“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” Revisiting the Child’s Poet(h)ical Presence in the Fiction of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan

“Through a glass, darkly”—deconstructing traditional poetics

The child-as-poet/child-as-prophet inheritance translates as a dual fictional child which is clearly an impossibility. On the one hand, it is expected to act as the perfect witness—to reproduce, through the accuracy of its senses, an unmediated world to the unknowing adult,5 while the other side of the Romantic coin would have it adding to this drab reality, altering it poetically through the rich prism of those very same senses.6 The fictional child must then add both nothing and everything to the world it allegedly so perfectly comprehends or transcends for the benefit of the adult, serve both as a mirror and a filter, be see-through yet imbue the picture it paints with its own creative touch.

Faced with contradictory expectations whose only similarity is their tendency to other the child subject through instrumentalization and a priori definitions, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis deconstruct the assumptions behind the workings of child-focused texts by giving a new twist to its traditional poetical uses. In Atonement for instance, the child retains its role as a witness, but is now deeply unreliable, demanding that the reader distance himself from all its sensory experiences–the 2001 novel stages a series of scenes glimpsed “through a glass, darkly”7 by the child protagonist, from the initial fountain incident, to Lola’s rape, or Cecilia and Robbie’s library tryst. In the first of these instances, it becomes clear that the contamination of the child’s gaze by that very literary-minded quality that should, according to Romantic lore, illuminate its vision, insures that it simply cannot be a reliable focalizer. Indeed, by projecting the tradition of romance upon what unfolds, thirteen-year-old Briony completely misses one of the scene’s most meaningful visual elements, the vase, which would have invalidated her fanciful interpretation:

It was a scene that could easily have accommodated, in the distance at least, a medieval castle. […] A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her. What was presented here fitted well. (McEwan, Atonement 38)

[Cecilia] turned abruptly and picked up from the deep shade of the fountain’s wall a vase of flowers Briony had not noticed before (Atonement 39)

In the rape scene, her senses are mislaid by her very innocence, that other quality of childhood purportedly essential to its proverbial truthfulness8 but which, McEwan seems to suggest, also makes the child an inherently incapable witness. Unable to conceive sexual assault, Briony can only recognize what her immature mind is painting for her—a harmless clump of bushes instead of ominous human shapes: the sound of a duck instead of Lola’s muffled cry.

[… ] a duck startled her with a high, unpleasant call, almost human in its breathy downward note. […] the bush that lay directly in her path—the one she thought should be closer to the shore—began to break up in front of her, or double itself, or waver, and then fork. […] She would have stopped immediately, had she not still been so completely bound to the notion that this was a bush, and that she was witnessing some trick of darkness and perspective. (Atonement 164)

Optical and auditory illusions are rife when the child serves as a focalizer, inviting the reader to reconsider the child’s testimony, and see its gaze for what it is—a fascinating narrative filter because of the very qualities that, from a Romantic perspective, should have warranted a peerless restitution. We have come a long way since E.M. Forster’s definition of the child in fiction as “a single point […] which, when rightly focused, may perhaps make all the surrounding landscape intelligible” (Forster 78). In Atonement, McEwan offers instead a Lyotardian experience9 to the reader, whose traditional meaning-making mechanisms are thwarted by the introduction of this wobbly gaze—seeing no longer means understanding, as Western culture likes to believe it does (Jay 67 and passim).

Interestingly, Amis’s treatment of the child’s voice in London Fields favours a similar displacement, with Rousseau’s infant soothsayer being recast as a way to ironize and deconstruct adult voices, rather than to articulate some universal truth, to which postmodern novels no longer subscribe.

Several types of whining were going on: the giant’s dentistry in the street below, Mr Frost above who was mad and dying, Keith’s fridge […] someone somewhere was actually shouting, “Whine! … Whine! … Whine!” […] That would be little Sue down below and to the left, calling to her son Wayne. […]

“Idea,” said the baby.

“Lager,” said Keith.

“Here,” said Kath.

“Adore,” said the baby.

“What’s that?” said Keith, meaning the TV.

“Ordure,” said the baby.

“News. Nothing on the Crisis,” said Kath.

“I’ll give you a crisis in a minute,” said Keith.

“Adieu,” said the baby. (Amis, London Fields 256)

In this excerpt, baby Kim’s little voice acts as what Nathalie Sarraute calls sous-conversation, hinting at the underlying currents of meaning behind normal adult speech—without however making clear sense of them. The parallel inarticulacy of baby, parents and neighbours, whose voices are equally reduced to the parataxis of isolated words, also transforms all instances of direct speech into a kind of babytalk, as if the child’s true prophetic gift was now to reveal, through the contamination of its own failing voice, the impending failure of contemporary communication, the ultimate breakdown of civilized language. What is more, by choosing to focus on an infant’s voice (Kim is only a few months old) rather than on a child proper, Amis highlights the artificiality of his own trick, and thus flaunts his own kind of instrumentalization for what it is. In other words, if contemporary fiction stays clear of idealizing labels as far as the child is concerned, it does not offer a straightforward alternative to poetical instrumentalization and stands poised between debunking a number of presupposed ideas on the child’s so-called universal nature, and investing its own brand of instrumentalization and its use of the old Romantic definitions with an ethical quality of some kind. We thus transition from the prophetic value of the child’s perfect vision to the educational value of its deeply skewed viewpoint; from that of the child’s truth-speaking voice to its unwittingly wise and playful deconstructions—a distinctly postmodern take on the Romantic myth.

Beyond linguistic kidnapping–exposing the forged child of adult desire

Underpinning the instrumentalization of the child as poet or prophet is the issue of adult desire—not only is it alienated by its tool-like function, but if the child is set up in the Wordsworthian fashion as a repository of values, a desirable inverted image of adulthood,10 then it is also less of a subject on that account. Awareness of these issues shines through in a number of contemporary works which use a particular focus on voice to expose the child in fiction as a fake. Baby-talk and assimilated forms of child language, which one critic has described as “the verbal equivalent of carrying a teddy bear or baseball bat instead of a briefcase” (Hurst 9) appear as flatly conventional ways of producing a child-flavoured folklore for the benefit of the adult reader. The contemporary novelist’s indictment of such contrived ploys is evidenced in the fact that whenever they appear, they turn out to be really adults masquerading as children, as in The Child in Time for instance, where, instead of the expected voice of the protagonist’s daughter, Kate, silenced by her pre-diegetic disappearance in a supermarket, the reader is presented with Charles Darke’s pathological impersonation of a ten-year-old, after a major breakdown causes him to revert to an infantile state.11 Below is an example in direct speech of the sort of utterance produced by this would-be Peter Pan:

“I dunno. Jus’ waiting.” […] Charles spoke in breathy, disjointed sentences, without turning his head. Stephen did not catch them all. Charles seemed to be talking to himself. “It’s really good… been building it all summer… by myself… my place…” […] “See this? See this?” […] “Up there!” he shouted. “Look, look!” (McEwan, The Child in Time 116-117)

The contracted forms, ellipses, repetitions, and jaunty rhythm all conform to the literary idea of how a child should speak, and are such textbook examples that we could parrot Stephen’s comment on the content of Charles’s carefully child-like pockets: “It was too correct to be convincing, not quite sufficiently idiosyncratic, perhaps even fraudulent” (The Child in Time 123). This clichéd, manufactured example of childspeak confirms Brian Hale’s intuition that the voice of the child in adult texts always verges on forgery:

Baby-talk is the conventionalized register of language used by adults in addressing infants or small children. […] Baby-talk may also be used by children themselves […] to dramatize their own babyishness before adults. […] the baby-talk features in children’s speech are those nonstandard (non-adult) features that have been imitated directly from adults, while the genuine children’s language features are those anomalies that have been generated by the children themselves on the basis of standard adult usage. (McHale 211-212)

Similarly self-aware, Martin Amis’s London Fields stages the process through which authentic children’s voices give way to adult hermeneutic violence. In the following excerpt, Marmaduke’s father systematically translates his son’s words so as to remove their disturbing quality, but by maintaining a dialogue between the original and the counterfeit in similar scenes throughout the novel, Amis highlights a fairly common—albeit unwitting—parental linguistic kidnapping, to which the narrator himself pleads guilty12:

“We’re in the garden now. What’s that? What’s that darling?”

“Dick.”

“Stick. Very good. Sssstick. […]

Wait, look! Animals. Animals. What’s that?”

“Jeep.”

“Yes, sheep. Very good. […] And what’s this squidgy thing here?”

“Nail.”

“Snail. Excellent!” (223)

Staging the silencing of a potentially upsetting minor voice which fails to correspond to Romantic views of childspeak, Amis’s novel reads like the forgotten draft of children’s voices in grown-up texts. Marmaduke’s utterances are not meaningless babble for his father to turn into words, but semantic units in their own right, which do not match adult textual desire and must therefore be suppressed.13 The child’s in-fant14 quality is here conveniently called upon to justify normalization and cutification—because it cannot use language as logos (reasonable speech) its use of language as phone (voice) is systematically disregarded.

Amis actually goes further than exposing this generalized ventriloquism. He insists that there are ways for the child’s voice to get through, even if it must accommodate itself to a form of silence.15 In a very postmodern valorisation of the suspension of logos (Hassan 504-505), which also revives the traditional association of the child in literature with nonsense poetry, Amis’s infants find ways of expressing themselves which deeply disturb the adult’s need for language to make sense. Instead of the depths of adult voices, they choose the surface of body language,16 the acute quality of insults,17 grunts,18 or screams,19 and the powerful and expressive meaninglessness of echolalia or glossolalia.

“Milt,” said Marmaduke. “Toce. Milt. Toce. Milt! Toce! Milt! Toce! Milt! Toce!” (London Fields 83)

“Enlah,” said the baby. “Enlah, Enlah, Enlah, Enlah. Enlah. Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah…” (London Fields 108)

Marmaduke’s rhythmical “milt/toce” and Kim’s “Enlah” vocalization demand that the signifier be paid attention to, that the reader experience language in a more essential, horizontal way than in the adult’s major, layered, vertical fashion. Interestingly, this work on the child’s voice stays clear of the despair of postmodern aporias. 20 Meaninglessness does not lead, when it is the infant’s, to an ontological experience of emptiness. Rather, it reads as another enriching suspension of hermeneutical responses, a healthy process through which linguistic clichés and their underlying ideology are systematically questioned, the automatic pairing of a signifier with the selfsame signified deconstructed. So much so that the narrator and would-be novelist Samson Young comes to see the infants’ surface chant as a deep, salutary way to renew literature in an otherwise post-apocalyptic world: “Kim has stopped saying ‘Enlah’! She cries normally, humanly, complicatedly. No longer does she pay homage to the sudden, the savage god of babies: Enlah! […] ‘Milt’ I reckon I can live without. But ‘Enlah’? Already I miss it” (London Fields 239).

Inverting the Romantic formula: child(ish) poets and new-found maturity

If these contemporary texts distance themselves poetically from the traditional voice and gaze built for the child upon a number of Romantic assumptions,21 the little figure’s narrative renewal also brings about an ethical change. The formulaic child=poet is inverted into the less flattering poet=child, while the child’s moralizing quality is traded for an opportunity to set off on an ethical journey. Atonement is a fitting example of the first kind of revision, which allows McEwan to turn the assimilation of the child to the creative imagination22 into something more productive than a blind worshipping of infantile metaphors,23 a possibility for the writer to look critically at himself and his responsibility through the mediating distance of its traditional double, the child. When Briony chances upon Robbie’s explicit letter to her older sister, McEwan resists the Rousseauian temptation of showing how the child is corrupted by adult language. Instead, Briony’s Proustian reverie on the c-word suggests that the real threat lies in that particular kind of innocence which sees language as a purely aesthetic medium—in the child’s mind, “cunt” is unbearable, not because of its ethical context, but because of its evocative power, which makes her see too much:

The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams—an uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an Old English king attempting to turn back the tide. Rhyming words took their form from children’s books—the smallest pig in the litter, the hounds pursuing the fox, the flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow. […] the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. (Atonement 114)

In these few lines, the little girl gradually destroys referent and signified, leaving only an empty shell of a word, stripped of its real-world implications on those involved in the utterance. The fall-out of this attitude to language, which is clearly a covert examination of the poet’s responsibilities, is that it allows Briony to use words poetically rather than ethically, and thus wreak havoc on the lives of the adult protagonists. Because the four-letter word has been reduced to a mere pleasing sound conjuring a network of related signifiers, it can be uttered again and again, and just as easily lead to other, more serious words, such as “maniac” which the child eventually uses against Robbie, causing him to be wrongfully imprisoned:

A maniac. The word had refinement, and the weight of medical diagnosis. All these years she had known him and that was what he had been. (Atonement 119)

Briony wanted [Lola] to say his name. To seal the crime, frame it with the victim’s curse, close his fate with the magic of naming. (Atonement 165)

In both excerpts, the child brings to mind an ivory tower poet, fascinated with a power of language she tragically fails to understand as having consequences beyond the fictional or sensual pleasure she derives from them. Briony experiences the magical pleasure of naming, and plays recklessly with the richness of the signified while indulging in the aesthetic joy provided by the signifier—all in all a rather cunningly ironical use of the child-as-poet equation, which, when read backwards, becomes a clear indictment of a poetical approach to language which would bypass the ethical.

In a similar manner, revisiting the child’s gaze allows contemporary novelists to achieve a form of artistic maturity through the medium of the infantile. If the poet-as-child equation operates, it is because some of today’s texts put the reading and writing adult in a position where it can actually encounter the otherness of childhood. Gone is the moralizing child witness theorized by Leslie Fiedler, who, in his famous essay “The Eye of Innocence,” identified decades, centuries even, of literary peeping Toms: “There he is […] his eye to the keyhole […] observing in his innocence our lack of it. He is the touchstone, the judge of our world—and a reproach to it in his unfallen freshness of thought” (Fiedler 251). However fashionable in Victorian fiction (Coveney 91-110), and still a competing trend in perhaps more popular contemporary British fiction,24 several postmodern novels prefer to opt for the unsettling viewpoint of amoral or plainly immoral children, which nonetheless guarantees an ethical experience of otherness to their readers. This is perhaps where childhood poetics have matured; instead of attributing an a priori moral value to infancy, these texts offer the more difficult and enriching experience of childhood’s marginality to their readers—where marginality is a more complex, more uncomfortable notion than the absolute and idealized difference of childhood formerly dreamed up by adult desire. McEwan’s The Cement Garden is a case in point,25 with its deeply disturbing incestuous youths and the gradual withdrawal of every grounding adult reference point from the narration. The child no longer serves as a framing moral and visual entity—it is no longer the wise fool, exposing the Emperor’s nakedness, but a kind of eiron, illuminating our blindness with his/her own, an unpleasant and sobering anti-prophet whose limited, disappointing truth is that neither he nor we can see the Emperor for what he is.

The main shopping street was empty except for cars. It was Sunday. The only person I could see was a woman in a red coat standing on a footbridge that spanned the road. […] She was still a long way off, but she looked familiar. […] fifty yards from the bridge I could not resist glancing up. The woman was my mother and she was looking right at me. I stopped. […] When I was almost under the footbridge I stopped again and looked up. Great relief and recognition swept through me, and I laughed out loud. It was not Mother of course, it was Julie, wearing a coat I had never seen before. […] Face to face with her now I saw that it was not Julie either. (The Cement Garden 75-76)

No reassuring narrative voice or reliable adult witness counters Jack’s hallucinations—as in Amis’s short story, “Insight at Flame Lake,” the child is his own narrator, and the reader has to learn to both see him and see against him, in texts where one fallacious perception segues into another, blurring the world perhaps but illuminating the blind subject.

“A theme that so obviously lends itself to nostalgia, sentimentality, false idealism and drug-addictive evasion—to diverse forms of sick refusal to recognize unequivocally, not merely the actual, but the real” (Leavis 23). If F.R. Leavis’s ruthless assessment of the child figure leaves little hope that child-focused texts may ever address their tendency to indulge in diverse forms of narratological peterpanism, reading McEwan, reading Amis, and several of their contemporaries, it appears that the child’s voice and gaze have actually become the writer’s way to engage more ethically with his own art and confront his responsibilities to otherness. Steering clear of the two extremes of Rousseauian prophecies and postmodern despair, the child’s voice and silence, his gaze and his blindness alike, allow pockets of meaning to emerge in texts which prove educational in a non-didactic way to their authors and readers. Sometimes, as in Amis’s otherwise very fin-de-siècle London Fields, the crises and reversals brought about by the child actually lead to a form of exultation which has nothing to do with the old nostalgia and sentimental kitsch plaguing the figure of the child.26 The contemporary novel’s chosen infantile maturity, its empowering deconstructions brought about by the child, allow its author to interrogate the assumptions behind so-called mimesis, and to ask what poetics owe to ethics. As these texts forego confining definitions of the child, become aware in their individual ways of the traps and pitfalls of writing childhood, its impossibilities and aporias,27 they put to us, quite simply, a very similar question to that of Briony’s mother in Atonement: “how could any one presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect?” (149)