Night

"Edna O’Brien is one of the greatest living writers in the language, and this extraordinary short novel from 1972 was out of print for a long time. It was republished a couple of years ago. I’d want to pick it in any case, but in comparison with Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway it gives us a completely different approach to depicting the stream of consciousness. There’s nothing that could be more stream of consciousness than this novel. You’ve got this woman, Mary Hooligan, who’s lying alone in a four-poster bed. She’s just taken a pill to help her sleep, the curtains are drawn, she is alone with her thoughts. The way she ranges, the way she travels internally over the period of time in the novel, is incredible. “She revels in consciousness, in memory, in language, in the ability of the human mind to seek connections in the darkness” With Joyce you’ve got this attempt to depict what someone’s inner speech would sound like if you could put a microphone in their head. With Mrs Dalloway you’ve got this attempt to orchestrate the multiplicity of minds, minds in interaction. With Edna O’Brien, you’ve got more of a journey through memory and that’s it. What Mary Hooligan’s stream of consciousness involves is these extraordinary enfolded narratives and memories. She is thinking about her childhood in the town of Coose. Tiny things trigger new memories. At one point, she sees a feather on the bed and that triggers connections. On another occasion she is dreaming of custard. She is remembering her mother and her funeral and portraying the funeral as a rather comic affair. She is remembering all sorts of sexual encounters, which are bracingly honest and explicit. It is extraordinarily sexually honest for the period. And she is just revelling in consciousness, in memory, in language, in the ability of the human mind to seek connections in the darkness, connections with other people, but also to seek its own meaning, to seek to draw the thread of a life together. I think, yes. Often when you ask people about their inner experience, they say it can’t just be related in the way you can relate an utterance. It then becomes a question of, is it language? Is it some other kind of communication of the self with the self? And certainly you find that when you ask people to describe moments of experience in fine details. They say, ‘Look, there aren’t any words. There are no words. There are no images. There’s just the thought. There’s just an experience.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Russ has a term for it; he calls it ‘unsymbolized thinking.’ It is a kind of thinking that happens without any symbols at all. It doesn’t have words. And I wonder whether some of that stuff is actually your inner speech that has been so thoroughly condensed and abbreviated, like how Joyce is depicting Bloom in a speech that’s stripped down, telegraphic, condensed, compressed. Maybe when that process goes to its ultimate end you end up with something that is in speech, but just about everything in its language has been stripped away from it. I don’t really know what that thing is. I don’t know whether that is language. A psychologist would give one answer, a philosopher would give another. Maybe what you end up with then is just another kind of thinking, another kind of thought. These are really fascinating questions, but I do think we need to ask them, and literature gives us a really interesting way in."