The Movement from the Parallactic Surreal into the Heimlich in McEwan’s The Child in Time

Two works of art came out in 1987. One is Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (648-3): the Abstract Impressionist tone of the painting radiates a sense – if only an impression – of the surreal and the uncanny. The other is Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time. The novel opens with the dissolution of home caused by the loss of a child; what happens thenceforth builds up a sense of the dissolution of reality wherein the reader is taken through the realm of the uncanny. Indeed, there is in The Child in Time a dimensional shift into the Surreal, a realm through which Stephen recovers and reinstates his lost sense of home. For it is in this realm where Stephen deals with the repressed through a liberating process that helps him dissolve the Unheimlich into the Heimlich[i], transforming the repressed into the homely. Slavoj Žižek’s work on The Parallax View[ii] will help us gain further insight into the surreal and uncanny experiences in the novel, and, more importantly, into the intricate process that gives Stephen liberation.

One of Žižek’s great contributions to philosophy and theory is his concept of the “parallax gap”. He introduces it as “a kind of Kantian revenge over Hegel”[iii]: whereas Hegel’s philosophy seeks some sort of dialectical synthesis between a thesis and antithesis, a link between two binary oppositions, Kant points out an unbridgeable gap, a transcendental illusion, “the illusion of being able to use the same language for phenomena which are mutually untranslatable”[iv]. There is thus, in Hegelian diction, “a fundamental antinomy which can never be dialectically “mediated/ sublated” into a higher synthesis, since there is no common language, no shared ground, between the two levels”[v]. What Žižek then observes in Kant’s notion of the transcendental is the presence of what he calls the “parallax gap”, “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible”[vi]. The parallax gap is made observable only through a shift, or a “minimal difference”[vii],  in the perspective of an object – a shift which Žižek further posits as an object itself. It is the third space between the phenomenal and the noumenal, a separate Dasein which we are able to contemplate.

An artistic notion that in the novel goes together with the concept of the parallax gap is that of Surrealism. André Breton in his first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) puts forth that “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life”. This “superior reality” is accordingly what Breton calls a surreality: the “resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality”. We may then draw from this description of surreality its inherent nature of uncanniness. Being a synthesis of the state of reality and dreams, surreality delves into the realm of the unconscious, the repressed, and the uncanny. Moreover, being itself a dimension beyond reality – and, in a sense, one which encompasses reality – the realm of the surreal is free to constantly fluctuate between our familiar reality and the trans-natural domain of unconscious, psychic automatism. It is precisely such a presentation of the surreal that gives it a sense of the uncanny; it draws on the familiar and yet distinguishes itself as psychologically unfamiliar and enigmatic. The in-between-ness of surreality, its position between reality and the psychically transcendental, characterises it as a version of the parallax gap: the “reality” it offers is nothing but a transcendental illusion.

In The Child in Time[viii], Stephen is transported into the liminal realm of the parallactic surreal. His first experience with the surreal is described as such:

He set off, and within minutes found satisfaction in this new landscape. He was marching across a void. All sense of progress, and therefore all sense of time, disappeared. The trees on the far side did not come closer. This was an obsessive landscape – it thought only about wheat. The lack of hurry, the disappearance of any real sense of a destination, suited him. (p. 53)

 

Stephen thereafter is in a constant flux between surreality and reality, with no explicit struggle to understand his displacement from mundane reality. What he questions instead is the nature of time in his seemingly unnatural experiences: “What do you make of it, that thing about time?”[ix] he asks Joe regarding their accident. It is indeed difficult to clearly distinguish the real from the surreal in the novel if only because it is an attribute of the surreal to encompass the real within itself – but also because Stephen himself is unconscious of the transitions between the two dimensions. The surreal parallax gap wherein we often find him strikingly positioned is moreover an anachronistic gap between his past and his present that blurs the temporal boundaries between those two periods of his life. At times, Stephen is transported into what for him is a prenatal period, able to observe his parents from before he was born; at times, it would appear as if he is rooted in present reality – though again it is almost impossible to draw proper boundaries between reality and surreality. The surreal in the novel occurs as a “minimal difference” between the perspectives of reality and the uncanny, and the object for which these perspectives offer such a difference is Stephen himself.

What is then evoked in this surreal realm is the return of the repressed as it is symbolically and obliquely personalized for Stephen. Consequently, his two major surrealistic experiences contain maternal motifs. The scene of the lorry accident presents a birthing scene: “There was a head at Stephen’s feet. It protruded from a vertical gash in the steel. There was a bare arm too. . .”[x] The scene continues until Stephen “took hold of the man’s shoulder with one hand, and cupped the other under his face and pulled. The man groaned”[xi]. The other scene involves Stephen’s mother in a pub (p.62) where we eventually learn of her pregnancy. The scene radiates an unconscious and uncanny pathos for Stephen from which he feels “a cold, infant despondency. . .a bitter sense of exclusion and longing”[xii]. The scenes taken together thus indicate that the repressed desire for Stephen returns is the actual unheimlich desire in its most Freudian sense, the Oedipal desire to return to “the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning”[xiii]. This desire expresses itself in Stephen’s consciousness: “home, he was home, enclosed, safe and therefore able to provide, home where he owned and was owned. Home, why be anywhere else?”[xiv] In a parallel perspective, the transposition of such a repressed, unconscious desire for Stephen into the realm of reality reveals his actual but subconscious[xv] desire to repair the lost sense of “home” in his family. What, in other words, Stephen longs for after the kidnapping of Kate is the restoration of the sense of the homely – to be able to return to Julie and re-establish their shattered home.

Stephen’s experience in the parallactic surreal, while often submersing him in the realm of the repressed, paradoxically liberates him from the selfsame paralyzing realm. Such is one of the many functions of the parallax gap. For the gap, being what Žižek calls “the third space between phenomena and the noumenon itself”[xvi], contains our freedom: “Our freedom persists only in a space between the phenomenal and the noumenal”[xvii]. For Stephen, freedom from the repressed involves a form of “separation”. According to Otto Rank, it is a process of

the overcoming of previous supporting egos and ideologies from which the individual has to free himself according to the measure and speed of his own growth, a separation which is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because victory is always, at bottom and in some form, won over a part of one’s own ego[xviii].

It is indeed an extremely difficult struggle for Stephen to liberate the ego from paralysis. The novel depicts his struggle as such: “Almost three years on and still stuck, still trapped in the dark, enfolded with his loss, shaped by it, lost to the ordinary currents of feeling that moved far above him and belonged exclusively to other people”[xix]. What is arguably the most poignant of the surreal scenes in the novel is that which also helps liberate Stephen. “Perhaps he was crying as he backed away from the window, perhaps he was wailing like a baby walking in the night. . .”[xx]. The vision of his mother at The Bell changes from a moment of the uncanny, the unheimlich, into a moment of das Heimliche [homely][xxi]. Wells explains that “he [Stephen] imagines it. . .as a stage in a process that will lead to new life. . .Stephen’s brush with non-existence through contact with his parents’ ‘ghosts’ prompted him to follow the ‘forking path’ that led to intercourse with Julie”[xxii]. Stephen’s journey through surreality encompasses and eventually refashions the melancholia and paralysis that he experiences: “he understood that his experience there had not only been reciprocal with his parents’, it had been a continuation, a kind of repetition. He had a premonition followed instantly by a certainty…that all the sorrow, all the empty waiting had been enclosed within meaningful time, within the richest unfolding conceivable”[xxiii]. What is thus expressed here is the total transubstantiation of the Unheimlich into the Heimlich, the uncanny – and with it, the repressed – into the homely. Stephen’s surreal experience at The Bell becomes a “continuation” from an uncanny prenatal “memory” into a present reality with Julie, a reality wherein the homely may be re-established, where “the feel of the warm boards under his feet brought to mind again the idea of home”[xxiv]. The parallax gap of the surreal becomes transformed itself, from an unbridgeable gap between Stephen’s paralyzing repression and his ideal Heimlich reality, into precisely the synthesis that allows for the conversion and transition of the former to the latter, a synthesis that paves the way towards Stephen’s freedom.

The Child in Time deals with the dissolution of home in its own unique way. Stephen’s uncanny experiences become the remedy that leads him towards his healing. His submersion in the realm of the surreal becomes his therapy, for it is in this realm that the repressed becomes deconstructed and reconstructed into the very thing that provides him with closure. The Unheimlich, once a gap wherein no higher synthesis is possible, becomes the higher synthesis for Stephen, the bridge that connects his experience in The Bell with his present situation, leading him back to Julie, endowing him with a new sense of home, and finally giving him the restoration of everything he lost in the beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] I use the original German terms because they contain not only the concept of the canny and uncanny, but more importantly the key connotations of the homely and un-homely that may not be so apparent in their English counterparts.

[ii] The Parallax View (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006).

[iii] p. 4.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Žižek, 18.

[viii] All quotes taken from Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (Vintage Canada, 1987).

[ix] p.107.

[x] p. 109.

[xi] p. 105.

[xii] p. 62.

[xiii] p. 528, Sigmund Freud, in “The ‘Uncanny’” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter (Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007), 514-532.

[xiv] McEwan, p. 68.

[xv] As opposed to unconscious.

[xvi] p. 22.

[xvii] Žižek, 23.

[xviii] p. 375 in Otto Rank’s Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1932).

[xix] McEwan, 141.

[xx] McEwan, 62.

[xxi] Coined from Freud, 526.

[xxii] p. 54 in Lynn Wells’ Ian McEwan (Palgrave, 2009).

[xxiii] McEwan, 235.

[xxiv] McEwan, 237.

The Dissolution of Being in the Narcissus Myth

“Being” tends to be an extremely problematic term especially in twenty-first century philosophical and academic discourse. But in the artistic frame of the Narcissus myth, at least, the topic of ontology is chiefly explored through the characters of Echo and Narcissus. They are, in fact, presented at first sight as two distinct and antithetical beings, but they have foundationally similar, unconscious desires. Echo’s desire for union with Narcissus and Narcissus’ desire for union with his own reflection express their deeper, unconscious desires for a unified, complete Self; the failure to achieve such a union results in the dissolution of their beings. The psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan will help us understand the complex relationship (or lack thereof) between the two characters and that which they have with their own Selves.

Lacan provides us with three major theories on the ego, the relationship between the Self and the Other, and desire. Lacan’s fundamental notion on the ego is the ego’s illusory nature. D’Alleva explains that “for Lacan, the ego – the sense of self as coherent, rational actor expressed in the word ‘I’ – is nothing but an illusion of the unconscious”[1]. Moreover, Lacan theorises that the unconscious is structured like language: it is composed of an arbitrary chain of signifiers and signifieds. For Lacan, then, “the process of becoming a ‘self’ is the process of trying to stabilize the chain of signifiers so that meaning – including the meaning of ‘I’ – becomes possible”[2]. With the arbitrary processes of the unconscious in motion, the individual is thus left with the illusion of the “I”, the ego.

The subject’s sense of the Other, according to Lacan, is created when the subject, as an infant, realises that it is separate primarily from its mother, then eventually from the rest of the people around it. The individual’s sense of Self, following the stage of sensing the Other, is brought about in the “Mirror Stage”, a stage wherein a baby sees itself in the mirror, and, seeing its own reflection, creates a concept of its own Self. Such a perceived concept is what Lacan calls a méconnaisance, a misrecognition; for the Self identified in the mirror is only an ontological illusion of the unconscious. The mirror image is what Lacan calls the “Ideal-I”, the ideal sense of Self with which the subject attempts to reconcile the reality of its own self-perception.

Lacan also theorises about the inherent sense of absence in the unconscious. Richter explains that “the sense of absence can take the form of mere lack (manque) or need (besoin), which force the psyche to make demands, or it can take the higher form of desire (désir)”[3]. The solution for the individual’s sense of absence is language: “Lacan says that language is always about loss or absence; you only need words when the object you want is gone”[4]. Language is an attempt to retrieve what is unconsciously absent – it is the bridge that connects the Desiring to the Desired. If language, then, is the noumenal link between the desiring subject to the desired object, the performative and phenomenal expression for desire is the Gaze[5]. D’Alleva says that “according to Lacan, we try to give structure and stability to our illusions, our fantasies of Self and Other, via the Gaze”[6]. The Gaze is, in other words, the medial point between the subject’s self-perception and its Ideal-I wherein the subject’s desire may be apprehended.

Lacan’s theories come into a strong interplay upon contact with the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Our route to unfold the discoveries from the interplay is to examine the stories individually but comparatively, with the overall context of the myth as a guide, and the direct and indirect implications of Lacan’s theories as instruments for insight.

In the myth of Echo and Narcissus, Echo is presented as a personification of her name. She is described in the myth as “a strange-voiced nymph…who must speak / Unless another speak”[7]. Her curse seals her fate as an echoing character: “All she can do is double each last word, / And echo back again the voice she’s heard”[8]. Echo is accordingly a “subject” in Žižek’s sense of the term. Žižek posits that “the subject’s elementary, founding, gesture is to subject itself. . . The subject’s activity is, at its most fundamental, the activity of submitting oneself to the inevitable”[9]. Echo’s curse, in line with a Žižekian perspective, is a curse of eternal verbal passivity. And cursed to be an echoing subject, she is subsequently deprived of a complete sense of Self. What she becomes is a mere signifier, devoid of the meaning and essence that the signified Other, whom she echoes, embodies.

With the absence of a complete sense of self, Echo consequently desires the Other. According to Richter, “it is in the true desire –  for an object that is itself conscious and can desire us in return – that higher forms of self-consciousness arise”[10]. In Echo’s desire for the Other there is thus an underlying, ontological desire to complete her Being. If Echo is a Žižekian subject, then Narcissus, in Echo’s perspective, is her corresponding object: “that which moves, annoys, disturbs, traumatizes”[11]. His presence moves Echo into desire. Narcissus is a threefold object: he is Echo’s desired object inasmuch as he is the object with which Echo may achieve the completion of her sense of Being. He is, however – and more importantly – the Lacanian objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire, the object that thus “disturbs”, if not “traumatizes”, Echo.

Narcissus’ rejection and mockery of Echo leads to the literal dissolution of her Being. The myth recounts that “shamed and rejected. . .Her body shrivels. . .Only her voice and bones are left; at last / Only her voice”[12]. Echo’s relationship with Narcissus is a case of the Other responding to the subject with rejection. Echo fails in her to achieve a union the Other, a union which would otherwise have completed her Being, attaching a meaningful Signified to her empty identity as a Signifier. Echo’s body eventually disintegrates, and what is left is only her voice, a signifier of her identity. What is thus most tragic about Echo’s dissolution is that ultimately her story emphasises the ironic and profound emptiness of her character as a Signifier: not only is she deprived of a Signified to give her meaning, but what remains in the end is only a signifier of her Being-as-Signifier[13].

Narcissus, in turn, represents – to borrow a Lacanian term – a “fragmented body”[14] – or, in other words, a fragmented self. In the myth, he is introduced with a question from his mother to Tiresias: “Would he long years and ripe old age enjoy?” to which Tiresias replies, “If he shall himself know”[15]. The prophecy is eventually followed up with a curse granted by Nemesis: “So may he love – and never win his love!”[16] The curse marks Narcissus’ unconscious sense of absence; what he lacks is the perfect self, the Ideal-I. The existence of Narcissus as a character is fated with the curse of an elusive Self, the desire for the illusory Ideal-I. His desire is manifested through his Gaze, as indeed D’Alleva suggests about the action: “we reveal what we desire through the Gaze”[17]. Narcissus is doomed to spend his living moments gazing at his own reflection, desiring a theoretically impossible union with the Ideal-I. Thus, in a Lacanian point-of-view, the character of Narcissus is essentially fixated in the Mirror Stage.

Narcissus’ curse and eternal struggle in the Mirror Stage is brought about by an encounter with an Other, a “scorned youth”[18]. Squillace clarifies Narcissus’ situation for us: “The curse of self-love alights on Narcissus, in fact, from the mouth of a rejected male suitor, by the addition of whom to the traditional story Ovid suggests that what the youth spurns is not Echo per se . . .but any contact outside the circle of himself”[19]. In other words, Narcissus’ futile chase for the Ideal-I is brought about by his rejection of the Other. The concept of the Ideal-I is what Žižek calls the “transcendental I”, a “purely formal function which is neither noumenal nor phenomenal – it is empty, no phenomenal intuition corresponds to it”. Indeed, for Narcissus the Ideal-I is a transcendental illusion manifested in his own reflection. Narcissus, it is said in the myth, “could not clasp himself”[20]. He fails to realise the futility of his actions, and the narrator of the myth notes the dramatic irony: “You simple boy, why strive in vain to catch / A fleeting image? What you see is nowhere; / And what you love – but turn away – you lose! / You see a phantom of a mirrored shape; / Nothing itself”[21]. The curse upon Narcissus works psychologically and ontologically; a theoretically unified Self might have been achieved by him through a union with the Other, but in his rejection thereof he is left with a phantom image with whom union is impossible. What Narcissus consequently experiences is the dissolution of his Being. The myth marks that he is “by love wasted”, until eventually there is “but no body anywhere; / And in its stead they found a flower – behold, / White petals clustered round a cup of gold!”[22] As in the case of Echo, we see a dissolution of the body in Narcissus’ story. What remains is a flower, a signifier of Narcissus’ character. It is an ultimate dissolution of Being: the Signified ceases to exist, and even its signifier is transformed into a symbol, a thing so far removed from the Real in the mimetic order of things. The essence of Narcissus has been dissolved, and what remains of him no longer bears any semblance to his essence.

The two intricately related stories of Echo and Narcissus contain tragic accounts of the unbridgeable boundary between inherent absence and unreciprocated desire. Both characters seek a union that would give them a complete sense of Self and Being, but their failure to do so proves devastating. Echo and Narcissus seem at first to be antinomic characters, and such a perspective may justify the reason for their isolated deaths wherein they dissolve ununified with the other. But even in binary oppositions, theses and antitheses, a synthesis may be produced – unfortunately for the two characters no such synthesis is yielded.

[1] p. 96, Anne D’Alleva, Methods & Theories of Art History (Laurence King Publishing, 2012), 96-105.

[2] D’Alleva ,96.

[3] p.1112, Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter (Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007), 1111-1128.

[4] D’Alleva, 97.

[5] The Gaze, capitalised, is “the process of looking” (D’Alleva, 104).

[6] 104.

[7] Lines 425-427, Ovid, Metamorphoses in The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, eds. Peter E. Knox and J.C. McKeown (Oxford University Press 2013), 274-188.

[8] Ovid, 441-442.

[9] p. 17, Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006).

[10] Richter, 1112.

[11] Žižek, 17.

[12] Ovid, 467-473.

[13] I have capitalised the words Signifier and Signified when they directly refer to the characters in the myth; lower cases implicate everything else.

[14] Lacan, 1126.

[15] Ovid, 416-417.

[16] Ovid, 479.

[17] D’Alleva 104-105.

[18] Ovid, 478.

[19] xxiii in Ovid, The Metamorphoses edited by Robert Squillace (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005).

[20] Ovid, 505.

[21] Ovid, 508-512.

[22] Ovid, 573, 595-597.