Clair Wills
Actress by Anne Enright
No Authority: Writings from the Laureateship by Anne Enright
Actress by Anne Enright. Norton, 264 pp., $26.95
No Authority:
Writings from the Laureateship by Anne Enright.
University College Dublin Press, 109 pp., $25.00
Fifty years from now, future historians attempting to understand the Me Too movement will pore over the legal documents from the Weinstein case; call up video of Christine Blasey Ford’s statements at the Kavanaugh hearing; ponder pictures of women in pussy hats and of tennis balls stuck to the feet of walkers; analyze the press coverage of high-profile cases of rape, assault, and sexual exploitation in the film and theater industries, as well as publishing, academia, government, and many other professions; and sift through the mass of online evidence around it all— the hundreds of low-profile stories of men abusing their positions of power over women, and sometimes over other men, that never get as far as the courts or the newspapers. Faced with this mountain of sources, they may well choose to relegate the evidence of contemporary Me Too novels and stories to a footnote. After all, it’s only fiction.
What can fiction contribute to any social reckoning that may emerge from this moment? It is a live question. Discussing her recent novella This Is Pleasure, about a powerful New York editor who is accused of multiple sexualized power games with his subordinates, Mary Gaitskill explained that the fictional mode was central to her treatment of the subject:
It was the only way that I could imagine addressing it. The essay form is best for making an argument that is more or less rational, and my feelings on the subject are too complicated and contradictory for that.
She was arguing in favor of the kinds of insight that can emerge from fiction, with its tension between inner monologue and exterior drama, which can help us understand the complex dynamics of social situations and the hidden frailties or cruelties of other people. Storytelling can put flesh onto the bald statements about fact, motive, and intention that are the materials of a court of law. The narrative of Gaitskill’s novella is split between two voices: Quin, the guy whose history of overly intimate encounters with young staffers has caught up with him; and Margot, his old friend and colleague, who defends him despite her feelings of anger. Both of them are what we might once have called “rounded” characters; both of them unpack Quin’s queasy history and both are compromised by failures of empathy and understanding, as rounded characters are. Margot, for example, who once fended off Quin’s grab at her crotch, simply can’t understand why his young female accusers didn’t just say No.
It’s an absorbing piece of fiction, and it has been praised for its “admirable interest in complication,” as compared to “simple” victim stories. But it doesn’t manage to save us from the tyranny of individual testimony as a means of addressing the issues. The question of the truth (Was it really abuse? Where do you draw the line between bad behavior and harassment? Were the women who accuse him now complicit then?) depends on the adjudication of different points of view. And in the end, we are not so far from the processes of law, which entail witnesses, testimony, and the weighing of contradictory interpretations of evidence to arrive at a judgment. What is missing—what cannot be accounted for in fiction that depends so heavily on the idea of “perspective”— is an account of the systemic nature of exploitation.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There are plenty of other places where the politics and structures of sexual power get taken apart and analyzed and protested against. Nonetheless, it is striking that the systems and institutions of violence have long been the stuff of Irish fiction. The modern Irish novel seems dedicated to insisting on the ways in which sexual violation in Ireland is not, or not only, done by one individual to another, but carries the force of an entire culture. From the violent punishment of the schoolboy Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the grim horror of daily (and nightly) abuse by the narrator’s father in John McGahern’s 1965 novel The Dark, twentiethcentury Irish novels repeatedly tell the same tale: the young are at risk from the brutality of their elders, who are in league with the institutions of power. Perhaps the most startling—and startlingly overlooked—example of this scenario is the sexual assault on the young female narrator by a young priest in Edna O’Brien’s 1970 novel A Pagan Place. Two pages later it is followed by another assault, this time by her father. The devastating twist in the final pages is that the narrator reveals she is telling her story from inside the walls of a convent, having taken the veil. She has chosen to punish her parents by burying herself inside the heart of the institution that has harmed her, and the novel is her defense of that choice.
This sacrificial logic has been harnessed to great effect by contemporary female Irish novelists. In Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), the narrator is distraught over her brother’s illness, but it is the combination of her mother’s rigid religiosity and her rape by her uncle that destroys her, and leads to her selfsacrifice by drowning. The spareness of Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) works as well as it does partly because behind her fairly simple story lies the attenuated echo of the Irish abuse plot, in which the main character’s masochism—she asks to be hit during sex, for example, including by people who don’t want to hit her—has been determined by her abusive father and brother. Anne Enright’s novel The Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2007, tied the narrative of familial abuse quite explicitly to the institutional structures of church and state. The narrator acts as the family’s detective who, in the days following her brother’s suicide, seeks the source of his harm. Uncovering his abuse by their grandmother’s friend and possibly lover takes her back to the early 1920s, when her grandparents met at the dawn of the new Irish state. What she learns is that surrounding the guilty perpetrator lay complicit institutions and a network of individuals who turned a blind eye. Culpability has seeped into the deepest corners of Irish life and its most intimate familial spaces. Enright’s new novel, Actress, is plotted in a similar way to The Gathering, set in the present but insistently looking back. Norah, a woman in middle age—married, children on the cusp of adulthood, a suburban house in the comfortable town of Bray, just south of Dublin—decides to investigate the story of her mother’s life. Katherine O’Dell, an actress once famous in Hollywood and on the Irish stage, is now some thirty years dead. We learn in the first chapters of the novel that as her star began to fade—as she aged, and as she was increasingly overlooked for parts and condescended to by men with influence but far less talent than herself—Katherine became unstable, eventually shooting and wounding a well-known Dublin theater producer in the foot.
It is a request for an interview from a Ph.D. student, Holly Devane (who is not into men in a “hetero-normative way,” she explains), that sets Norah off on her search. Holly wants to write a biography of O’Dell so that she might, “for once, be well served.” But after a