Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English (review)
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Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish
Novel by Bridget English (review)
Julieann Veronica Ulin
James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 55, Number 3-4, Spring-Summer 2018, pp.
481-484 (Review)
Published by The University of Tulsa
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2019.0021
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725551
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]LAYING OUT THE BONES: DEATH AND DYING IN THE MODERN
IRISH NOVEL, by Bridget English. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2017. x + 236 pp. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.
B ridget English’s Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the
Modern Irish Novel departs from the postmortem hauntings that
populate Irish literature and criticism, the “voices of the dead . . .
missing people, unwritten histories, [and] unrealized potential,”
to focus on the literary representation of the process of dying itself
and the rituals surrounding it in an increasingly secular Ireland (27).
English moves beyond Peter Brooks’s interpretation of deathbed
scenes in literature as offering “a key moment of summing-up and
transmission,” a way of understanding “man’s time-bound-edness,
his consciousness of existence within the limits of mortality,”1 to con-
sider Irish literary representations of death particularly “shaped by a
cultural and literary experience that includes Roman Catholicism, the
Famine years, and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and martyrdom that
characterized its struggle for independence” (4). Laying Out the Bones
opens with English’s analysis of Nuala O’Faolain’s unsparing 2008
interview about her impending death from cancer without the con-
solation of religion, the endpoint of a trajectory English traces from
1922 to 2007 through James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-
Room, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks,
and Anne Enright’s The Gathering.2 This eighty-five-year period sees
the shift from communal practices around death enacted at home to
the removal of the sight and site of dying from the domestic space.
Given the tremendous social and religious changes that shape death
and burial practices in the forty-four years that separate the two
final novels in her analysis, one would welcome additional chapters
focused on the works in this gap. Laying Out the Bones contributes a
timely literary study to the growing body of interdisciplinary work
that considers the Irish reputation for “doing death well”3 even as the
Irish public and government continue to excavate a past in which so
many were denied what English calls “a good death” (3).
As the first of English’s selected novels, Ulysses serves as a contrast
to the texts that follow; as in the other novels, death “disturb[s] the
narrative order” and “disrupts fixed meanings and destabilizes nar-
rative authority” (18). Joyce incorporates the dead throughout the
novel to create “imaginative possibilities that are shut down by nor-
mative novelistic endings, ensuring that death functions as a point of
reinvention or rebirth” (18). Joyce scholars have long considered the
central place that death occupies in Ulysses and so will find surprising
English’s opening claim in her chapter that “the central importance
of death to Joyce’s Ulysses . . . tends to be overlooked by readers and
critics who focus instead on the famous ending, with Molly Bloom’s
481
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vitalist affirmation of life summed up in the word ‘Yes’” (23). The
chapter would have benefited from a more sustained engagement
with criticism focused on the representations of death and funeral
practices and their implications for the depiction of ritual as well as
language, form, and reinvention in the novel. English demonstrates
how Joyce’s resurrection of past characters, his insistence on the tex-
tual presence of the physical, decaying, grotesque body, his protean
language resisting closure, and his use of death and the afterlife serve
to reinvigorate the narrative structure by “bringing the living and the
dead into dialogue and submerging his readers in the infinite play of
language that mediates between the actualities of lived experience
and the meanings endowed upon that experience by death” (23). In
astute close readings of “Telemachus” and “Hades,” English argues
that Joyce’s design in Ulysses textually resists the meaninglessness
implied in Buck Mulligan’s dismissal of the dead as “tripes” (U 1.206)
and Bloom’s preference for Paddy Dignam’s corpse with its open ori-
fices sealed up and sanitized to disguise death in an imitation of life
(36, 43). In English’s framework, Joyce’s insistence on open, exposed,
or reanimated corpses serves less as a nightmare of history and more
as a site for potential revivification of the form of the novel itself. The
shift in form in “Circe” and the return of the deceased allow the novel
to remake itself and to facilitate Bloom and Stephen’s emergence from
their melancholic states “by incorporating their memories of the dead
into their lives” (46). That the dead they encounter provide no clear
answers for them confirms Joyce’s break from a structure in which the
novel uses death to confer retrospective meaning. Choosing narrative
recomposition over decomposition, Joyce concludes with Penelope’s
“rejuvenation of textual energies” not only through petite mort but
in a nod to “the premodern tradition of the Irish wake that featured
amusements for the living, often involving matchmaking and procre-
ation” (54).
It is a testament to the coherence of English’s book that each
chapter remains in conversation with the previous ones. Thus, while
Ulysses forms the primary subject of English’s first chapter, the novel
reemerges in subsequent passages as English explores recurring
themes. The figure of the dead or dying mother so central to Stephen
recurs in The Ante-Room and The Barracks. The constraints imposed
on the internal life of the dying by Catholicism and the capacity
for ritual to stifle the ability of the dying to express physical and
emotional pain form a key component of English’s analysis of The
Barracks. Beckett’s macabre humor in Malone Dies and the narrator’s
rejection of the religious ceremonies that seek to give shape to human
life might return us to Bloom’s most comic deflation of the Irish burial
customs he observes in “Hades”: “Only man buries. No, ants too” (U
6.809-10). English’s interpretation of the characters in The Gathering,
482
Complete_Issue2_55_3.indb 482 4/25/2019 2:51:22 PMforced to conduct a home wake for their brother at the insistence of
their mother, captures their frustration with continued indebtedness
to diminishing rituals. Such a reading prompts us to look anew at
moments where Bloom and Molly express similar doubts about the
practices and rituals that follow death (U 6.815-16, 18.1448-49).
English’s Laying out the Bones skillfully demonstrates how these
five texts challenge the form of the Irish novel by representing, rather
than denying, death. Taken together, they illustrate how the novel
negotiates the shift from the religious practices of ars moriendi to secu-
lar definitions of “a good death.” English’s wide-ranging conclusion
turns to the popular trope of the Irish wake at festivals and in media
representations, where it has achieved an afterlife even as many of the
practices on which it is based fade in Ireland, and she considers the
ongoing relevance of Irish literary narratives to contemporary debates
between religious and secular humanist worldviews on death.
Reviewed by Julieann Veronica Ulin
Florida Atlantic University
NOTES
1 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 95, xi.
2 See Marian Finucane, interview with Nuala O’Faolain on RTÉ radio (12
April 2008), and published as “Nuala O’Faolain Interview: ‘I Don’t Want
More Time. As Soon as I Heard I Was Going to Die, the Goodness Went Out
of Life,’” The Independent (13 April 2008), n.p.; James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans
Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); Kate O’Brien, The
Ante-Room (London: William Heinemann, 1934); Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Publishers, 1951); John McGahern, The
Barracks (London: Faber and Faber, 1963); and Anne Enright, The Gathering
(New York: Black Cat, 2007). Further references to Ulysses will be cited paren-
thetically in the text as U and by episode and line numbers..
3 Salvador Ryan, Death and the Irish: A Miscellany (Dublin: Wordwell Pub-
lishers, 2016) p. 5. Additional recent edited collections include James Kelly
and Mary Ann Lyons’s Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe (Kildare,
Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2013), and Lisa-Marie Griffith and Ciarán
Wallace’s Grave Matters: Death and Dying in Dublin, 1500 to the Present (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2016). Kevin Toolis’s memoir My Father’s Wake: How the
Irish Teach Us to Live, Love, and Die (New York: Da Capo Press, 2017), consid-
ers his father’s traditional Irish wake and what has been lost when death’s
visibility is erased by a modern death industry, asking, “Why have we lost
our way with death?” (p. 20). The 2018 American Conference for Irish Studies
featured papers that explored deathbed scenes in Irish-American fiction and
burial practices of Irish-Americans in New Orleans such as Beth O’Leary
Anish’s “Deathbed Scenes as Death of Community in Mid-20th Century
Irish-American Fiction,” and Laura D. Kelley’s “Waking the Dead: Old World
483
Complete_Issue2_55_3.indb 483 4/25/2019 2:51:22 PMJames Joyce Quarterly 55.3-4 2018
Traditions in a New World Environment” (19 and 22 June 2018), University
College Cork, Ireland. The discussion that followed papers by Sarah-Anne
Buckley on “Exploring Infant Death and Burial in Dublin City, 1919-1967:
A Case Study,” and Ciara Breathnach on ‘“A Good Death’: Burial Law and
Practices in Ireland 1857-1922,” centered on ethics and research in the after-
math of the exhumation of a mass grave at a Mother and Baby home in
Tuam between November 2016 and February 2017 following research by the
historian Catherine Corless (21 June 2018), University College Cork, Ireland.
Debates over the continued exhumation and identification of the remains at
Tuam are ongoing as of this writing.
THE IRISH FAIRY TALE: A NARRATIVE TRADITION FROM THE
MIDDLE AGES TO YEATS AND STEPHENS, by Vito Carrassi, trans-
lated by Kevin Wren. Lanham, Maryland: John Cabot University
Press, 2012. ix + 207 pp. $35.99.
I n The Trembling of the Veil, W. B. Yeats’s volume of memoirs pub-
lished in the same year as Ulysses, the poet recounts his first meet-
ing with Douglas Hyde, genteel scion of three generations of Church
of Ireland clergymen.1 Yeats was struck by Hyde’s “considerable
popularity” as an Irish-language poet and records “mowers and
reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry” (Veil 100). “Years
afterwards,” he stood at the Roscommon man’s side “and listen[ed]
to Galway mowers singing his Gaelic words without knowing whose
words they sang” (Veil 100). This easy commute between authorship
and the cultural commons, between writing and orality, is central to
Hyde’s The Love Songs of Connacht: Being the Fourth Chapter of the “Songs
of Connacht,” a volume to which Joyce was no stranger.2 Serialized in
the Weekly Freeman in 1892 and co-published as a book the following
year by T. Fisher Unwin in London and by Gill and Son in Dublin,
Love Songs was, as Clare Hutton has determined, “one of Dublin’s
best-selling books in the Autumn of 1893” and remained a popular
work in Ireland over the years of the Irish literary revival.3 According
to Hutton, five commercial reprints appeared between 1893 and 1909,
which, taken together with the limited fine-press edition issued by the
Dun Emer Press in 1904, indicates a broad, enduring popular appeal
for the collection (379).4
The poems were taken “from the lips of the Irish-speaking peas-
antry” or else “extracted from MSS. . . . made by different scribes dur-
ing this century,” as Hyde explains in a preface addressed to George
Sigerson.5 This imbrication of speech and the written word also fig-
ures repeatedly in the work’s early reception. J. M. Synge, encounter-
ing a copy in a homestead in the course of a visit to the Aran Islands at
the turn of the century, persuaded his host to read some of the verses
484
Complete_Issue2_55_3.indb 484 4/25/2019 2:51:22 PMYou can also read
