I've recently reached the conclusion that I'm not very good at novels. This is not ideal for someone doing a degree in English Literature. I spent the first few weeks of my holiday stressing out over my destined-to-fail dissertation idea, while cramming bits of various 600-page novels in a desperate attempt for material. Not only were these novels not cooperating with my unfair demands, I was finding that I wasn't hooked by any of them; their characters, their emerging plots. The dissertation became poetry-based, I left the novels half-finished on my bedroom floor, my sanity was only briefly compromised.
Luckily, my exis/English-tential crisis (really?) coincided with my discovery of two authors; one old, one new. With far-from-gentle and far-from-comforting words of encouragement, they made me read properly again; slowly, attentively, pleasurably. I am, perhaps, 'pearl-lined', as Jeanette Winterson puts it.
Dylan Thomas, that marvel of poetry and casual sexism, described Djuna Barnes' Nightwood as 'one of the three great prose works ever written by a woman'. While this comment is utterly ridiculous, it did introduce me to the novel, which is one of the greatest and most interesting prose works I've ever read by any author, regardless of gender. The novel follows several idiosyncratic characters and is structured around their interaction and emotions. There is the false Baron Felix Volkbein, steeped in ideas of ancestry and nobility but really made up of 'tarnished gold threads', one so busy 'wishing to be correct at any moment' that he exposes himself as emotionally impotent and perpetually 'embarrassed'. At the other pole is the false Doctor Matthew O'Connor, who muses upon everything from drink, to religion, to the night. 'You know what man really desires?', he asks. 'One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.' While the Baron replies that he 'was not thinking of women at all', and the Doctor agrees, love, desire and self-deception pattern the novel from its beginning. Between the Baron and the Doctor flit Robin Vote and Nora Flood, creating victims of themselves and their temporary lovers.
Barnes' prose style, then, is dense and chaotic, 'a mass' not only of 'tangled grass' but also of languages, place-names, a 'look', a 'gaze', a 'liver and a long-spent whisper'. Rather than explicitly tracing a plot and movement, much of Nightwood's style occurs as the 'sensation of a thought'. At its centre lies the Doctor, discovered in a dinghy flat dressed in women's clothing by Nora, who in turn has been abandoned by Robin for Jenny Petherbridge, the 'bird, snatching the oats out of love's droppings'. 'Doctor, I have come to ask you to tell me everything you know about the night', she says. 'The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up', he replies, before a long, sensual meditation on what the night means in this novel. It is a time and place where 'distress is wild and anonymous', where 'night people [...] sling the creature, husked of its gestures'. It is the night that seems to account for Nightwood's strangeness, the defamiliarising, unheimlich phenomenon that traces its agony, passion and suffocation from its beginning to its absurd end. I read the novel mainly on buses and in bed, and its 'fabulous reconstruction of fear', fear of betrayal, of social responses and of one's own identity and weakness, is intoxicating wherever and whenever its pages are turned.
Where sympathy and attention flits between characters in Nightwood, often settling on the abstraction of emotion itself, consciousness when reading Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is felt intently through its speaker and protagonist, the eponymous 'Girl'. It would be easy, to describe the novel, stylistically, as stream-of-consciousness, but this also seems lazy. McBride has constructed a syntax, an entire mode of experience, to reconfigure her girl's relation to the world. Its beginning in the womb, simultaneously fluid and fragmented, sets the tone for the novel. The girl is positioned in interaction with her brother, the intimate and near-constant 'you' of the story. In the beginning, she 'loved swimming to your touch', a touch she will later try to restore, painfully: 'My name is. Water. All alone.' Despite the distance that the girl wedges between herself and her family, '[i]n the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say'. It is her brother who will 'give her name', and it is this name that is 'gone' in the book's final sentence. What remains, though, is a pervasive 'I' and a 'you', and the harrowing details of sexual abuse, familial disintegration and prejudice heighten the sensations of a sister-brother relationship, one in which the brother has an incurable brain tumour.
When condensed in this way, it seems extreme, unrealistic. Yet A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is spare and visceral. It's poetic in a bone-crunching, stomach-dropping kind of way: 'I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked me, splits and choked my neck until I said I was dead.' And later: 'Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP. Look. And I breath. And I breath my. I make.' And later again: 'Water blaze across with sun. No one to touch. Far out. Far gone the ground. I do not need I do not. Carry me over. And silent morning. No one to hear the lap lap on me. Island. Moving stealth and through the clear the brown but all the same. It lick off hurt my face and hands. Strip pain all the parts off me.' McBride's language makes sense in a remembered way, in an almost pre-linguistic babble that shapes its world solely through the black marks on the page. Ironically, it reminds me of the first stanza of a Dylan Thomas poem:
Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.
McBride takes many thematic and stylistic markers from her predecessors in the Irish tradition, Joyce and Beckett. However, the experience she creates is distinctly female, fragmented even further with a tone and style that makes the novel difficult to piece together in any way other than its own. And it is here that Nightwood and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing come together. The former published in 1936, the latter in 2013, they both follow their own linguistic schemes, and I was thinking about how impossible it would be to make either of them into films without seriously compromising the quality of the narratives and relationships told through such distinct voices. Both of these novels possess a kind of alchemy, wholly different from each other, but each contributing to how the unwritten and unspoken might be written and spoken.
