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Narrative Space in Ian Mcewan's Saturday

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Narrative Space in Ian Mcewan's Saturday FNS 2018; 4(2): 359–373 Alenka Koron* Narrative space in Ian McEwan’s Saturday: A narratological perspective https://doi.org/10.1515/fns-2018-0028 Abstract: Although the work of Ian McEwan, one of the most important modern British writers, has been quite thoroughly researched, the narrative space was rarely the subject of narratological treatment. This article tackles a close reading of McEwan’s novel Saturday from a narratological perspective testing the applic- ability of a series of spatial categories systematized by Marie-Laure Ryan in the already existing narratological tradition and in her own research in narrative space. At the macro level of the story, the circular structure of the novel and the concepts of space as a container and space as a network are being shown and so is the use of local names. In the foreground there is a discussion of the five fundamental levels of narrative space (spatial frames, setting, story space and spaces of intertextuality, storyworld, narrative universe), followed by the treat- ment of textualization at the micro level (perspectivism and aperspectivism, map, and tour, and the lived experience of space). The analysis of space representation in Saturday eventually makes it possible to conclude that McEwan promotes the conception of space that became prominent within the spatial turn in postmodern humanities. Keywords: Marie-Laure Ryan, postmodernism, spatial turn Ian McEwan is considered one of the most important contemporary British writers. His work has attracted widespread scholarly interest both with its the- matic diversity and the author’s mastery of the adopted literary techniques and strategies. This can also be said of the novel Saturday, which, on 280 pages, records 24 hours in the life of its central character, with the focus remaining on the protagonist’s consciousness and his interactions with the world, in spite of a number of incidents and occasional dramatic action. Literary critics have high- lighted some important elements in Saturday, which is regarded as a mature work *Corresponding author: Alenka Koron, Institute of Slovene Literature and Literary Studies at the ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana (Research Centre of Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia), E-Mail: [email protected] 360 Alenka Koron that “provides the most affirmative ending of McEwan’s novels” (Möller 2011: 190): Dominic Head, for example, made reference to a “global political context that will surely endure” (Head 2007: 180), but also analysed other key themes in the text (the Two Cultures Debate, the issue of literature and science), as well as its stylistic and technical features (Head 2007: 184–208); in her article “Ian McEwan’s Modernist Time”, Laura Marcus reflected on time and the experience of temporality, while Sebastian Groes interpreted the author’s representation of a modern metropolis as a complex “meditation on the state of the world in the early 21st century” (Groes 2009: 99); Swantje Möller found the author’s novels, includ- ing Saturday,tobe“fictional expressions of an ethics of alterity” (Möller 2011: 187); in her paper “Ian McEwan’s Neurological Novel”, Jane F. Thraikill inter- preted Saturday as a neurological novel; having adopted narratological analysis in her study “Narrative Temporality and Slowed Scene: The Interaction of Event and Thought Representation in Ian McEwan’s Fiction”, Hannah Courtney demon- strated the presence and use of slowed scene in Saturday, as well as in certain other works; Marco Caracciolo treated the effectiveness of the phenomenological metaphor in communicating the character’s experiences to the readers; finally, in Beyond the Archive; Memory, Narrative and the Autobiographical Process (Carac- ciolo 2013: 129–169), Jens Brockmeier investigated Saturday as a model example of an alternative memory model that he called an autobiographical process. This list of scholarly treatments of Saturday by literary critics is, of course, by no means exhaustive. Initial exposure is even given to the problem of space and spatiality in the novel (see Shen & Cheng 2016; Lin 2013), a topic that has generally been neglected when compared to the treatment of time in narrative (Buchholz & Jahn 2005: 551). The secondary position taken by analyses of narra- tive space relative to analyses of time is somewhat surprising given that space and time, as a priori forms of perception, are the two basic categories that structure human experience in Kant’s philosophy. And according to Monika Fludernik (1996), experience is at the heart of each and every narrative. However, narrative space, as an umbrella term for settings, interiors and exteriors, cities, landscapes and the natural environment, was long regarded primarily as a back- drop for literary characters and their actions, which is why literary scholarship has not developed as many categories for spatial analysis as for representations of time (Ryan, Foote & Azaryahu 2016: 16–7). Nonetheless, in literary criticism in general and narratology in particular, space has not been completely overlooked (Dennerlein 2009: 13–47, 210–17). The foundations for the analysis of space and its representations were established by immanent interpretation, the investiga- tion of topoi, and thematology, which, inter alia, treated nature motifs in Roman- ticism and the history of spatial matter and motifs, tradition-related allusions to natural processes, locus amoenus, etc. The tradition was further developed by Narrative space in Ian McEwan’s Saturday 361 semiotics, in particular, and by various phenomenological approaches (see Nün- ning 2004), some of which also inspired narratology. Narrative space is a polysemic phenomenon (see Parker 2012/2014) and is not easily defined, as it quickly leads to metaphorical or excessively abstract inter- pretations. However, it does seem that the following frequently cited definition has succeeded in avoiding this pitfall: “Narrative space is the environment in which story-internal characters move and live” (Buchholz & Jahn 2005: 552; Ryan, Foote & Azaryahu 2016: 7). Space as the physical environment of narrative has attracted the most attention in narratology, which has addressed its textual aspects – the question of how narrative tools are used to guide the reader to the perception of space – as well as the symbolic and functional aspects of space that affect its role in plot. Space involves the following features of fictional settings (which can also exhibit features of real-world referents) and the placement of characters in individual scenes: location, position, arrangement, distance, direc- tion, orientation and movement. The notion of place, which denotes settings transformed by human activity and existence, is also in use, as is the related concept of sense of place, which refers to the emotional bonds that people develop in relation to certain locations, cities or wider (social) environments. In what follows, the present study considers space in McEwan’s Saturday from the narratological perspective, drawing mainly on Marie-Laure Ryan’s arti- cle “Space” in the Handbook of Narratology, and on Chapter 2 of the collective monograph Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative, which is also largely Ryan’s work (Ryan, Foote & Azaryahu 2016: 15). In both contributions, Ryan relied on her own research on the theory of possible worlds and a close reading of Joyce’s Eveline, as well as on newly systematised literary and narrative theoretical find- ings regarding space in narrative. Before undertaking the analysis, a brief sum- mary of the story of the novel is provided. With mostly internally focused narration, written predominantly in the pre- sent tense and in free indirect discourse, Saturday depicts the thoughts and actions of its protagonist, the well-off upper-middle-class neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, as he moves through his day from the early morning hours of Saturday, 15 February 2003, to approximately the same time the next day. The story is set in London on the day of the largest protest in British history, in which over a million people marched against the government’s planned invasion of Iraq. These “ex- ternal”, historical events constantly invade Perowne’s calm, well-protected “in- ner” world in various ways, via his own thoughts, media messages and their commentaries, or debates with other characters, disrupting his usual feelings of security. Perowne’s day starts before dawn, when he suddenly wakes up in very good spirits but soon after witnesses a burning plane attempting an emergency landing from the bedroom window of his house in Fitzrovia, the image of which is 362 Alenka Koron based on McEwan’s private home (Groes 2009: 101). He initially thinks that it might be a terrorist attack, but it later turns out it was just a manageable technical failure on a Russian cargo plane. After chatting with his son Theo, he makes love to his wife Rosalind and plans a relaxed day off with his usual game of squash at the club. On his way through London, however, his usual route is changed due to the anti-war protests and, having driven across a road sealed off for protests, he is involved in a minor car accident. After his game of squash, he pays a visit to his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and lives in an old people’s home, and attends his son’s blues band concert. He then returns home for a family gathering at which his daughter Daisy and father-in-law John Grammaticus are also present. The dark presentiments that have haunted Perowne throughout the day as a result of the morning scene with the burning plane and the incidents that followed materialise when Rosalind arrives home. At that point, the whole family is taken hostage by the thug Baxter, the driver of the second car involved in the morning accident, whom Perowne has diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Baxter is aided by his sidekick Nigel. The family successfully defend themselves against the intruders, but just a few hours later Perowne is called in to operate on Baxter, the very man with whom he had got into a conflict that morning and who had threatened his entire family in the evening.
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