Against Reference: On Reading Objects in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's The Bray House

Ireland as we know it—as it could be known in the way we know things—is gone. In the near future depicted in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's novel The Bray House (1990), it has been decimated by ecological catastrophe and unchecked British nuclear ambitions. The narrator, Dr. Robin Lagerlof, is an archaeologist with an authoritarian streak who mounts an expedition to Ireland from Sweden, leading a small team that includes Karen, also a researcher, and two young volunteers, the couple Karl and Jenny. They land near Dublin, and after exploring Bray's desolate landscape of ash, discover and excavate the titular house. Robin's report, which occupies the entire midsection of the book, details what she discovers in the home, which was inhabited by a family named MacHugh at the end of the twentieth century. As the novel progresses, flaws in Robin's narration raise questions not only about her personal trustworthiness, but also about the validity of her methodology, through which she claims the ability to assemble a true and full account of the MacHughs from their possessions. The MacHughs' things, as rendered by Ní Dhuibhne, resist Lagerlof's stern management, and in doing so counter the novel's penchant for the ethnographic. Objects in The Bray House become increasingly ambivalent, raising questions about the limits of mimesis, as well as the ability of object-oriented criticism to account for the status of objects in the novel. As the gap widens between Robin's report and the world represented by the text, the reader is drawn to ask: How faithfully do objects, including novels, refer back to the world?

Robin sees objects as unequivocally referential. Her report, she insists, "illumines the lives of millions. It documents a really important, lost culture. A great civilization."¹ Jenny, disillusioned with Robin's methods by the end of the novel, sardonically raises the possibility of a living MacHugh coming along and repudiating the findings in the report, to which Robin responds:

my story is true. It doesn't need a MacHugh to prove it. It's true because my methodology is foolproof: positivistic and holistic. It has to work. Solid empirical research, rigid logical analysis, coupled with a vast knowledge of all circumstantial data. The story I'll write is the true story of the MacHughs. Even if a MacHugh came along and suggested otherwise, I would believe that. The MacHugh would be wrong.

(BH 248)

For Robin, objects are repositories of social history with referential capabilities that exceed those of people. But in The Bray House, objects do not always tell the truth. They slip away and recede; now they seem one thing, now something else entirely.

In a broad sense, the instability of meaning surrounding objects forestalls interpretive practices like Robin's, which see literary objects simply as information-rich artifacts; if no one can agree on what objects mean, clearly they do not refer directly or unambiguously to any one thing or participate in simply one narrative. In The Bray House, the uncertainty of objects mirrors anxieties about the preservation and transmission of Irish identity just as the nation belatedly entered the age of late capitalism, emerging from the Troubles and on the verge of the Celtic Tiger. Insofar as objects refer back to this moment—a time when questions about what objects can or cannot represent were especially fraught—it is often not as reliable informants, but as markers of the ambivalence of representation, history, and memory. In other words, historical crisis gets taken up in the very structure of objects, which recede from interpretation and become sites of narratological and epistemological contestation.

By turning her present into the novel's past and her nation into a site of archaeological inquiry, Ní Dhuibhne foregrounds the ignored detritus of everyday life. Objects that might seem mundane to the author become of scholarly value to the narrator, denaturalizing assumptions about historical and geographical frames. Such narrative displacement binds the contested status of objects in the novel to the historical moment at which The Bray House appeared. In 1990, the...