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
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!
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, something interesting is happening in the Irish literary 1 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/
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’, and literature 3 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. Gough’s pessimism about the 4
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 3https://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.
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. Along with new 5
literary prizes like The Goldsmith there is also increased government investment in the literary arts. This support, in conjunction with many boutique publishers 6 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.
Joyce in their interviews to the press and wish to experiment with their prose by 7 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
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
most well-known of SOC novels. Looking at Joyce’s work will also open 8 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 8This 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.
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
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. Critical debate begins in the 1950s in the examination of canonical 10 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. However, as Humphrey reminds his reader, the term 11 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 10Also 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’.)
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)
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 when considering the three contemporary novels 12 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
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. However, 13 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
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. Structurally, this creates an experience for the reader that, at least in 15 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. By omitting even the most basic 16 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)
16After 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.
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, and the 17
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 17Save 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Gina Wisk’s commentary on the lonely, half-formed 20 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”
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, which is part analysis of the text and review of literary criticism of the 21 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
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,
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).
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’, combined 22
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.
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, light behaves as either a wave or a particle depending on 23 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. If we allow 24 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-narrative loop to the interested reader. Referring back to SOC criticism, this 25 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
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.
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)
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,
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.
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
