Belatedness of Trauma, Self-Reflexive Conscious and Narrative Vicissitude in Child in Time - sersc
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International Journal of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Vol.11, No. 3, (2020), pp. 160–165
Belatedness of Trauma, Self-Reflexive Conscious and Narrative Vicissitude in
Child in Time
Dr. Shabbir Ahmad1,2, Muhammad Imran1,3, Muhammad Iqbal4, Samina Akhtar3
1 Department of English, The University of Sahiwal, Sahiwal, Pakistan.
2 School of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
3 School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
4 Department of English, The University of Lahore, Pakistan.
Corresponding Author:
Muhammad Imran, Department of English, The University of Sahiwal, Sahiwal, Pakistan.
Email: imranjoyia76@gmail.com, mimran@uosahiwal.edu.pk
ABSTRACT
McEwan’s narrative strategy associates with his attempt at a psychic exploration of characters in
Child in Time (1987). In terms of the trauma representation under the third-person perspective, McEwan
is in favor of the objective panoramic angle to reveal the trauma origin, traumatic moment, and the
characters’ post-traumatic life. The omniscient narration elaborates on the misery of the protagonist and
indicates the stress spreading all over his life by presenting the traumatic events in a temporal narrative
framework consisting of memory flashback and flash-forward. This study explores the metaphoric
implications of chronotope narrative (Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1981) term for the inseparability of time and
space) for projecting the psychological syndrome of the traumatized character whose self-reflexive
conscious highlights post-traumatic stress through a narrative focus on the belatedness of trauma
representation in temporal facets. This representation of enduring traumatic aftermath, as a cause of an
individual’s estrangement from others and community, proposes that McEwan’s sympathy with individual
trauma expands to an ethical and social critique.
KEY TERMS: post-traumatic stress, chronotope in narrative, self-reflexive conscious,
Belatedness of trauma, cultural critique
INTRODUCTION
Ian Russell McEwan, in the list of “Fifty greatest British writers since 1945”, is known as one of
the prominent British contemporary writers. His major novels include The Child in Time (1987), Black
Dogs (1992), Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam (1998), Saturday (2005), and Sweet Tooth (2012). His
early works gave him the reputation of “literary bad boy” (Mellors 112), although he was treating novel
as “an investigation at its broadest and best form into human nature” via psychological assessment of
human beings. Nevertheless, at the start of the 21st century, his novels were framed in historical and
social contexts such as the anxiety of global warming and events as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, thus giving
him the title of “a latter-day humanist” (Bradbury,2001, p. 536). Besides these later works, the narrative
manipulation is the central point with the synthesis of psychoanalysis, ethical concern, and narrative
perspective. The present study of McEwan’s novel Child In Time (1987) also combines narrative
vicissitude with the psychological depiction of trauma in the context of Michael Bakhtin’s (1981)
Chronotope (inseparability of time and space).
As a novelist engaged in the psychological exploration, McEwan combines psychological
conscious with the narrative strategies, as Courtney demonstrates,
McEwan favors narrated thought. Narrated thought is not summary – it relays the step-by-step
thought progressions of a character and so conveys finite detail of character consciousness; it also
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Vol.11, No. 3, (2020), pp. 160–165
allows the voice of the character to subjectively color the narration while aiding the flow of the
narrative by keeping the narrator at the helm at all times (Courtney, 2013, p. 186).
The above demonstration makes it easy to contend that McEwan’s protagonist, indispensably, displays
psychological trauma in the stylistic integration of stream-of-conscious narrative, whose reflection of the
past misery abruptly emerges from the coherent panoramic view. Furthermore, time in the narrative
reconstruction of trauma is no longer analogous to its logic sequence; and the reemergence of the
traumatic moment in the victim conscious is nothing but a metaphorical phantom intruding into narrative
coherence. Hence, to probe into the complicated ethical issues in McEwan’s trauma fiction, the synthetic
approach of trauma study and narratology is taken as a tentative methodology by analyzing the
representation of trauma motif in McEwan’s novel Child In Time (1987). The narrative, here, exemplifies
the post-traumatic stress upon trauma victims, whose reflective conscious direct to what Cathy Caruth
(2009, p.4) has addressed as “the belatedness of trauma (coming back of trauma repeatedly in slow
fashion)” in the extension of narrative temporality and spatiality.
Theoretical Framework
Trauma refers to the physical and psychological injury caused by a natural or man-made catastrophe,
and the victims’ psychological disorder is the topic of contemporary psychoanalysis. Trauma defined as
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 (Caruth, 2009,
p. 3), is composed of syndromes such as nightmares, insomnia, anorexia, self-disclosure, and other long-
term negative effects on survivors of a catastrophe. The forerunners of this faculty, Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan assume that trauma study should be an integration of the past and the present in a parallel
chronological structure, in which the historical burden is elaborated by the contemporary critics as “an
imperative to awaken that turns between a traumatic repetition and the ethical burden of a survival”
(Caruth, 2009, p. 108). Complete trauma reconciliation has to go through the three stages: “safety and
stability, trauma work, and integration” (Weiner and Craighead, 2010, p. 1804). Thus, the traumatized
person has to go through the haunting of traumatic memory, the hesitance in accepting the past
responsibility, before the relief is achieved. The trauma reflection via narrative is the realm of McEwan’s
novels featured with trauma motif.
Trauma representation in contemporary narrative fiction is not merely a recollection of traumatic
moments, it further gets conceptualized as retrospection over the traumatized characters’ immediate
response and the enduring aftereffect. The post-traumatic stress, as Cathy Caruth proposes, “lies precisely
in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of
any single place or time” (Caruth, 2016, p. 9). This “belatedness” permeates with the chronological and
spatial dimension of the narrative, through various devices as a flashback and flash-forward, bringing out
the victim’s self-scrutiny over trauma itself and the ambiguity of possible recovery or trauma
reconciliation. Narrated with the third-person panoramic perspective, the self-reflexive conscious of the
trauma victim is designated within a traumatological chronotope projecting the traumatized character’s
ambivalent psychological mood characteristic of post-modern society.
In concrete trauma representation, McEwan alludes to Mikhail Bakhtin’s catalog of “chronotope” in
Forms of time and the chronotope in the novel;
We will give the name chronotope (literally, "time-space") to the intrinsic connectedness of
temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature…; we are borrowing
it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)…it expresses the
inseparability of space and time. … In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal
indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. (Bakhtin,1981, p.84–85.)
Thus chronotope presumes narrative into the metaphysical framework of temporality and spatiality,
leading to variation of literary works in the contingency of chronological coherence or spatial extension.
With trauma fiction, narrative time could be either prolonged or shortened for presenting consciousness of
characters who suffer from the haunting memory of the traumatic moment, while the traumatological
space, usually in the psychological domain, is immensely preconditioned with contemporary historical
and social surroundings.
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What concerns philosophers, ultimately, is whether the metaphorical linearity of time exists. During
the peak period of Modernism, such masters as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Marcel
Proust, and Franz Kafka, encapsulate time as an essential domain wherein the retrospective memory or
the meaning of life projects. The representation of time in modern literature, thus, manifests the
ontological existence and the ideological complexity of human beings through the alternation of time
sequence in narrative progression. Paul Ricoeur is the predecessor in affirming the narrative variation of
time with his groundbreaking three-volume monograph - Time and Narrative, by pointing out that
“[c]ontemporary experience in the area of narrative techniques [is] … aimed at shattering the very
experience of time” (Ricoeur, 1996,p.134). Ricoeur’s classification of narrative time pioneers the
narratological concern about the variation of temporality in fiction, and predicts the narrative
manipulation of time as inevitable in the presentation of conscious’ fluidity. In the third-person trauma
representation, the memory flashback usually appears with inconsequential skips in the chronological
recording of victims’ post-traumatic life, whose unrelieved psychological enigma is subject to individual
conscious presentation marked with the belatedness of trauma in the temporal realm.
Discussion
The Child in Time is a narrative of pain and loss that epitomizes the misery suffered by the
protagonist, Stephan, whose three-year-old daughter is abducted in a supermarket. What counts in this
narration is how the traumatic moment of loss haunts the protagonist’s consciousness and shadows his life
for years. Brian Diemert (2013) notices that this novel is McEwan’s probe into “the traumatic in the
narrative” (p.23) in which the narrative time is a significant metaphor implicated as the pun in the title.
On one hand, the phrase “the child in time” refers to Kate whose abduction is the origin of trauma for
Stephan; on the other, it indicates the forthcoming baby at the end of the novel, who comes in time as a
reconciliation between the traumatized couple, and simultaneously, hints the hope of ethical relief to
which McEwan’s optimism of trauma recovery is credited, however, this optimism is doubtful. The
overwhelming chronological narrative incorporates Stephan’s post-traumatic life in which the sustaining
sorrow is pertinent to the trails of his consistent recall of Kate’s abduction, his eagerness to search for her,
the separation between him and his wife Julie, and their ultimate reconciliation which is still questionable.
The primary syndrome of post-trauma stress corresponds to “the range of Stephen’s actions and emotions
which this traumatic event prompts” (McEwan,1987, p.95) ever since the traumatic moment, and the
personal anguish intensifies the “intrusive re-experiencing of elements of the trauma in nightmares,
flashbacks, or somatic reactions” (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart,1991, p. 173). The narrative time shifts
its linearity, following the third-person narrative, to profuse the reader’s sympathetic attitude toward the
trauma victims in The Child in Time. Under a panoramic overview, the character Stephan’s immediate
response to a traumatic event is analogous to every victim with “shock and denial as initial defenses
against the emotional distress” (Tedeschi and Calhoun,1995, p. 80); moreover, his painful post-traumatic
life mirrors the obsession with trauma aftermath that becomes hard to recede as time goes by.
Generally, narrative coherence abiding by certain chronological or logical order traces back to
Aristotle’s “Three Unities” of time, place, and plot, whose instructional prescription, deduced from the
analysis of Greek tragedy, has maintained its prodigious impact till the heyday of 19th-century realistic
novels. Once the modern fiction transits with the inward turn, however, the cliché of chronological
narrative encounters sabotages the multiplicity of narrative order to which the alternation of time refers.
For instance, prolepsis and analepsis, two terms coined by French narratologist Gérard Genette (1983)
respectively equivalent to the notions of flashforward and flashback in the movie industry, are two typical
means to disclaim the narrative smoothness, from which the modern narrative benefits in presenting the
character’s psychological conscious (p.48). Fundamentally chronological in the narrative progression,
analepsis and prolepsis in The Child in Time make the narrative borderline dubious in the narrative
transition between the present and the future and connotes the temporality of traumatological mood in the
victim’s psychological cognition.
The analepsis about the traumatic moment, as Dominic (2007) insists, “treats narrative chronology in
an assured and fluid way, with flashbacks appearing seamlessly within the episodes that give rise to them,
or dexterously juxtaposed with the later scenes they elucidate” (p.75), thus the time point fluxes into a
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concretized procession accompanied by the victim’s syndrome of psychic trauma. The prolepsis of the
post-traumatic life, emblematic in the temporal expansion, further prolongs the misery in a way of on-live
recordings. On this occasion, the parallel of analepsis and prolepsis enlarges the momentary measurement
of the traumatic devastation and extends the protagonists’ suffering with the reemergence of trauma in an
expansive temporal framework.
In trauma representation predominant with character’s self-reflexive conscious, prolepsis, rather than
analepsis, is an artistic means more frequently used to expose the awkwardness in the narrative, given the
fact that “events that occur in the order ABC are told in the order ACB or CAB” (Herman, 2009, p.192).
It unavoidably disturbs the primarily chronological order in the narrative, arousing the reader’s
supposition in the encounter with the upcoming events. This narrative rhythm enacts the motility of
readers whereas the objective third-person narration shapes into the stealthy narrator’s empathetically
subjective prediction. Accordingly, the narrative progression skips back to the details associated with the
present plot in a self-reflective view, intermittently undermining the coherence of the chronological
narrative. In The Child in Time, the prolepsis animates the character’s self-accusation with a sympathetic
tone. As a trauma victim losing his daughter Kate, Stephan could not evade the ethical load that it’s his
carelessness that leads to the tragedy. On the day when Kate is abducted, Stephan hesitates at the moment
of bringing her outside. The prolepsis appears in Stephan’s remorse with indicative time duration, “later,
in the sorry months and years, Stephan was to make efforts to re-enter this moment, to burrow his way
back through the folds between events, crawl between the covers, and reverse his decision”
(McEwan,1987,p.9). The unexpected interjection of prolepsis predicts the upcoming tragedy before the
traumatic scenery that appears in the narrative and sets the tragic tone implicating Stephan’s everlasting
self-accusation. Meanwhile, this narrative order entangles Stephan’s dual roles of trauma victim and
perpetrator at the same time, reminding readers of Stephan’s post-traumatic stress that derives from the
ethical burden of irresponsibility for the custody of Kate. Prolepsis further prompts the self-condemnation
in the impasse of his coldness to his wife Julie, in that he is reluctant to accompany her when she starts
her reclusion after Kate’s abduction. The chronological narrative keeps Stephan, as well as readers,
unaware of the fact that Julie conceives their new baby and lives at the cottage alone. Implicitly, the
prolepsis bridges the narrative information gap by calling attention to the repentance of Stephan, “for
years afterward he would be baffled by his insistence on not returning to see her” (McEwan, 1987, p.71).
Once Stephan is aware of Julie’s upcoming childbirth, the unfulfilled obligation of a responsible husband
represses him as a new ethical burden. The prolepsis alternating the chronological order, therefore,
functions as the lens to motivate the intropunitive response in the conscious of a trauma victim.
The other implication of prolepsis adumbrates the victim’s post-traumatic life, within which the
negative effect permeates with temporal marks in the narrative. After Stephan moves out of his own
house, his contemplation of the terrible veracity that Kate would never come back remains in his mind,
“two and a half years on, it still made him uneasy to be away when Kate, or someone who knew where
she was, might come to the flat” (McEwan,1987, p.131). He insists that Kate would come back one day
even though he is aware of the fact that she is too young to remember the way back home. The time
duration of “two and a half years” emphasizes the continuity of Stephan’s psychological anguish, and
produces a sympathetic voice in the professedly objective narration. Besides, the prolepsis accentuates the
formidability of the plausible trauma recovery which is marked by the forthcoming baby at the end of the
novel. The emotional relief in Stephan and Julie seems to be accessible within the temporal marker:
“three years later, that they began to cry together at last for the lost, irreplaceable child who would not
grow older for them, whose characteristic look and movement could never be dispelled by the time”
(McEwan,1987, p.239). Nevertheless, their memory of Kate stimulated by the new baby simultaneously
comes forth with these legible temporal markers. The explicit timing quantizes the belatedness of trauma
within the range of temporal expansion, reversing the omniscient narration with an authorial and
empathetic voice to speculate on the victim’s experience of encounter with trauma and the ostensible
recovery. Through third-person narrative and prolepsis, readers understand the narrative facts “in the
similarly disoriented positions of the narrators and characters through a shift in time, memory, affect and
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consciousness” (Vikroy, 2002, p.28), and sense the estrangement between the couple whose
psychological trauma is of slim curable hope.
Converse to the predictive narrative in prolepsis, analepsis usually “interrupts the forward movement
of narrative time by narrating material (events, an image, a figure of speech) from an earlier time in the
chronology” (Phelan, 2012, p. 542). It conjures up the narrative orientation digresses from the linear
coherence by interjecting the previous event into the present narrative settings. Analepsis in trauma
representation, thereby, refers to the emergence of the traumatic memory that symbolizes the victim’s
innate psychological shadow. In The Child in Time, analepsis appears not only in Stephan’s memory
flashback about the abduction of Kate, but in the engrossed recall of his early trauma experience in
childhood, indeed, a co-product incurred by the abduction of Kate. In Stephan’s self-reflexive
consciousness, he sees himself as a child standing outside a restaurant and gazing at a young couple that
turns out to be his parents who are arguing for a possible abortion. This argumentation, confirmed as a
real event by Stephan’s mother later, articulates the confusion of young Stephan who is afraid of being
discarded. Nonetheless, the analepsis extricates the narrative time beyond the textual range and points out
the deep-rooted trauma in Stephan’s subconscious resurfacing by the visible present traumatic event.
During the transition of the temporal realm, Stephan’s worry equals what he assumes to be Kate’s horror
of being abandoned by his parents. In other words, the analepsis assimilates the protagonist’s traumatic
anguish into a psychic burden, because Stephan’s presumption that Kate may misinterpret the abduction
as his deliberate discard of her, comes forth as new trauma acceleration on account of previous misery.
The ethical impetus in the analepsis, arising as an upsurge of responsible parentage in the character’s
conscious, manifolds a dual trauma strategically adjusted by narrative temporality. Given that the trauma
representation in The Child in Time focusing on the trauma origin and then retreating to the protagonist’s
earlier psychic trauma, Stephan’s post-traumatic stress schematizes in two aspects, firstly, in the traverse
superposition of victim, and then in the longitudinal apposition of Kate’s abduction and his own memory
of being abandoned. The changeability of time in narrative sequence lies in the relationship between the
trauma at present and the past, which culminates in Stephan’s self-condemnation in a temporal portion of
the belatedness of trauma representation. The diaphragm initiated by third-person narrative paves the way
for the emotional confound of post-traumatic stress in the narrative that is situated within the self-
reflexive discourse.
The denouement in the novel exhibits the possibility of trauma recovery, with a resolution to the
previous crisis initiated by the traumatic experience. The estranged couple reunites and the abducted child
is represented by another beloved, which eradicates the trauma origin with the implication of ontological
rebirth. Also, the narrative focus on personal suffering, rather than the socio-historical traumatological
context, simplifies the accessibility of individual trauma relief. The moral duty for readers therefore lies
in their awareness of the victim’s enduring devastation of post-traumatic stress and the exhilaration of the
resolved life crisis. Once readers witness the trajectory from the victim’s denial of confronting with
trauma and the endeavor of reversing the traumatized status, they would embrace the empathetic narrative
attitude explicit in the authorial narrative manipulation (Vickroy, 2002). The belatedness of trauma in
temporality, to some extent, releases its ethical burden under the therapeutic function of time. However,
readers do not know whether the new baby indeed brings the traumatized characters the ultimate trauma
relief, since the image of the abducted Kate appears repetitively in the narrative. Sympathetic yet
confusing, the denouement does not exhibit a clarified solution to psychological trauma. Only the slim
optimism arises from the ambiguous ending. This ambiguous ending explains the tendency that
“McEwan’s novels do not offer final answers. They are not narrative compasses to which readers, who
might find themselves amid a situation of postmodern disorientation, can turn for moral guidance”
(Möller,2011, p.189).
Conclusion
Owing to the long period in the narrative, The Child in Time covers the trauma aftermath of the
victim for 3 years wherein the character’s obsession with the past misery lays out in the recollection,
assimilation, and mourning under trauma. Chronologically, the trauma narrative exposes the miserable
trauma origin with the abduction of the protagonist’s daughter at the very beginning and prompts the
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contingency of trauma relief with the birth of another child in the denouement. Thus, the trauma
representation aligns with narrative coherence, being confined to the personal borderline of individuality
to confirm that the post-traumatic stress could be relieved via surrogate of the loss.
Meanwhile, the metaphor of linear time consistently converts to the past, and the narrative sequence
accounts for Bakhtin’s narrative adjustability in the schema of temporality. The narrative progression in
the temporal range of three years elaborates analogously on the procedure of trauma recovery, in which
the third-person narration shuffles the objective narrative insight into Stephan’s psychological movement.
Thereby, a large sum of the narrative gap in the time axis could be later filled up with the reader’s
acknowledgment of the victim’s regret and self-criticism in the traumatic event.
In a word, being afflicted with the tragic moment and its aftereffect on the trauma victims, the
trauma representation in The Child in Time ascertains a temporal adjustment of narrative order into the
victim’s haunting memory and his years of self-blame via narrative techniques of analepsis and prolepsis
featured with a third-person perspective. The narrative presents a panoramic portrayal of the belatedness
of trauma in a temporal framework which brings fore his implicit expectation of trauma relief within an
ethical and social context.
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