LITERARY CRITICISM: FIONNUALA DILLANEreviews Anne EnrightEdited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill Irish Academic Press,246pp. €22.95
ANNE ENRIGHT is the kind of writer, along with the likes of Umberto Eco, Margaret Atwood or John Banville, for example, that you know is the best critic of her own work. All the signs are there: artful, testing, teasing narratives; layered, philosophical books that unfold in ways that teach us how to read and how to become better readers. And because wry humour and meaningful irony are hallmarks of her craft, this is not medicine and no spoonfuls of sugar are needed.
Enright assumes that we're all adults, so she brings on the complicated dissections of family life; deconstructs the politics of place and belonging, remembering and forgetting; exposes the frailties of the body; and unravels and re-knits the complexities of love and lust, death and betrayal. All this substance forms Enright's groundbreaking work over her 20-year writing history to date, from her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin(1991), to her recently published fifth novel, The Forgotten Waltz(2011). And as with all great storytellers, the art is in the telling as much as in the tale.
Enright's best critics help us to understand the ways she tells those tales and offer broader contexts in which to think about her work. This collection of essays, edited ably by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill, does just that: it is a scholarly and illuminating addition to the Irish Writers in Their Timeseries, which to date numbers Banville (its only other contemporary writer), Swift, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Bowen and Kavanagh in an august line-up. The essays cover Enright's three collections of short stories, her non-fiction account of pregnancy and motherhood, Making Babies(2004), and her four novels, from The Wig my Father Wore(1995) to The Gathering(2007).
There is also a useful bibliography of her writing, including her journalism, as well as a revealing interview by the editors in which Enright, among other things, attests to her ongoing interest in psychoanalysis, her commitment to deconstructing powerful and restrictive gender ideologies, and her transition from an earlier fragmented, experimental writing style to the more controlled aesthetic of her recent works.
The 10 international scholars gathered here deploy a variety of theoretical approaches, but it is not unexpected that psychoanalytical, feminist and gender theories feature strongly. There are uneven moments in the more scattershot approaches taken by some of the contributors, stretching across too many texts and themes or trying to make Enright be all things for all readers. Happily, though, sophisticated and wide-reaching readings dominate.
Patricia Coughlan's exploration of the interconnected international contexts (Cork, Paris, Paraguay, England, Scotland) and temporal frames of Enright's historical novel, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, is grounded in a fascinating analysis of body and food images in the text. Coughlan sees a positive disruption of the Irish literary tradition in this work, an "implicit rejection of those narratives of masculine identity formation within a primarily local, often rural context". These local-global issues and the significance of embodied history are addressed from different perspectives by Matthew Ryan, Heidi Hansson, Elke D'hoker and Kristin Ewins.
Anne Mulhall, Susan Cahill and Hedwig Schwall attend to the way Enright's work exposes what Mulhall calls, provocatively, "the hole in the Irish literary tradition where the mother is buried, alive or dead". Cahill focuses on the irreparable trauma that results in the suppression or occlusion of the mother from the cultural imaginary in an insightful reading of What are You Like?. Mulhall's deft negotiation of the allusive strategies of The Wig My Father Worebrings to the surface the "traces of the spectral feminine" in the text to offer new systems of making meaning, the "re-articulation of the feminine and the maternal that is one of Enright's major achievements in the Irish literary context".
Planes, trains and automobiles, are central to Enright’s fiction, explains Claire Bracken in her intriguing account of how the body is enmeshed in the machine. Anne Enright’s ‘Machines: Modernity, Technology and Irish Culture’ sets up a persuasive challenge to dominant readings of Irish modernity that downplay or exclude the subjective and the feminine.
Gerardine Meaney takes Judith Butler's observation that "It is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable" as a starting point for a compelling analysis of the grieving protagonists of The Gatheringand My Little Sister(from Enright's Taking Pictures). Meaney situates these narrators in a suggestive frame of mourning sisters, the mythological Antigone and Ismene, to provide a provocative rereading of the overlooked Ismene and the often ignored positive return to life by Veronica at the end of The Gathering. Meaney reminds us that this novel "asks political questions about the way in which the recovery of memory substitutes for engagement with its consequences in the present". Timely and important warnings, art and criticism at their best: ethical, humane, unsettling, creative and political.
FIONNUALA DILLANEteaches and researches 19th- and 20th-century literature at the School of English, Drama and Film, UCD
