Il caso e l'immaginazione: "Saturday" di Ian McEwan

This essay addresses Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) along lines which prioritize the philosophical aspects of this novel. Saturday is a compelling exploration of the psychological experience of risk, staging the myriad ways in which our mind interprets life as an unrelenting effort at anticipating imagined futures which can help avert unexpected outcomes and “manage” threats. Such “dark imagining”, which McEwan suggests to be the result of evolution, is represented as the defining feature which inscribes the world of social risk within the grander discourse of genetic “chance” and evolutionary self-destruction. By exploring the connection between private and public risks, the private space of the mind and the public space of the city, the novel succeeds also in mapping out the cognitive, emotional and creative experience of the artistic imagination, understood as that which makes us human.