Subjective realism in Emma Healey's novels

When the first chapter of the novel The Whistle in the Dark is named ‘The End’ , one can expect a complicated timeline in the narrative. For Emma Healey that would not be very surprising. Her Elizabeth Is Missing is a masterpiece of representing from the first-person perspective a human mind lost in time. While Maud’s dementia chips away recollections constitutive of the self and her personal identity dissipates, her mind becomes a flow of allusions, alternating between illusions and realities. But Healey deals with the complexities of internal experience in a realist manner, she allows us to inhabit a mind that loses its grip on immediate surroundings while diving deeper and deeper into the past. The little cues from the present spark the feelings which resonate with the emotions felt in similar circumstances and revive the events of the past. Maud’s search for her friend Elizabeth today and her sister Sukey in her memories from seventy years ago creates a suspense – both narrative and psychological – that compels us to keep following the unravelling of the human mind, although we know it is irreversible and will inevitably end in the demise of her personhood. The novel is built along several central parallels – between Sukey and Maud, Sukey and Elizabeth, Maud and Elizabeth, to name just a few. The latter, in my view, is the axis of the plot. On the one hand, the search for Elizabeth is the only thing that keeps Maud from complete personhood dissolution, her last words (in the novel) are: “...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” [Healey 2014: 313]. The search for Elizabeth underpins Maud’s own self in her sorrowful mental condition. On the other hand, the contrast between Maud and Elizabeth highlights the tragedy of losing one’s personality to dementia: while Elizabeth, when finally found, does not look the same after the stroke and hospital ordeals, she is still the same

person [see ibid.: 285], Maud, in contrast, looks still her old self but she is no longer the person she used to be.

The relation between memory and personality has fascinated philosophers since Augustine juxtaposed two infinities – divine spirit and human soul – in his Confessions . The immeasurable stores of memory and the capacity to preserve even the absences – when, for instance, I am the same individual but not the same person I used to be as a child or when I remember that I have forgotten something, but do not remember what it was – amazed Augustine. For Augustine, thinking is recollecting, and recollecting literally is collecting the self – “cogitating”, that is, gathering all that the mind has stored within in front of its ‘mental eye’:

...And how many things of this sort does my memory retain … which, should we for small intervals of time cease to recall, they are again so submerged and slide back, as it were, into the more remote chambers, that they must be evolved thence again as if new..., and must be marshalled [cogenda] again that they may become known; that is to say, they must be collected [colligenda], as it were, from their dispersion; whence we have the word cogitare [Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 11, 18].

Augustine’s interest, though, was primarily theological: how to make God and human mind meet? Because the mind is essentially time, and time is solely the present, in which memory preserves the past and hope anticipates the future, two minds – divine and human – can communicate when they establish synchronicity between them. The never changing present of God and the ever-changing present of the human soul can be synchronized once the human soul knows herself fully in ultimate self-unifying recollection-cogitation and thus becomes capable of facing the ultimate unity of God. This theological account of time, in my view, illuminates how by carefully crafting an immersive temporality in her narrative, Healey conjures otherwise unattainable synchronicity between the reader and Maud who struggles to “gather” herself through her memories and makes Maud’s mind accessible to the reader.

Thus, in Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing, realism in the novel is neither classical nor post-classical. The novel’s realism is not produced by the omniscient narrator who gives us a complete knowledge of characters and their motivations, and who carefully manipulates their actions and situations, maintaining the externally imposed logic of the narration. This approach would be characteristic of traditional realism in which the god-author gives the reader a “God’s-eye” perspective on the story. On the other hand, the effect of realism is not achieved by evoking empathy with the subjective experiences of a failing mind which is created with the techniques of surrealism, such as plunging the reader into the world of the subconscious. In line with Augustine’s reasoning, the only way to know the infinite complexity of the other’s mind, the ailing mind as well, is through making us – the reader – synchronized with it. By plugging the reader into the flow of Maud’s mind, with all its faults, Healey makes Maud’s present, full of memories (search for Sukey) and anticipations (search for Elizabeth), the reader’s present, unites them in the single moment and lets this shared moment float through the story’s timeline. And although Maud’s condition prevents her from realizing that all the vexing pieces of the story have finally clicked in their places (Elizabeth is found, Sukey is found), the reader’s ‘cogitation’ gathers together both the internal logic of the plot and reconstructs the continuity of Maud’s personal identity. The reader becomes a staple of the story’s confused timeline and of Maud’s dispersing personhood, as God, in Augustine, is a staple of the human soul and of the created world. Thus, the novel which sets out to represent a first-person perspective on mental illness and allows the reader to relive the internal experience of dementia with all its subjective intensity upholds the realistic tradition with its emphasis on factual veracity and literary simplicity.

The interest in internal experience of time and the flow of consciousness was revitalized in the beginning of the twentieth century by Husserl and the phenomenological movement, on the one hand, and Bergson and literary modernism, on the other hand. Although there were significant advances in the study of consciousness, this approach, which places time and internal experience at the centre of the mind, faced a problem of intersubjectivity. If personhood is primarily anchored in the internal time flow, how could social relations and social institutions emerge? How can different minds communicate if all the mind has is its internal experience? How can they share the experience, in particular, their suffering and pain?

In The Whistle in the Dark, which, as was mentioned, starts with ‘The End’ , Emma Healey tells the story of severe depression. The reader has the main protagonist’s perspective, but not her voice. An impartial narrator replaces the first-person account of Elizabeth Is Missing . Although the timeline is complicated here and revolves primarily around the central character, instead of synchronicity and the shared present that unites the protagonist and the reader as in Elizabeth Is Missing , the timeline in this novel is built on rhythmicity. Jen reproduces Lana’s path – both metaphorically and literally – through depression. Step by step in the narrative we observe how Jen slips deeper and deeper into the depression as she is assaulted by the pain of failing to communicate with her snappy and bitter teenage daughter, who hurt herself and attempted suicide (“Lana looked back at her phone. It was a tiny movement, but it gave the impression of a large stone door banging closed” [Healey 2018:118]). Jen is haunted by the constant fear of losing her daughter in another suicide attempt:

...they’d been arguing on a train and Lana had jumped off when it pulled into a station. The doors had closed and the train had moved on before Jen could react. She’d had an agonizing journey back, not knowing if Lana would still be there, imagining her throwing herself in front of a nonstopping express. And Jen had suddenly remembered that bit of film, often played in museums, of Emily Davison and the king’s horse. The halting black-and-white clip. The moment when the small body detached itself from the crowd and then disappeared under the hooves, seemed literally to dissolve on impact [Healey 2018: 68]

After actually losing her daughter on a ‘painting holiday’ trip, Jen is plunged into a state of unhappiness and guilt, which eventually leads her to the cave where she nearly dies. (“ ‘There, happy now?’ – No, Jen thought, of course not. But then, happiness was something from a past life; it was the opposite of life now, where you could try to do everything right and yet find you’d made things worse” [Healey 2018: 119]).

Thus, we can reconstruct the cycles which bind our main characters together: Lana’s depression – disappearance and – subsequent (slow) recovery and recognition of the need of her mother (“Good,’

Lana said. ‘Because we need you” [Healey 2018: 328]); Jen’s depression building on after Lana’s disappearance, – cave trip and – recognition of Lana’s depression as a clinical condition rather than a teenage whim. The final cycle unfolds when beleaguered by her own depression (“Jen’s sudden lethargy, the severity of her disappointment, shocked her. She didn’t remember giving up so easily before, or being so apprehensive, so instantly frightened ...” [Healey 2018: 237]), Jen delves into the cave for the clues of Lana’s disappearance and discovers that her daughter went there for a suicide, failed at it, got lost and barely managed to get back to the surface. By reiterating Lana’s path through the cave Jen reproduces the emotional stages of depression – disorientation, fear, pain, panic, loneliness, exhaustion, surrender and (if at all) an exit through hope:

She was so tired, and the never-ending dark was so heavy and it all seemed so hopeless. Perhaps the best thing was oblivion. Sleep would be a respite, a way to blank out the world. It was something she had seen Lana do and, if she made it home, she promised herself she would never drag Lana into the waking world again…

Jen opened her eyes and had a brief moment of panic. In the past, she had been warm and safe and loved. In the present, she was tense, cold, alone, and there was only the bleak, icy sound of water somewhere beneath the rock. She got up and carried on [ Healey 2018 : 320].

While struggling through the cave, through the path her daughter had gone through, Jen understands in which situations suicide might seem a solution:

Halfway along, though, she wondered if it wouldn’t be best just to let herself drop, rather than carry on struggling like this. It was the trying to survive that was torturous; ending things now might be preferable [Healey 2018: 320].

Jen also realizes along the way why people might want to hurt themselves:

She was in pain and suspected her head was bleeding, though it was hard to tell because she was so wet all over. Her hands were cut and blistered, but she couldn’t save them as she moved and had to accept the feel of rock biting into her skin. She was sorry for herself and wept at the pain, but amid the self-pity and anguish was a kernel of satisfaction. Her suffering would leave a mark, and this infernal journey wouldn’t exist only in her head [Healey 2018: 322].

When she finally emerges from the cave, she feels reborn:

Perhaps it was the fresh breeze after the airless tunnels, or the light on her skin after the darkness, or the feeling of rejoining the landscape, but there was a wonderful sense of newness to everything. A Garden of Eden newness [Healey 2018: 324].

The story is sealed when the whole family happily re-unites around the birth bed of Meg’s daughter.

Unlike traditional realism, which aims at “... at generating spec-tatorial absorption in narrative …to achieve a kind of transparent immediacy ... that promote temporal and spatial continuity in conjunction with narrative conventions that offer clear chain of character-centred cause and effect” [Campora 2014: 2], Healey, I would argue, develops a method of subjective realism in which traditional literary techniques of realist literature acquire a new dimension due to her ability to communicate the internal experience of human mind, in particular, a human mind in the state of mental illness such as dementia or depression. While a literary strategy of creating synchronicity allows Healey to convey the internal experience of time in the human mind with dissolving identity, a method of construing rhythmicity enables her to overcome the problem of incommunicability of personal experience and to make it comprehensible and empathically accessible.