Marco Constitucional de la Acción Pública de Inconstitucionalidad

Thatcherism, we’ve found, seeks to ‘disappear’ the child as the embodiment of time, and of the private which (antagonistic towards Thatcherite ‘privatisation’) demands acknowledgement of the difference between the public and private realms, the latter impenetrable and disorderly, a space of desire and of death – but also of ambition and creativity. This is the space of the child, in whom Hollinghurst, McEwan and Ackroyd have each found the persistence of a disruptive desire, a capacity for difference that is (following Arendt), both private at source and political in effect. The difference between source and effect is the difference constitutive of time itself as the object of politics; it is the space between a reading of the world and a change to its representation, either political or literary. We can locate the child, therefore, precisely in this gap, and conclude that this accounts for the persistence and centrality of her disappearance in literary representations of Thatcherism.

Hollinghurst, McEwan and Ackroyd place this scenario in a historically specific set of circumstances prevailing from c.1979 to the present, when Thatcherism proclaimed an end to the post-war future and identified the future instead with an essentialist past. Ackroyd both reiterated and exceeded this account not only by locating Thatcherism’s origins in earlier discourses of rationalism, but also in suggesting that Thatcherism as a reading of the world has parallels in other forms of reading, even perhaps (as his theoretical references imply) our own as critical readers. Even here, Ackroyd implies, the desire for mastery, for the

elimination of time and politics, is always at risk of erupting. As Rose said, we need to consider what we seek in our own readings.

This provokes the question of whether it is possible – either for politics or for literary criticism – to read in a way that represents more than we can recognise; that represents, in fact, the never wholly perceptible interests of the child who will survive us. If it is possible, it would probably demand that we too are ‘in time’ in a dual sense: in reading within the terms of temporal political history, but

representation and recognition to coincide produces the disappearance of the child – who, unlike at the end of Hawksmoor, is both fictional and all too real, both object and subject of reading.

If, then, the implicit critique of Theory, found both in Hawksmoor itself and in my reading of Ackroyd’s own ambiguous position in his novel, sounds like the

conventional accusation that the Left turned to Theory and representation when it lost the material capacity to engage in political change, this needs important qualification. We do, indeed, need to turn to history and to real politics, as these representations of Thatcherism suggest. However, we need to do so not because the matters to which Theory, particularly psychoanalytic Theory seeks to attend –

desire, ambition, death and the child herself – are unserious or unimportant, or because the real political needs for the future are obvious, but rather the opposite: because we cannot see and read the future through the child, other than through violence towards the real child. This is not, therefore, the typical criticism of the effect of Theory, made by Terry Eagleton amongst others, as a deviation from the real politics towards the politics of identity. On the contrary, this rather suggests (and here both Arendt’s theory and Ackroyd’s historical awareness are helpful) that modern politics has been based around identity since well before the 1980s, even though the markers of twentieth-century time in the ‘post-war’ and the supposed ‘end of the post-war’ for various reasons intensified the demand for identity, for a figure available for recognition. Such demands persist not because of Theory or even of Thatcherism in themselves, but rather because the anxieties and attractions to which they respond are psychologically real and thus historically persistent.

There is, nevertheless, an imperative to change politics, including the politics of reading, here: this is the imperative to no longer base political representation on recognition, on identity. Rather, as Arendt argued, we need to accept the necessity of the private space and private life for political representation – something which is known to exist but yet cannot, by definition, be presented and made available visually. This particularly applies, as the ironies of Thatcherism show, to the child in growing up and exercising her creativity and ambition.

The texts considered here suggest that we should not extend access to representation to the child on the basis, and prerequisite, of the child demonstrating some set of essential values, qualities or truths. Such a mode of predictability is in conflict with the child’s ambition, with her stake in the future, even when (as in Thatcherism) it tries to align with it. The equality of pleasure indicated by the role of images in The Line of Beauty hints that such attempts at prediction are false, and cannot last. Which aesthetic objects, then, and which texts, should be made available for the child’s education – since Clause 28 attempted to control exactly this? The readings offered here suggest that precisely those texts and objects Clause 28 attempted to remove from schools should be those provided to the child: those which allow her to imagine herself as other than the child. Only through extending access to such things (and as the case of the market hall, the car and the lads in The Line of Beauty showed, controlling of access to pleasure is fundamental to authority in practice) will political representation itself ultimately, though not in any

selectively predictable way, also be expanded.

Although Thatcherism may have aimed for atemporality, it was in fact itself a historical phenomenon; although it may have had great cultural longevity, other phenomena within political culture will increasingly supplant its real, and perhaps even even its perceived, importance. Yet analysing its literary representations, and their odd common interest in child disappearance, exposes some broader

implications for the relation between the child, time, history and politics. It is on these that we shall build in the next chapter, turning to the works of Kazuo Ishiguro.