Half-formed Visions of McBride and Joyce

The opening chapters of Eimear McBride's "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" are confusing to say the least. It took me two readings just to figure out the setting for most of it, the main narrator, and basic information such as the structure of the family portrayed. However - like most stream-of-consciousness works - what it lacks in clarity, "Girl" more than offsets by it's raw vibrancy.

When McBride opts for stream-of-consciousness, she decides that the feel of the story, what it has the potential to evoke in the reader, is more important than it's specifics. As such, its hard to give a bulleted list of what happens in the first chapters. There's a family a boy is born. The brother is sick, he's healed, now he's not quite living "but he's just stopped dying". The parents fight, the father leaves. A second child is born, evidently the narrator, even though she's also been first-person narrating everything preceding her birth. The vagueness in these chapters make sense given the narration: that of a narrator going off the secondhand stories of others, and memories from her very first days being mashed together into a blurred half-formed vision of the past. The narrator remembers a stern but loving feminine force, this must be her mother; a kindred spirit, comforting her, and subjected to the same circumstances as her, this must be her brother; the shadow of masculine force, must be the father. Our narrator, however, can't recall the names, their faces, so there's uncertainty on some level, not on any rational level - of course these outline memories and impressions belong to these roles, but there's still some obscurity. So the father becomes the "shape of a man" leaving behind jigsaw-like "empty spaces where fathers should be". Sensations are recalled, but not their causes: "Hand on my head." Whose hand? The vagueness also manifests as an abundance of pronouns: all people lose their names, becoming "he"s and "she"s, all objects lose their definite identities, becoming "it"s and "that"s, instead, direct objects and names seem to be only used in the context of figurative language and indirect allusions, both making it extremely difficult to tell what is being discussed by the narrator. Formal structure breaks down: incomplete sentences, interrupted thoughts, confusing grammar, no punctuation to differentiate between narration, dialogue, and description. All of these combine to make reading "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" a bit like experiencing sculpture with your hands, blindfolded: it can be frustrating, and you're almost definitely missing some of the finer points, but rewarding nonetheless.

It is clear that McBride - as she has stated it herself - owes a massive intellectual debt to James Joyce. Joyce's classic Irish novel "Ulysses" is often hailed as the most difficult English work to read, primarily because it exhibits many of the same qualities as McBride's "Girl". "Ulysses" has very similar approaches to formal structure as "Girl", namely, ignoring it. Additionally, it has a similar usage of pronouns, to the same confusing effect as in "Girl". The one large difference in obfuscation tactics is in the imagery. Whereas McBride utilizes vague, outlined images, Joyce employs a more free-association approach. By following loose associations between words - be they linguistic (puns, homophones, homonyms, acronyms, Latin translations), religious, historic, or pop-culture in derivation - Joyce follows rapid fire tangents, perpetually circling around the central image or occurrence at hand, seemingly only able to relate to it via these third-party sources.

Both of these styles are very fascinating, however, I'm not quite sure what they are saying about Irish culture. Maybe McBride is suggesting that Irishmen can only see themselves as positioned among these - possibly outgrown, possibly broken from the outset - Irish totemic roles and stereotypes. Maybe Joyce is suggesting a similar thing, but about the more day-to-day grassroots Irish culture.