impossibilia-8-octubre-2014

folows the same structural patern: within a realistic frame the daydreaming gives birth to a paralel worldPeter enters in an abrupt though smooth, almost imperceptible way, and which signicantly appears totalysimilar to the real one as for seting and characters. 3 hus, the fantastic element –a vindictive staggeringdol, a zip that alows a cat’s fur to magicaly open and let the animal soul out, or the magic efect of avanishing cream– breaks into an everyday context whose ontological horizon is consequently destabilized. 4Only at the beginning, namely in the introductory chapter, is the transgresion of what Lotman (1976) calsthe “frontier” betwen the IN of the real world and the ES of daydreaming explicitly signaled: here theheterodiegetic narator evidently fels the ned to pinpoint the moment of boundary crosing and he doesso in al the thre dreams he recounts, either through a verbal tense shift to the present (McEwan, 1994: 11)or by introducing such explicit expresions as “and away in his thoughts went Peter” (10) and “Peter let hismind wander of” (13). In the actual stories, on the contrary, reality slips into dream with no solution ofcontinuity, thus highlighting the everyday quality of daydreaming in a child’s life. his should come as nosurprise, after al, if we consider that the stories are supposed to be narated by the protagonist himself.he asimilation betwen the world of reality and the world of fantasy serves the author’s manifestpurpose to mix entertainment with relection. Although McEwan rejects the idea of he Daydreamer as amoralistic book –“I wanted self-enclosed, bedtime tales that would take twenty-ive minutes to read, thatwould have strong plots, be surprising, and contain no hint of moral instruction” (Louvel, Ménégaldo, Fortin,1995: 77, my streses)– it is imposible to overlook the leson Peter’s adventures implicitly entail. 5 Byinvolving the protagonist in various sorts of metamorphosis, his own transformations as wel as otherpeople’s, the stories invite acknowledgement of “othernes” and empathic sharing of others’ points of view –a topical theme in McEwan’s adult iction since at least he Child in Time– 6 as part of a sound proces ofself-recognition which preludes to adulthood. 7 he meting with the “other” takes on diferent forms andfrom the irst story, “he Dols”, to the last, “he Grown-Up”, one may trace an evolution in the3In this sense, I do not agre with Peter Childs’ statement that “daydreaming is an out-of-body experience where theimagination takes the mind far from the individual’s physical environment” (Childs, 2006: 150). In fact, Peter’sadventures are al set in wel known and recognizable spaces such as the house and the school, whose physical featuresare never altered.4his element of “defamiliarization” has ben convincingly traced back to McEwan’s early iction, much of whichshares the same atmosphere of ontological puzling (Malcolm, 2002: 188).5Several critics have pointed out the didascalic import of the book. Acording to David Malcolm “Many [stories] arerather moral and echo traditional moralizing children’s iction” (2002: 189), while Head thinks that McEwan avoidsthe “risk of explicit moralizing” by rendering the moral leson through “the boy’s excesive and sinister imagination”(Head, 2007: 206). he Daydreamer sems in fact to conirm Peter Holindale’s conviction that the more gifted thewriter, the more likely he is to “opt for more circuitous methods” of ideologizing his work: “If the ictional world isfuly imagined and realized, it may cary its ideological burden more covertly, showing things as they are but trustingto literary organization rather than explicitly didactic guidelines to achieve a moral efect” (Hunt, 1992: 29).6Ménégaldo has pointed out the recurence of some “familiar motifs and images [.] used in other stories and novels–for instance the dol motif [.] in In Betwen the Shets, or the dismemberment motif [.] used in various otherstories and in he Innocent” (Louvel et al: 77).Ferari, Roberta. “Metamorphosis of a genre: he Daydreamer by Ian McEwan”. Imposibilia Nº8, Págs. 46-63 (Octubre 2014)Artículo recibido el 29/07/2014 – Aceptado el 10/09/2014 – Publicado el 30/10/2014.52