* * *
To return, finally, to literary writing, which is where this chapter began. Not to Plath and Sexton but to two modern-day women writers who I think bring what women can do with words, disturbingly, into its next phase, into our time where violence against women seems to have been raised to a new pitch. First Temsula Ao. Then the Irish writer Eimear McBride. Ao is Naga. She comes from that part of India which received the brunt of the newly independent nation’s drive to crush anything that might tar the image of national unity which it so needed to believe in and project to the outside world. In fact the Naga rebellion predated independence as the Naga National Council was formed in 1946. The violence in Nagaland is not widely known. Gandhi had stated that, after struggling for freedom, of course India would respect the desire for independence of any of its peoples. Perhaps it is because he promised what he could not deliver that the state then struck with such viciousness against the secessionist Nagas.52
Ao entitles her collection of short stories These Hills Called Home – Stories from a War Zone. She means it. She does not spare her reader. Neither of my two writers spare their readers – indeed not sparing the reader is the point, so this final turn to literature is not intended as a soft landing. As Ao states in her preface – ‘Lest we forget’ – her aim is to probe how the atrocities of that era have ‘restructured or even “revolutionised” the Naga psyche’.53 Government forces would enter the villages with the intention to degrade, humiliate and maim. In one story – ‘The Last Song’ – a young girl, Apenyo, who starts singing almost from birth and becomes the lead soprano of her school, renowned across the land, carries on singing as a government soldier yanks her off to the local church where he and his fellow soldiers rape both her and her distraught mother and then kill them. Apenyo’s song then echoes through the village for years as ‘one more Naga village weeps for her ravaged and ruined children’.54
The story I will briefly focus on here is ‘An Old Man Remembers’. It is for me one of the most courageous stories of the collection, first for so boldly entering the life of a man’s mind and secondly for what it finds there. Sashi is a man who has been part of the Naga resistance, although what he remembers is not a heroic struggle but a moment of violence which has haunted him ever since. The story is therefore a counter-myth. It is also a talking cure. His ageing body is wracked with pain at least partly, the story suggests, because he cannot bring himself to tell the grandson who so lovingly tends him the truth about the war. ‘Grandfather, is it true,’ the little boy asks him, ‘that you and grandfather Imli killed many people when you were in the jungle?’ He is completely thrown, has never spoken about his jungle days: ‘It was as though that phase of his life was consigned to a dark place in his heart and would be buried with him when his time came. But now the question of a disturbed child stirred old spectres and left him speechless for a long time.’ He has been hurled a question ‘from the other side of history’. When Sashi starts speaking, it is ‘like the massive gush of a waterfall which now threatened to drown both storyteller and listener’.55
What matters is not so much the main incident he remembers, which brutally conveys ‘how youngsters like Imli and him were transformed into what they became in the jungle’. More crucial is the fact that the morning after the act, the young Sashi and Imli decide anxiously and hesitantly to go back to see what they had done in the night. They, and the reader, have to look at the one they have destroyed. Facing your own violence therefore provides the core of the story as well as its narrative frame. As the grandfather tells this story, he starts to weep. The young boy is baffled – ‘after all, they were enemy soldiers, weren’t they?’ Why would you weep for your enemy? ‘Once in a lifetime,’ the grandfather says to the boy, ‘one ought to face the truth.’ To portray the Naga resistance as the agents rather than the victims of violence goes against the grain of how this community, with more than slight justification, views itself since they were after all the targets of the most violent barrage of state power. But for Temsula Ao, the future of her world depends on its doing so. ‘And the earth continued to be’ are the last words of the story.56
Finally Eimear McBride, who crashed onto the literary scene in 2013 with the publication of her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, which won the 2014 Bailey’s Prize, formerly the Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction. As has now become part of its mythical status, the novel languished unpublished for nine years until the independent Galley Beggar Press took the risk of publishing it. ‘This was something’, wrote the publisher Sam Jordison, ‘for which we were prepared to go bankrupt.’57 Commentaries have rightly focused on the form of the writing, above all on the shortness of the sentences and the absence of the comma – although that is not quite accurate. There are commas but they are used very sparingly and to dramatic effect. But the overall impression is of a voice starting and stopping, choking almost on its own breath, as in these now famous opening lines: ‘For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.’58
The fact that we are, as we soon discover, inside the womb simply adds to the suffocating effect. This is a voice – the only and unnamed voice in McBride’s novel – repeatedly halted in its tracks (a kind of breathlessness which places writing on the border between life and death). The break-up of language and the more-or-less dismemberment of the woman’s body are inseparable (the language manages to be as unrestrained and free-wheeling as it is broken and clipped). It a story of sexual abuse – by the uncle, and then, as we are later told, of the mother by her own father: ‘Lie across each other’s beds we tell each other sorts of things. It makes us such close friends. No bits pieces left unsaid. And truth now tell the truth we say. Her father felt her up. It makes her red and cry. Daddy still loves her the best but he wouldn’t want anyone else to try. That is love.’59 Abuse passes down the generations. Think back through the grandfathers, as, perverting Virginia Woolf, one might say. She famously suggested that women writers feed their imaginations back through the generations of their foremothers: ‘Who’, Woolf asked, ‘shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?’60
At the opposite pole from trauma as unspeakable, which is one fashionable account of trauma, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is traumatised speech with no exit. ‘Out my mouth like a mad thing raving clawing out my eyes.’ Once you start talking, you never stop (McBride might also be miming and sabotaging the Catholic confession). As a reader, you are given no cover. You have nowhere else to go other than the narrator’s head. Her brother is dying – she has known this since before she was born (from inside the womb where the novel begins). As a child, she is slapped, rammed, bruised and bloodied by her mother, who she also describes as her ‘close friend’.61 Her uncle rapes her as a thirteen-year-old girl. She responds with a form of crazed promiscuity that allows men, including the uncle, repeatedly to tear her to pieces. This is modernism as slut walk, language as a type of syncopated abuse – the constant line breakage as the literary form for injury or self-harm (as Anne Enright put it in her review of the book, ‘you can almost hear the blows in the rhythm of the words’).62 To take just one example – a rare sentence with commas: ‘I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked, me, spliffs and choked my neck until I said I was dead.’63 The fact that this can also be read as a nursery rhyme simply intensifies the violence.
At the end of the novel, when her brother has died, she walks out on the pious mourning party of the gathered relatives and heads for the woods where she knows – she seeks it out – she will meet with a violent sexual encounter, one of a trail that have run through the novel, but which, in terms of what it does to her, and to the language of the text, makes everything that has preceded it seem – almost – harmless. This passage, which is not the worst of it, comes
after the encounter itself when, you could almost say, she is collecting herself. Whenever I have presented McBride in public, I have always projected this passage for the audience to read silently to themselves as I cannot bear to read it out loud:
* * *
* * *
I lie thisright place for me with my fingers ripped onthebody Mine is Lie in the ground faceWhere I Right for meyes. Think about your face. Something. Shush now. Right now. FullofslimeThere better now. And I am. Done with this done. Fill the air up. Smear the blood up is there any no no t reeeeelly. My work is. I’ve done my I should do. I’ve done the this time really well. And best of. It was the best of. How. Ready now. I’m screaming in the blackness. Scream until I’m done my body. Full of nothing. Full of dirt the. I am. My I can. 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.64
* * *
* * *
Hardly any of the first reviewers and critics of this novel dwelled on the sexual violence at its core.65 Adam Mars-Jones, who wrote one of the earliest reviews in which he predicted its extraordinary success, told me he left it out for fear that readers would be put off. The moment will lead, more or less, to her drowning, which is how the novel ends. But note two things about this passage. First, the ‘you’ – as almost constantly throughout the text – is her brother (from before her own birth till after his own death): ‘Think about your face.’ The destruction of herself is therefore her loving return to him and a form of care: ‘There there’. This, incidentally, is why to describe this text as all interior monologue is not quite right. She is nearly always somehow speaking to him. Secondly, the narrator goes out looking for the violent encounter and knows where to find it. As well as everything else it monstrously is, it is also her achievement: ‘My work is. I’ve done my I should do. I’ve done the this time really well. And best of. It was the best of.’ Crucially, therefore, she is her own agent. Violence is sought. As well as being viciously what men do to her, it is a component of her grief. None of this mitigates anything; the protest against violence is not lessened but intensified. For me, the genius of McBride’s novel is that she can get all of this onto the same page or line or word, into the strangulated syntax of her prose.
If McBride plunges us into the worst – and I have not conveyed the half of it – she also, like Sexton, like Plath, gives us a voice that brilliantly orchestrates its own sorrow and rage. The fightback is in the words, in what a mind – the life of the mind no less – can do with its own history. Along with the necessary fight for public and legal recognition of violence against women, this continues to be, as I see it, one of women’s best weapons against cruelty and injustice. As feminists, we do not have – should not be asked – to choose between the two, at least not in the world I want to live in.
5
WRITING VIOLENCE
From Modernism to Eimear McBride
What might be the relationship between experiment in language and the violence of the modern world, between a truncated sentence and a truncated life? What drives syntax askew, makes language stall completely or spill over its proper borders, mess with itself? We have become used to thinking of modernism as an early-twentieth-century European crisis of representation provoked by the collapse of empires and impending war, when the seemingly fixed barriers of class, gender and racial privilege started to implode. In fact, for one influential version of this account, the crisis begins earlier, in 1848, when revolutions across Europe shredded the belief of the bourgeoisie that they were the class of progress. Up to that point, it was possible to see language as immune to social and political contradictions, lord of all it surveyed, blind to the role it plays in shaping a world it claimed merely, and innocently, to reflect. Modernist writing, famously difficult, is the appropriate form for that crisis. Most simply, it brings to an end the illusion that either language or the world can be made safe.
In recent years, a revival of the discussion about the difficulty of modernism, and its relation to the world’s violence, has taken two forms which might seem at first glance to be at odds with each other. In the first version, there is an intractable difficulty inside modernism, explored by its key writers and artists, which consists in a refusal to submit to the norms of representation.1 If that refusal was historical, tied to the early decades of the twentieth century – 1910 and 1922 competing for the key slot – it was because it alerted us to a crisis of authority. A broken world snatched from the writer and artist their confidence that reality could be seized, or simply recorded, in the work. All the work could do, or any viable work could do – although that was a huge amount – was to register its awareness of the fragility of its own grasp on what it struggled to represent. That this should be accompanied, some would say precipitated, by a loss of belief in the cohesion of the artistic – of any – consciousness is central to the argument. The most important literary modernists – say Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka – robbed us of a double illusion: that the world, that human subjectivity, could ever be fully known. The form of their writing, precisely its difficulty, was therefore the logical outcome of a dilemma, one which persists in our time, unless of course you think the world now hangs more or less perfectly together (the end-of-history argument which is now generally agreed to have fallen flat on its face). At the same time, and this is central to the recent version of this polemic, most writers today seem to carry on blissfully and naively as if none of this had ever happened.
The other case for the difficulty of modernism has been given one of its strongest articulations by the philosopher John Gray.2 For Gray the modern is contaminated by an Enlightenment dream from which it never wholly emancipated itself. His story is the reverse of the one just described, or rather its subtext. According to Gray, the modern – as distinct from literary modernism – is heir to the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of the world, a belief that spawned Nazism, and which gives rise to revolutionary terror of the kind represented by 9/11. The aim, which according to Gray unites these two hideous moments, is to produce a new human being, an aim that is unequivocally modern (we cannot therefore see Al-Qaeda as some uncivilised throwback in time). What Gray wants is a way of thought which relinquishes that fantasy and allows the world to proliferate in all its unmanageable difference from itself. Crucially that desire is not Utopian. Utopia is on the wrong side of this argument. It is a type of perversion that aims to subordinate the world to its own will. It is here that, to my understanding, Gray rejoins the first argument. In both cases, what is yearned for is a world that has shed the myth of perfection, of unity, of harmonious self-possession which is seen to have licensed some of the worst atrocities of modern times. Better hesitancy than total belief of any kind, and better a world that falls apart under the pressure of its own already existing fault lines, than an apparently seamless capitalism, as resilient as it is cruelly unjust, sweeping without check or inhibition across the globe.
If these two arguments might appear to contradict each other, it is only in the sense that Gray is describing the persistence of the Enlightenment myth which modernism was meant to have broken. Shadowed behind this discussion is Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ – the title of their famous 1944 book – where, they insist, the fallen nature of man cannot be separated from social progress and the belief in the reason of the world that upholds it. They are referring to anti-Semitism, to the ease with which ‘enlightened civilisation’ reverts to ‘barbarism’, of which Nazism was providing such a glaring instance. ‘Not merely the ideal’, they write at the end of the introduction, ‘but the practical tendency to self-destruction has always been characteristic of rationalism, and not only in the stage in which it appears undisguised.’ In such a world, language is always in danger of becoming ‘apology’ or ‘mechanised history’, of losing its dissonance. ‘There is’, they claim, ‘no longer any available form of linguistic expression which ha
s not tended towards accommodation to dominant currents of thought; and what a devalued language does not do automatically is proficiently executed by societal mechanisms.’3 For Adorno and Horkheimer, writing in the aftermath of Nazism, only a radical re-evaluation of the language we use will save us from the deadly plenitude of false, instrumental reason and the ravages of capitalism that accompany it.
If we want to grasp the interface between literary writing and the worst of the world, both in literary modernism and after, then, to my mind, these ideas go too far and not far enough. Too far in the suggestion that today there are barely any writers who remain true to the modernist vision, as if there were just a few select people, or writers, who were living disabused lives, only a handful aware of the ease with which language can become the handmaiden of a corrupt world. Toni Morrison, who I was dismayed to see summarily dismissed on these grounds by Gabriel Josipovici in his study of modernism, will be summoned as a vital counter-example in what follows, as one of several women writers discussed in these pages who take the link between violence and writing to its next stage.4 In any case, these dismissals are sheer elitism, a charge regularly levied against modernism, but in this case even truer of its fervent defenders, for whom so few writers – so few women writers – make the cut. But these same ideas also do not go far enough. We need to pause at this idea of fragmentation, loss of cohesion, and ask where it might take us. What does it mean in terms of anguish for a mind to lose its way, relinquish its authority over itself? And, to which violent history or histories might it bear witness in that process?
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 19
