Chapter 3 considers Ian McEwan’s engagement with neo-Darwinism in its manifestation as evolutionary psychology. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, human behaviour is driven by genetic self-interest and society is structured around competition, while our tendency to self-deception disguises our motives from ourselves and others. This bleak view of human nature, which was promoted in the 1990s by influential figures such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, informs the characterization and plot of McEwan’s major novels (Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday). It also inflects the movement known as literary Darwinism, with which McEwan was closely associated. Having charted McEwan’s tight connections with neo-Darwinism, the chapter concludes with a reading of his recent novel Nutshell (2016) as a witty subversion of the neo-Darwinian orthodoxies which shaped his earlier work

Ian McEwan: The Literary Animal

The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11

Science and Climate Crisis

The Construction of Childhood

The Public and the Private

This essay identifies a “scientific turn” in two recent novels by Ian McEwan, arguing that in Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), literary realism becomes linked with a particular conception of science. Science is presented in these two novels as the discourse of objectivity, enjoying largely unproblematic access to the workings of the material universe, and the reality that science describes is seen to underlie the models of realism utilized in each text. Realism, and the scientifically backed reality that supports it, is placed in opposition to a particular type of mindset, embodied by religious extremists, the broadly postmodern humanities, and climate change deniers, all of whom are seen to represent, and be in thrall to, an excessive focus on the subjective world.

Reality Check: Ian McEwan’s Rational Fictions

This chapter focuses mainly on Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), the two texts which represent the peak (thus far) in McEwan’s bid to produce an exemplary third culture novel. In Saturday and Solar, literary realism becomes more central than in any of McEwan’s previous works, and is linked with, and aims to parallel, a type of realism which McEwan associates with science. At the same time that these two novels are antagonistic to poststructuralist theory, they are also self-reflexive in the sense that they serve, in part, as propaganda for themselves. Literature is lauded as the ideal medium for conflating and disseminating the most important knowledge from across the two cultures divide, but only literature which operates in precisely the way that McEwan’s does, so that this attempt to take up a broad, detached perspective risks collapsing into the sort of solipsistic navel-gazing for which theory has often been criticized.

Ian McEwan and the Aeroplane View

In recent years, a substantial amount of critical attention has been given to what Marco Roth, in 2009, termed the ‘neuronovel’. Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and Thinks… by David Lodge are generally included by critics under this definition, but this chapter argues that they are better classified as postneuronovels if we are to take the prevailing categorizations, with their emphasis on the ability of neuroscience to ‘refresh and redeem’ an exhausted literature, as our starting point. Despite incorporating detailed research from neuroscience and conveying it with pedagogical determination, these two novels actually undermine materialist conceptions of the self in favour of traditional humanist ones, at the same time that they utilize scientific materialism in order to deprecate literary and cultural theory. Where these two novels do move beyond traditional humanism, though, is in their attempt to provide a material basis for human emotion, and, by extension, for the novel.

The Postneuronovel: Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and Thinks… by David Lodge

This chapter discusses two novels by Michel Houellebecq, Atomised (1998) and The Possibility of an Island (2005), both of which base a large amount of their intellectual focus on the relevance of the objective, material world to philosophical thought. The chapter outlines recent developments in continental philosophy, in which a revived interest in the significance of the material world and a desire to re-engage with the ‘in itself’ after decades of what Quentin Meillassoux terms the crippling ‘correlationism’ between thinking and being, has come to be classified under the banner of speculative realism or speculative materialism. By comparing the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux with Houellebecq’s fiction, I argue that both the speculative realist philosophy of these two thinkers and the aesthetics of the two novels under discussion, despite their alliance with scientific-materialist models of the universe, actually reach towards a transcendent space existing beyond objective reality.

Michel Houellebecq and the Possibilities of Fiction

This chapter discusses The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, two novels which attempt to create links between a materially grounded emotional sphere and a conception of the unique, individuated space of the novel. Human emotion is understood in these two anti-consumerist fictions as the driving force of society, and a proper respect for emotion is promoted as being the crucial element underlying any successful moral framework. Not only does their interest in the materiality of the affective realm place these novels in a position which moves away from literary and cultural theory, it also develops a new type of literary transcendentalism, one which understands morality to be grounded in nature because it exists as part of naturally occurring affective phenomena. Emotion in these two texts precedes, outlives and underlies the systems it has spawned, and the novel is depicted as being a vital arbiter between affect and effect.

Rachel Holland

Papers

Reality Check: Ian McEwan’s Rational Fictions

Ian McEwan and the Aeroplane View

The Postneuronovel: Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers and Thinks… by David Lodge

Michel Houellebecq and the Possibilities of Fiction

Scientific Transcendentalism: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood