Physicality and Repetition in Ian Mcewan's Saturday
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Keeping the History from Oblivion : Physicality and Repetition in Ian McEwan’s Saturday Faculty of Law, Department of Politics Yoshikatsu TSUJI 1 Introduction On 1 5t h September in 2001, Ian McEwan commented on 9/11 i n the article of T he G ua rdi a n, en tit led " O nly L ov e and Then Oblivi on: Love Was All They Had to Set against Their Murderers": If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is h ard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality. In this article , McEw an i nsi st s on the significance of sympathy to imagine oneself “into the thought and feeling of” the other. Referring to the act of narrating in conversation with David Lynn , he rephrases it a s “mapping out of other minds and the invitation to the reader to step into those other minds ” (51 ). Some critics paraphrase it in terms of “penetration” and McEwa n once remarked “penetration into other consciousness ” i n a n article, which is not available now. 1 His use of “penetration” for sympathy is w ort h attention in the sense that this word frequently mea ns the sexual intercourse. 2 In this respect , t hree of McEwan’s works , published before and after 9/ 11 , a re noteworthy. Those works describ e penetration s int o ot her s i n a lit eral sense, and it is significant t ha t all penetrations are not accomplished. T hese t hree works are At onem ent (2 00 1), Sat urda y (2005), and On Chesil Beach (20 07 ). 2 The remarkable point of the motif of penetration is that it is represented as the sexual penetration between men a nd w om en who belong to different class es: Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis in At onement, Baxter and Daisy Perowne in Sat urday , a nd Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting in On Chesil Beach . Men’s st at us i s always lower than w omen ’s. Robbie is a son of a serv ant for the Tallis es. Baxter is a street gang st er, while Daisy is an Ox ford -educa ted poet. Edward is a son of the headmaster of a primary school, while Florence is a gifted violinist , whose father is a prosperous businessman and whose mother is a l ect ure r i n phil osophy. In relation to the recurrent motif of penetration, “beach” functions as the boundary between two spheres i n al l three works . In Atonem ent , one of the protagonists, Robbie, has bitter experience on the beach of Dunkirk and goes across the Channel. In Sa t urday , a s will be referred to later, Matthew Arnold ’s well -know n poem entitled “Dover Beach” plays an important role. As t he ti tl e apparently shows , On Chesil Beach use s a seashore as the setting where i t s principal characters, Edward and 3 Florence, spend their wedding ni ght. T hus, these three works foreg round the boundary. Considering McEwan’s comment about 9/11, these three works can be regarded as attempts to search for the possibil i ty of penetration into others by way of lite rature. However, they ca n also be regarded as a paradoxical depi ct ing of the impossibility in that they describe failures of physical penetrations. The physicality is , of course, connected with the motif of sexual penetrations, a nd is opposite to the menta l penetration, on w hi ch McEw an i nsi st s in his comment on 9/11. Just before 9/11, McEwan’s his ninth nove l, At onem ent , wa s published, and it took four more y ears for him to publish his next novel. Between t hese w orks, t he Iraq wa r b roke out . Thus hi s preoccupation with “the core of our humanity” is condensed into his tenth novel , Sat urday, w hose scene is set in London , w here people are in the grip of anxious fear of attacks by terrorist s. I n Sat urday, w e ca n see t he dynamics of penetration t ha t occ urs i n the boundary between two opposite element, such as individual and society, humanities and science, reality and fiction, and so on. Sat urday i s the story of Henry Perowne’s one -da y ex peri ence, and is narrated by an omniscient narrator in the thi rd pe rson, i n t he present tense. T hi s day can be identified as 15th February 2003, for a huge demonstration that took place act ually on the very day in London is described in the novel. 4 Henry Perowne is a ne urosurgeon. This novel describes hi s off da y, which includes a regular squash game with his colleague, an accidental encounter with a diseased thug, the family meeting t o celeb ra te his daughter’s publication of a collection of her poem s enti tled My Saucy Bark , a nd the i ntrusion into the party by gan g st ers. Entering the mind of others —or penetrating the wall of the mind of other people —is a significant theme of Sa turday . T hi s can be seen not only in the story but also in the narrative st ruct ure . At the level of story, Perowne unconsciously tries to imagine what others think , throughout the novel . Na rra ti ng i n the novel is the same act in this sense. While Perowne uses his medical knowledge to investigate others’ mind s, the narrator’s literary description is carried out by entering Perowne’s mind and by reporting what he is thinking. It is clear that Perowne’s entering the mind of others and the narrator’s “ penetration ” i nt o the protagonist ’s mi nd constitute the opposit ional relationship in Sat urda y. However, as mentioned above, the physicality is also significant factor. Considering not only the me ntal but also the physical lea ds to bringing the hidden message of McEwan to light. The present paper aims to investigate t he meaning of the physicality a nd t he repeti tion , a nd it fina lly t urn s out to be the attempt to explore the role of the novel for the history that is on the verge of obli vion. 5 1 . Physicality, Intertextuality, and the Wa rs The physical is the core of the world for Perowne and it connects to his sense of value in literature: They [ Anna Karenina a nd Madame Bovary ] had the virtue, at least, of representing a recognizable physical reality, which could not be said for the so -called magical realist she [Daisy] opted to study in her final year. (67) In this passage, there is also a denouncement for the magical realist, which is regarded as the opposition against t he reali st who represents “a recognizable physical reality” in the novels. Perowne describes the no vels of magical realists as follows: In more than one, heroes and heroines were born with or sprouted wings — a symbol, in Daisy’s term, of their liminality; naturally, learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration. (67) The motif of “wings” is regarded as the representative of magical realism here. Wings enable “heroes or heroines” to fly, namely, to be against the law of gravity. Gravity in McEwan’s work is identical with the principle of reali ty. For instance, P et er, t he protagonist in The D ay dream er 6 (19 94 ), invents a kind of weightless environment simulator i n a da y dre am, which is offered as a tale within t he novel . As P eter Childs points out, it is noteworthy that this novel is constituted by seven interlinked stories of “ out -of-body experience” (149). Am st erdam (1998) also has a li t t le reference to the weightless environment simulator. It appears as the unrealized devi ce in the nov el . In both novels, the weightlessness is connected to the opposition of reality. On the contrary, in Sa turda y , the phrase “the iron weight of the actual” (168) confirms the connection bet w een g ravity and the principle of rea lity. In relation to the wings, flying, and gravity, height is also an essential motif in McEwan’s works. F rom the early part of this novel, height is connected to the omniscient or the fantastic . Starting this novel with Perowne’s looking down on the square, McEwan sets the one -wa y relationship between the seer and the seen. It also appears in other McEwan’s w orks. For instance, i n At onem ent, the innocent Bryony on the first floor looks down on the exchange between her sister Cecilia and Robbie, who a re i n the ga rden , a nd mistakenly regards it as a n assault upon Cecilia by Robbi e. Bryony ma kes up t he st ory b ase d on the misunderstanding , which sends Robbie to jail . Also at the end of Sat urday, Perow ne stands beside t he window and reflect s upon his Saturday, w hile [h]e feel s himself turning on a giant wheel, like the Eye on 7 the south bank of the Thames, just about to arrive at the highest point – he’s poised on a hinge of perception, before the drop, and he can see ahead calmly.