Leaving For Good
Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing
Galley Beggar Press, 240pp, £8.70, ISBN 9780957185326
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
Fear death by drowning – an extreme unction – an atheistic, watery reminder of one’s life, no oily, priestly redemption at the end, all one’s life, every sordid detail revealed, purposeless, without reason. If the whirlpool miraculously pops me back up for air, should I share my life review? And why? And how?
As soon as she’s born, Eimear McBride’s ‘half-formed girl’ knows dying – her brother, three years older than her, has a brain tumour. Attention is on him, and on her attention to him. So he’s always in her mind as they grow up, he’s part of her, and then it all ends shortly after his death at 22, surrounded by cradle Catholics. She is elsewhere, out by the lake, being violated again. Hers is a life formed by relations, never in situations entirely of her making, a life of unwanted attention. No wonder violent, loveless sex and the appeal of the lake for the girl.
Sex and the lake, and often sex by the wood next to the lake, and a dying brother are the girl’s life. And because her brother has always been dying, from page 1, sex and the lake are remedies. But first sex was with her uncle at 13. And then it’s just with everyone, out of anger and submission. And sex is always a mess, physically, psychically. Wanted, useless, painful, bloody, liquid, regretted, submitted to. And a dead father and a pious mother in there too – talking to her all the time, petty complaints but one big one we’ve all heard from Mammy: ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ So walk into the lake. Or write the stream. That’s what you do, isn’t it, if you’re a modernist writer?
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is the first winner of the Goldsmith’s Prize (2013) for ‘fiction at its most novel’ (Make It Noo!). It’s the author’s first novel, and she’s admitted it’s consciously in the modernist tradition pre-Finnegan’s Wake, which is also what the judges were looking for (preferably something as good as the 1922 vintage of Ulysses and Jacob’s Room). And something that will ‘stimulate a much wider debate about fiction beyond the pages of learned journals’ (Although the author’s already presented on the ‘art of fiction’ at Goldsmith’s Department of English and Comparative Fiction).
In her 1925 essay Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf pointed out ‘new’ is required when the author is not free to write what and how they want and, crucially, when something new needs to be written, when the times demand a different approach to fiction (what’s to argue?). In her time, that need centred on a new awareness of ‘the dark places of psychology’. It followed that new literary tools were needed to craft this new world of our inner lives… we got the broken sentence:
‘It follows…’ said Jacob.
Only half a sentence followed; but these half-sentences are like flags set on tops of buildings to the observer of external sights down below.
None of this in McBride’s work, though. No need for explanations for the style, just pure subjectivity. Except the girl is never, it seems, simply herself thinking and acting. ‘Half-formed’: what can that mean? Perhaps the Sartrean paradox revealing that we have no fixed essence, each of us is not a ‘thing’, ‘we are what we are not’ – our lives are always chosen at any one moment. The girl never makes conscious choices, yet it’s never bad faith. Her freedom’s been thrown into a world that’s fixed in its ways (like all of us). And it’s as if she doesn’t have the strength to choose in her world – to the point that she asks her abuser to hit her. So she chooses unfreedom, to be half-formed – it is the life she was born into after all, seeing her brother punished for no good reason (not like all of us)...
The interest of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is how it conveys this desperate sense that sometimes only submission is possible, but that others can at least be made to feel a sense of guilt by their aggressions. (But is that just what teenagers do, play the victim?) So is this good, something of literary value? ‘New’? Well, ‘new’ doesn’t mean good of course. The philosopher of art RG Collingwood lauded another product of 1922, Eliot’s The Waste Land because he thought it was exemplary of art proper – of art that acted as ‘community medicine’. Such works aren’t simply individualistic, don’t just reveal the writer’s psychology, they reveal to us emotions and feelings that until then have been confused and inarticulate. Eliot, in this case, articulates our sense of a decaying civilisation. Collingwood quotes Coleridge for support: ‘we know a man for a poet by the fact he makes us poets’.
McBride does not pander to the confused by entertaining them or by concluding with some magical solution to the most difficult aspects of growing up and living. But for all the broken sentences and dark psychology of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, what is perhaps most disturbing about it is its relentless amorality. It is a book to read when young, to wonder at, place on the shore, and then leave for good.
As soon as she’s born, Eimear McBride’s ‘half-formed girl’ knows dying – her brother, three years older than her, has a brain tumour. Attention is on him, and on her attention to him. So he’s always in her mind as they grow up, he’s part of her, and then it all ends shortly after his death at 22, surrounded by cradle Catholics. She is elsewhere, out by the lake, being violated again. Hers is a life formed by relations, never in situations entirely of her making, a life of unwanted attention. No wonder violent, loveless sex and the appeal of the lake for the girl.
Sex and the lake, and often sex by the wood next to the lake, and a dying brother are the girl’s life. And because her brother has always been dying, from page 1, sex and the lake are remedies. But first sex was with her uncle at 13. And then it’s just with everyone, out of anger and submission. And sex is always a mess, physically, psychically. Wanted, useless, painful, bloody, liquid, regretted, submitted to. And a dead father and a pious mother in there too – talking to her all the time, petty complaints but one big one we’ve all heard from Mammy: ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ So walk into the lake. Or write the stream. That’s what you do, isn’t it, if you’re a modernist writer?
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is the first winner of the Goldsmith’s Prize (2013) for ‘fiction at its most novel’ (Make It Noo!). It’s the author’s first novel, and she’s admitted it’s consciously in the modernist tradition pre-Finnegan’s Wake, which is also what the judges were looking for (preferably something as good as the 1922 vintage of Ulysses and Jacob’s Room). And something that will ‘stimulate a much wider debate about fiction beyond the pages of learned journals’ (Although the author’s already presented on the ‘art of fiction’ at Goldsmith’s Department of English and Comparative Fiction).
In her 1925 essay Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf pointed out ‘new’ is required when the author is not free to write what and how they want and, crucially, when something new needs to be written, when the times demand a different approach to fiction (what’s to argue?). In her time, that need centred on a new awareness of ‘the dark places of psychology’. It followed that new literary tools were needed to craft this new world of our inner lives… we got the broken sentence:
‘It follows…’ said Jacob.
Only half a sentence followed; but these half-sentences are like flags set on tops of buildings to the observer of external sights down below.
None of this in McBride’s work, though. No need for explanations for the style, just pure subjectivity. Except the girl is never, it seems, simply herself thinking and acting. ‘Half-formed’: what can that mean? Perhaps the Sartrean paradox revealing that we have no fixed essence, each of us is not a ‘thing’, ‘we are what we are not’ – our lives are always chosen at any one moment. The girl never makes conscious choices, yet it’s never bad faith. Her freedom’s been thrown into a world that’s fixed in its ways (like all of us). And it’s as if she doesn’t have the strength to choose in her world – to the point that she asks her abuser to hit her. So she chooses unfreedom, to be half-formed – it is the life she was born into after all, seeing her brother punished for no good reason (not like all of us)...
The interest of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is how it conveys this desperate sense that sometimes only submission is possible, but that others can at least be made to feel a sense of guilt by their aggressions. (But is that just what teenagers do, play the victim?) So is this good, something of literary value? ‘New’? Well, ‘new’ doesn’t mean good of course. The philosopher of art RG Collingwood lauded another product of 1922, Eliot’s The Waste Land because he thought it was exemplary of art proper – of art that acted as ‘community medicine’. Such works aren’t simply individualistic, don’t just reveal the writer’s psychology, they reveal to us emotions and feelings that until then have been confused and inarticulate. Eliot, in this case, articulates our sense of a decaying civilisation. Collingwood quotes Coleridge for support: ‘we know a man for a poet by the fact he makes us poets’.
McBride does not pander to the confused by entertaining them or by concluding with some magical solution to the most difficult aspects of growing up and living. But for all the broken sentences and dark psychology of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, what is perhaps most disturbing about it is its relentless amorality. It is a book to read when young, to wonder at, place on the shore, and then leave for good.