From Dover to Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan at the Seaside

What are poems for? Perhaps they are sexual signals. Perhaps, as Charles Harper Webb argues,
they are indicators of evolutionary fitness akin to the peacock’s tail: ‘like a mockingbird blasting songs
from a power-line, a poem is an impressive display.’ ((Webb)60) From this Darwinian perspective,
either the performance involved in writing a fine poem was subject to direct adaptation, as people
preferentially chose poets as sexual partners, or else poetic ability functioned in the ancestral
environment as a proxy for other desirable mental and emotional traits. Readers of poetry too could
exhibit their fitness by demonstrating their capacity to interpret attractive poems successfully; hence
the well-attested sexual success of literary critics. According to Webb, the perfect poem in Darwinian
terms will be ‘moderately difficult to apprehend’, thereby showing off the fitness of the author without
humiliating the reader:
Weak-willed, fussy, and undistinguished poems don’t make the grade as fitness indicators or as
poems. Blasé, jaded, too-hip, excessively self-conscious poems may succeed as social displays,
but not as art. (66)
Remarkably, evolutionary argument aligns itself with a sort of ‘Goldilocks’ poetic taste – neither too
clever, difficult or self-regarding, nor populist doggerel or greetings-card verse – which in turn, quite
by chance, conforms to Webb’s own aesthetic preferences.
‘The Poem as Fitness Display’ is only the feeblest example of a new movement in literary
criticism: Darwinian criticism, or biopoetics. It summarises all that is silliest in it: shallow post hoc
arguments, cheerful leaps from alleged fact to asserted value, incautious use of more or less
speculative biological claims, and so on. Most conspicuously, it gambols gaily from the interesting idea
of literature as an adaptation (or a by-product of an adaptation or ‘exaptation’, in Steven Jay Gould’s
terms – Webb doesn’t seem to mind which, although it is a key question) to the quite different and far
less tenable idea that poetry is a ‘fitness indicator’, then on to the absurd notion that squabbles among
20th century American poets have some grand biological significance. Most creepy of all is the
unshakeable sense that Webb wants to intimate his own ‘evolutionary fitness’ as a poet.
The embarrassing foolishness of Webb’s efforts do not necessarily give the lie to E.O Wilson’s
grandiloquent statement that ‘The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be
the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities’ ((Wilson)6): genuinely magnificent projects may
be tawdrily imitated by those unworthy or incapable of them. To borrow Darwin’s famous phrase,
there is indeed grandeur in Wilson’s view of life, which is unambiguously committed to the
Enlightenment project of scientific progress and the unification of all knowledge, including the social
sciences, arts and humanities. The intellectual challenge is, as Wilson says, that ‘We know that virtually
all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on
the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact,
and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature.
(138) For Wilson, justly famous both for his work on sociobiology and for popularising and defending
biodiversity, environmentalist objectives require an understanding of human nature in its complex
interactions with historically-contingent cultures.
In literary study, however, it is still far from clear what consilience might involve, since many
of the examples of Darwinian criticism published thus far suffer from some of faults exemplified by
Webb’s argument (albeit less egregiously). In a detailed, encouraging but critical review of The
Literary Animal (Gottschall and Wilson), Steven Pinker questions the capacity of Darwinism to
enhance literary criticism, saying that ‘advocates … should be prepared to spell out what they hope
evolution will add to literary analysis beyond a rehabilitation of a conception of human nature
(Pinker)175) More positively, he suggests that ‘a consilient literary scholarship should avail itself not
only of evolutionary psychology but of the other sciences of human nature: artificial intelligence…,
cognitive science…, linguistics…, behavioral genetics… [and] social psychologyhe relationship of
biopoetics and ecocriticism – both potential forms of consilient criticism – is complicated too because,
as Wilson implies, ecology may play a role as that for the sake of which consilient study is motivated to
analyse human nature – via literature or any other cultural form – but it seems it cannot bear directly
on culture in the way that, say, cognitive psychology can. As Joseph Carroll observes, ‘Literature is
produced by the psyche, not the ecosystem, and the psyche has been produced by natural selection
(Carroll)87) At the same time, however, Glen Love has argued that ‘ecological thinking – insofar as it
involves an enlarged sense of what needs to be taken into account in attempting to answer questions
about the natural world and our place in it – must include a larger and more vigilant consideration of
evolutionary biology and genetics, biocultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, the neurosciences,
and other Darwinian-based ideas about human behavior (Love)51) Environmentalism that remains
uninformed by the biases and propensities of human nature is likely always to revert to moral
idealism, and shortly afterwards, despair. Bringing the perspective of evolution to bear upon ecocrisis,
alongside that of cultural history, may or may not bring better results, but should at least yield better
strategies.

Evolution is the biological dimension of deep time, a temporality that vastly exceeds and
humbles humanity. Anyone seeking the site of the first glimpse into the dark abysm of deep time
would be well advised to start on the south coast of England. It was there that, in 1812, a girl called
Mary Anning discovered an ichthyosaurus embedded in a cliff-face, setting her off on an extraordinary
career of fossil-hunting and excavation. She was not the first to discover fossil animals; what was
unique was, as Bill Bryson says, ‘the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved working
virtually unaided with the most basic tools in nearly impossible conditions’ (Bryson)(74) Fossil
mammoths had already been found in America, leading George Cuvier to speculate as to the possible
existence of extinct species of prehistoric animal, but it was Anning’s discoveries near Lyme Regis of
complete skeletons from the Jurassic era in Dorset that began to open up vistas of staggering temporal
scale. Archbishop James Ussher’s famous dating of the Creation to 23 October 4004BC was already, by
the late 19th century, rejected by those with serious knowledge or interest in geology, but it was
Anning’s fossils that provided palaeontological evidence to support James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth,
the founding text of modern geology. In 1830, Henry de la Beche’s watercolour of the prehistoric
battles of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, with pterodactyls wheeling overhead, allowed people to
visualise a world before people for the first time; it was so popular that a print based on the painting
was sold to help Anning out of her poverty. Moreover, the cross-sections of geological strata revealed
by erosion along what became known as the ‘Jurassic Coast’ provided a graphic illustration of the
uniformitarian timescape of gradual accumulation and change.
It was appropriate, then – and no doubt deliberate – that Matthew Arnold set his great poem of
doubt and meagre redemption at Dover Beach. Not only could the speaker and his beloved see the
coastline of France, where ‘ignorant armies’ had but recently clashed when the poem was started in
1851, the cliffs themselves, hard by the speaker’s vantage-point, could represent the disillusionment,
even humiliation, that deep time brought to human faith.

Dover Beach
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.(Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy)

For Arnold, the ‘Sea of Faith’ seemed destined to recede, and although the reasons for its retreat are
not made plain in the poem, it seems likely that the disorientations induced by Darwinism are to
blame: the cosmos is not fundamentally providential, let alone beneficent, but dark and cruel,
redeemed only by frail sparks of humankindness. Science has disenchanted the world. The
‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of dying religious belief leaves behind the ‘naked shingles’ of
materialism, whose unforgiving character is summarised in a devastating litotic series: Darwin’s world
‘hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain’. All these are the
delusions bequeathed us by a religion that, as Arnold remarked in ‘The Hundred Greatest Men’, has
doomed itself by its claims to factual truths: ‘Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the
supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact and now the fact is failing it(Arnold).’ Poetry is
safe, he thinks, because of the unsullied and incontrovertible purity of the ‘idea’, although this refuge
from nihilism seems little more secure than the hope of a promise: ‘Ah love, let us be true / to one
another.’ If one cannot find truth in Faith, one might at least have faith in troth.
To think so, however, one must think it axiomatic that materialism threatens nihilism and
disillusionment (‘Abolish your reverences’, Nietzsche proclaimed, ‘or yourselves!’) while only the
poetic or romantic ‘idea’ redeems. According to Arnold’s transcendentalism, ethics is whatever one
may hope against hope for, or merely impose upon, two naked apes clinging together in a godless
universe, not a part of the natural history of those creatures themselves. Literary criticism and theory
has been overwhelmingly transcendentalist, believing with Arnold that when we hope or love or,
paradigmatically, read, we leave behind the baser selves that we, admittedly, must indulge at
mealtimes, concede to on our deathbeds or, for Joyce, surrender to ‘on the jakes’. Dominic Head, for
instance, demonstrates the resilience of this tradition in his reading of McEwan’s most bluntly
Darwinian novel, Enduring Love, which he still somehow reads as contesting a naturalistic account of
morality: ‘The novel shows humanity to be at a stage of evolution and/or social complexity that takes
us out of the evolutionary loop, and that demands of us an ethical sense that addresses the problem of
self-interest with acute self-consciousness.’ (139) (Head) For the empiricist tradition, though,
refounded for the Enlightenment by David Hume and boasting Ian McEwan as its most distinguished
literary adherent, the evolutionary ‘loop’ has no outside – at least, not for living creatures on Earth –
and to think otherwise is sheerest mysticism. Both morality and literature are natural, albeit that we
will need to reconceptualise nature as more capacious and less deterministic in order to say so.
 What I am arguing for, in effect, is the unification of ecocriticism, the critical metadiscourse of
nature, and Darwinian criticism, the equivalent for human nature, under the heading of consilient
literary criticism. My reading of McEwan therefore bypasses his overtly environmentalist novels, The
Child in Time and Solar, to focus on Saturday and On Chesil Beach, each of which embodies the dream of
consilience. In Saturday, the shores of the south coast of Britain enter the narrative indirectly, but
pivotally: at a moment when the competing scientific and poetic accounts of human nature are put to
their severest proof. Chesil Beach, by contrast, is not only the primary setting for McEwan’s succeeding
novella, but a brilliantly subtle and pervasive symbol for the effects of the tidal drift of evolution on the
nature of homo sapiens.

By taking a stand for consilience, McEwan is at odds with the dominant strand in
environmental philosophy and ecocriticism. At least since Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature
(whose progenitors include Weber and Romanticism), mainstream science has been accused of
‘disenchantment’ of both nature and the human body under the influence of reductive materialism.
Pointing the finger at Descartes rather than, like Merchant, Francis Bacon, Val Plumwood asserts that:
In the Cartesian dream of power, the subject is set over against the object it knows, in a
relation of alleged neutrality in practice modelled as power and control. We are yet to awaken
from this dream, which has formed modern conceptions of scientific knowledge and
rationality, human as well as non-human identities. (Plumwood)(117)
Such Cartesian dualism can be circumvented by ‘physicalism which reduces mind to brain’ (121), but,
Plumwood protests, only at the expense of ‘all talk of teleology, of agency, of goals, of striving, of choice
and freedom.’ Plumwood argues for non-hierarchical, non-oppositional dualism of mind and body,
which retains something of the traditional autonomy of the human soul, but extends it animistically
into the ‘physical’ world. On this view, Wilson’s consilience is an imperialistic project to extend the
baleful and ecocidal reductionism of the physical sciences into the last redoubts of literary criticism
and philosophy. Of course, since not even ecofeminist critics want to disavow science entirely –
ecology, to say nothing of oncology or anaesthetic dentistry – they readmit its possibilities on
condition that it fulfils some pious hope, such as that, in Plumwood’s words, ‘we reconceive ourselves
as more animal and embodied, more “natural”, and that we reconceive nature as more mindlike’ (124)
or that, as physicist Thelma hopes in The Child in Time, the ‘clever boy’ becomes a ‘wise
woman’(McEwan The Child in Time). While any Darwinian would applaud the desire see ‘ourselves as
more animal and embodied’, it is not at all clear what it might mean in practice for, say, an astronomer
to think of a brown dwarf star as ‘more mindlike’, or indeed to admit her ‘embodiment’ (freezing at
night in a telescope dome perhaps). Whatever the virtues of the philosophical critique of ‘scientism’,
the pseudosciences defended (dowsing, indigenous botany) and the sciences that get chastised seem
to be little more than personal or ideological hobby-horses.
 By contrast Saturday is, at least at first, quite uncompromisingly empiricist, and there is no
doubting the ‘Cartesian’ power of the neurosurgical knowledge, skills and tools deployed by Henry
Perowne. Even though he awakes ‘baffled and fearful’ ((McEwan Saturday)4) in the early hours to
confront a host of modern anxieties, it is the succession of procedures – rapid in story time as well as
narration – in the early pages of the novel that memorably communicates McEwan’s awed fascination
with Perowne’s interventions. The inexpert reader is almost overwhelmed by the torrent of surgical
terminology that surges through the excited narration of wonders such as Perowne’s ‘infratentorial
supracerebellar route’ to the removal of a ‘pilocytic astrocytoma’ in a belligerent Nigerian girl. His
successful intervention will cure Andrea of her ‘headaches, blindspots and ataxia’, but not her
rebellious behaviour, much to the disappointment of her vicar uncle who ironically hoped for a
neurological explanation: ‘Perowne could offer no such comfort. The tumour was remote from the
frontal lobes’ (10) The admiration of the impersonal heterodiegetic narrator for the surgeon’s skill,
and the institutions and technologies that nurture it, is unconcealed, as in the description of a
consultant’s excision of a tumour from the brain of Perowne’s future wife:
The elegance of the procedure seemed to embody a brilliant contradiction: the remedy was as
simple as plumbing, as elemental as a blocked drain – the optic nerves were decompressed and
the threat to Rosalind’s vision vanished. And yet the making of a safe route into this remote
and buried place in the head was a feat of technical mastery and concentration. To go in right
through the face, remove the tumour through the nose, to deliver the patient back into her life,
without pain or infection, with her vision restored was a miracle of human ingenuity. (44)
The surgeons’ ‘high-wire act’ is a microcosm of the well-functioning city in which it takes place, where
the mass demonstrations against the Iraq War seem as much an expression of comfortable self-
indulgence as anti-war sentiment, for ‘the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological
masterpiece – millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as
though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part,
nearly everyone wanting it to work’ (5) By contrast with the declensionism that guides anti-
Enlightenment ecophilosophy, Saturday is a paean to scientific, technological and economic progress.
The first appearance of a coastal rhetoric is here in a simile at once biocentric and scientistic: the ‘reef’
that is London may appear to swarm chaotically, menaced by the threat of terrorism and criminal
violence, but it is really possessed of the layered, dynamic diversity that is said to characterise stable
ecosystems. Tightly bound to the protagonist as focaliser, the narrator tells it as Perowne sees, and
says, his world, without a trace of irony. Two nurses crossing the chilly early morning square are ‘hot
little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with numerous branching
neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone casing, buried fibres, warm filaments with their invisible
glow of consciousness’ (13) So consistent is the confidence invested in this man, his work and the
world that sustains it, and so finely attuned to his empiricism is the precise, incisive narrative idiom,
that it exercises a paradoxically alienating effect on readers with humanistic assumptions. Many
readers, in short, hate both the novel and Perowne.
One source of tension in this comfortable world is overtly environmental. Thus the
cornucopian ranks of fish and seafood beached on the metonymic shore of the fishmonger’s slab give
false reassurance of the sea’s bounty. Perowne ‘sees at a glance that everything he needs is here. Such
abundance from the emptying seas’ (127) As an empiricist, he cannot reassure himself that the fish
died painlessly, but as a keen fisherman he chooses to be ‘selective in [his] mercies’. Yet in a still wider
context, each killed creature wrapped and bought exemplifies the incommensurable elements, and the
wild play of necessity and contingency, that the coastline epitomises:
… what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf, ending
up on the pages, no, on this page of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of
infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. … at every instant, a
trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like
freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god. (128)
The very peculiarity of some of the subaquatic animals, and the crazy tenuousness of the links in their
journey to this strange meeting, confronts our anthropomorphic tendencies, even as their delusive
profusion hints at a challenge to Perowne’s confident progressivism.
It is, however, the redoubtable Baxter, a low-rent criminal in the early stages of Huntingdon’s
disease, who disrupts Perowne’s complacent world like a force of nature. As Childs points out,
‘Perowne is insufficiently alive to his involvement in the world until he is confronted with violence and
the opportunity for mercy close to home: the opportunity to operate on the man who has threatened
his life and family’ (Childs)(146). Even so, the origin of the threat is unambiguously and recalcitrantly
material, even mechanical: ‘This is how the brilliant machinery of being is undone by the tiniest of
faulty cogs, the insidious whisper of ruin, a single bad idea lodged in every cell, on every chromosome
four.’ Andrea’s love of drugs and nightclubs might not be neuropathological, but Baxter’s physical tics
and dizzying capacity for unprovoked violence certainly are, and it is the practised eye of the clinician
that can make the diagnosis and infer its genetic aetiology. Perowne’s stubborn empiricism is, he is
convinced, vindicated both by his procedures and their astonishing results: ‘It isn’t an article of faith
with him, he knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs.’ There
seems to be no hiding place in the skull for Arnold’s transcendental self, nor indeed any saving role for
that incidental and decorative activity of our grey matter, the production of literature.
The first and most obvious irony to which the plot subjects Perowne is that it is not surgery but
poetry that saves his family from Baxter’s vindictive rage: ‘Could it happen, is it within the bounds of
the real, that a mere poem of Daisy’s could precipitate a mood swing?’ (221) The sentence is
Perowne’s narrated thought, but might equally be read as a metanarrative query directed at the
novel’s own conspicuous realism. In his state of advanced neurological degeneration, Baxter is elated
and transformed by Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ into a kind of parodic version of the ideal
subject of liberal humanist literary theory – just long enough for Perowne and his son to push him
down the stairs. On the face of it, the poem that uniquely seemed to ‘cast a spell on one man’ (278)
might constitute a riposte to empiricism and an Arnoldian plea for the autonomous power of
literature, and yet McEwan’s choice of poem indicates a second, more subtle level of irony: whereas for
Arnold, as for Merchant and Plumwood, science had disenchanted the world, leaving only a frail,
residual kindness to give succour in a world that ‘hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor
certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,’ it is precisely Perowne’s mercy that will ensure his terminally-
ill assailant receives whatever palliative care can be arranged. He is not subjected to any epiphany, but
simply forces himself to pursue the implications of his own liberal conscience. His moral sense is not a
baffling, if redeeming, exception to his evolved nature, let alone an objection to it, but a just act that
follows from it in a society that, as Darwinian moralists would say, has made it easy and rewarding to
be good. As an artefact, Arnold’s beach poem symbolises the transcendental humanism to which Daisy
and her grandfather John Grammaticus subscribe, but its function in the wider narrative suggests that
the mutual exclusivity it assumes between ethics and Darwinian nature is overdrawn. To be good, to
forgive and to be ‘true to one another’ is as natural as either competition ‘red in tooth and claw’ or
Baxter’s cruel vulnerability.
So Saturday models a conception of mainstream, unreconstructed science that robustly rejects
the demand that it somehow re-enchant itself, proclaiming in response Darwin’s magnificent phrase:
‘There is grandeur in this view of life’ (55). Developing its consilient vision further in a different
direction, On Chesil Beach points towards an interactionist conception of human nature that strives to
navigate between the faded threat of biological determinism and the embattled, intransigent and
increasingly forlorn redoubt of anti-essentialist theory. Moreover it does so by enacting a short, simple
story of sexual repression and disappointment at a hotel on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset.
Before we get there, we need to confront the myth, pervasive in non-scientific culture, that
biology must be destiny while culture is infinitely plastic. As Richard Dawkins argues in his demolition
of genetic determinism in The Extended Phenotype:
People seem to have little difficulty in accepting the modifiability of “environmental” effects on
human development. If a child has had bad teaching in mathematics, it is accepted that the
resulting deficiency can be remedied by extra good teaching the following year. But any
suggestion that the child’s mathematical deficiency might have a genetic origin is likely to be
greeted with something approaching despair: if it is in the genes “it is written”, it is
“determined” and nothing can be done about it: you might as well give up attempting to teach
the child mathematics. This is pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale. Genetic
causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some
influences of both types may be hard to reverse; others may be easy to reverse ... [but] there is
no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irreversible than
environmental ones. (Dawkins)(13)
The next step is to acknowledge that individual genetic variation within the human species is such that
even significantly distinct groups (most notably men and women) will include coextensive
distributions on nearly any criterion you might choose (although not, of course, identical
distributions). The most difficult part, then, is not merely to allow a crucial shaping role to “culture”
(which no biologist or evolutionary psychologist denies), but to understand both common human
nature and individual variation as being expressed necessarily within specific, contingent historical
situations. Edward and Florence’s disastrous wedding night is exemplary in not merely thematising
human nature, but dramatising it in just such a complex interaction.
At the level of geological time, Chesil Beach itself suggests how order emerges out of apparent
tumult, as ‘thousands of years of pounding storms had sifted and graded the size of pebbles along the
eighteen miles of beach, with the bigger stones at the eastern end’ (McEwan On Chesil Beach)(19),
while, at the opposite extreme, at a critical moment in their catastrophic pas de deux, a stray pubic hair
is microscopically observed setting off in Florence ‘a mere shadow of a sensation, an almost abstract
beginning, as infinitely small as a geometric point that grew to a miniscule smooth-edged speck and
continued to grow’ (87). Even in the face of the couple’s wildly differing sexual needs and expectations,
and the fact that ‘they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly
impossible’ (3), the agitated hair might have, so to speak, turned the tide. ‘How could the root of a
solitary hair drag her whole body in?’ That it does not is due both to typical innate differences in male
and female sexual psychology and to the post-war culture of congealed gravy and awkward silences
that massively exacerbates (even ‘constructs’) them. If the drift of stones on Chesil Beach indicates the
tidal bias of evolutionary gender differentiation, the drift of the sound of a wireless radio through the
floor of their honeymoon suite is a reminder of the historical circumstances that shape them too. When
Edward sarcastically suggests they might join the older generation downstairs listening to it, Florence
is so desperate to escape the pressure of his sexual urgency she almost accepts:
She really would have been happier, or less unhappy, to go down to the lounge and pass the
time in quiet conversation with the matrons on the floral-patterned sofas while their men
leaned seriously into the news, into the gale of history. Anything but this. (27)
The narration is suffused by a mournful sense of historical irony thanks to our shared knowledge that
they teeter on the brink of a more liberated age, ‘but for now, the times held them.’ (18) Edward’s
desperate sexual need is on a collision course, worthy of Thomas Hardy, with Florence’s ‘visceral
dread, a helpless disgust palpable as seasickness’ (7) at the prospect of physical intimacy. With
sympathetic sarcasm, the narrator asks:
And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity,
squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a
religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all. (96)
Encircling and shaping the whole debacle is the evolutionary psychology of a mildly polygynous
primate species exhibiting sexual differentiation somewhere in between the androgyny of bonobos
and the radical dimorphism of gorillas. McEwan renders the psychological gender difference
economically and effectively by shifting focalisation between Edward and Florence: when they kiss
and she moans with fear she will vomit in his mouth, he responds erotically to the sound with the
thrilling sensation ‘that his happiness was almost complete.’ (30) Yet there is no biological
determinism or gender essentialism in play here: by contrast with the historiography of scientific
socialism inflicted on Edward at university, the novel insists that at the levels of evolutionary,
historical and individual change, causation is so complex as to constitute, effectively, an entanglement
of fortune, not necessity. Tiny, brave and baffled in face of such besieging contingencies, Florence and
Edward are, like all of us, flotsam on the sea of time. Reflecting in old age on his rejection of her artless
plea for love and patience, Edward recognises himself as a genealogical terminus whose ‘unborn
children’ would never ‘have their chances’. What he cannot see or know is how close she was to
turning back, waiting only for his word. ‘This is how the entire course of a life can be changed – by
doing nothing.’ (166) And since the concentric circles of causation radiate out as well as in, we must
imagine that that moment alters history and evolution, however infinitesimally.
Saturday and On Chesil Beach might seem unpromising materials for ecocriticism, given that
neither novel concerns itself centrally with ‘the environment’, preferring to focus upon human dramas.
But the significance of beach and shoreline as symbol and setting indicate a deeper level of
environmentality at which the interaction of human and non-human nature is crucial. Darwinian
criticism has the potential to correct the tendency of ecocriticism to moral idealism, while the
acceptance within ecocriticism of the value of historical and ideological perspectives might help
Darwinian criticism overcome its inability to, as one critic put it, ‘see society’. Together, these
biologically-orientated, anti-deterministic theories of criticism have the potential to transform the
literary academy, with McEwan’s novels at the heart of the canon.

Acknowledgements: The opening part of this essay was first published in a similar form in
‘Ecocriticism and Consilience’, Indian Journal of Ecocriticism 2010 (vol.2), while some elements of the
discussion of Saturday were first published in ‘Ian McEwan’s Next Novel’, Contemporary Literature
Winter 2009 (Vol.50, no.4): 695-720.

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