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.