The Secularizing Work of the Novel: Modernist Form and Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Abstract:Studies of Ian McEwan’s novels have demonstrated his engagements with modernist form and neuroscience, but they have not attended to how he draws these two together with a specific purpose: to put the novel to work for secularizing ends, understood as challenging and surpassing religion and the supernatural as sources of meaning. What draws McEwan to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce is not simply modernist form per se, but its secularizing potential, though one McEwan sees as incompletely realized. McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) completes the secularizing work of modernist form by grounding it in materialist, brain-based cognition, a reading of the novel supported by a genetic view of McEwan’s notebooks and drafts. Saturday, and McEwan’s fiction generally, emerge as much more stridently secular than recent studies of his work’s sincerity and commitment suggest. Identifying this set of affiliations across the modern and contemporary novel further develops the form’s secular genealogy.