Collective Unconscious: Climate Change and Responsibility in Ian McEwan’s Solar

Abstract

This article makes links between issues of responsibility, climate change, and contemporary literature, using Ian McEwan’s Solar as a case study. The article not only addresses oversights in the existing critical responses to the novel, but identifies important insights that the novel can offer into a frontier of the politics of climate change: collective responsibility. Using and adapting Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious, the article argues that many dominant conceptions about how to act on climate change (and other environmental problems) are based on patently outdated modes of political thought, especially those oriented around conceptions of individual responsibility. Using Jameson’s framework, this article offers a way of reading beyond the failings of dominant modes of thinking to the anticipations of collective responsibility and action that exist in the margins of literary texts. By way of conclusion the article offers some reflections on how an ecocriticism guided by such a reading strategy can inform the work of an experimental environmental activism.