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

Abstract

We propose, through the combined influences of narratology and cultural studies, to chart Ian McEwan and Martin Amis’s experimentation with the figure of the child witness drafted by the Romantics, from its initial casting as poet and prophet, to a marked ethical concern with issues of poetic alienation, adult desire and impossible subjecthood. Novelists now have us squinting with the child “through a glass, darkly,” or monitoring its resonating silences in the midst of ironized adult chatter. The inherited Rousseauian blank voice purportedly reporting an unmediated world, or the “eye of innocence” famously theorized by Fiedler, are substituted for the nonsensical chant and unreliable vision which contribute to the postmodern project against hermeneutic obsession. As for the child=poet equation, it now reads less as a nostalgic clouds-of-glory reverie than as the writer’s self-critical examination of his own infantile temptation to prioritize the aesthetically pleasing over the ethical.