VIADUCT Trauma and Representation in Three Irish Novels

VIADUCT and Trauma and Representation in Three Irish Novels

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2020

Mariah I H Whelan School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

CONTENTS

Abstract 4 Declaration & Copyright Statement 5 Acknowledgements 6

VIADUCT Notes on the Poems 8

I. Sylvia September 11 Necessary Maintenance 12 The Piano 13 3-6 Months 14 March 15 Wound 1968 16 February 17 Mother 1962 18 Brother 1961 19 Pigs 20 Fox Studies I 23 House of Light 24 Fox Studies II 25 Grabbing a Coffee with Friends 26 October 28

II. Girl History Lessons 30 Boyfriend I 34 Night Drive 35 Four Deaths 37 Cheyne Stokes 38 In the Staff Room 39 Geography Lessons 40 Ashes 43 Hunger 44 Fossils 48 Information Point 49 Viaduct 50 Hefted 51 Village 52 Boyfriend II 56 Wood 57 Threads 58 Tarot/Death 59

III. Michael Act One Scene One: Night 68 Act One Scene Two: Morning 73 Act One Scene Three: Rain 78

Entr’acte 83 Act Two Scene One: Evening 84

Trauma and Representation in Three Irish Novels

Introduction 90 Trauma and Representation 99 James Joyce, the ‘Nightmare’ of History and the Hibernicization of the Novel 104

Chapter One: Traumatic Geography and Transgenerational Trauma in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark 117 Seamus Deane, ‘Field Day’ and the Traumatic Topography of London/Derry 121 Transgenerational Trauma and the Search for ‘Truth’ in Reading in the Dark 127 Linguistic Loss, Silence and Traumatic Knowledge in Reading in the Dark 137 Conclusions 143

Chapter Two: The Traumatised Body in Anne Enright’s The Gathering 146 Anne Enright, Traumatised Bodies and Testimony in The Gathering 150 Personal Trauma and the National Context 161 The Gathering and the Joycean Legacy 171 Conclusions 173

Chapter Three: Trauma and the Sense-making Body in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing 176 Trauma, the Body and Narrative in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing 180 Traumatic Sexuality and the Brother-Sister Relationship 192 Trauma, Cyclicality and the Joycean Legacy 202 Conclusions 210

Conclusions 212 Bibliography 217

Total Word Count: 56, 757

ABSTRACT

This submission is comprised of two parts: a creative thesis titled Viaduct and a critical thesis titled ‘Trauma and Representation in Three Irish Novels’. While each is designed to stand independent of the other, over the past four years of writing and research there has naturally been some dialogue between the two. Both theses share a preoccupation with ideas of history, memory and expression. They are interested in how to represent experiences in the past that are forcefully felt in the present and yet often resist conventional notions of language, time and space. I. Viaduct Viaduct is a collection of poems that interrogates the intersection of personal experience and family history. The collection is divided into three sections each written in the voice of one of three personae who inhabit the book: Sylvia, Girl and Michael. Sylvia is a woman in her mid- sixties, sister to Michael and aunt of Girl. Girl is a woman in her thirties, niece of Sylvia and daughter of Michael. Michael is a man in his seventies, brother of Sylvia and father of Girl. The poems are interested in how the shared past has shaped these characters’ lives in both the past and the present. They grapple with themes of landscape and recollection, the body as a house of memory and the difficulty of expressing in language a history that is hedged in uncertainty and doubt. To access this past, the poems experiment with different formal strategies, exploring material culture as a stand in for the mourned body and the formal side-steps necessary to explore difficult sibling and parent-child relationships. II. Trauma and Representation in Three Irish Novels Since its inception in 2013, many Irish writers have been shortlisted for or won The Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction. Questioned about this phenomenon, Eimear McBride speculated that their success could be explained by the formal innovations necessary to accommodate the Irish language within the English prose novel. In thesis, I explore the innovations made in three Irish novels to not only accommodate the trace of the Irish language but Irish experience more generally. I argue that Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing all participate in a legacy of formal innovation initiated by James Joyce. Departing from the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel, in his increasingly experimental texts Joyce sought to better map the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on the Irish subject. Positing the three texts by Deane, Enright and McBride as ‘trauma novels’, I argue that the novels take Joyce’s pattern of formal innovation as their common foundation. I argue that in Reading in the Dark, the novel’s linear narrative trajectory is deliberately installed only to be interrupted by transgenerational traumas that foreground Northern Ireland’s unresolved histories and ongoing political animosities. In my analysis of The Gathering, I posit that the traumatised body plays a key role in expressing Ireland’s ongoing history of misogyny. In my final chapter I contend that in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing the novel’s treatment of a traumatised narrative voice enacts a model of traumatic Irish girlhood that is ongoing and cyclical. While each text is different, I argue that they all rework the anglophone novel to enact the experience of traumatic Irish histories that are deeply complex, difficult to retrieve in language and always left unresolved.

DECLARATION

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my supervisors Vona Groarke and Liam Harte for guiding this project from its inception to completion. I am grateful for your careful and generous readings of my poetry and critical writing, your unfailing support despite your many commitments and for signposting me to opportunities beyond the PhD. I am also grateful to my third supervisor Jerome de Groot for his input in the bi-annual panel review process. Many thanks also to John Mcauliffe, Kaye Mitchell and all the staff at the Centre for New Writing for creating a rich and supportive atmosphere in which to work. Particular thanks to the staff of the Graduate School (especially Julie Fiwka, Joanne Marsh and Amanda Matthews) for offering unwavering practical support and advice. I cannot thank my fellow students at the University of Manchester enough for all their support and feedback over the past four years. My especial thanks go to Fatema Abdoolcarim, Imogen Durant, Charlotte Haines, Tessa Harris, David Hartley, Rebecca Hurst and Usma Malik. Your friendship and support have been invaluable. Thanks are also due to a great many people outside the university who have supported my critical and creative work. These include: Hana Bressler, Joe Carrick Varty, Tom de Freston, Niall Munro, Pablo de Orellana, Maya C. Popa and Gaby Sambuccetti. Thanks also to friends who have provided essential moral support including: Kimberly Aono, May Chung, Caroline Cook, Maria C. Goodson, Alice Herring, Alex and Amanda Macgregor and Bernadine Nixon. I am grateful to the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester for the funding award that made this thesis financially possible. I am also grateful to the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the Economic and Social Research Council for two funded residencies that helped me to develop this thesis, particularly the ‘Michael’ section of Viaduct. Special thanks go to my family for providing the love and support that is the foundation of everything I do. Thank you to my husband Paul Austin for managing our domestic, financial and family life so that I can go and sit alone in my office for days on end and work. Thank you to my brothers for your support and interest in my work. The greatest thanks of all go to my parents Susan and Christopher Whelan. Thank you for all the sacrifices you made so that I could have choices you never had. This thesis has been made possible by your love, commitment and vision. This thesis is dedicated to you with love and gratitude.

VIADUCT

NOTES ON THE POEMS

Viaduct is a collection written in three voices: Sylvia, Girl and Michael. Sylvia is a woman in her mid-sixties, sister to Michael and aunt of Girl. Girl is a woman in her thirties, niece of Sylvia and daughter of Michael. Michael is a man in his early-seventies, brother of Sylvia and father of Girl. The collection is split into three distinct sections where each persona reflects on their shared and personal histories. I am grateful to the editors of the following journals and anthologies in which my work has appeared over the past four years. These include: Artlyst Art to Poetry Prize Winners Anthology (‘The Piano’), Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology (‘Viaduct’), Best New British and Irish Poets (‘Hefted’), Poetry Birmingham (‘Fossils’ and ‘Four Deaths’), The Interpreter’s House (‘House of Light’), The Oxford Review of Books (‘History Lessons’), A Change of Climate (‘Geography Lessons’), Stand Magazine (‘Information Point’ and ‘Mother 1968’), The Tangerine (‘Hefted’) and the Poetry Book Society website (‘Viaduct’).

‘There is no catharsis […] the stories we tell ourselves do not heal us’ —Maggie Nelson

SYLVIA

September

a second flowering of yellow canola across the top field

they won’t survive the month

Necessary Maintenance

When I was young and a fool I thought if I filled our house with sideboards, tables— oak doors and heavy sofas, the weight of all that timber would somehow joint you to me, that I could square our life between clean white walls, keep you inside what are now my fought for, court-appointed responsibilities tender with damp and unspooling paper.

Each decade you’d trot out some new way to solve the surface drying out, damp climbing their insides, I put my faith in your metal pots, plastics but now I live here alone

I’ll hire a builder and tell him to strip this house back, I don’t know what it was before I filled it with all this junk, I’m going to expose its stonework, rip open the fireplace and chimney flue, make friends with these walls because I know what it means to be soaked through and dried out.

And when the builder’s gone I’ll set a fire in my new fireplace, the first one in years to get this house breathing, I don’t care about keeping myself warm, want this house to be what it is underneath the life we lived in it, will set a fire in the fireplace to set this room free, burn you out of my house.

The Piano

Of all the stupid things I bought with your money worst of them was the piano, a great brown upright far too big for our cottage, seeming to tip the floor, upend what little light made it through our windows.

I had every intention of learning how to play it, wiped dust from the keys, paid a man to keep it tuned, rubbed its grain with a mixture of linseed and turps, used a special soft cloth every week until I didn’t.

I don’t know if it got heavier or the house weaker, would go to bed at night and feel its weight tugging whole rooms towards the foundations, lay in my bed listening to roof struts groan.

I think you occupied our marriage like that, upending rooms, eating what little light got in, moved through me like bass notes, a thumping hammer that hung on in this house long after the lid was shut.

Voice in my head, terminal note, why are you still here after all this stripping back, these ripped out fireplaces— why can’t I break this habit of speaking you into being, loving your absence, silences that make you real?

3-6 Months

After three months the door to the room where we’d stood holding our grief and mumbling our thank-yous closed.

We were supposed to step through, from August into October like their hours were the same size, a corridor big enough to hold my six-month swollen body in days sliced back to a crescent moon, frost-bitten air.

They told me grief is a rhythm exorcised in ritual, there’s no getting out of the rituals: weeks into months, months into years but I could show them a day bigger than the rest of my life.

Better to try and pour a pint of water into a thimble, pull the entire actual sky through the closed eye of the moon, why would I want to step out of here, leave this room when inside it my body has ways to love what it made: sounds of weight on empty staircases, stirred air.

When you left with your hammer and nails I thought it was to make this room safe, they’d told me to keep our marriage moving towards the same horizon, in parallel like our grief was two cars and not a room, an entire house where we stood holding hands, listened to damp run through our walls but when you came back you held your hand out to me, asked me to come and test the hinges you’d oiled, planed front door, our steps and driveway down to the road.

We walked out together and my mouth said thank you, my body came with you but how could I leave this room of muscles and bone when it’s something stitched into my skin, a body I can’t leave if I tried.

I have carried this house inside me, watched you from its windows— your back smaller and smaller as you walked down the road holding hands with a woman who looked just like me, footsteps I still feel on my skin like weight on floorboards, rooms full of what I know how to love: empty hours, stirred air.

March

On my TV a woman with square white teeth says it takes three years for skin to regenerate totally.

I think about my tulips, how they’ve pushed new heads up and out of the same bulbs last spring and this spring, too.

What a joy it is to know that after thirty-five years next spring you will never have touched me.

Wound 1968

What I remember most is coolness, the little chunk of missing muscle and skin holding its shape just below my knee pale and bloodless under the bathwater.

I was fourteen and fascinated by all the new black hairs sprouted over my shins and ankles, by my father’s razor resting its head on our pink soap, part of me still held in its teeth.

And then— then the world came flooding back over its edges, blood beading skin, bright redness smoking hot water and when it arrived half a second later pain ripped through my ankle bones, knee, mess of black hair between my legs and I think that was the beginning of sex for me, my body opened, a flood of sharp heat but just before, still alive inside the pain a moment of coolness, something just for me— what I could give to my body with my own hands, now I knew how to begin.

February

This afternoon is a broken box spilling its light across my garden, not spring but the end of winter in rotten things, mud. Now that’s something I can understand.

Mother 1962

In my dreams I fold linen by the range downstairs in our old house, which taking the logic of dreams is empty save for you behind the closed door to your room.

I pile up sheets and towels, place blankets into the big basket. Outside rain falls on windowpanes, fierce grey rolls of water that make me think of car washes though I wouldn’t see a drive-through car wash for years. I have to keep the rain from getting in, know what it wants the way all children know nothing, everything with their small, frightened bodies. I push balled-up sheets between the flags, fill skirting gaps with pillowcases and cloth napkins but it dribbles down the walls, water pluming on window panes, lintels collapsing over my head like pulp. I need to keep you safe, look—

I’ve found pitch to seal the sills, door-jamb, your keyhole flaking light on rising water. It pours downstairs from your room at the centre of this failing house and taking the logic of dreams I am an adult who can stand on the stairs and shout up: you were a spring, mother! a hole in the centre of this house where everything dark and wet poured out though my body is still that of a child fighting the water to keep you safe who calls your name, needs you to call mine.

Brother 1961

It was a summer so hot the hayfields took on a scorched brown air, fires on the moor flooding our village—if you can call that smatter of houses a village— with smells of burned heather, earth.

You took me to a place where the river bends down into woods, long arms of willow trees spread their green-yellow branches across the cool water, you taught me how to hide my face in its slick surface, let a river take all the heat burned into my cheeks.

I float in that water now knowing it is a gift to be held by something that expects nothing back, think about our father, the dark recess by the range, cigarette smoke that drifts across the kitchen searching out my eyes, nose.

Here are his hands in my hair, making fists— thank you brother for teaching me before you left how to hide my face in armfuls of water, when we couldn’t hide, to run. If we couldn’t run, how to go limp.

Pigs

He in? I say and my brother Michael nods

Michael is victor ludorum is studying at the art college is my biggest brother and we are home after school for buttered bread steaming tea

I am recently beautiful this comes as something of a shock having to learn quickly to say nothing go limp when men I don’t know ask dark-eyed beauty where do you live when girls at school whisper Sylvia Ryan thinks she’s so great or say You’re my best friend which all mean the exact same thing

Best friends best friends I had so many! Sue Sheila Marjorie Janet the whole lot of them hoping a bit of me would rub off my me-ness traded for time and records invited round to tea

Reach me the butter Sylvia that is my brother Joe now asking my other brother pig Michael snatching up the dish

Reach it me Joe says again and Michael fat smile butter in hand says that’s no way to speak to your— Joe lunging and Michael a half-foot taller Say “please” Fuck off Say “please” you little shit

And here is my father coming down the stairs sucking all the air out the room big black-hole bastard that he is

Get your fat arse up and make me tea my mother uncurls from the dark spot beside the range Joe is blinking looking at Michael looking at our father and I’m thinking Jesus Joe don’t

He won’t give me the butter

All is dark quiet

20 shadows up the wall from the fire stop and turn to look

Can I not (he whispers) get one fucking night of peace?

I’ve given it Dad Michael passing the butter I’ve given it to him look Dad see but my father is hands down on the table hands into fists white skin gripping

Why can’t you get these fucking kids to behave?

My mother my mother my mother was still uncurling I remembered hands around her neck hair feet off the floor the baby crying but all this before not now choking and I think Should I? Should I dare?

I lift my hand (a strange white animal) off the table move it to where his fist grips the pine Daddy I say (placing it on top of his) Shall I get up and make your tea?

His eyes frown-looking at my face my nearly-a-woman face shocking to a man who never looks

Let me fetch you a cup I smile and chair lightly pushed back (no scraping) soft I think make yourself soft hands shaking on the kettle soft swilling of pot and inside it fresh tea soft setting down on the tea towel

My brothers head-down buttering Joe catching my eye my brother’s eye looking nothing from Michael

I was bra straps thick plait limbs newly long crossed ankles soft fingers shoulders suddenly big enough to brace mother brothers sister idiot father’s bad moods

And when my mother would disappear just for a wee rest strong enough to keep clean linen in the drawers milk on the cold shelf so they could all keep shovelling toast and tea into their fat pink lips

Pig brothers I think brothers pink and shitless pig house pig father pig baby snorting by the fire my poor pig mother in the dark and me clean and recently beautiful a white spot in a pig family home for buttered bread and steaming tea

Fox Studies I

Last night I dreamed in fox: crickets millipede vole pups crunch of skull and brain meat big moon above the trees

I knew car

I had told car to my kits in our dark den and of roads that snaked through the woods car was the other side of the bend grouse eggs the other side of the road

I stepped out and light closed in

I woke before it hit alone in our bed, headlights smearing the wall.

I staggered down the hall, through my house I’ve come to know lately in footsteps and fingertips, in the bathroom I kept the light off, stared into blue glass lit by a big moon behind my toothbrush and half-empty holder where yours isn’t anymore.

House of Light and if I had become the house of light I always tipped towards, would you have stayed? If I’d kept myself clean would you have worn my skin over yours, shrinking your hands’ tick into smaller and smaller circles? Yes, I used light as a lure in the stations of the night. Yes, like the lump-eyed angler fish intending towards itself in smaller and smaller circles at the end, I too hit silt. A knuckle of spine under the covers, a side in silhouette—the body I would have occupied differently had I known you would remove yourself the way the lifted bones of a fish release from cooked flesh: with open arms, a white smile.

Fox Studies II

When I get home from work there’s a fox slumped on the road, not quite dead but enough of a mess it’s going that way soon enough, skin on its legs ripped open, bones exposed to the sky.

I want to touch it, beautiful fox: red fur, gloved paws, the split skin on its belly spread like a nightgown on a starlet, stomach and lungs webbed in wet, white membranes.

I know she’s a girl fox even before I spot the black teats, her womb which is big and pale as a cabbage peony, horned ovaries covered in little white egg buds, a whole litter’s worth— imagine! not like mine which managed one or two duffers once in a blue moon.

I know she’s a girl by the look in her eyes packed with plaited gold, how they refuse to meet mine, by her jutting, sullen jaw and the tilt of her face towards the woods, the shame of her opened body.

I want to cover her, not with a blanket from the car or house but with some sort of branch, I could go into the woods, enter the trees to find some sort of fern or even a rock, a big one to hold over her head and let go but putting things out of their misery has never been my strongest suit.

And why waste time on what’s already dead or good as, beautiful as she is why waste time on a creature who never learned to stop lusting for bright light, impact— hungry for engine, in love with the road?

Grabbing a Coffee with Friends

Strange creatures Strange creatures these women and ugly gobble necked loose middled red nails on their thick-knuckled fingers

So, I told her you won’t have time for any of that! here is my friend Jane speaking a human woman whose life has slotted into mine at the golf club jazz nights at The Crown what else is a friendship? Here is Marie now

Jesus with my first (sage grey shake of her head) I didn’t have a clue! Now it’s all NCT this and midwife-led that!

I would very much like to tell these long-term strangers

I remember my first time— here I am counting backwards in calendar days here I am slipping the test under his pillow whispering there’s a present for you upstairs

I would very much like to say this spreading it out between the coffee cups and napkins to watch the embarrassment boil up their faces—

How delicious! How mine solely!

If you can’t say something nice Well Mother I tried and look where it got me

I get my hair done and go to the gym have avoided the hideous back-hump frown-lines don’t piss when I sneeze and have an enormous kitchen full of clean white surfaces

It got me all these men— brothers father a husband who still sits in my ribs telling anyone who’ll listen my family his friends complete strangers in bars that yes I have always been this cold and mean

It got me all my money Mother! I pay it out in fifty pound lots to a woman with a bad haircut who sits me on her sofa and pulls all this self-knowledge out my mouth

Look at all this self-knowledge dribbling out my ears through my nose as I sit here pouring milk into my cup listening to these women bang on about their babies’ babies what else do they have?

What do I have? A house full of dark corners home to pianos and various men’s bad moods inside a girl’s body that came into being the moment it was seen

Well here I am listening to these women gobble-necked loose-middled women and I am about to tell them

I remember my first time to rip a hole through this afternoon—

I’ve made so many holes in my life! And now I’m no longer young no longer beautiful (thank christ) there’s nothing to stop me falling

And why not fall? Who else has been there but me through all the rooms of my childhood and marriage stayed faithful to these little pockets of stirred air I still feel turning inside

Now I’m old and no longer beautiful have fallen out of girlhood I think I could try to be a person again could try to live in this body as though it belongs just to me though I have no idea how to do it no idea how to go back to my house and live without all the weight that kept me jointed to my life what I thought was my life— what I thought was weight

October

After exhausting the timber-framed houses the wildfire reaches the vineyard, in my garden an October bee enters and re-enters honeysuckle.

I wear short sleeves and bring home tubs of cheap yellow ice cream, it’s a thrill to watch the world burn up field by American field on my TV far off and inevitable, to let the ice cream sit out all afternoon and spoil because I want it to spoil, a relief to know finally this is who I am— who you are too, under the good people we pretended to be.

GIRL

History Lessons

I want to try and learn the language my dad speaks.

Can you pass me the water please he says, pulling his chair to the dining-room table.

I pick up each word, hold it to the light— try to count all the meanings inside, which one he wants me to see.

Tonight he doesn’t mean look at me or don’t look at me but something new and I am left to peer into him the way I’d stare into the red beads on my mum’s charm bracelet watching clouds appear inside like photographs of galaxies, nebulae beamed back from the Hubble telescope, holding each bead’s cracked glass close as I could to my eye.

II.

One night, after El Clásico, there’s crushed glass everywhere, distress flares burning and I can’t see the palm trees for the red smoke billowing across the square. Someone is singing El Sagadors and I am speaking perfect drunk Spanish to the old man beside me who says Si! Si! Entiendo, si!

Saying I understand with all the I emptied out.

III.

I come back from Spain when Grandad dies.

My dad inherits: a photograph album a bottle of champagne a sizeable care bill

In the front room I hold the album out to him and say,

Look, the last three photographs are missing?

He says,

Look how this old glue still holds the fabric to the board.

IV.

History is things that have happened he says, putting his hands palm down on the dining-room table.

Ok, then. I say.

Because he won’t talk to me I go out and buy water-colour paper, write history is things that have happened in red ink.

Why do I need to take his muteness and fill it?

Why can’t I write this history like it is, an old bottle of champagne he holds in his arms like a quiet, green baby giving away nothing but its own thick surface, how do I wipe it clean of stories stuck to its wet glass like sawdust, packing nuts?

Boyfriend I

I fall in love with my first boyfriend because of his silences. I liked the way they slotted between us and prized us apart. The missing of him rang through my eyes and lit me like street lamps coming on across a town. Maybe that’s why I feel the way I do about what happened to my dad. I like its big, dark edges. I like how no matter how I try to hold it, touch it, turn it in the light I can’t get hold of the missing inside.

To leave my first boyfriend I had to strip my desire back to its root. It left all the latches of my life undone. No more reaching, testing, weighing. No more silence with something secret inside. I suppose I was learning how to speak silences of my own, chords inside a voice-box I’ve been using to name the things I’ve come to rely on to stop myself floating off: cardboard and glue, the gravity of paper.

Night Drive

I remember the nights we spent up on his barn, late July, combines out in the valley to the south, horizon green as an aquarium along its western edge. I lay on my back and dipped my fingers into the blue air while he sat throwing stones down into the empty cowshed. That was enough for me, to feel the corrugated roof shudder under each throw, taking the sound into itself, coming back into silence again. I had the whole valley, the white arm of The Milky Way stretched overhead, stones he threw ringing inside me one-by-one. Years later, I drive home under skies rinsed clean by rain, the wet air cools, gives itself back to the sky as clouds but I can’t tell if those are stars coming out now— or just lights from airplanes as they land at Heathrow.

In the Staff Room we discuss contingencies and arrange cover, At least he left plans, the Head says and it’s true— up in the art room I use Mr Hamper’s lesson plan as a map to steer the girls through a lesson on negative space, drawing a tangle of chair legs and lamp shades, old dummies and kettles he’s piled on desks.

There are three things they cannot draw, he’s scrawled— the lilies, the red chair and bicycle, encourage them to mark where the background stops.

The girls whisper to each other while I sit at my desk

It’s not fair. What will they do to him? I wouldn’t want to come back.

It is inside them already then, his male need to be seen without asking, their brilliant minds softening around his pain.

Back at home, I jolt awake when my husband comes in, tell him about the joke of me being in an art room, he smiles and says how similar all subjects are, the exercise in negative space like the maths done to find black holes by what they leave behind.

Before he washes-up after dinner he puts away the dry breakfast plates, checks each one for stray droplets, sets the wet dishes in the drainer with space between them to breathe.

I love him for this.

I love him for the time he takes with the small objects that make up our life— each knife in its drawer, every plate and mug put away, surfaces sprayed and wiped clean.

Before we go up to bed he pauses to check the kitchen is tidy and neat, rests his hand on the counter that holds the reflection of our fridge and cupboards, a final bit of sunlight falling through the window in its still-damp surface— the one lit room in our dark house.

Geography Lessons

In class I teach the girls about erosion, give them a diagram with features: meander, silt-bed, banks with cracks, mud creases— ask them to label a river with the forces that make it bend, curl.

After we’ve covered the basics I’ll ask them What about flood plains, girls?

What about land that disappears at night, whole houses swallowed up by mud?

I know these huge losses begin with the small ways a swollen river worries its bank, takes small bites, softly at first, takes years to undo ground under lawns and pavements, sinkholes at the centre of an estate decades in the making.

I want them to understand how water moves through hills and what it takes with it— years of leached soil, small stones, how the tiniest cracks and fissures make room for collapse.

II.

On the Rwandan border, after five days of rain a boy dies at the bottom of a coltan mine.

Where is the sure place you can say a death begins?

In the tipping point of mud or inside my pocket where my phone’s battery empties itself of heat and light.

In our module on Fair Trade I have to teach them about cocoa pods, here’s a photo of a cocoa pod, another of three pods drying and a farmer’s hand as he shucks white beans from their green skins,

I give out census results, GDP and grid paper— If the red line goes up, girls, what do we call that?

Tomorrow we’ll go back to mapping precipitation across the equator, they know how to plot five days of rain in bar graphs, line charts—

I can give them units to explain the wrong kind of downpour at the wrong time of year but what do I give them to measure the mud that it makes— the human foot that slips on the rungs?

III.

No way to stop a cliff once it teeters over the sea like a broken neck, it’s too late for grass and the field— cancel any hope you had of insurance for your small house by the water, its walls already a mash of wood and paint.

No way to stop humans once they’ve made up their mind on the edge—no way to pin us or clad us like we’re a beach covered in a mesh of chicken wire and root-binding plants.

I don’t want them to be afraid because there’s no time left,

I give them transferable skills: tools and units to measure collapse, ask them to present their findings. They list off statistics about disturbed weather and human damage—furious and yes, their fury is the best chance we have but for their sake I want to offer one closing suggestion: that extinction might not be the world ending but a correction, righting itself of its heavy, human tilt.

BOYFRIEND (II)

Just before I fell in love with my first boyfriend I lived in Barcelona. One night, around the table, we were speaking a mixture of French and Spanish, a bit of Catalan thrown in for good measure. I loved it, sat in the soft dumb place between languages, drunk and not bothering to conjugate, threading mange to a pronoun and putting it down on the table, letting the light and my hands unwrap its meaning.

I’d spent so much time inside the tight column of grammar. Checking and correcting, believing you needed to live for years inside declensions before they became supple, bodily. I didn’t want that for myself, so when my grandad’s dying brought me home to England, always planned to go back out to the real world again, out to where you could speak and live and be warm.

In the end though, months got in the way of my leaving, piled up until my life was too, complex too big. While I loved him for his silences, I think I loved him more for what he did with language, breaking its skin to fit his life. I remember getting off the boat in Belfast and taking the train north to his parent’s farm. I watched him and his siblings bat Yous and Yous’ns about the kitchen, his mother inflecting You (plural) and You (singular) differently, distilling her children’s various small crimes (not enough tea in the pot, not fetching the good cups) into manageable chunks she threatened with a wooden spoon though even the youngest sister was already 23.

I can’t mimic that kind of inflection. Although when I say he or him what I really mean of course is you. That’s how I live now, inside this messy grammar, not speaking to him.

The night I met my ex-boyfriend, I fell down the stairs of the bar. At the bottom he helped me to stand. The lip of the stair left an indent in my shin. When we first got together, my husband wrote me a sad letter that said, You are still at the bottom of the stairs telling him, “I love you.”

The best I could offer was to build a life with my back to him. I don’t think it’s so uncommon to live like this, backing up like a heifer in the crush for the first time, though this is not my first time. Not my first time at all.

I will leave it like this: there is a you I wear in my mouth, another I leave here on the page.

BOYFRIEND (II)

I can’t mimic that kind of inflection. Although when I say he or him what I really mean of course is you. That’s how I live now, inside this messy grammar, not speaking to him.

I will leave it like this: there is a you I wear in my mouth, another I leave here on the page.

WOOD

Under a Cold Moon I walked the join between years before the birds were awake before branches and the last few leaves bent in a crown of noise I stood in a blue room of trees. Out of a crease in the moor where hill met hill a thickening of mist something up ahead a rustle bootsteps dampened by mud a head on a human spine twisting itself alive and the fear I felt was so strong it was almost genital almost desire— the part of me that lurched forward up into the trees wanted to know you touch you make you real again and the body left behind backing down the path my boots slipping on stones and chalk. What did I leave there in that room of trees— a real wood bent around an unreal man a real part of me left to follow through an unreal valley over the ridge where branches move and hush come back to stillness again?

No bootsteps now no turning spine all memory.

Tarot/Death

There’s no name for this part of the moor, it’s too far East for the Brontës to have wandered and no farmers come with their quadbikes and dogs to graze sheep and tread any name into the hill. The topsoil is too thin to hold anything except dry grass and a few browning ferns, there isn’t even any mud to freeze into ruts, earth hardening and splitting flatly under the weight of the cold sky.

I’m walking to its centre, to the crack in the moor where the earth drops down and water comes sloshing out of the hillside, frothing white and streaked with dirty, phlegm-coloured weeds.

I think it has always been coming to this. Sometimes I think this thing people call grief has always been folded inside me— just as each fig holds the pollen-stained body of a wasp, needs its flesh to fruit— I’ve been holding this and headed here.

The first time I did tarot we did the Celtic Cross spread and I drew ‘Death’ as my origin card. This was an actual thing that happened under Ikea ceiling lights, Obviously, the death card doesn’t mean death. Obviously.

There is nowhere else for me to go now— this is as close as I can get, lowering my body into the strip of rock and water at the centre of the moor, close as I can get to everything under that is alive. I think about the pores in the limestone,

the air suspended in liquid rock that hardened and all the shale gas everyone wants to get out, picking up the hillside like it’s a box with everything rattling around inside it because the moor itself is thin and hard like a Christmas tin. There is nowhere else for me to go.

II.

I think I see my dad, you know, a little boy stomping around this moor he grew up on. He told me about breaking the ice on horse troughs when he was thirsty and finding a human skull in a bag at the centre of the flooded quarry when all the water had dried up into a white sludge.

In his stories he’s always alone and when I close my eyes I can feel his life running just below my own but when I try to see his face it whitens like a piece of film burning up in a projector feed and up on the screen there is a hole now and out of the hole come: steam trains, space suits, cowboys, cap guns and they’re dribbling out of his mouth except he’s a little boy in a man suit babbling on about the EU and sovereignty like it’s something that matters except to him it does, absolutely— he wields it like it is a cap gun and the pain flakes off him like old paint. And I could say you’re not even really British and all he’d say is British? British?— punctuating the air with his hands in a way I am supposed to understand because to him this outrage boiling off his skin is a complete argument with no way into it, no way out. And if I could bring him here he’d talk about the fucking rock cycle except he doesn’t call it the rock cycle because he doesn’t know what that is

60 and he’d try to teach me all about how the millstone grit is formed and because when he talks about it it’s like a sunrise is breaking through his body

I can’t say anything—I think I might hurt him, give him less joy in his life but the truth is he wouldn’t listen if I tried. The only way of loving him that works is to let the light he gives off warm my face. Gave off.

III.

I’ve tried to find something here that would explain him. I have to keep editing his story,

I invent him as a little boy being harmed in ways he didn’t recognise as harm, running under the wind as it grinds into the East side of the moor, moving the way a cat does when it’s sick, slipping under a porch. I have to invent him as a little boy because loving him was grief-stained.

Because living with him was like— and here I give you a house that is full of bees. There is honeycomb dripping from the ceiling and the room is packed with soft bee bodies dribbling over each other. Bee-fur against your skin, wings touching eyelid, cheek, lip— and because your body remembers how it feels to be stung you learn to keep very still. It will turn out best for you if you can find ways to lower your heart rate. Yes, you will become adept at removing stings but there will also be honey.

And there was. It was there when the hospital forgot to give my uncle his insulin, and when my grandfather fell back on the bed holding his big chest with his hands,

61 and when my brother slipped into death, right up to his neck in it, and my mother disappeared into the dark leading him back with her eyes on the light ahead. There was no need to keep my body very still and quiet because we went outdoors. He took me out across the hill, he took me out to learn what the rock cycle was, although he didn’t know it was called that. There was my dad ankle-deep in the cold water frothing out of the hillside, pulling different stones out of the stream. He placed them in my hands and as I held each cold, wet rock he traced their layers and swirls to make each one a map you could follow backwards through time to explain where it came from, what had happened to it.

And when he was sweet like this, how could he have been anything other than this? And now I am living in a body infested with honeycomb— all I have is this honey and these holes but once, when I misjudged a dive at the swimming pool, the burn of chlorine at the back of my nose was the same as the smack of my skull into the hallway door when he shoved me into it.

I floated in the water which churned with the kicks of other people’s feet and felt a child’s skull inside my brain and what shocked me wasn’t that this child felt this happen but that she knew in every part of her body it was her fault. And here on the moor, I am that little girl again and I reach out to touch the white wall under the hall light:

I touch it and nobody dies so I keep touching it—the same white spot everyday

62 until eventually I have to do it to keep everyone alive— this is my magic power.

But I don’t know if these are things are true or fictions I dreamed in the hours he took to die.

IV.

More girls than boys are diagnosed with OCD. Boys’ symptoms are comorbid with religious-sexual complexes, aggression and physical tics, whereas women tend to develop contamination fears and eating disorders.

Boys push everything outward, girls take everything in. It has never been a question of shame,

I have done nothing to be ashamed of, but the fear of it— the fear of doing something and being seen has kept me prowling the edges of my own life. I didn’t want to keep everyone alive because I loved them, I wanted to keep them alive because their death would be my fault and I couldn’t live with that kind of collapse. My body became a hillside, my body became like this moor with everything inside it tilting and pressing against my skin. Sometimes I think I have been walking my body the same way I walk from my car to the front door at night, taking the longer well-lit way, holding my key like a square blade in the pocket of my coat.

And when I’m home I keep the chain on and before I go to bed I walk through the house switching on every light and believe that what I have seen— the four plain walls of each room, means the same thing as being safe.

I have convinced my husband

I live with him. I lay my body next to his in the dark and feel the bed creak under my enormous weight. Sometimes, I think he knows he lives with a woman whose body is a house crusted with dead bees and empty wax-comb. Sometimes I think he knows that I know this and am sorry. And when I make myself come beside him in the dark, thinking about my ex-boyfriend,

I think he understands that I do this to keep everything inside— because to slip under into the room where I love him, still and move outwards opening doors and climbing into the nerves that line my body gives all this broken furniture and soft walls the space they need. It stops the ground from splitting open and though I drag this house around like the bloated abdomen of a queen I have kept myself on-time and well-presented, infinitely reliable.

But there is nowhere else for me to go now,

I have lowered myself into the centre of the moor thinking I was chasing my dad when all this time I have been living with the dead, sleeping beside the dead every night for as long as I can remember. I have brought that into our home.

The death card made everyone very polite and I can understand why. When we say: Obviously, the death card doesn’t mean death it’s a kind of spell we say to make it true, something we say to each other in our good-sized dining rooms. I thought the death card came to me because that was what my life had been:

I had sat in so many corners on stiff-backed chairs wearing a navy-blue dress and eating cold sausage rolls.

I had watched rooms fill with black shoes and black tights and black suit-legs nosing towards each other.

I knew how to let myself be left with people called Aunty who were not my aunty and how people will leave you alone if you keep yourself quiet and grateful and mostly outdoors. But I have begun to think that when I drew the death card my body became a tarot pack with a seam of death running through it. It has always been here— this grief spot, dead spot, slit where I have passed through and lived. Yes, I have brought the dead into my home every night and yes, I have lied about where I live to my husband but haven’t I also lived knowing this body came out of nothing, will fold back into it in the end? And because this has been written into my bones haven’t I been kind because of it?

And if this kindness is something I have pulled on like a good winter coat over a dirty jumper to get me up and out the front door, well— there are worse ways of doing that.

But there is nowhere else for me to go now and this kindness has become a skin that will not do, will not keep everything inside.

I lower myself into this crack in the moor to sink my hands into it. To stand ankle-deep in the cold water and pull out all these rocks and mud and worms. And if this makes me messy and vicious, I’ll be messy and vicious enough to say yes, there is honey, there are holes, and there is my head smacking

65 against the hallway door and that was not my fault but his. I do not say this is what happened but this is what my body remembers.

MICHAEL

Set

A small town in northern England. The town used to be a village but is now a place where people who don’t want to live in the city but still work in the city buy new-build homes. One long street running through the town with two charity shops, a Co-Op, a good number of TO LET signs and a thriving Costa. Little cobbled streets running off the long road down the hill into a valley with a stream splashing through it. Little cobbled streets running up the hill that branch into cul-de-sacs of new developments. A mill with blown-out windows in the town centre surrounded by barbed wire. Night. Rain.

Dramatis Personae

The Townspeople – mostly asleep with rain pattering on their windows

The Chorus – eight voices who haunt the town and move like water

Michael – an old man asleep on the moor above the town

Act One Scene One: Night

[Lights up on the town already on stage holding its breath. Townspeople asleep in their beds etc. Chorus enter like fog climbing out of manholes.]

Voices [together]: We are a chorus that moves like water

Voice 1: Daytimes we drizzle over playgrounds

Voice 5: and down the common

Voice 6: We get into hills

Voices [together]: We soak through ground

Voice 1: drain through the water table

Voice 5: coming up again in butler sinks

Voice 2: and toilet bowls

Voice 6: At night we drip through holes in human dreams

Voice 1: tune through sleeping heads

Voice 3: like a radio through stations

Voice 6: In stone houses and the council flats

Voice 3: we seep like water Voice 1: watching dreams play out

Voice 6: across closed lids Voice 7: And why watch? 68

Voices [together]: What else is there to do?

Voice 2: There’s literally nothing else to do

Voice 1: but dribble through clean dreams of a vicar in his bed

Voice 6: or condense on long walls

Voice 5: in rooms above the sandwich factory

Voice 1: where men sleep two-to-a-pillow

Voice 5: dreaming Romanian dreams Voice 7: We watch

Voices [together]: and that’s all you need to know

Voice 6: And who is this asleep above the town

Voice 1: where the moor meets farmland

Voice 6: in a tent of wet nylon?

Voice 1: Their mind is quiet inside their skull

Voice 3: like the layer of cold water

Voice 7: at the bottom of a pond

Voice 5: What washes up on the shoreline of his dreams?

Voice 2: If you can call it a shoreline

Voice 7: Call it an edge then

Voice 1: Yes call it reeds

Voice 4: A name

Voice 1: What name?

Voice 4: Michael

Voice 5: Anything else?

Voice 4: a sister a daughter a kingdom Voice 2: coke tins crisp packets

Voice 4 [channelling Michael]: You know where you are with a mountain

Voice 1: What’s that? 69

Voice 4: All things can be measured, maintained

Voice 5: Shh, listen!

Voice 4: The trick to raising a girl is

Voice 5: Tell us Michael!

Voice 4: to treat them the same as a boy

Voice 6: Wait a second— Voice 2: What?

Voice 5: Play that bit again

Voice 6: Spool it back to its beginning

Voice 1: and let it Voice 4 [still channelling Michael]: Water wakes me. play Raindrops on nylon, dripping off the Douglas firs, Voice 8: Press your twanging the guy ropes. I eat breakfast in the tent face up to the glass flap. Sausages, a soft white roll, watch the magpies walls of Michael’s pick through the car park. You know where you are dream

with a mountain (I pack up the tent pegs, telescopic Voice 7: what do you see? poles, knee out the groundsheet the best I can). I’m Voice 1: A hand not interested in the high peak anymore. I take the shielding blue eyes

farm tracks up to where the fields give out to Voice 3: a man pressing rougher ground, a bit of gorse and then it’s red ferns out of a thicket of Horse Tails far as the horizon. I keep my map in a plastic wallet. I know the way, more or less, but in this rain the path’s half beck-bed and new streams cut in across Voice 5: His face the ferns. You can’t trust the sound of water. holds a day’s worth of grey stubble Voice 6: damp hair pushed back from his forehead Voice 5: body carrying its small belly out in front of itself Voice 6: snug under his jacket zip Voice 1: He presses out of a divot that marks the treeline Voice 3: his left leg swinging forward Voice 5: his right dragged to meet it Voice 6: swing and step Voice 5: swing and step

I’ve read that many maps, sometimes I think I see the contour lines. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five yards, a steep run of brown loops tailing off into the flat tops, the softer sedimentary rock worn off by ice and rain. It’s like reading, walking this valley. It’s like reading a book—proper, old history—right here trodden into the ground. Sheep keeping the grass low on the midden pits and earthworks, ironstone wearing through the soil and the magnetism keeping it all together. That’s the only thing that will save you in zero visibility. When the clouds come in (which they do) and the world is my hood, hands and gortex sleeves, I take out my compass and go way-point to

way-point. You can get anywhere you want like that. Voice 7: What’s he I go off the path, first thing, before other folk can be doing out on the moor bothered getting up. There’s a wood down there. An alone? old one behind the pines where the trees have beards

Voice 5: No mobile and the lichen grows huge like two-penny pieces on in his pocket the bark. Voice 6: no GPS watch

Voice 2: An old git with something to If you plan and have the right kit, most things can Voice 8: Observe this man prove be managed. This weather’s textbook. It’s no freak Voice 7: and moment storm, no bad luck, no iPhone that told you one Voice 8: Watch him thing and now here’s another. It’s just higher walk through woods pressure on the hills, warm air forced up the valley that line his dreams to make those huge, black-bottomed cumulonimbi. Voice 8: Watch him That silver crack, that sunlight behind the rain? I can speak to air

practically see the isobars. Look, there it is, coming Voice 7: words up the slope. An enormous invisible bouncing my spooling out of his breath back at me, smeared and small, reduced to mouth like tape

rain. Voice 5: that cool and harden in the damp Voice 7: What is inside

this tunnel of language?

Voice 8: Tap it—

Voice 7: Listen to where the hollows are Voice 1: under the surface of words

Voice 6: he fixes over his life as he walks Voice 7: Under his thin cotton base layer

Voice 3: and the skin that laps like a seabed

Voice 7: where his muscles used to be Voice 1: Look at the hot core of body he carries

Voice 6: up and out of this valley

Voice 1: wrapped in skin and Gortex

Voice 6: his buttocks and arms shrunk around the globe of his belly

Voice 5: with its coils of organs

Voice 8: Put your face up to the glass walls of his dream 71

Voice 7: watch it convulse

Voice 1: Watch the pocket of empty air he’s just walked through

Voice 5: the wet grass holding imprints of his boots

Voice 6: for a moment

Voice 3: before they release back

Voices [together]: into pure grey dream

[Lights down on town. Chorus depart like rain]

Act One Scene Two: Morning

[A room that looks out over the town. A bed in the centre of the room and a chair up-stage left turned towards the window. The sky in the window getting lighter like water diluting ink. An old woman in the chair, sleeping. The town stretches. Chorus enter like damp on bedsheets. Morning. Rain.]

Voice 1: Early morning we flush through storm drains

Voice 3: and down-pipes

Voice 5: Cling to porcelain loos

Voice 6: fog blue bedrooms like breath on glass

Voice 1: We lay on our backs Voice 3: and listen

Voice 7: The first humans are awake

Voice 6: farmers who dreamed of pulling on boots

Voice 5: wake and pull on mud-covered wellies

Voice 7: Small children turn over

Voice 2: A barista flicks fag ash behind bins

Voice 1: Some people conduct other people

Voice 3: like pipes carry sound

Voice 6: The old woman is like this

Voice 1: at night taxi drivers and foxes keep her awake

Voice 6: In the day

Voice 5: the whole wet town drains through her—

Voice 5 [channelling townspeople]: house prices

Voice 6 [channelling townspeople]: this bloody weather

Voice 5 [channelling townspeople]: the state of this government

Voice 1: grumbling inside her wrists

Voice 3: like damp gets into bones

Voice 5: This morning she is dozing in her chair

Voice 1: In her dream a cat she used to own pushes through the cat flap

Voice 5: steps out of her dream and circles her legs

Voice 6: sets to work washing the white fur around his paw

Voice 5: quite matter-of-factly Voice 7: the way ghosts do

Voice 8: And what about Michael?

Voice 5: Michael is still asleep

Voice 8: And inside his dreams?

Voice 1: Inside his dreams it’s early summer

Voice 6: he kneels on the springy lawn outside his house

Voice 5: It needs a good mow

Voice 6: but first he needs to sharpen the mower blade

Voice 1: Here he is bent over Voice 3: with his back to us

Voice 5: He is at the centre of a logical kingdom

Voice 6: garden hose neatly coiled

Voice 5: garage door freshly painted

Voice 1: hedge clipped at a clean bright angle

Voice 2: Sounds like Michael hasn’t got much else to do

Voice 5: A typical boomer

Voice 2: a marigolds and Neighbourhood-Watch loser

Voice 1: What else does he have?

Voice 4 [channelling Michael like a seismometer translates tremors into the Richter scale]: I stupidly Voice 3: Like all old men broke the lawnmower blade. Or rather, the blade has Voice 8: in his dream broken inside this chamber and got itself wedged. I Michael is alive in two places at once can’t get this stupid safety collar off. The clamp is fine. I can hear the catch inside click into place. I am having a nightmare because this stupid bloody guard is not fit Voice 5: Here he is kneeling on his lawn for purpose. I think I can feel two raised bevels in the plastic but there’s nothing to tell you what to do with Voice 6: pain flushing his kneecaps them. If I pull lightly on the trigger, inside the noise of the blade is like a boot heel on scree, cracked flints in Voice 1: trying to the gears. I haven’t been to a mountain in a long time. break into a No more tramping. No more diving off the path and machine keeping to the line of a hedge to get out into the fields. Voice 3: that’s not No nosing about in scree slopes for belemnites or meant to open wedges of slate that split under a chisel with a perfect black fern inside. The ground used to open itself to me 74 like that. Going into the mouth of a cave and following it down until it was too small to walk, crawling until it was too tight to keep going on my hands and knees. Breathing air no one had breathed for a very long time if at all. And now I can’t even get a removable cover off a damn lawnmower. How can it be for my safety if it won’t let the bloody thing work? Half the instructions are in Chinese and the other half in French. When did French become the default! Who decided that? It’s a sign of the times and it’s a sign of what’s going on with this government. All this compromise. All this giving away. I am a friendly person. I am happy to be part of a friendly nation. Friendly enough to let people learn our language. Friendly enough to let countries purchase our engineering. Our standards. Our systems of governing. Did you know India is the fourth largest economy and the biggest receiver of British aid? How did that happen? We don’t even have a space program anymore. We are part of the EU space program! This damn plastic collar is exactly the problem. My daughter, she’s always trying to teach me how these things work. A triangle on its side always means play. Two triangles fast-forward. Why not just write fast-forward? Just write what it is and let the damn thing be. She’s always asking me questions: Are you drinking water? Why are you still smoking? Were you a happy child? A happy child? Well, I had a perfectly normal childhood. I had a dog, played cricket, failed my eleven plus and did woodwork at the thicko school. But look where I’ve been. Look where I have taken myself. No education, Voice 4 [channelling Michael like a seismometer translates tremors into the Richter scale]: I stupidly broke the lawnmower blade. Or rather, the blade has broken inside this chamber and got itself wedged. I can’t get this stupid safety collar off. The clamp is fine. I can hear the catch inside click into place. I am having a nightmare because this stupid bloody guard is not fit for purpose. I think I can feel two raised bevels in the plastic but there’s nothing to tell you what to do with them. If I pull lightly on the trigger, inside the noise of the blade is like a boot heel on scree, cracked flints in the gears. I haven’t been to a mountain in a long time. Voice 6: His daughterNo more tramping. No more diving off the path and has told him this keeping to the line of a hedge to get out into the fields. Voice 2: repeatedly No nosing about in scree slopes for belemnites or

Voice 5: but he still wedges of slate that split under a chisel with a perfect grips the plastic black fern inside. The ground used to open itself to me Voice 6: tries to like that. Going into the mouth of a cave and following force it apart it down until it was too small to walk, crawling until it

was too tight to keep going on my hands and knees. Voice 1: It’s not a question of thrift Breathing air no one had breathed for a very long time if at all. And now I can’t even get a removable cover off Voice 5: It’s a question of principle a damn lawnmower. How can it be for my safety if it Voice 6: Look how it lights won’t let the bloody thing work? Half the instructions him from within are in Chinese and the other half in French. When did Voice 5: the difference French become the default! Who decided that? It’s a sign of the times and it’s a sign of what’s going on with Voice 6: between what he wants this government. All this compromise. All this giving Voice 5: and what the away. I am a friendly person. I am happy to be part of world offers a friendly nation. Friendly enough to let people learn Voice 1: ripping apart our language. Friendly enough to let countries purchase Voice 3: like a thick scab our engineering. Our standards. Our systems of from skin governing. Did you know India is the fourth largest economy and the biggest receiver of British aid? How did that happen? We don’t even have a space program Voice 7: Here is Michael anymore. We are part of the EU space program! This damn plastic collar is exactly the problem. My daughter, Voice 1: bent over a lawnmower she’s always trying to teach me how these things work. A triangle on its side always means play. Two triangles Voice 6: at the exact same time fast-forward. Why not just write fast-forward? Just Voice 3: somewhere write what it is and let the damn thing be. She’s always in the territory of asking me questions: Are you drinking water? Why are his adolescence you still smoking? Were you a happy child? A happy Voice 1: he child? Well, I had a perfectly normal childhood. I had a kneels on the dog, played cricket, failed my eleven plus and did side of a hill woodwork at the thicko school. But look where I’ve been. Look where I have taken myself. No education, Voice 8: This is not a memory no contacts, more often than not no dinner. I never had any safety guards. No plastic keeping my fingers safe but I got on with the job. And yes, I’ve lived one way Voice 7: there’s an entire mountainside and made sure she’s lived another. There’s no sadness Voice 8: alive inside in that. It’s just history. Sometimes, I think she’s afraid this man of the things that happened to me. But when you live Voice 5: who can’t up against it, you know who you are. I keep my fingers quite seem to away from the blade because I know what will happen catch hold Voice 6: of what’s in front of him

Voice 5: and when he touches the ground if my fingers slip. Isn’t that better? Isn’t that real? Not of his youth some safety label— the plastic, the EU, some set of Voice 6: watch how internationally-agreed symbols. It is the same blade it unbuckles doing the same job with all this nonsense they’ve put Voice 5: mud around it that won’t let me in. There are all these words eases apart around it. She has put all these questions around it. But Voice 1: gifts him it is the same simple thing at the centre it has always the perfect outline been. It’s what they’ve put around it that is the problem. of a fern cast in stone This stupid plastic collar that won’t let me unhook my own damn clip and blade.

Voice 7: The whole hillside of his adolescence Voice 6: held in a body that can’t grasp this collar Voice 5: and clip

Voice 1: It boils inside his body Voice 6: the difference between the past Voice 1: still alive inside him Voice 6: and the present Voice 1: a fury that pitches and foams

Voice 1: Look it spills out of his mouth

Voice 6: It scalds the ground

Voice 3: like hot water from a kettle

Voice 5: burning his own hands

Voice 1: splashes his daughter stood behind him

Voice 7: but each boiling drop

Voice 6: each moment of pain

Voice 1: is a way back into himself

Voice 2: back into the body

Voice 6: he was told

Voice 5: was his way into the world

Voice 1: the place where the whole world began

[Lights down on Michael. Lights down on town. Chorus disperse like steam]

Act One Scene Three: Rain

[The town in afternoon. A pub with a once blue carpet showing an Estonian stream of the game. In a road running off the High Street a woman parking her car, kids carrying in the Aldi shop. Dog walkers in the wet field throwing tennis balls from long plastic scoops. In the sandwich factory the afternoon shift spooning coleslaw onto buttered bread. Inside his house, an old man reading The Daily Mail. He shakes his head. He reaches for his tea. Chorus falling on windowpanes like heavy drizzle.]

Voice 1: Some days the sky is so heavy with grey linen

Voice 3: it’s hard to believe in the sun

Voice 6: Some days clouds unbutton themselves

Voice 5: over and over

Voice 6: across roof tiles and power lines

Voice 1: and we move so much like water

Voice 3: I begin to wonder if we are the rain

Voice 1: by which we mean Voice 2: it’s pissing it down

Voice 1: if we had skin we would be soaked to it

Voice 4 [stumbling like they’ve a bad headache]: Michael says there’s no such thing as bad weather just poor preparation

Voice 6: Well Michael Voice 2: lucky you Voice 6: to have found yourself

Voice 5: always on the right side of a raincoat

Voice 4 [Still stumbling]: Michael says luck doesn’t come into it

Voice 1: Here Voice 4 [All Michael now] Not one jot. Go outside on a day he goes again like today and look up at the sky: thick grey clouds horizon

Voice 2: like a to horizon, no wind in the trees, no wind to rip clouds apart and let the light down and what that means is drizzle all day pull-toy running down its string and if it’s going to drizzle all day you’ve got options because it will settle on wool but not soak it and if you’ve not got wool a light rain jacket or parka or even a bloody bin bag will Voice 6: not stopping keep you perfectly dry but you do need something other than for breath a hoody or T shirt and if you go out in one of those and get wet there’s a lesson there and you can take advantage of it or Voice 5: Why doesn’t he stop for breath? not. At home my daughter and I sit on a sofa each to watch

Voice 1: He doesn’t the news and one day there was a story about a holiday need to check he’s company collapsing and an interview with a woman outside been heard

Voice 6: just keeps speaking a boarded-up branch and the reporter asked her Are you

to the soaked air feeling worried about what might happen to your holiday and the

Voice 3: moving woman says Yes actually I am feeling quite worried about it all really Voice 7: I used his hands like he’s and then they cut back to the studio. Stop banging on about to think it was a signing to the deaf how you feel and do something about it! Get off your arse kind of weaving and bloody get out there! And my daughter said Dad! Voice 3: all this talking and I said What? Everyone’s gone mad. It’s all bonkers. old men do

Everyone’s gone Voice 7: a kind

of wax cloth too far in the other direction. Then they went back to the Voice 3: spoken headlines: the world is burning, a car company has put a into being in pubs car in space with a fake astronaut, footage from Syria and the Syria situation really made my blood boil because the first Voice 2: in front rooms shouting at TVs sign of trouble I would be out. And she said You Have

No Idea What You Would Do In That Situation but I do Voice 5: meant to cover and I know what she would do too because while she insists their body from rain

the world needs to be fair in her heart she’s a winner. She got Voice 6: when to live up and went out of the living room. in this town

Voice 1: is to live in All men want to be free. an aquarium of dirty water She went up to bed and then so did my wife and I sat up Voice 3: they can’t sleepless. I watched Question Time. Everything felt see beyond Voice 7: Look how disconnected. Everything felt wrong. They kept asking the close it sits to his wrong questions like Can you guarantee there will be no disruption body in medicines and some old man saying We Voice 6: He really Will Be Fine There Are Still Rabbits In The Fields and believes Apples In The Trees and blitz spirit but that’s not not what

Voice 5: all men this is about. I don’t actually even like the word Brexit. It’s are born in the too flashy. I can’t hear it without thinking of a Daily Mail same kingdom headline and a photo of a Sweaty MP in the back of a car

Voice 6: the body a How is this man from a cul-de-sac in Bournemouth going to knowable country survive on rabbits.

Voice 5: where each man is king Everything felt wrong and disconnected because what this is Voice 7: He has inducted really about is freedom. When my daughter graduated she said I Have Been So Lucky and I said Lucky? What’s it his daughter into this realm of the real got to do with luck. She worked like mad to get that degree but she said I’ve Been Very Privileged In How I Was Raised Voice 6: and hasn’t he been a generous ruler? And Where I Was Born and I had to stop her there because she was born exactly where I wanted her to be. There’s a 50- Voice 1: Outside all this mile ring around London and if you’re born in it you’re 8 fuss about gender times more likely to have a degree and 15 times more likely Voice 6: treating her the same as his sons

to be a home owner. That’s not unfair, it’s just a fact capital Voice 7: but when she cities will be richer and you can look at that fact and act walks through the world accordingly or not. I got up and out of what I was he’s given her born into and I chose to come down here and that kind of Voice 6: doesn’t it make it get up and go is what being British is all about and I refuse all seem real? to be ashamed of it. If you went to the cinema when I was a child you’d see it – people being proud of who they are: films with British soldiers and British women doing interesting things but now it’s either American super heroes or kitchen sink dramas about dreary people who never do 79 anything remotely worth watching. It’s a dilution. It’s a celebration of the average and I refuse to give way to the average when I’ve dragged myself out of it to be a home owner. That’s not unfair, it’s just a fact capital cities will be richer and you can look at that fact and act accordingly or not. I got up and out of what I was born into and I chose to come down here and that kind of get up and go is what being British is all about and I refuse to be ashamed of it. If you went to the cinema when I was a Voice 1: Look what it child you’d see it – people being proud of who they are: films does to the light with British soldiers and British women doing interesting Voice 6: it bounces things but now it’s either American super heroes or what little light the kitchen sink dramas about dreary people who never do valley holds anything remotely worth watching. It’s a dilution. It’s a Voice 5: back at him celebration of the average and I refuse to give way to the

Voice 7: This is the average when I’ve dragged myself out of it best chance he has at drying up any idea of luck And actually I don’t care if there are distribution problems

Voice 1: because luck and I don’t care if there are empty shelves because I would isn’t an inheritance rather have nothing than rags on my back and a stick to shake that will keep her safe than let these bastards win I actually remember empty shelves I actually remember being out on the hill all day and making a tea out of blackberries Voice 7: Look at or bilberries or berries of some sort I forget the exact ones. his body And it was because there was nothing at home and learning Voice 8: lift these strips of you could manage in a jumper if it was drizzling if you ate skin to see what’s your rasberries under the big tree and I wasn’t scared then underneath and I’m not scared now there’s no reason to be. And she’s wrapped up in this noise of news and Voice 6: Here nonsense that gets between her and the plain truth that each person is free to make what they want of life I made what I wanted out of my life and this is why people like us rise to the top like two corks straight Voice 5: and here

to the

Voice 8: where his bicep and thighs once were

Voice 5: are all her choices Voice 8: Watch Voice 6: when she moves through his world Voice 1: they twitch Voice 3: like muscle fibres

Voice 7: And he’s stood in the tent porch now

Voice 2: He’s like Frankenstein’s monster

Voice 6: stumbling out of the wet nylon Voice 5: dragging his right foot forward to meet the left Voice 1: stumbling out of his dreams

Voice 3: onto the moor

Voice 6: but look Voice 5: as he staggers past Voice 1: look at the places she’s refused him

Voice 6: all the choices she’s made

Voice 5: that say no to his world

Voice 1: It undoes the knots he’s tied around his bones

Voice 6: It undoes the little engines Voice 5: that drive his legs and arms Voice 6: forward

Voice 7: This skin of words he’s spoken into being

Voice 6: has kept him together

Voice 8: Watch him stumble to the bank-edge above the town now Voice 1: Watch words spilling out of the townspeople’s mouths

Voice 6: rise through the air Voice 3: like fog

Townspeople [together]: the will of the people!

Voice 1: Whole sentences drift past roof tiles and treetops

Voice 7: reach out and touch them

Voice 8: hold them in your hands

Townspeople [together]: a great union

Voice 6: Words can hold anything you like

Voice 1: ideas Voice 2: hot air

Townspeople [together]: with a history to be proud of!

Voice 7: anything that gives them weight enough

Voice 5: to chuck back and forth like bean bags

Voice 6: when you’re bored

Voice 2: or scared

Townspeople [together]: free to be fair and strong

Voice 1: But when they reach him Voice 6: out here on the moor Voice 5: watch what they do to his body Voice 1: They flush through his muscles and veins Voice 6: organs and nerves

Voice 7: making his whole self ring Voice 3: like a telephone call Voice 1: through an empty house Voice 6: and when the walls and ceilings of his body

Voice 3: shake like that Voice 5: for the first time in years Voice 1: isn’t it a homecoming? Voice 7: A return to his body Voice 6: which yes Voice 5: is a kind of truth Voice 2: Oh Michael Voice 1: living with words instead of skin Voice 6: a country instead of an arm Voice 5: dragging your right foot forward Voice 1: to meet words that bring you back to yourself

Voice 5: What must to be yourself Voice 1: though this skin you made Voice 6: can’t seem to keep out the rain Voice 5: can’t keep out a chorus who move Voice 3: like rain Voice 7: A soaked man Voices [together]: insisting his dampness is a choice

[Lights down on chorus. Lights down on town. Lights down on Michael.]

Entr’acte

[Sounds of rain falling, stage in blackout. Spotlight up on Michael down-stage left. Michael’s skin of words streaming out behind him in the wind. Some muscles missing. Some words ringing in his body like a telephone in an empty hall. Michael blinking and shielding his eyes as he looks into the audience.]

Michael:

I didn’t know how to love my sons, it was like trying to hold a plastic bag of water, I’d go to plug one small rip and the whole thing would collapse, I don’t know what made me afraid.

She took the violence out of me the way lightning rods draw damage from a storm, the things she got up to— being cheeky to me, getting drunk, coming back shoes in her hands.

She came to the home when mum died, it’s astonishing to watch your child pass exams, learn to drive, take your phone from you and say No, Dad. How do you feel?

Children are the most unreal real thing.

Dear god tell me it doesn’t warp the metal when it takes lightning from a storm.

[Michael blinking. Lights down. Rain sounds grow louder.]

Act Two Scene One: Evening

[A front room in early evening, a TV on in the corner. Woman on the sofa on her laptop. Teenager on the other sofa eating pasta from a bowl. Upstairs another teenager on his Xbox enters the lobby for a COD 4 Battle Royale. His friend comes online. The internet running like roots through the town carrying his smile through armoured cables. The town contracts. The town expands. The town, sick of waiting, turns over.]

[Chorus enter like low hanging cloud]

Voices [together]: There are worse things than being a chorus that moves

Voice 3: like water

Voices [together]: Sometimes we get under collars of raincoats

Voice 5: and ride the bus into town

Voice 6: hidden in nostrils and lungs

Voice 1: Yes there are worse things

Voice 6: than what rises from this town

Voice 1: worse things than a townspeople

Voice 6: dipping their bodies into a stream of language

Voice 1: to make the rooms of their life crash like cymbals

Voice 6: speak themselves real with their fingers in their ears

Voice 7: There are worse things than ghosts

Voice 8: who get stuck up here like hefted ewes

Voice 7: men who don’t know they’re dead

Voice 1: Michael was always ruled by a consistent logic

Voice 6: he used his body and it grew tired

Voice 5: so he slept

Voice 6: When he was hungry he ate

Voice 1: and when his body was injured

Voice 6: on some rock or rough fence post

Voice 5: he packed the graze or flap of skin with Germolene

Voice 1: left his body to knit itself

Voice 5: back into one whole piece

Voice 7: Injury was something that happened from without

Voice 8: Other sorts of damage

Voice 7: kidney stones fibroids cancer

Voice 8: seemed faintly absurd

Voice 7: a peculiar thing to choose to do

Voice 1: Sometimes I feel sorriest for men

Voice 6: living on the rise of their bodies

Voice 1: believing they’re permanent and real

Voice 7: trying to get back to the part of them

Voice 8: alive thirty forty years ago

Voice 7: bending to fix an unfixable mower

Voice 8: that no longer exits

Voice 7: because fury feels so much like youth

Voice 1: I feel sorry for Michael

Voice 6: organising love like it’s a logical process

Voice 5: a question of cause and effect

Voice 6: like the engine in a car

Voice 5: in a garage where his wife and bored children

Voice 6: have to stand around

Voice 1: nodding and smiling to his monologue of fixing

Voice 7: living quiet lives

Voice 8: outside the bright centre of attention

Voice 7: where he worked alone

Voice 2: It must have been impossible to hear anything

Voice 6: as he climbed from pistons into:

Voice 4: these damn spark plugs these bloody foreign cars what this country needs

Voice 6: in three easy steps

Voice 1: Almost impossible to hear

Voice 6: over the sound of his muscles ringing like telephone calls

Voice 1: a dark spot of cells

Voice 6: nestled in the loop of his guts

Voice 5: dividing and doubling

Voice 7: Why bother with the quiet column of your body

Voice 8: when you can flush it with borrowed sound

Voice 7: His daughter does it too look

Voice 1: here she is fifty miles to the West in a big northern city

Voice 6: where they hang red lanterns in trees for Chinese New Year

Voice 1: She slots her body into a protest

Voice 6: The crowd pitches and foams

Voice 1: shouts slogans

Voice 6: carries funny signs

Voice 8: What does she want?

Voice 6: Who has time to answer this question?

Voice 1: Who has time for questions at all

Voice 6: when there is all this energy

Voice 1: running through her body

Voice 5: what some people call virtue

Voice 6: some people fury

Voice 1: lighting her up

Voice 5: like a mobile phone

Voice 7: It feels like a path through

Voice 8: feels like truth

Voice 7: and is

Voice 8: although not in the way she expects

Voice 1: Look here is Michael’s sister now

Voice 6: on the other side of the town

Voice 5: sat at her dining room table

Sylvia [writing]: … if you’re lucky you fall quickly into the ruins of your body. As my husband left slowly (it took years) it broke me open like the back of a spoon on an egg, the pain of no longer being beautiful, no longer being young undoing my breasts and hair until I had nothing left to keep me up. I fell into being a person again. Sat on the floor of my life like a child, a bit fat and quite drunk on my own expensive wine, totally free from being a creature that’s born the moment it’s seen… [At the desk Sylvia smiling and taking a sip of wine]

Voice 1: Michael’s daughter has felt this

Voice 5: moving about in the roots of herself

Voice 6: felt herself begin to fall out of girlhood

Voice 1: slipping her body into a protest crowd

Voice 7: or the night her grandma died

Voice 8: I hold it out to you this moment of falling

Voice 6: Here are Michael and his daughter driving all night to get home

Voice 5: They arrive at 4am and sit in the car

Voice 7: A full moon is setting over the house

Voice 1: Tiredness washes through them

Voice 6: no space for anything else

Voice 5: not sadness not love Voice 7: no language or history

Voice 1: only the fact of two exhausted bodies

Voice 6: sharing the same carful of air

Voice 7: There are moments inside us the dead never leave

Voice 8: but stay waiting to be needed

Voice 6: Maybe we make all this noise Voice 7: all this fixing and fury

Voice 5: because it’s the only thing

Voice 6: that can hold these silences

Voice 5: The dearest things in our life

Voice 1: though we are not quite sure they really did happen

Voice 8: I hold it out to you this moment in the car

Voice 1: before they sigh and undo their seatbelts

Voice 6: open their doors and climb back into their lives

Voice 5: dipping their bodies into streams of words

Voice 6: that flow out from his newspaper her Netflix specials

Voice 1: The stories they told themselves

Voice 6: and told about each other

Voice 5: living their lives back to back

[Chorus exit like water draining through old pipes. Lights fade on the car centre-stage. Blackout. Curtain.]

Trauma and Representation in Three Irish Novels

Introduction

In an interview with Stephanie Boland in 2016, when asked why so many Irish writers had been shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction, the novelist Eimear

McBride speculated that it was most likely something to do with ‘Language I suppose.’1 For

McBride, interesting things starts to happen when the ‘skin’ of the English prose novel is broken and reworked in order to accommodate ‘the skeleton of Irish.’2 While speaking explicitly about the Irish language in this interview, McBride’s comments throw light on a wider tradition of formal innovation by Irish novelists.

In his seminal study The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt posited that the novel has its origins in eighteenth century England. Other critics, such as Steven Moore, have traced the novel tradition back to much earlier, experimental and non-anglophone texts such as Don

Quixote and The Tale of Genji.3 Watt, however, proposed that what made his selection of eighteenth century English texts the first ‘true’ novels was their ‘formal realism’.4 Organising his argument around a study of works by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry

Fielding, Watt argued that this realism was characterised by a desire to express the interior lives of ‘ordinary individuals’ within their everyday social and historical contexts.5 It was interested in presenting the ‘individuality’ of characters, the details of the ‘times and places’ that gave rise to these characters’ actions and made use of a prose style where language was

‘largely referential’.6 The later realist novels of the nineteenth century were similarly

1 Stephanie Boland, ‘Eimear McBride: “From a Few Male Critics I Heard the Sound of Petrified Gonads Retracting in Distaste”’, The New Statesman, 4 November 2016, n.p. [accessed 7 November 2018] 2 Ibid. 3 Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 4–5. 4 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), p. 32. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

90 interested in using formal technique in service ‘of a profoundly serious interest in life.’7 The novels of George Eliot, George Meredith, Henry James and the other realist novelists of the nineteenth century used language and form as a ‘transparent medium’ to depict the ‘real’ lives of ordinary people.8 Indeed, writing in 1884, James used the metaphor of the ‘mirror’ to describe the ideal mimetic relationship between fiction and real life, arguing that the

‘supreme virtue of the novel’ was its ability to function as a form that can faithfully reflect the ‘real’ world.9 To achieve this effect of verisimilitude, James and his contemporaries often made use of a number of formal techniques. Their realism tended to pay great attention to material detail, made use of linear narratives driven by plot and tended to privilege particular narrative positions. These narrative perspectives, particularly the first person and third person omniscient modes, were used to glean deep insights into characters’ motivations, thoughts and feelings. Accordingly, the realist novel has been often posited as a ‘democratic’ literary form, its conventions ideally suited to representing the interior life of individuals.10

Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of the link between ‘surveillance and power’, critics such as Marina MacKay have questioned the ‘democratic’ nature of nineteenth century realism.11 MacKay argues that the realist novel’s formal techniques, particularly its ‘all- encompassing’ social range and ‘all-knowing’ narrators, in many ways mimic the idea of the state as an centralised site of knowledge and therefore of power.12 Moreover, while the realist novel often sought to depict in great detail the lives of a broad spectrum of citizens, its narrators were very often male, middle-class, Protestant and English. Rather than a form calibrated to represent some essential aspect of human character then, the nineteenth century realist novel’s formal conventions instead evolved to express the interior experience

7 F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 28. 8 Marina Mackay, The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 23. 9 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Myth and Method, Modern Theories of Fiction, ed. by James E. Miller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 14. 10 Nancy Ruttenburg, ‘Introduction: Is the Novel Democratic?’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 47.1 (2014), p. 3. 11 Mackay, Cambridge Introduction to the Novel, p. 13. 12 Ibid., p. 14.

91 of narrators who sat within a particular history, language and worldview. While nineteenth century realism has been followed by subsequent literary movements such as modernism and postmodernism, Catherine Belsley argues that realist conventions still remain the

‘dominant popular mode’ in contemporary fiction.13 Its trace remains visible, she insists, even where writers have attempted to move away from its conventions. For Christine van

Boheemen, to attempt to write about experiences that sit outside the worldview coded into the realist legacy, is very often to encounter a profound mismatch of content and form. This is particularly true for Irish novelists, who have very often faced a profound ‘disjuncture’ between the lived reality of Irish experience and the modes of narrative expression available to them within the novel tradition.14 To return to McBride’s ideas about the success of

Ireland’s prize-winning writers then, it is not simply a question of having to break the linguistic ‘skin’ of the English to accommodate the ‘skeleton’ of the Irish language.15 It is also a question of how to rework the novel’s formal features, long coded with specific ideas about history, society and language, in order to express Irish experience itself.

In this thesis, I analyse how Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), Anne

Enright’s The Gathering (2007) and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) each rework the novel form in order to accommodate their respective ideas about Irish history, experience and subjectivity. In doing so, I argue that the novels participate in a formal tradition initiated by James Joyce. Born in 1882, Joyce published his increasingly experimental novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans

Wake (1939) against a backdrop of profound literary and political change. In their book

Modernism: a Guide to European Literature, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane posit that in early twentieth century continental Europe, the ‘cataclysmic upheavals of culture’

13 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 2003), p. 67. 14 Christine van Boheemen, ‘The Trauma of Irishness; or Literature as Material Cultural Memory in Joyce’, Configurations, 7.2 (1999), 247–66 (p. 248). 15 Boland, ‘Eimear McBride’, n.p.

92 represented by changing ideas about science, industrialisation and geo-political conflict left the realist mode ‘impossible to countenance’.16 While the nineteenth century realist novel often paid close attention to changing social and material conditions, it usually did so through language that was ‘largely referential’ rather than used for its own rhetorical sake.17

By way of contrast, European literary modernism instead began to look ‘inwards’ towards

‘form and language’ in order to engage with the ‘changing material circumstances’ in which literary texts were created and read.18 Echoing this idea, in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw

Weaver in 1926, Joyce posited that human experience could not be accurately rendered through the formal strategies of ‘wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot’ associated with the realist mode.19 Instead, Joyce had begun to develop a stream-of- consciousness style, to depart from grammatically ‘complete’ language and to increasingly make use of non-linear narrative structures in his fiction.

Living in continental Europe since 1904, Joyce’s experimental style can be situated within the European modernist movement and the upheavals of society, politics and culture to which it responded. However, his fiction has also been read through the lens of the political and artistic changes that were happening in Ireland. In 1921, the Anglo-Irish treaty established the Irish Free State, bringing about an end to the War of Independence.

Running alongside this armed conflict, Ireland’s writers and artists had long been engaged in a cultural battle to establish a ‘brand new national identity’ for the nation.20 Since the 1800s, writers of the Irish Literary Revival had looked back to Ireland’s Gaelic-speaking literary heritage to help formulate this identity. However, for writer and critic Seamus Deane, the

16 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’’, in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. by Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 19–55 (p. 19). 17 Mackay, Cambridge Introduction to the Novel, p. 13. 18 Jeff Wallace, ‘Modernists on the Art of Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. by Morag Shiach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 15–31 (p. 15). 19 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce Volume III, ed. by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 146. 20 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 333.

93 danger of Nationalist art is that, conditioned by colonial discourse, it often risks becoming a

‘copy of that by which it felt itself oppressed’.21 Anticipating Deane’s analysis, looking backwards to an idealised and mythic age, writers of the Revival often recycled ‘old imperialist mechanisms’ of ‘inheritance and nostalgia’ in order to establish Irish identity.22

Joyce, however, rejected this backwards-looking gaze. He instead focused on how to represent human consciousness itself, pursuing a ‘National idea’ not through nostalgia but

‘by means of a renovated style’.23 Through his experimental modernism, Joyce sought to better represent Irish experience by using formal strategies that paid attention to the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on the Irish subject. Breaking and remaking the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Joyce took a form coded with the ideologies of the dominant colonial centre and reinvigorated it. He did so in order to better represent the interior life of the ‘modern’ Irish subject, his innovations grappling with the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on Irish subjectivity. In this thesis, I argue that Reading in the Dark, The Gathering and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing all take this Joycean pattern of innovation as their common foundation. While each novel is distinct, through an analysis of how each text negotiates the traumatic consequences of history, language and form, I will posit that like Joyce they all use innovative formal strategies to enact the experience of traumatic histories that are deeply complex, difficult to retrieve in language and always left unresolved.

In order to advance my argument that the three novels by Deane, Enright and

McBride all participate in a formal tradition initiated by Joyce, I will posit that each text can be read as a trauma novel. Robert Garratt has argued that what identifies a trauma novel is

21 Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 3–20 (p. 8). 22 Fintan O’Toole, ‘Going West: The Country Versus the City in Irish Writing’, The Crane Bag, 9.2 (1985), 111–16 (p. 113). 23 Ruth Gilligan, ‘Eimear McBride’s Ireland: A Case for Periodisation and the Dangers of Marketing Modernism’, English Studies, 99.7 (2018), 775–92 (p.782).

94 that rather than ‘objectifying’ traumatic experiences to determine plot and character within a

‘conventional’ narrative structure, in a trauma novel the traumatic event’s impact on subjectivity and its consequences for form are as important as the event itself.24 Building on

Garratt’s theorisation, I will argue that these selected texts all use innovative formal strategies in order to express the traumatic impact of history and discourse on the Irish subject. To pursue this line of analysis, I will begin by clarifying the model of trauma I will use throughout this thesis. In this introductory chapter, drawing on the work of Cathy Caruth, I will propose that ‘trauma’ can be defined most usefully through its symptoms. Traumatic events overwhelm an individual’s ability to process experience into healthy narrative memory so that, unprocessed as it occurs, a traumatic event often only manifests belatedly as an unknown past that comes to ‘possess’ the life of the traumatised victim.25 Having clarified what trauma is, I will then outline the consequences it holds for representation and form. Trauma, I will propose, disturbs fixed categories of past and present, confounds the usual operation of knowledge and nescience and in doing so complicates the ideas of presence and absence that language itself depends upon.

For Anne Whitehead, because of the consequences trauma holds for time, knowledge and language, if it is to be ‘at all susceptible to narrative formulation’ it will always require innovative literary strategies.26 Building on Whitehead’s position, in this introductory chapter

I will also outline how Joyce’s formal innovations enact the experience of Irish colonial history and discourse as a traumatic ‘nightmare’ from which the subject cannot ‘awake.’27 Through an analysis of his novels’ traumatic energies, I will posit that Joyce enacts an experience of Irish life where the past continues to warp and control the novels’ ‘present’. In particular, I will

24 Robert Garratt, Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 5. 25 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 4. 26 Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 6. 27 James Joyce, Ulysses (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2010), p. 32. All future references will be incorporated in the text.

95 explore how in Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man language, coded with the dominant ideologies of the colonial centre, controls the models of history, identity and expression available to protagonist Stephen Dedalus. However, while the ongoing legacy of colonialism is an inescapable ‘nightmare’ for his characters, I will propose that as a writer

Joyce took this crisis of language and history and transformed it into formal plenitude. I will propose that in his increasingly experimental texts Joyce used innovative formal strategies to frustrate any readerly or broader cultural desire for catharsis, resolution and answers. In doing so, I will argue that Joyce was able to express the ongoing traumatic consequences of colonial history and discourse for the Irish subject. To support this argument, my analysis will explore how the issues of expression experienced by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses are coded into the formal strategies of Finnegans Wake, with particular reference to the novel’s treatment of language and time.

Having established how the increasingly experimental novels of Joyce represent an attempt to better map the traumatic impact of Ireland’s colonial past on its present, I will then move on to outlining how my selected texts all take this pattern of innovation as their common foundation. In my first chapter, I will explore ideas of transgenerational trauma in

Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark. Published in 1996, Reading in the Dark is set in the border city of Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Following its unnamed protagonist from childhood to early adulthood, over the course of the novel the narrator attempts to uncover his family’s occluded

Republican past. The novel’s coming-of-age narrative focuses on the boy’s struggle to determine what happened to his paternal uncle Eddie who disappeared during a shoot-out between the IRA and the police in the 1920s. I will argue that as a quasi-detective story, the novel installs a clear linear narrative trajectory. However, this sense of forward momentum is always interrupted by the recursive past. I will suggest that what results is a tension between forward momentum and cyclicality that aligns the novel with the Joycean tradition.

I will argue that like the novels of Joyce, while the formal features of Deane’s novel might engineer a desire for closure, solutions or answers, the text sets up this desire only to frustrate it. In doing so, my analysis will suggest that the text foregrounds the idea that

Northern Ireland’s antithetical sectarian identities and unresolved histories cannot be easily laid to rest. I will instead suggest that the text posits a traumatic model of history where the past continues to warp and poison Northern Ireland’s ‘present’.

After investigating ideas of transgenerational trauma in Reading in the Dark, in my second chapter I will turn my attention to the treatment of Ireland’s ongoing history of misogyny in Anne Enright’s The Gathering. Published almost a decade after Reading in the

Dark, Enright’s 2007 novel is set in Dublin in the mid-1990s during the period of massive economic growth known as The Celtic Tiger. The novel follows its protagonist Veronica

Hegarty over an uncertain period of months following the suicide of her younger brother

Liam. Catalysed by his death, Veronica struggles to recover a history in which to situate her brother’s alcoholism and suicide, trying to give narrative shape to the sexual abuse that she believes her brother experienced when the pair were sent to stay with their grandparents as children. Through an analysis of the role of the traumatised body in this narrative, I will argue that the novel enacts a traumatic history of misogyny that is forcefully felt in the present and yet always hedged in doubt. I will posit the traumatised body as an important site of hidden somatic memories for Veronica but also argue that it plays a crucial role in formal strategies that draw attention to the way in which the traumatic past is still ongoing within her present. My discussion will contend that through this fractured narrative, the text opens up a hidden history of abuse that is not only personal but national in its reach. In doing so, I’ll argue that the novel’s treatment of the traumatised body aligns the text with the Joycean tradition. My analysis will contend that the text’s formal features eschew any idea of resolution or answers to instead foreground the way that Ireland’s history of misogyny is still ongoing within the novel’s Celtic Tiger present.

In order to bring my thesis to its conclusion, in my fourth chapter I will analyse

Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Published in 2013, the novel tells the story of the unnamed titular ‘Girl’ as she grows from pre-natal consciousness through to her eventual suicide by drowning as a young adult. Along the way, the novel details the girl’s difficult childhood within a rural, Evangelical Catholic family, her rape by her uncle as a young teenager and the chaotic sexuality that develops in its wake, as well as her brother’s eventual death from a brain tumour. For critics such as Michael Gorra, when McBride’s novel was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2013, the novelist was often lauded as the direct inheritor of Joyce’s modernism.28 In particular, critics drew attention to the similarities between Ulysses and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, noting how both texts depart from the linear English sentence in order to express the interior life of the subject. In my analysis, however, I will argue that while Joyce and McBride are similar on level of sentence and structure, McBride’s text recalibrates Joyce’s style to enact the traumatic experience of

Irish girlhood. Paying attention to the novel’s treatment of narrative voice, I’ll argue that the text doesn’t simply depict the girl’s difficult life but through its experimental impressionism compels the reader into an intimate experience of her damage. In doing so, I will suggest the novel foregrounds the traumatic and ongoing consequences of Ireland’s misogynistic

Catholic culture. My discussion will conclude that, echoing the Joycean project of formal innovation, the novel enacts a history of misogyny that is not only ongoing but inescapable for the novel’s nameless protagonist.

In this thesis I will make the case that as trauma novels, my three selected texts participate in a formal tradition initiated by Joyce. I will argue that while Reading in the Dark,

The Gathering and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing are very different, like Joyce they use innovative formal strategies to represent Irish experience and subjectivity. I will posit that in

28 Michael Gorra, ‘Eimear McBride’s Toolkit’, The Times Literary Supplement, 2016 [accessed 8 October 2018].

98 doing so, the texts enact a model of Irish history that is ‘traumatic’ in the way that the past continues to control the life of the subject in the present. In Reading in the Dark, I will outline how a structural tension between the novel’s forward momentum and the recursivity of the traumatic past draws attention to the ongoing consequences of colonisation in Northern

Ireland’s unresolved histories and incompatible identities. In my analysis of The Gathering, I will posit that the traumatised body becomes a key formal strategy in expressing a history of misogyny that is forcefully felt in the novel’s Celtic Tiger present and yet always hedged in doubt. Finally, in my analysis of Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, I will contend that the novel’s treatment of narrative voice demands the reader enter into an intimate encounter with traumatic Irish girlhood that is cyclical and inescapable. While each novel is different, my analysis will argue that their diverse formal strategies all foreground the way that for the Irish subject the traumatic past is ongoing and unresolved within the

‘present’. To advance this argument, in the remainder of this introductory chapter I will now outline the model of trauma I will use throughout this thesis and its consequences for representation, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Trauma and Representation

One useful point of origin for contemporary theories of trauma, is the inclusion of

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the third edition of The American Psychiatric

Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980. The inclusion of PTSD marked a shift in ideas about trauma, away from the Freudian origins of psychoanalysis that posit all trauma is the result of universal childhood sexual experience, to

‘classificatory templates’ that situate psychic disorders within ‘neuro-biological, organic

99 illnesses’.29 Building on this new clinical position, in her book Trauma: Exploration in Memory

Caruth argues that to live with PTSD is to live in an everyday reality ‘possessed’ by

‘repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours […] often accompanied by a numbing and sometimes an increased arousal to and avoidance of stimuli’ recalling a traumatic event.’30 Manifesting in contradictory ways and along an erratic timescale, what united the symptoms of PTSD into an identifiable pathology was their relationship to healthy human coping mechanisms overwhelmed by an extraordinary and first-hand experience of ‘a physical threat to the integrity of the self.’31 While this pattern of symptoms would remain largely unchanged in successive editions of the DSM, precisely who could be diagnosed with PTSD and why expanded. In later editions, diagnoses could be made in

‘secondary victims’ such as caregivers, first responders and witnesses but also in those who face challenges that are ‘in a statistical sense’ quite normal.32 While trauma can result from a single catastrophic event, the attrition of ‘continuing patterns of abuse’ as well as the constant low-level ‘stress and humiliation’ associated with the everyday experiences of women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ communities are equally able to overwhelm an individual’s coping mechanisms, resulting in traumatisation through chronic means.33

Spearheaded by Caruth, a symptoms-based pathology therefore began to emerge, moving away from diagnoses focused on a personal encounter with a traumatic event, instead emphasising an inclusive aetiology that could encompass a broad spectrum of patients and experiences.34

29 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), p. 273. 30 Caruth, Trauma, p. 4. 31 DSM III, p. 273. 32 Laura Brown, ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 100–112 (p. 103). 33 Ruth Leys, Trauma: a Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 6. 34 Caruth, Trauma, p. 3.

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As trauma emerged as a key way of thinking about psychic disorders in the mid-

1990s, its trace also became increasingly visible across a diverse range of cultural spheres. Its narratives topped bestseller lists and began to fill academic papers.35 Its energies inflected public discourse, not only in the tribunals, reports and enquiries that came to constitute a significant part of the life of many civil states, but also informing media representations of culture more generally. Trauma began to emerge as a way of thinking about life itself in the

‘advanced industrial world’.36 Indeed, for Caruth, in the ‘catastrophic age’ of the late twentieth century and beyond, trauma has become a key structuring principal of experience and subjectivity.37 Trauma is therefore not only a psychological concept with which to understand PTSD, but a catalyst for new ways of thinking about time, memory and authority in contemporary culture.

Despite the dominance of trauma as a key cultural paradigm, it nonetheless remains controversial when used as a frame to explore literary texts. The psychiatrists Bessel van der

Kolk and Onno van der Hart argue, drawing on the work of Pierre Janet, that ‘memory’ is

‘the central organizing apparatus of the mind.’38 It ‘categorises and integrates’ all aspects of experience into ever-enlarging and flexible ‘schemes and categories’ of meaning, understanding and prediction.39 A great deal of this work is automatic, with familiar and expected experiences quickly assimilated into the existing knowledge base. However, extreme events are ‘stored differently’.40 At the moment of trauma the individual

‘disassociates’ so that not really present, the traumatic event is not ‘assimilated or experienced fully at the time’.41 The source of trauma comes to exist only through its

35 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 2. 36 Ibid. 37 Caruth, Trauma, p. 11. 38 Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past: the Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 159. 39 van der Kolk and van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past’, p. 60 40 Pierre Janet, Psychological Healing: a Historical and Clinical Study (London and New York: G. Allen & Unwin, 1925), p. 660. 41 Caruth, Trauma, p. 4.

101 absence, the mind unable to assimilate the event into normal memory, leaving it suspended as a traumatic memory that only manifests belatedly in its ‘repeated possession of the one who experiences it.’42 To be traumatised is to live a ‘precisely literal’ experience where an uncertain past haunts the present, the victim possessed by an image or event that both does and does not exist.43 Irene Visser argues that within this context, narrative can offer the traumatised victim a ‘recuperative and empowering’ path forward.44 While the experience of trauma is an experience of contradiction, where felt force and an absence of knowledge plague the victim in equal measure, the traumatised victim can nonetheless be helped to

‘speak of the unspeakable’.45 Giving narrative shape to the aporetic past allows it to be drawn into the textual present, alleviating the pattern of symptoms that plague the victim. In clinical cases then, drawing this ‘enigmatic core’ of the occluded past into an ‘organised, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and historical content’ can have significant therapeutic benefits.46 However, as Whitehead argues, in fiction any attempt to narrate the traumatic past always risks coming up against the ‘collapse of understanding’ that lies at the heart of traumatic experience.47 To speak meaningfully about trauma requires a discourse able to express the absence that lies at its core and narrative forms able to contain its

‘unassimilated, inchoate’ nature.48 Trauma therefore emerges as a representational paradox.

By attempting to express its absences in the referentiality of language, the traumatised subject risks entering into a formal double-bind, calling into question the possibility of narrative even as it is asserted.

42 Caruth, Trauma, p. 4. 43 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 44 Irene Visser, ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47.3 (2011), 270–82 (p. 271). 45 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: the Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. 179. 46 Ibid., p. 177. 47 Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, p. 5. 48 Ivor Browne, ‘Psychological Trauma, or Unexperienced Experience’, Re-Vision Journal, 12.4 (1990), 21–34 (p. 27).

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Despite the paradoxical nature of trauma, many novelists have nonetheless attempted to grapple with the challenge it poses to conventional representational strategies.

For Robert Garratt, in what he terms ‘trauma novels’, the traumatic event’s impact on subjectivity and its consequences for form have increasingly become as important as the event itself.49 Drawing on Caruth’s idea of traumatic memory, he posits that in trauma novels protagonists are ‘permanently attached’ to the past, unable to come to ‘know’ it or move beyond it, their lives becoming a medium through which history repeats over and over.50 While the resulting textual ‘neurosis’ is an effective formal strategy for exploring the personal experience of trauma, it is also an ideal approach when attempting to explore how the historical past has ‘gnawed’ at the public and political present in Ireland.51 Indeed, as

David Lloyd suggests, the ongoing consequences of Ireland’s colonial past can be productively framed by ideas of trauma. Referencing Judith Herman’s idea of ‘the atrocity’ as trauma deliberately inflicted by a human on another human, Lloyd characterises colonisation as a ‘violent intrusion’ that forces the colonised subject into a position of ‘utter objectification’ that ‘annihilates the person as subject or agent.’52 Irish history is littered with acute moments of colonial encounter between colonised and coloniser. These instances of colonial violence can be mapped through the historical objects of massacre and conquest that constitute relations between Ireland and the English colonial centre. However, a further layer of psychic violence is also visible in the laws and prevailing ideologies that supported and legitimised these historical events. While colonial action is constituted by violence, it is also at work in the discourse and ideology that justifies it. Colonisation can only be seen as

‘complete’ when the coloniser’s legitimising ideologies and discourses have been fully absorbed into the mind of the colonial subject, no longer needing to be imposed by the

49 Garratt, Trauma and History, p. 5. 50 Ibid., p. 3. 51 Ibid. 52 David Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, Interventions, 2.2 (2000), 212–28 (p. 214).

103 colonial centre through force but written into the public sphere as ‘common sense’ codes that regulate behaviour.53 In colonial and post-colonial contexts, art and culture play an important role in this ideological supremacy. Situating the nineteenth century realist novel within this context, its narratives and the way that they unfold in space and time can be seen as reinforcing the middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant and English ideas of progress and cultural superiority that regulate colonial life. For van Boheemen, to try and write about

Irish experience and history in the novel form is to risk entering into an English colonial discourse which, while it is often the Irish subject’s mother tongue, always risks positioning the subject as other.54 The subject’s entry into language becomes a ‘disruptive and violently fracturing event, splitting the body from discourse […] initiating an endlessly repeated attempt to arrive at signification of itself.’55 The question of how to represent trauma therefore takes on an additional layer of complexity in colonial and post-colonial contexts. It is not only a question of how to represent the ‘collapse of understanding’ at the heart of trauma in language but how to do so in forms that always risk interpolating the Irish subject as other.56

James Joyce, the ‘Nightmare’ of History and the Hibernicisation of the Novel

For van Boheemen, nowhere is the tension between Irish experience and the forms of representation available to the Irish subject more keenly felt than in the novels of James

Joyce. Indeed, Joyce himself was acutely aware of this traumatic disjuncture. Lecturing on the Famine-poet James Clarence Mangan in 1902, while Joyce praised the poet’s technical abilities he lamented the extent to which Mangan was plagued by a national ‘history’ that

53 Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, p. 215. 54 van Boheemen, ‘The Trauma of Irishness’, p. 248. 55 Ibid., p. 252. 56 Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, p. 5.

104 enclosed him ‘so straightly that even his fiery moments do not set him free from it’.57 What

Joyce lamented in Mangan’s poetry was his pathological mourning of historical objects at the expense of addressing the ‘greater injustices’ visited upon Ireland by its ‘despoilers.’58

Mangan’s grief, he insisted, never lamented a loss deeper than ‘the loss of plaids and ornaments’, participating in an inherited ‘tradition’ of ‘narrow and hysterical nationality’.59

For Seamus Deane, the danger of Nationalist art and cultural critique is that, conditioned by colonial discourse, it risks becoming a ‘copy of that by which it felt itself oppressed’.60

Alternative and indigenous forms of expression and analysis are very often either simply erased or transformed into nostalgia. Anticipating Deane’s analysis, locked in cycles of representation that looked backwards in an attempt to formulate discourses of Irishness,

Mangan’s poems asserted a readymade subjectivity inflected by the very power relations of coloniser and colonised he sought to move beyond. For the writer who tries to assert a poetics beyond the limitations imposed by colonial discourse then, they often cannot help but reassert the very ideologies they seek to escape as they are coded into the only modes of expression available to the colonial subject.

While the tension between Irish experience and expression are a lyric problem in

Mangan’s poetry, it is also an issue that is repeatedly foregrounded in Joyce’s second novel

Ulysses. First published in its entirety in 1922, Ulysses tells the story of a single day in the life of its protagonists Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Rich in allusion and written in a number of styles from stream-of-consciousness monologue to play script and musical notation, the novel follows its characters as they move around Dublin on June 16th, drawing on the structure of the epic poem The Odyssey to produce a text deeply invested in

57 James Joyce, ‘James Clarence Mangan’, in James Joyce: Occaisional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2000), pp. 51–61 (p. 59). 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 60. 60 Deane, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.

105 subjectivity and ‘the process of thinking’.61 However, to say the novel ‘follows’ its characters is perhaps not quite correct. Departing from the realist mode where a character’s thoughts and feelings often have an illustrative function within a larger narrative frame, in Ulysses subjectivity is instead constitutive of the novel’s textual world. Dublin emerges through

Stephen and Bloom’s consciousness, their respective subjectivities marked by the ongoing consequences that colonial history holds for their sense of self. Indeed, early in the novel, protagonist Stephen Dedalus states that ‘History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (32). Recalling Caruth’s suggestion that nightmares are one of the many ‘repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours’ symptomatic in the traumatised subject, throughout Ulysses history haunts Stephen’s subjectivity and nowhere is this more apparent than during a conversation he has with his employer Mr Deasy.62

In the ‘Nestor’ section of Ulysses, the conversation between Stephen and Mr Deasy is replete with tensions that have their roots in colonial ideology. As headmaster of the school where Stephen works as a teacher, Deasy is responsible for paying the young man’s wages.

Over the course of the section, the older man is introduced through an accumulation of small physical details and dialogue that are deeply satirising. He has an ‘angry white moustache’ and wears old fashioned gaiters, moves ‘fussily’ about his office and is a self- declared expert on everything from the state of ‘Old England dying’ at the hand of the Jews to the ‘pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture’ (31). Over the course of Deasy’s meandering monologue in this section, he finds a particular point of focus in

Stephen’s lack of money: ‘Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?’ Deasy asks Stephen, quickly following up that the answer is ‘I paid my way’ before asking Stephen if he can say the same (28). While Stephen answers out loud

61 Declan Kiberd, ‘Ulysses, Modernism’s Most Sociable Masterpiece’, The Guardian, 16 June 2009, n.p. [26 June 2020]. 62 Caruth, Trauma, p. 4.

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‘for the moment, no’ this fragment of an answer stands in sharp contrast to the profusion of

Stephen’s thoughts and feelings that surround his speech (29). Coloured by colonial stereotypes that position Stephen as financially and culturally inferior, Deasy’s rant has a muzzling effect on Stephen’s speech. In doing so, the boy’s silence builds on a similar sense of speechlessness that takes place in Joyce’s first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Appearing as a character in both novels, in the earlier text Stephen is drawn into a profound moment of colonial encounter as he discusses aesthetics with an English Jesuit priest. The two men come to a particular point of misunderstanding over the word ‘tundish’.63 For

Stephen, ‘tundish’ is the first word that comes to mind for the small funnel used to top up an oil lamp. However, while it might be quite natural in his ‘Drumcondra’ vernacular the priest is baffled by the phrase. This encounter causes Stephen to experience a profound moment of alienation as he realises ‘the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine’ (194). While it is his mother tongue, as a colonial subject English will always be ‘an acquired speech’, the conversation between young man and priest reorganised into an encounter between colonial ‘foes’ over the issue of meaning (194). In Stephen’s conversation with Mr Deasy in Ulysses, while both men are Irish, the same discourses of power and control are present. Echoing Lloyd’s suggestion that the work of colonisation is only complete when it has been fully ‘internalised’ into the common-sense codes that govern civil society, Deasy’s Irish unionist perspective silences Stephen as, alienated in his second-hand language, he is unable to formulate any kind of rebuttal out loud.

In addition to the way in which Deasy silences Stephen, even more worrying in this scene are the ways in which Deasy’s language begins to take over Stephen’s interior monologue. Throughout the Nestor section, Stephen’s psychic processes are enacted through a tissue of different generic textures. His brief replies are prefaced by a stream-of-

63 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Flamingo Modern Classics, 1994), p. 193. All other references will be included parenthetically in the text.

107 consciousness account of how he lost his money, while earlier in their conversation a third- person narrator heavily coloured by Stephen’s voice notes how the boy’s ‘embarrassed hand’ moves to touch his empty pockets (27). While this third person narrator maintains a consistent tone throughout the passage, Stephen’s internal monologue becomes increasingly coloured by his employer’s diction and rhythms. Asked to write down a letter that Deasy is dictating, Stephen’s mind begins to wander as he remembers how he lost all his money:

Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the mudsplashed breaks […] (30) As Stephen turns to the memory of how his friend Cranly lost his money through betting

(‘hunting his winners’), Deasy’s tone of bombast spills into Stephen’s interior monologue.

The memory emerges through ornate vocabulary and an arch tone that echo the self- satirising speech of Deasy. Interrupted by Deasy’s diatribe, which is literally scored into the page with the en-dashes that precede his speech, Stephen’s responses are not only muzzled into unvoiced thoughts, but these thoughts themselves begin to emerge from and through

Deasy’s language and the ideas this language contains. Rendered on the page, Stephen’s subjectivity emerges as a container for Deasy’s worldview, the young man unable to form any rebuttal to his employer’s chastisement.

As the Nestor section of Ulysses continues, Deasy’s lecture on money management expands into a lecture on Irish history. Telling Stephen that ‘You fenians forget things’ (29),

Deasy sets about ‘correcting’ Stephen’s deficient memory concerning the Great Famine that ravaged Ireland between 1845-1849. The potato blight that affected most of Northern

Europe between 1841 and 1852 was transformed from a subsistence crisis into a demographic catastrophe in Ireland by the ‘distinctly colonial matrix of forces’ that regulated political, social and economic life.64 The failure of the potato crop removed the surplus of nutrition that until that point had ‘frustrated’ the orthodoxies of colonial political

64 Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, p. 220.

108 economy, supporting a population of ‘underemployed’ labourers living in excess of the

‘capital’ available to them.65

It was a sense of ‘excess’ that contemporary debates around Famine relief often focused on. For British writers such as Thomas Carlyle, the continued thriving of Irish was

‘irrational and immoral’, their lack of interest in ‘material progress, their idleness’ grating on the ‘protestant sensibility of the English capitalist’.66 Indeed, within British colonial discourse, the paradoxical ideas of ‘surplus’ and ‘misery’ were key to representations of ‘the

Irish’ during the famine.67 ‘Content’ in their lack of interest in ‘material progress’ they represented a dangerous ‘contagion’ that threatened to spill out and infect the British working classes with their ‘slovenly habits and idleness’ through immigration.68 Underlying this idea, Lloyd argues, was a racialised discourse that affirmed the relation of colonised to coloniser, positing the Irish as ‘biologically and culturally inferior’ and requiring British intervention to bring them along a line of material and cultural progress.69 In Ulysses, it is this very same ideology that underpins Deasy’s ‘advice’ to Stephen. While Mr Deasy and

Stephen are both ‘all Irish’, Stephen’s poverty and Catholicism are points of excess. Within his lectures on finances and history, Deasy attempts to instruct Stephen out of these bad

‘habits’. As Deasy’s tirade continues, Stephen is unable to offer any form of rebuttal towards this political perspective. Instead, he remains silent within their conversation, only able to internally recite a traditional Protestant toast to King William of Orange. Caruth argues that with no way of accessing the past in any meaningful way, the traumatised subject often risks becoming a ‘symptom of a history that they cannot ever entirely possess.’70 This is perhaps exactly what happens in this scene as, excluded from the narration of history, Stephen finds

65 David Lloyd, ‘The Indigent Sublime: Spectres of Irish Hunger’, Representations, 92.1 (2005), 152–85 (p. 158). 66 Ibid., pp. 158–60. 67 Ibid., p. 157. 68 Ibid., p. 158. 69 Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, p. 218. 70 Caruth, Trauma, p. 5.

109 himself inserted into a historical discourse where he is robbed of any discursive agency as subject. To ‘awake’ from this ‘nightmare’ would require a discourse with which to redress these complex currents of othering but in the moment of confrontation with Deasy, this discourse simply doesn’t exist. Possessed by a historical past which he cannot come to know or overcome, Stephen is left silent and haunted. His internal world, like the personae of

Mangan’s poems, left to simply repeat and replay received discourses of colonial power and control.

So far, in my analysis of Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I have drawn attention to the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on protagonist

Stephen Dedalus. Echoing the idea of trauma as the possession of the present by the unspeakable past, Irish political history and colonial discourse control Stephen’s subjectivity, positioning him as an object rather than a subject within Irish history. At the end of A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, frustrated by the way in which life in Dublin impinges of his subjectivity, Stephen resolves to leave his home city. In the final pages, remembering the

English priest and his ‘Damn […] funnel’, he resolves to go abroad in order to ‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ (256-257). However, in Ulysses,

Stephen is still subject to the same discourses of colonial power and control. So inescapable is this traumatic political ‘nightmare’ of history and language, that it even comes to possess

Stephen’s most intimate relationships, particularly his relationship with his dead mother.

Throughout the novel, Mrs Dedalus returns to haunt the text as a ghostly presence.

She appears to Stephen ‘emaciated’ and her mouth ‘green with grave mould’, her revenant body emerging out of imagery that recalls popular contemporary Famine accounts.71 While

Deasy might lay claim to official accounts of the Famine, Julie Ulin suggests that it is

71 Julie Ulin, ‘“Famished Ghosts”: Famine Memory in James Joyce’s Ulysses’, Joyce Studies Annual, 2011, 20–63 (p. 33).

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Stephen who has fully ingested its ‘cultural iconography’ using it to ‘illustrate his personal demons’.72 Indeed, in one particular dream, Mrs Dedalus appears ‘wasted’ and smelling of

‘wetted ashes’, solely focused on Stephen who lies prone as she stands over him:

Ghoul! Chewer of Corpses! No, Mother. Let me be and let me live (10).

To whom these lines are addressed and who is speaking within this scene is ambiguous. In the events of the dream, nested within third person narration, Stephen and his mother are surrounded by figures who ‘prayed on their knees’, the moment recalling Mrs Dedalus’ actual death and Stephen’s refusal to kneel and pray to a god he no longer believed in (10).

These lines could therefore be directed at the ghost who approaches Stephen, this ‘ghoul’ his literal revenant mother. However, isolated from rest of the scene and surrounded by white space on the page, Ulin suggests the first line could also be an address to God for ravaging his mother’s body with disease but also to himself as a reprimand for his role in her suffering and pain.73 For Stephen, while his Catholic community offers alternative notions of identity and belonging to the Irish subject in colonial Dublin, they often prove as simplistic and empty as the discourses of colonialism he seeks to escape. When his mother dies, the young man rejects the forms of mourning expected of him by his mother and community, refusing to pray for her soul. By rejecting these traditions, Stephen tries to find more authentic forms of being, but in doing so he betrays his community and family’s discursive codes of behaviour and belonging, triggering profound feelings of guilt. Any sense of public and personal trauma as discrete categories begins to break down. Stephen’s most private horrors emerge through discourses of public atrocity, his most personal betrayals engineered by the ways in which personal relationships are warped by colonial and anticolonial ideology. In colonial Dublin then, personal traumas emerge as acute symptoms

72 Ulin, 'Famished Ghosts', p. 34. 73 Ibid.

111 within a chronic continuum of traumatic history. The ongoing legacy of colonial history and discourse not only restricts Stephen’s professional life with Deasy but also transforms his personal relationships into politicised spaces conditioned by ideas of betrayal, guilt and shame.

Echoing the criticisms Joyce made of James Clarence Mangan, for Stephen Dedalus history is a traumatic ‘nightmare’ for the ways in which it controls and limits the subject’s imaginative possibilities and ability to ‘speak’. In his conversation with Deasy, the incompatibility of Irish experience and colonial discourse leaves Stephen mute, the symptom of a historical legacy that always seeks to interpolate him as other. Moreover, even in his most intimate relationships, attempts to awake from this nightmare history are transformed into further layers of traumatic betrayal, leaving the young man haunted by a past he can’t move beyond. For Stephen then, the traumatic nightmare of colonial history is a personal crisis of expression, a struggle to find forms able to enact the ways that colonial and anti-colonial ideologies impinge on his subjectivity. Again and again, Stephen is unable to overcome the past through the narrative methods available to him and yet, while this may be a problem for the young man on the level of plot, in Joyce’s hands this problem also becomes a formal opportunity. This is particularly the case in a scene close to the opening of the novel where Stephen and his friends receive a delivery of milk. Introduced as a

‘wandering crone’ with ‘shrunken paps’ and ‘wrinkled fingers’ (13), the milk delivery woman recalls the mythic figure of Caitlín Ní Uallacháin, an enfeebled old woman who calls on young Irish men to help free Ireland from English colonisers. However, unlike her symbolic twin, the old woman in Ulysses is happy ‘serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer’, debasing herself into their ‘common cuckquean’ (13). In the conversation that follows her arrival, the text is replete with latent tensions to do with ideas of colonial and anti-colonial power. Of the three people in the room with Stephen when the delivery woman appears, it is only the Englishman Haines who is able to speak Irish. Stephen listens

112 in silence as Haines speaks to the old woman in Irish and then in English upbraids the whole room for failing to speak their ‘native’ tongue (14). Once again, Stephen is unable to formulate a rebuttal out loud. However, the text does begin to express an unvoiced yet potent indictment of Haines’ arrogance and his ignorance of the historical realities that led to the almost total erasure the Irish language in Ireland. Throughout this section of the novel, the novel’s ‘plot’ is enacted through an amalgamation of dialogue, third-person narration and internal monologue. While Stephen is unable to formulate a rebuttal to

Haines, by drawing these disparate speech acts together, the text does begin to pulse with an implied criticism. Stephen’s actual silence, his internal frustration, Haines’ dominance of the scene and the allegorical figure of Caitlín Ní Uallacháin begin to work by means of association. Rather than having Stephen explicitly criticising Haines and his opinions, the text instead enacts the difficulty of doing so, leaving the reader to come to this conclusion for themselves.

For the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses Stephen

Dedalus, the incompatibility of colonial historical discourse and Irish experience emerge as a crisis of personal expression. Always positioned as an historical object rather than a subject,

Stephen is left speechless. So positioned, he is left with no way to formulate an anti-colonial discourse, his own community’s practices and modes of identity only causing him further alienation and shame. However, while the ongoing consequences of colonialism are a crisis for Stephen, for Joyce as an artist they become a formal opportunity. While Stephen is unable to formulate a rebuttal to the Englishman Haines in the milk delivery scene, through its innovative formal features the text is able to do so. Van Boheemen argues that the

‘discursive death’ of the Irish language is a ‘spectral presence’ that lies at the heart of

Ulysses.74 In the milk delivery scene, eschewing the realist narrative mode, experience is

74 van Boheemen, ‘The Trauma of Irishness’, p. 249.

113 filtered through Stephen’s internal monologue. The text draws together myth, fragments of incomprehensible Irish language and the Irish men’s silence, working by means of association to trace the absence of understanding that haunts the scene. Rather than lamenting its loss through a nostalgic return to ‘indigenous’ forms as the Irish Literary

Revival did, the text instead articulates the traumatic absence of the Irish language through formal features that work by means of ‘affect and intersubjectivity’.75 In his final novel

Finnegans Wake, Joyce took this pattern of formal innovation even further. For Stephen

Dedalus, positioned as an object, the experience of history emerges as a traumatic nightmare where the past and present live in relay. Building on this idea, in Finnegans Wake past and present dissolve entirely as the novel can be read as a cyclical loop whose final words are the beginning of the novel’s first sentence. Moreover, the novel also takes the ‘deadlock of signification’ that surrounds the Irish language in Ulysses and literalises it.76 A-grammatical, incorporating non-English vocabulary and neologisms, the text resists conventional reading strategies that look for ideas of meaning let alone notions of a linear plot or narrative development. Rather than simply describing the traumatic impact of colonial discourse and subjectivity on the ‘modern’ Irish subject then, the novels instead demand the reader experience something of trauma’s effects. Joyce’s increasingly experimental novels enacting the way that trauma disturbs time, confounds meaning and has serious consequences for language.

In Ulysses, the ‘cracked lookingglass of a servant’ is a key symbol for the function of

‘Irish art’ (10). Writing in 1884, the novelist Henry James used the metaphor of the mirror to describe the ideal mimetic relationship between reality and realist fiction. The ‘supreme virtue of the novel’, he wrote, is its ability to function as a form that faithfully reflects the

75 van Boheemen, ‘The Trauma of Irishness’, pp. 248–49. 76 Ibid., p. 252.

114

‘real’ world.77 However, for Stephen Dedalus, having first belonged to the colonial master, in Ireland the realist novel in English is always an inherited and inferior form. Unlike Anglo-

Irish writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Lady Sydney Morgan whose ‘Big House’ novels explored the anxieties of the Protestant land-owning class in texts published in England,

Joyce was instead interested in representing Irish subjectivity in novels that weren’t primarily designed for English audiences. However, as his characterisation of the mirror suggests, the representation of this reality is challenged by the way that the realist novel form was conditioned by colonial history and language. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and

Ulysses, Joyce drew attention to this problem of representation by positioning it as a crisis of personal expression. Within the novels, Stephen Dedalus is a symptom of a traumatic history he cannot ever entirely possess, always left as an object rather than a subject in Irish historical discourse. However, despite the ‘second-hand’ nature of the nineteenth-century realist novel, in Joyce’s hands its deficiencies were transformed into formal plenitude.

Through his formal innovations, Joyce took the novel form’s ‘cracked’ (10) surface and broke it further, remaking it using a style that could more accurately enact the traumatic experience of Irish history and colonial discourse. In Ulysses, the text uses different generic textures, departs from standard syntax and exploits non-linear narrative structures in order to better express the interior experience of this traumatic history. In his next and final novel

Finnegans Wake, Joyce pushed this formal innovation even further. Through the novel’s cyclical structure, its incorporation of myth and fable, as well as its departure from conventional syntax and language, the text resists any desire for conventional ideas of narrative closure or catharsis. In doing so, the novels are better able to enact the traumatic experience of colonial history and discourse for the Irish subject. So far in this thesis I have clarified how Joyce had to break and rework the novel in order to force it to admit Irish

77 James, 'The Art of Fiction', p. 14.

115 experience. Having outlined this formal pattern, I will now move on to the next phase of my argument by analysing issues of transgenerational trauma in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the

Dark.

116

Chapter One:

Traumatic Geography and Transgenerational Trauma in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark

Introduction

Seamus Deane wrote and published his first and only novel Reading in the Dark against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s fledgling peace process. Extracts first appeared in Granta throughout the late-1980s and early-1990s at the same time as confidence building measures and informal talks edged combatants in the sectarian conflict towards hesitant ceasefires and negotiations. The novel itself was published in 1996, the same year that factions ratified the

Mitchell Principles, a series of commitments to paramilitary decommissioning that paved the way for official peace talks.

Through its negotiations, the peace process sought to bring about an end to the political and sectarian violence known as the Troubles that had plagued the province of

Northern Ireland for 30 years.78 Fuelling this conflict were incompatible ideas about

Northern Irish identity, culture and national belonging.79 Nationalists and Republicans sought to bring about the reunification of the six counties of Northern Ireland with the rest of the Irish Republic, viewing Westminster’s continued control of the territory as British colonial interference on sovereign Irish soil. By contrast, Northern Ireland’s Unionists and

Loyalists viewed the territory as a constituent part of the UK, pursuing a ‘continued constitutional relationship’ between the province and Great Britain.80 These political tensions were complicated by sectarian divisions. Catholicism, associated with Nationalism,

78 Birte Heidemann, Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature: Lost in a Liminal Space? (Basel: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 12. 79 Stephan Wolff, Peace at Last? The Impact of the Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 1. 80 Ibid.

117 and Protestantism, associated with the Unionist political majority, inflecting the conflict with sectarian bigotry and the ‘systematic pursuit of segregation and discrimination’ across

Northern Irish life.81

The Northern Irish peace process sought to resolve the province’s longstanding history of political violence and discrimination through a renegotiation of the territory’s sovereignty, a commitment to civil rights for all and the normalisation of Northern Ireland’s security services. Peace talks focused on getting parties to recognise the right of people on the island of Ireland to decide the territory’s constitutional status by majority consent, committing the British and Irish governments to implementing this decision. Participants were also asked to agree on the right of people in Northern Ireland to identify as British,

Irish or both and to qualify for citizenship of both countries. Instead of Northern Ireland being governed directly from Westminster, talks proposed a new power-sharing assembly and executive based in Stormont, where major decisions would be decided by cross- community vote. Parties were also asked to make a commitment to civil rights and religious freedom for all, with a view to installing new administrative bodies such as the Northern

Ireland Human Rights Commission to implement these pledges. All factions were also expected to commit their influence to full paramilitary disarmament and the normalisation of Northern Ireland’s security services.

Through its ceasefires, negotiations and the resulting legal agreements such as the

Good Friday Agreement, the peace process sought to offer new political perspectives on recalcitrant binaries of Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Republican that had choked

Northern Irish political and civil life for thirty years. However, as Liam Harte argues, it also opened up ‘new artistic […] perspectives’.82 Citing Michael Longley’s poem ‘Ceasefire’ as a key example, Harte suggests that in the 1990s writers began to use aesthetic practice to

81 Wolff, Peace at Last?, p. 1. 82 Liam Harte, ‘History Lessons: Postcolonialism and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark’, Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, 30.1 (2000), 149-62 (p. 149).

118 negotiate the irreconcilable identities and political goals that fuelled the Troubles.83

Reframing the conflict through the Trojan War, Longley’s poem contains a moment of tentative reconciliation contingent on the mutual grief that emerges as Achilles and Priam share their respective truths and experiences. Much of the peace process was focused on something similar, finding ways for a territory and its people, overburdened by irreconcilable political-religious identities and histories, to express both in order to find points of commonality in order to move forward.

In this chapter, I will examine Reading in the Dark within the social and political contexts in which it was written and published. I will argue that the novel can be read as a text that, like Longley’s poem, uses the aesthetic to negotiate Northern Ireland’s plural and contradictory identities and histories. However, I will contend that the novel’s formal strategies are coloured by Deane’s broader project as a literary and cultural critic sensitive to colonial and postcolonial paradigms. In Longley’s ‘Ceasefire’, the poem’s moment of tentative reconciliation emerges from linear notions of time and history. The messy business of war and burying of the dead take place in the past, outside the poem’s textual present.

Indeed, the volta separating the sonnet’s second and third stanzas functions as a further point of separation, a barrier between the traces of historical conflict that mark the first part of the poem and the tentative peace of its final stanza. For many, the peace process that led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 represented a similar point of demarcation. It represented the possibility of an end to Northern Ireland’s history of violence and bigotry, allowing its people to step into a new future. However, in this chapter,

I will contend that in Reading in the Dark the novel’s traumatic energies challenge the idea that in Northern Ireland history can ever be fully resolved. In my introduction, I outlined how the novel’s coming-of-age narrative centres on a boy in the border city of

83 Harte, ‘History Lessons’, p. 149.

119

Derry/Londonderry seeking to discover the truth about his family’s Republican history. I suggested that this seemingly linear narrative trajectory is deliberately installed within the novel only to be interrupted and undermined by the recursive past. Building on this introduction, in this chapter I will posit this tension constitutes an aesthetic intervention in the idea of the peace process as an ‘end’ to Northern Ireland’s violent history. In doing so, I will argue that this intervention aligns the novel with Deane’s broader critical project, questioning the idea that history in this part of the world can ever be fully contained or

‘over’.

In the analysis that follows, building on the model of trauma established in my introductory chapter, I will explore how trauma emerges as a way to understand colonial legacy within the Reading in the Dark. My analysis will focus on the traumatic structures that make up the topography of Derry/Londonderry and the events that happen within this locale. I will argue that transgenerational trauma emerges as a burden that frustrates the protagonist’s search for the ‘truth’ about his family’s past. I will contend that his search is part of a larger crisis to do with language, form and knowledge within the text, the boy’s personal family crisis emerging from the co-existence of antithetical forms of knowledge and discursive codes within the novel’s colonial/post-colonial spaces. I will conclude my examination of the novel by exploring how its formal features participate in the Joycean legacy. I will argue that while there is a clear forward movement within the novel, this sense of narrative propulsion is always interrupted by unfinished histories, unresolved stories and irreconcilable animosities that tug at any sense of historical progress. I will conclude that the text can therefore be read as an aesthetic intervention in the idea of the peace process as a resolution to Northern Ireland’s history of sectarian and political violence, the novel’s traumatic energies questioning the idea that history in this part of the world can be easily or authoritatively ‘resolved’.

120

Seamus Deane, ‘Field Day’ and the Traumatic Topography of London/Derry

In addition to writing Reading in the Dark and three volumes of poetry, Seamus

Deane is a celebrated, controversial cultural and literary critic. Born in Derry’s Bogside in

1940, Deane attended St. Columb’s College, Queen’s University Belfast and Cambridge

University, becoming an increasingly important figure in setting the critical agenda of the diverse fields that became known as Irish Studies.84 As a director of the Field Day Theatre

Company, Deane’s critical output through the company’s pamphlet series and anthologies explored the confrontation between tradition and modernity in modern Ireland. His work offered a critique of Irish historical revisionism, positing a critical discourse predicated on the conception of Ireland ‘as a postcolonial country, and of the violence of Northern

Ireland as a lingering effect of colonial rule.’85

After partition in 1921, Northern Ireland continued to be a constituent country of the United Kingdom. However, for Deane, colonial critical paradigms are nonetheless useful in exploring the impact of actual and psychic violence on the subjectivity of those who live in the contested territory. In my analysis of Ulysses, I outlined how Stephen

Dedalus experiences profound feelings of alienation as a colonial subject, his identity always determined ‘by somebody else’.86 Similarly, growing up in Derry, as the protagonist of

Reading in the Dark seeks to uncover the truth of his family’s past he encounters coercive

(police, army, economics) and ideologically persuasive (education, culture) state apparatus.

As they seek to interpolate him as a rational British subject, encounters with these forces cause him both psychic and actual pain. However, equally uncomfortable are the forces exerted on him by the Republican community which seeks to intervene in his identity by casting him as an anti-colonial agent. While Deane saw conflict in Northern Ireland as a

84 Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 132. 85 Ibid., p. 139. 86 Sabrina Broadbent, ‘Reading in the Dark: An Interview with Seamus Deane’, English and Media Magazine, 36 (1997), 17-20 (p. 17).

121 lingering effect of colonial rule, this did not translate into a celebration of the post-colonial state as an inevitable alternative or goal. In both anti-colonial action and post-colonial states

Deane argued that there is a risk of simply reorganising the damaging energies of colonial coercion and control within new regimes of power. In Northern Ireland in particular, Deane suggested that the forms of Republicanism that supported a united Ireland often exerted damaging effects on individuals and communities.87 In his critical analysis Deane argued that the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland was a vestigial colonial feature. However, rather than using this perspective to pursue reunification, Deane instead focused on breaking down the ways that violence, both psychic and actual, past and present, continued to dominate and warp communities in Northern Ireland.

In his exploration of colonial legacy in Ireland, Deane argued that specific moments of colonial and anti-colonial encounter exist as symptoms within a broader traumatic continuum. Exploring the idea of literary or historical ‘traditions’ in an article in 1992,

Deane argued that within Irish historical and political experience any sense of a ‘tradition’ is largely artificial.88 To try to impose a linear narrative onto Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial spaces is to ignore a historical experience primarily characterised by ‘rupture, discontinuity, break and breakdown.’89 Recalling the idea of trauma as the possession of the present by the past, if any idea of historical continuity is possible within this context it is perhaps traumatic in nature. It is a history where ‘time’ is not a linear succession of moments but an experience where the ruptures and breakdowns of the ‘past’ are still alive and ongoing in the ‘present’.

From the outset of Reading in the Dark, the traumatic interrelatedness of past and present is evident in the novel’s multiple and interconnected timelines. Set in Derry’s

87 Broadbent, ‘An Interview with Seamus Deane’, p. 17. 88 Seamus Deane, ‘Canon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland’, in Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster, ed. by Jean Lundy and Aodan MacPoilin (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1992), pp. 22–32 (p. 23). 89 Ibid.

122 working-class and Catholic Bogside community, the novel ostensibly ‘begins’ in February

1945 and ‘ends’ in July 1971. Divided into three parts, the text is split into six chapters.

These chapters are further subdivided into a series of short vignettes, each with a brief title and date that move chronologically through the protagonist’s youth and early adulthood.

Much of the novel is focused on the boy’s experiences during the 1940s and 1950s, decades that incubated political tensions between Protestant Unionist authorities and the Catholic

Republican community that would eventually go on to precipitate the Troubles. Each of the novel’s vignettes detail key moments in the boy’s coming-of-age amid these simmering political tensions. However, tempering this forward moving chronology is a political mystery that looks back to the 1920s and the political events and personal betrayals that marked the boy’s family during the War of Independence, the Civil War, the founding of the Irish Free

State and the partition of Ireland.

With its multiple and interwoven timelines, Reading in the Dark is one of a number of

Irish novels that explore the impact of traumatic histories on the ‘present’. Rather than simply taking past events as their central drama, Robert Garratt suggests that such novels are instead preoccupied with the structural implications of trauma, exploring how the past interrupts and saturates the present.90 As a cultural and literary critic, Deane was deeply pessimistic about the Northern Irish peace process, fearing the territory’s longstanding and antithetical political identities would mire any progress in cycles of deadlock and violence.91

For Edna Longley, when Deane’s Field Day project dissolved its principal activities in 1993, rather than signalling a lessening of how political deadlock had possessed Northern Irish life during the Troubles, it instead represented a shift of form for Deane towards the aesthetic possibilities of the novel.92 Indeed, within Reading in the Dark, the antithetical identities that precipitated the Troubles are so pervasive they saturate and govern the boy’s community,

90 Garratt, Trauma and History, p. 3. 91 Broadbent, ‘An Interview with Seamus Deane’, p.17. 92 Edna Longley, ‘Autobiography as History’, Fortnight, 355 (1996), p.34.

123 determining much of the action on the level of plot. However, they are so fundamental to the world of the text they are also visible in the novel’s formal features, becoming particularly apparent in its treatment of landscape and place.

At the heart of sectarian politics is a need to interpolate individuals as either Catholic or Protestant, Republican or Unionist. In seeking to assert the dominance of one, these irreconcilable political binaries deny the viability of the other. However, these binaries are not limited to questions of personal political identity but extend to questions of land. In the novel, the ground is required to be either Derry or Londonderry, the Free State or the UK, depending on political persuasion. For the protagonist of Reading in the Dark, these sectarian tensions colour and shape the way he sees the physical world around him, becoming particularly discernible in the border that lies just beyond the city. Early in the novel, the boy and his friends decide to stop and play on a ‘humped-back bridge’ that crosses a stream.93

This small, rural waterway marks part of the border between Northern Ireland and the Free

State, making up ‘part of the red line that wriggled around the city’ (49). As the children play, two currents of geography emerge: one physical and one imaginative. The physical features of hillside, stream, mountains and lough are marked by a red line that belongs properly to a remembered or imagined map and yet the verbal action of the border, its

‘wriggling’, takes place within the physical world of the boy’s experience. While the two geographies exist in a single textual space, any sense that the two are easily accommodated in the boy’s mind is resisted. While the line has its verbal action in physical geography it is still ‘red’, its colour identifying it as an extra-spatial object that ‘marks’ the physical land. In the introduction to this thesis, I outlined how the legacy of trauma is often experienced as a paradoxical relation of presence (symptoms) and absence (knowledge) that come to a point of crisis within the life and body of an individual. Echoing this idea, while the border is a

93 Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 49. All future references will be incorporated in the text.

124 point of historical and cartographic rupture visible in the violence that afflicts the boy’s community, the very idea of any border is undermined by the territory’s geographic reality.

As the protagonist of Reading in the Dark plays on the bridge, he crosses a site of profound political breakage but also physical features that undermine any desire to organise the land in a particular way. The border emerges as something that is momentous and yet traversable. It is something people have died for, a profound point of cartographic and political rupture and yet it is also a small stream of water the children ‘cross and re-cross’ with ease (49).

While contrary physical and cartographic realities sit ‘in antagonistic opposition’ to each other in Northern Ireland, they also often belong ‘intimately to one another’.94 Binaries of Catholic/Protestant and Derry/Londonderry might deny the viability of the other and yet, like the banks of the stream that mark the border, they often also rely on their opposite for their very definition. Indeed, throughout the text, the boy’s community defines itself in opposition to the politically powerful Protestant Unionist community. Within the novel, there are very few moments of encounter between the two religious groups but when the young narrator does discuss the city’s other inhabitants, he does so by describing them through deeply impersonal language. Discussing the city’s culture of bonfires, for example, the other community is described in turn as ‘The Protestants’ and then ‘they’ and ‘them’

(33). ‘Their’ freedom to set bonfires to commemorate July 12th is a key part of the way the

Bogside community articulates its own experience of police discrimination and the curtailment of their religious freedoms. These experiences become part of the way the community defines itself through anti-colonial struggle. However, while the Bogside community might insist on the Protestant’s ‘otherness’, this opposition is an essential component of the community’s own narratives of self and identity. Like the border, in the boy’s discussion of Derry’s bonfires, Northern Ireland’s political identities each insist on the

94 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, p. 147.

125 others’ destruction and yet are also held in uncomfortable opposition. The border is therefore a site where multiple political realities that insist on the impossibility of the ‘other’ exist simultaneously. It is point of demarcation between ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ space and yet also a single unbroken geographic reality. While these incompatibilities might preoccupy characters and motivate action on the level of plot, the aestheticisation of these tensions in the novel’s treatment of landscape and place suggests they are something fundamental to the region. Northern Ireland’s intractable religious and political identities are not only a traumatic interruption of ‘ordinary life’ but so deeply entrenched their oppositions have come to constitute the land itself. 95

The Northern Irish peace process aimed to institute political solutions that would resolve Northern Ireland’s incompatible binaries of national identity and belonging. In doing so, it sought to bring about an end to the history of sectarian violence that had plagued the province during the Troubles. In his criticism, however, Deane queried the idea that Northern Ireland’s history could ever be easily ‘resolved’. Within Reading in the Dark, echoing the idea of trauma as the inability of an individual to ‘move past’ a history to which they are ‘permanently attached’, Derry is a territory made up of antagonistic identities locked in intimate opposition.96 The ground itself is a place where binaries of past and present,

Ireland and the UK, the border and unbroken fields, are locked together so that they become a fundamental part of the landscape itself. In doing so, the novel questions the idea that identity and politics in this part of the world can ever be pulled out of their intimate yet antagonistic opposition. The text’s treatment of landscape, and of the border in particular, presents a serious challenge to the idea that any agreement or political process can easily resolve such fundamental tensions. To be successful, the peace process would have to address how, within Northern Irish historical experience, the traumatic past is still ongoing

95 Nick Fraser, ‘A Kind of Life Sentence’, The Guardian, 28 October 1996, p. 9. 96 Garratt, Trauma and History, p. 3.

126 within the present as an experience of ‘rupture’ and ‘breakage’ so deeply entrenched it forms the very ground itself.97

Transgenerational Trauma and the Search for ‘Truth’ in Reading in the Dark

Having posited traumatic landscapes as the foundation of the novel, I will now turn my attention to the events that occur within this political landscape. In particular, I will now explore how the novel’s plot further destabilises the idea of the peace process as a full resolution or end to Northern Ireland’s violent past, focusing in particular on the text’s engagement with ideas of transgenerational trauma. For Visser, while ideas about trauma are a ‘signal’ cultural paradigm in contemporary cultural studies, in colonial and post-colonial contexts they can prove highly problematic.98 Symptoms-based definitions that focus on the possession of the present by the unknown past demonstrate a lack of ‘historical particularity’ that is at odds with postcolonialism’s emphasis on the actual ‘historical, political and socio- economic factors’ at play in colonisation and de-colonisation.99 Far more appropriate, she suggests, is the reorganisation of trauma into ‘the memory of an overwhelming, unassimilable, violent wounding directly incurred as a first-hand experience’.100 However, such a model fails to take into account the way trauma can be transmitted within families.

In their study The Shell and the Kernel, psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria

Torok argue that within families ‘psychic conflicts, traumas, or secrets’ can be passed unconsciously from one generation to another.101 When implicated within violent histories, parents engage in acts of ‘preservative concealment’, burying the secret past inside a ‘crypt’ or ‘sealed off psychic space […] within the ego.’102 As Esther Rashkin points out, however,

97 Deane, ‘Canon Fodder’, p. 23. 98 Visser, ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’, p. 271. 99 Ibid., p. 273. 100 Ibid., p. 271. 101 Maria Abraham and Nicolas Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewels in Psychoanalysis Vol. I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 166. 102 Ibid., p. 141.

127 such acts of suppression can install instances of ‘silence’ or ‘gap’ within the family unit.103

These silences can come to ‘speak’ to a child, compelling them to ‘patch a history together’ out of the fragmented materials available to them.104 What develops is a common language of concealment, parent and child sharing an experience of the world that is conditioned by the gaps and holes constitutive of their shared traumatic history. For the protagonist of

Deane’s novel, the violent history that predates his birth initially manifests as a point of narrative absence that lies at the centre of family life. Growing up in a large, Catholic family in Derry’s Bogside, the boy’s early experiences are full of family members who tell ‘story upon story’ (9) between them. There are several ‘great events they return to again and again’

(9), and one of these is the violent story of the boy’s paternal uncle ‘Eddie’ who disappeared during a shoot-out between the police and the IRA. While the family discuss what might have happened to Eddie, the boy’s father remains mute refusing ‘to speak of it’ (9). In the profusion of storytelling, what happened to Eddie becomes a point of silence that preoccupies the boy. ‘I wanted him to make the story his own,’ the boy insists of his father, to ‘cut in on their talk’ but his father refuses to supply the desired historical information, prompting the boy to start his own process of trying to recover the occluded past (9).

Through snatches of overheard conversation, local folklore, the family stories that are available to him and his parents ‘telling’ silences, over the course of the novel the boy begins a search to situate what happened to his uncle within what he terms ‘the feud’ (44).

This phrase encompasses a patchwork of silences, absences and sites of emotional sensitivity that contain a matrix of interrelated secrets about his family’s past. ‘So broken was my father’s family,’ the boy explains, ‘that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet’ (42). However, the more the details of ‘the feud’ resist the boy’s interpretive action, the more preoccupied he becomes with exposing its occluded

103 Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 94. 104 Ibid.

128 edges, leading the boy’s mother to conclude ‘Child […] I think sometimes you’re possessed.

Can’t you just let the past be the past?’ (42) As stated in my introduction, Caruth’s argument is that the experience of trauma is often ‘precisely literal’, an ‘incompletion in knowing’ about one’s own past that results in the ‘repeated possession of the one who experiences it’.105 The risk is that locked in a cycle of obsessive return that cannot access the past it aims towards, the traumatised subject can become the ‘symptom of a history that they cannot ever entirely possess’.106 While the protagonist of the novel might not have ‘first-hand’ experience of his family’s violent past, it nonetheless exerts a powerful force over his life.

While specific instances of ‘trauma’ might, as Visser suggests, be personal experiences of extraordinary and violent ‘wounding’ they are also transmissible, the ‘historical crisis’ that affected the boy’s parents manifesting as an ‘identity crisis’ for the protagonist as he searches for a history in which to situate himself.107

Within Reading in the Dark, the silences and absences that make up the boy’s occluded family history initiate a clear forward-moving narrative arc within the text. The boy is compelled to explore the gaps of knowledge within his family, struggling to discover the

‘truth’ of the events that pre-date his birth. Over the course of this journey the boy slowly unearths what happened to his uncle Eddie, discovering that his paternal uncle didn’t simply disappear but was executed as an informer by his maternal grandfather, a commander in the

IRA. The more the secret is probed, however, the more complex it becomes as it is revealed that Eddie was executed based on false information and that the real informer was the boy’s other uncle Tony McIlhenny who also disappeared. In trying to discover these ‘facts’,

Robert Garratt argues, the past becomes a place of struggle for the young boy.108 It is a zone where ‘a dynamic process of questioning and interpreting difficult, complex, and even

105 Caruth, Trauma, pp. 4–5. 106 Ibid., p. 5. 107 Liam Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 187. 108 Garratt, Trauma and History, p. 97.

129 disconnected memories and stories’ become a way of understanding past and present, and for the boy to find self-definition through interpretive action.109 What Garratt proposes here is a narrative structure that is a quasi-detective story. Within the novel’s sequential vignettes,

‘discoveries’ take place that allow the boy to mature and develop a sense of identity as he discovers more and more about the past. However, while this narrative trajectory is clear, it is also deceptive. The boy might be able to uncover the past, but the idea that these facts and the narrative they form can offer opportunities for empowerment are called into question by the ways this ‘journey’ is interrupted by the recursivity of betrayal within the boy’s community and family.

Betrayal emerges within the novel as a traumatic transgenerational burden that interrupts the protagonist’s search for the ‘truth’. It is a weight that places stress on his personal relationships, coming to a particular point of crisis in the boy’s interactions with his mother. Indeed, within his search, the boy’s mother becomes a principal site of information.

Like her husband, the boy’s mother attempts to conceal the past from her son but as she does so, her body and gestures become deeply communicative sites. A single glance from the boy’s mother as he enters a room contains a ‘waltz of welcome and then of pain’ (136).

Moreover, he begins to have entire silent conversations with her, her gestures and expressions testifying to what he believes is her secret knowledge about what happened to his uncle Eddie. However, as the novel progresses, it emerges that the secrets she conceals are much more personal in nature than the boy first imagined.

Mid-way through the text, the boy’s grandfather dies confirming to the boy and his mother that it was McIlhenny and not Eddie who betrayed the community by acting as a police informant. The effect on the boy’s mother is profound. She moves ‘as though there were pounds of pressure bearing down on her’ and begins to repeat disconnected phrases

109 Garratt, Trauma and History, p. 97.

130 and maintain anxious silences where her mouth is ‘working like a muscle in her still face’

(139). What the boy eventually discovers is that these behaviours not only attest to the fact it was this second uncle ‘McIlhenny’ who was the real traitor, but the boy’s mother was in love with him, perhaps even when she married her husband. Mimicking the way traumatic events are often only visible through the symptoms that surround them, this further layer of traumatic significance emerges through diffuse currents of meaning that play out across the novel’s multiple narrative layers. Just before the opening vignette of the novel is an epigram that reads:

[…] no two were e’er wed But one had a sorrow that was never said. (np)

This epigram, taken from a well-known Irish song first collected by Padraic Colum in the early twentieth century, is positioned alongside a scene of domestic haunting that opens the novel. In this scene, the boy’s mother urges him to go downstairs to avoid an invisible ghost that hovers between them on the stairs. In their theorisation of transgenerational trauma,

Abraham and Torok use the metaphor of ‘the Phantom’ to refer to the way that trauma can be passed from parent to child, its ghostly presence a manifestation of the ‘silence’ that surrounds the concealed past.110 Recalling this idea, while the boy’s mother insists the ghost is ‘somebody’ unhappy she also claims it is ‘nothing’ (5). As she does so, the text begins to pulse with an anxious current of signification, the epigram’s mention of marital secrets casting a long shadow over the mother’s denials. For the boy, his mother’s gestures, silences and speech are all evidence of her love for McIlhenny, an embodied traumatic language that testifies to the way her love transgresses the Republican community’s strict codes of behaviour and belonging.

As an informer, what transforms McIlhenny’s behaviour into something unspeakable, inadmissible and ultimately transmittable within the body of the boy’s mother

110 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 168.

131 is shame. Within colonised communities, state-controlled narratives about behaviour and identity often find their answer in anti-colonial discourse. Mimicking what they seek to displace in their desire to be authoritative, strict codes can develop that regulate personal behaviour for anti-colonial purposes. McIlhenny’s betrayal as an informer transgresses the

Bogside community’s narratives about identity, needing to be made abject in order to maintain the community’s ‘unsteady edges’.111 However, by loving McIlhenny, the boy’s mother also betrays her community’s expectations. Psychoanalytical theories state that typically, after losing a love-object, an individual will embark on a slow process of mourning where the idea of the lost person is slowly integrated into the self.112 For the boy’s mother, however, healthy mourning is interrupted by the more pressing need to conceal her love from her community’s sight. When healthy mourning is interrupted in this way, a lost love- object can become dysfunctionally ‘incorporated’ within the self, kept alive as the ghostly

‘living dead’.113 While trying to conceal her love for McIlhenny might represent an attempt to keep faith with the Republican community’s values, her refusal to mourn his death reinscribes her love for him as a ghostly presence that haunts her gestures and speech.

Despite her best efforts to supress the past, encrypting her secrets within herself paradoxically transforms her body into a deeply communicative space. She becomes a point of silence surrounded by tears, anxious gestures and obsessive and incomprehensible babbling where the very feelings of affection and love she tried to conceal are made visible.

Through her pathological refusal to mourn, the boy’s mother ironically inducts her son into the very legacy of complicity and betrayal from which she tried to protect him. As he ‘reads’ his mother’s silences and gestures as a site of information, the boy becomes a witness to her

111 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 71. 112 Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York and Chicester: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 2. 113 Ibid.

132 embodied language of shame. In doing so he betrays her confidence, with catastrophic consequences as the novel moves into its final act.

Despite his growing awareness of the pain his actions are causing his mother, the boy continues to excavate the past to discover more and more of the complex secrets that reside inside her. He feels an increasing desire to ‘tell […] everything I knew’ (182), but unable to vocalise the story in English, instead reads it aloud in Irish, which no one in the house speaks. Reading the story aloud, while his father nods commenting on how ‘it sounded wonderful’ (195), the boy’s mother listens carefully. ‘I knew she knew what I was doing’ (195), he states and indeed, this does seem to be the case as it is after this final revelation that the mother-son relationship breaks down entirely. His mother embarks on a

‘low-intensity warfare’ against the boy (217). Her words become loaded with minor aggressions, she singles him out from his siblings and refuses to allow him to do anything except study for his exams. The aggression becomes so acute that his father asks him in secret, ‘Did you say something to her? Did something happen?’ (217) The boy replies that he has not said anything and insists to himself this is true because while he may have let his mother know he understands her secrets, he resolves never to disclose them to his father.

Not revealing his mother’s secrets, the boy insists, is a way of ‘staying loyal’ (229) to his mother and the pain he believes emerges from her internalised shame. However, as she becomes ill and eventually suffers a stroke his perspective shifts. Made mute by her illness, the boy’s mother begins to repeatedly take to the stairs, staring obsessively out the same window where mother and son first observed the ghost between them at the opening of the novel. The boy realises that in his attempt to uncover the past that ‘plagued her’ he has

‘become the plague’ himself, that ‘it wasn’t just that she was trapped by what had happened’ but that she is doubly trapped ‘by my knowing it’ (223-230). McIlhenny’s betrayal stems from how he informs on his own community, sharing their secrets with the police. Echoing this historical disloyalty, while the boy’s search for the ‘truth’ of his family’s history may be

133 motivated by a search for a story in which to situate himself, as he tries to uncover this past he enters into its energies of collusion and betrayal. Acting as a witness to his mother’s secrets he breaks their unofficial pact of shared silence, damaging their relationship irrevocably.

So far, in my analysis of Reading in the Dark, I have suggested transgenerational trauma operates in two important ways. The occluded past that haunts the boy’s family at the beginning of the novel initiates a narrative arc where the boy embarks on a struggle to come to ‘know’ his family’s past. While this linear trajectory is deliberately installed within the text’s plot and the formal arrangement of its vignettes and chapters, betrayal emerges as a transmissible inheritance that interrupts any sense of forward progression. As the boy discovers the interrelated disloyalties that make up this past, he cannot help but become implicated in acts of betrayal himself. His mother’s final secret is ‘of such intimacy’, Deane has suggested, that as the boy enters into it he damages the reason why he loved his parents: for loving each other.114 As he breaks open the secret knowledge inside his mother, he not only violates her parental duty but triggers a collapse into silence within her that interrupts her relationship with her husband. Within the novel, betrayal emerges as a recursive point of contagion within the protagonist’s family that spreads across the generations, a burden for both parent and child. Realising that he has committed a ‘profound betrayal’, in an effort to preserve what’s little is left of his family at the end of the novel the boy resolves that like his mother he will now ‘seal it all in too’ (232). As he assumes her mantle of concealment, the novel’s linear narrative trajectory of a boy trying to uncover the ‘truth’ of his family’s past is arrested in a transgenerational loop. Recalling Abraham and Torok’s metaphor of ‘the crypt’, the boy resolves to conceal his mother’s secrets and his own betrayals inside his own silent

114 Broadbent, ‘An Interview with Seamus Deane’, p. 17.

134 body, participating in an inherited traumatic legacy where the past continues to warp and deform the present.115

Interviewed about the emergent peace process in 1997, Deane feared that Northern

Ireland would remain ‘trapped in a cul-de-sac’ of violence that would ‘go on reproducing itself endlessly’.116 In Reading in the Dark, the violent events that make up the boy’s family history are less a single point of causation that can explain the boy’s broken family than a transmissible legacy of betrayal that warps and damages the boy’s relationships. While the novel’s dated sections and coming-of-age narrative might propel the novel’s plot ‘forward’, any sense of progress is always tempered by the way this traumatic inheritance tugs the narrative backwards. Discovering the story of betrayal and recriminations that surrounds the boy’s uncles does not resolve this history but instead inducts the boy into its unfinished narratives. As the novel comes to a close, this unresolved history is still ongoing within the present, the traumatic interrelatedness of history at odds with the idea of the peace process as a resolution or end to Northern Ireland’s violent past.

In my arguments about transgenerational trauma, I suggested that betrayal emerges as an inheritance within Reading in the Dark that interrupts the novel’s overarching forward momentum. However, while this sense of forward propulsion is deliberately installed through the novel’s structure, it is also complicated by narrative perspective. Titled ‘After’, the novel’s final vignette is set in July 1971. Three years have passed since the ‘Battle of the

Bogside’ in 1969, a mass riot often cited as one of the first major conflicts of the Troubles.

While the boy may have mapped his family’s role in the conflicts that surrounded and constituted the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, the political violence that marked the beginning of the Troubles is just beginning to escalate around him. The boy explains how he and his siblings, involved in the civil rights movement, are caught up in riots and arrested,

115 Broadbent, ‘An Interview with Seamus Deane’, p. 17. 116 Ibid.

135 his parents’ home searched not by the police as it was in the past but by the newly deployed

British army. While it is refreshed by new combatants and contexts, violence emerges as a constant across the novel’s interwoven timeframes, not ‘over’ at all but left unresolved and about to escalate further as the novel ends. Indeed, in the very final scene, on the evening of his father’s funeral the protagonist finds himself frozen on the stairs looking out of the lobby window that overlooks the city. The day his father dies a night-time curfew is declared by the authorities, the boy and his family spend the night waiting inside the family home as the protest barricades outside their house are cleared. In the early hours of the morning, the boy looks forward in time commenting ‘that evening we would take my father to the cathedral that hung in the stair window’ (233). As he does so, however, a strange moment of grammatical shift takes place. His description of taking his father’s body to be received into the cathedral looks forward in time and accordingly, the grammar of the sentence could be read as a conditional description of what might happen. However, the scene itself is described with such clarity and surety it is as if the anticipated action has already taken place.

The closing lines of the novel look forward into the future, just as the peace process did, and yet they are pulled backwards by an inescapable sense of the past. Moreover, while the novel’s action unfolds sequentially here and indeed, throughout the novel, the story itself is largely ‘told’ by the protagonist in the past tense. This retrospective grammar implies there is a narrator, at some point in the future, reflecting on his life experiences. While the events of the novel seem to unfold in real time they are actually always contained within this narrated

‘past’.

In the introduction to this thesis, I posited a model of trauma where the present, possessed by the past, results in stagnation and stasis for the traumatised subject. For the boy, now a young man, while this closing section might be titled ‘After’ any sense of him being able to move beyond this moment is called into question by the novel’s formal features. It is challenged not only by the unresolved nature of the histories he tried to

136 excavate, but through the traumatic interrelation of past and present at work in the novel’s narrative position. As the novel ends, the violent history the boy discovered is ongoing inside his own acts of complicity and betrayal, the forward propulsion of the novel’s ‘plot’ turned back on itself by the text’s retrospective gaze.

Linguistic Loss, Silence and Traumatic Forms of Knowledge in Reading in the Dark

In this chapter, I have suggested the novel can be read as a continuation of Deane’s critical project to explore the legacy of colonial history in Ireland. In particular, I explored how the novel’s traumatic energies intervene in narratives that posited the peace process as a resolution or ‘end’ to Northern Ireland’s antithetical identities and unfinished histories. I suggested the text intervenes in such ideas in two ways, through its treatment of landscape and the way transgenerational trauma interrupts the novel’s ‘plot’ and mediates its narrative style. What results is a text where a deliberately installed narrative arc is always dragged backwards by the presence of unresolved stories, personal histories and political animosities.

For this boy, growing up in this community, history is unfinished and ongoing. It is this tension that aligns the text with Deane’s broader deconstructive project as a literary and cultural critic, undermining the ideas of linear history and resolution coded into the

Northern Irish peace process. Having made my arguments about the novel’s traumatic topography and the role of transgenerational trauma, I will now turn my attention to three other interrelated ways trauma is visible within the novel. Namely, the discursive death of the Irish language, the role of willed silences within the boy’s community and how both these traumatic sites are the product of the different regimes of knowledge and power present within the novel’s colonial/post-colonial spaces.

In my introduction, I suggested that one of the central concerns for authors who wish to represent Irish experience is how to negotiate the loss of the Irish language. Within the novels of James Joyce, this loss is an anxiety that increasingly preoccupies Stephen

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Dedalus. Within A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen’s internal monologue is often haunted by his inability to adequately express himself, or even to fully understand himself, in

English. In the ‘tundish’ episode in particular, I outlined how Stephen struggles to make himself understood to an English Jesuit priest. For Michel Foucault, language, knowledge and power are always intimately related. Within every society are ‘regimes of truth’, systems by which a society decides what is ‘true’ or ‘real’ and what is not.117 These regimes are in a state of constant negotiation within a given culture’s discourse and institutions. However, in colonial situations, indigenous ideas about reality and truth are often secondary to culturally dominant ideas imposed by the coloniser. Language is a key way by which this cultural dominance is achieved, the coloniser’s ideology coded into the forms of expression available to colonial subjects. For Stephen, to enter into the English language is therefore to enter into an experience of limitation. It is a discourse that insists on his own word ‘tundish’ as secondary when compared to the English priest’s ‘funnel’, with no indigenous language or forms of expression available to him where he can redress this imbalance of power (194).

While Stephen Dedalus is able to realise he is trapped by the mismatch of experience and language that leads to feelings of alienation, the young protagonist of Reading in the Dark cannot. Like Stephen, the protagonist of the novel grapples with difficult questions of language, expression and understanding. However, his struggles are inflected by the particular contexts that arise from growing up within his family in mid-century Derry. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, close to the end of the novel the boy decides to read out an account of what he ‘knows’ about his family’s past in Irish. However, long before he does so, the boy grapples with finding a form that can appropriately express the secrets he has discovered. The more he uncovers about his family’s past the more he longs to try and fashion it into a single, authoritative narrative: ‘A choice, an election, was to be made’ the

117 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 51-75 (p. 74).

138 boy decides, ‘between what actually happened and what I imagined, what I had heard, what

I kept hearing’ (182). While he feels the truth ‘swollen inside me’ (194), every time he tries to tell his mother what he knows he fails to do so. This failure is partly to do with his fear of how this knowledge might harm his mother, but it is also to do with how the secrets he’s discovered exceed the forms of representation available to him. He begins to try and write what he knows down on paper to ‘rehearse it’ but also to try ‘to get it clear’, embarking on a process of trying to decide which of the complex and contradictory details ‘to include and which to leave out’ (194). Faced with a fraught set of interrelated histories then, expressing the ‘truth’ to himself or to his mother in clear, plain English proves impossible. Just as it does for Stephen Dedalus, to try and express his experiences in English results in a deadlock of signification. However, while Stephen is able to reflect on this formal problem, the protagonist of Reading in the Dark cannot. Instead, he literalises this deadlock as he translates his account into Irish, his use of the language no one else understands indicative that for this family there is no way to communicate ‘the truth’ directly.

In the introduction, I suggested that in the novels of Joyce the loss of the Irish language haunts the increasingly experimental skin of the novels’ formal features. I posited that the texts begin to deploy breakdowns of signification as a deliberate strategy to resist the ideas of truth, linearity and closure coded into English. In doing so, I suggested that the novels are able to more accurately express Irish experience, their formal strategies able to gesture towards all that is deemed ‘untrue’ and ‘inferior’ to dominant colonial regimes of truth and knowledge. For the boy in Reading in the Dark, as he resorts to Irish, he exploits a similar point of indecipherability as a formal strategy. In doing so, he is able to communicate knowledge of his mother’s secrets. However, it is interesting to note the way this formal anxiety is weaponised within the specific social and political contexts of Reading in the Dark in a way not seen in Joyce. Disclosing his knowledge of her secrets in Irish, the boy offers his mother an account that pulses with traumatic significance. Like Joyce’s novels it is a text

139 that operates more by affect and intersubjective inference than direct statements, but it is also a text used to provoke and challenge his mother. It is a formal method used to betray her confidence, his formal strategy mimicking the secret history of duplicity he narrates.

Vocalising his account of the past in Irish, the protagonist of Reading in the Dark not only betrays his mother’s confidence but also ignores the ways in which silence plays an important role within the Republican community. In my arguments about transgenerational trauma, I suggested silence is a major way the traumatic past manifests within the boy’s family at the beginning of the novel. However, within the text, not all silences are the sign of an individual possessed by an unspeakable history. Indeed, if the most prominent verb in the novel is ‘to know’, it is interesting to note the frequency with which it is connected to the noun ‘nothing’, especially when it comes to speech.118 Early in the book, after the boy’s younger sister dies, he is asked by his mother to take flowers to her grave. At the graveyard the boy encounters her ghost and unsure if he should tell his mother asks his brother for advice. ‘Are you out of your head, or what?’ his brother replies, going on to insist that ‘Sure any sane person would have […] done nothing. Anyway, you saw nothing. You say nothing.

You’re not safe to leave alone’ (18). What astounds the boy’s brother here and throughout the book, is the protagonist’s inability to adhere to the ‘natural’ codes of behaviour which govern family life, particularly the unspoken importance of saying ‘nothing’ within the

Bogside community. ‘Saying nothing’ is such an important maxim within the community it even penetrates the boy’s Jesuit schooling. While the boy’s school is very much a separate sphere from the Bogside community, the importance of saying ‘nothing’ nonetheless becomes important when speaking about the community in which the students live. ‘Some of you here, one or two of you perhaps, know the man I am going to talk about today’ the boys’ teacher begins one day, telling his pupils a story about the sectarian violence that exists

118 Stephen Regan, ‘Review of Reading in the Dark’, Irish Studies Review, 5.19 (1997), 35–40 (p. 36).

140 within the community: ‘You may not know you know him, but that doesn’t matter’ (22).

Interestingly, the priest’s words recall here, almost verbatim, lines from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’. This poem parodies the language used by the media to speak about the Troubles, detailing the ways in which non-verbal cues are used to infer information within communities and how the importance of saying nothing incriminating leads either to silence or a profusion of utterance that while vocalised essentially says ‘nothing’.

Throughout the novel, when confronted by his community’s ‘shared modes of secrecy’ the boy is often left reeling. 119 He is confused and indeed is perhaps ‘not safe to leave alone’ as onto a complex communicative space of intersecting silences, some willed and some unconscious, he often erroneously reads an absence of knowledge that fuels his desire for the facts he imagines are being held from him. Early in the novel, when the children visit a circus, a clown called ‘Mr Bamboozelem’ performs a trick where he disappears. While his siblings ‘laughed and clapped’ the boy is ‘uneasy’ for while they are all able to see how the trick works the boy cannot and he is left wondering anxiously ‘How could they all be so sure?’ (8) The boy is bamboozled by the disappearance, unable to read it for what it is and coming close to the novel’s opening, this scene is perhaps an important prefiguring of the ways the mechanics of his community will come to bamboozle him as the novel progresses. Indeed, the boy’s sense of childhood unease grows into profound alienation as he becomes an adult. Unlike his parents, the protagonist of Reading in the Dark was part of a generation that benefited from extended access to education as a result of the

1947 Education Act. This generation would go on to become the Catholic middle class that played a significant role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. However, as much as education would go on to become a socially and politically empowering force for the

119 Broadbent, ‘An Interview with Seamus Deane’, p. 17.

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Catholic community, it poses serious problems for the young boy and his role within his family. For children like the boy, Deane suggested in an interview with Carol Rumens, trying to fashion an account of their family history will always be the story of a ‘search for one’.120

‘What happened’ will always be unavailable to a subject whose training, based in empiricism, rationality and logic, takes the idea that ‘facts are coincident with the truth’ as a foundational principle.121 Throughout the novel, the text is littered with myths, legends and fairy stories.

One such story is that of Brigid McLaughlin, a Derry woman who takes a job looking after two young children. After a series of ghostly happenings, the woman’s charges disappear and Brigid goes mad, descending into muteness. While these stories arouse the boy’s interest as entertainment, they do nothing to satisfy his curiosity about the past and the secret knowledge he believes holds the key to understanding his place within the community.

However, for Deane, stories like these are often ‘subtly coded ways of dealing with trauma and difficulty’.122 While Brigid’s story is a fantastic tale, at its core it is a narrative that echoes the boy’s search. It is a story about an adult failing to protect children, children in turn betraying a parent-figure, and a resulting breakdown of family that results in madness and muteness. The story ripples with patterns of betrayal that recall what has taken place within his own community, however the boy is unable to see how this story deals with the very thing he pursues.

One of the ways that regimes of ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’ are defined and reinforced within a society is through its cultural institutions. For Foucault, education is a key area where the ‘battle for truth’ takes place, where ‘the rules according to which the true and the false are separated’ become codified and disseminated.123 Over the course of the novel, the protagonist’s education inducts him into a very specific idea of truth and knowledge.

120 Carol Rumens, ‘Reading Deane: an Interview with Seamus Deane’, Fortnight, 363 (1997), 29–30 (p. 30). 121 Ibid., p. 29. 122 Ibid. 123 Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, p. 74.

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‘British’ or ‘colonial’ in nature, it is predicated on empiricism and verifiable realities.

However, within the colonial/postcolonial space of Derry, multiple regimes of knowledge co-exist. Within the boy’s community are traces of indigenous forms of knowledge premised on the belief that there are intangible realities which empiricism cannot access. Drawing on these forms of knowledge, willed silences and fantastic stories become an important way in which the community negotiates its own ideas about the world. For the boy, however, the very ‘intellectual skills of reasoning and analysis’ his education gives him, actually alienate him ‘from the discursive modes’ of his community.124 Within a novel where so much of the boy’s narrative is given over to interpretation, the story of Brigid McLaughlin is presented within the text without comment from the boy. It is isolated within its own section titled

‘Katie’s Story’ and offered without gloss or comment by the protagonist. The nested story reaches out to the rest of the text, its similarity latent and yet the boy is unable to decipher and understand any of its allegorical significance. A moment of textual unease emerges that signifies a point of rupture between the boy and his community. In doing so, the novel dramatises the pressures colonial and post-colonial spaces inflict on subjectivity, as the boy is forced to negotiate an impossible path to ‘truth’ between two contrary and antithetical world views.

Conclusions

Over the course of this chapter, I explored Reading in the Dark in light of the social and political contexts in which it was written and published. I suggested that like many of his contemporaries, Seamus Deane uses the aesthetic possibilities of art to negotiate the antithetical identities and histories that plagued Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Reading in the Dark is uniquely coloured by Deane’s preoccupations as a literary and cultural

124 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 168.

143 critic, and in particular, I outlined how the novel can be read as a creative extension of

Deane’s critical position that there is no easy way to resolve the legacy of colonialism in

Ireland. I suggested that, within the novel, trauma emerges as a key way to understand this legacy. Beginning with the border as a point of political and cartographic rupture, my analysis posited the novel’s landscapes as a place where antagonistic identities are locked in intimate opposition. Any attempt to ‘resolve’ these animosities is called into question by the way they not only interrupt life in Northern Ireland but are indeed constitutive of it.

Deane’s deconstructive energies are also visible in the novel’s engagement with transgenerational trauma. My examination of the text suggested that within the novel there is a deliberately installed forward-moving story that couldn’t be any clearer and yet is also deceptive. Its narrative propulsion is interrupted by the way transgenerational trauma warps and damages the lives of both parents and child within the novel. This transmissibility calls into question the idea that the peace process could ever represent a ‘full’ or final resolution to Northern Ireland’s violent past. Instead, the betrayals that make up the boy and his family’s shared history are still ongoing as the novel ends, its narratives unfinished and unresolved.

I then turned to the different regimes of knowledge that exist within Reading in the

Dark. My analysis suggested that the co-existence of indigenous and colonial forms of knowledge have a profoundly damaging effect on the novel’s protagonist. While he may be compelled to find a history in which to situate himself, in doing so he is forced to try and negotiate between two antithetical worldviews, the education which seemed to offer him opportunities for self-definition and empowerment resulting in his profound alienation.

Throughout this chapter, my analysis has found that instead of closure, solutions and answers, the novel instead prioritises undecidability, cyclicality and further sites of traumatic rupture. While Deane’s novel may be very different in terms of style and narrative

144 approach from the novels of Joyce, what they both share is a formal desire to resist any readerly or indeed, broader cultural desires for easy resolutions. In my introductory chapter,

I posited that Joyce took a crisis of linguistic deprivation and instead of looking backwards, as the Irish Literary Revival did, took the realist novel form and hibernicised it. In doing so, he was able to better map the ongoing impact of colonial history and discourse on subjectivity. In Reading in the Dark, Deane takes this pattern and adapts it to negotiate the specific experience of a young boy growing up in Derry’s contested territory. The text appears to follow a relatively linear narrative plot, where the young boy slowly uncovers his family’s Republican past. However, as my analysis has shown, the text deliberately installs this plot only to interrupt it with strategies and formal features that question the idea that

Northern Ireland’s complex histories can ever be finished, its antithetical identities resolved or its animosities ‘over’.

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Chapter Two: The Traumatised Body in Anne Enright’s The Gathering

Introduction

In this thesis, my goal is to demonstrate that while Reading in the Dark, The Gathering and A

Girl is a Half-formed Thing are very different, as trauma novels they share a formal preoccupation with how to represent the traumatic consequences of Irish history and experience for subjectivity. In the previous chapter, I outlined how Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark participates in this Joycean legacy. Having done so, I will now turn my attention to Anne Enright’s The Gathering, the second of the three novels that this thesis will explore.

Anne Enright published her fourth novel The Gathering in 2007, towards the end of a period of massive economic growth in Ireland known as the Celtic Tiger. During this period, in less than twenty years, the country transformed from one of the poorest in the

European Union to one of its richest, with GDP per capita growing from less than 70% of the EU average in 1987 to 136% by 2003.125 The liberalisation of the Irish economy through deregulation, foreign investment and low corporation tax was accompanied by significant socio-cultural shifts. Prior to reforms in the late eighties, Irish economic policy was dominated by a culture of ‘chauvinistic economic nationalism’.126 Protectionist policies, high levels of government spending and a failure to invest in education and infrastructure led to chronic levels of poverty, high unemployment and emigration. Exacerbated by the cultural dominance of the Catholic Church, these conditions incubated a culture where women, young people and children were particularly vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse.

However, by 1999, a strategy document released by the National Economic and Social

125 Lizette Alvarez, ‘Letter from Europe: Suddenly Rich, Poor Old Ireland Seems Bewildered’, The New York Times, 2 February 2005, n.p. [accessed 26 June 2020] 126 Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 12– 13.

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Council proudly proclaimed Ireland had successfully ‘reinvented itself’.127 This document was part of an increasingly dominant cultural narrative where, as a newly ‘modern, vibrant economy’, Ireland had successfully left behind its ‘reactionary, nationalist Catholic past’.128

The country’s economic growth was seen as coetaneous with increasingly liberal attitudes towards relationships and sexuality, the lessening of the Catholic Church’s hold over civil life and the emancipated role of women within Irish society.

At the centre of narratives which posited Ireland as a ‘reinvented’ nation lay a confrontation between ideas of tradition and modernity. Taking Mary Robinson’s presidency as an example, Joe Cleary suggests that during the 1990s Irish political discourse was dominated by an uncritical championing of ‘modernisation’.129 Within this climate, as the first woman President of Ireland, Robinson’s victory was construed as the triumph of a

‘modern […] post-nationalist […] and secular’ culture over the nation’s conservative past.130

Rather than querying the tangible benefits of Ireland’s expanding economy, such questions were ‘effaced’ within this self-congratulatory narrative of economic and social progress.131

However, while the Celtic Tiger phenomenon did have a positive impact on quality of life indicators such as GDP, participation in education and housing conditions, benefits were not felt equally across all social groups. By 2007, child poverty figures remained ‘virtually unchanged’ compared to those before the boom.132 While women made up the largest growth sector in the job market they hugely under-earned compared to male counterparts and continued to be denied full access to healthcare when it came to reproductive rights.

127 National Economic Social Council, ‘Opportunities, Challenges and Capacities for Choice’ (Report No. 105) (Dublin, National Economic Social Council, 1999), p. 21. 128 Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, ed. by Pedar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 7. 129 Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernity’, in Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. by Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–22 (p. 16). 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid. 132 ‘Figures on Poverty Show the Celtic Tiger Changed Nothing’, The Irish Independent, 5 September 2007, n.p. [accessed 3 January 2020].

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Moreover, despite the growing economy, a failure to invest in public services meant many of the boom’s social and economic benefits struggled to percolate beyond its principal financial actors. Instead of a triumphant victory of modernisation over a conservative ‘past’ then, the continued experience of poverty and precarity by vulnerable social groups suggests that the hierarchies of power that characterised the 1970s and 1980s were simply recast within refreshed economic terms. The ‘patriarchy, privilege and impersonal forces’ of the postcolonial Irish state reconstituted within the Celtic Tiger’s discourses of economic freedom and neo-liberal celebration of the individual.133

In this chapter, I will examine The Gathering in light of the traumatised bodies that populate its narrative. My analysis of the novel will contend that through its attention to the impact of trauma on the body, The Gathering can be read as a text that disputes the idea of the Celtic Tiger as a resolution of Ireland’s patriarchal past. Kristen Ewins argues that within

Anne Enright’s novels, short stories and essays ‘the body, sex and family history’ have often become key ways of negotiating ‘questions of nationhood, sexuality and religion.’134 Building on Ewins’ reading, in this chapter I’ll contend that within The Gathering the traumatised body in particular emerges as a way to understand the ongoing legacy of misogyny and patriarchy in Celtic Tiger Ireland. In my introduction I outlined how the novel is set amid the affluence of the Celtic Tiger financial boom. Catalysed by her brother’s suicide, the text follows its protagonist Veronica Hegarty as she struggles to write down ‘what happened’ the summer she and her brother were sent to stay with their grandmother as children.135 Recalling the model of trauma developed in my introduction and chapter one as an unknown past that possesses the present, while this past is ‘roaring inside’ Veronica at the beginning of the novel, exactly what happened remains ‘uncertain.’ (3) In this chapter I’ll examine how

133 Reinventing Ireland, p. 11. 134 Kristen Ewins, ‘“History Is Only Biological”: History, Bodies and National Identity in The Gathering and 'Switzerland'’, in Anne Enright, ed. by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), pp. 127– 44 (p. 129). 135 Anne Enight, The Gathering (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 3. All future references will be incorporated in the text.

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Veronica’s self-consciously written text attempts to ‘bear witness’ (1) to her brother’s sexual molestation, Veronica’s witness of this abuse and the damage this traumatic action has inflicted on their lives, while the historical experience itself remains hedged in doubt. I will contend that within the novel, the body operates as an important site of somatic memories but also plays an important role in formal strategies that suggest the traumatic past is unresolved and ongoing for Veronica. In doing so, my analysis will posit that within The

Gathering, Celtic Tiger Dublin emerges as a city where Ireland’s history of patriarchy and privilege has not been overcome at all but instead lives on ‘in traumatic relay’ with the present.136

My chapter will begin by introducing Enright’s preoccupation with the objectification of women’s bodies within Irish political discourse. Situating The Gathering within this context, I will argue that Veronica’s testimony tries to reconstruct a history that can explain her brother Liam’s suicide but also her own uncertain status as a witness.

Building on Margaret Mills Harper’s suggestion that ‘ordinary language and temporal narrative’ often cannot furnish ‘the truth of traumatic experience’, my analysis will explore the role of the body in Veronica’s attempt to reconstruct a traumatic past that is always couched in doubt.137 I will then contend that while Veronica grapples with personal and extraordinary traumatic events, her experiences emerge from a broader political-historical context. My discussion will focus on how Veronica’s fractured narrative opens a window onto a hidden history that is both personal and national in its reach. I will argue that the

Celtic Tiger’s economic and social transformations represent a further layer of traumatic action around this hidden history. To bring my examination of The Gathering to its conclusion, I will then explore how the text’s formal features align the novel with the

Joycean legacy. My discussion will focus on the formal strategies in The Gathering that, like

136 Cleary, ‘Ireland and Modernity’, p. 19. 137 Margaret Mills Harper, ‘Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright’s The Gathering’, The South Carolina Review, 43 (2010), 74– 89 (p. 76).

149 the novels of Joyce, always frustrate any readerly or broader cultural desire for resolution or catharsis. While The Gathering is very different from Reading in the Dark or indeed the novels of Joyce, it shares formal strategies with them that seek to better express the traumatic legacy of history for the Irish subject. My chapter will conclude that within The Gathering, the novel’s treatment of the uncertain event of sexual molestation suggests the discourses of inequality, bodily objectification and shame that facilitated this abuse have not been resolved but rather recast within the Celtic Tiger present.

Anne Enright, Traumatised Bodies and Testimony in The Gathering

Since the publication of her first short story collection The Portable Virgin in 1991,

Enright’s writing has been preoccupied with the relationship between national identity, gender and the body. Born in 1962 in Dublin, Enright graduated with a degree in English and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin before completing an MA in Creative Writing under Angela Carter at The University of East Anglia in the UK. Echoing Carter in theme and style, in her short stories, novels and essays Enright has probed ideas of Irish national identity to explore the ‘effects of its construction’ on female subjectivity.138 This is particularly true of the novels that preceded The Gathering. In The Wig My Father Wore (1995), the text interrogated Dublin’s ‘encroaching corporate culture’ as a substitute for nationalism and religion within Irish national imagining, examining this culture’s impact on one woman’s capacity for intimacy.139 In What Are You Like? (2000) Enright explored similar questions through ideas of ‘home’ and ‘away’, narrating the lives of separated twin girls growing up in

London and Dublin.140 In The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) Enright’s quasi-historical novel destabilised received notions of history and authenticity, the text prioritising the body and

138 Carol Dell’Amico, ‘Anne Enright’s The Gathering: Trauma, Testimony, Memory’, New Hibernia Review, 14 (2010), 59–73 (p. 59). 139 Ibid., p. 68. 140 Ewins, ‘“History is Only Biological”’, p. 129.

150 emotion as sites of ‘truth and experience’.141 In The Gathering, similar questions to do with truth, authority and narrative once again came into sharp focus. This time, however, Enright situated her ongoing preoccupation with the relationship between Irish culture and subjectivity within the epidemic of childhood sexual abuse in Ireland that came to light in the 1990s and early 2000s. Throughout the 1990s, media coverage such as the RTÉ documentary States of Fear (1999) threw light on the widespread physical and sexual abuse of children in Ireland. In The Gathering, these questions take on personal significance for the protagonist Veronica as she struggles to reconstruct her past and her suspicions about the sexual abuse of her brother by family friend Lambert Nugent. In each of Enright’s early novels then, the texts demonstrate a preoccupation with the consequences of patriarchal culture for the female subject. In The Gathering, these consequences are most ethically significant for the body and subjectivity of the sexually abused child, Liam Hegarty.

However, in her attempt to testify to her brother’s abuse, Veronica’s account is also inflected by issues of truth and meaning that emerge from her gendered experience growing up in 1970s Dublin.

For Enright, to grow up as a woman in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, was to grow up as an object within Ireland’s culture of conservative, patriarchal Catholicism. While the introduction of universal free secondary education in the late 1960s and membership of the

European Economic Community in the 1970s seemed to promise equality of opportunity for all Irish citizens, the culture of familism enshrined in legislation following Humanae Vitae

(1968) often emphasised the biological function of the female body while removing the subject’s autonomy over it.142 In an article on the role of personal stories in the 2018 referendum campaign to repeal the Constitution of Ireland’s eighth amendment (which represented a de facto ban on all forms of abortion), Enright lamented the longstanding

141 Dell’Amico, ‘Trauma, Testimony, Memory’, p. 59. 142 Harper, ‘Flesh and Bones’, p. 85.

151 objectification of women’s bodies in Irish political discourse. While personal accounts of women were the ‘redemptive heart’ of the successful repeal campaign, Enright suggested that by framing political debate through personal experience there was a risk of continuing to define women through biology.143 By shaping her story ‘into words’, a woman could

‘possess an experience that might have possessed her’, but in articulating her story the speaking woman also risked being transformed into an object that can be ‘penetrated and impregnated, into a physical, and a physically helpless, thing’ rather than an autonomous subject due the proper rights of Irish and international law.144

Echoing Enright’s anxieties about narration and objectification, from the outset of

The Gathering Veronica Hegarty’s self-consciously ‘written’ text vacillates between the desire to shape experience into words and the difficulties of doing so. Following a non-linear chronology, the novel is made up of short chapters where Veronica, veering between narration and speculation, explores her life and family history before and after the death of her brother Liam. In these chapters, the speculative world of 1920s Dublin, where her grandparents met and married, is juxtaposed with Veronica’s childhood in the 1970s and her later experiences as a young woman, journalist and mother. However, these distinct timelines are set within the larger retrospective narrative frame that opens the novel.

When we first encounter Veronica in the opening chapter, it is some time after Liam has died and the ‘gathering’ of his wake has taken place. Unable to bring herself to sleep next to her husband anymore, Veronica stays up all night in the huge new-build home her husband’s finance job affords them. Unable to sleep she spends her nights drinking and writing, trying to give narrative shape to the past that is both ‘roaring’ inside her and yet, as she states explicitly, ‘may not have taken place’ (1). ‘I think you might call it a crime of the

143 Anne Enright, ‘Anne Enright: Personal Stories Are Precious Things and They Made the Difference’, The Irish Times, 28 May 2018, n.p. [accessed 7 February 2020]. 144 Ibid.

152 flesh’ (1), Veronica comments; however, having expressed her tentative suspicions about this ‘crime’, she abruptly shifts away from her meditation on the past into a story about walking with her daughters. On their walk, Veronica finds the landscape littered with the dead and rotting bodies of mice, a finch and ‘a magpie’s ancient arms coming through the mess of feathers’ (1). While her written text might retreat from explicit reference to the crime of flesh in the past, spoiled flesh nonetheless continues to dominate her night-time writing. These bodies are intimately connected to Liam, causing Veronica to hesitate in front of them as she remembers ‘how he admired their intricacies’ and yet they are also something she wants to protect her daughters from, urging them to ‘step back’ although she ‘is not sure why’ (1). Recalling the idea of trauma as an experience often only visible through its symptoms, while the ‘crime of the flesh’ in the past is a point of narrative absence, it is nonetheless surrounded by images of tainted flesh and Veronica’s acute feelings of fear and avoidance. While Veronica might not be able to name the crime in the past ‘roaring’ inside, her images and narrated action imply it is something of great significance intimately connected to Liam and the compromised body. However, avoiding any explicit reference to this past, Veronica then goes on to literally erase her account. ‘I erase it’ she insists, referring to the story of her daughters and the animal bones from which she tries to protect them, this literal erasure is compounded by a further layer of negation as she states, ‘It does not matter. I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth’. (2) As this short opening chapter ends, although Veronica might want to ‘bear witness’ to the uncertain past, and while her language choices and use of imagery might begin to gesture towards it, there is a further layer of ‘truth’ she cannot access. She lacks a discourse able to ‘tell’ or express the

‘crime’ of the flesh in conventional narrative forms, and her uncertainty about the past is further complicated within her written text by questions of language and the dangers associated with bodies.

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From the outset of The Gathering, trauma emerges as a way to map the complex and ongoing consequences of Ireland’s patriarchal culture for one woman’s subjectivity. Staying up all night to write, Veronica grapples with a past that plagues her ‘written’ present as an unknown but nonetheless forcefully felt history that manifests in the animal bodies that litter her text. Trying to fully articulate this history, she experiences a mismatch of content and form, struggling to find narrative strategies able to express the multiple layers of traumatic action that make up her uncertain past. For Denell Downum, the reason

Veronica’s narrative project is so difficult is because it must find forms able to map multiple and interrelated layers of traumatic activity. As a ‘duty to her brother’s ghost’, Downum suggests, Veronica is compelled to reconstruct the historic ‘crime’ of sexual abuse that she suspects explains Liam’s alcoholism and suicide.145 However, Downum insists, she is equally obligated to address her own shattered identity and persona.146

Throughout the novel, Veronica’s account of the past is mediated through her own status as a traumatised witness. Shosana Felman and Dori Laub argue that at the epicentre of trauma and of greatest ethical significance is a primary victim’s inability to act as a witness to their own traumatic experience. However, participating in traumatic events as a secondary witness also risks traumatic symptoms of ‘bewilderment, injury, confusion’ and ‘dread’.147

Witnessing traumatic events overwhelms an individual’s ability to process events into normal, narrative memory so that also subject to ‘the dialectic of trauma’, witnesses are often unable to see more than ‘fragments’ of traumatic events, struggling to find a ‘language’ able to convey ‘what one has seen.’148

145 Denell Downum, ‘Learning to Live: Memory and the Celtic Tiger in Novels by Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright and Tana French’, New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua, 19.3 (2015), 76–92 (p. 81). 146 Ibid. 147 Shosana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 58. 148 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 2.

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In a surreal sequence, Veronica speculates on her own status as a victim of sexual abuse. In her mind’s eye, she has a ‘picture’ (221) of herself as a child, with the man who most likely abused Liam Lambert Nugent, ejaculating into her hand. However, the picture is

‘made up of the words that say it’ and indeed, the word that is most clearly written across the vignette is ‘Nothing’ (221). While the memory of a past that is ‘nothing’ could be read as symptomatic of a direct experience of sexual trauma, it can equally be read as evidence of her difficult role as a witness. For Veronica, the past comes to exist as a ‘place in my head where words and actions are mangled’, a place that could be ‘the beginning of things’ but where she cannot tell what is and is not ‘real’ (221-222). Despite the instability of these memories, it is nonetheless important for her to distinguish herself as a witness. Born eleven months after Liam, from the beginning of their lives the siblings are so close she wonders if

‘we overlapped in there, he just left early’ (11). Almost-twins, the pair become locked in a

‘double trajectory’ entwined around the uncertain event of abuse, but while Veronica is able to marry, have children and live a ‘successful’ life, Liam cannot.149 While Veronica’s need to distinguish herself as a witness might attest to the reality of the historical past, it also attests to Veronica’s complex and lingering feelings of guilt. Within the novel then, Veronica’s

‘written’ narrative not only negotiates an uncertain historical event but the ways her memory is complicated by shifting roles of victim and witness. Veronica’s attempt to recover the past and integrate her own fragmented persona is couched in her ongoing feelings of betrayal, suffering and shame.

Despite the difficulties Veronica faces in constructing her ‘written’ narrative, she nonetheless resolves to ‘tell Liam’s story’ (13). To do so, however, she decides not to begin in the timeframe of their shared childhood but through the vehicle of a much older historical ‘romance’ (13). Set in a fictionalised version of 1920s Dublin, this romance focuses

149 Harper, ‘Flesh and Bones’, p. 78.

155 on the meeting of Veronica’s grandmother Ada, and Lambert Nugent, the man who most likely abused Liam. In a downtown hotel, Liam’s possible abuser is introduced through his

‘decency’, an ‘ordinary man’ (15) who happily waits for his friend and Veronica’s grandfather Charlie Spillane to arrive. ‘Unprepared’ (13) for a beautiful and sophisticated woman like Ada, as she walks into the hotel lobby a flicker of emotion takes root in him that wavers between hatred and desire. In the minutes they stand beside each other, time becomes filled for Nugent with ‘phases and stages […] years long, or decades’ where he moves from ‘love to a kind of sneering […] smitten by hatred and touched by desire’ (18).

What Veronica traces in this initial meeting and throughout the vignettes within this time frame that punctuate the novel, is a pattern of desire perverted into a sense of ownership. In a third-person narrative voice, Veronica explores Nugent’s gaze as he transforms Ada into a naked object in the hotel lobby. Surreally, while her clothes actually stay on, Nugent imaginatively strips Veronica’s grandmother, taking in ‘her breasts […] her throat’ surprised by the fact she ‘does not realise she is naked’ (20). ‘No one owed anyone a thing. Not a jot.’ (2), Veronica’s narrating voice comments, imagining the future Nugent sees for himself. However, as Ada marries Veronica’s grandfather Charlie instead of Nugent, this sense of being free morphs into a sense of being owed something that was not given.

Out of the ‘dour narcissism of the ordinary man’, Nugent’s sense of entitlement to Ada’s body grows into a desire to ‘push’ himself into Veronica’s grandmother (32). This desire eventually becomes literalised as a surreal pair of hands that ‘slip into her belly, to feel the heat and slither of her insides’ (32) as they stand in the lobby of the hotel.

In an attempt to manage the instability that plagues them, Garratt has argued that the desire for a ‘history’ in which to situate their experiences often manifests in trauma survivors.150 Echoing this idea, within her written text Veronica tries to recover a narrative

150 Garratt, Trauma and History, p. 2.

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‘that would explain us all […] the reason we are all so fucked up’ (84-85). While her historical ‘romance’ might not narrate the abuse of Liam per se, it does attest to what

Veronica suspects are the energies of hatred and desire that precipitated it. Within her

‘historical’ romance, Veronica traces an inheritance where the surreal objectification of

Ada’s body by Nugent anticipates his abuse of Liam. However, useful as this narrative approach may be, Veronica’s romance ultimately proves unsatisfactory. Throughout the novel, Veronica openly doubts and questions the veracity and usefulness of her imagined history in her narrative configuration of Liam’s abuse. ‘I can twist them as far as you like, here on the page’ she comments of Ada and Nugent, noting how she can explore what ‘they might have done’ (139).

Ultimately, Veronica finds her story always ‘shrivels back’ to an inescapable lack of knowledge and this is particularly true when Veronica is faced with the very real ‘facts’ (140) of Liam’s suicide. The Brighton-based coroner explains to Veronica how Liam was found at sea, his pockets loaded with stones, wearing no underwear. This final fact makes Veronica

‘want to cry’ (142), believing Liam’s alcoholism was so advanced he was unable to keep his underwear clean. These ‘facts’ lead Veronica to finally reject the ‘shifting stories and the waking dreams’ of her romance, the awfulness of Liam’s death ‘requiring’ Veronica to finally

‘call an end to the romance and just say what happened in Ada’s house’ (142).

Veronica ultimately rejects her ‘historical’ romance of bodily objectification, however, the body nonetheless continues to play an important role as she struggles to narrate her unstable memories of Liam’s abuse. From the novel’s outset, Veronica uses the body as a governing metaphor for her protracted and difficult search for the ‘truth’, positioning her ‘written’ sentences as ‘clean, white bones’ on which she seeks to put the

‘flesh’ of narrative (2). This metaphor is perhaps unsurprising given the increasing emphasis

157 on the body as a site of memory within traumatic contexts since the new millennium.151

Ubiquitous as talk-based therapies were in the 1990s, clinicians began to find that they often proved inappropriate in cases where traumatic experiences are ‘stored in nonverbal parts of the brain such as the amygdala’.152 Body-based therapies focusing on sensation, feeling and movement became increasingly popular for the way they can help traumatised individuals access knowledge of the traumatic event ‘not yet available for verbal narration and cognitive reflection’.153 Recalling this idea, when the time comes for Veronica to finally relate what she possibly witnessed between Liam and Nugent, it is a memory accessed through the body.

In a supermarket following Liam’s death, Veronica finds the brand of ‘old-fashioned pink soap’ (142) her brother used to use. Sniffing the soap triggers a surreal visual memory; opening the door to her grandmother’s front room, Veronica sees ‘Mr Nugent’s penis, which was sticking straight out […] grown strangely […] to produce the large and unwieldy shape of a boy, that boy being my brother Liam’ (143). Almost immediately, Veronica’s narrating consciousness insists this is most likely a ‘false memory’ (146). However, what she is sure of are the physical sensations registered by her body as a child, the house ‘very cold’, the ‘smell of Germolene’ filling the air and the sudden urge ‘to pee and look at the pee coming out; to poke or scratch […] and smell my fingers afterward’ (146). Rather than

‘normal’ narrative memories recalled by the adult Veronica, these sense impressions emerge from a child-self still alive inside her. ‘I pause as I write this,’ Veronica comments as she narrates the scene, ‘I place my own hand over my face, and lick the thick skin of my palm with my girl’s tongue’ (146). As her ‘girl’s’ body performs the action of licking on her adult hand, Veronica concludes that ‘you know everything when you are eight’ before qualifying that it is ‘hidden from you, sealed up in a way you have to cut yourself open to find’ (147).

151 Shoshana Ringell and Jerrold R. Brandell, Trauma: Contemporary Directions in Theory, Practice and Research (London: Sage Publications, 2012), p. 7. 152 Ibid, p. 8. 153 Ibid.

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This is perhaps exactly what Veronica’s testimony does, the act of writing through the physicality of her child-self opening up the body to lay its hidden knowledge bare.

While Veronica ultimately rejects her fictional ‘romance’, through the attention that it pays to the objectified body, Veronica establishes a method of thinking about the uncertain past through the way that traumatic experiences register in the body. Within her written account of the abuse itself, Veronica’s somatic memories emerge as points of certainty while her adult narrating consciousness remains saturated by doubt, insisting her memories must be ‘false’ (146). Through its focus on the traumatised body then, Veronica’s account not only testifies to the uncertain event of Liam’s molestation but also the way her own hesitant recollections are always mediated through her status as a traumatised witness.

So far in this thesis, I have posited trauma as an aporetic experience that comes to possess the life of the traumatised subject and suggested that through its focus on the traumatised body, in both Veronica’s ‘romance’ and her account of Liam’s abuse, the text dramatises how the traumatic legacy of sexual trauma continues to impact on one woman’s subjectivity long after the event itself. However, Harte has argued that within The Gathering, the text doesn’t simply ‘present’ trauma’s symptoms, but seeks to ‘encode them in the novel’s form’.154 The traumatised body plays a particularly important role in the repeated images of compromised flesh that complicate any sense of a linear narrative trajectory within the text. Within trauma novels, narration often becomes, what Garratt has referred to as, a ‘task and a cure’ for the traumatised subject.155 Haunted by the unknowable past, they are ‘compelled’ to draw out its occluded edges through narration, transforming their unknown history into a knowable memory in an act of ‘therapeutic healing’.156

Any sense of healing in The Gathering is, however, challenged by images of flesh, repeated across the novel’s disjointed timelines, that emphasise trauma as a chronic and a-

154 Harte, ‘Mourning Remains Unresolved’, p. 192. 155 Garratt, Trauma and History, p. 8. 156 Ibid.

159 temporal condition. While the account of Liam’s abuse that occurs mid-way through the novel could be read as a narrative ‘break through’, throughout the text Veronica continues to be plagued by intrusive images that recall the energies of bodily objectification and victimisation at work in sexual abuse. As she sleeps with her husband on the night of Liam’s wake, Veronica’s body opens under her husband ‘like a chicken when it is quartered’ (40).

During Liam’s wake, his corpse becomes an object for the mourners ‘to feast on’ while

Veronica’s mother sits in the kitchen like a ‘piece of benign human meat’ (47-74). In its most vulnerable moments, again and again the human body is portioned into flesh to be consumed. Moreover, while these images all occur on the same night of Liam’s wake, they do not occupy the same physical space within the book. The final account of this evening comes late in the novel when Veronica wonders if it was the ‘pill’ given to her by her siblings that made her unable to say ‘no’ to her husband when he has sex with her, leaving her feeling like ‘meat that has been recently butchered’ (219). Recalling the way trauma confounds linear notions of past and present, the memory of this particular evening is digested and disseminated through the body of the text, its images of compromised flesh rising up across the novel’s non-chronological chapters. In doing so, these repeated and a- synchronous images of flesh not only interrupt any expectations of narrative catharsis or closure but also problematise the idea of Liam’s abuse as a single point of traumatic origin.

In my analysis of the novel’s short opening chapter, I suggested images of tainted bird flesh and Veronica’s inappropriate level of fear anticipate the bodily objectification and victimisation at work in Liam’s sexual abuse. However, within the novel’s nonlinear timeline, this opening scene most likely occurs after the night of Liam’s wake. Accordingly,

Veronica’s fear of the birds’ opened bodies could also be read as a sign of her ongoing distress at how her body was treated by her husband the night she was unable to say ‘no’ to him (219). Just as the novel dramatises Veronica’s difficulty in piecing together a history that can explain her brother’s death, the text encodes a similar struggle for meaning and narrative

160 for the reader in the novel’s structure and form. Through its focus on the body, Veronica’s text emerges as a history where multiple sites of traumatic objectification are detectable, ever-present and yet always hedged in doubt. This doubt not only affects Veronica, but also the reader who struggles to piece together the history that explains the protagonist’s ongoing feelings of pain, alienation and fear.

Personal Trauma and the National Context

In this chapter, I have argued that in The Gathering, the traumatised body emerges as a way to map the ongoing consequences of Ireland’s patriarchal history. Rather than simply depicting the effects of trauma within this history, I posited that the novel’s formal features enact Veronica’s feelings of searing doubt and uncertainty for the reader. In doing so, the text not only destabilises any notion of a linear narrative of healing for Veronica but also questions the idea of Liam’s abuse as a single point of traumatic origin. Instead, the novel enacts a personal history that is constituted by multiple sites of traumatic activity, though historical events themselves always remains shrouded in doubt.

The novel can also be read as a text that specifically intervenes in narratives that posited the Celtic Tiger as a resolution of Ireland’s patriarchal past. For Veronica, writing at night in her mock-Tudor mansion, there is no sense that the affluent present has been able to ‘resolve’ her difficult history. Indeed, it is through this present, particularly media reports of the emerging history of endemic sexual exploitation that ‘went on in schools and churches and in people’s homes’ that the adult Veronica first becomes aware of the abuse that went on ‘slap-bang in front of me’ (173-174). I will now turn my attention to the ways that Veronica’s fractured narrative opens up a window onto a hidden history that is both personal but also national in its reach.

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For Gerry Smyth, what makes The Gathering a typically ‘Irish’ text is its preoccupation with how ‘the sins of the past continue to poison and distort the present’.157

In particular, he suggests that ‘betrayal’ emerges as the central legacy ‘informing the narrative’ on a personal but also national level.158 The energies of betrayal are particularly useful when mapping the relationship between the ongoing consequences of sexual trauma and the social and political contexts in which this abuse most likely occurred. At the centre of Liam’s suffering and suicide, Veronica suspects, is Nugent’s betrayal of the child Liam.

However, within her written narrative, the energies of betrayal also inflect the broader political contexts which allowed the abuse to take place. In one scene relatively late in the novel, Veronica decides to drive out to St Ita’s hospital where her dead uncle, Brendan, was a long-term resident. Veronica visits the site’s communal graveyard, wondering ‘how many people were slung into the dirt of this field’ (160). She is horrified by the lack of care their mass-grave demonstrates but is even more shocked at how the dead are not an anomaly within the landscape but are instead constitutive of it. As she surveys the site, she notes the ground she walks on ‘is boiling with corpses’, the topography not interrupted by bodies but instead ‘knit[ted] out of their tangled bones’ (160).

So far in my analysis, I have posited Liam’s abuse as a profoundly personal and extraordinary attack on his bodily autonomy and subjectivity. However, it is also symptomatic of a pervasive patriarchal culture where the lives and bodies of the vulnerable meant less within the state’s postcolonial political project of self-definition. While the 1916

Proclamation of the Irish Republic pledged to protect and cherish ‘all the children of the nation equally’ the emergent post-colonial state quickly reneged on this promise.159 Under the façade of a ‘content, if poor, morally pure Irish society’ the realities of Irish social policy

157 Gerry Smyth, The Judas Kiss: Treason and Betrayal in Six Modern Irish Novels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 181. 158 Ibid., p. 187. 159 Ibid., p. 181.

162 often failed to protect the vulnerable, particularly children who were ‘illegitimate, poor, neglected and abused’.160 Those who fell outside the limits of the state’s vision of itself were often contained in institutions run by the Catholic Church and rife with physical and sexual abuse. So endemic is this pernicious culture in The Gathering, the ghostly bodies of the dead not only come to constitute the ground itself but also to haunt Veronica’s family home. On the night of Liam’s wake, on her way to bed, Veronica encounters the revenant spirits of

Ada, Nugent and, finally, her Uncle Brendan whose body is fashioned out of ‘the inconvenient dead’ (216). Veronica hears the dead ‘muttering and whining under his clothes’, they ‘crawl and bulge’ out of his opened fly, his body so overfull that when he touches his collar ‘handfuls’ of the dead come loose (216). For Felman and Laub, the struggle to come to know the ‘buried truth’ of trauma is not only an attempt to address a

‘lack’ of historical knowledge but to address the way trauma erases the perceiving subject.161

Echoing this idea, within the novel Brendan’s bodily autonomy and distinct subjectivity dissolve into an amalgam of the disposable dead, the national-level betrayal of vulnerable bodies coming to constitute his ghostly self.

While the presence of the inconvenient dead within the novel’s landscapes and domestic spaces suggests the ubiquity of Ireland’s patriarchal culture, the text also dramatises how this environment precipitated specific instances of sexual abuse. Even though the event of Liam’s abuse is always couched in uncertainty, it most likely took place at a time when endemic poverty, notions of hierarchical authority and reproductive fecundity conspired to make children like Liam and Veronica vulnerable. Following their mother’s multiple miscarriages, the children are sent to live with their grandmother who often left them alone with her landlord Nugent. This vulnerability of proximity is further compounded by an unequal relation of power that insists on the children’s silence and

160 Moira J. Maguire, Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 2. 161 Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p. 58.

163 powerlessness, not only facilitating the initial act of abuse but a ‘second order’ of betrayal in its covering up.162 This double layer of traumatic action is particularly evident in the novel when the adult Veronica puts her grief-stricken mother to bed. As she does so, she almost brings up her suspicions about Liam’s abuse, asking her mother if she remembers ‘the landlord’ Nugent who used to give them sweets (213). ‘What are you saying to me?’ her mother responds, staring at her ‘pointedly’, and while Veronica quickly says ‘Nothing,

Mammy’, inside her narrative she does give voice to her suspicions:

I am saying that, the year you sent us away, your dead son was interfered with […] and that interference was enough to set him on a path that ends in the box downstairs. That is what I am saying, if you want to know (213).

While this is one of the most explicit statements of certainty about Liam’s abuse within the text, Veronica is unable to express her thoughts aloud. Her account ripples with a tension between her accusatory tone and actual silence and in doing so, the text engages with the multiple layers of complicity and betrayal at work in Liam’s abuse. Harper suggests that The

Gathering is intimately concerned with the Hegarty family’s ‘collusion’ with Liam’s powerlessness.163 In her characteristically arch prose, within Liam’s story of ‘interference’

Veronica positions her mother as a primary actor who sends the children ‘away’ (213).

However, while she indicts both Nugent and her mother in this scene, her inability to voice these accusations aloud also foregrounds her own complicity.

In both their youth and adulthood, whatever befalls the Hegarty children, they collectively repeat the mantra: ‘Don’t tell Mammy’ (9). So ingrained is this dictum that when the adult Veronica tries to bring up her suspicions about Nugent to her mother, she is unable to break this shared pledge of secrecy. As children, Liam and Veronica developed complex codes about what could and couldn’t be acknowledged and articulated between them. Veronica notes, for example, how as adolescents she and Liam enjoyed a ritualised

162 Smyth, The Judas Kiss, p. 181. 163 Harper, ‘Flesh and Bones’, p. 74.

164 discussion of ‘foothering priests […] little boy’s bollocks […] and gay men’s backsides’ but while they are able to laugh and joke about these sexual subjects, ‘getting your mickey licked’ was firmly off limits (167). Wondering why this might be, Veronica remembers how she liked the silence that came after these discussions because it was as if Liam ‘had just peed himself but no one had noticed, so it was all magically OK’ (167). Likening Liam’s sexual abuse to involuntary urination then, Veronica’s text creates an implicit comparison between the two that rests on the idea of shame. The clinician Judith Herman argues that attempting to mitigate the overwhelming effects of catastrophic disappointment, the abused child often begins to inscribe themselves as a site of responsibility and blame.164 In this context, the siblings’ complex discourse of laughter and silence makes everything ‘OK’ because it prevents their feelings of guilt from being seen publicly. However, this silence goes on to have deadly consequences for while Veronica’s silence was ostensibly protective, it nonetheless allowed Liam’s unvoiced wounding to fester. Veronica concludes, it was this discourse of laughter and silence that allowed Liam to slide from his ‘cheerful drinking’ all the way down to the ‘final stinking stage of his drinking’ that ultimately led to his death

(167). Nugent’s probable betrayal of Liam took place within a culture where the voices and lives of women and children are chronically devalued and silenced. Within this context,

Veronica’s silence becomes fraught with the energies of betrayal, for while staying silent was a way of staying loyal to her brother and indeed, perhaps was her only option in their youth, she suspects it also played a significant role in his suffering and death.

In addition to Veronica’s complicit silence, the protagonist also asks to ‘be forgiven’ for a further act of betrayal (167). As a teenager, Liam is arrested for some unknown crime and after her father bails him out, Veronica notes how her father ‘didn’t even bother pushing Liam anymore’, concluding that the ‘shame’ of his arrest was ‘so total’ her father

164 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 105.

165 gave up on his son (167). Even worse, however, is the way that Veronica feels she also betrayed her brother by refusing to believe his version of events. ‘If I am looking for the point I betrayed my brother, then it must be here, too’ she writes, identifying the moment when she decided ‘he did not deserve to be believed’ (166-167).

Veronica’s decision is predicated on the way that among the family and their local community, Liam is seen as a habitually difficult child. At first he is characterised as a ‘Pup, gurrier, monkey’ and then later, as his behaviour escalates, as a ‘thug, hopeless, useless, mad, messer’ (123). These names form a kind of narrative where the displaced effects of Liam’s childhood sexual abuse, be it wilfully or unwilfully, are continually misread. This misreading is not only carried out by the Hegarty family but by wider society as state agencies such as the Gardaí, who arrest Liam, and ordinary citizens alike condemn, marginalise and further victimise Liam through their attitude and language. Reflecting on the past after Liam’s death, Veronica realises that this is what happens when ‘a family […] a whole fucking country’ are ‘drowning in shame’ (168). While poverty and precarity might have conspired to make children like Liam vulnerable to sexual abuse, a culture soaked in shame institutes a further layer of betrayal where secrecy, silence but also disbelief further debase and devalue victims of sexual trauma. Indeed, for those whom society devalues, there is a lack of, what

Harte describes as ‘discursive space’, in which the traumatic experience ‘can be publicly articulated and publicly acknowledged’.165 So ubiquitous is this culture of devaluation that

Veronica is left to conclude that Nugent may be the ‘explanation’ for the siblings’ suffering, but the more frightening truth is they ‘did not have to be damaged by him to be damaged’, the poison inside the ‘second-hand air’ they shared (224).

Downum argues that at the heart of the Celtic Tiger’s economic and socio-cultural shifts was a turn away from the Irish nation’s ‘preoccupation’ with history, nationalism and

165 Harte, ‘Mourning Remains Unresolved’, p. 198.

166 shame towards a future ‘newly imagined as full of possibility’.166 However, contradicting this view, within my analysis of The Gathering Veronica’s experience of Celtic Tiger Ireland has emerged as an experience haunted by the difficult past. Through its focus on the body,

Veronica’s self-consciously ‘written’ text situates Liam’s abuse and her own suffering within an ongoing history of bodily objectification and victimisation. Moreover, reading the text through the idea of betrayal, my analysis has suggested the uncertain event of Liam’s abuse is symptomatic of an ingrained culture where the bodies and voices of women and children continue to be devalued and silenced. Within the novel, sexual abuse takes on a double aspect where sexual crimes are further compounded by victims’ subsequent treatment by state, society and family. Rather than a resolution of the difficult past then, Veronica’s experience of Celtic Tiger Ireland continues to be inflected by traumatic energies.

Within the novel, even the Celtic Tiger’s supposed financial ‘benefits’ emerge as a further layer of traumatic action. Veronica’s family enjoy a lifestyle very different from her own childhood growing up as one of twelve children living in a small, terraced house.

Funded by her husband’s finance job, Veronica’s family live in a huge ‘Tudor-red-brick- with-Queen-Anne-overtones’ home, drive luxury cars and have two daughters who enjoy ballet and horse-riding lessons (36). For Veronica, however, rather than providing an optimistic alternative to the poverty and precarity she grew up in, following Liam’s death this present is chiefly accessed through an ironic attachment to the material objects that constitute it. Veronica cannot stop mentioning the brand-name Saab that she steers through

Dublin during bouts of insomnia. Remembering her grandmother, who wept into the washing up, she wryly comments that having a ‘stainless-steel Miele dishwasher’ she does her crying ‘respectably’ in front of the TV (89). Moreover, finding her own career was getting ‘in the way’ of her husband’s, Veronica has given it up to become a housewife who

166 Downum, ‘Learning to Live’, p. 76.

167 spends her days decorating their enormous home in designer shades of ‘oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate’ (36).

Repeated throughout the novel, this list of colours becomes a kind of litany for

Veronica that is both protective and yet deeply insufficient. Veronica recites it at key moments of stress such as a scene where she considers her history of self-harm.

Remembering her ex-boyfriend Michael Weiss, Veronica recalls ‘hacking away’ at her inner thigh first with a biro and then with a kitchen knife (130). While the cut provides a temporary ‘coolness’ that blots out her pain, very quickly ‘the whole world came bleeding back (130).’ In particular, Veronica remembers suddenly becoming aware of her then boyfriend Michael who, having witnessed her self-harm, looked at her with ‘complete and utter disgust’ (130). The memory of this disgust prompts the adult Veronica to recite her litany of ‘Oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate,’ the words mimicking the palliative action of the knife as the neutral colours and cool surfaces she can purchase offer her respite from the weight of the past (130). The Celtic Tiger phenomenon represented an attempt to resolve the difficult legacy of the post-colonial state through what Fintan O’Toole describes as

‘hysterical materialism’.167 This attempt, he suggests, failed utterly and indeed, echoing this idea, within The Gathering Veronica’s participation in hyper-capitalism only ever offers her temporary respite. While her list of chic colours offers her reprieve from memories of self- harm, it brings her back to her house, which rather than a source of comfort has increasingly become an additional site of distress and shame in Veronica’s night-time writing.

Veronica’s home is a place where her tenuous identity as a Celtic Tiger housewife increasingly begins to unravel. Following Liam’s death, Veronica is struck by the realisation that for a long time she had been ‘living my life in inverted commas’ (181). One night,

167 Fintan O’Toole, Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 131.

168 having deserted the family home following an argument with her spouse, she reflects that she could ‘go “home” where I could “have sex” with my “husband”’ (181), her ironic use of quote marks in her written text drawing attention to the long-standing dissociation and self- alienation which Liam’s death has exposed.

Reflecting on her home and the role she plays within it as a mother and wife,

Veronica increasingly comes to see her life as something that has ‘nothing to do with me’

(36). These profound feelings of alienation stem from the way Veronica has come to view her lifestyle and home as a façade. Following the scene where Veronica asks to be forgiven for her ‘betrayal’ of Liam, she observes that after this betrayal her brother spent twenty years

‘blaming’ her not for her actions, but for her ‘nice house with the nice white paint on the walls, and the nice daughters in their bedrooms of lilac and nicer pink’ (168). Veronica found this unfair at the time, but following Liam’s death she has begun to join him in wanting it to ‘pull the whole thing down’ because it is ‘built on a lie’ (168). In her grief,

Veronica has come to realise all the ways she once thought she was ‘vital’ within her family are in reality ‘not even vaguely important’ (27). Her husband, once far too busy, is easily able to take over her domestic and caregiving responsibilities, her daughters managing perfectly well without her care and influence. Most disturbing for Veronica, however, are her realisations about her marriage. Earlier in this chapter, I suggested the text’s repeated images of consumable flesh across the novel’s non-chronological chapters destabilise the idea of

Liam’s abuse as a single point of traumatic origin. I suggested that the text implies these images are all ‘written’ long after Liam’s death and the wake where Veronica’s husband has sex with her, leaving her feeling like ‘butchered’ meat (219).

Recalling the idea of trauma as an unknowable experience that plagues the victim,

Veronica states that having returned to her life of ‘school runs and hooverings’ she had almost forgotten this sexual experience (133). However, unable to sleep one night, she is visited by ‘the horrors’ (133), a string of fractured memories and associative thoughts to do

169 with her husband. These thoughts begin with her suspicion that her husband is ‘sleeping with someone else’, before she is overwhelmed by the sensation of her husband ‘laid the length of my body and kissing and rubbing’ her on the night of Liam’s wake (133). These sense impressions then give way to some ‘much older, and more terrible thing’ where in his sleep Veronica’s husband is ‘fucking […] a thing that might be me […] Marilyn Munroe […] a slippery, plastic kind of girl […] or it might be a child – his own daughter, why not?’ (134)

Echoing her attempt to reconstruct the conditional and fragmented memories of her brother’s abuse, Veronica finds she ‘cannot draw a line’ between what is real and what is false within this ‘memory’ (134). While it is highly unstable, however, what this memory does attest to are they ways in which Veronica’s marriage and family are not solutions to her difficult past but are themselves contaminated by the traumatic energies of bodily objectification and betrayal. While she might enjoy a lifestyle of affluence and success, the trappings of the Celtic Tiger emerge as a façade around a marriage where Veronica’s history of objectified flesh is still ongoing. Rather than an end to Ireland’s history of patriarchy and privilege then, the Celtic Tiger’s discourses of modernity and hyper-capitalism operate as a veneer of ‘amnesia, concealment and denial’.168 As the force of Liam’s death works to dissolve this amnesiac façade, Veronica’s home and lifestyle emerge as further sites of traumatic action. Veronica’s home, decorated in its palliative colours of ‘Oatmeal, sandstone, cream and slate’, might obscure Veronica’s knowledge of the past, but within its walls her relationships nonetheless continue to be haunted by a legacy of objectification, victimisation and betrayal that is deeply painful and ongoing.

168 Harte, ‘Mourning Remains Unresolved', p. 188.

170

The Gathering and the Joycean Legacy

My argument in this thesis is that Reading in the Dark, The Gathering and A Girl is a

Half-formed Thing take as their foundation a formal legacy instituted by Joyce. In my introductory chapter, I posited that Joyce took the realist novel form and hibernicised it in order to better represent the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on Irish subjectivity. My analysis posited that Joyce’s formal strategies work to resist many of themes, ideas and narrative expectations coded into the realist novel. In particular, I suggested that Joyce’s novels deploy formal features that frustrate any readerly or broader cultural desire for catharsis, resolution and in some cases even for meaning itself, in order to better express the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on the Irish subject. In this chapter, I have demonstrated how in The Gathering the traumatised body emerges as a way to understand the ongoing legacy of patriarchy and misogyny in Celtic Tiger Ireland, and through its focus on the impact of trauma on the body, emerges as a novel where history lives on ‘in traumatic relay’ with the Celtic Tiger present.169

The ongoing saturation of the present by the difficult past and the subject’s inability to move beyond it, are particularly evident at the novel’s close. In the final pages, Veronica experiences an uncharacteristic desire to move beyond the silence and suffering that have conditioned her narrative throughout the novel. Having ‘run away’ from her husband and daughters, Veronica finds herself in Gatwick Airport when she is struck by the sudden realisation that:

I know what I have to do – even though it is too late for the truth, I will tell the truth […] I will ask [my brother] to break this very old news to the rest of the family […] (257-259)

For Harper, this resolution to tell her family ‘the truth’ about Liam’s abuse suggests that over the course of her written narrative Veronica has been able to dissolve the paralysis that

169 Cleary, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernity’, p. 19.

171 has arrested her life since Liam’s death.170 While the novel might be about the rituals of grief

– its wakes and funerals – Harper insists grief is not the ‘real substance’ of the book but what will happen after the novel’s conclusion now that Veronica has found a way to disclose the truth.171 However, reading the text in light of the Joycean inheritance, the novel’s formal features perhaps contradict Harper’s reading of the text. Following her realisation, Veronica does indeed decide to return to her life back in Dublin and yet, this resolution always remains ‘deferred at the level of speech’.172

As she waits in a queue for a ticket home, Veronica imagines the impending journey stating ‘I do not know if I can get up those tin steps and on to the plane’ (261). While her thoughts might reach forward in time, this sense of forward momentum is tempered by the fact this scene of ascent only takes place within Veronica’s imagination, her glimpse of the future couched in her inability to ‘know’ for certain that it will indeed take place. Moreover, this gesture towards the future is further interrupted by the text’s narrative position and ambiguous grammar.

Throughout this chapter, I have argued The Gathering is a novel framed by scenes where Veronica, alone at night, writes in order to try and make sense of her past. While in some chapters this overt frame is absent, the consistency of narrative perspective and voice throughout the novel mean that the entire text can be read as various elements within

Veronica’s larger written project. This final chapter could be read in strict chronological order as the ‘end’ of the story and as an accumulation of Veronica’s narrative efforts to find a way to disclose the ‘truth’ of Liam’s life. However, it can also be read as one of many written memory fragments and fictional stories whose exact chronology is ambiguous (if indeed, they did actually occur). While the text might install Veronica’s sudden desire to move beyond her painful past at the novel’s conclusion, we never see this desire brought to

170 Harper, ‘Flesh and Bones’, p. 74. 171 Ibid. 172 Harte, ‘Mourning Remains Unresolved’, p. 202.

172 fruition in a novel where past, present and future exist in traumatic relay. Indeed, this sense of temporal ambiguity is even coded into the grammar of the novel’s closing lines. In the very last sentence of the text, Veronica concludes that while she has ‘been falling into my own life for months’ she is ‘about to hit it now (261).’ The use of ‘now’ invites the reader to imagine the act of ‘hitting’ is actually happening, however, it is always mediated through the qualifier ‘about’, this act of hitting not really happening ‘now’ at all but always taking place in a future that never arrives. Just as the novels of Joyce deploy formal strategies that frustrate any desire for narrative resolution and indeed, even meaning itself, Veronica’s story similarly eschews any sense of easy linearity and catharsis. Although Enright’s method is very different from Joyce’s formal approach, the texts nonetheless share a desire to rework linear notions of plot to better map the traumatic impact of history and discourse on the Irish subject.

Conclusions

Over the course of this chapter, I have explored The Gathering in light of the traumatised bodies that populate its narrative. Situating the novel within Enright’s ongoing preoccupation with the objectification and victimisation of vulnerable bodies within Irish political discourse, I have posited that within the novel the traumatised body emerges as way of understanding the ongoing consequences of Ireland’s patriarchal culture and power structures. In doing so, I have suggested that the novel can be read as a text that intervenes in discourses that posited the Celtic Tiger as a resolution of the nation’s post-colonial past.

Building on the model of trauma developed so far in this thesis as an aporetic experience that haunts the present, my discussion explored the role the body plays in Veronica’s 1920s

‘romance’ in establishing a history of bodily objectification in which to situate her brother’s suicide and her own suffering. As well as the role the body plays in Veronica’s narration of the abusive act itself, mapping how somatic memories allow Veronica to articulate her

173 experiences while the event itself remains hedged in doubt. The body plays an important role in formal features that not only present the ongoing effects of sexual trauma but encode these effects for the reader within the novel’s form. In particular, my analysis explored the images of the body as consumable flesh that repeat across the novel’s non-chronological timelines. I suggested that these images interrupt any sense of easy narrative catharsis within the text, the novel’s formal features recreating Veronica’s ongoing struggle for narrative cohesion within the reader. I also suggested, however, that these images query the idea of

Liam’s abuse as a single point of traumatic origin within the novel, the text instead instituting multiple and ongoing sites of traumatic action.

Then, turning my attention to the social and political contexts that inform the novel, in the second part of this chapter I focused on the idea of betrayal in order to illuminate the shifting patterns of complicity at work in Veronica’s attempt to narrate her difficult past.

While the betrayal of Liam’s bodily autonomy and subjectivity by Nugent is of greatest ethical significance within the text, it emerges from a hidden history where the bodies and voices of women, children and the vulnerable were devalued and silenced. Rather than a resolution of this culture, I argued the Celtic Tiger’s discourses of modernity and hyper- capitalism emerge as a further layer of traumatic action for Veronica, a brittle amnesiac veneer around a life still marked by ongoing energies of betrayal and objectification.

Within The Gathering, the relationship between trauma and the body emerges as a way to negotiate the ongoing consequences of Ireland’s patriarchal culture for Veronica

Hegarty. As I have outlined, what The Gathering and the novels of Joyce share are formal strategies that resist any readerly or broader cultural desire for resolution and catharsis.

While Joyce’s formal strategies adapted the conventions of nineteenth century realism to better express the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on the Irish subject, in

The Gathering the body emerges as a vehicle for the ongoing consequences of Ireland’s patriarchal culture. The novel’s formal features fracture linear ideas of narrative and time

174 and in doing so, the text disputes the idea it is ever possible to fully leave behind Ireland’s postcolonial past. The novel instead posits a model of history where the discourses of patriarchy and misogyny continue to plague the present, while the past itself remains always hedged in uncertainty and doubt.

175

Chapter Three: Trauma and the Sense-making Body in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

Introduction

In order to extend my arguments further and bring this thesis to a conclusion, I will now turn my attention to the final text I will analyse, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed

Thing. Eimear McBride published her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (Girl) in 2013 with the UK-based independent publisher Galley Beggar Press. The book garnered huge critical acclaim and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the Baileys Women’s

Prize for Fiction (amongst many others), but the novel’s journey to publication was anything but swift. While McBride completed the first draft of Girl in six months between 2003 and

2004, it took more than nine years for the novel to finally find its home.173

This lag between composition and publication can be partly explained by the way that Girl is often seen as a direct inheritor of the Joycean literary experiment. Critics such as

David Collard, Jacqueline Rose and Anne Enright, have all suggested that Joyce and

McBride share a preoccupation with how to find forms ‘through which consciousness might be rendered into language.’174 Joyce’s modernist experiments emerged at a time when Irish society was particularly interested in questions of ‘national identity’.175 Published almost a hundred years later, Girl’s rocketing popularity is similarly suggestive of the way that in 2013

Irish culture was still concerned with questions of individual and national identity.

Serialised in The Little Review between 1918-1920, Joyce’s Ulysses was published in full by Paris-based publisher Sylvia Beech in 1922. Anticipating the way that Girl would also find a home with a non-Irish press, the Dublin-set Ulysses was published against a backdrop of

173 Eimear McBride, ‘How I Wrote A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, The Guardian, 10 September 2016, n.p [accessed 18 June 2020]. 174 Gilligan, ‘Eimear McBride’s Ireland’, p. 778. 175 Ibid.

176 profound political and cultural change in Ireland. In 1921, the Anglo-Irish treaty established the Irish Free State, bringing about an end to the Irish War of Independence. However, while the treaty marked a cessation of armed conflict, the cultural battle to establish a ‘brand new national identity’ for Ireland continued with literary culture playing an important role in this ideological struggle.176

Since the late nineteenth century, writers of the Irish Literary Revival had drawn heavily on the idea of an Irish ‘Golden Age’, a pre-colonial ‘rural idyll’ where Gaelic- speaking peasants lived in harmony with ‘land and nature’.177 This mythos could easily be co- opted to suit different political purposes in the revolutionary era, reconfigured to suit both separatists and moderate cultural nationalists alike.178 The problem was that by looking backwards to an idealised and mythic age, literary culture often recycled ‘old imperialist mechanisms’ of ‘inheritance and nostalgia’ in order to establish a tradition in which to situate newly-independent Irish identity.179 Joyce, however, rejected this backwards-looking gaze. He instead focused on how to represent human consciousness itself, pursuing a

‘National idea’ not through nostalgia but ‘by means of a renovated style’ that focused on the ongoing impact of colonial history and discourse on the ‘modern’ Irish subject.180

While published nearly a century later, the political and cultural contexts that surrounded the publication of McBride’s Girl echo many of Ulysses. In my chapter on

Enright’s The Gathering, I outlined that her 2007 novel was published at a time when Ireland had largely embraced the economic and psychic narratives coded into the Celtic Tiger boom. Fintan O’Toole argues that the Celtic Tiger was much more than fiscal or political policy, representing ‘a new way of being’ at a juncture ‘when Catholicism and nationalism

176 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 333. 177 O’Toole, ‘Going West’, p. 111. 178 Ibid. 179 Ibid. 180 Gilligan, ‘Eimear McBride’s Ireland’, p. 782.

177 were not working anymore’.181 In particular, O’Toole has suggested that the boom’s discourses of coetaneous economic and social progress helped to liberate the Irish subject from Joyce’s ‘formulation of history’ as a traumatic ‘nightmare’.182 However, in the 2008 financial crash, the idea of Celtic Tiger Ireland as both an economically but also a socially

‘modern’ country collapsed. Left behind was a nation that underneath the Celtic Tiger myth had actually been subject to decades of ‘neoliberalisation, Europeanisation and

Americanisation’.183 With these forces removed, the nation was left in an ideological vacuum, once again pressed to consider who or what Ireland and Irishness might mean.

In this chapter, I will explore Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (Girl) in light of the sense-making body of its unnamed protagonist and narrator. By analysing the way this body negotiates trauma, I will argue that McBride’s novel can be read as a text that speaks deeply to the nation’s ongoing preoccupation with national identity. In my chapter on Enright’s The Gathering, I explored the role of the traumatised body in Veronica Hegarty’s self-consciously ‘written’ attempt to recover the memories of sexual abuse that she suspects her brother suffered in the past. In this chapter, however, I will examine the role of the body in narrating traumatic events that are much closer in proximity to the novel’s protagonist.

The narrative of Girl is made up of events that can be described as ‘traumatic’ as the text follows the unnamed protagonist from pre-natal consciousness through to her eventual suicide by drowning. Along the way, the novel details the girl’s difficult childhood, her rape by her uncle as a young teenager, the chaotic sexuality that develops in its wake and her brother’s eventual death from brain cancer. In this chapter I will explore the role of the body in narrating this seemingly linear account of birth, life and death. My analysis will posit that through its attention to the way that trauma impacts on the body, and consequently on

181 O’Toole, Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic, p. 5. 182 Ibid. 183 Cleary, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernity’, p. 14.

178 narration and meaning, the text doesn’t simply depict these difficult events but instead encodes their traumatic consequences within the novel’s form. Indeed, for Susan Cahill, Girl is a text that demands the reader’s ‘affective immersion’ in one girl’s damage.184 Building on this reading, I will contend that the novel’s traumatic energies play a key role in formal features that compel the reader into an intimate experience of the novel’s traumatic events.

Paying particular attention to the way that the experience of trauma inflects the novel’s narrative voice, my analysis will suggest that Girl can therefore be read as a text that speaks to ongoing questions of national identity in Irish private and public life. I will argue that like the novels of Joyce, Girl’s formal features eschew any sense of an easy answer or resolution to these questions. Instead, by enacting in excoriating detail the damage inflicted on one unnamed girl by Irish society, McBride’s novel problematises the idea that questions of Irish identity can ever be easily resolved into a singular and authoritative idea of national identity and belonging.

I will begin by outlining McBride’s interest in the formal possibilities of the novel and her training as a method actor. Situating the novel within this context, I will suggest that while the novel is indebted to Joyce, in Girl McBride recalibrates Joyce’s style to interrogate an embodied and traumatic experience of Irish girlhood. I will suggest that while Joyce’s novels are about ‘the extension of the human into the universe’, by way of contrast

McBride’s Girl is about the vulnerability of one young woman’s subjectivity within the misogynistic Catholic culture that dominated rural Ireland in the late twentieth century.185

Paying particular attention to the narrative strategies McBride uses to narrate ‘the point at which thought and physical sensation prove inseparable’, I will focus on the mother- daughter relationship, using it as a lens to analyse how the girl’s community interpolates

184 Susan Cahill, ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing?: Girlhood, Trauma and Resistance in Post-Tiger Irish Literature’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 28.2 (2017), 153–71 (p. 158). 185 Kate Kellaway, ‘Eimear McBride: “Writing Is Painful – but it’s the Closest You Can Get to Joy”’, The Guardian, 28 August 2018, n.p. [Accessed 7 June 2020].

179 women as both victims but also agents of Catholic patriarchal culture.186 Outlining the ways that the girl’s body is consequently transformed into a battleground between Catholic notions of sin and her frustrated desire to make meaningful choices about her body, I will argue this culture primes the girl for her uncle’s rape as a teenager. My discussion will then examine the complex sexuality that develops in the wake of this attack, positing sex as a complex site of resistance but also pathological self-damage for the girl. My analysis will then examine the brother-sister relationship within the novel, analysing how their connection is integral to the girl’s subjectivity and narrative voice but also a further site of pain. Having explored how trauma inflects the girl’s relationships and sexuality, I will then turn my attention to how the novel’s ending engages with the Joycean legacy. My analysis will conclude that echoing Joyce, McBride’s Girl uses formal innovation to create a text that demands the reader’s intense identification with one Irish girl’s damage. In doing so, I will argue that if any answer is possible to the question of Irish ‘identity’, it is one that must accommodate the ongoing damage that history exerts on the female Irish subject.

Trauma, the Body and Narrative in Girl is a Half-formed Thing

In both her fiction-writing and as an actor, Eimear McBride has long been interested in the relationship between subjectivity, language and the body. Born in 1976 to Northern

Irish parents in Liverpool, McBride spent most of her childhood and adolescence living in

Counties Sligo and Mayo before returning to the UK to study at the Drama Centre in

London.187 Often jokingly called ‘the Trauma Centre’ for its emphasis on ‘the method’ of

Konstantin Stanislavski, McBride received an education that demanded an actor enter

186 Gorra, ‘Eimear McBride’s Toolkit’, n.p. 187 Isobel Thompson, ‘Eimear McBride: “What I Am after Is Deeply Interior and Human”’, Vanity Fair, 12 September 2016, n.p. [accessed 15 April 2020].

180 deeply into the interior life of characters.188 Creating a character on stage as a method actor,

McBride has insisted, requires the actor to become a nexus where ‘what is being said, and also how a person is reacting and feeling, what they’re feeling about feeling […] their gut reactions, and physical sensations’ all meet within the actor’s body.189 However, following the death of her brother from a brain tumour, McBride decided she was no longer the kind of ‘communal person’ necessary to become an actor.190 Instead she turned to writing, her training in ‘the method’ informing her written techniques as she experimented with trying to replicate in language ‘what an actor does with their body’ on stage.191

It was only after reading Joyce’s Ulysses, that McBride found a formal approach to frame her writing experiments. In Ulysses, McBride found a way of modifying the linear

English sentence and realist narrative mode in order to access the interior ‘parts of life’ which the orthodox novel can often ‘fail to serve’.192 However, while both Joyce and

McBride deploy similar ‘tools of modernism’ at the level of form, they do so in order to explore very different relationships between the external world and the interior life of their characters.193 In Ulysses, Joyce was largely interested in mapping the interior experiences of his protagonists as they ‘go out’ into the world of Dublin over the course of a single day.194

Echoing McBride’s preoccupation with the mind-body nexus at work in method acting, while Girl uses the same tools of modernism at the level of sentence and structure, they are used to go ‘as far inside the human as possible’.195

188 David Collard, About a Girl: a Reader’s Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (London: CB Editions, 2016), p. 11. 189 Kira Cochrane, ‘Eimear McBride: “There Are Serious Readers Who Want to Be Challenged”’, The Guardian, 15 June 2014, n.p. [accessed 4 June 2020]. 190 Kellaway, ‘Writing is Painful’, n.p. 191 Ibid. 192 McBride, ‘How I Wrote A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, n.p. 193 Danielle Sands, Eimear McBride and Kaye Mitchell, ‘Streaming Conciousness’, The London School of Economics Public Event Podcast, 9 January 2018, [accessed 27 June 2020]. 194 Catherine Conroy, ‘Eimear McBride: “I’m Sick of Having to Live to the Agenda of Angry Men”’, The Irish Times, 20 December 2016, n.p. [accessed 28 June 2020]. 195 Ibid.

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In McBride’s Girl, while the text draws significantly on Joyce’s formal techniques, this style is recalibrated in order to narrate the internal life of one nameless girl. From the outset of the novel, rather than an autonomous self that extends out into a specific

‘universe’ as seen in Ulysses, the girl’s subjectivity instead emerges as a permeable object into which an uncertain external world intrudes. Despite this uncertainty, divided into five titled

‘parts’, each of which is further subdivided into numbered chapters, Girl follows a relatively linear narrative chronology. Every few chapters, addressing her brother as ‘You’, the girl prefaces narration of her life experiences with reference to the siblings’ ages, commenting

‘Two me. Four you five or so.’ and then later, ‘Fifteen sixteen.’196 However, this forward- moving trajectory is complicated, as Susan Cahill has argued, by the way the girl’s voice is conditioned by ‘porousness’.197 This sense of permeability is particularly evident in the novel’s opening when the girl, still inside her mother’s womb, overhears a conversation between her mother and brother:

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed. I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day (3).

Echoing the Joycean departure from the conventional punctuation of dialogue, precisely who is speaking and to whom in this opening section is equivocal. While the use of ‘You’,

‘she’ and ‘Mammy’ suggest an intimate family relationship, these details only become clear through further fragments of speech overheard by the in-utero girl (3). In this short opening chapter, half-heard prayers, medical terms and the sound of the girl’s mother’s anxious heart

‘Going dum dum dum’ (4), all imply the girl’s brother has been diagnosed with brain cancer.

While this cancer goes into remission, doctors confirm he will most likely die prematurely, causing the girl’s father to abandon the family unit. However, rather than an autonomous

196 Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), pp. 3–64. All future references will be incorporated in the text. 197 Cahill, ‘A Girl is a Half-formed Thing?’, p. 159.

182 narrative voice organising this dialogue into a larger narrative frame of action and description, the opening of the novel is instead made up mostly of aural sense impressions.

In my chapter on The Gathering, I outlined how in contemporary theories of human cognition, sensory data mediated through the nervous system and brain can either be translated into healthy narrative memory or stored as traumatic memories in the body.198 I argued that sense impressions registered by the body become a key part of Veronica

Hegarty’s attempt to recover the traumatic past. In the opening section of Girl, however, rather than a fully-formed adult consciousness struggling to narrate an occluded history, the text instead gives voice to the interior place where sense impressions are registered but not yet fully processed into a grammatically complete narrative. So far in this thesis, I have posited trauma as an experience where a victim is plagued by a past that is both unknown and yet forcefully felt in the present. However, in Girl, rather than enacting the experience of trauma as a crisis of memory, the brain-body mediation of trauma is instead coded into the novel’s narrative voice. For Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez, what results is a narrative position of ‘embodied consciousness’ and this formal focus on the place where world and body meet is particularly appropriate in a novel that explores the experiences of a girl growing up in what is most likely rural Ireland in the late 1980s-1990s.199

From the outset of McBride’s Girl, while there is little information about setting or era, the gendering of the novel’s narrative voice as a ‘girleen’ locates the text within a specific socio-cultural moment in Ireland. As I discussed earlier, women have long been positioned as objects rather than subjects within Irish political discourse and this is particularly true in terms of the way women have long been defined through their bodies. At the opening of the novel, introduced as a third person ‘She’ rather than an ‘I’, the girl’s

198 van der Kolk and van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past’, p. 160. 199 Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez, ‘The Embodied Subjectivity of a Half-Formed Narrator: Sexual Abuse, Language (Un) Formation and Melancholic Girlhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, Estudios Irlandeses, 13 (2018), 1–13 (pp. 3–5).

183 subjectivity is something that is implied, a narrative ‘voice’ that functions more as a container of other people’s speech than as an autonomous consciousness (3). Moreover, when an ‘I’ finally does begin to coalesce towards the end of the novel’s opening chapter, it is a self that emerges through bodily sensation. As the girl’s mother prays all night in a cold church the girl states ‘I am froze’ and later, in the process of being born, observes ‘a vinegar world I smelled’ as the doctor announces ‘There now a girleen isn’t she great’ (4-5).

Emerging as a permeable object whose personal pronoun only coalesces around bodily sensation then, from the outset of Girl the protagonist’s narrative consciousness sits easily within my assessment of female subjectivity in Ireland. However, the girl’s voice is also coloured by specific experiences associated with growing up in rural Ireland in the late

1980s-1990s.

Over the course of the novel, the girl’s homelife is increasingly dominated by the discourse and practices associated with the forms of Charismatic Catholicism that became popular in Ireland in the late twentieth century. Emerging in the USA in the 1960s, the

Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement drew on Protestant Pentecostal teachings to encourage ordinary Catholics to develop a personal relationship with Jesus and rededicate their prayer life to God the Holy Spirit. Officially embraced by Pope John Paul II as a

‘strand of Grace’ within the Catholic Church in the 1970s, while the movement espouses a

‘relatively radical theology’ it is also committed to ‘militant activism’ when it comes to maintaining ‘traditional’ values.200 Taking a fundamentalist position on the bible and

Catholic doctrine, the movement is absolutely opposed to contraception, abortion and sex outside of marriage. Belying the movement’s radical spirituality is a patriarchal agenda that actively seeks to control women’s rights, access to reproductive healthcare and sexuality.

Indeed, for Frances Kissling, at the heart of the movement’s social politics is a

200 Thomas J. Csordas, ‘Global Religion and the Re-Enchantment of the World: The Case of the Charismatic Renewal’, Anthropological Theory, 7.3 (2007), 295–314 (p. 296).

184 fundamentalist misogynistic belief that women ‘ever since Eve […] have been a source of evil’ that must be controlled in order to preserve the proper operation of gender relations within the Catholic Church and society at large.201

In Girl, following the death of the girl’s absent father, the girl’s mother begins to increasingly participate in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. She holds prayer meetings in the family home, insists to herself at moments of stress ‘my family is love’ (35) and regularly urges her children to pray. In one scene early in the novel, the girl’s mother presses her daughter to recite a Hail Mary. Using standard punctuation and syntax, this prayer is incorporated within the text in its entirety, including the proper use of commas which are otherwise almost entirely absent from the novel. Throughout the text, the most common punctuation mark is a full-stop. Often interrupting discreet units of meaning, these full- stops institute staccato-like rhythms within the girl’s narrative voice. With its conventional syntax then, this prayer introduces a much slower pace and moment of textual stability into the novel. However, this change of pace emerges as an all too temporary moment of pause in a family life that is chaotic and violent. Despite the children’s mother insisting that her family ‘is love’ in this scene she also calls her daughter a ‘stupid bitch’ and threatens her son with a ‘bloody nose (34-35).’ Rather than a signal of the family successfully following the biblical example of Jesus, the discourse and practices of the Charismatic Renewal emerge as moments of superficial pause in a homelife that continues to be mediated through patriarchal notions of authority predicated on violence.

Despite the ironic distance between the ideas of maternal love coded into prayers and the violent reality of the girl’s life, prayer continues to play a significant role for the girl.

As she negotiates her difficult life experiences, such as her molestation and the death of her brother, the girl consistently recites the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary in their entirety at key

201 Frances Kissling, ‘Roman Catholic Fundamentalism: What’s Sex and Power Got to Do with It?’, in Religious Fundamentalism and the Human Rights of Women, ed. by Courtney Howland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 193–202 (p. 199).

185 moments of stress. Snatches of other prayers such as Salve Regina and fragments of mass liturgy and bible readings are also stitched into her internal monologue. However, rather than implying a redemptive faith in God or even offering her relief, the girl’s resort to prayer is instead a signal of the very few choices available to her within the context of her religious upbringing. Growing up within a home and community saturated by the misogynistic ideas of the Charismatic Renewal, there is no alternative discourse or framework available to the girl with which to process her experiences. The girl’s only option is to default to prayers that are part of a religious ideology that not only denigrates her subjectivity but also increasingly positions her as a sexualised object as she grows up.

As the girl continues to default to the prayers associated with the fundamentalist

Renewal movement throughout the novel, the text draws attention to the insidious way this culture not only interpolates women as victims but as agents of their own oppression.

Throughout the novel, the text pays particular attention to the hypocrisy of the Charismatic

‘Holy Joes’ (25) in the girl’s community. In one scene, where the charismatic women come to the girl’s house to pray, the girl watches as the group becomes filled with the ‘Holy Spirit’, praying in tongues and asking God to make their lives into a ‘perfect sacrifice’ (24-25).

However, at the same time, the group also make racist comments about the ‘Chinese going to Hell’ and the role of a ‘black’ anti-Christ in their fundamentalist interpretation of the

Book of Revelations (25). They also engage in petty gossip, espousing a doctrine of Christ’s love while hypocritically judging the women of the community, such as a politician’s wife whose sadness at being abandoned by her husband is judged as being too ‘proud’ (23).

Within patriarchal cultures, while real power and agency lies in the hands of men, such systems often rely on women to maintain this hegemony. Foregrounding their social prejudice and moral judgementalism, within the novel the charismatics play a key role in policing the behaviour of women within the local community, reinforcing the idea of their lives and bodies as something inherently ‘sinful’. For the girl and her mother, this idea takes

186 on particular resonance as she grows from an infant into a child, and the girl’s mother inducts her daughter into a model of girlhood organised around the idea of her body as a sexualised object that needs to be increasingly disciplined through violence and shame.

One key example of the way the girl is inaugurated into a misogynistic model of identity that focuses on the female body as a site of sin occurs when the girl’s grandfather makes a rare visit to see the family. Once again, rather than a more typical ‘realist’ mode where a distinct narrative voice objectively describes action that is then threaded through with key pieces of dialogue, this scene is largely constructed from overheard speech.

Describing her process of writing Girl, McBride said it was important to strip the realist narrative mode back so that ‘all that’s left’ was what the girl sees, hears and how her body

‘reacts’ to these experiences.202 This experimental impressionism allows the text to bind the reader to the girl’s experiences so that they begin to feel ‘they were her, and that what was happening to her, and inside her, was also happening within themselves’.203 In order to generate this intense subjectivism, Joyce’s non-linear sentences became an important model.

His style offered a way of making language work differently, having its ‘grammar mauled and its punctuation recalibrated’, in order to demand the reader enter into an intense identification with the girl’s experiences.204

Echoing this idea, the grandfather’s visit to see the family is narrated through a self- aggrandising rant where the grandfather positions himself as a moral and spiritual ideal. In one section of this tirade, he reprimands the children’s mother for her ungratefulness about her own son’s recovery when one of his own children died in infancy:

He doesn’t mind telling you his faith was sorely tried. There’s no grief like a parent’s […] so show some gratitude for what you’ve got. A lot my girl. A lot (13).

202 McBride, ‘How I Wrote A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, n.p. 203 Ibid. 204 Ibid.

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While the grandfather’s words are prefaced by a third person ‘He’ that implies the girl’s narrative presence, this sense of distinction collapses as the passage progresses. With no conventional punctuation to distinguish between girl and grandfather, his voice comes to dominate her ‘narration’ of this scene. By departing from the conventions of ordinary

‘cutanddry grammar’ then, the text not only presents the grandfather’s words but mimics the way they flood and dominate the girl’s subjectivity.205 In doing so, McBride’s modernism is less a ‘stream of consciousness’ that belongs to the girl than it is an immersive ‘stream of existence’ that through its formal strategies asks the reader to enter more deeply into the experience of psychic invasion and control.206

In addition to the way that the grandfather comes to control language during his visit, he also physically and emotionally intimidates the children. Calling the boy ‘stunted’ and ‘feckless’, the grandfather demands that he recite a Hail Mary (14). Dumbfounded, the boy is unable to say anything and incensed by this ‘Godlessness’ (16), the grandfather briefly reprimands the boy before quickly refocusing his anger onto the women of the house. In the grandfather’s increasingly furious monologue, he situates the boy’s inability to recite a

Hail Mary within a much more fundamental ‘evil’ (16) on the part of mother and daughter.

Over his pages-long diatribe, he segues from the boy’s failings to the inability of the mother to induct her daughter into the proper bodily performance of the Catholic faith:

Look at her. Forward rolls in a skirt. It’s disgusting. It’s perverted. Underwear on display. […] How is she supposed to be a child of Mary? (16)

The Marian tradition within Catholicism has long been used as a vehicle to supress and control women by transforming them into ‘agents of their own oppression.’207 By requiring women to be like Mary, the Catholic Church offers women an ‘impossible and contradictory’ model of sexuality that posits Mary as the mother of God without having

205 Joyce, Letters of James Joyce Volume III, p. 146. 206 McBride, ‘How I Wrote A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, n.p. 207 Sian Taylder, ‘Our Lady of the Libido: Towards a Marian Theology of Sexual Liberation?’, Feminist Theology, 12.3 (2004), 343–71 (p. 345).

188 ever ‘known’ a man.208 It is, therefore, a tradition based on the inherently patriarchal construct of virginity, insisting that a woman’s worth lies in her ability to remain sexually pure.

What horrifies the grandfather in this scene is the inability of the girl to perform this misogynistic tradition with her behaviour and gestures. However, while the grandfather points out this ‘evil’, it is the mother who enforces its punishment. Shaking with ‘rage’, the children’s mother calls the siblings ‘morons’ and the girl a ‘Dirty brat’, beating them until she draws blood (17). Following this violent outburst, the girl privately calls her mother a

‘piss cow bitch’ (17). However, in order to appease her mother’s temper, for her own sake but also for the sake of her brother, she nonetheless resolves to assume the outward appearance of being ‘good’ (17). Rather than inducting her daughter into a renewed spiritual life then, through her participation in the right-wing and fundamentalist Charismatic movement, the girl’s mother initiates her into a deeply misogynistic tradition of self-policing her physical gestures and words.

While the teenage girl ostensibly rebels against her mother’s Charismatic faith, the ideologies coded into its discourses and practices continue to have a significant impact on her subjectivity. The girl frequently positions her mother as a hypocrite, making fun of her and her ‘Holy Joes’ friends. Recognising their insincerity, for example, the girl often tries to

‘leg it’ (25) from their prayer meetings and yet, their fundamentalist interpretation of the bible nonetheless has a lasting impact.

Fundamentalist notions of sin and shame continue to mediate her internal life, and this is particularly the case as she begins to experience sexual desire. The girl first begins to experience ‘lust’ (51) at age thirteen when her uncle comes to stay with the family. Unable to name her new feelings as anything other than ‘it’, the girl feels a novel sensation ‘ran up me.

208 Taylder, ‘Our Lady of the Libido', p. 345.

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Legs stomach knees chest up head’ (51). Echoing the way that trauma functions within the body , the text mediates the experience of desire as a sensation that operates on the girl’s physical self. Lacking any other vocabulary, these sensations then become hedged in the religious discourse that dominates the girl’s homelife:

Lord make haste to help us […] Be quiet insides. Don’t be fucked up. I will wait. This out […] I’ll be pure to then […] Oh sacred heart of Jesus I place all my trust in thee (52).

Mediated through Catholic liturgy, the girl’s physical experience of desire is transformed into a prayer to keep her insides ‘pure’ (51). As the week-long visit progresses, the girl becomes gripped by a conflict between feelings of physical pleasure and the need to shut down these

‘dirty’ sensations (52). Lacking any other discourse, the experience of sexual desire therefore becomes configured for the girl as an internal battle between purity and ‘sin’. Couched in notions of guilt and shame, the adolescent girl struggles to keep this battle a ‘secret’ from her family and in doing so, this secrecy leaves her profoundly vulnerable to her uncle’s sexual advances.

On the penultimate day of his visit, the girl’s uncle rapes the protagonist as the rest of the extended family sleep upstairs. Rendered through the novel’s idiosyncratic prose style, throughout this attack the girl’s narrative consciousness is once again positioned as a penetrable object:

Against the back of the kitchen chair. Pull my skirt down by ankles […] And this is what it’s like after all. After all I’ve heard. It hurts me […] The air squeezed out. The air pushed to the edge. Coming out my eyes. My ears. […] Too much so much. […] Pain (57-58).

For Martha Carpentier, one of the points of similarity between Joyce and McBride’s formal strategies is the way in which both texts employ ‘fragmentation’.209 Joyce’s ungrammatical sentences, she suggests, are a way of representing the way modernity weighs on the subject, forcing its linguistic surface to crack under its pressure. However, disagreeing with

209 Martha C. Carpentier, Joycean Legacies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. xv.

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Carpentier, so far in my analysis of the novel I have argued that McBride’s non-linear sentences instead give voice to an embodied consciousness that is ‘half-formed’ rather than fragmented. The novel’s idiosyncratic prose style gives voice to a place ‘inside’ the girl where sensations register within her mind-body nexus.210 It is a narrative position that is ‘far back’ in the body, the girl’s voice emerging from a place ‘just before language becomes formatted thought’.211

However, this scene is perhaps one of the few occasions where the narrative voice does indeed fragment under external pressure. Within this passage, the narrative voice degrades from fuller phrases at the beginning of the attack to the one-word ‘Pain’ (58) by its end. Recalling the way that trauma is often only accessible to victims as bodily sensation, by emptying the text of grammatically complete narration, the novel’s formal features mimic the way that sexual trauma erodes an individual’s ability to narrate. In doing so, the text once again works to remove any sense of ‘separateness’ between reader and girl.212 By dissolving the narrative voice until it only registers the sensation of pain, the text not only illustrates the damaging effects of sexual trauma for the girl but demands the reader enter into a much more intimate encounter with the sensation of pain itself. Echoing McBride’s interest in the mind-body nexus at work in method acting then, the novel not only adapts the realist novel form to enact the experience of rape but by encoding the effects of sexual trauma into its style demands the reader enter into a much more intimate encounter with the nameless girl’s damage.

Through its formally innovative style, Girl can be read as a text whose formal features not only speak deeply to the questions of Irish identity that surrounded its publication but to the ongoing objectification of female subjectivity within Irish political

210 McBride, ‘How I Wrote A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, n.p. 211 David Collard, Interview with Eimear McBride’, The White Review, May 2014, n.p. [accessed 15 June 2020]. 212 McBride, ‘How I Wrote A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, n.p.

191 discourse. For McBride, to be born a ‘girleen’ in Ireland in the late twentieth century was to live in a culture that, since the declaration of the Free State in 1921, had little to offer women beyond ‘violence, rape, […] and domestic bondage’.213 By asking the reader to enter into an intimate encounter with this culture, the novel calls into questions the idea that this misogynistic past is fully over. When the novel was published in 2013, the idea that Celtic

Tiger Ireland’s social and economic modernity represented a ‘break’ with this past had already been called into question. As Ursula Barry and Pauline Conroy have argued, the

2008 crash and subsequent years of austerity drew attention to the way that inequalities experienced by Irish women, particularly in terms of their vulnerability to sexual violence and rape, had continued underneath the Celtic Tiger’s veneer of economic success.214

Through its traumatic energies, Girl can be read as a text that speaks deeply to this ongoing history. The text not only narrates trauma, but by encoding its consequences on the level of form, demands the reader enter into an intense identification with how an ongoing history of misogyny frames the protagonist’s experience of Irish girlhood.

Traumatic Sexuality and the Brother-Sister Relationship in Girl

In an interview with Jacqueline Rose in 2018, McBride suggested that reviewers in the UK and Ireland were particularly prudish about the treatment of sexuality in Girl.

McBride posited that critics were reluctant to discuss how, after being raped by her uncle, the girl begins to use sex as a form of self-determination through the limited means available to her. Central to this prudishness, McBride insisted, was a misunderstanding of ‘trauma’

213 Boland, ‘Eimear McBride’, n.p. 214 Ursula Barry and Pauline Conroy, ‘“Ireland in Crisis 2008-2012: Women, Austerity and Inequality”’, in Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, ed. by Maria Rubery and Jill Karamessini (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 186–207 (p. 194).

192 where it is seen as ‘an unpleasant memory’ rather than something much more insidious that seeps into ‘the life of a person and the choices they make.’215

Following the girl’s rape by her uncle, sex becomes the primary way in which the girl negotiates the difficult circumstances in which she often finds herself. This is particularly the case when the girl is hounded by a boy from her brother’s year at school who she meets by a local lake. Playing truant with a female friend, the girls are startled when several boys approach them shouting ‘girleens, girleens’ (67). The boys begin to harass the girls and one boy in particular singles the girl out, following her and calling her names. Realising that these are the same boys who bully her older brother, a ‘savage’ (69) feeling arises through the girl’s body. Out of her throat she hears a voice ‘I don’t know’ scream out ‘fucking scum’ and ‘pig ignorant culchie’ before she finally demands of the boy ‘Do you know how to fuck?’ (69).

At a moment of mental stress and vulnerability, initiating sex becomes a form of self- defence and control for the girl. The pair have sex and while the act itself is brief, fumbling and gives her no sexual pleasure, it does allow her to reorganise the power dynamic between them so that the boy is suddenly ‘small and scared’ while the girl feels in control and ‘calm’

(69). What then follows is a sustained period where the girl engages in what she terms her

‘great work’ (71), saying yes to anyone who wants to have sex with her as often as she possibly can.

In their work on the development of dissociative sexuality in the wake of childhood sexual abuse, Mark Schwartz, Lori Galperin and William Masters identify several symptoms common in victims. Symptoms of depression and numbing often manifest co-morbidly with hypersexual behaviour that focuses on the compulsive initiation of sex accompanied by a shutting down of emotions and pleasure.216 As the girl begins to have sex with any boy who

215 Eimear McBride and Jacqueline Rose, ‘Eimear McBride in Conversation with Jacquline Rose’, 25 January 2017, [accessed 27th June 2020]. 216 Mark F. Schwartz, Lori D. Galperin and William H. Masters, Post-Traumatic Stress, Sexual Trauma and Dissociative Disorder: Issues Related to Intimacy and Sexuality (St Louis: Masters and Johnson Research Institute, 1995), p. 2.

193 wants to, often ‘two or three behind the prefabs’ (71) at school consecutively, she similarly experiences an absence of enjoyment. She has ‘no eyes’ for the boys’ attractiveness or personality, instead focusing on her obsessive ‘counting ticking off’ of the boys who have had sex with her:

On my knees I learn plenty—there’s a lot I’ll do and they are all shame when they think their flesh desired. Offer up to me and disconcerted by my lack of saying no. Saying yes is the best of powers (71).

Schwartz et al. suggest that for sexual abuse survivors, compulsive hypersexual behaviour often allows individuals to ‘recapitulate’ aspects of their trauma in situations where they now seem ‘in control’.217 Echoing this idea, for the girl saying ‘yes’ becomes the ‘best of powers’ for the way it allows her to cast the boys as objects of ‘shame’ (71).

McBride has said that the uncle’s attack is particularly damaging for the way it manipulates the girl’s underlying sense of herself as a ‘shameful object’.218 After the attack, while the age difference between uncle and niece precludes any possibility of consent let alone control, the uncle positions the girl as the catalyst if not the cause of their encounter.

He appears suddenly ‘shy’, positioning her as the principle agent as he whispers ‘you make me insane. I’ve never done that before’ (60). Already consumed by an internal struggle between competing notions of Marian purity and ‘Dirty’ feelings of desire, the girl begins to think of herself as the one who has ‘done wrong’ (60). Lacking any vocabulary other than misogynistic religious discourse, she frames the uncle’s attack as an act of departure from the shoreline of her childhood, locating herself as the one ‘pushing out to sin’ (60). In the sex that follows, the girl begins to embrace this ‘brazen’ identity, insisting to herself ‘It’s good not feeling pure’ (71).

However, while the girl comes to think of herself as sinful, within the sexual act itself she continually tries to recast this abusive dynamic. She comes to revel in the boys’

217 Schwartz et al., Post Traumatic Stress, p. 2. 218 ‘Eimear McBride - A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, Bookclub, BBC Radio 4, 8 February 2018.

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‘shame’ (70) and disconcertion, using her sexuality to situate the boys as objects of debasement. In one particularly telling metaphor, she describes the boys she has sex with as rats ‘caught in a trap’, taking pleasure in their ‘useless whinging’ and ‘squeaks’ (71). Unable to say no in the moment of her own sexual abuse then, by saying yes to almost ‘anyone, and to anything’ the girl’s post-traumatic sexuality replays the abusive event in her favour.219

Given that the girl has no other discourse available to process her experiences, her sexuality does indeed become a way of trying to come to terms with her experiences. However, while this might be the only course of action available to her, it nonetheless goes on to have serious negative consequences for her physical and mental health as the novel progresses.

While victims of sexual violence might obsessively seek to regain a sense of power through hypersexual behaviour, to do so is very often only ever a simulation of control.

Initiating sex with multiple partners can allow the victim to feel as though they are dictating the terms of their sexuality and yet, such behaviour is often ‘extremely reinforcing and […] endorphin releasing’.220 Rather than a conscious choice, hypersexual behaviour comes to be dictated by a chemical compulsion where the body and psyche must increasingly be re- exposed to physical and emotional pain in order to elicit the same chemical ‘hit’.221 Within the novel, while the girl’s ‘great work’ might allow her to briefly recast the abusive dynamics of her uncle’s attack, she is increasingly consumed by her obsessive pursuit of sex. Even when the sheer amount of sex she has leaves her feeling ‘dizzy’ and overwhelmed she can’t

‘bear to stop’ (72). In her theorisation of traumatic memory, Caruth argues that compulsive and mechanistic behaviour is very often a key symptom of traumatic injury. For the traumatised victim the unexperienced past manifests belatedly through compulsive re- enactments that are often accompanied by a total absence of emotion or recall of the event

219 Ramona Koval, ‘Transcript: Eimear McBride in Coversation with Ramona Koval’, The Monthly, March 2014 [accessed 20 May 2020]. 220 Schwartz et al., Post-Traumatic Stress, p. 7. 221 Ibid., p. 22.

195 itself.222 As the girl embarks on her ‘great work’, the traumatic consequences of her sexual abuse become visible in the dissociation of act and affect. However, when this ‘work’ is discovered by her brother, this compulsive project collapses.

In one scene, now aged eighteen, the girl’s brother confronts the protagonist with rumours of all the ‘Dirty stuff’ (73) he’s heard about her. The brother asks the girl ‘if it’s true’ and when she refuses to answer the boy begins to choke his sister, slamming her against a wall and calling her a ‘slut’ and a ‘Fucking bitch’ (73-74). While the brother tries to kick and punch the girl, she curls up into a ball and internally states ‘Go plummet down please. Hell open up and take me in’ (73). If the aim of the girl’s ‘work’ (71) is to reorganise her feelings of powerlessness, sin and shame, in this scene her project fails utterly. In her distress the girl asks not to be taken to heaven, or indeed any other place, but specifically to

‘hell’ (73). While sex might represent an attempt to reorganise the dynamics of shame and powerlessness that have conditioned her life, the girl’s actions not only cede control to traumatic compulsion but ultimately only compound her sense of herself as a sinful object.

When the girl’s ‘great work’ (71) is discovered by her sibling, her suffering is compounded by the way in which it is specifically her brother who comes to see her as an object of sin. This suffering is so acute because, throughout the novel, the brother-sister relationship is essential to the girl’s subjectivity and the girl’s sense of self. Nina White argues that the primary focus of Girl is the relationship between the novel’s nameless siblings.223 While much has been made of the similarity between Girl and Ulysses, White suggests that the text owes much to McBride’s favourite playwright Sarah Kane. She posits that the sibling relationship in Girl echoes Kane’s play Cleansed which features a pair of incestuous, gender-swapping twins at the centre of its drama.

222 Caruth, Trauma, p. 4. 223 Nina White, ‘“It Was like Lightening”: the Theatrical Resonances of Sarah Kane in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, Irish Studies Review, 26.3 (2018), 1–14 (p. 3).

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While there is no trace of incest in Girl, from its outset the text’s treatment of the siblings’ relationship is inflected by issues of gender, intimacy and identity. Still in the womb, it is the boy who names his sister, the girl coming to ‘wear’ this name in the ‘stitches of her skin’ (3). Never revealing her name to the reader, this act of naming establishes an intimate bond between the siblings that is strengthened as the children come to rely on each other to survive their mother’s verbal and physical violence. This is particularly the case as the brother’s tumour-related cognitive impairments become more pronounced, the girl helping him to fulfil their mother’s expectations that they be ‘good children’ (18). This bond becomes absolutely essential for the girl as the children grow into adolescents. As she is increasingly positioned as a sexualised object, Anne Enright has suggested that the siblings’ bond emerges as ‘a clean space’ outside of this ‘soiled world’.224

This relationship is so essential it is even coded into the text’s narrative perspective.

Long before a narrating ‘I’ coalesces in the novel’s opening chapter, the brother first emerges as a ‘You’ (5). Throughout the novel, this ‘You’ continually frames the girl’s narration of her difficult life events. While the text gives voice to the girl’s embodied consciousness where the world and mind-body nexus meet, this voice is not a monologue but rather a dialogue. The brother-sister relationship is not only crucial to the children surviving their difficult childhood but is essential to the girl’s very subjectivity itself, her narrative voice always orientated towards her brother.

Fundamental as the brother-sister relationship might be within Girl, as the siblings grow older this intimacy is increasingly interrupted by the discourses of sin and shame that frame their religious upbringing. This is particularly the case when other children at their school begin to notice the boy struggle to keep up with his peers as a result of the cognitive impairments left by his brain tumour. While her brother is unable to recognise it, the girl

224 Anne Enright, ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride – Review’, The Guardian, 20 September 2013, n.p. [accessed 21 June 2020].

197 begins to observe her brother being increasingly bullied for his ‘handicap’ (50). Witnessing this bullying she feels ‘the scald and full of shame […] Was it yours or mine?’ (50) not only experiencing her own embarrassment but also taking on the shame her brother is unable to feel. In addition to the way that misogynistic discourses of sin and shame mediate the girl’s emerging sexuality and subjectivity, she is doubly trapped by further feelings of guilt and shame to do with the sibling who is absolutely necessary to her sense of self. Overwhelmed, she resolves that ‘I will not think of your feelings anymore’ (50), and begins to ignore her brother, especially in public.

The siblings’ ‘daily lives of separation’ go on to become what Áine Mahon has described as, a kind of low-level chronic trauma within the text.225 Recalling the idea of trauma as a point of forcefully felt absence, the trace of the abandoned brother-sister relationship becomes increasingly visible in the girl’s post-traumatic sexuality. Immediately after she embarks on having sex with as many of her brother’s classmates as possible, the girl reflects that ‘Now I know full well what I can do. For me and for you’ (70). In addition to the way that the girl’s ‘great work’ represents an attempt to reorganise the traumatic dynamics at work in her sexual assault then, it also allows her to draw her peers’ attention away from her brother. Her post-traumatic sexuality becomes a way of trying to negotiate a complex matrix of interrelated layers of suffering and shame. Representing a frustrated attempt to reorganise the act of sexual abuse in the past, it is also a way to protect her brother from the shame of being bullied. Moreover, by framing her ‘great work’ as something she does for ‘me and for you’, while ostensibly not speaking to her brother she is able to maintain a dialogue with the ‘you’ on which her sense of self depends (71).

However, when her brother finally finds out about this sex, the girl’s compulsive project collapses. While she may have attempted to recast the boys as shameful objects in

225 Áine Mahon, ‘Moral Education and Literature: On Cora Diamond and Eimear McBride’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 51.1 (2016), 102–13 (p. 107).

198 their encounters, she only confirms herself as a ‘Dirty’ (73) object in the eyes of her brother.

In doing so, she reifies the separation between the siblings, as after their confrontation the girl’s brother stops talking to her altogether and the girl, giving up her sexual project, instead focuses on getting out of the family home ‘Quick. Quick’ (76).

Following the confrontation between the girl and her brother, the siblings’ emotional distance takes on a geographic reality when the girl leaves home for university.

While the girl’s brother gets a job stacking shelves as a local supermarket, the girl receives all

‘As and Bs’ and leaves for college eager to find out ‘Next now. What I’ll be?’ (80-81). Shortly after arriving in the nameless city where she studies, the girl becomes friends with a fellow female student and the pair quickly embark on a second period of promiscuity:

Fuck me softly fuck me quick is all the same once done to me […] We’re in this. She and me together […] Dancing up upon the tables. Unbuttoning our tops. Throw our knickers in the air. Get out of this pub. Don’t have your sort around here. Fuck you. Suck you. Ha ha ha (89).

Once again, this scene’s unconventional syntax and grammar colour the girl’s voice with permeability. However, rather than the speech fragments of the novel’s opening, or the overwhelmed narration of the girl’s childhood, there is much more of the girl’s narrative presence within this scene. Rather than overwhelming the girl, the voice of the landlord who tells the girls to ‘Get out’ is contained within a voice that is able to retort ‘Fuck you’ (89).

While this could be read as the words of the best friend, they could equally belong to the girl and this increased narrative completeness is indicative of the way that, for McBride, it is important not to ignore the significant effort the girl makes to become a ‘fully-formed person’ during this period of her short life.226 Indeed, during this second period of promiscuity, the girl begins to make her first real decisions ‘about her body and what she will do with it.’227 In the chapters that focus on the girl’s sex with boys from her school,

226 ‘Eimear McBride - A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, Bookclub, BBC Radio 4, n.p. 227 Ibid.

199 there is very little detail about the sex itself. By way of contrast, however, as a young adult there is much more detail about the kinds of sex the girl seeks out but also rejects:

I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. […] choked my neck until I said I was dead. […] I met a man with condoms in his pockets. Don’t use them. He loves children in his heart. No. I met a man who knew me once […] Who said come back marry me live on my farm. No (96).

In contrast to saying ‘yes’ to everyone and everything while at school, at university the girl begins to say ‘No’ for the first time (96). However, while saying ‘No’ might imply a degree of choice and self-esteem, the sex she does have is increasingly violent and damaging:

I met a man who hit me a smack. I met a man who cracked my arm. I met a man who said what are you doing out so late at night. I met a man. I met a man. […] Should have turned on my heel. I thought. I didn’t know to think. I didn’t even know to speak. […] And I lay down. And slapped and cried and wined and dined (96-97).

In their work on post-traumatic sexuality, Schwartz et al. posit that rather than processing the way that they have been used ‘as an object’ by an abuser, many victims instead come ‘to hate and blame’ their bodies.228 Punishing the body becomes a way for the abused child-self, often sealed-off within the adult personality, to protect themselves from the truth that they were betrayed by a trusted adult.229 While the girl’s sex life might be an attempt to make choices, these decisions continually place her body in jeopardy. She is unable to extricate herself from situations where she knows she ‘should’ have turned and ran, instead committing herself to further humiliation and pain.

In McBride’s Girl, the protagonist’s sexuality emerges as a site of frustrated attempts at self-determination. Positioned as a sexualised object in her childhood and early adolescence, sex becomes a way for the girl to try and install herself as an agent within her own life. Embracing her ‘brazen’ identity while still at school, saying ‘Yes’ to as many boys as possible allows the girl to regain a sense of control, casting her partners as objects of

‘shame’ (70). However, while this sexual project might offer her temporary respite from the

228 Schwartz et al., Post-Traumatic Stress, p. 22. 229 Ibid.

200 discourses of sin that would position her as a debased object, this project ultimately fails.

Any sense of the girl’s sexual ‘choice’ or agency is undermined by the way her behaviour is increasingly dictated by a compulsive need to re-enact her traumatic past. The girl’s ‘great work’, designed to help protect her brother and maintain the internal dialogue with him on which her sense of self depends, only confirms her as a sinful object in his eyes. While away at university, the girl does begin to make real choices about who she has sex with and to say

‘No’ for the first time (96). Once again though, the sex she has becomes increasingly compulsive and violent; punishing her body by seeking out sex that will explicitly cause her pain.

In my analysis of the girl’s childhood, I argued that by encoding the consequences of trauma into the novel’s narrative voice the text demands the reader enter into an intimate experience of the girl’s ‘damage’. As the girl grows into a young adult, through the text’s treatment of the girl’s post-traumatic sexuality, the novel enacts the ongoing consequences of this traumatic past. In doing so, trauma emerges not as an ‘unpleasant memory’ but as something that seeps into and deforms the girl’s attempts at self-determination.230 While the novel might install a relatively linear narrative chronology that follows the girl from infancy to adulthood, any sense of the girl becoming a fully-formed person is always frustrated by the ongoing consequences of her upbringing. For McBride, in Irish literature and society alike, there has long been a tendency ‘to close doors at the end of an era and forget about what happened’.231 Within Girl, however, through the novel’s treatment of the girl’s traumatic sexuality, the text calls into question the idea that the ongoing consequences of the misogynistic past can ever be fully over. In doing so, the novel can be read as a text that not only speaks deeply to the social and political contexts that surrounded its publication but to the ongoing legacy of misogyny in Ireland. If, in 2013, in the wake of the financial

230 ‘Eimear McBride - A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, Bookclub, BBC Radio 4, n.p. 231 Ibid.

201 crisis Ireland was once again asking what Irishness might mean, the text demands that any answer must account for the way that Irish girlhood has continually been warped and deformed by misogyny. Instead of ‘shutting the door’ on the past, the text’s formal features instead demand that the reader in 2013 and beyond enter into an intense identification with the traumatic experience of Irish girlhood, coming to experience its ongoing and devastating consequences.232

Trauma, Cyclicality and the Joycean Legacy

When writing Girl , McBride wanted to recreate in language what an actor’s body does ‘on stage’.233 Recalibrating Joyce’s modernist style, the text gives voice to the way in which sensations and feelings register within the girl’s mind-body nexus. In doing so, I argue that the text’s experimental impressionism demands the reader enter into an intimate experience of the girl’s ongoing damage. Throughout this analysis, I have drawn attention to the way that the text follows a seemingly linear narrative chronology underpinned by its being organised into named sections that are further sub-divided into sequentially numbered chapters. Within these chapters, the girl gives clear indications of the siblings’ ages as they mature from small children into young adults. However, tempering this forward-moving narrative is a voice that remains characterised by permeability. Moreover, while the novel might adopt a linear chronology that would be at home in a bildungsroman, the girl’s attempts at becoming a ‘fully-formed’ person are always frustrated. Recalling the Joycean model of Irish history as a traumatic ‘nightmare’ that plagues the present, the girl’s past similarly comes to deform and control her choices. For the girl, the traumatic injury of her religious childhood and rape exist not as an unknown history but rather as a traumatic compulsion to repeat this past by exposing herself to continued suffering and pain.

232 ‘Eimear McBride - A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, n.p. 233 Cochrane, 'There Are Serious Readers', n.p.

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Having analysed the text’s treatment of trauma within girl’s narrative voice and sexuality, my discussion will now turn to the traumatic energies at work in the novel’s conclusion. In particular, I will analyse the way that while the novel installs a seemingly forward moving narrative chronology, this apparent linearity is complicated by the cyclicality at work in the novel’s ending. I will examine how the girl’s suicide by drowning at the novel’s conclusion echoes the cyclical structure of Joyce’s final novel Finnegans Wake. I will argue that what results is a tension between the linear and the cyclical that suggests that for all her attempts to become a fully-formed person, there is no sense the girl will ever be able to overcome the traumatic circumstances into which she was born.

Throughout her early teenage years and young adulthood, the traumatic injuries of

McBride’s girl are visible in her increasingly pathological pursuit of violent and self- lacerating sex. After the girl’s brother is re-diagnosed with a brain tumour, the girl’s sexuality reaches its most violent and self-destructive phase as she tries to anaesthetise the pain of his loss. Returning from university, at the beginning on the final two sections of the novel, the girl is shocked to discover that her brother’s health has severely deteriorated. Eventually, after he collapses and is taken to hospital, the doctors confirm her brother’s brain tumour has returned, giving him less than a year to live. As he succumbs to his disease, the siblings quickly fall back into the gentle and nurturing relationship they enjoyed as children.

Recalling the way that the girl helped her brother to be a ‘good’ child when they were small, as her brother regresses until he seems like he’s ‘five again’ (122) the girl increasingly spends her time soothing his anxieties and nursing his symptoms.

However, outside these duties, the girl begins a sexual relationship with the uncle who abused her as a child. This relationship begins when the girl calls her uncle to tell him about her brother’s impending death, begging him to come and see her, asking him to

‘Fuck. Yes. Help me. Save me from all this’ (131). What the girl wants, however, is to be

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‘saved’ through increasingly violent sex and in one particularly difficult scene, the girl begs her uncle to bring her relief from her emotional pain by breaking her nose:

Just hit me on the face. No. Then get off. Get fucking off. Alright slaps my face […] Hits again. He hits til something’s click and blood begin […] I’m better though. In fact I’m almost best (143-144).

Once again eschewing conventional punctuation, at the beginning of this scene action is rendered through dialogue held within the girl’s permeable narrating ‘voice’. However, after the uncle begins to hit the girl, this violence precipitates narration that is much more grammatically complete and organised around a clear narrating ‘I’. What allows the girl to feel ‘better’ in this encounter, is the way that physical pain allows the girl to escape her feelings of distress while also solidifying her sense of self. As the brother dies physical pain allows the girl to experience brief moments of what Abdel-Rahman Téllez has described as masochistic ‘oneness’.234 Extreme pain drowns out her mental and emotional distress by filling her body with sensation, shifting the girl’s subjectivity away from her thoughts and feelings into her body. Indeed, as the girl’s brother is bought home from hospital to die, the girl begs her uncle to ‘Hurt me. Until I am outside pain’, violent sex allowing her to step out of her emotional pain and into the sensation of physical ‘hurt’ (148).

Extreme physical pain may offer the girl respite from her emotional distress, but sexual violence is unable to offer the girl a coping strategy once her brother dies. In addition to the way that losing her beloved brother brings her emotional distress, the girl’s sense of grief is compounded by the loss of the ‘You’ to whom her narration has long been addressed. Even at university, although the siblings no longer speak, the girl’s narration remains orientated towards her sibling. At the end of the ‘I met a man’ passage, for example, the girl concludes her account of frustrated self-determination with an address to her brother as she concludes ‘I met a man […] and I didn’t know you at all’ (97). When her

234 Abdel-Rahman Téllez, ‘The Embodied Subjectivity of a Half-Formed Narrator’, p. 10.

204 brother dies, in addition to the pain of losing her sibling, the girl is also faced with the loss of an essential component of her sense of self:

Where have you gone. […] Nn. My heart. Comes broken now. Broken off in me […] Off the. My. You. Where […] Who am I talking to? Who am I talking to now? (188-189)

In addition to the way that the girl’s heart is ‘broken’, within this passage the boy’s absence is also visible in the novel’s dissolving language. The verb ‘off’ is repeated twice in this short piece of text, while the language around it degrades from the relatively complete phrase

‘Broken off in me’ to ‘Off the. My. You. Where’ (189). This repeated phrase not only loses its central verb, but the ‘me’ also breaks down into three parts that ends with a statement of uncertain location.

So overwhelming is the brother’s absence, that the girl leaves the family home and goes to the lake where she once again meets the boy who, as a teenager, addressed her as

‘girleen’ before they had sex. Now adults, this same man beats and rapes the girl, but rather than violent sex offering the girl a way of bolstering her sense of self and narrative voice, the girl’s internal voice continues to degrade:

Done done Til he hyehappy fucky shoves upo come ui. Kom shitting ut h mith fking kmg I’m fking cmin up you […] He come hecomehe (193). In striking contrast to the half-formed voice the text employs elsewhere in the novel, as the girl’s distress grows to its most intense pitch, individual words begin to lose their distinction and collapse into each other. Having lost the person on whom her sense of self depended, the girl’s narrative voice begins to fray and come apart, physical violence only exacerbating her profound sense of loss. Following this violent attack, the girl does manage to make it back home but while there she is once again raped by her uncle before being berated by her mother for the way her visible injuries have ‘shamed’ (199) her brother’s memory in front of the charismatic community who have come to pray over his body. Agreeing with her

205 mother that she is indeed a ‘disgrace’ (200), the girl leaves the family home one last time and walks to the lake having resolved to drown herself.

Deeply and serially traumatised, Eimear McBride’s novel concludes with one final and superlative act of self-destruction for its nameless protagonist. So great is the weight of her multiple traumatic injuries that the girl frames her act of drowning as an act of relief and release. Arriving at its shoreline, the girl describes the lake as a ‘home’ she has ‘touched and loved’, inviting the water to ‘Baptise’ her as she moves into the shallows (201). As she begins to submerge herself under its surface, the water begins to ‘Wash away’ her ‘hurt’ and ‘pain’, erasing the places inside her body ‘Where uncle did’ and ‘Where mother speak’ (202-203). In contrast to the frayed and collapsing syntax of the sections immediately preceding it, the language of the girl’s voice becomes increasingly grammatically complete as she begins to die. This is perhaps not surprising as inside the water the girl finds her brother, the ‘You’ on which her narrative voice has always depended. Under the water, the girl describes the lake as a ‘Deepest mirror of the past’ where the girl and her brother are once again ‘Very young’ and ‘very clean like when we wash our hands’ (202). As her voice begins to assume the register and tone of her much younger self, the pair also begin to swim together echoing the earlier relationship between the boy and the in-utero girl. Indeed, at the beginning of the novel, the girl states how she loved ‘swimming to your touch’ (5) while still inside her mother’s womb.

Framed as an act of baptism and a return to their youth, while the girl’s death is a moment of profound self-annihilation, the text’s action and language also anticipate a return to the novel’s beginning. Finally, as the water begins to shut down her body totally, it dissolves the part of her body that ‘holds’ her name:

The plunge is faster. The deeper cold is coming in. What’s left? […] My name for me. My I.

Turn. Look up. […]

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My name is gone (203).

For the girl, before her narrating ‘I’ begins to coalesce in the novel’s opening chapter, the boy first places her name in ‘the stitches of her skin’ (3). In the final pages of the book, this act of naming plays out in reverse, leaving the girl in almost the exact same position she was in at the narrative’s beginning: nameless and floating in water.

In a 2018 radio documentary, McBride explained that for a long time she had no interest in Joyce’s final novel Finnegans Wake thinking it the ‘end’ of literature with nowhere else ‘to go’.235 However, re-reading the book while writing Girl, she began to think of it differently as a ‘gateway to a different kind of literature, written from and for a different part of the psyche.’236 In the novel’s watery conclusion, appropriating the cyclical structure of

Finnegans Wake, the novel begins to draw on Joyce’s ideas about the Irish subject’s traumatic experience of historical time. The final line of Finnegans Wake, ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the’, is a sentence fragment which can be read as the first half of the novel’s opening line ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s’.237 With no distinct ‘start’ or ‘end’, rather than a sequential succession of moments arranged along a linear timeline, the text organises the experience of Irish history as a loop that can be entered at any point. This idea is replicated in the structure of Girl, while the arrangement of sections, chapters and the siblings’ ageing all install a forward-moving chronology, its ending institutes ‘a cycle that begins in the womb and ends in the lake.’238

Abdel-Rahman Téllez has argued that in addition to this cyclical structure, the novel also recycles images and fragments of language that introduce a ‘double’ temporality into the text.239 For example, in the scene where she is raped by her uncle as a teenager, the moment where the girl is pushed against the chair is followed by a seemingly random, throwaway

235 ‘The Advance Guard of the Avant-Garde’, Archive on 4, BBC Radio 4, 10 March 2018. 236 Ibid. 237 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2012), p. 628, p. 3 238 ‘Eimear McBride - A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’, Bookclub, BBC Radio 4, n.p. 239 Abdel-Rahman Téllez, ‘The Embodied Subjectivity of a Half-Formed Narrator’, p. 11.

207 word: ‘Against the back of the kitchen chair. Pull my skirt down by ankles. Shed’ (57).

Isolated and of a totally different register to the rest of the passage, ‘Shed’ could be read as shocked regurgitation of random language. However, in a novel where so much emphasis is placed on individual words, this is most likely not the case. Later, when the girl embarks on her ‘great work’ (71), it is a prefabricated ‘shed’ where she begins to have sex with multiple boys from her school. When the word ‘Shed’ bubbles up during the scene where the uncle rapes his niece, the incident in the shed itself is yet to take place. Throughout the novel, repeated images and fragments of language such as ‘Shed’ come to disturb the novel’s seemingly chronological momentum. When the girl is beaten by her mother as a child, she describes the experience as an act of ‘drowning’ (28) that replicates almost exactly the language used to narrate her later death. Moreover, long before the girl begins her ‘great work’ behind the ‘prefabs’, she describes her brother as having ‘prefab’ eyes when she watches him begin to be bullied (37).

Echoing the way that in Finnegans Wake nonstandard syntax and repetitions operate as a simultaneous and encyclopaedic container of experience, within Girl language and images similarly become unstuck within the novel’s apparently linear chronology. In doing so, they inflect the girl’s voice with foreknowledge of her difficult life and death. This sense of foreknowledge is particularly visible in the girl’s ongoing dialogue with her brother. In the novel’s opening chapter the girl states that ‘You and I were busy with each other long before

I came’ (5). While the girl’s gestation is largely made up of overheard dialogue that imply the action is happening in ‘real time’, these sense impressions are framed by a brief aside that implies this action has already taken place. While the novel might seem to be taking place sequentially then, these asides continually temper this sense of a forward moving chronology, the girl’s voice at once moving forward through her story and yet always retrospective in tone.

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Installing a sense of cyclicality within the text was important to McBride in order to resist any idea of the novel as an act of ‘therapisation’.240 Before McBride lost her brother to a brain tumour as a young adult, she also lost her father to cancer as a child. After this initial loss, McBride has recounted how she slowly began to believe ‘all the bad stuff’ was behind her, that the disaster of her life had happened, but this confidence was undermined when her brother became ill.241 In writing Girl, McBride has insisted, rather than trying to organise the experience of loss into a narrative where this pain can be easily overcome, it was important to ‘look at the ugly cruel thing and describe the ugly cruel thing and have that be enough’.242 Recalling this idea, for the novel’s nameless protagonist there is no sense that the girl can fully overcome the traumatic circumstances into which she is born. Within the novel, to be born into the body of a ‘girleen’ is to be always positioned as a sexualised object. The girl’s upbringing conditions her body as a battleground between incompatible ideas of purity, sin and her desire to take control of her life, with her sexual assault confirming the girl’s underlying sense of herself as a shameful object. Lacking any discourse other than the forms of evangelical Catholicism of her community, the girl’s abortive attempts to use sex as a way of trying to seize agency are always doomed to fail. Indeed, as

Susan Cahill has argued, it is only by choosing to end her life that the girl is ultimately able to refuse to participate ‘in the system that produced her as object’.243 However, saying ‘No’ to this system is only possible through the catastrophic destruction of her subjectivity and body. While the novel’s watery conclusion might imply a return to the start of the text, there is no sense that the girl will be able to change her fate, the novel’s nameless protagonist is thus condemned to repeat her pain and suffering in an endless loop.

240 Collard, About a Girl, p. 13. 241 Conroy, ‘Eimear McBride’, n.p. 242 Rose and McBride, ‘Eimear McBride in Conversation with Jacquline Rose’, n.p. 243 Cahill, ‘A Girl is a Half-formed Thing?’, p. 166.

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Conclusions

In this chapter, I analysed Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing in light of the sense-making body of its nameless protagonist. In doing so, I argued that the novel can be read as a text that not only speaks to the questions of national identity that surrounded its

2013 publication but draws attention to Ireland’s ongoing history of misogyny and its ongoing consequences for the female Irish subject. My discussion focused on how

McBride’s novel recalibrates Joyce’s modernist style to give voice to the traumatic experience of growing up as a ‘girleen’ in late twentieth century Ireland. I argued that by encoding the experience of trauma within the girl’s narrative voice, the novel’s intense subjectivism demands the reader enter into a close identification with the girl’s difficult childhood. My analysis therefore suggested that the text enacts the way that the girl’s

Evangelical Catholic upbringing conditions her body as a site of competing and contradictory discourses of purity, sin and her desire to make choices about what happens to her body. The need to keep this struggle a secret primes the girl for her uncle’s attack, his attempt to position her as the principal agent in their ‘relationship’ confirming her underlying sense of herself as a shameful object.

Following her uncle’s attack, sex becomes a way for the girl to try and redress this traumatic childhood. However, recalling the idea of trauma as the possession of the present by the past, the girl’s obsessive pursuit of increasingly violent sex only serves to compound her idea of herself as an object of debasement. Indeed, this is particularly the case when the girl’s brother finds out about her ‘great work’ (69). The brother-sister relationship plays an essential role in the girl’s psychological self-understanding. While the girl’ sexuality might represent an attempt to overcome the traumatic past, her attempts at self-determination are not only frustrated by the way the past continues to warp and control her choices, but how this past also comes to interrupt her relationship with the ‘you’ to whom her interior dialogue has always been addressed. When the girl’s brother dies towards the end of the

210 novel, no amount of violent sex can help the girl manage the pain of this loss. Always positioned as a sexualised object by the prevailing religious discourses that saturate her homelife, and having lost the only relationship that gave her a sense of herself outside this debased identity, the girl’s only form of recourse is to end her own life.

Although the novel might appropriate the cyclical structure of Joyce’s Finnegans

Wake as the girl’s life ends, there is no suggestion this act of cyclical renewal will result in anything other than death of the protagonist. Recalibrating Joyce’s style to give voice to the internal place where sensation and self interact, the text asks the reader to enter into an intimate account of the way misogynistic Catholic culture irreparably damages one nameless girl. In doing so, the text can be read as a novel that speaks deeply to the questions of national identity that have long preoccupied Irish writers. If, in 2013, Ireland was once again asking what it might mean to be Irish, the novel suggests that any future definition must account for the way that the misogynistic experience of Irish girlhood has serious and ongoing consequences for the female Irish subject.

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Conclusions

At the beginning of this thesis, I drew attention to a question raised by the journalist

Stephanie Boland: why have so many Irish writers been shortlisted for The Goldsmiths

Prize?244 The £10,000 annual prize rewards fiction that ‘breaks the mould’, extending the possibilities of the novel through formal innovation.245 For novelist Eimear McBride, the reason why so many Irish writers have been shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize and indeed, many other prizes has something to do ‘with language’.246 It’s a question of the interesting shapes that are made in the ‘skin of English’ as its stretched to accommodate ‘the skeleton of Irish.’247

In this thesis, expanding on McBride’s point about language, I analysed how Reading in the Dark, The Gathering and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing all rework the novel form in order to accommodate their ideas about Irish experience, language and subjectivity. While for

Henry James the novel might be a neutral mirror of the ‘real world’, I argued this pose of neutrality privileges a particular political position and worldview. In his second novel Ulysses,

James Joyce found an apt metaphor for the ideological constraints of form, characterising

Irish art as the ‘cracked lookingglass of a servant’.248 His metaphor implies that when it comes to representing Irish experience, the conventions of the novel risk reifying the power relationship between colonising master and colonised servant that are coded into the formal tradition. For Joyce, the formal ‘skin’ of the English, nineteenth-century realist novel was too constricting to accommodate Irish language and experience, operating as key part of the colonial project.

244 Boland, ‘Eimear McBride’, n.p. 245 ‘The Goldsmiths Prize 2020’, Goldsmiths University [accessed 24 June 2020]. 246 Boland, ‘Eimear McBride’, n.p. 247 Ibid. 248 Joyce, Ulysses, p. 33.

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In A Portrait of the Artist and a Young Man and Ulysses this incompatibility of colonial forms and Irish experience manifests as a crisis of personal expression for Stephen Dedalus.

Always positioned as an object within Irish political discourse, the young man finds himself the symptom of a traumatic history he cannot possess, lacking a discourse with which to redress his traumatic objectification. However, while this is a problem for Stephen on the level of plot, in Joyce’s hands this crisis becomes an opportunity for formal plenitude.

Departing from the ‘wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot’ of the nineteenth-century realist novel, in his increasingly experimental texts he prioritised innovative formal strategies that frustrated any readerly or broader cultural desire for catharsis, resolution and answers.249 In doing so, he was able to better enact Irish experience and the traumatic impact of colonial history and discourse on the individual. To answer

Boland’s question about the success of Ireland’s prize-winning novelists then, I would propose it is not solely to do with language. It is also to do with the way that Irish novelists have engaged with the Joycean legacy of needing to rework the novel form itself, remaking it in order to force it to admit Irish history and subjectivity.

In this thesis I looked at three prize-winning Irish novels: Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and while each is distinct, I argued that as trauma novels they each participate in the legacy of formal innovation initiated by Joyce. In order to advance this argument, in my chapter on

Reading in the Dark, I posited that the novel installs a clear forward-moving chronology only to continually frustrate this momentum. Geographic and transgenerational traumas, alive within the novel’s present, continually tug at any sense of forward progression. I argued that in doing so, the novel posits a traumatic model of history that calls into question the idea that Northern Ireland’s unresolved histories and irreconcilable political identities can ever be

249 Joyce, Letters of James Joyce Volume III, p. 146.

213 fully laid to rest. Then, in my analysis of The Gathering, I argued that within the novel the traumatised body operates as a way to understand the ongoing consequences of Ireland’s history of patriarchy. The body functions as an important site of somatic memories but also formal strategies that express a past that is forcefully felt in the present and yet always hedged in doubt. The novel therefore questions the idea of the Celtic Tiger as a ‘resolution’ to Ireland’s patriarchal history, with the text enacting the way that Ireland’s misogynistic past is still ongoing within the novel’s present. Finally, in my chapter on McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, I explored the role of the traumatised body within the novel’s treatment of narrative voice. I argued that instead of the crisis of memory at work in the novels by

Deane and Enright, the novel focuses on giving voice to the place inside the girl’s mind- body nexus where the external world impinges on her physical and psychological self. I argued that by recalibrating Joyce’s modernist style, the text demands the reader enter into an intimate account of this damage. The novel not only expresses a traumatic history where the past continues to plague the present but by foregrounding the cyclicality of this history, calls into question the idea it can ever be overcome or escaped.

While each novel is different then, it is possible to discern a similar Joycean pattern of innovation in each text. Rather than simply narrating traumatic events through conventional narrative modes, the texts’ formal features enact the structural consequences of Ireland’s traumatic past. These features express the way that trauma resists narration, interrupts linear notions of time and complicates the idea of meaning itself. In doing so, the novels eschew any idea of resolution or catharsis for a model of history that is cyclical and ongoing. The novels therefore take the problems trauma poses for representation and transforms them into formal plenitude, using innovative formal strategies to map the way that the traumatic past continues to plague the Irish subject.

When writing this thesis, it was a deliberate decision to feature novels set in the mid- late twentieth century across the geographical island of Ireland. Seamus Deane’s Reading in

214 the Dark gives narrative shape to a history that is unique to a small Catholic community on the border between the Irish Republic and the province of Northern Ireland. While technically a constituent part of the United Kingdom, the text explores the irreconcilable identities and unresolved histories that are not only forged in the 1920s timeline of its buried political mystery but have their origins much further back in Irish-British relations. Moving

South East to Dublin in the early twenty-first century, Anne Enright’s The Gathering explores the legacy of partition from the other side of the border, its hidden history of sexual abuse emerging from the patriarchal politics of the post-colonial state. Finally, moving westwards,

Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing explores the devastating consequences of this misogynistic culture and the power and control of the Catholic church for a girl growing up in a rural, Evangelical community in the early 1990s. Given the limitations of this thesis in terms of length, this geographic spread gives as broad a base of evidence as is possible to support my argument that these novels participate in a trend of formal innovation by prize- winning Irish novelists.

It felt important to start and complete this thesis, framed as it has been by contemporary political events. For those whom Irish society has historically devalued, there has long been a lack of ‘discursive space’ in which traumatic events can be articulated and acknowledged.250 What these novels do is to help to carve out a space for that discourse, using narrative strategies that can express the way that trauma resists language. Moreover, they also help to normalise the idea that the experience of abuse can very often resist empirical ideas of knowledge and ‘provable’ truth. In particular, The Gathering and A Girl is a

Half-formed Thing give voice to hidden histories of violence and sexual exploitation that sit within a broader political context where the lives of women and children are devalued. Both texts resist any readerly or cultural desire to close the door on this difficult past.

250 Harte, ‘Mourning Remains Unresolved’, p. 198.

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Resisting the desire to draw a line under history and be ‘done with it’ feels as important as ever in 2020. I think, in particular, of the contrast between the success of the

Repeal movement to legalise abortion in Ireland and the ongoing misogyny at work in attitudes towards adolescent female sexuality, such as the 19-year old woman whose thong underwear was used as evidence of her consent in a rape case in 2018.251 Moreover, as of summer 2020, Northern Ireland has still failed to extend full reproductive rights and healthcare to women.

Turning also to Northern Ireland’s broader political context as I finish this thesis, the need to resist the urge to draw a line under the past more broadly seems once again particularly pressing. I have drawn attention to the way in which Deane’s Reading in the Dark questions the idea of the peace process as a resolution to Northern Ireland’s sectarian divisions and unresolved histories. Despite these deficiencies, the peace process that led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement has been followed by a period of relative political stability and economic prosperity for the province. However, the dangers of forgetting the past seem to be in action as Brexit threatens to undermine much of the legislation on which the Agreement was built. Reading Deane’s novel, I cannot help but be reminded that

Northern Ireland’s unresolved histories are indeed not ‘over’ and without careful diplomacy and co-operation can easily come to actively possess the present once again.

251 Mary Oppenheim, ‘Teenage Girl’s Underwear Considered as Evidence against Her in Rape Trial, Sparking Fury among Campaigners’, The Irish Independent, 19 November 2018, n.p. [accessed 20 June 2020].

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