INTERTEXTUALITY IN IAN MCEWAN’S NOVEL SATURDAY

Kavitha. A,

M. Phil Scholar,

Research Department of English,

Sri Meenakshi Government Arts College for Women (A), Madurai-2.

ABSTRACT
This study purposes to analyse Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday in the light of postmodern

techniques called Intertextuality. McEwan uses many texts parallel to his fiction to increase its

authenticity. McEwan’s narrative strategies are unique that makes him a writer of postmodern

discourse. This paper discusses how this focus distinguishes his recent novel from earlier ones

and also examines how he used Intertexuality in the contemporary British novel Saturday.
 INTERTEXTUALITY IN IAN MCEWAN’S NOVEL SATURDAY

Ian McEwan is a prominent British Writer, Novelist and Screen writer. He was born on

21 st June 1948 at Aldershot, Hampshire. He spent his early childhood days in different countries

such as Singapore, Germany and Libya. He went to Woolverstone Hall School for education

enrolled in University of Sussex where he received his English Literature in 1970 when he first

realized his passion for writing. His first book, was a collection of short stories named First

Love, Last Rites published in 1975. This book was highly acclaimed winning “The Somerset

Maugham Award” in 1976. He also wrote many novels during his time such as The Cement

Garden and The Comfort of Strangers both are his early novels. The Day Dreamers (1994),

Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005), and Solar (2015) are some of his

famous novels.

Ian McEwan has been honoured with many awards. “James Tait Black Memorial Prize”

for his novel Saturday and “The Man Booker Prize” for Amsterdam. He also received the

“Shakespeare Prize” by The Alfred Toeper foundation in 1999 and the CBE IN 2000. He

received many awards and also ranked amongst The 50th greatest British Writers since 1945.

The novel “Saturday” set in fitzrovia, London, on Saturday,15 February 2002, as a large

demonstration is taking place against the united states invasion of iraq the protagonist, Henry

Perowne ,a neurosurgeon has planned a series of chores and pleasures culminating in a family

dinner in the evening. As he goes about his day, he ponders the meaning of the protest and the

problems that inspire it, however, the day is disrupted by an encounter with a violent , troubled
man. In this novel, Ian McEwan used Intertexuality technique by Mathew Arnold’s poem Dover

Beach.

Intertextuality is a way of interpreting texts which focuses on the idea of texts’

borrowing words and concepts from each other. Every writer, both before writing his text and

during the writing process, is a reader of the texts written before his text. She either borrows

from the prior or concurrent texts and discourses in the network through allusions, impressions,

references, citations, quotations and connections or is affected by the other texts in some ways.

Therefore, an author’s work will always have echoes and traces of the other texts to which it

refers either directly or indirectly and either explicitly or implicitly. It will also have layers of

meanings rather than a solid and stable meaning which is supposed to be constructed through the

writer’s authorial vision. Intertextuality asserts that when a text is read in the light of the text(s)

to which it refers or from which it has traces, all the assumptions and implications surrounding

those referred texts will shape the critic’s interpretation of the text in question. It is because a

network of other texts provides the reader, critic and interpreter with the contexts of possible

meanings and therefore it would not be misleading to say that his or her meditation on the

meaning of the text at hand is shaped by the quotations from, absorptions and insertions in and

transformation of another text or discourse. It is important to cite that Intertextuality cannot be

limited only to the discussions of literary arts. It provides an area of study of influences,

adaptation and appropriation of texts into not only the written or literary texts but also the other

media or non-literary fields. It is also a method for the analysis of any text constructed in culture

and a way of interpretation of any cultural phenomenon correlated with non-literary arts and the

current cultural epoch.

 Intertexuality is a stylish literary device. It is the shaping of a texts meaning by another

text. It is the interconnection between similar (or) related works of literature that reflect and

influence an audience’s interpretation of the text. Intertextuality a term first introduced by French

semioticion Julia Kristeva in the late sixties. In his essay such as Word, Dialogue,and Novel

Kristeva broke with traditional notions of the author’s “influences” and the text’s “sources”

positing that all signifying systems, from table settings to poems are constituted by the manner of

language in which they transform earlier signifying system. A literary work, then is not simply

the product a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language

itself. “Any text”, “she argues “is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the

absorption and transformation of another”. (Julia Kristeva 66).

An exemplary moment appears in Saturday – though, strangely, the episode I refer tends

to be neglected in critical analyses of this novel: Henry Perowne decides to spend part of a

Saturday morning at the squash centre, playing a match with his colleague Jay; for critics, this

event is only important because on his way to the sports centre Perowne has a minor car accident

which becomes his first encounter with a young delinquent who will, later in the day, break into

his flat and threaten several members of his family gathered for a party. This is undoubtedly a

crucial moment in the plot development, but the subtlety of McEwan’s art of construction rests in

the way in which he manages to connect a dramatic scene, relevant for his central theme of

different forms of violence in the post-9/11 world, with an event that can provide a more

universal clue to what kind of reality we live in. This event is the squash match itself which

Perowne believes he has won, only for victory to be snatched from him at the last as his rival

convinces him that the last service was a let and must be repeated; after accepting this view

Henry, subsequently, loses the match. Not only does this mean that reality is not what is or what
seems to be, but what becomes, principally as a result of the discursive power relations, but also

that nothing exists as one’s private possession, least of all an event turned into a story, however

much Perowne would like to cherish such a notion: “Isn’t it possible to enjoy an hours’

recreation without this invasion, this infection from the public domain? He begins to see the

matter resolving in simple terms: winning his game will be an assertion of his privacy. He has a

right now and then – everyone has it – not to be disturbed by world events, or even street events”

(McEwan 2005: 108). Losing the game is interpreted in this sense as the result of the intrusion of

the world into the private sphere – anticipating the critical scene of violent intrusion into

Perowne’s home later that day but also, perhaps more importantly, linking the match with

Perowne’s initial encounter with Baxter, which was in fact resolved in the same way as the

squash match: the situation that seemed almost for Perowne finally turned in his favour due to

his eloquence or, more accurately, discursive power. In this way his lost match mirrors, in a

reversed manner, his previous triumph and creates Semantic balance between the two closely

related scenes. At the same time, it prepares us for the resolution of the final crisis: first it seems

that the only effective means to break the pernicious dominance of Baxter over the Perowne

family is Henry’s authority as a neurosurgeon and, by extension, his possession of a clue to

Baxter’s brain, a clue which lends Perowne the power of manipulation. But the precise tool that

effectively disarms the pathological delinquent is, paradoxically, poetry – Perowne’s daughter

Daisy’s reading of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.

“The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay, like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
 Retreating, to the breath
Of the night -wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. (MathewArnold 1867.)

Here the intricate web of discourse power relations is foregrounded in full: while in the

morning Perowne won over Baxter by lying to him about his disease and soon after lost his

match by being distracted from what he believed was the truth, in the evening the family is saved

by Daisy’s plagiarised performance of Arnold’s poem. Reality is thus defined by ontological

relativism or, in other words, by how we construct reality in our discursive strategies. As

Baxter’s reaction to Dover Beach indicates, literature can help intervene in the anxiety caused by

the failure of metanarratives, and can help subjects cope with the violence and terror of the

postmodern condition.

Thus the novel Saturday comes to know that Intertexuality is the crucial aspects of

McEwan’s writing. His whole literary career is encrusted with different kinds of fields and

activities. He is creative writers of the contemporary literature especially novel. He is a well

known writer of the postmodern writing characterized by special use of Intertexuality, and his

novels are the best presentation of this aspect.

WORKCITED

McEwan, Ian. Saturday, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.

Kristeva, Julia 1980 (1977). Word, Dialogue, and Novel. Desire in Language: A Semiotic

Approach to Literature and Art. Ed.Leon S.Roudiez. Trans.Thomas Gora et al. New York:

Columbia U. P. 64-91