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Wild Decembers

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from: Chris Kelly

Glimpses of a Placeless Place

Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2000, at 4:18 PM ET

Dear Daphne,

It would be remiss of me if I didn't say that I begin this discussion with more than a slight feeling of trepidation. You see, my relationship with Edna O'Brien is nearly as long as my relationship with literature itself. As a child in an Irish household where books were respected but not read, I can recall with fondness the feeling I had when I first cracked the spine of O'Brien's Country Girls. Though it seems a strange to me now, I suppose I was driven to read the book--indeed, to possess it--because it was to us a "a horrible, forbidden thing." It seemed to me, at that time, that everybody was talking about Edna O'Brien. Everybody had an opinion about her. Of course, very few had actually read her work. A minor detail, really. Especially when you consider that her works were censored in Ireland and therefore very difficult to come by. Not that that troubled anybody--the much more important concerns of that age had much more to do with her poor family, her use of curse words and blasphemies, and who the hell did she think she was anyway?

I certainly didn't know, but I wanted to find out, wanted to know what all the ruckus was about. I can perhaps confess from a distance of 20 years or so that if the book failed to live up to my adolescent fantasies, it certainly became the stuff of my dreams. Dreams that I never knew I had, or perhaps never could have had if not for Edna.

So when I come upon a book such as Wild Decembers in full maturity, I can't help but look back. The book is, of course, vintage O'Brien, full of so many dark familiars, and whose success, in my estimation, relies so much upon her extraordinary ability to make us witness them anew.

In reading this book, I found myself thinking about what it must have meant for Edna to have been censored in Ireland, to live in exile in London, and yet, in some very significant way, never really leave Ireland.

Take the setting: Cloontha, "a locality within the bending of an arm," seems a unique creation for O'Brien. I'd like to suggest here that Edna has transformed her own absence from Irish rural living into a potent narrative device. As a reader, I can't help but think that we somehow apprehend this mountainy, "placeless place" in much the same way that Edna does, or that, in fact, its inhabitants do--which is to say in glimpses. This Cloontha, it seems to me, is a world steeped in tradition but uncertain of its history. It is a place where past and present seem not to follow each other in a cause-and-effect fashion, but rather seem to exist simultaneously, forever pushing and pulling, the result a rupture for which there is no seal. Put another way, Cloontha seems to me a postmodern society still grappling with modernism. It is also very much an imagined place, one coming to grips with what its memory might be composed of before it's even witnessed the present.

It's curious, too, the way in which O'Brien's narrative technique seems a perfect complement to the setting. Like the Down by the River, the book that most immediately preceded it, Wild Decembers unfolds in a series of short breezy chapters chockablock with rich, shimmering prose. Unlike that book, however, Decembers relies heavily upon song, letters, and other such "found" texts. It is a measure of Ms. O'Brien's artistry that she gives song to these fragments. If, at times, it seems that the voice doesn't hold, it's only that another has taken over. By turns operatic, symphonic, and even at times resembling a sean-nos seisiun (a form of traditional Irish singing), O'Brien's book seems to declare itself most forcefully by invoking its own limits. Somehow though, the song lingers.

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4

from: Chris Kelly

Glimpses of a Placeless Place

Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2000, at 4:18 PM ET

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This week, a discussion of Edna O'Brien's Wild Decembers (click here to buy it). Chris Kelly is an Irish writer who lectures on English and Irish studies at New York University. Daphne Merkin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes "Reckonings," a column on personal and cultural life. She is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays (click here to buy it).

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