1In her 2018 article entitled ‘Why does literature ignore pregnancy?’, writer Jessie Greengrass signals the need for literature, especially the novel, to address one of its problems of transmission, that of a ‘fundamentally female experience’, pregnancy (Greengrass n.p.). While she is convinced that ‘writing a novel about pregnancy’ means that ‘a female body might be required to stand both for itself and for something other, the experience of which is not uniquely female at all’ (Greengrass n.p.), she also regrets that this has not often happened. Greengrass argues that pregnancy in literature is either confined to autobiographical writing by authors who have gone through it, or to works of fiction where it remains ‘out of shot . . . while in the centre of things a man paces a carpet’. Representations of pregnancy can, it seems, be organised into categories defined by genre on one side, sex and/or gender on the other. Confined to these categories, pregnancy has less opportunity to stand for ‘both for itself and for something other’ (Greengrass n.p.).
2Greengrass’s examples of fiction, however, stop before the second half of the twentieth century. In The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Clare Hanson comes to similar conclusions regarding, more generally, the maternal body, in fiction exclusively, including contemporary works:
For female writers, the focus is principally on the subjective experience of maternal embodiment and the difficulty of negotiating the somatic, psychological and social changes associated with pregnancy and birth. . . . Male writers, by contrast, regard motherhood from a social point of view, with pregnancy seen as a disruptive event that may threaten the stability of family ties. Another recurring theme is illegitimacy as a threat to the social order. . . . In a surprising number of instances, male writers deploy the maternal body in a philosophical and/or allegorical fashion. . . . (Hanson 96–97)
3Categories dependent on sex and/or gender can also be outlined when looking strictly at novelistic accounts of pregnancy and the maternal body. This tendency in male writers to allegorise the maternal body is also acknowledged by Susan Stanford Friedman in her article ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse’ (1987). She writes about the widespread use of pregnancy and childbirth being used metaphorically to refer to the work and release of creativity by authors, although such tendency is not observed only in male authors, but in female ones as well. Either way, Friedman acknowledges that ‘[b]iological analogies ultimately exclude one sex from the creative process, and in a patriarchal society it is women’s creativity that is marginalized’ (Friedman 50). She adds that in ‘the male metaphor’ of creativity as childbirth, ‘[h]istory and biology combine to make it a form of literary couvade, male appropriation of procreative labor to which women have been confined’ (Friedman 56).
4Although so far non-metaphorical representations of pregnancy and of the maternal body seem to be a problem mostly for male authors, Cristina Mazzoni finds a similar ‘silence’ surrounding the maternal body in turn-of-the-century Italian fiction by female writers. To explain such silence, Mazzoni quotes feminist writer and activist Alessandra Bochetti: ‘Our hypothesis is that we should take women’s silence not as a sign of their poverty of language, but of the poverty of language’ (Mazzoni 181). This establishes that both male and female authors find it difficult to write about the maternal body. Still, male-authored and female-authored works that include and/or tackle pregnancy provide different representations that can be categorized fairly clearly. If ‘the poverty of language’ is one hurdle—perhaps the ultimate one—, it seems that male- and female-authored texts handle it in different ways, perhaps meeting others along the way.
5The couvade seems to have been the way to go for male authors, or so do Hanson’s and Friedman’s conclusions on the metaphorisation of the maternal body show. One reason for this can be found in Robert McElvaine’s Eve’s Seed. McElvaine argues that ‘the male inability to bear and nourish children . . . causes men to feel insecure. Because of this relative incapacity, many men suffer, largely subconsciously, from what might be termed “women envy” and “breast envy”’ (McElvaine 3). McElvaine further writes that, faced with the ‘no-man’s land’ of maternity, men have created ‘no-woman’s lands’ (McElvaine 3). This echoes the absence of pregnancy/maternity in literature (literature itself was for a long time a ‘no-woman’s land’), as well as the appropriation and/or erasure performed by metaphorisations of pregnancy, childbirth and more generally the maternal body.
6While this may be common in novels that, as Greengrass suggests, anecdotally include pregnancy in their diegesis, perhaps less pessimistic conclusions can be reached when looking at male-authored novels with male narrative perspectives that include pregnancy and the maternal body to a larger extent. It is the case with two contemporary British novels: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), in which a male narrator depicts a rare scene of abortion and dwells upon its many causes and consequences; and Andrew Cowan’s Common Ground (1996), which follows in vivid detail the pregnancy, birth and first few months postpartum of the main character’s partner and child. These narrations by/about fathers attempt to make room at their very centre for both a male perspective and for the ‘no-man’s land’ of the maternal body—which should be called a ‘no-male’s land’ (in fact, it could be said to exclude anyone who is or has not been pregnant). Because of this antithetical endeavour, these two novels hardly seem to qualify as ‘no-woman’s lands’, or more specifically and to steer clear of essentialism, ‘no-pregnancy’s lands’, while, at the same time, the transmission through language of the experience of pregnancy attempted by these narrations is expected to be limited.
- 1 Miller’s ‘Introduction à la lecture du Séminaire L’angoisse de Jacques Lacan’ was published in two (...)
- 2 ‘Ces objets petit a ne s’arrêtent pas à cinq. Dans leur foisonnement, vous trouvez . . . le placent (...)
- 3 My translation. The original French version reads: ‘c’est un corps dont on ignore la limite’; ‘L’or (...)
7This article shows that in these two novels, the couvade, appropriation, or metaphorisation of pregnancy that male perspectives are, apparently, condemned to perform, is undermined by the more subtle, rhetorical, and literary choices of their father-characters. These choices leave room for the pregnant experience to be represented as itself, and not only as a metaphor, although this ‘self’ remains out of the reach of the male perspectives. In both novels, analogies undermine allegories and destabilise the bridges built between biology and discourse, thus leveling the playing field between vehicles and tenors. Irony, sarcasm and theatricality continue to undermine and de-centre the male perspectives that produce them, thus pointing out the failures in their accounts. Eventually, both allegories and analogies of the fruits of pregnancy (either carried to term or not) point more precisely towards the organicity of pregnant and maternal bodies, and confirm the intuition that, rather or more than envy, the novels’ representations of pregnancy are fuelled by anxiety as it is defined by Lacan. That is, anxiety as ‘the means of accessing that which does not signify’1 (Miller 2004, 65), this ultimately being ‘the body as organism’2 (Miller 2005, 86), ‘a body whose limits are unknown’, an organism that ‘infringes on the body of the Other’3 (Miller 2005, 87). As such, through their male, paternal perspectives, these two novels outline ‘a new figure of the father’ (Miller 2005, 90), one which acknowledges the flaws in his own attempts at transmission and allows other perspectives (not) to be seen through his own.
8Waterland and Common Ground do illustrate the tendencies highlighted by Hanson for pregnancy and the maternal body to become an issue about ‘illegitimacy as a threat to the social order’, or to be ‘deployed . . . in a philosophical and/or allegorical fashion’ (Hanson 97). In Waterland, illegitimacy is an issue brought up by Mary’s pregnancy. The text floats several possibilities for who the father is—it is Tom, but this certainty is shaken by Mary’s contradictory statements. She first lies to Dick to protect Tom, claiming the father is Freddy. When Tom confronts her and insists that ‘[i]t’s Dick’s, isn’t it? Dick’s, Dick’s!’, Mary gives him confirmation, then corrects her statement a few lines later: ‘Not Dick’s. Ours. Ours’ (Swift 293). Many years later, Mary attributes the baby she steals to God in a parody of Jesus’ Virgin Birth, the only illegitimate child tolerated by Christian societies, which still signals an issue of legitimacy in the novel. Finally, Tom’s brother Dick is the child of an incestuous relationship between his mother and her own father. In Common Ground, Ashley’s paternity is not questioned, and the issue with transmission is rather the anxiety surrounding what is being transmitted, and whether there will be anything worth passing down upon the next generation. Ashley’s and Jay’s respective parents and their flaws are reflected upon, which brings up anxiety about the legacy they both have inherited. We learn that in the house where Ashley grew up, ‘the paper had peeled away in long sheets, revealing walls of smooth grey. Only on closer inspection did the cracks become visible’ (Cowan 55). In Ashley and Jay’s house, one generation later, there are ‘cracks everywhere’, and some are ‘wide enough to swallow a man, or woman, or both at once. Providing that neither is pregnant’ (Cowan 6). Here pregnancy appears an opportunity of avoiding the ‘cracks’, the ‘vacuum’ of generational legacy that they wish to avoid.
- 4 ‘La cartographie hésitante d’une représentation en déshérence, une représentation orpheline du sens (...)
- 5 ‘L’enlèvement de l’enfant, mais avant tout l’avortement—trois séquences essentielles—provoquent une (...)
- 6 ‘Les chapitres 42 et 45 concentrent tout particulièrement le potentiel transgressif et subversif du (...)
9A deployment of the maternal body in ‘a philosophical and/or allegorical fashion’ can also be observed in both novels. Common Ground places Jay’s experience of maternity against a background of ecological destruction: the nearby commons is to be bulldozed down to build a motorway, and Jay is a fervent opponent of this. In fact, this ecological concern is tackled as early as the opening of the novel: through the window Ashley sees ‘a red car that had been abandoned beneath a shedding sycamore’ (Cowan 1). The car, strangely, is ‘new’, but in a pitiful state: ‘[t]he windscreen lay like a sheet of crazed ice across the front seats’; ‘[t]he rear tyres were flat and the body-work was dented’ (Cowan 1). The car’s red colour and its association with the ‘shedding’ sycamore (like the uterus shedding its lining during menstruation) link it to the female reproductive cycle and seem to comment on its pointlessness: the new becomes old quickly; excitement quickly turns to neglect. Jay’s pregnancy, which is announced on that same page, and all the questions it raises about the future and the ability of the parents to care for their child can therefore be read as an allegory of the relationship between humans and the natural world, and as a comment on the present ecological crisis. In Waterland, the crisis of transmission exemplified by interrupted or incestuous pregnancies is an allegory of the meta-crisis of representation at the heart of the novel. Catherine Bernard reads Waterland as ‘the hesitant cartography of a representation in escheat, orphaned of meaning, which always remains out of the reach of words, as the twists and turns of the narrative logic of [this text] go on a quest for a totality that always escapes a fragile and inevitably failed representation’ (Bernard 1991, 32).4 Bernard uses ‘the child’s kidnapping’ and the abortion as illustrations of this issue of representation, as both events ‘trigger a dislocation, a revulsion of discourse, and reveal chaos as an informal state of reality’ (Bernard 1991, 55).5 More specifically, she reads the abortion scene in the light of the concept of abjection, ‘which defines a mode of brutal reassessment of the subject and of language’ (Bernard 1991, 55).6
10These allegories perform the couvade denounced by Friedman. McElvaine’s words also resonate—but only at first. McElvaine identifies the creation of ‘no-woman’s lands’ as a response to the ‘no-man’s land’ of maternity, whereas in Waterland and Common Ground, maternity and what it performs is already lacking or missing. The two novels already are or are threatened to become ‘no-woman’s/no-pregnancy’s/no-maternity lands.’ Waterland is the stage of many missing/missed mothers, as signalled by the abortion and kidnapping that are at the centre of the novel. And, through its criticism of urban development and its evocation of the at-times very problematic parenting of Ashley’s and Jay’s parents, what Common Ground points out is the lack of consistent, thoughtful and respectful care and nurturing in the world it depicts. Through Jay’s pregnancy, such care and nurturing are associated with maternity, and their absence in the outside world is underlined. Both novels point out the absence of or threat to pregnancy and maternity more than they attempt to erase them.
- 7 My translation. The original French version reads: ‘l’une des stratégies privilégiées de l’explorat (...)
- 8 ‘L’analogie se différencierait donc des stratégies plus strictement textualistes, telle que l’allég (...)
- 9 ‘L’expérience du présent se démultiplie à l’infini dans des images trop obstinément organicistes po (...)
- 10 ‘Non que la projection analogique du monde ait donc touché à ses limites. Au contraire, jamais peut (...)
11The two novels also denounce and divert the mechanisms that usually support ‘no-woman’s’ and ‘no-pregnancy’s lands’ in literature. They do so by counterbalancing the previously identified ‘philosophical and/or allegorical’ uses of pregnancy with the repetitive use of analogies of pregnancy. In her article on analogy in the contemporary English novel, Catherine Bernard reads analogy as ‘one of the preferred strategies for exploring the contradictions of semiotic activity’7 in several novels, including Waterland (Bernard 2000, 21). While it may seem that analogy is not much of a step away from allegory, Bernard writes that ‘analogy differentiates itself from more textualist strategies, like allegory, in the way it links the reflection on the status and the logic of interpretation with a critical dialogue between text and nature’ (Bernard 2000, 22).8 In some texts, she argues that ‘the experience of the present multiplies itself indefinitely in images that are too obstinately organicistic not to signify, in negative, the unravelling of links between the individual and the universe, the rupture of the ligaments of the world’ (Bernard 2000, 24).9 In these, analogy ‘does not reach its limits’ but ‘on the contrary it has never been so significant and pertinent’ (Bernard 2000, 26).10 The word used by Bernard to mean ‘significance’ in French is ‘prégnance’, which is where the English language got ‘pregnant’: it seems that Bernard’s theory of analogy in the contemporary English novel can be taken very literally when it comes to Waterland and Common Ground. A ‘critical dialogue between text and nature’ is indeed much needed when it comes to the subject of female bodies, as Friedman argues about the childbirth metaphor. And so, the analogies of pregnancy and maternity in Waterland and Common Ground become, literally, ‘so pregnant’, stretch their ‘organicistic’ limits so much, that each of them ends up making manifest the gap that remains between language and the natural world. As such they point out the very fallacy that, historically, they have relied on to exist: the experience of pregnancy and childbirth being used as metaphors that erase the physical process they rely on.
12Henry’s ‘brooding’ also contains another, more problematic analogy: that of pregnancy as a metaphor for writing—or at least, for storytelling, for creativity. The most striking examples of this analogy and of its failure is Mary’s psychotic theft of a child. Mary tells herself a story—God has given her a child—but she violently and through violence finds out that telling oneself stories does not make them true. The gap between storytelling and procreativity, and so the failing analogy between the two, is never so obvious in the novel than in that moment. In Common Ground, Ashley’s efforts to create bridges between Jay’s pregnancy and his own storytelling also point out this gap. Ashley is not the narrator, as opposed to Tom in Waterland, but the reader is nevertheless given to read Ashley’s letters to his brother Douglas, who is travelling around the world. In several aspects, the written exchanges between the two brothers function as an analogy of the process of pregnancy. Ashley’s letters to Douglas ceaselessly track Jay’s pregnancy, parturition and postpartum in intimate and uncomfortable detail. For example, the opening of chapter 6 provides a detailed list of Jay’s symptoms of pregnancy, from ‘crippling pain in the pelvis’, to ‘amnesia’ by way of ‘constant peeing,’ ‘constipation’ and ‘carpal tunnel syndrome’ (Cowan 69). More strikingly, as Ashley announces Jay’s pregnancy to his brother, he retraces the whole process of impregnation and times it to fit Douglas’s arrival in Nepal:
- 11 All letters are presented in italics in the novel.
and thus as you descended the steep valley walls into the bowl of Katmandu, there swam my sperms for Jay’s womb; as you touched down on the runway, so my sperms sped along Jay’s cervical canal; . . . and finally, as you spluttered towards your hotel, there floated our twinned cells to find a bed in the lining of her uterus. So now you’re up a mountain and we’re up the buff. (Cowan 13–14)11
13Here, Ashley takes over his brother’s story of his travels to make it coincide with and function as an allegory of Jay’s pregnancy. However, what this analogy shows, apart from their doubtfully identical timing, is how far out of the reach of Ashley’s words both Jay’s pregnancy and Douglas’s travels are—literally and figuratively—on the other side of the world.
14One last analogy is present in both novels, between pregnancy, maternity and more generally parenthood on one side, and teaching on the other. Tom and Ashley are indeed both teachers, the former of history, the latter of geography. In Waterland, Tom creates an overt analogy between his students and the children he never had: ‘Once upon a time there was a history teacher’s wife who, for quite specific and historic reasons, couldn’t have a child. Though her husband had lots: a river of children—new lives, fresh starts—flowed through his classroom’ (Swift 131). While Mary refuses adoption because she is ‘not a woman to resort to make-believe’ (132), it seems Tom does resort to it through his students. Still, the comment on Mary’s refusal of ‘make-believe’ points out the gap ‘make-believe’ fills between Tom’s students and his non-existent children. In Common Ground, Ashley does not resort to such make-believe. However, he does depart from his curriculum and creates an analogy between his partner’s pregnancy and his subject, geography. The gap in the analogy is pointed out to him by one of his colleagues:
‘Is your wife’s pregnancy an appropriate topic for geography?’
‘She’s not my wife,’ Ashley said coolly. ‘But it is geography. We’re doing population.’
‘You’re doing population,’ Mrs Marnie repeated, surveying the room. ‘I see.’ (Cowan 85)
15Ashley is pushing his luck here, and Mrs Marnie is not fooled by his analogy, which, the emphasis on ‘doing’ hints at, relies on a play on words between ‘doing’ population—what Ashley is studying with his students—and ‘making’ population—what Jay’s body is accomplishing in pregnancy. Ashley eventually gives up his job as a teacher to become a stay-at-home dad. This, preceded as it is by his lack of interest in and motivation for his job is another indication of the problematic analogy between teaching and pregnancy/parenting.
16In addition to analogies that are ‘too organicistic’, Bernard argues that in other texts, analogy becomes ‘demonic’:
- 12 My translation as far as Bernard’s words go. The original reads: ‘L’analogie a ceci donc de démonia (...)
Analogy is demonic in the way it uses and abuses the signs of literary modernity, defined by Baudelaire as a space of correspondence, in order to atomise its significance. Dissemination and significance . . . no longer carry extra meaning. . . . The space of analogy is no longer this ‘space of radiation’ in which man is taken as ‘the great fulcrum of proportions—the centre upon which relations are concentrated and from which they are once again reflected.12 (Bernard 2000, 26–27)
17Similarly, in Common Ground and Waterland, ‘man’—which in Bernard’s text is meant as ‘humanity’ but which can also be read as the gender ‘man’ and that we transpose here as ‘the male’, or even ‘the non-pregnant’—is no longer ‘the great fulcrum of proportions’; he loses his position as centre of the narration and of the universe. As a result of the analogies of pregnancy that pervade the novels, the fraud of the male body as the norm is exposed, and the tradition of depicting the pregnant (and often the more generally female) body as ‘extra meaning’, as inherently other, is challenged. Through analogies, a ‘no-male’s land’ is being created as an echo of the ‘no-mother’s land’ or ‘no-pregnant land’ of male perspectives in literature, and these two are made to cohabit. Male—and, in fact, paternal—accounts are established as being off-centre, although they cannot place female experiences of pregnancy at their centre either, so that Waterland and Common Ground end up being centreless.
18What maintains the male perspective off-centre, and the female perspectives or experiences as something more than ‘extra’, is irony, sarcasm and theatricality. In Common Ground, Ashley is the main vehicle of sarcasm, which he directs at himself, but also at various other accounts of pregnancy that the narration comes upon. Sarcasm is indeed Ashley’s favourite mode of speech. He ridicules his own attempts at ‘nest-building’ in Chapter Nine, in the letter he writes just after Maggie’s birth. One would expect the letter to open with the news of Maggie’s birth, which is the most important event having taken place since his last letter. However, the opening lines of the letter read: ‘Of course you’ll be wanting to know whatever became of the half-done tiling around the fireplace’ (Cowan 117). With this sarcastic opening line, Ashley both erases, for a while, the childbirth that took place, and points out and mocks his own desire and attempt at doing so.
19What Ashley’s sarcasm is most effective in denouncing is the general process of dehumanisation that Jay undergoes, including animalisation, infantilisation and commodification. The sarcasm in Ashley’s speech is evident in the following passage from another letter, earlier on in the novel, when Jay is pregnant:
. . . she has too much else on her plate, including all of the following:
crippling pain in the pelvis (baby’s big head squashing a nerve on her pubic bone)
constant peeing (baby’s big head squashing her bladder)
constipation (baby’s big head squashing her bowels)
breathlessness (baby’s big bum squashing her diaphragm)
backache (baby’s big everything)
braxton hicks contractions (caused by Braxton Hicks)
carpal tunnel syndrome (or ‘tingly fingers’, caused by fluid retention)
swollen ankles (caused by a gloomy outlook, the result of all the above)
And amnesia (‘Some women find their memory is never quite the same again’)
But not piles (‘Yet’)
Or sunburn (Ha!)
Apparently it can only get worse. But, as the book also says, ‘Pregnancy is not an illness but a natural life transition with important holistic and spiritual dimension.’ Rather like South-East Asia, I suppose. (Cowan 69–70)
20This list of symptoms itself is taken from a pregnancy guidebook, more precisely from a chapter entitled ‘beached whale’, describing ‘the period from twenty-eight weeks to childbirth’ (Cowan 69). Through the guidebook, therefore, Jay is animalised—depicted as a whale—and depersonalised—turned into an object of science, an enumeration of symptoms. This is condemned by Ashley’s sarcastic additions to the guidebook. The ‘cute’ language used in ‘baby’s big head’, ‘baby’s big bum’, ‘baby’s big everything’ is in contrast with the medical symptoms and points out the difference in treatment between mother and child. The Braxton Hicks contractions being ‘caused by Braxton Hicks’ also ridicule the pseudo-scientific language of the book—it seems no explanation is given as to what these contractions are. He also pokes fun at the guidebook’s theory of pregnancy as ‘holistic and spiritual’ when he compares it to ‘South-East Asia’, where his brother currently is (Cowan 272).
21Perhaps the most violently dehumanising language used to speak about maternity is to be found during the birthing scene in Chapter Eight. There is no letter in this chapter, and this event is not re-told by Ashley to his brother. All we get is the perspective of the third-person narration—so none of Ashley’s sarcasm—and as such a decentred perspective.
[Ella] nodded and smiled. ‘You’re going to cut the cord, Ashley?’
‘If that’s okay.’
‘Sure, there’s nothing to it. . . . It’s like opening a supermarket.’
‘He’s never opened a supermarket,’ Jay said.
‘This’ll be good practice then,’ replied Ella, and gently smoothed Jay’s fringe from her eyes. (Cowan 103)
22Through the midwife’s comparison, the relationship between mother and child is utterly commodified. Yet, although Ashley’s perspective is absent here, there is still a certain irony to the scene, echoing Ashley’s sarcasm in his letters. The comparison but most importantly the assurance by the midwife that ‘[t]his’ll be good practice’ is indeed funny in itself, as it is completely unexpected and cannot be understood as anything other than a joke. The midwife therefore undermines her own comparison. The commodification is further softened by Ella’s caring hand brushing away Jay’s hair. In fact, the absence of one of Ashley’s letters in the birth chapter and the presence, nevertheless, of his sarcasm continue Ashley’s decentring endeavour, attempted in his letters.
- 13 My translation. The original text reads: ‘L’ironie semble verrouiller l’énonciation alors même qu’e (...)
- 14 My translation. The original text reads: ‘La théâtralité à travers laquelle le roman dénonce sa fac (...)
23In her work on Graham Swift, Pascale Tollance tracks down irony in Waterland and writes that it ‘seems to lock the enunciation even as it upsets the meaning of its message, for whoever is being ironic remains in the position of game master, while nevertheless being caught into a speech that is not under their own control’13 (Tollance 105). It becomes clear how irony allows this complicated balance between centre and periphery that the two novels attempt to negotiate. As a male narrator writing about pregnancy, Tom is at the centre of the perspective we are given, but through the text’s irony it is made sure that he is also ‘caught in a speech that is not under [his] own control’ (Tollance 105). Tollance reads irony in Waterland as ‘theatricality’: ‘the theatricality through which the novel denounces its own facticity is eventually what saves the characters from the threat that it otherwise imposes on everything: to see it all—including tragedy—become parody’ (Tollance 105).14 In other words, the novel makes sure that irony manifests also as what Tollance calls ‘the hypertrophy of play’, as an over-theatricality that points out its own mechanisms and prevents the novel from becoming nothing but parody, which would leave no room for authenticity or ethics. One of the places where this danger of ‘parody’ comes from is Mary’s theft, which she commits on God’s order, and which reads as a parody of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. When Tom gets home, finds her with the baby, and insists to know where she got it, Mary insists that ‘God told [her]’—that is until Tom insists, too, to know whose baby it is:
‘He told me . . .’
‘Mary.’
‘All right, all right. I got him from Safeways. I got him from Safeways in Lewisham.’ (Swift 268)
24Mary’s action stems from the tragedy of her infertility, but her admission abruptly puts an end to the tragedy of the scene. She sounds like a pouting child who has been forced to confess her whim, to come out of her play-world and face reality. The realism introduced by the very prosaic mention of the supermarket creates such contrast that it almost gets a laugh out of the reader. Mary’s theft has become parody. Yet, forty pages later, this is countered by ‘theatricality’. As they are taking the baby back to the supermarket, Tom’s narration reads: ‘What follows is like a parody of those panic drives to hospitals made by young husbands with wives in the throes of precipitate labour’ (309). Another parody is introduced here in connection with Mary’s theft, and both are annulled by Tom’s mention of the very word, ‘parody’.
25What further contributes to Waterland’s centrelessness is the decentering performed by tragic irony, as it is applied to Mary’s delusion. The reader finds out about Mary’s theft of a child early on in the novel in the form of a headline in the local press given to us by Tom: ‘Schoolmaster’s wife admits theft of child. Tells court: “God told me to do it.”’ (14). As such, Mary’s words, reported to us by Tom later on in the novel, after we find out about the theft but before we are actually given to witness it, are heavy with tragic irony: ‘You know, don’t you, that short of a miracle we can’t have a child?’ (126). These words, pronounced by Mary innocently, sound ominous to the reader who knows that she will attempt to perform said miracle. As if Mary’s desperate act were not enough, Tom’s narrative choice here builds up its inherent tragedy, and so its theatricality. Waterland comes close again to parody, but eventually, it is too much for the text to bear, and ‘[i]n Chapter 35 of Waterland, in which the narrator takes from Mary the child she has kidnapped, the theatre set disintegrates. It becomes strictly an accumulation of artificial accessories, which the brutality of the situation reduces to a pathetic collection’ (Bernard 1991, 55). Bernard points towards the following passage from the novel:
Observe [your history teacher] locked in elemental violence. Witness, for contrast, the fastidious surroundings which offset this central whirlwind: a room still preserving its late Regency features, tastefully furnished over a period of thirty years with items to match: old porcelain, leather bindings, Cruickshank prints. A veritable museum. Witness the Chelsea vase on the Sheraton table which, jostled by the sofa which in turn is jostled by the motions of this desperate tug-of-war, topples from its perch and disintegrates on the floor. (Swift 266)
26This ‘whirlwind’ fight at the centre is for the centre, between two perspectives (‘The wife pulls. The husband pulls’ (267)), in which, unexpectedly, Mary comes to stand for ‘text’, language, and Tom for ‘nature’, biology, with the two traditional and essentialist wife/husband, mother/father roles reversed. Through Mary’s psychotic use of storytelling, her reliance on God and language to change her fate, Waterland de-essentialises and un-sexes what we have so far called ‘the male perspective’—and so perhaps it is not just their being male that condemns Tom and Ashley to their limited representations of pregnancy.
27In his introduction to Lacan’s seminar on anxiety, Jacques-Alain Miller writes that ‘Lacanian anxiety is . . . the means of accessing that which does not signify’ (Miller 2004, 65). Similarly, what the novels accomplish through their use of analogies and irony is to make manifest what, to the male perspectives that produce them, is not manifest, ‘does not signify’. The novels leave as much room as they can for a female, pregnant and/or maternal perspective which they can only portray as gaps, as lack—their own. As such, they follow the lead of anxiety as much as if not more than McElvaine’s envy. This anxious pursuit is due to the fact that the novels’ narrative perspectives are male (or more generally, non-pregnant, not-ever-having-been-pregnant), but not only. There is something in pregnancy which inherently ‘does not signify’, not just to a male perspective, or a non-pregnant perspective, but to a pregnant one too, to a generally human one, although its absence of signification is heightened in pregnancy and in maternal bodies. It is ‘the body as organism’ (Miller 2005, 86). This organic body is explored through the images the novels produce of the fruits of pregnancy: in Waterland, the aborted embryo; in Common Ground, baby Maggie.
28While the narrations of the two novels are careful, when it comes to pregnant characters, to keep the male perspectives off-centre and so to allow for an equivalent, rather than an ‘extra’ (Bernard 2000, 27), pregnant perspective to transpire, the aborted embryo in Waterland and Ashley and Jay’s daughter Maggie in Common Ground appear to us at first as ‘extra’, as leftover—in fact, as waste or refuse. In the abortion scene in Waterland, the embryo, after having been sucked out of Mary’s uterus by Martha, is spat into a ‘pail’ (Swift 307) and then thrown away into the river, to be devoured, as Tom hints, by eels (315). Similarly, Mary’s blood-soaked underwear is given to the dog to munch on. The depiction of the aborted embryo as waste or refuse is understandable, it being an unwanted pregnancy after all. For Mary and Tom, it inevitably is the cause of Freddie’s murder: ‘Because if this baby had never . . . Then Dick would never . . . And Freddie . . . Because cause, effect . . .’ (294). Tom and Mary’s apparent grief throughout the novel partly contrasts with this depiction of the embryo as refuse, although it remains unclear whether their grief is directed at this specific, unrealised child, or any child they could have had—perhaps both. Similarly, and more surprisingly, Maggie, although she is carried to term, earns a strange nickname from her father, as early as the first letter he writes to his brother after Maggie’s birth: ‘the Maggot’ (Cowan 122)—a creature which thrives in waste and refuse. Such an association echoes an earlier analogy, during the birth scene, when the midwife encourages Jay to think of her child, as it remains stuck in the birth canal despite her efforts, as ‘a big jobbie’, which is Scottish slang for ‘shit’—waste, refuse. Both fruits of pregnancy, therefore, appear to receive a treatment that is, at first sight, less inclusive than that which the pregnant body receives.
29In fact, through the depiction of the embryo and of baby Maggie as waste or refuse, both texts seem to revert to a form of allegory when it comes to the result of their pregnancies. ‘Maggie the Maggot’ can indeed be read as an allegory of a parasitic humanity peopling the damage and waste it has created on earth, echoing the novel’s ecological concern. The child embodies Ashley’s own guilt for contributing to the decay, overconsumption, and destruction of the world he lives in. In Waterland, the discarded embryo works as an allegory of the ‘totality that always escapes a fragile and inevitably failed representation’, as theorised by Bernard and as quoted earlier (Bernard 1991, 32). Yet, just as both allegories and analogies of pregnancy make up the two novels, both allegories and analogies of the fruits of pregnancy can be found there too. In Common Ground, Maggie’s status as waste, as a maggot, appears to be reached in part through paronomasia, which, according to Bernard, is the ‘last instance’ of analogy (Bernard 2000, 29). And, perhaps a little more forcibly, the embryo, through the same device, shifts, slides (Bernard writes of a ‘glissement paronomastique’ [Bernard 2000, 29]) into the position of ‘eel’, as Tom suggests it will most likely be eaten by one. These analogical glissements, like the analogies of pregnancies studied earlier, point out the gap between vehicle and tenor. One could also argue that the rather disturbing association of baby and maggot, and the shocking destiny of the embryo do that on their own, that they defeat the power of language as it antithetically associates a spoiled, animal, abject nature, with children, born or unborn.
30Whether allegorical or analogical, the metaphors that are used to represent the aborted embryo and Maggie underline the deeply embodied condition of being that characterises humans: the fact that the human body is ‘a body whose limits are unknown’, ‘an organism whose limits go beyond the body’ (Miller 2005, 86), an organism that ‘infringes on the body of the Other’ (Miller 2005, 87). This organic body, normally repressed and abjected, becomes more visible in pregnancy and maternity. ‘The maternal body’, Hanson writes, is a body ‘[whose] borders are indeterminate’, ‘it has the property of divisibility, beginning as one and becoming two, and for this reason, it calls into question the idea of the indivisible subject which underpins the Western philosophical tradition’ (Hanson 87). So do all bodies, according to Lacan, although their organic nature is normally not so visible as it is for pregnant and maternal ones.
- 15 My translation. The original text reads: ‘le fœtus est jeté à la rivière Ouse et devient implicitem (...)
- 16 ‘l’abjection brouille les limites entre les règnes’.
31And so the organic body that the embryo and Maggie signal is not only a pregnant or maternal body. It is also a universal, organic, animal body, as Catherine Bernard suggests in her reading of the abortion scene. Bernard reads two moments of the scene as ‘a fantasy of absorption into the animal kingdom’: the moment when ‘the foetus is thrown into the river and implicitly becomes the eels’ prey’15 and the moment when Martha throws Mary’s bloodied underwear to her dog for him to chew on (Bernard 1991, 60). In this scene, ‘the human is undone, threatened of becoming nothing but meat, a degrading ambiguity. . .’. As such, ‘abjection blurs the limits between the kingdoms’,16 human and animal (Bernard 1991, 60). In Common Ground, ‘the animal kingdom’ extends to maggots and further, to ‘jobbies’—to bacterial biomass and lifeless waste. Through the embryo and baby Maggie, the pregnant and maternal body is thus made to stand both for itself—as one declination of a female body whose organicity is heightened—and for something other—the organic, animal body that the human body also is.
- 17 ‘À cette déchéance de l’humain s’oppose l’“abréaction” du sujet (Baudrillard et Kristeva). Confront (...)
32‘To this degradation of the human’, Bernard writes, ‘this intolerable experience’, ‘abreaction’ opposes itself (Bernard 1991, 60).17 According to Bernard, what constitutes ‘abreaction’ to such animal fantasy in Waterland is Tom’s reaction to seeing what is in the ‘pail’: ‘I rush out again to be sick’ (Swift 307). In Common Ground, the contents of the pail and the rushing out to be sick are performed at the same time by one little phrase: ‘Maggie the Maggot’. This phrase is the way Ashley finds to include the abject revelation that came to him as he witnessed the birth of his child, and to abreact, to reappropriate the narrative around it. Ashley’s witty little pun/paronomasia carries out the same difficult task that irony and analogies of pregnancy perform: to signify what cannot be signified without annihilating the language that can make it not signify. ‘Maggie the maggot’ stands for the capacity and the necessity for language to both do what it does and to point out what it does. Making things stand for something other is the only way to make them stand for themselves—it all depends, it seems, on which ‘something other’ they are made to stand for.
- 18 My translation. The original text reads: ‘Dans les tout derniers aperçus du Séminaire de L’angoisse (...)
- 19 ‘Nous n’avons pas les développements ultérieurs que Lacan aurait pu donner, mais peut-être vous app (...)
33Both Tom and Ashley end up giving up their respective positions as teachers. Tom is forced into retirement by his headmaster who has caught wind of Tom’s recent take on History during his classes. Like Ashley who shares his wife’s pregnancy undercover of ‘doing population’, Tom has taken to sharing his, Mary’s, their families’ and the region’s history with his students. Tom is made to renounce his allegorical children at the school and is left only with the gift that Mary got him to care for: a dog. As for Ashley, he becomes his daughter’s primary caregiver when he, of his own mind, decides to leave his job, giving his partner Jay the opportunity to take one on full-time. These endings confirm what ends up being this article’s final argument: that the male characters in Waterland and Common Ground are sketched out as ‘new figure[s] of the father’. According to Miller, ‘in the very last glimpses of the Anxiety Seminar, when Lacan announces the “Names-of-the-Father” Seminar, he paints a new figure of the father. . . . A father who would not be tricked by the paternal metaphor, who would not believe that it can accomplish a complete symbolisation’ (Miller 2005, 90)18—the paternal metaphor is to be understood here as the power of language to name, designate, metaphorise, analogise, allegorise. ‘We do not have the ulterior developments that Lacan could have given’ on this hypothesis, Miller writes, though for him, this father figure ‘is none other than the analyst’ (Miller 2005, 90).19 In Waterland’s and Common Ground’s narrations, this father figure is represented by the actual father that Ashley becomes, and by the childless father that Tom remains. This refusal to be ‘tricked by the paternal metaphor’ is maintained by the novels’ play on analogies, allegories and irony. The character’s final situations confirm this, as they are assigned new positions as caretakers for reminders, analogies of the ‘organism’ that cannot suffer a ‘complete symbolisation’. Tom’s dog, an often-anthropomorphised creature, stands for the opposite of ‘the paternal metaphor’—God. Ashley becomes the guardian and main caregiver of ‘Maggie the maggot’, the linguistic and organic reminder of both the inefficiency and the necessity of language to speak of such unspeakable, organic events as pregnancy.
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