Child’s Play? Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock and Freud’s Game of the Wooden Reel

This paper looks into the disturbing intimacy that painfulness and playfulness share in Graham Swift’s second novel. It also explores the threat that they could be dissociated from one another: that play, through power games, should be deprived of any playful dimension and reduced to a sinister form of manipulation; or that pain should be cancelled through what may appear as mere ‘games’, a pointless and meaningless act of juggling with words. Beside the different games that are being played by the characters and that duplicate each other, it is the show which the narrator puts on for the reader which is of chief importance in this novel: the narrative is an alleged confession where the rules become blurred—a piece of playacting which turns into another version of hide and seek. Freud’s comments as he observes his grandchild playing with a wooden reel (which the title, ‘Shuttlecock’, brings to mind) seem relevant in more ways than one: Shuttlecock exemplifies the contradictory dynamics through which inflicting or self-inflicting pain can become a way of mastering it in a act where subject and object exchange their positions. At the same time, the novel finally points at the power and dynamic force of something that lies in the very renunciation of mastery. It finally reveals a need to be ‘in the dark’, to welcome an absence that allows real ‘playwork’ to begin. What is crucial then is the ability to stay suspended in an ‘in-between’ defined by the back and forth movement of the shuttlecock/of the voice. Until the end, Shuttlecock nevertheless remains a disquieting text, its ‘in-between’ an uncomfortable space of doubt and hesitation in which the reader is insistently brought face to face with a ghostly presence, flaunted only to be withdrawn