Political Relationship Between Space And The Body In Ian Mcewan's Novels

As two important signifiers in Ian McEwan's fictions,space and the body have undergone noticeable changes in his writings over three decades.McEwan's early stories showcase grotesque bodies caught in some desoicalized wasteland settings.His historical novels in the nineties,however,present bodies tortured,raped,abused against the backdrop of the politicized space of the postwar Berlin.After the new millennium McEwan has written a few novels that see bodies,despite their elegance and refinement,trapped in the modern ordered,dazzlingly spectacular city of London.Bodies have evolved along with the development of space in McEwan's fictions.In the end of the last century the Western academia began to re-examine the interrelationship between space and the body.Space,conceptualized as a dynamic agent shaping social topography,has an immediate hold on the body,and leaves political imprints on its surface.The body,however,does not take these political writings readily.It either revolts against the oppression and manipulation of space with bodily deviations,or re-constructs space with its senses,movements or gestures.Space and the body become entangled into such a political relationship marked with containment,oppression,manipulation,revolt and resistance.Given the significance of space and the body in the modern literature,an examination of their political relationship can throw new light on our interpretation of a literary work and help decipher the message the writer intends to communicate.This dissertation,adopting the notion that space and the body are inseparable and interrelated,examines McEwan's representations of space and the body in the different stages of his writings,focusing on how the body transgresses,transforms,and is transmuted under the rule of space,and brings to light McEwan's underlying meditation on the conditions of the English society and culture.This dissertation is composed of the introduction,three chapters and the conclusion.The introduction maps the trajectories of McEwan's representation of space and the body in his writings,summarizes both Chinese and English scholarship on related topics,and introduces the theoretical framework as well as the structure of the present study.The first chapter focuses on McEwan's first novel,The Cement Garden,aiming to associate and make sense of the oppressive space of the cement garden with grotesqueness of the bodies in the story.By presenting the cement's violation of the natural garden and the city-space's oppression on the dystopian suburb,the story constructs the political tension between the adults' space of hierarchical order and the children and adolescent's space of dystopian anarchism.The former's oppression on the latter leads to the children's “paralyzed” existence incarnated in the demonic grotesque body hardened by cement and hidden in the cellar.The children and adolescents,in their effort to revolt against the oppression of “the cement garden,”indulge in such bodily anomalies as cross-dressing,behavioral regression into babyhood,even incestuous love-making.This political conflict between space and the body – oppression and revolt –is expressive of a prevalent antagonism against the oppressive social milieu in the 1960 s and 1970 s Euro-American community.Chapter Two reads the violence in The Innocent– rape and dismemberment –as the process in which the politicized space re-shapes and transforms the body.It reads the story as a bildungsroman and interprets the protagonist Leonard's flee from London to the post-war Berlin as his attempt to rid his infantilized body and assume his manhood.In Berlin he translates the inter-national and inter-cultural politics into personal relationship and projects it in his acts of violence.Leonard's violent sexual attempt and his later brutal butchery of a corpse in this sense allude to his body being“penetrated” and transformed into a “truly grown-up.” Leonard's personal initiation is a metaphor of the transformation of the English society since the 1980 s when Margaret Thatcher embraced the US-led,pro-market “enterprise culture” as an antidote to the “English Disease,” which,as McEwan sees it,has shrugged off the British innocence and re-shaped the country into a hard-hearted,divided nation.Chapter Three analyzes McEwan's utopian representation of London in his2005 novel Saturday,and explores the political implications it has for the body.By analyzing Peronwe's claustrophobia,it suggests that camouflaged under the mask of a spectacular utopia lies the city's idiosyncrasy as a prison.Then it goes on to analyze Perowne's claustrophobia in light of Mike Davis and Foucault's theories,revealing the visible “walls” that are set up to protect himself from “contagious touch” as well as invisible “walls” the disciplinary regimes set up circumscribing his activities.With all these “walls” Perowne' s weekend odyssey becomes virtually an incorporeal experience,and the utopian London,in this sense,exiles the body,as it reduces Perowne's body to a pair of eyes and a disembodied conscious.Such implication of a lost body is wired with McEwan's interrogation about the nature of modern civilization.The last part summarizes how the body's transfigurations along with the evolvement of space in McEwan's novels,and deciphers the tenors of the English social vicissitude such interplay comes to dramatize.It draws a conclusion that the political interaction between space and the body is one of the major polemics for McEwan to explore the conditions of the country and existence of men in modernized social and cultural context.