“There is grandeur in this view of life”: Ian McEwan’s Poetics of Chance and the Forms of Genetic Determinism

In this chapter, my focus shifts to the way in which two novels by Ian McEwan employ chance as a central formal element in their interrogation of genetic determinism. In Enduring Love (1997) and Saturday (2005), McEwan’s poetics of chance reveals a complex critique of molecular explanations of life and the deterministic rhetoric they have frequently inspired. Exploring aesthetic and genetic structures of chance and determinism, these novels embody a new form of confronting the biological and cultural dimensions of life in the novel. The emerging deep structural relations between genetic and literary manifestations of chance shed light on significant common ground between processes of life and their literary representations in the novel. However, the two novels’ determinist discourses rely on different genetic paradigms, which in each case imply specific temporalities and causal relations. The novels thereby not only illustrate that discourses of genetic determinism are in fact manifold to begin with, but they additionally demonstrate that literary fiction is attuned to scientific ideas in very precise ways down to the level of form. In the form of a coda, I outline the contours of McEwan’s genetic thinking in Solar (2010), Nutshell (2016) and Machines Like Me (2019).