significance of Lessons and Teaching
Content Warning: The source text depicts a nonconsensual sexual and romantic relationship between a minor and an adult.
Lessons and teaching play a key role in the relationships between characters in the novel. For example, Roland recalls how, when he was nine, his father “taught [him] how to dive and hold his breath under water for half a minute and how to swim the crawl” (47). His father also taught him Morse code, and how to fire a rifle. Roland’s father bonds with him by teaching him certain skills.
Additionally, the defining romantic and erotic relationship of Roland’s life is characterized by the student-teacher dynamic. Roland’s relationship with Cornell begins with her teaching him piano, and these lessons continue to dominate the way Roland interacts with her. In this regard, “lessons” are not necessarily healthy or conducive to psychological growth. Cornell uses her role as teacher, and the practice of teaching itself, to establish a hold over Roland and to groom and manipulate him. As the narrative says, “she had seeded herself into the fine grain not only of his psyche but of his biology” (66).
McEwan shows how teaching is not just a way of giving someone skills that they can use once the lessons are over. It can also be a way of imprinting certain desires and ways of thinking upon the student that define and constrict them throughout their lives. Certainly, this is how teaching Roland, whether intentionally or not, operates for Cornell.
Cornell eroticizes teaching and its power dynamics, and gives the sexual a pedagogical structure. As Roland says, when in an explicitly sexual relationship with Cornell, “a beautiful woman […] was teaching him how to love, how to touch her, how to build slowly” (145). For this reason, sex and teaching, or being taught, become inextricably intertwined for Roland. It is no surprise that Roland’s next significant relationship, with Alissa, begins with her teaching him German.
However, not all lessons in Lessons are either literal or overtly sexual. Roland observes, looking back on his childhood, how “his father had sent him 2,000 miles away from his mother to learn” (10). On a literal level, Roland is referring to the formal teaching he would get at his new school. On another level, this alludes to how Roland, in being sent away, would be getting a salutary life lesson. He would be taught not only about survival and independence but about the inevitability of loss and heartbreak.
Likewise, the question of such figurative life lessons is broached at the novel’s end. Looking back on his life, at 74 and after having burned his journals, Roland wonders whether he has learned anything from life. He concludes, speaking with his granddaughter, that “in the liberated moment he thought that he hadn’t learned a thing” (482). Paradoxically and against his upbringing, Roland learns momentarily the importance of letting go, and of not trying to impose on experience any clear moral or existential meaning.
The Intertwining of History with Personal Narratives
In the novel, historical events are linked with the personal. Reflecting on the impact of historical events on his life, Roland observes, “If Colonel Nasser had not nationalised the Suez Canal, and if British elites were not still immersed in dreams of empire,” then he “would not have spent a rapturous week of play in a military camp” (160). The Suez Canal crisis in 1956 led to fear among the British families in Libya that there would be reprisals from the locals. In turn this led Roland and his parents to live briefly on a military base, which gave Roland a newfound sense of freedom and independence.
Likewise, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 led to another intense personal experience for Roland. As Roland notes, “if Khrushchev had not placed nuclear missiles on Cuba and Kennedy had not ordered a naval blockade of the island,” he “would not have biked to Erwarton, to Miriam’s cottage” (157). Fear of death, caused by impending nuclear war, led Roland to make a momentous decision changing the course of his life. History and historical events directly impacted the most significant details of his own personal narrative.
However, it does not necessarily follow that individuals are thereby involved in history. The influence of history on one’s life, in other words, does not mean that one is an active agent in history. This contradiction troubles Roland throughout Lessons, especially in connection with his parents’ generation. As Roland says, his father “had seen the slaughter of civilians and soldiers during the retreat […] to the Dunkirk beaches. He had taken three bullets in the legs from a German machine gun” (104). His father, like so many others at the time, had played an active role in history, fighting for something. This is also symbolized in the novel by the courage of the White Rose group Jane investigates. They had sacrificed their lives to confront Nazi tyranny.
In contrast, Roland’s relationship to history remains essentially passive. Even though his generation “had had all the historical luck and all the chances” (105), he is fated to a comfortable life with little chance for active historical participation. Roland, in his own way, tries to address this. He smuggles Western music and books into East Germany for a couple he knows. He attempts to subvert the East German regime and risks himself in the process. However, he also comes to see that this is a “self-loving exercise in virtue” (176), which is not really dangerous. It also has little bearing on the couple’s eventual arrest. Like Roland’s standing on the spot where the Berlin Wall no-man’s land used to be, Roland is belatedly and futilely trying to become part of a struggle that is not his own. Instead, he is condemned to the role of a historical spectator. As seen by his journal entries and dinner party discussions about politics, he is fated to be the retrospective bystander, perpetually talking and writing as a substitute for actual involvement.
Writing as a Means to Reveal and Conceal Truth
Writing serves a powerful purpose throughout the novel. For example, when researching the pamphlets of the White Rose group, Jane records in her notebooks her response to one of their opening lines—“Nothing is so dishonorable in a civilized nation as to permit itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by a reckless clique” (86). Jane finds these lines deeply inspiring. She senses in them “a passion for intellectual freedom” and likens reading them to “falling in love” (86).
Writing can be a way of resisting established thought and power and of asserting freedom and independence. For example, the sixth-formers at Roland’s school “read a prepared statement” to resist their school’s tacit endorsement of nuclear weapons (116). As in Jane’s case with the pamphlets, good writing can inspire others to assert their own freedom through writing in turn.
Yet if writing can be used to reveal the truth, and to inspire understanding between people, it can also be a way to close down truth and understanding. This is shown in Roland’s mother’s letters to him while at school— “She hoped he enjoyed the school trip. She hoped his team would win the next game too. She was glad it didn’t rain” (117). Such writing expresses nothing meaningful, and willfully conceals the true pain of Roland’s separation from his mother behind banalities. This is also true of the notes that Alissa later sends Roland. One of these reads: “Dear Roland, Away from you both = physical pain… But I know mthrhd [motherhood] would’ve sunk me […] Please don’t phone” (73). On the surface this message appears to reveal her feelings and gives an explanation for her actions. The subtext, though, especially evidenced in her unnecessary use of abbreviations, is that she no longer has time for Roland or Lawrence. She wants to be free of the obligation to communicate with them and is confirming that any further relationship or discussion regarding this is over.
More ambiguous is the case of Alissa’s novels. On one level, if Roland’s descriptions of them are to be believed, they are masterful works of prose, “crisp, artful, beautiful” and reveal “broad historical awareness” tackling profound and pressing issues (241). Yet at the same time they conceal or distort much about her relationships, or lack of them, with others. Her memoir of her childhood, In Murnau, unfairly casts her mother as resentful and loveless. Meanwhile, her other novels contain no trace of Roland or Lawrence at all, except for a late work, Her Slow Reduction. This novel, despite her insistence otherwise, insinuates that a husband in London similar to Roland may have beaten her. Like Roland’s journals, which “did not bring any fresh understanding of his life” (473), such writing can be as much a vehicle to evade the truth about oneself and others as it is to confront it.
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