《星期六》中的“两种文化”语言学研究

本文是语言学论文，笔者认为在论述―两种文化‖中的另一种文化——文学的道德意义。巴克斯特的入室劫持最终以黛西朗诵阿诺德的《多佛海滩》告终，黛西通过一首诗化解了矛盾，拯救了被劫持的佩罗恩一家。文学将不同背景的人联结在一起，通过创造与分享故事，为人们提供了无间的交流机会。文学也是培养道德想象与同理心的最好方式。

Chapter One Science: Perowne’s Unquestioned Faith

1.1 A Sense of Certainty and Control against a World of Chaos
Saturday depicts a world seemingly teetering on a precipice. From the flamingplane and the anti-Iraq War demonstration, which allude to 9/11 to the home invasionin the end, the novel aims to show that the protagonist‘s privileged and satisfactorylife is threatened and destabilized by countless forces both in a global and a personalscale.
Written right after the events of 9/11, Saturday is full of the 9/11 allusions. Thenovel is set on 15 February 2003, the day of the international protest against the Iraqwar and the largest demonstration in the history of the British Isles. The openingscene of Saturday witnesses a burning plane heading to Heathrow, which immediatelyreminds both the protagonist and the readers of the two hijacked planes crashing intothe World Trade Centre. For many people, like Perowne, the events of 9/11 likenightmares hover over their consciousness, rendering them with a state of anxiety anda sense of looming threats. Perowne ponders ―It‘s already almost eighteen monthssince half the planet watched, and watched again the unseen captives driven throughthe sky to the slaughter…Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky thesedays, predatory or doomed‖ (McEwan, Saturday 16). Responding to the Septemberattacks, McEwan concludes in his article ―Beyond Belief‖: ―Like millions, perhapsbillions around the world, we knew that we were living through a time that we wouldnever be able to forget. We also knew though it was too soon to wonder how or whythat the world would never be the same. We knew only that it would be worse‖(McEwan, Beyond Belief 1). No one could escape the impact of 9/11 and eachinpidual‘s private life is experiencing a potentially direct and destructive strike.
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1.2 An Explanatory System in Defiance of His Sense of Guilt
It is noteworthy that at the end of the novel, when ruminating on his day,Perowne shows a firm claim on the importance of the genetic heritance for the fate ofany human being. He thinks, ―it can‘t just be class or opportunities—the drunks andjunkies come from all kinds of backgrounds‖— it must be ―down to invisible foldsand kinds of character, written in code, at the level of molecules‖ (McEwan, Saturday281). Such claim immediately brings to us what has been called the evolutionarypsychology by which, Perowne has been greatly influenced. Evolutionary Psychology(EP) is a growing field within psychology that looks at the human mind and behaviorthrough the lens of evolution. It tells us that our thoughts and behaviors evolvedbecause they served a purpose in the environment in which we evolved - anenvironment far different from that which we live in today. Thom Dancer concludes―This is the case with Henry‘s desire to see everything through the lens of a kind ofDarwinian materialism.‖(214). In this way, Perowne could ―depreciate the role ofculture and feeling‖ (Dancer 214) while clinging only to the scientific explanation ofhuman fates—genes. This makes him an absolute ―professional reductionist‖(McEwan 2005, 281), whose ―training and specialization inevitably lead him tobiological formulations rather than political or socioeconomic ones‖ when heconsidering the issue of the haves and have-nots (Tim Gauthier 18).
Although Henry here still holds different possible answers, he has no doubt that thebehavior is medical in nature. As long as Henry sees a symptom, he grasps it and losestrack of all other possible explanations that are not on the level of biochemistry. Thebiochemical explanation, by providing him with an explanatory apparatus for thewhole scenario, gives Henry the relief and certainty he craves for.
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Chapter Two Literature: The Secular Transcendence and ItsRedemptive Power

2.1 An Umbilical Bond Forged by the Shaping and Sharing ofStories
Literature is created, in its most initial sense, to shape and to share stories. In fact,the desire to tell and be told a story is one of our human nature, which is coded intoour genes and passed down generation to generation. Our childish desire to be told astory is similar to our longing to be held by our mother at her breast, both of whichrepresent our deepest desire for a close contact through a kind of unmediatedcommunication. This notion of contact might also be found in psychoanalytic theory,in Wilfred Bion‘s notion that the reflective ―reverie‖ of the mother as she gazes at herbaby forms the conditions for the child to understand its connection with the personwho is holding him or her (116). Therefore, literature, by the mere act of shaping andsharing of stories, provides the chance of mediated communication and thus bondspeople together.
It is noteworthy that the mother-child relation is reversed in Saturday because ofthe brain damage the mother suffers. Lilian is suffering from vascular dementia whichcauses the confusion of her perception. She returns to the little Lilian as a girl whenher long gone mother is still alive and mistakes Peorwne as her aunt. Her speech istotally broken in its meaning. The de-narrated self is the dehumanized one. Lilian isnever the mother Perowne used to rely on. Instead of his earlier attempt to set hismother straight, and to tell her the truth, Perowne finally chooses the ―comfortingfictions that go along rather than defy the brain-damaged narrative connections‖(Salisbury 903). Instead of telling her the truth, Henry chooses to play along with hismother and to take the role of a maternal comforter by telling his mother those―comforting fictions‖. Those stories provide Henry and Lilian with the privilege ofunmediated contact. It calms down the agitated brain-damaged mother and fulfills herdesire to be told a story like a child. The stories Perowne made for his mother may notbe true, but they function as the invisible bond that reconnects him with his dementedmother. Those stories also represent the laudable efforts he has made in order tounderstand what it means to be someone else, to be a patient with senile dementia andto be his mom Lilian Perowne.
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2.2 A Space for Moral Imagination and Empathy

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Chapter Three From The ―Two Cultures‖ to The ―Third Culture‖ ..................28
3.1 The Epistemological Immodesty of the Scientific Reductionism and theSocial Constructivism ...........28
3.2 Consilience as the Merging of the Two Parallel Discourses......32

Chapter Three From “The Two Cultures” to “The ThirdCulture”

3.1 The Epistemological Immodesty of the ScientificReductionism and the Social Constructivism
McEwan, by creating two groups of characters respectively to endorse scienceand literature and by choosing Arnold‘s poem ―Dover Beach‖ as the source ofBaxter‘s final epiphany, deliberately alludes to the debate on science and literaturebetween Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry Huxley and the ―Two Cultures‖ theorylater christened by C.P. Snow.
The argument between Arnold and Huxley mainly concerns whether it isliterature or science that is the necessary education to foster true culture. Arnold‘scognizance of the declining influence of classics in English department made himstand up for the defense of literature. In the annual banquet of the Royal Academy ofArts in 1881, Arnold was invited to make a toast for literature and he courageouslyspoke of the inequality literature had faced as merely ―ornament‖ while science as―necessary‖ and he eulogized: ―before their sister, Science, now so full of promise andpride, was born, there were Art and Literature, like twins together, innocentlybelieving in their own necessity, as eager in the pursuit of the eternal and unseizableshadow, beauty‖ (Roos 319).While Huxley responded to the same toast to Arnold todefend science: ―I think there are many persons who look upon this new birth of ourtimes as a sort of monster rising out of the sea of modern thought with the purpose ofdevouring the Andromeda of Art‖(Roos 321) He toasted for science that "the freeemployment of reason…is the sole method of reaching truth," and that an"unhesitating acceptance of reason was the supreme arbiter of conduct" (qtd. in Roos318).
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Conclusion
McEwan, in Saturday, depicts a terrified Londoner Perowne who tries to rely onscience as his secular religion and his solely explanatory system to achieve a sense ofcertainty and control in face of a world of chaos and terror in the post 9/11 Westernsociety. Deeply depending on science, Perowne despises literature, which he finds hasneither meaning nor beauty. His epistemological immodesty—placing scientific truthas the only truth of the world makes him numb with others‘ suffering. By resorting toscience, the suffering of others bothers him less since the impoverished others couldbe reduced to genetically-flawed ones. As a member of the privileged, Perowne freeshimself from any empathy or responsibility for those unlucky fellow human beingssince their bad luck has nothing to do with his prosperity. They are unlucky due to theinheritance of a bad gene. Therefore, in dealing with Baxter, instead of giving him hisempathy, Perowne could only treat him with an operation. Such kind ofepistemological immodesty finally brings him serious trouble in the form of a savagehome invasion by the humiliated Baxter.
In the end, it is literature‘s magic of binding people together and inspiring moralimagination and empathy that saves the day. It is not surprising that McEwan, afamous atheist, and humanist will endow literature with such moral significance.McEwan believes that fiction is the place where all of us – whether as writers orreaders – imagine what it is like to be someone else. The ability to imagine someoneelse instead of yourself is the essence of morality and is what separates us from thoseterrorists. For McEwan, 9/11 terrorist attack is a tragedy of lack of empathy because ifthose terrorists could imagine the horror of those passengers on the plane and thebroken-heartedness of their relatives and friends, they would not commit the crime.
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