Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English (review)

Bridget English’s Laying Out the Bones investigates the representation of death and dying in modern Irish novels, and attends to both the thematic treatment of death as well as death’s role in narrative structure. The resulting book is exceedingly accessible and full of critical explication—a smart piece of criticism that one could safely assign to undergraduates. English works from Peter Brooks’s use of Freud’s Eros and Thanatos as structurally important to the novelistic form to examine how novelistic structure responds to death through the modern period in Ireland. She analyzes five novels, beginning with Ulysses, and moves on through works by Kate O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, and Anne En-right. The chronological order in which she discusses these works allows English to represent changes in the treatment of death over time. Death in Ireland, she suggests, has become more secular and more individual; it appears that Irish culture needs to interrogate its ability to address death within contemporary norms so foreign to their traditions.

The text attends also to the combination of pagan and Christian practices in Irish traditions around death, especially the wake itself. Much of English’s analysis responds to the ways these Irish novels critique Catholicism’s hold on Irish ways of dealing with death, and at times, how these novels “write back” to the once nearly universal Catholic rituals. Laying Out the Bones argues that narrative representation of death provides a way for readers to understand changes in the culture during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

For English, Joyce’s Ulysses uses narrative to represent, and then overcome, death. She pays considerable attention to Joyce’s stylistic exuberance, which, for English, explains his text’s attempt to use language to undercut narrative endings, and thus to undercut death itself. As the novel begins with Stephen Dedalus in mourning for his mother and guilty for his inability to pray for her, then moves to Bloom’s role inside Dignam’s funeral procession, English reminds readers that several individual deaths—and metaphoric ones, like the death of Irish Gaelic and the demise of Stephen’s Catholic belief—punctuate Joyce’s novel. Yet for English, the repetitions and reversals of the text, especially in “Circe” where the dead reappear, represent Joyce’s use of narrative to cheat death.

In Chapter Two, English argues that Kate O’Brien’s 1934 novel The Ante-Room reflects the Eros-Thanatos conflict directly, by conflating the death of desire with physical death in a character who unexpectedly kills himself. According to English, O’Brien’s novel interrogates Catholicism’s requirement that individuals subsume their thoughts and wishes within the practices of the communal religion. She suggests that the tensions of individuality rise to the surface in the face of death; O’Brien declines to advocate for either the Catholic or the secular approach to death.

English next approaches Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951), the middle text in his trilogy, arguing that it focuses on the process of dying; Beckett’s novel differs from Joyce’s in its lack of surety that language can cheat death. In the Beckett chapter, English complicates her attention to Brooks’s argument that Thanatos pushes the narrative structure of novels as readers work toward closure. Malone’s non-death, she points out, undercuts the surety of endings—but she points out that Beckett uses the novel to search for new answers to understanding death. English’s careful explication of subtle reversions and playful use of the ars moriendi or “good death” tradition, extending Erik Tonning’s work, adds to her thoughtful treatment of Beckett’s novel. Equally crucial for English’s work is the conflict between individualism and community, which she recognizes in most of the novels. The chapter where this becomes the focus is her analysis of John McGahern’s first novel, The Barracks (1963). Her work examines...