With Ian McEwan and Saturday, we are straying across the Atlantic to provide a point of comparison to the American fiction we're reading this quarter. McEwan, like Roth, has been fairly prolific. Born in 1948, he has produced not only Saturday (2005) and the award-winning Atonement (2001), but also a long list of earlier works that earned him the title of "Ian Macabre." In The Cement Garden (1978), Enduring Love (1997), and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan explores themes such as incest and the "enduring" love of a stalker for his prey. Also manifest in these early works is McEwan's growing preoccupation with the battle between reason and unreason, science and religion, and chaos and ethics--themes that will find their culmination in the work we'll be reading for class.In many ways, McEwan's career, and particularly his work in Saturday, illustrate a return to ethics and a new humanism in twenty-first century letters. Hailed as one of the first great works composed subsequent to 9-11, Saturday has also consistently come under fire for its adherence to the tenets of formal realism and its reliance on traditional humanistic discourse as an antidote to the "barbarism" of the terrorists' threat. How might we read McEwan's rendering of the life of Perowne? What does the style of the novel and its interest in science and reason say about McEwan's discursive preoccupations? What does it say about the rupture that terror can create in the everyday? Is it, as Banville argues, a somewhat conservative novel? Can a novel be conservative?
With Saturday, Ian McEwan gives us an interesting logic problem. Are we, like Rosalind, to hold Baxter responsible for his crimes? Or are we, like Henry, expected to forgive/absolve Baxter his responsibility. If, as McEwan's neurosurgeon asserts, there is no soul, only code, only "genotype, the modern variant of a soul" (289), then what becomes of free will? It's a dilemma that George Saunders tackles in his essay "Thought Experiment," from his essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead, 2007). Like McEwan's narrator, he asserts that human nature is decided at conception, that our innate abilities and difficulties are "ceded to us at the moment that sperm meets egg" (172).
ReplyDeleteSuch talk can be frustrating, in both the essay and the novel, because, in narrative, as in life, we've been trained to look for someone to blame when bad things happen, and we want people to take responsibility for their actions. But perhaps McEwan isn't simply letting Baxter off the hook for what he's done. Perhaps Saunders can better articulate, with wit, if didacticism, the point that I think McEwan means to make in his fictional narrative. Saunders writes: "The upshot of all of this is not a passive moral relativism that makes the bearer incapable of action in the world. If you repeatedly come to my house and drive your truck over my chickens, I had better get you arrested...or elevate my chickens. But I'd contend that my ability to protect my chickens actually improves as I realize that your desire to flatten my chickens is organic and comes out of somewhere and is not unmotivated or even objectively evil--it is as undeniable to who you are, at that instant, as is your hair color...But dropping the idea that your actions are Evil, and that you are Monstrous, I enter a new moral space, in which the emphasis is on seeing with clarity, rather than judging; on acting in the most effective way (that is, the way that most radically and permanently protects my chickens), rather than on constructing and punishing a Monster" (172).
To me, that sounds just about right.
-Jamie