Anthropogenesis: Ian McEwan’s Fictions of the Human

Abstract

Proceeding from the assumption that growing interest in the nonhuman has revived the question of what it means to be human rather than abandoning it, this chapter reads three of Ian McEwan’s novels, Nutshell (2016), Solar (2010), and Machines Like Me (2019), as works of anthropological enquiry. As a review of the tradition of philosophical anthropology suggests, in both classical and modern Western thought, the very idea of the human has always given rise to conceptions and representations of being other than or not (yet fully) human. The chapter argues that such negative versions of the human condition must therefore be regarded as an integral part of that condition. On this view, the human being is a creature that is unable to be quite what it is. Always at a remove from itself, it dwells in the space of contingency between the necessity of maintaining a life and the multiple possibilities of directing and fashioning it. As the chapter shows, McEwan’s novels explore a variety of problems that result from this “excentric” organisation (Plessner) of human existence. These problems include the ecology of consciousness, the scale of human thought, and the technological extension and transformation of physical life.