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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English Julieann Veronica Ulin (bio) 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. Bridget 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 consider 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 consolation 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 narrative authority” (18). Joyce incorporates the dead throughout the novel to create “imaginative possibilities that are shut down by normative 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 [End Page 481] 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 textual 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 orifices sealed up and sanitized to disguise death in an imitation of life (36, 43). In English’s framework, Joyce’s insistence on...