Saturday (novel)
Saturday is the title of a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan that was first published in excerpts in literary magazines, including the entire first chapter in the New York Times Book Review , and finally in book form in 2005 , for which the James Tait Black Memorial Prize , the oldest literary award in Great Britain.
The novel was published in German in a translation by Bernhard Robben while retaining the original English title, also in 2005.
Action overview
The action takes place on Saturday, February 15, 2003, in London , when over 700,000 people demonstrated against the Iraq policy of the USA and Great Britain, and follows the daily routine of the 48-year-old neurosurgeon Henry Perowne , who and his wife Rosalind (lawyer, Lawyer for a newspaper) and eighteen-year-old son Theo ( blues musician ) lives in a house in Fitzroy Square in the London district of Fitzrovia and awaits the return of her twenty-three-year-old daughter Daisy (literary studies and poet) from Paris in the afternoon .
- Night (cp. 1)
Perowne wakes up around four o'clock in the night and can no longer sleep. Thoughts occupy his head: once about his brain operations, which he carried out precisely with the highest professionalism in the last week, his responsible work as a doctor, his many years of experience in dealing with the suffering of many patients and his joy at successful interventions. On the other hand, he thinks about his family: about the creative children Theo and Daisy, who, in contrast to their middle-class parents, set different priorities in their lives, his solid, trusting, if lately somewhat routine marriage with Rosalind (short sex with "Effortless seduction! His wish fulfilled, not a finger lifted, envied by gods and despots."), Whom he met at his clinic as a nineteen-year-old patient suffering from a pituitary tumor and who carefully approached him.
Looking out of the window, Henry discovers a burning airplane approaching Heathrow and fears, remembering the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001 , an assassination attempt. To listen to the news on the radio, he goes into the kitchen, has a cup of coffee with Theo, who is also sleepless, who reads a music magazine and listens to pop music, while he remembers the son's guitar playing, which he talks about, and talks to him about it Appearances. Theo hardly takes part in the tiring discussions of recent times about the world political situation, because they take away his enjoyment of private life, friendships and music. His new philosophy is: "The bigger you think, the shitty it looks [...] So my motto should be - think small."
- Tomorrow (cp. 2)
Since Rosalind has to work this Saturday, Perowne goes to the game with his colleague, the anesthetist Jay Strauss, after the morning toilet in a squash outfit . His early morning reflections continue, focusing and a. the authoritarian system in the Iraq war and the literature promotion program that Daisy ordered him. While driving his Mercedes S500, he encounters groups of demonstrators with banners. Policemen divert traffic and direct it into a narrow street. There he touches a BMW and tears off its mirror. The three inmates, Baxter , Nark, and Nigel, demand a large amount for the repairs, which he refuses to pay. When he tries to call the police to record the accident, a brawl threatens. Henry, who discovered the symptoms of the onset of Huntington's disease at Baxter , prevents escalation by slipping into the dominant role of the doctor, speaking to him about his disabilities and offering help. He gets curious and sends his buddies away so that they don't find out about his suffering. However, the conversation is unsatisfactory for Baxter, as Perowne does not know a miracle cure either. He hits Henry in the chest and then runs after his friends who are leaving. Perowne then drives to the squash courts. His partner was also late because of the marches. During the breaks and after the game, they talk about their work in the clinic. The game, intended as a friendly leisure activity, is increasingly developing into a fight: Perowne's ambition to win correlates with his desire to break free of his thoughts by winning: “He's been involved in some form of argument all morning” and so he fights just like his opponent doggedly about every point: "If a passerby stopped in front of the glass wall to watch [...] Maybe she even wondered if this was a hate match, such despair lies in her game." Henry loses in the final round and says goodbye himself fair from his opponent.
- Afternoon (cp. 3)
On the way back to the apartment, Perowne buys fish on Paddington Street for dinner, which is supposed to be the festival of reconciliation between Daisy, who is returning from her six-month stay in Paris, and her grandfather. They used to spend their family holidays in his villa at the foot of the French Pyrenees , where Grandpa John tried to support the grandchildren through a cultural program, Theo in music and his sister in literature. When Daisy presented her first successes as a lyric poet and the poet's grandfather, who tended to be angry after drinking alcohol, insensitively criticized her erotic poems, she withdrew hurt and did not visit him again. Now he has exuberantly appreciated her new works in a long letter and apologized, so to speak, so that Henry hopes for a peaceful evening.
In the afternoon he visits his demented mother Lilian at the Suffolk Place nursing home in Perivale. She no longer recognizes him, like the people around her, and the spatial and temporal impressions mingle incoherently with memory fragments in her speeches, while she immediately forgets the utterances of the visitor. Although the son cannot help his mother, he feels guilty about her home stay. Still under the numbing impression of the sick, he drives to Wesbourne Grove to rehearse Theo in an old variety theater and can free himself from the stressful reality for a moment through the music.
- Evening (cp. 4)
Henry has just begun preparations for the fish stew dinner when Daisy arrives and they greet each other lovingly. She was at the demonstration in Hyde Park and immediately involved him in one of her typical discussions, in which he, first playfully, then more and more seriously, deliberately used the opposite pole, the advocatus diaboli (possibly short war, elimination of a dictatorship and building of a democracy ... .) takes over. His daughter reacts surprised and criticizes not only his arguments, but his attitude: The controversy becomes personal by accusing him of being unable to make up his mind, as always. Although he would run the risk of war, at the same time he was not sure whether this would also achieve his goals. That is not consistent. Perowne counters that her pacifist stance indirectly supports the Saddam regime and the al-Qaida terrorists. After all, in order to relieve the tension, the father bets, remembering similar family conflict solutions in previous disputes over 50 pounds: Democracy or chaos in Iraq in three months. This settled the dispute, but Henry was dissatisfied with himself: “He's a dove to Jay Strauss, a hawk to his daughter. What is the point of that? And what a luxury it is to philosophize about geopolitical moves and military strategies in the kitchen at home without being held responsible for them by voters, the press, friends or even history. ”The arrival of father-in-law John Grammaticus creates new potential for tension, On the one hand, he has little respect for the son-in-law's job and, on the other hand, grandfather and granddaughter should be reconciled after years of upset, but both immediately argue about the correct scanding of a line of poetry. Theo's appearance loosens the atmosphere again.
Then the reality of class society and uncontrollable violence breaks into the world of the well-off family with their artistic-aesthetic and scientific-theoretical preferences: Nigel and Baxter intercepted Rosalind, threatened them with a knife and broke into the house. They want revenge for Henry's behavior in the collision and humiliate the bourgeoisie . The verbally defending grandfather is immediately hit in the face, so that his nose breaks. "Henry suddenly realizes that up until now he has lived like in a fog". He observes Baxter's movements and utterances and diagnoses that he is unpredictable because of his incurable illness and the lack of future prospects and that he wants to restore his reputation in front of his buddy because of his frustration after the accident. In this situation he could lose his ability to coordinate or become uninhibited and aggressive. Henry comes up with a plan to overpower Baxter: He pretends to have found out about a new treatment method in the USA and to place him in an experimental group. To prove it, he wants to show him data. But the latter does not respond, threatens Rosalind with the knife and forces Daisy, encouraged by Nigel, to undress. The body of a fourth month pregnant woman becomes visible and the intruders lose their sexual interest. Then Baxter discovers her volume of poetry, My brazen boat, and is amazed that the young woman is a poet. She has to read him a poem. But instead of her own work, she recites Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold , which Baxter speaks to emotionally, as it reminds him of the area of his childhood. In a sudden change of heart, he wants to keep the book and Daisy is allowed to get dressed again. He comes back to the treatment proposal and wants to see the documents. Henry lures him into his upstairs study. From there they hear the front door being thrown into the lock. Baxter fears that Nigel has left the house and goes to the landing, where Perowne and the hurrying to help Theo overpower him and throw him down the stairs. After Baxter's transport to the hospital, the family's nightmare shock slowly dissipates in a liberating conversation about what happened. Shortly after, Jay Strauss calls and asks Henry to handle the operation on a young man, Baxters.
- Night (cp. 5)
The family processes the attack and the liberation in an exchange of ideas and then listens to the recording of Theo's new song City Square in an “artificial party mood” . Rosalind informs her husband about Daisy's boyfriend Giulio , speaks to him about his decision to take over the operation and asks about his potential motive for revenge. He tells of the sheet metal damage that triggered the escalation and his clumsy reaction: “I have to finish this here. I am responsible."
Perowne, thinking of Daisy's future life as a student and poet mother in Paris, hurries with her 22-year-old partner through Gower Street, littered with demonstration rubbish, to the hospital. The team, anesthetist Jay Strauss, his assistant doctor Gita Syal, the operating nurses Emily and Joan and Henry's assistant doctor Rodney Browne, prepared everything. On about fourteen pages it is described in detail in technical terms how Henry removed a blood clot between the broken skull and the meninges (extradural hematoma ) of the patient in a long, difficult operation and Rodney then sets up the bone fragments and fixes them with a titanium plate. The procedure was successful. Henry looks after fourteen-year-old Andrea in the neurosurgical ward, from whom he has removed a tumor in the cerebellar cortex, and returns home to Rosalind.
The long day ends as it began: with a conversation about her family, a love game and a look out of the window at the nocturnal square at a quarter past five while he sums up the experiences of the day: There is the approaching end of a stage of life: Theo takes an engagement for New Blue Rider and goes to New York for fifteen months, Daisy and Giulio lead a kind of student marriage. He and Rosalind will live alone in the big house. He wants to work to ensure that no charges are brought against Baxter in order to spare the terminally ill a trial.
Classification and analysis
Fitzroy Square
The main setting of the novel on the Georgian square, proportioned around a circular park by the Scottish architect Robert Adam, was the residence of famous people: For example, the writers George Bernard Shaw (1887–1898) and Virginia Woolf (together with their brother Adrian Stephen von 1907 to 1911), as well as Bloomsbury Group artists Duncan Grant (No. 21) and Roger Fry (No. 33), who were friends with Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell . Ian McEwan continued this prominent series with his family. There are further biographical parallels in the novel: The protagonist is of the same age as the author and Christopher Hitchens, a friend of McEwan's, noted similarities with Perowne's wife, parents and children, e.g. B. McEwan's son Greg played guitar like Theo in his youth.
Fitzroy Square - north side
East Side
South side
West side
Structure and narrative form
Saturday is a three-generation social novel about the upper-class family house on the north side of Fitzroy Square. Rosalind's mother Marianne, who died in a car accident, inherited the building from her parents and lived in it with John and their two children. After her death, Rosalind and Henry made the property their family home. This phase of life is now coming to an end with Theos New York commitment, and Daisy's pregnancy and the aging process of her grandparents signal the beginning of a new phase. For Henry this turning point in the middle of his life is an occasion to take stock and reflect on the existential questions of his life: “What kind of days are these now? He usually finds it confusing and frightening when he takes the time to think about it in the weekly routine. "
McEwan's novel is based on the type of Mrs. Dalloway : The external plot takes place on a day on which the reader accompanies the main character on their way and through their remembered reviews, reflections and conversations an insight into their life and that of their family against the background historical events. Virginia Woolf's heroine Clarissa Dalloway walks through the Westminster district in June 1923 , while Henry Perowne roams the London area of Fitzrovia to the north of it. However, while the wife of MP Richard learns of the counterworld of Septimus Warren Smith, confused by the war trauma of the First World War , and his suicide only through a conversation with her "upper class" evening party, the Perownes experience the social stratification elementary in their house.
External and internal actions are told in the tense of the narrative or historical present and in the language of the protagonist. From his perspective, in personal narrative form , the reader sees his activities, learns his thoughts, follows the statements of those present in the scene, partly in dialogue form or incorporated verbatim speech, as well as their perceptible reactions.
In his novel, the author has taken into account the aversion of his protagonist to magical realism and implemented it stylistically: Typical of Henry's love for realistic precision and order are the precise self-observations and descriptions of people and situations, sometimes with meticulous information (e.g. street names and times: "twenty before four, five to four ”). The many medical terms also serve to characterize Henry in his profession. McEwan spent two years watching neurosurgeon Neil Kitchen at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London, performing operations in preparation for the design . He also had his manuscript checked by experts in order to achieve the greatest possible authenticity.
Historical context
The action takes place against the background of the events and political debates after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York and the Iraq war preparations of the Americans and Great Britain in the Gulf region .
An existential uncertainty can be felt on this day of the demonstration against an imminent military operation with uncertain consequences. The fear of the actions of fanatical al-Qaida fighters also spreads to Henry and does not let him sleep when the routine processes of his working week are suspended. Significantly, the day off begins with the discovery of a burning airplane approaching Heathrow , which activates the memory of September 11th: “Disasters observed from a safe distance. Watching multiple deaths, but not seeing anyone die. "
The view out of the window of his safe home and the walk through the city constantly confront him on this day with the feeling of endangering his civil, orderly life: seedy drug dealers or the neglected old woman in Fitzroy Square, radio and television reports about terrorism and war preparations.
The random chain
Daisy recommends a literature program to her father, who has little time to read, etc. a. reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species . The evolutionary theme accompanies him during the day and is repeatedly associated with observations and thoughts, for example in his reflections on the parents' expectations of the children and the abundance of possible combinations with the genetic makeup: "It can be quite a bit for parental self-esteem Be hit when you realize the extent to which the work is already done. But it can also be a relief. This becomes particularly clear when you have more than one child: two completely different people grow up under almost the same living conditions. ”Applied to his son, he wonders:“ We only had one person as conscientious and conventional as he and Rosalind can bring forth such a free spirit. ”In Theo's virtuoso guitar playing, he is fascinated by the“ appeal of the deviation, the unexpected variation. ”Since he loves his children as successful examples of evolution, he quotes Darwin: There is something truly sublime about this conception of life . He sums up: “An infinite number of the most beautiful and wonderful forms of life, as you can find them in a common hedge, but also higher-ranking beings like ourselves, develop according to physical laws, from a war of nature, from hunger and death. That is where the sublime lies. ”Accordingly, in a conversation with Daisy about religions, he described evolution as the most beautiful“ creation myth ”, which also had“ [the] unprecedented advantage that this unfolding story demonstrably corresponds to the truth. "
If Perowne sees himself and his family as winners of the evolutionary randomness principle , using the example of his children , this assessment changes in other situations: The creatures become playballs of random developments unknown to them: The Iraqi professor of ancient history Miri Taleb was arrested and tortured for no apparent reason and thrown in jail. Using the example of a fish accidentally caught in the net from a large school of fish that he buys for dinner, Henry asks himself the question of probability and fate: "The random order of the world, the improbability that speaks against a certain state, he still liked it [...] Even as a child he believed neither in fate nor in providence [...] Instead there were trillion futures at every moment and the arbitrariness of pure chance and the laws of physics promised freedom from the intricacies of one dark god. ”For Perowne it is certain,“ that a result, a consequence exists independently of it and independently in the world […] What collapses is only one's own ignorance. Whatever the result, it is preprogrammed. "
Such a chain, triggered by a small random event, determines the course of this Saturday: Henry is driven into a blocked street by a police officer because of the demonstration and bumps into a car, he feels blackmailed by the excessive demands and reacts by pointing out the police, the driver has a movement and behavior disorder and feels humiliated in front of his mates by the behavior of the doctor from a privileged social class of the Mercedes owner, who speaks to him about his illness. From this everyday situation and a minor damage, in connection with certain personal constellations, the attack on the Perownes develops in the evening with the consequences of Baxter's severe head injury and the operation. Like the fish caught in the net, Henry experiences the disillusionment of the sublime myth of creation.
Realism and imagination
Henry Perowne has established himself as a routine in his world and has learned that in his job, in order to help others, one has to control emotions: “He has too much experience to allow suffering in its multiple manifestations to approach him - his job is to make himself useful. ”Daisy,“ the principal of his literary training ”, would like to compensate for his aesthetic deficits with the help of a reading list and thereby give him tutoring for his personality development, his lack of imagination. He goes into this game in order to exchange ideas with his well-read daughter, but sees, for example, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Flaubert's Madame Bovary as demanding fairy tales, whose portrayal of a known reality he recognizes, but whose detailed descriptions, in his opinion, “everyone is halfway attentive observer “and who did not give him any new insights. Above all, he rejects the “magical realists” because, according to his scientific view of the world, “the consciousness of mere matter, created by the brain [...] The real, not the magical, should be the challenge.” In a letter to the daughter pleads he "Please no more magical dwarf drummers [...] If anything can happen, everything is indifferent." The author has adopted this aesthetic of the realist for his novel and the description and evaluation of the world from the sober perspective of the protagonist.
Perowne not only criticizes the artificial world of literary prose, in the novels on Daisy's list he finds "too many human imperfections [...] to simply arouse astonishment at the magnificence of human genius". He found this “purity” only in music, v. a. with Johann Sebastian Bach .
The purity of the music
In contrast to literature, Perowne has an affinity for music: when he listens to his son making music, he feels “an almost painful feeling [...] There is no melancholy in the heart of the blues, but a strange, earthly joy.” But it reminds him at the same time his shortcomings: “Theo's guitar struck him because it criticized him, the memory of a deeply buried dissatisfaction, of a missing element in his life. There is nothing in his life that contains such creativity, such a kind of freedom. ”Theo's music gives him“ an inkling that he has blocked an open path, a life from the heart, as the songs boast. ” In this life situation he looks back on the "discipline and responsibility of a medical career, made more difficult by the fact that he started a family in his mid-twenties - and a veil of exhaustion over many things" and registers that he is still "young enough, To long for the unforeseen and unrestrained, but also old enough to know that the chances are dwindling "and asks himself:" Is he on the way to become one of these men, these modern fools of advanced age who are in the process catching them stopping in front of shop windows to stare at saxophones or motorbikes, or holding a mistress the age of their own daughter? He's already bought the expensive car. ”On the other hand, he wants to preserve his solid basis for life:“ What he needs is possession, a feeling of belonging and repetition. ”But he longs for a paradisiacal alternative world:“ There is in the real world outside there are visionary projects [...] in which all conflicts are resolved and everyone's happiness exists forever - ”But for him these are“ illusions ”and“ only in music and only in rare moments does this curtain actually rise to tempt the dream to conjure up a community that disappears with the last notes. "
The power of poetry
While such shared experiences build an emotional bridge to his son and he waits for the father at rehearsal to play his new song for him (“This is what the boys were working on and they wanted him to hear it. "), The relationship with the daughter is through controversial intellectual discussions that quickly become personal (" This is so typical [...] [for you. "), Tense (" Daisy can't stand that he doesn't think like her. " . "). Henry tries, however, to better understand his daughter and to keep talking to her, to work through her list of books, even, as the father of a poet, reads poetry again for the first time since his school days and feels it in "unusual exertion" as a balance " on the needlepoint of the moment ”.
Daisys spiritual father is her grandfather, who through a classical educational program (e.g. Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre , Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis ) and a reward of five pounds for twenty lines of a poem by William Shakespeare or John Milton's Paradise Lost memorized, preparing her literature studies at Oxford. The poet, however, criticized her own first attempts at writing in a derogatory manner, which accelerated her emancipation from him. The title of her volume of poetry Mein dreister Kahn , which refers to Shakespeare's 80th sonnet (My saucy bark), as well as the dedication to John Grammaticus, and the grandpa helps her out of the emergency, prove that she is well aware of the sponsorship Baxter humiliates her and tries to force her to read her “dirtiest poem” by advising the granddaughter to recite Dover Beach , which he once memorized .
On family home evening, at the end of the chain of chance, the dissolution of the danger, reflecting the discussion about the Iraq mission, the different outlooks on life and approaches meet. In contrast to the realist Henry, who carefully observes the situation, analyzes and develops a strategy, who finally frees Baxter's family together with Theo through an act of violence, Daisy reaches the perpetrator through the power of poetry: "Baxter seems ecstatic," leaves Rosalind free, wants to know more about the poet and accepts Perowne's suggestion to have his illness treated in an experimental group. However, as a doctor, he expertly interprets the change of feeling with the "essence of a degenerate brain", which suddenly causes a momentary change in mood through the violent surge of emotions, the memory of his childhood on the coast, which can change again just as quickly.
Feelings of guilt and responsibility
Baxter's intrusion into his private life makes him think about guilt and responsibility and the chain reactions triggered by insignificant coincidences: “Now he's nothing but fear. He is weak and ignorant of how the consequences of an act get out of control and produce new events, new consequences, until you get to a point that you never dreamed of and never made up your mind - a knife on the throat [...] Or is he the one who seeks forgiveness? After all, he is responsible; Twenty hours ago he was driving down an officially closed road, setting a chain of events in motion. ”Recalling his feelings between vengeance and responsibility, he is struck by the magic of the word, which Baxter, unlike him, grasped and "triggered a longing", a "claim to life, to a spiritual existence" and he deduces from this: "Enough of vengeance."
References and comments
- ↑ Ian McEwan's homepage: http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/books/saturday.html , last accessed on September 14, 2012.
- ^ Winners of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, listed by year of publication , The James Tait Black Prizes Website, accessed September 24, 2012.
- ↑ Ian McEwan: Saturday . German translation by Bernhard Robben. Diogenes, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-257-06494-2 , p. 141. This edition is cited.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 75.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 52 ff.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 153.
- ^ McEwan, p. 160.
- ^ McEwan, p. 161.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 268.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 292.
- ^ McEwan, p. 8.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 328.
- ^ McEwan, p. 329.
- ↑ Christopher Hitchens: Civilization and its malcontents . In: The Atlantic . April 2005.
- ^ McEwan, p. 9.
- ↑ Ian McEwan: Saturday . Acknowledgments p. 389.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 48 ff.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 26.
- ^ McEwan, p. 11.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 39.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 40.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 41.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 77.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 78.
- ^ McEwan, p. 79.
- ^ McEwan, p. 87.
- ^ McEwan, p. 177.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 29 ff.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 19.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 81.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 94.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 95.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 96.
- ↑ a b McEwan, p. 43.
- ^ McEwan, p. 44.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 60.
- ^ McEwan, p. 240.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 238.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 261.
- ^ McEwan, p. 258.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 178.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 182.
- ↑ With this quote Daisy compares herself with the narrator of the sonnet: a poet who modestly recognizes the achievements of a great poet who praises youth. Metaphorically, however, he defends his bold claim to write poetry: The power of youth is a vast ocean, it offers space for everyone: both for the magnificent sailing ships and for the small boats.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 310.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 313.
- ↑ McEwan, p. 384 ff.
- ^ McEwan, p. 386.