As controversial a book as this requires yes or no from the reader and my answer is definitely yes. An eminent UK Eng Lit prof recently compiled a list of 10 books he couldn’t finish, which included McBride’s. He carefully excluded James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I won’t name names because A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing is partly about just that.
What happens, the book asks, to literature and to feeling when names are withdrawn? About two thirds through the book I realized that none of the characters have names and how therefore they’re missed, how they prevent us being ghosts or going mad or undergoing the existential merger RD Laing wrote about in The Divided Self in 1960. And how when used they can lead to a kind of immodesty. Modesty is what this book has. The prof clearly likes his child sex/abuse, adolescent predatory open-to-all-comers sex, brain cancer, mental disability, love that never had a chance, housework, religious fundamentalism, drawn-out death, rape, and finally, suicide less in his face. On the contrary, the more I lived in the unnamed narrator’s head and therefore her body, the more I understood the non-specific delicacy of human beings, however brutal their experience. That’s what I mean by the book’s modesty.
The language, of course, is the thing, and, as the Galley Beggar Press cover says, the book isn’t so much stream of consciousness, although it certainly dispenses with the ‘correct’ English grammar that only exists in writing and in Chomsky’s theories. Rather, McBride conjures up the elusive language of thought. Language and thought aren’t co-terminus. Tiny children learning to talk make this obvious: L.S. Vygotsky, the great Soviet psychologist and educationalist, described the overlap in the 1920s, at the same time as literary modernists began to edge near it, and Oxford ordinary language philosophers ruled against it. The latter dumped ideas or concepts, which constitute some of our thinking, in favour of language alone, consigning meaning to oxymoron land. Wittgenstein was the man who, turning his back on logical positivism, nonetheless let reductionism out of the lab and, frightening it thoroughly, sent it on a cultural rampage which a hundred years later the poor thing’s still on.
McBride, on the other hand, plunges us into the most extreme form of first person narration that written language, while retaining meaning, will allow. She chops sentences into separate words, elides subjects, flings predicates into following sentences, dispenses with verbs, swops transitive for intransitive and vice versa, and employs punctuation as a kind of band-leader to keep an eye on her rhythms. They have such resonance they’ll sit eternally shivering in your brain if you don’t watch out. They’re still in mine. The book is an anarchic glory where the narrator’s reliability – is the fictional narrator constructing her own fiction? Is the writer causing the narrator to lie to the reader, bearing in mind the writer’s making the whole thing up in the first place? – is as irrelevant to its intensity as reality is to fiction and which the eminent prof won’t/can’t admit is a skilled transformation of the chaotic and compressed interior of all our minds.
Of course the book’s not in least chaotic. McBride pulls off four literary magic acts and counting.
First, the poetry which periodically leaps out of the water, or heaves – water, not to mention vomit, is a constant – so that I was always examining its prevailing rough and toss for the next gorgeous shock. ‘I know not what I do. It is not that. It is not drowning I have come for. Not for death or any other violent thing that I could do to myself. I am here this hour for. Storage I think. Cleaning and cold storage. I will gush myself out between my legs … I’ll put my head in for discreet baptize. It makes me want to, feel like laugh. Out loud and crack that silence.’ p55. The language and imagery of Catholicism chime under the water, on and on. So, to my ear, does E.E. Cummings: ‘I lie on beds I stare and watch islands by in clouds of up.’ p177. Toni Morrison also. ‘I smell this is some world I’m in with loose down hair. It is my mother cannot see. Cannot see into. I am glass no more.’ p86, the narrator says, but after a year has to return to the sodden west of Ireland to visit her mother, alone with the narrator’s brother and not admitting to her son’s disability. ‘Those fields. Going through them just like then. Drowned over. Filled up with rain. Even cows drown here. Even sheep . Even people if they’re lucky. Children falling under every year. All the suffocated grass. The world’s submerged in raining. And feel old lady rosaries crossing over me.’ p97, is her funny and mordant view from the train window. ‘I’m glad to see you is what I say … Come into me. Come into my house. Come in and stop all of the clocks for he can for he can and I know that. Give me a moment. Give me time.’ This is language in all its ambiguous splendor where dialogue segues into interior monologue into interior dialogue without an inverted comma to be found.
So, second, McBride tips her narrator near to madness by setting up internal and external conversations with her brother, addressed throughout the book as ‘you’. McBride creates something of a child’s madness when, apparently talking to themselves, they’re practicing how to think. The dramatic conversations they conduct with an imagined interlocutor in time become internalized. Gradually the dramatic language becomes silent, travels inside the child’s mind, becomes compressed linguistically, becomes thought. Thus the development of thought, otherwise known as cognitive development, is profoundly social. Not all psychologists agree with this view.
For the narrator, loosing her brother is loosing her interlocutor. He dies. ‘Who am I talking to? Who am I talking to now?’ p189, is her cry. And on the last pages, when she travels ‘… down where the water turns to hot and rivers flowing rocks go by. … You say. You tell. You tell me your name and tell me the truth this time.’, McBride fuses the narrator and her brother. The last line of the book is ‘My name is gone.’ So we learn that the narrator’s life depended on her name. Technically, leaving out names is a bit tricky. Try it. Anaphoric reference is the name for keeping up with a pronoun’s prior referent. Without a name to refer back to, a pronoun is like the dying brother’s eyes: ‘I wipe your face. Dribble I see it. Just there. And swim your eyes around your head.’ The priest, the doctor, the uncle, the aunt, mammy, brother, friend, all words McBride uses, are universals not specifics. From that generalized vocabulary I got an apt whiff of Happy Families, a peculiarly nasty game.
Third, by the very intensity of her language and her narrator’s experiences, McBride creates forward momentum. How will this all end? What’s the next page, the next paragraph? The holy quasi-drowning so beloved of Christianity (and Hinduism) is introduced early on, but no, not this time surely, this is metaphor not plot. And I’m right. It’s metaphor working at full strength, showing us the way, not a crude pre-emptive devise. Eminent prof, maybe you needed to swim a bit further out to get yourself caught in the vortex.
Fourth, the writing’s funny alright, but primarily moving. I cried. When mammy, abandoned by her husband, driven to distraction by the wrath of her fundamentalist father and her uppity children, one mentally disabled, beats them, the brother on the head. When the brother, teased at school, undefended by his sister, unhelped by his mother who pretends his brain operation wasn’t a problem, says, ‘It’s my scar. It happened to me.’ p39. When the brother in his twenties, his cancer returned, his legs no longer working, has to shit, raging, crying, in a nappy and his sister waits for him to sleep and then cleans him up. When ‘Murmur holy spirit. She pray and whatsit she thinks she sees? Her son has failed his mother. Have put upon her these things. For she for her life shouldn’t be this.’ p162.
Judith Amanthis 