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.

WRITING AND EXISTENCE IN MARTIN AMIS’ MONEY

Martin Amis opens Money with the following inscription: “This is a suicide note. By the time you lay it aside…John Self will no longer exist. Or at any rate that’s the idea. You can never tell, though, with suicide notes, can you?” With such a statement, Amis immediately puts into perspective the idea of death – but it is an idea that is subsequently superimposed with doubt. “Will John Self die?” the reader may ask. Or to be more specific: “Will John Self cease to exist?” In a novel that contains John Self’s past-tense narrative of what to him is his ever-dynamic present, his neverending “now”, these are questions that the readers are supposed to keep in mind upon reading the beginning all the way to the novel’s ending. Indeed, Money, as a suicide note, depicts John Self’s retrospective attempt to establish, through the reader, an existence that will survive his future inexistence. The novel, in this light, captures the totality of John Self’s essence as he writes and narrates events of his life to the readers. Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, Why Write?, and Peter Brooks’ work on Freud’s Masterplot will help us further understand and explain John Self’s search for such an existence.

Brooks states that “ultimately…the passion that animates us as readers of narrative is the passion for (of) meaning”, which passion “appears to be finally a desire for the end” (1162). This end, for Brooks as it was for Freud, is death. It is the final stroke of death that gives completion and meaning to the life that precedes it. “All narration is obituary in that life acquires definable meaning only at, and through, death”, says Brooks, connecting literary narratives with life and death (1163). As such, literary narratives are rendered incomplete, fragmentary, and meaningless without their appointed endings. Brooks points out that beginnings “presuppose the end” (1163),  and readers, upon reading a narrative’s beginning, assume a desire for its end. Amis taps on this expectation of death and endings, and the meaning which these bear with them, when he marks Money as a suicide note and announces, however ambiguously, John Self’s future inexistence.

Money thus becomes what Sartre would call an “appeal” by the writer to his/ her readers. In the preface to Why Write, Richter explains: “We who know that the physical world we animate with our perceptions will go on darkly after we are gone must write to make something that will survive us” (660). According to Sartre, the process of writing stems from a writer’s need to remain essential in a future wherein he no longer exists. In writing, the writer “meets everywhere only his knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself” (Sartre 663). The writer leaves an implant of his/her essence in the written word – a legacy that survives the writer even when he/she is gone. Ultimately, Sartre explains: “Since the creation [the written work] can find its fulfillment only in reading, since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal” (665). “To write”, Sartre concludes, “is to have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one’s self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons” (670). Thus, in writing –a process that appeals to the reader’s sense of freedom to read –  the writer relays his/her being through the reader and the reader’s process of reading, and with this process of reading, the existence of the writer lives on.

 

The writer in the artistic frame of Money is John Self. The novel is an account of John Self’s experiences, conversations, and other such interactions that help readers construct a view of his character. Self’s is the main authoritative voice in the novel, and it is primarily through his own recapitulation of his own actions and conversations where we may form opinions about him. There is very little informative self-reflection and there are only very few instances where Martin Amis breaks the artistic frame to explain the dramatic ironies that concern John Self. What we have, then, is a first- person past-tense narration of Self’s experiences. In this perspective, moreover, John Self may be seen as writing in retrospect, with an end in mind even from the beginning of the novel.

The end of the novel contains the narrative of Self’s near-death experience, and the end of John Self’s narrative expresses the extra-narrative note of Martin Amis whereby “John Self will no longer exist”. Such an ending affects the overall tone of Self’s narrative. His narration thus ceases to be a mere retelling of events in his life, but, with the threat of inexistence and nothingness in the novel’s Beyond looming over his existence as a charcter, becomes an appeal. The narrative becomes Self’s appeal for a connection with the readers through his writing. In fact, Amis notes: “To whom is the note addressed? To Martina, to Fielding, to Vera, to Alec, to Selina, to Barry – to John Self? No. It is meant for you out there, the dear, the gentle”. Self’s writing, in turn, becomes a space wherein he can write out the essence of his character, so that he no longer remains simply as a voice, but becomes a being whose essence and experiences are imprinted in what he writes. The novel itself, the “note”, becomes John Self. Amis states that “usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes”. In our case for the novel, the note is not canelled out: the note becomes the life.

 

As he comes closer to disappearance in the novel, John Self begins to exist not in the past, but in the present, a time between the past and what Richter calls the “as-yet-nonexistent future” (659), the future that will be John Self’s void of inexistence. Self tells the readers: “You know, during that time of pills and booze, during that time of suicide, my entire future flashed through my head. And guess what. It was all a drag! My past at least was – what? It was…rich. And now my life has lost its form. Now my life is only present, more present, continuous present” (392). Here, Self’s present becomes in tune with that of his readers – supposing that they have read his story thus far –  marking the fulfillment of their unity through reading, an achievement which in turn grants security in Self’s existence. With the survival of his existence secured through the process of writing and reading, John Self accordingly “signs off” (392). He says further, “I’m closer to you, I hope, than he’ll ever be” (392). Though the answer to whom “he” might be remains vague, it may be postulated that he is the Self of the past. The Self of the present indeed is closer to the reader than the Self living in the past.

John Self is a memorable character – though not necessarily the most likeable one. But it is also his unique character that draws the reader along through the novel. In this way, his carnivalesque character helps him in his case to find essentiality in his future inexistence by making the readers at least interested enough to see him through the narrative’s end, and, having such an end, give meaning and completion to the life retold in the novel. The novel is John Self’s life, and in the act of opening the book and reading its contents, the readers in their freedom breathe life into its words and pages, giving John Self a voice, a character, and ,ultimately, an existence.

 

 

 

WORKS CITED:

 

Amis, Martin. Money. Vintage, 2005

 

Brooks, Peters. Freud’s Masterplot. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary                   Trends, ed. David H. Richter, 1161-1171. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007.

 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Why Write? The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends,               ed. David H. Richter, 659-672. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DUALITY AS A TRAGIC MOTIF IN SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH

Russ McDonald’s statement that “Shakespearean tragedy depends on a paradox” could not be better suited to any other play than in Macbeth[1]. The actions and the structure of the play hinge on the paradoxes found in accepted truths, language, and signifiers. The theme of duality, in particular, comes into special significance in Macbeth. Shakespeare utilizes duality as a tragic motif in Macbeth; that is, it is used to contextualize and procure Macbeth’s hamartia, and also to lead the hero eventually to his downfall and death. Theories from Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and Sigmund Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” would help us further understand the significance of duality in Shakespeare’s play.

The theme of duality is uncannily pervasive in Macbeth,[2] as is depicted in the diction of the characters. The witches “speak in paradoxes: ‘When the battle’s lost and won,’ ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.4,11),”[3] “Double, double, toil and trouble” (4.1.10). The human characters themselves speak at times through duality if not in paradoxes: “All our service / In every point twice done, and then done double” (1.6.15), “Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell” (2.1.64-65). Macduff, moreover, makes note of “such welcome and unwelcome things at once / ‘Tis hard to reconcile” (4.3.139-140). This extensive use of duality and paradox serves to reflect the play’s consciousness of and emphasis on the arbitrariness of language and words as signifiers.

Indeed, Nietzsche describes words as having “arbitrary assignments…beyond the canon of uncertainty” and “arbitrary differentiations”, explaining that “we believe we know something of the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors of things, which do not at all agree with the original entities.”[4] The human being’s “arrogance associated with knowing and feeling,”[5] as Nietzsche terms it, is tested in Macbeth, where Hecate remarks that “security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy” (3.5.32). To be secure in the stability of language in Macbeth is to forget that “truths are illusions that have become worn out and sensuously powerless.”[6] Macbeth, who, in the beginning of the play, is “sensitive and aware”[7] of the arbitrariness of language—for in fact he notes that “two truths are told (1.3.128) which “cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.132)—in the end forgets the instability of words and signifiers, that they “speak metaphorically or metonymically to a single aspect of the signified; they cannot convey its essence.”[8] Macbeth perceives the admonitions of the apparitions only in their literal sense, and confidently declares that they “will never be” (4.1.94). He forgets Banquo’s warning that “the instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequence” (1.3.123-126). This situation William Scott explains thus: “In becoming a part of the self-deluding show and undoing some literalisms to confirm another, he [Macbeth] skews the boundaries of literal and figurative and of perceiver and perceived, with paradoxical results.”[9] As much as Macbeth, in self-delusion, “skews the boundaries of literal and figurative”, the witches do so as well, if not better, using Macbeth’s ambition-driven over-assurance in language to deceive him who so readily would be deceived. Accordingly, the witches’ use of seemingly impossible predictions and “hopeful messages”[10] effects the dissolution of Macbeth’s awareness of the arbitrariness of language: he who, being unprepared, thus becomes a servant to defect[11]. Hence Macbeth declares ironically that “damned [be] all those that trust them” (4.1.139), not realizing that he himself belongs with the damned.

Macbeth’s defective action, then—his hamartia,[12]—is precisely that he blindly disregards the existence of dualities in the realm of the play. This gives him a false and unhealthy sense of security as, after saying, “I cannot taint with fear…. / The mind I sway by and the heart I bear / Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear” (5.3.3,9-10), Macbeth, in response to the servant’s entry, and in what is consequently an expression of his paranoia, says “The devil damn thee black, though cream-faced loon! / Where got’st thou that goose look?” (5.3.11-12). This sense of security is, in turn, haunted by the duality that Macbeth overlooks, and such effects Macbeth’s tragic recognition and reversal.

Informing and qualifying the notion of this haunting duality in Macbeth is Freud’s concept of the “double”[13]. In Macbeth there can be found characters whom Freud would identify as the “doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.”[14] In fact, two stages of Freud’s “double” are represented in the play: that which “was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death,’”[15] and that which, “from having been an assurance of immortality…becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”[16] The titular character of the play possesses three of these “doubles” in the figures of Lady Macbeth, the witches, and Macduff—and these figures offer Macbeth unique stages of his own recognition and reversal..

Lady Macbeth, as one of Macbeth’s “doubles,” figuratively completes him, exhibiting characteristics and performing actions that are either opposite or almost like his. In Act 1 Scene 5, she calls on the spirits (l. 40) to “take [her] milk for gall” (l. 48), since her husband is “too full o’th’ milk of human kindness” (l. 17). Her apostrophe to night beginning in line 50 of the same scene, resembling that of Juliet’s in Romeo and Juliet[17], is echoed by Macbeth in Act 3 Scene 2 when he calls on, “Come, seeling night” (l. 49). They both find themselves reluctant before the execution of their murderous actions, yet Lady Macbeth’s power over Macbeth’s identity earlier on in the play is such that he attempts to affirm his masculinity through Lady Macbeth so much so that “he sins to win her approbation.”[18] She inevitably corrupts his masculine identity by using it against him during his times of hesitation. Eventually Macbeth becomes “in blood / Stepped in so far that, should [he] wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4.137-139). Lady Macbeth realises only too late that “What’s done cannot be undone” (5.1.68). When it becomes her turn to regret the actions of herself and her husband, telling him “You must leave this” (3.2.39), Macbeth only informs her of a forthcoming plan for her to “applaud the deed” (3.2.49). Such has become of the situation of Macbeth’s identity as it relates to Lady Macbeth, that his actions have become mere performances, “deeds”, that need the applause of his one audience, his wife. Her death consequently triggers his speech in Act 5 Scene 5 wherein life is but “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more” (ll. 24-26) –  a description of life that is very much pertinent to his own.

Realising such a fact, Macbeth “turns unsuccessfully to the witches for the power he needs to make him author of himself.”[19] The witches, who are characteristically duplicitous, symbolise Macbeth’s “double” that is supposed to assure him of immortality. They are beings who may be figuratively associated with Macbeth. Macbeth’s first words “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.38) echo the witches’ last ones in Act 1 Scene 1 where they say “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.11) Cheung observes this of the witches’ interaction with Macbeth:

Significantly, it is not a surprise encounter but a meeting that is to take place. Already there is a hint of intercourse between the witches and Macbeth, so what seems to be an external temptation also can be interpreted, as many critics have done, as a psychological projection.[20]

The witches not only embody the external “multiplying villainies of nature / [that] Do swarm upon him” (1.2.11), but also they symbolize the internal, “black and deep desires” (1.4.51) already present in Macbeth’s character. Viewing their relationship thus makes it easier to relate such a relationship with Freud’s idea of the double where “the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other.”[21] Indeed, the witches prove to be effective because, according to Scott, “they seemed to have access to the frightening secrets of his heart.”[22] The power in the duality of their nature, being representative of both the external and internal forces of evil that besiege Macbeth, makes it highly difficult for Macbeth to resist the temptation of accessing and utilizing the murderous ambition that their prophecies leave as a readily-available option for him. However, it is exactly this duality in nature that opens up and leads Macbeth to his downfall. He recognises that he has fallen into this pitfall, but only too late: “And be these juggling fiends no more believed / That palter with us in a double sense, / That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope” (5.8.19-22).

In the face of this realisation, Macbeth finds himself pitted against Macduff, the “double” who is the “uncanny harbinger of death” for Macbeth. For, being what Campbell terms as a “figure of the tyrant-monster”[23], Macbeth’s presence inevitably calls for “the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence will liberate the land.”[24] And Scotland must needs be liberated from Macbeth, as it is described by Lennox as a “suffering country / Under a hand accursed” (3.6.49-50). Indeed, Macduff becomes for Macbeth “a thing of terror,”[25] who tells him: “Despair thy charm, / And let the angel whom thou still hast served / Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (5.8.13-16)[26]. Hence is Macduff qualified to be the nemesis of Macbeth, whereby he is also portrayed as a figure that is the direct opposite of Macbeth, a figure of “the self-creating and invulnerable masculinity that Macbeth cannot fashion for himself.”[27] Macduff’s character moreover serves to haunt Macbeth with the duality that the tragic character forgets persists in the play’s dramatic universe. The very fact of Macduff’s birth and existence, the circumstances of which Macbeth deems impossible, shakes Macbeth out of his self-inflicted tragic delusion and reverses his expectation of the witches’ equivocal prophecy. His death in the hands of Macduff symbolises the taking-over of the “double”: the former, suffering self, represented in Macbeth, is replaced by the projected and more perfect – though not entirely unscathed[28] –  self in the person of Macduff[29].

This ending for Macbeth is not to be restricted with a tragic affect. “Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms,”[30] writes Joseph Campbell. Macbeth, in this light, is at once tragic and liberating. The titular character is tragic because he, blinded by ambition, undermines if not forgets about the existence of duplicity and the prevalence thereof in the world he lives – but on the same note, this selfsame duplicity allows for the liberation of the imprisoned and corrupted self in Macbeth and transfigures it into the more complete, more heroically-realised self in Macduff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] R. McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s: 2001), 86.

[2] All quotations from Macbeth are taken from D. Bevington, The Necessary Shakespeare (The University of Chicago: 2013), 710-747.

[3] D. Bevington, The Necessary Shakespeare, 712.

[4] F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s: 2007), 454.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 455.

[7] D. Bevington, The Necessary Shakepeare,711.

[8] D. H. Richter, The Critical Tradition, 438.

[9] W. Scott, “Macbeth’s—And Our—Self-Equivocations” (Shakespeare Quarterly: 1986), 160-174.

[10] Ibid, 171.

[11] I am referring here to 2.1.17-18: “Being unprepared, / Our will became the servant to defect”.

[12] Russ McDonald reminds us that hamartia would be “a term more properly understood as an error in action rather than as fatal weakness of character”. The Bedford Companion, 88.

[13] Quotes from Freud are collectively taken from “The ‘Uncanny’” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s: 2007), 514-532.

[14]Ibid, 522.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 523

[17] See Juliet’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in The Necessary Shakespeare ed. D. Bevington (The University of Chicago: 2013), 3.2.5

[18] D. Bevington, 712.

[19] Ibid, 713.

[20] K.K. Cheung, “’Dread’ in Macbeth” (Shakespeare Quarterly: 1984), 431.

[21] S. Freud, 522.

[22] W. Scott, 170.

[23] The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell Foundation: 2008), 11

[24] Ibid.

[25] S. Freud, 523.

[26] Macbeth is certainly made terrified by this statement, saying “it hath cowed my better part of man” (5.8.18).

[27] D. Bevington, 713

[28] For Macduff has also suffered loss: the death of his wife and children.

[29] Not coincidentally, Macbeth uncannily tries to refuse killing Macduff: “Of all men else I have avoided thee” (5.8.5). He sees a vision of a more perfect and unsullied self in Macduff – to him, there is something of the uncanny in Macduff, something, according to Freud in p. 526, “familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” This more perfect and now-alienated self that Macbeth finds in Macduff he has repressed in his murderous drive towards kingship.

[30] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 21.

The Fragment of Elska

I.

I, now awake, have dreamt.

Though ‘tis unclear if indeed ‘twas so.

Misty mountains, whose clouds veil

Unseeing eyes, but lift souls, lost souls,

To mythic havens, where hill-gods

And elven goddesses linger and live —

In these lofty godsteads myself I found.

Embraced by the cold breeze,

I, a vagabond, a dreamland roamed

Where naked Nature,

In the fairest form of her unsullied beauty,

Enclosed her towns of mirth,

Her hidden heaths and turfy mounds;

And looked upon her people,

Forever free and independent,

Unbothered by the world without.

She, with the peaceful waves of her pristine shores

Caressing ancient stones on steep slopes,

Slopes grazed by sheep and horses wild —

Verdant were the pastures, and so will they ever be –

She called the sun and moon,

And, hark, they played, and paused,

While anon and henceforth the birds did sing

Above candle-lit barnyards and steeples.

II.

There she was, further up the mighty mount.

Like the nightingale’s, her tale-like song,

Soft and sweet, resounded clear.

Near she was, yet quite afar,

Her melody to me flowed, however,

As river water smoothly runs

Tow’rds valley fields and dale downs.

Enchanted, awe-struck – such was I.

The daughter of the mountain,

Slowly did she reveal herself to me.

Calmly she came,

Forth into the frosty wind,

Her graceful stride ‘gainst the storm.

Elska was she called.

Not even winter’s woes, nor its grinding gales

Could quench her spirit, warm and kind:

For though her ocean eyes may see the deep,

And bore with them the burdens of years,

How yet did they meet mine with friendly gaze,

Captivating effortlessly.

Thus we walked,

Travellers alike,

Down towards the valley vast,

Where spring and summer dance away

The sunlit days.

During my brief stay in Iceland I was able to compose this poem. It is a fragment, a brief vision or dream from the speaker, an idyll; although the speaker is not certain whether it is a dream or whether it is actual reality. The speaker starts off by recounting himself being lost in “a dreamland”, a land which people may recognise as, or connect with, Iceland. All of these happen in Part I. Part II sees the full personification of the land, of Iceland, as Elska, which in Icelandic means “love”. Elska, though introduced and seen only in passing, embodies certain characteristics of Icelandic nature and those of her people. The readers – and the speaker – never really get to know Elska in depth, as it is a fragment of a dream; something that is obscured by the reality of waking up. But the fragmented memories of the speaker of Elska show enough of the essence of her being, but only enough as to leave her to remain as the mysterious being that she is perceived to be. After all, the fragments of our dreams that rest with us upon our waking up are memories most poignant, those which leave us in a state surreal yet wanting — a state that makes us long for the unattainable reality found only in dreams.