Susan Green, Macquarie University

Ian McEwan’s recent novels, Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), are part of the new interdisciplinary momentum between the sciences and the humanities. These novels reveal McEwan’s keen interest in the brain and how science can be deployed in literature; in fact, McEwan has been described as “inaugurating the genre of the neuronovel”. Despite recent developments in neuroscience revealing, for example, that consciousness and emotion are not separable, exactly how the brain encodes experience is still not understood. McEwan’s fundamental argument is that the flexible form of the novel is uniquely able to capture the intricate workings of the mind in a way that science alone cannot. McEwan uses ideas from the cognitive sciences to thematically frame his work, thereby constructing not only an intersection between the traditionally separate “two cultures”, but also communicating his belief that science and literature are interdependent in their quest to understand the human mind.

This paper explores the various narrative strategies McEwan employs to position Saturday as a philosophical thought experiment engaging with both literary and scientific ideas. Rather than merely positioning the two traditionally disparate discourses of science and literature as alternative but complementary, I argue that Saturday is a new form of science fiction, inviting us to re-conceive literature as a merging of these parallel discourses, thereby promoting a cultural shift in ideas about science, literature and the complexities of consciousness.