THE AUTHOR IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE AUTHOR! PATTERNICITY, THEORY OF MIND AND HUMAN ERROR IN IAN McEWAN'S SATURDAY
[Several things I've read recently, and a few conversations pursuant thereto, have put me in mind of a talk I gave for a graduate seminar course in contemporary British fiction at UNB a couple of years ago. Perhaps you'll enjoy reading it, though you'll definitely get more out of it if you've read McEwan's Saturday, which was not a novel I much enjoyed, as a work of art, but is nevertheless intellectually impressive.]
Given
Ian McEwan's avid interest in science and this book's particular
focus on the functions and pathologies of the human brain, I thought
it would be fitting to examine it through the lens of a couple of key
scientific concepts.
The
first of these is “patternicity,” a term coined by psychologist
Michael Shermer.
- PATTERNICITY
Basically,
this is the innate human tendency to, as Shermer puts it, “find
meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” According to Shermer,
“our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition
machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns
that we think we see in nature.” We do this because it has survival
value; when things are in fact connected, we gain crucial knowledge
of our environment.
The
downside is that our instincts for pattern-recognition often lead us
to forge erroneous links between things that are best left
unconnected. Shermer provides a few examples of false patterns:
“UFOlogists see a face on Mars.
Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building.
Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio
receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the
Bush administration.” He encapsulates all this with a nifty
aphorism: “people believe weird things because of our evolved need
to believe nonweird things.” If the distal cause of these
misconceptions is embedded in our DNA, the proximal causes, or
“priming effects” in Shermer's terminology, are rooted in the
specific cultural milieu of the individual.
So,
if you're doing your duty as a pattern-perceiving hominid, you've
likely guessed that I'm next going to talk about Henry Perowne's
early-hours plane-spotting episode, which begins on page 13.
Strikingly, Henry “doesn't immediately understand what he sees,
though he thinks he does.” First, he mistakes the streaking flame
for a meteor. Then, realizing the trajectory's all wrong, he corrects
this misreading with another one: it's a comet. Then, with the help
of a bit of auditory stimulus, he realizes that it is, in fact, a
plane.
This
bird-plane-superman process happens very rapidly; on page 14, the
narrator says “Only three or four seconds have passed since he saw
this fire in the sky and changed his mind about it twice.” Once he
knows what it is, his imagination is “set free” and patternicity
kicks into overdrive. On Page 16, Henry imagines “The fight to the
death in the cockpit, a posse of brave passengers assembling before a
last-hope charge against the fanatics.” Etc. He sees a pattern
because it's human nature to see one. He sees the particular pattern
he sees because of the priming effect of 9/11. Henry clearly isn't a
marginal conspiracy theory wackjob in thinking this way, as the
media, throughout the day that follows, repeatedly report things that
accord more with what one expects or wants to be found, than with the
actual facts of the case: fundamentalist Islamic pilots, Koran in the
flight deck, etc.
- THEORY OF MIND
Before
I say anything further about how patternicity relates to Saturday,
I'd like to briefly explain a related concept: Theory of Mind. This
sounds pretty highfalutin, but psychologist Martin Doherty explains
that it is, essentially, the practice of making “inferences about
the psychological states of others.” This is something that
virtually all (neurotypical) humans do as a matter of course.
In
How
the Mind Works,
Steven Pinker situates Theory of Mind within what he calls the
practice of “intuitive psychology” and, like Doherty, says it's
something everyone does instinctively:
“We
mortals can't read other people's minds directly. But we make good
guesses from what they say, what we read between the lines, what they
show in their face and eyes, and what best explains their behavior.
It is our species' most remarkable talent.”
And
it is a talent that becomes manifest in human beings, typically, by
the age of four, regardless of what culture they come from, as
research conducted by Doherty and others has shown.
Saturday
is
rife with examples of Perowne practising Theory of Mind in trying to
anticipate, interpret and understand the words and deeds of other
people. The two Baxter episodes are the most obvious—and the most
fraught, because Baxter, whose “face is never still” (222) is far
from neurotypical—but think also of the brief moment, which you can
find on page 141, when Henry, stuck in traffic, looks over at a TV
screen in a storefront, where he sees a close-up of Tony Blair's face
and tries to determine, by reading Blair's features, if he's being
honest.
Here,
the narrator comments on Theory of Mind explicitly:
“For
all the difficulties, the instinctive countermeasures, we go on
watching closely, trying to read a face, trying to measure
intentions. Friend or foe? It's an ancient preoccupation. And even
if, down through the generations, we are only right slightly more
than half the time, it's still worth doing.”
Which
is a neat recapitulation of Shermer's argument for the evolutionary
benefit of patternicity.
When
I started thinking about how to approach this presentation, I had the
idea of using McEwan's interest in neuroscience and evolutionary
psychology as a foil to Barthes' “Death of the Author.” I was
motivated in part, I have to admit, by my disagreement with Barthes'
thesis and my distaste for the dogmatism with which he propounds it.
The reading experience has long been for me, fundamentally, a matter
of communication between the person who wrote the text and the person
who's reading it, an extension and refinement of the face-to-face
storytelling that is such a big part of daily life.
Far
from limiting the possibilities of the text, as Barthes says, this
conception of writer-reader intimacy enriches it for me. If anything,
Barthes' view seems to me mistily naive, a kind of nostalgia for the
innocence of the child's reading experience, uncluttered by awareness
of the publishing industry, book prizes, celebrity gossip, etc. It
seems to me exactly the sort of theory that might be espoused by a
writer who lived with his mother most of his life...
I
came to see McEwan, particularly in Saturday,
as an ally. The more I read about him and his book, the more I saw a
rejection of critical theories such as Barthes'. Not only does McEwan
favour peer-reviewed science over abstract theory and intuition, but
he falls very much on the side of the things against which Barthes
rails in the conclusion of “The Death of the Author”: i.e.,
“reason, science, law.” As opposed to the surrealism and
automatic writing championed by Barthes, McEwan favours prose and
plot that are the quintessence of tidy, disciplined, sequential
order.
Moreover,
in Henry Perowne McEwan has created a protagonist who, we learn
through various profiles and interviews, lives in McEwan's house,
plays McEwan's squash game and prepares the same fish stew served to
Dr. Neil Kitchen in Mr. Ian McEwan's dining room. Henry also has a
mother, Lily, who, like McEwan's mother, Rose, has vascular dementia.
McEwan has gone so far as to say that “Henry
is probably closer to me than any of my (characters).”
We
sometimes catch McEwan using Henry as a mouthpiece for his creator's
views. Henry, for instance, has no truck with fairy tales and magic
realism. At the bottom of page 67, McEwan/Perowne opines that “the
supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a
dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and
wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible.”
In
the New
Yorker
profile by Daniel Zalewski, McEwan says, in what seems like a
broadside against one of the other books on our reading list [Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus]: “It's
enough to try and make some plausible version of what we've got,
rather than have characters sprout wings and fly out the window.”
McEwan's
use of free indirect discourse in the narration of Saturday
further blurs the line between himself and Perowne.
So,
armed with all of this good, hard evidence, it isn't so great a leap
to say, if not Henry Perowne = Ian McEwan, then at least that the
author is alive and well in Saturday.
It's certainly a leap that John Banville was willing to make. His
review of Saturday,
in the New
York Review of Books,
is literary criticism as Patternicity and Theory of Mind par
excellence. Consider some of the things Banvillle says:
“ Few
passages catch the flavor of this extraordinary book as well as the
one in which, apparently
without a trace of authorial irony,
Perowne is made to recall an epiphanic moment on a fishing trip when
his eye lit on his beloved car”
“The
hard-fought match between Perowne and his American-born rival
is meant, we assume, to
illustrate the competitive, indeed warlike, nature of the human male,
and to show us that McEwan is not entirely Mr. Nice Guy.”
“This
fight
seems meant to be a further display of McEwan's tough-mindedness, but
is merely as tedious as any other overheard squabble between youth
and age.”
“The
awful possibility arises that Perowne's ignorance
may be intended as a running gag;
if so, it is the only instance of humor in the book, if humor is the
word.”
Note
all of the iterations of intention and meaning in these quotations.
Banville—or his editor—appears to know he can't get away with
saying these things with absolute certainty, but the cumulative
impression is that he's pretty darn sure what's going on in McEwan's
mind. Towards the end of the review he elaborates on why Saturday
is a “dismayingly bad book,” which is deeply rooted in Banville's
theory of McEwan's mind:
“It
happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic
proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and
preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all
these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program,
a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands
of mere art—no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a
man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. ”
Banville
concludes by saying that Saturday's
“arrogance” gives it “the feel of a
neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong;
if Tony Blair—who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book,
oozing insincerity—were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel
for our time," the result would surely be something like this.”
If
reading Barthes made me run to McEwan as an ally in the cause of the
live author, reading Banville made me long for a bit of Barthes's
scribocidal hemlock—in much the same way that Henry, when talking
politics with the unflaggingly self-assured Jay Strauss, finds
himself drifting towards the anti-war side of the Iraq debate, I
found myself drifting towards Barthes.
It's
precisely this sort of drift from fixed positions that Banville's
patternicity, primed by McEwan as best-selling outspoken celebrity
author, has to edit out in order to make his reading of Saturday
hold up. If the presence of the author in this book is to be
detected, it is not so much in isolated, offhand statements made by
Perowne, as it is in the overall pattern of speculation, error,
doubt, backtracking, correction and revision that is the hallmark of
a devotee to reason and science.
Molly
Clark Hillard's
essay on Saturday,
in part a response to Banville's reading, is salutary. In it, she
observes that McEwan's “novel
... turns upon reading and reading again, that apparently requires
re-reading to amend misprision. ... [Hillard] would remind
us of our own capacity for misprision, for taking the newspaper
interview for the novel, the man for his text, the narrator for the
protagonist.”
Hillard
cites several instances of misprision in Saturday,
many of which I would say are the product of patternicity, and
focuses in particular on the “Dover Beach” scene as a case of
multi-layered misreading. I'd like to conclude by looking at that
scene as a reification of patternicity.
On
page 220, the narrator says that Henry “only half remembers” the
poem that Daisy is reciting. This is likely true, since—as Banville
points out, missing the irony, as usual—what English schoolchild of
Henry's generation can have escaped exposure to “Dover Beach”
altogether? But because he is primed by the context to believe that
Daisy is the author of the poem, Henry shoehorns it into his memory
of reading her work, even while he recognizes that the “wilfully
archaic” tone of the poem is unusual in Daisy's work.
In
the first reading of the poem, Henry commits speaker-as-author
fallacy, an irony apparently lost on Banville. Primed by the
unexpected revelation of Daisy's pregnancy, he deduces that the poem
must be about her, her lover and the child they're expecting, set
against the backdrop of the Iraq war, as he accidentally substitutes
“desert” for Arnold's “ignorant.” He does this even though
the poem is not supposed to be a new work of Daisy's, but is included
in the Van Dykes of her book and therefore almost certainly predates
her pregnancy, which is only in its first trimester.
On
page 221, at Baxter's insistence, Daisy “reads” the poem again
and Henry realizes that he “missed first time the mention of the
cliffs of England” and this time sees the poem not through the eyes
of its “author” but rather through those of its auditor, Baxter.
Strikingly, Henry imagines Baxter “standing alone, elbows propped
against the sill” of an “open window.”
This
brings us back to Perowne “standing alone” at his window,
watching the flaming plane streak by. On page 126, we learn that
Henry has come to regard the story of the Russian cargo plane “as
his own,” much as he comes to see “Dover Beach” as, first,
Daisy's story and, second, Baxter's, before he is finally disabused
of these erroneous perceptions and learns that the poem is
Arnold's—the “truth” of which he mangles further by wondering
about Arnold's surname.
Saturday
is loaded with instances of miscommunication, misunderstanding and
misidentification. As Ruth Scurr puts it succinctly in her review of
Saturday:
“free people with choices are sure to mess up.” If the book's
author intends a moral lesson, it is nothing so crude as what
Banville posits, but perhaps something along the lines of: because we
are human, we will err, but by revisiting our assumptions,
interrogating our beliefs and rereading people, events and texts
carefully, we might make fewer and less grievous mistakes. As Mark
Lawson put it in a review for The
Guardian:
Saturday
... is subtle enough to be taken as a warning against either
intervention or against isolationism. Is the foreign policy of
Henry's government exposing him to danger, or is his moneyed,
bouillabaisse-eating existence a self-delusion in a threatening
world? As in the best political novels, the evidence and arguments
are distributed with careful ambiguity.
Pace
John Banville, it's awfully hard to imagine Tony Blair's stamp of
approval on a book in which he is made to look foolish – by
mistaking Perowne for someone he isn't, and yet carrying on boldly as
though he had the right guy all along.
WORKS
CITED
Banville,
John. “A Day in the Life.” New
York Review of Books 52/9
(May
26, 2005).
http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html
(May 26, 2007).
Barthes,
Roland. Trans. Richard Howard. “The Death of the Author.”
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm
Doherty, Martin J. Theory of Mind: How Children Understand Others' Thoughts and Feelings. New York: Psychology Press, 2009.
Fray, Peter. “The Enduring Talent of Ian McEwan.” The Age. January 29, 2005. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/01/28/1106850082840.html#
Hillard,
Molly Clark. ““When
Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight”: Re-Reading
McEwan’s Saturday
and
Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”” Partial
Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas,
(6:1), 2008 Jan, 181-206.
Lawson,
Mark. “Against
the Flow.” The Guardian. January 22, 2005.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/22/bookerprize2005.bookerprize
McEwan,
Ian. Saturday.
Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2006.
Pinker,
Steven. How
the Mind Works.
New York: Norton, 1997.
Scurr, Ruth. “Happiness on a Knife-edge.” The Times. January 29, 2005. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article507285.ece
Shermer,
Michael. “Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless
Noise.” Scientific
American.
November 25,
2008.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns
Weich, Dave. “Ian McEwan, Reinventing Himself Still.” Powells.com. April 1, 2004. http://www.powells.com/authors/mcewan.html
Zalewski,
Daniel. “The Background Hum: Ian McEwan's Art of Unease.” The
New Yorker, February
23, 2009.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_zalewski
