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.
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