Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
Ian McEwan, “Journeys Without Maps: An Interview with Ian McEwan”, in Ian McEwan, ed. Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2009), 123–134 (p. 128). See also McEwan’s contribution to The Literary Animal, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloane Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), entitled “Literature, Science, and Human Nature” (5–19) and his interview with Lynn Wells (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 2.
Other notable ‘evocritics’ include Patrick Colm Hogan, Joseph Carroll, and Brian Boyd. For a debate regarding the value of this school of criticism, see Critical Inquiry 38 (Winter 2012).
- 3.
Ian McEwan, “Literature, Science, and Human Nature”, in The Literary Animal, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloane Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 5–19 (p. 11).
- 4.
Ian McEwan in interview with Lynn Wells, Ian McEwan (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 132.
- 5.
McEwan, “Journeys Without Maps”, 128.
- 6.
Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 4.
- 7.
See Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
- 8.
Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 22.
- 9.
Laura Salisbury, “Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan’s Mother Tongue”, Textual Practice 24 (2010): 883–912 (p. 890).
- 10.
Nick Bentley also analyses McEwan’s representation of head and brain trauma in Saturday in his contribution, entitled “Mind and Brain: The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday ”, in Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock (New York: Routledge, 2013), 115–129.
- 11.
Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 4. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.
- 12.
Ian McEwan, in “Journeys Without Maps”, 128, 130. McEwan makes a very similar argument in interview with Lynn Wells (2010).
- 13.
McEwan, in “Journeys Without Maps”, 130.
- 14.
See McEwan’s response to the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan in The Guardian for an example of this. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2, accessed 7 October 2013.
- 15.
Graham Hillard, “The Limits of Rationalism in Ian McEwan’s Saturday ”, The Explicator 68 (2010): 140–143 (p. 142).
- 16.
See, for example, Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
- 17.
McEwan, in “Journeys Without Maps”, 130.
- 18.
Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010), 9.
- 19.
Bradley and Tate, 11.
- 20.
Bradley and Tate, 31.
- 21.
Dominic Head, Ian McEwan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 190.
- 22.
David Amigoni, “‘The Luxury of Story-Telling’: Science, Literature and Cultural Contest in Ian McEwan’s Narrative Practice”, in Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 151–167 (p. 157).
- 23.
Raymond Tallis, “Ian McEwan’s Saturday : Does Implausibility Matter?”, in In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 162–172 (p. 166).
- 24.
McEwan, in “Journeys Without Maps”, 127.
- 25.
Thomas Jones, “Oh, the Irony”, London Review of Books 32 (2010): 20.
- 26.
Laura Salisbury, “Narration and Neurology”, 909.
- 27.
Jane F. Thrailkill, “Ian McEwan’s Neurological Novel”, Poetics Today 32, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 171–201 (p. 198).
- 28.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Vintage, 2006 [1994]), xxiii. McEwan mentions his debt to Damasio’s work in the acknowledgements to Enduring Love .
- 29.
Ian McEwan, Solar (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), 14. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.
- 30.
Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things”, Theory & Event 14, no. 3 (2011): Project MUSE, http://muse.jhu.edu/, accessed 29 April 2013.
- 31.
Shaviro, “The Universe of Things” [italics in original].
- 32.
See, for example, Thomas Jones, “Oh, the Irony”, London Review of Books 32 (2010); James Urquhart, Independent, Review Section, March 14, 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/solar-by-ian-mcewan-1919286.html, accessed 29 April 2013.
- 33.
Jason Cowley, Observer, Books Section, March 14, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/14/solar-ian-mcewan, accessed 29 April 2013.
- 34.
Terry Eagleton, “Darwin Won’t Help”, London Review of Books, September 24, 2009, 20.
- 35.
Tibor Fischer, “Review”, The Telegraph, March 7, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7359254/Solar-by-Ian-McEwan-review.html, accessed 7 January 2014.
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Holland, R. (2019). Ian McEwan and the Aeroplane View. In: Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_6
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