LITERARY CRITICISM: RACHAEL SEALY LYNCHreviews Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Perspectives,edited by Rebecca Pelan
THIS COLLECTION of essays on the remarkable contemporary writer Éilis Ní Dhuibhne provides what is possibly the only critical format capable of encompassing the work of this richly diverse writer: her output takes so many shapes that it requires a multivalent set of responses.
Some essays in this collection are weaker than the rest, succumbing, for example, to an abundance of plot summary. Taken in its entirety, however, Perspectives deserves real praise both for its fine editing and its individual interlocking essays. The value of this collection is twofold. First, it offers us the overarching “big picture”, and second, it allows us to think of the portions of Ní Dhuibhne’s output with which we are already familiar in a new or enhanced way.
Of the many strengths of this collection, two deserve particular mention. First, its editor, Rebecca Pelan, and her contributors, work together to identify and connect the many dots on the canvas of Ní Dhuibhne’s writing. The result is a portrait of almost unimaginable diversity. The critical essays examine Ní Dhuibhne as a novelist, short story writer, playwright for both stage and radio, poet, children’s writer, bilingual author, folklorist, and scholar. Her contributions to any one of these categories are formidable. The evidence laid out in this book of the range of her work must surely enrich our reading of the individual arms of her achievements, each one of which is significant. Her scholarly contributions in the area of folklore alone include an array of scholarly articles and translations and an important contribution to the International Folktales section of the Field Day Anthology.
Secondly, the essays explore Ní Dhuibhne’s acute awareness that a single lens is limited in its power. She is dedicated to the erasure of boundaries and binaries, bravely crossing the dividing lines between categories and genres, past and present, traditional and modern, orality and the written word, Irish and English, time and space, home and exile, the universal and the particular, fiction and scholarship. In the case of Irish and English, both language and nationality burst out of their containers and commingle in her fiction.
Several outstanding essays attend to Ní Dhuibhne's use of interleaving and slippage in a particularly revealing way. Christine St Peter focuses on the novel The Dancers Dancing, showing how the narrative layers "events in modern Ireland with old stories of infanticide in Irish history and folklore" as a way of (in Ní Dhuibhne's own words) "negotiating the boundaries of different worlds". Anne Fogarty analyses the "shifting spaces and timeframes" in the short stories, shifts that result in what she calls "unsettling effects". Fogarty and Jacqueline Fulmer both elucidate, in a most helpful manner, the oral/folkloric resonances woven into the contemporary narratives in The Inland Ice and Other Stories and the individual short story, Midwife to the Fairies.
Both Fogarty and Fulmer celebrate a key change in Ní Dhuibhne's , The Search for the Lost Husband,her updated tale of the goat husband and his bullied, demeaned bride: here the wife walks away from her abuser, declaring that she is "tired of all that fairy-tale stuff". Stressing that Ní Dhuibhne makes her changes based on her "extensive knowledge of where these stories come from", Fulmer argues that such cross-contamination offers a commentary upon contemporary and continuing oppression in women's lives and "inequitable relations between men and women". Fulmer further points to "the postmodern emphasis on questioning received narratives" as evidenced in Ní Dhuibhne's reworking of women's responses to physical and emotional violence. Fulmer sees the interleaving technique as a consciousness-raising strategy. As she puts it, "In The Search for the Lost Husband and Midwife to the Fairies, funny and appealing female characters express themselves on tension-filled topics". These two stories show how adept Ní Dhuibhne is with folklore, postmodern fiction, feminist humour, and strategies of indirection that hold the attention of readers who might otherwise be averse to such elements in literature. Fulmer's brilliant essay alone is worth the price of this book.
Perspectives is both scholarly and accessible. In addition , its extensive bibliography, including a listing by genre of all she wrote between 1974 and 2008, will be of great use to all who love her work. The incorporation of two previously unpublished short stories is an added delight. In putting together this collection, Pelan has honoured the spirit of her subject’s extraordinary diversity, and reading Perspectives is a deeply satisfying and at times genuinely exciting experience.
Rachael Sealy Lynch is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is currently working on a book on class, gender, and identity in Jennifer Johnston’s work