A couple of days ago I finished reading A Girl Is a Half–formed Thing by Eimear McBride and a few minutes ago I finished reading Judith Butler’s review of Derrida’s The Death Penalty: Vol. 1. as I get through some of the backlog from recent issues of the LRB. Ummm I can hear you murmuring somebody is giving themselves a hard time. Well, I might respond, if it’s not tough it’s not worth doing! It took me a few attempts to get into Eimear McBride’s award winning first novel. The early pages are about the young female protagonist as a child . . . was it that I simply couldn’t connect with the abbreviated syntax, truncated grammar or was I already sensing the brutality of the world she was describing and I was resistant to entering the brutal family nexus. It was easier once the protagonist was in her later teens but not much easier. A lone mother, the repression of Catholic orthodoxy, the languages that were available in the context of coming of age, of sexuality, of the boundaries of what is abuse and self-harm, and centrally the tragedy of her younger brother.
What McBride makes brilliantly clear are those drives that push us further into crisis, she makes tangible Eros and Thanatos, that push for pleasure and cessation. Can we escape the cruelties of life? Cruelty being some sort of combination of Eros and Thanatos. The guilt and the debts we owe to the collective. Will the collective demand our life in return for our errors? Torture, execution, death or the slowly dragged out suffering of long incarceration. Butler, as an American is keenly aware if the dynamics of American justice. Of the fact that there are 3000 waiting on death row, the fact that a disproportionate number both in prison and on death row are African Americans or Hispanics. She follows Derrida’s exploration of cruelty and the death penalty, that we cannot escape our cruelty by abolishing the death penalty. She refers to Angela Davis who argued for the move away from vengeance towards restitution and repair. But it would seem our excess aggression, our envy and rage, make the project extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.
The question might turn to the sort of political institutions that we are able to hold in place. David Cameron famously talked of Britain being broken. I don’t suppose he would agree with my contention that it is now even more broken than it was five years ago. A process that of course was initiated by Margaret Thatcher as the Tories attempted to turn back the tide on post-war social democracy.
As I said, I did in fact finish reading McBride’s courageous book even though there were parts towards the end that were barely readable (by me, at least); making apparent what we can do to each other through our push towards retribution, ignorance, and cruelty through a fine piece of writing. Just don’t ask me to read it again.
