• Time and Trauma in The Child in Time
• Claire Kahane (bio)

*Winner of the Silberger Prize from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

In a provocative interview some years ago with Adam Begley, Ian McEwan narrated an anecdote that ended with a question most of his readers at the time would have readily asked as well:

In 1986 I was at the Adelaide literary festival where I read the scene from The Child in Time in which the little girl is stolen from a supermarket […] As soon as I was done, Robert Stone got to his feet and delivered a most passionate speech. It really seemed to come from the heart. He said, "Why do we do this? Why do writers do this, and why do readers want it? Why do we reach into ourselves to find the worst thing that can be thought?

(Begley, 2002)¹

Known already for a host of fictions depicting perverse and traumatic scenes that shocked his readers, McEwan himself attempted an answer to this intriguing question:

I still don't have a clear answer. I fall back on the notion of the test or investigation of character, and of our moral nature. As [Henry] James famously asked, What is incident but the illustration of character? Perhaps we use these worst cases to gauge our own moral reach. And perhaps we need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary, as a form of hopeful exorcism.

(Begley, 2002, emphasis added)² [End Page 673]

It is that statement that I would like to parse and pursue, by looking more particularly at the ways in which the imaginary in The Child in Time (1987) plays out, and plays with, the fears it evokes, often playing with the reader as well.

Near the opening of the novel, Stephen Lewis, a writer of children's literature and the novel's third person point of view, recalls the worst thing that has happened to him—the sudden disappearance of his three year old daughter Kate two years earlier while they were shopping in a supermarket. A radical break in the flow of ordinary life that has since broken up his marriage, this traumatic event, depicted with all the dreadful clarity of detail and durational distortion common to traumatic memory, has distorted Stephen's relation to time itself. The subsequent narrative traces the effects of this trauma on Stephen as he wanders through a present-time made unreal by his loss.

McEwan himself justified his portrayal of moments of crisis as a way

of exploring how we might withstand, or fail to withstand, an extreme experience, what moral qualities and questions are brought forward, how we live with the consequences of our decisions, how memory torments, what time does, what resources we have to fall back on.

(Begley, 2002)

While no one could argue with his rationale—that extreme experiences test character and illuminate the ethical and psychological dimensions of our lives—the remark that his fictional crises may have repeatedly played out his own fears "as a form of hopeful exorcism," suggests that McEwan is driven by an unconscious repetition compulsion to exercise as well as exorcise his demons, a compulsion that has worked well for him as a writer.

Indeed, as McEwan remarked, The Child in Time was the first of a series of novels to employ a traumatizing scene as its opening gambit:

At the time this was hardly a conscious choice or a systematic program; it was simply how it came out in a number of novels, beginning with this one. And of course, these [End Page 674] scenes […] offered attractive fictional possibilities in themselves […] They also offered a means of exerting a hold over the reader.

(Begley, 2002)

Although placed as an afterthought, McEwan's desire to exert "a hold over the reader" is, I would argue, a crucial element in his grounding of a number of his novels, even before The Child in Time, in some terrible event. And exert a hold he has done, becoming one of the leading British novelists of his generation. Clearly, McEwan's realistic depiction of psychic trauma has been an effective lure in capturing...

• 时间的孩子中的时间与创伤
• 克莱尔·卡汉（Claire Kahane）（生物）

*波士顿精神分析学会和研究所的西尔伯格奖获得者

几年前，伊恩·麦克尤恩（Ian McEwan）在对亚当·贝格利（Adam Begley）的一次挑衅性采访中讲述了一个轶事，结尾时他的大多数读者也会很容易提出这样一个问题：

1986年，我在阿德莱德文学节上读了《时光之子》中的场景，在那儿，小女孩被从超市偷走了。演讲。它确实似乎是发自内心的。他说：“为什么要这样做？为什么作家要这样做，为什么读者要这么做呢？为什么我们要深入研究发现可以想到的最糟糕的东西？

（贝格利，2002年）¹

McEwan自己已经尝试了一个有趣的问题：

我仍然没有明确的答案。我回过头来检验或研究品格以及我们的道德本性。正如[Henry] James著名地问到的，除了人物的插图，什么是事件？也许我们用这些最坏的情况来衡量我们自己的道德影响力。也许我们需要在想象中的安全范围内发挥我们的恐惧，作为一种希望的驱魔。

（Begley，2002年，增加了重点）² [End Page 673]

我要分析和追求的是这种说法，特别是着眼于《时光之子》（1987年）中的虚构人物表现出并唤起恐惧感的方式，并经常与读者一起玩耍。出色地。

在小说的开头附近，儿童文学作家，小说的第三人称视角的斯蒂芬·刘易斯回忆起发生在他身上的最糟糕的事情-两年前，他三岁的女儿凯特突然失踪了。在一家超市购物。自从他的婚姻破裂以来，这种普通的生活发生了根本性的中断，这种创伤性的事件以创伤性记忆中常见的所有可怕的细节和持续的扭曲来描绘，这扭曲了斯蒂芬与时间本身的关系。随后的叙述追溯了这种创伤对斯蒂芬的影响，因为他徘徊在当前因失去而变得不真实的时代。

麦克尤恩本人证明了他对危机时刻的刻画是一种方式

探索我们如何承受或不经受极端的经历，提出什么道德素质和问题，如何生活以决定的后果，记忆的折磨如何，什么时间做什么，我们必须退缩的资源在。

（2002年，贝格利）

尽管没有人可以证明自己的理论依据（极端的经历会检验性格并阐明我们生活的道德和心理层面），但他的虚构危机可能会反复表现出自己的恐惧，“作为一种希望的驱魔手段”，这表明：麦克尤恩受到无意识的重复强迫运动和驱魔的驱使，这种强迫对他作为作家来说非常有效。

确实，正如麦克尤恩（McEwan）所说，《时光倒流的孩子》是一系列采用创伤性场景作为开场白的小说中的第一部：

当时，这几乎不是有意识的选择或系统的程序。从这本小说开始，它就只是在许多小说中出现的方式。当然，这些[End Page 674]场景[...]本身提供了引人入胜的虚构可能性[...]他们还提供了一种吸引读者的手段。

（2002年，贝格利）

我想说，尽管事后才想起，但麦克尤恩想要“抓住读者”的欲望，在某些可怕的事件中，甚至在《时光之子》问世之前，都是他扎根许多小说的关键要素。并发挥自己的作用，成为这一代英国领先的小说家之一。显然，麦克尤恩（McEwan）对精神创伤的真实描述一直是吸引人的有效诱饵...