Eilis's Reviews

 

 

Eilis Ni Dhuibhne has reviewed books regularly in the Irish Times for several years. These reviews can be accessed in the Irish Times Archive, at www.irishtimes.ie

She has also reviewed for the Sunday Tribune and The Times, and for journals Bealoideas and Inis.

 

 

 RECENT REVIEWS

Mary Shine Thompson, ed., The Fire i’ the Flint. Essays on the Creative Imagination.. Dublin, Four Courts, 2009.     ‘What role does the imagination play in creative processes, artistic and otherwise? What role does creativity play in the way humans engage with the world?’ Mary Shine Thompson asks in her eloquent introduction to this collection of articles, based on the third series of Seamus Heaney lectures, given at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, in 2004-5.        Some of the distinguished contributors address the question directly, some more elliptically. Seamus Heaney’s typically lucid analysis of Patrick Kavanagh’s ways of fulfilling the artist’s brief to both witness and transcend experience is itself the epitome of truly imaginative writing – he sifts the evidence but makes a ‘transcendent’  leap to an illuminating conclusion.     Like that word, ‘transcendence’, plenty of the terminology used to talk about creativity has a religious flavour.  But what terms are available to describe it?  Alan Titley suggests, in his delightfully lively essay,  that words such as wonder, mystery, and imagination ‘work much better than anything else.  Susan McKenna Lawlor’s  term  ‘quantum leap’, in her clear  mapping of the use of the imagination in scientific thought about the origin of the multiverse, may appeal more to some.  In his brilliant after-word, Ciaran Benson offers this succinct description: ‘a precondition for becoming ‘aesthetically absorbed’ is that one cedes control in the construction of consciousness temporarily to the power of the object’ (p. 195)  This mouthful he clarifies: it means that the egocentre (that spot behind your eyes, which is where you perceive your thinking to occur) takes a holiday. As he writes, there is a great deal more to be said about this.            And there is a great deal more to be said about this great book than I can fit in here.  Every article in it is  thrilling. The words leap off the page in all of them. Seymour Papert and Kieran Egan are stunning on education and creativity; Jones Irwin poses the intriguing question ‘Whither imagination after postmodernism?’  Bridget Riley’s ‘Working: A Visual essay’  dispenses entirely with language in a remarkable‘visual essay’ about influences on her art.    I left the articles on music, Patricia Flynn’s wonderful ‘Words and Music: a Dialogue of Maker and Materials’, and Peter Michael Hamel, on musical improvisation, until last, because I’m not an especially musical person. But Hamel’s article is so honest, so brimful of insight and  original observations, that I immediately wanted everyone to read the book for it alone.    However, I had a similar response to almost every essay in the collection.   Seldom have I read anything which discusses with such insight, such brilliance, and so entertainingly, what creativity – the work and play of the artist – is all about. 

  

(Inis)  

Erica Wagner, Seizure. London, Faber, 2007. 226 p.  £10.99      In this, her first novel, Erica Wagner, an American living in London for many years, eschews all convention and writes a work which is weird in the original sense of the word.    The narrative focuses on Janet, a young woman who lives with her partner, Stephen, a concert violinist, in London. Their lifestyle is gracious and Stephen is a beloved and exemplary partner. Janet has problems, however: a strange past, in which her mother was lost when she was three; a recent miscarriage; and, pivotal to the plot and theme of the story, a neurological disorder which subjects her to regular seizures, not specified but perhaps epileptic fits, or something similar.     Janet receives a sudden phone call from a firm of solicitors, and is told that she has inherited a house, in an unnamed place but clearly Scotland, or Shetland or the Orkneys, from her recently deceased mother. In one of the novel’s not quite solved enigmas, it emerges that her mother did not, after all, die when Janet was an infant, but had been living until relatively recently.   Janet drives north to see her inheritance, ‘The Shieling’. When she arrives there, she finds that the house occupied by a wild-looking man called Tom – a garage mechanic and covert sculptor - who refuses to move out. And the story goes on from there to its conclusion, as wild and unorthodox as Tom himself.   Very alert and learned readers may have observed that Janet and Tom are names which occur in one of the most celebrated of all Scottish ballads, ‘Tam Lin’ – a Child ballad, known in many versions, based on an international folktale about a man who has been transformed into some sort of monster or elf and can only be redeemed by the love of a particular woman. ‘Hold me fast, don’t let me pass,’ is one of its recurring lines, uttered by Tam Lin as he changes into various nasty creatures on his way to becoming fully human. All stories of human/animal/supernatural  transformation exert a powerful fascination, and this one has a particular attraction.   It is, for instance, the inspiration for one of the very few stories Alice Munro has located in Scotland ‘Hold Me Fast, Don’t let me pass’ – a story which she sets near Caterwaugh, the residence of the demon king in the Child ballad.     There is no other similarity between Wagner’s novel and the Munro story – apart from this: that they are both totally original modern treatments of the old narrative, and both outstanding works of art.   Wagner blends the ‘Tam Lin’ story – to which she never directly refers -  with other legends and folktales, of seal maidens, selkies, mermaids, and with a very fully realized story set in the real modern world, questioning the barriers we normally place between fantasy, imagination, story, and reality.  One of her points, in fact  maybe the only ‘message’ of this novel, is that the brain seizures suffered by Janet serve to break down the boundaries between the fantastic and the real world, open up the gates to fairyland, as it were, for her. The novel appears to question the validity of these barriers – if it has a conclusion, it is certainly that such divisions, into normal and abnormal, real and imagined, are irrelevant to love and literature.   Layering personal memory, legend and folktale, landscape, seascape, a vivid present reality, the novel has a circular narrative, which brings us back to the point where we started. Although it has a contemporary setting,  it transcends time and context and is entirely focused on the story it is telling, a story of  emotions which are as  compelling as the vast natural world which surrounds ‘The Shieling’: He heard the grass tear in their teeth, he heard the wind in the wall, the sea, he listened and watched with his ears and eyes wide. His heart beat steadily. He pulled a hand from his pocket, rested it on the cold wall. Lichen yellow and grey at the edge of his vision, rough under his fingers. (p.52) 

    Erica Wagner has written a book which is unique, which defies categorization. She has managed to weave  familiar old tales, legends, psychology, neurology, and topography,  into a fresh, poetic, tapestry, a celebration of the human imagination and the power of story. It is a project which could have gone badly wrong. But it is a triumph because she has woven her words well. The composition is subtle, the language is superb. Nothing could be as poetic, as stunning, as magical, as the original stories which inspired this book. But The Seizure comes close. It  is a magnificent novel.

(Irish Times)

 Mark McGurl, The Program Era. Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. London, Harvard University Press, 2009. 455 pp.     Creative Writing has been taught as a subject in universities in the United States for almost a hundred years. The most famous programme, the MFA (Master’s in Fine Arts) at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, started in 1936. It was in the period immediately after WW2, however, that the subject began to take off. By 1975, fifty- two universities offered postgraduate degrees in Creative Writing. In 2004, there were more than three hundred such courses on offer in the United States, and over seven hundred universities teaching creative writing at undergraduate level. And still people ask ‘Can it be taught?’   Mark McGurl surveys the development of Creative Writing as a university subject and its place in the history of fiction in the United States.  His account of the great writing teachers – Paul Engles, Wallace Stegner, John Gardner – and of the evolving pedagogy of the subject is immensely useful. Fond of classification, he sees the teaching of fiction  as falling into three principal eras:  ‘Show Don’t Tell’ (1890-1960), ‘Find Your Voice’, (1960-1975), and ‘Creative Writing at Large’, (1975-now.) He analyses the typical  styles of these periods, and Irish writers or historians of fiction will be find much food for thought in what he has to say about literary trends. Most interesting, though, is his sensitive exploration of the interplay between individual writers and the Creative Writing progammes.  For instance, he demonstrates the influence of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on the style of Flannery O’Connor. The Iowa method in the 1940s, when she took her MFA there, was to focus intensely on the word and the sentence, to edit and revise obsessively, and to strive to eliminate the personal from the text – she is a ‘show don’t tell’ writer par excellence ‘We can learn how not to write,’ she said, in her typically tart way (in lectures and interviews she was far from impersonal).  Ken Kesey, on the other hand, was a product of the ‘Find Your Voice’ school of the 1960s, where instead of allowing the story to unfold itself as if independent of its writer, the storyteller became almost more significant than the text itself, as the individual asserted him/herself within the institution. However, McGurl points out that Kesey wrote what is perhaps the most anti-institutional of all novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, from within the institution of the MFA programme at Stanford.          McGurl is far too clever to make sweeping claims for university writing programmes. He discusses the teaching of fiction within its complex historical and ideological contexts. Thus the expressionism of the 1960s pedagogy clearly arose from the rebellious spirit of the age. The universities react to the zeitgeist as well as prescribing it – more so in the United States than here.  Indeed,  McGurl’s main conclusion  is that the biggest influence on American postwar fiction was the democratization of university education in general,  rather than the effect of the Creative Writing programmes per se.  Thus, he points out that writers such as Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, or Jayne Anne Philips – all of whom  in fact took MFAs in Creative Writing – might not have emerged at all had it not been for the opening of the universities  to the lower middle classes (a term he uses loosely).   McGurl  makes the point that the expansion of Creative Writing as a subject was one reflection of the democratization of  education – as well as opening its doors to the masses, the academy welcomed ‘creativity’ into its erstwhile authoritarian and elitist scholarly fortress. While this theory sounds convincing, it is interesting that there was no such rush to welcome creativity in the form of creative writing courses into European universities – although they have been much more democratic in admission policy than their American counterparts in the post-war period.   Indeed, it is only very recently that Creative Writing has been offered as a subject in any Irish university, although the role of ‘Free Education’  in the story of Irish writing has long been acknowledged, usually by the writers themselves - vide Seamus Heaney’s comments in his recent memoir, or Theo Dorgan’s lecture on ‘O’Malley’s Children’.    Opinionated and lively,  McGurl’s book is definitely in the ‘Find Your Own Voice’ mode – scholarship too has its fashions.  Not everyone will agree with all his conclusions. But he delivers a cornucopia of exciting new ideas and insights in a work which will be indispensable reading for teachers and students of creative writing, and for anyone interested in modern fiction. Perhaps McGurl’s most important contribution to literary scholarship will be to stimulate further investigation into the contexts of literary production. Writing is not carried out in a vacuum.  The romantic notion of the solitary genius working  in his attic or a room of her own is demolished. It would be interesting to see some studies of the relationship of university syllabuses (eg in traditional English or Irish degree courses) to modern Irish literature, or the links between, say, the publishing industry and what is written.      McGurl concludes that creative writing programmes play an essentially beneficial role, artistically. The ‘Can it be Taught?’ objection is thoroughly redundant.  The graduates of Creative Writing MAs in the US constitute a roll call of the greatest fiction writers of the twentieth century. (And I can think, sacrilegiously,  of some good Irish writers of the past whose work might have been even better had they had the benefit of a Creative Writing course.) What we need to ask is not can it be taught, but how it can be taught, and  can it be taught better? In other words, the questions we should  be constantly asking, about the teaching of literature, or medicine, or law, or anything.  And these issues  too are discussed in this complex, energetic and fascinating book. 

(Irish Times)