…

(33)

Whatever the qualities of Stephen's book, this negative emphasis contrasts starkly with the message of hope drawn from even the most threatening moments of childhood experience by Wordsworth in the poem Charles's phrase alludes to:

          Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised …

Our mortal nature might tremble, but Wordsworth takes such moments as intimations not of mortality but immortality. Charles sees only mortality (“… it can't last, that sooner or later they're finished, done for, that their childhood is not for ever …”), but there is reason to suppose that his perception of Stephen's book is skewed by his own pessimism. His judgement is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the end of his own attempt to live as a child, and is recalled by his widow (“… Your book … was a warning of mortality …” [201]) when she explains his suicide to Stephen near the end of the novel.

The character of Charles Darke is radically divided; his ‘child’ self is truly separated by an ‘abyss’ from the adult self that flourishes erratically but successfully in the public world. Before dropping out he has been an up-and-coming government minister, a protégé of that Prime Minister whose policies are shown as inimical to those human qualities that childhood represents. Indeed he is not merely a protégé, but diligently contributes to her (?—the novel coyly obscures the Prime Minister's sex) policies, and is revealed to be the author of the back-to-basics Authorised Childcare Handbook from which the novel's epigraphs are drawn. Darke writes this in a spirit directly contradictory to that sense of the mystery of childhood expressed in his subsequent attempted regression:

Make it clear to him that the clock cannot be argued with and that when it is time to leave for school, for Daddy to go to work, for Mummy to attend to her duties, then these changes are as incontestable as the tides.

(27)

The fatalistic subservience of ‘him’ (the child) and his parents to mechanical time (the clock) and to their gender-roles is surreptitiously smuggled into the order of nature by the final simile. But again we can turn to Wordsworth's Immortality Ode to see that imagery of the ocean need not lead in such a discouraging direction, that it can hint at eternity rather than servitude to a mechanism:

          Hence, in a season of calm weather,
                    Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
                    Which brought us hither,
                    Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Charles has a conception of childhood (‘timelessness … a mystical state’ [201]) that is close to Wordsworth's, but his attempt to live this state is simply an imitation of Richmal Crompton books. This character, then, functions as the carrier of a false or unsatisfactory version of the novel's value-system. Therefore, like the surrogate-daughter, he must die before Stephen can recognise that value-system manifested through his own experience. His morbid obsession with childhood is a version of the morbidity (at least adequately motivated in Stephen's case) that blights Stephen's life and marriage after Kate's abduction. Hence Stephen's cry, when weighed down by the corpse of Charles (which he has carried in from the tree which held his tree-house), ‘For God's sake get him off me!’ (199). The value-system of the novel is, then, roughly based on a conviction of the sustenance that we may derive from ‘childhood’ (properly understood) when we are adults.

For Wordsworth, as later for Yeats, this sustenance could be explained in terms of the Platonic myth of a form of ‘existence’ before birth in eternity; the clouds of glory that we trail in childhood are traces of this state. In the Kantian terms that were familiar to his friend Coleridge, childhood would be seen as an at least partial penetration through the ideal categories of space and time—especially time—to the ‘thing-in-itself’. And since Wordsworth's time, the perceptual manifold of space and time has often been seen as the complement of the Newtonian mechanics that have created the industrial societies governed by inhuman clock-time rather than ‘organic’ time, and of the psychology that represents us as units behaving according to predictable patterns.² One strand of what we call ‘Modernism’ is predicated on the superiority of types of experience and forms of representation that subvert the Newtonian-Kantian manifold of our common-sense world. Except to lofty mythologers like Yeats, the Platonic system is no longer an adequate vehicle for such subversion. Besides, science itself now seems to be escaping from the Newtonian straitjacket that also confined our human nature. And this transformation of science is an explicit (perhaps too explicit) topic in The Child in Time.

Charles Darke's wife Thelma is a physicist who has worked on the theory of time and is now attempting a theoretical synthesis that will explain the consequences of such scientific revolutions as quantum mechanics. In a light-hearted, but serious enough, ‘Two Cultures’ style, she execrates Stephen (and other writers) for their ignorance of modern science. This, she claims, is becoming more feminine and is ‘growing up’ and overcoming the ‘frenetic, childish’ egotism of its ‘Just William’ obsession with commanding viewpoints, catapults and control. It accommodates such anti-Newtonian concepts as ‘backward flowing time’ and shows that our common experiences of time, space and matter are ‘intricate illusions’. The conclusion of her harangue is ignorant but effective: ‘As far as I can make out, you think that some local, passing fashion like modernism—modernism!—is the intellectual achievement of our time. Pathetic!’ (43-45). It is, in fact, a leading characteristic of Modernism that it seeks to accommodate and realise the metaphysics implicit in modern scientific revolutions. The Child in Time itself is based on a metaphor of alternative universes that develop from the choices not taken in this one, and within the novel the attempts of that arch-Modernist miniaturist, Borges, to accommodate physical theories of time are unmistakably alluded to: ‘Their hesitation was brief, delicious before the forking paths’ (63; cf. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’). Thelma's vision, also, of a grand theory referring to an ‘order of reality, a higher ground, the ground of all that is, an undivided whole of which matter, space, time, even consciousness itself, would be complicatedly related embodiments, intrusions which make up the reality we understood’ (119) has been anticipated in metaphysical systems such as that of Alfred North Whitehead, expounded in the twenties and thirties, and thence found its way into such intransigently Modernist and experimental works as Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems in the fifties and sixties. Yet in relation to such works, which implicitly raise the question of the possibility of connecting ‘the ground of all that is’ to the world of common sense through language, the refusal of McEwan in this work to violate the form of the realist novel (while allowing it to encompass apparently non-realist content which I shall discuss) reminds us of the continuous relegation to eccentricity by British culture of any writer who wholeheartedly practises formal innovation in a Modernist tradition. The only major Modernist that McEwan invokes is the T. S. Eliot of Four Quartets (118)—a poem that eschews the more radical formal invention and disruption of Eliot's most ‘Modernist’ work. And many of the experiences of ‘time’ incorporated into McEwan's novel can be accounted for within the terms of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which was so popular and influential before the First World War. The subjective experience of a few seconds (of clock-time) in which Stephen manages skilfully to avoid a lorry which is crashing in front of his car is characterised as ‘duration shap[ing] itself round the event’, for example. Bergson's philosophy, as expressed in Time and Free Will, distinguished between intensive, psychological duration (durée), which is unique and creative, and extensive clock-time as homogeneous and repeatable.³ Where Bergson's philosophy inspired the early Modernists to radical formal innovation, however, McEwan remains faithful to a moderate English eschewal of extremism—though fortunately exhibiting its strengths rather than its weaknesses.

But there is a politics that accompanies these questions of form, which is ultimately related to the more explicit political characterisation of England that occurs in McEwan's book. Its terms were set out towards the close of the increasingly desperate period of post-war ‘consensus’ by Donald Davie, in his book Thomas Hardy and British Poetry.⁴ Davie was writing before ‘extremism’ and Englishness could be thought of as a possible hegemonic combination; before Thatcherism, in other words, Davie's artistic (and cultural) predilections are to artistic extremism, (even, and far more than any other respectable critic, to the extremism of Charles Olson), but ultimately, on political grounds, it is to ‘moderation’ that he gives his support, even in the arts. This constitutes a conscious lowering of sights on Davie's part, and is consonant with Britain's role as a second-class power and (inglorious) welfare state. McEwan's moderation in the face of Thatcherism is a quite different thing from Davie's exasperated and wounded moderation in the face of Heath-Wilson, but Davie's book retains its relevance, not least, to McEwan's novel.⁵

The central, redemptive experience of ‘time’ in the novel (actually of a process that violates clock-time), initiating a hidden development unrevealed until the novel's closing pages, occurs in Chapter Three. Stephen visits his virtually estranged wife Julie in her cottage in a Sussex village. Before seeing her he has a strange disorientating déjà vu experience of seeing his parents through a pub window. But the scene he witnesses evidently occurred before his own birth, and his young mother gives no sign of recognition when he meets her gaze. In a state of shock, he appears to lose consciousness, and wakes to find himself in his wife's cottage, in their old marital bed, clasping a tepid hot-water-bottle. Almost as a matter of course, he and Julie make love, but their lost child again reminds them of their unhappiness, and the fresh start the moment could have led to seems aborted. Stephen returns to London. In a later chapter he recounts the experience to Thelma (omitting mention of the love-making, which ‘was not Thelma's business’ [116]) and asks for a scientific explanation. Her response is humorously derisive: ‘You come cap in hand to the oracle you quietly despise. Why don't you go and ask a modernist?’ (117). Perhaps the event could be accounted for in general terms by analogy with the ‘backward flowing’ of time that Thelma has already mentioned, for it turns out to have had an apparent influence upon the past. But, it seems to me, Thelma's mock advice, though misleading, suggests the correct affiliations for this experience; it needs to be understood in a literary context. Not a Modernist context, primarily, but one derived from the subject of Donald Davie's literary criticism.⁶

Several aspects of the chapter will need examination in order to bring out this context, and this will be easier if I explain what I take to be the significance of the incident in the value-scheme of the novel. It has two ‘results’, one in the past, and one in the future. Stephen later learns from his mother that his conception had been unplanned, and that his father (for whose sake she had lost her job selling clocks), had been in favour of aborting the foetus. Discussing this in the Sussex pub (in just such a scene as Stephen witnessed), his mother was swayed by the apparently pleading face of a child at the window to carry the pregnancy through to fruition. For Stephen himself, the quasi-noumenal experience is the crucial determinant in his choosing to make love with his wife rather than turn his back on her. The fruit of this is not revealed until the close of the novel, when he is suddenly summoned again to her cottage, and assists her in giving birth to their second child. The nine months interval had for Stephen been apparently no more than a halting but pointless reconciliation to loss. Approaching the village again, he suddenly realises why he has been sent for, and a pattern becomes clear to him:

It was then that 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 certainty … that all the sorrow, all the empty waiting had been enclosed within meaningful time, within the richest unfolding conceivable.

(211)

This ‘meaningful time’ had been initiated as a result of Stephen's acknowledgement of, and guidance by, qualities he genders as feminine—‘a faith in endless mutability, in remaking yourself as you came to understand more’ (54). Men, on the other hand, take a line and stick to it. When Stephen makes love with his wife, however, he does so despite having so far taken the line that their relationship is now finished.

Had he not seen two ghosts already that day and brushed against … the times and places in which they occurred, then he would not have been able to choose, as he did now, without deliberation and with an immediacy which felt both wise and abandoned.

(63)

Reality itself, in this novel, follows the ‘feminine’ patterns of cyclical time, time in which alternative ghostly events may seem causative, or time which may reverse itself. It may, through childhood, overcome the seemingly inevitable progression of determined, (masculine) clock time.

In its schematised form, this value system sounds petty trite, perhaps, but that is the fault of my summary rather than McEwan's writing, which is vivid yet tactful, and deploys narrative suspense in such a way that the values are revealed through Stephen's own appealingly childish surprise at the end of the novel. Looking abstractly for the moment, though, we seem to have here an attempt to naturalise a set of values, and to ground them in biology and (to a more debatable extent) in physics. The extent of the naturalism is debatable because the precise status of Stephen's experience of temporal regression is left undetermined by the narrator. It in fact borders on the metaphysical. The narrator, in telling us that the noumenal experience is prior to, and determined, the love-making (‘Had he not seen … he would not have …’) grounds those ‘biological’ natural values on this ambiguously natural (real? hallucinatory? physical? metaphysical?) experience.⁷ As well as seeming schematic, the values may be criticised for their consonance with gender-roles that are ideological and oppressive rather than natural (‘There's no such thing as nature’); and, in the context of a supposed critique of Thatcherite tendencies in society, unduly quietistic and apolitical. The first charge can, at least provisionally, be fairly simply answered. The novel, after all, appears to argue for an integration of the various gendered characteristics, not for irreconcilable differences or social roles determined by difference. But it is, in broad terms, the political that I wish to address, and for this a closer commentary on Chapter Three is necessary.

It begins with a railway journey. Railways are themselves, the novel slyly reminds us at one point, the stuff of politics: ‘The Prime Minister … was known to despise railways’ (186). In terms of the opposition between Thatcherite politics and the values of childhood, this has a significance that is playfully indicated in the narrative when Stephen makes his way down to Sussex after the pregnant Julie's urgent summons. Arriving too late for the final train (he has no car, again in opposition to the ‘great car economy’—Baroness Thatcher's phrase—that is shown as choking the city in the novel), he persuades a train driver to give him a lift in the cab of the engine. The line, with its cathedral-like tunnels, will shortly be closed and replaced by a motorway. We already know that Stephen still nourishes a boyhood ambition to ride in a railway engine cab (191). The journey thus becomes emblematic of the fortuitous (but how else can it occur?) integration of the boy within the man, and thus forms a contrast with Charles Darke's willed and artificial second childhood. Within Chapter Three itself a brief passage of recollection has already made the association between childhood and trains, as well as linking both to a sense of wonder that subtly prepares for the ghostly experience at the pub. As a child, standing on the footbridge over the railway, Stephen had asked his father why the lines grew together as they got further away. His father had explained that this was because

the trains got smaller and smaller as they moved away, and that to accommodate them the rails did the same. Otherwise there would be derailments. Shortly after that an express shook the bridge as it shot beneath their feet. Stephen marvelled then at the intricate relation of things, the deep symmetry which conspired to narrow the rail's gauge precisely in keeping with the train's diminishment; no matter how fast it rushed, the rails were always ready.

(51)

His father's explanation is a fiction, of course, a story to be told to a child, but it is a fiction which expresses truth and reveals it to the child. It thus forms a miniature apologia for the form of the novel itself.

But railway trains and train journeys also have a particular place in the English poetic tradition, where they serve to define a certain sense of the nation, from Edward Thomas's ‘Adlestrop’, Auden's ‘Night Mail’ to Philip Larkin's ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Here’.⁸ The Larkin poems are both central exhibits in Donald Davie's discussion of the ‘lowered sights’ of post-war British poetry in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. Both of these poems also seem to me to lie behind Chapter Three of The Child in Time. Davie makes what is now a common point about the English landscape that appears in Larkin's poems; that its heterogeneous confusion of the industrial, suburban, post-industrial and pre-industrial reflects for the first time in English poetry both the bare fact of that landscape and the manner in which we take its degradation for granted. McEwan's description of the landscape is clearly in the tradition that Larkin initiated. Mildly infected with a Larkinesque misanthropy, Stephen shuts himself away from the other ‘customers’ in a first-class compartment:

They ran along the rear gardens of Victorian terraces whose back additions offered glimpses through open doors into kitchens, past Edwardian and pre-war semis, and then they were threading through suburbs, southwards then eastwards, past encampments of minute, new houses with dirty, well-thumbed scraps of country in between. The train slowed over a tangle of junctions and shuddered to a halt. In the abrupt, expectant silence exuded by railway lines he realised how impatient he was to arrive. They had stopped by a new housing estate of raw, undersized semi-detached houses, starter homes for first time buyers. The front gardens were still rutted earth; out the back, fluttering white nappies proclaimed from diagrammatic, metal trees a surrender to a new life. Two infants, hand in hand, staggered beneath the washing and waved at the train.

Shortly before his stop it began to rain.

(50)

The passage (and I have quoted only a part of it) is a beautiful set of variations on ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: ‘We ran Behind the backs of houses … the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars … now fields were building plots … And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.’ Larkin's poem is not simply about landscape, of course. It is about weddings, and the mixed values and emotions that marriages (and by implication, parenthood) imply. Its conclusion, like many of the better moments in Larkin's poetry, represents a triumph over the small-minded misanthropy shown in the descriptions of the wedding parties themselves. And that triumph (in absolute terms not much more than an acceptance of the reality of other people's emotional lives, whose field will be the continuation of the species) is expressed largely in terms of transformed pastoral. The syntactic complementarity in ‘Now fields were buildings plots’ (carrying its ghostly equivalent: now building plots were fields) is realised in the famous and still startling lines:

I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat …

Davie's comment deserves quoting:

… The collision between the organicism of wheat and the rigidity of ‘postal districts’ is calculated. It is the human pathos of the many weddings he has seen from the train which spills over to sanctify, for the poet, the postal districts of London, the train's destination; the human value suffuses the abstractly schematized with the grace of an organic fertility.⁹

The same might be said of the image of rain, which, as well as evoking the dreariness of a wet day indoors with bored children, plays its part in the natural cycle which culminates in the grown wheat. Like Larkin, McEwan assimilates the natural to the human in the passage quoted above, in his image of the metal trees bearing white nappies. This assimilation is a process that, in its accurate replication of the condition of post-war England (the reduction of a sense of the landscape as something other than merely human) Davie protests against, understandably, I think. Davie does not really address the question of how far it is actually possible to avoid some form of anthropomorphism in any representation of nature, and is presumably aware that the matter is one of degree: Larkin in some poems, and the English in their land, have tamed and humanised nature too much. McEwan's metal trees, representing (proclaiming, indeed) a surrender to the exigencies of the fertility of the species, are themselves a sardonic emblem of what Davie is objecting to. The ‘natural’ image, and nature itself, become ‘abstractly schematized’ to fit the schematization of our human lives; and we and nature both suffer diminishment on that account.

Davie recognises that this is a result of a historical process, while objecting that to think of people as merely the victims of such a process (rather than its perpetrators) adds to the diminishment. But Davie was writing his discussion as long ago as 1963,¹⁰ and McEwan's novel is suffused with a sense that the processes Davie describes have progressed almost beyond what could have been imagined at that time. The countryside of his alternative present, through which Stephen walks after leaving the train, is dotted with hypermarkets, car parks and motorways. ‘Real, open country’ is a concrete track traversing symmetrical conifer plantations. The closest thing to an animal (a counterpart to the metal trees), a ‘grey beast languidly lifting its blunt, heavy head with a steady purr’, is a nodding donkey engine pumping at a small oil-well (51). From a perspective derived from Davie's discussion, what might be most depressing about this is Stephen's apparent acquiescence in the substitution of this landscape for the less schematized land that preceded it. Stephen feels ‘light-hearted’ now he is in open country. I take it that it is the double diminishment that Davie is concerned about. Human, not solely environmental, diminishment distresses him. This, also, is McEwan's subject, it seems to me. Stephen is in danger of losing a more nourishing sense of wonder than what a tidied and industrialised environment can provide: the ‘flashing parallax as one row [of the geometrically arrayed conifers] cede to the next, a pleasing effect …’ We can connect this with Stephen's rather indifferent and at times cynical acquiescence in the political fraud of the child-care commission on which he serves. Despite his beliefs, he is capable of simply shrugging his shoulders at the whole business, so impoverished are his political expectations in this England.

What Davie objects to is that such a diminished sense of both nature and human nature—the last refuge of liberal humanism—should be considered and adequate basis for a worthwhile life. Larkin, in his poetry, appears to think it is; but Davie has a Modernist revulsion from such a surrender.¹¹ McEwan, also, in apparently grounding his values naturalistically on human fertility itself (admittedly with all the concomitant values that inhere in the more tender forms of sexual intercourse) might be held to be vulnerable to Davie's criticism. But I have already suggested that the value-system of The Child in Time is not simplistically naturalistic, and might be said to be grounded on the borderline between nature and metaphysics. This can also best be approached through a Larkin ‘railway’ poem: ‘Here’, which Davie severely criticises for its apparent disparagement of the natural (on account of the way the ‘otherness’ of nature is defined solely as a negation of the human, rather than as a value in itself). The Child in Time's ‘housing estate of raw, undersized semi-detached houses’ is surely one of the ‘raw estates’ of Larkin's poem, and its ‘halt for commuters’ (50) is Larkin's, ‘harsh-named halt’. It may be that my reaction to ‘Here’ has been affected by what I take to be the use made of the poem by McEwan, but it seems to me that Davie does less than justice to the poem's final verse. This continues the sweep of the railway journey (though we are now past the terminus) out beyond Hull, over the countryside until it arrives before what it cannot reach, the sea:

                              … Here silence stands
Like wheat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

It seems to me that Davie is determined not to hear the (faint enough) note of wonder before the unbounded and out of reach ocean in these lines. He might well, after all, welcome the negation of the merely human, as much as bemoan the fact that it is the human that provides the positive term from which the negation is effected. The same note of wonder before the unbounded is struck when Stephen, on his walk to his wife's cottage, emerges from the pine plantation:

The pine forest gave way abruptly to an unbounded prairie of wheat. Stephen rested against an aluminium five-barred gate. The only indication that the yellow field, which resembled a desert, was finite was a line on the horizon where the plantation resumed. Perhaps it was a mirage … 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 … The lack of hurry, the disappearance of any real sense of a destination suited him.

(51-52)¹²

Wheat is the most human of plants—a result of man's ‘improvement’ of nature—and the boundless prairie has been created by agri-business for ease of mechanical harvesting. The landscape Stephen walks through can be found already in parts of East Anglia; it is the product of the economic and political forces (which I have called in shorthand Thatcherism, though more than that limited ideology is at stake here) that are responsible for the social disintegration depicted in the novel. Yet it is not, surely, a sign of Stephen's limitations that he responds positively to the experience of traversing this vast wheatfield. In a sense the infinite wheat is cognate with the ocean (as it is to some extent in ‘Here’), the closest phenomenon in nature to the unbounded and eternal experience of the noumenal itself, as in Wordsworth's Ode. Both time and space are abolished in Stephen's experience; he crosses a ‘void’ and time disappears. I shall argue that, as also in Wordsworth's poem, this noumenon is associated with origins and (mediated through childhood) with sustaining value. In terms of the environmental politics of Davie's discussion, what the novel is asserting is that even in a landscape apparently violated and schematised beyond recognition, we may still have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither, so that our humanity need not be as diminished as our politics. And if our humanity is not diminished, (the novel implies) it remains open to us to invent a politics that does justice to our values.

Again the summary betrays a complex literary creation. I can only briefly indicate how the links are made, and the values established. The strange, noumenal experience on the prairie removes Stephen from space and time. This results in his finding himself in the village (which, with its bicycles, pub, and ‘magnificent trees’ [57], is the ‘timeless’ England of Georgian poetry recently evoked in a tepid speech by England's current Prime Minister), where he witnesses his parents discussing whether he should be born. Immediately afterwards he undergoes a regression through birth and beyond, back to the nothingness of pre-existence. Oceanic images are evoked (ontogeny here recapitulating phylogeny and substituting a scientific perspective for Wordsworth's Platonism). He is ‘hurled through … muscular sluices’;

his knees rose under him and touched his chin, his fingers were scaly flippers, gills beat time, urgent, hopeless strokes through the salty ocean … he formed a single thought: he had nowhere to go, no moment which could embody him, he was not expected, no destination or time could be named …

(60)

The lack of destination and time link this passage (already linked by narrative sequence) to the experience of crossing the prairie. It is not by any means a benign experience, but is fraught with the terrifying sense of the contingency of one's own existence (sensed more through parenthood in this novel than through childhood), just as Wordsworth's sense of the noumenal is fraught with the ‘Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized’. Stephen is brought to the borders of what is out of reach of language, so far beyond the identity that is contingent on the perceptual manifold of time and space and the sign systems with which we label it that ‘Nothing was his own, not his strokes or his movement, not the calling sounds, not even the sadness, nothing was nothing's own’ (60). I have suggested that this takes us beyond naturalism to the metaphysical. Yet of course the novel cannot argue across that boundary. And the logical generation of all our categories out of the simple given, ‘Being’, is, compared with those experiences that novels explore, a barren-seeming procedure. In the human terms of novels, the boundary is conception itself—terrifying when seen, as Stephen sees it, from the perspective of the foetus regressing into nothingness, but from another perspective the origin of a faith that life is fundamentally benign. Stephen makes love with his wife:

Not governments, or publicity firms or research departments, but biology, existence, matter itself had dreamed this up for its own pleasure and perpetuity, and this was exactly what you were meant to do, it wanted you to like it … Surely then, he thought, as he fell backwards into the exquisite, dizzy emptiness and accelerated down the irresponsibly steep slope, surely at heart the place is benevolent, it likes us, it wants us to like it, likes itself.

(64-65)

The novel by no means claims that these values are in themselves a victory over the unhumanity and unnaturalness of the political system that prevails in the England of The Child in Time; children do die or are abducted, ‘Authorised Childcare Handbooks’ are written. But it suggests that only through a sense of these values can any political opposition become possible. My aim here, however, is literary-critical, not political. It seems to me that The Child in Time reveals its deepest meaning when viewed in the literary and cultural perspectives that I have attempted to outline in this essay.

Notes

1. Ian McEwan, The Child in Time, (1987) rpt. (London: Picador, 1988).

2. For a fuller discussion of this topic, and some of the modern attempts to avoid these consequences of this side of Kantianism, see the editorial ‘Afterword’ in Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. P. Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), pp. 466-74.

3. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, tr. F. L. Pogson, (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1910).

4. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

5. A discussion following the session on ‘Englishness and English Art’ at the 19th Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians (The Tate Gallery, April 1993) found itself addressing the same issues as those raised twenty years ago in Davie's book, though the parallel was probably unknown to most participants.

6. This does not mean that there are no connections with Modernism. The allusion to Borges already mentioned occurs in this chapter. It is also just possible that the ‘time hallucination’ that Stephen enters was in part suggested by the time hallucination of old England into which the ghosts, Pullman and Satterthwaite, stray in Wyndham Lewis's representation of the afterworld (The Childermass: Section I [London: Chatto and Windus, 1928], pp. 83-103). Also, after Stephen's hallucination, in the period of semi-consciousness, it is just possible that his sensation of being like a fish with flippers and gills recalls the ‘strange fishes withouten heads’ in Joyce's Ulysses (ed. J. Johnson, [Oxford: OUP, 1993], p. 370) mentioned at that point to point up the parallel between the development of English and the development of the foetus. But both parallels are doubtful, and reveal the distance, rather than any closeness, of The Child in Time from high Modernism.

7. By definition the noumenal must logically precede natural phenomena, of course. But Stephen's experience is not directly classified in the novel as quasi-noumenal or noumenal; that description is mine.

8. The tradition can be said to begin with Wordsworth's opposition to the encroachment of the railway on the Lake District; a reminder of the shifting significance of this (it now seems) most human of industrial forms of transport in the poetic sense of the country and its landscape.

9. Davie, op. cit., p. 66.

10. See ibid., p. 73.

11. The Modernist point of view is expressed by Wyndham Lewis in a way that brings out the dilemma (but squares the circle), in a passage discussing the liberal-humanist attitudes to meat-eating and capital punishment, written around 1925: ‘At the root of both of these questions it is advisable to place the not necessarily inhuman proposition that life is in itself not important. Our values make it so: but they are mostly, the important ones, non-human values, although the intenser they are the more they imply a supreme, vital connotation’. The Art of Being Ruled (1926), rpt., ed. R. W. Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), p. 59.

12. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is also still present in the writing at this point: ‘all sense of being in a hurry gone’; and, of course, wheat is a central image in that poem as it is in ‘Here’.