Psychology and the chronotope of consciousness in Emma Healey's Elizabeth is missing

When I read the book for the first time, I viewed the main character from the common reader’s point of view and I enjoyed the suspense of a seventy-year-old mystery adventure being gradually solved by the end of the book, at least to some degree.. When I started reading the book for the second time thinking of those problems E. Healey raises in her book, as a linguist and researcher I focused on the subject as a cognitive experiment the author conducts with her character, named Maud, (not by chance!), she is a “powerful battler”. What conditions Healey describes strike immediately and make us shudder admitting the naturalness, inevitability and irreversibility of the aging process. A lot of people begin thinking about old age long before they really start experiencing it, because they have aging parents and grandparents and some of the luckiest witness the latest period of their great-grandparents’ life. In her novel Emma Healey vividly shows us the relationships between time and memory, she digs into the core of the problem with much more evidence than some of the human mind scientists do.

Understanding the category of chronotope is essential for revealing deep philosophical and psychological issues concerning our mind, consciousness and unconsciousness, the layered structures of which operate in a nonlinear mode, synchronizing our reflections with the surrounding world to relate them to subjective constructs about the past and the present, to project the future. Besides, once constructed they can change over time, particularly when we are trying to restore them. But what is intriguing is that our mind is free in choosing pace of time: we can be hurrying in the present, we can be slowing down with the past and we can be stuck with the future because future is virtual or if dreaming, we can stay there for seconds, hours, for years:

I face the door, wondering how long I’ve waited here.

Five minutes? Ten? I check my watch, but it doesn’t give me any clues. Time is so elastic now [Healey 2015: 24].

Chronotope

Chronotope has been studied by philosophers, psychologists, literary studies scholars. I would like to quote Professor V.P. Zinchenko because his five-word definition incorporates the two constituents and explains their interrelations. “Timing space and spacing time”, he writes, “comprehending meanings and signifying senses, reading oneself into the other self and reading oneself out of it. All these acts provide a person not only with understanding of his self and the world but accumulate “delusion energy”, “misunderstanding energy”, reveal lacunas of misunderstanding, urging the self to fill gaps” (Translated by T. Klimenko) [Zinchenko 2011: 135‒ 157]. Filling gaps is what the psychologist understands in constructing memories if we do not know for sure, if we forget, if we relate new evidence and emotion into the process of restoring the picture. Literary theory of chronotope which was reinterpreted many times after M.M. Bakhtin’s understanding of it as the intrinsic relations between temporal and spatial dimensions in a text turned out to be fundamental for understanding thinking processes. Relating oneself in time and with time can be quite an interesting thing to observe which Healey tests with Maud:

• (1)    It’s morning now. I know because the sun is on the bird table. It shines on the bird table in the morning and the pine tree in the evening. I have a whole day to get through before the light hits that tree [ Ibid.: 5].

• (2)    It’s so quiet in here; even my clock doesn’t tick out loud. It shows the time though, and I watch the hands slowly moving round on top of the gas fire [Ibid.: 5‒6].

• (3)    Ma would ask me afterwards about what I’d seen, whether certain neighbours were out, what I thought about someone’s new garden wall. I’d never noticed; it had all gone past in a flash. Now I have plenty of time to look at everything and no one to tell what I’ve seen [Ibid: 9].

A well-known BBC broadcaster and psychology writer Claudia Hammond also writes about the problem of understanding time in Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception [Hammond 2012] . Hammond writes that constructing the experience of time in our minds is caused by our wish to change our memories. The way we experience time is the core of our living. Focusing on an episode from life is a phenomenon of “forward telescoping”. Constructions of our own time speak of the so-called inner chronometer which helps us count time even if we must justify it by some visible signs as in the cited above example (1) with Maud. Experiencing an event and memorizing it by the emotion felt, a scent memory or any other token codes it into a complex cognitive structure, easily accessible at the sight of a familiar thing, color, musical piece or a photo:

Sometimes, when I’m having a sort-through or a clear-out, I find photos from my youth, and it’s a shock to see everything in black and white <> But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. <> Nowadays – though I’m sure the sky is still and occasionally blue…<> – nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph [Ibid.: 9].

Photos stop the moments, but they differ for those who look at them. Bright colours are accessible for the participants of the moments. This reminds of the phenomenon known as ‘context reinstatement’. Photos and things and sometimes ideas about them act to trigger memories:

A small thing easily missed. The broken lid of an old compact <> The mildewed mirror is like a window on a faded world, like a porthole looking out under the ocean. It makes me squirm with memories [Ibid.: 1].

Rich imagery which the author uses to describe processes of retrospection turn out to be more explicit than cognitive psychology terminology. Squirming with memories is “feeling deep mental discomfort, guilt, embarrassment” [Collins Dictionary] and moving restlessly through twists of ideas. The plot of the novel is centred around Maud’s large-scale quest: of her missing friend Elizabeth, of her missing sister Sukey, of Maud’s identifying herself with the present, which will be her identity in revealing her personality and at the same time disclosing many details of her life which made up her present state of the mind. Healey makes the reader feel the agony of the quest by creating a twisted compositional and multi-voiced narrative structure in which the reader should always correlate the planes of narration, make up the puzzle of clues and associations keeping in his (objective) mind such categories of the text as the point of view, the narrator, the type of narration and the chronotope.

Polyphonic thinking

Long before postmodern psychologists began developing the theory of multiple “selves” (Kenneth Gergen The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, 1991) Bakhtin spoke of polyphonic character of thinking which is polysemic and syncretic; different voices meet and call to one another in emerging meanings, images, symbols, metaphors in the so-called stream of consciousness. “Increasingly we emerge as the possessors of many voices. Each self contains a multiplicity of others, singling different melodies, different verses, and with different rhythms. Nor do these many voices necessarily harmonize. At times they join together, at time they fail to listen one to another, and at times they create a jarring discord.” [Gergen 1991: 83].

I have a terrible feeling something has happened to her. Anything could have. There was something on the news yesterday, I think. About an old woman. Something unpleasant. And now Elizabeth’s disappeared. What if she’s been mugged and left for dead? Or had a fall and can’t get to a phone? [Ibid.: 140].

Dynamic correlation between the narrator’s voice and those of the characters’ is represented by various ways: through dialoguing, monologuing, reported speech, self-reported inner speech. The latter is significant for performing self-regulating, self-reflecting, selfmotivating and critical thinking activities. For example,

Elizabeth is missing,’ I say. ‘Did I tell you?’ I am looking at Helen, but she isn’t looking at me.

‘You said. What are you going to eat?’

I sit staring over the top of my menu. God knows where we are. I can see it’s a restaurant – waiters in black and white, marble-topped tables – but which one? [Ibid.: 16].

To render the feeling of disorientation and the assembly which is required to perform on the narrator’s part Healey carefully chooses details of description and the sequence of their appearance throughout the novel to create each speaker’s context.

I have an awful feeling I’m supposed to know, and that this is some kind of treat. I don’t think it’s my birthday, but perhaps an anniversary. Patrick’s death? It would be just like Helen to remember and make it a ‘special occasion’. But I can see from the bare trees out on the street that it’s the wrong time of year. Patrick died in the spring [Ibid.].

The choice of details and the way they appear and reflected upon in the text are given through the perspective of the narrator and indirectly tell us about her thinking processes, emotions, evaluations and problem-solving performance. Spatiotemporal relations are fixed through objects and personages and switching between the past and the present occurs instantly through some detail like in the following situation when reading a word ‘marrow’ on the menu brought a series of recollections from Maud’s past.

‘What are you going to have?’ she asks now.

Lowering the menu but keeping her eyes on it.

‘Chorizo-stuffed marrow,’ I read, unable to stop myself. ‘Are marrows fashionable again then? <>

People used to grow marrows more when I was young and there were competitions for the best ones [Ibid.: 17].

Another device Healey uses to switch between times is through associating one thing from the present to an image with the help of secondary nomination (simile, metaphor), which suddenly can be recalled out from the past in its literal meaning:

The china breaks. Helen says something. <…> I keep looking at the plate. The middle has crumbled slightly and it looks like a broken record, a broken gramophone record.

I found some once in our back garden [Ibid.:19].

Cognitive association formation can be triggered by the language we use. Let us consider the following example:

When a girl with blondish curls steps on to the patio I throw the currants at her feet. She stops and blinks, doesn’t skitter away, doesn’t peck at the fruit. Perhaps because she has no beak. <…>

A man steps out and bends, swoops, to gather the currants, scattering them over the lawn. The blackbirds flutter down to pierce them with their beaks, and the sight pierces me too. ‘Elizabeth is missing’, I say, feeling a twist of something inside me, the memory of a smile [Ibid.: 275].

The key words for understanding the textual meaning and Maud’s vision of the situation are peck at, beak, birds, pierce. The nature of our language and the ability to use one word in a lot of senses, polysemy, leads to problems of disorganized speech and deficits in discourse comprehension with people who suffer from memory disorder. Word-level meaning associations with action words like throwing, skittering, scattering produce a series of semantic associations grouped around the image of a bird in Maud’s imagination. Her memory fails to suppress context-irrelevant meanings. So, the sentence Perhaps because she has no beak in reference to the girl is an indicator of Maud’s cognitive dissonance.

Humour is another feature of Healey’s style which creates the polyphony of voices in the book and in many ways the voices of the mad – Maud, Douglas’s mother, Elizabeth’s son Peter who also sounds ‘mad’ and funny to the reader in reflecting on the situation of which he is completely unaware of, for example, when he is blaming Helen and her mother for digging in their garden:

I know for a fact she found something and didn’t tell my mother what it was. If it’s anything valuable we want it back. It’s ours by right’ [Ibid.: 254].

The humour of the reprimand derives from the knowledge of the reader about Peter’s being mean not buying enough food for his mother, and thus, in Maud’s opinion, “keeps her on starvation rations” [Ibid.: 253]. K. Hewitt writes about Maud as the comic actor in the eyes of the others because they are “ignorant of her thoughts” [Hewitt 2018: 15‒16].

Bakhtin’s dialogism and a philosophy of the act

The polyphonic nature of the world and especially fictional world as we read it is full of voices which can create cacophonic meanings unless we grasp the “emotional-volitional consciousness” of the speakers to restore the individual contexts of their ‘worlds’. As Bakhtin puts it, “Does not one and the same thought have completely different emotional-volitional colorations in the different actual consciousnesses of those who are thinking that thought?” [Bakhtin 1993: 34]. A careful reader will notice that the sentence which could render Maud’s daughter Helen into exasperation (and is the title of the book!) is “ Elizabeth is missing”. The fact that Maud pronounces it so many times does not mean that every time she attaches the same meaning to it and, it goes without saying, that no one including Helen, the person who is the first one to be able to comprehend the meaning of the sentence, can acknowledge the reason of it being mentioned again and again:

‘Elizabeth,’ I say. “She is missing.” The words are correct, familiar, but I can’t think what they mean [Ibid.: 250].

‘Elizabeth is missing,’ I say, feeling a twist of something inside me, the memory of a smile. <…>

The woman doesn’t think that’s the answer and the man begins to explain something to me. But I can’t concentrate. I can see they won’t listen, won’t take me seriously. So I must do something. I must, because Elizabeth is missing [Ibid.: 275].

What is clear from the above cited examples of one and the same sentence is that every time Maud uses it in a different individual context. And even pronouncing it becomes a satisfaction to some extend as pronouncing it means performing a simultaneous action, that is being active when speaking.

Another expression of the main character’s “obscure” thinking is the expression to grow marrows . Healey continuously uses it in the book and, analyzing the moments at which she uses it, makes it possible for the reader to suggest that apart from its literary meaning of growing vegetables, she might employ a figurative meaning of the word marrow , which is the “essential part of something” [Oxford English-English dictionary]. I will not cite the examples here as you can easily find them in the book on pages 2, 10, 17, 25, 107, 125, 212, 226, 234, 234, 240, 258, 260, 268. Each time Maud performs the act of pronouncing the sentence she refers to and tries to grasp the architectonic of the actual world of her existence actually experienced, not the merely thinkable, which, according to Bakhtin is I, the other, and I-for-the-other [Bakhtin 1993: 54]. A question can arise of why at the end of the book Maud is still restless and she must do something. Life, as Bakhtin put it, “can be consciously comprehended only as an ongoing event, and not as Being qua a given” [Bakhtin 1993: 56].

Conclusion

According to statistics, there are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK and by 2025, this number is expected to pass one million [Barton 2016]. Scientists and artists cooperate and research dementias as an inspiration to the arts, of which the discussed book is an excellent example. They create projects to address such questions as how the arts can communicate the experience of people living with dementia, how traditional definitions and common misconceptions about dementia can be challenged. One of such projects is Created Out of Mind . The project shows ways to empower dementia voices and enhances people who deal with dementia with different experience and understanding. Literature as a medium is one of the ways to approach the problem. The novel Elizabeth is Missing engages the reader to experience an encounter with an individual whose perception of reality is different, and it challenges one’s awareness of oneself in terms of time, space, one’s place in the continuum of life.

By creating a literary masterpiece, Healey at the same time gives an extensive revision of psychology: cognitive psychology when she studies mental processes, social psychology investigating social interactions and their impact on a person’s mental state; developmental psychology which helps to trace those changes a human mind undergoes with aging since childhood to elderly years and clinical psychology when she is concerned with understanding, assessing and describing mental illness.