“THERE’S GRANDEUR IN THIS VIEW OF LIFE”:

UNDERSTANDING THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SATURDAY, 

THE CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS DESIGNED BY IAN MCEWAN in SATURDAY (PP. 237-248)



Introduction

Throughout the classes, Henry Perowne has been viewed as the metaphor of the (anti-)terrorist the United State of America, the guilty Western society, the privileged Londoner, the insomniac London city, science, and so forth. In “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Elizabeth Kowalseski Wallace claims that “Limited in imagination, committed to a rationalism that blocks his empathy and impedes his vision, Henry fails to become truly cosmopolitan” (479). According to Dictionary.com, cosmopolitan means “a person who is free from local, provincial, or national bias or attachment; citizen of the world; cosmopolite.” As the synonyms of this word are worldly-wise, well-traveled, aware, mature, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated and so on—Henry Perowne, in Wallace’s eyes, appears to be a short-sighted adult whose irrationality has not been cultivated. In “‘Plastic Fork in Hand’: Reading as a Tool of Ethical Repair in Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Teresa Winterhalter raises a sympathetic aspect on Henry’s lack by explaining, “He has lived for many years by wrapping himself in the narrative of science, and since it has supported him as well, to simply reject it would require an extremely unnatural gesture, much like changing his spots” (357). Moreover, standing on Henry’s angle, Winterhalter further claims, “Science is his bastion against impending bereavement and emotional outpouring, but his years in the surgical theater also show him that science can save lives” (357). Regarding Henry’s obsession with science, in “A Melodiousness at Odds with Pessimism: Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Christina Root points out that in the novel, “McEwan focuses not on sensitive scientists open to literature’s attraction, but on men who are deaf to anything but the science they espouse and want others to adopt” (63). However, if were not for this specific setting, it would not be so obvious that “By the centrality it gives to literature’s capacity to adumbrate dimensions of reality not available to the rational discourses of scientific explanation” (Root 63). This crafted plots and settings in the novel are by all means the manipulation of the author. As readers, we are all guided into a controlled hallucination, a reality, or a kind of consciousness that is crafted by Ian McEwan.

 

McEwan’s Controlled Hallucination: The Faith-Based Neuroscience

Referring to Anil Seth’s speech called “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality” at TED 2017, we understand that the experience of being a self/you and our experiences of the world are kinds of controlled hallucinations generated by our brains: “we predict ourselves into existence” (14:13). This comes to explain why Henry would think that “Once a patient is draped up, the sense of a personality, an individual in the theatre, disappears” (248). Only when the head bandage is in place and secured, the neurosurgeon Henry assumes that this is the stage at which the patient’s identity is restored, when a small area of violently revealed brain is returned to the possession of the entire person” (256). For Henry, this process marks “a return to life” (256). Thus, in Henry’s mind, penetrating the skull relatively comes to penetrate one’s self or personal identity (depended on consciousness) and life. As Henry recalls, neurosurgeons are not what “those medics who deal not with the brain, but only with the mind, with the disease of consciousness” think of: that neurosurgeons “are blundering arrogant fools with blunt instruments, bone-setters let loose upon the most complex object in the known universe” (86). On the contrary, Henry sees neuroscience as a kind of “recent adventure,” in which by penetrating the skull, “the vast ignorance of the brain, and the mind [consciousness], and the relation between the two” will be diminished (86). What lies beneath this, as Henry assumes, is “medical science, the wonders it performs [and] the faith it inspires” (85). Henry’s faith towards medical science can be referred to the description below:


Over decades, as long as the scientists and the institutions remain in place, the explanations will refine themselves in to an irrefutable truth about consciousness. It’s already happening, the work is being done in laboratories not far from this theatre, and the journey will be completed, Henry’s certain of it. That’s the only kind of faith he has. There’s grandeur in this view of life. (255; underline mine)


Based on this faith, Henry is able to give consciousness a scientific explanation: an “inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre” (254-5). Similarly, Anil Seth explains that there are two kinds of consciousness: “There are experiences of the world around us, full of sights, sounds and smells, there’s multisensory, panoramic, 3D, fully immersive inner movie. And then there’s conscious self. The specific experience of being you or being me. The lead character in this inner movie, and probably the aspect of consciousness we all cling to most tightly” (03:51).


Supposedly, these well-proved explanations serve as one of the elements of Henry’s faith. However, as Henry has already noticed, there is something that his faith is incapable of upholding. For instance, the fundamental wonder “Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes consciousness?” (255). This fundamental wonder is what medical science is incapable of explaining, as it covers not only the field of medical science but also philosophy, archeology, geography, literature and so forth to answer the question. Also, drawing on Henry’s description that “If only the mayor was right, that penetrating the skull brings into view not the brain but the mind. Then within the hour he, Perowne, might understand a lot more about Baxter; and after a lifetime’s routine procedures would be among the wisest men on earth” (243), Henry acknowledges the fact that penetrating the skull does not make him a person who can read others’ minds. The mental “life” of Baxter, as Henry knows, is saved by the melodiousness of “Dover Beach.”


Understanding the Consciousness of Saturday

In “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England,” Michael L. Ross cites Catherine Deveney’s report, pointing out that the consciousness of Daisy and Henry are in fact derived from Ian McEwan’s consciousness:


Henry rows with his daughter, Daisy, about the war [in Iraq]. It was, says McEwan, the conversation he had within himself. “I was very torn by it, so she represents one bit of me and Henry represents some other bit. It was like two voices in my head.” (91; underline mine)


The debate between the radical humanist Daisy and the so-called rationalist Henry about the Iraq war is nothing but another controlled reality that McEwan designs in order to hallucinate the reader. The reason underneath this setting, as I suppose, is to urge the reader to realize that neither science nor literature can come out with a better solution by itself. As Root claims, “The novel as a whole suggest that the debate between literature and science cannot be resolved simply by one side’s winning the argument or by the collapse of literature into science” (64). There is always a limitation or blindness in each field/consciousness in the meaning-making of the universe. This interdependency between each field/consciousness is emphasized by Seth at the end of his talk:


Finally, our own individual inner universe, our way of being conscious, is just one possible way of being conscious. And even human consciousness generally—it’s just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses. Our individual self and worlds are unique to each of us, but they’re all grounded in biological mechanisms shared with many other living creatures. (15:44; underline mine)


While the divergence of McEwan’s consciousness represents the separation of different disciplinary fields among the society, the convergence of his consciousness comes to stress the interdependent relationship between each field. In Saturday, we can see the connection between (1) neuroscience and archeology/geology, (2) archeology/anthropology and literature, (3) literature and music, and so forth. The connection between (1) neuroscience and archeology/geology can be referred to the descriptions below:


<Archeology>

The artists had drilled through this skull of brick to discover the mind of ancient Rome. (243; underline mine)

This Roman Giulio may be just like the admirable boiler-suited types he saw in the gloomy chambers of the Domus Aurea, dabbing away at mosaic tiles with their toothbrushes – archeology is an honourable profession. (243; underline mine)


<Neuroscience>

In its centre, sitting right on that midline, is shattered bone, where the skull has partially caved in. Right below that depressed fracture, vulnerable to the sharp edges of displaced bone tilted like tectonic plate, runs a major blood vessel, the superior sagittal sinus. It extends along the fold – the flax – where the two hemispheres meet, and it’s the major vein draining blood away from the brain. (248; underline mine)

But the limits of the art, of neurosurgery as it stands today, are plain enough: faced with these unknown codes, this dense and brilliant circuitry, he and his colleagues offer only brilliant plumbing. (255; underline mine)


Archeology is a study of human activity through the recovery of material culture. Like, geologist, archeologist seeks “to understand the past through remains that are often found under the surface of the earth” (Deveauxe, 2013). However, archeology “tends to focus on a more recent past than geology.” Because of this smaller time scale, archeology “occurs on a much smaller scale than geology so everything about the field is likewise scaled down, allowing for more minute observations. Calling it “recent adventure,” the neurosurgeon Henry focuses only the brain of the human body, searching for a solution through penetrating the skull. As to the case of Baxter, the discovery of Baxter’s bleeding—“so much blood escapes, you can see to make a repair” (248)—resembles the discovery of the ancient plumbing system by archeologists.[1] Furthermore, the “toothbrushes” used by archeologists resemble the tools used by neurosurgeons to operate the brain.


Furthermore, McEwan stresses the interdependence between (2) archeology/anthropology[2] and literature by claiming,


As a defense of literature’s continued relevance, McEwan argues for it as a kind of fossil record of consciousness, substituting for the now-vanished tribes anthropologists used to study. He writes, “On our crowded planet, we are no longer able to visit Stone Age peoples untouched by modern times. Mead and her contemporaries would never have wanted to put the question—What is that we hold in common with such people?—and anthropologists no longer have the opportunity of the first contact. We can, however, reach to our bookshelves. Literature must be our anthropology” (“Literature, Science, and Human Nature” 17-18; qtd. in Roots 63; underline mine)


As to the connection between (3) literature and music, we can trace back to Henry’s recalling of Daisy’s reading lists and his response on Dover Beach during Baxter’s invasion:


So far, Daisy’s reading lists have persuaded him that fiction is too humanly flawed, too sprawling and hit-and-miss to inspire uncomplicated wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity, of the impossible dazzlingly achieved. Perhaps only music has such purity. (68; underline mine)


…it’s through Baxter’s ears that he hears the sea’s ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.’ It rings like a musical curse. The plea to be true to one another sounds hopeless in the absence of joy or love or light or peace or ‘help for pain.’…The poem’s melodiousness he decides, is at odds with its pessimism. (222; underline mine)


The interconnectedness between archeology, literature, neuroscience, music and so on leads us to think that after all, McEwan’s attempt in Saturday is to re-emphasize the importance of “crossing”—cross-cultural experiences, the clashing of civilizations, cross-boundary fields—and the “interdependence” between each culture, society, and field in our universe. In the novel, the car clash resembles the clashing of high and low culture within the same society. The invasion of Baxter represents the invasion of insecurity/(Islamic) terrorism while Henry’s attempt to induce Baxter in believing his lie symbolizes another kind of violence based on authority (West). Thus, the operation of Baxter by Henry serves as a redemptive behavior or a release of guilt. To Henry, metaphorically, the operation of Baxter’s brain resembles a kind of cross-cultural experience. As Henry claims,


He’s looking down at a portion of Baxter’s brain. He can easily convince himself that it’s familiar territory, a kind of homeland, with its low hills and enfolded valleys of the sulci, each with a name and imputed function, as known to him as his own house. Just to the left of the midline, running laterally away out of sight under the bone, is the motor strip. Behind it, running parallel, is the sensory strip. So easy to damage, with such terrible, lifelong consequences. How much time he has spent making routes to avoid these areas, like bad neighbourhoods in an American city. And this familiarity numbs him daily to the extent of his ignorance, and of the general ignorance. (254; underline mine)


Henry describes this cross-cultural experience as fresh, pure, difficult and danger:


For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at a time, it feels like profound happiness…This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can’t bring him to this…This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It’s a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted joy…There must […] be something wrong with him. (258; underline mine)


Even though Henry does not aware of this metaphorical cross-cultural experience, he claims to feel a deep joy after experiencing it. This deep joy is derived not only from the release of his guilt toward Baxter but also the cross-cultural understanding between his neighborhood and his community.



References:


Notes:

[1] “Archeologists discovered the remains of an ancient plumbing system (at least 3,000 years old) on the island of Crete at the site of an ancient palace of Knossos. This ancient plumbing system included a bathtub made out of hard pottery that looked similar to the shape of a cast-iron bathtub of late 19th-Century America. There was also evidence of a water closet with a seat and crude flushing device (1000 B.C.)” (Lisa, 2012).


[2] Archaeology is a subfield of anthropology, the study of all human culture.