Normal Anomaliler: Ian McEwan içinde sadomazoşist Şiddet tasviri Strangers Comfort (Seri B)

Violence and death, being in one form or another a recurrent feature of every one of the contemporary English writer Ian McEwan's novels, have long been identified as the hallmarks of his work. Criticism of his work, however, has tended to screen off the many ways in which his fiction transcends the mere representation of violence to probe its innateness in all human beings. This paper aims to offer a critical study of McEwan's second novel The Comfort of Strangers. I postulate that literary critics' frequent reduction of McEwan's work to the topoi of violence and sex has typecast him as a writer of disturbing, salacious fiction; consequently, his thought-provoking engagement with cultural questions has more often than not gone unexamined. Arguing that McEwan writes to dissect and criticise contemporary culture, I offer a reading of one of his novels as a literary intervention into a cultural debate. I explore McEwan's penetrating analysis in The Comfort of Strangers of sado-masochism as a patriarchal distortion of sexual pleasure with brutal paradigms of dominance and subservience. By shifting the emphasis to McEwan's depiction of these abnormalities as potentialities in all human beings, I refute the view of critics such as Douglas Dunn, who argues that McEwan's novel assigns to the reader the "unwilling role of voyeur of abnormality". I conclude that violence and sex in McEwan's novel serve as a means: the end is to impart self-knowledge, to make readers more conscious of their desires, and ultimately more in control of their own predilection for violence.