Pregnancy remains a rare diegetic occurrence in literature. When it appears, so it has been remarked most recently by writer Jessie Greengrass, pregnancy struggles to ‘stand both for itself and for something other’ (Greengrass 2018). Pregnancy and maternity are at best metaphors or allegories for something else, a tendency that is not exclusively found but most often observed and most problematic in male-authored texts (Friedman 1987; Hanson 2015). While this is true of texts in which pregnancy and maternity are ‘despatched elsewhere while in the centre of things a man paces a carpet’ (Greengrass), it hardly applies to two contemporary male-authored texts in which pregnancy and maternity are central to the diegesis: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Andrew Cowan’s Common Ground (1996). This article shows that these texts’ anxious male perspectives offer ‘a new figure of the father’, one whose language makes manifest that which ‘does not signify’ and restores balance between tenor and vehicles in metaphors of pregnancy and maternity (Miller 2005).

Although they have often been used as metaphors for the act of writing, pregnancy and childbirth have a long history of being left out of literature itself, especially as diegetic events in the novel. Jessie Greengrass’s novel Sight (2018) provides us with a rare pregnant narrator and as such includes pregnancy as a diegetic event and as a theme. Starting with the assessment that pregnancy in literature can be summed up by the image of “a man pac[ing] a carpet” while a woman gives birth outside the frame of the narration, Greengrass’s novel tackles the compulsion to look and to look away, to show and to hide that is at the heart of this image. The novel shows that pregnant bodies have been overlooked by literature not for lack of curiosity, but rather because of an obsessive curiosity for what lies inside them and what comes out of them. By investigating scientist/object relationships alongside mother/daughter relationships, Sight formulates the beginning of an ethics of looking at and of writing about bodies, which lies in a practice of parenthood that acknowledges both curiosity for and discomfort with bodies. The novel thus deconstructs the metaphor of writing as pregnancy and childbirth and points to an ethical way of incorporating bodies, especially female ones, into literature.

Ian McEwan’s claim that, like Conrad, he writes novels “to make [us] see” can seem problematic when applied to his 2016 novel Nutshell. The novel both illustrates and complicates the author’s self-assigned task, as its foetal narrator is essentially blind but still insists on conveying a view of the world outside the womb. It is further complicated by the fact that Nutshell is meant as a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play, and therefore implies a transition from stage representation to novelization, “from the showing mode to the telling mode” (Bandín and González). Ian McEwan did not renounce his visual ambitions when writing Nutshell (Guignery) but instead “the book […] is clearly generated by the technical challenges implicit in the opening sentence, rather than a story that McEwan urgently needs to tell” (Tayler). Therefore, the following questions must be asked about Nutshell: how is such visuality, or visibility, made possible in a novel whose narrator is blind? Exactly what tricks do the narrator and writer rely on to transform blindness into images? And what is the reader really given to look at? This article argues that Nutshell fails to transition “from the showing mode to the telling mode”. It attempts instead to picture blindness by relying on what can be called echographic writing-the translation of sounds into images-as well as incomplete staging of the foetus’s condition. These inappropriate mechanisms threaten the integrity of the novel, eventually leaving narrator, reader and writer in the dark.

Pregnancy remains a rare diegetic occurrence in literature. When it appears, it has been remarked, most recently by writer Jessie Greengrass, that pregnancy struggles to ‘stand both for itself and for something other’ (Greengrass 2018). Pregnancy and maternity are at best metaphors or allegories for something else, a tendency that is not exclusively found but most often observed and most problematic in male-authored texts (Friedman 1987; Hanson 2015). While this is true of texts in which pregnancy and maternity are ‘despatched elsewhere while in the centre of things a man paces a carpet’ (Greengrass), it hardly applies to two contemporary male-authored texts in which pregnancy and maternity are central to the diegesis: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Andrew Cowan’s Common Ground (1996). This article shows that these texts’ anxious male perspectives offer ‘a new figure of the father’, one whose language makes manifest that which ‘does not signify’ and restores balance between tenor and vehicles in metaphors of pregnancy and maternity (Miller 2005).

Pregnancy and childbirth have long been used as metaphors for writing, yet they are rarely present in literature as fully depicted, diegetic events. In other words, pregnant bodies have been granted a metaphorical part in literature but have mostly been kept diegetically apart from it.  

In her article entitled ‘Why does literature ignore pregnancy?’, British writer Jessie Greengrass points out and regrets such an absence. She also speaks of her own struggle to write a novel about pregnancy from a pregnant narrator’s perspective. She writes that this felt ‘transgressive’ because ‘in doing so 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’. According to Greengrass, therefore, an inclusion/exclusion paradox remains even in novels that include diegetic pregnancies. In these novels, the experience of pregnancy can be read as a metaphor for other universal experiences, all the while standing ‘for itself’, apart, even as it is included in the diegesis. 

In Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy (2021), Jessie Greengrass’s Sight (2018) and Julie Myerson’s Sleepwalking (1994), the main – but not always only – narrator is pregnant, and these pregnancies are set against antagonizing backgrounds: the aftermath of the Trojan war; complicated scientist-object and mother-daughter relationships; and a family history of child abuse and incest. I show that parallels can be found in these novels between the pregnancies and their hostile backgrounds, which map out painful connections and disconnections between and within characters, events and narrations. These (dis)connections seem to speak of the difficulty of dealing with the polarizing experience of pregnancy, as well as that of including female bodies in literature. The three novels eventually beg the question: how much of becoming a mother, a child, or a novel can be achieved in these works?

Although it has often been used as a metaphor for writing, pregnancy has long been left out of literature as a diegetic event, along with the material, genetic act of transmission it operates. In a 2018 article for The Guardian, British writer Jessie Greengrass regrets that, as a ‘fundamentally female experience’, 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’. As such, accounts of pregnancy have mainly been limited to one gender and one genre. 

However, Greengrass’s examples of fiction do not go further than the first half of the twentieth century. Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Andrew Cowan’s Common Ground (1996) are contemporary novels that focus on male characters whose partners are pregnant. In Waterland, Tom witnesses Mary’s abortion and subsequent infertility, while in Common Ground Ashley closely follows Jay’s experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and post-partum. What can we learn from these novels of the difficulty of representing pregnancy from a fictional, male perspective? 

I show that the authority of male characters is shaken by the diegetic presence of pregnancy, which turns them into inadequately ‘brooding’ (Swift 10) or ‘nesting’ (Cowan 55) men. What these two novels also have in common is that their main male characters are teachers, of history (Tom) and geography (Ashley). Their teaching attempts but fails to replicate pregnancy’s genetic process of transmission. These failures point towards old and new ways of dealing with the anxiety of transmission that pregnancy stirs up, from sublimation and dehumanisation to an acceptance of ‘nonknowledge’ (Agamben 91). Eventually, because of pregnancy’s close relationship with teaching and writing, these two novels offer insight into the ethics of writing another’s experience, or an experience of the other.

L’accouchement a longtemps été utilisé, par de nombreux.ses auteur.e.s, comme métaphore pour désigner le processus d’écriture, et plus généralement tout processus artistique. Paradoxalement, les scènes d’accouchement et les suivis de grossesse sont très rares dans la littérature même, particulièrement dans le roman en tant qu’évènements diégétiques. Ainsi, alors qu’elle essayait d’écrire son roman Sight (2018), qui offre la perspective rare d’une narratrice enceinte de son deuxième enfant, l’autrice anglaise Jessie Greengrass fait le constat que la grossesse et l’accouchement dans la littérature sont généralement des évènements qui se déroulent « hors-champ [...] tandis qu’au centre de l’action un homme fait les cent pas » (The Guardian, 2018).

Les œuvres citées par Greengrass s’arrêtent à la première moitié du XXe siècle. Ian McEwan est l’un des auteurs anglais contemporains les plus connus et rentables des quarante dernières années, et parmi ses dix- sept romans, publiés entre 1978 et 2022, cinq font figurer une grossesse diégétique—de façon plus ou moins importante vis-à-vis du récit central, et jamais d’un point de vue féminin. A quels points les accouchements ont-ils lieu « hors-champ » dans les œuvres de cet auteur contemporain ? Quels sont les paramètres de leur inclusion ou de leur exclusion ?

Au fil de ses excursions timides dans différents genres littéraires, l’œuvre de McEwan se heurte au problème de représentation du genre, du sexe et du corps que pose l’irruption de la grossesse et de l’accouchement dans ses narrations. Le corpus mettra en évidence chez McEwan un problème de figuration exhaustive de la grossesse et de l’accouchement. Les accouchements diégétiques ne sont possibles que partiellement et dans ses romans figurant des éléments du surnaturel (The Child in Time, Nutshell). Les grossesses restantes n’ont droit qu’à des accouchements métaphoriques, littéraires ou spirituels dans ses œuvres essentiellement réalistes (Black Dogs, Saturday). Enfin, dans son roman comico-satirique Solar, les processus de grossesse et d’accouchement vont jusqu’à subir des tentatives d’inversion narrative et d’appropriation, qui pointent cependant du doigt leur propre inadéquation.

Alors que la grossesse est souvent sous-représentée dans la littérature, restreinte à des récits majoritairement autobiographiques et au féminin, l’œuvre de Ian McEwan, romancier phare de la littérature contemporaine de langue anglaise, fait figurer la grossesse dans cinq de ses dix-sept romans. Cet article explore les mécanismes mis en place dans les textes de ces cinq romans pour faire figurer la grossesse et l’accouchement, qui se déclinent au fil des sous-genres du réalisme adoptés par l’auteur, et pointent finalement du doigt le potentiel « dégenreur » de la grossesse diégétique.

While pregnancy is an under-represented subject in literature, which is often reduced to not-so-numerous autobiographical accounts by women who have experienced it, the internationally acclaimed author Ian McEwan has included it in five of his seventeen novels. This article explores the mechanisms put in place in these five novels by McEwan to represent pregnancy as well as parturition. These strategies vary as the novelists tries his hand at different sub-genres of realism, and eventually point out the de-genre-ing and de-gendering potential of diegetic pregnancy.