‘The Tangled Confluence’: Hybrid Accounts of Madness in Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity and Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love

Abstract

Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity and Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love both feature attempts by arch rationalists to apprehend, even understand insanity, which constantly threatens to overturn all established systems of knowledge and belief. Madness is often depicted by Self’s and McEwan’s narrators as a state of unusual confluence, a coexistence of conflicting impulses and ideas, leading them to combine different perspectives or approaches in their narratives, especially those of science and literature. This paper focuses on the subversive strategies of confluence enacted in both works, where various disciplines both converge and conflict over the depiction of insanity; where hybrid, even dialogic narratives attempt to accommodate such a complex and multi-faceted experience, yet also reflect an ever-growing tension between the yearning for stable knowledge and the awareness that madness lays bare some of the flaws in our epistemological categories.

Keywords

• Ian McEwan
• Will Self
• madness
• genre
• hybridity
• science