Journal of the Short Story in English, 63

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Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

63 | Autumn 2014 Special Issue: The 21st Century Irish Short Story Guest Editor: Bertrand Cardin

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1474 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 December 2014 ISBN: 0294-0442 ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 63 | Autumn 2014, « Special Issue: The 21st Century Irish Short Story » [Online], Online since 01 December 2016, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/jsse/1474

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher

Introduction Bertrand Cardin

Part 1: Traces of Oral Tradition: Voices, Dialogues and Conversations

Skipping and Gasping, Sighing and Hoping in Colum McCann’s “Aisling”: The Making of a Poet Marie Mianowski

Narration as Conversation: Patterns of Community-making in Colm Tóibín’s The Empty Family Catherine Conan

“Elemental and Plain”: Story-Telling in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields Eoghan Smith

“The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here” by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, or the Art of Reconciling Orality and Literacy Chantal Dessaint-Payard

“Black Flower”: Dichotomy, Absurdity and Beyond Vanina Jobert-Martini

The Old and the New in Claire Keegan’s Short Fiction Claudia Luppino

Part 2: Resonance, Revision and Reinvention

Rereading the Mother in Edna O’Brien’s Saints and Sinners Elke D’hoker

The Irish (Short) Story, Level 1: Julian Gough’s “The Orphan and the Mob”

Questioning the Paddy Stereotype in Edna O’Brien’s “Shovel Kings” Jeanette Roberts Shumaker

Part 3: The Ironic Observation of Contemporary Ireland

Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan, or the Chronicle of a Collapse Foretold Bertrand Cardin

Anne Enright’s Short Fiction: “Post-Freudian and Post-Feminist and, of course (three cheers!), Post-Nationalist”? Thierry Robin

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The Subjective Real in William Trevor’s “Justina’s Priest” Eugene O'Brien

Part 4: Metanarrative Reflections

Rewriting the Irish Short Story: Emma Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits Debbie Brouckmans and Elke D'hoker

“All Stories Overlap”: Reading Keith Ridgway’s Short Fiction John McCourt

Writing Aslant: Putting Chisel to Paper—William Trevor’s A Bit on the Side Claire Majola-Leblond

Bibliography

Selective Bibliography Bernard Cardin

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Foreword

Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher

1 We are very pleased to present this special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English devoted to the Irish short story in the twenty-first century. Bertrand Cardin, Professor of English at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie and guest editor of the issue, has gathered a selection of groundbreaking articles, as well as an insightful introduction and thorough bibliography. As Bertrand Cardin indicates in his introduction, the Irish short story was of great interest to our founding editor, Ben Forkner. We are grateful to Professor Cardin for pursuing this interest and furthering research in the Irish short story. We thank him for his innovative approach to this project and his thoughtful editorial work.

2 You will also note in the front pages of this issue that Michelle Ryan-Sautour has become Editor of the JSSE, and Gérald Préher has joined the team of the JSSE as Associate Editor. Emmanuel Vernadakis will continue on in his role as Consulting Editor, and Linda Collinge-Germain will now be Director of Publication, as she will also be developing other short story research projects.

3 Michelle Ryan-Sautour, JSSE Editor Gérald Préher, JSSE Associate Editor Emmanuel Vernadakis, JSSE Consulting Editor Linda Collinge-Germain, JSSE Director of Publication

AUTHORS

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR

JSSE Editor

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GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor

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Introduction

Bertrand Cardin

Seldom did neighbours come into that house but whenever they did, Martha told stories. In fact, she was at her best with stories. On those rare nights they saw her pluck things out of the air and break them open before their eyes. Claire Keegan (76)

1 In this excerpt from a story by Claire Keegan, the encounter between the narrator and her audience mirrors the relationship between the short story writer and her readers who are invited to admire “the things plucked out of the air” by the storyteller. According to this Chinese box structure, entering the house is like opening the book; Martha thus becomes Keegan’s reincarnation and we, readers, can recognize ourselves in the neighbours gathered around the peat fire.

2 This metanarrative or second-order level invites us to keep remembering that the written story is a form that originates in the oral tale. The connection is recalled by many theoreticians, among whom Ben Forkner: “The short story is a form you may listen to, and its length conforms to the span of attention that a listener may give to an oral narrator” (16). Not only is the story writer read as if he were listened to, but he also writes as he speaks, as Richard Ellmann remarks about Frank O’Connor: “his own talent required the sense of an actual man, talking” (viii).

3 If the short story thrives in a vibrant oral culture, no wonder Ireland has proved such a fertile ground for the development of the genre. As Forkner puts it: “The Irish story is firmly rooted in a land where a high premium has traditionally been placed on the spoken word, especially in the form of the story or tale” (22). In Gaelic society, the storyteller played an essential part. He passed down the stories of his people, together with myths and legends, from generation to generation. This local culture was orally transmitted for hundreds of years. But as Ireland was progressively assimilated to the English mores and language, some Irish writers of the late 19th century feared the extinction of their traditional culture. They organized themselves to safeguard this heritage, recover national identity and move away from English models. Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats or Douglas Hyde, among others, traveled all over the island in

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order to collect myths and legends in cottages and transcribe them. This initiative made it possible not only to immortalize, but also to widely spread a threatened patrimony.

4 Because these literary productions are prose texts of short fiction, the authors of this Celtic Revival are somehow the first Irish short story writers. In any case, they contributed to creating an osmosis between Ireland and the short story. From then on, this specific literary genre has been considered as Ireland’s national art form. Although its morphology resembles that of the traditional tale, its contents, which are most often realistic, do not ignore the issues of contemporary Irish society. Reconciling the past with the present, “the short story is the natural result of a fusion between the ancient form of the folk tale and the preoccupations of modern literature,” as Declan Kiberd remarks (42). These preoccupations vary with the changes of society, as the themes of the short stories have testified for about one century.

5 At the beginning of the 20th century, Ireland was depicted as a restricted, parochial universe, characterized by its narrow-minded bigotry and its stifling conformity. James Joyce, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor and other short story writers described the society of their days as a community where taboos and prejudices were so powerful that their fellow citizens were continuously repressed and frustrated. Any personal initiative was discouraged. Only father-figures, whether they were political, colonial, religious or domestic, were decision-makers. Because of this context of a still, petrified, unchanging world, Joyce evoked Dublin as a “centre of paralysis.”

6 In the second half of the 20th century, the genre mirrored the evolutions of a new society, which was progressively becoming more urban and open to the outside world. As it was also more competitive economically, the population’s standard of living was improving. Irish women acquired a different status and their places were less and less subordinate. Traditional values were somehow weakened by demands of freedom, cries of protest and denunciations of hypocrisy. These changes are reflected in Edna O’Brien, John McGahern or Benedict Kiely’s stories, for example.

7 For two decades, Irish society has experienced chaotic situations: if the Celtic Tiger decade maintained a sustained high-level growth, it also generated wild capitalism, extreme materialism and ostentatious consumerism. As everybody knows, this period of unprecedented prosperity was followed by a severe downturn which fueled disillusionment, bitterness and suspicion towards political and financial authorities. Simultaneously, scandals in the Roman Catholic Church called the clergy’s credibility into question. As a result, all of the ideologies have been challenged and reappraised. Dechristianization, together with the dislocation of families and the archaism of patriotism exemplify the collapse of traditional values.

8 Today’s short stories mirror a society which has lost its bearings. They observe, depict and ironically comment upon this Ireland. Their postmodern approach faithfully apprehends the uncertainties of the contemporary. The clash they narrate is no longer between Ireland and England, but between past and present values. They reflect the citizens’ distrust in public life and withdrawal into their own individual lives. Private concerns and personal expositions play an essential part in contemporary fiction. Today’s stories often narrate the way characters manage their lives and their relationships with others; intimate issues are treated without any taboos: sexual relationships are openly dealt with and mentioned in their diversity because everyone is master of their bodies.

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9 In this respect, Colm Tóibín’s collections are worth mentioning: Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family are, as their titles indicate, focused on family links. Nevertheless, the family is not idealized in this fiction: on the contrary, it is depicted as a space which hardly ever stands for comfort and well-being. It fosters guilt, incommunicability and hampers the development of its members. All of the Irish topoi are revisited in Tóibín’s stories which still deal with the traditional themes of Irish fiction, but according to the postmodern, relativist point of view of our contemporary western societies. Family values, but also Catholic beliefs and patriotic principles, which were once glorified, are now ironically re-assessed. As one character eloquently puts it: “I do not believe in God (…) I do not even believe in Ireland” (4). Adultery, homosexuality, aids, paedophilia, drug-addiction are as many themes treated in Tóibín’s fiction.

10 In the past as in the present, contemporary Irish short stories can be read as adaptations of anecdotes, of news items, of unusual minor events of everyday life, which are nevertheless pointers to changes in society. However, two thematic categories can be distinguished: on the one hand, new subjects reflecting present society are noticeable. They are the antipodes of the themes that could be picked up in the stories of the past. On the other hand, great motifs, such as disillusionment or entrapment, which already characterized the Irish short stories of the 19th and 20 th centuries are still present in today’s texts. The causes, manifestations and consequences of disillusionment are different, but the feeling remains. Likewise, the forms of entrapment have changed, but the sentiment is still there. Joyce’s characters are caught in the nets of an oppressive home or unhappy marriage; they brood over their jealousy towards their workmates who managed to escape their restricted universe and are likened to harnessed horses walking round and round statues. In today’s stories, characters fall into different traps, such as easy money, inextricable liaisons or addictive substances, but the motif of entrapment remains. Besides, the revelation of truth is often the same too: characters become aware of their condition by a sudden spiritual manifestation, an epiphany which opens their eyes. By the same token, in spite of their recurrent preoccupations for other places, for difference and alterity, many stories prove to be very traditional, particularly in their crafted narratives and sober style. This paradox is exemplified by Tóibín, Enright or Keegan’s stories, for instance.

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11 All in all, in many respects, today’s Irish stories are not so different from yesterday’s. The secret of emotions, passed on by elliptical modes of expression, is still a feature of the genre. Short stories remain small-scale, compressed forms that mean a lot with few words: “Short-stories are a lovely little explosion of a moment. They can encapsulate an entire life purely by suggestion,” according to Colum McCann who considers suggestion as the cornerstone of the genre, as Sean O’Faolain did fifty years before him: “The short-story writer’s problem of language is the need for a speech which combines suggestion with compression” (250). A short story proves that there is always more than meets the eye. Because of its brevity, it suggests a maximum with a minimum of words. It does not dwell on details but calls for decoding and incites the reader to be active. To take up Roland Barthes’s terminology, the short story is a “writerly” text—un texte scriptible, which makes demands on the reader who has to work things out, look

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for and provide meaning. The reader is no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.

12 Beyond the requirements of this elliptical genre, suggestion establishes interconnections, especially when the story can be interpreted as an allegory, when national features are perceptible in families, when the personal is given a collective dimension. Any short story character can be perceived as embodying part of the national psyche. This capacity to go from unity to multiplicity is a specificity of the genre, which can still be observed today. The short story remains characterized by its amazing plasticity. It exceeds any limits and borders.

13 As many articles in the present volume illustrate, the genre is not strictly marked out, insofar as stories construct bridges with other genres, such as theatre plays, poems or novel chapters. Besides, some of the following articles show that the boundaries of literature are also challenged, as many texts establish connections with other artistic disciplines, such as painting, music or sculpture. These connections draw on a dialogic form which is a feature of postmodern aesthetics in which the 21st century Irish short story is deeply anchored.

14 The few elements of context outlined above, which seek to situate the genre in the restricted spatio-temporal context of a nation today, are exemplified and treated in depth in the following pages. These papers are grouped by themes, so that readers may compare examinations of the same type.

15 A first series of articles deals with the traces of oral tradition in the Irish short story today. Colum McCann’s “Aisling” is obviously focused on the heritage of storytelling. According to Marie Mianowski, the short story writer, inspired by an ancient form of poetry, embodies the voice of an eternal Ireland. Orality is so pregnant that the reader can hear the text breathing, sighing and panting. Colm Tóibín’s stories are also humanized in the course of the talks between characters, but also the conversations between narrator and narratee or between author and reader, as Catherine Conan demonstrates. Her paper perceives in these exchanges the expression of the tensions at work in contemporary Ireland as a community. For Eoghan Smith, oral popular tradition, combined with literary naturalism, characterizes Claire Keegan’s collection, Walk the Blue Fields, and endows it with aesthetic sense. In Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s stories, Chantal Dessaint-Payard perceives a will to reconcile spoken and written languages; her article is based on a story which alternates narratives diegetically anchored in the present with tales taken from oral tradition. In this case, memory plays an essential part. Edna O’Brien’s short story, which is studied here by Vanina Jobert-Martini, is also highly connected with orality, as illustrate the talks between the two protagonists which provide the reader with “a soundtrack recording the tensions and conflicts at the heart of the plot.” Last, in Claire Keegan’s stories, Claudia Luppino notices a compromise between the survival of the old traditions of oral storytelling and their readiness to tackle Ireland’s current issues. This constant return to tradition means something fairly specific in spirit, matter and style.

16 A second series of articles is more directly connected with the notions of resonance, revision and reinvention: in Elke D’hoker’s article on two stories by Edna O’Brien, the mother-daughter relationship is revisited and leads to a renewed definition of the mother-figure. Flore Coulouma considers Julian Gough as the heir to Flann O’Brien as the two writers have a lot in common, particularly their humorous and nonsensical writing or their complex relationships with orality and literacy. In a story of her latest

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collection, Saints and Sinners, Edna O’Brien takes up the old stereotype of the “Paddy,” the Irish manual labourer in England who personifies “brawn rather than brain.” This old tenacious cliché is revisited by Jeanette Shumaker’s paper which considers these “Shovel Kings” as creators of civilization and founders of empires.

17 A third category of articles is in line with the ironic observation of contemporary Ireland. In Bertrand Cardin’s paper, irony is indeed the major characteristic of Gerard Donovan’s vision and interpretation of the prosperous years of the Celtic Tiger. The depiction of present Irish society by an ironist fits into the scheme of postmodernism, as exemplifies Anne Enright’s work which, according to Thierry Robin, can also be interpreted by post-Freudian, post-feminist and post-nationalist analyses. This post- position involves a backward look on the past with a touch of irony. Besides, in her fiction, Enright does not resort to the usual markers of the nation, and nevertheless depicts genuine Irishness. Ironic is also the narrator’s turnaround in William Trevor’s story “Justina’s Priest” whose reader, influenced by the context of clerical scandals in Ireland, would expect the relationship between the two characters—a young woman of limited intellectual development and a priest—to be somewhat asymmetrical and abusive. Using the Lacanian notion of the real which lurks beneath and around the symbolic order of language, Eugene O’Brien’s article probes “the real of this relationship.”

18 The papers classified in the fourth part of the volume arouse a reflection of the text about its own nature. A collection by Emma Donoghue is considered by Debbie Brouckmans as an example of the experimental short fiction of Ireland. It is envisaged by Brouckmans’s paper in the larger context of the feminine aesthetic of rewriting and metafiction. In his article on Keith Ridgway’s stories, John McCourt perceives the characters as having a lot in common with the readers, as all of them are unable to understand their places in the world. As for Claire Majola-Leblond, she highlights the way William Trevor, who was a carver before being a writer, manages to enhance his literary production with a new dimension—his art of carving meaning.

19 A number of short story collections are studied here. They all share a common feature: they were written by Irish men or women over the past two decades. They are highly diversified, particularly in the connection they establish with their authors’ nation. Some stories reflect a familiar Ireland; others have nothing to do with it. Political events like the Troubles in Northern Ireland are depicted by some, ignored by others. The link with the nation differs according to the texts, and this has been noticeable particularly since an Irish diaspora was officially recognized. Nowadays, the Irish are free to live in Ireland or not. And if they choose to live in a foreign country, it is a deliberate decision. The concept of Irishness keeps on undergoing changes and always needs to be redefined. Ireland is no longer limited to its national borders, but is open to the world. Ireland is no longer paralyzed, but free to make its decisions. This Ireland, depicted by Fintan O’Toole as “frantic, globalized and dislocated,” is mirrored in short stories. Considering the writers’ movements and places of residence, together with their international readership, is the concept of national literature still meaningful? Is an adjective of nationality still relevant to characterize a genre or a writer? How far can a writer be restricted to the nationality which is written on his/her passport? In Ireland, as in many other countries, the current short story is pluralistic, cosmopolitan and universal. Writers belong to the country in which they were born, but also to the one in which they live; they consider themselves as being parts of both, as participants

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and observers; they are somehow insiders and outsiders here and there. Beyond national divides, short story writers signal their desire for equality among human beings and contribute to characterizing their literary production not so much by its Irishness as by its amazing vitality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forkner, Ben. Introduction. Modern Irish Short Stories. Ed. Forkner. London: Penguin, 1980. 21-42. Print.

Keegan, Claire. “The Forester’s Daughter.” Walk the Blue Fields. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. 69-110. Print.

Kiberd, Declan. “Storytelling: The Gaelic Tradition.” 1978. The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

McCann, Colum. “Interview with Katie Bolick.” Atlantic Unbound 16 July 1998. 22. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. Collected Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Introduction by Richard Ellmann. Print.

O’Faolain, Sean. The Short Story. Cork & Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1948. Print.

O’Toole, Fintan. “Writing the Boom.” The Irish Times 11 Nov. 2001. Print.

Tóibín, Colm. “One Minus One.” The Empty Family. London: Viking, 2010. Print.

AUTHOR

BERTRAND CARDIN Bertrand Cardin, Professor of English at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie (France), is the author of a book combining six textual analyses with theoretically informed readings of a single short story by John McGahern “Korea,” Lectures d’un texte étoilé (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2009). He also wrote a book on father-son relationships in the contemporary Irish novel, entitled Miroirs de la filiation. Parcours dans huit romans irlandais contemporains (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2005) and co-edited, with Professor Claude Fierobe, Irlande, Écritures et réécritures de la Famine (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2007) and, with Professor Sylvie Mikowski, Écrivaines irlandaises/Irish Women Writers (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2013). He has also published many articles about contemporary Irish novelists and short story writers.

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Part 1: Traces of Oral Tradition: Voices, Dialogues and Conversations

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Skipping and Gasping, Sighing and Hoping in Colum McCann’s “Aisling”: The Making of a Poet

Marie Mianowski

1 Colum McCann has been writing short stories since the middle of the 1990s, most of which were collected in the volume Fishing the Sloe-Black River in 1998 which addresses the theme of exile and its variations, such as social exclusion, disability and the most extreme version of exile, death. Three other short stories1 had been published in magazines or anthologies between 1997 and 1999, addressing the themes of geographic exile, social exclusion and handicap, much as Fishing the Sloe-Black River. A collection of novellas came out in 2000 about the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Since 2005, only two short stories by Colum McCann have been published: “What is it Called your Country behind the Mountain?” in David Marcus’ anthology The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-5, also on the theme of exile and belonging, and “Aisling,” Colum McCann’s latest short story, first published in 2010 in the Paris Review, and then in 2011 in Joseph O’Connor’s anthology New Irish Short Stories.

2 “Aisling” deserves specific attention not only because it is Colum McCann’s most recent short story, published in the wake of the longer novels which have earned him international fame. It is also remarkable because “Aisling” is a very short four-page piece of fiction, giving voice to a modern-day female “I” enunciator. As a writer who has voluntarily exiled himself abroad and has been living most of his adult life in New York City, Colum McCann has often been examining in his fiction the tension and confusion, energy and despair, as well as the sense of guilt and redemption that goes along with any exile, but which is also part of any life. In “Aisling,” McCann makes the journey all the way back home, so to speak, taking his inspiration from an ancient poetic form, the “aisling,” which flourished in the 18th century, and carrying it into the 21st century. This short story reveals a double metamorphosis. The first metamorphosis resides in the writing itself. Dance and dancing movements and gestures which have been at the core of McCann’s writing since his first collection of short stories Fishing the Sloe-Black River, are not explicitly present in “Aisling.” Instead they seem to be deployed

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through the syntax, rhythm and tropes. The narrative actually recedes behind the power of images and rhythm, so that the reader is captivated by the visions and seized by the breathing, sighing and sometimes almost gasping of the text. The second metamorphosis concerns Colum McCann himself: as a New York-based, Dublin-born writer, he has not only chosen to focus on the fate of his native country in the 21st century, but he has chosen to give voice to a female first-person narrator, borrowing from ancient lore and Irish literary tradition. This paper will therefore question first how much of the heritage from the ancient aisling tradition can be found in McCann’s short story “Aisling,” and the meaning it bears, as it links contemporary Irish issues with myth and folklore. How are present-day Ireland and ancient lore represented and brought together artistically in a double tension between home and exile, peace and violence? A final section will show how in “Aisling” McCann brings the aesthetics of hope and the energy of dance to their poetic essence.

3 The title of the short story “Aisling” itself links it to the Celtic aisling tradition. As Danielle Stirling wrote in her “Examination of the Aisling Genre in the Work of Three Irish Poets,” “in the aisling genre of poetry, Ireland is represented as an otherworldly woman weeping for her misfortunes, awaiting her savior” (2). In the Irish Bardic and post-Bardic tradition, the desire for the good old days, “the backward look” (Stirling 2), is often expressed in a hope for the future and a return to the old ways. The genre had its roots in prophetic and love poetry. But it was only in the seventeenth century that the two were joined to form the political aisling, comparing and contrasting the past and present, in which the dream-woman embodied the past. Brendan O Buachalla described the four motifs of standard aisling genre as: the description of the vision- woman, the conversation (in which the poet interrogates the woman, the naming (in which she reveals herself to be Ireland) and the prophecy (qtd. in Sterling 2). In a paper entitled “For Want of Education: The Origins of the Hedge Schoolmaster Songs,” Julie Henigan also described the different types of aisling poetry, stressing the variations in the attitude of the dreaming poet and the prophetic vision: Not all eighteenth-century aislingí follow this pattern precisely. For example, some neglect the dream premise or the interrogation; others employ the basic framework but possess no allegorical or political connotations; still others retain the allegory, even the Jacobite allusions, but omit the final prophecy. But whether more or less to type (the pattern most closely associated with Eoghan Ó Súilleabháin), the eighteenth century aisling was indisputably a well-established and much-exploited genre. (5)

4 Colum McCann’s “Aisling” short story is definitely a descendant of the ancient form of the aisling tradition, although of course there are fundamental differences. Apart from the fact that it is not presented as a poem, the narrator does not wake up to meet a woman of supernatural beauty and there is therefore no interrogation of the woman by the narrator. Here the “I” narrator woman clearly has a prophesying vision and herself embodies Ireland’s past, future and present. The short story is made of three non- identical parts and six paragraphs. The general pattern is not balanced, although the sixth and final paragraph definitely echoes the first two and therefore gives the reader the impression that a cycle has been completed. But the “vision” theme is definitely present. The short story begins with the three words “I woke up” (183), which are again mentioned as the opening of the last paragraph with the addition of the adjective “alive”: “I woke up alive” (186). Between the first paragraph and the sixth and final one, the narrator has embarked the reader on a journey through time and space, the

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contours of which are difficult to trace and to make sense of. Suffice to say, for a start, that the final paragraph and the short story as a whole end on an optimistic note of hope. The short story is composed of six paragraphs which all present the different facets of Ireland evoked by the allegorical voice of Ireland itself. Apart from the title, the reader is given few hints that would enable him to guess that he is offered a vision of Ireland’s fate in modern times. But at the end of the sixth paragraph, the quote from an old song definitely roots the entire narrative in a long tradition of lament over Ireland’s fate. It also inscribes the implicit voice of ancient Ireland within the narrative, as if some sort of dialogue were taking place in the last lines of the short story, echoing the traditional dialogue between the poet and his vision of allegorical Ireland: “Be not sad, Roisín, for all that happened thee.” This sentence seems to be echoing from the most faraway recesses of the narrator’s mind and connects the entire narrative to the ancient form of the aisling.

5 The song “Roisin Dubh” was written in the 16th century and is attributed to Antoine O Raifteiri. It was translated into English by James Clarence Mangan, as well as Padraig Pearse. It is one of Ireland’s most famous political songs and is based on an old love- lyric which referred to the poet’s beloved rather than, as has often been the case since, being a metaphor for Ireland and it is said to belong to the “aisling” songs. The quote is one of the last lines of the short story: I cleaned the windows, watched the clock, got myself together, paced the hall, wore a pathway, awaited the boys, sang this ditty. Be not sad, Roisín, for all that happened thee. I watched the clock, saw it strike, heard no footsteps, thought of suicide but the beauty of just about everything else took my courage away. (186)

6 Although the narrator cannot be said to be actually dialoguing with anyone in the strict sense of the word, the text is indeed dialoguing with the ancient aisling. Being framed by a reference to it in the title and by the address to Roisín in the last paragraph, the short story is presented to the reader within the perspective of the ancient poem. Moreover the last three sentences quoted above are by far the most optimistic of the whole short story. The horizon seems to be getting clearer as the windows are being “cleaned” and the clock can be watched. There is a watchful sense of expectancy (“got myself together, paced the wall, wore a pathway, awaited the boys, sang this ditty”), which strongly contrasts with the anxious or even violent agitation of the preceding paragraphs. This time, the idea of suicide, which was contemplated at the end of each of the preceding paragraphs, is brushed off, not out of a lack of courage but because of “beauty”: “I watched the clock, saw it strike, heard no footsteps, thought of suicide but the beauty of just about everything else took my courage away” (186). Even the wronged expectations (“heard no footsteps”) do not hinder the greater and wider sense of aspiration that pervades the end of the narrative.

7 This ending and the allusion to “the beauty of just about everything else” contrast optimistically with the endings of most of the other paragraphs which ended on notes of despair for which suicide seemed the inevitable logical conclusion. There are almost subdued echoes of Yeats’ “terrible beauty”2 emphasizing the Irish heritage of the text. In the first paragraph the narrator seems wretched as her children have gone away and she retraces her steps on her own, towards her empty home. The choice of verbs as she trudges back home contrasts with the happy activity of the beginning of the paragraph which described her preparing her boys for a day at school. Once they are gone, her daily tasks are turned into despondently meaningless chores:

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I woke up, opened the curtains, found my nightgown, made the bed, tightened the sheets, fluffed the pillows, donned my slippers, boiled the water, brewed the tea, stirred the milk, climbed the stairs, woke the boys, combed their hair, straightened their curls, brushed their teeth, buttoned their buttons, zipped their zippers, checked their homework, poured their cornflakes, ladled the milk, toasted their toast, packed their lunches, checked their satchels, fixed their collars, tied their laces, wiped their noses, kissed their cheeks, unlocked the chain, crossed the threshold, tapped their bottoms, waved them off, ran the driveway, called their names, held their shoulders, kissed their foreheads, trudged on home, keyed the lock, climbed the stairs, brushed my teeth, washed my face, slipped on sandals, filled my clothes, ignored the mirror, jumped out the window and developed two huge wings on the way down. Of course I didn’t. (182)

8 In the first paragraph as reproduced above, the narrator wakes up and undertakes her daily activities with enthusiasm. The choice of verbs betrays energy, and even joy, as she prepares herself and her boys. The verb “opened the curtains” directly follows the mention of her waking up, thus opening the short story on a jolly note. What follows is both casually and happily done, with a concern for a certain neatness of action: “found my nightgown, made the bed, tightened the sheets, fluffed the pillows, donned my slippers, boiled the water, brewed the tea, stirred the milk, climbed the stairs, woke the boys, combed their hair, straightened their curls, brushed their teeth.” Just as the sheets are tightened, the boys’ curls are straightened. The eagerness verges on fervour and is further accentuated by the alliterations and echoes in the trine of words, such as for example: “kissed their cheeks, unlocked the chain, crossed the threshold, tapped their bottoms’ or the collocations ‘buttoned their buttons, zipped their zippers, toasted their toasts.” In sharp contrast, once the boys have left, the narrator does not seem to inhabit her life anymore. Whereas she “donned” her slippers at the beginning of the paragraph, she casually “slips” on her sandals and “fills” her clothes at the end. No desire is expressed in the words chosen at the end of the paragraph, as she symptomatically avoids her own reflection in the mirror and is tempted by the idea of suicide. Although the rhythmic pattern remains the same, the words have transformed the merry ternary rhythm of the beginning into a plodding and depressed one, making the succession of trines and the never-ending sentence sound like a sigh or even a gasp. Then all of a sudden, as the first long sentence is still being continued, the ternary rhythm is brought to an end. The narrator seems to be holding her breath while imagining herself jumping out the window, or rather refraining from doing so, thanks to the vision she has of herself as a mythical bird. In the reader’s eye, the image of the two great wings opening as she goes down might trigger the vision of a big swan opening its large wings to bring her back home where she belongs. “Of course I didn’t” (183): the second and last sentence of the first paragraph initiates a pattern of conclusions in the short story. At the last minute, she has not mustered enough courage to commit suicide and moves on to another vision in the following paragraph. The second paragraph is the most violent of the whole short story and it also ends on a hint at a possibly failed suicide. The narrator has just evoked her husband, as well as the fact that she mutilated him twice, apparently guiltlessly. She suddenly escapes the dire straits of her gloomy apartment on board a private jet, which has transformed itself into a nightingale by the time the sentence has reached an end: (…) shook a cocktail, drank it down, recalled my husband, mutilated him twice, fair is fair, what he deserves, wept an aria, made another drink, iced it up, held the sink, poured it down, heard it gurgle, guilt and grace, phoned my friend, forgot her number, ordered a private jet to bring me all the way up to Cornelscourt and flew

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along through Monaloe Park on the back of a very handsome nightingale. Well at least I tried. (183)

9 Again the reader is engulfed in the same ternary rhythm but this time in a frenzy of violent action. And at the end of the paragraph, the bird is this time explicitly the legendary nightingale whose song is reputably a sad and woeful one and whose fame reaches back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and before him, to the violent story of Philomela in Greek mythology. In those ancient tales, Philomela had been changed into a nightingale after being raped by her brother-in-law. Here it might be made to echo Ireland’s tragic fate under the boot of the British Empire but also under the oppression of a global economy and civilization. But again the worst is avoided and the narrator escapes a doomed fate in flying away both from a suicidal death and from the sombre reality of a hopeless life. Fantasy and myth are the ways in which the narrator escapes reality and transports her reader into the depths of ancient lore, wrenching the narrative from the contemporary reality of modern day Ireland. And yet it is far from being an easy journey for the reader as he is carried from one paragraph on to the apparently disconnected next paragraph. The landscape of Ireland he is presented with is a torn and paradoxical one, as the narrator is torn between the yearning for home and the desperate urge to escape what seems a doomed fate.

10 As much as there is no apparent logic in the way in which the six paragraphs of the short story are presented, there is hardly any more logic in its chronology or the representations of space. The logic is that of the subjective mental space of the narrator. Each paragraph seems to present different periods of modern day Ireland. The first recalls life in the 1950s or 1960s while the second paragraph jumps forward to a modernized Ireland, in which home appliances and electronic devices have thrust their way into the home. The shock of the irruption of modernity into Ireland is highlighted by the choice of the vocabulary and the semantic field of violence to which most of the verbs belong and which hint at all sorts of physical and psychological violence: I nuked the tea, blew it cold, sipped it down, junked the teabag, threw it out, made some toast, spread the marmalade, flicked the television, jumped the channels, killed the remote, dialled the radio, broke the static, heard the weather, turned it off, ached for rain, waited for sunshine, rinsed the cup, cleaned the plates, separated the forks, licked the knives, sliced my lip, bit the blood, loaded the dishwasher, hit the switch, heard the hum, boiled the kettle, made more tea, rifled the cupboards, found the gin, opened the freezer, broke the ice, shook a cocktail, drank it down, recalled my husband, mutilated him twice, fair is fair, what he deserves, wept an aria, made another drink, iced it up, held the sink, poured it down, heard it gurgle, guilt and grace, phoned my friend, forgot her number, ordered a private jet to bring me all the way up to Cornelscourt and flew along through Monaloe Park on the back of a very handsome nightingale. Well at least I tried. (183)

11 Not only do most of the words denote sheer violence (“nuked,” “junked,” “threw,” “killed,” “ached,” “sliced,” “mutilated”), but there is a contamination of violence in the most mundane activities. Hence, “loaded the dishwasher” strangely echoes “rifled the cupboards” a few words further on, in a crescendo of crime, while all this time the narrator has not left her Dublin kitchen. The paradoxical permeability of the most ordinary activities to violence finds an illustration in the chiasmic patterns of sounds or letters in words such as nuked/junked or flicked/killed. More generally, words echo visually and phonologically, as the bouts of violence resonate and intensify across the

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paragraph: “licked the knives, sliced my lips, bit the blood, loaded the dishwasher, hit the switch, heard the hum, boiled the kettle, made more tea, rifled the cupboards.” In those first two paragraphs, the down-to-earth actions are literally lifted off the ground in the last few words by wings that carry both narrator and readers above the scene. And just as the narrator travels above and across from Monaloe Park to Cornelscourt, so do the readers become familiar with this part of Dublin and make their way with the narrator down the aisles of the shopping mall. Ireland by then seems to have gone global, and the age of consumerism has penetrated all aspects of life, as the narrator tediously fills her trolley and trawls on home. The geography of modern Dublin is very precise and the reader is able to imagine her taking the overpass over Clonkeen road and walking down her driveway. And yet the narrator’s imagination is even more versatile, as her visions take her back to a time when she might have met the nuns from Loreto Foxrock on a daily basis and got instructed by them of the moral and religious codes she was to obey: (…) trawled on home, took the overpass, walked down Clonkeen, used the doormat, ate a pill, skipped the stairs, thought of visions, destroyed all trinities, had a love affair with a tar-dark Gypsy who rang the doorbell and afterwards, in the driveway, had a minor collision with fifteen hundred nuns from Loreto Foxrock, oh my darling you’re a child of the Immaculate Mary and you don’t have to kiss him until you’re entirely ready. But I very well might. (182-183)

12 This raving incursion into memories that are presented as moral and religious constraints of a youth she wishes to forget, leads to the fourth paragraph, which is an explicit flashback. The narrator here distinctly remembers looking at photos of herself as a young girl doing her homework and running to mass, then growing up, breaking up with her parents, getting rich but then marrying “the hard-working boy who came up from the country” and leaving her old self behind. For once the fourth paragraph seems to precede the fifth logically, as the last but one paragraph opens with the narrator telling of her life as a mother: “I went to hospital, had the children, settled in Monaloe” (185). And yet, in those two paragraphs, the apparent chronology ends up with a strange vision of the narrator’s body. At the end of the fourth paragraph, as she marries the boy from the country, the text alludes to her life before as the body of a dead girl flying off in the shape of a question mark: “thinking well you can eat around the bruised part, my dear, but the core is still altogether dark I fear” (184). Paragraph 5 also ends on a bizarre vision of the narrator’s body as her heart is described being filled with petrol and pouring out into a styrofoam cup: “filled my heart full of petrol and poured it out into a styrofoam cup” (185). Narrating pain creates strange visions of the narrator’s body in a juxtaposition of anatomical elements and vegetal metaphors, as she appears like a bruised fruit with a black core. Or it triggers hyperrealist images of modern day consumerism, a self-service gas-station cafe with petrol and styrofoam cups. Reliable, geographical space dissolves into a poetic space as pastoral or romantic echoes merge into a hyperrealist landscape.

13 And yet, it is not so much the specific space of Dublin and the landmarks near Monaloe Park, Foxrock and Cornelscourt which are of interest here, but the perspective on those particular places as they embody a sense of home and belonging. The disrupted chronology illustrates the tension between Ireland entering an era of all-out consumerism and globalization and an Irish sense of home and domestic love, a need to nurture and tend the garden, as in paragraph 1 and at the beginning of paragraph 5:

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I went to hospital, had the children, settled in Monaloe, painted the walls, planted the garden, weeded the lawn, bought some secateurs, clipped the begonia, fertilised the floribundas, plucked the weeds, changed the vasewater (…). (185)

14 The narrator’s grasp of her garden, weeding, planting and clipping, goes hand in hand with a certain hold on space and hence on events of the world as it moves on. As opposed to this sense of control on things and events, the reader witnesses the narrator’s body being submitted to the strangest contortions as it strives to reconcile its past and its present while contemplating a possible future. Torn between two ages and avoiding the mirror in the first paragraph, the narrator aches and weeps, loves and mutilates, offers her bruised body and her black heart, and yet wakes up alive, although almost mad, thanking God for the beauty around her and the life that lies ahead. Through all this chaos, just as she can grow wings and become a nightingale, the narrator portrays Ireland as it outgrows its tensions and undergoes a metamorphosis. The conversion and radical change, the metamorphosis from a lamented and lost past to an unknown future take shape in the actual form of the narrative as the short story in fact unfolds into a poem.

15 The very shortness of the short story “Aisling” might from the start question its status as a piece of fiction, or at least present it as a very peculiar piece of fiction. But there is more to it than just its length. Implicit and elliptical as it is, the rhythm and rhyming patterns make it all the more striking. In manipulating language in such a minimalist way, McCann is creating a poetic device which in turn becomes the poetic world in which the narrator is going to perform her ritual verbal performance. The most obvious common point between the six paragraphs is their repetitive structure: each paragraph is made of one extremely long sentence followed by one or two very short ones, and each sentence is itself based on the juxtaposition of several, often more than twenty, three-word kernel sentences. The same pace and rhythm is found all along the narrative, while only the meaning of the verbs changes, thus giving more weight to the overall meaning. For example, just as the jolly “donned my slippers” (line 2) becomes a casual “slipped on sandals” at the end of the first paragraph, the shift from the maternal “boiled the water, brewed the tea, stirred the milk” (line 2 and line 3) emphasized by the [b] sound alliteration, to the violent ‘I nuked the tea, blew it cool, sipped it down, junked the teabag’ with its harsh [k] sounds at the beginning of the second paragraph, leads the reader to experience musically, and almost physically, the change of era and the change of world. A similar sensual, almost tactile experience can be made by the reader as he goes on the exciting errand of shopping at Cornelscourt mall behind the narrator’s trolley: squeezed some apples, filched a grape, shook a cereal, eyed the ham, flirted with watermelons, lingered at lemons, checked the calories, avoided all fats, filled my trolley, wandered the wine, grabbed the Bordeaux, queued at checkout, flicked the magazines (…). (183)

16 As in the preceding paragraphs, the visual and phonologic play on words and sounds between the collocations and words is striking, as “squeezed” echoes “shook” and “checked” and “filched” resonate with “flirted,” “filled” and “flicked.” The poetic form of this short story strengthens the links with its ancestor, the aisling, and therefore highlights the dimension of this narrative as a lament for the dispossessed, for Ireland’s fate and what it has become. McCann wrote “Aisling” in 2010, well into the recession that hit Ireland as early as 2008. This poetic narrative therefore brings on new weight and a new modernity to the aisling poetic form. Ireland’s latest plight and suffering, as

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well as waves of exile, are inscribed within the long train of similar sorrow and torments over the centuries.

17 And yet, more profoundly, this poetic narrative also gives a new perspective on Colum McCann’s work of fiction and literary work as a whole, as an author who has been writing about Ireland from the distance of the exiled outsider for more than two decades. It is almost as if Colum McCann were lending his voice to a female allegory of Ireland as a way of lamenting what Ireland has become, mourning what has been lost, fretting about the faults it has brought upon itself while at the same time, despite all the sighs and sorrows, describing it skipping into the future, gasping for hope. It is as if this lamentation could not be done from the outside and could only be achieved after the writer himself had embodied the voice of Ireland and become a poet in the process, borrowing from a long train of ancient poets before him. ‘Aisling’ then appears as McCann’s utmost artistic accomplishment so far and in more than one sense.

18 I have studied the aesthetics of dance in McCann’s writing and the fact that the function of dance in his fiction is most obvious in his bestselling novel Dancer (Mianowski, “The Choreography of Exile”). Any attentive reader will have also noticed how Clarence Nathan danced, already doing what the narrator of This Side of Brightness called “crane-dancing” (247) in the final page of the novel. Dancing has been prominent in all of McCann’s fiction since Fishing the Sloe-Black River in 1998, skips and jumps expressing the exiles’ fear and hope for the future when words went amiss and failed to tell the heart-wrenching experience of exile and the anguish before the unknown lying ahead. “Aisling” embodies the rhythm, music and the very breathing of dancing. Words not only skip, bounce and dance, but after many a sigh and a gasp, they eventually cry out for hope.

19 According to Alain Badiou, dance is the perfect metaphor of thought, because like dance, thought is an intensification of actual experience (57-58). But dance also suspends time into space, and because it is an absolutely ephemeral art form, dancing has to do with eternity. Nureyev’s urge was to tell a story and dance at the same time. As early as his short stories, Colum McCann seemed to be ready for an encounter with the hero of his novel Dancer. As the poet Yves Jouan stated in an interview with the Colombian choreographer Alvaro Restrepo, artistic categories always strive towards what they cannot express: painting towards the invisible, writing towards the “unspeakable” and dance towards the “speakable.” One of the characteristics of art is always to try and push limits beyond what it could reasonably reach. McCann’s writing carries words to the limits of words, towards what cannot be told nor spoken: gesture or movement. When words fail to tell what emerges from the past because it has fallen into oblivion or it is too cruel to be spoken out, bodies come along and dance out a few skips and leaps. As Giorgio Agamben argued in his essay “Les Corps à venir,” dancing is then simply a form of bodily writing. But this becomes a real feat when it concerns a fictional character. In ‘Fishing the Sloe-Black River’, the eponymous short story of the 1998 collection that took place in Ireland, the writing is extremely concise, and the allusion to the exile of the sons of the women fishing in the river is very brief. The meaning is revealed by the tragic choreography of those motherly bodies throwing their lines in unison. The movements of their bodies lined along the river banks tell how vain their waiting is, but also how much all those daily individual and collective rituals link them to that other place where their exiled children now live: “they waited the women, and they cast, all of them together” (56). The syntax and the inverted verb

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and subject, as well as the symmetrical repetition of the pronoun ‘they’ give a particular rhythm to that sentence which literally almost dances. In the same collection, the short story “Step We Gaily On We Go” describes Flaherty as an ex-boxing champion and the word “dance” is used to describe the movements of the boxer on the ring: “Wait for the hole. Spare the right. Dance a little. Jab. Atta boy. Move away. Dance. Throw that shoulder” (60).

20 The dancing movements there are meant to fill in the moments between the actual boxing actions in which anything can happen. In this moment of dance, the movement of bodies also translate the imminence of a metamorphosis. At the end of the short story “Sisters,” one of the many discoveries Sheona makes as she is reunited with her sister Brigid, is that her sister has learnt how to dance (18). This episode is crucial, as it shows that dance is a language that has become common to both sisters over time. Sheona is standing at the foot of Brigid, her dying sister’s bed and she is handling Brigid’s feet as if they were puppets and as if her feet were going to talk to her: Her feet are blue and very cold to the touch. I rub them slowly at first. I remember when we were children, very young, before all that, and we had held buttercups to each other’s chins on the edges of brown fields. I want her feet to tell me about butter. As I massage, I think I see her lean her head sideways and smile, though I’m not sure. I don’t know why, but I want to take her feet in my mouth. It seems obscene, but I want to and I don’t. (21)

21 Sheona then looks towards the window and thinks of her future. The metamorphosis and the possibility of a future have been expressed through a gesture, in a movement of feet like dancing puppets. In “Aisling,” McCann leaps higher still in creating the poetic frame for a female “I” narrator, inheritor of the age old “Aisling” poetic form who performs verbal actions, embodying a sort of allegorical Ireland. In a few skipping sentences and half a dozen paragraphs all ending with imaginary visions of flight, the voice brings together ancient and modern Ireland, the ordinary and the revolutionary, the peace and quiet of home with the irrational violence of change, the need to nurture and the abyss of suicide and finally the tenacious and powerful never-dying glimmer of hope.

22 In all of Colum McCann’s short stories from the first in 1997 to the latest in 2010, dancing movements seem to help bodies reconcile the individuals with the actual space and time in which they live, thus suspending for a while their turmoil and agony in a leap, a skip or a twirl. In Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou defines dancing as forgetting, because bodies forget their weight. For him, dancing is a beginning because any dancing gesture should look as if it were inventing its own beginning; it is a game because it frees bodies from any social constraint and can be compared to the cycle of a wheel. In his writing, and in “Aisling” especially, Colum McCann is as much a poet as a choreographer, words tracing a choreography of the times to come. The experience of otherness seems like a deep chasm that only art can hope to bridge. More powerfully still than in describing the arabesques of dancing bodies in his earlier narratives, in “Aisling” McCann sublimates time, space and the shortcomings of memory by conjuring up visual references, musical echoes and linguistic tropes, and taking his reader along in a swinging jig, for an extraordinary breath-taking four-page journey.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. “Les Corps à Venir.” Les Saisons de la Danse 292 (May 1997): 6-8. Print.

Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Print.

Henigan, Julie. “For Want of Education: the Origins of the Hedge Schoolmaster Songs.” Ulster Folklife 40 (1994): 27-38. Print.

McCann, Colum. “Aisling.” Paris Review 193 (Summer 2010): 182-186. Print.

---. “Aisling.” New Irish Short Stories. Ed. Joseph O’Connor. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. 182-186. Print.

---. “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Story Magazine 45.2 (Spring 1997): 76-86. Print.

---. “As If There Were Trees.” New Dubliners. Ed. Oona Frawley. Dublin: New Island Books, 2005. 53-60. Print.

---. “As If There Were Trees.” Story Magazine 47.4 (Autumn 1999): 53-60. Print.

---. Dancer. London: Phoenix. 2003. Print.

---. Everything in this Country Must. London: Phoenix. 2001. Print.

---. Fishing the Sloe-Black River. London: Phoenix. 1998. Print.

---. This Side of Brightness. London: Phoenix. 1998. Print.

---. Songdogs. London: Phoenix. 1998. Print.

---. “Sumac.” Story Magazine 47.2 (Spring 1999): 104-108. Print.

---. “What is it Called your Country Behind the Mountain?” The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-5. Ed. David Marcus. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. 257-258. Print.

---. Zoli. London: Phoenix, 2007. Print.

Mianowski, Marie. “The Choreography of Exile in Colum McCann’s Short Fiction.” Nordic Irish Studies (2015): forthcoming. Print.

---. “The Poetics of the Leap in Colum McCann’s Novel TransAtlantic (2013).” Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines 47 (2014): forthcoming. Print.

O’Connor, Joseph. New Irish Short Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Print.

Stirling, Danielle. “‘Kiss Me, I’m Ireland’: An Examination of the Aisling Genre in the Work of Three Irish poets.” Celtic 430 (April 2009): 1-10. Print.

Yeats, W. B. Easter 1916 and other Poems. Mineola: Dover, 2012. Print.

NOTES

1. “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (1997), “Sumac” (1999), “As If There Were Trees” (1999). 2. W. B. Yeats’ famous “Easter 1916” poem uses the anaphorical repetition of the phrase “a terrible beauty is born” to describe the ambivalent power of the 1916 insurrection.

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ABSTRACTS

“Aisling” est la dernière nouvelle en date publiée par Colum McCann dans la revue Paris Review en 2010, puis dans l’anthologie New Irish Short Stories de Joseph O’Connor en 2011. Elle mérite toute notre attention car dans cette nouvelle l’écriture de McCann semble atteindre un point d’accomplissement particulier. “Aisling” est une nouvelle très brève qui donne la parole à une allégorie de l’Irlande contemporaine et s’inspire de “l’aisling” une forme poétique ancienne, florissante au XVIIIème siècle. Cette nouvelle met au jour une double métamorphose. La première est la métamorphose de ce texte de fiction en un poème, alors que le romancier incarne la voix d’une Irlande éternelle tout en faisant des emprunts à une forme poétique traditionnelle. Le récit recule peu à peu derrière la puissance des images et le rythme, laissant le lecteur captivé par les suggestions visuelles et sonores, la respiration du texte, ses soupirs et halètements. Dans cette nouvelle, Colum McCann se métamorphose lui aussi en poète, dessinant une véritable poétique de l’espérance, poussant la dynamique et le souffle de la danse jusqu’à sa plus pure expression poétique.

AUTHORS

MARIE MIANOWSKI Marie Mianowski is a senior lecturer at the University of Nantes where she teaches Irish and British contemporary literature as well as translation. She is the author of many papers on the subject of Irish contemporary literature, including Colum McCann’s work. In 2012, she edited Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan) and is currently working on a translation into French of five short stories by Colum McCann, as well as writing a book on the landscape of exile in William Trevor’s work.

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Narration as Conversation: Patterns of Community-making in Colm Tóibín’s The Empty Family

Catherine Conan

Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk. R.L. Stevenson, “Talk and Talkers (I)”

1 Much discussion of Tóibín’s fiction centers around the question of exactly how revisionist it is, with his oft-quoted review of Foster’s Paddy and Mr Punch1 laying out the terms of the debate2 between revisionism and (neo-) nationalism, 3 or de- and reterritorialization (Ryan) in his fiction. His texts are the space where the conflict between the aspirations of a younger, liberal generation to freedom from the constraints of a conservative and religious nation and a sense of rootedness, or homesickness, is played out. The search for identity, whether in the form of home or nation, is carried out via an interaction between the individual and the physical environment of Ireland (Redmond swimming with his grandson or the erosion of the coast in The Heather Blazing) or a reflection on the intertwining of personal and national history (Redmond, again in The Heather Blazing). However, I would like to argue here, with the illustration of Colm Tóibín’s latest collection of short stories The Empty Family, that a sense of communal identity is equally gained by interaction with others in the form of intradiegetic conversation or through the act of writing itself. The practice of linguistic exchanges according to rules that bind participants together defines a set of commonplaces around which a feeling of community can be created. The fact that the stories were written while Tóibín worked as a visiting writer at Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin (Wiesenfarth 2) creates a distance as the texts both reach out for and create an Ireland of the mind. Ireland stands out more sharply from a distance, as the Irish tourists in JFK in “One Minus One,” the story that opens the collection, look wrong. The narrator, imagining the easy, reassuring conversation he could have with them, recognizes that verbal interaction creates a familiar space away from home and encourages reflection on what exactly “home” is (Tóibín, Empty Family

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4-5). This article will take a look at two different types of dialogue between characters, then at narrative communication, and finally argue that “good talk” provides the ethics of Tóibín’s stories in The Empty Family.

Conversation in The Empty Family

2 Conversation and its accompanying rituals, often involving food or drink, play an important part in The Empty Family. Classic sociology has established the links between food and talk. For Georg Simmel in “Sociology of the Meal,” “the sociological structure of the meal […] links precisely the exclusive selfishness of eating with a frequency of being together,” and this “gives rise to the primitive notion that one is thereby creating common flesh and blood” (Frisby and Featherstone 130-131). Community is also at the root of the word “communication.” Shared words and gestures create a sense of home, but they can also be the field where dissensions are played out. Pragmatic linguistics has provided a framework within which to analyse everyday conversations in terms of illocutionary acts and practical communication goals, inasmuch as In everyday conversation we do not merely want to represent facts with linguistic means, nor do we merely want to provide our conversation partners with information, we have additional purposes… viz. illocutionary actions, with which we want to influence the possible actions of the hearer. (Van Dijk 142)

3 Another theoretical tool is Conversation Analysis, which studies “the particular strategies conversationalists use for achieving the meaning that they desire within the particular context of interaction” (Woodilla 36), paying attention to who opens or ends a conversation, how turns are taken and how the conversation progresses, has developed a specific methodology and standardized transcripts to make sense of ordinary conversation. By contrast, literary dialogues, characterized by linearity, cannot as readily represent silences or several participants speaking at the same time. Nevertheless, both conversation analysis and pragmatic linguistics help the reader make sense of the construction of meaning by participants in a conversation.

4 However, by assuming that speakers want to “influence the possible actions of the hearer,” pragmatic linguistics considers only one possible meaning of communication: exchange. Alain Milon in L’Art de la conversation reminds his reader that munus, the Latin root of the word “communication,” can imply either utilitarian exchange or sharing, which suggests a sense of community (21). He then proceeds to make a distinction between communication, especially in the modern sense, which emphasizes exchange—and conversation, whose Kantian “finality without end” is the creation of a properly human communal space.4 Thus the distinction made by Milon between cold- hearted communication and convivial conversation is not far from that articulated by communicational critic Roger D. Sell between coercive and non-coercive, or genuine communication. The former is that “where one communicant is thought of as sending a message to the other, who interprets it in the light of a context that is also implied by the sender” and the latter where “the parties think of each other more as human equals, and are basically comparing notes about something as seen from their different points of view” (Introduction 3-4). Studying how some conversations between characters of The Empty Family negotiate their way between the two poles of the ideal Kantian conversation and a Bourdieusian vision of linguistic exchanges as occasions of

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wielding symbolic power (Bourdieu 14) will hopefully trace the contours of their conversational habitat, or home.

5 The idea of talking as the exchange of words for money or status is present in The Empty Family through various motifs such as Malik’s phone conversations in “The Street,” where spoken words have an actual price: “The phone call cost him less than five euros if he stayed on for under three minutes” (161). Malik then moves on from his job as a sweeper in the barber shop to another selling phone cards and mobile phones, whose value as objects is not so much that promised by their original purpose as the status— or symbolic power—that they convey to their destitute owners: “these men away from home would never have enough money for a car or a truck or a house. This small object so filled with modern tricks had come to stand in for all of that” (171). As they also are “one of the subjects for easy discussion” (171), mobile phones provide conversation starters, thus strengthening bonds with the other emigrants as well as the folks back at home, at the price of closing upon their fragile community a self-referential loop (talking about technologies that enable talking).

Conversation as Competition in “The Pearl Fishers”

6 In “The Pearl Fishers,” talking is very much a competitive activity whose aim is to prevail upon other participants or to get them to act in a certain way. This is suggested when it becomes apparent that the three main characters in the story met through school debates, i.e. archetypes of coercive communication, with strict rules and an avowedly competitive purpose. One of the characters, Gráinne Roche, was then renowned for “a skill at insulting her opponents that thrilled the audience” (Empty Family 68). Her talent for coercive communication does not desert her years later as the dinner invitation that she sends to the narrator is really a simulacrum of a convivial occasion. Indeed, her intention is to persuade him to allow her to reproduce a poem he wrote when they were at school together. She is planning to use it in a book that she has written to denounce her sexual abuse at the hands of a priest in that school. The narrator too tends to use other people for his own ends, with an attitude of social and sexual consumption: “[he does] not see anyone [he has] no desire to see,” seeks “sex with no strings attached” (63) and confesses that “[he lets] no one irritate [him] unless [he] can expect in return some compensation such as sex or serious amusement” (64). While he was in the toilet, Gráinne and her husband Donnacha have been joined by another man: I tapped him on the shoulder. “Get up,” I said. He turned and grinned. “I now declare this meeting of the Catholic cranks of Ireland suspended,” I said. “Go back to your own table.” “What are you doing together?” he asked. “How do you know each other?” “We are the only two people who have read your book Reading the Bible with Bono, and we often meet to discuss it,” I replied. “OK,” he said. “Wexford. I get it. The Wexford mafia.” “Our aim,” Donnacha said, “is to rule all Ireland.” “Wash your hair,” I said to Seamus Fox. “It’s too long and too greasy.” “Fuck off.” “Here now,” Donnacha interrupted. “If the bishops heard that,” I said.

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“You can take them out of Wexford,” he said, “but you can’t take Wexford out of them.” “Tell me something,” I asked. “What is it now?” “Is the Church still against fornication? Or has it gone the way of Limbo and the burning of heretics?” “Fuck off.” “What is the current thinking on wankers?” I asked. Seamus Fox stood up and grinned and then sullenly turned and walked back to his table. “How to make friends and influence people,” Donnacha said. “Hey, it worked,” I said. “He’s gone.” (85-86)

7 It is apparent from the conclusion of this exchange that it was conducted with a specific pragmatic aim on the part of the narrator (“it worked”) and that this aim was paradoxically not the creation or strengthening of an interpersonal bond but on the contrary its severance (“he’s gone”). Although this has all the evident features of an ordinary conversation (it has a beginning, an end, and participants talk in turns), the two main participants systematically refuse to take into consideration the implications of the previous utterance so that the flow of the conversation is never established as the two speakers fight for control. Harvey Sacks’ classic studies in the working of conversations has established that they work in adjacency pairs, such as invitation/ response, request/acceptance or refusal, and that conversations show a preference for agreement over disagreement (Hutchby and Woofit 42). However, the progression of the present conversation between the narrator and Seamus Fox never takes the path of least resistance: a statement whose illocutionary force is clearly an order (“go back to your own table”) is not followed by compliance or refusal but by a question (“what are you doing together?”) A pair that actually works, such as “Tell me something”/“What is it now?,” where the pronoun “it” clearly refers to the “something” in the previous utterance, signals the defeat of Fox, the second speaker, who will leave the scene soon afterwards. Fox loses because he makes all the wrong moves in this game, such as playing second speaker. Refusing to engage (“Fuck off”) and to frontally address the narrator, using the third person plural pronoun (“you can take them out…”) instead of the second are other mistakes that lead to his leaving the ground.

8 On some level the conversation works, even as competition rather than cooperation, because speakers understand each other’s sentences in their deviation from the expected norm, or in other words their conversational implicature (Short 244). The narrator softens the aggressive request that Fox leave with the mock-performative tone of “I now declare…,” which gives a humorous edge to the insult (“Catholic crank”). His sidestepping answer to Fox’s question about how they met is still correctly interpreted via a system of shared knowledge and assumptions. “We are the only two people who have read your book Reading the Bible with Bono” is rightly understood by Fox as an attack on what the narrator sees as an attempt to re-package Catholicism in an age of mass consumption. Fox then probably places him as Gráinne’s vocally anti- Catholic Wexford acquaintance, although this is left to the reader’s interpretation.

9 Thus, on another level this is a contest not only for discursive and physical space (the attention of Gráinne and Donnacha and the table laid for three people), but also for an ideological representation of Ireland. The narrator undermines Fox by associating him with a religious institution that traditionally buttressed the authority of the Irish state but that came under attack as a result of accusations of sexual abuse, which are the

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central theme of “The Pearl Fishers,” and a general modernization of Irish society, which the narrator’s openly gay lifestyle exemplifies. The narrator mocks the inconsistencies of both the Catholic Church (“what is the current thinking” implies that doctrine has more to do with fashion than morality) and Fox himself, who is driven by him to swear (“If the bishops heard that”). By contrast, Fox associates the narrator with a local entity, county Wexford and Enniscorthy, where the narrator grew up, and which according to Tóibín are inextricably linked with the history of Irish rebellions (O’Toole 183-185).

10 Two political visions of Ireland are opposed here, and the heated argument is a fictional device that enables Tóibín to present a dynamic vision of the contradictions that plague the contemporary Irish Catholic Church. Even though the narrator wins this contest, the argument is not wholly resolved in his favour. Donnacha’s ironic comment at the end and the silent presence of Gráinne throughout, suggest that the narrator’s attitude is divisive rather than constructive of meaningful social relations.

Conversation as Cooperation in “Two Women”

11 At the other end of the spectrum of interpersonal relationships, more “sharing” than “exchange,” the conversation between Frances and Rachael in “Two Women” creates a meaningful bond between them. Both are elderly women who decades before were involved with the same man, Irish actor Luke Freaney, with Frances as his mistress and Rachael, once they had split, as his wife. The two women meet for the first time at the end of the story in a Wicklow pub that Frances is dressing as a set for the shooting of a film. A pub, significantly situated not in Dublin but in rural Wicklow, in itself represents an authentic kind of sociability that the story shows as no more than nostalgic fantasy, as evidenced by the fact that this particular pub is going to be turned into a simulacrum of itself5—and by the distinctly unfriendly attitude of the owner. Frances, instead of creating a pub from scratch in a studio, has to dress a real one, a task which is much more difficult: But [the director] was not old enough to know that you got nothing extra from using a real pub, no matter how quaint and full of atmosphere, instead of a studio- built pub. A set, she knew, just needed a few spare props that suggested something; with a real pub you would have to spend hours removing objects that suggested too much, and painting over colours that seemed faded to the eye but would jar once bright lights and a camera were shone on them. (Empty Family 40)

12 Besides the obvious metafictional value of this comment,6 the suggestion here is of an analogy between Frances’ aesthetically creative task of re-arranging the pub as a film set and the process of remembering her time with Luke. The same idea of a few props being sufficient to evoke a rich reality, and a similar parallel between art and the workings of memory, is present in the scene where Frances visits the National Gallery. As the French manner, with bold colours, of some Irish artists creates a truer (i.e. aesthetically richer) picture of Irish landscapes (44), so “the lightness in the walk, and the way of speaking” of a porter at the museum suddenly reminds her of Luke, even though his “face did not look at all like Luke Freaney’s face” (45). What is at stake here for Frances is an elusive essence of Irishness (“Perhaps, she thought, it was Irish, but he had brought it to a fine art and used it as a mask and made it into pure charm” [45]) glimpsed at through the memory of love or a successful work of art. Her hard work

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arranging for the film is both a preparation for, and a symbol of, her finally making sense of her time with Luke.

13 This will be carried out through her conversation with his widow, which concludes the story and constitutes a moment of authentic interpersonal connectedness, what Ciaran Carson would call in the context of music session (held in a pub, as it happens), “crack, or social exchange” (71). Although Frances initially wants to get the intruders out—as the narrator of “the Pearl Fishers” with Seamus Fox—because they are going to shoot the film, when her assistant tells her who the woman is Frances puts on make-up and walks up to her: “Rachael,” she said, “I’m Francie.” What she saw when the woman looked up at her was veiled sorrow and then a smile with even more sadness in it than her first look. “Oh God! I didn’t have any idea.” “I know. We never met before, did we?” “He talked about you,” Rachael said and stood up awkwardly to shake her hand. Her accent was English. “He talked about you,” Rachael repeated. “I didn’t know it was you,” Frances said, “until Gabi told me just now.” “I thought you lived…” “I do, Rachael. I’m just working here.” “I hope we’re not getting in the way.” “Don’t worry at all.” “Can you sit down and talk with us for a moment?” Rachael asked. “I can, of course, Rachael.” Rachael introduced Frances to her companion. “She was with Luke before me,” she said, and once again her smile had a terrible sadness in it, but there was something elegant about her too, almost beautiful. “This woman was the love of his life,” Rachael said to her companion and then smiled again at Frances. “He was lucky with both of us, wasn’t he?” Frances asked. “He was the love of my life,” Rachael said. “I can say that.” In her voice and in her face Frances could see how kind she was, and how good she must have been with him. “He loved this pub,” Rachael continued. “He knew Miley, the owner, for years.” “I never knew that,” Frances said. “You know, we were never in Ireland together, never once.” “I did know that. He talked a lot about you, especially when he got sick, but other times too. He was happy out of Ireland. It was just a few funny places he missed.” (60-61)

14 The contrast between this conversation and the one from “The Pearl Fishers” is obvious. This passage shows cooperation rather than competition between the two women. Their talk is arranged into functioning adjacency pairs, such as “I hope we’re not getting in the way”/“Don’t worry at all” or “Can you sit down…”/“I can, of course, Rachael.” Frances introduces herself as “Francie,” thus sparking a feeling of intimacy and shared history which is denied the reader, for whom she is “Frances” throughout the preceding narrative. Frances also uses the other woman’s first name, showing her willingness to accept her for who she really is. This is to be contrasted with the practice of the narrator in “The Pearl Fishers” who resorts to insult (“Catholic cranks”) and irony (“Reading the Bible with Bono”) to refer to his interlocutor. Frances also probably uses Rachael’s first name to control her in this space which, while they are dressing the set, is hers—and which, as we have seen, symbolically stands for her memory process. Frances’ attempt at being in control of the conversation is also apparent in her decision

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to apply makeup before confronting Rachael, and in her interruption of the other woman’s question (“I thought you lived…”/“I do, Rachael”). However, this should not be seen as an aggressive fight for territory but rather as indicating how much is at stake in this conversation, at least from Frances’ perspective, which is what the internal focalisation gives the reader access to.

15 The aim of this conversation for both women is to understand how they stand in relation to each other and to their time with the same man. Both women use very simple, essential terms to describe a situation whose essence is expressed by Rachael (“This woman was the love of his life… He was the love of my life”), Frances’ interruption representing an attempt at mitigating its bare, after all banal, sadness. Their attention to each other is made evident by their frequent use of the pronoun “you,” and the predominance of verbs indicating cognition and communication (think, know, hope, talk) suggest that the phatic function is of paramount importance here, if not the raison d’être of their talk. This is an exchange in which information provided by Rachael (Frances says “I didn’t know,” “I never knew”) and the confession of Luke’s love for her make up, albeit belatedly, for the lack of social recognition that she suffered as a result of her illegitimate position. Although Rachael had her picture in the gossip magazines when she married Luke, Frances could not even attend his funeral (52). In a sense therefore, his conversation fulfills the same function as Lady Gregory in “Silence” giving her poems to her lover to publish under his name as dramatic monologues, because “the fact that it was not known and publicly understood that she was with him hurt her profoundly, made her experience what existed between them as a kind of emptiness or absence” (Empty Family 22). Telling the anecdote to Henry James, even in a distorted form, so that he will make a story out of it, is also a way for her to gain public recognition.

16 Once more, as in “The Pearl Fishers,” Ireland has a special symbolic function in the conversation. The fact that Frances was unaware of the special link between Luke and the pub where they are sitting suggests that “Ireland” stands for what Frances missed in the relationship, a special kind of intimacy that comes with the married status. Rachael does perceive this implicit significance of Ireland, as her answer to “we were never in Ireland together” is, apparently illogically, “He talked a lot about you,” a way of assuring her that she mattered to Luke all the same. Thus the pub that Frances was stripping down really is a “funny place”: it acquires real value and significance as a place of community via a linguistic exchange that enables her to come to terms with her past. This could be Tóibín’s post-revisionist way of suggesting that a sense of togetherness and shared identity is possible through the practice of genuine, ethical conversation, even after the globalization and subsequent re-packaging of Irishness.

Narrative Communication in “One Minus One”

17 The metafictional parallel between conversation and poetry or fiction as ways of granting social recognition to those who are denied it suggests that the good conversation could provide a blueprint for the ethics of Tóibín’s fiction. The difficulty here is that, just as conversation in fiction between characters differs from natural conversation (in that it is written not spoken, made to be overheard by readers and arranged by the narrator), narrative communication between the narrator and a narratee who may be dead or absent has different rules from intradiegetic

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conversation. On yet another level, the notion of literary communication across narrative planes, i.e. between implied author and reader, calls for a redefinition, and perhaps a restriction, of the idea of communication. Indeed, according to Monika Fludernik: The implied author ‘communicates’ only in so far as the actual reader when reading (i.e. as Nünning’s ‘empirical reader’) constructs the meaning and values of the textual whole from all textual levels of utterance and story content […] In as much as the (real) reader may hold moral or political opinions inimical to the text’s value systems, s/he needs to suspend his or her real-life beliefs in order to enter into a co-operative reading experience (Warhol 1989). (Fictions 446)

18 While Fludernik is interested in narrative communication between narrator and narratee and is rather dismissive of the idea of a communication between implied authors and implied readers, other authors like R. D. Sell study precisely this “suspension of real-life beliefs” that enable texts to function as spaces of dialogue and cooperation between (implied) authors and readers. My aim in this section will be to study both levels of communication (narrative and literary) in relation to Tóibín’s stories.

19 In The Empty Family, two crucial stories are addressed to a second-person narratee: one is the opening story of the collection, “One minus One,” and the other is the one who gives its title to the book. The presence of the pronoun “you” inevitably draws the narrative towards the conversational form, even though interaction is made impossible by the absence of the narratee. Rather, these stories are conversational in the sense that they are stand-ins for an impossible conversation between narrator and narratee. To put it differently, their narrative form is a poignant reminder of the impossibility of direct interaction. Fludernik and DelConte after her have shown that second-person narratives cover a variety of situations of narrative communication, according to whether narrator, protagonist and narratee are one and the same, or exist on different diegetic levels (for instance, the you-protagonist in Butor’s La Modification is very different from that in Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler because the latter has a first-person narrator whereas the former does not).7 Similarly, second-person narratives are not merely indicators of metafictional intent, or revelators of the fictional nature of fiction, but each in its specificity makes a particular aesthetic, emotional or political point (Fludernik, “Second-Person”).

20 “One Minus One” is told in the present tense by a homodiegetic narrator, an Irish academic who lives and works in the United States, with flashbacks in the past tense that narrate his mother’s death and funeral, which the narratee attended. In the present of the narration, narrator and addressee are separated by three kinds of distance: spatial (one is in Ireland, the other in the US), temporal (because of the time lag, “Ireland is six hours away” [Empty Family 1]) and linguistic/communicational (for several complex reasons that the narrative hints at, he can’t or won’t phone). Thus the text of the short story represents the narrator’s attempt at establishing communication with his narratee across these three distances. Stylistically speaking, he does this while simultaneously keeping in view the huge gap between him and his addressee by using a form of preterition: If I called you now, it would be half two in the morning; I could wake you up. If I called, I could go over everything that happened six years ago. Because that is what is on my mind tonight, as though no time had elapsed, as though the strength of the moonlight had by some fierce magic chosen tonight to carry me back to the last real thing that happened to me. On the phone to you across the Atlantic, I could go

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over the days surrounding my mother’s funeral. I could go over the details as though I were in danger of forgetting them. (Empty Family 1)

21 The use of the conditional is a clear indicator of the fact that the narrative here is the replacement of a conversation that cannot take place, both imagined and denied by the written words. The repeated use of the subordinating conjunction “as though,” both comparative and concessive, also establishes this distance between reality and the world of fears and fantasy. The prevalence of this expression has been noted by Edward A. Hagan, who associates it with the fiction of “marginalized groups” such as homosexuals or (post-)colonial societies (32-33), as a device to mark the distance between their experience and “the ordinary consensus about reality” (32). While I cannot but accept the statistical evidence collected by Hagan about the frequency of the expression in “marginalized” writers, the feelings of emotional separation expressed by the distance posited by the comparative/concessive “as though” are certainly universal. Incidentally, Fludernik has claimed that the use of a second-person addressee within a gay narrative can serve to withhold their gender until the end of the story and thereby show as universal (because they are shared by the deluded reader), and thus acceptable, feelings of homosexual love and affection. However, in the case of “One Minus One,” the reader is left in no doubt about the gender of the narratee in the first page, because he “wore a suit and a tie at the funeral” (1). Then in the next paragraph, the whispered implications of a homosexual affair are made clear: “she used the word ‘friend’ with a sweet, insinuating emphasis” (2).

22 All in all, the reader gains very little knowledge about who the narratee is, apart from the fact that he is a former lover of the narrator and that their affair was over even before the mother died. The story is wholly about the narrator’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy while his mother was dying, because he stayed out of touch with his sister while the mother was ill, and because he failed to communicate with her while she lay on her death bed. In this story, the narratee is almost a pure function, that of an intradiegetic audience. His homosexuality and sentimental involvement with the narrator are his only defining characteristics. The second-person pronoun in a narrative has a necessary extradiegetic pull, drawing the reader inside the story all the more so as the intradiegetic addressee is devoid of specific traits (hence it is easier to identify with the “you” of a guidebook than with the protagonist of La Modification). Here the blandness of the addressee facilitates identification by the real reader, potentially holding “moral or political opinions inimical to the text’s value systems” (Fludernik, Fictions 438) and thus validates this gay narrative as an expression of universal feelings.

23 In the case of “One Minus One,” this feeling is the guilt at having turned one’s back on elemental family ties in the search of freedom and self-fulfillment, here an academic career in the United States. It is not exclusively linked to the gay experience, as it is very similar to what Nuria, the protagonist of “the New Spain,” is made to feel by her family when she returns to the family holiday home on Menorca after years spent in London. The function of the apostrophic mode in the first-person narrative of “One Minus One” is that it “supplies a motivation for the narrational act” (Fludernik, “Second-Person”). Don Bialostosky analyses the otherwise puzzling address by the narrator to a “dear brother Jim” in the first line of Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” as a device “that conceals his vulnerability and enables him to continue […] his appeal to his brother implicates him in the human bonds he wishes to sever” (241). This analysis also applies to Tóibín’s story, where the function of the “you” is to restore within the

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narrative the human bonds that the narrator had severed by going incommunicado while his mother was dying in Ireland, and thus alleviate his guilt.

24 Finally, the “you” stands in a clear triadic relationship with the mother and the country: “My mother is six years dead tonight, Ireland is six hours away and you are asleep” (Empty Family 1, my emphasis). This is the first mention of the second person pronoun. Rather than the mother/country dyad that Kathleen Costello-Sullivan posits, one could see the problematics of home in Tóibín’s work as mother/country/other. The apostrophic narrative as a fundamental tool for what Matthew Ryan calls “reterritorialization” in Tóibín’s work. Indeed, Ryan considers that textual relations offer political models: The novels offer examples of how the nation ‘should be’ and how the individual should inhabit it. The novel itself becomes the material mediation of the highly abstracted sociality of this form of life; it functions in much the same way as ‘sovereign and limited territory’ does for the imagined community of the nation. (20)

25 While Ryan is here concerned with the novel form, one could argue that stories also, through their pattern of narrative communication, offer a model of social relationships within the territory of the text. This homodiegetic story in the apostrophic mode and in the present tense constitutes an example of what Russian formalists called “skaz,” or “a written (literary) imitation of a discourse […] occurring within what is formally describable as a communication framework” (Banfield 172). Thus the focus in “One Minus One” is, through the choice of the narrative communication framework, on the severance and restoration of the bond with the organic community represented by “mother” and “Ireland,” inasmuch as, for Ann Banfield, “through the skaz form a literate culture reflects on and distances itself from an oral folk tradition” (172).

Literature as Dialogue in “The New Spain”

26 The last question is whether in The Empty Family the construction of meaning by the reader constitutes an example of “genuine” literary communication, this being defined as the ability to establish cooperation with a variety of readers with different ideological convictions, and by exercising a Keatsian negative capability, which “is the main psychological and ethical precondition for any genuine communication—for any uncoercive community-making—at all/Great writers’ negative capability makes critical discussion of their “meaning” problematic. After all, a “meaning” is thought of as a something that is communicated” (Sell, Communicational 37).

27 This vast question would deserve more than the space of these concluding remarks, but I will try to provide some tentative answers via a reading of a passage from “The New Spain.” Some stories like “Barcelona, 1975,” especially the sex scenes, read too often as self-indulgence on the part of the homosexual narrator, and probably also of the author, given the strong autobiographical strain in this particular story.8 On the contrary, in “The New Spain” the narrator manages to withdraw and to let a political issue stand—at least partially—unresolved. The main character is “the rather annoying Carme” in the words of the Daily Telegraph reviewer (Miller), who criticizes her hypocrisy as a former Socialist who comes back to the homeland to take possession of her inheritance, the house her grandmother has left her. After eight years in London (“in exile” writes Thomas Jones, the Guardian reviewer), Carme finds Menorca much

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changed, to the point of losing her way to the family house. She realizes that the island has opened itself to tourism and that her family has shared in the economic benefits that the process has brought (the father rents holiday cottages that he built on the land), which enabled them to build a swimming pool in lieu of the olive grove in the garden. However, according to her grandmother’s will, the house is hers and her sister’s, not her parents’. In a climactic scene, she disparages the changes that were introduced by her father, thus highlighting his ideological contradictions: ‘He has grown fat selling our property to tourists and now he has the nerve to complain about them spoiling things!’ (108). This reveals how the parents, by wanting to make profit, have alienated themselves from the conviviality of the island’s festival, which according to them is “too full of outsiders and tourists now” (107). However, Carme’s criticism is turned against her by her mother, who accuses her of being the ultimate reason why her grandmother sold her property (“Do you know why your grandmother sold the land?” her mother asked. “So she would have enough cash in the bank to send you every month” [108]) and neglecting family ties in her selfishness: “‘Every stitch you’re wearing was paid for by the poor old lady,’ her mother said. ‘And you phoned once a year, that is what she got in return. And you come back just in time to claim your inheritance’” (109).

28 All participants in the argument emerge as full of weaknesses and contradictions that the text does not try to solve, thus creating a space for dialogism within the story. Even the father, who wants to preserve the peace, does so only because he needs his daughter’s signature, as the owner of the land, to sell the houses he built on it. Given Tóibín’s involvement with Socialists in 1970s Barcelona (Homage 28), it is not surprising (but neither is it necessary) that his story should adopt Carme’s point of view rather than her parents’ (Carme is the focalizer throughout this third-person narrative). However, Tóibín’s narrator acknowledges that the mother’s accusation hits home because it is justified and does not try to solve the protagonist’s ideological contradictions: by settling into her grandmother’s house, she accepts the privilege of inherited private property even as she strengthens her bond with the deceased’s memory. Thus it becomes easy for a review in the Daily Telegraph to portray her as a spoiled hypocrite (“So much for Socialism” [Miller]) while the Guardian reviewer chooses to emphasize her “exile” and her “regret” at not having phoned her grandmother (Jones). The lack of narratorial intervention in the dialogue and the fact that all characters are blamable, even to different degrees, are examples of successful, non-coercive literary communication. The text thus accommodates diverse opinions on the readers’ parts and different readings, as the two reviews show.

----

29 This article has looked in turn at the three levels at which participants in the literary process communicate: dialogue between characters, narrative communication between narrator and narratee, and literary communication between (implied) author and reader in The Empty Family. Just as in real-life exchanges, communication within a literary text can be coercive or non-coercive, in the spirit of competition or cooperation, exchanging or sharing. At each level, what is at stake in Tóibín’s texts is the possibility of Ireland as a functioning, reterritorialised community. Visions of Ireland as home are at the bottom of characters’ arguments or friendly talks, of narrative addresses to a narratee, and of how Tóibín’s texts communicate with its

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readers insofar as the practice of literary communication mediates within the text the kind of social bonds that its ideological subtext views as desirable. This would tend to revive the notion of reading as encounter and to rekindle interest in “the types of friendship or companionship a book provides as it is read” (Booth 170). Conversation understood as a socially binding ritual, carried out through the linguistic medium and with respect and attention for another who is the end and not the means of it, provides the ethical blueprint for literary discussion of “home” in his works. Tóibín’s answer about the ideal type of community that “Ireland”—as a geographical entity, as a web of social relations and cultural representations—thus lies in the various acts of conversation within his work, not in their outcome.

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Jones, Thomas. “The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín.” The Guardian, 3 October 2010. Web. 26 June 2013.

Ledwidge, Grace Tighe. “‘What is my nation’: Nationalism and Neo-nationalism in the Novels of Colm Tóibín.” Redefinitions of Irish Identity: A Postnationalist Approach. Eds. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.

Miller, Keith. “The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín: Review.” The Daily Telegraph, 9 September 2010. Web. 26 June 2013.

Milon, Alain. L’Art de la conversation. Paris: PUF, 1999. Print.

O’Toole, Fintan. “An Interview with Colm Tóibín.” Reading Colm Tóibín. Ed. Paul Delaney. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2008, 183-208. Print.

Ryan, Matthew. “Abstract Homes: deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation in the work of Colm Tóibín.” Irish Studies Review 16.1 (2008): 19-32. Print.

Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language. 50.4. (1974). 696-735. Print.

Sell, Roger D. Communicational Criticism: Studies in Literature as Dialogue. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Print.

---. “Introduction.” Literature as Communication. Spec. issue of Nordic Journal of English Studies 6.2 (2007): 1-15. Print.

Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London and New York: Longman, 1996. Print.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Essays and Poems. Ed. Claire Harman. London: Dent, 1992. Print.

Tóibín, Colm. The Empty Family. London: Viking, 2011. Print.

---. The Heather Blazing. London: Picador, 1992. Print.

---. Homage to Barcelona. 1990. London: Picador, 2002. Print.

---. “New Ways of Killing Your Father.” London Review of Books, 1993, 15.22: 3-6. Print.

---. The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. 1994. London: Picador, 2001. Print.

Van Dijk, Teun A.. Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse. The Hague: Mouton, 1981. Print.

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “An Interview with Colm Tóibín.” Contemporary Literature 50.1 (2009): 1-27. Print.

Woodilla, Jill. “Workplace conversations: the Text of Organizing.” Discourse and Organization. Eds David Grant, Tom Kinnoy and Cliff Oswick. London: Sage, 1998. 31-51. Print.

NOTES

1. See for instance Costello-Sullivan 89.

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2. “Foster’s position is clear: he wants Ireland to become a pluralist, post-nationalist, non- sectarian place. So do I. But there are other (I hesitate to say “atavistic”) forces operating within me too that I must be conscious of” (Tóibín, “New Ways” 6). 3. For a discussion of nationalism and neo-nationalism in Tóibín’s fiction, see Ledwidge. 4. “Ainsi, la conversation, quand elle est bien menée, ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’elle doit nécessairement aboutir à une fin, à une prise de position ou à un accord, permet de réaliser d’un point de vue pragmatique, un lieu de vie où l’esprit communautaire trouverait ses fondements dans la cohérence d’un acte vertueux, autrement dit pour reprendre l’expression de Kant, dans la véritable humanité, lieu d’un jeu que les hommes doivent préserver” (Milon 24). 5. According to Roy Foster, Irish pubs are already simulacra, where “supposedly totemic objects are stacked up haphazardly in a homage to history as bricolage, summoning up a nostalgia for something that never was” (156). Although this phenomenon used to be confined to Irish pubs abroad, “they are starting to appear in Ireland as well” (256). 6. An interesting parallel could be drawn with the way in which Tóibín describes foreign cities, especially in his travel writings. In The Sign of the Cross for instance, Seville as décor is vividly represented through a few salient elements, such as the Basilica or an “L-shaped bar in the Barrio de Santa Cruz” (38) while the depth of the description is given by the shouted words and recollections of the inhabitants. 7. For a very handy chart that summarizes these distinctions, see DelConte 211. “One Minus One” and “The Empty Family” belong to the third category (out of five), where there is “a coincidence of narrator and protagonist functions but a distinct narratee; in these narrative, most commonly simultaneous present-tense, a narrator speaks about him/herself to someone else” (DelConte 212). 8. Like his narrator, Tóibín arrived in Barcelona in 1975 with no Spanish or Catalan. His naive but sexually enthusiastic Irish protagonist could easily be seen as a post-1993 (when homosexuality was decriminalized in Ireland) version of the coy Tóibín who in 1976 saw a transvestite prostitute in a bar for the first time, which “came as a bit of a shock” (Tóibín, Homage 167).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article se propose d’étudier le fonctionnement des conversations dans le dernier recueil de nouvelles de Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family, et leur importance dans la définition, ou la création, d’un sentiment d’identité collective. Considérant que ce sentiment d’appartenance est construit non seulement par l’interaction entre l’individu et son environnement, mais aussi à travers la sociabilité conversationnelle, on examinera tout d’abord les conversations entre personnages, au niveau intra-diégétique. Celles-ci, qui peuvent être coercives ou non, fondées sur l’échange ou le partage, la compétition ou la coopération, articulent les tensions qui traversent l’Irlande contemporaine en tant que communauté. On se demandera finalement dans quelle mesure la conversation, cette fois entre plans narratologiques différents, entre narrateur et narrataire ou entre texte ou auteur (implicite) et lecteur fournit au texte de Tóibín sa structure éthique, et donc réalise au niveau de ses relations textuelles le modèle de communauté désiré par son inconscient politique.

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AUTHORS

CATHERINE CONAN Catherine Conan is a lecturer at the University of Western Brittany in Brest working in the field of Irish studies. Her research interests include (but are not limited to) contemporary poetry from Northern Ireland, with a special focus on environmental and ecocritical issues, and on communicational criticism. Her latest publications are: “Letters from a (post-) troubled city: epistolary communication in Ciaran Carson’s The Pen Friend,” in Roger Sell, Adam Borch and Inna Lindgren, eds. The Ethics of Literary Communication: Genuineness, directness, indirectness, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013, 247-265; “Dancing—and writing—at the crossroads: Communication and community-making in Ciaran Carson’s Last Night’s Fun,” Anglophonia 33, Carrefours/Crossroads, 2013, 91-104.

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“Elemental and Plain”: Story-Telling in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields

Eoghan Smith

1 The great Irish short story writer Seán Ó Faoláin once commented that twentieth- century “Irish writers are far less interested in the technique of writing than in the conditions of writing” (25). Though the Irish literary movement known as the Revival, led by W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge, and later rejected by its fiercest critic James Joyce, would help to produce some of the most brilliant works of modernism of the twentieth century, Ó Faoláin’s insight perhaps reflects a more general disappointment with the aesthetic evolution of post-Revival Irish writing. Forty years have now passed since Ó Faoláin made his observation, but it has proved to be an enduring one: that the literature produced in Ireland in the decades subsequent to the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 was lacking in radicalism, innovation and politically transformative power has been a common complaint. As Joe Cleary has explained, if twentieth-century Irish writing was notably de-energized, it is because the intellectual conditions of twentieth-century Ireland were inhospitable to the continued flourishing of modernism. If Irish writing appears to have frequently been devoid of radical aesthetic forms, the argument goes, it was because revolutionary thinking was often unavailable to the Irish intelligentsia in a society dominated by successively conservative governments and the overbearing influence of the Catholic Church. Consequently, Irish culture produced a pessimistic social and cultural environment which found expression in the stylistic limitations of literary naturalism, a style which would become dominant in Irish writing.

2 On first reading, Claire Keegan’s 2007 collection Walk the Blue Fields can be made to fit relatively comfortably within the broad continuum of literary naturalism that has been the greater part of Irish short story writing from James Joyce’s Dubliners onwards. But her writing also draws on a pre-Joycean version of the Irish short story tradition that traces its origins to the Gaelic oral folk tale. This connection to the past is not without significance for a contemporary readership. The folkloric aspects of Walk the Blue Fields occasionally offers a glimpse of more mystical realms, predominantly feminine in character, beyond the rational boundaries of the material world. Anne Enright has

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succinctly described this merger of classic Irish naturalism and folkloric supernaturalism in Walk the Blue Fields as a “rural world of silent men and wild women who, for the most part, make bad marriages and vivid, uncomprehending children” and which is also a “pagan place … where healers and seers live in caravans, and actually do heal, and see.” What binds these two superficially contrary narrative modes— naturalism and supernaturalism—is a deep belief in the power of story—telling to defamiliarize the familiar. In Walk the Blue Fields, the story of contemporary Ireland, from the mid—1970s to the mid—2000s, is passed through the mouths of those who have lost faith, the lonely and the damaged, those who exist outside the boundaries of society, and eccentric mystics. And here another parallel can be drawn which emphasizes the importance of narrative as the recuperation of truth in Keegan: those who tell their stories in this collection are often a contemporary form of the traditional Gaelic story-teller, the seanchaí, the holder of folklore who told unlikely, mythical tales that both reminded a community of their collective identity and challenged the boundaries of belief.

3 A central tension in Keegan’s work lies between the necessary freedom that storytelling offers, and the very society which has often sought to suppress unspoken truths, so that the act of writing itself stretches beyond the limitations of social observation towards an idea of art that is unbound by the “conditions” of writing. As Heather Ingman points out in her study of the Irish short story, Keegan “eschew[s] socio- cultural messages” and concentrates instead, “like McGahern, on the quality of seeing” (255). Although Ingman’s reading of Keegan may give the impression that Keegan is an aloof artist who is interested more in the illuminative processes of art than social comment, the idea of visibility which Ingman offers here is subtly important, because it suggests that writing is an important mediation between the internal world of the writer, and the external world which she lives in. But Ingman’s definition may be slightly readjusted. Although Keegan’s work does not directly engage in the kind of polemical writing that Ó Faoláin identified as characteristic of Irish writing in the mid- twentieth century, her work is nonetheless one of the most powerful portrayals of contemporary Irish life, in which social, political and economic transitions are obliquely registered as moments of opportunity and loss.

4 In Frank O’Connor’s well-known formulation, the short story is suited to cultures which have experienced revolutionary upheaval; Walk the Blue Fields was published after a particular transformative period in Irish history. The most substantial social changes in Irish culture since the foundation of the State in 1922 began to occur at the beginning of the 1990s. That decade and the first part of the 2000s were years that saw a series of social and political transformations occur, such as increased secularization, social and legislative liberalization, economic prosperity, sustained net inward migration for the first time since the end of the colonial plantations in the seventeenth century, and closer EU integration. In 1990, the first female president Mary Robinson was elected, in 1993 homosexuality was decriminalized, and in 1995 Divorce was introduced. In 1998 the Good Friday Agreement signalled an historic end to violent Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland with a new constitutional dispensation between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom based on the principle of consent, while the introduction of the Euro in 2002 helped to bring the Irish economy into the new currency union, accelerating an already rapid process of social and economic transformation. During these years, commonly known as the “Celtic Tiger,” Ireland was popularly imagined at home and abroad to have begun the process of emerging from a

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socially and economically backward state to a more progressive and modern one, culturally confident and flush with creativity.

5 From the perspective of cultural vitality, in such moments of upheaval often the challenge for artists, as it was for W.B Yeats and Augusta Gregory, is to help facilitate the transition from one form of society to the next. While Keegan is not a writer who busies herself in making pronouncements on the state of Irish public life, something of this challenge is nonetheless present in her work. For instance, the position of the writer or the story-tellers in relation to tradition is one of the dominant questions in Walk the Blue Fields and in many of the stories in the collection; changes in the dominant order is an important theme. The opening story, “The Long and Painful Death” is the tale of a woman writer on the verge of her fortieth birthday, and who has rented Heinrich Böll’s former house on Achill Island. Suffering from writer’s block, and imagining herself an intruder, she is confronted by a conservative, male German professor, enthralled with a patronizing vision of a bygone Catholic, pre-Celtic Tiger, rural idyll of Ireland—“people here were poor but they were content”—and who finds her presence in the Nobel Prize winner’s house distasteful and improper (15). The confrontation between the two is rendered sinisterly comic, with the woman finally breaking her writer’s block by concocting a story in which a man—possibly the professor, possibly a former lover—will suffer from a long and painful death. Writing is power: the writer’s lack of reverence for the official narratives of the past offers a means through which an alternative, subversive dynamic of feminine authority may emerge.

6 “The Long and Painful Death” offers an image of a woman who seizes an opportunity to fashion a new narrative of feminine power, and to release herself from the grip of patriarchal control. Subtle images of breakage and transgression are sprinkled throughout the narrative; the narrator twists fuchsia off the hedges; wandering sheep threaten to come through the shut gates of the house. Yet clever as the man’s impending demise is in “The Long and Painful Death,” the emergent feminine authority is carefully balanced by other themes that will help define Walk the Blue Fields as a whole: the emotional and sexual poverty of human relationships within a repressive Catholic, and superficially post-Catholic culture, intellectual immiseration through social and historical conformism, a McGahern-esque masculinity characteristically defined by its attachment to land, and its consequent ruin by nature, and a pessimism entailed in the enduring disunity between the sexes which results inevitably in the unsatisfactory empowerment of one over another. As the narrator of “The Long and Painful Death” succinctly remarks in an echo of Cork short story writer Frank O’Connor: “there was earth and fire and water on these pages; there was a man and a woman and human loneliness” (20).1 The potential failure to transcend environmental limitations is also emphasized by the collection’s structural design: just as Walk the Blue Fields begins with a story in which a woman goes to Achill Island off Mayo, the final story, “Night of the Quicken Trees” ends with an image of a woman leaving the mainland for the Aran Islands. Taken as a whole, this symbolic circular patterning of isolation suggests that those on the margins, the storytellers themselves, may reach for a space beyond the boundaries of social convention, but such spaces are perhaps themselves a psycho-social condition.

7 In many of the stories in Walk the Blue Fields, the necessity of transition is externally registered, but often the making of personal transition proves traumatic. The final

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image of the second story, “The Parting Gift,” about a girl from rural Wicklow who has been sexually abused by her father and is emigrating for America, ends with the Eveline-like image of the girl locking herself inside the toilet of the airport, neither able to leave nor go. Such a story, which is set in any time between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s, is immediately suggestive of sexual abuse cases which have been a periodic feature of the Irish news cycle in recent years. The use of the second person narrator in the present tense hints darkly at collective complicity in her sexual ordeal and the ongoing trauma of memory. The nightmare scenario of endless psychological torment is further explored in “Dark Horses,” where the alcoholic farmer Brady, who has “drunk two farms” and lost his woman to a rival, dreams the same torturous dream every night; his personal emotional and social failure to which he is nightly doomed to repeat stands as a metaphor for the unspoken agonies of an irreparably damaged Irish masculinity.

8 It has often been remarked that one of the peculiarities of the Celtic Tiger years is that in spite of the enormous changes that occurred in Irish life, no significant literary documentation of that moment was produced by an Irish artist. Ingman observes that Walk the Blue Fields evokes a “spare, quiet” Irish rural life which appears virtually untouched by the mass urbanization, both of the geographical space and of popular consciousness of the Celtic Tiger years (255). Yet, that these stories of marginal and isolated figures, who suffer from sexual and psychological damage, and most of all, irrepressible loneliness, should emerge at the peak of the boom in 2007, is hardly surprising. Keegan’s aesthetic obliquely traces historical and social patterning: although the concretization of the Irish landscape and monetization of Irish culture from the 1990s onwards is left directly unremarked, for example, it is the chauvinistic obsession with land-ownership which drives madness into characters such as Brady in “Dark Horses,” or the abusive father in “The Parting Gift,” both of whom would rather inflict suffering on themselves and others than lose money on their land. Nor is it surprising that in almost every story in Walk the Blue Fields, the final image is of departure. These departures suggest an un-readiness to accommodate the unveiling of destructive historical legacies such as sexual abuse, but also that figures who make visible such suffering are condemned to a life on the outskirts, often wilfully so.

9 In this regard, Keegan’s work has resonance for another naturalist of a different era, J.M. Synge, who documented in the early 1900s the social quirks of the colonial twilight of Irish culture. Like Synge, who sought material not simply in the outer reaches of Irish rural life—the oppressive Wicklow Hills, West Kerry, Connemara, Mayo, and the islands—Keegan’s stories are often situated in the outlying realms, areas which are both economically remote from the urban heartland and places where in the imagination of these writers eccentricity flourishes. In his travel writing, Synge takes an interest in the displaced, the mad, and especially tramps, but he stresses that his interest has little to do with a fascination with “freaks.” Instead his outsiders are what he calls “variations” on the public and psychological norm, variations which have arisen through social decay and which are intensified by the oppressiveness of the landscapes that at every moment heap misery upon their already nervous characters (27). In one of his Wicklow essays, Synge tells us of a woman he meets who is “afeard of the tramps,” perhaps because the tramps are not only physically threatening, but also because they represent an image of social failure itself (30). Yet even though Synge is generally thought of as a key cultural revivalist, he also sought out the transitional spaces between life and death, whether that was social or cultural; he looked for those

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people who were living unconventionally, the tramps, the destitute, the mad, and extracted from the stories they told him final bursts of vivacity. In turn these people became symbols in his work of the existential extremities of Irish culture. In a similar vein Walk the Blue Fields explores these outsider figures who have also been thrown up in their own moment of transition, where one world is about to transform into another.

10 One reason why the Celtic Tiger did not produce a distinctive literature was that finding a form which could ably accommodate the transformations of recent Irish history proved challenging. The innovation that Keegan introduces in Walk the Blue Fields is to recover the mystical aspects of the folk tale at the very moment that Ireland became enthralled to the concrete. This mysticism is not alternative to materiality, but charged by it. The question of whether the Irish short story actually emerged from the remnants of the Gaelic oral tradition is vexed. James Kilroy has argued that “the influence of oral tradition is neither wide nor deep” on the Irish short story when considered against the effects Russian and French writers have had on it (5). Yet as editor of the Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, published in 1991, William Trevor included seven folk tales to indicate that the short story in Ireland should be considered as having its origins in the oral folk tradition. This question is relatively unimportant, however. Since the Gaelic oral folk tradition has now largely perished as a living cultural activity, Keegan, like other Irish short story writers such as Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, simply uses the lingering folk memory of that tradition as a mythical structuring device, which is radically other to the rationalist limitations of modern culture.

11 In the magnificently conceived story “The Forester’s Daughter,” Keegan acknowledges the recuperative power of the oral folk tradition by making her character Martha Deegan a revered, local seanchaí, who uses her position as public story-teller of wondrous and fear-inducing tales to expose publicly the more prosaic reality that she had a child by a man other than her husband. Set in the mid to late seventies (money is scarce, the oil crisis is in full swing, there is a reference to an ABBA record), “The Forester’s Daughter” reinvents the oral tale by offering a modern folk story of marital breakdown and personal unhappiness. Martha has three children: two boys—one a boy who will leave the land as soon as he is old enough, and who never features in the story, another, who is simply called the “simpleton,” and a third, the eldest, a girl, the product of a single sexual experience with a salesman, of which her husband—the forester of the title—knows nothing. The title is ironic; the girl is, of course, not the forester’s daughter. In “The Forester’s Daughter” Frank O’Connor’s differentiation between the short story, which is dictated by form, and the folk tale, which is dictated by an audience, is collapsed and then self-reflexively amalgamated into a single story- within-a-story structure.

12 The story centres on a dog that Deegan, the forester, steals for his daughter. It is through the dog that the bitterness of the family’s dysfunction is played out. Martha is sure that the dog will break the girl’s heart, and Deegan eventually returns the dog to its rightful owner as a cruel punishment for his wife’s transgression, which inevitably upsets the child. A brilliantly clever narrative device in this story is that Keegan gives the dog, appropriately named Judge, his own free indirect narrative, which allows Keegan to shift the narrative perspective away from the human and into a sceptical, distanced narrator: “Judge is glad he cannot speak,” we are told. “He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say

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useless things that seldom if ever improve their lives. Their words make them sad. Why can’t they embrace each other” (84).

13 Judge’s gratefulness for silence is offset by his understanding that the human act of communication for telling the truth can also be a disturbing emotional weapon. The neighbours who come to listen to Martha are often so disturbed by her stories that her husband has to often drive them home. Unlike Judge, who cannot speak, Martha is transformed in the story into a symbol of the artist who is compelled to speak. It is as if this revelation of truth in the folk tale is both compulsive and harmful: the sheer power of Keegan’s work comes not from the celebration of the artist’s revelation of truth, but from the fact that there is a compulsion to uncover the truth, whatever the cost. In such moments, the power of story can be crushing or liberating, and the ending of the story emphasizes this dual aspect of story-telling. When the neighbours come in and ask Martha for a story, she tells them the story of her marriage and the conception of her daughter by the salesman, effectively repeating the story that we have just read. But on the second telling, the story is told publicly; Martha’s story is transformed from a private, secret affair into public knowledge. Once the truth has been admitted there seems no need to maintain superficial appearances. Deegan admits to himself he has always known about the girl and he stops going to mass, because there is no sense in keeping up the pretence.

14 “The Forester’s Daughter” demonstrates that once a story becomes the possession of the public, fiction ceases to be simple fiction and attains the quality of truth. The final scenes in the story are of the “simpleton” burning down a model of the family house that he has been building, which in turn set fire to the actual family home. This chilling image of an entire facade going up in flames signifies the devastatingly, unstoppable power of revelation. It also, perhaps, can be read as a metaphor for cultural upheaval in modern Ireland. Although the story is set in the seventies, it acts as a premonition for the challenges of the Celtic Tiger; when one narrative replaces another, what is put in its place? As the house burns, the “simpleton’s” final chilling lines of “who cares, who cares?” might be read as an expression of concern for what happens when an entire society collapses once its facades have been torn down at the same time, as the necessity of unburdening oneself from the past is indicated by Martha’s public revelation.

15 At the core of the image of destruction in “The Forester’s Daughter” is a crisis of belief, a crisis which is more apparent in the title story, “Walk the Blue Fields.” In Declan Kiberd’s terms, the difference between the short story and folktale is one between credibility and incredibility; a distinction which Keegan exploits by using the conventions of the story within the story, or incredible folk tale within the credibility of the short story form. The oral tradition in Keegan’s work reminds the reader of an important, lost cultural practice; it is also part of the war against time and of the unknowability of total reality. “Walk the Blue Fields” exploits the incredibility of the folk tale by testing both the contemporary reader’s willingness to believe, and by extension, the extent to which story-telling can maintain social power. In this story, a Celtic Tiger fable about the limits of conviction in a society which has lost trust in its religious identity, the central character is a priest who not only struggles with his faith after an unknown affair with the bride, but who has himself lost the faith of the community. “Walk the Blue Fields” must surely rank as one the most accurate portrayals of an Irish wedding in Irish writing—all drunkenness, packaged rituals and

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forced jokes—while also displaying the sharp ear Keegan has for the vibrant joviality of modern Irish life. In a brilliantly ironic utilization of Frank O’Connor’s definition of the short story as “the literature of submerged population groups,” the once all-powerful Irish clergy are now a marginalized faction in the post-Catholic Ireland. The priest himself has broken his vows of celibacy and is secretly in love with the bride whose wedding he has officiated at. “Walk the Blue Fields” depicts an emotionally incapacitated society which has retained the superficial trappings of ritual but none of the faith that once underpinned it. As in “The Forester’s Daughter,” everyone knows the truth, but none will speak it directly: “we all know the white cloth is aisy stained” remarks one of the wedding guests snidely to the priest (46). As in McGahern, ritual without belief becomes a kind of cultural entrapment through which the individual perishes. Yet, the need for faith is not completely abandoned: the community, which disparages Catholicism, has opened its disenchanted heart instead to a Chinese healer who lives in a caravan on the outskirts of the town, and who has replaced the priest as the village mystic.

16 Like the town people who are only superficially Catholic, the priest is haunted by the absence of God. To overcome his crisis of faith brought about by the memory of his love affair, the priest too goes to visit the Chinaman, who is reputed to have the power to cure ills. The final extraordinary scenes of the story are of the priest being massaged by the Chinaman until he purges the priest of his guilt, kneading him until the name of the bride he has lost comes flying out of his mouth in a moment of inexplicably strange therapy. These moments, which transform the story from a commonplace observation on the emotional repressions of small-town Catholic secrecy into a wondrous folk tale of magic healing, suggest perhaps that a more fuller, and irrational, existence may be found beyond the limitations of institutionalized religion. Yet in “Walk the Blue Fields,” the incredible folk-tale elements of the story are momentarily overturned by a Joycean petty economic exchange. While the priest pays the Chinese healer with the money he has earned for the wedding—perhaps ambiguously hinting at some sort of personal redemption, perhaps not—the grubby psychology of the priest is exposed. As he walks home, his final, bland epiphany that “God is nature” surely delineates the limits of his spiritual horizon. And yet, there is perhaps some offering of hope here: in speaking her name, the priest has, as if in confession, purged himself of guilt. Like Martha in “The Forester’s Daughter,” speech alone is curative. Remembering his affair he “feels no shame,” signalling perhaps that the communion of natural world and religious devotion may find some as yet undefined, but unashamed, accommodation (58).

17 The final story of the collection, “Night of the Quicken Trees,” is most explicitly written as a folk tale full of wondrous events, stretching the boundaries of credibility beyond any other story in the collection. Opening with a quotation from an Irish fairy tale, “Night of the Quicken Trees” is self-consciously a contemporary folk tale, incorporating a large variety of folk superstitions, and opens in the style of a seanchaí’s recitation. The story seamlessly combines many of Keegan’s Celticist and contemporary motifs: premonitions and dreams, fertility, immersion in natural world, folkloric phrasing, fortune tellers, sexual relationships, priests, eccentricity, loneliness, and secret or hidden histories. The story is of a superstitious post-menopausal woman, Margaret Flusk, who moves into the house of her dead cousin, a priest, who had impregnated her years ago under a magical quicken (rowan) tree. She destroys his furniture, performs a superstitious ritual of nightly urination on the grass outside the house and, after finding herself suddenly fertile again, subsequently embarks on an amorous adventure

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with the lonely next door neighbour bachelor named Stack, who sleeps with his pet goat Josephine. Josephine, like other animals in Keegan’s stories, has her own narrative. Margaret herself is a kind of healer: the townspeople go to her for traditional remedies (such as putting the hind legs of a frog in the mouth to cure a toothache). One night, after a dream, Margaret breaks down the walls between their houses with a sledge hammer and after becoming pregnant by Stack, leaves him to begin a new life on the Aran Islands with her son.

18 At the core of this story, like so many of the stories in Walk the Blue Fields, is a question of gender confrontation. The re-awakening of Margaret’s fertility is, of course, a symbol of rebirth that suggests the resurgence of a powerful femininity submerged under the patriarchy of twentieth-century Clericalism on the one hand and patrilineal land ownership on the other. As with “The Long and Painful Death,” there is an opportunity here to be freed from the burdens of history and to be revitalized. Margaret stands as an irrepressible image of feminine resurgence. But this resurgence does not find its home on the mainland, but in the margins, on an island. That these islands are the Aran Islands is significant: for so long in Irish culture, the Aran Islands had been the spiritual home of an authentic Gaelic culture, and were particularly fetishized by the revivalists seeking Gaelic pre-Christian primitivism at the turn of the twentieth century. Like so many of Keegan’s characters, Margaret ultimately departs. If “Walk the Blue Fields” holds out the possibility of communion, then “Night of the Quicken Trees” is a little more ambivalent. Heading for Aran with her son in a rowing boat, while Stack stays on the mainland, is perhaps the most obvious pointer in that direction. And “Night of the Quicken Trees” ends not with the embrace of Margaret’s journey to Aran, but with Stack reminding himself to buy a bag of cement for the broken wall and vowing never to go near a woman again.

19 Like so many of the characters in Walk the Blue Fields, Stack does not have the imaginative capacity to think beyond his immediacy and ultimately, perhaps, the return to an elemental world in Margaret’s departure for the Aran Islands suggests that those tattered remnants of half-alive Gaelic Irish culture offer only a consolatory imaginative space. Yet just as these modes of narration—the folk tale and the short story—are not in competition with each other, so too are the mythical and the material conjoined as the sum total of existential possibility. For this Walk the Blue Fields is a remarkably balanced piece of work, which holds the idea of transition from one state to another, the balance between opportunity and loss. Stack, we are told, always knew that Margaret would leave, but “he couldn’t judge her, not even when she had taken his son’s hand and rowed away with strangers. They were, after all, divided by nothing but a strip of deep salt water which he could easily cross” (180). For his part, in the metaphor of his preparations for the onset of winter, Stack recognizes that the loss of his son to this strange woman brings to his mind eventual death, and the death of all his kind. In an echo of “The Long and Painful Death,” Stack reflects that his own death would be a long way off: “winter was coming …although he was no longer young his near future was a certainty” (180).

20 The promise that is held open for Stack is to make a transition should he wish to; unlike many of her naturalist predecessors, choice for Keegan is always there, even though the cost may be great and Stack resolves never to go near a woman like Margaret again. That death hovers around the edges of the final story is significant, because even though his death is not imminent, the image suggests that those who fail to make

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necessary transitions—to cross the water—will eventually stagnate and perish. But even the choice has its limitations: Margaret too is condemned to reside in a world of the almost-dead. The Aran Islands, the ideal of cultural purity and Gaelic authenticity beloved of the Revivalists has long since ceased to be a mythical space radically alternate to modern materiality and is instead a ready-to-hand, reified image of the Irish tourist trail. Margaret’s journey towards Aran is a journey towards a derisory, near-exhausted ideal.

21 For the use of the oral folktale in this way, Keegan is a significant contemporary Irish short story writer because nothing, perhaps, encapsulates the gaudiness of the Celtic Tiger years better than the monetization of traditional Irish culture. Nonetheless, Keegan’s reinvigoration of the short story with aspects of the folk tale as a contemporary eccentricity, offers a mode of story-telling which is freed from the naturalist limitations of social commentary. As a folk story of Ireland in the early twenty-first century, “Night of the Quicken Trees” carries tremendous cultural resonance, because the wondrous is absorbed into the naturalist tradition as a cultural peculiarity, and its once-imagined spiritual power potentially disentitled. And there is tremendous power in these stories: the extraordinary challenge that Keegan makes in Walk the Blue Fields is that those who become prisoners of materiality—of the past, of the land, of society, even, perhaps, of an ideal, such as Brady in “Dark Horses,” the father in “The Parting Gift,” or Deegan in “Walk the Blue Fields”—will stagnate and ultimately die a long and painful death. And yet, it is impossible not to look at Margaret’s departure for the Aran Islands out of the corner of the eye: the final image in “Night of the Quicken Trees,” of Margaret and Stack departing each other and moving towards realms of the half-living, can be thought of in JM Synge’s terms as an intimation of the sharpening of existence in the state before death, a variation of life through which art attains its value as eccentricity, rather than the antics of the freak. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern IrelandA History of the Irish Short StoryWalk The Blue FieldsThe Irish Short StoryThe Irish Short Story: A Critical HistoryThe Lonely VoiceThe Short StoryTravels in Wicklow, West Kerry and ConnemaraTrevor, William. The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories.

NOTES

1. Frank O’Connor famously wrote in his study of the short story that “always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society…as a result there is in the short story…an intense awareness of human loneliness” (19).

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article explore la manière dont la tradition orale populaire et le naturalisme littéraire se mêlent aux nouvelles du recueil de Claire Keegan A travers les champs bleus (Walk the Blue Fields— 2007). Il retrace le contexte culturel, littéraire et historique des nouvelles, suggère que le recueil n’est pas une critique sociale directe de la culture irlandaise, mais peut être lu comme une contribution indirecte à la tradition naturaliste irlandaise, notamment dans la manière dont elle perçoit ce moment historique que fut le Tigre celtique. S’appuyant sur l’analyse d’un certain nombre de nouvelles du recueil, l’article suggère que les éléments folkloriques de Walk the Blue Fields sont utilisés comme moyens d’échapper aux limites de la culture matérielle, offrant ainsi à la narration de nouvelles potentialités. Enfin, il montre en quoi la promesse d’une transformation personnelle, culturelle et sociale dote le recueil d’un sens esthétique.

AUTHORS

EOGHAN SMITH Eoghan Smith completed his PhD at NUI Maynooth and currently lectures in English at Carlow College, Carlow, Ireland. He has published on Irish Studies, including articles on John Banville, Samuel Beckett, and Irish modernism and philosophy. He is the author of John Banville: Art and Authenticity, Reimagining Ireland Series (2013).

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“The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here” by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, or the Art of Reconciling Orality and Literacy

Chantal Dessaint-Payard

1 Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (born in 1954) is a contemporary Irish short story writer and novelist whose work, in spite of its often ironical portrayal of modern life, shows a desire to reconcile tradition and modernity. Some of her short stories alternate narratives situated in the present with tales taken from the oral tradition, as is the case with “The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here,” published in 2003.1 The story portrays a woman, Polly, on her journey back to Ireland after a thirty-year period of exile; Polly had left the country after her mother turned her out of the house on discovering that she was pregnant by a young fisherman who drowned in tragic circumstances. Polly now lives in Denmark where she works as a script writer for Danish television, and she hopes that this journey back home will give her the opportunity to renew the dialogue with her mother and to become “whole again” by telling her the story of her life. But the dialogue between mother and daughter turns out to be very frustrating, as the former is engrossed in her TV programme and has obviously become deaf. However, she unwittingly gives some sign of recognition to Polly by reciting an old tale that finds its way back into her memory and whose end she pretends to have forgotten. It is obvious, as is indicated by the choice of the title, that this story bears many common points with Polly’s own tragedy. It is indeed after the latter manages to find the rest of the tale in a book that she is able to tell her own tale, not to her mother, but to the mother of her former lover, thus achieving what Paul Ricœur defines as “narrative configuration.” What this short story brilliantly shows is how Éilís Ní Dhuibhne performs a reconciliation of orality and literacy, while emphasizing the central role played by language, memory and a painterly aesthetics in a process of re-creation essential to Polly’s quest for identity.

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Orality and Identity

2 The opening page of the story underlines how important it is for Polly to tell her story to her mother, as she badly needs to recover a sense of identity that has been shattered by the latter’s rejection: She has read somewhere that in everyone’s life are seven devils, and only when you meet them and overcome your fear of them can you find your guardian angel. […] Her mother. That is one of her devils, the one she is going to meet and talk to, regale with the story of her life, Polly’s version. Until Polly tells this story to her mother she will be unfree, ununited, unwhole. (140)

3 It is not only with her mother that she has a score to settle, but also with the whole community of the valley from which she has been severed for thirty years: “There is unfinished business between herself and her mother, between herself and this valley, and time is running out” (140). So she expects the confrontation with her mother and her native country to restore both a sense of parental and social recognition, a sense of belonging to herself and to a whole social network, as her impression of being “unfree, ununited, unwhole” is also the consequence of her exile from Ireland.

4 However, Polly’s quest proves very disappointing as far as her desire of recognition by her mother is concerned: on entering her house and seeing the latter engrossed in her TV programme, Polly realizes her attempts to capture her attention are vain, because her mother has become completely deaf: “She is deaf. Suddenly Polly realizes this. She is deaf and apparently her sight is poor also: thick glasses occlude her eyes” (150-151). Mother and daughter even fail to establish satisfactory physical contact since, instead of giving Polly a warm embrace, her mother merely shakes hands with her. The mother’s bad eyesight, which prevents her from even lip-reading, indicates how fruitless Polly’s efforts will be. Even when the mother does understand what Polly says, her answers are irrelevant: when Polly describes her life in Copenhagen and how she likes to buy flatfish from the fishermen on the quay at Dragor, her mother interrupts her, saying: “They don’t have the Euro in Denmark […] They have more sense I suppose” (159).2 This inept remark is perhaps an attempt on the mother’s part to avoid a tricky subject, as Polly’s former boyfriend, Paddy, was himself a fisherman. But when later on Polly broaches the subject of her child, who is now grown-up, the mother’s reply is even more irrelevant as she concentrates on food concerns: “I have a child,” [Polly] says. Her mother cocks her head and smiles uncomprehendingly. Her ability to lip-read is most erratic. “He’s Paddy’s child,” Polly continues. “Paddy Mullins, the boy who drowned. Do you remember?” “Would you like a cup of tea?” asks her mother. It is the first time she has offered Polly any refreshment. She gets up and walks across the kitchen to the electric fire. “I was in love with Paddy Mullins,” Polly says. Her mother smiles and says, “I was thinking of baking an apple tart. I still have apples in the garden. It’s the only apple tree in this parish.” (162)3

5 The reader is left to wonder whether the unexpected allusion to the apple tart contains a deliberate disparaging message, as the word “tart” could be a way for the mother to qualify Polly’s behaviour. The implicit biblical connotation present with the reference to the apple tree may in this respect account for the mother’s rigid behaviour and her incapacity to hear Polly’s speech.

6 However, the mother gives Polly an important clue that may indicate that she has a guilty conscience for not having shown more sympathy to Polly when the latter

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discovered her pregnancy. The clue consists in a tale that Polly catches her mother reciting on her second visit. The narrative involves two lovers tragically separated by the girl’s parents who object to her marrying a young man from a lower social class than her, a situation that clearly echoes Polly’s story. The girl’s parents manage to draw their daughter away and the young man dies of grief. One night, the young woman, who hasn’t been told about this death, hears someone knocking at the door. It is William, on a horse, who takes her away on a blissful ride: “It was a bright night, the moon was shining, and she was as happy as could be” (156). The tale, which is transcribed in italics in the short story, is interrupted at this point when the mother realizes Polly’s presence behind her. Although Polly wants to know more about it, she claims to have forgotten how the story ends, saying that these stories are just “buried in [her] head somewhere and when [she] told one the others came back, one after the other” (157). Yet the fact that her subconscious should have chosen this story among others and that she should stop it when the girl experiences a moment of bliss before learning about her lover’s tragic fate, indicate that she must feel remorseful and guilty, even if she would never admit it. Telling this story, even if unwittingly, is thus a form of implicit recognition of her daughter’s grief.

7 Polly is slightly luckier concerning her desire of recognition by the community, as she will eventually manage to tell her story to Paddy’s mother, Muriel. The latter appears as a substitute figure not only for Polly’s mother but also for the whole community. She is the necessary audience whose presence helps to shape and validate Polly’s story at last, the one who enables Polly to assume the status of storyteller: “So now [Muriel] listens intently, her whole body still, […] and the story is shaped by her listening as much as by Polly’s telling” (166).

8 Even if Muriel used to be considered as an outsider on her arrival in the village, as she couldn’t speak Irish and came from a working-class Dublin suburb (155),4 she can now be said to be a true member of the community since she masters the Irish language: “Of course I speak Irish. […] I’ve been here for fifty years. I’d have been out of the loop altogether if I hadn’t learnt it, wouldn’t I?” (165). The other reason why Muriel has now become a rightful representative of the community is that she’s an accomplished storyteller herself. When she tells Polly her version of Paddy’s death and explains that he’s likely to have been pushed overboard after a quarrel with the son of the boat’s owner, her tale is polished by years of retelling: She tells the story calmly, pausing occasionally for dramatic effect or to let a shocking point sink in. It is a story she has told before, many times, in spite of her protestations that it is confidential, a secret. […] The story is polished. […] Paddy has been transmogrified into a hero: a brave, strongly-drawn character in a story that she has half-remembered, half-invented. (165-166)

9 Even if her version of the story contradicts the official version that circulates among the village people—and which she describes as “a sham” or “fiction” (165)5—it doesn’t mean that her narrative endangers her status within the community or endows her with an antagonistic dimension. On the contrary, her story fulfils one of the traditional functions of tales that consists in renegotiating the values of the community, as Angela Bourke underlines: “Every oral performance represents an interplay between communal, or received, values and the will of the individual, so that ‘communal’ values are constantly being renegotiated” (1195).

10 By the same token, Polly’s version represents no threat to the community; her story will also operate a renegotiation of values and contribute to changing and enriching

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the community’s perspective of the past. The village people are in this respect by no means opposed to her presence in the valley after thirty years of exile. They don’t see her as a stranger: the ones she meets in the shops nod to her and chat “to her about old times.” Although no mention is made of Paddy, nobody seems surprised to learn that Polly has a grown-up son now (162). This reluctance to name Paddy and acknowledge him as the father of the child —which may be put down to the embarrassment surrounding the circumstances of his death or to a lingering taboo attached to single mothers—is rather to be considered as a sign of the inhabitants’ tactfulness and desire to preserve Polly’s intimacy. They had already manifested a similar reserve when Polly and Paddy were two teenagers in love. At that time, in reaction to Polly’s mother’s snobbish attitude to them, they had protected the two lovers by not telling Polly’s parents what was going on, as if all the village members had been conniving silent agents defending Polly’s cause: “All normal adults would protect Polly and Paddy, and leave her parents, who were not popular, in the dark” (148).

11 That she should now be able to involve them as actors in her own story and make herself heard by them indirectly through Muriel, marks a definite step in her quest for identity. Now at last can she feel “whole” again since, by choosing and selecting which elements she wants to keep or exclude in her own version, she accomplishes an act of self-assertion: So Polly tells her story of Paddy, and for her it is a fresh story […]. Polly has to decide […] where to start. The bus, the pier, the park? School? […] She decides, or memory decides, or Muriel, or the pressures of the moment, […] the pressure to create, what to leave in, what to exclude. (166)

12 As the last sentence suggests, memory and creativity play a key role in that process of self-assertion. As such, the passage illustrates exactly Paul Ricœur’s definition of the narrative configuration in La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli where he argues that the narrative act is inseparable from the constitution of identity because it necessarily contains an ideologization of memory: On a deepest level, […] it is through the narrative function that memory is integrated into the constitution of identity. The ideologisation of memory is made possible thanks to the resources of variation offered by the process of narrative configuration. […] More precisely, it is the selective function of the narrative that fosters manipulations by offering them the opportunity and the means of a shrewd strategy that partakes at once as much of a forgetting strategy as of a recollection strategy. (103)6

13 Polly’s oral performance can be said to mark her legitimate reintegration into an Irish community where storytelling is considered as an essential social skill. What legitimizes her status as a storyteller in the scene with Muriel is the fact that after having listened to the latter’s story, where she is both a heroine and a narratee, she is now entitled to become a narrator: in this way she occupies the three “narrative positions” distinguished by François Lyotard in La Condition postmoderne where he argues that the right to occupy the position of narrator in traditional societies is founded on the fact of having occupied the first two positions of narratee and hero in previous performances of the tale (40).7 Polly is thus able to show the three necessary skills that rule the relationships between the individuals of a community: the capacity to listen, to tell, and to act—which François Lyotard calls “a triple competence.”8

14 Even if Polly’s tale is not so polished as Muriel’s (166), her legitimate right to hold the position of storyteller and to find a place within an oral tradition is also legitimized by

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the embedding inherent to the short story: by inserting extracts from the German legend and giving its title to the story, the author implicitly establishes a link between the two narratives. This parallel contributes to intensifying Polly’s tragedy while endowing it with an ancestral dimension. The link thus established between past and present also serves to conjure up an implicit audience and human network that goes beyond the mere dyad composed of Polly and Muriel. As Jacqueline Fulmer remarks: “Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, however, by reinstating the person-to-person folkloric basis for legitimacy in the rhetoric of their fiction, re-establish human continuity among the past, present, and future” (173). The reverberation created between the two narratives is a way to assert this legitimacy and so to validate Polly’s position as a storyteller; it also reinforces the impact of her tale by putting it on the same level as the German legend.

15 As such, the embedding endows Polly’s story with the magical dimension common to oral tales: when Polly conjures up Paddy’s character, she does it with such forcefulness that for a moment Paddy seems to be alive again (166), just as the girl in the German legend had managed, during her blissful ride under the moonlight, to give her dead lover a handkerchief that is later found in Williams’s grave when it is reopened. Polly shows that she too can transgress the borderline between life and death. She too can make the two worlds overlap, just as, on a metatextual level, the oral and written versions of the tale are made to overlap and complete each other.

The Language Issue and the Return to Orality

16 Another interesting strategy used by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne in order to reassert the power of the spoken word in this story is to emphasize the importance of language. The author underlines its fundamental ambivalent nature, since speech—as well as its counterpart: silence—and the tongue chosen, can be either precious tools of communication or dangerous weapons of exclusion. Polly’s mother’s language partakes of this ambivalence, as it can be either mesmerising or abusive. It is mesmerising like the flow of a river when she’s heard telling the German legend: “Polly stands just inside the door and listens. It takes her a while to get accustomed to the flow of words, which seem to pour out of her mother’s voice in a stream, not monotonous but unbroken, fluent as a river” (156, my emphasis).

17 But it is also horribly aggressive when Polly’s mother discovers that the latter is pregnant and resorts to a mixture of English and Irish, “a macaronic stream of abusive language,” in order to pour out her fury (160). No wonder Polly, when she was younger, used words as a shield to protect herself from her mother, and considered silence as the utmost form of communication between herself and Paddy: […] the nature of her relationship with Paddy had become, literally, unspeakable. Polly could not describe it in any words she knew, in any language, and her connection with her mother was, it seemed to her, only by means of words, the formulae Polly selected from her rich store of clichés to dish out, sparingly, to keep her mother at bay. (152-153)

18 Silence, which is synonymous with complicity in her relationship with Paddy, is also marked by ambivalence, since when Polly meets her mother again after thirty years, the silence that settles during their fruitless dialogue symbolizes the gap that separates mother and daughter.

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19 What is true of language and silence is also true of tongues. Indeed the short story underlines how English and Irish are constantly pitted against each other, and can be used either as tools of integration or of exclusion. This is why, when Polly was younger, she was torn by a sort of double bind or double allegiance: on the one hand being faithful to her mother’s exclusive passion for the Irish language9 and, on the other hand, being accepted by her schoolmates for whom English was “trendy, the language of pop singers and films, the universal language of teenagers” (142). Persisting with Irish condemned young people to be part of the “most prim or (…) the most excluded” and to be called an “Ireeshian” by the pupils who despised swots, a category in which Polly herself was put because of her good school results and her mother’s snobbishness. Irish, the mother tongue, is thus both a tool of integration (as is shown with Muriel’s example) and a tool of exclusion for the younger generation since Polly is rejected by her schoolmates on account of her proficiency in Irish, even if she is careful to speak English on the bus with them.

20 However, the two languages are no longer set apart when Polly’s mother discovers that the latter is pregnant: her fury is so intense on that occasion that she resorts to both English and Irish, thus performing a kind of double betrayal: a psychological one that consists in letting her daughter down, and a linguistic one as she no longer confides in the Irish language alone to express her anger: Home, adoption, hiding, were words which occurred, in a medley of Irish and English, a macaronic stream of abusive language which had never emanated from Polly’s mother before. It seemed that one language did not contain enough invective to express the full depth and range of her anger. (160)

21 It sounds as if Polly’s mother is no longer able to master the languages she uses but is suddenly overtaken and controlled by them, as if those tongues had an autonomous existence and meant to punish her for her ruthlessness and her narrow-mindedness. She who uses oral language so badly, either by keeping silent when she should have spoken,10 or by resorting to verbal abuse, finds herself years later condemned to deafness and reduced to deciphering subtitles on the TV screen, thus becoming ironically dependent on the written word. What is more, as if to compensate for her betrayal of orality, oral tales seem to have also colonized her brain against her will: when Polly catches her reciting William’s story, her mother explains: “I used to hear those old things when I was a child and I thought I’d forgotten them […] They were buried in my head somewhere and when I told one the others came back, one after the other. Funny, isn’t it? […] Usually I just watch the television. Most things are subtitled.” (157)

22 Thus, both the written word (with these subtitles) and the oral word (with these tales that invade her brain) seem to be performing a form of retribution in order to avenge Polly’s ill-treatment, as if they had an existence of their own and chose to take possession of human minds whenever they please. This is what Polly concludes on discovering in a book the rest of the story told by her mother: The story is in a collection of German ballads, which [Polly] finds in one of the bedrooms. So how did her mother learn that? Had she read the book, or were the stories flying around in the air like migratory birds, landing wherever they found suitable weather conditions, a good supply of food? (163)11

23 In fact, tales appear to have the same characteristics as repressed memories: they appear unbidden, the reason being that, like repressed memories, they speak the

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language of the unconscious. As Bruno Bettelheim underlines in The Uses of Enchantment: There is general agreement that myths and fairy tales speak to us in the language of symbols representing unconscious content. Their appeal is simultaneously to our conscious and unconscious mind, to all three of its aspects—id, ego, and superego— and to our need for ego-ideals as well. This makes it very effective; and in the tales’ content, inner psychological phenomena are given body in symbolic form. (36)

24 And so, because Polly’s mother has become deaf to the language of her subconscious, it is up to tales to relay her feeling of guilt by taking hold of her psyche. Indeed, it is not a coincidence if her memory is particularly haunted by William’s tale as a token of her unavowed remorse at having rejected her daughter and provoked her misery; it is also significant that the tale should be interrupted at a climactic point, just before the girl discovers the ghastly truth about her dead lover, as if Polly’s mother unconsciously wanted to prolong the blissful moment shared by the two lovers so as to atone for her own relentless behaviour regarding Polly’s relationship with Paddy.

Orality, Literacy and Iconicity

25 What Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s short story beautifully underlines is how the oral word and the written word are not to be set apart and antagonised, but on the contrary how their complementary action presides over the creative process. Indeed, it is after Polly manages to find the rest of her mother’s tale in a written form that she can take hold of the narrative of her life and find a voice of her own. She who had chosen to devote herself to the written word by becoming a scriptwriter can now become a storyteller and reconcile her present with her past, as well as recover repressed memories. One may indeed presume that her desire to become a scriptwriter had been unconsciously triggered by the feeling of exclusion she experienced when, still a teenager, she had been forbidden by her mother to take part in the shooting of a film in which all the other village people participated. That feeling had been so painful that she had completely erased it from her memory, until back on Irish soil again, it violently returns to her mind: A film set, that is what it is, Polly remembers suddenly, a chink opening like a trapdoor in her head. There it is, something she has not thought about in thirty years: the commotion when the film had been made in the valley […]. The film had been a disappointing experience, an experience of total exclusion for Polly. No wonder she had forgotten all about it. (141)

26 Even if Polly doesn’t seem to realize that this repressed memory may have influenced her career and her decision to become a scriptwriter, there is no doubt that such a resurgence participates in “cleansing” her memory so as to restore its full scope and capacity for creation. For memory is inseparable from the creative process, as is underlined by the narrative voice when Polly starts telling her story: “Polly has to decide. […] She decides, or memory decides, or […] the pressure to create, what to leave in, what to exclude” (166). With all its voids and fullness, memory thus appears as an essential component that presides over the creative process, so that Polly’s tale is at the same time “half-remembered, half-invented” like Muriel’s (166). This creative process is so powerful that it enables Polly to conjure up the figure of Paddy for a brief moment, and to bring him back from the world of the Dead: “They sit in silence. They let the story settle. And for minutes it is as if he is here again, on this earth. Alive,

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seventeen. […] He is sitting on the bus, silently staring out of the window, motionless as a seagull on a rock, lost in a boy’s dream” (166). What is at work here is Ní Dhuibhne’s painterly aesthetics, as the reader is left to muse over the picture of Paddy’s face, itself described looking out of the window. This painterly aesthetics is all the more appropriate as the functioning of memory itself relies on images: as was underlined by Freud, both dreams and memories use similar plastic form and iconicity (Freud 62). Besides, this painterly aesthetics illustrates the central role played by images in the author’s way of writing; in an interview with Donna Perry, she declares: “I find that [my short stories] gel after I’ve written the first draft: I get ideas about images that tie things together” (255).12

27 We can further argue that it is the very presence of these images that ensures the link between orality and literacy since through these images, the author manages to recreate, with a written—and so visual—medium, the kind of auditory reverberation created by an oral tale. Indeed, the lingering effect produced on the reader’s mind13 by the final image of Paddy looking out of the bus window can be compared to the kind of auditory impact left by a tale performed in front of a live audience. It is a way to recreate in the reader’s mind the kind of solitary rehearsal that accompanies oral verbal arts: “Oral verbal arts need live audiences for their transmission, but the music and metre of songs and the highly patterned shapes of oral stories mean that the solitary individual can also remember, rehearse and contemplate them” (Bourke 1194).

28 The story’s embedding, by making the two narratives echo each other, also contributes to reinforcing that phenomenon of reverberation. And so, even if readers are deprived of Polly’s oral performance because her tale is not transcribed (they have been previously given all the details of Polly’s life by the narrative voice), Paddy’s image produces on them a physical effect that is akin to the one experienced by a live audience listening to a tale; it is a physical reaction also similar to the one experienced by Polly when, on closing the book of German legends, she felt a shiver running through her body, as if the dead hand of William had touched her very forehead (164).

29 If reasserting the iconographic dimension common to both memory and writing is so central to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s art, it is because it is a way for her to address the issue of what she calls “the iconoclastic present”; when asked by Christine St Peter what she meant when she spoke of her work as being an exploration of “the different sides of Ireland” and an attempt “to negotiate the boundaries of the different worlds” (“Why Would Anyone Write in Irish?” 80), the author replies: “By “different sides” I mean the traditional past and the iconoclastic present, the rural and the urban, the oral and the literary, […] and most particularly, the Irish and the English languages as used in Ireland” (68). In this respect, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s artistic approach can be said to be a kind of poetic manifesto insofar as it asserts iconicity as the prevailing link between orality and literacy so as to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity.

30 Polly’s tale precisely illustrates that reconciliation of tradition and modernity. It celebrates more than just her symbolic reintegration into the Irish community; it also marks the end of an era when single mothers like her were ostracized, when the individual was generally entrapped in a social, religious and moral network or what Ní Dhuibhne calls “the social and cultural web that enmeshed everybody” (135). Polly’s oral performance is a way to renegotiate this outdated social web (here represented by her deaf mother) so as to insert her story into a completely different social organisation where the needs of the individual are stated and acknowledged. As such, it

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illustrates the evolution of an Ireland that has learned to open itself to the outside world and is best represented by Muriel’s character. The Ireland that Polly confronts on her return after thirty years of exile is “an Ireland where it’s OK to be Irish” (“Holiday in the Land of Murdered Dreams” 118). It is an Ireland that is outward-looking, as is exemplified by the townspeople’s interest in hearing about Polly’s son (the latter now lives in Australia doing university research on whales): “They want to hear about Australia and the whales. Lots of the local young people do round-the-world trips as a matter of course, in their gap year” (162).

31 So, while acknowledging the evolution of Ireland over a thirty-year span, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne reasserts in this story the power of orality, its capacity both to renegotiate the place of the individual within the community and to provide a powerful reservoir of imagery inscribed in the collective and individual memory. Her painterly aesthetic is a way to renew with that imagery while emphasizing the importance of preserving it from a pervasive visual culture imposed by the media and whose harmful impact is symbolized by Polly’s mother’s dependence on TV subtitles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. 1976. London: Penguin, 1991. Print.

Bourke, Angela. General Introduction to the chapter “Oral Traditions.” Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Cork: Cork UP, 2002. 1191-1197. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Psychopathologie de la vie quotidienne. 1923. Trans. Serge Jankélévitch. Paris: Payot 1967. Print.

Fulmer, Jacqueline. Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Print.

Lyotard, François. La Condition postmoderne. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Print.

Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís. The Dancers Dancing. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1999. Print.

---. “How Lovely the Slopes Are.” The Inland Ice. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1997. 238-258. Print.

---. “Holiday in the Land of Murdered Dreams.” Midwife to the Fairies. Dublin: Attic Press, 2003. 83-119. Print.

---. “The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here.” The Shelter of Neighbours. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2012. 157-188. Print.

---. “The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here.” Phoenix Irish Short Stories 2003. Ed. David Marcus. London: Phoenix, 2003. 134-166. Print.

---. “Why Would Anyone Write in Irish?” ‘Who Needs Irish?’: Reflections on the Importance of the Irish Language Today. Ed. Ciaran Mac Murchaidh. Dublin: Veritas Publications, 2004. 70-82. Print.

Perry, Donna. “Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.” Backtalk. Women Writers Speak Out. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1993. 245-60. Print.

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Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Print.

Ricoeur, Paul. La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Print.

St Peter, Christine. “Negotiating the Boundaries, an Interview with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 32.1 (2006): 68-75. Print.

NOTES

1. This short story was also published in 2012 in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s recent collection The Shelter of Neighbours. 2. In the version of the story published in The Shelter of Neighbours, the description of the fish is even more developed, as if Polly needed to pay tribute to her dead lover’s profession (181). 3. The two last sentences (“I still have apples in the garden. It’s the only apple tree in this parish”) disappear in the second version (Shelter 184), although a previous passage mentions that hardly any trees grow in the valley where Polly lived (“The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here” 148, Shelter 171). 4. Her son Paddy explains to Polly that he was frequently disapproved of on account of his mother. But Polly herself is not devoid of prejudices: when she asked Paddy what kind of clothes his mother wore, he answers: “What is this? Is my mother wanted for some crime? Not speaking Irish?” (155). 5. The reason why the other fishermen kept silent about the true cause of Paddy’s death is that “the fishermen would never inform on one of their own” (165). 6. “Au plan le plus profond, […] c’est à travers la fonction narrative que la mémoire est incorporée à la constitution de l’identité. L’idéologisation de la mémoire est rendue possible par les ressources de variation qu’offre le travail de configuration narrative. […] C’est plus précisément la fonction sélective du récit qui offre à la manipulation l’occasion et les moyens d’une stratégie rusée qui consiste d’emblée en une stratégie de l’oubli autant que de la remémoration.” My translation. 7. “[…] les ‘postes’ narratifs (destinateur, destinataire, héros) sont ainsi distribués que le droit d’en occuper l’un, celui de destinateur, se fonde sur le double fait d’avoir occupé l’autre, celui de destinataire, et d’avoir été, par le nom qu’on porte, déjà raconté par un récit, c’est-à-dire placé en position de référent diégétique d’autres occurrences narratives” (Lyotard 40). 8. “savoir-dire, savoir-entendre, savoir-faire, où se jouent les rapports de la communauté avec elle-même et avec son environnement” (Lyotard 40). 9. Her mother’s family had played an active part in the Irish language movement (136). 10. When Polly told her mother about Paddy’s death, she merely turned back to her embroidery, ignoring her daughter’s grief: “‘It’s a great tragedy for his family,’ her mother then said, pursing her lips and tut-tutting. She turned her attention to the table cloth she was embroidering with pink roses. Polly said nothing, but left the room” (158). 11. This idea is corroborated by another story by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne where the main character is suddenly reminded of an old Scandinavian legend: “More lines from Njal’s Saga visit her mind, spontaneously and unbidden, as is the habit of proverbs and saws, or any of the old scraps of traditional wisdom we have heard and which whirl invisibly in the air around us all the time, choosing their own moment to descend to our consciousness, like angels bearing featherlight gifts of truth” (“How Lovely the Slopes Are” 258). 12. The importance of images is also asserted at the beginning of The Dancers Dancing: “Every picture tells a story. A truism. Half true like all truisms. Half false. The rest of the story is in the mud” (3).

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13. Ezra Pound describes that phenomenon as “phanopoeia,” that is to say a casting of images on the visual imagination.

ABSTRACTS

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (née en 1954) est une romancière et nouvelliste irlandaise contemporaine dont le travail est caractérisé par une grande ironie mais aussi par le désir de réconcilier tradition orale et modernité. La nouvelle “The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here,” publiée en 2003 dans l’anthologie de David Marcus Phoenix Irish Short Stories, illustre la façon dont elle alterne des récits situés dans le présent avec des contes issus de la tradition orale. La nouvelle dépeint le retour en Irlande de Polly, exilée au Danemark pendant trente ans, après que sa mère l’a chassée de la maison en apprenant qu’elle était enceinte d’un jeune pêcheur disparu dans des circonstances tragiques. Polly espère que ce retour au pays lui donnera l’occasion de se sentir de nouveau « entière » en ayant enfin la possibilité de raconter à sa mère le récit de sa vie. Le dialogue entre les deux femmes s’avère très décevant cependant, même si la mère donne involontairement un indice à Polly en récitant un vieux conte surgi inopinément de sa mémoire et dont elle prétend avoir oublié la fin. Polly réussit finalement à trouver le reste du conte dans un livre, une étape nécessaire avant de pouvoir raconter sa propre histoire à la mère de son amant, accomplissant ainsi ce que Paul Ricoeur appelle la « configuration narrative. » Ce que cette nouvelle démontre brillamment est la façon dont Éilís Ní Dhuibhne accomplit ici une réconciliation de l’oral et de l’écrit tout en ayant recours à une esthétique picturale et en soulignant le rôle central de la mémoire dans le processus de création si essentiel à la quête identitaire de Polly.

AUTHORS

CHANTAL DESSAINT-PAYARD Chantal Dessaint-Payard is an English teacher in the French Literature Department in Lille 3, France. In October 2011, she defended a Ph.D thesis entitled “Memory and Writing in the Works of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Nuala O’Faolain” under the supervision of Fabienne Dabrigeon-Garcier. She is a member of the research group CECILLE in Lille 3; her field of research deals with women’s studies and the links between history, memory, and autobiography.

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“Black Flower”: Dichotomy, Absurdity and Beyond

Vanina Jobert-Martini

This was a war that reached epic magnitude, slaughter and counter slaughter, which on paper could be termed Jacobean but in life became a gruesome statistic of death and mutilation so that, as in Hamlet’s Elsinore, ‘carnal, bloody and unnatural acts’ were committed on all sides. Edna O’Brien, Country Girl (237)

1 Edna O’Brien has never been treated kindly by literary critics and journalists, and her writing about Irish political violence was not well received as she points out in her recent Memoir: “To write about the North was to enter troubled waters, wrath and accusation from some, fractured friendships, along with the sneering accusation that I was ‘sleeping with the Provos’” (Country Girl 236). She also recalls an interview with Gerry Adams and what was said about her at the time: “I remembered, too, that having written about him with an openness, for my ‘silly novelletish mentality,’ I would be described in an English newspaper as ‘the Barbara Cartland of long distance republicanism’” (Country Girl 249). Obviously, such a judgment does not apply to the author of Saints and Sinners, a collection of thought-provoking short stories displaying a consummate style and, for some of them, a sense of tragedy. “Black Flower” unmistakably deals with the issue of political murders in Ireland and actually confronts readers with atrocity and absurdity, forcing them to go beyond acquired certainties and political sympathies, to gauge the depth of the human predicament. Like many before her, Edna O’Brien has set herself the task of writing about chaos and horror, of putting language to the test of representing what is beyond words. In doing this, she is well aware of the specificity of her subject: I admired those who had written about the war, especially Hemingway, Orwell and Auden. But this was a different war, the ‘dirty war,’ as it had been named fought openly and in shadows, […] a war where courage and criminality overlapped, a war where ideals were shafted in the all out hurray of victory. (Country Girl 236)

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2 This paper will approach the question of O’Brien’s style in “Black Flower” resorting both to traditional and cognitive stylistics in order to reveal how readers are led to inhabit a fictional world that is bound to change their perception of the real world through a unique aesthetic experience.

3 In “Black Flower,” Edna O’Brien’s style is mimetic of the explosive political context and relies heavily on stark contrasts and oppositions. The surface structure of the short story can be compared to a “soundtrack” oscillating between silence and unbearable loudness. Speech can nevertheless be heard and contributes to the creation of a fictional world in which characters achieve prominence and focalize the reader’s interest. Grice’s cooperative principle (Jeffries and McIntyre 105) is thus activated, and readers make inferences about characters and context, becoming involved in a piece of crime fiction fraught with tragedy.

Silence and Sound

4 If “Black Flower” was adapted for the screen, the soundtrack would include private conversation verging on sweet talk, silence, howling and explosions, thus exposing the spectator’s ear to the widest possible range of decibels and conveying the widest possible range of emotions. Sharp contrasts actually structure the story and form a distinctive feature.

5 The conversation between Shane and Mona runs as a thread through the short story and provides a chronological structure which is distorted by flashbacks. Direct speech (DS), indirect speech (IS) and narrative passages alternate and sometimes create echoes impressing the reader’s inner ear. The story starts in medias res with a brief exchange between the two main characters: “It’s a dump,” Mona said. “‘Tis grand,” Shane said, looking around. (63)

6 DS and the use of the present tense define the time of enunciation and the reporting clauses contain first names, a way of establishing the identity of the characters from the start. This first exchange, in the form of an adjacency pair (Jeffries and McIntyre 102) is in fact based on contrast rather than concord, which attracts the reader’s attention. The conversation is immediately interrupted by a long flashback running over six pages. Bonheim identifies this device as “a modal façade,” whose aim, here again, is to pique the reader’s interest: Stories which open with speech do not necessarily, of course, continue in the same fashion. We have noted the trick of ‘the modal façade’: often the first few words are in quotation marks, after which no dialogue follows for a paragraph or even a page or two. […] The opening words […] often constitute a kind of puzzle; the resolution is left to material in other modes. (110)

7 Returning to the initial conversation is not only delayed but done very slowly: “Now they were in the big dining room, famished and waiting for the owner to come and tell them what she could possibly give them to eat” (68). Readers cannot fail to notice a deictic shift with the adverb “now” placed saliently at the beginning of a paragraph, and the mention of place i.e. the big dining room. The use of the preterit creates continuity between the preceding flashback and the new context, and DS only reappears after a few paragraphs, as if the conversation was resumed. If chronology was restored, the opening exchange would be placed page 70, just before the following

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paragraph: “Looking at the stranded microphone, she said it was lucky they hadn’t come on a dance night, as she was not a dancer. ‘Me neither,’ Shane said” (70). Mona’s words are reported by the narrator, but Shane’s are in DS, like the opening exchange.

8 From then on the story concentrates on the time Shane and Mona spend in quiet conversation over dinner at the restaurant. The owner is sometimes included in the conversation, as she comes and goes to serve the meal. Her words either appear in DS or IS. These constant shifts from DS to IS and vice versa give a sense of fluidity to O’Brien’s prose and tend to associate the narrator with the characters, as if he were a silent participant in the conversation. The verbal exchange is brutally interrupted by Shane’s departure, which represents a major turning point in the story: “Toilet,” he said and reached out and touched her sleeve. She watched him go, something so wounded about him, his clothes clinging to his thin body, his sleeves rolled up as he tugged at the loose door knob. Then peculiarly he ran back and took his jacket off the back of his chair. (73)

9 The narrative comment points out incoherence between the words uttered by the protagonist and his actions and the adverb “peculiarly” raises suspicion: Shane is not going to the toilets. Mona and the owner are therefore left alone in the dining room and the conversation goes on between them, until they go out looking for Shane. The tone and content of the exchange between the two women brutally change: “Wynne shrieked at Mona—A murderer … you brought a murderer under my roof where my grandchildren slept” (75). The change of tone is conveyed through the use of the introductory verb “shriek,” in a text where such realistic comments are few and far between, hence its importance. The time spent in the dining room appears as a parenthesis in Shane’s life, and the conversation with Mona could have opened up on a relationship, had the context been different.

10 The end of the peaceful interval is brought about by a noisy car, and just after Shane has left, dogs start howling, echoing the bleating lambs they had heard when they arrived. The connotations of the cries of the two animals could not be more opposite: sheep symbolize innocence, whereas barks are often associated with ominous unfoldings. At the end of the story, the people in the dining room hear the noise of a car: “The car drove in at hectic speed, lights fully on and then drove off again, with a vengeance” (73). The phrase “with a vengeance” denotes loudness but it also points to the idea of reprisals that has already been alluded to several times in the short story. It suggests that a trap has closed on Shane.

11 As for Shane’s assassination, it seems to be done silently, since no noise reaches the people in the dining room after the car has driven off. Similarly, Shane was not woken up by the warders pounding on his cell door to tell him that his wife had died. The main character himself is finally reduced to silence, and the narrator remarks that “He could not say what he most wanted to say” (75). This sentence echoes the narrator’s comment about the greeting card given by Shane to Mona: “Something about the message seemed unfinished, as if he had wanted to say more (…)” (66).

12 At the end of “Black Flower,” silence prevails even though the police are about to conduct interrogations. The narrator seems to move away from character and incident to consider the matter from a much more general point of view, suggesting a pessimistic stance regarding the future: A brooding quiet filled the entire landscape and the trees drank in the moisture. There would be another death to undo his and still another and another in the long

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grim chain of reprisals. Hard to think that in the valleys murder lurked, as from the meadow came not even a murmur, the lambs in their foetal sleep, innocent of murder. (76)

13 Such an ending can be analyzed along the lines of Sean O’Faolain’s theory and be classified among “the poetic endings whose purpose is to float the narrative into the poetic continuity of place whose image the reader will carry away in his thoughts, unaware of any sense of disjunction” (181). However, in the case of “Black Flower,” the suggestion of continuity is far from satisfying and by underlining it, Edna O’Brien expresses both despair in the face of a situation that has lasted so long that it seems it will never change, and maybe the faint hope that absurdity may not triumph for ever. Such general considerations only come at the very end of the short story, which before that focuses on individual characters who retain the reader’s attention, thus drawing him/her deep into the fictional world.

“Black Flower,” A Story of Character?

14 The title of Edna O’Brien’s latest collection of short stories Saints and Sinners raises very specific expectations. As a matter of fact, readers tend to believe that both saints and sinners are human beings. According to Emmott, fictional characters are regarded as counterparts of human beings in the real world: “In reading narrative texts, we imagine worlds inhabited by individuals who can be assumed to behave, physically and psychologically, in ways which reflect our real-life experience of being situated in the real world” (58). We thus expect the stories of Saints and Sinners to focus primarily on characters and on their deeds, either good or bad. Knowing that Edna O’Brien rejected the strict Catholic education she received, we might suspect that the opposition between saints and sinners is not to be taken at face value, and that the author has probably revisited such a simplistic binary vision of the world. If the title “Black Flower” points to an element of the setting (or “frame” to use the terminology of cognitive stylistics), characters are nevertheless foregrounded and are treated as figures evolving against a (back)ground. Stockwell explains: In most narrative fiction, for example, characters are figures against the ground of their settings. They have boundaries summarized by their proper names (‘Beowulf,’ ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Winnie the Pooh,’) and they carry along or evolve psychological and personal traits. Stylistically, they are likely to be the focus of the narrative, moving through different settings and are likely to be associated with certain verbs of willful action by contrast with the attributive or existential sorts of verbs used descriptively for the background. (15)

15 In the already quoted adjacency pair, the characters’ names represent individual wholes, whereas at this stage in the story we do not know where they are or what they refer to with the expressions “It’s” and “Tis.” The background is, for the moment, completely shapeless, which is one of the defining features of the ground as opposed to the figure. At the same time, as the characters are foregrounded, an opposition between them is made salient. The first names are clearly gendered, and the two characters express opposite opinions about the place they are discovering at the same time as the reader. Their subjective appreciations could not be more different. As a result, subjectivity is also foregrounded as one of the main themes of the story. Other elements of characterization are progressively added in a long explanatory flashback and contribute to the building up of the opposition. The reader learns about the

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circumstances of their meeting: “She had volunteered to give painting lessons in the prison in the Midlands where he was serving a long sentence” (64-65).

16 Theirs is a chance meeting and although they happen to spend some time in the same place, they do not belong to the same world. Mona goes to the prison of her own free will whereas Shane is locked up there. Nothing is said about Mona’s motivations, but readers spontaneously infer that she probably gives painting lessons to prisoners out of pure generosity and kindness of the heart. Information about Shane is not given all at once. Provided readers have a few notions about Ireland’s politics, they are able to identify Shane as a member of the IRA which is notorious for its violent and murderous actions: “He said once to her and only once that she herself could be the judge of his actions. He had fought for what he believed in, which was for his country to be one, one land, one people and not have a shank of it cut off” (69). The narrator refrains from passing explicit judgment on his characters, but the reader forms a positive judgment of Mona and a much more ambiguous one about Shane.

17 In spite of the initial opposition, Mona and Shane are presented as a couple travelling together as early as line 3, and this is grammaticalised by the use of the third person pronoun “they,” often used to refer to them both. They share an interest in painting and a personal relationship develops between them, to the point of becoming one of the structural elements of the story. Mutual appreciation is hinted at several times: They had not shook hands when they met on the steps of the hotel, but she knew by his way of looking at her that he was glad to see her and remarked on her hair being much nicer, loose like that. (67) “Your eyes are the colour of tobacco,” Mona said. “Is that good or bad?,” he asked. “It’s good,” she said. (71) “I’d be worried for others,” he said, and looked at her with such concern, such tenderness, across the reaches of the wide table, the flames from the stout candle guttering in the breeze from the open window, half his face in shadow. (72) Mona wanted to kneel by him and shut his eyes, but she was too afraid to stir. […] He looked so desolate and so unbefriended, the breath just ebbing away, and the instant it left him, she let out a terrible cry. (75)

18 Yet, the characters of Mona and Shane do not have the same status in the story. As is the case in the last example, Mona’s point of view tends to prevail. Readers do not seem to learn more about Shane than she actually knows, and they never have direct access to Shane’s thoughts, unless he voices them. Readers come to know about his feelings for her through her own impressions and deductions. Mona is not the narrator of the story but the narrator seems to adopt her restricted perspective on the events. She is the centre of perception and reflector throughout and she focuses on Shane, who thus becomes the main object of interest for the reader, or in other words, the most prominent character in the story. This mode of presentation is original in so far as it runs against the general trend in which the focaliser is usually the main character in a story, with a few well-known exceptions like The Great Gatsby.

19 Shane first attracts the reader’s attention because he is surrounded by mystery. Neither Mona nor the reader ever learns what he was convicted of, but murder is a likely hypothesis. Grice’s cooperative principle is flouted by the narrator who does not abide by the maxim of quantity namely “make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.” The amount of background

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information is reduced to a minimum: “It was a hair-raising capture that attracted the attention of the nation and confirmed him as a dangerous outlaw” (66).

20 As if the authorities themselves feared for his life, his liberation is “kept a secret to avoid a media jamboree” (66). Bearing a resemblance with the narrator, Shane is characterized as a man of few words who tends to keep to himself and is happy to let others talk. The narrator accounts for his silence by mentioning that the years inside have made him taciturn, and the reader is also made to understand that he is afraid of reprisals, and tries to hide as best he can. What also makes Shane prominent is that in spite of the brevity of the text, the reader can trace an evolution. Emmott explains: “Flashbacks are interesting because they are a type of context-shifting which can place contexts from two different times adjacent to each other in a text. One consequence of this is that the same person can appear in past and present forms in quick succession” (177). The use of flashbacks gives temporal depth to the story and takes the reader back fifteen years before the time of the initial situation, when Shane was captured and sent to prison: Judging by the newspaper photographs that had been taken on the day he was captured, he had changed beyond recognition. He had gone in, young and cavalier, and had come out almost bald, with a thin rust moustache that somehow looked as if it were spliced to his upper lip. (69)

21 This passage is echoed later on in the story, as if to emphasize the notion of change: “How different the two hims, the young invincible buccaneer and the man sitting opposite her, ageing and dredged, his deeds locked inside him” (72). Physical change, however, does not seem to be paralleled by deep psychological change since the desire to fight for his country remains intact as he confesses to Mona. The owner of the restaurant is first attracted to Shane and pronounces him a nice man. However, a few minutes later, she is prompt to adopt the attitude of the group of people standing outside the restaurant around Shane’s corpse. They consider Shane not as a victim, but as a murderer: “The group recoiled, stricken, not only with fear, but with revulsion. The brief spate of pity had turned ugly” (75).

22 Such radical change of opinion leads us to wonder about the validity of moral judgments, about the relevance of notions such as saints and sinners, victims and murderers. Edna O’Brien manages to elicit sympathy for Shane by using the character of Mona as a reflector. Mona’s attraction for Shane is thus communicated to the reader who seems to be invited to suspend his moral judgment or at least to reconsider it, endlessly. It may be tempting to infer some kind of resemblance between Mona and Edna O’Brien insomuch as O’Faolain’s claim still rings true: “In other words, the created personalities will bring the fable alive and personalities will seem projections of the creator’s personality. The truth is that a writer imagines his subject to his own likeness” (208).

“Black Flower”: Crime Fiction or Tragic Tale?

23 Even though Shane can be considered as the most prominent character in the story, the fact that the reader never has access to his thoughts results in a lack of depth. He appears to be locked in a role, that of the political opponent using violent means to fight for his ideas. Such characters are necessarily tightly linked to a specific context. Unlike “Plunder,” the next story in the collection, “Black Flower” is unmistakably set in

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Ireland. The reader is thus invited to establish a relationship between the world of fiction and the extra-linguistic reality it refers to. The reader’s knowledge about Ireland is therefore activated and will help him interpret parts of the story like the exchange between Mona and the governor: As he spoke she recalled the shiver she had felt as the governor told her there were many people who wished Shane dead. “You mean the Brits?” “Them and his own…feuds…feuds… Put it this way, he’ll always be a wanted man,” and he raised his arms to fend off questions. (67)

24 The general context of the short story is that of the Troubles. The narrator does not dwell on the subject, as if it was well known by readers. An Irish or well informed implicit reader is thus targeted, and the reason why no specific date is given in the story may be that the period lasted so long that it came to seem an eternity. “Black Flower,” does not offer any kind of political reflection or analysis, as if Edna O’Brien, notwithstanding the specific local context, was more interested in exploring the more general notion of fate. Shane thus appears as a prototypical character and even if giving him a first name is a sign of individuation, a way of granting him a unique identity, the reader cannot help thinking that there are many more like him and that he stands for all of them, wanted men. While the author remains vague about the general political context, she gives many details about the places Shane and Mona go to, as if the setting was meaningful. The description of the restaurant is uncommon and produces a strange impression: For an hour or more, they had driven, under the prow of a range of mountain, in search of a restaurant that would be quiet but also cheerful, and now they had landed themselves in this big gaunt room that seemingly served as both ballroom and dining room. A microphone on a metal stand took pride of place, and a bit of orange curtain lay crumpled on the bandstand, as if someone had flung it down there in petulance. One end of a long refectory table was covered with a white lace cloth under which there had been put a strip of red crêpe paper, and it was there they would most likely be seated. (63)

25 The place does not correspond to the characters’ expectations and it bears traces of past events, as if the room had not even been tidied up after the last ball. A sense of uneasiness is conveyed by the words “crumpled,” “flung down” and “petulance” since they seem to suggest an atmosphere of tension and conflict. Violence is thus introduced enigmatically at a very early stage in the story. The red colour points in the same direction. By contrast, the description of the immediate surroundings evokes peace, at least until they come to the car park where they discover an ominous sign: “A sign on a post read ‘Danger—High Voltage’, and from a metal box there issued a burping, that every few seconds rose to a growl” (64).

26 Such indications do not actually make sense either at the stage when they occur in the story or later on, and the characters do not seem to interpret them in any way, yet they stand as bad omens, all the more so as several of them point in the same direction and create coherence. The child’s tractor is filled with toy soldiers and the black flower is described at length: In the hallway, a nest of candles glimmered on a high whatnot and a luxurious flowering plant trailed and crept along the floor, amoeba-wise. The petals were a soft velvety black, with tiny green eyes, pinpoints, and there was something both beautiful and sinister about it. (64)

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27 Black Flower sounds like an oxymoron because it is rare and most readers, like Mona, have never seen any. The choice of the verb “creep” likens the plant to an unpleasant animal, which is confirmed by the comparison with amoeba, occurring in rhematic position and therefore attracting the reader’s attention as an essential piece of information. Amoebas are dangerous for human beings since they cause lethal diseases. Within the context of the short story, it is interesting to take etymology into account. Amaoeba originally comes from the Greek word “amoibe” signifying change or alternation. As previously pointed out in this paper, the story is polarized by a series of oppositions and contrasts, starting with the title of the collection and the title of the short story, and including silence and outbursts, youth and maturity, imprisonment and freedom, tenderness and violence, togetherness and isolation, conflicting evaluations of the main character and finally life and death. The black flower thus epitomizes the tensions at work in the story and can be seen as their objective correlative (Abrams 123).

28 The sense of danger and the proximity of death are repeatedly hinted at throughout the story. Mona and Shane take a walk in a graveyard, the place of their first appointment changes at the last minute, and Mona wonders why Shane does not try to be more discreet when he meets her at the station. The phone box where Shane finally dies is described as if incidentally: Holding open one half of the iron gate—she had put a stone to the other half—she saw to one side a public telephone kiosk that looked glaringly forlorn, the floor strewn with litter. The horse chestnut trees were in full bloom, pink and white tassels in a beautiful droop, and in the meadow, lambs bleated ceaselessly. (69)

29 Yet, the attention of the reader is attracted to and then diverted from the phone box and it is later on in the story that it becomes obvious that Shane had also spotted it and that it plays a crucial role in the plot: “‘He went out…he got change for the pay phone’ Jack said and instantly she guessed that he had gone to phone one of his comrades to come for her, as he would have to disappear” (74). After Shane has left the dining room, the dogs start howling and the owner makes the wrong inferences about their behaviour, predicting a storm which never comes instead of guessing that Shane is in trouble when there may still be time to do something. As for Mona, she assumes that Shane might have passed out because he was not used to drinking alcohol. This is clearly a case of dramatic irony since the reader is able to make more adequate inferences than the characters about what is going on outside. The reader is also able to dismiss the conversation between the two women as inadequate and irrelevant.

30 Tragic irony is also present in the story since all the precautions taken by the characters are of no avail; looking for a place where they can spend a quiet evening, they do not escape Shane’s fate. Place and plot are tightly linked in “Black Flower” and they encompass the itinerary of the main character, leading him to his death. Through the flashbacks and the peregrinations of the main characters, the story exemplifies the conceptual metaphor “Life is a Journey” and highlights the last stage (Stockwell 105-109).

31 Sound and silence alternate in “Black Flower,” revealing a world of extreme violence and highlighting the aspiration for peace and quiet. Various modes of speech presentation are intertwined and the conversation between the two protagonists constitutes the underlying structure of the story, which is rendered more complex by explanatory flashbacks. As the fictional world builds up, it becomes more and more

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obvious that Shane is in danger and that fate is about to catch up with him. Edna O’Brien’s style remains transparent throughout but apparent simplicity is deceptive and conceals complete mastery of direct and indirect characterization, construction and rhythm. Figures of speech such as oxymorons and metaphors embark readers on a literary quest for meaning which takes them further than the representation of a specific Irish reality. The horrors of the war are depicted and its absurdity is highlighted but the structure of the story and the powers of speech hold fast. Resilience seems to be the hallmark of characters, narrator and author and its utmost importance is conveyed to the reader by the very form of the tale. The theoretical vantage point adopted in this article is underpinned by the belief, shared by Toolan: “[…] that there is a causal link between the signallings of narrative progression in a story and numberless the reader’s individual first-person experiences of suspense, or acceleration, or secrecy […]” (2).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, Meyer Howard. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Print.

Bonheim, Helmut. The Narrative Modes. London: D.S. Brewer, 1982. Print.

Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension. 1999. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.

Jeffries, Lesley and Dan McIntyre. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

O’Brien, Edna. Saints and Sinners. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Print.

---. Country Girl. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Print.

O’Faolain, Sean. The Short Story. 1948. Cork: The Mercier Press, 1972. Print.

Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics. London, Routledge, 2002. Print.

Toolan, Michael. Narrative Progression in the Short Story. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Print.

ABSTRACTS

La trame narrative de “Black Flower” est constituée par la conversation entre les deux protagonistes qui se retrouvent dans une salle de restaurant au fin fond de la campagne irlandaise. Le déroulement chronologique du récit est cependant perturbé par des analepses et des amorces qui complexifient la structure de la nouvelle. L’omniprésence des paroles, entrecoupées par des silences et des explosions de violence, donne l’impression d’une « bande- son » particulièrement contrastée qui témoigne des tensions et des conflits formant le cœur de l’intrigue. Le choix du récit focalisé et l’utilisation des analepses explicatives aboutissent à la mise en relief du personnage de Shane qui accède au statut de « figure », selon les théories cognitives. Paradoxalement, le même personnage n’en devient pas moins prototypique, en ce qu’il représente un groupe, celui des militants politiques engagés dans des actions violentes à

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leurs risques et périls. Si la nouvelle ne propose aucune analyse politique, elle est jalonnée par des effets de réel, des symboles et des métaphores qui signifient le destin tragique du personnage. Confronté à l’horreur et à l’absurdité de la violence, le lecteur constate néanmoins qu’il n’y a chez Edna O’Brien ni effritement du sens ni faillite du langage, comme si au contraire la capacité à dire l’absurde était un ultime rempart permettant de préserver l’humanité et la conscience morale.

AUTHORS

VANINA JOBERT-MARTINI Vanina Jobert-Martini is Senior Lecturer in Irish Studies in the English Department of the University of Lyon (Jean Moulin, Lyon 3). After completing a PhD on John McGahern’s prose fiction she has published many articles on contemporary Irish authors and edited a collection of papers of W.B. Yeats. Her theoretical background is stylistics and cognition.

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The Old and the New in Claire Keegan’s Short Fiction

Claudia Luppino

1 In Volume V of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, famously devoted to Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, one of the editors refers to Claire Keegan—along with other young women writers—as the author of a first collection of stories, Antarctica, whose “quality and wealth […] guarantee that the future of the short story is in good hands” (Carr 1138). Apart from this illustrious instance, and despite the successful reception of her works by both reviewers and readers, only minimally does Keegan feature in critical studies of contemporary Irish fiction, and an extensive investigation of her subtle and highly poetic stories is still lacking to date.

2 In an attempt to confront the lamentable marginality of this author in the current critical debate around contemporary Irish women writers, this essay will locate Keegan’s works in the panorama of the history of the genre that was long regarded as the Irish literary prose form par excellence. The intertwining of the old and the new that characterizes her narratives, both at the formal and at the thematic level, will be illustrated through a close reading of her investigation of the shifting balances of gender and generational divides, of the blending of rural and pagan traditions with global consumerism, and of the crucial role that nature and art play for her characters. Keegan’s short stories will thus ultimately be considered as a refined specimen of the unique match of tradition and innovation that is the distinctive hallmark of the Irish short story of the twenty-first century.

The Contemporary Short Story by Irish Women Writers: Themes and Techniques

3 Contemporary Irish fiction is marked by a critical attitude towards tradition, which “involves reclaiming and revisioning rather than rejecting [it]” (Peach 11-12). If a vast section of recent scholarship stresses the distinguishing “formally conservative” character and frequently retrospective outlook of recent fiction (Patten 259), even at

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times of radical social and cultural change like the Celtic Tiger years (Cleary 208-209, 230), in fact, a specific focus on the genre of the short story demonstrates that historical events and personal memories are certainly pervasive concerns, but that new perspectives and interests are also incorporated. What has gradually emerged in the Irish short stories since the 1980s, especially by women writers, is an outstanding “readiness to tackle current ideas and topics (gender as performance, retrieving women’s history, immigration), as well as a willingness to experiment with language and form and embrace complex, non-linear narratives” (Ingman, History 255). Typical formal features, such as brevity and immediacy, undoubtedly facilitated such an evolution. The space of the short story is conveniently manageable for experimentation and for the quick acknowledgement of change. As a result, the speaking voice of oral tradition and (revisited versions of) myths, legends, fairy tales and folk themes have featured alongside poignant snapshots of the suppressed desires, haunting memories and buried fears that accompany contemporary life. The short story has managed to comply with the requirements of both tradition and modernity and therefore is, ultimately, the genre that best represents and expresses both.

4 At the thematic level, what Gerry Smyth has trenchantly characterized as “one of the most enduring and resonant of Irish cultural obsessions” (Smyth 55), the family, has constantly been a major concern for Irish prose writers, who have explored family relationships in a large range of situations, usually moving along the family’s two constituent axes of gender and generation. Interestingly, the patriarchal structure and the often troubled dynamics of the traditional Irish family have allowed it to serve as a backdrop and a privileged site for the investigation of wider political, generational and cultural issues of identity formation and power distribution. The physical, verbal, and psychological struggles that engage the male and female members of often dysfunctional and dismembered fictional families thus act simultaneously as symptoms and as metaphors of the political and socio-cultural structures of post-independence Ireland, of their deficiencies, historical roots and ideological underpinnings.

5 The condition of women within the family and in society has been another key theme of Irish fiction. This has implied a confrontation with, and a questioning of, the symbolism traditionally associated with women in Irish literature, as well as an “updating,” as it were, of fictional female portraits in the light of the secularization and globalization of Irish society and of the increasing presence and weight of women in the public sphere. Mother figures, in particular, have been substantially modified, and the impact of their choices on their children has been put under scrutiny. Ireland itself has long been represented as female: Hibernia, the Poor Old Woman, Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the Dark Rosaleen. Nationalism endowed these images with political value: if Ireland was a victim of Britain’s violation, its purity and morality were trademarks of the Irish nation’s alterity and integrity, and therefore needed to be preserved and guaranteed. The cult of the Virgin Mary, in turn, added a further layer of symbolism, implementing notions of virtue and purity into this complex intertwining of the private sphere of sexuality with the public one of politics. The icons of femininity that resulted from the conflation of nationalism and Catholicism were Mother Ireland and the Blessed Virgin. Such symbolic constructions also meant that colonial subjugation and gender inequality were associated, the nation’s century-long fight for independence moving in parallel with, and adopting similar strategies to, the women’s struggle for equal rights (M. O’Connor 133). The emphasis on virtue and on the need to

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rid the nation of colonizers, however, meant that the fight for equality was not pursued with as much intensity, despite the hopes fostered by the participation of Irish women in the suffrage movement and in the nationalist struggle. In fact, women's lives in the Irish Free State were characterized by a gradual erosion of political rights (lower pay at work; marriage bar for school teachers and civil servants; restricted access to higher education; forbidden access to contraception, abortion and divorce) and by an increasing restriction to the domestic sphere. Ultimately, it is arguable that nationalism in Ireland disempowered women (Ingman, Twentieth-Century 7; Longley; Wills 1127).

6 The traditional domestic, caretaking and maternal responsibilities associated for centuries with women and with their function in society has, in more recent times, proved at odds with their search for, and right to, personal fulfilment and independence, and called for a new conception and a new representation of women. The culturally constructed character of gender has been questioned, and the need has been felt to understand and renegotiate male and female identity and roles. As a result, in the fiction of many contemporary Irish authors, “maternity and the natural world […] emerge as the locus of dark, occult forces,” and characters are torn between “disturbing and unspeakable secrets of the past and the desire for a liberating and satisfying futurity” (Fogarty, “Uncanny Families” 62). A noteworthy instance of the recent fictional probing of feminine subjectivity and motherhood can be found in those stories of mothers without child and on the related motifs of absence and loss (Fogarty, “Uncanny Families” 69; Tuttle Hansen 1-27). While negative portrayals of mothers do not lack in Irish literature, the last twenty years or so have witnessed an increase in cruel, self-absorbed and amoral figures, in stark contrast with the idealized and stereotypical self-sacrificing Irish mother of the nationalist and Catholic tradition. The shocking revelations, in the 1990s, of the abuse perpetrated by men and women in Church, and the state-run institutions in particular, appears to have irrevocably altered the notion of femininity as benign and nurturing, and to have prompted an updating of mother-figures on the literary page. Also, and very importantly, recent Irish women’s fiction has begun to treat the mother-daughter relationship more extensively and in a gradually more positive light: the relatively late appearance, in Irish literature, of stories focusing on this bond (as opposed to the mother-son relationship), has had “consequences for Irish women’s sense of self [which] can only be imagined,” and the attention has mostly been put on “mutual hostility and conflict” (Ingman, Twentieth- Century 75-76). The mother-daughter confrontation in fiction often takes the shape of a repudiation of the old in search for the new, and results in the daughter’s departure, in the attempt to escape her mother’s disempowering influence and to avoid repeating her thwarted life. In the fictional production of more recent years, however, daughters have started to prove more and more sympathetic and empathetic to the mothers’ social and cultural constraints, and to seek to recover their mother’s history and to reclaim their voice, in a quest for identity and self-knowledge which pertains to both (see Fogarty, “Uncanny Families”).

7 Another distinctive trait of contemporary Irish women’s writing is the use of “traditional sources […] [and] folk beliefs and narratives […] as ways of coming to terms with what are sometimes naïvely thought to be typically modern traumas and psychological disruptions,” and “to explore the shocks and pleasures which have always patterned women's lives,” an approach that revitalizes and revalidates traditions rejecting “the distinction of ancient custom and a dynamic modernity”

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(Wills 1128). Such a use of folklore and mythology in the fiction of writers like Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (to mention but one, notable example) can be interpreted as indicative of the attempt to voice long-silenced or repressed histories, but also to resist stereotypical roles and structures, and to experiment with modes of living and thinking that are alternative to the modern and postmodern ones. This consideration is strikingly resonant with the interpretation of women in Ireland as a “temporal anomaly within nationalism” which looks forward towards the future at the same time it wishes to freeze the “values” of the past (McClintock 66). The concept of temporal anomaly, in turn, finds a fascinating counterpart in the conception of ancient and traditional cultural practices and beliefs that survive side by side with modern and global elements as a critical counterpoint and an alternative way of living recently proposed by David Lloyd.

The World of Children, the Interrogation of Femininity, and the Reappraisal of Ancient Traditions: The Old and the New in Claire Keegan’s Fiction

8 The thematic and aesthetic concerns outlined so far as characteristic of the Irish short story and its twenty-first century manifestations by women authors appear to surface in Claire Keegan’s fiction also. Formal conservatism, the retrospective look afforded by memories and flashbacks, the focus on children and women within the patriarchal family, the survival of ancient rites and traditions alongside the lifestyles and mindsets of the global era, and the use of a very local idiom—all these elements are identifiable in her work.

9 Born and raised in South-East, rural Ireland and educated in Louisiana and Wales, Claire Keegan (b. 1968), to date, has published two collections of short stories, Antarctica (1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (2007), and the long story Foster (2010). 1 Awarded numerous prestigious prizes and identified by reviewers and critics as the literary heir of great masters such as William Trevor, John McGahern2 and Alistair MacLeod, she has been described as “a great writer” (Ford et al.) and “a writer already touched by greatness” (Kiberd). Her fiction has been seen as characterized by “an enviably acute ear for speech, a vivid capacity to invent what people might be thinking that’s of no consequence […] and a bright eye for the unexpectable, fixing detail” (Ford et al.). Others praised the “close, lapidary beauty” of Keegan’s prose (Enright), and her sparing use of epiphanies “to crystallise the pain as well as the possibilities of different kinds of desire” (Harte). The relatively small number of Keegan’s publications so far might, at least partially, justify the lack of an extensive critical study of her fiction; yet the quality of her work calls for more attention. Focusing primarily on the stories with an Irish setting, this article will illustrate the ways in which Keegan, typically choosing the vantage point of children and women, and through the juxtaposition of successive generations and of their conflicting views, follows and challenges the shifting trajectory of the traditional representation of women in Irish cultural discourse.

10 The story entitled “Men and Women” is arguably the most obvious example offered by Keegan’s fiction of the emergence of a new female awareness and of the shifting perception of women’s position in society and in the family towards the end of the twentieth century, a century for a large part of which Irish women were “imprisoned in

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stereotypes of Irish womanhood not of their making” (Ingman, Twentieth-Century Fiction 6), acquiescing in the rigid and supposedly incontestable gender roles prescribed by the State and the Church that were now questioned and ultimately rejected. The age of the narrator accounts for the limitations of her gaze: “[Santa] leaves me the Tiny Tears doll I asked for, wrapped in the same wrapping paper we have, and I think how the postal system is like magic, how I can send a letter two days before Christmas and it reaches the North Pole overnight, even though it takes a week for a letter to reach England” (A 123). Yet, this young girl casts a penetrating look at the relationship between her parents: she notices that, even on Christmas day, her mother wakes up at dawn to cook and to look after the rest of the family, while her husband and son sleep late and then simply enjoy the day off. The girl helps her mother, but unlike her she has difficulties accepting the situation: “‘How come they do nothing?’ I ask her. […] ‘They’re men,’ she says, as if this explains everything” (A 124). Later in the narrative, the girl’s annoyance at the way her father treats her mother, and her wish to actively intervene to change things, open up the possibility of a female strategic empowerment through coalition, which sheds a positive, or confident, light on the potential of the mother-daughter alliance, as seen by the younger generation: “[f]or the first time in my life I have some power. I can butt in and take over, rescue and be rescued” (A 129). In a similar fashion, the boy in “Close to the Water’s Edge”—one of the few stories with a non-Irish setting and with a male narrator—finds it difficult to understand why his grandmother spent all her life with her husband, something which she saw, on the contrary, as unavoidable: “She said if she’d had her life to live again, she would never have climbed back into that car. […] Nine children, she bore him. […] ‘Those were the times I lived in. That’s what I believed. I thought I didn’t have a choice’” (WBF 100).

11 The lack of physical contact between their parents is perceived by children in Keegan’s stories as a telling index of a loveless, or at the very best complicated, relationship. The young protagonist/narrator of “Men and Women” notices how they “do not kiss. In all my life, back as far as I remember, I have never seen them touch” (A 129). Similarly, Ellen, in “Storms,” remembers her father's attempt to console his wife after a bad dream as a rare occasion: “my mother curling up on the floor, my father who never spoke a tender word, speaking tender words. Coaxing her, saying her name. Mary, Mayree, ah Maayree. The two people who never touched, whose fingers left the gravy jug before the other’s clasp, touching” (A 71). After that dream, she goes mad and is confined by her husband first to an upstairs bedroom, then to a hospice, for the rest of her life. Before that happens, however, she tells her daughter how her husband’s “hands bruised her for fifteen years” (A 73), a violence which could possibly help explain both her final mental collapse and her husband’s decision to confine her safely away. If we accept this interpretation, we should certainly look at Ellen’s mother as closely related to another character, namely Greer’s wife in “A Scent of Winter.” This woman is also the victim of a man’s violence (in this case a stranger who rapes her in her house) and she also ends up locked in her bedroom, like a “madwoman in the attic,” unable to recover from that traumatic experience. Going back to “Storms,” it is worth observing how Ellen’s fate was the same as many other girls in rural families, who inherited, as it were, their mothers’ duties in the care of the men and other children and in the housework after the mothers’ death or, as in this case, serious illness. Ellen’s attitude, however, is quite different: “It’s turning out that I’m taking no nonsense from anybody. They leave their wellingtons outside the door now. And I

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haven’t heard them say the spuds are hard in the middle. I’d swat them with the serving spoon. They know that too” (A 75).

12 The protagonist of “Quare Name for a Boy” is an adult woman but, like the girls seen so far, she senses that a more independent life than that of the women of older generations must be possible. She moved to England to try and have a career as a writer; now she is expecting a child from a man she barely knows, and she has no intention to marry him, or to let anything interfere with her search for personal fulfilment and independence: “I will not be the woman who shelters her man same as he’s a boy. That part of my people ends with me” (A 101). Unlike all the women in her family, she does not want to be an obedient wife and a mother, nor give up all her desires and ambitions to conform to what society expects from women: My female relatives [...]’re tweedy, big-boned women who like to think they taught me right from wrong, manners and the merits of hard work. Flat-bellied, temperamental women who’ve given up and call it happiness. We come from women who comfort men, men who never say no. [...] I’m no spring chicken any more. I should be doing something else by now, latching myself on to some unmarried man with a steady wage and a decent car. [...] Irish girls should dislike England; they should stay home and raise their sons up right, stuff the chicken, snip the parsley, tolerate the blare of the Sunday game. (A 95-98)

13 The open and somehow hopeful ending of “Quare Name for a Boy” is in sharp contrast with the closing scene of the title story of Keegan’s first collection, Antarctica, which sees the protagonist naked and handcuffed to a stranger's bed. Something is missing in the life of this “happily married woman” (A 3), who decides to break her routine as a wife and a mother by betraying her husband with an unknown man: “she wanted to do this before she got too old. She was sure she would be disappointed” (A 3). Her tragic fate, however, appears to suggest that sexual transgression can only produce catastrophic consequences. A similar conclusion can be drawn from “Love in the Tall Grass,” whose protagonist, Cordelia, also fares tragically from her transgression of rules, in this case an affair with a married doctor, after which she ends up cutting all her bonds with the outside world, freezing, as it were, her life while waiting for that man to be available for her again.

14 Although Keegan seems to be more interested in a reappraisal of the mother-daughter relationship and in the possibility of their strategic allegiance against patriarchal constraints, her fiction also offers a few instances of those “updated,” or negative mother figures observed earlier. The most outstanding example is certainly represented by “The Parting Gift.” The narrative employs an unusual enough second person singular3 and focuses on a teenager who is about to move from rural Ireland to New York. The shocking revelation that confronts the reader is that this girl was sexually abused by her father for years with her mother’s complicit acquiescence: Your turn at boarding school never came. By then your father saw no point in educating girls; you’d go off and another man would have the benefit of your education. If you were sent to the day school you could help in the house, the yard. Your father moved into the other room but your mother gave him sex on his birthday. [...] And then that too stopped and you were sent instead, to sleep with your father. It happened once a month or so, and always when Eugene4 was out. (WBF 6)

15 Not only does the mother fail to protect the girl from the father’s violence, but she is also responsible for that abuse, imposing on her daughter the duty to satisfy that man’s needs in her stead. It is significant that the girl’s most vivid memory of this woman is of

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her drowning some unwanted puppies (WBF 7). The second-person narration is maintained conspicuously throughout the whole story and does not seem to imply a generalization, but is more likely to reflect the narrator’s attempt to objectify or to depersonalize her dramatic experience, both as a result of her suffering and alienation and as a strategy for survival.

16 It must be highlighted, however, that the picture of family relationships produced by Keegan’s fiction is not an altogether negative one. On the contrary, happy children, surrounded by loving parents and living in harmony with the natural world that surrounds them also populate her short stories, and in fact the reader is often struck by the stark contrast of such positive renderings with the gloomy and shabby interiors, never-ending labour and inescapable misery of so much Irish fiction. “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” for example, beautifully evokes life in pre-Celtic-Tiger rural Ireland and depicts tender and joking parents, playfully nicknaming neighbours and practicing their dances at home in view of a Saturday night out. The story is told, once again, in the first person and by a young girl. Some of the typical devices of oral storytelling are deployed here: a direct address to the audience; the use of the present tense; a colloquial tone. “Don’t ask me why we called him Slapper Jim” (A 47), the opening sentence reads. Although her parents have a good relationship, this girl, like the girls of other stories by Keegan, finds the traditional male-female divide, and the respective roles associated with that strict gender division, awkward and difficult to understand and accept. Her mother, for example, tries to teach her how to behave properly like a girl: she rips out the last page of Woman’s Weekly, “so Da can’t read about women’s problems” (A 49), and insists that, instead of cutting wood with the men, her daughter should “flute the pastry edge or wash the car at best is what she thinks. I should tidy my room, practice walking around with a book on my head to help my posture” (A 53). When the girl gets her first period, the mother instructs her not to say anything to her father, “always hiding women away, like we’re forbidden” (A 57).

17 The narrator’s use of the present tense is conspicuous throughout the story, with the only exception of the first three paragraphs, where the past tense informs us that she is now an adult recollecting the crucial events that marked the end of her childhood and innocence (A 47). Consistently with the structure of a largely simultaneous narration, the story, though told in retrospect, adopts the child’s point of view, and the events are disclosed gradually as they occur, as if the girl was recording them day by day. In her description of herself splitting wood sticks with the lumberjack who works for her father, for example, there is no hint of the upcoming tragedy in her solid use of the present tense: “He and I are like two parts of the same machine, fast and smooth. We trust each other” (A 52); “Slapper holds my hand and stands me up on the bonnet of the car in the rain, telling me to say the poems. I read them off my memory. He asks me what ‘immortal’ means, but I don’t know” (A 56). The use of the present tense also endows the narrative with a static and permanent quality which places it almost outside of time. The happy atmosphere of the story is compromised by the tragic end of the girl’s friendship with Slapper Jim: as she grows up, her interest turns into a strong physical attraction and, on a snowy night, she slips into his bed and lets “his will [subside]” (A 62). Shortly afterwards, presumably tormented by guilt and shame, Slapper Jim hangs himself on a tree. Interestingly, the narrator-protagonist seems to feel responsible or guilty only when she notices her brother’s look: “Eugene standing there looking at me like I did it [...] [his eyes] are full of accusation and blame” (A 64).

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18 The long story Foster is arguably Keegan’s most significant illustration of the possibility of familial harmony. Described by a reviewer as “a haunting, crafted narrative” which “has beauty, harshness, menace and the spine of steel worthy of high art” (Battersby), the story focuses on a very young girl and on the summer she spends with her aunt and uncle, Edna and John Kinsella. Set in the rural South-East of Ireland in the early 1980s (as indicated by several references, most notably to the hunger strikes in the North,5 F 31), the story is told in the first person by the girl, who is initially unsure of what to expect, but soon becomes very fond of these new places and people and of their busy but quiet lifestyle and affectionate behaviour: “this is a different type of house. Here there is room, and time to think. There may even be money to spare” (F 13). The story’s heavily internal focalization is particularly evident in the descriptions, where both places and people are associated with some characterizing detail or episode that made them memorable for the child who is recounting them, and the adults’ behaviour often remains inexplicable. Only in one instance is the underlying presence of an adult author behind the child-narrator betrayed: “[e]verything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before” (F 26), the girl concludes while trying to fall asleep on the first night at the Kinsellas, thinking about her sisters’ clay figures dissolving into mud under the rain. Her comment is perhaps too philosophical for a child her age. The author’s overhanging presence, and her skilful role as the conductor of this very refined symphony, can also be perceived on two other occasions. The girl’s first entrance into the Kinsellas’ house is described like a birth: “[s]he leads me into the house. There’s a moment of darkness in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me. We walk through the heat of the kitchen where I am told to sit down, to make myself at home. Under the smell of baking there’s some disinfectant, some bleach” (F 8). The alternation of darkness and light, of coolness and warmth, of smells of food and detergents, and the woman and the child sharing the novelty of being alone together, all this is reminiscent of a birth-scene, the girl’s second birth, as it were, to a new life. Similarly, the girl’s first walk to a nearby well with Mrs Kinsella, her reflecting herself in the water and her drinking some of it, is characterized like a baptismal rite, marking the beginning of something new, the woman as a godmother for this cathartic moment, in a sublime mixture of fear and pleasure (F 23).

19 Another noteworthy aspect of Foster is its staging of two sets of parents, which allows an insight and an appreciation of the different expressions of parenthood possible. If the girl’s mother is exhausted and overloaded by endless pregnancies and poverty, as opposed to the tidy and peaceful atmosphere that surrounds Edna Kinsella, the most noticeable differences emerge from the comparison between the two father figures: the girl's biological father drops her at the Kinsellas’ without saying goodbye and telling them that they can keep her “as long as they like” (F 9) and that “[s]he’ll ate [sic] but you can work her” (F 12); Kinsella, for his part, talks with the girl, jokes with her, patiently teaches her to read, gives her money to buy sweets.

20 As far as language is concerned, Keegan’s fiction employs an interesting blending of standard English and Hiberno-English. The language spoken by her characters is deeply rooted in their background in terms of age, education, and geography, and this background, as well as the residual influence of the Gaelic language, are reflected and reproduced accurately in her pages. In “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” for instance, typically Hiberno-English words, such as “yoke” (A 48), 6 or graphically rendered Irish sounds, such as “baste” for ‘beast’ (A 54), “me” for “my” (A 58), “Jaysus” for “Jesus” (A

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64), punctuate the narrative. Foster also usefully and clearly exemplifies the alternation of the standard English of the descriptions with the colloquialisms and Hiberno-English structures of direct speech, which is typical not only of Keegan’s, but also of many Irish short stories of the past decade. The habit of answering a question by repeating the verb, instead of saying yes or no, for example, can be observed, and typically Irish lexical items feature, such as “ye” for “you” plural, “ate” for “eat,” “aye” for “yes,” “wud” for “with,” “wee” for “little,” “girleen” for “little girl” (F 16), “aisy” for “easy.” Interestingly, language in Foster is also the means through which Keegan exposes, as a reviewer observed, “the nastiness of human nature at its most petty” (Battersby). The gossipy, sometimes insensitive and cruel, nature of people transpires in the shopkeepers’ curiosity towards Mrs Kinsella in the nearby town of Gorey and in the neighbours’ comments at a wake (F 53-59). The few stories set in America also reflect the speakers’ accents, primarily in the graphical reproduction of their broad vowel sounds, in the frequent lack of agreement between subject and verb, and in the use of double negations and short forms, but ultimately in a more farcical and formulaic, altogether less convincing, fashion than the Irish stories.

21 There is one last characteristic of Claire Keegan’s short stories that deserves critical attention. Set in the recent past or in our days, these narratives often blend ingredients that pertain to the globalized, consumerist and secular outlook of twenty-first century Ireland with the narrative strategies, and the very practice, or performance, of more traditional, sometimes ancient, elements of Irish culture, such as pagan rites and beliefs or oral storytelling. The story that perhaps best demonstrates the inclusion of current issues and ideas or, to put it differently, the author’s acknowledgement of the changes that have affected the Irish society and lifestyles in very recent years, is the title story in Walk the Blue Fields. The focal character is a priest who is uncertain of his vocation: he had an affair with a young girl, but now he is celebrating her wedding. At the meal that follows, the guests are served exotic food items, whose names they can barely pronounce: “‘Wouldn’t a piece of boiled ham do us? It’s far from alvocadoes [sic] we were reared,’ she says, looking for praise” (WBF 24). Far from the prejudices of most of the guests towards the Chinese healer who lives in the area (“‘It’s all talk. Sure what use could he be? Hasn’t a word of English. There’d be no way of telling him what’s ailing ya. [...] Sure he’s a Chink: ates [sic] dog and shites tay [sic]!,’” WBF 26), the priest visits the Chinese man, and their encounter prompts an epiphany for the priest, who seems to find peace and satisfaction in a quasi-pantheistic appreciation of the beauty of nature: “The blue night has spread itself darkly over the fields. […] Where is God? he has asked, and tonight God is answering back. All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead the stars have rolled into place. God is nature” (WBF 38). This celebration of natural beauty as a lay path to spiritual and intellectual happiness is deeply significant, and not dissimilar from the conception of art which the protagonist of “Quare Name for a Boy” seems to embody. Keegan’s interest appears to lie not so much in traditional religion and institutionalized religious practices, as in those elements of pagan beliefs and rites that have not completely vanished from the Irish cultural discourse. In this light, Walk the Blue Fields hosts several stories where the use of the present tense and the reference to ancient habits and beliefs result in simultaneous narratives that have all the taste of oral tales. Interestingly, the author explains some references to folklore and popular beliefs and sayings in an Appendix to

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the collection, where a translation of some Irish words that appear in the text is also provided.

22 “Night of the Quicken Trees” is possibly the most significant and representative illustration of the taste of oral tales and folklore that Keegan’s fiction can have. The main character, Margaret Flusk, not unlike Cordelia in “Love in the Tall Grass,” has had an illegitimate affair with an unavailable man, a priest and a first cousin, from which she was the one who fared worst in the end, bearing and eventually losing a child. Her clothes and behaviour are perceived as wild and strange by the locals, including “Stack, the forty-nine-year-old bachelor who lived next door” (WBF 127), sharing his dirty and untidy cottage with his beloved goat, Josephine. Their first contact occurs when she gets rid of her feet water late at night and accidentally throws it on him; as the excerpt from a traditional Irish fairy tale that precedes the story explains, their relationship is therefore marked by bad luck. Margaret’s most interesting aspect here is precisely her strong adherence to ancient beliefs and superstitions: If she believed in the forces of nature she was yet determined to avoid bad luck. She’d had her share of bad luck so now she never threw out ashes of a Monday or passed a labourer without blessing his work. She shook salt on the hearth, hung a Saint Bridget’s cross on the bedroom wall and kept track of changes in the moon. (WBF 126) In all the years she lived in Dunagore, she never lit her own fire, never failed to pull rushes in February and, hard as she tried, could never throw ashes on a Monday or go out as far as the clothesline without placing the tongs across the pram. (WBF 157)

23 As is well known in popular belief, being the seventh child, she has healing powers, which her neighbours eagerly avail of, as soon as they find out. She senses things before they happen and she seems to have a very intense bond with natural elements. The frequent references to proverbs and beliefs, some strange animal apparitions, as well as premonitory dreams that turn out to be correct, and “healers and seers [...] [that] actually do heal, and do see” (Enright 2007), confer upon this fascinating story an aura of magic and of traditional storytelling.

24 The other story that powerfully testifies to Keegan’s interest in myths and folklore is “The Forester’s Daughter.” The protagonist, Martha Deegan, is yet another non- conventional mother figure, who looks after her three children with no particular love or care: “When [the dog] gets back, Martha puts the frying pan on the kitchen floor and watches while he licks it clean. Without so much as a wipe she hangs it back up on its hook. Let them all get sick, she thinks. She doesn’t care” (WBF 64). But what interests us more here is that Martha is a very skilled storyteller, who charms her neighbours when she tells them a story (in her, one could possibly see a likely alter ego of Keegan’s herself): “On those rare nights they saw her pluck things out of the air and break them open before their eyes. They would leave remembering [...] the woman with the dark brown hair which got looser as the night went on and her pale hands plucking unlikely stories like green plums that ripened with the telling at her hearth” (WBF 56); “Martha concentrates on the room. [...] Before she can begin she must find the scent; every story has its own, particular scent” (WBF 79). As Anne Enright pointed out, the characters in Keegan’s second collection of short stories “have a belief in the redeeming power of tales, especially their own—but, like spells or curses, these must be spoken aloud.” In “The Forester’s Daughter,” the climax is reached when Martha, exasperated by her husband’s lack of affection for her and their children, and eager to take her revenge on him after he hurts the daughter’s feelings, invites all their neighbours and tells them

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the story of her betrayal. Though told “in disguise” (WBF 83), her story is a mise en abîme of the story itself, in that it duplicates what the reader has already learnt about the forester and his wife and children. Another interesting aspect of “The Forester’s Daughter,” in terms of narrative techniques, and undeniably a very fascinating one, is the extent and the way in which the narrator penetrates each character’s thoughts and presents us with their different perspectives, in turn. A light is thus shed not only on Deegan’s hard work and anxiety to extinguish his mortgage, or his idealized memories of childhood; nor on his wife’s disillusion and plans to escape; but also on their second son’s imaginary world as he plays, and even on the dog, with his thoughts and dreams described in as much detail as those of the human beings around him (WBF 64-65). The narrator’s omniscience is absolute here, and Keegan’s skill obvious. The switching points of view of this story are a challenging formal feature. Writing, for her, can start from looking and following the desire of the observed object, trying to imagine what he or she thinks and wants, and this can result in writing from a dog’s point of view.

25 Finally, Martha’s affection for her hens is noteworthy, in the light of the frequent association of hens with women in Irish fiction (hens minded by women; “egg money” as a small measure of independence; etc.); this draws a significant parallel between the exploitation of both as mere bodies, for their procreative function (for their egg-laying capacity or for their flesh; see M. O’Connor 143-145). In an insightful study of the role of the animal in relation to gender and cultural identity in the work of Irish women writers, Maureen O’Connor has remarked: “Martha's own radical ideas about the status and worth of the lowly hen, who shares her narrow life of enforced and loveless reproduction, is made clear when, after the fox kills a number of the birds, Martha insists on giving them a proper burial […]. The waste of meat strikes her husband as crazy” (M. O’Connor 146-148). More generally, the frequent similes and metaphors that associate female characters with animals, notably in women’s fiction, are particularly relevant as indexes of the fact that, in the deeply Catholic and conservative Ireland of the mid-twentieth century, women and their bodies were considered important primarily for their role in reproduction. Animals, moreover, particularly domesticated animals, share with women the fate of being subject to the pressures of both nature and man, as well as being relegated in the position of mindless servants.7 As one scholar observed, “[t]he otherness of women from an androcentric perspective finds a correlate in the more radical otherness of the animal from an anthropocentric perspective” (Scholtmeijer 232; see also Kristeva). In the (post)colonial context, the figure of the animal is usually employed to negotiate colonial questions of control of language and body, and to metaphorically represent violence and appropriation.

26 Introducing her Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women. Nation and Gender, Heather Ingman has observed that “much Irish women’s writing, from all parts of the twentieth century, implicitly or explicitly deals with women trying to find a place for themselves within the narrative of the Irish nation” (1). In the section of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing dedicated to post-1960s women’s fiction, Claire Wills remarks on the frank and penetrating exploration of personal issues that has characterized Irish women’s imaginative writing in recent decades and their growing concern for “women's search for personal and sexual fulfillment, the desire for economic independence, the problems posed by marital breakdown and unwanted pregnancy, and the painful need to confront social taboos” (1125). In tune with these critical analyses, and as this essay has illustrated, Claire Keegan’s subtle and compelling fiction portrays female characters of all ages trying to cope with claustrophobic lives as daughters, mothers

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and wives, in a variety of situations. These range from their subjugation and marginality at home and in society, to the violence they suffer from their fathers and husbands; from the contrasting feelings and implications of motherhood (love, sacrifice, loss), to their often uneasy relationship with art; and from dangerous, extra- marital relationships to the issues of madness and superstition. The setting of many of Keegan's stories in the past and in remote rural villages may, at least partially, account for the fact that her female characters are still struggling to accommodate their needs and innermost feelings with still harsh material conditions. Her simultaneous inclusion of traditional and new elements, both at the linguistic and at the thematic level, also proves coherent with the dialogic relationship that the contemporary Irish short story appears to entertain with its most ancient historical and cultural legacies, on the one hand, and with the challenging stimuli offered by global forms, on the other. The resulting intertwining of the old and the new is most charming, and reassuringly ensures that, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the future of the Irish short story is in good hands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Battersby, Eileen. “Beauty, harshness, menace and the spine of steel worthy of high art.” Review of Foster by Claire Keegan. The Irish Times 28 August 2010. Web. 14 Sept. 2010.

Boland, Rosita. “Carefully choosing her words.” The Irish Times 12 May 2007, W6. Print.

Carr, Ruth. Introduction. “Contemporary Fiction.” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions Volume V. Eds. Angela Bourke, et al. Cork: Cork UP (with Field Day), 2002. 1130-1138. Print.

Cleary, Joe. Outrageous Fortune. Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Dublin: Field Day, 2006. Print.

Dolan, Terence Patrick. A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1999. Print.

Enright, Anne. “Dancing in the dark.” Review of Walk the Blue Fields. The Guardian, 25 August 2007. Web. 9 Sept. 2009.

Fogarty, Anne. “Uncanny Families: Neo-Gothic Motifs and the Theme of Social Change in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction.” Contemporary Irish Fiction. Ed. Anthony Roche. Spec. issue of Irish University Review 30.1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 59-81. Print.

Ford, Richard, et al. “The best of the page-turners.” The Irish Times 1 December 2007. B10-B11. Print.

Harte, Liam. “Critical acclaim that was not misplaced.” The Irish Times 12 May 2007. W11. Print.

Ingman, Heather. Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women. Nation and Gender. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. Print.

---. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.

Keegan, Claire. Antarctica. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Print.

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---. Foster. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Print.

---. Walk The Blue Fields. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Print.

Kiberd, Declan. “Fruits of the second flowering.” Rev. of The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, ed David Marcus. The Irish Times 30 April 2005, B11. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. 1980. Trans. Léon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print.

Lloyd, David. Irish Times. Temporalities of Modernity. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. Print.

Longley, Edna. “From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands.” Dublin: Attic Press, 1990. N. Pag. Print.

McClintock, Anne. “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family.” Feminist Review 44 (1993): 61-80. Print.

McGahern, John. The Dark. London: Faber, 1965. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. A Study of the Short Story. 1963. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2004. Print.

O’Connor, Maureen. The Female and the Species. The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.

Patten, Eve. “Contemporary Irish Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John Wilson Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006, 259-275. Print.

Peach, Linden. The Contemporary Irish Novel. Critical Readings. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Scholtmeijer, Marian. “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction.” Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Eds. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. 232-245. Print.

Smyth, Gerry. The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction. London: Pluto Press, 1997. Print.

Tuttle Hansen, Elaine. Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print.

Wills, Claire. Introduction. “Contemporary Writing 1960-2001.” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions Volume V. Eds. Angela Bourke et al. Cork: Cork UP (with Field Day), 2002. 1123-1129. Print.

NOTES

1. In this article, I will refer to these three works through the abbreviations A, WBF, and F, respectively. 2. Keegan has acknowledged the influence of John McGahern’s work on several occasions (see, for example, her 2007 interview with Rosita Boland). Such an influence transpires in her choice of settings and in her style, although her thematic concerns and the perspective of her characters are distinguishably those of a younger generation, and gender issues are more centre stage. 3. In the light of the influence, outlined earlier, of John McGahern on Keegan, it is noteworthy that the second person singular is used extensively by McGahern in his 1965 novel, The Dark, whose protagonist is also an adolescent that suffers sexual abuse.

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4. Eugene is the girl’s older brother. 5. Between May and August 1981, ten Irish Republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the prison of Long Kesh outside Belfast; the most famous, and the first to die, was Bobby Sands. The hunger strike was the culmination of a series of protests that started in 1976 to have their status as political prisoners and other basic rights recognized by the British authorities. 6. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English defines “yoke” as “any contrivance or implement; something whose name does not spring immediately to mind” (291). 7. Cows are also particularly effective in expressing female helplessness. This emerges most potently in “Storms,” where the protagonist’s mother feeds and talks to imaginary cows around their house: “And that was when she started living upstairs” (A 72).

ABSTRACTS

Bien que ses recueils de nouvelles, Antarctique (1999), A Travers les Champs Bleus (2007) et la longue nouvelle Les Trois Lumières (2010) aient été bien accueillis par l’ensemble de la critique, il est regrettable qu’il n’existe toujours pas d’étude approfondie sur l’œuvre de Claire Keegan (née en 1968). Tentant de combler cette lacune, cet article place ces nouvelles subtiles et sensibles dans le contexte du débat critique actuel sur les écrivaines irlandaises contemporaines. Il aborde une réflexion sur l’ancrage de la nouvelle dans la tradition du conte oral, et sa promptitude à aborder des problèmes actuels. L’article propose une lecture analytique des nouvelles de Keegan, et s’intéresse en particulier aux thèmes récurrents dans les recueils et aux techniques narratives spécifiques. Une attention particulière est également portée aux divisions entre générations ou entre masculinité et fémininité, aux articulations entre traditions rurales et consumérisme mondial, ou encore au rôle crucial que jouent la nature, l’art et la religiosité.

AUTHORS

CLAUDIA LUPPINO Claudia Luppino recently completed a PhD in English and American Studies at the University of Florence (Italy) with a dissertation titled “From John McGahern to Claire Keegan: Resistance to Postmodernism in Contemporary Irish Fiction.” Her recent publications include “A fruitful exchange: a comparative study of the different versions of John McGahern’s The Leavetaking and its French translation Journée d’adieu by Alain Delahaye” (in Werner Huber, Sandra Mayer and Julia Novak, eds, Ireland in/and Europe. Cross-Currents and Exchanges, Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012. 127-136), “Art, politics and memory: a conversation with Colm Tóibín” (in the second issue of SIJIS—Studi Irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies (expected publication: late March 2013) and “Life told slant: History, memory and imagination in John McGahern’s short stories” (in Sylvie Mikowski (ed.), Histoire et mémoire en France et en Irlande / History and Memory in France and Ireland, Reims, Éditions et Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2011. 57-75. She has edited an issue of the peer reviewed online journal JOFIS (Journal of Franco-Irish Studies) on the “Winds of Change in France and Ireland” (2013).

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Part 2: Resonance, Revision and Reinvention

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Rereading the Mother in Edna O’Brien’s Saints and Sinners

Elke D’hoker

1 Mother-daughter relations have always been a central concern in Edna O’Brien’s fiction. In her first novel, The Country Girls, Caithleen’s strong bond with her long- suffering mother is abruptly broken off by the mother’s death by drowning, which haunts the girl for the rest of her life and eventually leads her to repeat the same fate.1 In stories such as “Cords” and “Sister Imelda,” the young girl’s symbiotic closeness with the mother becomes suffocating and the daughter makes a desperate bid for freedom, while the ultimate impossibility of that escape causes terrifying dreams of matricide in “A Rose in the Heart of New York.” As several critics have observed, the mother- daughter bond is always riddled with tension in O’Brien’s fiction, with the daughter struggling between a need for nurturance and a desire for autonomy. As Patricia Coughlan has put it: Sharply conflicted, it [the mother-daughter bond] involves opposite imperatives: in one direction to escape, to form, and free the separate self and disavow the maternal other, and in the other to remain attached, to resist at all costs the process of detachment from and relinquishing of the mother, and indeed to long for a total (re)union with her. This longing is exceptionally strong in the universe of O’Brien’s fictions, and I see it as an instance of that desire for fusion with the other, overriding the aim of individuation. (187)

2 While the similarities between these fictional mother-daughter plots and O’Brien’s own troubled relationship with her mother have often been commented on, it is also clear that these strained mother-daughter relations fit in with larger trends in Western literature. Luce Irigaray has famously argued that “the whole of our western culture is based upon the murder of the mother,” which makes it almost impossible for women to gain a secure identity in the symbolic order and leaves them in a state of “dereliction” (Reader 47). 2 Adrienne Rich has claimed similarly that “the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy” (237). In her classic study, The Mother-Daughter Plot. Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1988), Marianne Hirsch has analysed the fraught relations between mothers and daughters as represented in novels by women writers. Common elements in the texts

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she analyses are the daughter's ambivalent feelings of fear and anger: “fears of maternal power and […] anger at maternal powerlessness” (167), inspired by the paradoxical combination of the myth of the omnipotent, devouring mother and the reality of the mother's submissiveness in a patriarchal society. In an Irish context, the difficulties of daughterly development in a patriarchal culture as described by Hirsch, have been exacerbated by the idealised images of the mother in the discourses of nationalism and Catholicism, which have so strongly shaped Irish culture. To the mythic image of the carnivorous mother—which many of Hirsch’s texts bear witness to —has been added the image of the sacrificial, suffering mother, inspired by the idealised figures of Mother Ireland and the Virgin Mary. Both of these mythic images— the self-denying, sacrificial saint and the overbearing, devouring monster—have left their mark on representations of mother-daughter relations in twentieth-century Irish fiction. Irish critics have in fact been unanimous in their characterisation of these relations as “embattled” (Chang 54), “difficult and acrimonious” (Weekes 120), “inveterately divided and strained” (Fogarty 88), riddled by tensions and “rivalries” (Shumaker 83), or characterised by “mutual hostility and conflict” (Ingman 76). Recurrent elements are matrophobia and matricide, anger and resentment at the mother's powerlessness and her failure to shield or empower the daughter. As Fogarty points out, many Irish stories and novels “depict the desperate struggle of the daughter to avoid the trap of female subjugation and the calamity of duplicating the mother’s experience” (113).

3 In all of these critical studies, moreover, O’Brien’s stories and novels are turned to for primary evidence of the embattled mother-daughter bond. What makes O’Brien’s texts particularly rewarding in this respect, is that they often explicitly refer to the larger cultural context in Ireland. In Mother Ireland, O’Brien hints at the pervasiveness of this myth in Irish society and the dedication of The Light of Evening—“For my mother and my motherland”—connects the personal story of the novel to the discourses of myth and national identity. The abundant Catholic imagery in O’Brien’s work also serves to associate her self-denying martyr-mothers with the Catholic idealisation of a motherhood characterised by “purity, asexuality, and self-denying devotion to others” (Fogarty 87). Or as Ann Owens Weekes has put it, a typical O’Brien mother “adheres rigidly to rural Catholic mores; receives and, as a later daughter recognizes, gives no sexual pleasure; and ultimately succumbs to a hopeless fatalism” (109).3

4 Traces of these maternal myths can also be found in O’Brien’s most recent collection, Saints and Sinners, which received the prestigious Frank O’Connor Short Story Award in 2011. The opening story, “Shovel Kings,” for instance, features an ageing London Irishman who keeps pining for the home he had to leave behind as a young boy. Yet when he is finally given the opportunity to return, his motherland feels empty now that his beloved mother is dead—killed, he believes, by his father who “had worn her out” (Saints and Sinners 19). In “Sinners,” the self-denying mother-myth is exposed as alien and repressive when a lonely widow, whose five children have dispersed, comes to confront her own emotional and sexual starvation through the—imagined—lewd behaviour of some of her lodgers. “Green Georgette,” on the other hand, tells of a visit of a mother and daughter to the wife of the town’s banker. Although they have high hopes for the visit, as it would raise their status in the community, it turns out a disappointment since they have only been asked to cover up the woman’s flirtations with the local doctor. “My Two Mothers,” finally, features the familiar, long-suffering

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O’Brien mother from the perspective of the daughter who dwells on the story of her mother’s life after the latter’s death. Almost all reviewers of Saints and Sinners note the repetition of “old O’Brien themes” (Kilroy), of “places and people from earlier books” in the stories (Shillinger).4 As Aisling Foster writes in The Times: “Some writers, like painters, return to the same subject again and again. Edna O’Brien is that kind of artist.” In this collection, she “returns to the theme of sexual repression and motherhood that marked her early works.”

5 “Green Georgette” and “My Two Mothers” are the stories which perhaps most explicitly revisit the mother-daughter plots of O’Brien’s earlier fiction. The high hopes turned sour of “Green Georgette” recall similar stories of disappointment in “The Rug” or “A Demon,” and the daughterly development sketched in “My Two Mothers” echoes that of “Cords,” “A Rose in the Heart of New York” and The Light of Evening, where an early, symbiotic mother-daughter bond is replaced by hostility and hatred, which fail to be fully overcome in subsequent efforts at reconciliation. In spite of these familiar ingredients, however, the tone and atmosphere of “Green Georgette” and “My Two Mothers” are markedly different from the far more negative and fatalistic mood of the earlier stories. In this essay, therefore, I propose to analyse these stories more in detail so as to account for this change in tone. I will argue that the stories do not so much repeat the mother-daughter plot of earlier stories as rewrite this plot through a remarkable rereading of the figure of the mother. Although this rereading could again be linked up with O’Brien’s own personal development, in the last part of this essay I will rather place it in the context of similar developments that mark the representation of mother-daughter relations in the short fiction of other Irish women writers, notably Anne Enright and Claire Keegan. I will argue that all of these stories respond in various ways to Irigaray’s plea for new symbolisations of the mother-daughter relationship.

6 At first sight, “Green Georgette” is a story of dashed hopes and expectations of a kind with such famous stories as “The Rug,” “Irish Revel” and “A Demon.” In these stories, dreams and hopes of mother and/or daughter are briefly raised by a luxurious rug, an invitation to a party or a day’s outing, yet these never meet the high expectations, and the stories typically end on a note of resignation or depression. In “Green Georgette,” the mother’s desire for social status and recognition5 and the daughter’s longing for glamour and romance come together in their careful preparations for the visit to Mrs Coughlan who, as the young narrator puts it, “is the cynosure of all” (Saints 112). Other familiar elements in the story are the mother’s reminiscences of a stay in America before she married, her hard work on the farm and her tireless serving of a lazy husband, who is prone to “tantrums” and “drinking sprees” (Saints 115).6 Still, this Saints and Sinners story also differs from the earlier stories in significant ways. What stands out, first of all, is the peculiar use of tense and narrative voice in the story. The first section of the story, entitled “Thursday,” is told by a first-person narrator in the present tense: “Mama and I have been invited to the Coughlans. It is to be Sunday evening at seven o’clock. I imagine us setting out in good time…” (Saints 111). Although the narrator also dwells on the Coughlans’ presence in the village and on how the “miracle” of the invitation came about, she mostly speculates on what the visit will be like, the dresses they will wear, what her mother will say and do: Mama says I am to wear my green knitted dress with the scalloped angora edging and carry my cardigan in case it gets chilly on the way home. […] She herself is going to wear her tweedex suit—a fawn, flecked with pink, one that she knitted for an entire winter. I know in her heart that she hopes the conversation will get

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around to the fact of her knitting it. Indeed, if it is admired, she will probably offer to knit one for Mrs Coughlan. She is like that. Certainly she will make Drew a gift of a wallet, or a rug, as she goes to the new technical school at night to master these skills. Nothing would please her more than that they would become friends, the Coughlans coming to us and a big spread of cakes and buns and sausage rolls and caramel custards in their own individual ramekins. (115)

7 The second part of the story, “Sunday,” chronicles the facts of the visit in the past tense: “We went” (166). Although the tense-switch heightens the contrast between the bright hopes of the first part and the disappointments of the second, it cannot entirely dispel these hopes and longings. Indeed, their vivid rendering in the present and future tense makes them outshine the disappointment. This is further confirmed when the future tense returns in the evocation of a new desire and promise at the story’s close. O’Brien’s earlier stories, by contrast, are typically framed by disappointment as the initial hopes and longings are already formulated in a past tense, which implies their essential futility: “Irish Revel” opens symbolically and ominously with “Mary hoped that the rotted front tire would not burst” (Fanatic 177) and in “The Rug,” the first- person narrator starts her reminiscence of the rug with the comment that the smell of new linoleum makes her “both a little disturbed and sad” (Fanatic 199).

8 The narrative set-up of “Green Georgette,” on the other hand, serves to highlight the hopes and desires of mother and daughter, with the girl interpreting her mother’s secret dreams of friendship, hospitality and recognition. In fact, both are united by a love of good clothes, nice food and glamour, and even though the mother does not give in to the daughter’s “insatiable longing for tinned peaches” upon their return, she does “promis[e] that we would have them some Sunday with an orange soufflé, which she had just mastered the recipe for” (Saints 124). The disappointment of the visit is thus already partly reversed by a new hope or promise, significantly involving food, the enjoyment of which binds mother and daughter together. The ending of the “The Rug,” by contrast, only serves to confirm the disappointment: “As she watched him go down the avenue she wept, not so much for the loss—though the loss was enormous—as for her own foolishness in thinking that someone had wanted to do her a kindness at last. “We live and learn,” she said, as she undid her apron strings, out of habit, and then retied them, slowly and methodically, making a tighter knot” (Fanatic 206). The tighter knot aptly sums up the suffering, self-denying mother of O’Brien’s early stories, who seeks to suppress the body and its desires, finally succumbing to fatalism, for as the mother in “A Demon” complains, “whenever she looked forward to anything it was always botched” (Lantern 134).

9 Although traces of that self-denial are left in the mother of “Green Georgette,” the narrator mostly foregrounds her mother’s warmth and generosity, the pleasure she takes in small luxuries such as soft clothes and delicious food—“Mama’s cakes […] were dusted with caster sugar or a soft-boiled icing that literally melted on the tongue” (Saints 119). There is nothing sinful about food—or the desire for it—in “Green Georgette” and again, that makes for a difference with an earlier story such as “A Demon” where the daughter “offered to make a sacrifice” if the car, which was supposed to drive them on their trip, came after all: “she would not eat apple tart, she would also decline lemonade if it was offered her, and that night, when they got home, she would get out of bed at least ten times to say several Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glorias” (Lantern 135). The title of that story also alludes to the demonization of the female body as something that has to be repressed or covered up.

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10 A final difference from the earlier stories concerns the relationship between mother and daughter in “Green Georgette.” As we have seen, mother and daughter are very close; they share similar likes and dislikes, hopes and disappointments, moving from “Our being invited is a miracle” to “We were in a gloom” (Saints 113, 124). Still, the daughter’s predictions of her mother’s behaviour in the lengthy passage quoted above also signal an awareness of her mother as a separate person. Moreover, in her account of the visit the narrator expresses slight annoyance at her mother’s compliance: “Normally she was reserved but her yearning to form a friendship had made her over- accommodating” (Saints 120), or “She was too conciliatory, even though she was rattled within” (Saints 124). The final lines of the story further highlight the difference between mother and daughter, with the mother taking comfort in the promise of an orange soufflé and the daughter praying “for drastic things to occur—for the bullocks to rise up in mutiny, then gore one another, for my father to die in his sleep, for our school to catch fire, and for Mr Coughlan to take a pistol and shoot his wife, before shooting himself” (Saints 125). Unlike the symbiotic but suffocating mother-daughter relations in several of O’Brien’s early stories, I would argue, the relationship between mother and daughter in “Green Georgette” is characterised by both similarity and difference, by closeness and distance, by mutual understanding and respect. The narrator knows and understands her mother’s desires and disappointments, shares some of them, and ultimately diverges from them, without, however, entirely tearing herself away from the mother in the process. Instead of the pathological mother- daughter evoked in most of O’Brien’s fiction, “Green Georgette” depicts what Jessica Benjamin has called an “intersubjective relation” in which the daughter no longer sees the mother as an object, whether of fantasy, need or blame. Instead, she recognises her as a subject, “as different and yet alike,” as “an other who is capable of sharing similar mental experience” (Benjamin 22)7. Indeed, as we have seen, the mother is primarily characterised as a desiring subject in her own right, even though her yearnings are more conventional and domestic than the romantic and rebellious dreams of the daughter.

11 The challenge of seeing the mother as a subject is also raised in “My Two Mothers.” The duality evoked in the title refers first of all to the opposition between the narrator’s ugly dreams of her mother and the reality of their past together: “In dream my mother and I are enemies, whereas in life we were so attached we could almost be called lovers” (Saints 169). And the story goes on to characterise the trajectory from symbiosis —“we were inseparable” (Saints 173)—through separation and estrangement to attempts at reconciliation—a trajectory which is highly familiar to readers of O’Brien’s and which has perhaps most compellingly been dramatized in “A Rose at the Heart of New York.” Again however, a closer consideration of these stories reveals many interesting differences between “A Rose” and its more recent retelling.

12 In the story, the two mothers of the title are also identified as “real mother and archetypal mother”—a duality which characterises most mothers in O’Brien’s fiction, who are represented as actual mothers and as instantiations of the archetypal images of Mother Ireland and/or the Virgin Mother. As if to underline that mythic dimension, the characters in “A Rose” remain nameless; they are referred to as “the mother” and “the girl.” In the harrowing birthing scene which opens that story, moreover, the “poor poor mother” is cast as a veritable sacrificial figure (Fanatic 375): brutalised by her husband (“prized apart […] rammed through and told to open up” [Fanatic 376]), worn

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down by domestic drudgery, and now bloodied and wounded, symbolically linked to the half-cooked goose the drunken men downstairs have torn apart. The rather overblown imagery of the first pages connects the mother not just with the Virgin Mary but also with Christ: “The mother roared again and said this indeed was her vinegar and gall. She bit into the crucifix and dented it further. She could feel her mouth and eyelids being stitched, too; she was no longer a lovely body, she was a vehicle for pain and insult” (Fanatic 379). How different then, the much more personal tone of “My Two Mothers” in which the first-person narrator recalls very specific details about her mother: Her fingers and nails smelt of food—meal for hen and chickens, gruel for calves and bread for us—whereas her body smelt of myriad things, depending on whether she was happy or unhappy, and the most pleasant was a lingering smell of a perfume from the cotton wad that she sometimes tucked under her brassiere. At Christmas time it was a smell of fruitcake soaked with grog and the sugary smell of white icing, stiff as starch, which she applied with the rapture of an artist. (Saints 169)

13 As in “Green Georgette,” the mother is depicted as warm and generous, with a love of food, clothes and luxuries, shared by the daughter. On summer evenings, they put on their best clothes and take a walk: Those walks bordered on enchantment, what with neighbours in some sudden comraderie, greeting us profusely, and always, irrationally, the added possibility that we might walk out of our old sad existence […] On those walks she invariably spoke of visitors that were bound to come in the summer and the dainty dishes she would prepare for them. There was a host of recipes she had not yet tried. (Saints 171).

14 If in “A Rose” and other stories the early, symbiotic mother-daughter bond is also often characterised by a shared love of food or glamour, these enjoyments invariably come with strictures: the girl’s enjoyment of an orange cake her mother has made elicits the warning that she’ll get fat (Fanatic 384); a gift of a “most beautiful lipstick in a ridged gold case” is admired and enjoyed for a while, but then shut away in its case where it “dried out and developed a peculiar shape” (Fanatic 388). The emphasis in these stories is on self-denial, inspired by religious beliefs and hard necessity, whereas the emphasis in “Green Georgette” and “My Two Mothers” is on small pleasures and enjoyment in spite of harsh circumstances.

15 Still, in “My Two Mothers” too this childhood happiness is followed by a period of rebellion and escape on the part of the daughter and of disappointment on the part of the mother, who disapproves of her daughter’s writing, her marriage and subsequent divorce. As in “A Rose,” further, the narrator seeks reconciliation by splitting the mother into an apparent and a hidden figure. In “A Rose,” the daughter hopes to unearth “a long-sustained hidden passion” of the mother. Unearthing this secret self, she believes, will allow them “to be true at last,” with no more need to “hide from one another’s gaze” (Fanatic 398). In fact, the daughter hopes that this discovery will expose a fundamental similarity between her mother and herself, which will lead the mother to finally accept her daughter and the life of passion she has lead. Yet, the mother quells all such hopes when she sternly states that “there was no such thing as love between the sexes […] there was only one kind of love and that was a mother’s love for her child” (Fanatic 399).

16 In “My Two Mothers” too, the narrator senses a “secret” inside her mother which she hopes to uncover (Saints 175). Significantly, the secret is linked both to a lost child—a

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pregnancy aborted in ominous circumstances—and to a lost sweetheart. Unlike the girl in “A Rose,” moreover, the narrator does not try to pry the secret from her mother in a conversation. Instead, she seeks to find this secret self, this “hidden room,” through acts of rereading. She rereads both her own memories of her mothers and the hundreds of letters her mother has sent her over the years. “Her letters were deeper, sadder than I remembered,” writes the narrator, “but what struck me most was their hunger and their thirst” (Saints 175). What the narrator uncovers in these letters are her mother’s wishes and desires—for a trip to London, for her daughter’s return, for a chandelier or newly made jam she can offer to her daughter (“Her letter kept wishing that she could hand me a pot of clear jelly over a hedge and see me taste and swallow it” [Saints 176-77]). Going back through her memories yields a similar image of her mother as a desiring subject. “It was clear,” the narrator now understands, “from a little shiver in her body in which desire and disgust overlapped, that she wished she could have gone through that forbidden door with him” (Saints 180). If in “A Rose” the girl had only wanted the mother to understand and accept her life, the narrator in “My Two Mothers” comes to recognise a similar desire for acceptance in her mother—“a woman desperately trying to explain herself and to be understood” (Saints 176). Again, this aspect of mutuality recalls Benjamin’s intersubjective relationship which is founded on “the need for mutual recognition, the necessity of recognizing as well as being recognized by the other […] This means that the child has a need to see the mother, too, as an independent subject, not simply as the ‘external world’ or an adjunct of his ego” (23).

17 The ending of both stories links the death of the mother to a final failure of communication. In “A Rose,” “an envelope addressed to her in her mother’s handwriting” only contains “some trinkets, a gold sovereign, and some money” (Fanatic 404). And although the daughter desperately “wanted something, some communiqué,” “there was no such thing.” The mother’s death radically stops all understanding or reconciliation: “A new wall had arisen, stronger and sturdier than before […] silence filled the room and there was a vaster silence beyond, as if the house itself had died or had been carefully put down to sleep” (Fanatic 404). In “My Two Mothers,” the mother’s death is also symbolised by an “unfinished” last letter (Saints 181). Yet, this ending is not final, as in “A Rose,” for the narrator keeps the conversation open by rereading her mother through memories and letters and by hopefully waiting for “the dream that leads us beyond the ghastly white spittoon and the metal razor, to fields and meadows, up onto the mountain […] to begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting and free of shame” (Saints 181). As in “Green Georgette,” the present tense used in this passage is future-directed and emphasizes hope, wishes and dreams over failures and disappointments.

18 In spite of the superficial similarities, in short, the mother-daughter plot has undergone quite radical changes in the Saints and Sinners stories. The archetypal and mythical dimension of the mother-daughter relation is downplayed in favour of personal interaction and concrete, individual lives. In both stories, moreover, the daughter notes her mother’s hard life in sometimes difficult circumstances, but highlights above all the moments of joy and wonder. Similarly, although the stories display the familiar O’Brien pattern of desire and disappointment, the hopes and dreams finally stand out most clearly. In the process of reading or re-reading the mother, the daughter also comes to understand the mother as a desiring subject, with wishes and dreams similar to but also different from her own. Instead of waiting to be

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understood herself—as in “A Rose” or “Cords”—it is now the daughter who seeks to understand the mother and, in doing so, comes to understand herself. This is particularly clear in “My Two Mothers,” where the narrator’s act of rereading leads her to the realisation that “what I admired in her most was her unceasing labour, allowing for no hour of rest, no day of rest. She had set me an example by her resilience and a strange childish gratitude for things” (Saints 179). What the story also, be it more implicitly, suggests is that the writer-narrator owes some of her creativity and writing skills to her mother—even though her literary career has always been a bone of contention between them. This shared creative space between mother and daughter is in fact also hinted at in The Light of Evening, where the letters the writer-protagonist receives from her mother form an important part of the novel. As Ellen McWilliams has suggested, “her mother’s letters from her home place in County Clare retain a powerful hold over her and, most importantly, leave their imprint on her writing” (56).

19 Since it is well known that Edna O’Brien drew on her own letters from her mother for The Light of Evening, one might be tempted to look at the author’s personal circumstances for an explanation of this recent transformation of the mother-daughter plot. McWilliams argues in this respect that O’Brien’s “more conciliatory version of the mother-daughter relationship and, by extension, the relationship between the Irish woman writer and Ireland […] may be usefully mapped onto O’Brien’s own changing relationship with her home place,” both in terms of her mother and motherland (51). Although the autobiographical input is certainly there, I think it is important not to exaggerate it, especially since O’Brien’s recent memoir, Country Girl, clearly revealed the large and significant differences between the author’s own life and that of her protagonists. It is probably as instructive, therefore, to consider the changing mother- daughter plots of O’Brien’s short stories in the context of international and Irish literary trends.

20 In her 1989 study, Marianne Hirsch already recognised a development towards a more positive appraisal of the mother in African-American feminist texts, where a recovery of the mother’s story and a matrilineal heritage is seen as a necessary ingredient of the daughter's development. Somewhat more tentatively, Anne Fogarty detects traces of a similar pattern in Irish novels of the 1990s where “the desire to break loose from traditional familial and psychic impediments” coexists with “the urge to recover the history of the mother” as a “necessary concomitant of the daughter’s quest for fulfilment and self-knowledge” (113). Yet, Fogarty immediately qualifies this, noting that “the mother remains, however, an ominous and disturbing figure even in these fables of female reconciliation. Painful rapprochements and intractable tensions continue to be the fulcrum of Irish fictions that focus on the complex ambiguities of the mother-daughter relationship” (114). We have seen how the daughter’s botched attempts at reconciliation, through uncovering her mother’s—secret—story also informed “A Rose,” with the daughter vainly seeking the mother’s acceptance and approval on the basis of shared sexual passion. As McWilliams has shown, further, The Light of Evening qualifies as a further, more successful fable of female reconciliation, with the mother’s voice “given equal presence to the daughter’s story” (64) and mother and daughter arriving “at a meaningful, if uneasy, understanding of each other by the end of the text” (54). If this novel—unlike earlier stories—manages to represent the mother as a subject of her own story, “Green Georgette” and “My Two Mothers” take this development even further by portraying the mother as a desiring subject within

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the daughter’s own story, thus presenting the mother-daughter bond as an intersubjective relationship, based on similarity, difference and mutual recognition.

21 In an Irish context, the importance of this representation of the mother as an embodied subject of desire, enjoying good food, soft clothes and even sexual passion, cannot be underestimated. In Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change, Gerardine Meaney has argued that the Irish cultural imagination has long been haunted by the idolisation of the mother Mary as a Virgin and the concomitant “refusal to countenance any representation of the mother’s body as origin of life” (8). In her book, she offers a detailed analysis of “the derealisation of motherhood in the ideology of the southern Irish state,” which created a culture that sought to “exclude the sexual, maternal, nurturing, ever-hungry body” (10). “Green Georgette” and “My Two Mothers” clearly seek to break with that repression, by representing the mother as, indeed, hungry, nurturing, and sensual—if not, or not explicitly, sexual.

22 Interestingly, similar representations of the mother as a desiring subject have emerged in contemporary short stories of other women writers. Anne Enright’s recent collection Taking Pictures (2008), for instance, contains some stories in which a grown-up daughter is slightly baffled to discover evidence of her mother’s separate existence, of her life “as another subject with a purpose apart from her existence for the child,” as Benjamin has put it (23). In “Honey,” a mother’s dying from cancer confronts the protagonist with her mother’s body—“Both of them listening to her body, the silent chemicals doing their silent work, and the dent on the side of her breast the largest thing in the room” (Taking 80)—and desires: “her mother […] saying, ‘These are the things I regret: I never slept with a Frenchman. I never slept with that little fucker whatshisname who went on to make all the money. I didn’t enjoy you girls enough when you were young enough not to thwart me. I deeply resent all that dieting. Deeply. Bitterly. What else? Nothing’” (Taking 82). In “Cruise” too, the daughter is brought up short by the realisation of her parents’ mortal body. Later, at her father’s funeral, she is appalled to learn of her mother’s intense friendship with another elderly couple, finding her “collapsed and sobbing, in a strange man’s arms” (Taking 52). The image of the mother which is foregrounded here is the opposite of the self-denying, sacrificial Madonna which has haunted the Irish imagination for much of the twentieth century. Instead what we find here is a focus on the maternal—sexual and mortal—body and on the mother’s identity as a subject in her own right. This awareness also allows the daughter to recognise the commonality between herself and her mother, as when the protagonist of “Honey” realises in an epiphany at the end of the story that “what she had felt as she stepped away from her mother’s grave” was “lightness—it was desire. And it was vast” (Taking 87).

23 Claire Keegan’s short story collections Antarctica (1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (2007) also contain several mother-daughter plots. Although set in a seemingly timeless rural Ireland in which patriarchal patterns are still firmly in place, the stories mostly give a nuanced portrayal of the relationships between mothers and their adolescent daughters. In general, the stories put less emphasis on the maternal body and desire, with the exception of “The Forrester’s Daughter” which revolves around the mother’s adulterous affair. Instead, the emphasis lies on the relationship between mother and daughter which is characterised, as I argued elsewhere, by mutual solidarity and respect (D’hoker). In “Men and Women,” for instance, the young girl—unlike her brother—comes to recognise her mother’s hurt feelings on the New Year’s Party and

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tries to step in and “rescue” her (Antarctica 29) and in “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” daughter and mother parodically enact a gendered ritual every Saturday when they dress up for an evening out. As in O’Brien’s “Green Georgette,” the daughter recognises the mother as a subject with dreams and fears, similar to and different from her own. Yet Keegan goes even further than O’Brien by making this mutual recognition the basis for female empowerment and change within a patriarchal society. This sense of action and change is in Keegan’s stories also conveyed through a clever use of first-person, present-tense narration, which is future-directed—as in the first part of “Green Georgette”—and allows for the possibility that dreams, hopes and resolutions may be realised, that change is possible, even within conservative rural communities.

24 Following on from her critique of the “matricide,” the silencing of the mother, which is at the heart of Western culture, Luce Irigaray has launched a plea for a symbolisation of the mother-daughter relationship: “we need to say goodbye to maternal omnipotence […] and establish a woman-to-woman relationship of reciprocity with our mothers, in which they might possibly also feel themselves to be our daughters. In a word, liberate ourselves along with our mothers” (Reader 50). “If mothers could be women,” she continues, “there would be a whole mode of a relationship of desiring speech between daughter and mother” (Reader 52). For an example of such symbolisations of the mother-daughter relationship, she turns in An Ethics of Sexual Difference to the “beautiful images of that natural and spiritual couple, the mother-daughter” which can be found in Greek mythology (Ethics 189). In her response to Irigaray, Amber Jacobs supports this appeal but warns that these mythic images are still “part of the male imaginary’s idealisation of this relation, the reverse of which is denigration” and that they threaten to “reproduce the situation she is trying to rectify—the collapse of mother and daughter into a merged identity that sustains the foreclosure of their structural differentiation” (179). Jacobs suggests instead that new symbolisations of the mother- daughter relation are needed which “represent the differentiation between mother and daughter,” based on a perception of the mother “as a sexed subjected whose relation to filiation and generational transmission is given expression in the symbolic economy” (178, 181).

25 Although Jacobs aims to realise these symbolisations in new psychoanalytic theories, the preceding analysis has made clear, I hope, that they can actually already be found in contemporary women’s literature. Indeed, the recent short stories of O’Brien, Enright and Keegan successfully dramatize mother-daughter relations which circumvent the mythic images of the sacrificial and devouring mother that have so long dominated the Western imagination. Avoiding the traps of idealisation and denigration, they represent the mother as an embodied subject, with her own fears, hopes and desires. The recognition of the mother as a subject in her own right, moreover, also acts as an important catalyst in the realisation of an intersubjective relation between mother and daughter, based on reciprocity, mutual understanding and respect. Returning to O’Brien’s recent mother-daughter stories, it will be clear that they are far from a mere repetition of earlier themes and plots. Like her daughter characters instead, O’Brien engages in a process of extensive re-reading and re-writing, thereby casting both the mother and the mother-daughter plot in an entirely new light. The mothers in these stories, then, are neither the saints nor the sinners referred to in the title, but rather ordinary human beings, “desperately trying […] to be understood” (176).

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Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge, 1991. Print.

NOTES

1. See Fogarty for a perceptive discussion of the mother-daughter plot in The Country Girls Trilogy (105-106). 2. For Irigaray, the major cultural taboo is the relationship with the mother rather than, as Freud argued, the murder of the father. The lack of proper representation of this relationship, leads to the continuing hold of primitive phantasies which see the mother as a devouring monster. It is important therefore that the relationship with the mother, and in particular the mother- daughter relationship, is brought out of silence and into representation within the symbolic order. Irigaray elaborates on this especially in two early texts, “Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order” and “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” (both included in The Irigaray Reader), as well as in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. For a more detailed discussion of Irigaray’s thinking on the mother-daughter relationship, see Whitford; Jacobs; Ingman. 3. Heather Ingman has noted similarly that in O’Brien’s novels, “mothers are often portrayed as joyless, self-denying victims of male violence” (78). 4. See also The Guardian review of the book which notes, “O’Brien revisits subjects she has covered in her novels: troubles family relations deep in the country in “Old Wounds,” the mutual heartbreak of mothers and daughters in “Two Mothers” (Brownrigg). 5. This recalls the mother’s intense class awareness in “A Demon,” where her attempts to ingratiate herself with the doctor’s wife are elaborated on at length. 6. The bare outline of the mother figure in this story, as of that in “My Two Mothers,” thus corresponds to the typical O’Brien mother, whom Ann Owens Weekes has characterised as follows: “Usually married to an alcoholic, abusive, lazy husband, this recurring figure often spends some time abroad before marrying, a time she later looks back on with longing. Once married, she puts on airs and accents to impress strangers; holds the home together through scrimping and drudgery; fawns on those whose social recognition she desires; distrusts and belittles those whose values differ from her own” (109). 7. With this intersubjective perspective, Benjamin aims to offer a correction to the “distorted view of the mother” in psychoanalysis, and indeed, “in the culture as a whole.” Psychoanalysis,

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and specifically objects relations theory, she argues, only understand the mother as an object of the infant’s needs, attachment or love, but not “as another subject with a purpose apart from her existence for the child” (23).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article analyse la manière dont Edna O’Brien revisite la relation problématique entre mère et fille dans ses nouvelles “A Green Georgette” et “A My Two Mothers”. Publiés en 2011 dans le recueil Saints and Sinners, ces deux textes présentent un certain nombre de caractéristiques qui rappellent des récits publiés antérieurement, tels “The Rug,” “A Demon” et “A Rose in the Heart of New York”. Toutefois, la représentation de la mère dans “A Green Georgette” et “My Two Mothers” est nettement différente. Contrairement à la mise en scène habituelle de la mère en tant que personnage réprimé et répressif qui fait abnégation de soi-même, l’image maternelle qui s’impose dans “Green Georgette” et “A My Two Mothers” est celle d’un individu cultivant ses désirs, voire d’une personne qui ose revendiquer ses propres droits. Cette conception particulière de la mère se traduit à travers les actes de lecture et de relecture de la part de la fille, et constitue la base sur laquelle s’appuie la relation intersubjective et réciproque entre mère et fille, telle qu’elle est représentée dans ces deux nouvelles. Par le biais d’une comparaison avec des récits d’Anne Enright et de Claire Keegan, l’article montre à quel point la redéfinition de la figure de la mère, telle qu’elle a été effectuée par O’Brien, peut être liée aux développements récents au sein du domaine de la short fiction irlandaise. Il prouve également que les œuvres de ces écrivaines constituent des réponses à l’appel lancé par Luce Irigaray, invitant à une nouvelle appréhension symbolique de la relation mère-fille.

AUTHORS

ELKE D’HOKER Elke D’hoker is lecturer in English and Irish literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She is the author of Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville (Rodopi, 2004) and has co-edited Unreliable Narration in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel (De Gruyter, 2008) and Irish Women Writers. New Critical Perspectives (Lang, 2011). She has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary fiction, with a specific focus on narrative theory, Irish studies and gender studies. Current research projects deal with the short story cycle and with the specific contribution of Irish women writers to the genre of the short story.

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The Irish (Short) Story, Level 1: Julian Gough’s “The Orphan and the Mob”

1 Julian Gough’s story “The Orphan and the Mob” (hereafter “The Orphan”) was awarded the 2007 National Short Story prize by a unanimous panel composed of Monica Ali and A.S. Byatt, among others. Panel chair Mark Lawson declared to The Guardian at the time that “the comedy, energy and originality of both plot and voice set [“The Orphan”] ahead of the other contenders” (Crown). Gough’s story had previously been published in the March 2006 issue of Prospect Magazine, and it became widely available online after the prize, both in written and spoken form. BBC radio 4 broadcast a spoken-word version of the prize-winning story, read by Beckett actor Conor Lovett; another version now features in the spoken literature album Sticky Ends and Unexpected Twists (2012). The story has been a favourite read at academic and literary gatherings—one particular instance (witnessed by the author of this article) at the July 2011 International Flann O’Brien Centenary Conference in Vienna, where Gough’s hilarious reading placed his story firmly and explicitly under the aegis of O’Brien’s comic spirit.

2 For all its short-story credentials, however, “The Orphan” is not technically an autonomous piece of short fiction but the opening part of a novel, Jude: Level 1, published shortly after the story was awarded its prize. Over five years and another novel later, “The Orphan” has become not simply the prologue to Jude (as advertised on the book cover), but the prequel to a still unfinished trilogy, comprising Jude: Level 1 (2007) and Jude in London (2011)—the last volume, Jude in America, has yet to be published. “The Orphan and the Mob” is not an isolated case since another of Gough’s stories, first published in The Financial Times in 2003, is now an episode from the novel Jude in London. Its plot takes Gough’s main character, Jude, through a nonsensical depiction of the Irish financial bubble and collapse of recent years. It was adapted in 2012 for live performances, first as a radio play on the BBC, then as a stage play for the Galway Arts Festival.1 Chronology is significant here, since the adapted excerpt had officially been part of its wider narrative for over a year before it was picked up again as a short story.

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3 Beyond the obvious financial reasons for publishing parts of a yet unfinished book, the fate of these stories reflects a specific relationship between author and readership through the very physical malleability and versatility of their format, narrative structure and delivery. By virtue of their changeable short-story-to-fragment status, “The Orphan and the Mob” and “The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble” raise the question of genre.

4 The question of genre, or rather, genre-mangling, is all the more relevant for an author whose blog signature is “the novel reinvented, while you wait,” and whose interest in the many forms of contemporary storytelling has gone as far as to author the concluding narrative for cult video game Minecraft. As the singer of 90s rock band Toasted Heretic, Julian Gough is firmly grounded in live interaction and oral performance. As a multimedia fiction writer and commentator with an up-to-date blog and twitter account, he does not fit the stereotypical picture of the bookish writer. His novels themselves have drawn mixed reactions, from the very enthusiastic to the very sceptical. In his review of Gough’s first novel, New York Times critic Richard Eder stated that “Mr. Gough is a clever writer; he is simply not, or not yet (judging from this first effort), a very good novelist: one who makes the demands on himself that even a comic romance requires.” John Banville remarked to The Guardian in 2010 that Gough’s “notion that shouting the word ‘feck’ (...) and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument” (Flood). The fact that Julian Gough won the 2012 National Short-Story Award for his latest story iHole (also, as a result of the prize, broadcast on BBC 4) may suggest he is more of a short story writer than and novelist, yet his expanded stories/novels are now also recognised in their own right since both Jude: Level 1 and Jude in London were shortlisted for the Bolinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, respectively in 2008 and 2012. Whatever the official status of his stories may be, Julian Gough has made clear that his aim was to distort and play with the notion of genre in fiction writing.

5 The question I wish to examine in this article is what “The Orphan and the Mob” brings to our understanding of the Irish short story, and how the seemingly blurred distinction between short story, story and novel in Julian Gough’s work also reflects a current state of contemporary fiction worldwide. The many influences and echoes to be found in “The Orphan” follow the reflexive, meta-fictional trend of contemporary western fiction, and its ambiguous structure reflects Gough’s explicit goal to do away with what he considers the crippling structural limitations and formal boundaries of his fellow Irish writers. Gough observes: Irish literary writers have become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture. We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off. (…) The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it’s a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature no longer does. (“The State”)

6 For all Gough’s ill-tempered and disingenuous accusations, “The Orphan,” with its Irish theme and comic exuberance, obviously displays influence from a long Irish tradition of satirical (short) fiction. My analysis of this story will rely on two of its main elements: its narrative themes and satirical purpose, and its open-ended, multi-faceted structure. How do the themes and structure of the narrative affect the structure of the story itself? What makes this story a viable, self-contained short story? How does our contemporary understanding of seriality affect the already complex definition of the

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short story as an autonomous literary genre? “The Orphan” reflects the evolution of (Irish) fiction writing today, as it leads a hybrid literary tradition of orality, literacy and seriality into the contemporary modes of literary communication.

Jude’s Adventures in Ireland

7 “The Orphan” is about a boy who accidentally urinates on a Fianna Fáil minister during a monument unveiling ceremony in the Tipperary countryside. The story is told retrospectively in the first person by the hero, confession-style, with a disingenuously teasing first sentence offering us the clue to a yet unexplained drama: “If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage.” The first-person narrator then proceeds to give us his name and address in a parodic rendering of Joyce’s Portrait: Jude The Orphanage Tipperary Ireland (3)

8 This incipit sets the story’s main themes: Irishness, filiation and identity, farcical comedy.

9 Jude is an ingenuous 18-year-old who leads a group of younger boys from his orphanage to attend a speech by (fictional) Brünhilde DeValera, the Fianna Fáil, “Minister for Beef, Culture and the Islands” (7). Brünhilde has come to the orphans’ remote part of the Irish countryside to open a newly minted national monument, “the Nation’s most famous Boghole, famed in song and story, in History Book and Ballad sheet” (6), named after her great-grand-father’s cousin—the Irish Republic’s spiritual father, Eamonn De Valera. The problem, of course, is Jude’s relentless bladder. After excruciating efforts to contain his fateful urge, Jude finally decides to hide behind the stage curtain and finds a miraculous hole in which he blissfully relieves himself—only to be caught red-handed (or rather, pants down), urinating in Dev’s National Boghole: “I feel, looking back, that it would not have gone so badly against me,” says a contrite Jude, “had I not, in my panic, turned and hosed Brünhilde De Valera with urine” (13). Jude’s bladder blunder is the first climactic scene in the story, and it partially solves its allusive incipit. It also sets the stage for the second part of Gough’s farcical plot, the destruction of the orphanage by an infuriated crowd of Fianna Fáil farmers who vow to avenge their desecrated Hole. After everything has been reduced to ashes, Jude leaves Tipperary: this is where the short story ends and the rest of the novel begins. At this point, if the story remains unclear as to its genre—long, short, interrupted?—one thing is certain: it is an Irish story which brings together both specific and generic references to Ireland’s politics and culture. Gough’s satirical comedy stems from this hybridity, since it addresses contemporary political and social questions, as well as the enduring intensity of colonial and bucolic stereotypes. In the speech scene, the comically bovine Brünhilde De Valera betrays her true feelings towards the European Union: “Although it is European money which has paid for everything built West of Grafton Street in my Lifetime… And although we are grateful to Europe for its Largesse…” She paused to draw a great Breath. (…) “Grateful as we are to the Europeans… … we should never forget …

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… that … … they … (…) … are a shower of Foreign Bastards who would Murder us in our Beds given Half a Chance!” (8)

10 Brünhilde’s tirade is greeted by a standing ovation as she launches into a eulogy of the incorruptible heart, soul and loyalty of the stereotypical Irishman, and proceeds to invoke the great heroes of independent Ireland. That a German-sounding Brünhilde should display such fierce Europhobia here only adds piquant to the scene, as Gough humorously caricatures his nation’s ambivalent feelings towards the EU. Coincidentally, at the time the story was first published, Irish opinion was considered generally favourable to the European Union, with “Seventy-three percent of Irish people feel[ing] that Ireland’s membership of the EU [was] a good thing,” according to the 2006 European Commission opinion poll—Irish voters were still two years away from their resounding “no” to the Lisbon Treaty.

11 As Gough’s farcical satire fleshes out the comic stereotypes of contemporary Ireland, its “eight-lane Motorway[s]” and its enormous car parks (8), he also draws from a seemingly indestructible stock of colonial clichés: in the speech scene, the cheering audience start to “leap up and down roaring (…), the younger and more nimble mounting each other’s shoulder,” thus mimicking the ape-like Irishmen of 19th century British caricatures. Back at the orphanage, Jude’s relationship with the Brothers recalls the iron grip of the Catholic clergy on Irish education since the 1830s, as well as, closer to us, the continuing stream of sexual abuse scandals made public from the 1990s onward. Gough’s black humour thrives in the endless opportunities for sexual innuendos and wordplay: “I found most of the young Orphans hiding under Brother Thomond in the darkness of the hay barn (…) he was maintained erect only by the stiffness of his ancient joints” (4).

12 Gough’s contemporary rendering of the bawdy tales of an ancient storytelling tradition is only an instance of the satirical ballet of stereotypes he orchestrates in “The Orphan.” In doing so, Gough puts a current spin on an old literary tradition of continental and Irish satirical writing, from Rabelais to Swift and Flann O’Brien. As Jude’s intemperate bladder recalls Swift’s scatological satire, his euphemistic depiction of the Brothers’ “desultory beating” of the orphans is an obvious tribute to the best satirical pages of O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen Lawn.2 The story’s wacky exuberance offers us a miniature cartography of Ireland, at full speed, first through a prized sample of the Irish countryside (“We hopped over a fence, crossed a field, waded a dyke, cut through a ditch, traversed scrub land, forded a river and entered Nobber Nolan’s bog” (6)), then in the apocalyptic frenzy of the burning orphanage. Along the way, Gough pays tribute to Flann O’Brien’s nonsensical writing and black humour. This literary and satirical filiation is explicitly acknowledged in the front cover of the published book.3 There is also a touch of Monty Pythonesque extravagance when a priest is changed into a statue by molten lead falling from the burning roof, and Jude escapes the Mob dressed in drag: “[I] slipped into a charming blue gingham dress (…). The crowd parted to let me through, the Young Farmers removing their Hats as I passed” (21-22). Finally, Jude’s ingenuous tone and naïve ignorance of the wider world, together with his eventual departure for a picaresque journey through Ireland, humorously echo Voltaire’s Candide on the verge of his eye-opening adventures across the world.

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13 The 2007 award panel had praised the story for the energy of its plot and voice. As the narrator-hero concludes this episode of his adventures, his self-consciously polyphonic tale places him clearly outside the realm of the “lonely voice” defined by Frank O’Connor in his 1962 study of the genre. O’Connor defined the short story as a modern art form, distinct from the tradition of storytelling because it is no public art. As opposed to interactive storytelling, the short story is “a private art intended to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary, critical reader” (84). The second element in O’Connor’s analysis also finds “The Orphan” at odds with his clear-cut definition of the genre: for O’Connor, the short story does not have a hero but a “submerged population group” (86), i.e. representative tokens of their class. Jude the orphan may be a barely identified character in the tale (he only has his first name and does not know his origins), but his very quest for identity makes him a hero more suited to a bildungsroman than to a short, epiphanic snapshot of Irish country life. Gough’s story draws from many traditions, from literature and popular culture, and both its mode of delivery and narrative structure make it a hybrid genre addressed to group audiences and isolated readers alike. Having determined that this is indeed an Irish satirical tale, we must now turn to the story’s pragmatic structure in order to examine further its relationship to the short story genre.

Story, Interrupted

14 The themes of lost identity and exile in “The Orphan” reflect what Heather Ingman describes as the “nomadic, fragmented identity of the Irish short story that, at its best, indicates an awareness of other worlds, other possibilities shadowing this one” (260). However relevant his story is as a satirical picture of contemporary Ireland, Julian Gough himself described its structure not as a short story but “like the bit at the start of the Star Wars trilogy, where Luke Skywalker is working on his uncle's farm, and then the planet’s destroyed, and he has to go off on his galactic quest and discover his destiny. Except set in Tipperary” (Crown). The question of structure is paramount here, since “The Orphan” is in fact the prologue to a very long, winding quest that takes Jude through Ireland, then London, and finally leads him to America. The story has been published in different forms; let us first examine its original, prize-winning format.

15 “The Orphan and the Mob” was first published by Prospect Magazine in March 2006; the original text is still available online (although only partially for non-subscribers). The story follows the usual format of articles in printed and online magazines and newspapers: it has a headline (the story’s title) and a subhead (which is typographically distinct from both title and text): “Were it not for the need to pee, Jude might discover the secret of his birth.” Magazine articles are clearly distinct from a published volume since their very format is more explicitly dialogic; they address their readers in a way that the volume does not. The internet further adds to this dialogue since it enables readers not only to leave comments, but also to share the text with others on social networks, something that Julian Gough himself is keen to do. The newspaper/ periodical and its internet version bring together two distinctive elements. With high- end technology comes infinite reproduction and virtually limitless distribution of the story; on the other hand, the headline and subhead format hail back to the traditional storyteller drawing in the public with a catchy phrase. Throughout his long career as a chronicler for the Irish Times, Flann O’Brien played with the hybrid nature of the

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newspaper as his pseudonymous persona, Myles, followed in the footsteps—albeit with a satirical pointe—of the traditional storyteller-by-the-fire. Gough explicitly inscribes his multi-media stories in the Mylesian tradition of satirical, and often farcical, self- conscious dialogism, while introducing us to the realm of the hypertext and the internet blog. Twentieth century and contemporary writers have largely demonstrated the hybridity of Irish fiction through genre-bending and multi-media adaptation: from Frank O’Connor’s radio storytelling to Beckett’s radio plays and Roddy Doyle’s cinematic adaptations, Irish fiction orchestrates a constant back-and-forth between oral storytelling, theatrical performance, cinematic production and written narrative. Gough brings a digital twist to this ongoing experimental literary tradition by ushering us into the age of the online story: a rhizomatic, digressive structure in which hypertext links, open-ended user participation and instant messaging prevail. Gough’s digital-age storytelling thus reflects the continuing importance of orality in Irish fiction while expressing a radically new sense of space, place and temporality through online interaction.

16 Gough published his story separately as a self-contained entry in his blog, with a comically explicit catch: “Here you go. ‘The Orphan and the Mob’: a free, award- winning, and slightly rude story, to celebrate ‘The iHole’ making the shortlist of the BBC International Short Story Award.” He then introduces the story and asks for comments: “Any questions? Ask them in the comments below, or mail me here. In fact mail me anyhow, say hello, and I’ll tell you what I’m up to, and send you the odd free story and poem.” Gough’s mode of storytelling is that of an ongoing, if fragmentary, conversation with readers, in which open discussion, poems and stories naturally follow one another in the chronological unfolding of the blog. In the blog, the text of “The Orphan” is a single entity made up of separate, unnumbered paragraphs. The end of the story is made explicit (“END”); it is immediately followed by a picture of the whole book with an enticing caption (“Jude’s continuing adventures, on Amazon…”) and by the “post a comment” section. The overall para-textual apparatus emphasises the story’s hybrid nature, at once interactive, self-contained tale and fragment.

17 Orality is of course the unambiguous star of the show in the BBC broadcast and recorded versions of the story. The story remains, however, a hybrid: a written story, read by an actor. The tale partakes of the theatrical performance while retaining its basic format of written narrative fiction. The oral rendering of the story by a single but versatile actor’s voice raises another question: is the broadcast story the exact same as its printed double? The corpus I have at hand is not, unfortunately, the BBC broadcast (only available online for two weeks after its original air date), but the subsequently released album form, with the story read by Irish actor Charlie De Bromhead. This recorded version makes small but significant changes to the original text, which can mostly be justified by the needs of oral delivery from a distant source lacking the gestures and mimics of a live performance. Long, meta-fictional sentences are often shortened in the narrative section, thus highlighting direct speech dialogues. The Spoken Ink and BBC recordings vary slightly (thirty-five and thirty minutes respectively), which seems to attest to alterations of the text to fit specific oral formats. This in itself might not be relevant to our reflection on the short story genre, but for the fact that it shows how malleable Gough’s text is, how adaptable to its pragmatic context. Again, we seem to be back to the tale-telling tradition where a basic narrative thread takes on multiple shapes according to its actual context of utterance: time, place, audience and storyteller may affect the form and delivery of the story. The

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author of the present article was among the audience at a public reading of “The Orphan” by Julian Gough. The reading/performance lasted about 15 minutes and corresponded to about half of the published story: it stopped after the first climactic scene and was understood as a self-contained funny story complete with the final punch line—the farcical snapshot of Jude urinating on an irate Brünhilde De Valera. That the story could be cut short with a different ending raises the question of genre much more pressingly than its other narrative features (satirical story, oral tale), since it brings us to the usual quandary of whether the short story is its own genre simply by virtue of being short.

18 This leads me to the version of “The Orphan” more readily available to the common reader of printed books: the so-called prologue to Gough’s novel, Jude, Level 1. In the book, “The Orphan” has lost its title. It corresponds to chapters 1 to 10 of the novel. The volume itself is divided into three parts: “Tipperary” (chapters 1 to 15), “Galway” (16 to 44) and “Dublin” (17 to 72). Chapters are extremely short, especially in the first part of the volume; the shortest is chapter 7, whose 10 words mark the transition from the De Valera scene to the burning down of the orphanage. An unsuspecting reader could logically deduce that the short story indeed corresponds to the bog hole episode, since it would gratify our sense of unity of time, space and action. The story carries on however, and sees Jude back at the orphanage, in pressing discussions with the “Master of Orphans,” Brother Madrigal, to learn the truth about his origins. This second part of the story greatly differs from the first since its purpose is to lay out the narrative suspense leading to a three-volume saga. When the mysterious letter addressed to Jude is all but reduced to ashes, Jude is left with only a burnt corner and three decipherable words. Gents anal cruise. The secret of my origin was not entirely clear from this fragment, and the tower was beginning to collapse around me. (21)

19 Jude’s realisation that he must leave signals the transition from a comic sketch to a longer narrative: My actions had led to the destruction of the Orphanage. I had brought bitter disgrace to my family, whoever they should turn out to be. I realised with a jolt that I would have to leave the place of my greatest happiness. (22)

20 This passage can be read at two different narrative levels. Plot-wise, it introduces the typically Irish themes of exile and identity, with a playful reversal of their usual relationship: Jude’s exile will enable his quest for identity, rather than cut him off from his roots. His final look at the orphanage launches him into his adventures. From a meta-fictional point of view, Gough points to the literary intensity of narrative fragments, because they create suspense, and because they implicitly acknowledge their allegiance to a bigger whole, be it a broader narrative or indeed a whole literary tradition: narrative fragments are strongly evocative because they resonate with other fragments. The fragmentary inner structure of “The Orphan,” with its diminutive 10 chapters, introduces us to Gough’s mode of storytelling, in the footsteps of Flann O’Brien’s narrative experimentations in his chronicles. Jude’s quest is a string of self- contained tales, brought together by the first-person hero and framed by his digressive

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journey through Ireland. Narrative fragments in the age of multi-media and interactive storytelling raise a final question, that of seriality and its relation to the short story.

Serial Storyteller

21 “The Orphan” is both a successful self-contained story and the initial part of a much longer narrative; this hybrid structure makes it akin to the opening episode of a serial narrative, and brings it closer to two other forms of fiction found in popular culture: television series and video games. An episode in a serial narrative must be autonomously consistent and function as a link in the wider narrative arc of the series. Jude’s initial escapade in “The Orphan” effectively provides a conclusion to its own original plot (the chase and destruction of Jude’s home) and enough unsolved elements to create suspense, since the story’s open-ended conclusion announces the next phase of Jude’s adventures. Jude’s letter fragment gives us the first clue in a long-lasting quest; readers expect the following episodes/chapters to follow the same logic and gradually help solve the initial mystery. The rest of the novel, however, is so digressive that it alters the original narrative altogether. By the time the reader embarks on the second volume of Jude’s adventures, the quest has become a satirical journey through the British Isles, only very loosely connected to its beginnings.

22 Jude starts off looking for an answer to his origins, but as he arrives in Galway (“the Sodom of the West”) he accidentally walks into a Supermac’s (local Irish equivalent to the ubiquitous American fast-food chain) and instantly falls head over heels for the foul-mouthed waitress. His initial quest becomes secondary when his “one true love” goes missing and he tracks her down to Dublin, only to lose her again. At the end of Jude: Level 1, Jude swims across the Irish sea towards London. The second instalment in the trilogy, Jude in London, was initially titled Jude: Level 2. Such titles are far from insignificant; they add another dimension to the narrative beyond the mere seriality of its fragments, openly acknowledging its resemblance with the randomly digressive, interactive structure of a video game.

23 Video games revolve around a basic narrative thread, and are organised serially, into levels. Jude: Level 1 is the first and easiest level of the story. If we understand the full implication of such a title, we not only expect a long-winded story arch maintained by ongoing suspense, but also a gradual complexification of the plot itself, so that the story becomes a trial for the reader as well as the main character. The first-person narration is a relevant part of the video game structure, since we are meant to identify fully with our persona in order to graduate to the next level. Pragmatically speaking, Gough’s reference to a video-game narrative contributes to his interactive game with the reader, while it partially justifies the actual increase in narrative complexity as the story progresses. As Gough explained in a 2011 interview, the story “was always structured like a computer game, with increasing levels of difficulty (…). You can read as far as you feel like, and then stop” (Smith 82).

24 Indeed, by the end of the first novel/level, Jude has witnessed a tsunami, the blowing- up of Charles Haughey’s private island and the graphic demise—James Bond style—of Haughey himself. In the second volume of the trilogy, the story has become so digressive and fragmentary (with most paragraphs made of a single sentence) that only the unchanging character of Jude keeps it together. Nonetheless, the narrator-hero’s recurring meta-fictional remarks and direct addresses to the reader maintain the

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initial pragmatic effect of “The Orphan”: that of a tongue-in-cheek, satirical tale addressed to a live audience of benevolent listeners.

25 In the age of interactive narratives, fan-fiction and innumerable sequels, Gough’s short story paradoxically offers us a glimpse into a sprawling, never-ending reflexive tale. Gough’s intention in writing his three-volume story was to “mirror the history of the novel”: Level 1 is the traditional novel (…). So it’s a picaresque, with a strong, linear adventure, a quest for true love, lots of action (…). It’s Candide, it’s Gulliver’s Travels, it’s volume one of Don Quixote. Level 2 is the crisis in the novel (…). It doesn’t know how to go forward (…) it compulsively quotes from other novels, and from itself, in a demented and doomed search for an authentic moment. Level 3 is my idea of where the novel can go next. The postcrisis novel. The novel after theory. (Smith 82)

26 My contention here is that what makes “The Orphan” a successful short story in its own right is precisely that it explicitly presents itself as a fragment from a longer narrative as well as from a broader type of discourse, thus offering us a representation of the fictional story as a necessarily polyphonic, dialogic part of a greater whole— regardless of its length. In this respect, “The Orphan” tells us more about narrative fiction than about a distinct genre, be it the short story or the novel—although it partakes in both.

----

27 Gough pays tribute to the national traditions of oral tale-telling and Irish (post)modernist experiments with language and narrative structures, and roots his satirical narratives in contemporary Irish life. Yet his foray into the realm of internet storytelling also places him within a global trend of experimental fiction writing, whose inventiveness with narrative structure acknowledges our new, proliferating and fragmentary modes of communication. Together with other Irish contemporaries such as poet and performer David Lorgan (Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry 2005) and novelist and radio broadcaster Sinéad Crowley, Gough joins an international cohort of experimentalists, from David Foster Wallace in the United States to Eleanor Catton in New Zealand and Stewart Home in England. Gough’s storytelling is thus at once rooted and adrift, seeking both to capture the spirit of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, and to decipher the chaotic complexities of the global age, in a world that is—like his narrative structures—at once a microcosm and forever expanding.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crown, Sarah. “‘Tipperary Star Wars’ wins National Short Story prize.” The Guardian April 24 2007. Web. 11 Dec. 2012.

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Eder, Richard. “Ready for Double Trouble In the Big City of Galway.” New York Times July 17, 2001. Web. 11 Dec. 2012. 9 Dec. 2012.

European Commission. “Public Opinion in the European Union.” Eurobarometer 65 (2006). Web. 11 Dec. 2012.

Flood, Alison. “Julian Gough slams fellow Irish novelists as ‘priestly caste’ cut off from the culture.” The Guardian February 11 2010. Web. 11 Dec. 2012.

Gough, Julian. “Here you Go.” Julian Gough September 28 2012. Web. 20 Dec. 2012.

---. Jude: Level 1. Dublin: Old Street, 2007. Print.

---. Jude in London. Dublin: Old Street, 2011. Print.

---. “The Orphan and the Mob.” Prospect March 22 2006. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.

---. “The State of Irish Literature.” Julian Gough February 10 2010. Web. 20 Dec. 2012.

---. The Great Goat Bubble. By Julian Gough. Fishamble Theatre and Galway Arts Festival. July 2012. Performance.

---. “The Great Squanderland Roof.” By Julian Gough. Dir. Di Speirs BBC radio 4. Afternoon Drama. 28 February 28, 2012. Radio Performance. Web. 14 November 2014.

Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.

O’Brien, Flann. The Best of Myles. London: Flamingo, 1993. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. “The Lonely Voice.” Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976. 83-93. Print.

Smith, Drew. “Interview with Julian Gough.” The Believer 9.8 (2011): 79-83. Print.

NOTES

1. “The Great Squanderland Roof” was broadcast on BBC radio 4 on February 28, 2012, and was– according to its author–wildly popular, as was the more recent stage play, The Great Goat Bubble, first performed at the Galway Arts Festival in July 2012. 2. “I am, of course, intensely interested in education. I have every reason to be because I was disabled for life at the age of fifteen by a zealous master (although I had the laugh on him afterwards when I came back from hospital with my two hands amputated)” (O’Brien 243). 3. The book cover quotes Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan: “Perfect, perfect comedy. A cross between Flann O’Brien, Father Ted and Morrissey. The best comic novel I’ve ever read.”

ABSTRACTS

“The Orphan and the Mob” a valu à Julian Gough le Prix National de la nouvelle en Grande- Bretagne, en 2007. Pourtant, ce récit n’est pas à proprement parler une nouvelle (“short story”) mais le premier chapitre d’un roman, Jude: Level 1, lui-même premier épisode d’une trilogie dont

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le dernier volume est encore à paraître. Le chapitre/nouvelle a été largement diffusé tant à l’écrit qu’à l’oral, sur internet et à la radio, et a posé, dès sa publication, la question de son format et de son genre. Entre nouvelle et fragment, le récit de Julian Gough est aussi une œuvre de l’écrit paradoxalement destiné à la représentation orale. Cet article s’attache à analyser la structure narrative et linguistique de ce récit, afin de déterminer ce qui permet de le considérer à la fois comme une nouvelle et comme l’épisode initial d’une vaste trilogie romanesque.

Julian Gough s’inscrit explicitement dans la lignée de Flann O’Brien, s’inspirant de sa verve nonsensique, de son humour et de sa fascination pour les relations complexes entre oralité et écriture dans les récits. La question de l’oralité poursuit et renouvelle, à travers la fonction centrale de l’anecdote comique, la longue tradition irlandaise du conte et de la récitation bardique. L’analyse de “The Orphan and the Mob” nous permet ainsi de définir quelques-uns des éléments qui font de la nouvelle irlandaise contemporaine un genre toujours renouvelé et un moteur crucial de l’écriture littéraire irlandaise.

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Questioning the Paddy Stereotype in Edna O’Brien’s “Shovel Kings”

Jeanette Roberts Shumaker

London is the place where the incessant labour that was the navy’s life can be forgotten for a while in the pubs of Camden Town and the dance halls of Cricklewood, so much so that it becomes a veritable home from home. Jean-Philippe Hertz (7)

1 Known for decades for her novels and short stories about passion, adultery, and relationships between mothers and daughters, Edna O’Brien seemed preoccupied by so- called “women’s concerns,” which may have caused her neglect by critics, according to Lisa Colletta and Maureen O’Connor (4). However, starting in the 1990s O’Brien broadened her focus to encompass contemporary Irish issues in several novels.1 O’Brien’s collection of short stories, Saints and Sinners, winner of the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, continues this broadening trend.2 This is especially the case in “Shovel Kings.” Based on tales told by an old Irishman in a London pub, “Shovel Kings” critiques the stereotype of the “Paddy,” the Irish manual labourer who lives in England.3 O’Brien has lived in London since 1959, spending most of her writing career in exile, like James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen (Greenwood 11). Several scholars shed light on the Irish experience in England: Mary J. Hickman and Bronwen Walter discuss stereotypes of the Irish in England; Liviu Popoviciu, Chris Haywood, and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill explore the challenges facing Irish emigrants there, as do Kevin Kenny, Aidan Arrowsmith and others. Julia Kristeva’s examination of exile from a psychoanalytic perspective also provides insight into O’Brien’s short story. As a Bulgarian who immigrated to France, Kristeva portrays the struggles of the emigrant living in a foreign land in Strangers to Ourselves. Kristeva’s ideas about the foreigner’s alienation, which are rooted in Freud’s work on the uncanny, expand O’Brien’s story’s implications beyond the Irish experience of emigration.

2 According to Kevin Kenny, beginning in the 1920s, Britain became the most popular destination for Irish emigrants. The Irish remain the “largest labour migrant and

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ethnic group in Britain” (Arrowsmith 173). In 1961—a year or two after O’Brien’s protagonist moved to London—the Irish in London numbered 172,493, as a result of long-term, high unemployment in Ireland (Murray 39). By 1991, more than 32% of the Irish emigrants in England resided in London (Walter 62). A larger proportion of Irish men working in England in the early 1990s (12%) were classified as unskilled than of Englishmen or Black Caribbeans—whose proportions of unskilled were 5.45% and 8.4%, respectively (Hickman and Walter 279). As such, Irish male emigrants to England face “high rates of injury and early death” and a shorter life expectancy than men who remain in Ireland (Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 176, 177). Yet they are a “deprived community” in terms of housing, mental health services and employment discrimination (Herron 2). In 1991, the Irish in London followed only Black Africans in their “lack of self-contained accommodation,” while “a disproportionate number” of Irish were homeless (Walter 85). The 1991 unemployment rate of 19% for Irishmen in Britain was nearly double that of whites from the UK (Greenslade 39).4

3 Hickman and Walter explain that in centuries past and continuing in the 1990s, English people often increased their self-esteem by denigrating the Irish, Welsh and Scots (268). Walter writes that in London it was still common in the 1950s and 1960s to see signs saying “No Irish, no coloureds,” near others saying “No dogs” (86). The “dirty Irish” was a common stereotype among the English, even in the 1990s, but “the central stereotype [is] of the male, working-class ‘Paddy’” who personifies “’brawn’ rather than ‘brain’” (Hickman and Walter 271-272). Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghiall write that the British have defined Irish masculinity as what British masculinity excludes —“working with the body (for example, the navvy)” (179). It is ironic that the Paddy is the main Irish stereotype when actually, since 1921 the majority of the Irish living in England have been women (Hickman and Walter 272). The Paddy is also known for his heavy drinking that can trigger violence (272). As Arrowsmith comments, the Irishman who lives in Britain “denotes religious and political subversiveness, social barbarity, moral laxity and a wild sexuality” (163). In O’Brien’s story, London police in the 1960s and later enjoy watching “the Irish slaughter one another. They hated the Paddies” (17). Heather Ingman provides an historical explanation for such xenophobia: “the colonial stereotype of the feminised Celt” caused the Irish to generate “a hypermasculine republican form of masculinity” that highlights “their manliness” (255).

4 Walter remarks that in London prejudice against the Irish is especially marked, since Irish accents act as stronger markers of ethnicity there than in Liverpool or northeast England, where local accents more closely resemble Irish ones (88). In Britain an Irish accent can trigger the “Irish joke,” generally aimed at the Paddy’s supposed stupidity (Hickman and Walter 272). In the 1990s English cartoons still mocked Irish construction workers at building sites and pubs (274), revealing underlying fears of Catholics and “foreign invaders” (272-274). The Irish who claimed public benefits in England were often called “scroungers” in the 1990s (276). In reaction to such prejudices, Irish men in England typically resided in Irish neighbourhoods, “Irish worlds” (288). In fact, Tom Herron writes that London is “a displaced capital of the Gaeltacht” (3). The decision to live in an Irish neighbourhood makes sense in that more “anti-Irish abuse” is reported in English neighbourhoods with “small Irish populations” (Hickman and Walter, 286). According to Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill, the British usually deny their racism against “the ghettoised male migrant” (176), but “pervasive institutional mechanisms of exclusion across public spaces operate against the Irish” (171). Irishmen

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“are simultaneously discursively positioned as white Europeans and as members of an inferior race” (Popoviciu 173). Arrowsmith explains that “the white Irish are assumed [by the British] to have assimilated unproblematically into a ‘British’ identity” (165). O’Brien’s story suggests otherwise.

5 Having come to Camden Town, London from Ireland at the age of fifteen, O’Brien’s Rafferty has remained in England for forty years, working at a series of construction jobs. O’Brien’s narrator meets Rafferty, now in his mid-fifties, in an Irish pub in London —one of the protective “Irish worlds” to which Hickman and Walter allude (288). Irish enclaves are harder to find in a twenty-first century London where “over twenty languages” are spoken in a single working-class neighbourhood (O’Brien 32). When Rafferty had left London for short periods to work on specific jobs, he had yearned to return to Camden, “where I had put roots down” (21). With “huge hands” that are “a dark nut brown” in contrast with his “sallow” skin, Rafferty has “a lopsided knuckle, obviously caused by some injury” (5). Wearing “a black felt homburg hat” (5) along with old clothes that suggest his age, poverty and identity as an “Other” in modern London, Rafferty describes his teens spent among Irish work gangs, in which some of the labourers spoke Gaelic but not English. Rafferty observes that even the non-English speaking Gaelic speakers “understood the foreman and the ruthlessness of him” (12).5 Yet young Rafferty “believed that a great future lay ahead of me” (11).

6 Rafferty repeatedly refuses the female narrator’s invitations to buy him a drink or share a cab she has paid for. As Kristeva writes of emigrants in general: “Indifference is the foreigner’s shield. Insensitive, aloof, he seems, deep down, beyond the reach of attacks and rejections that he nevertheless experiences with the vulnerability of a medusa” (7). Rafferty explains: “you had to be tough, on the job and off the job, even if you were dying inside” (17). To live under London’s bridges with other Irish alcoholics in his early middle age, Rafferty had to become even tougher. Later, sitting at a bar in his fifties, Rafferty seems imperturbable. Yet he pushed his mother, wife and even the narrator away because “of a heart that was immeasurably broken” (42). Speaking of exiles like Rafferty, Kristeva remarks: “The lost paradise is a mirage of the past that he will never be able to recover” (10). Rafferty recalls hunting with a white ferret on Sundays when he was a boy. He misses his long-dead mother, telling the narrator about an idyllic day picking berries with her shortly before he left for London.

7 When Rafferty finally returns to Ireland to retire on charity in his fifties, he is unhappy there and, within two weeks, moves back to his small, Spartan room in Camden. “He doesn’t belong in England and ditto Ireland,” says a friend of Rafferty’s (41). Or as Kristeva comments, “Always elsewhere, the foreigner belongs nowhere” (10). Rafferty complains that in the pubs in Ireland, no one wants to listen to his stories about working in England. But Kristeva finds such an experience to be typical in the emigrant’s new country, not the exile’s homeland: “Who listens to you? At the most, you are being tolerated” (16). By contrast with Kristeva, and confirming Rafferty’s experience, Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghiall report that in Ireland, the returning older emigrant male is often seen as “psychologically flawed, prone to alcoholism, etc.”—as the “Other” to the resident Irishmen who are prospering in the new Ireland (180). They add that generally only the Irish emigrant men who return with wealth feel comfortable in Ireland (180).

8 Having lived in secular London for decades, Rafferty finds the overt piety of Ireland hard to tolerate, for religious objects and pictures deck his new home there, and the

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housekeeper is constantly praying. In his disapproval Rafferty displays a kind of hybridity similar to that which Bertrand Cardin sees as characteristic of O’Brien’s fiction: “O’Brien’s fiction is an atemporal, displaced, dislocated network, endowed with intercultural hybridity” (79). Rafferty, a cultural hybrid, is too old to relearn Irish mores. Similarly, Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghiall speak of “Paddy the hybrid— the insider/outsider” (179-180). Another reason for Rafferty’s dissatisfaction in Ireland is that he is beyond the age for taking advantage of the Celtic Tiger boom that supported “unprecedented in-migration and the return of younger immigrants” (Stoddard 149). Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghiall state that aged Irish emigrants who return home often find Ireland very different from the country they left (177); many are bachelors or divorced, with “limited social support networks and virtually no contact with families in Ireland (178). These statements are true of Rafferty.

9 Rafferty survives the loss of his dream of moving back to Ireland, persisting with his old routine in London after he returns there. The reader wonders whether Rafferty, in his mind, continues to live in the dreamed Ireland of his youth, even while sitting in a London pub. Kristeva notes of the exile that, “No obstacle stops him, and all suffering, all insults, all rejections are indifferent to him as he seeks that invisible and promised territory, that country that does not exist but that he bears in his dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond” (5). Rafferty’s poverty is typical of that of aged Irishmen in London: in his study of fiction about the Irish in London, Tony Murray notes that the city has long been full of impoverished elderly Irishmen (42). Rafferty walks the London streets each day, without seeming to have a goal for his own life. Kristeva explains such a seemingly aimless pattern: “according to the utmost logic of exile, all aims should waste away and self-destruct in the wanderer’s insane stride toward an elsewhere that is always pushed back, unfulfilled, out of reach” (6).

10 A cause of Rafferty’s enduring alienation in London was his father’s cruelty to him. His father locked the teenager out of their Camden room so he could entertain a prostitute, before beating the boy for finding out. Rafferty’s father then moved back to Ireland. For years Rafferty felt he couldn’t go home to Ireland while his father was alive because he’d kill his father if he did. No longer is Rafferty just an Irish emigrant seeking work in London, but an exile who cannot return to his homeland. In his impulse to commit patricide in response to domestic abuse Rafferty resembles Christy Mahon in J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. Declan Kiberd observed in 1988 that “a revolt by angry sons against discredited fathers” is a common theme of Irish literature (179).

11 His father robbed Rafferty of home not so much by moving him to London as by betraying his mother there. The disillusionment with parents that is typical during adolescence is extreme for Rafferty, who condemns his father while worshiping his mother. Kristeva writes that hating is common among exiles: “Hatred makes him real, authentic so to speak, solid, or simply existing” (13). Rafferty’s hatred of his father seems his most intense, enduring emotion, deflecting other resentments he might have felt with as much cause—such as for his exhausting, ill-paid, inescapable labour in a foreign land. On the positive side, though, Rafferty seems to enjoy his freedom from his father’s control after his father returns to Ireland. Kristeva observes that, “Certainly foreigners become intoxicated with… independence, and undoubtedly their very exile is at first no more than a challenge to parental overbearance” (21).

12 Rafferty’s drinking as a teenager, once his father leaves the boy alone in London, is a way to show he is finally a free adult. But there are other reasons why Rafferty drinks

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more and more as the years pass.6 Kristeva writes of the immigrant’s frustration, “He has fled from that origin—family, blood, soil—and, even though it keeps pestering, enriching, hindering, exciting him, or giving him pain, and often all of it at once, the foreigner is its courageous and melancholy betrayer” (29). The existential guilt of the exile underlies Rafferty’s alcoholism. As a boy and young man earning little, Rafferty could not have saved his mother from his father, but he should have, he believes. “His father, he believed, had killed her, had worn her out” (25). Rafferty tells the narrator that it was “too much” for him to learn from his mother before he left Ireland that she loved him better than her daughters and husband (29).

13 Another reason Rafferty develops a drinking problem is because his happiest times are spent among other Irish workers at London pubs. Kristeva explains what such moments might mean for exiles: “A miracle of flesh and thought, the banquet of hospitality is the foreigners’ utopia—the cosmopolitanism of the moment, the brotherhood of guests who soothe and forget their differences, the banquet is outside of time” (11). In the warmth of the Aran Pub as a teenager in Camden, Rafferty finally feels happy in his new city. Through his decades in London, Rafferty makes most of his friends at its many Irish pubs. In line with this, Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghiall assert that Irish male emigrants’ lives are “highly gendered, taking place within all-male environments” of Irish pubs, construction sites, clubs and games. In his fifties, as a guest of Irish pub owners in London at a Christmas dinner for lonely men from Mongolia, Africa and Ireland, Rafferty imagines that their convivial happiness is what domesticity means. Mary J. Hickman remarks: “In the heterogeneous diaspora space of contemporary Britain, Irish immigrants and their children have formed transethnic alliances” (40). Hence, it is not surprising that Rafferty enjoys the company of Africans and Mongolians who may feel at least as displaced in London as he does.

14 Rafferty gave up his chance at domestic happiness when his drinking drove away Grania, the young woman who lived with him in Camden during his youth. As his father betrayed his mother by purchasing women, Rafferty betrayed Grania via purchasing alcohol. As an aging bachelor, all that Rafferty now owns is the suitcase he brought from Ireland as a boy, with his mother’s gifts of missal, crucifix and striped pajamas. Kristeva explains that the foreigner’s poverty is both humiliating and liberating: “Available, freed of everything, the foreigner has nothing, he is nothing” (12).

15 This freedom of the exile does create charisma in Rafferty’s case. Kristeva explains of the foreigner: “Your awkwardness has its charm, they say, it is even erotic…” (15). Grania became interested in Rafferty even though he was too shy to dance with her, unlike the other Irish men at the Cricklewood dance hall. The aging Rafferty is paid to sit among old furniture for sale on a London street because his Irish songs attract prospective customers; this Paddy has been commodified for his quaint charm. “He was totally at ease out in the open,” the narrator explains (10). Ironically, a life spent in hard labour in all weathers has made Rafferty comfortable with being part of an outdoor furniture display. Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghiall state that since the late 1990s, the British represent the Irish in positive terms in popular culture (179). That the narrator writes a story about Rafferty also suggests he still has the power to interest those who meet him.

16 Kristeva explains how the exile’s conviviality masks pain: “One who is happy being a cosmopolitan shelters a shattered origin in the night of his wandering. It irradiates his memories that are made up of ambivalences and divided values. That whirlwind

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translates into shrill laughter” (38). Over his decades in London, Rafferty’s sorrow makes him grotesque—a stereotypical Irish alcoholic. Later, after he’s learned to limit his drinking, Rafferty wears absurd talismans that are popular with tourists such as a Gaelic harp pin. He has learned to tolerate—“with a quiet sufferance” (8)—the St. Patrick’s Day green beer and shamrocks abounding in London’s Irish pubs. Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill note that the “deterritorialisation” of the Irish is seen in the “global attraction of Irish theme pubs” (171). Wearing his harp pin as he lures customers to buy old furniture in the street, Rafferty himself has become deterritorialised, a sentimental emblem of stereotypical Irishness.

17 Rafferty also wears a pin that he says represents his guardian angel. How trite these emblems seem, even laughable, except when the reader recalls Rafferty’s loneliness and alienation that might make cheap mementos of Ireland a comfort. Kristeva asks: “Split identity, kaleidoscope of identities: can we be a saga for ourselves, without being considered mad or fake?” (14). Is a displaced Irishman like Rafferty wearing a harp pin an impostor? At least that is better than seeming to be a madman, as Rafferty must have done when he lived under a bridge, begging with other Irish drunks.

18 Coupled with Rafferty’s opacity is the narrator’s mysteriousness. Who is the narrator who recounts Rafferty’s tale? “The foreigner’s friends, aside from bleeding hearts who feel obliged to do good, could only be those who feel foreign to themselves” (Kristeva 23). O’Brien’s narrator remains mysterious, except for her middle-class penchants for psychoanalysis and white wine. Unusual in a story written in first person, the narrator merely retells Rafferty’s stories, not her own. Her extreme reserve suggests that she feels uneasy about herself; perhaps she, like O’Brien and Rafferty, comes from Ireland, explaining why she frequents Irish pubs. The narrator’s reserve confirms what Hickman and Walter found regarding Irish female emigrants in England: unlike Irish men, Irish women often try to hide their accent and origin to avoid prejudice against them (287). Reviewing Saints and Sinners in the Guardian, Sylvia Brownrigg comments: “O’Brien tells Rafferty’s truth but tells it slant, via a female narrator… Rafferty’s tale of drink-destroyed lives and helpless yearning for home is interwoven with references to the narrator’s more settled circumstances (as she herself becomes the listener in the chair, absorbing Rafferty’s account).” The narrator is thus Rafferty’s analyst or secular confessor. Maybe she is a long-term London resident like O’Brien, who left Ireland at the age of 29.

19 Like the Chinese workers who completed the Herculean task of building the railroads in the American west, Rafferty’s comrades dig English soil so that electric cables, water mains, motorways, hospitals, or factories might be constructed: “imagine those men, young though they were, destined for all eternity to be kept digging some never-ending grave” (12). The grave they create is ultimately their own, via a life spent digging one hole and then another in a seemingly endless series of jobs.

20 While O’Brien writes specifically of the Irish emigrant male, Kristeva writes more broadly about the work ethic of emigrants everywhere: “The foreigner is the one who works. While natives…think that work is vulgar and display the aristocratic manners of off-handedness…you will recognize the foreigner in that he still considers work a value” (17-18). O’Brien concludes her story by memorializing Rafferty and the other Irishmen who created the undergirding of modern England. Their nicknames give them an intimate, if mythic, presence: “a litany—Haulie, Murph, Moleskin Muggavin, Turnip O’Mara, Whisky Tipp, Oranmore Joe, Teaboy Teddy, Paddy Pancake, Accordion Bill”

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(42). Rafferty’s reference to young Irish labourers as “gladiators” adds to the impression of the timelessness of builders’ anonymous yet essential role in creating civilizations throughout history (16). Discussing fiction about Irish emigrants (not including O’Brien’s story), Tony Murray identifies the “long-established oral tradition of Irish exile and masculinity” (54). Rafferty’s tales about his life told over a pint fit him into this tradition, which Murray calls “latter-day mythologies of a recent yet almost already forgotten era of London Irish life” (44). That some of the Irish men Rafferty knew died in accidents while they dug adds to their mythos. Kristeva observes of the foreigner that, “Since he has nothing, since he is nothing, he can sacrifice everything” (19). These Irishmen sacrificed homeland, family and life in the service of Britain. Kristeva also comments that the foreigner’s happiness is that “of tearing away, or racing, the space of a promised infinite” (4). Rafferty’s colleagues’ moments of joy exist on an epic scale, even though they spent most of their lives imprisoned by the trenches they dug. Recalling a long ago party on a construction site, Rafferty describes “dancing in that London wasteland, as if in some Roman amphitheatre” (39). It is not just that, when paid, “Men felt like kings momentarily” (13). Rafferty himself possesses “a strange otherworldly dignity” (9). O’Brien’s title suggests that these Irish labourers ruled empires underground, digging the necessary trenches for the empire that had sacked their homeland in eons past.

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Walter, Bronwen. “Contemporary Irish Settlement in London: Women’s Worlds, Men’s Worlds.” Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish Society. Ed. Jim MacLaughlin. Notre Dame: U Notre Dame P, 1997. 61-93. Print.

NOTES

1. The Country Girls (1960) and Time and Tide (1992) are two of O’Brien’s famous works that center on women. Her recent novels about contemporary Irish issues are The House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), Wild Decembers (1999) and In the Forest (2002). Michael Harris speaks of “O’Brien’s shift in focus from the individual subject to the national culture” (125) in these novels. However, Amanda Greenwood notes of these novels that “political commentary sits

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uneasily with the ‘Colleen image’ which continues to be imposed on O’Brien by reviewers and literary critics alike” (11); Heather Ingman assesses critics’ reaction to O’Brien’s novels in a similar manner (253). 2. See Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Web. 3. Ellen McWilliams points out that most fiction about Irish emigrants concerned men, until recently (2). O’Brien’s story adds to this body of work, while deviating from her own early emphasis on female emigrants to London in her Country Girls trilogy of novels published between 1960 and 1964. 4. As Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill remark, the Irish are “one of the world’s most internationally mobile labour emigrant populations” (171). Popoviciu, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill also observe that the Famine emigrants get the attention from the Irish who live in Ireland, while Irish emigrants since World War I (like the men in O’Brien’s “Shovel Kings”) “are written out” (171); the reason for this is that the Famine emigrants can be blamed on the British, while post-Independence emigrants cannot (171). 5. Speaking of exiles in general, Kristeva explains the painful experience of knowing the wrong language: “Bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or like a handicapped child—cherished and useless—that language of the past that withers without ever leaving you” (15). 6. Writing in 1971 (when Rafferty, aged about 26, would have been drinking heavily), sociologist Margaret J. Sargent explains that the Irish, like the Australians and Americans, have a “utilitarian style of drinking” that is more likely to result in abuse than the drinking styles of other cultures; utilitarian drinkers use alcohol to alleviate depression or other personal problems (85). Discussing Irish drinking patterns in a 1973 article, Brendan and Dermot Walsh note that the male emigrant Irish in London do have “a high rate of alcoholism,” with a rate for admission to English psychiatric hospitals because of drinking at five times that of native Englishmen (20). The Walshes speculate that the cheapness of alcohol in England compared to Ireland encourages greater consumption by the Irish emigrant, who is “exposed to new pressures and uncertainties which might have predisposed him to seek refuge in alcohol” (23).

ABSTRACTS

« Rois de la pelle », la nouvelle d’Edna O’Brien, extraite du recueil Saints et Pécheurs, aborde le stéréotype de “Paddy”, le travailleur manuel irlandais en Angleterre qui a « tout dans les muscles mais rien dans la tête »… Dans un pub de Londres, la narratrice écoute le récit de Rafferty, ouvrier du bâtiment pour qui les travailleurs irlandais à l’étranger sont des « gladiateurs », des créateurs anonymes et éternels de civilisation tout au long de l’Histoire. Comme le suggère le titre de la nouvelle, ces travailleurs creusent les fondations d’empires, y compris ceux qui ont blessé leur propre nation. La nouvelle est ici analysée à partir de la réflexion de Mary J. Hickman et Bronwen Walter sur les stéréotypes relatifs aux Irlandais en Angleterre d’une part, et à partir de l’étude des exilés sous l’angle psychanalytique qu’élabore Julia Kristeva, d’autre part.

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AUTHORS

JEANETTE ROBERTS SHUMAKER Jeanette Roberts Shumaker is a professor of English at San Diego State University, Imperial Valley, less than a mile from California’s border with Mexico. She has published articles on Irish women writers in such journals as Women’s Studies, New Hibernia Review, Estudios Irlandeses and Studies in Short Fiction. Shumaker also publishes essays on Victorian and Edwardian fiction. In 2009, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press published a book on Leonard Merrick, a neglected Anglo-Jewish writer that she co-authored with William Baker.

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Part 3: The Ironic Observation of Contemporary Ireland

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Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan, or the Chronicle of a Collapse Foretold

Bertrand Cardin

Après avoir si souvent dénoncé chez les autres la folie des grandeurs, comment, sans ridicule, pourrais-je me croire encore l’homme inefficace par excellence, le premier parmi les inutiles? (Cioran 144)

1 At the end of the 15th century, in Switzerland, was published a long poem written in German by Sebastian Brant who warned his contemporaries against their vices in order to save them from damnation. According to him, the world was heading straight for its final sinking and the fools were so numerous that one ship could not hold them all, hence the title of his poem, Das Narrenschiff—The Ship of Fools. Inspired by this Renaissance text, the well-known Irish critic, Fintan O’Toole, wrote an essay in 2009 which is also entitled Ship of Fools. If this intellectual chose a title which echoes Brant’s poem, it is precisely because he noticed the same transgressions as his predecessor, though in a very different time and context. In his study, O’Toole endeavours to show how Ireland lost its mind in the last two decades and he considers that the authorities missed a historic chance to use the available wealth and lay the basis of a renewed Irish society. Such an achievement would have been possible, according to O’Toole, if only the governments had displayed judgment and moral rectitude, which was not the case, as the complete title of his essay suggests: Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. As long as it swept through the country, the wave of madness was lived and viewed as a festival, but a festival in the sense that Roger Caillois gives it in Man and the Sacred, that is an exceptional time of disorderly exuberance, an interlude when all excesses are allowed, when one loses control and gives oneself up to the most irrational impulses (129). Now the party is over. Feast and frenzy have been replaced by austerity and restraint. What’s left after the ball? In retrospect, some observers notice today that the rare voices which rose to warn the Irish people of the insanity of the situation were

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not really heard. As a matter of fact, it seems that they were not taken over by the media. What about fiction? Were calls for reason expressed? In an approach similar to that of Sebastian Brant in his days, did Irish writers of fiction incite their contemporaries to vigilance? To answer this question, we need to focus on recent publications whose plots are in close touch with the pulse of events and anchored in today’s world. And yet, considering the necessary period of time between the conception and the publication of a book, we are not yet capable of gathering a varied amount of texts meeting this requirement. Nevertheless, among these few publications, a book of short stories seemed attractive because of its ironic title: Country of the Grand. Spontaneously, the reader would expect the book to focus on a rich superpower like the US. And yet, it is about Ireland1. Although it refers to Ireland’s boom, the title, by its grandiloquence, implies that the Celtic Tiger, as it is going to be dealt with in the text, will be treated with caution and skepticism. Indeed, right from the paratext,2 the irony is obvious: the title that highlights strength, wealth and grandeur is directly followed by an epigraph which discloses the other side of the picture—“Frailty, thy name is man.” This aphorism in inverted commas proves to be a parody—an ironic process—of a quotation from Hamlet: “Frailty, thy name is woman.” This connection between the title and the epigraph introduces a symmetrical contrast, an inversion as if each element contained the seeds of its opposite. In this case, it condenses the replacement of strength by weakness, in other words, a possibility for this “country of the grand,” endowed with great power, to be weakened and impoverished. Even if the text never explicitly states this, it suggests, particularly through the ironic process of changing from one position to the other in a recurrent movement of oscillation, that the Celtic Tiger might be only an idol with feet of clay. This critical distance can be justified in the way the writer, Gerard Donovan, observes his country of origin. As an Irishman living in the States, he takes a look at the situation from outside. And his look is probably more clear-sighted and objective than a native’s. Irony is characteristic of Donovan’s view and interpretation of the Celtic Tiger years. As it is a permanent feature in the book, irony is also the thread that runs through our analysis. We’ll see first that irony is in league with the genre of the short story, that it is part of the paradox of the unexpected themes and motifs of the book. Then we’ll focus on the writer’s intentions and the reasons why he takes on the part of an ironist to depict the Irish society of his days. This progression will lead us to answer some questions which are specific to the very activity of writing: writing in what form? On what themes? For whom and why?

2 Thirteen stories make up Country of the Grand and eleven of them are set in Ireland.3 It is worth mentioning that it is the first time that Gerard Donovan has published a collection of stories and written about Ireland. Indeed, the plots of the three novels he wrote before were set in the US for two of them and in an unnamed, war-torn country, possibly in Eastern Europe, for the third one. According to Donovan, the stories in this collection were written over a period of fifteen years: most of them began life in the early 90s, were revised and re-worked many times; new stories were designed in the meantime; others were written just before publication. As a result, the writing period of the stories ranges from 1993 to 2008 and chronologically coincides with the Celtic Tiger years. And as Donovan writes as a witness of his own world, this period is at the heart of the collection that it anchors in an obvious realistic context. Furthermore, this amount of time provides the writer with the opportunity of taking an interest in a textbook case, of wondering about this society which is both his own insofar as it is his native country, but which, at the same time, has nothing to do anymore with the one

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he lived in because of the unprecedented economic miracle that the nation was experiencing as he wrote the book.

3 It is most probably significant that this questioning is based on a set of different texts, in other words, that the author chose a collection of stories to share his numerous questions. Indeed a book of stories is an interesting literary option to depict a society because it establishes some kind of diversity within unity. Though it is composed of various narratives, the book conveys a single effect, a “unity of impression” (60) as Edgar Allan Poe puts it, which allows the writer to narrate the different destinies of his characters who are perceptible as samples of the Irish population. In this microcosm, individual destinies can easily be transposed to collective fate, the short story writer having the gift of making symbols from events and characters. He also manages to grasp what lies beneath the surface and make it tangible. This is one of the reasons why the implicit plays a major part in the genre. The short story incites the reader to interpret the clues which are left unsaid; it does not go too closely into the matter but touches upon it lightly and proceeds by hints and allusions, hence its close relationship with irony.

4 Furthermore, unlike the novel which develops the art of evolution, the short story is an art of immediate revelation, dotted with a high emotional, dramatic potential. As a result, is there a genre more adapted to depict a society which is prone to unexpected crises, a society which goes from the status of a developing country to a model of global economic success? Of course, these sudden changes can be welcome and lead to dramatic improvements as, on the other hand, they may cause terrible damage. It is also because the short story is focused on a crisis-point, a momentous peak that is both felt and feared, that Donovan chose the genre. The short story format is perfect in keeping with the depiction of a society threatened by a sudden setback.

5 These crucial points are common patterns in the book. In each story, Donovan focuses on a single character in a single episode at a particular moment. This moment is most often a personal crisis on which the whole narrative hinges. The character undergoes some decisive change in attitude or understanding. He or she even proves to be, at the end of the narrative, in a situation which is the complete reverse of what it was at the beginning. The protagonist’s universe is then turned upside down. This balance between two extremes is not only characteristic of the process of irony but also of the very genre of the short story as confirmed by numerous critics.

6 What are these stories about? A man in a changing room overhears two friends discussing his wife’s infidelity. A depressed solicitor comes back to the places of his childhood and tries to recover his youth. A girl is warned against the new immigrants by a friend of her father’s. A couple of archaeologists about to break up are working together under pressure from a construction foreman to finish a dig in an area that is going to be flattened over to make way for a motorway. A woman discovers that her recently deceased husband had another family with a child. A boy who stops speaking after his father’s death looks at his mother throwing herself into a desperate liaison with a good-for-nothing. The collection centers around crises of modern life, feelings of disconnection, fractured relationships, broken marriages, death, loss, betrayal and their inevitable effects that are pain, loneliness, indifference, anxiety and depression.

7 In the background we find the Celtic Tiger and the message expressed loud and clear that “things have never been better” (“Country of the Grand” 53), that “it’s so much better in Ireland now,” that “things are grand all the same” (“Country of the Grand” 55)

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… The stark contrast between this displayed optimism and the characters’ painful experiences raises a few questions: how can this paradox be interpreted? What message is the writer delivering?

8 According to Donovan’s definition, a short story is something we enter after it has begun and leave before it has finished (qtd. in Cullinane). As a result, the motifs of the book—loneliness, anxiety, depression, all of these personal crises that are subsequent to separations and deaths, imply by the irony of reversals that the characters were in the opposite situation before the beginning of the story and maybe they will recover comfort, serenity and optimism after the end of it. According to the same symmetry of antitheses, it is predictable that Ireland’s boom, the background of the plots, changes into a severe recession in the post-diegetic period, hence this impending disaster that is constantly hanging over the fictive universe of the narratives. When the young archaeologist asks her friend: “Why do we always see the past as down?” (“Archaeologists” 102), the other replies: “That’s where it’s preserved.” Logically, if the past is “down,” underground, the present is on the surface of the earth and the future, “up,” in the sky. And the sky is described in the story as full of dark and threatening clouds that cover the stars and let rain fall in torrents. Throughout the book, such clues hint at a dreadful event. And this is because there hangs the threat over the stories of a sudden change which did not fail to happen, this time not in fiction but in reality and, ironically, at the same time as the book was published, that Country of the Grand can be considered as the chronicle of a collapse foretold.

9 Indeed, irony characterizes not only the short story and the characters’ destinies but also, as confirmed reality, the Irish economic circumstances. With the return of economic difficulties, the decline of competitiveness, the rise of unemployment and the resumption of mass emigration, isn’t the nation comparable with Cinderella who, after the ball, finds herself back in the ashes, from rags to riches and back to rags, or with this girl whose body has been hidden in turf for millenniums until it is dug up from the ground by archaeologists who finally bury it in long, dark warehouses?

10 Many stories exemplify an extension of the individual to the collective. For example, in the title story, the protagonist, Frank, a well-to-do solicitor who, at the end of his day’s work and after one too many whiskeys, suddenly makes up his mind to join an eight- kilometer race, where he is dressed in his business suit, is possibly reminiscent of the Irish nation. Ill-prepared for such an event, Frank, in a sudden burst of energy, though he endeavors to get some extra speed, accelerates his pace, opens his mouth wide to gasp his way to more oxygen, but suffocates, slows down, gets a stitch in his side, stumbles and hits the ground, knees first, before falling flat on his face. Too sustained a pace is the cause of many evils and there are quite a number of falls in the book. The ill- considered sprint becomes an understated metaphor for an Ireland which was not adapted to the frantic pace of development it experienced for several years. Why run a long distance when you still have the memory of learning to walk and being in need of someone else’s help to stand on your feet? “As he left the house that morning, Frank Delaney remembered being so young that he was not able to walk, struggling from his father to his mother, going soft at the knees and collapsing into her hands” (“Country of the Grand” 50). The allegory here is obviously ironic, as the protagonist who overestimates his strength must endure humiliation, in the literal sense of the word, since he bites the dust. Furthermore, his race in space goes together with a run in time. The vague memory of his first steps incites him to reconnect with the past. This is why

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he changes his usual route to see the house in which he spent his childhood. And yet the house is no longer the same: the lawn is now a concrete parking space. The contrast between what the place used to be and what it has become arouses his feeling of displacement and his yearning for the past: he bursts into tears when he realizes his failure: “He was tired of the sudden obsession with his past disappearing while he wasn’t paying attention” (“Country of the Grand” 62). Many stories in the book are moving indictments of so-called progress and the decreasing importance of the past in modern life, both personal and historical. Similarly, on the construction site of a parking area and a filling station, a trench produces Neolithic stone (“Archaeologists”). The works stop to leave the place to archaeologists who excavate treasures that require a couple of months’ work. But, as time is getting short, they are forced to finish their digs with a pickaxe at the risk of destroying everything because they are urged by the developer who laments over the money he wasted.

11 Celtic Tiger Ireland is depicted as mean, venal, caught up in a system of a crazy pace and many characters are irresistibly carried away by the wheels of this terrible chain. The motif of the trap is recurrent in the book, whether it is the cubicle of a changing- room, a wheelchair, crystallized ice or rabbit-cage houses. The trap is the metaphor of the characters’ incapacity to escape their destinies, as they are living in a universe that does not suit their identities and desires.

12 The whole work is dominated by a crisis of values which, according to Donovan, is characteristic of Celtic Tiger Ireland. The staff of a restaurant refuses access to arriving guests who will not be given food because the place has been closed for two minutes. The Irish tradition of welcome and hospitality is reduced to nothing. Throughout the book, there is a sense of having come too far, of something precious being lost.

13 In the story entitled “The Summer of Birds,” the immigrants are always impersonally referred to as “they” or “the shadows” and are the subject of an eloquent comparison by Tommy who says: “That reminds me of a film, a famous film, you know, a man called Hitchcock. The Birds, there’s more and more of them (…). The place gets full of them and they attack you. People’s faces torn up and bloody” (“The Summer of Birds” 158). The speaker of these xenophobic remarks is a friend of the narrator’s father—the narrator being a girl who wonders why that man is progressively taking her mother’s place in the house. As a matter of fact, the true invasion is not the one he exposes but the way he himself viciously intrudes into the house and tries to manipulate the girl’s mind by instilling in her his hatred for the other and his obsession with money and security.

14 These are the effects of the so-called prosperity according to Donovan for whom material enrichment comes with a mutilation of the Irish soul and an upheaval of old traditions. Most of the characters belong to this upward class of nouveau riche whose major concern is the accumulation of wealth—an air-conditioned car, a house in Spain, a few days’ shopping in New York... Their only values are money, consumption and material power. They and their assets are as one. They are so interested in short-term benefits and self-centered to such an extent that they would have been defined as bourgeois by Flaubert because their thoughts and behaviours are despicable.

15 Some characters, just like many Irish people, however, really do not have the feeling of experiencing a festive period during all those years, as a young boy’s narrative puts it: I lay under a woollen blanket (…). We were saving oil. The cold made my feet feel like blocks. I had taken off my trousers and draped them around my head for warmth. As I tried to sleep I saw the snowflakes twisting under the street lamp and

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over a deep frost serrated across the window. After an hour lying in bed I was still shivering. (“Glass” 118)

16 What is the use of the boom if it is not fairly shared, if the vast majority of the population does not take advantage of it, but is still exploited and rejected? The country may be grand but the gulfs between its inhabitants seem not only to remain but to be growing wider and wider. Here again, the traditions of solidarity and fair distribution definitely belong to the past.

17 By the same token, the legendary warm and friendly relations established between people are also given a hard time in the book. Once more, the irony is that, although characters are equipped with brand new cell phones, computers and other devices which are supposed to facilitate the connection between people, communication is a failure. The protagonists essentially get in touch with one another by e-mail and are caught up in such a frantic spiral that they do not take time to read, and all the more so to answer each other (“Country of the Grand”). And when there is an exchange, it is necessarily fake as characters keep on cheating, lying and deceiving one another. In “How Long Until,” the man imagines his wife’s lies and gets to the point of decoding her fallacious explanations to provide them with their genuine meanings: “I’m going to the shop. Translation: I want some privacy so I can phone my new friend. I’m going for a few drinks after work. Translation: We’re driving to his place” (“How Long Until” 25). This is why characters want to find a simple language that they can share, that can allow them to understand one another, to quench their thirst for authenticity and truth. Once she is a widow, when she hears about her husband’s secret life, Mary is looking for truth and needs to see “what had been true in their lives” (“Another Life” 149). When Jim inadvertently eavesdrops on his friends talking about his wife’s infidelity, he can visualize her: He saw images of Denise, not with another man, not of her naked body, but of her not telling the truth. He watched her in the kitchen not telling the truth, in the garden not telling the truth, watching television not telling the truth. The images slid back in time, and in a few seconds she was not telling the truth ever, all the way back to when they first met. Even then, when he brought her to a film on a rainy Friday after classes and she was still doing her degree, she was not telling him the truth. (“Morning Swimmers” 15)

18 Silenced for a long time, the truth finally comes out violently from his mouth: the scorned husband rushes out of his changing room and proclaims his truth to the ones he no longer considers as his friends and will never see again.

19 What do the good years mean? Obviously, the boom of national economy does not exempt individuals from suffering loss, mourning and deception. The few couples who are still together are not for a long time because the two members no longer trust each other; genuine love and sexual relationships within the couple are seriously threatened by sex on the phone, escort services or pornography, as many illusions and lies that lead the one they live with on a wrong track. And when there are too many tracks, characters lose their bearings: “The more the builders filled the countryside with roads, the more lost he felt” (“Archaeologists” 89). Images of maps and cartography occur frequently in Donovan’s writing. In this Ireland of suburbs, the road network keeps on developing but traffic is not moving more freely as cars are stuck in congestions and progress in small jerks even on motorways. Although cars are supposed to favour links and connections, they are only metal boxes in which each driver is isolated. They are not only the setting for many important scenes in the

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collection but also the reflection of the paralysis and social separation of their occupants.

20 By highlighting the paradoxes of our contemporary societies, Gerard Donovan belies the idées reçues which could let us believe that the thriving business of a country necessarily brings about its population’s happiness. He aims to attract his readers’ attention, to appeal to their common sense. He establishes a direct form of communication with them, particularly his Irish readers to whom he primarily appeals with the intention of opening their eyes. He incites them to awake and consider carefully that the exceptional phenomenon they are experiencing is not what it seems to be or what they are told it is: the Celtic Tiger is just apparently strong but this strength conceals a genuine weakness. This calling out is aroused by the contrast that can be noticed between the motifs and the background of the plots. Just like Sebastian Brant in his days, Gerard Donovan appeals to his readers’ reason. He sets himself the task of warning them of the potential deterioration of Irish identity and above all, of the necessity to redefine their choices and values. With a view to clarifying reality, he writes first to free his contemporaries of their subjection to dignitaries, to warn them against the authorities’ manipulative power. He belongs to these writers who enlighten us on the world, these artists whose function is, according to Bergson, to see and make us see what we do not naturally make out. Their art aims to show us things that had not explicitly struck our senses and awareness (Bergson 149). The writer has the power to disclose a latent, potential truth. He is not a visionary for all that but a clear-sighted artist. He incites us to reconsider our conventional ways of thinking, the ready-made general beliefs, the dominant ideology, what Samuel Johnson called the cant when he advised his fellow countrymen to “clear their minds of cant” (qtd. in Bloom 200). Donovan’s book of short stories informs us of something different from what we can read in the media. It sheds another light on the contemporary situation, on human behaviours and motivations. It calls for caution, but it is also endowed with great power, the liberating power of knocking down idols and changing the world. And as the text aims to change the world, it can be considered as being in line with committed literature. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, the écrivain engagé shows the world as it is so that men can face up to their own responsibilities in front of the naked truth of the exposed object (29).

21 A genuine commitment is meaningful only if the writer is interested in his present time. Unlike a great number of contemporary Irish writers who choose to set their plots in the past, Donovan has an interest in his present world. In this respect, one can legitimately wonder if the writers of the diaspora are not more attached to describing today’s Ireland than the ones who live in the country, as Michael Collins or Colum McCann would tend to prove it. Nevertheless, whatever Ireland is described, whether it is the past or present one, Donovan’s questioning is similar to that of most contemporary intellectuals. All of them meet up in a common preoccupation and try to give their personal answers to a crucial question: how can the nation keep its uniqueness in a European, globalized context and all the more so when it is in the grip of serious, unexpected upheavals? And after all, if so many writers take an interest in the past of their nation, is it not precisely to maintain and prolong all the elements that contributed to create what Ireland has become today? Whether their fiction is retrospective or not, writers all show a common interest in Irish identity, even if their commitment is likely to be stronger when they write about contemporary society.

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22 In this particular case, Donovan obviously refuses to write tepid exercises for the purpose of sheer entertainment. On the contrary, he considers his books as spaces of expression which allow him to confront the major issues of his time and take a stand on them. He is well aware that his writing can engage his reader only if he himself engages first as a writer. This is why he criticizes the world he lives in, particularly by disclosing the worrying possibilities of his epoch. He perceives his function as a means to raise public consciousness. To do so, his writing gets to the pulse of the apparent wounds of the present and makes sense of what is yet to come. He is able to restore the lives which have been devalued by others, to restore the possibility of decency for the ordinary Irish men and women neglected by the authorities and despised by the nouveau riche.

23 Such committed writers are essential today; without them, literature may be restricted to sentimental books. The readers we are feel the need for writers in opposition who are able to express their disagreement, buck against power and write against decision- makers. The artists’ original roles in society are to instruct and entertain, but this is not enough: taking stands and confronting the present issues also matter. To do so, they need a little rage, a capacity for indignation and, as Zola puts it, le courage de vivre tout haut—“the fearlessness to live out loud” (108). If writers freely express their opinions, they have to be prepared to put themselves in danger not only with authorities but also with their own readerships.

24 Indeed, with his remarks and his commitment, Donovan takes a chance on making himself unpopular and disliked by many readers. He is in a critical position: the mirror of the society he presents is uncompromising and does not at all reflect an image of flattery and complicity. The communication he establishes with his readers may give rise to a conflict and break off their relations. But even if the writer is a voice in the wilderness, even if his voice does not carry—like that of the silent child in the book (“Glass”)—he will have established a concrete, genuine and direct relationship with his contemporaries. He will have acted as a free interpreter, as a mediator and this mediation itself is already a form of commitment. Ironically, denouncing the uncertainties, complexities, paradoxes of his time is an efficient way to incite his contemporaries to think them over because, as Jankelevitch explains, “irony is progress: in the places it has gone through, there is more truth, there is more light (58, my translation).”4 Donovan’s text is a subtle invitation to perceptiveness. It gives no conclusion but remains open and subjected to the judgment of readers who are implicitly incited to give their own answers to the questions raised. As a result, the writer makes of his readers the producers of the text and the text, in its infinite wealth, clearly becomes food for thought.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergson, Henri. La Pensée et le mouvant. 1934. Paris: PUF, collection Quadrige, 2004. Print.

Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why? New York: Scribner, 2000. Print.

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Brant, Sebastian. The Ship of Fools. 1494. London: Folio Society, 1971. Print.

Caillois, Roger. Man and the Sacred. 1939. Trans. Meyer Barash. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Print.

Cullinane, Majella. Review of Gerard Donovan’s Young Irelanders. The Short Review. Web. November 2014.

Cioran, E. M. Syllogismes de l’amertume. 1952. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Print.

Donovan, Gerard. Country of the Grand. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Print.

Genette, Gérard. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Richard Macksey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Jankelevitch, Vladimir. L’Ironie. Paris: Flammarion, 1964. Print.

O’Toole, Fintan. Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Review of Twice Told Tales. The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles May. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994. 59-64. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What is Literature?” and Other Essays. 1948. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1988. Print.

Zola, Emile. Le Roman expérimental. 1880. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2008. Print.

NOTES

1. In this respect, it is worth mentioning that in the US the book was entitled Young Irelanders. 2. Paratexts are extra-texts, the “framings” of the text or, as Gérard Genette puts it, “the thresholds of textuality” (8). Examples of these are titles, epigraphs, headings, dedications, prefaces… 3. The plots of the two other stories are set in the US. 4. “L’ironie est un progrès… là où elle est passée, il y a plus de vérité et de lumière” (58).

ABSTRACTS

Un recueil intitulé Pays de Cocagne (Country of the Grand) laisse à penser que l’objet du livre est une riche superpuissance, comme les Etats-Unis. Or, l’intrigue de la quasi-totalité des nouvelles atteste que ce pays n’est autre que l’Irlande, sur laquelle l’auteur, Gerard Donovan, né à Dublin, écrit pour la première fois. Ce titre, délibérément grandiloquent, fait allusion à la période de prospérité sans précédent vécue par l’Irlande à la fin du vingtième siècle et implique que celle-ci sera abordée avec précaution et scepticisme. Bien qu’il ne le stipule pas clairement, le texte suggère, par de nombreux indices, que le Tigre celtique pourrait bien n’être qu’un colosse au pied d’argile. L’ironie caractérise la vision de Donovan et son interprétation de ces années fastes. Dans la mesure où elle est en permanence repérable dans le recueil, elle est le fil rouge de notre analyse. Cet article rappelle d’abord à quel point l’ironie a partie liée avec le genre même de la

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nouvelle. Il examine ensuite la manière dont elle s’inscrit dans les thèmes de l’ouvrage et s’intéresse enfin aux intentions de l’auteur, aux raisons pour lesquelles Donovan se fait ironiste pour dépeindre la société irlandaise de son temps. Cette progression invite à répondre à des questions propres à toute production littéraire : écrire sous quelle forme ? Sur quels thèmes ? Pourquoi et pour qui ?

AUTHORS

BERTRAND CARDIN

Bertrand Cardin, Professor of English at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie (France), is the author of a book combining six textual analyses with theoretically informed readings of a single short story by John McGahern “Korea,” Lectures d’un texte étoilé (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2009). He also wrote a book on father-son relationships in the contemporary Irish novel, entitled Miroirs de la filiation. Parcours dans huit romans irlandais contemporains (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2005) and co-edited, with Professor Claude Fierobe, Irlande, Écritures et réécritures de la Famine (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2007) and, with Professor Sylvie Mikowski, Écrivaines irlandaises/Irish Women Writers (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2013). He has also published many articles about contemporary Irish novelists and short story writers.

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Anne Enright’s Short Fiction: “Post- Freudian and Post-Feminist and, of course (three cheers!), Post- Nationalist”?

Thierry Robin

I say you’re married to the novel, no choice, whereas short story is more of an encounter really. (Anne Enright, An Instinct)

1 In his introduction to The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999) which Colm Tóibín edited, he describes Enright’s work as “post-Freudian and post-feminist and, of course (three cheers!), post-nationalist” (xxxiii).1 We shall come back to this revealing triad of qualities—to which one could certainly have added ‘post-modernist’ with some theoretical profit. Let us remind first that Anne Enright is probably best known now by the general public thanks to or because of the boon or doom that the Man Booker Prize represented in 2007 when she was awarded that most prestigious token of literary recognition in the English-speaking world for her rather sombre novel The Gathering. Before writing novels such as The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What Are You Like? (2000), The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), Enright practised her art in short fiction. Her collection of short stories The Portable Virgin was published in 1991. One should also mention an interesting collection of essays on motherhood entitled Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004), which shares some noteworthy thematic features with the short stories under scrutiny here, namely sexuality, humour, love, a quirky sense of everyday life, family. Most of her short stories can be found in the collection entitled Yesterday's Weather (2009), which gathers most of the stories from The Portable Virgin and those pertaining to the more recent Taking Pictures (2008).2 As regards short fiction, one could also add her enigmatic contribution to Dermot Bolger’s experimental Finbar’s Hotel.3 To come back to Tóibín’s characterization of Enright’s work, let us say it deserves some further critical investigation in itself. Beyond Tóibín’s witty ternary

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remark, if one had to qualify and ascertain the recurring features of Enright’s short fiction—while sticking to the triads so dear to their fellow Irish writer Flann O’Brien [1911-1966], as ironically proven in his At Swim-Two-Birds—another three characteristics would loom large, which would eventually turn up complementary to those stated by Tóibín: feminine, disenchanted, strange. For her short fiction doubtless remains profoundly marked by feminine voices and a peculiar kind of humour often related to that feminine dimension. Secondly, her stories all more or less deal with the way one relates to their own expectations from life and conversely their frustrations, and the ensuing comical or derisive deflation at an individual level. This strong, individualized, idiosyncratic flavor does not really allow for the perpetuation of any complacent flamboyant mythologised discourse on Irishness or any given ideology at that. Ireland becomes a local anecdotal though necessary backdrop in her fiction, not a major frontal theme. To cut a long story short and to use a clear-cut oxymoron, her work is enchantingly disenchanted on an intimate level little compatible with collective simplifications or indictments inherent to nationalist or committed dialectics or their grandiose purple patches. Thirdly, the atmosphere emanating from her short fiction often proves uncanny and unsettling though wryly funny too. This strange dimension is reinforced by her unusual style combining a disjointed chronology and a warped sense of focalization and structure particularly blatant at the beginning of her writing career—as in The Portable Virgin (1991).4 Yet again this haunting strangeness has a lot more to do with idiosyncrasy rather than any genre prescription or pre-existing psycho-analytical dogma. Thus Enright’s voice is highly original in a manner that remains for us to map out in this article.

FEMINIST VS FEMININE WRITING? BAD SEX AND SOCIAL NORMS…

2 Anne Enright’s short stories may not be argumentatively or militantly feminist in any overt political, ideological way, yet they remain strongly associated with questions having to do with womanhood and what it feels like to be a woman in Ireland in the contemporary era. Heather Ingman in her History of The Irish Short Story has no problem calling Enright’s work feminist.5 Yet the adjective ‘feminist’ in turn may reduce Enright’s fiction to a sociological and political agenda that the text itself does not justify. As Enright herself clarified in an interview answering a question about the woman who condones her husband’s infidelity in “Until the Girl Died”: “[…] I don’t write in a political way. I don’t say here is the problem, this is what men do, therefore we must act in this way or that way and this is how we should respond and how we don’t respond and this the ways in which we are foolish” (An Instinct). Her writing remains feminine though in all the subtlest and implicit pressures and nuances of the term. It also, as a rule, features heterosexual couples. Though acutely aware of men’s potential shortcomings and faults, her prose never gives in to gender-based resentment or acrimonious lecturing brewed in generalisations. The offshoots of the numerous downsides to the misunderstandings between partners are rendered through humour or tender irony as in this baroque list of all the twisted lovers Bridget has met in her life: She liked sleeping with men. It changed them. […] Bridget divided her disasters into sections and phases. There were the fanatics, who had a tight, neurotic smell and

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undiluted eyes. They talked about death all the time or were severely political. There were the outright freaks: bizarre, hairy or double-jointed men who played the saw on the streets or trained to be anaesthetists; men who hated themselves so badly they might injure themselves if left on their own in a room. Some respite was provided by the silent brigade: patriarchal countrymen or foreigners, with rings of perspiration under the arms of their shirts and mothers who ascended bodily into heaven. There were the endearingly stupid. Men with beautiful smiles… (Portable 133)

3 And the butt of that irony is not purely masculine. Women and their own weaknesses or zany idiosyncrasies also loom large amongst Enright’s targets. Thus Bridget’s mother is “plastered” with make-up (Portable 135) and “When she was not talking about unmentionable diseases she was busy flirting with her own dead husband” (Portable 134).

4 A certain ambivalent coolness therefore characterizes Enright’s humorous tendencies. Since Yesterday’s Weather, published in 2009, gathers stories written previously, one could venture that these stories loosely bear testimony to the slow emergence of the so-called Celtic Tiger till the moment when the country went from boom to bust in the global financial crisis which erupted in 2008. Yet Enright’s stories do not deal with macro-economic or historical events either,6 rather, they deal with the sphere of one’s intimate life, that of family life or the multiple crises, misunderstandings or exchanges amongst neighbours, friends, siblings, relatives, lovers, husbands and wives or simple fellow-creatures on this Earth. They assuredly deal with the joys and sorrows, grand expectations and fierce disappointments encountered within the framework of the couple, be it married or not, aged or not, blasé or adolescently romantic as in that campus short-story “Pillow” involving young international female flatmates. That main concern for the family unit and for marriage and the question of having kids could easily and stereotypically—thus also arguably—be labeled as feminine in itself. More subtly, Enright’s writing allows the reader to see how minute parameters distantly pertaining to social, economic conditions influence one’s own sense of identity. This paper though certainly does not aim to solve the dilemma and contradictory tensions characterizing the binary opposition between French feminists belonging to the second-wave feminist “écriture féminine” movement such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva or Catherine Clément on the one hand and third-wave feminists such as Judith Butler.7 To cut a long story short, one could quote Peter Barry to encapsulate the problem glaringly displayed by Enright’s rich work: [I]t is clear that the notion [écriture féminine] as put forward by Cixous raises many problems. The realm of the body, for instance, is seen as somehow immune to social and gender condition and able to issue forth a pure essence of the feminine. Such essentialism is difficult to square with feminism which emphasizes femininity as a social construction… (128)

5 Precisely that dialectical tension between those two brands of feminism runs through Enright’s short stories. One can reasonably assert that they concur with the concept that the experience of women has been singularly shaped and conditioned by gender— that the latter concept should still be a controversial social construct arguably based on and poorly reflecting complex biological facts does not even matter.8 What actually matters is the acknowledgement that beyond the diversity of experiences and the infinite variation in terms of individuals and subjectivities, there remains in Enright’s fiction such a specific thing as a “woman’s condition”—though the labeling process may involve some degree of simplification in its restriction to its sexual dimension. But as

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Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements put it in their introduction to The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: “Their [women’s] texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men (viii-ix).”

6 This vivid composite consciousness of her own identity as an individual determined biologically, sexually and socially is clearly observable in the introduction Anne Enright wrote to her collection of short stories in 2008. It is loaded with references to women’s ability to bear and give life to children and also to specifically matrimonial concerns which appear central to her vision of life. I thought the most terrible thing about middle age would be marriage […] Worst of all the women in my early stories have children and say that the experience has not changed them. How wrong can you be? It is interesting but only in a sociological way, to see the sympathy two of my narrators have for men who have just lost their virginity. It is odd but only to me, to read of the bitterness that exists between female friends […]. This gift [collection] is presented not just to the reader, but also to the future—in my case, to an old woman called Anne Enright… (Yesterday ix-x, my emphasis).

7 Certain blatant heterosexual and gender markers of the norm are obvious here; Enright underlines her own work as that produced specifically by a woman. Instead of opting for more neutral, universal lexical items—which is easily feasible in English—“people have children,” “the bitterness between friends,” “this is a gift to an old person” etc.— she constantly reasserts her own sexual identity as a woman. The focus on marriage in itself would be sufficient to spot a clue as to some particular heritage in Enright’s writing which could be traced back to female writers belonging to the Victorian era (from Elizabeth Gaskell to Jane Austen or the Brontës) and for whom marriage is the central topic and event in a woman’s life…

8 By way of exploration of this dominant narrative feminine-female voice9 which can be heard in Enright’s fiction, the following data concerning the various narrators’ sexual identities and sexualities has been compiled:

Types of sexuality Female/male 1st person narrative (F1/M1) mentioned Titles of the short stories Or 3rd person narrative featuring a female or Heterosexual (H) male main character/focalizer (F3/M3) Homosexual/gay/ lesbian (G)

‘Until the girl died’ F1 H

‘Yesterday's weather’ F3 H

‘Wife’ M3 H

‘Caravan’ F3 H

‘The Cruise’ F3 H

‘Natalie’ F1 H/G

‘Here's To Love’ F1 H

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‘Honey’ F3 H

‘Switzerland’ F3 H

‘What You Want’ F1 H/G

‘The Bad Sex Weekend’ F3 H/G

‘Della’ F3 H

‘Green’ F1 H

‘Shaft’ F1 H

‘In the Bed Department’ F3 H

‘Little Sister’ F1 H

‘Pillow’ F1 H/G

‘Pale Hands I Loved, Beside F1 H the Shalimar’

‘Taking Pictures’ F1 H/G

‘The House of the F1 H Architect's Love Story’

‘Men and Angels’ ?/F3 H

‘(She owns) Every Thing’ F1 G/H

‘The Portable Virgin’ F1 H

‘Indifference’ F3 H

‘Historical Letters’ F1 H

‘Luck Be a Lady’ F3 H

‘Revenge’ F1 H

‘What Are Cicadas?’ M1 H

‘Mr. Snip Snip Snip’ M3 H

‘Seascape’ F3 H

‘Felix’ F1 H

9 This clearly shows that in the overwhelming majority of the 32 short stories collected in Yesterday’s Weather, either the narrator is female (15 female homodiegetic “I” narratives) or the prevailing character-focalizer is female (14 3rd person narratives in

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all). This means that out of 32 short-stories, only 3 resort to or feature a male narrator (“What are Cicadas?”) or a prevailing male character focalizer (“Wife” and “Mr Snip Snip Snip”). Similarly, actual questions about gender construction or references to sexualities different from the prevailing/normative heterosexual one finally prove pretty sparse. In “Natalie,” homosexuality is only referred to as a mild menace to the young female narrator’s boyfriend. It is intended as a joke which deliberately sticks to stereotypes: “I say why doesn’t he take his own soap in, but my boyfriend looks at me like I am trying to turn him into a queer” (Yesterday 60). In “What You Want,” the female narrator’s son is temporarily gay because it is unexpectedly identified as a way to educate himself.10 In the revealingly titled piece “The Bad Sex Week-end” the female protagonist’s sexual partner claims he travelled in America though she does not believe him at all. He adds that he used to have sex “with an old guy” when he was young and that he met a transsexual in Reno with “breasts you wouldn’t believe” (Yesterday 118). But clearly in the short story, this dimension is purely anecdotal and reinforces the shallow, unlikely, unreliable, pseudo-exotic, even disgusting, aspect of this male character. “[S]he doesn’t believe him […] she doesn’t want him touching her any more” (Yesterday 118-119). In “Taking Pictures,” once again the unreliable nature of one of the female characters’ boyfriends called Fiach is rendered through the hypothesis or the suspicion he might be bisexual: “‘the fucker won’t do Saturdays’. Maybe he is a bisexual” (Yesterday 196). Apart from “She Owns Every Thing,” where an unexpected intense lesbian love seizes Cathy, a woman who sells handbags in a shop and who “fell in love one day with a loose, rangy woman, who […] seemed to pick her up with the same ease as she did an Argentinian calf-skin shoulder bag” (Yesterday 225), the sexuality depicted by Enright is overwhelmingly heterosexually normative, though often problematic or frustrating. The following passage is clear, in a calculatedly awkward comical manner, about the idea that the eye that sees things in the story and the voice which tells it, are those of a White Western heterosexual woman, someone definitely open-minded about culture and sex but still belonging to and illustrating, to an extent, the prevailing norm and its aporias: “Alison,” she said. “Yes?” “What is a homosexual?” I did not know what to say. “It’s a man who loves another man.” “Yes,” she said. “But what is it?” “They are in love,” I said. “But how?” she said. “How are they in love?” And I thought I knew what she meant then. I said they put their things up each other’s bottoms, though I used the word “anuses,” to make it sound more biological. (Yesterday 171)

10 Actual decentrings or departures from that sexual norm are rather few. Contrary to Tóibín who thoroughly explored male homoerotic desire, Enright is more interested in female heterosexual desire, which in itself is also rather original in a literary world which may still be seen as somewhat male—centered; even as of 2013, she seems to echo Hélène Cixous’ words that “Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity; about their eroticization…” (38). Thus Enright’s fiction combines diverse conflicting elements both challenging or abiding by the current social norms in a syncretic home- grown type of feminism.

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11 Women in her short fiction do not seem to need to vehemently claim independence from patriarchal authority simply because patriarchal authority has long been undermined. Patriarchal lovers are even caustically turned into a soothing “silent brigade,” in “Fatgirl Terrestrial” (Portable 133). Enright is a good representative of a new generation of Irish writers ranging from Dermot Bolger (born in 1959) or Colum McCann (1965-) to Kevin Barry (1969-) for whom the days of censorship and de Valera’s nationalist conservative agenda seem rather remote. Individual problems—love, drugs, marginalization, perversion, isolation, for instance—have therefore superseded collective causes. As Enright analysed: “During the decades of censorship, it was much easier to talk about ‘Ireland’ than it was to talk about sex, or about the actions of individuals like John Charles McQuaid” (Diary). Now her fiction displays the opposite trend, since the question of Irishness (or Irish history) no longer seems to be a direct priority, unless on a light-hearted parodic mode. To return to the post-feminist label issue, a few quotations can sum up the calm conviction which suffuses the collections under our scrutiny as regards women’s condition. In “Green,” the female narrator puts it quite simply when discussing marriage with her mother: “Why not marry a nice, well-to-do man?” I said there’s better ways to earn your new Sanderson curtains than on your back—I’d get the money myself. Or no money, if that’s the way I wanted to play it. And I packed my bag for uni and shook the dust of that damn town off my feet. (Yesterday 134)

12 Clearly, depending on a man financially does not even seem to be an option any more. Most of the women in the collection, though they may feel betrayed, lonely, bored, loved the wrong way, still display the same qualities, namely natural independence and a critical mind. Consequently, even if a good deal of the ideas conveyed in the collection are rather bleak as regards marriage or even marital life, that bleakness is not the direct consequence of women’s specific social alienation but rather of universal parameters determining what could be called, long after Seneca, taedium vitae. As Enright wittily remarks “The life of an optimist is a lonely one” (Portable 134).

13 It is undoubtedly in this ambiguous and more often than not dark perception of life in couples that Enright’s originality lies: “Amazing. We are people who have sex. Frank fills the glasses and I see it all stretching out ahead of me. Couples. I look at the rest of my life and despair” (Yesterday, “Taking Pictures,” 199, my emphasis). “The House of the Architect’s Love Story” is one of the best instances of the close association between marriage and alienation, family life and conformism which may drive one insane. The ironical way it tackles abortion is thought-provoking: “I don’t want anything so bland as an abortion” (Yesterday 210, my emphasis), especially in a country where having an abortion is just anything but bland precisely. That physical exhaustion mixed with boundless boredom is nearly reminiscent of Michel Houellebecq’s exhausted universe: “After seven years you don’t know who you are touching, or not touching any more” (Yesterday, “Revenge” 264). Paradoxes and hyperbolic isolation then prevail as in the following statements: “Once the fiction between two people snaps then anything goes, or so they say […] as if you didn’t know how lonely living with someone can be” (“Revenge” 264-265). “Revenge” is about swinging couples. But rather than celebrating transgression and libertine love-making, it wryly underlines the enduring ideals and lust for love the characters feel. Though the female narrator mock-grandiloquently states: “Nothing is incomprehensible, when you know life is sad” (“Revenge” 265), she is still eager to be kissed by the stranger whose wife her husband is having sexual

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intercourse with at that precise moment in the next room. Her one-night sexual partner speaks about his own wife in potentially misogynous words: God I hate that woman. Did you see her? The way she was laughing and all that bloody lip-gloss. Did you see her? She looks like she’s made out of plastic. I can’t get a hold of her without slipping around in some body lotion that smells like petrol and dead animals… I know she is sexy… I just prefer it if someone else does it. (“Revenge” 267)

14 But those words spoken by a man are also a clear indictment of the physical constraints imposed violently upon the female body through a whole range of social constraints— makeup, plastic surgery, application of lotions due to fear of old age etc. This final reconciliation between brutal words spoken by a man swinger and feminism may consist of what Tóibín calls post-feminism (xxxiii), that is a moment when men’s and women’s interests simply converge. The final image in that short story is eminently regressive, reminiscent of the days when as an infant the narrator used to wet her bed —“First it is warm then it gets cold” (“Revenge” 268). After casual sex between exhausted grownups, the image conveyed is that of inescapable helplessness and wry squalid individuated existence. It is through this cunning alliance of irony and disenchanted clear-sightedness that Enright manages to surpass just any parochial or limited bias. Doing so, she also reveals her enduring paradoxical idealism. “Bad sex,” desire, craving for true love, skepticism—contradictions are mentioned in one shot. In “Yesterday’s Weather,” she simply manages to achieve the description of some sort of impossible synthesis between sheer frustration and complete fulfillment in a mother’s life. That story is about a young mother coping with her in-laws and with her baby’s basic needs, involving changing nappies, cleaning various body fluids etc., while in the middle of a family gathering. The passage presents a vision of womanhood which may appear essentialized but simultaneously deconstructs clichés about so-called natural motherhood. The baby […] wiped his nose on her T-shirt. […] There was something slightly depressing about being covered in snot. It was just not something she had ever anticipated. […] The baby’s skin, under the downy hair, breathed a sweat so fine it was lost as soon as she lifted her hand. Women don’t even know they miss this until they get it, this smoothness, seeing as men were so abrasive […]. (Yesterday 15-16, my emphasis)

15 In this passage, clichés about women being natural mothers are both stated and deconstructed in a complex, funny way. Being covered in snot or worse happens with babies, and it is something that women, like men, cannot normally anticipate, though the second movement about the baby’s skin is more lyrical. This passage is quite in keeping with the tonality to be found in Enright’s nonfiction book, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004), whose title sums up her original approach that motherhood does not come naturally. This memoir and collection of essays is quite revealing of her complex conception of women’s condition. It may also prove clearer about her subversive values and her caustic humour. As the following samples show, fact and fiction neatly intertwine in her prose since large parts of her memoir could read as fiction and some short stories also read as being strongly rooted into personal so-called “biographical” experience: Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t need aliens—we already had a race of higher beings to gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will: we called them priests. It is great being Catholic. […] In the 1980s while we were fighting for contraception and abortion, they were fighting for the future of the

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human race. […] “Get your rosaries off our ovaries” was the battle cry as we voted, over and over, for or against abortion while the pro-life louts hung around the Dublin streets with their short hair and jars full of dead baby. (Stumbling 16)

16 In other words, Enright’s feminist agenda, if there need be one, can be seen as typically rooted into the traditional fight women have had to lead in order to secure their control over their own bodies. But apart from that ‘traditional’ or second-wave feminist aspect, which may be discerned here and there in her work, her vision of woman is neither conflictual nor theoretically central. As she says: Finally and quietly I have to apologize to my family […]. Starting with my own mother—whose voice comes though my own from time to time–and working down the generations. Like all women who write about their children, I have a wonderful partner—except in my case it is true. (Stumbling 13-14)

17 Boys will be boys and to some extent women in Enright’s fiction more often than not will be mothers. Her post-feminism is feminism with a difference—that is her own idiosyncratic humorous style (“except in my case it is true”) influenced by our Zeitgeist.

POSTNATIONALIST?

18 Beyond post-feminism, Colm Tóibín naturally focuses on Dublin when dealing with Enright (xxxiii), though elements of Ireland as a whole can be detected in her short fiction. The narrator in “Felix” was born in the imaginary small town of Killogue in the West of Ireland. In “Honey,” Catherine goes to Killarney only to find out that her flirtatious boss is predictably an unpleasant chauvinist. In “Green,” a short story about female rivalry, organic farming and parochialism, Birr (co. Offaly) and Crossmolina (co. Mayo) are mentioned to refer satirically to the Irish countryside. Sligo is also extensively mentioned in “The Bad Sex Weekend”: the female character got drunk there once and she likes the way her problematic partner says “‘pussies’ in a Sligo accent” (Yesterday 113). Dublin seems to be a logical prominent spatial option and reference for that author who was born there, studied some time there too graduating at Trinity in philosophy and English before moving on to Canada and Norwich (UK). As of today, she still lives in the vicinity of the capital city, in Bray, co. Wicklow. Dublin though implicitly central is depicted in a very sketchy manner.

19 In her short fiction, Enright never actually dwells on places in any emphatic realistic or picturesque manner. Different places outside Ireland are also mentioned as in “Switzerland” or “The Bad Sex Weekend”: from Venice, Berlin and Mexico to New York, Bangkok and Wisconsin. In “Caravan” for instance, Irish tourists in Vendée, France, are featured to renew the Irish tradition of fantastic ghost stories, mixing kitchen sink drama with minimalist postmodernist ennui. The Zeitgeist present in Enright’s short stories is definitely that of globalization and one can even make out a multicultural inflection taken by the Irish society as early as the 1990s as in “Here is to Love,” in which the narrator’s husband is a Vietnamese refugee. Ireland for once is no longer the land of emigration but possibly of immigration. Yet what seems to matter more than actual places is the interaction between human beings or rather the lack of connection, the dysfunctional kind of interaction between them. It is that flawed or intriguing process of linking that seems to interest her first and foremost, as in “Natalie,” a piece about death, love, cancer, loneliness and a youth’s aspirations and ensuing disappointments. The young female narrator, who looks a lot like a younger avatar of

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Anne Enright (“I will be a writer when I grow up and I will put it all down on the page” (Yesterday 55), expresses that idea of problematic links somewhat forcefully: We are not connected. Because this is what Natalie is saying, isn’t it? That we are alone. That there is no connection between me and her, or between Billy and me, or between any of us and Mrs Casey, who might live or who might actually die. Between human beings. (Yesterday 63, original emphasis)

20 In a globalized world, where the notion of movement, transportation for work or leisure is ubiquitous, the notion of place and fixed identities no longer seems to be so relevant as in “The Cruise,” where the narrator’s elderly parents eventually visit exotic places while on a cruise. The feeling subtly conveyed once again resorts to the binary of expectations versus disappointment and verges on existential taedium. Thus Kate’s parents, immediately after returning from America and the Caribbean, appear somehow frustrated: They talked dutifully about the islands—the size of the spiders, the palm trees, a manta ray they had seen from the harbour wall in a place called Labadee—but they seemed slightly disappointed with the world, now that seeing it was so easy. Her mother was very taken by the warmth and the endless beauty of the sea, though there wasn’t much time for a swim, she said, when they went on shore. Besides, the ship had Jacuzzis and what have you. The big excitement was the ship. (Yesterday 49)

21 Eventually, places in Enright’s fiction do not feature centrally as such. They are peripheral, though necessary, props. Quite revealingly in a world where mobility is a by-word, technology has become a major concern or source of interest, as in “Mr Snip Snip Snip” where the editing room full of monitors allows the male character called Frank to try and figure out what is going on in his own life and his couple. A final impression of frailty and inescapable ambiguity mixing fact and fiction, chance and determinism, chaos and order, prevails in the final metaleptic scene where Frank disappears into the film he has been editing at the moment when his partner Moira is about to disclose the name of the man she cheated on him with. This blurring of boundaries between diegetic levels and between fact and fiction once again privileges the notion of links, connections—faulty though they may prove to be—over stable identities and places.

22 The same treatment of Irishness prevails in Enright’s fiction. It is deliberately deconstructed in a humorous way so that there finally stand out a few hilariously twisted stereotypes and echt linguistic constructs. Being Irish is therefore equated with a mask, not to say masquerade, vaguely reminiscent of the heavy-handed clichés going along with the so-called stage Irishman so fashionable in 19th century plays. In “Pillow,” the young student narrator who is studying on a North American campus is so fed up with the questions bearing on her own Irishness that she ironically offers a deal to one of her flatmates: “I said I’d be Irish for her of a Tuesday, but could I have the rest of the week off?” (Yesterday 171). This farcical treatment is a standard in Myles’ column. Myles is Flann O’Brien’s penname when writing his column for The Irish Times, as in the following excerpt: Explain what it feels like to be Irish. State at what age you first realised that you were an Irish person. When did you have your first fight? At what age did you make your first brilliant ‘Irish’ witticism? At what age did you become a drunkard? Please tell me all, because there can be no cure until the pathological background has been explored. […] It is in your own interest to tell all. Remember that I too was Irish.

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Today I am cured. I am no longer Irish. I am merely a person. I cured myself after many years of suffering. (Flann O’Brien at War 105)

23 Irish History is not directly discussed in the stories. It becomes a set of conspicuous vignettes or, in other words, it remains present, not because it refers to real events in time, but thanks to or because of its own status as a linguistic construct as aptly analysed by Linda Hutcheon.11 Its own artificiality is played with and underscored as in “Indifference”: I am Canadian, she used to say, it may be a very boring country, but who needs history when we have so much weather? Irish people had no weather at all apart from some vague shifts from damp to wet, and they talked history like it was happening down the road. (Yesterday 237-238)

24 History, then, is all talk. Of course the comparison between History and weather is also meant to be funny just as the stereotypical description of the Irish weather as a slight variation from damp to wet is ironical. Similarly, the litany of requests which is to be found in “Switzerland”—“Hello Dublin, […] Tell me about coffin ships and how you came from Connemara, really. Tell me about potatoes”—also deconstructs the 19th century clichés about the Irish Diaspora and the Great Famine (1845-1852), all the more effectively since they are followed by the description of a paranoid great-aunt seeing eyes everywhere, including potatoes. The result of this ironical approach is once again that hackneyed tropes about collective discourse are done away with swiftly to shift the focus back onto a more individualized and contemporary issue precisely involving individuals as such and not great abstract entities, or Lyotard’s metanarratives and “grandes histoires,” potentially involving the Famine, the Diaspora, the American Revolution, the Easter Rising to name but a few of those monumental historiographic landmarks.

25 This postmodernist carnivalesque aspect is quite clearly illustrated in “Historical Letters” whose title is elaborated upon by the narrator who is “a woman that was born in 1962” —just like Anne Enright—and who says: “History is just the scum on reality as far as I am concerned. You scraped it away” (249). Now even If the latter judgment does not necessarily tell a lot about Enright’s position, at least it clearly expresses one possible viewpoint which is recurrent amongst narrators in her fiction—for instance the narrator does not really care to delve into the details of the Vietnam War which left her husband wounded in “Here is To Love.” More farcically, de Valera’s death is recycled by yet another minor character in “Historical Letters”: “When de Valera died, I didn’t care either way, but a girl in my class was delighted, because her granny was buried half an hour before him, and all the soldiers along the road saluted as they went by” (Yesterday 249). In this case, History is a great mixer of coincidences, funny impostures and unlikely practical jokes. It also serves as a foil to micro-individual history. In other words, just as “Mr Snip Snip Snip” is about infidelity, “Historical Letters” is about the sadness felt at the breakup of a couple, the female narrator’s more precisely, when portentous events are incidentally taking place in the background. The same emphasis is laid on the baroque ontological position occupied by people in reality, and in their representation of the flow of time. They are, like the narrator’s mother in “Historical Letters” at the crossroads between absolute futility and resplendent grandiloquence or, in other words, halfway between the homely process of drying the dishes and the complex operations of the first Apollo landing on the Moon, as shown in the following excerpt: “I saw them landing on the Moon, but my mother wasn’t

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bothered. She wanted to finish drying the dishes, so she said, ‘Sure I can see the moon, right here in the window’” (Yesterday 249).

26 Representations and linguistic constructs as dynamic ambivalent notions take precedence over facts and meanings as univocal landmarks in these stories. This is often achieved in a humorous and paradoxical manner. Enright’s use of Irish idioms or what she identifies as typically Irish turns of phrases serves the purpose of a minimalist kind of national satire. This is precisely what Flann O’Brien does too with Gaelic when he underlines its indeterminacy and wavering semantics: The Irish lexicographer, Dinneen, considered in vacuo is, heaven knows, funny enough. He just keeps standing on his head […]. That of course, is why I no longer write Irish. No damn fear. I didn’t come down in the last shower. Call me a bit fastidious if you like but I like to have some idea of what I’m writing. Libel, you know. One must be careful. If I write in Irish what I conceive to be “Last Tuesday was very wet,” I like to feel reasonably sure that what I’ve written does not in fact mean “Mr So-and-So is a thief and a drunkard.” (The Best of Myles 276-277)

27 Echoing this funny lack of semantic clarity, Enright adopts the same strategy with her own contemporary language that is modern Hiberno-English. Let us quote the following dialogue centering on the character’s wife’s state of mind: How’s Maria? “Oh. She’s up and down,” he says. “Right.” Because “up and down” is Irish for anything at all–from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though now that I think about it, a psychotic is more usually “not quite herself.” (Yesterday 70)

28 Of course the violent semantic gap between reality and its potential linguistic translation through a mild euphemism—i.e. “up and down”—is funny. Enright loves playing with the notion of steep ironic contrast. Precisely what is funny is the discrepancy the reader notices between the narrator’s stream of consciousness and what is actually verbalized somewhat euphemistically. This dimension in Enright’s work further stresses the problematic boundary between the world outside the mind and outside characters and the intimate imaginary or cogitative mind within them. These are further excerpts from the same short story about a man and a woman (the narrator) who are both Irish and meet in Paris a long time after they used to go to college or work together. They used to be friends but the gap between them has widened in an irreconcilable manner. This is particularly well rendered in the immediate juxtaposition of actual speech uttered by the characters and thoughts kept to themselves and piquantly made accessible to the reader through interior monologues. “The thing I like about you,” says Shay, “is you tell it like it is. You get old, you get fat, it all turns to shit, you die.” “Yeah well.” So now it is my fault […]. (Yesterday 72)

29 The same irony due to the same blatant gap between what is said and what is thought runs through the following lines: […] Shay starts to realize how old Hoa [my husband] is. He does the thing men do when they think I might not be getting the ride; amused but surprisingly vicious, too. I’d fuck you. And I smile. (Yesterday 74)

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30 Here the coarse insertion of projected free direct speech in italics followed by “I smile” precisely causes the reader to smile. The same brutal discrepancy between representations/judgments and reality can be observed when the female narrator defines her friend’s wife as the one he “gets… to load his dishwasher for him, every night of the week” (73) or when ironically the same narrator inverses roles in a simple thought like “He is depressed now. The whole business of accusing me has worn him out” (75). Similarly, the main female character in “Luck Be A Lady” displays a strange homely conception of happiness: “‘This is being happy,’ she thought, scattering the contents of the night bucket over the scutch grass or trekking to the shop” (Yesterday 255).

31 All these short stories exhibit a huge playful interest in psychological meanderings and the intricate subtle mechanisms which prompt human beings to act or not, to make mistakes, to lie, to love or hate, to feel emotions or just blunder about… The actual psychoanalytic value of her work then remains to be assessed in that tongue-in-cheek humorous perspective.

POST-FREUDIAN?

32 In the introduction to the book they edited, Susan Cahill and Claire Bracken mention an interesting quote by Enright concerning Freud, after stating that psychoanalysis is “a major influence on her work” (2); Enright declares: “I see how important my reading in psychoanalysis is to my work. I read all of Freud when I was in college and sort of loved Freud’s work and laughed at it as well. But it’s a great way to think about things. And he is also a wonderful stylist and writer” (Cahill, Bracken 2).

33 The potential irony present in those lines will not escape the reader. Enright read “all of Freud,” but in her college days, and “sort of loved” his work, and “laughed at it as well.” Finally what she retains from him may not be his ideas or theories which make up one option amongst others, but that he was “a wonderful stylist and writer”—a statement which may sound slightly ambivalent as regards hard facts and psychoanalytical ‘science,’ so to speak. However it makes perfect sense to analyse parts of Enright’s work through psychoanalysis as Sarah C. Gardam did for The Gathering. In her article, Gardam resorts to Lacan’s split subject and trauma theory to account for the complexity of the narrator Veronica Hegarty’s struggles against and within language and sexuality in the wake of her brother Liam’s suicide after he was abused sexually. More concretely in Yesterday’s Weather, what Anne Enright says in the introduction could also make her fiction sound as therapeutic or centered on the analysis of the self in an empowering process of making oneself conscious of one’s own errors and conflicting views: These stories are not written by the person who has lived my life and made the best of it, they are written by people I might have been but decided against. […] They are the shed skins of the snake. None of this matters—my life, and how it is reflected or distorted in the stories here. (Yesterday x)

34 It is not absolutely certain though that Enright’s short fiction, which characterizes itself by an extreme dogma-proof tongue-in-cheek approach to all discourses and fields of knowledge, could be harnessed so systematically as a talking or rather writing cure. In some passages, hyperbolic caustic humour through antiphrasis has the upper hand over subtle analysis: “But before I go completely self-hating, I do actually like my hair,

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which is black and really glossy, especially when it is, like totally saturated with grease” (Yesterday 56). What is obvious though is that sex—including bad sex—, language, transgression and a very original kind of uncanniness typify Yesterday’s Weather, which probably features fewer phallic symbols than The Gathering, if one bears in mind the provocative criticism Enright quotes about her novel: “Someone told me that there were more penises in The Gathering than in a medical textbook; I was interested in that disapproval. Surely sex is an incredibly valid thing for a woman to write about” (“Gender Envy”).

35 That sincere interest in sex sometimes turns heavily intertextual as in “Felix” which may read as a condensed and parodic rewriting of Lolita by Nabokov from a female point of view. That story tells the physical passion a middle-aged woman named Iris feels for a young boy called Felix. Yet the baroque linguistic strangeness which the critic Patricia Coughlan identifies (349) is probably one of the most striking elements when reading Enright’s work. This could incidentally offer some kind of reconciliation —if need be—with Freud, if one bears in mind his own definition of the uncanny as Das Unheimliche.12 Tropes, especially similes, confer a special quality on Enright’s short stories. As in “Here is To Love,” when the narrator’s sleeping husband “might as well be a sheet of paper–a blank sheet of paper–stretched out on the bed” (Yesterday 74), or as in “Pale hands I loved, Besides the Shalimar,” where the narrator has sex “sweet as rainwater” (192), or again the narrator’s partner in “Taking Pictures” whose face looks “like setting concrete” (200) when having to listen to his guest’s lengthy and erudite digressions on bird-watching. In “Felix,” the passionate narrator declares about her young lover that she “wanted the whole world inside me, with Felix at its center, like a small hard pip” (303). In “Historical Letters”: “Sleeping with you is like watching a man in a wet suit cleaning windows, in with the otters on the other side” (248).

36 Thus the linguistic games Enright plays often achieve the realization of the haunting strangeness of reality itself. In “Luck Be a Lady,” a short story about a lady who is excessively lucky at the lottery, the baroque accumulation of statistical data and numbers fragments the character-focalizer’s world into slightly worrying and hilarious bits and pieces: I have had sexual intercourse 1,332 times in my life…65% of the occasions took place in the first eight years of my marriage, and I was pregnant for 45 months out of those 96… I’ve been married for 33 years and a bit, that’s 12,140 days, which means an average of once every 9.09 days. I stopped at 1,332 for no reason except that I am scared beyond reason of the number 1333… She wanted him. It was as simple as that. A woman of 55, a woman with 5 children and one husband, who had sexual intercourse 1,332 times in her life and was in possession of 14 coal scuttles, wanted the 3-fingered man, because he had three fingers not 4. (Yesterday 254-258)

37 Finally the strangeness permeating most of the stories, echoing again the beginning of The Third Policeman, also shares the same ambivalent humorous aspect with O’Brien’s work. Most notably, “Felix” displays blatant thematic and stylistic echoes with O’Brien’s:

Felix The Third Policeman

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I was born in 1935 in Killogue, a small town in I was born a long time ago. My father was a the West of Ireland. My father was a small, strong farmer and my mother owned a public introverted man of uncertain stock, who ran the house. […] my father was out at work on the pub that faced out on the town square. My farm and my mother was always in the kitchen mother died of creeping paralysis in my seventh […] I never saw my mother outside the kitchen year, and nothing remains of her in mind save […] then a certain year came about the the image of a woman sitting in the parlour in a Christmas-time and when the year was gone my perpetual Sunday dress […] (295) father and my mother were gone also. (6-7)

38 The main difference between O’Brien’s work and Enright’s certainly consists in their opposite treatment of sex. O’Brien, who was born in 1911, still had to cope with a sternly repressive censorship while Enright belongs to her times that is those of a more tolerant, more globalized Ireland where TV shows on RTE—a national TV network for which Enright used to work—such as The Savage Eye can even feature the Irish Roman Catholic Church and paedophile priests as regular butts to their jokes.

39 Colm Tóibín in his catchy assessment of Enright’s prose definitely spotted a complex defining feature in her work which is related to a peculiar sense of chronology through the Latin preposition “post.” Her short stories, as shown above, may well be regarded as post-feminist, post-nationalist, post-Freudian, and even post-modernist in that they delineate a new globalized Ireland where a literature which deconstructs, recycles, or even exorcizes her collective ghosts is not only possible, but increasingly inescapable. Yet to remain faithful to Enright’s writings, one should not view the chronological implications in the prefix ‘post-’ as mostly negative or oppositional; that prefix rather marks an extension, or some further lively criticism of the concepts involved: feminism, the nation or powerful insights into the workings of the mind. While resorting to female narrators and sticking to feminine points of view, her short fiction goes amply beyond the realm of women’s writing. Also, while anchored in Ireland by its idioms, its (Dublin) settings and its exploration of the long and rich tradition in Irish comic literature (Mercier), these stories go beyond the strict framework of any nation to combine “stylistic subtlety with emotional depth” (Ingman 250). In a sense, all those post-ending prefixes also point in a melancholy direction that is not so much about modernity as mythology, as Enright explains: … I realise very often that I write the same stories over and over again…as a repeat of this endless theme I have, the Orpheus and Eurydice thing that I find I’ve written all the time… Orpheus looked back because he was bringing Eurydice out of the underworld and when he looked back he lost her. So it’s both about death and desire. The people in my work are always trying to pull the dead back somehow, but also there’s a point about desire, that you lose it in the instant. (“An Instinct”)

40 Ihab Hassan, as a major theorist of postmodernism in literature, also focused on Orpheus as a telling metaphor of contemporary writing in his Dismemberment of Orpheus. In that sense the quality presented in Enright’s work is both an aspiration to cancel reality and an expression of that human feeling that somehow people are bound to experience, whenever they speak that simple phrase “it is too late,” voicing more than ever their own inexorably fleeting fugitive dimension. Enright’s short fiction precisely provides elegant and witty solace for those regretting that “no one ever stopped to describe yesterday’s weather” (Yesterday 24).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Manchester UP, 2002. Print.

Blain, Virginia, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990. Print.

Bolger, Dermot, ed. Finbar’s Hotel. London: Picador, 1997. Print.

Bracken, Claire and Susan Cahill, eds. Anne Enright (Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers in Their Time). Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011. Print.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY, London: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of Medusa.” 1975. The Portable Cixous. Ed. Marta Segarra. NY: Columbia UP, 2010. Print.

Coughlan, Patricia. “Without a Blink of Her Lovely Eye: The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and Visionary Scepticism.” Irish University Review 35.2 (2005): 349-373. Print.

Enright, Anne. “Diary.” London Review of Books 35.6, 21 March 2013. 42-43. Web. July 10, 2013.

---. The Gathering. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2007. Print.

--- Interview by Ramona Koval. “An Instinct for Short Stories.” ABC Radionational. Monday 15 September 2008. Web. July 10, 2013.

---. Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2004. Print.

---. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2002. Print.

---. The Portable Virgin. London: Secker & Warburg. 1991. Print.

---. Taking Pictures. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2008. Print.

---. What Are You Like?. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2000. Print.

---. The Wig My Father Wore. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 1995. Print.

---. Yesterday’s Weather. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2009. Print.

Gardam, Sarah C. “‘Default[ing] to the Oldest Scar’: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of Subjectivity in Anne Enright’s The Gathering.” Études irlandaises 34.1 (2009): 99-112. Print.

Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus-Toward a Postmodern Literature. NY: OUP. 1971. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Ingman, Heather. A History of The Irish Short Story. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Print.

Lane, Johanna. “Gender Envy: Anne Enright.” Publishers Weekly 258.32, 8 Aug 2011, 21. Print.

Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. 1921. Minneapolis: Filiquarian Classics, 2010. Print.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition. Oxford: OUP, 1962. Print.

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Murphy, Thomas Brendan. “Model-Based Classification With Constraints: Who Wrote Each Chapter In Finbar’s Hotel?” https://www.scss.tcd.ie/disciplines/statistics/tech-reports/0502.pdf. Web. July 10, 2013.

Na Gopaleen, Myles [Flann O’Brien]. The Best of Myles. 1968. Ed. Kevin O’Nolan. London: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. 1939. London: Penguin Books, 1967. Print.

--- The Third Policeman. 1967. London: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

--- Flann O’Brien at War. Ed. John Wyse Jackson. London: Duckworth, 1999. Print.

Tóibín, Colm. The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. London: Viking. 1999. Print.

NOTES

1. Enright’s work is actually given great prominence in that book since she corresponds to Tóibín’s conclusion in his introduction to the overview of Irish literature. 2. In Yesterday’s Weather, 7 short stories originally published in The Portable Virgin are missing: “Juggling Oranges,” “Liking,” “Science and Nature,” “Fruit Bait,” “Eckhardt’s Dream,” “Fatgirl Terrestrial,” “The Brat.” 3. Finbar’s Hotel is an experimental collection of short stories where for each story the author’s identity is left for the reader to decide. According to Thomas Brendan Murphy from TCD, in his article “Model-Based Classification With Constraints: Who Wrote Each Chapter In Finbar’s Hotel?,” Anne Enright wrote chapter 3 (or story number 3) entitled “No Pets please…” Murphy resorts to statistics and a Bayesian approach. 4. Read for instance “Mr Snip Snip Snip,” “Juggling Oranges” or “Fruit Bait” (Portable Virgin), where the actual narrative voice and focus of narration often prove unstable and the “plots” non- linear or heavily fragmented. This transgressive treatment of narratological entities and of ontology could be called post-modernist by Brian McHale or even Ihab Hassan. This is what she says about her style: “I don’t write necessarily in a conventional arc or with a conventional structure… Yes, well, it’s various incompetencies that I have that I try to turn into strength somehow. I was always worried about not writing proper books and every time I tried to write a proper book I got too bored or it just got wrong or it got too false. So I tend to not write proper books. I don't write third person, past tense, ‘beginning, middle and end’ books” (“An Instinct”) 5. Ingman goes so far as to say that “The Brat” (Portable) by Enright is “a cheeky feminist rereading of Joyce” (256). Yet on the question of feminism, she also qualifies her statement as regards the 1990s Zeitgeist: “In contrast with the previous decades, in the 1990s and beyond, Irish short stories by women became less preoccupied with using the realist mode to register an angry feminine protest against the conditions of marriage and motherhood than with exploring the changing nature of femininity and the instability of female identity in a playful, postmodernist style” (Ingman 249-250). This echoes Tóibín’s characterization of “post-feminist.” (xxxiii) 6. Though she owns up in the same interview that humour in her work “[is] part of the fact that the country is emerging from fairly poor circumstances and that's what keeps people going, they make jokes. It's not crass jokes, it's like twist...and it's empowering as well” (An Instinct). 7. To identify that third-wave feminism seeking to avoid what it considers the second wave’s essentialist misconceptions of femininity, one can read Judith Butler’s seminal Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 8. Usually sex is seen as objectively biological and gender as a more questionable social construct though some theorists have increasingly criticized that binary going as far as to assert the

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interchangeability of both concepts as Butler does: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (10-11). 9. Both spheres of womanhood and femininity are deeply intertwined, if not to say, undecidable in Enright’s short stories. Though women’s sexual identities seem to be “natural” or obvious, they keep being questioned or criticized in their social manifestations somewhat indirectly through what Percy Lubbock identified as the showing mode (62-63). Ingman aptly analyses the character’s dying her hair blonde or applying make-up to her face in “Fatgirl Terrestrial” (249) as so many rituals or routines which make fakeness look real, which is also incidentally a central paradox in femininity according to Butler (60-61). See more specifically Butler’s analysis of the Lacanian concept of “masquerade” of femininity and “the slippery distinction between ‘appearing’ and ‘being,’ ‘a radicalization of the comedic’ dimension of sexual ontology” according to her. (60). 10. “then he wasn’t gay […] he was just looking for an education” (Yesterday 105). 11. “[…] recent critical readings of both history and fiction have focused more on what the two modes of writing share than on how they differ. They have both been seen to derive their force more from verisimilitude than from any objective truth; they are both identified as linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms, and not at all transparent either in terms of language or structure; and they appear to be equally intertextual, deploying the texts of the past within their own complex textuality.” (Hutcheon, 105-106, my emphasis) 12. In his famous 1919 essay entitled Das Unheimliche, Freud defines the uncanny precisely as what is not familiar.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article a pour but de parcourir l’ensemble des nouvelles d’Anne Enright publiées entre 1991 et 2008 afin d’en identifier les caractéristiques singulières et ce à partir de l’analyse que fait Colm Tóibín de son travail dans son anthologie de la littérature irlandaise (1999). En effet, selon lui la fiction d’Anne Enright se prête à une analyse post-freudienne, post-féministe et post-nationaliste. Après un état des lieux des récits courts d’Enright, une quatrième caractéristique se fait jour rapidement : celle de postmoderne. L’examen de chacune des trois autres révèle en regard de ce quatrième attribut une tension systématique tantôt ludique et délibérée, tantôt spontanée entre norme et transgression. Il en ressort que les nouvelles d’Enright déploient un féminisme très idiosyncratique et syncrétique entre deuxième et troisième vagues (Cixous, Butler). De même, Enright réussit à dépeindre une irlandité authentique sans avoir recours aux marqueurs habituels de la nation pourtant bien présente métonymiquement. Le volet psychanalytique renforce encore cette interprétation postmoderne de l’écriture d’Enright, étrange, drôle et désenchantée, adogmatique, puisant ses thèmes orphiques dans des invariants mythologiques insoupçonnés résonnant fortement avec la pensée d’un Ihab Hassan (The Dismemberment of Orpheus).

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AUTHORS

THIERRY ROBIN Thierry Robin is a lecturer at the European University of Brittany, Brest, UBO. He is a current member of the research team HCTI-CEIMA EA4249 in Brest. His research focuses on contemporary Irish literature and the connections between ideology, epistemology and the concept of reality. He wrote numerous articles about his favourite writers amongst others, including Oscar Wilde, Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett and John Banville. He also published a book devoted to the study of Flann O’Brien’s novels, entitled Flann O’Brien, Un voyageur au bout du langage (Rennes, 2008) and coedited a collection of essays bearing on political ideology, Political Ideology in Ireland from the Enlightenment to the Present (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). As regards literature proper, his research bears on the conflicts entailed by the conceptual binary oscillating between reality and its representational “doubles” within a postmodernist conceptual framework.

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The Subjective Real in William Trevor’s “Justina’s Priest”

Eugene O'Brien

1 As a genre, the short story is one which can be seen as neither/nor or both/and: it does not have the length and scope of a novel, nor does it have the intense yet disciplined formal structure of a poem, and it is for this reason that it is, perhaps, the most under- examined of all literary genres. Despite the fact that it has been practiced by some of the greatest writers in world literature—Chekov, Maupassant, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway—as well as a significant number of Irish writers—O’Faolain, O’Connor, Joyce, Banville and McGahern—it remains an elusive genre. Studies seldom focus on a single story, as there does not seem to be sufficient material in one story to carry the weight of sustained analysis. In this article, that trend will be reversed, as the focus here is on a single short story by William Trevor, entitled “Justina’s Priest,” from his 2005 collection A Bit on the Side, a collection which Paul Delaney has termed “masterful” (183). The title is part of an ongoing trope of Trevor’s fiction in that “women’s names provide the titles for several of his novels and many of his short stories” (Fitzgerald- Hoyt 143). The reason for the choice of this story is that it offers a fictive and complex perspective on the socio-cultural demise of the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland. This is a topic that has been the subject of a significant amount of comment, but the fluctuations and consequences of the hegemonic power of this institution have never, I would contend, been dealt with so subtly as in this story.

2 “Justina’s Priest” deals with the relationship between a young Irish woman of limited intellectual development, Justina Casey, “a girl with learning trouble” (Trevor 50), and a priest, Father Clohessy, “fifty-four and becoming stout, his red hair cut short around a freckled pate” (Trevor 40), who is silently aware of “the Church’s slow collapse” (Trevor 56) in contemporary Ireland. The story is located in a small town in County Offaly, which has a view of the Comeragh Mountains, and it is set in the context of the fall from Grace of the position of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the early 21st century: Centuries of devotion had created a way of life in which the mystery of the Trinity was taken for granted, the Church’s invincible estate a part of every day, humility

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part of it, too, instead of rights plucked out of nowhere, order abandoned in favour of confusion. What priests and bishops had been—their strength and their parish people’s salvation—was mocked in television farces, deplored, presented as absurdity. That other priests in other towns, in cities, in country parishes, were isolated by their celibacy, by the mourning black of their dress, had been a consolation once, but that source of comfort had long ago dried up. (Trevor 57)

3 Part of this was due to the clerical abuse and sexual scandals which came to light, such as when a “well-loved bishop had been exposed as the begetter of a child, nor when there had been other misdemeanours on the part of other clergymen” (Trevor 56).

4 A significant number of these indiscretions occurred when children were placed in the protection of the clergy in clerically-run, state-sanctioned institutions, and instances of clerical child abuse have been documented in the Murphy and Ryan reports, where tribunals of inquiry made stark findings about the role of the church in the abuse, and systemic denial of responsibility of that abuse, of children, over a sustained period of years. One example of the type of information provided stands in synecdoche for the shame and worry felt by Father Clohessy in this story: In addition to being hit and beaten witnesses described other forms of abuse such as being flogged, kicked and otherwise physically assaulted, scalded, burned and held under water. Witnesses reported being beaten publicly in front of other staff, residents, patients and pupils as well as in private. Many reports were heard of witnesses being beaten naked and partially clothed, both in private and in front of others. They reported being beaten and physically assaulted with implements that were for the specific purpose of inflicting pain and punishment, such as leather straps, bamboo canes and wooden sticks. (Ryan, vol. 3, 393)

5 This story describes the impact of these findings on the position of the church in Irish society, and the specific effects of this on Father Clohessy, and this creates a context within which expectations arise for the reader. The focus on his relationship with a young woman, whom he has known since she was “no more than five or six,” as he remembers “Justina’s black hair cut in a fringe and curling in around her face” (Trevor 51), would seem to place this story as a possible specific parole in the langue of clerical child sexual abuse. There are two direct references to her “First Communion” dress (Trevor 40; 52), which again point towards the implicit sexual impropriety of the relationship, and there is also some imagery of Justina on her knees, being watched by the priest, as she cleans the church, a scene which has implications of fetishism and voyeurism. His feelings of guilt that only she “made sense,” and yet she “made no sense at all” (Trevor 39), would seem to imply that he, too, is part of the context of a church where improper relationships have gone unacknowledged, unreported and unpunished: “the problem wasn’t simply that no one told about the abuse, but that no one in the Church was prepared to act. No one in authority did anything even when they did know” (O’Gorman 224-25): Another consistent pattern has been for Church authorities to close ranks in an attempt to limit the damage done to the institution. Denial of guilt, refusal to co- operate with the civil authorities, the victims and their families, abdication of responsibility, failure to recognise the seriousness of the problem, fear of the costs involved in any settlement, arrogant disregard for the truth through the use of “mental reservation,” are just a few of the hallmarks that characterise the Church’s management or mismanagement of the abuse scandals. (Littleton and Maher 8-9)

6 It is in this environment that the story is set, and even the title suggests an inappropriate level of connection between the two characters through the use of the possessive: “Justina’s Priest.” It suggests a level of ownership or mutual belonging—he

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is her priest, or she is his “Justina.” In the context of the clerical abuse scandals in Ireland, one would expect there to be some form of asymmetrical and abusive relationship between the young girl and the priest; one might expect the priest to ponder on the structural role of the church in terms of occluding responsibility for such abuse, but these issues are never formally addressed in the story; they are only addressed in the inward musings of Father Clohessy.

7 In a time when the power of the church is on the wane, both nationally and in the world of this story, Father Clohessy nevertheless manages to exert some control over the movements and freedoms of Justina Casey, as he tells her family of the dangers on her leaving for Dublin to visit Breda Maguire, a long-time friend of hers who had “gone off the rails” (Trevor 47), and who is remembered by Father Clohessy as wearing a T- shirt which had a slogan on it: “bold yellow letters on black, simple and straightforward: Fuck Me” (Trevor 55). Breda is seen by other characters in a predatory sexual light. Maeve, Justina’s sister, who is a surrogate mother to the orphaned girl, refers to her as “a hooer” [whore] (Trevor 50), and her father-in-law has a similar opinion: “Breda Maguire was on the streets, Mr Gilfoyle said to himself” (Trevor 49). Indeed the attitudes to women in the story reflect a patriarchal habitus within the church which can be seen to be a partial causal factor in the issues of abuse and the suppression of details of that abuse.

8 Using the Lacanian notion of the “real,” which lurks beneath and around the symbolic order of language, this article will probe the real of the relationship between Justina and “her” priest. For Jacques Lacan, the real “is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious” (Lacan, Seminar 20: On Feminine Sexuality 131). The multi- perspectival narrative position of the story recreates and transforms our knowledge of subject positions within it, and I will use a theoretical matrix derived from the works of Lacan and Jacques Rancière to analyse these aspects of “Justina’s Priest.” Writing about such notions of decision, Jacques Derrida has examined the relationship between both/ and choices, and those can be more accurately categorised as neither/nor. Speaking about knowledge and how it is accessed and created through language, he notes that it is “neither this nor that; but rather this and that” (161), and in this story, this is the kind of epistemological position adopted. Writing about what he terms the “aesthetic unconscious,” Jacques Rancière conflates the development of aesthetics with notions of “confused knowledge.” He sees the aesthetic as a place where the relationship between rationality and emotion, consciousness and the unconscious is played out in a different manner: This new and paradoxical idea makes art the territory of a thought that is present outside itself and identical with non-thought. It unites Baumgarten’s definition of the sensible as “confused” idea with Kant’s contrary definition of the sensible as heterogeneous to the idea. Henceforth confused knowledge is no longer a lesser form of knowledge but properly the thought of that which does not think. (The Aesthetic Unconscious 6)

9 This relationship between the symbolic rational order of thought and language, and the underlying unconscious aspects of knowledge, has a strong bearing on Lacan’s notion of the real, as it suggests the confused knowledge that is unable to be rationally expressed, but which is nevertheless a motive factor in so much of our lives. It is almost impossible to express this in ordinary language—indeed it is often that which remains unsaid in ordinary language. The type of knowledge that is revealed in literature in general, and in this short story in particular, is one which mirrors that of the

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contemporary socio-cultural sphere. Normally the response to trauma is either to repress it or to displace it, and in contemporary Ireland, despite the plethora of evidence, there has been little enough ongoing discussion of the continued role of the church in education and health matters, given the church’s egregious record in dealing with the abusers of children in both areas.

10 The aftermath of the reports on abuse has seen a general fall in respect for the church on one side, and an entrenched siege-mentality on the other, with little real discussion as to how a revised role for the church could be set out. “Justina’s Priest” attempts to examine this phenomenon through a different paradigm of knowledge, what could be seen as Rancière’s confused knowledge. I would argue that the knowledge that we gain through this story about the role of the church in contemporary Irish society is of equal value to that gained in reports, interviews and other discourses in the Irish public sphere. This type of knowledge is based on Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, which marks a decisive break with the Cartesian tradition which saw the human being as “essentially a unified, autonomous subject, fully present to its own consciousness— indeed, essentially identical with this consciousness”; and which held the belief that “all human knowledge can be grounded in the clear self-knowledge of this unified subject”; and which felt that “the moral assessment of human actions is grounded in the human being's autonomy as a thinking, knowing subject” (Scott Lee 22). Lacan offers a useful definition of the type of knowledge which Rancière sees as operative in literature, speaking of it “as caught up in an ever-changing dialectic between the data derived from a subject’s experience and that subject’s complexly mediated identity that shapes the very nature of the data” (Scott Lee 23). For Lacan, it is: a kind of [experiential] knowledge [connaissance] we admire because it cannot become [articulated] knowledge [un savoir]. But in Freud's work something quite different is at stake, which is a savoir certainly, but one that doesn't involve the slightest connaissance, in that it is inscribed in a discourse of which the subject— who, like the messenger-slave of Antiquity, carries under his hair the codicil that condemns him to death—knows neither the meaning nor the text, nor in what language [langue] it is written, nor even that it was tattooed on his shaven scalp while he was sleeping. (Écrits 680)

11 The image of something tattooed on a scalp is a good one, as such knowledge is signified on, and through, the body of the subject, but the subject is unable to access it, and this is precisely what we see in “Justina’s Priest.” The meaning is there but it requires a hermeneutic and heuristic reading practice uncover the hair which is obscuring this tattoo, and to understand its meaning in terms of the two forms of knowledge connaissance and savoir. Interestingly, Calum Neill suggests that it “is in this gap between knowing and not knowing, between known and unknown, between knowledge and the impossibility of knowledge, that the possibility of the ethical emerges” (237).

12 The narrative mode of the story is one which allows us glimpses of the subjective real of Father Clohessy. The method used is analogous to the one which allows us to date the story precisely. “Justina’s Priest” takes place in the week of May 24th - 28th 2001. We know this because part of the story takes place on Bob Dylan’s 60th birthday (Trevor 46), so the week of the story can be pinpointed. This is the way that Trevor’s poetics of knowledge works: the information is there, but is not overt; it requires careful reading to unearth it.

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13 It is in the ethical that this story makes tangential comments on the current state of the church. One of the main complaints about the abuse issue is that the church as structure closed ranks and protected its own people at the expense of the victims. This can be seen to be a systemic norm in large corporations, businesses and civil organisations, where the good of the institution prevails over individual unethical behaviour. Ethical issues are at the core of this story, as a number of decisions need to be taken, none of which can be verified by a predefined rule. Father Clohessy has to decide whether to try and block Justina’s planned visit to see Breda in Dublin: “‘Come up for the two days, what harm would it do anyone? I’ll show you the whole works,’ Breda said” (Trevor 51). He also ponders as to whether he should break the confidentiality of the confessional, as it is through this that he knows that Justina is planning to visit Breda in Dublin: “all that Justina put into her confessional” (Trevor 51). Similarly Maeve, Justina’s sister, has an ethical decision to make—does she allow her sister to go to Dublin, or does she stop her. Jacques Derrida uses the term “ethics” in a singular way. Like Lyotard here, he argues that following rules is not an ethical process, noting in an interview that: “ethics start when you don’t know what to do, when there is this gap between knowledge and action, and you have to take responsibility for inventing this new rule which doesn’t exist” (in Payne and Schad 31-32).

14 As ever, in Trevor, the motives for decisions are very mixed. Since the death of their mother, the care of Justina has fallen to Maeve, who “considered that she’d been caught: when their mother had died, there had been only she to look after Justina, their mother being widowed for as long as either of them could remember” (Trevor 41). When Father Clohessy tells her of Justina’s plan to leave on the bus, there is a flicker of hope that flashes across Maeve’s face as the possibility of not having to look after Justina is briefly raised: “She never would,” Maeve said at last. Successful in controlling her irritation, she failed to keep an errant note of hope out of her tone. It flickered in her eyes and she shook her head, as if to deny that it was there. (Trevor 53-54)

15 The complexity of Maeve is clear from her sense of both loving Justina, and at the same time resenting yet another burden in her life. As Suzanne Morrow Paulson notes, Trever excels at dealing with such “psychic splits” in order to expose a “full and compassionate vision of humanity” (103). All of these characters have choices to make, and all choices are, to some degree, shaped by the church. There are times when it seems the characters themselves do not know why they choose a particular course of action, and this is an example of the tattooed knowledge of which Lacan has spoken, and it gestures towards the modes of knowledge that is embodied in this story: “speech introduces the hollow of being into the texture of the real, the one and the other holding on to and balancing each other” (Lacan Seminar 1 Freud’s Papers on Technique 229).

16 Literature can provide mediation between these two different types of knowledge, in the hollow of being, a point made by Rancière when he speaks about what he terms a “poetics of knowledge,” which he defines as “a study of the set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science, and signifies this status. The poetics of knowledge has an interest in the rules according to which knowledge is written and read, is constituted as a specific genre of discourse.” He traces the conflicts between scientific knowledge and the knowledge of the social

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sciences, and stresses that his view is different as he thinks that such debates “forget this too easily—the age of science is also that of literature”—a genre which he distinguishes from “belles lettres” and the “simple enchantments of fiction” through “the rigor of its own action” (The Names of History 8). This perspective offers a broad view of the epistemic value of literature: A poetics of knowledge can be viewed as a kind of “deconstructive practice” to the extent that it tries to trace back an established knowledge—history, political science, sociology, and so on—to the poetic operations—description, narration, metaphorization, symbolization, and so on—that make its objects appear and give sense and relevance to its propositions. What is important to me is that this “reduction” of scientific discourse to the poetical moment means its reduction to the equality of speaking beings. (Rancière “The Thinking of Dissensus” 14)

17 This type of knowledge is located in the gap between connaissance and savoir, between the conscious and unconscious, and it allows the unspoken aspects of knowledge, which are in the subject, but hitherto inaccessible to that subject, to be articulated in the language of the text. In gaining knowledge of the motivations of Father Clohessy, we gain some knowledge, some “confused idea” about the motivations of those in the church. Interestingly, the knowledge we gain is from Father Clohessy’s speech and thought, but it may not be fully understood or recognised by the priest himself—he is not able to see that tattoo on his scalp. This stands, I would argue, in synecdoche, for a similar attitude in the structural church which is unable to come to a full, subjective knowledge of why it has fallen so far in the regard of its people. There is a parallel here with the work of the psychoanalyst as the aim of such analysis is to listen to the speech of the analysand and to “what is left out of the analysand’s discourse” and to “what he claims not to know,” in order to discern what is “known in the unconscious” of the subject, but “unbeknown to him. Interpretation aims to hit that gap in his knowledge” (Fink 77).

18 Thus, when Father Clohessy is relaxing on a Saturday evening in The Emmet Bar, as he “talked to two men with whom he had attended the Christian Brothers’ forty years ago” (Trevor 55), certain topics are not mentioned: They, not he, did the talking in the Emmet Bar, always sensitive to the cloth he wore. They neither of them had mentioned it when a few years ago a well-loved bishop had been exposed as the begetter of a child, nor when there had been other misdemeanours on the part of other clergymen …. There would be embarrassment if he mentioned the Church’s slow collapse. There would be an awkwardness; best not said, his friends’ opinion would be. Sometimes you had to close your mind down. (Trevor 56)

19 In these non-conversations, the Lacanian real is very much present, through its absence, and in a manner that parallels Rancière’s idea of a thought that is present outside itself and identical with a non-thought. For Lacan, the real “is always and in every case in its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from it” (Écrits 17); it is “what did not come to light in the symbolic” (Écrits 324, italics original).

20 The very fact of the silence of these men is indicative of their awareness of the huge problem facing the church, and the silence of Father Clohessy, who we remember, does not speak much himself, is a further indication that there are thoughts to which he cannot give voice—he has repressed them, as indeed has the institutional church in Ireland:

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That he considered it necessary to keep private his concern about the plight of his Church did nothing to lighten the burden of his mood, any more than the temporary absence from the parish of Father Finaghy did. At present undergoing a period of treatment after a car accident, Father Finaghy was extrovert and gregarious, a priest who carried his faith on to the golf-course, where it was never a hindrance. “Arrah, sure we do our best,” Father Finaghy was given to remarking. (Trevor 45)

21 Like Father Clohessy, Father Finaghy is not open to discussion about the problems of the church, or about its decline in influence. Later in the story, as the priest’s views on loud music in the town square are politely listened to, but discounted, Father Finaghy again falls back on phatic utterance to disguise his own feelings or reactions: “that a priest’s protest had been so summarily dismissed was par for the course, an expression often used by Father Finaghy in his own un-protesting acceptance of the decline of clerical influence” (Trevor 46).

22 The silences of Father Clohessy, and the phatic displacements of Father Finaghy, are examples of Rancière’s unconscious knowledge, as both men are aware of the problems of the church, but displace their fears and worries onto different activities. They are also typical of Trevor’s writing style, as his stories are full of characters who are “unable to speak about their sufferings” (Lee 25). Father Finaghy, “companionable and easy,” plays golf, drives cars (possibly recklessly, given his car accident), socialises by leading the “singsongs in the Emmet Bar on a Saturday evening, a little tipsy and none the worse for that” (Trevor 58). Part of the narrative economy that is at the core of Trevor’s sculpted style of writing is that Father Finaghy is only mentioned ten times in the story, and yet we can piece together quite a nuanced view of his character, even though his structural function is to provide a point of contrast and comparison to Father Clohessy, the focal point of the story. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon has made the point that Trevor is very much a “deus absconditus” who leaves his characters to their postmodern world of indeterminacy (357). His evasion of responsibility for his own role in the decline of the church in Ireland is an example of the subjective real—he is hardly in the story, only utters six words directly, and three in reported speech and yet he is crucial to our understanding of the evasions and silence of Father Clohessy. His overt displacements of worry and anxiety in social practices is the reflected real of Father Clohessy’s more covert displacements, part of the value of the poetics of knowledge, as this paradigm acknowledges the value and significance of what is not spoken: “in the symbolic order, the empty spaces are as signifying as the full ones” (Lacan, Écrits 327).

23 This emptiness is signified through Father Clohessy’s silence, and through his sense of the loss of respect for the church, as well as through his own lack of professed belief in God or in religion. His relationship to the church is implied through various glimpses into his inner consciousness as the omniscient narrator lays bare his views on the church. In a story primarily about relationships, the real is that father Clohessy is alienated from the two main relational aspects of his social position—his church as structural institution, and his people in the parish. In terms of the church, he feels guilty and embarrassed at all of the scandals and it remains the great unsaid in his life: Father Clohessy walked in the opposite direction from the one taken by Justina. The sense of loss that had possessed him when she left the church had given way to a more general feeling of deprivation that, these days, he was not often without. The grandeur of his Church had gone, leaving his priesthood within it bleak, the vocation that had beckoned him less insistent than it had been. He had seen his congregations fall off and struggled against the feeling that he’d been deserted.

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Confusion spread from the mores of the times into the Church itself; in combating it, he prayed for guidance but was not heard. (Trevor 44-45)

24 Here is a man whose relationship with his vocation and the institution of the church has been gradually eroded until the fullness of a spiritual life has been replaced by the sense of deprivation of which he speaks. He is a good, decent man, who has given over the old presbytery building to the town to “become the youth centre the town had long been in need of” (Trevor 47), and who does not grudge the increased prosperity of his parishioners: “there was money where there’d been poverty, ambition where there’d been humility. These were liberated people who stood about in ways that generations before them had not” (Trevor 55). He is aware that a sense of liberation from a church which imposed strictures on them is not necessarily a bad thing for his parishioners, and as is so often the case in Trevor’s writing, there is a nuanced and complex sense of knowledge at play in his thinking—and the word “thinking” is important here, as none of these comments are ever voiced by him in the story; the reader is given access to his thoughts, which generally show him as a decent man.

25 This ambiguity is part of the poetics of knowledge; it is a knowledge that eschews the stark binary oppositions that are often seen as paradigmatic of the scientific method, a method which is often blind to the nuance and ambiguity of the Lacanian real. Father Clohessy remembers how he once approached the owner of Mulvany’s Electrical and TV shop about his practice of celebrating the “birthdays of popular entertainers by playing a tribute” of one particular song. Father Clohessy sees this practice as “a disturbance in a quiet town and had once approached Mulvany about it” (Trevor 45); however, Mulvany argued that it was nostalgic for the older citizens to hear the likes of Perry Como or Dolly Parton coming out of the blue at them, and exciting for the youngsters to have the new arrivals on the music scene honoured. That a priest’s protest should have been so summarily dismissed was “par for the course,” as Father Finaghy puts it; what it signifies to Father Clohessy is his own “un-protesting acceptance of the decline of clerical influence. The times they were a-changing, Bob Dylan’s reminder was repeated yet again before there was silence from Mulvany’s loudspeakers” (Trevor 46).

26 It is in this context that we must analyse his relationship with Justina—she is the paradoxical real in his life, and this is set out very evidently in the opening of the story where her significance to a man whose power, influence and contextual structure are falling apart, is stated as clearly as Trevor ever states anything: Only Justina Casey made sense, Father Clohessy reflected yet again, shaking his head over the recurrence of the thought, for truth to tell the girl made no sense at all. The contradiction nagged a little in a familiar way, as it did whenever Justina Casey, sinless as ever, made her confession. It caused Father Clohessy to feel inadequate, foolish even, that he failed to understand something that as a priest he should have. (Trevor 39)

27 To describe someone as the only thing that made sense, and then to say that she made no sense at all would seem to be a logical non-sequitur, and the levels of knowledge that could be gained from such a statement would seem to be negligible. However, in the light of the Lacanian difference between connaissance and savoir, and Rancière’s notion of the confused ideas, both of which are part of a poetics of knowledge, I think we can gain access to the subjective real of Father Clohessy through this statement. In this story, no-one listens to Father Clohessy: His parishioners seem to go their own way, Maeve, Justina’s sister, has taken little notice of his previous comments about Justina—“once or twice before, she had been abrupt to the point of rudeness when he’d

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been concerned about her sister” (Trevor 53)—and we have already seen the lack of response to his strictures about the playing of loud music in the square. The second reason they do not listen to him is that he says very little: the majority of the story relays his thoughts and not his actual words. He has 13 sentences of direct speech, and 3 sentences of reported speech in a story of 4,766 words, and the reason for this relative silence on his part is because “when he preached he was angry because he didn’t know what to say to them, that he searched for ways to disguise his distress, stumbling about from word to word” (Trevor 40). There is a truth to his silence, as he has no insight into his own motivations, and has no solutions or answers to people’s problems, and so remains silent: “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real” (Lacan, Television 3). For him, words definitely do fail and the impossibility is that he must give a sermon every Sunday and yet “he didn’t know what to say to them anymore” (Trevor 55). The subjective real of Father Clohessy is his doubt, his uncertainty, his sense that he should, perhaps apologize for the behaviour of his church, but is unwilling to take that step because the church, as a structure and system, had its own corporate policy on that: “He should apologize, yet knew he must not” (Trevor 55).

28 Much of his musing takes place after a mass on Saturday night, or after hearing confession, and we can now see that the cause of his reflections is his inability to lead his flock with any sense of certainty. These musings are a locus classicus of Trevor’s mature style: Trevor uses multiple centres of consciousness to shift back and forth between an interior view of a character and various exterior views, and therefore to negotiate between sympathy and irony, intimacy and distance, and, in larger terms, affirmation and qualification… Trevor’s novels and stories are essentially networks of perceptions and attitudes, and the reader is forced to make connections between the various points—to enact, in the process of reading, the principle of connection. (Schirmer 9)

29 We know that in his own mind he is aware that the “grandeur of his Church had gone, leaving his priesthood within it bleak, the vocation that had beckoned him less insistent than it had been” (Trevor 44). He is unsure of his vocation; he is unsure of the role of the church; at no stage do we hear him speak of any great sense of faith in God, in fact his experience would seem to indicate quite the opposite: “he prayed for guidance but was not heard” (Trevor 45). It is in this overall context of confused ideas that we come close to a poetics of knowledge of Father Clohessy, of his relationship with this young girl, and of the subjective centrality of that relationship to him, a centrality which makes him go to the house in Diamond Street, break the sanctity of the confidentiality of the confessional, and warn Maeve and Mr Gilfoyle that Justina may want to go to Dublin to visit Breda. In an uncertain world, Justina Casey, and her old-fashioned, simplistic devotion to the church, to his authority as a priest, and to the sacrament of confession, is the only thing that is keeping Father Clohessy’s melancholy form lapsing into deep despair.

30 Justina is effortlessly devout and crucially she never expects him to say anything to her —unlike his flock, she is not looking for answers from him (answers which he no longer has) because for her, ritual, devotion and the sacrament of confession are all she needs to give her peace and happiness. Unlike the liberated, secularised flock in which he now

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resides, she is racked with catholic guilt and feels the constant need to confess and then to do penance for her “sins”: “Father, I’m bad,” she had insisted and, allotting her her penance, he had been again aware that she didn’t even know what badness was. But without the telling of her beads, without the few Hail Marys he had prescribed, she would have gone away unhappy. Of her own volition, every few days she polished the brass of the altar vases and the altar cross. She would be there on Saturday evening, a bucket of scalding water carried through the streets, the floor mop lifted down from its hook in the vestry cupboard. On Fridays she scraped away the week’s accumulation of candle grease and arranged to her satisfaction the out-of-date missionary leaflets. (Trevor 39)

31 In this respect, she is a throwback, temporally and experientially, to a time when the church was hegemonic in Irish society. In terms of gender, in a world full of women like Maeve, who are in charge of the men in their lives, and Breda, who is sexually liberated, Justina still looks to the patriarchal church for all her validation: Father Clohessy is the man in her life, he is her “father” in a spiritual and in a validatory sense. Unlike women who are looking for equal treatment in the church, and who question attitudes handed down by tradition as sexist, Justina is happy to embrace traditional roles of women in a patriarchal structure, cleaning, polishing, dusting and scraping away candle grease. She is not asking questions, she is not looking for answers, it is she who speaks in confession and all Father Clohessy has to do is respond to her. Indeed, ironically, for a man who has embraced silence, he actually interrupts Justina during her confessions, so she is the one person who is able to make him speak and this is because, while he does not know what to say to his flock, he knows exactly what to say to Justina because her faith in him makes his vocation and his own sense of his priesthood all the stronger. She accepts the power and truth of the church and she defers to Father Clohessy as the symbolic representative of the church. It is as if he sees a better reflection of himself reflected back from her certainty about him and about the church. The thought of her leaving is shattering to his sense of self. Though he never enunciates this doubt, it is clear in the narrative gaps between connaissance and savoir that this is the case: “it frightened him that she might visit her friend, that she might forget what he had said, that somehow she might acquire the bus fare, that she’d go, not telling anyone” (Trevor 52).

32 His silence, his melancholy, his negative musings can all be traced back to this fear, because even if he does not realise it, he is only still a priest because of the faith, the blind faith, of Justina Casey. At a time when “what priests and bishops had been—their strength and their parish people’s salvation—was mocked in television farces, deplored, presented as absurdity” (Trevor 57), she is his still point in a turning word. As he returns from another empty night, still not talking with his two classmates about the elephant of clerical abuse in the room, what keeps him sane is the thought of “the careful hands of Justina Casey,” lifting down “the altar ornaments, her polishing rags and Brasso pads tidily laid out” (Trevor 58), as she removes faded petals from the altar, and scrapes grease from the candle-holders. There is no moment of revelation, no sense of redemption, just the ordinary rituals that have endured since before Father Clohessy was ordained, and which are carried on by Justina. She provides the sacerdotal certainty that was so lacking in the rest of his life: It was what there was; it was what he had, whether he understood it or not. Justina Casey would stay in the town because Mr Gilfoyle would make sure she didn’t get on the Dublin bus; Maeve would keep an eye on her; after a time Breda Maguire would

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forget about her. In the confined space of the confessional there would again be the unnecessary confessions, again the granting of absolution. Then happiness would break in the face that saw God in his own. (Trevor 58)

33 This is the knowledge that is tattooed on his head; this is the poetics of knowledge that is embodied in this story; this is the way in which connaissance and savoir interact as “the real supports the phantasy, the phantasy protects the real” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 41).

34 In this story, the subjective real is that Father Clohessy needs Justina’s simple faith and her pietistic actions as a fixed point in a world that is turning all too quickly for him. He may be unaware that this is his motivating factor, but through the narrative style, and through an analysis based on the poetics of knowledge, we can see that this is the case. He needs Justina’s confessions and her faith in the church, and in him in order to validate what is left of his vocation: “here it is the real which creates desire by reproducing in it the relationship between the subject and the lost object” (Lacan, Écrits 724). For Father Clohessy, Justina Casey, or more particularly, the blind, obedient and completely certain faith of Justina Casey, is his lost object—she is the last remaining foundation point of his subjective real. So while on the surface, it may seem that she is reliant on his interference in her life to keep her safe in her home village, in fact it is she who is the guarantor of Father Clohessy’s priesthood, sanity and selfhood: ultimately he is, indeed, Justina’s priest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Delaney, Paul. “‘The Art of the Glimpse.” Cheating at Canasta’” William Trevor: Revaluations. Eds. Paul Delaney and Michael Parker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 180-197. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Deconstruction and the Other.” Trans. Richard Kearney. States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. Ed. Kearney, Richard. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. 156-76. Print.

Fink, Bruce. Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. 1st ed. London: W. W. Norton, 2007. Print.

Fitzgerald-Hoyt, Mary. William Trevor: Re-imagining Ireland. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2004. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink Grigg in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell. London: W. W. Norton, 2006. Print.

---. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. Print.

---. Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 1. Trans. John Forrester. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Print.

---. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge Encore. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 20. Trans. John Forrester. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1998. Print.

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---. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: Norton, 1990. Print.

Lee, Hermione. “‘Learnt by Heart’: William Trevor and Reading.” William Trevor: Revaluations. Eds. Paul Delaney and Michael Parker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 15-27. Print.

Lee, Jonathan Scott. Jacques Lacan. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Print.

Littleton, John and Eamon Maher. The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism? Dublin: The Columba Press, 2010. Print.

Neill, Calum. Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

O’Gorman, Colm. Beyond Belief. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2009. Print.

Ormsby-Lennon, Hugh. Fools of Fiction: Reading William Trevor’s Stories. Dublin: Maunsell, 2005. Print.

Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. William Trevor: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Print.

Payne, Michael and John Schad, eds. Life after Theory: Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi and Christopher Norris. London: Continuum, 2003. Print.

Rancière, Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Print.

---. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Trans. Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Print.

---. “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics.” Reading Rancière. Eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. London: Continuum, 2011. 1-18. Print.

Ryan, Sean. Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Report. Vol. III, Confidential Committee. Dublin: Stationery Office, 2009. Print.

Schirmer, Gregory A. William Trevor: A Study of his Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Trevor, William. A Bit on the Side. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article analyse la nouvelle de William Trevor “Justina’s Priest”, extraite du recueil A Bit on the Side (2005). Le récit se focalise sur la relation entre un prêtre et une jeune femme limitée intellectuellement. Dans le contexte irlandais des scandales d’abus sexuels par des prêtres, le lecteur s’attendrait à ce que cette relation soit clairement asymétrique et abusive. Toutefois, comme c’est souvent le cas chez Trevor, la réalité est tout autre. Exploitant la notion lacanienne du réel qui se cache derrière l’ordre symbolique du langage, cet article examine la réalité de la relation entre Justina et « son » prêtre. Il étudie la multiplicité des points de vue narratifs, laquelle recrée et transforme les positions de sujet, à partir des concepts théoriques de Jacques Lacan et Jacques Rancière.

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AUTHORS

EUGENE O'BRIEN Eugene O’Brien is senior lecturer, Head of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. His publications include: The Question of Irish Identity in the Writings of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (1998); Examining Irish Nationalism in the Context of Literature, Culture and Religion: A Study of the Epistemological Structure of Nationalism (2002); Seamus Heaney—Creating Irelands of the Mind (2002); Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (2003); Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (2006) and Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse—Negotiating Texts and Contexts in Contemporary Irish Studies (2009). He co-edited: La France et la Mondialisation/France and the Struggle against Globalization (2007); Reinventing Ireland through a French Prism (2007) and Modernity and Postmodernity in a Franco-Irish Context (2008) and Breaking the Mould: Literary Representations of Irish Catholicism (2010). His research interests include French literary and cultural theory and contemporary Irish writing, culture and society.

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Part 4: Metanarrative Reflections

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Rewriting the Irish Short Story: Emma Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

Debbie Brouckmans and Elke D'hoker

1 The Irish short story tradition has long been considered a predominantly realist one, with writers from George Moore and James Joyce over Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin to John McGahern and Claire Keegan offering largely mimetic portrayals of Irish life. As Heather Ingman has convincingly argued in her A History of the Irish Short Story, however, this dominant realist mode has often led critics to overlook that other strand in Irish short fiction—the strand of the fantastic, the gothic or the metafictional which emerges in the short fiction of writers like Sheridan LeFanu, James Stephens, Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett and foregrounds themes of “fragmentation or dissolution” (12). Ingman traces the development of this fantastic strand up to the present, with the short fiction of contemporary women writers which seeks to “explor[e] the changing nature of femininity and instability of female identity in a playful, postmodernist style” (250). The early short story collections of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue are referred to as cases in point.

2 Even though the more recent work of these writers, in such collections as The Shelter of Neighbours (2012), Taking Pictures (2008), and Touchy Subjects (2006), respectively, seems to largely abandon postmodern experiment and return towards a more realist mode of writing (D’hoker, “Distorting,” 33-50), these first experimental collections should certainly not be forgotten, as they form important and innovative contributions to the development of the Irish short story. Compared to the quite substantive critical engagement with the postmodern short fiction of Anne Enright and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne,1 Emma Donoghue’s story collections have received but little attention from critics. Her collection of postmodern fairy tales, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) has been treated as a work for adolescents (Martin 4-25). and her recovering of women’s history in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) is often considered as but a supplement to the larger rewriting projects of her historical novels.2

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3 As this essay hopes to show, however, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits certainly deserves a more detailed and comprehensive critical scrutiny, as it is an important work in many ways. It deserves attention, first of all, as an instance of the strand of fantasy and fragmentation in the Irish short fiction and, in particular, as part of the postmodern, experimental mode of writing that characterized the Irish short story in the 1990s and early 2000s. Secondly, it needs to be scrutinized in the context of the larger feminist project of recovering women’s history through the practices of rewriting. Finally, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits can also usefully be read from the perspective of the short story cycle as it is a tightly-structured collection which displays significant similarities, cross-references and connections between the different stories. In what follows, therefore, Donoghue’s collection will be considered within these different critical and generic frameworks in order to highlight the specific contribution it makes to both to the tradition of the Irish short story and to the feminist project of recovering forgotten female voices so as to question the gender and sexual politics of a patriarchal society.

4 “The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits is a book of fictions, but they are also true,” announces Donoghue in the “Foreword” to this collection, and she continues, “Over the last ten years, I have often stumbled over a scrap of history so fascinating that I had to stop whatever I was doing and write a story about it” (1). The main motivation guiding this project of recovery and re-imagining, is revealed as curiosity—asking “What really happened?” but also “What if?” Its main method is described as a combination of historical facts and imaginative creation: “I have used memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past” (1). With this foreword, in short, Donoghue explicitly positions her story collection within the postmodern aesthetics of metafictional rewriting, which she also uses in her historical novels. This postmodern project has perhaps most famously been described by Linda Hutcheon as “historiographic metafiction,” which she applies to “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Poetics 5). Like the novels discussed by Hutcheon, indeed, Donoghue’s stories often take as starting point half-forgotten anecdotes or submerged historical facts to offer a different, skewed perspective on the dominant historical narrative. The “scrap[s] of history” she refers to in the foreword (1), are anecdotes, footnotes, minor official records, and even a ballad or a painting. Most stories, in fact, seek to imagine the private life, thoughts and feelings of the historical characters referred to in these historical or pseudo-historical documents. Some are rather well-known figures, whose main achievements have been recorded in history, such as the Blind Poetess of Donegal, Frances Brown(e), Mary Wollstonecraft and Dame Alice Kyteler; others are only mentioned as a name, or have remained anonymous, like Mr Knox’s niece in “Acts of Union” or the patient in “Cured.” Depending on the availability of historical facts, the stories seek either to plumb the private struggles hidden behind well-known public figures and events or to imaginatively reconstruct the lives of ordinary people forgotten in the folds of history. In all seventeen stories, however, the imaginative reality takes precedence before the historical facts as each story is followed by a brief “Note,” in smaller font, which mentions the facts that are known and lists historical sources.

5 This hierarchical inversion of fiction and fact also points to the metafictional dimension of Donoghue’s collection, as it seeks to challenge our belief in history as

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“objective,” as a sequence of “true” facts. One of the main aims of historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon has argued, is indeed to “open [the past] up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological” (Poetics 110).3 Historiographic metafiction thus plays “upon the truth and lies of the historical record. […] [C]ertain known facts are deliberately falsified in order to foreground the possible mnemonic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error” (“Historiographic” 838).

6 The hazy border between truth and lies, fiction and fact is often foregrounded in the stories as well. The significantly placed first story, “The Last Rabbit,” centrally revolves around a lie. “And if who can tell what’s true and what’s not in these times, Mary, why then mayn’t this rabbit story be as true as anything else?” (2), Mary’s sister-in-law asks when they decide to initiate the scam of a woman giving birth to rabbits. In retrospect, as she is telling her own story, Mary says that, in the end, she supposed her lies had infected her and that her “counterfeit pains had become true” (12). The title of the collection in fact already announces the ambivalence of truth and fiction: while a woman who claimed to have given birth to rabbits seems indeed to have existed, the very phrase “the woman who” alerts us to the pattern of storytelling, while conjuring up rabbits is of course a well-known magician’s trick. Interestingly, the title of the collection foregrounds yet another important theme of the book, which Donoghue oddly keeps silent about in the foreword, namely that the imaginative recovery projects of the book all revolve around women. In all of the “forgotten puzzles and peculiar incidents” which Donoghue aims to uncover and remember in her stories, women are indeed the central protagonists. In this way, Donoghue’s questioning of history and truth in her collection acquires a clear feminist dimension. The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits is then not just a sceptical, postmodern investigation into the impossibility of truth or necessarily subjective and incomplete nature of historical narrative, but also an inquiry into the ideologies that motivate historical narratives, the interests and values that lie behind so-called historical facts. As Linden Peach has put it: Underpinning the engagement with different histories in her work are questions about the writing of history itself. In whose interests and from what standpoint is it conceived? Who is excluded and who is privileged as a result of the particular narrative perspective? How incomplete are particular histories and who is it that benefits and who is it that is disadvantaged by this incompleteness? (31)

7 In The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, these “excluded” and “disadvantaged” are, primarily, women. The fact that Donoghue, in her stories, imaginatively reconstructs the lives of these forgotten or marginalized historical women fits in a larger feminist project of recovery and empowerment. In some stories, the women are literally empowered by being given a voice with which to tell their version of the facts, while in other stories their perspective is revealed through focalisation. The importance of having a voice is referred to by Mary in “The Fox on the Line,” when she ponders in her diary: “Keeping a diary is a monstrous waste of time. But I cannot seem to help it. Without words, we move through life as mute as animals” (29).

8 As Liedeke Plate and Gayle Greene have argued, this self-conscious attempt to give voice to those women who had been marginalized, misrepresented or forgotten in history or in literature, is one of the central trends in late twentieth-century feminist fiction. Greene emphasises in particular the metafictional dimension of this practice of rewriting and argues that “feminist metafiction may have more radical implications

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than male post-modernist texts, in having more urgency and edge, more relevance to lived experience: for when women write of being trapped in an alien tradition, they write from a sense of living in a culture not their own” (19). Plate claims similarly that through the aesthetics of rewriting, women writers seek “to propel them [the silent and the silences] into the space of representation that is also the place of remembrance. Seeking to “know the past” differently, women’s rewriting “writes back to silence in an effort to generate usable pasts, answering it with stories of its own” (97).

9 The books discussed in this respect by critics like Hutcheon, Greene and Plate, however, are principally novels.4 In The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, to the contrary, Donoghue uses these techniques of feminist rewriting and historiographic metafiction in a sequence of seventeen short stories. It is important, therefore, to take a moment to consider the particular effect of this choice of genre on the meaning of the book in general and Donoghue’s feminist project in particular. What this collection of short stories foregrounds, first of all, is diversity and variety. Unlike novels which tend to zoom in on one historical frame and one or at most a few female protagonists, the women staged by Donoghue differ considerably in terms of age, class and nationality. Some are upper-class ladies, like Mary Stuart O’Donnell Countess Tyrconnell in “Figures of Speech,” Elizabeth Pennington in “How a Lady Dies” and the Cottage Ladies in “Salvage”; others are middle-class, like Frances and Mary in “The Fox on the Line” and Euphemia in “Come, Gentle Night.” Women like Mary Toft in “The Last Rabbit,” Kitty in “A Short Story” and Margery Starre in “The Necessity of Burning” belong to the lower classes or are entirely outcasts and outsiders. Some of the characters are only girls, like Frances in “Night Vision” and Dido in the story of that title, while others are middle-aged or elderly. Still other characters are followed over an entire lifetime, such as Margaret Drummond in “Account” and Kitty in “A Short Story.” The women also come from different parts of the British Isles—from London over Nithsdale, Scotland and Hengwrt, Wales, to Dublin—and live in widely divergent time periods, ranging from the fourteenth century of “The Necessity of Burning” to the twentieth century of “Looking for Petronilla.” Moreover, while some women clearly are victims of patriarchal oppression or violence, others employ violence themselves or oppress and exploit those who stand beneath them. The most glaring example, perhaps, is the female prophet Friend Mother, who has founded a personal cult and makes her children fast until disease and death while she remains healthy by secretly eating bacon. What is more, Donoghue adds to this sense of diversity by employing different styles and narrative forms for the stories as well. Most of the stories, for instance, have third-person narration. Both female and male narrators appear, but the majority of these stories are focalized through a woman. The many I-narrators in the book are all female and they include Mary Toft (“The Last Rabbit”) and Dame Alice (“Looking for Petronilla”), as well as Mary Lloyd (“The Fox on the Line”), Frances Brown(e) (“Night Vision”) and Dido Bell (“Dido”). Since the women are all explicitly staged as narrators, Donoghue carefully adapts their different voices to their nationality, class and age. This stylistic and narratological variety thus further adds to the highly diversified picture Donoghue paints of women’s lives in Britain and Ireland in the last seven hundred years.

10 Yet, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits is not just a short story collection. As the foreword and aesthetic structure of the book already indicate, this diversity and variety is counteracted by an aesthetic unity as well as by a common aim and method: the

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imaginative recovery of women’s lives and histories, neglected or distorted in the official history of the British Isles. As we hope to show, moreover, this unity is not confined to foreword and structure alone but is continually strengthened by the cross- references, similarities, and symbols that tie the different stories together. For this reason, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits can be read as a short story cycle, a hybrid genre mid-way between the loose collection of short stories and the more highly unified form of the novel. Originally defined by Forrest L. Ingram as “a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader’s successive experience of various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts” (19),5 the genre has been further analysed and described by critics such as Susan Garland Mann, James Nagel, and Robert M. Luscher. Although there is an ongoing discussion about the appropriate terminology and the precise limits of the genre,6 critics agree that the main characteristic of the short story cycle consists of the “simultaneous self-sufficiency and interdependence” (Mann 15) of its component parts and that this simultaneity often gives rise to a tension between diversity and unity, between “the one and the many,” as Ingram famously put it (19). Luscher also stresses the active participation of the reader in negotiating this tension and recovering the cycle’s meaning. The reader, he argues, is invited to construct a “network of associations that binds the stories together and lends them cumulative thematic impact” (148). In what follows, we will trace this network of associations in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits so as to uncover their cumulative thematic impact in the book as a whole.

11 In spite of the marked differences between the women characters in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, there is one important thing they have in common: they are all depicted as firmly fixed within a patriarchal structure.7 Even if some women occupy positions of power with regard to their servants, children, or even—as in “Revelations”—an entire community, they are all shown to labour under the gender norms and gendered hierarchies of a patriarchal society. Margaret King’s forbidding mother in “Words for Things,” for instance, embodies patriarchal rule in enforcing her daughter to obey gendered expectations for young ladies and she dismisses the governess, Mary Wollstonecraft, for leading her daughter away from her duties. Most of the female characters are, however, more clearly depicted as victims of patriarchal oppression. Mary Toft (“The Last Rabbit”), Mr Knox’s niece (“Acts of Union”) and Kitty (“A Short Story”) are all exploited by men in various money-making schemes. Miss F. (“Cured”) is tricked into undergoing a cliterodectomy by a surgeon she admires and trusts. Frances and Mary (“The Fox on the Line”) are thwarted by the “old boys” network of the legal and political system in their struggle for animal rights. Similarly, the blind girl Frances (“Night Vision”) has to stand up against the local authorities to receive the education she desires. Another interesting example is “Account,” which exposes the inferior position of women in the mediaeval feudal system through a bulleted account of the life of King James IV of Scotland and of the many mistresses he took on, dismissed and—allegedly—killed.

12 If the female characters of The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits share a position of subordination in the society they live in, the male characters are mostly depicted as occupying positions of power and authority. Although some characters, such as the father of Frances in “Night Vision” or Margery’s husband in “The Necessity of Burning,” embody this position with tact and empathy, others can be seen to take advantage of it and to abuse their power in various ways. Especially men of specific

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authority in a patriarchal society, such as priests, lawyers, doctors and scientists, are depicted in a negative way throughout the book. They are shown to use their authority to mislead women and to misuse language in order to exercise power over them. For instance, the priest in “The Necessity of Burning,” who did not arrive in time to christen a dying baby because he was drunk, refuses to bury it in holy ground, because its mother, trying to christen the boy herself, mixed up the order of the words: The priest was shaking his head. “Ah, woman,” he said crossly. […] Margery was almost shrieking. “What? Aren’t those the right words?” “Aye”, the priest said, pursing his lips, “but in the wrong order. The Father goes before the Son, as any ignoramus knows. It’s the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” She stared at him. “What does that mean?” “It means that this child’s soul is lost to hellfire through your carelessness, woman, that’s what it means!” (196)

13 In most stories, in fact, the authority and power these men enjoy is not the power of physical strength, but the power of knowledge and language. In “Cured,” for instance, the famous Victorian surgeon Isaac Baker Brown uses technical terms and his position of authority to trick his patient, Miss F. who suffers from back ache, into admitting to symptoms of hysteria, a medical condition he proposes to cure by means of a cliterodectomy. The story, focalized through the hapless patient, is interrupted by the doctor’s notes on the case, so as to illustrate again the manipulations and distortions that lie behind ostensibly objective scientific descriptions. As Peach indicates, the woman’s lack of command of medical language in fact equals a lack of control over her body (38). The surgeon examines her in “a part she has no name for, or not one that could be said aloud” (111). When she threatens to tell her brother what the doctor has done to her, he asserts his power again: “‘I’m afraid he would not understand which part you mean. He is not a man of much education.’ A pause. ‘How would you describe the part to him, Miss F.?’ Another moment went by. ‘Would you point perhaps?’” (121-2).

14 “Cured” thus brings together the two lines of subjection and control which the stories bear witness to: the physical subjection or containment of female bodies, by doctors and scientists in particular, and the power of words, learning and official discourse to control or manipulate women. Women are reduced to mere bodies in several stories, whether in a medical context as in “Cured,” in the frame of a freak show as in “The Last Rabbit” and “A Short Story,” or simply as part of a marriage deal, as in “Acts of Union.” Moreover, many of the female characters have a physical defect which seems to symbolize their reduced position; they are blind, crippled, pregnant, too small, or suffer from severe pain. In “The Last Rabbit,” the first-person narrator has been so thoroughly examined by medical men that she remarks wryly, “for a month I had been nothing but a body” (12). The fate of women is in some stories also linked to that of animals. The rabbits referred to in the title crop up in other stories as well and in “The Fox on the Line” the narrator links the practice of vivisection to the oppression of women’s bodies: Nowadays I see vivisections everywhere. In the heels that deform women’s feet, for instance; in the corsets that grip our lungs. “If we dress like slaves,” Fà says, “no wonder men enslave us.” I have known two women who died of having their ovaries removed, quite unnecessarily. I have heard whispers of another fashionable operation, where a part is cut away that is not diseased at all. The surgeons do it simply to kill passion. Simply to make women quieter. Simply because they can. (34)

15 Recalling both the cliterodectomy of “Cured” and the vivisectionist practice of “The Fox on the line,” the seven-inch long girl in “A Short Story” is, quite literally, dissected

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after her death by “a butcher in the service of science” (167) and her skeleton is displayed. There is, however, a symbolical victory in this: “She was a fossil, now; she had her niche in history. […] She would stand grinning at her baffled visitors until all those who’d ever known her were dust” (169). This girl, who could only speak a few words, will outlive the men who took advantage of her in order to make money and leave her mark while they are long forgotten.

16 In similar way, in fact, most of the female characters in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits are granted moments of rebellion or revenge. The protagonist in “The Last Rabbit” ultimately revolts against her being reduced to a mere body and decides to tell her story.8 In “Cured,” the female protagonist successfully plays the role of the submissive patient in order to achieve her release; in “Come, Gentle Night,” Effie Ruskin reacts against her husband’s disembodying of her into an idealised “queen” by divorcing him on the grounds of “non-consummation” (94). In “The Necessity of Burning,” to give a final example, Margery takes revenge on the priest who refused her new-born son a Christian burial by throwing the Church books into the fire.

17 In this story, moreover, the woman’s rebelling against the clergy’s and clerks’ power of words becomes a metafictional mise en abyme of Donoghue’s own feminist rewriting in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. “What good ever came out of a book,” Margery wonders: She doesn’t need to read them to know what’s in them; she’s heard enough. Tales of lickerous widows who force men to lie with them; tales of clever young men who trick girls into lying with them; whole books full of wicked wives, like Eve who let the snake into Paradise. No wonder, Margery reckons, seeing as it’s men who write the books. (187)

18 The story ends with Margery asserting agency and power, not just through the act of book-burning, but also by claiming—somewhat ironically—a place in the history books: “the churchmen will tremble when they hear of Margery Starre—read of her, even, maybe. In the turning of a page, in the lifting of a pen, they will pause to think how fast paper burns” (198-9). Here the text, about a woman burning books, who will be mentioned in texts read by those whose texts she destroyed, becomes metafictional to the second degree. Although the power of words and books were used against her, Margery and her rebellion against patriarchal society are in fact remembered by way of a written record.

19 In giving these neglected or forgotten female lives a space—and often a voice—within the covers of her own book, Donoghue also aims to set right the injustices done to them, whether in their own times or in their subsequent marginalisation in authoritative histories. What is important, however, is that Donoghue always seeks to highlight elements of agency or rebellion within the women’s lives themselves. As a result, they are not staged as mere victims of patriarchy which have to be rescued by the more enlightened feminists of today. By this repeated staging of women who are not quite or not just victims, Donoghue also implicitly addresses some of the problems which feminist historiographic metafiction often faces: in retelling history from the perspective of the oppressed outsider, these works run the risk of repeating rather than reversing this position of marginalisation. Donoghue’s emphasis on women’s agency within a structure of confinement and oppression thus offers a correction to this tradition of victimization. As we have seen, some of her characters use and abuse

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power themselves, while even those who are victimised find ways of resisting patriarchal structures and oppression.

20 That fact that Donoghue’s female characters are not “the weeping piteous victims who flock across the pages of history” (204) is even more emphatically demonstrated in the final story of the collection, “Looking for Petronilla,” which nicely ties together the different thematic, symbolic and metafictional strands of the short story cycle. Also in terms of space and time, the story functions as a true closing story. It is narrated by Dame Alice who has restlessly travelled the world, haunted by guilt for having allowed her faithful maid Petronilla to be burnt as a witch while she herself managed to escape from her executioners. As a result, she cannot die and is now revisiting Kilkenny, the scene of the crime, after seven hundred years—which is, not coincidentally, also the time-span of the book. In Kilkenny, she tries to imaginatively recover surviving evidence of her life, and in particular the life of her maid, in a bid to redress her former neglect. Her quest thus mimics that of Donoghue who has similarly “travelled” the British Isles and revisited seven centuries of British history for evidence of women’s hidden, private lives.

21 The story again comments on the distortions and omissions of our histories. Alice’s own life has become the stuff of tourist attractions—“History always becomes a cartoon, where it survives at all” (201)—and is remembered chiefly because of the mythic demonization of a woman’s crime: “When a man kills a wife, he is a tortured rebel, criminel de passion, dusky Othello or bluff King Hal. When a woman kills her husband, she is never allowed to forget it” (201). She has become a “long-nailed monster, a Kilkenny Clytemnestra” (201). What is forgotten in the process, as The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits as a whole also points out, are the ordinary lives of women who are neither victim nor monster—such as Petronilla, her maid, who is interesting in her “extraordinary ordinariness” (202). Yet, evidence of this ordinary life is hard to find: “Petronilla is not here. There is nothing left. I do not know what I was hoping for, exactly: some sign of presence, some message scratched for me on the prison wall, some whisper from her walking ghost” (208). Even though Alice fails to find some facts or truths about her maid, she keeps searching and hoping: “My one faith is that I will find some trace of Petronilla. My one hope is that she will teach me how to die. My one love now, the only one whose face I can remember. There, around some corner, she burns, she burns” (212). In this closing story, in other words, the feminist aesthetics of rewriting history by recovering forgotten lives is both enacted and questioned for its truth and efficacy. Once again, the representation of women as victims of men, society and history is explicitly engaged with. In an obviously feminist revisionary history book, Dame Alice discovers that she is portrayed as a “victim of a combination of the worst excesses of fourteenth-century Christo-patriarchy. […] As in so many other ‘witch trials,’ powerful men (both church and lay) projected their own unconscious fantasies of sexual/satanic perversion onto the blank canvas of a woman’s life” (206). Alice laughs at this, knowing, although there is some truth in it, she is certainly not innocent: “blank canvas, my eye” (206).

22 In all, by preferring the form of the short story cycle over that of the novel for her feminist recovery project, Donoghue is able to, on the one hand, paint a broad canvas and present a large variety of female characters and, on the other hand, to draw attention to the things these characters—and beyond them, all women in patriarchal societies—have in common. What stands out in this respect is that, in spite of their

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structurally submissive and secondary position in society, which renders them vulnerable to abuse by men of authority, they are nevertheless not without agency, nor simply innocent. By emphasising in particular the gestures of rebellion or resistance, however small, on the part of her female characters, Donoghue refuses them the status of “weeping piteous victims” which both official histories and, ironically, feminist revisionary histories have often bestowed on them. The women Donoghue manages to rescue from oblivion or to resurrect from the “facts” that remain, are above all shown to be ordinary human beings, with their own dreams, hopes and disappointments, who always exceed the stereotypical images of “monster,” “cartoon” or “blank canvas” with which history and culture have too often sought to contain them.

23 Ordinary women’s rebellion against confining stereotypes is also the topic of both Anne Enright’s and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s postmodern fictions. Like Donoghue, both writers focus on the position and identity of women in patriarchal society, but they do so in radically different, though interestingly complementary, ways. While Donoghue’s metafictional stories draw on historical facts to bring to light women’s ordinary lives in previous periods, Ní Dhuibhne is, throughout her early short stories, more interested in what folk tales tell us about women’s place in patriarchal society. As Caitriona Moloney has argued, in “Midwife to the Fairies,” Ní Dhuibhne juxtaposes an ancient folk tale and a contemporary story to “emphasize the longevity of practices that silence women in literature and history” (2). In The Inland Ice and Other Stories, to give another example, Ní Dhuibhne uses the techniques of feminist metafiction to recover and revision the often passive and submissive roles of women in traditional fairy and folk tales. This collection, which could also be called a short story cycle, is held together by the fragmented telling of “The Search for the Lost Husband,” a feminist retelling of an old Irish folk tale.9 In the other stories, moreover, she reveals the continuing hold of fairy tale notions about women, love and marriage on contemporary women’s lives today. Very much like Donoghue, moreover, Ní Dhuibhne is keen to stress the grey zone between truth and lies, between fact and fiction, suggesting that the power of stories and storytelling easily overrides that opposition. Like some of the characters in Donoghue’s stories, the heroine of “The Search for the Lost Husband” simply claims the right to tell her own story: “That is my story. And if there is a lie in it, it was not I who made it up. All I got for my story was butter boots and paper hats. And a white dog came and ate the boots and tore the hats. But what matters? What matters but the good of the story?” (Inland Ice 262)

24 For Anne Enright in The Portable Virgin, on the other hand, it is not so much folk tales or histories that performatively represent women’s secondary place in a patriarchal society. In her highly experimental early stories, she focuses rather on the continuing hold of certain words and images on gender expectations in contemporary society. The title story of the collection for instance zooms in on the iconic image of the Virgin to highlight the chaste and submissive role that is still expected of women. In other stories female characters strain to find words for their bodies and desires. In the only story to actually use the technique of feminist rewriting, “Felix,”10 Enright in fact uses the frame of Nabokov’s Lolita to tell the story of a middle-aged woman’s passionate affair with a young boy. The female narrator can be seen to struggle against ingrained Catholic taboos to find words to express her desire. “Descriptions of the sexual act always pain me,” she admits and she notes self-consciously, “I must stop. ‘Ghost,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘fine, blunt cheekbones,’ these words are all strangers to me” (297, 300). Hence,

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she tries to follow “Poe, and Proust, […] Keats and Thomas Mann” as “the secret must be in the style” (297-298).

25 In short, with Donoghue’s recovery of women’s histories, Ní Dhuibhne’s rewriting of folk tales and Enright’s reclaiming of the words, symbols and images of feminine identity, all three writers can be seen to contribute to a feminist writing-back in contemporary Irish fiction. The metafictional dimension and/or formal experiment of their fiction suggest once again the search for new forms that accompanies the attempt to tell new stories or to highlight alternative feminine identities. That the more recent short fiction of these writers bears witness to a partial return to realism and to an opening up to other, less explicitly feminist, concerns should not lead us to forget that it is precisely their earlier postmodern and feminist practice of rewriting that has made this new phase possible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D’hoker, Elke. “The Postmodern Folktales of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.” Abei Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies 6 (2004): 129-39. Print.

---. “Distorting Mirrors and Unsettling Snapshots: Anne Enright’s Short Fiction.” Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers in their Time: Anne Enright. Ed. Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011. Print.

Donoghue, Emma. Foreword. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. London: Virago Press, 2002. Print.

---. Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins. New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 1997. Print.

---. Life Mask. London: Virago Press, 2004. Print.

---. The Sealed Letter. New York: Harcourt, 2008. Print.

---. Slammerkin. London: Virago Press, 2000. Print.

---. Touchy Subjects. London: Virago, 2006. Print.

---. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. London: Virago Press, 2002. Print.

Dunn, Maggie and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Boston: Twayne, 1995. Print.

Enright, Anne. The Portable Virgin. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991. Print.

---. Taking Pictures. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008. Print.

---. Yesterday’s Weather. London: Vintage, 2009. Print.

Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Indiana: University Press, 1991. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print.

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---. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. New Jersey: John Hopkins University Press, 1987. 830-850. Print.

Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Print.

Lochead, Judy. Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Lundén, Rolf. The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Print.

Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellen Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 148-167. Print.

Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Print.

Martin, Ann. “Generational Collaborations in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35.1 (2010): 4-25. Print.

Moloney, Caitriona. “Re-Imagining Women’s History in the Fiction of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Anne Enright, and Kate O’Riordan.” Postcolonial Text 3.3 (2007): 1-15. Print.

Mulvany, Maria. “Queer Temporalities: The Spectral Histories of Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin.” Irish University Review 43.1 (2013): 157-168. Print.

Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís. The Inland Ice and Other Stories. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press Limited, 1991. Print.

---. The Shelter of Neighbours. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2012. Print.

O’Callaghan, Claire. “‘Smash the Machine’: Neo-Victorianism and Postfeminism in Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter.” Neo-Victorian Studies 6.2 (2013): 64-88. Print.

Peach, Linden. Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power: Writing Wales in English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007. Print.

Plate, Liedeke. Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

Shumaker, Jeanette. “Uncanny Doubles: The Fiction of Anne Enright.” New Hibernia Review 9.3 (2005): 107-122. Print.

Tallone, Giovanna. “Butter Boots and Paper Hats: The Fiction of Eilís Ní Dhuibhne.” Testi, Intertesti, Contesti: Seminario su ‘The Wife of Bath’ di Eilís Ní Dhuibhne. Eds. Gianfranca Balestra and Leslie Anne Crowley. Milan: Vita ePensiero: Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2000. 165-168. Print.

NOTES

1. For critical approaches, see Tallone 165-68; D’hoker, “Postmodern” 129-39; Shumaker 107-22; Moloney 1-15. 2. Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin (2000); Life Mask (2004); The Sealed Letter (2008). Two recent articles investigate Donoghue’s feminist project of rewriting history in her novels: Maria Mulvany highlights Slammerkin’s self-conscious attempt to redress “the spectralization of women

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in history” (158) and Claire O’Callaghan reveals how Donoghue tackles contemporary postfeminist problems through the neo-Victorianism of The Sealed Letter. Both articles briefly refer to The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits as part of a similar “project of rewriting feminist histories” (Mulvany 158; O’Callaghan 68). 3. As Judy Lochead points out, postmodernism sees teleological notions of history as having negative implications for “those groups whose ‘stories’ have been erased” (6). 4. Generally, as Hutcheon indicates, the privileged genre for historiographic metafiction is the novel (Poetics 5). Greene, for example, focuses on novels by Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence. Plate, although she also discusses short stories by, for instance, Angela Carter, centres her discussion around novels by J.M. Coetzee, Maryse Condé and Michèle Roberts. 5. Well-known examples of short story cycles are, for instance, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989). 6. Critics have used different terms to designate the works which belong to this genre, for example “short story sequence” (Luscher), “composite novel” (Dunn & Morris), “short story composite” (Lundén), etc. Although the term short story cycle has been criticized for suggesting an idea of circularity that cannot be found in all short story cycles, we have opted to use this term, because it is the most widespread. 7. Interestingly, they are often given identical or similar names (e.g. Frances, Euphemia, Mary, Margaret or Margery) and last names (e.g. Bell and Gray). Mann speaks of a “composite protagonist” (10) when the protagonists of the different stories bear a strong resemblance to one another. So, in this sense, the book could be seen as unified by the presence of a composite protagonist. 8. Interestingly, the titles of the book and of the story about Mary Toft are not identical. The title of the first story, “The Last Rabbit,” refers to Mary’s wish to bring about “one last rabbit” (11) when she is being watched by Sir Richard. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, on the other hand —although named for Mary Toft—covers all of the stories. Like the book, this title shows women to be both victims and rebels. It can be seen as objectifying women (“The Woman”), but also as assigning agency to them (“Who Gave Birth”). 9. “The Search for the Lost Husband” is Ní Dhuibhne’s adaptation of “The Story of the Little White Goat,” female storyteller Máire Ruiséal’s version of the international “Beauty-and-the- Beast” folktale (D’hoker, “Postmodern” 130). 10. “Felix” is one of Enright’s earliest stories. Together with “Seascape,” it was first published in the tenth book of Faber’s First Fictions (1989). Both stories can be found in her collected stories, Yesterday’s Weather (2008), which also contains all the stories from Taking Pictures and eleven of the seventeen stories from The Portable Virgin.

ABSTRACTS

Cet essai propose une analyse de The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) d’Emma Donoghue, qu’il considère comme un exemple de la fiction courte irlandaise métafictionnelle, expérimentale et fantastique. Dans la première partie, ce recueil est situé dans le contexte plus large de l’esthétique féminine de ré-écriture et de métafiction, en vue d’examiner en détail son engagement concernant les rôles et les identités des femmes dans les structures et histoires

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patriarcales. Dans un deuxième temps, l’article montre que la structure générique spécifique du recueil change le message féministe de Donoghue d’une façon particulière: tandis que les histoires se font remarquer individuellement par leur diversité en termes de style, de personnages ou de lieux, beaucoup de références et de répétitions accentuent une position féminine similaire de soumission et d’isolement dans une société patriarcale. Néanmoins, Donoghue veille à toujours souligner des éléments de force pour lutter contre l’image stéréotypée des femmes en tant que simples victimes du patriarcat. La dernière partie de l’article cherche à comparer la ré-écriture féministe de Donoghue avec l’esthétique postmoderne des nouvelles d’Anne Enright et d’Ėilís Ní Dhuibhne.

AUTHORS

DEBBIE BROUCKMANS Debbie Brouckmans obtained degrees in Linguistics and Literature, Journalism and Literary Studies and is currently working on a PhD project entitled “A Formal, Thematic and Generic Analysis of the Short Story Cycle in Ireland” at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

ELKE D'HOKER Elke D’hoker is lecturer in English and Irish literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She is the author of Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville (Rodopi, 2004) and has co-edited Unreliable Narration in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel (De Gruyter, 2008) and Irish Women Writers. New Critical Perspectives (Lang, 2011). She has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary fiction, with a specific focus on narrative theory, Irish studies and gender studies. Current research projects deal with the short story cycle and with the specific contribution of Irish women writers to the genre of the short story.

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“All Stories Overlap”: Reading Keith Ridgway’s Short Fiction

John McCourt

“I weigh characters in my hand like I am buying fruit” Hawthorn & Child (151)

1 In 1987, still a student at University College Dublin, I wrote a play entitled Called Apart which was performed by UCD Dramsoc and directed by Keith Ridgway. Having read a revised draft of my script, we met for coffee in the university restaurant. Ridgway’s comments were short and to the point and can, twenty-five years later, be summarized as follows: Do you really need all this material? What are you trying to say here? What is essential? Not exactly thrilled, I went home and took out the scissors. The play went off well, but Keith was the one who went on to become a widely acclaimed writer. His time at UCD was an apprenticeship in which he did his best to avoid the obvious and not always exciting demands of a UCD Arts degree and prepared the ground for what would become his own highly successful creative trail. Throughout his distinguished writing career the strikingly underestimated Ridgway has applied a singular discipline to his own work, always avoiding the predictable and striving to write what is necessary and essential while at the same time lurking very naturally in an experimental space which allows him to work freely in at least three genres: the short story (especially in his 2001 Standard Times collection), the novella (for example his 1997 Horses), and the novel, with The Long Falling (1998) (winner of both the Prix Femina Étranger and the Premier Roman Étranger), The Parts (2003), Animals (2006), and Hawthorn & Child (2012). But the short story, a form that functions through reduction, distillation, a focus on the essential, is in a way the core component of Ridgway’s aesthetic armory sometimes standing alone, sometimes a vital component of a larger fictional structure which resists the neat classification of “novel.”

2 As has often been stated, the short-story has always been seen as somewhat liminal genre, although it could be argued that this is less the case in the Irish tradition in which quite a number of short stories occupy a position of cultural centrality rivaling that of the novel. One thinks of seminal stories such as Joyce’s “The Dead,” Frank

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O’Connor’s “The First Confession” and “Guests of the Nation,” as well as Seán Ó Faoláin’s “The Trout,” to name but a few. The short-story is perhaps better suited to the fragmented nature of Irish history and of contemporary Ireland, to a history that seems distinguished by dead-ends and wrong turns more than by a powerful drive towards a successful conclusion, not to mention a happy ending. Perhaps for this reason the Irish short story is an appropriate genre especially given its focus on vital moments in individual lives.

3 Elizabeth Bowen writes that “the first necessity for the short story, at the set out, is necessariness” (260), that is, she implies, that it is a story that needs to be written rather than one that is written because the writer needs to come up with a story. Ridgway’s deeply original stories are saturated with this quality of necessariness. But what is essential for Ridgway might not immediately appear so for other writers or readers. In his dark, grim, and sometimes hilarious novel, Animals , a multi-voiced homage to Dublin, the incipit—an 18-page internal debate about whether or not to poke a dead mouse—would not be everyone’s idea of the strictly necessary. But the rodent is not the point. It happens to be the focus of the protagonist’s somewhat anguished reflections, his dangerously precarious take on reality. As Bowen tells us, the “necessary subject dictates its own value” (260), and in this case the subject is not the mouse but the sole narrator-illustrator’s perception of himself, the world, and his relationship with the world. Thus the story fulfils what Bowen suggests is the short story’s role (as against that of the novel), that is, to place a protagonist on that “stage which, inwardly, every man is conscious of occupying alone” (260). If this is a common gene in the short story, for Ridgway it is also true with regard to the novel. He is not content to limit studies of the isolated individual to the short story but to show that the precariousness of individual experience in which things risk spiraling out of control in an instant can also be an essential component of longer fictional forms.

4 All of Ridgway’s works share a common relative disinterest in external events and are less concerned with action, plot, and forward movement (although a dark, violent, everyday is ever present) than they are with a focus on individual thought processes, personal stasis, alienation, and, at times, collapse. As he put it, in an Irish Times interview: “Most of the things I write tend to be character driven” (Hegarty). Ridgway’s focus is far less on outer events than on the functioning and malfunctioning of the mind and with the mind’s way of perceiving the world. Animals started life as a story called “The Mouse in the Body” which was posted on the Liffey Project website (Ridgway is something of a pioneer among his Irish peers in seeking to make creative publishing use of internet publishing). The fact that the novel grew out of what was initially a short story that remains of interest in its own right and not simply as a (slightly altered) part of a larger whole, signals to the reader Ridgway’s interest in both genres. There is no sense of a hierarchy between the two forms. For him there is no doubt that a short story that later becomes part of a larger narrative structure retains a separate value on its own, original terms.

5 Long before Ridgway began to mix genres, his 2001 collection, Standard Time, which won the Rooney Prize for Irish literature, provided ample evidence of his mastery of the “pure” or autonomous short story—as against the short story that later is connected to a novel by either preceding it, appearing as part of it, or appearing after it. And yet the collection contains stories that are carefully and, at times, profoundly interconnected and is far more than an aggregate of individual pieces. It is a book about

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relationships between couples, gay and straight, between individuals and their cities, within families. But it is also a book which focuses on how individuals interact in their communities and struggle (sometimes failing) to maintain an outer mask of normality to cover an inner world of turmoil. Lurking behind every protagonist’s everyday mask are doubts and insecurities, dark shadows, discomfort, disturbance, an inability to continue to play a role even if that role is what defines them for others and gives their lives an outward sense. Furthermore, the characters in Ridgway’s short stories do not correspond to Frank O’Connor’s description of a “submerged population group” (18), or the socially marginal. The dilemmas depicted in the stories are made all the more pressing by the fact that the protagonists are not, as O’Connor put it, “outlawed figures wandering about on the fringes of society” from a “submerged population” (41), but represent people drawn from a variety of mainstream social groups, ages, backgrounds and classes. They are on-page incarnations of the “normal” people one encounters daily on the Dublin street: the Belvedere College schoolboy, the golf-playing, mass- going suburban father, the still-youngish returning Irish emigrant, the retired gay writer, the menopausal department store saleswoman.

6 Writing about Dublin and Dubliners is of course to court or to risk comparison with illustrious predecessors, but this is not an issue for Ridgway, who sees Dublin on his own terms (he has lived abroad most of his adult life). The issue will not be to do justice to Dublin, but to see it as a rich and complex backdrop which can just as easily be negative as positive. The polished stories of the collection very deliberately play with views of the city. The first-person narrator of the opening story, “The First Five Pages” (it actually runs to nine), is an exile returning to visit Dublin with his foreign partner. The city has a somewhat unreal sheen especially when first seen through his eyes from the airplane approaching Dublin airport. As described from the sky by the narrator, it could be any modern city: We descended over housing estates and motorways that I had never seen before. We skimmed the tops of call centres and warehouses, distribution networks and technology parks, software development clusters and the green belts tightened by a future that I had missed. (ST 1-2)

7 For the narrator of the opening story, the conclusion about Dublin will be peremptory (and with serious meta-textual consequences implying the author’s own connection with the city at the time of writing): I have deserted Dublin. Dublin has failed me. It has failed to act, failed to facilitate me. It has simply carried on, as if I had never been away, as if I had never come back, not seeming to realise that it was the major player in my plot. It has been such a disappointment’. (ST 8)

8 This negative vision of the city will be reversed in subsequent works including The Parts, which has been described as a “great Dublin novel,” one that leaves “a long, dark and compelling shadow” for future generations of writers of the city (Battersby). The Dublin of this novel is a variegated city containing multiple distinct realities, some of which Ridgway enjoys listing: “Working Dublin, queer Dublin, junkie Dublin, media Dublin, party Dublin, executive Dublin, homeless Dublin, suburban Dublin, teenage Dublin, gangland Dublin, Dublin with the flags out, mother Dublin, culchie Dublin, Muslim Dublin...” (TP 41).

9 In “The Ravages,” the city is again initially sketched in a neutral way: it could be anywhere and yet it is a place, a canvass almost, that Cathal, the protagonist, covers and makes his own with his dawn drives: “He drove to the north of the city and turned

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then and drove south to the southernmost point of the city and drove northwest then to the western reaches and turned once more and drove east to the sea and the sun appearing.” All this at dawn so that he can claim to himself: “And that was the city blessed” (ST 119). Cathal’s quiet satisfaction and the false calm of this description will soon be ruptured. There is zero nostalgia in the collection’s many depictions of Celtic Tiger Dublin and there is precious little looking back in any of Ridgway’s works which are relentlessly written to the moment, and which, on the rare occasions they are set in the past, are inevitably narrated in a way that stresses their immediacy. In a 2012 interview, Ridgway stated his desire to be contemporary, saying simply: “I want to write about what surrounds me” (Breathnach).

10 In “The First Five Pages,” it is clear that the narrator left before the economic boom took root but little is said about this. Travelling to this “city on the edge of Europe, on the edge of the world, a city from the back of our minds” allows the narrator to see himself in its mirror “to see how I had changed” (ST 1). The focus is not on the past but on how things are now. The collection enjoys playing with time, personal and communal, which is anything but “standard.” However it also plays with space and the narrator’s trip to Dublin is also about getting a different sense of his partner by taking him to his home place for the first time “to see what you really looked like, sounded like, to find out how wrong I’d been” (ST 1). The homecoming becomes the occasion for the narrator to abandon his partner and he makes his intent clear early on, when wishing he could abandon him in the airport arrivals hall. The sense of dislocation is constant as the taxi takes them “on a road which I didn’t recognise, past homes and businesses which I didn’t fully see” (ST 3). All is “familiar, somehow, but altered as if by special effect, which is I suppose, what time may be” (ST 3). Shortly after they have arrived in their hotel, the narrator wonders about the five years he has spent with his lover and tots up the balance with an alarming lack of emotion: I realised that we were five years into it. Five years. Into it. Which is too long for a seaside romance with a man you hardly understand. And I entered the counting room—located somewhere between the heart and the stomach—that dour, fearful little place where the books are kept, where the tallies are made and the sums done and the imbalances are justified, and where the present is divided by the past to give the future. And other formulae follow. And there I tried to make sense of you and couldn’t. I pored over the ledgers and the receipts and I tried to make us solvent. And all I found was an accumulation of debts and promises and failures and dodgy practices, and I came to the conclusion that we had been simply an accounting sleight of hand, a convenient, unexplained statistic, a false item, a fraud. (ST 4-5)

11 Having come to this hasty if clever summation, he simply walks out: his arrival home becomes the occasion of his definitive departure from his lover. But it is a departure he will later come to regret. Once again alone, he finds he is not able to move on and his conclusions can be read as the text’s own commentary on itself and as Ridgway’s signaling of his own literary method: Put one story behind you and start another. That is the theory. But I find that what should be new is polluted by what should be old. That there are no endings, that all stories overlap, and that all you can do is decide where to begin. When to begin. I don’t know where you are and that is the start of it. (ST 9)

12 The reader is left shocked and will be shocked again by the surprising turns each of the subsequent stories in the collection takes. Another of the very best stories, entitled “Headwound” is told from the point of view of a seemingly devoted father who is also a

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betrayed husband. The reader is lured into sympathy with his account of his own and his family’s life and their problems. It begins crisply and in a matter-of-fact tone which implies that the man is a bastion of common sense, devoted to his five-year-old boy and supposedly keeping the family show on the road (including the “very wretched terrier, Ninny,” one of a vast cast of often disturbing animals that populate Ridgway’s fiction), despite the misdoings of his cheating wife: I took my son to the park while my wife, who is not good with children, went to see her lover in my German car. It is not a particularly new car, but it is very solid, handles very well, and is good for maybe another couple of years. But I don’t like my wife driving it. She is not a bad driver, but she is not smooth, does not conduct herself very confidently, is all fits and starts, jerks and tics. (ST 155)

13 Gradually, the reader begins to realize he/she has been taken in and to have doubts about the reliability of the narrator and indeed about his/her own capacity to know and judge. In the intimate prose narration, the reader is lured by the narrator’s conversational asides: “You can imagine my surprise” (ST 164), “Anyway, I digress” (ST 169), and at least initially has sympathy for him as he walks his child and dog and has to tolerate the interest of an interfering neighbor and his French wife. Doubts are sown early, however, and it is difficult not to notice the narrator’s jarring repetitions of phrases like “my wife, who is not good with children” (ST 155) It becomes increasingly apparent that the one with the problems, despite the consistent reasonableness of his tone, is the narrator. When his son takes down his trousers because he needs to urinate, the narrator, under the couple’s surveillance, swiftly attempts to cover him up: The French woman giggled, and scolded me, in a good-natured kind of way, for slapping my son, while her husband made some silly comment about park flashers or something along those lines. I fumbled with the boy’s clothing, trying to cover him up, as he started to quietly whimper in a completely artificial way, feeling nothing more traumatic than sorry for himself. The couple were by now laughing openly, and as I was not laughing at all—I think it is fair to say that they were laughing at me. It was at this moment, annoyed and embarrassed as I was, that I believe I may have inadvertently, while trying to do up his shorts, somehow pinched or otherwise lacerated my son’s penis, a difficult thing to do given its size. (ST 157)

14 Although he manages to calm the boy down despite what he calls “his continuing addiction to tantrums,” it is clear that the narrator is struggling to maintain control and that things are set to go from bad to worse. When they are playing near the water and the father throws what he believes is a twig but is actually a rock towards (rather than at) his small son, but unfortunately hits the boy and knocks him senseless1. The couple rush to help and the boy is taken to hospital, while the father-narrator is brought into police custody where his ultimate worry is not about his son, but about Ninny, the dog: “I wanted to see her. See that she was all right. That is what I wanted. Only that. Damn it” (ST 178). The tone remains reasonable if hard-done-by to the end, but the reader has long since realized that the head wound of the story is not only the small boy’s physical one but the psychological trauma being lived by the narrator which causes him to lose all sense of judgment and reality. The reader has also been forced to ponder not only the reliability of the narrator’s story but also the reliability of narrative itself and the capacity of the human subject to understand the reality in which he or she lives. The reader is impelled to consider whether the short story is in some way a realistic account of events or a delusional fantasy. Can the reader ever really know? Similar questions may also be evinced in Ridgway’s longer fictions.

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15 Even when writing novels, Ridgway is never far from the gene and the genre of the short story which so often is character rather than plot driven and he is far from alone in creatively hovering between the two modes, in initiating what will eventually become a novel through the publishing of a self-contained short-story that will come to be a semi-autonomous component in the larger whole. In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Mary Lavin writes: “I even wished that I could break up the too long novels I have published into the few short stories they ought to have been in the first place. For in spite of these two novels and in spite of the fact that I may write other novels, I feel that it is in the short story that a writer distils the essence of his thought” (qtd. in Rafroidi 27). While Lavin would have wished to break up her novels, Ridgway effectively finds that the two genres can co-exist within the larger structure and can help fuel each other, and in so doing he uses the short story, so often seen as the quintessentially enigmatic modern form conveying contemporary fragmentation and dislocation, as the foundational blocks with which to build his novels. Even in his novels, Ridgway’s reader cannot help but be struck by their splintered structures, their elliptical suggestiveness, their lack of comfortable resolution, features drawn most distinctly from the shorter fiction tradition. Thus Animals can use its opening to dwell at length on the unnamed narrator’s thoughts as he looks at a dead mouse lying in a gutter. He wants to prod it but cannot decide what implement to use. He does not have his umbrella and the pen he has would bring him a little too close for comfort to the dead rodent. As an illustrator, he drifts into a reflection on how mice are depicted in cartoons before deciding to use his pen: “Cap on, or cap off?” he wonders, the reader’s frustration rising.

16 And yet the long monological trip towards inconsequential action actually points to an important change, a sudden collapse for the narrator, who comments: “That was it. There was no way back then.” While this points to an enigmatic conclusion in the short story, it signals a beginning in the novel, becoming, “That was it. That was how it started.” What was started is then followed by nine chapters mapping out the narrator's almost inexplicable disintegration into paranoia. Again what is important is the inner world of the character’s mind which seems to find confirmation in an outer reality—including a vague and shadowy Dublin—that is at least partly held back from the reader. The narrator’s unreliability further complicates the reader’s capacity to believe what is being described, as he is told on occasion: “None of this is true.” The conduit for everything is character and narrative voice, the fictionality of the enterprise is constantly flagged and it is never clear if we are to take the minor events narrated as figments of an imagination or refractions of a reality seen through a distorting eye.

17 Ridgway’s acclaimed recent novel, Hawthorn & Child, continues to play with the connections between shorter and longer fictional forms and is, in a very real sense, a book of short stories, each chapter with its own title, its own dominant character and narrative consciousness, its own autonomy, even if there is a distinct narrative voice and style maintaining an overall coherence. In part a crime novel, denying both solution and resolution alike, the volume, while focusing mostly on an edgy London world where crime is never far away, plays with the individual marginalities associated with the protagonists we find in the short stories by moving characters in and out of focus from chapter to chapter and allowing each one, no matter how marginal he or she may have seemed at the outset, to assume a moment of centrality while teasing the

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reader to make the link to the book’s central dynamic and to its central characters, Hawthorn, a lonely and slightly down-in-the-mouth gay detective, and his seemingly tougher straight partner, Child. This strange, fragmented work revels in defying readers’ expectations by refusing to offer a solution to the shooting incident that opens the book and that Hawthorn and Child are called upon to solve. This refusal of the closure so typically demanded in the novel is, however, a central feature of the short story particularly in its modern form. Thus Hawthorn & Child is another Ridgway work that makes ample use of the short story and its techniques. Two texts that later became chapters in the novel appeared earlier as separate fictions, namely “Goo Book” which was published in the New Yorker and “Rothko Eggs,” which was first published in Zoetrope All-Story in the spring of 2011. “Rothko Eggs” splendidly captures a teenage voice, an adolescent view of the world, a mixture of superficial understanding and genuine desire to find answers and to know more. It is the story of Cath, a teenager who splits her time between estranged parents. No different to adults, the teenager wants to understand things so as to be able to control them, to have a fixed sense of how things are in her world. Thus she explains in her school essay: “Churchill lost the post-war election because people were tired” (H&C 161). Fine as far as it goes, but of course it falls short of being an adequate explanation. Her reasoning continues on this assured but trite path: “When you have a fire in your house you want the fire brigade to come. When the fire is out you want them to leave” (H&C 161). She was, we read, “really pleased” (H&C 161) with this, but her straightforward, simplistic cause and effect conclusion, while clever, is only a very limited, somewhat clichéd and ultimately unsatisfactory explanation. Not surprisingly, she is given a mark of just 56% for her essay.

18 This is a novel of limited parts, fragments almost. On being asked whether Hawthorn & Child should be seen as a novel or a book of short stories, Ridgway, having initially claimed that the distinction was not important, asserted: It’s a book....I call it a novel because I feel that it needs everything that’s in it and that the pieces—which can indeed be read separately, which can even I suppose be read in any order—are diminished by being taken away from each other. But it wouldn’t do really to call it a collection of stories. That doesn’t cover it at all. That would be misleading. So in that sense, the distinction does matter a great deal. People have talked about it as an anti-novel, and I accept that. Its structure is deliberate. Its fragmentation is deliberate. Its hesitancy about being a novel is deliberate. It doesn’t want to be a novel. But tough. It is. (Breathnach)

19 The sense that the individual short stories cannot be contained within the novel and that they are in no way subordinate to it was reinforced by Ridgway’s subsequent digital publishing of a long short story called “The Spectacular” which is also set in North London and has Hawthorn among its characters. This, Ridgway insists, is “definitely not a part of the novel” (Breathnach) although it belongs to the same fragmentary whole: I started writing a book that I wanted to be entirely fragments. It was originally going to be as many as 70 or 80 of these things, with some relationship between some of them, but it was the fragments that interested me. How they would rattle together in the same container as it were. But that didn’t happen. I drifted towards story, towards characters that reappeared, towards a more conventional coherence. So I tried to balance the two, and by so doing became very conscious of the tension between the desire for coherent stories and the facts and experiences of living, which are almost entirely fragmentary. (Breathnach)

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20 Although the fragments grow by being juxtaposed with their companion pieces in the novel, “Rothko Eggs,” by way of example, also stands, quite radiantly, alone. Cath, as we have seen, yearns for clarity and even simplicity. In tracing out her thoughts and feelings Ridgway does not eschew simple syntactical structures but rather embraces them to express this London version of teenspeak as in the following example after she and her boyfriend Stuart have had oral sex for the first time (and rather too quickly): He said that no one had ever done that before. He said that Byron had offered, but that was all. He said that he and Byron had kissed once, and he had liked it, but he had stopped because he didn’t want to do anything else and Byron did, and Byron had sulked for a while, but they were OK now. He said Byron was his best friend. Him and Byron talked about everything. He said she was a better kisser than Byron. […] (H&C 178)

21 Gradually she becomes aware of the gaps and limits of her knowledge, especially when she goes to visit the Rothko exhibition: “There were some artists that she couldn’t quite understand. She could see that they had left her lots of space, but she didn’t know what to fill it with” (H&C 156). This dilemma corresponds very closely with the experience lived by the reader of Ridgway’s fictions. Knowledge is withheld, information is unreliable, conclusive judgment is difficult. Ridgway leaves the readers of this short story just as he will leave the readers of the novel where the story re-exists and the readers of all his fictional works, long and short, with a similar burdensome message, one which is, in a very real sense, representative of the human condition: the desire for knowledge can never be adequately fulfilled and the knowledge of that same inadequacy can only be acquired alone. All of this both frustrates and entices. As the publisher in Hawthorn & Child puts it: “Knowing things completes them. Kills them. […] They fade away, decided and over and forgotten. Not knowing sustains us” (H&C 152). Those who think they know are the superficial or the false, they are damned to eventual realization. Some hope remains for Cath who is last seen in the fiction as follows: “She went home. She thought about their day. Something had gone wrong but she didn’t know what” (H&C 189) What she has learned is the limit of knowledge and the fact that no two people ever see the same thing in precisely the same way. And so aloneness, separateness is unavoidable. Facts work in ineluctably separate and different ways on different people. After an unsuccessful (for the couple) visit to the Rothko exhibition during which Cath is bored and Stuart so struck that he bursts into tears, she tries to tell him an anecdote about her father: I made my Dad scrambled eggs one morning, yeah? When I was staying at his place for the weekend. […] And he really liked it, and then he was trying to show off that he knew about art—he’s always doing this—and he splutters ketchup all over the scramble eggs and he said, Rothko eggs. Pointing at the eggs, yeah? Rothko eggs. I didn’t know what he was on about. They look like a Rothko painting, he said, all pleased with himself. And then I realized that he’d gotten Rothko mixed up with Pollock! She laughed. Stuart smiled. (189)

22 And in his smile their separation and impending separation is already apparent. Soon it is reiterated when we read: “And she laughed, to show how funny it was.” As she reaches out with affection towards her father and strains to convey what she means to Stuart, Stuart chooses not to understand, preferring to establish his own distance from her. Their personal isolation and lack of connection is sealed. When she returns home

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she knows something has gone wrong, but she does not know exactly what it was. What she is left to feel is very close to what is experienced by the Ridgway reader. At the end of each story, the reader perceives that something, usually unknowable, always obscure, often terrible, has happened. However, alone before the text, all that the reader can fully know is that s/he will never know the full story, not to mention what it might mean.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Battersby, Eileen. “Making Sense of Good and Evil.” Review of Hawthorn and Child. Irish Times. 21 July 2012. Print.

Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories.” 1936. The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994. 256-262. Print.

Breathnach, Kevin. “Keith Ridgway Interviewed.” Totally Dublin. 31 July 2012. Web. 24 October 2014. Print.

Hegarty, Shane. “Just parts of the story.” Irish Times. 24 January 2003. Web.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice A Study of the Short Story. Hoboken: Melville House Publishing, 2004. Print.

Ridgway, Keith. Animals. London: Fourth Estate, 2007. Print.

---. “Goo Book.” The New Yorker April 11, 2011. 62-71. Print.

---. Hawthorn & Child. London: Granta, 2007. Print.

---. Horses. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Print.

---. The Long Falling. New York: Mariner Books, 1999. Print.

---. The Parts. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Print.

---. Standard Time. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Print.

---. “Rothko Eggs.” Zoetrope All Story 15.1 (Spring 2011): Web. 22 October 2014.

NOTES

1. Moments of almost freakish violence like this occur repeatedly in Ridgway’s fiction—it happens again in “Never love a gambler” and they always precipitate a mental crisis or signals its prior if up-to-then concealed existence.

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article s’intéresse aux nouvelles de Keith Ridgway, plus particulièrement au recueil Standard Time, publié en 2001, et à “Goo Book” et “Rothko Eggs” qui apparaissent dans le roman Hawthorn & Child (2012). Il vise à démontrer que le genre de la nouvelle est la pierre angulaire de l’oeuvre fictionnelle de Ridgway dont les personnages cherchent à comprendre leur place dans le monde. Incapables d’acquérir une quelconque connaissance à cet égard, ils partagent ainsi des points communs avec les lecteurs du texte.

AUTHORS

JOHN MCCOURT

John McCourt teaches at Università Roma Tre, Italy. He is the author of The Years of Bloom Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000). He has edited Roll Away the Reel World James Joyce and Cinema (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010) and James Joyce in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). He recently completed a book on Anthony Trollope and Ireland for publication in 2014.

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Writing Aslant: Putting Chisel to Paper—William Trevor’s A Bit on the Side

Claire Majola-Leblond

“I don’t write about art to explain it but to explore what has happened between me and the image, both emotionally and intellectually” Siri Hustvedt (282)1

1 It is now well-known that before being a full time writer, William Trevor used to be a sculptor, a carver of wood. In “Mentors” he gives a humorous account of his beginnings, carving an eagle in low relief at St Columba’s School under Oisin Kelly’s supervision: Anyone could, Kelly impatiently insisted. He was wrong. If the chisel wasn’t sharp enough, it tore at the wood, leaving it shredded and hairy. Sharpening the chisel was a knack and carving with it was a knack. The more you hacked, the less the carefully pencilled outline resembled a proud bird of prey. Perspective disappeared […] if you dealt with the chisel too powerful a blow with the trickily rounded mallet the eagle’s claws weren’t there anymore. If you didn’t look after your fingers they wouldn’t be there either. Most of the time there was blood all over the place. But there was something about the arduous, unsatisfactory activity that was appealing. When a delicate little gauge was as sharp as a razor, it slipped pleasurably through the grain of the wood […]. The grain was a pattern to make use of, a means of suggesting concavity or depth, an emphasis when you wanted it to be. In time—five or six weeks—I finished the eagle, and Kelly advised me simply to polish it with beeswax, but I chose, instead, to plaster on raw linseed oil, which had the effect of bringing out all the flaws. Kelly said I ruined it.

2 The precision of gestures, the alliance of mind and matter and the independence of spirit are here strongly emphasized. Trevor pursued carving until he was in his late thirties, going back to writing because, as he explained to John Tusa, his sculptures had become too abstract and “[he] missed the people [he] had once carved as it were, and [he] just stopped.” In the Irish Arts Review, Homan Potterton presents rare pictures of

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William Trevor’s works and sums up his career in a way which is not without evoking the sculptor of “Sacred Statues,” the seventh story of A Bit on the Side (128-153). 2 “An elderly woman” gives Trevor a set of chisels; an elderly Mrs. Falloway tries to help Corry, persuading bishops to buy his sacred statues to put in their churches, arguing “how refreshing it would be […] to see the art of the great High Crosses of Ireland brought into the modern Church” (140). Like Corry, Trevor used to carve Saints, as Potterton recalls, “doing a number of sculptures for churches at Ashbrittle and Greenham near Wellington—a Saint John the Baptist in painted wood, a reredos with the Last Supper,” and like him, he is unable to pursue: “When the clergyman who commissioned these, the Rev. Ralph Bowman, left the parish, he was succeeded by an Evangelical who did not believe in decorated churches, and the sculptures disappeared.” Like Corry, he had been thinking about “becoming a professional letter- cutter.” Unlike Corry though, who has to turn to road works and rather ironically finds himself “re-surfacing […] the quarry boreen” (150), Trevor went back to writing, putting chisel to paper.

3 Autobiographical echoing obviously has its limits; yet, it is an invitation to take a closer look at William Trevor’s sculptures. Potterton draws attention to the way “Trevor achieves his effect […] by the subtle gradation of different planes progressing deeper and deeper to what ultimately amounts to a bevelled recess,” which can be seen on some of the pictures that illustrate the article. Witches (1951) and Christ Carrying the Cross (1954) are both structured around the oblique lines of the abstracted triangular figures of respectively three witches and Christ bearing his Cross, standing out against a flat, carved-in stylised background. Georgian Houses form the backdrop of Witches, whereas the backdrop behind the foregrounded carved out first plane of Christ Carrying the Cross consists of a second plane with the two vertical crosses of the robbers and a third plane with the oval faces of the crowd, controlled by the three standing figures of the centurions. The network of oblique lines in that last sculpture is particularly puzzling, offering the eye of the beholder different directions to explore simultaneously. The figure of Christ draws an oblique line oriented towards the left, the arms of the Cross running parallel to it while the longer part of the Cross leads in the opposite direction. Obliquity stands as a challenge to verticality.

4 When asked by interviewer John Tusa why he had turned to sculpture, Trevor explains: “the last school I was at was a very good one but there was a sort of clique of writers there, would-be writers, and I didn’t seem to want to belong to that. So I was attracted by sculpture for that rather silly reason and I gave up writing in much the same way as I later gave up sculpture.” The desire for difference, the reluctance of belonging seems an early motivation in Trevor’s choices; he then pursues his deciphering: “if you think of what sculptors do, […] you carve away a huge amount of material […] throwing away is to me the vital part, and the most exciting part of writing is what you decide should not be there.” His preference for implying rather than asserting, his reticence, his predilection for obliquity in writing are clearly stated here.

5 Tristram Shandy, a specialist in lines, claimed the meandering line as his favourite, wandering into digressions and seemingly useless details as a way to conduct narrative, leading the reader into a baroque profusion of directions. Trevor’s line of beauty seems to stand as an exact opposite to Sterne’s; the oblique line of the chisel. The aim of this paper is to try and peep into the secret workshop of this sculptor of words to try and

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unravel some of the strategies used to initiate us to the perception of a third dimension in writing and reading.

“A bit on the side”

6 Although a prolific writer, William Trevor is a silent writer. Apart from a volume of autobiographical sketches, Excursions in the Real World, which includes two articles previously published in The New Yorker, the very moving “Field of Battle” about his parents, and the already mentioned “Mentors” about his teachers, and a few interviews, discretion about personal matters is a main characteristic. He left Ireland when he was in his late twenties, sharing in that respect the move of numerous Irish writers, past and present, for whom exile, whether self-imposed or not, turned out to be essential to creation. “Most writers benefit from exile,” he tells Miriam Stout in The Paris Review interview in 1989, before describing his position as “writing through the other end of the telescope,” thereby foregrounding indirect, displaced perspective as inescapable and vital. He further connects it to his status of being a “not well-off Irish protestant”: It began the process of being an outsider—which I think all writers have to be—[…] Displaced persons in a way—which is really similar to what a writer should be, whether he likes it or not […] personally I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight and the centre of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in. I dwell upon it rather than in it.

7 The idea is constantly reiterated; a few years later in the New Yorker: “I think writers and any artists belong outside, on the edge, looking in” (qtd. in Schiff 162-163).

8 Trevor’s characters are most of the time marginal, on the fringe of society. Often lonely, if not altogether deviant, they are essentially different, unfamiliar. As deictic centres in the different narrative worlds and frequent anchors of internal focalisation, they bring the readers to share their de-centred positions, thereby constructing complex oblique vantage points on their situations and relationships.

9 Readers therefore find themselves “a bit on the side” too, guided into oblique perspectives that demand interpretation, while at the same time repeatedly deferring it, imposing suspension of evaluation and confrontation with uncertainty. According to Hustvedt “a work of art must be an enigma. It must push me into a position of unknowing or else I find myself bored by my own comprehension” (282). There is certainly little risk of being bored with our own understanding of Trevor’s stories. The task is immense and urgent. When asked to define the art of the short story, Trevor explains in The Paris Review: “I think it is the art of the glimpse […] the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness.”

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Stereoscopic writing

10 In order to exclude meaninglessness, one of Trevor’s most recurrent techniques in his later stories is to use, in addition to the narrator’s often complex viewpoint, a double internal viewpoint anchored in the characters. The same event is thus seen from different perspectives; meanwhile, the plot often moves forward thanks to ellipses. He divides his stories into several parts (between 3 and 12), alternating perspectives in order to create an illusion of depth, a third narrative dimension. Such discoursal architecture is not without calling to mind Wheatstone’s mirror stereoscope,3 a visual contraption invented in 1833 which consists in placing two similar pictures in front of two mirrors, with the viewer positioned at the far end of the triangle, at the point of junction between the two mirrors, enabling them to perceive as three dimensional originally two dimensional photographs or drawings, recreating the illusion of solid reality.4

11 The opening story of A Bit on the Side, “Sitting with the Dead” (1-19), experiments with this device in multiple ways. The paratext—the title and the Irish context—raises expectations of a wake; presumably, someone is dead and the reader expects people gathering to share stories and memories about the dead person, in a not necessarily lugubrious atmosphere. The first part operates a radical reorientation of perspective: His eyes had been closed and he opened them, saying he wanted to see the stable- yard. Emily’s expression was empty of response. Her face, younger than his and yet not seeming so, was empty of everything except the tiredness she felt. “From the window?” she said. No he’d go down, he said. “Will you get me the coat, and have the boots by the door.” She turned away from the bed. He would manage on his own if she didn’t help him: she’d known him for twenty-eight years, been married to him for twenty-three.

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Whether or not she brought the coat up to him would make no difference, anymore than it would if she protested. “It could kill you,” she said. “The fresh air’d strengthen a man.” Downstairs, she placed the boots ready for him at the back door. She brought his cap and muffler to him with his overcoat. A stitch was needed where the left sleeve met the shoulder, she noticed. She hadn’t before and knew he wouldn’t wait while she repaired it now. “What’re you going to do there?” she asked, and he said nothing much. Tidy up a bit, he said. (1-2)

12 The dead man is not dead; the one-line first paragraph represents a step aside in the uncanny; the referent of the “he” is unknown; there is no acknowledged addressee, and the request seems arbitrary. The interlocution patterning is unbalanced, direct speech is answered in free indirect speech, confirming the erasing of the addressee; Geoffrey Leech’s Politeness Principle cannot be said to be acknowledged either by the male character who gives unmitigated orders. The point of view soon branches off into internality through the use of free indirect thought, anchored in the female character whose identity, via naming, is acknowledged by the narrator (contrary to the male character’s). It only takes a few lines for the narrative to foreground the complexity of marital relationships as the main subject of the story and raise another set of expectations in the reader’s mind. Emily is granted little existence in her husband’s eyes; yet narrative choices establish her as the reflector of the story. The husband’s perspective on her is mainly interpreted through her own perception of it, as well as through the deciphering of the relationship with the reader’s own sensitivity. Yet, Emily’s concerned noticing of the missing stitch tends to invite the reader to maintain an open evaluation.

13 The second part, after an eight-day ellipsis, sees the arrival of the Geraghtys, “two middle-aged women, sisters […] who sat with the dying” (2). Emily’s husband has just died. The perspective shifts on the two sisters, Kathleen and Norah, and alternates in the following parts between Emily’s perception of them, what she imagined her husband’s perception of them would have been had they come before his death, the fear of what could have been their perception of him had they met him, evolving into her renewed and articulately voiced ambivalent perception of her husband, before closing on the sisters’ perspective on her and on their shared experience of the evening: “A visit had not before turned out so strangely, so different from what had been the sisters’ familiar expectation.” Norah is eventually left with the last words of the story, echoing the title and giving it its full meaning: “‘I’d say, myself, it was the dead we were sitting with’” (17). The story might well have been called “The Sisters,” had the title not already been taken by James Joyce for his opening story of Dubliners; an intertextual wink cannot be excluded: “The Sisters” operates a similar step aside from the expectations raised by the title; it is less about sisters than about a young boy’s confrontation to death and might well have been called “The Dead”…

14 The main feat of Trevor’s story is to open a bewildering intermediary space in which the main character can voice the complexity of her relation with her husband while maintaining the reader’s evaluation suspended: “How could these two unmarried women understand? Emily thought. How could they understand that even if there was neither love nor mourning there had been some love left for the man who’d died?” (15). Although, or rather because, they remain “a bit on the side,” the Geraghtys are essential in this story; as interlocution partners, they are like midwives creating the

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conditions for the emergence of Emily’s ambivalent discourse, liberating her from a dark and confused resentment which needed a listening ear to be voiced; at the same time, their evaluation on the situation is rather conventional in the final sympathy expressed for the dead man; and they do have the last word. Yet the two major perspectives eventually combine into a textual vanishing point, sacrificing nothing to the depth of meaning and the complexity of judgment, urging the reader to clear- sightedness as the main character had been urged to lucidity and acceptance; the fact that the Geraghty sisters apparently did not reach that far makes them a landmark to evaluate our own intuitive understanding.

15 Narrative silence, the “carving out” Trevor insists on as part of writing can be likened to the photographic strategy of reducing the aperture to create depth of field. Letting in minimum light is a way of making it possible to see clearly further, to the point of perceiving the irony behind the seemingly acceptable viewpoint of the sisters, and then, further to a luminous point beyond textual borders. Trevor repeatedly emphasizes the fact that characters have a life before and beyond the limits of the story proper (Shouldice); his art is to make us receptive to that textual “yonder” Siri Hustvedt describes as “a new space—a middle region that [is] neither here nor there” (Yonder 4).

16 Sometimes, the technique of stereoscopic writing is used more rigorously; thus in “An Evening Out”(59-84), “Sacred Statues” (128-153), “On the Streets” (193-213), or “A Bit on the Side” (228-245), which all deal with the intricacies of heterosexual love, the shifts between reflectors are strictly respected. The masculine and the feminine viewpoints unfailingly alternate in the successive parts of the stories—after the systematic ellipsis, the chiseled out bit which enables the plot to develop in the wings of the text, since “what you leave out is the most important” (Allardice interview)—to ensure the readers can eventually see things “in the round.”5 They are thereby invited to define their own point of view, prolonging the double textual lines towards a vanishing point of interpretation. It is worth noting that this vanishing point is often “a bit on the side,” biased towards the feminine perspective, which Trevor partly justifies: “I write out of curiosity more than anything else. That’s why I write about women, because I’m not a woman and I don’t know what it’s like. The excitement of it is to know more about something that I’m not and can’t be” (Allardice interview).

17 Yet, in some stories, the oblique lines traced in the text do not converge to create any textual vanishing point to liberate lucidity and awareness; they rather seem to end up in a complex, intricate, ambiguous and problematic bundle in the textual foreground which defies deciphering.

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Textual impossible objects

18 “On the Streets” is a seven-part story about Arthurs, a paranoid waiter, presumably severely mentally deranged, who appears to be a serial killer, and Cheryl, who had married him without being aware of his mental state; ever since the failure of their five-month marriage, she has been attempting to flee him; yet he seems to know every detail about her life now. One afternoon, he suddenly reappears and, over tea, describes the details of what we understand to be his latest murder, the acting out of his long- planned revenge on a dissatisfied customer who had caused him to be downgraded from waiter to breakfast-waiter only. The story is gloomy, deeply disturbing. Points of view regularly alternate between Arthurs (whose Christian name we never know) and Cheryl; but to these, a third, discontinuous narrative line must be added that comes and goes between the past and the present, irrespective of the alternating viewpoints, allowing interfering embeddings of perspectives, blurring the time line through memories. Eventually, the resulting combination of perspective lines is more akin to Penrose’s triangle,6 barring all possibilities of constructing a vanishing point, confining the viewer in endless puzzlement over the textual object.

19 Yet, denying the reader any way out of this stifling story is nothing but the blatant manifestation of the success of mimetic strategies. Indeed, the very subject of the narrative is the distressing tension between Cheryl’s will to break the link and the painful obviousness of the impossibility of severance: “She had never said she knew it was her nature that had drawn her to go for walks with him and to accept his reticent embrace, that her pity was his nourishment. She had never wanted to talk with Daph about him” (212). And yet, Cheryl’s friend Daph could have had the same liberating function that the Geraghtys had for Emily in “Sitting with the Dead”; still, this would have opened a vanishing point in the story, which Trevor does not allow here. The final paragraph, closing on Cheryl’s perspective, transmits the inescapability of her

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predicament, her awareness of it and of her share in it, possibly her silent and resigned acceptance of it: “Her tears, tonight, allowed him peace” (212). Trevor simply chooses here to make us share a complex and obscure experience of self-sacrifice, close in that particular case to a tragic error of judgment. He takes us to the limits of our own acceptance in order to achieve suspension of evaluation; here is a most precious key to his fictional universe.

20 Although rare in Trevor’s stories, this is not the only instance of such tactics. “Gilbert’s Mother,” a story from a preceding volume published in 1996, After Rain, explores the complexities of the relationship between a mother and her mentally deranged son who is most probably guilty of murder, although all certainty about that is cleverly denied: Before his birth she had possessed him. She had felt the tug of his lips on her breasts, a helpless creature then, growing into the one who controlled her now, who made her isolation total. Her fear made him a person, enriching him with power. [….] Her role was only to accept: he had a screw loose, she had willed him to be born. No one would ever understand the mystery of his existence, or the unshed tears they shared. (Selected Stories 94)

21 The only possibility for the readers is once more to step aside, but this time, they are left alone, facing the limits of their understanding. Yet, although the reading experience is rather disturbing, and in a way, unpleasant, it sharpens our discernment, longing and receptivity. We had been warned: “I don’t believe in the black and white. I believe in the grey shadows, the murkiness, the not-quite-known” (qtd. in Schiff 160).

Anamorphosis and anagnorisis

22 Yet it sometimes happens that some originally obscure and perturbing elements in Trevor’s stories make sense when a shift in vantage point is achieved, revealing the presence of what could be termed anamorphic writing. In what has come to be considered one of the most famous examples of oblique anamorphosis, Holbein’s painting of The Ambassadors,7 the enigmatic oblong shape in the foreground of the picture can only be deciphered if viewed from the right hand side, very close to the plane of the painting. The skull that then appears can be seen as a memento mori, reminding the admirers of science, wealth and power that in the words of Genesis (3,19): “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return,” tracing a dark line across the painting, undermining its in-front message. In many of Trevor’s stories, the opposite occurs; in the chiaroscuro of narratives, darkness becomes radiant. “Dark nourished light’s triumphant blaze, but who should want to know” (120), remarks the character in “Solitude” in her maturity. This phenomenon is essentially linked to vanishing points and three dimensional writing, but it also depends on the opening up of other dimensions in the text, in particular the fourth dimension of time. Growth, continuity and futurity, promise and renewal are essential if the reader is to experience true epiphany and catharsis. That aspect in Trevor’s writing is probably one of the most secret and the easiest to overlook.

23 “Graillis’s Legacy” (84-100) is the story of a fifty-five year old man, now a widower (after what will only be alluded to as “the tragedy of a winter’s night, on an icy road three years ago” (89)) who is informed by a lawyer, Mr. Clifferty, of his “being left a sum of money that’s not inconsiderable” (87) by a former woman friend. After some deliberating, he eventually chooses not to take anything. The story, as always,

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simultaneously develops different viewpoints; that of the lawyer on the actual situation, neutral and prudent; that of Graillis, imagining the lawyer’s misunderstandings of the situation, remembering in micro scenes that work like magic lantern slides his past double life, sadness and tenderness intertwined; and lastly, his developing perspective on the present situation with the decision to be taken about his former lover’s will. The story is strikingly allusive: “He hadn’t explained because you couldn’t explain, because there was too little to explain, not too much” (90); “He didn’t know why he’d gone to the house; he didn’t know why he’d got into a state because he hadn’t told a man who was a stranger to him that he was widowed” (91). Whatever explanations are given are dismissed as eventually inescapable misunderstandings: “A crudity still remained in the solicitor’s reading of the loose ends that still were there: the wronged wife haunting restlessly from her grave, the older woman claiming from hers the lover who had slipped away from her” (92). The narration is told so to speak in the negative: “Driving on, he tried to think of nothing, not of the girl who had become his wife when he was still a junior in the Munster and Leinster Bank, not of the woman he’d got to know when she borrowed novels from his branch library” (93).

24 The exact nature of their relationship remains encased in the secret of a story that metamorphoses into poetry in its epiphanic closure, worth quoting in its entirety: The whiskey talk was private now, a whisper from his orderly remembering that no longer nurtured panic. In visiting the solicitor, in going to the house, he had touched what should not be touched except in memory, where everything was there forever and nothing could be changed. Retirement from a branch library would not bring much and so there’d been a gesture. A stranger’s interpretation of that—what curiosity hatched or gossip spun―was neither here nor there. Again, instead, there was the fresh, bright face, the gentle shyness. Again, instead, the older woman lifted to her lips a tan-tipped cigarette touched with crimson. Again there was the happiness of marriage, again embraces were imagined. There was no more, nor would there be. Not even an ornament, for that would cheat reality. Not even a piece of china, and he would write to say so. The winter flowers lay scattered in the shadow of a secret, deception honouring a silent love. (99)

25 The sense of appeasement which is eventually reached at the end of the story by the character experiencing anagnorisis cannot be better transmitted to the reader than through the music of words, the web of assonances and alliterations, the rhythmic structuring of anaphora (again) or the significant patterning of sound: the iconicity of “gossip spun,” the sound-based chiasm, “There was no more, nor would there be,” engraining immutability in the very texture of language. The assonance in /i:/ significantly expresses the inescapable link between be, cheat, reality, piece just as the assonance in /i/ weaves an intricate web between whiskey, whisper, panic, visiting, solicitor, memory, everything, nothing, bring, interpretation, curiosity, lifted, lips, tipped, cigarette, crimson, happiness, imagined, connecting everything to nothing, the past to the present, memory to happiness and imagination. The final alliteration in /s/ closes the story on the essential and unsolvable tension at the heart of the plot between discontinuity (at the level of content) and continuity (at the level of form): scattered, shadow, secret, deception, silent. When interpretation takes the path of sound, it can easily turn to endless subjective speculation although there is probably too much emphasis in Trevor’s prose on music for it to be meaningless.8 In 1981, novelist John Updike noted in his review of Other People’s Worlds: “Mr Trevor has worked his text closely, to the compression, often, of poetry. Strange chimings, perhaps unintended, play across the

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surface” (156). Siri Hustvedt writes, “reading is creative listening that alters the reader” (140); any attentive reader of Trevor’s stories repeatedly makes that experience of epiphanic listening to “the music of what happens.”

“The delicacy of their reticence”

26 The last story, which very aptly gave its title to the whole volume, “A Bit on the Side,” contains the different techniques that have been studied in this paper. As a story about breaking up an illicit love affair, it conscientiously adopts the form of stereoscopic writing, developing the double internal viewpoints and creating three dimensional perspective through ellipsis and the (relative) suspension of evaluation;9 out of a dark story of disappointment and failure emerges the luminous perspective of a clear- sighted woman who, much like her masculine counterpart in “Graillis’s Legacy” refuses “to claw back fragments from the debris” (244), thereby becoming Graillis’s inheritor, giving the title of that former story a new direction, a new sense.

27 Once again, anamorphosis is indissociable from anagnorisis. The ending is handled by the narrator, which is not usual in Trevor’s stories; here, it seems a way of legitimating the reader’s instinctive quest for open vanishing points, like a writer’s legacy at the close of the volume: In the plate-glass of a department store window their reflection was arrested while they embraced. They did not see that image recording for an instant a stylishness they would not have claimed as theirs, or guessed that, in their love affair, they had possessed. Unspoken, understood, their rules of love had not been broken in the distress of ending what was not ended and never would be. Nothing of love had been destroyed today: they took that with them as they drew apart and walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than now it seemed, that in there still would be the delicacy of their reticence, and they themselves as love had made them for a while. (244-245)

28 This final stepping aside of a heterodiegetic narrator to offer reorientation of perspective as an ultimate gift to readers and characters alike seems to assert obliquity as the privileged path to lucidity. Reading with a difference is required to match the writing with a difference that definitely characterises William Trevor’s narrative choices. Differre in Latin means to set apart; it then developed into differ and defer, both being relevant to describe the process at work here, calling to mind Jacques Derrida’s coinage of the word différAnce to hold both meanings together. We are thus invited to a form of open, free-floating, meditative and slow reading, taking time to be receptive to sound and rhythm as well as sense, yet another way of “seeing things in a round.”

29 At the close of this reflection, we clearly reach a point where writing aslant necessarily calls for a reading aslant, grounded in a capacity to relinquish ready-made evaluative positions to maintain, through multiple internal perspectives, compassion and sympathy for characters sometimes most alien to us, tapping the spring of alterity in ourselves, inviting us to “that excursion into You that is also I” (Living 354), thereby connecting with one of the most fascinating recent discoveries in neuroscience, that of mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team in 1996. Although Rizzolatti’s observation first focused on monkeys, it has then been extended to the functioning of the human brain (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia), watching someone perform an action or express a feeling apparently fires the same neurons in our brains as in theirs. This gives

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rise to endless speculation, as V.S. Ramachandran, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California at San Diego explains: With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: ‘mind reading,’ empathy [he humorously calls them Gandhi neurons], imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to ‘read’ and understand another’s intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated ‘theory of other minds.’ (Ramachandran)

30 A similar situation has been observed by Battaglia and Freeberg with viewers looking at a painting.10 This ground breaking discovery might turn out to be of great interest to researchers in the aesthetics of reception in particular, offering a scientific perspective on this third dimension in reading which is too often perceived—and often too readily dismissed as mere intuitive deciphering.

31 Yet, receptivity to intentionality and perceptive intuition is what reading William Trevor is about. It constitutes the very essence of his writing. Trevor repeatedly insists on the intimacy of his relationship with his characters, his knowledge of them, his sympathy for every one of them; he tells John Tusa “I think one of the things which you do as a writer is you, you have to get into, literally, into the skin of your characters […] I have sympathy for the worst of my characters, for the most difficult, and the naughtiest of my characters, I have sympathy.” It might even be constitutive of Trevor the man who mischievously explains in The Paris Review interview: “I liked teaching maths best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either.” And most importantly, it is definitely the very yarn of his stories, the very stuff they are made of.

32 The very last word will therefore be given to his latest character to date. Cecilia is a fourteen year old teenager living alone with her father in London, nourishing illusions about her mother’s death; yet, she accidentally discovers her real identity, one day, in her boarding school, through an altercation between two mysterious older women. She spends her summer holidays with her father in the beautiful little French island of Porquerolles, fearfully longing for him to “tell her what she had to know,” which her father tactfully—or cowardly does not do while silently acknowledging her discovery. Trevor’s most recently published story “The Women” closes on these words, which, besides evoking the different writerly strategies of obliquity that this study has been trying to delineate, sound as a patient reassertion, in our rather intransigent age of certainties, of the urgent necessity of John Keats’ Negative Capability,11 and a most delicate description of reading by a major 21st century sculptor of meaning: “Shakily challenging the apparent, the almost certain, this flimsy exercise in supposition was tenuous and vague. But Cecilia knew it would not go away and reached out for its whisper of consoling doubt” (64).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hustvedt, Siri. Yonder. New York: Holt, 1998. Print.

---. Living, Thinking, Looking. New York: Picador, 2012. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1905. The Portable James Joyce. London: Penguin, 1983. Print.

Keats, John. Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends. Ed. Sidney Colvin. The Project Gutenberg eBook. Web. March 28, 2011.

Kornfeld, Cary D. “The History of Stereoscopic Imaging.” 2006 ETH Stereoscopic Student Film Festival, ETH Zürich, 3 Nov. 2006. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

Leech, Geoffrey. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983. Print.

Majola-Leblond, Claire. “The Art of Irish Counterpointing: William Trevor’s ‘A Day.’” Music and the Irish Imagination. Eds. Thierry Dubost and Alexandra Slaby. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2013. 163-173. Print.

Mortensen, Chris. “Inconsistent Images.” Department of Philosophy University of Adelaide, 2007. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

Potterton, Homan. “‘Suggestions of Concavity’: William Trevor as Sculptor.” Irish Arts Review 2002: 93-103. Archive Irishartsreview. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

Ramachandran, V.S. “Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind ‘the great leap forward’ in Human Evolution.” 31 May 2000. Edge.org, n. pag. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. Mirrors in the Brain. How We Share our Actions and Emotions. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Print.

Schiff, Stephen. “The Shadows of William Trevor.” The New Yorker, 28 Dec. 1992, 158-163. Print.

Shouldice, Frank. “William Trevor: A Sculptor of Words.” Irish America Magazine, 28 Sept. 2009, n. pag. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

Trevor, William. Excursions in the Real World. Toronto: Alfred A.Knopf, 1993. Print.

---. A Bit on the Side. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

---. Selected Stories. London: Penguin, 2009. Print.

---. “Field of Battle.” The New Yorker, 17 May 1993: 84-86. Print.

---. “Mentors.” The New Yorker, 23 August 1993: 51-55. Print.

---. “The Women.” The New Yorker, 17 Jan. 2013: 56-64. Print.

---. Interview by Miriam Stout. The Paris Review 110 (Spring 1989). Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

---. Interview by John Tusa. The John Tusa Interviews. BBC Radio 3, 12 June 2005. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

---. Interview by Lisa Allardice. “A Life in Books.” The Guardian. 5 Sept. 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

Updike, John. Review of Other People’s Worlds. The New Yorker 23 March 1981, 156. Print.

Wheatstone, Sir Charles. Contributions to the Physiology of Vision―Part the first: On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision, 1838. Stereoscopy.com. The Library. Sterescopy.com and Alexander Klein, 2004. Web. 5 Dec. 2014.

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NOTES

1. I have chosen to place this study of William Trevor’s volume, A Bit on the Side, under Siri Hustvedt’s auspices, although I couldn’t trace any writing of hers concerning William Trevor directly. Yet, much of her thinking deeply resonates with my reading of Trevor. Furthermore, in a study of oblique perspectives, that a writer of Norwegian origins, living in Brooklyn, who repeatedly describes herself as “an outsider, an unaffiliated intellectual roamer” should be our guide in an exploration of an Irish artist living in Devon, who has been publishing his short stories in the New Yorker for 36 years (Trevor’s story “Torridge” was the first to be published in The New Yorker on 12 Sept. 1977) did not seem altogether inappropriate. Most references, unless otherwise specified, are to her latest volume of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking. Page numbers are given parenthetically. 2. All quotations are from the 2005 Penguin edition and page numbers are given parenthetically in the text. 3. Dr. Cary D. Kornfeld, from the Computer Systems Institute (ETH Zurich), explains that Sir Charles Wheatstone, whose original drawing is reproduced at the beginning of this part, “invented the Stereoscope in 1833 and then spent the next five years exploring this device and its unique effect before announcing his discovery to the world in his publication, Contributions to the Physiology of Vision—Part the first: On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision (1838). He explained that doubleness of vision, caused by retinal disparity, actually produces the depth sensation that we now call stereopsis.” 4. To go back to the etymological meaning of stereoscopy—from the Greek stereo meaning solid and scopy, sight. 5. See the interview with John Tusa, where the connection between the art of carving and the art of writing explicitly concerns the perception of the third dimension. 6. See Mortensen. A very detailed and stimulating reflection on inconsistent images is to be found on the website of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Adelaide. The picture of the Penrose triangle comes from this site. 7. Hans Holbein the Younger. Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’). 1533. Oil on oak. 207 / 209,5cm. National Gallery, London. 8. For further development on Trevor’s musical art, see Majola-Leblond. One could also note that one story in this volume is entitled “The Dancing-Master’s Music.” 9. The suspension of evaluation remains relative here, because there are hints of cowardice and hypocrisy in the man’s position, not wanting his lover “to be his bit on the side,” but not ready for all that to divorce his wife, although he does seem to love his mistress truly. 10. Seminar at Columbia University on June 13, 2006, referred to in Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking 321. 11. In a letter to George and Thomas Keats, John Keats writes: “that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

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ABSTRACTS

Avant de se consacrer entièrement à l’écriture, William Trevor Cox fut sculpteur. L’objet de cette étude de A Bit on the Side est de mettre en lumière, grâce aux outils d’analyse du discours et aux théories de la réception, la façon dont Trevor, par le jeu des perspectives, le contrepoint des voix et l’art de l’ellipse, parvient à sculpter le sens et à créer une troisième dimension textuelle. Le lecteur se trouve alors placé au cœur même du processus d’interprétation dans une confrontation souvent déroutante à une altérité radicale, résultat de la stratégie exigeante d’un artiste majeur du XXIe siècle.

AUTHORS

CLAIRE MAJOLA-LEBLOND Claire Majola-Leblond is Senior Lecturer in Stylistics at Lyon 3 University, France, where she teaches Irish literature, discourse analysis and a course on contemporary short-stories. She is the author of a Ph.D thesis on point of view in Dylan Thomas’s short stories and has published articles on the art of writing of contemporary Irish authors such as Bernard McLaverty, John McGahern, Deirdre Madden, Colum McCann or William Trevor.

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Bibliography

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Selective Bibliography

Bernard Cardin

Collections or Selections of Stories Under Study

1 Donoghue, Emma. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. London: Virago Press, 2002. Print.

2 Donovan, Gerard. Country of the Grand. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Print.

3 Enright, Anne. The Portable Virgin. London: Secker & Warburg. 1991. Print.

4 ---. Taking Pictures. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2008. Print.

5 ---. Yesterday's Weather. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2009. Print.

6 Gough, Julian. Jude: Level 1. Dublin: Old Street, 2007. Print.

7 Keegan, Claire. Antarctica. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Print.

8 ---. Foster. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Print.

9 ---. Walk The Blue Fields. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Print.

10 McCann, Colum. “Aisling.” New Irish Short Stories. Ed. Joseph O’Connor. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. Print.

11 Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís. The Shelter of Neighbours. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2012. Print.

12 O’Brien, Edna. Saints and Sinners. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Print.

13 Ridgway, Keith. Standard Time. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Print.

14 Toibin Colm. The Empty Family. London: Viking, 2011. Print.

15 Trevor, William. A Bit on The Side. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

Studies of the Irish Short Story

16 Bourke, Angela et al eds. Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. IV & V: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. Print.

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17 Brewster, Scott and Michael Parker, eds. Irish Literature Since 1990: Diverse Voices. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Print.

18 Brown, Terence and Patrick Rafroidi, eds. The Irish Short Story. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979. Print.

19 Cahalan, James M. Double Visions. Women and Men in Modern and Contemporary Irish Fiction. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press, 1999. Print.

20 Cleary, Joe. Outrageous Fortune. Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Dublin, Field Day, 2006. Print.

21 Conlon, Evelyn and Hans-Christian Oeser, eds. Cutting the Night in Two. Short Stories by Irish Women Writers. Dublin: New Island, 2001. Print.

22 Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.

23 ---. Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender. Ashgate: Hampshire, 2007. Print.

24 Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Print.

25 Kelleher, Margaret and Philip O’Leary, eds. The Cambridge History of Irish Literature. Volume 2: 1890-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.

26 Kenneally, Michael, ed. Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Limited, 1988. Print.

27 Kiberd, Declan. The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

28 Kilroy, James. The Irish Short Story: A Critical History. Berkeley, CA: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Print.

29 O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. A Study of the Short Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Print.

30 O’Faolain, Sean. The Short Story. London: Collins, 1948. Print.

31 Roche, Anthony, ed. Irish University Review. Special Issue on Contemporary Irish Fiction. 30.1. Spring/Summer 2000. Print.

32 Ryan, Catriona, ed. Writing from the Margins. The Aesthetics of Disruption in the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publ, 2014. Print.

33 Smyth, Gerry. The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction. London: Pluto Press, 1997. Print.

34 Winther, Per, Jakob Lothe and Skei Hans H., eds. The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Print.

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AUTHOR

BERNARD CARDIN

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