One reviewer even went so far as to take a passage from Molly Bloom’s monologue and rewrite it with full stops throughout as a way of conveying how alienation works in the two registers: unending flow on which nothing can get a grip (Molly), and a voice that constantly shudders and halts. This is Molly Bloom stripped of any lyric remnant. It also, for me, evokes other great woman modernists, such as Elizabeth Bowen, from whom McBride seems to borrow, whether consciously or unconsciously, the disconcerting habit of placing prepositions at the end of her sentences, leaving the reader in a type of frantic, and vulnerable, suspense. It is one of the best ways of not ending a sentence: ‘That clouds and wind skiteing sand spray floats of it up’; or ‘Coffee quiet new beginning is the boiling kettle bowl of’; or ‘Wave and wave of it hormone over’; or ‘Stinking smothered by life by.’26 As is clear from those last two, McBride raises the temperature of this syntactic move (as if a sexual body were left dangling over its own edge, which would be one definition of sex). Another link would be May Sinclair, whose Life and Death of Harriett Frean turns on what happens, or might have happened, to Harriett Frean as a child in the lane at the back of her house where she has been forbidden to go. In Sinclair’s novel, you cannot ever answer the question of what actually took place or its consequences. ‘The man came out and went to the gate and stood there. He was the frightening thing.’27 That ‘He was the frightening thing’ can be read as much as the baffled, over-coerced Victorian child trying to figure out what the danger might be, as seeing it for what it brutally is. You never know. The uncertainty does not, however, stop this moment from spreading across the whole text, like the campion flowers in the lane that merge with her mother’s mouth, almost seeming to stain it blood red: ‘She was holding the flowers up to her face. It was awful, for you could see her mouth thicken and redden over its edges and shake.’ Instead, with McBride, the sexual encounters are as vicious as they are explicit. She takes us back down the lane and stuffs the blood red in our face.
With A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, McBride has ushered Ulysses’s Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom into the twenty-first century. The reader is not confronted, as in Joyce’s Gerty MacDowell sequence, with a man on a beach masturbating to the mental tune of a limping woman. Nor is the book a tease, which would be one way of describing Molly Bloom’s erotically charged monologue, on which Ulysses ends and which led Carl Gustav Jung famously to write to Joyce to congratulate him: ‘I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows as much about the psychology of women. I didn’t.’28 (Which, as a dear friend wryly observed to me long ago, simply shows how little Jung knew about women.) Precisely because the novel is so thick with allusions to modernism, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing offers itself, I would suggest, as modernism’s return of the repressed. To get a sense of what, linguistically and sexually, has happened, this is Leopold Bloom, the central character in Ulysses, musing on the beach as he watches MacDowell, who is both lost in thought and playing to his stares:
* * *
* * *
O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul to perfume your wife black hair heave under embon señorita young eyes Mulvey plump years dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next.29
* * *
* * *
Famously this passage condenses more or less everything in the novel up to this point, or more precisely all of Bloom’s women: Gerty MacDowell, the actress Anne Bracegirdle, Molly, Martha Clifford, ad infinitum, as one might say. This is writing that heaves under its own sensual weight, plumpness, embonpoint, girdles and swoons. The only possible response as a reader, one almost feels, is either to applaud or fall at his feet (notwithstanding that, as the novel also mercilessly narrates, he is a cuckold).
If we turn back to the passage from A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing cited in the last chapter (p. 196), it should be enough to get the measure of the difference, not only as a testament to the perils of sexual abuse, but now as a radical engagement with a whole history of modernist writing which it bends, unerringly, to its purpose.
This is language as a bloody mess, barely but always just about intelligible, as she splices words together and pulls them into shreds: ‘I lie thisright place for me with my fingers ripped onthebody Mine is Lie in the ground faceWhere I Right for meyes […] Smear the blood up is there any no no t reeeeelly.’ McBride is presenting disenchantment with the world on behalf of women – ‘Full of nothing. Full of dirt the. I am. My I can’ – without ever losing faith in the capacity of language to recraft the worst of history: ‘There there breath that. Where is your face off somewhere. Where am I lay down this tool. I fall I felled. I banged my face head I think. Time for somewhere. Isgoing home.’30
Almost immediately after, girl walks into the lake. As she slowly submerges herself, taking the reader into the water with her, it is impossible not to read McBride as paying tribute to Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in the midst of the Second World War (an act which, given the real threat of Nazi invasion, was far more measured and worldly wise than crazy, which is how it is most often seen). How to write what the world might feel and look like as you drown?
* * *
As I suggested in Chapter Four, it is the energy of the writing which stops A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing from coming anywhere close to a chronicle of despair, even while the agony of the novel leaves us with the problem – as indeed did Woolf and Morrison – of how to survive the world’s cruelties. In all of these books, literature appears repeatedly as the place in our culture where the worst of history, especially in relation to women, can be represented as it enters deep into the space of the mind. As we hear in relation to the daily revelations of sexual abuse, telling the story, however unbearable and awful, is one of the ways to survive. But having cast its deathly shadow over the page, violence at such a pitch of intensity also confronts us with the question of where and how such horrors can be endured and/or fought against. By the end of Between the Acts, Woolf restores a barely credible semblance of England which she clearly does not believe in herself. Morrison famously ends Beloved with the refrain and/or injunction: ‘This is not a story to pass on’ – hand down through the generations or pass over? preserve or refuse? or both? In The Lesser Bohemians, her second novel, McBride offers her response to the same question. The novel has been criticised for playing havoc with syntax once more – as if such experimentation is something you should only do once, and the linguistic disruptions of Girl were a tic she should be getting over (a bit like those who respond to the rising reports of sexual harassment with the helpful suggestion that women should just deal with it and move on).
Instead, I suggest, The Lesser Bohemians takes its exploration of literary form into a new domain. Sexual abuse is still an ever-present danger, but, for all that, the possibility of love, of sexual and human contact, is not seen as scuppered for ever. The novel can be read as its own precarious, only partial cure, since any redemption is troubled and incomplete. In The Lesser Bohemians, the violence of the modern world spreads across the psychological landscape. No one is exempt. It is impossible to dismiss the turbulence as the expression of one freak, damaged soul. At the same time, it explores the type of human communication necessary for the worst of modern times to be held, however gingerly, between individual people, and inside their own heads. And it goes further than Girl by daring to mix the reality of sexual abuse with the pleasures and unpleasures, the joy and potentially mortal danger, of sex (not perhaps since the writing of Georges Bataille have the two been released into such intimate proximity).
Speaking about the novel, McBride has lamented the dearth in past fiction of anything approaching an adequate exploration of sexual experience, even in the modernist tradition she rejoins and celebrates, especially in relation to the sexual experiences of women. Only when she first discovered Edna O’Brien
did she understand that ‘there was a part of women’s lives that had been absent in everything I had read’.31 Bored (her word) with the way sex is mostly written about, she has now given us two novels in which language falls apart under the pressure of sex. And violence. After all, sex and violence are two experiences which tend to leave people lost for words (remember that Hannah Arendt described violence as ‘mute’). In McBride’s hands, they re-find their natural affiliation, together precipitating a crisis of speech. With The Lesser Bohemians, coming on the heels of Girl, McBride has definitively established herself as the foremost writer of sexual abuse, now recognised as one of the hallmarks of the century in which we are living.
There are of course traces of dimly remembered abuse in Virginia Woolf, ghostly visions in corridors, shadows that fall across the page. The woman speaker of Beckett’s Not I is haunted by some ugly, not quite spoken, event. And, as already touched on, something which is never named happens to May Sinclair’s young Harriett Frean down the lane. With McBride, it is all up front. Seen in this light, the earlier accounts of modernism, with which this chapter began, once again look a bit limited, only this time not just too psychologically anodyne, instead coy or strait-laced. What fucks up language, The Lesser Bohemians suggests, is fucking – good, bad or indifferent. There is scarcely a page of the novel untouched by the linguistic fallout of sex. Joyce may have shown McBride that ‘you could do whatever you wanted with language and that the rules didn’t apply’, but he does not go here.32 Seen in this light, Molly Bloom’s euphoric self-affirmation appears too lyrical, Gerty MacDowell’s allusions to menstruation too seemly and quaint. McBride has said that her aim is ‘to make language cope and more fully describe that part of life that is destroyed once it begins to get put into straightforward grammatical language’.33 ‘Destroyed’ is crucial. Nearly all her characters are in recovery. They do not all make it. In contrast to Girl, The Lesser Bohemians ends on an up beat, but, given all that has gone before, the reader is left unsure. What, given half a chance, are bodies capable of doing to each other? More or less single-handed, McBride has taken us back to the experiment of modernism and ushered it into a new gut-wrenching phase: ‘Guts to gorge’, ‘Flesh scraping fear against the Do of my brain.’ ‘Then I am back in the world and must understand again how to cover my bones with my skin.’34
The Lesser Bohemians is a love story narrated through the mind of an eighteen-year-old girl from Dublin who comes to London to take up a place at drama school, and falls wildly in love with an established actor more than twice her age. Readers of Girl would be forgiven for not expecting a tale of heterosexual passion to have been McBride’s next move, especially a tale courting more than one cliché – man initiates girl into sex, older man with a girl the age of his own daughter, women who take pleasure in pain: ‘I like of his upon me, whatever marks he’s made’ (early in their relationship he refuses her request to sodomise her and then finally relents).35 Or even for seeing this as a betrayal of the first novel, especially the ending, when the narrator, after her lifetime of abuse and the sexual self-harm which is its consequence, took herself off to the river after her beloved brother’s funeral and drowned; as one feminist paradigm would have it: the abuse of girls by men leads to death. Grief is key, taking its place alongside sex and violence as another experience that brings language shuddering to a halt (you choke on grief). McBride describes herself as a feminist – ‘Decisively so.’36 A thirteen-year-old allowing a forty-one-year-old ‘to do what he wants to her will probably feel complicit in that act, but is not and cannot be.’ But the victim narrative is misleading. The girl also goes on to choose her fate. McBride insists on her agency: ‘Now the reader may not find that the girl has become – and I shudder to say it – “a better person” by the end of the book, but she has, undeniably, become herself.’37 Nonetheless, by no stretch of the imagination can the end of the first novel be seen as a happy ending. The last line of Girl is: ‘My name is gone.’
By contrast, from the very first page, The Lesser Bohemians makes its lilting bid for life: ‘Here’s to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine.’ These lines then track through the first part of the novel as a refrain: ‘I will make myself of life here for life is this place and would be start of mine’; ‘what this pleasant present lacks. I will it, hope and dream it. Fine my life’ll be when it comes. When I am right. When I have made myself. When I have. When I.’38 London is the scene, specifically the streets, pubs, clubs and letting houses of north-west London in the 1990s (with occasional references to the IRA, Pakis and the poor of the East End). One way of reading The Lesser Bohemians would be as girl given a second chance: from the suffocating and fraudulent moralism of Catholic family life in Dublin to free-wheeling London where promiscuity, instead of incurring damnation, is more or less the norm. This shift of place, of tone and mood puts paid to the idea that, in her second novel, McBride was repeating herself.
What is constant is McBride’s unswerving commitment to unplugged syntax as it veers between common and uncommon sense. But while Girl was virtually no commas and all stops, commas proliferate in The Lesser Bohemians, one of whose most striking syntactic features is elongated, unfilled spaces between words. It is the difference between a voice that does not pause for breath, stopping and starting in its tracks, and blanks as a way of registering what can barely be spoken. In such moments, the more conventional ellipses would, it seems, have cluttered the spaces too much: ‘like not being fine was alright was fine was how it should be’ (the repetition – ‘alright’, ‘fine’, ‘how it should be’ – underscoring that it was clearly not fine at all). Or again: ‘But do not find so do not ask. Especially about the little girl who is not. And this greater swathe that she cuts through his life, what is its what can it mean?’ (At this point in the story she knows almost nothing about his relationship to his daughter.)39 To the question of Girl: how to speak when the worst has happened? The Lesser Bohemians adds another: to whom do we tell our stories, especially those we cannot bear to tell ourselves? As we have seen, Girl is a type of inner monologue (with the proviso that she is also almost always addressing her brother). As if partly in response, The Lesser Bohemians sets a different challenge: how on earth does anyone ever manage to talk to somebody else? How close in language can, or should, you try to get? The issue of sexual and that of linguistic proximity turn out to be one and the same thing. McBride has said that in writing and rewriting the novel, she was most worried about the representation of sex: ‘Actually,’ she then qualifies, ‘it was really about trying to maintain the connection between the inner life and the physical life.’40 What makes this novel so powerful is the way she jams the bodies into the speech (we have never been given sex quite like this before). Sex is presented as intensely pleasurable, but it is never innocent. McBride has no interest whatsoever in purging her characters of their potential for violence, a move which – as I suggest throughout this book – is the precondition, under cover of a falsely regimented world, for projecting violence onto others and then enacting it.
Roughly halfway through The Lesser Bohemians Stephen tells his story to Eily (it takes seventy pages). Since they are named for the first time after he has done so, the message would seem to be that only when you can bring yourself to talk to another can you ever hope to find yourself. Critics who objected to the way the novel’s voice divides at this point, or saw Stephen’s narrative as ‘hijacking’ the narrative, or inconsistent with the novel’s form, were therefore missing the point. For the reader of Girl, the only place to go was inside the mind of the narrator. The Lesser Bohemians is suggesting on the other hand that in order to survive, you must be more than one. Unlike the continuous present of Girl, the protagonists of The Lesser Bohemians arrive at something like a moment of truth, when ‘the past sits forward and the cold comes pouring in.’ They have each been warding off this moment for their own reasons but it marks the shift between the casual sex they had been enjoying and not enjoying up until t
hen, and their full-blown love affair. This, we could say, is the unconscious contract between them (as indeed between many couples). It is what they have been gearing up for – and what the reader has been primed to expect – from the start: ‘Mess is why we’re here.’ ‘How were you fucked up? Let me count the ways!’41
According to one psychoanalytic theory, mother–son incest is worse than father–daughter, because somewhere in the great cosmic and social scheme of things, girls are meant to be wooed by their fathers into a heterosexuality to which their own deepest impulses would not otherwise take them. The dire heteronormative view of women’s destiny, so often attributed to Freud, is therefore tinged with a radical streak, as I suggested in relation to abuse and trans in Chapter Three (nature has nothing to do with it, girls have to be more or less forced into their role). Mother–son incest, on the other hand, is catastrophic (psychosis-inducing), yanking boys beneath the social radar altogether since their psychological task is to break away from their mothers if they are to have any chance of becoming ‘men’. Just to be clear, this does not mean that it is good for thirteen-year-old girls to be seduced by forty-one-year-old men, nor indeed eighteen-year-olds by men of thirty-eight. If the distance between thirteen and eighteen from Girl to The Lesser Bohemians makes all the difference, McBride must have been aware that she runs the ages of the protagonists in the two novels perilously close to each other. Like girl in the first novel, Eily has been abused as a young girl, in this case by a friend of her mother, who remains in denial even when Eily confronts her near the end of the book. Momentarily, she also tries on girl’s response to trauma by seeking out sex as degradation and terror: ‘Devil at my navel. Devil at my breast.’ ‘And why shouldn’t I reject my scum-rid history and wherever I’m wanted, go?’ ‘And how much do I already know I can take.’42
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 21