I have strong reactions to books because I feel their
authors so intensely, particularly in the language they use, even in a very
small piece. Novels which have become well-known in the last century, sometimes
referred to as the “century of the self,” have dealt mostly with the inner
lives of characters. As John Bayley says, “if the early novel saw the
individual as part of the social whole, the post-Dostoevsky novel has come to
represent his awareness of himself as a solitary being, who wishes to dream and
to act ‘as he likes.’”
Writers ride the crest of a cultural wave. The wave
throughout most of my life has raised up those who plumb the depths of their
existence, who examine themselves and their struggles with the social world
around them. A writer who found herself, somewhat to her surprise, surfing the
wave of the Sixties is Edna O’Brien. Her characters wish to dream and act as
they like!
The consequences for O’Brien’s characters are devastating.
Set against an all-pervasive Irish Catholic church, which is more oppressive
and dangerous than salutary, Edna O’Brien’s language is controlled, but
underlaid with violence. The innocence of childhood foreshadows the scars of
maturity, chronicling “unflinchingly the patterns of life for women, from the
high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair,”
according to the cover material on The Country Girls Trilogy. “My
novel,” O’Brien says of her first, “was completed in three weeks. It had
written itself and I was merely the messenger . . . The words tumbled out, like
the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft.”
Out of sync with the cultural wave for most of my life, I
first felt it when I wrote a letter to my college newspaper in April, 1966. The
letter expressed my belief that people were spending their energy criticizing
what went on around them and not appreciating what they had been given. “Must
the opinions we voice be so negative generally?” I plaintively ask. (Thanks to
an amazing archive program, the letter exists on-line today!) In that year,
when the political left was intent on naming and reforming “the system,” this
was not a popular sentiment!
Seeing the glass as mostly full, rather than mostly empty,
the social whole as invoking the individual, are suspect in literature. The
naked inner self and its authenticity still rules. I credit my remarkable
parents with giving me the strength of mind, as well as their iconoclasm, to
buck the prevailing winds. And of course, my own journey includes a great deal
of soul-searching, as well as youthful exploration and rebellion. I do wish to
lay claim to language as constructive, however; its ability to build as well as
critique. (I'm aware that skirting the edges of platitudes can be dangerous!)
Cultural winds and waves change. I feel it in my bones.
Violence and despair are not the only fruits of experience. Language which
reflects hard-won inner peace may, at some point, be valued. It depends on
where the story stops.
