School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemBlind spots in motion: antinomies of distance in Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016)( 2018)Eimear McBride is an Irish experimental novelist whose striking two novels—A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016)—are bound together by the dreams and voices of their narrators. In them, McBride recuperates from literary modernism a technique of formal opacity, which she uses to aim for transparency in representing sex and sexual trauma. I examine McBride’s novels according to the dialectic of transparency and opacity, showing that blind spots, as well as distance, make vision possible. I investigate McBride’s avowed aim to collapse distance and dissolve boundaries between the readers and narrators of her novels. By showing that they draw attention to the irreducible gap between reader and text, I argue that McBride’s stated aim—like her impulse towards transparency—exhibits its own impossibility. I argue that transparency and the dissolution of boundaries are beyond the capacity of representation; there is always a quotient of opacity in transparency and a measure of distance in closeness. Precisely through opacity and distance, McBride finds a paradoxically appropriate form for the representation of sexual trauma, which serves to circumvent its eroticisation. Both of her novels figure their readers within their fields of vision, casting reader as witness to the traumas they depict. McBride, I suggest, has much to offer contemporary culture: she asks us to consider the antinomies of transparency by showing us the power and possibilities of literary opacity. She wills us to think desire, sex, and sexual trauma in their most startling and uncomfortable dimensions.