이언 매큐언의 『토요일』에 드러난 차이의 정치학과 타자의 윤리학

Abstract

This paper aims to explore some essential ideas embodied in Ian McEwan's Saturday(2005), a highly acclaimed post-9/11 novel yet published. McEwan sees a sense of crisis in the cultural pessimism pervading the 21st century called, The Age of Terrorism, as epitomized by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City's World Trade Center Twin Towers. Saturday is a timely literary response to such terror. One strand of argument is that McEwan is deeply worried about the politics of division (polarization) operating at various levels such as between civilizations, classes, generations, and the camps of literary intellectuals versus scientists. Arguably, “politics of division” gives rise to a climate of violence and terror which clearly threatens the foundations of civilization, as thereby the security of each individual's life. First, some implications of 9/11 Terror and massive protests against the Iraq War mentioned in the text are explored. Then an examination of the class divide between Henry Perowne (a neurosurgeon) and Baxter (the street thug) are made. Next are discussions about the sense of crisis resulting from the generation gap between father and son (a blues musician), together with the cultural divide between father and daughter (a poet). Perowne, a philistine, begins to realize that literature can have a transformative power, as evidenced in his daughter Daisy's recitation of Matthew Arnold's poem “Dover Beach” in the presence of Baxter. Perowne himself faces the ethical dilemma in Baxter's brain operation, how to deal with the Other embodied by Baxter. The other strand of argument is that McEwan offers visions for curbing the rise of violence and terror. He draws readers' attention to the human capacity for empathy, that is, the capacity of thinking oneself into the minds of others, that can function as the antidote to cruelty. To achieve that goal, he addresses the need to restore rationality and ethics through a literary education. The Levinasian ethical subject's capacity for affective disposition towards alterity is central to the paper's discussion.