Between innovation and iteration : post-Joycean heteroglossia in Eimear McBride’s "A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing"

Abstract

Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) is a prime specimen of post-Joycean heteroglossia in Irish fi ction. The novel exhibits a programmatic dialogical/intertextual orientation orchestrated with its own parodic and ironic modes, which makes McBride’s work uniquely capable of re-energizing Irish cultural tradition. Simultaneously, her novel contributes its own distinct voice to the impressive amplitude of artistic expressions which have emerged from Irish culture in the wake of Joyce’s writings. Mikhail Bahtin’s approach to the novel (as discussed in The Dialogic Imagination), in turn, is particularly relevant to McBride’s fi ction because of her incorporation (as well as adaptation) of a variety of voices and perspectives. As a consequence, in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, the categories of heteroglossia and dialogism appear to be responsible for creating and sustaining a vital cultural dimension, a dimension which is subject to being perpetually rewritten in the present, even though it crucially depends upon ur-texts from the past.