The Stream of Consciousness Irish Novel Today: A Recall of the Past, an Update for the Future

Beau Brown

Supervisor: Dr. R. Glitz

Second reader: Dr. S. Wesemael

MA: Literature and Education

University of Amsterdam

June 20th, 2018

Table of Contents

Introduction p. 3 …

Chapter I: The Stream of Conscious Aesthetic Presenting the Inner Experience to the Reader p. 9 …

Chapter II: The Irish SOC Novel, Joycean Idiom and the Catholic Soul p. 38 …

Conclusion: The Irish SOC Novel and the Global Perspective p. 64 …

Works Cited p. 68 …

1

Acknowledgments

After a year of learning, I humbly submit my final thesis for the English MA. My time at UvA has been wonderful, and I would like to thank a few people for helping me complete my degree. First, I would like to thank Dr. Glitz for taking on my thesis at the last minute, and for providing support to me and my writing all year long. A thank you is also in order to Dr. van der Poll for problem solving various issues during my studies. To Dr. Wesemael, thank you for being my second reader, and for taking on the literature course in the nick of time. And all my professors in literature and linguistics, I learned so much--thank you all!

Finally, I would like to thank my wife Jamila for supporting me in every way possible this year. Taking a year to study while also raising our newborn daughter Abby could have been problematic for other partners, but my beautiful wife allowed me to fulfill my dream of returning to school after so many years away, and encouraged me to bury my nose in as many books as I could. Oh, and thanks of course to baby Abby for always having a cuddle ready for me after a long day at the library!

2 Introduction

At the time of this writing, sales of literary fiction are down in the British Isles and Ireland (Flood). Since the turn of the 21st century, this downward trend has meant publishing houses and their editors are struggling with the realities of balancing marketing and economics in a world dominated from the technology propagated by Amazon and ebooks. For a writer like Mike McCormack, deemed an ‘experimental’ novelist by the industry gatekeepers, it has been difficult to publish his work, let alone have it be read. However, amidst these trends of marketing departments driving book sales to readers consuming content on their iPhones and tablets, 1 something interesting is happening in the Irish literary community--McCormack and his peers writing experimental fiction are receiving increasing critical and popular attention. This week, McCormack has been awarded yet another literary prize for his novel Solar Bones, The International ​ ​ Dublin Literary Award. The award is another prize for McCormack’s fifth and by far most widely read novel. Earlier this year, he was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Goldsmith Prize, a literary competition that rewards experimental fiction in the UK and Ireland for a book which “opens up new possibilities of the novel form” (“The GoldSmith Prize”). Awarded annually, the prize seeks the “genuinely novel [and] which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best” (ibid). This ‘spirit of invention’ has been awarded to three Irish writers since The Goldsmith’s inception, and of these three, two have written their prose in the stream of consciousness (SOC) style. 2 Asked in an interview with Sian Cain for The Guardian, McCormack responded ​ ​ about the interest and support his novel has received: “‘The publishing industry doesn’t always credit the reading public with being adventurous enough and intelligent enough for certain books,’ he says. ‘And Solar Bones is popular – ​ ​

1 For more see: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/oh-internet-you-wonderful-newsy-reada ble-lovely-internet/481500/ 2 With Eimear McBride’s unique SOC style nominated twice-- finishing runner up in 2016 for The ​ Lesser Bohemians after winning in 2013 for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing ​ ​ 3 insofar an experimental novel can be popular. But yes, I did worry, ‘Will anyone read this?’” (Cain). In 2018, the critics and sales of his book have answered this question with a resounding ‘yes’, but his is not the only book of experimental Irish fiction receiving attention. As we will explore in this thesis, there is something interesting happening in Irish literature that is more than a one-off example of success for an SOC novel. The popular and critical support for contemporary Irish fiction of a style popularized by Joyce and Modernism has only been a recent phenomenon. For thirty years, Ireland’s economy transformed into the ‘Celtic Tiger’, 3 and literature at the time had grown stale for many critics and writers while the economy was booming. Ireland’s economic bubble from the mid 1990’s to 2010 was for many literary critics, a lean time for experimental fiction. This sentiment was captured by Irish writer Julian Gough in a 2010 interview regarding the state of Irish literature, in which he wrote:

“Really, Irish literary writers have become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture. We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off!” (Gough)

That contemporary Irish fiction is experiencing a ‘literary boom’ after the financial boom and bust of The Celtic Tiger has been written about extensively in The Guardian and The Irish Times in recent years. 4 Gough’s pessimism about the ​ ​ ​ Tiger’s effect on literature in Ireland is cited in The Guardian’s 2015 article, ‘A ​ ​ new Irish literary boom: the post-crash stars of fiction’, as a counterpoint to this described ‘Post-Tiger boom’, where small publishing houses have given experimental fiction a chance, and where prizes such as The Goldsmith have

3 https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/what-caused-the-celtic-tiger-phenomenon-1.950806 ​ 4 See: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/17/new-irish-literary-boom-post-crash-stars-fiction and Irish times’ goo.gl/H3qycD. ​ ​

4 elevated these novels in the public eye. Experimental fiction praised by the Goldsmith is of course a fuzzy term to define, but it should be noted at this juncture that it is described as ‘inventive’, ‘challenging’ and ‘novel’ by the prizes previously listed and given to work such as Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a ​ Half-Formed Thing and the aforementioned Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. ​ ​ ​ These are two works of contemporary Irish fiction that are written utilizing the SOC style, and are both praised for their aesthetics and held as examples of the resurgence of more daring fiction coming out of Ireland. 5 Along with new literary prizes like The Goldsmith there is also increased government investment in the literary arts. 6 This support, in conjunction with many boutique publishers flourishing in parallel with literary magazines like The Stinging Fly, is bringing readership and attention to works of authors like McBride and McCormack, writers who struggled for years during The Celtic Tiger decades to get their novels published. The Stinging Fly has also added its own publishing arm, of which a once pessimistic writer like Gough is enthusiastic in The Guardian's piece ​ ​ on the Post Celtic Boom : “[The Stinging Fly is] changing the landscape of Irish fiction, issue by issue, book by book”, adding that since 2010 there are “New zines, new writers, new arguments, lots of experiments, Ireland finally connecting properly with its diaspora; it’s a wonderful time to be an Irish writer” (Jordan).

This all means that today’s Irish writer has the potential to create ‘new experiments’ in the wake of the Celtic Tiger’s demise, and authors who idolize

5 See: The New Yorker:newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/useless-prayers, The Guardian’s ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/04/solar-bones-by-mike-mccormack-review, The ​ ​ Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/experimental-fiction-revelling-in-the-wonder-of-words- 1.2925656 and The NY Times ​ ​ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/books/review/solar-bones-mike-mccormack.html?referer= https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ie%2F for more. ​ 6 See: http://www.artscouncil.ie/Arts-in-Ireland/Literature/ and http://www.literatureireland.com/ ​ ​ ​ for more. 5 Joyce in their interviews to the press 7 and wish to experiment with their prose by writing as ‘from the inside out’ can write about the Ireland of the now whilst paying homage to what was the most avant garde mode of fiction a 100 years ago, the SOC novel. Along with McCormack and McBride, Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells is ​ ​ a novel that is written in the SOC style and is a product of Lally’s involvement with the Irish Writers Centre 2014 Novel Fair initiative as part of an effort by the center to pair talented but unrepresented writers with publishers. Released in 2015, it is another example of an SOC novel that has been made possible in Ireland since 2010. Taken together, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), Eggshells ​ ​ ​ (2015), and Solar Bones (2016) are three novels published only three years apart ​ ​ ​ ​ that are products of this literary renaissance in the country. In the reviews and literary criticism of all three novels, there have been many references to James Joyce and his work. Joyce’s Ulysses stands out for its lionization of SOC as a ​ ​ literary technique from the Modernist era to today, with the author himself being a pillar in the Irish literary tradition. This thesis is based in part upon interviews with the novelists, and the authors and their work considered in light of Joyce and his influence on Irish fiction today written in the SOC technique. With the cultural zeitgeist of the moment lavishing attention on Irish writers such as ​ ​ McCormack, McBride and Lally for their use of SOC style, the recent trend argued for in articles about the ‘post Tiger boom’ in Ireland leads to the question whether more authors are returning to this famous literary technique.

If one is chance, two is coincidence and three a trend, then there is reason to believe the popularity of these three novels using SOC in such a short time span is pointing to something worth examining in Irish literature of today. This investigation will seek to answer questions regarding the use of SOC in contemporary Irish literature, and the experience a reader in 2018 will have

7 See: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/24/mike-mccormack-soundtrack-novel-death-metal- novel-solar-bones on McCormack’s ‘Holy Trinity of Joyce, Becket and O’Brian’, the ‘Mount ​ Rushmore of Irish literature’. 6 when reading a novel written in a form resembling a nostalgic callback to Joyce, which, in the hands of such writers, becomes new again. The central argument for this thesis will be predicated upon the interplay of the past and present for a reader of these recently published novels. Specifically, that SOC as technique and aesthetic choice is utilized in the same ways as when it first found its way into the novel form--namely to provide insight into the obscure and private place of another’s conscious experience. However, each novelist in this thesis employs SOC in unique ways, from the grammatical to the structurally challenging. This recasting of the SOC technique allows for contemporary issues to blend with the timeless themes of love, life and death that have always been the focus of the narrative form. This is the ‘special’ feature of SOC as Dorrit Cohn writes in the introduction to Transparent Minds, her seminal book on SOC in literature, “...the ​ ​ special life-likeness of narrative fiction...depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body feels” (6).

There are numerous studies of the literary technique of SOC and its definitions (for example: ‘the inward turn’, ‘the psychological novel’) and many examples in novel form. Current research is still based on literary criticism from the 1950s where I will establish a background of the literature on the subject. I will discuss the vocabulary and the taxonomy to gain a foundation for the subject of portraying an inner consciousness in literature. In this first chapter I will provide an explanation and analysis of criticism on Joyce and Modernism, and how a technique like SOC became so exemplary of a literary time period. Modernist SOC authors such as Woolf and Faulkner (to name just a few well-known writers of this aesthetic) are examples of the period, however, it is the work of James Joyce that is most relevant for this thesis. The reason for this is the iconic stature Joyce has as an Irish author and whose work is arguably the

7 most well-known of SOC novels. 8 Looking at Joyce’s work will also open possibilities for comparison to the three novels that constitute the primary sources of analysis in this paper. While there is not much criticism examining the primary novels as they are all so recently published, there remains enough to link each source to the SOC debate and canon of literature and existing analysis of the genre. I will argue that each novel utilizes SOC as an aesthetic dialogic 9 with previous Modernist texts, but that continues the literary ‘conversation’ by unique choices in the linguistic architecture and thematic approaches in each novel’s presentation of the narrator’s conscious thought as presented on the page. Intertextuality and a contemporary reader’s interpretation of each novel with previous SOC works will bring any comparison of Irish literature back to Joyce. This comparison will lead into chapter two, in which I will focus on the idea of the SOC novels in this thesis as having something ineffably ‘Irish’ about them. That Joyce becomes party to this level of scrutiny and comparison is almost a foregone conclusion in the literary world at this point. That said, I will sift through the debate and literature on Joyce as the Irish writer, whose greatest ​ ​ novel, Ulysses, becomes a shorthand for praise and comparison to today’s ​ ​ modern Irish novelist using SOC in their work.

Examining the connection of Joyce to Irish literature, I will continue my analysis from chapter one on Solar Bones, A Girl is a Half--Formed Thing and ​ ​ ​ ​ Eggshells. Following on how the SOC technique is used by each author to ​ compare and contrast each work, I will attempt to argue that each novel is emblematic of a unique renewal of the SOC aesthetic for the contemporary reader in the Joycean, and thus Irish, tradition for chapter two. This tradition will focus on themes of religion and the soul in Irish Catholicism, Joyce’s place in Irish

8 This MA thesis will exclude others to focus on Joyce as the SOC aesthetic found in the primary ​ sources of this investigation. Disciples of Joyce who wrote in the SOC style, such as Beckett and O’Brian, will thus only receive brief mention.

9 Bakhtin and his work will be examined in detail in chapter two for further theoretical support. 8 literature and the Irish idiom as SOC aesthetic in each novel. After spending the body of the investigation focused on SOC criticism and Irish links to Joyce, the focus will zoom out from Ireland to the globe. The conclusion will summarize my previous analysis on each novel and its SOC aesthetics and compared against the backdrop of the SOC diaspora throughout the world today. This will conclude my thesis regarding contemporary Irish SOC novels and their effects on the contemporary reader.

Chapter I

The Stream of Conscious Aesthetic: Presenting the Inner Experience to the Reader

“[Stream of consciousness] techniques effected something most important: they have broken through the bottom of our consciousness—on which the psyche has hitherto rested with confidence”

-- Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss (1957) ​ ​

In relating literary techniques and time periods, the questions of when and where to begin a discourse on an item of focus become important to establish an initial marker in the continuum. For the SOC technique, this attempt to trace a lineage to its source becomes problematic for many reasons. The most pressing of which deal with how SOC writers employed the technique in the past, and the subsequent criticism and taxonomic models for SOC novels. The twin compendia of SOC literature and their criticism require careful parsing, as there has been debate amongst critics how the latter relates to the former. What follows is an examination of the literature and debate regarding the aesthetic of SOC to the literary timeline. I will argue for specific nomenclature and definitions when relating the SOC technique to ‘established’ novels of the past to establish a framework to my thesis for how the three contemporary novels in this

9 investigation use SOC and evolve the aesthetic. These changes to SOC will lead to an alert reader able to recognize them as being interesting generic reconstructions to the form.

Before entering the area of debate regarding the origins of the SOC technique, what is clear in the existing literature is that the literary period of Modernism stands as a monolith in the timeline for the number and variety of SOC novels. 10 Critical debate begins in the 1950s in the examination of canonical literature focusing on the well-known and critiqued Modernists such as the aforementioned Woolf, Faulkner and Joyce. Modernism is the starting point for the SOC novel and in criticism, and the analysis of this begins with Humphrey’s seminal book, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1954). Along with ​ ​ Edel’s The Psychological Novel (1955), these two books open the academic debate ​ ​ to define various categories of the SOC technique. It is important to note that in today’s existing SOC debate, both Humphrey and Edel are still relevant in Modernist literary studies. Humphrey begins his book by introducing what will become a common reference in SOC criticism, the invocation of the famous psychologist and metaphysician, William James. Scholars credit James as inventing the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in his work on the psychology and philosophy of the mind.11 However, as Humphrey reminds his reader, the term jumped from psychology to literature in the intervening years from James to the work of writers (including William’ brother Henry) incorporating SOC as a technique to become “novels which have as their essential subject matter the consciousness of one or more characters; that is, the depicted consciousness

10 Also of importance to note is what SOC as aesthetic and genre is not. As Erwin Steinberg writes ​ ​ ​ in The Stream of Conscious Technique in the Modern Novel (1979) that while “the psychological ​ ​ novel reports the flow of consciousness, as in Henry James, or the flow of memory as recalled by association, as in Marcel Proust; but SOC tends to concentrate on the pre-speech, non-verbalized level, where the IMAGE must express the unarticulated speech and where the logic of the grammar belongs to another world” (6). 11 1842-1910, James William. Principles of Psychology Volume 1. Hardpress Ltd, 2013. (7 mentions in book, first found on 180 un ‘Material Mondad Theory’ a retrospectively adorable section in which James posits ‘individual cell-level consciousness’.) 10 serves as a screen on which the material in these novels is presented” (2). Humphrey continues by focusing on how the great Modernist SOC writers would write about the inner experiences of their characters on the ‘screen of consciousness’ of their novels. However, for Humphrey the term ‘SOC’ is as fraught with difficulty for a writer using it as it is for a critic trying to analyze and define the term as a literary technique:

I refer to such subjective fiction as Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, To the ​ Lighthouse and The Sound and The Fury. These novels may very well be ​ ​ ​ within a category we can label stream of consciousness, so long as we know what we are talking about...we mean ‘inner awareness’. The expression of this quality is what they have in common [After a breakdown of the term stream-of-consciousness’ into its constituent parts, analyzing ‘stream’ and ‘consciousness’ for their semantic value, Humphrey ends by saying]... Thus, we may, on inductive grounds, conclude that the realm of life with which stream of consciousness literature is concerned is mental and spiritual experience--both the whatness and the howness of it. (6-7)

As Humphrey writes, the ‘mental and spiritual experience’ of the SOC technique makes it a well-known marker of Modernism. How writers of this period related the mind of their characters through pose becomes the marker ​ ​ according to Edel, who writes that SOC is “the most characteristic aspect of twentieth-century action [is] its inward turning to convey the now of mental experience” (7). Writers like Joyce forge a new relationship with the reader in writing the ‘mental experience’, and Edel writes how a Modernist like Joyce approaches this way of relating to the reader of his work:

“‘Here is the artistic record of a mind, at the very moment that it is thinking. Try to penetrate within it. You will still know only as much as this mind may reveal. It is you, not I, who will piece together any “story” there may be. Of course I have arranged his illusion for you. But it is you who must experience it.’” (26)

11 Edel and Humphrey’s scholarship in the 1950s, with their focus on Modernist works becomes our starting point for SOC analysis. Humphrey’s focus on types of SOC are salient in terms of how different Modernist novels related consciousness and language. Humphrey describes four such types: direct interior monologue, indirect interior monologue, description by an omniscient author and soliloquy (23-41). For comparative analysis to our primary sources, Humphrey’s direct interior monologue (IM) provides a useful description of an SOC form. IMs are “that type [of SOC] which is represented with negligible author interference and with no auditor assumed...it presents consciousness directly to the reader...the monologue is represented as being completely candid, as if there were no reader” (25). Molly Bloom’s final chapter, “Penelope”, in Joyce’s Ulysses ​ represents this kind of ‘candid’, or as Steinberg writes, “the standard” of IM SOC representation (151). Joyce writes Molly’s thoughts to show “incoherence and fluidity [being] emphasized by the complete absence of punctuation, of pronoun references, and of introductions to the persons and events Molly is thinking about, and by the frequent interruptions of one idea by another” (Humphry 27). Erich Kahler, in his work The Tower and the Abyss, describes the IM as being part ​ ​ of the SOC aesthetic and sometimes including free association, but “extends both into guided contemplation”, (167) and this contemplation is exemplary of this SOC form in Molly Bloom’s IM.

Humphrey and Kahler both state that SOC IM is ‘written directly to the reader’, and this is interesting 12 when considering the three contemporary novels

12 While my argumentation is focused on these ‘interesting’ types of SOC, from mainly Humphrey and Edel’s work from the mid 1950s, the nomenclature and descriptions of SOC as literary technique are echoed in the last 60 years of scholarship in the words of Kahler:“[SOC] effected something most important: they have broken through the bottom of our consciousness—on which the psyche has hitherto rested with confidence” (1989 [1957]: 167); Eysteinsson: “in view of previous literary history, modernism is felt to signal a radical “inward turn” in literature, and often a more thorough exploration of the human psyche than is deemed to have been probable or even possible in pre-Freudian times” (1992:26), Cohn’s ‘autonomous monologue’ from her 1976 narratological, eurocentric rebuttal to some of Humphrey (1954) and Edel’s (1955) writing and David Herman in his book 1880-1945: Re-minding Modernism : “In their critical ​ ​ writing, twentieth-century authors like James and Woolf themselves helped establish a 12 in this investigation. All three are in direct dialogue to the reader, with little reported or indirect speech. Shorn of these narrative layers, McCormack, McBride and Lally all attempt to write their novels from the ‘inside out’, without the helpful scaffolding of authorial framing to make sense of dialogic, scenic and emotional descriptions. We will return to Joyce and his work many times throughout this investigation, but the first link between Solar Bones, A Girl is a ​ ​ ​ Half-Formed Thing and Eggshells is that while there are many ways in which each ​ ​ ​ novel can be described as ‘Joycean’, the most important aspect as far as the term ‘Joycean’ relates to SOC is that it is Molly’s IM that is the pattern for both Solar ​ Bones and Girl to rejuvenate this SOC interior monologue-as-aesthetic for the ​ ​ ​ contemporary reader.

The first novel for comparison to Joyce’s “Penelope” chapter is McCormack’s Solar Bones. Before its publication and string of awards, author ​ ​ Mike McCormack was not well-known, even within The British Isles. 13 However, with this novel and its unique use of SOC, McCormack has found success by way of a small publishing house open to experimental fiction in Post-Tiger Ireland. 14 The novel takes place in one long moment of reflection, when Marcus Conway, narrator of the story, seems to begin his thoughts in the opening of the novel. Similar to Molly Bloom’s monologue, Solar Bones flows outward from the ​ ​ consciousness of Conway onto the page, and McCormack uses typography and sparse punctuation to keep the reader engaged. However, fully absent in the

precedent for viewing modernism as contributing to what Erich Kahler described as the ‘inward turn’ of narrative, a movement away from characters’ environments for acting and interacting to the domain of the mental or psychological, characterized as an interior space separated from the external, material reality.” (2011: 250)

13 For more on McCormack’s sudden rise to fame see: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/04/solar-bones-by-mike-mccormack-review and ​ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/books/review/solar-bones-mike-mccormack.html. ​ 14 “‘Every detail that other publishers had pissed and moaned and whined about, they (Tramp Publishing ran with,’ says McCormack. ‘Intellectually they met it head on.’ Tramp, which also publishes the acclaimed Sara Baume, is part of a resurgence in Irish fiction that has swept McCormack up in its wake” (Jordan). 13 novel are any full stops. The prose is recursively embedded and runs to loops of free association as Marcus sits at his kitchen table, but the prose never ends at a period. 15 Structurally, this creates an experience for the reader that, at least in the beginning of the novel, encourages a close reading of the prose. However, as Marcus’ thoughts wander through his life, the novel settles into its rhythm. Just like Ulysses’ final chapter, this type of sparse punctuation and typography ​ ​ becomes, as Humphrey writes, a ‘visual control’ for Joyce relating Molly’s thoughts in “Penelope” :

It contains no punctuation. 16 By omitting even the most basic punctuation and typographical aids, Joyce manages to present the flow of Molly’s consciousness as it is represented on a near-sleep level. The lack of punctuation is entirely a visual control, for the monologue itself is actually carefully phrased. (61)

While Molly is ‘near-sleep’ when Joyce famously captures Molly’s fading consciousness, McCormack’s homage to Joyce is to write this stylized (as Humphrey writes ‘carefully phrased’ prose) not to represent a drowsy and unfettered consciousness, but rather the opposite: to relate the angst-filled thoughts of a ghost, stuck in a single moment of total life recall. Marcus’s novel-length IM is similar to Molly’s IM in Ulysses because each narrator’s psyche ​ ​ is laid bare to the reader. The structure of the prose and its minimal punctuation serve to allow McCormack to relate his character’s thoughts to the reader in a way very close to that in “Penelope”. For an informed reader with Ulysses and its ​ ​ famous final chapter on her bookshelf, this recall to Joycean IM is unmissable.

15 This looping structure, where Marcus’ thoughts run along the timeline of his life, recall memories and scenes from the past that link together and back to the present in what I refer to as ‘recursively embedded loops’ from here on. This type of definition for discourse stems from sociolinguistics, specifically the work of Erving Goffman (1981) 16 After finding an original printing of Ulysses, I can confirm there are actually two full stops ​ ​ ​ (including the final one) and zero commas in the chapter. However, the SOC in the chapter is as near to ‘no’ punctuation as one will find in SOC fiction. 14 Revealed at the end of the novel, Marcus-as-ghost is frozen in one moment of purgatory after his life’s end. At the opening of the novel however, the reader is yet to learn of the mortal state of the narrator. Bones begins with the Angelus ​ ​ bell tolling, and Marcus’ ghost (for brevity, ‘ghost’ will be omitted) snaps into existence in his kitchen. Marcus died of a massive heart attack on March 22 of the previous year (which is only related at the end of the narrative), and he spends the entire novel in his thoughts, sitting at his kitchen table. This lack of external kinetic energy (or need to report on interaction with the environment level of narrative event) means the book focuses on Marcus taking stock of his life. Cohn writes that this type of physical rest allows for all the action to take place on a mental level, as in Ulysses’ “Penelope”: ​ ​

Doubtless the most artful stratagem Joyce employed, however, is to set Molly’s mind into its turbulent motion while setting her body into a state of nearly absolute tranquility. This obviates a major difficulty inherent in the autonomous monologue form: to present though self-address the physical activities the self performs within the time-span of the monologue (222).

In Solar Bones, the narrator is immobile like Joyce’s Molly, 17 and the ​ ​ external world, if commented upon, only is done through the inner thoughts of the narrator. The mimesis of a mind’s thoughts on the page has made Molly’s monologue one of famous study, and elevated Joyce to the pantheon of SOC writers. McCormack has cited Joyce amongst the ‘Holy Trinity of Irish Writers’ 18 , and his stylistic rejuvenation of Molly Bloom repurposes the ‘flow’ of thoughts into a novel--hence the lack of an end punctuation. In an interview about the novel, McCormack reveals his aesthetic choice of pairing a SOC style with an absence of punctuation in an interview with Jordan in The Guardian: “A ghost

17 Save for her trip to the loo. ​ 18 “I sometimes think we forget that Irish writers are experimental writers. Our Mount Rushmore is Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien, and if you’re not talking about those writers then you’ve lowered your gaze. For me they’re the father, son and holy ghost. They’ve nothing in common except they all went to some trouble to expand the received form, and there’s something of that happening again – a rejuvenation of the experimental instinct” (Jordan). This commentary on experimental Irish writers is explored in detail in chapter two. 15 would have no business with a full stop, it might fatally falter and dissipate” (Jordan). Marcus and his thoughts wander through the time and space of his life in the novel, and only slight shifts in typography, along with well-placed commas and linking words, delineate changes in topic. The first page of Marcus’ consciousness begins with the Angelus tolling. Marcus’ thoughts appear to crystallize for the reader, which as the reader learns while reading further, form a timeless moment at the exact point his soul’s transition from life to death. This moment, which Bones expands into a novel-length series of thoughts without a ​ ​ full stop is tied to, and begins with, the Angelus bells. The bells ring Marcus’ thoughts into existence on November 2nd, which is All Souls Day in Ireland. This added layer of Irish Catholic association with the concept of life, death and one’s soul frames the entire narrative structure of the novel. Marcus’ soul remains focused on reviewing his life until he dissipates in the final lines of the novel. All Souls is a holiday for Catholics to pray for the souls of those stuck in Purgatory, and as the novel opens, Marcus’ soul seems to take shape:

The bell The bell as hearing the bell as hearing the bell as standing here the bell being heard standing here hearing it ring out through the grey light of this Morning, noon or night god knows this grey day standing here and listening to this bell in the middle of the Day, the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day, ringing through the grey light to here Standing in the kitchen Hearing this bell snag my heart and draw the whole world into

16 being here pale and breathless after coming a long way to stand in this kitchen confused no doubt about that (1-2)

After this opener, in which the casual reader might be forgiven for thinking she has picked up a book of poetry, Marcus becomes himself again amongst the familiar surroundings of his home. After his ‘whole world’ is ‘snagged into being’, Marcus ends up ‘pale and breathless to stand’ in his kitchen, the end of the book-- where Marcus is revealed to be dead-- and the beginning linked by the opening lines. As mentioned however, the reader is not yet aware of Marcus and his mortal state. As the bells ring, Marcus feels them in his chest “reverberating” (2), which is the first foreshadowing to his fatal heart attack at the end of the novel. He traces the bells’ sonar range throughout his village where he has “lived for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland ” (3) the bells and … their reach delineating Marcus’ home and surrounding countryside. After a description of his country home and the people who populate it, the narrative takes shape (as much as it will in the story) in Marcus’ thoughts, and the reader adjusts to the SOC structure following Marcus in his recall of varying events in his life that form the rest of the novel.

Before the reader learns of Marcus’s death, McCormack foreshadows Marcus’s demise by Conway’s constant, fretfullness: “there is something strange about all this, some twitchy energy in the ether which has affected me from the moment those bells began to toll, something flitting through me, a giddiness drawing me” ( 5). The ‘strangeness’ Marcus feels becomes a running commentary and anchor to the character’s thoughts. I have written of the embedded, freely associative loops of Marcus’ thoughts, and it is the kitchen table that brings

17 Marcus (and thus the reader) back to the ‘present’ moment in narrative time. As he reminisces on his childhood, marriage, career and many other topics, when returning to his ‘present’ in the kitchen, Marcus remarks time and time again that something is wrong: “something different about moving through the house today/a feeling of dislocation ” (23) and “...the ghost neurology which upholds … and haunts...drifting in that state between sleep and waking it is easy to believe I inhabit a monochrome x-ray world from which I might have evaporated, flesh and bone gone ” (128); “how strange this day is” (146) and: …

my entire existence is these same thoughts, that rolling idea, as it occurs now is wholly responsible for me being here like something lost, a revenant who has returned to this house at some grey hour … sitting at this table (193)

Before Marcus is described as a ‘revenant returned to this house’, this foreshadowing technique not only signals to the alert reader that something is amiss, but also anchors Marcus in time as his mind wanders through many loops of recall across the timeline of his life. The leaps of free association from topic to topic is another nod to Molly’s thoughts at the end of Ulysses, echoing Cohn’s ​ ​ analysis of Joyce as being a ”...model for that its singular narrative genre entirely constituted by a fictional character’s thoughts” (283) and Humphrey stating Molly’s SOC monologuing “mak[ing] the reader feel like he is in direct contact with the life represented in the book” (15) and that “the importance of free association and the skill which it can be used to represent the quality of movement in the psychic process is most clearly represented by the IM technique in Joyce’s work” (43). For Marcus, this free association is clearly the ‘psychic process’ of a ghost looking back along his life. McCormack has written a type of IM that is as Humphrey describes ‘direct contact’ with the reader. This direct

18 contact is facilitated by the central premise of the book, which is that of a ghost whose thoughts are all that define him. Free of mortal form and lacking kinetic function, the SOC of the novel gets as close to ‘pure thought’ (at least from a structural definition of SOC narrative) as can be seen in the literary genre.

Even though the novel begins with a poetic and ethereal opening in which Marcus comes-to as the bells ring him into existence, the prose shifts to an approachable style for the reader, which is fitting for Marcus Conway was a city planner and engineer in life. Pragmatic in his descriptions and anecdotes (even as his mind wanders), McCormack creates a character whose practical qualities serve as anchor to the experimental structure of the novel. The book -- a story about a middle-aged Irish civil engineer reminiscing upon his life -- becomes as many reviewers have noted, an ‘80.000 word sentence-as-novel’. Yet for the reader of Solar Bones, McCormack balances a technical and structural ​ ​ experiment with clean prose to be as easy to read and relate to as possible for such an experimental work. In contrast to this SOC style that crosses a Joycean approach to punctuation with simple prose, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a ​ Half-Formed Thing is a SOC novel that challenges in its language and structure. ​ ​ ​ While Marcus’s consciousness presents itself on the page as a contemporary update to Molly Bloom’s solitary thoughts, McBride makes a different choice, instead of punctuation alone, McBride applies a unique approach to sentential grammar o confront the reader of Girl with an unnamed narrator captured in her ​ ​ pre-speech thoughts her life, from fetus to birth to death.

As Steinberg writes (and as quoted in an earlier footnote), “SOC tends to concentrate on the pre-speech, non-verbalized level, where the IMAGE must express the unarticulated speech and where the logic of the grammar belongs to another world” (6). The novel’s narrator begins her ‘otherworldly grammar’ SOC from the womb, addressing her brother, and it is this grammar I will focus on

19 when analyzing how McBride’s SOC choices for sentence-level syntax create the inner world of the narrator’s SOC in the novel. Written in the second person to the brother and never rising above third person pronouns for her family members (her mother is ‘she’, her father ‘he’), the novel’s staccato, challenging prose does not waver from the title-as-thesis: that the girl (the narrator’s referent from here on in), from the womb onwards, never ‘fully forms’, is born damaged and remains that way by the many tragic events her family suffers through, and projects onto her. McBride’s novel opens on the girl’s consciousness in utero: ​

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stiches 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. (1)

Even though the girl’s grammar and vocabulary evolve as she grows older, this choppy, not ‘fully-formed’ style of pre-speech thoughts remains the consistent SOC aesthetic used by McBride in her writing. While Solar Bones uses SOC sans ​ ​ ​ full stop in its conceit to project the final thoughts of a ghost to the reader, Girl ​ uses the narrator’s IM to show the internal chaos and damage of its monologist’s psyche. As a means to an end, each author utilizes SOC differently to show the inner experience of the narrator. Bones expresses this through sparse ​ ​ punctuation and close visual controls on the page, but for Girl the broken ​ ​ grammar and ‘pre-speech’ thoughts describe a mind as turbulent and damaged as Marcus Conway’s ghost is introspective. The 'loneliness’ of chaotic and desperate narration is emotionally mitigated by the narrator addressing all of her thoughts to her mentally handicapped brother, who the reader learns along with the still-unborn narrator, is ill with cancer. McBride’s presents her narrator as solitary in her thoughts, and damaged in her social contact with her family, so that only by relating to her brother in second person can she find an outlet (and thus create a structure for how the SOC and story is related to the reader). Cohn

20 describes this kind of second person SOC as a Joycean technique, as it is something that isolates Molly in her IM at the end of Ulysses: ​

The most significant variant in pronominal patterns amongst the different monologues concerns their use the second person singular. Far more frequently than Molly, other monologists address their inner discourse to one or mind-haunting interlocutors, living or dead, human or divine .underscore the pervasive loneliness of the … monologist. (245)

We can see how this approach to SOC-- using choppy and broken grammar combined with second person narration-- creates a character’s thoughts and inner experience tortured by guilt and suffering, as in the following passage when the girl is describing one of the central tragedies of her life, the illness and suffering of her brother:

I know. The thing wrong. It’s a. It is called. Nosebleeds, head aches. Where you can’t hold. Fall mugs and dinner plates she says clear up. Ah young he says give the child a break. Fall off swings. Can’t or. Grip well. Slipping in the muck. Bang your. Poor head wrapped up white and the blood come through. She feel the sick of that. Little boy head. Shush...Listen in to doctor chat. We done the best we could. There really wasn’t much. It’s all through his brain like the roots of trees (1) …

In this passage, we can see how the other family members and their action related to the reader by “she says clear up” for the mother and “ah young he says give the child a break” for the father. However, the reported speech never receives its own typographic distinction, and blends into the rest of the stop-start mechanics of the SOC prose. The only addressee in the novel is the sick (and later handicapped, and still later sick again) brother, and the narrator’s thoughts, never ‘fully formed’, fail to become distinct in a shared dialogue with another character throughout the novel. As Cohn describes when examining Molly’s IM, the SOC experience of the narrator can be a lonely thing. When expressed in

21 second person to convey a character who can never mature and escape abuse and tragedy in her life story, a novel like Girl can combine elements of grammar ​ ​ and perspective to update Joycean approaches to SOC in contemporary Irish literature.

Mentioned in the introduction, at the time of this writing little scholarship exists for review and analysis of the three novels in this investigation. 19 However, in her article 20 Gina Wisk’s commentary on the lonely, half-formed thoughts of Girl’s narrator echo Molly Bloom, but add something new as well: ​ ​

A form of memoir, one of liminality and developed … from modernist stream of consciousness, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing ​ builds on the expression of Joyce In reclaiming … stream of consciousness for a coming-of-age, female perspective, McBride offers something new, but also new is the parallel between the liminality of the girl’s identity, her uncharted life, buffeted between versions of self, and the liminality of the language and the form, the words and narrative expressed in her head, and the moments before thought and expression (61) …

As Solar Bones does by using a ghost on the cusp of the afterlife to reimagine the ​ ​ Joycean, “Penelope” inner monologue, A Girl is a Half-Formed thing ‘builds upon’ ​ ​ Joycean IM and according to Wisk adds to the “ the modes of the confessional, internalisation, and stream of consciousness, but in a new mix (my emphasis)” ​ ​ (63). This ‘new mix’, or as I shall use as parlance, ‘rejuvenation’ or ‘update’, lends support to my argument that Girl is ‘building upon’ SOC and Joycean and ​ ​ Modernist groundwork.

19 On Girl there are two articles, and on Lily’s Eggshells, one. On McCormack, nothing exists ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ outside literary magazines, newspaper book reviews and interviews. 20 “‘I Am Not That Girl’: Disturbance, Creativity, Play, Echoes, Liminality, Self-Reflection and ​ ​ Stream of Consciousness in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing” 22 The third novel in my investigation of SOC as technique in contemporary Irish experimental fiction, Eggshells, also references Joyce in its SOC aesthetic, yet ​ ​ like the previous two novels, stands on its own as a contemporary work. In his article, 21 which is part analysis of the text and review of literary criticism of the novel in the press, Jose Estevez writes that it is the ‘informed reader’ of the novel who will easily connect the SOC style to Ireland’s most revered author: “This … description serves any reader familiarized with Irish literature to establish links with James Joyce and the main concerns of novels such as Ulysses ” (138). For …​ ​ Eggshells, as in Solar Bones and Girl, the ‘informed reader’ will recognize that ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ “like Ulysses Eggshells is a novel in which the plot is reduced to a minimum, …​ ​ where little or nothing happens apart from Vivian’s daily and aimless ramblings through the streets of contemporary Dublin. She is, in fact, a contemporary female version of the flâneurs Leopold (Bloom)” (139.) As Vivian wanders Bloom-like through Dublin, her thoughts are full of flights of fancy about how humans and language intermingle in various social settings. At the beginning of the novel, Lally establishes Vivian’s inner voice, as well as the character’s frustration in expressing it to others. Posting an advertisement for to ‘find friend called Penelope’ (a reference to Molly Bloom’s chapter of the same name) in one early scene, when a woman confronts Vivian on the street, the whimsical protagonist doesn’t know how to react:

She stares at me, her face contorted.Even her nose frowns at me. I don’t know how to respond. I never know how to respond to people who want small complete sentences with one tidy meaning, I can’t explain myself to people who peer out windows and think they know the world. (Lally 12)

Following Vivian through the novel, the reader will recognize this slipperiness of language as a recurring theme. Lally imparts her character’s thoughts with a

21 “James Joyce’s Echoes in Caitriona Lally’s portrait of Dublin City”

23 self-awareness that winks to the alert. This meta critique on the SOC, Joycean novel becomes for Estevez, a ‘meta conversation for the informed reader’. Discussed earlier, Vivian’s Bloom-like wanderings around Dublin make up the majority of the plot, and the story stitches together her musings on the world, although she returns to language and its function often. When Vivian wanders through a foreign conversation, her curiosity is piqued:

Two men walk by speaking in a foreign language. Their consonants come from the backs of their throats, and their words run headlong into one another like boisterous children [and in another nod to Joyce, this time his punning classic, Finnegans’ Wake]. I try repeating words out loud, and ​ ​ think how I would like to learn a language that almost no one else speaks, especially if the few who do speak it are old or almost dead. (15)

We will return to Lily’s meta awareness and Joycean references later in this chapter’s discussion of each novel relating being emblematic of Postmodern writing, but what is important to note for now is how Eggshells elevates the SOC ​ ​ inner monologue to a new plateau of fiction for the contemporary, alert reader. Just like Solar Bones and Girl, Eggshells builds on the work before it, yet uses the ​ ​ ​ ​ SOC aesthetic in a novel way. As Vivian wanders, her SOC style thoughts dwell upon the people around her in Dublin, and, like Bloom in Ulysses, these thoughts ​ ​ mix with her experiences in the city to form Vivian’s consciousness narrative as related by Lally on the pages of the novel.

Along with the aesthetics of how inner thoughts are conveyed, another of ​ ​ the obstacles facing SOC writers is when to relate a character’s consciousness to ​ ​ the reader. The idea of relating one’ consciousness experience to the passage of time is an idea that connects philosophy, science and literature in fundamental ways. These connections come together in many examples of time passing in SOC literature, and Marcel Proust is one of the most well-known and studied authors who related the inner experience to memory and time. In a brief analysis of this,

24 I will show how Proust relates to French philosopher Henri Bergson and how this in turn connects to the SOC aesthetic from Modernist literature onwards. When Humphrey and Edel began their analysis of 20th century SOC novels, they open the debate on SOC and temporality based upon these two French sources of literature and philosophy. As we will see in the coming pages, Humphrey is interested in how time is expressed in the SOC novel. His book is followed by the work of Kumar in the 1960s linking the ideas of Bergson and Proust to the development of SOC as literary genre from William James and culminating in Joyce’s SOC work. In contrast to Solar Bones, Eggshells and Girl move ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ chronologically through time. As SOC novels lack an omniscient narrator to inform the reader of jumps in time and place, the passage of time is dependent upon how the narrator relates it to the reader (for example, as Woolf does in To ​ the Lighthouse when she adds ellipses to show time passing). Humphrey ​ examines the philosophy of time and consciousness in his book, with Henri Bergson and William James’ ideas on time’s subjective passage mentioned in the following passage:

Consciousness, first of all, is considered in its movement fluid and unbound by arbitrary time concepts by these writers who belong to the generation following James and Bergson The notion of … synthesis must be added to that of flux to indicate the quality of being sustained, of being able to absorb interferences after the flow is momentarily broken, and of being able to pass freely from one level of consciousness to another. The other important characteristic of the movement of consciousness is its ability to move freely in time--its tendency to find its own time sense...Everything that enters consciousness is there at the ‘present moment’; furthermore, the event of this ‘moment,’ no matter how much clock time it occupies, may be infinitely extended by being broken up into its parts, or it may be highly compressed into a flash of recognition...The chief technique in controlling the movement of SOC in fiction has been the application of the principles of psychological free association (42-43).

25 SOC scholar S. Kumar adds to this analysis in his book The Stream of ​ Consciousness Novel and Bergson (1963) by dissecting the conveyance and ​ passage of time as related to French philosopher Henri Bergson and written into literary history by Proust.

“Bergson’s la duree, or psychological time, thus becomes the distinguishing ​ ​ feature of the SOC novel. The new novelist accepts with full awareness inner duration against chronological time as the only true mode of apprehending aesthetic experience” (7) [All based on Proust who] … “supplies all the ingredients of the SOC technique, except, of course, its practical application” (10)

In Solar Bones, this ‘apprehension of the aesthetic experience’, 22 combined ​ ​ with the aforementioned tenets of a SOC novels’ depiction of time passing is reinvigorated by the 2016 work being structured as one long, recursive sentence lacking even a full stop. As described, the novel of a ghost at rest in his kitchen removes all external action that would distract and diminish an uninterrupted ‘flow’ of thoughts. As Molly Bloom was in “Penelope”, Marcus is physically (if that word can be applied to a ghost) inactive, leaving his consciousness room to expand and contract along the timeline of his life. What follows is a method of consideration for the novel that allows for the existing ideas of SOC scholarship relating time and inner experience. This idea I propose for 21st century ideas of science and philosophy suggests a unique reading for the novel that I have yet to find in the reviews and debate on the novel. If Mike McCormack’s intentional lack of punctuation for his character is meant to keep Marcus’s soul from noticing the state of his existence (and as McCormack says in interviews then collapsing upon itself at a full stop) Marcus’s soul-as-wave becomes an interesting concept to consider.

22 In previous nomenclature, Humphrey’s ‘direct monologue’ or Cohn’s ‘autonomous monologue’ 26 That the soul would stop its thoughts’ ebb and flow and ‘collapse’ according to the author in a previously quoted interview, recalls a famous concept in quantum physics -- that of observing a wave function in the famous ‘double slit experiment’. In short, 23 light behaves as either a wave or a particle depending on whether it is being observed. If observed, the ‘potential states’ of a photon (or packet of light) which exist in a state of superposition to one another, collapse into one observable state of existence. What follows in the experiment is that instead of a ‘non-observed’ photon behaving as a wave, it becomes a particle and forms a different observable pattern. This different pattern points to a universe that behaves differently under observation. The idea of the particles of our existence behaving differently under observation has fascinated scientists, philosophers and of course, writers, ever since. In the previous work of McCormack, his novels have focused extensively on ideas of science, engineering and how man and technology affect one another in modern society. 24 If we allow for McCormack’s SOC aesthetic choices and interest in science to lead to a creation of a ghost narrator that behaves like a wave function, the novel can be viewed as a 21st century metaphor for McCormack’s relation of a timeless moment. This moment is one I have described in SOC scholarship as an important obstacle (Humphrey, Bergson) for a novelist to overcome and portray. If Marcus’ consciousness sans full stop is viewed this way, the structure of the novel, in ​ ​ which a soul in purgatory only realizes his own mortal state at the end of the novel, becomes looped back onto itself. Much like how Marcus’ thoughts recursively bring him back to the ‘present’ moment at his kitchen table, the book itself can become a loop, with expressed time in the novel taking on a key feature in allowing for multiple readings and accessible at any point within its own

23 See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse and ​ ​ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment for more detail. ​ 24 For more on his previous work and themes see: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/24/mike-mccormack-soundtrack-novel-death-metal- novel-solar-bones 27 narrative loop to the interested reader. 25 Referring back to SOC criticism, this kind of typography choice by McCormack also helps delineate what Humphrey described as ‘psychological time’, and what Cohn wrote (on Molly Bloom’s time in her autonomous monologues)) “...advanc(ing) time solely by the articulation of thought paginal breaks, convey passage of time by interruptions of thought” … (220). As I will show through references to the primary text, Solar Bones is a ​ ​ unique addition and update to SOC for how it relates its narrator’s thoughts and temporal experience to the reader.

As a contemporary meditation on life (after death) external time is removed from the narrative equation in this reading of the novel, and the book can be admired for its novel approaches and changes to existing SOC forms. The ebb and flow of thoughts -- Marcus’ consciousness like a wave -- hold together in the first lines of the Angelus bells ringing and the last lines of the novel, when his soul takes flight, his thoughts collapse and the novel ends:

Killing these couple of hours before my wife and kids return, trying to shrug off this sense that all things around me are unstable and barely rooted to the here-and-now and that the slightest pressure will cause everything to tip away from me...sending the whole thing skyward into the grey light leaving me am Alone here in the open space of the world with no walls or roofs around me, the sole inhabitant of a vast, white space which is swept clear...the world as complete erasure since even the sun itself is drawn from the sky leaving me wholly alone, fading whatever way it is we fade from the world animal, mineral, vegetable father, husband, citizen

25 See the final lines of previously cited Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly’s review for more ​ ​ on this approach to reading the book: “Finishing the book (and that rousing Beckettian imperative to carry on), I found myself going back to the beginning and starting all over again. But was this a starting afresh or merely a continuing on? Either way, I had no problem – it was 5 am, the morning was taking on light, and I had another blast of déjà vu to look forward to ” … 28 my body drawing its soul in its wake or vice versa until that total withdrawal into the vast whiteness is visible only as a brimming absence so that there nothing left, body and soul all gone … ...cast out beyond the darkness into that vast unbroken commonogage of space and time...keep going one foot in front of the other the head down and keep going keep going keep going to fuck (224)

As soon as Marcus realizes his position as being ‘unstable and barely rooted to the here-and-now’, he shifts from the world into the void of the hereafter--just as in the double slit experiment, when Marcus observes his own existence he collapses like a wave function. First described as ‘white space’ then ‘beyond the darkness’, Marcus nears death with the same grim determination he displays throughout his many life’s ordeals in the novel-- ‘head down keep going to … fuck’. I will analyze this determination in the character of Marcus, through his life and times and everything between the opening and closing lines of the novel, in the following pages. What is important to note is the way in which Solar Bones ​ temporally relates the SOC aesthetic to its reader, from its experimental structure, simple prose and ghost-as-wave function oscillating through his life (but not forward in time). This treatment of time becomes a key feature of the SOC style in Bones, and allows for multiple readings of the book. Having now analyzed the ​ opening and closing of the book -- the bindings of this ghost’s SOC narrative -- it is possible to see how McCormack’s novel carefully uses visual controls of punctuation and typography to achieve another layer of significance above the clausal level of writing to express a single moment of time. When the ghost of Marcus Conway at last realizes the mortal state of his soul, Solar Bones ends. ​ ​ While the alert reader may have suspected this much earlier, Marcus’ final moments allow for his conscious experience to coincide with the end of the novel--collapsing the ‘wave’ of his thoughts on the final page.

29 A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing deals with time in a different way. As a SOC ​ novel focused on the narrator’s ‘stream’ of life moving forward in time, we revisit William James’ seminal work again, for as mentioned earlier, not only did he coin ‘stream of consciousness’, he thought about the mind and its relation to time as a psychological feature worthy of study. In his seminal work, Principles of ​ Psychology (vol. I) he writes: ​

[The present] is...an altogether organized abstraction it must exist ​ … ​ but can never be a fact of our practical experience the … … practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time’ (609)

Whether I refer to Bergson’s ‘la duree’ or James’ ‘saddleback’, how the inner ​ ​ psyche’s relation is to time is of prime importance in a SOC novel. As we have seen, a ghost distilled into an uncollapsed wave can be typographically situated on James’ impossible ‘knife-edge’ and exist in one recursively embedded line of prose. However, if the narrator is alive and of the world, then she must be presented as such on the page. As stated earlier, Eimear McBride’s Girl presents ​ ​ her narrator’s life in a ‘pre-speech’ level of SOC prose, with grammar and punctuation breaking up thoughts on the page as the SOC as aesthetic becomes of a consciousness not full formed, narrating the ‘half-formed’ thoughts to the reader of the novel. Scenes and events become part of this ‘half-formed’ SOC technique by leaps forward in time that are referred to by a brief mention of the narrator and/or brother’s relative age. After ending the novel’s first chapter with her birth: “I struggle up to. I struggle from. The smell of milk now. Going dim. Going white..” (5), we open on the next chapter two years later:

Two me. Four you five or so. I falling. Reel table leg to stool. Grub face into her cushions. Squel. Baby full of snot and tears. You squeeze on my sides a bit. I retch up awful tickle giggs.” (6)

30 The alert reader must pay close attention then not only to contextual clues, but to any temporal information as markers in the girl’s forward-moving SOC. As stated, the book is written to the girl’s brother in second person. The jumps in time become marked by this age referent between the siblings and part of McBride’s temporality choice for her SOC style. In volume II of Girl this way of relating the ​ ​ jump forward in time to the siblings’ age shows the narrator dealing with the passage time again: “The beginning of teens us. Thirteen me fifteen you. Wave and wave of its hormone over” (32). Sometimes a time jump is even less clear though, and the careful reader must read the narrator’s thoughts for clues for time (and place). For example, when the narrator arrives in ‘the city’ after high school (this most likely is either Dublin or London): “City all black in my lungs. In my nose. Like I am smoking am not but still...And shocking. That. Homesick. Still” ( 87).

In each chapter and volume, the story moves forward along with the girl narrating upon her life, until her eventual death by suicide in the final lines of the book. As a contemporary update to the Modernist SOC aesthetic, Girl and ​ ​ Eggshells share similar approaches to moving each of their narrator’s ​ consciousness experience along with the external clock of their world. The complexity of prose between McBride and Lally is a key distinction in how the reader can relate to each narrator’s story moving forward.

Although Eggshells’ protagonist believes herself to be a fairy and is prone ​ ​ to fanciful tangents in her thoughts, the reader comes to understand how Vivian relates to both her inner world of thoughts and the outer world of Dublin as she wanders around the city. Rather than grammatically challenging, semi-rendered thoughts on the page (as in Girl), the prose is written in the present tense and ​ ​ adheres to much more accepted norms of syntax and fictional prose. While Girl ​ challenged the reader in its SOC grammar, time jumps and sentence structure,

31 Vivian’s experience is related in the present tense by Lally’s prose not to challenge a reader, but to portray a narrator’s thoughts that while fully formed, wander in a way much more similar to Marcus’ in Solar Bones. But while Marcus ​ ​ muses upon his life in the past tense, Vivian is experiencing things in real time, and this is conveyed to the reader. Each chapter’s wanderings come to end by a small hand-drawn map on the page representing where in the city Vivian had been to that day. Time ticks by in the novel from chapter to chapter, with the reader experiencing everything happening to and around Vivian at the same time as she is. Breaks between chapters are almost always when Vivian is asleep, and the caesura in consciousness matches the breaks between one chapter ending and the next one beginning the following morning. For example, Vivian’s wanderings end in chapter 12 as :

I peel and open the map of Dublin and plot today’s route, just the part when walked to Ferryman’s Crossing, because Charlie might want to plot the drive on his own map, and it’s not really mine to draw. Today I walked the ECG of a patient who flatlines briefly, before rallying into a healthy peak (10)

Fig 1: An example of Vivian’s drawn wanderings of Dublin. Chapter 12’s trail appeared to her as an ‘ECG’ shape.

32 Chapter 13 begins ‘Early on May morning’ as Vivian “takes off yesterday’s clothes off the floor April’s clothes, turn them inside out to appease the fairies and put them on. Vivian’s emotions “my heart threatens to rise up my gullet with excitement” mix with her actions, “I sup milk from the carton and eat three chocolate biscuits” and her thoughts “I eat things in threes and sevens because that third biscuit or seventh slice of bread could have transformative powers ” … (143-144) all happen in the present tense, moving her (and the reader) through time to the end of the novel. Lally’s approach to time and SOC is perhaps the most straightforward method of relating time to the reader, but as we can see in examples from Eggshells, this approach allows for the wandering thoughts and ​ ​ personality of the narrator to be clearly transmitted to the reader as Vivian’s mind wanders on the page in the present tense. The passage of time and the story occur together in the novel, and the digressions of thought in Vivian’s SOC become interesting tangents for the reader to experience as the narrator seems to do in the novel.

So far in this chapter, I have held up each of the primary sources as contemporary examples of the SOC novel. From critical theory I have related the framework for SOC descriptors and taxonomy, from the early scholarship of Humphrey (1954) and Edel (1955) to Kumar’s work on SOC and time (1963) and the narratological work of Dorrit Cohn (1973). These scholars’ efforts, while not the only sources for study on SOC and the novel, remain authoritative in the current debate on representing consciousness or the ‘inward turn’ in novels from the 19th century onwards. In this chapter I analyze each novel according to the descriptions inherent to the SOC genre to show that for today’s informed reader of such experimental fiction, there is something new to read and appreciate in these works. From structural and narrative reveals (as in Solar Bones), to ​ ​ typographical and grammatical onslaughts to represent a damaged psyche on the page (Girl) to the wanderings of self-identifying fairy in 21st century Dublin ​ ​

33 appearing as a contemporary Leopold Bloom (Eggshells), each novel distinguishes ​ ​ itself as a work of SOC fiction. Each makes reference to Joyce’s most famous SOC work, Ulysses, and building on their references towards being more than just ​ ​ homages to the form. That each novel stands out as a contemporary update to the Modernist SOC genre leads us to question what this ‘update’ means in terms of these works being considered against established Modernist SOC novels.

(How) can we place the three primary sources in this investigation amongst the constellation of postmodern literature? With each novel demonstrably shown to be a SOC novel, with Modernist and Joycean roots we turn to Postmodern narratology scholarship for answers to what an informed reader of this investigation’s primary sources will associate with when reading this kind of experimental fiction.

For a 21st century reader familiar with Ulysses, reading a SOC novel from ​ ​ today’s Post-Celtic tiger literary boom will form part of a long running conversation stretching back over a 100 years. This kind of dialogue with other authors and their works falls under the purview of the work by Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva. In her work on intertextuality, Kristeva needs little introduction to her ideas in literary scholarship. As it relates to postmodernism, intertextuality -- or how one text links to all those that came before it -- becomes of prime importance when relating the impact of a text on a novel’s reader. Kristeva opines that,

the texts of Joyce are a very special example of this type (of complex texts of ‘great condensation and great polysemia’). It is impossible to read Finnegans Wake without entering into the intraphysic logic and ​ ​ dynamics of intertextuality. Yet this is also true of postmodernism, where the problem is to reconcile representation, the imposition of content, with the play of form -- which is, I emphasise again, a play of psychic pluralization. And here, in postmodernism, the question of

34 intertextuality is perhaps even more important in certain ways, because it assumes an interplay of contents and not of forms alone. (191)

The ‘intraphysic logic’ of one text relating to another (with this thesis, Solar ​ Bones, Girl and Eggshells to the work of Joyce and Modernism) is then how a ​ ​ ​ reader understands the SOC aesthetic as it references texts that employed it previously. Since there is not a mention of an Irish SOC novel without Joyce in any review of import, it becomes critical to understand how a contemporary reader ‘reconciles representation’ and the ‘play of form and content’ to realize that what has been established as an ‘update’ to the SOC novel becomes the distinguishing feature when relating it as exemplary of intertextuality. Building on Bakhtin's (1981) ‘heteroglossic dialogism’ in his focus on the novel’s continuation of discourse from other literary works, Kristeva’s idea becomes a simple one: Today’s informed reader can’t read a novel like Solar Bones, Girl or ​ ​ ​ ​ Eggshells without making a connection to Joyce’s work. 21st century SOC Irish ​ fiction can be considered to be as experimental as Ulysses was last century, but ​ ​ the innovation becomes a link in the intertextual chain. As Joyce built upon the work of others, 26 so do today’s Irish writers of the SOC aesthetic using the

26 On Joyce’s (and his peers) intertextual indebtedness to Dujardin see: Before the ‘Inward Turn’: Tracing Represented Thought in the French Novel (1800-1929) Melanie Conroy. On his SOC work being a marker in the Modernist period see: Watt (2001 [1957]), (Ulysses) “is the supreme ​ ​ culmination of the formal trend that Richardson initiated”—that is, the triumph of the representation of inner life (2001 [1957]: 206). Eric Auerbach’s, Mimesis (1968 [1946]) describes ​ ​ Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf’s novels as the culmination of this long tradition. “What takes place here in Virginia Woolf’s novel is precisely what was attempted everywhere in works of this kind […] to put the emphasis on the random occurrence […] In the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice,” (1968 [1946]: 552). In the interest of inclusion, Kevin Dettmar proposed Joyce to be a postmodern, and used Bakhtin's dialogism much differently to support his argument in The Illicit Joyce of ​ Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. Having read the book ‘s argumentation and held it against ​ the body of work placing Joyce as the pinnacle of Modernism, I concluded to hold with the Modernist Joyce definition for this paper.

35 technique to portray the inner life of a character as famous works have done before them.

As shown for Solar Bones and Girl, this intertextual innovation draws from ​ ​ ​ ​ “Penelope” and Molly Bloom’s final IM in Ulysses. How McCormack and McBride ​ ​ layer their prose, typography and narrative structure to create something innovative in the SOC genre becomes each novelist’s attempt at the main goal of every SOC novel: a mimesis of the mind on the page. As Paul Ricoeur wrote, this makes the postmodern SOC novel a window into “the incompleteness of personality, the diversity of the levels of the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious, the stirring of unformulated desires, the inchoative and evanescent character of feelings” (1984:10). As scholars like Ricoeur have noted, this representation of the ‘real’ becomes a reality in and of itself in postmodern works. 27 Rather than a Modernist SOC work bridging the gap between real life and fiction, a postmodern awareness makes the distinction that there is no one reality to begin with. As McHale has written in his many postmodern works of scholarship, rather than a Modernist author (like Joyce) writing to understand ourselves through epistemological inquiry, a postmodern work establishes itself rather by questioning reality itself by ontological questioning. 28 Holquist and Reed further this idea by writing the postmodern story is "essentially tied to realism whenever realism is conceived as more real than literature since the novel always operates in reaction to literature" ( 417).

Based on the above existing scholarship on the subject, how each novel deals with this ontological inquiry into realism defines it as an example of SOC Irish literature for a postmodern reader. I have examined each novel in this chapter’s discussion and shown the works to offer a unique ‘update’ to the SOC

27 For more see: McHale (1987, 1992), Lyotard (1984) and Genette (1985) 28 “Postmodern fiction differs from modern fiction just as poetics dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological issues.” (McHale 1987 xii) 36 genre, by direct reference to the Joycean aesthetic in their prose and style (Solar ​ Bones, Girl) or in characterization and literary meta references (Eggshells). The ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ relation of time itself shows contemporary SOC to be a disruptive, postmodern relation into how the mind relates to internal and external temporality. From Marcus Conway’s ghost-wave function stuck in a single moment of his life’s reflection, to the girl in McBride’s fitful rendering of the outside world passing by at almost a subconscious level, to Vivian floating through her days in a reverie like a 21st century Leopold Bloom, Bergson’s ‘la duree’ or inward time is shown to ​ ​ be the most relevant timekeeping standard in each character’s consciousness experience. This temporal perception is reflected in literary theorists tracing the arc of postmodern novels focus on time. Genette (1981), Ricoeur (1984) and Jameson (1985) all questioned the subjective experience of time in their scholarship, with the central theme being the asynchronous, unreliability of time (one of) the pervasive markers of postmodern literature. With each novel thus being written to express this kind of strange, personal relationship with the external passage of time, I return to McHale’s (1992) definition of a postmodern work being one that questions the world(s) the text describes for its characters.

And so to conclude our discussion of postmodern techniques in this investigation, it is McHale who points out that Joyce’s prose fiction would “end in the simulacra of death” 29 (233). What is of interest in our discussion of our 21st century SOC novels being postmodern is not McHales’ postmodern distinctions between Joyce introducing death at the end of his stories, 30 but rather that for our purposes of comparison, two of the three novels in this investigation simulate

29 Other than in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ​ 30 From Molly’s ‘little death’ of sleep ending her conscious state in Ulysses and Gabriel Conroy’s communion with ghosts in “The Dead” story that ends Dubliners, McHale writes that Joyce ends ​ ​ each story in an “ontologically unproblematic backdrop against which the movements of the character’s minds my be displayed” (234), making each of these two works “Modernist fiction” (ibid). However, McHale argues that Finnegan’s Wake descends Anna Livia’s consciousness into ​ ​ the personification of the River Liffey in which she drowns herself, making the novel “postmodern” (ibid). 37 Molly’s fading of consciousness (Solar Bones) and Anna Livia’s suicide by ​ ​ drowning (Girl). Returning to the dialogism of Bakhtin and intertextuality of ​ ​ Kristeva, we can see how McCormack and McBride take their postmodern, Joycean emulation even further by incorporating this kind of ending in their work. While Marcus Conway’s death is referenced earlier in the chapter, in Girl, ​ the suicide of the narrator is a brutal end to her already tragic existence. As she walks into the lake after her brother’s death, her name, still stuck somewhere out of her fully formed thoughts, dies with her. Examined in the next chapter, this tragic ending to the novel links Girl to Joyce as a postmodern ‘update’ to the SOC ​ ​ Irish novel. Along with Solar Bones and its character’s fading of consciousness a ​ ​ ​ la Molly Bloom, and a constant series of meta references in Vivian’s SOC account ​ of Dublin in Eggshells discussed in chapter one, Joyce’s influence becomes the ​ ​ most important link binding each of our three novels to one another and to Irish literature. As all three novels are Irish works of SOC fiction, and all three have demonstrated to be postmodern intertextual updates to the genre, I will examine what it means to be ‘Joycean’ and ‘Irish’ in terms of a contemporary literary context for McCormack, McBride and Lally.

Chapter II

The Irish SOC Novel, Joycean Idiom and the Catholic Soul

"For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal” -- James Joyce

The number of books, articles, lectures, conferences, symposiums and work dedicated to the life and work of James Joyce is too high to count. A cursory look online will reveal 9.6 million hits on Google containing ‘James Joyce’.

38 Further searching into academic journals and publications reveal 147.000 results on Google Scholar alone. On ‘Bloomsday’, thousands of people celebrate Joyce’s most famous work Ulysses on June 16th every year. 31 It is tempting to end the ​ ​ argument here as it relates to Joyce as a literary figure of relevance in the annals of Irish literature. 32 In the interest of comprehensiveness I will delve into the extant debate and scholarship that best speaks to James Joyce’s work and novels when establishing a connection between the author and the ‘Irishness’ of his fiction. 33 Establishing the field of Irish literature itself and Joyce’s place clearly, I will continue on to Joyce’s influence on the recent SOC novels in my thesis. The methodological groundwork will be to service various arguments I will relate to specific motifs in the novels: the Angelus bell and the soul in Solar Bones, Joycean ​ ​ SOC idiom in the pre-speech prose of the narrator in Girl, and Joyce’s Dublin and ​ ​ Irish idiom as meta devices in Eggshells. ​ ​

After the publication of Ulysses, Joyce and his work came under fire from ​ ​ many critics. The description of sex, religion and society as well as the narrative structure and the SOC in various reporting of a character’s fractured thoughts all lead to a reaction to the novel that was negative, with the book banned in many countries. 34 It took another half century for the biannual symposiums, the widespread Bloomsday parties, the university programs, and the Joycean cottage industry to come about. Then however, it took a peer of Joyce’s in T. S. Eliot to write an essay defending the novel against criticisms against it. Against charges of formlessness and chaos leveled at the novel, Elliot wrote it wasn’t the novel

31 For more see: http://jamesjoyce.ie/bloomsday/ ​ 32 See: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/07/top10s.irish as an example of a top ten ​ ​ Irish writers (Joyce is inevitably number one) 33 Many famous irish writers have been tasked with reworking Joyce’s work for a centennial ​ celebration, of which Eimear McBride is one such novelist: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/irish-authors-step-out-of-james-joyce-s-shadow-to-take- on-dubliners-1.1778851 34 For more see copies of early reviews in The Guardian’s coverage for Bloomsday: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2012/jun/15/archive-james-joyce-ulysses -bloomsday 39 that was incomprehensible, it was the world, and Joyce gave “a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (174). Whether one reads the novel in this way or another, the debate surrounding the novel hasn’t lessened, from how to read it, to what ​ ​ ​ Joyce intended to reflect in his novel, in the one hundred years since. Joyce the Modernist (Ehrlich 1984, Gaiser 1986, Levitt 2000 to name but a few books) Joyce the Catholic, Joyce the Irishman, Joyce the Postmodernist, Joyce the Anti Catholic, Joyce The Feminist, Joyce the Irish exile -- how the man and his work have been interpreted may come into conflict with one another, but the fact Joyce occupies such an influential role in popular culture, the arts and the academic and literary world is without question. 35 So what is Joyce’s role in Irish literature, and how does his renown come to bear on the three novels in this paper? For answers we will look at Joyce and his famous SOC style as influences on McCormack, McBride, Lally and their novels in the aforementioned motifs of religion, language and place (in this case, Joyce’s Dublin).

One of the reasons Joyce’s influence on the Irish literary world persists comes from the critical appreciation for the innovation in his work. As previously covered, his use of SOC, language and the relation of the inner thoughts of his characters to the reader makes his work one of, if not the most, famous of Modernist authors. 36 With his innovation, Joyce casts an unavoidable shadow on those that have come after him. However, in her book, Contemporary Irish ​ Literature, Mahony writes that it is because Joyce is famous for his innovation of ​ the form that his work remains both ‘daunting’ and ‘liberating’ for novelists since the early 20th century:

Perhaps the most famous Irishman to find his metier in prose and to be published abroad was Joyce’s Ulysses It is considered by some to be the ​ ​ …

35 Perhaps Shakespeare or J.K. Rowling are more readily identifiable by book lovers (depending on who is polled) than Joyce. 36 Irish Literature: A Social history N. Vance; James Joyce and Modernism: Beyond Dublin M. Levitt ​ ​ ​ ​ 40 ultimate revenge of the metropolitan colonial, by appropriating the English novel, fracturing it, and rendering it irrelevant. The highly experimental quality of the book could be, and was, daunting for writers who followed Joyce, but it was liberating, especially for Irish writers. (18-19)

On inspiration, McCormack speaks openly in interviews about Solar Bones and ​ ​ Joyce’s influence on experimental novelists in Ireland today:

The generation behind me seem to be much more open to the idea of experiment,” he says. “I sometimes think we forget that Irish writers are experimental writers. Our Mount Rushmore is Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien, and if you’re not talking about those writers then you’ve lowered your gaze. For me they’re the father, son and holy ghost. They’ve nothing in common except they all went to some trouble to expand the received form, and there’s something of that happening again – a rejuvenation of the experimental instinct.

[and on McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing]: ​ ​

“She made no bones about the fact that she was influenced by Joyce. And you never, ever hear Irish writers saying that, because Joyce seemed to be more a luring, disabling presence in many ways. She saw him properly, as an enabling presence, and she ran with it.” (Jordan)

That McCormack is so candid about today’s experimental Irish writers continuing the work of Joyce and the other ‘Mount Rushmore’ greats lends credence to the ideas covered in this paper so far, that the updated SOC aesthetic in recent Irish fiction follows McCormack’s belief that these Irish literary greats ‘expanded the form’ leading to a ‘rejuvenation of the experimental instinct’. Reviewers agree that McCormack continues this tradition of innovation of the form:

Solar Bones is now the work that might plausibly put McCormack in the ​ company of his great innovative Irish predecessors such as Joyce and Flann O’Brien. If McCormack’s novel is more a consolidation, a reaffirmation, of the tradition of Irish experiment than a wholly original extension of it,

41 nevertheless readers open to a different but not formidable kind of reading experience should find it entirely rewarding. (Green)

I will discuss Joyce’s linguistic innovation for how McBride’s Girl continues ​ ​ the tradition of Irish idiom in the SOC novel, but it is another quality of Joyce’s writing that I shall analyze for Solar Bones as an Irish SOC experimental novel: ​ ​ The Church. Even in referencing Irish literary titans in the preceding interview, McCormack can’t help but refer to Joyce, O’Brian and Beckett as ‘The Father, son and holy ghost’, so ingrained it seems is the Church in an Irish novelist’s vernacular. For James Joyce, one of the many ways he broke from the mainstream novelists of his time was in his challenge of religion and Irish Catholicism of the day. This is a focus in Religious Experience and Modern Novel, ​ ​ where Pericles Lewis writes that “the case of Ulysses shows the paradoxical ​ ​ character of the modern novel’s encounter with the sacred.” (179). While T. S. Eliot (from his earlier interpreted defense of Joyce) wrote about the book’s ‘mythical method’ of shaping the chaos of life’s ‘panorama of futility’, Lewis contends that the “pre-eminently modern novel, presumably the secular product of a secular age, is God-haunted” (179) and that, following Franco Moretti’s ideas of a “Ulysses without epiphanies”:

The success of Joyce’s use of the stream of consciousness results from the author’s decision to use the technique consistently throughout the novel...with its emphasis on mimetic technique over content...The difference between Moretti’s and Eliot has much to … do with whether we understand the parallels between Ulysses and ​ ​ The Odyssey as fundamentally Catholic or at least religious (181). …​ ​ ​ …

Whether explicitly Catholic or ‘fundamentally religious’ scholars may disagree upon, 37 but the fact is that Joyce’s SOC fiction focused on religion. Joyce’s upbringing in the Catholic, Jesuit school system in Ireland from his primary years

37 See Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company by Mary Lowe-Evans for a recent pushback for ​ ​ reading Joyce in a Catholic mode of interpretation. 42 in Clongowes Wood College (1888) to his time at University College in Dublin (1902) has been cited by many historians as influencing his writing. In Joyce and ​ Aquinas, Noon writes in the books’ introduction that “Joyce’s educators, in their ​ long course of philosophical and theological studies, would certainly have come to see many things under the influence of a number of Aquinan ideas, and so far as Joyce fell under the influence of his educators he too must have come to see other things in the same lights” (3). However, Noon then states that it was through Joyce’s informal reading of Aquinas and his self study after his time at University College he would have delved into Thomist philosophy to relate in writing. In Paris, with his formal education finished, Joyce “began to teach himself Greek, which he had avoided taking in College...and he embarked, without formal direction, upon a fairly intensive program of private study of Aristotle and Aquinas” (12). 38

In Joyce’s work, his ‘alter ego’ Stephen Daedelus often quotes Aristotle and Aquinas in his dialogue with other characters, and in his own private thoughts. Noon writes that,

By the time Joyce completed his first published novel in Trieste in 1914 he had, it would appear, a much wider and more mature familiarly with Aquinas’ ideas and text than Stephen Dedalus, as he is represented in the Portrait, could possibly have had [allowing Joyce] to criticize an evaluate ​ … Thomism for himself. (14) …

With Joyce’s ‘familiarity with Aquinas’ written into his alter ego Dedalus, the author’s Thomism is “likely to be most strongly felt, by anyone sensitive to the categories and attitudes of Aquinas, in the general texture or tone of Joyce’s writings .. .where the authority of Aquinas is most explicitly invoked” (17). Of Joyce, Aristotelian metaphysics and Aquinian thought, there is not enough space

38 Joyce’s readings are corroborated by his friend and literary critic Valery Larbaud “James Joyce” La nouvelle revue française, nouv. Ser., 9e annee, 16, no. 103 (Avril 1922), 387. ​ ​ 43 to compare and review the existing literature as it pertains to such concepts as aesthetics, Truth, reality, metaphysics and the hylomorphic idea of the body and soul. 39 Germane to this chapter’s discussion on Joycean SOC and Irish Catholicism is the Thomist idea of the soul existing beyond the body’s death, and seeing this idea played with in a contemporary Irish SOC novel like Solar Bones. ​

The Catholic soul is the literary device that harbors Marcus’ consciousness to his kitchen as the Angelus bells ring on All Souls day. The bells as Irish Catholic motif play out in the narrative structure and provide for the ‘rationale’ for the novel’s use SOC for its narrator (in its stylistic and typographic format and as discussed in chapter one on Marcus’ soul-as-wave function) and throughout the story, as Marcus’ freely associative thoughts are always recalled to the ‘present’ by the ringing of the Angelus bells. The bells are one of the most symbolic devices Solar Bones uses with an Irish Catholic motif. McCormack writing the Angelus ​ bells into the story also ties the novel to contemporary debates about the role of The Church in Irish society, with the ringing of the bells on Irish broadcast television and radio a spirited debate between secular and religious groups. 40 Finally, the Angelus is a reference to Ulysses, where it is discussed in the famous ​ ​ final chapter, when Molly mentions hearing them as she tries to fall asleep:

I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can dose off 1 2 3 4 5 (Joyce 725)

39 For more see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/ ​ 40 For more on the Angelus bell debate, see: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/why-do-we-still-broadcast-the-angelus-bongs-1.3013064, ​ Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/sep/23/rte-angelus-ireland, ​ ​ and http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/angelus-bells-ireland-1585363-Jul2014/

44 This callback to Molly’s SOC makes McCormack’s choice for Irish Catholic symbolism and motifs Joycean, and signals once again to the engaged contemporary reader that the SOC form in the novel is as well thought-out and executed as it is reverent for the technique and genre. As Martin Riker writes in his review in the NY Times:

So when I tell you that a contemporary Irishman has just written a novel with minimal punctuation, recording the stream of consciousness of a man sitting for a few hours at his kitchen table in western Ireland, you might be forgiven for assuming that we are back at the feet of James Joyce, brought here by a modernist apostle, and that you’d do well to wait for the annotated edition. But Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones” (winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker) is a wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary book, with a debt to modernism but up to something all its own (Riker) …

This ‘something all its own’ is another reference to what the three novels in this investigation are doing to the SOC aesthetic: whether it is ‘rejuvenation’ or ‘update’ or ‘something all its own’, reviewers and the reader can see how the spirit of Joyce’s SOC comes through into the 21st century life of each novel’s characters and stories. I will return to the rest of Riker’s review when discussion begins on SOC novels in a globalized society, but for now I would like to return to the text of Solar Bones to understand the different ways McCormack considered ​ ​ Irish Catholicism and the soul in Solar Bones. ​ ​

As I have discussed throughout this investigation, the book is set on November 2nd, or All Souls. This holiday is when the soul stuck in purgatory, through prayer from those devout catholics on Earth, is meant to transition to Heaven. 41 The tradition is one mainly found in the catholic sects of Christianity, and stems from scripture. 42 As discussed previously, Thomist philosophy on the soul,

41 For more see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls%27_Day ​ 42 It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins. 2 Maccabees 12:42-46 45 embedded in Catholicism and passed on to Joyce at school, is referenced often in Joyce’s writing, often through the words of his fictional alter-ego, Stephen Daedelus. McCormack’s employment of this ideology of the soul stuck in purgatory to capture Marcus’ thoughts on the page makes the SOC format in the novel a playful reminder that McCormack knows this source material when structuring the elements of the novel. From here, the reader may appreciate how Marcus struggles with his faith and The Church during life, through his memory episodes in the book. Bones establishes the day of All Souls (7) and follows ​ ​ Marcus’ thoughts as they begin to wander, first to the newspaper on the table and then outwards, into county Mayo, Ireland, where Marcus grew up and lived his entire life:

Mayo God help us Mayo abú A county with a unique history of people starving themselves for higher causes and principles...like no other county it is blistered with shrines and grottos and prayer houses and hermitages just as it is crossed with pilgrim paths and penitential ways, the whole county such a bordered realm of penance and atonement that no one should be surprised that self-starvation becomes a political weapon … McNeela, Gaughan, Stagg … Arbour Hill, Parkhurst, Wakefield valiant souls who took their inspiration from our martyred land and saw a world beyond themselves (9)

This passage contains a lot of references worthy of analysis in this chapter on Irishness and SOC in the novel. First is the subtle way of incorporating Gaelic into Marcus’ idiom, in ‘Mayo abú’ (Mayo forever), a reminder to the reader that the ​ ​ narrator’s thoughts, besides covering memory and emotion and opinion, include his linguistic and national Irish identity. As Marcus continues thinking about this identity, he describes his part of Ireland with a mix of awe and irony, with the positive and negative descriptions of the country related as only a true native could offer. A country ‘blistered with shrines and grottos and prayer houses and

46 hermitages’, Marcus’ provincial part of Ireland ‘such a bordered realm of penance’ to become a place where political protest takes place in the form of ‘self-starvation’. Listing the names of famous hunger strikers imprisoned and protesting the English 43 leads to Marcus’ reckoning that the catholic spirituality in the county -- the ‘martyred land’-- inspired the ‘valiant souls’ in life and eventually, in death. The passage, so soon in the novel, establishes the musings of the narrator as being focused on his country, religion and place in all of it, with Ireland, the soul and the church returned to again and again in the novel. Soon after Marcus finishes ruminating on the countryside and its Irish Catholic roots, his thoughts “woven into that memorial arc which curves from childhood to the present moment” (18) turn to his agrarian father and his family’s farm machinery from when Marcus was young. In the same way Marcus’s memory would recall the names of the hunger strikers (‘, Gaughan, Stagg/Arbour Hill, Parkhurst, Wakefield’) Marcus’ SOC thoughts begins to chant the names of farm implements that allow his ‘memorial arc’ to move backwards in time to “ploughs, harrows and scufflers/pounds, shillings and pence” (18). Descriptions of Marcus as a child witnessing his father taking a malfunctioning tractor apart “dismantling the whole thing to its smallest component to put it back again” (19) lead to Marcus:

worry(ing) about the world, the first instance of my mind spiralling beyond the immediate environs of hearth, home and parish, towards the wider world beyond way beyond since looking at those engine parts spread across the floor my imagination took fright and soared to some wider, cataclysmic conclusion about how the universe itself was bolted and screwed together, believing I saw here how heaven and earth could come unhinged when some essential cottering pin was tapped out which would undo the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in the their wheeling rotations and send them

43 For more background on the 1970s hungerstrikes see RTE: https://www.rte.ie/culture/2017/1101/916706-how-did-one-irishman-have-three-funerals-doc-on-o ne/ 47 plummeting through the void of space towards some final ruin out on the future mearing of the universe soul sick with anxiety (20) …

The word ‘soul’ (‘soul-sick’) is used in this SOC memory to conclude Marcus’ feelings of existential worry, and it should be noted McCormack write the word‘soul’ 28 times in total throughout the novel, in various guises and ways, but all as a device for McCormack to keep his readers attuned to the framework of the story -- that of an Irish catholic ghost stuck in the purgatory of his life’s moment, his consciousness the only tangible aspect left. The passage also highlights the struggle of faith and understanding for the secular civic engineer who thinks soon after: “my childhood ability to get ahead of myself and reason to apocalyptic ends has remained intact for four decades” which Marcus admits is a “strange mindset for an engineer whose natural incline is towards the stable construct” (25).

In one particular passage of reflection, Marcus’ spirit switches from remembering his life to contemplating the tension of his existence (“a kind of waking dream in which all things come adrift” [78]) that builds in each successive loop of recall from memory back to Angelus bell and the kitchen table and back to memory again. This happens throughout the novel, each time anchoring Marcus back in the present, where his thoughts begin to more foreshadow his (im)mortal state to the alert reader:

a crying sense of loneliness for my family--Mairead, Darragh and Agnes--their absence sweeping through me like ashes sitting here at the table and something in me would be soothed now if, at this moment, Mairead or one of the kids were to walk through the door and smile or say hello to me...this would be something to believe in, another of those articles of faith that seem so important today, a look or a word, enough to hang a whole life on, something to believe in during

48 These grey days after Samhain when the souls of the dead are bailed from purgatory for a while by the prayers of the faithful so that they can return to their homes and The light is awash with ghouls and ghosts and the mearing between this world and the next is so blurred we might easily find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the dead...those unique souls whose tormented drift through these sunlit hours we might sense out of the corner of our eye or on the margins of our consciousness where you need to have faith in these things (79) …

McCormack writes about his character’s faith throughout this passage, and for Marcus it is his family and home that provide comfort to him (or at least it would, if he was alive). ‘These gray days after Samhain’ is a reference to the first of the month in the calendar and to the ancient Gaelic calendar marking the new year and start of winter. This reference, Irish and referential to the Catholic soul stuck in a grey purgatory, continues where Marcus wonders about other ‘souls of the dead bailed from purgatory’, souls ‘tormented’ just as Marcus is, but as this occurs in the first third of the novel, the explicit reveal of Marcus’ death is yet to come. The reader is left to understand the narrator’s angst as his Catholic soul’s need to move from purgatory to heaven on All Souls, and McCormack allows the alert reader plenty of time to worry along with Marcus about his ‘crying sense of loneliness’ foreshadowing his soul’s Catholic limbo.

After this passage, Marcus remembers telling his son Darragh about when he knew he would become an engineer, after a failed two years spent in the Catholic seminary. This reveal, of the ‘apocalyptically-obsessed’ narrator, prefaces Marcus the engineer relating his ‘true believer’ inner self in his SOC thoughts to the reader. Picking up from ‘you need to have faith in these things’ from the previous quoted passage, Marcus continues:

It always gladdened me to find that the part of me that was always a true believer has not died...is still alive within me and clutching his catechism, still holding the truths which were laid out in its pages

49 who made the world God made the world and who is God God is our father in heaven and son on and so on to infinity the whole world built up from the first principles, towering and rigid as any structural engineer might wish...the engineer’s dream of structured ascent and stability so carefully laid out … the alter boy with his catechism instead of the man of faith I tried to become at one time (80) …

The conflict of faith and reason and the wish for an ordered universe and afterlife is all here in this passage. This conflict, also seen in Joyce’s writing, is the battle between the secular and religious that reflects the current Ireland of today -- the Ireland that engages in serious social debate over how to display the Angelus bell during state broadcasts, that struggles with the difficulties of abuse and coverups in the Church, that fights over doctrine and law for marriage and abortion. In Bones, Marcus becomes a stand-in for the educated, secular class of ​ ​ modern Ireland. And as Joyce would, McCormack uses his character’s SOC to express the intellectual and emotional struggles endemic in the lives of today’s Irish citizen. The deep-down ‘true believers’ of today’s Ireland -- baptized in the Church, perhaps even with choir boy memories like Marcus, are now secular or lapsed Catholics in a country struggling with its own faith. Solar Bones moves ​ ​ forward in the story (not in the loops of time and space that comprise Marcus’ moment of novel-length reflection), and Marcus’ ‘chest becomes tight’ so that he “can hardly breathe now as if the clouds themselves had dropped into my … chest...this soft hour bracketed by the Angelus bell” (96) its narrator’s thoughts becomes more and more searching and desperate. I covered this ‘ghost neurology’ in chapter one, and it signals more explicitly to the reader about Marcus being a SOC ghost in the novel: “ drifting in that state between sleep and …

50 waking it is easy to believe I inhabit a monochrome x-ray world...so that I might coalesce around it (fat systolic contraction of the light) once more, flesh and bone ” (128). …

As stated earlier, Marcus, discovering he is in fact dead and a soul in purgatory (the ‘systolic contraction’ a descriptive nod to Marcus’ heart attack that ends his life), recedes from his own existence on the book’s final page until ‘finally, there is nothing left, body and soul all gone.’ This fading away of consciousness is the final reminder to the reader as to the Joycean influences of the novel. Instead of Molly’s ‘yes!’ terminus for her consciousness fading into sleep at the end of Ulysses, the contemporary reader reading Marcus’ final SOC ​ ​ thoughts of the novel comes to understand that they too broadcast in the affirmative; rather than the ‘yes!’ of Molly, this final part of the consciouss experience comes in a rough, colloquial and final philosophical note: ‘the head down and keep going/keep going/keep going to fuck’. As an Irish SOC novel that adds another link in the intertextual chain to the work of Joyce, I look again to McHale, who finishes his book on postmodernism and Joyce by stating, “dead on the last page, this discourse is resurrected...on the first. Postmodernist writing … models not only the ontological limits of death, but also the dream of return” (235). Solar Bones is as a rejuvenation of this kind of narrative, in which the ​ ​ ‘ontological limits of death’ presage the ‘dream of return’ speaks to the level of writing in the novel, and how emblematic McCormack’s work in the current ​ ​ movement of experimental Irish literature. The book and its story allow for the ‘return from death’ as McHale calls it and the ‘ontological limits of death’ through structuring the SOC narrative recursively onto itself, with Marcus reborn on the first page of each subsequent reading of the novel.

51 In a review about Solar Bones (which is a broader-ranging review that ​ ​ includes McBride’s Girl as part of yet another piece examining experimental Irish ​ ​ fiction) titled “Experimental fiction: revelling in the wonder of words” by Ian Melaney, Marcus and his internal struggle is described as a novel that is:

concerned, to borrow a phrase from Martin Heidegger, with “the same … that is always newly sought”. The daily rhythms and routines of a place and community – Angelus bells, morning news, cars going along the road – shape the lives of those who live within it, and McCormack examines the idea that some balance might be achieved between ambition and duty, between imagination and responsibility It is important though that Solar … ​ Bones is told from the perspective of a ghost, the ultimate outsider. Who ​ else could see “all of life”? there is no true way to tell the story of a place … from the inside. As John Berger once said, writing is like getting very close to something and then coming back. What you bring back, always partial and unfinished, is the story McBride and McCormack all get very close to … life – daily life, and the life of the mind – in one part of the country, but then they come back; they return to the literary world, the creative world, which makes different demands.

What kind of voice emerges from this constant back-and-forth? A voice that is always both here and there, always up and down; cryptic, wild, jazzed, jagged, unstoppable, glottal, fucked. A voice that is nowhere settled. A voice that is nowhere at home. (Melaney)

In his praise of Girl and Bones, the reviewer is interested in pointing out how ​ ​ ​ ​ close these two novels get to ‘describing the daily rhythms’ of life. Following Heidegger and Berger’s ideas on what a novel ends up being-- a new way to describe life through language, by getting close to it and coming back with the rest-- the review’s praise focuses on how the language of the SOC novels emerges from this attempt at balancing ‘literary’ and ‘creative’ mimesis. The voice of both works, a voice that is ‘always there’-- ‘wild, jazzed, jagged, unstoppable, glottal, fucked’ -- becomes the praise-worthy attributes of each SOC novel. This final line of the review, with its emphasis on a ‘voice that is nowhere settled’ serves as a

52 good transition from Solar Bones to A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, an SOC novel ​ ​ ​ ​ that attempts the mimesis of a ‘half-formed’ girl to produce a voice indicative of the praise of the above review through idiomatic expression in the narrator’s SOC.

In another review of Girl in The Guardian famous critic Kyra Cochran ​ ​ ​ ​ writes, “the book has been described as difficult, because of its language; devoid of commas, a fractured, poetic, preconscious voice, pregnant with full stops and half rhymes, which McBride knew she had captured when she wrote the first lines ” (Cochran). This ‘difficult’ language the book expresses through SOC … narration is expressed in Humphrey’s description of how important idiom is in the SOC novel. In his discussion of Faulkner and Joyce, Humphrey maintains that a SOC novel that “For the idiom of the character, there remains an arrangement of thought units as they would originate in the character’s consciousness ​ (Humphrey’s emphasis), rather than as they would be deliberately expressed” (37). As argued for in chapter one, the ‘thought units’ of Girl become expressed as ​ ​ disjointed, grammatically challenging SOC narration. As Cochran in his review notes this is the ‘fractured, poetic, preconscious voice’ the author of Girl, Eimear ​ ​ McBride, pours into her novel.Melaney writes in his Irish Times that this creates ​ ​ the novel’s voice as ‘cryptic, wild, jazzed, jagged, unstoppable, glottal, fucked.’ The ​ following passages from Girl will be analyzed in detail to understand how Girl ​ ​ ​ captures the Irish idiom. As a secondary source of comparison to Joycean language, we will use the work of the famous novelist Anthony Burgess, whose ​ academic analysis of Joyce’s language use is covered in his book, Joycean Prick: ​ An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. ​

In Prick, Burgess writes in the book’s preface his approach to Joyce’s ​ ​ language are “attempts to suggest answers to two basic questions which are essentially literary (... the aesthetic disposition of language): how does Joyce use language and why does he use it in that way or those ways? (10). Burgess then

53 goes into detail exploring Ulysses (the ‘acknowledged masterpiece’) to find as ​ ​ Humphrey understood, the idiom in a ‘character’s consciousness’ as a means to express it through a linguistic approach. As Burgess writes, Joyce was a master of this unique approach to Irish idiom:

Joyce’s pleasure in the fracting of language and the notation of noise is an aspect of his fascination with what seems to him to be the magic of the whole semiological process. He considers the act of signalling rather more important than the message it attempts to convey...Semiology to Joyce is phatic and those peripheral or totally extra-linguistic signs which, more … than any other author, her revels in, are legitimate modes of communication (24) …

So how does this kind of ‘magic semiology’ leading to Joyce using ‘noise’ and phatic signalling’ as a way of expressing the inner thoughts of his character’s SOC relate to McBride’s Girl? As reviews covered already have suggested, the mix of ​ ​ typography, broken grammar and ‘half-formed’ thoughts go a long way in presenting a character crippled by family trauma, sexual abuse and in feminist readings, social patriarchy. These traumas and abuses suffered by the girl in McBride’s novel all merit their own analysis in future readings of the recently published novel, but I will restrict my own analysis into what Burgess described as the ‘visual and auditory shock’ of Joycean, Irish language:

Joyce saw the virtues of the visual, as well as the auditory, shock. In a small way, the practice of eschewing hyphens and, for that matter, inverted commas was, and still is, a means of forcing the eye into a new look at language .that undamned river of Molly Bloom’s closing monologue, in … which there is not even minimal punctuation, is essentially a visual effect. (25)

In his description of Joycean typography, we can see McBride’s girl, and in another reference to Molly Bloom’s IM, the ‘visual effect’ of presenting ‘visual and

54 auditory shocks’ through SOC idiom. In McBride’s Girl, the reader finds this kind ​ ​ of ‘shock’ on every page, from the narrator’s own birth -- “A vinegar world I smelled. There now a girleen isn’t she great. Bawling. Oh Ho. Now you’re safe. But I saw less with these flesh eyes. Outside almost without sight. She, asking after and I’m all fine.” (5)-- to her death:

Go there. Struggle down. We are down. We are down down down. And under water lungs grow. Flowing in. Like fire torch air. Like air is. That choke of. Eyes and nose and throat. Where uncle did. No. Gone away. Where mother speak. Is deaf my ears. Hold tight to me. I. Will I Say? For you to hear? Alone. My name is. Water. All alone. My name. The plunge is faster. The deeper cold coming in. What’s left? What's left behind? What's it? It is. My name for me. My I. Turn. Look up. Bubble from my mouth drift high. Blue tinge lips. Floating hair. Air famished eyes. Brown water turning into light. There now. That just was life. And now.

What?

My name is gone. (238)

The final coda of the novel where even in her own suicide and death the narrator cannot express herself by name, is replete with the ‘shocks’ Burgess described in Joyce’s SOC idiom, where an Irish girl cannot become ‘fully formed; in her twenty years of life. In her final lines of the novel, this visual and auditory language is McBride’s attempt to take the reader along into living the final, sensual moments of its narrator. McBride expresses these thoughts in ‘under water lungs grow. Flowing in. Like fire torch air./ Like air is. That choke of. Eyes and nose and throat. Where uncle did. No.’ The phenomenological experience of the girl’s death--her drowning in a lake, her feeling the water in her lungs and relating it to

55 her rapist uncle, are examples of the idiomatic, pre-speech language tools McBride employs in writing the girl’s psyche through SOC narration. This similar to Joyce’s writing Molly Bloom’s mental state as an attempt (according to Burgess) to express the ‘undamned river...of minimal punctuation’ to the reader as ‘a means of forcing the eye into a new look at (Irish) language.’ The success and prizes won by Girl in the few years since its publication seem to reflect McBride’s ​ ​ adroit reworking of Joycean idiom as a return to form, a form predicated on ‘a new way’ at looking at how language at a local, Irish level can be seen as the basis for expression in an SOC novel such as Girl. From reviews and criticism, when a ​ ​ novel is able to capture the particular linguistic and grammatical features of a time and place (for Girl, rural Ireland), the success of this mimesis of language is ​ ​ measured in how the informed readership relates to the narrator and story. In the scores of reviews published, this successful mimesis is praised for capturing a unique voice narrated through SOC style to both update and advance the spirit of Joycean Irish idiom.

In the chapter, ‘Dialect and Idiolect’, Burgess writes about Bloom and Daedalus’ IMs as a way of expressing the real thoughts of the characters, as opposed to their self-aware dialogue: “in Ulysses we must, as we must with ​ ​ Bloom, listen to the IM to find out the essential Stephen that lies under the brittle erudite exterior” (44). For McBride’s girl, there is only what lies beneath the ​ ​ ​ ​ ‘brittle exterior’ in the novel. Discussed previously, the SOC of the novel is the ‘pure’ SOC of the narrator itself, and with very little reported speech or dialogue (and none ‘outside’ the narrator’s IM stream of broken grammar and idiom), it leaves the reader to experience a novel-length ‘half-formed SOC’ in Girl, as ​ ​ opposed to only once in Molly’s final chapter in Ulysses. As Burgess writes in ​ ​ chapter four, “Bloom’s ‘thought-paragraphs’ --the IM of the character -- become almost ‘epigrams’” (51). Contrast this with girl, who only thinks in the IM form of extreme ‘epigrams’, as she is not ‘formed’ enough like Stephen to have an ‘erudite exterior’-- only expressing the ‘very short thought paragraphs’ Burgess writes as

56 being the ‘true thoughts’ of the character. This kind of ‘extreme epigram’ is seen throughout Girl in her rural Irish idiom and thoughts. In one scene, where the ​ ​ girl reflects to herself on bullying her brother at school:

Why did you do that? Humiliate him? I didn’t. Did you not? He doesn’t know where he is. He does. Does not and pretending won’t help. You’re a rare bitch when you want, you know that? That night long night. Every rake of me sore. Raw. Hum good night to you and you. Goodnight. That is all. (141)

We see her ‘epigrams of thought’ here as she struggles with her teenage years dealing with her mentally handicapped brother at school. In the story she sides with her classmates over him on the playground, and doesn’t intervene when the schoolyard turns on him and bullies him. In another instance, the girl’s focus shifts to an invective against the Church as the girl’s mother, a devout Catholic, calls for prayer for the sick brother (for while Catholicism isn’t as explicit in the story as in Solar Bones, this novel revolving around guilt and trauma in 1980’s ​ ​ rural Ireland would always include it): 44

The Lord knows. I won't survive. Not that. No. For I’m not Job. It’s time for our father to be tested. That’s all. Now is the time for prayer.

In the chapel. Down on my knees. Oh god Jesus. I beg you. I am pleading. See. I plead. But stones in my mouth. You are not the praying person. But I. Not you. Not you. After all you have done. Good people do the praying and sinners go to. Hell. Thank Jesus. Amen. (153)

44 For more see the review in the New Yorker, that begins with : Eimear McBride’s first novel, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” (Coffee House), tells a fall-and-fall story that, especially in a traditional Irish setting, can seem familiar fictional material: a departed father, a pious, abusive mother, an errant and blasphemous daughter, a predatory uncle, a death in the family, a God-soaked household busy with meddling priests and vain prayer. Irish fiction and drama have prospered on their ration of curses, drink, and church: family history of this kind would seem to be the nightmare from which we are happy enough not to be awakened. 57 ‘Stones in my mouth’, the girl’s reaction to prayer in church, is a good description for how the girl’s SOC describe the effect of narration throughout the novel: that of a girl unable to express herself; nameless, a victim of incestuous rape but never allowed to share her victimhood, her angst is held within her mind. Sometimes, however, her rage and pain explodes across the page in some rare scenes of dialogue with other characters. One of the most powerful examples of the girl’s SOC thoughts capturing her emotional turmoil is when her rapist uncle comes back into her life some ten years after molesting her when the girl was very young. Now in her early twenties, and sleeping with multiple nameless men in ‘the city’ to cope with her sexual agency being stripped from her by her uncle many years back, the girl has to fend off the advances of her uncle yet again. As Burgess wrote about ‘low language’--i.e. curse words and taboo language-- it was Joyce who tried to bring the ‘real language’ of Dublin citizens to life in Ulysses: ​

It was Joyce’s knowledge of the lowers reaches of Dublin life, and his determination--following the naturalistic side of his symbolist naturalism--that its language should appear in a novel, along with certain aspect of middle-class life that had never previously been disclosed in fiction, that earned him certain ladylife rebukes from the British literary establishment, which did not like his cleverness or erudition either. In the first chapter of Ulysses, ‘snotgreen, as an epithet Biddy the Clap and yet ​ ​ … another as Cunty Kate contributed to the interest of the censors of Joyce’s masterpiece. But there are more spectaculars uses of obscene language … an understanding of the ways in which quadriliterals may be properly used (173)

In the scene in question between the girl and her uncle the ‘spectacular use of obscene language’ is used to full effect:

I want he says. No. You to leave with me. No. I came here for. No. You don’t need me. I don’t Touch. He does...Get away get away. LEave the fucking. Spitting out his mouth. Say. Leave me fucking alone. You’re the one I. No fuck you. Don’t you think I. Fuck you. To me you're not some. Fuck you. Fuck me please undoes his fly. No. I. Shut up. Hurt my arm I’ll...Push it up.

58 Me. I am dry and blind. While he goes on. Crushing all my bones Get … away from me you. That is the last time. The very last. You filthy bastard fucker cunt. Or cunt. Is me. For all time forward. For search he through my body rub. In the steeple. In the head. I’m. Now I’m. The wrong again...Pray this will all be gone. (186)

This passage--full of the physicality of the act and the dread of the narrator’s inability to prevent it, shows difficult and shocking language McBride uses time and time again in her SOC novel to confront the reader and write the girl’s pain is unique reformulation of the SOC aesthetic. Added to that, the Joycean use of Irish idiom and vernacular, the harsh language and the staccato ‘epigrams of thought’ all work together to allow for the novel’s title to be its recurring linguistic theme of half-formed thoughts in the SOC of its narrator. In the end of the scene, the girl blames herself for the rape, calling herself a ‘Cunt.Is me. For all time forward’, and it is this guilt, coupled with the loss of her brother to cancer at the novel’s end, that leads the girl to drown herself in a nearby river. This death is the second of the three novels in this investigation that ends in, as referred to earlier in the work of McHale, as the ‘simulacra of death’ found in postmodern fiction. This difficult, tragic ending is what James Wood writes in The New Yorker that ​ ​ was the ‘something else’ of the Joycean SOC in the novel:

McBride has spoken of the moment, when she was in her mid-twenties, that she first encountered “Ulysses.” She told The Guardian that it was ​ ​ decisive. “Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else,” she concluded What is most original about … McBride’s novel is not the style but the use that is made of that style. The perverted uncle and the pious mother may be conventional enough; McBride’s relentless examination of a teenage girl’s psychic and moral collapse is anything but. When McBride’s prose is most difficult, it is because it is doubly difficult: hard to follow and hard to bear. (Wood) 45

45 This is echoed in a NY Times review of the novel, which ends by stating: “A Girl” won a bundle of prizes, and the inevitable comparisons to the Irish tradition — Beckett’s monologues, Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy in Ulysses and the ontogenetic prose of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ​ ​ ​ Man What all that praise had in common, besides that it was deserved, was the sad sense that ​ … the English-language novel had matured from modernism, and that in maturing its spirit was lost: 59

This ‘difficult to bear’ language -- Joycean in its SOC aesthetic and Irish in its idiom -- grips the reader in the thoughts of the narrator right to the final page. For, as I have argued, the choice made by an author for SOC is one to provide function to the form. By writing SOC to express the uniqueness of an individual’s thoughts and emotions on the page, a skillful author can construct a narrative from the inside out. This perspective and its mimetic synthesis in a novel is the goal of writers in our investigation, and through their innovative writing in SOC, the literary world has taken notice.

Our final novel for analysis to Joyce and Irish literature is Eggshells. Another ​ ​ example of Irishness in its use and expression of idiom through SOC narration, the main character Vivian is, as has been noted, fascinated with language. This fascination becomes thematic in her tour of Dublin, and in the many references to Joycean influences in the novel’s exploration of Irish idiom, foreign languages mixing with Dubliner English, and the whimsy of Vivian’s musings on language as a tool for thought and expression. In a review other novel in the Irish Times, ​ ​ idiom, Joyce and Burgess’ work are referenced to give credence to the ‘experimental’ quality of this SOC Irish novel:

But for all its whimsy, at the heart of Eggshells is the desperation of a character who clings to language as a code to understand a world from which she’s excluded. Vivian’s hunt for meaning through language brings to mind another Burgess comment, that all novels are to some degree experimental, but it is their language that makes them spectacular. (Gilmartin)

“It was now gray, shaky, timid, compromised by publicity and money, the realisms of survival . … McBride’s book was a shock to that sentiment, not least because it is about that sentiment. Girl ​ subjects the outer language the world expects of us to the inner syntaxes that are natural to our minds, and in doing so refuses to equate universal experience with universal expression — a false religion that has oppressed most contemporary literature, and most contemporary souls.” (Cohen)

60 Lally’s novel foregrounds modern SOC style with this ‘experiment’ of language, and the success of the novel, just as in the other two novels in this thesis, is a response in part to how Irish language and culture comes through the SOC of the narrator. The narrator in question, whimsical, wandering, take many interests in her wanderings through Dublin, but as mentioned in the Time review, she ‘clings ​ ​ to language as a code’. One way she does this is making lists. In one particular episode, Vivian’s wandering SOC seems to be a scatter of unrelated thoughts at first, but is quickly distilled when she arrives at her destination, the Natural History Museum (note the Ulysses reference to Stephen’s Green, 46 yet another ​ ​ subtle link to Joyce that recurs throughout the novel) :

I order black coffee. I prefer milky coffee, but I’ve heard things on the radio about lactose intolerance and I somethings think that if I stopped drinking milk my life would be a different thing. When I leave the cafe I take Grafton street at a saunter, and head east along Stephen's Green. I make for the Natural History Museum its smells of something old and musty, … furniture polish or mothballs. There glass cases of birds and fish and animals, most of them shade of beige or brown, with typewritten descriptions on faded, tea-colored paper. I’m looking for new names of things, a list of new words in a particular order that could form a pattern and give me a clue as to how to find my way back. I take out my notebook and write out the names of interesting birds. (48)

When Vivian finds the birds, she thinks ‘my list is short’, then spends the rest of the chapter -- about five pages -- listing out hundreds of names of birds, butterflies and moths. This childlike fascination with names and sounds, with a reference to Joyce or Yeats 47 in almost every chapter, reminds the reader that

46 ‘Joyce’ is found three times in the novel, and the first instance is explicit in its conjuring of the writer: “... passing the statue of James Joyce with his legs crossed. He looks easy to topple, and if I had to read Finnegans Wake, I’d probably try to topple him” (16).

47 Yeats is quoted in the preface of the book to remind the reader of his work and study of Irish fairies and folklore, which becomes an obsession for Vivian in a side plot to transform from human to fairy as she considers herself a (Yeastian) ‘changeling’. For more, see the review of the novel in The Guardian: ​ ​ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/12/eggshells-caitriona-lally-review-novel-debut 61 this SOC novelist is aware of her story’s intertextual links to Irish language and literature of the past. This becomes explicit at the end of the chapter, when Vivian walks past a “bookshop that used to be a chemist and that sells lemon soap regardless of what else it sells. Either James Joyce or Leopold Bloom or Stephen Daedalus (or maybe all three) bought soap there ” (49). As Vivian takes the … number 4 bus home, her thoughts continue to wander, making connections between semiotics, meaning and language: “I wonder if the drivers with the fewest accidents and the cleanest buses are rewarded with the single-digit routes, or the routes with a mixture of numbers and letters, or the even-numbered routes, or if it matter at all” (50). As the novel follows Vivian’s SOC musings, either when puzzling out meaning in linguistic features of museum taxonomy or Dublin bus routes, Lally reminds the engaged reader that this kind of focus on Irish life and language owes an explicit debt to Joyce.

I will conclude my analysis of Joyce and Irish idiom in the three primary novels of this investigation by ending on how Burgess viewed the strength of Joycean language, a strength seen in this thesis’ three examples of contemporary SOC Irish literature:

The fundamental strength of Joyce’s language lies not in its eagerness to expand the lexis in its loving acceptance of the native idiom Joyce … … never moved far from the rhythm of his native Dublin Ulysses and ​ … … ​ Finnegans Wake end up as glorifications of the linguistic resources of that ​ town (Dublin).” (178)

While Joyce’s Dublin and its native idiom became a global literary success, bringing the world closer to Ireland through the avant garde SOC of last century, Burgess’ glorification of Joyce as a standard bearer unequaled in his use of IM and SOC techniques is worth mentioning before finishing this chapter on Irish and Joycean SOC. The book ends with a final few lines I take issue with, considering the previous analysis and critical reception of Bones, Girl and ​ ​ ​ ​

62 Eggshells: “Joyce exhausted the possibilities of IM, as of so many other literary ​ techniques, in Ulysses, and it cannot be said that any of his followers have used ​ ​ the innovation with success one Ulysses is probably enough” (212). ​ … ​

Though I agree that there can only be ‘one Ulysses’ that’s not the point of ​ ​ whether there should, or even could be, more IM and SOC novels, whether Irish or from elsewhere in the world. I interpret ‘Joycean followers’ as the novelists whose work I have covered in this thesis. When I set out to write about this particular field of literature, my intention was to understand the phenomenon happening at the moment in Ireland where so many acclaimed SOC novels are being produced. That this is all happening in a short span of time also means that for research, there is as little written on the primary sources as there are loads of background criticism on SOC, Joyce and Modernism. When I came across Burgess’ book (via one review of Eggshells mentioned earlier), I was delighted to ​ ​ find a book written by an author whose fiction I admired, and whose academic understanding of Joycean language was as accessible as it was interesting for my research. The book allowed for me to complete my investigation linking Joycean and Irish idiom to my primary sources, and this led to me finishing the main body of my thesis. And yet, the ending of Joycean Prick is for me disagreeable in ​ ​ its admonishment to future SOC novelists. Burgess’ work that allows for so much detailed study into the SOC genre and Joyce’s influence upon it falls short then as prophetic piece of writing in these last few lines. As I have tried to show, Joyce’s impact on Ireland has been inspirational as of late. From reviews of the novels in question to interviews with their writers, the influence of Ireland’s most famous novelist is being embraced now more than ever. I hope that Burgess will continue to be wrong as more novelists like McCormack, McBride and Lally produce SOC-style novels that challenge, entertain and bring us closer to understanding ourselves through this genre of literary fiction. It will be exciting now to watch and see how the SOC genre continues to express the Ireland of today and

63 reference greats like Joyce who brought the country, its idiom and its SOC literature onto a global stage.

Conclusion

The Irish SOC Novel and the Global Perspective

“It is no surprise, that the stream of consciousness should be the most famous technique of the twentieth century: in view of what it has done, it fully deserves to be.” -- Franco Moretti

Moretti’s claim that SOC is the most famous technique of the 20th century stems in part from the large amount of extant criticism and debate on the subject. So far in the body of this thesis, SOC scholarship has not ceased in its study of the technique made famous by Joyce. For Ulysses to be so influential to have an ​ ​ impact on SOC novels being produced today speaks to this fact. Modernists, Joyce in particular, set the standard for current authors of the genre, but as I have argued regarding the novels in this investigation, the standard is by no means set in stone. For authors like McCormack, McBride and Lally, the new generation of Joycean disciples in Ireland today is producing SOC novels that could represent a trend in literature that will lead to more innovation and literary production in the genre. My contention, based on the research and ideas presented in this thesis, is that a novel like Solar Bones, a work of experimental fiction that has ​ ​ won numerous prizes and sold many copies around the world, is not a singular occurrence. Taken together with Girl and Eggshells, this recent phenomenon in ​ ​ ​ ​ Irish literature seems that it will continue for a little while longer, if articles like Olivia Kiernans’ “When it comes to Irish writing, this is a golden age” in The Irish ​ Times are to be believed. The article, as others shown in this thesis, cites the ​

64 contemporary Irish SOC novels as part of a larger movement of experimental fiction coming out of Ireland. As another article in The Irish Times suggests, 48 the ​ ​ books still coming in 2018 and beyond offer hope that experimental fiction in the country will continue to evolve the SOC aesthetic and tap into what critics like Moretti cite as a global influence for the technique.

In his book The Modern Epic, Moretti sets out to link world literature’s ​ ​ modern works from Goethe to Marquez to seek patterns of narrative, structure and meaning in modern novels. As his investigation examines the Western canon’s biggest names, Joyce and Ulysses receive many pages of Moretti’s ​ ​ attention. For his sections dealing with how and why Joyce’s SOC style has become so emblematic of the twentieth century, Moretti makes the following claim: that there are two ‘strains of SOC’ in Modernist literature, one of ‘exceptional circumstances (fainting, delirium, suicide, death-agony)’ and one of ‘absolute normality’ (173). It is this second strainthat Joycean SOC is about “an ordinary individual on an ordinary day. An everyday, calm SOC: free to look around, and to play with the stimuli that arrive from all sides” (ibid.) The success of SOC, Moretti argues, comes from Joyce’s epic storyline developing slowly in the mind of its wandering characters and their thoughts. The ‘normal’ thoughts of the novel’s characters react to the world and their own psychological afflictions to elevate this type of SOC and Joyce to canonical status. Moretti argues that as the book develops, the SOC becomes increasingly a focus of storytelling, leading to Molly’s famous final chapter, where the ‘pure SOC’ of her IM ends the novel. As seen in Bones, Girl and Eggshells, Joyce’s ‘everyday strain’ of SOC is influential in ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the novels. There are also moments of ‘exceptional circumstances’ to be found in the SOC of the novels (Girl in its final scenes). However, it is the fact that Joyce’s ​ ​ strain of SOC and writing became so popular to have benefitted and influenced a generation of writers almost a 100 years after Ulysses was published that I wish ​ ​

48 For more see “Books to look out for in 2018”: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/books-to-look-out-for-in-2018 65 to explore in this final section of the thesis. For Joyce to have become so emblematic of 20th century literature, and his ‘everyday SOC’ taken from the streets of Dublin and read around the globe is something that has left a mark on the literary world. His disciples of today are continuing the tradition and aesthetic and adding their own mark to Irish SOC literature, which is becoming part of the tapestry of SOC novels produced worldwide.

This idea of SOC literature finding its way into so many novels written around the world is supported by empirical evidence. Working with Moretti’s claim, a group of researchers uses computer modeling to track SOC style literature across global sources of publication, to see if Joyce and his strain of SOC was as influential as Moretti claims. From the abstract, the researchers set out to:

use computational modeling and large-scale pattern detection to develop a theory of global textual transmission as a process of turbulent flow. Specifically, [to] model stream-of-consciousness narration as a discrete set of linguistic features and rhetorical elements and uses this model to track the movement of this modernist technique across generic boundaries (from anglophone modernism to more popular genres) and linguistic ones. (Long, So)

The researchers use a term from physics, ‘turbulent flow’ 49 as a loose model for the ‘anglophonic diffusion of SOC into world literature’. Tracking and quantifying SOC terminology and techniques (of which our old friend Humphrey’s 1954 work on SOC IM helps form their methodology), the patterns of SOC style are pervasive in sixty selected works used as examples of the genre. The researchers then set out to study the ‘turbulent flow’ of wavelike diffusion of SOC (based on Moretti’s ideas of how the genre spread through world literature from France outward). The researchers study this diffusion in a corpus of 1700 books, of which none that are already labeled ‘SOC’ are included. The results of the study are interesting, as the researchers find more than passing evidence that Moretti’s ideas on the type

49 For more see: https://www.britannica.com/science/turbulent-flow ​ 66 of SOC made popular by Joyce have indeed moved like a wave throughout the countries of the world in the last century, and the initial evidence shows that the SOC influence out of France and Ireland is something that has had a measured impact on global literature.

Against the backdrop of downward trends in readership and the corresponding struggles in book publishing industry, the Irish SOC novel of today seems to be alive and well. Since the demise of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger, the last few years of experimental fiction written in the SOC style have seen the novel first made by Joyce return in novels by McCormack, McBride and Lally. These 21st century disciples of the Joycean SOC tradition have taken the genre of this novel and added their own artistic and literary marks. From critical praise, prizes and popular reception, the readership of today’s Irish SOC novel has signaled that a hundred years on from Joyce’s masterwork, this type of personal storytelling device is as relevant as it ever was. To borrow from Joyce one last time before ending this thesis, the ‘polished looking glass’ the author famously held up to Dubliners for them and others to see them through his work now lives on in today’s Irish SOC novelists.

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