The Real in Anne Enright’s The Gathering

When Anne Enright says, "I am very impatient with the real. I'm very impatient with the

claim to be real, okay, because I just don't think it's possible,” she is obviously referring to

the claim that her novels are realist novels. And indeed in a sensational way, they are.

However, the style we call “realism” and what we might call “the real” are not necessarily the

same thing. Realism is a stylistic attempt to emulate reality, while “the real,” despite what

some post-modernists might claim, is in fact REAL; despite the unreliability of our

subjectivity, reality insists. Enright shows an awareness of this distinction and the misleading

nature of realism when she says, “I just don’t think it’s possible.” This leaves us to wonder

what Enright’s approach to the real actually is.

Enright has described her writing as “hyperrealism,” which is a more accurate interpretation

of her work. The hyperreal suggest an exaggerated reality; a post-modern reality which could

be said to stand in or even replace reality itself. And so Enright is aware that she is always at

least one step removed from reality. If “language is already an act of translation from the

real,” then we can assume that something is always lost or never completely expressed due to

this translation.

If we are to understand the relationship between language and the real in a more

comprehensive way we will have to turn to Lacanian theory. For Lacan, language is always

already outside of the real, belonging instead to the realm of the symbolic. In fact, encounter

with the real are traumatic events whereby “all words cease and all categories fail” (Lacan

164). According to Slavoj Zizek:

 The Real is experienced in terms of the Symbolic (dis)functioning itself. We touch the

Real through those points where symbolization fails; through trauma, aversion,

dislocation and all those markers of uncertainty where the Symbolic fails to deliver a

consistent and coherent reality. (Zizek)

Considering this traumatic aspect of the real and the impossibility of language to penetrate it,

we can understand Enright’s statement, “language strains towards metaphor” (210), as

evidence of a struggle with the real; an attempt to reconstitute the symbolic order after the

fact of a traumatic encounter with the real.

In the very first paragraph of The Gathering we are informed by Veronica that an encounter

with the real has already taken place: “I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it

roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place” (1). Due to languages

inadequacy to absorb the real into the symbolic order, this traumatic encounter which

Veronica alludes to is only half remembered and its truth is doubted. The contradiction that

encounters with the real never feel real is explained by the fact that we need the frame of

fantasy from where we can safely observe the real. This explains why victims of traumatic

events often report that “it was like being in a movie”; when the real comes too close fantasy

takes over. And so when Veronica doubts the reality of this traumatic event, it reveals that

she has not yet constituted herself in the symbolic order. We can read The Gathering as an

attempt to reclaim this constitution after the fact.

In The Gathering the real is buried in the past but it is constantly threatening to burst through

the material reality of the present. Objects, rooms, locations, take on weighty significance and

are often over-saturated in historical meaning. Anne Mulhall writes:

Even seemingly inanimate objects are saturated with the spectral. Things become, in

Enright’s work, ghostly interconnections across the generations, on whose surface the
 past can rise up suddenly again in the gap gouged out of the wallpaper, the worn

pattern of an old carpet, or the chipped paint of a much used cot” (67).

In the very first chapter of The Gathering, the very first mention of Liam is mediated through

an object both found in the past and found in the present: “Like all boys, he loved the bones

of dead animals” (1). Enright might here be using “bones” in a multitude of meanings.

Perhaps most obviously, the bones represent death. They persist and are immutable. They are

all that remains. To this effect, her statement, “That is the word we used about bones: Clean”

(1), has slightly disturbing overtones, as if even in childhood Liam and Veronica were aware

of the ‘cleansing’ effect of death. But the bones also suggest a connection with the real. The

bones are where the real resides.

In the opening paragraph, when Veronica refers to the “uncertain event” she calls it a “crime

of the flesh,” “but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt lingers in the

bones” (1). The bones are what remain beyond even the memory itself. The relationship

between the flesh and the bones is here the same as the relationship between language and the

real.

However, even still, the reliability of Veronica’s memory is in question. Is the “uncertain

event” true or is it all just a metaphor? A statement from Anne Enright might suggest the

latter:

And then sometimes I might make the metaphor radical, like I have an angel knock on

the door instead of saying he looked like an angel. So it is linguistically determined,

my relationship with the real … my impulse is towards the real. That’s where I am

trying to get (210).

But if the sexual abuse of a children is indeed a metaphor, then this leaves us with the

awkward question, a metaphor for what? Hedwig Schwall describes Nugent’s abuse of the

children as “a metonymy of a practice that was widespread in the country” (208). He

continues: “, Nugent’s highly ambiguous position as both private and public figure (friend

and landlord of the house) shows him to be a metaphor of the Catholic Church, which

interfered with parents’ sexuality” (208). I will not argue at the validity of Schwall’s

observation, it is most certainly true; however I will risk another interpretation of the event.

The “uncertain event” (to call it by its polite name) is a metaphor, or perhaps more accurately

a focal point, around which Enright explores the differences of the sexes and relationship to

the real. By making this metaphor a traumatic experience in Veroncia’s life, Enright opens up

a space to explore the constitution of female subjectivity. Our clue to such an interpretation is

presented here succinctly by Anne Mulhall:

For Enright, the ‘awful hole in the text’, the ‘unsayable thing in the center of a book’,

the ‘silence… illusions and the slippages … the jumps, and the uncertain way of

making sense’ are ‘part of the feminist aesthetic’(68).

In order to explain this further I must return to Lacan and his statement, "la femme n'existe

pas" (woman does not exist). When Lacan says “woman does not exist”, he is not trying to be

chauvinistic; what he is referring to is the difference between the masculine and the feminine

in the symbolic order (which is constructed by language) and thus their different relationship

to the real. Woman is said to “not exist” because she lacks the phallus. What does this mean?

To explain I will have to briefly digress into strict psychoanalysis.

Woman is said to be the castrated sex because she does not possess a penis. But we all know

that she is not castrated of a penis but simply possesses a different organ – a vagina. In the

real, woman does not have an absence of an organ; she simply is as she is.
 Only when language dissects the real, designates an organ as an isolated entity,

transforms this thus-designated entity into a signifier, and therefore becomes capable

of marking an "absence" of a penis (i.e., a "phallus," insofar as the penis is elevated to

the level of a signifier) on woman's body — can individuals be said to be "castrated””

(Johnston).

It is only when the “symbolic order enters the real” that a lack immediately appears marked

on the body of the female child. The vaginal organ is erased under the now-designated

absence of a signifier, a signifier for a dangling little piece of flesh” (Johnston). Thus woman

is said to not exist. 1

So what does this mean in terms of female subjectivity and woman’s relationship to language

and the real? Because woman lacks the phallus, the universal signifier, the transcendent

“thing” between the real and the symbolic, and furthermore because language constructs the

symbolic, when woman speaks she always speaks as the “other” of man.

And so, if the scene of abuse (the traumatic encounter with the real) is indeed a metaphor for

this gender difference, it is understandable why in Veronica’s vague memory it is Liam who

has the “privileged” (to use the inappropriate term) position to the real (trauma), while

Veronica watches as an “outsider”. This female position to the real is maintained by Enright

by how she presents Liam and Veronica’s relation to “bones”: For Liam, bones are an object

of morbid fascination to which he was inevitably drawn due to the aforementioned phallic

connection with the real: For Veronica, the bones represented the real to which she was only

vicariously connected to through Liam due to female separation from the real in the symbolic

order. This is why the cuttlefish bones she found on the beach was a “comfort” to her; it was

a vestige which reconnected her with the real following Liam’s loss. This is also why while

1
Of course this is not a complete explanation but due to essay restraints and relevance to the subject I must
try to be succinct.
standing over Liam’s coffin she says, “This lift and fall of bone is all I want to see of him”

(195).

So in light of this analysis, Anne Enright’s statement, “I am very impatient with the real. I'm

very impatient with the claim to be real, okay, because I just don't think it's possible,” might

be a little clearer. The impossibility of the real she is referring to is due to woman’s removal

from the real by the symbolic order. In The Gathering, Enright explores woman’s attempt to

reconstitute herself by centring the story around a traumatic encounter with the real, which

stands as a metaphor for the divide in male/female position. Veronica’s loss of Liam stands

for her initial loss of the phallus when woman enters the realm of language and the symbolic

order.

Works Cited

Bracken, Claire, Susan Cahill, Anne Mulhall, and Hedwig Schwall. Anne Enright. Dublin:

Irish Academic, 2011. Print.

Enright, Anne. The Gathering. London: Vintage, 2008. Print.

Johnston, Adrian. "Non-Existence and Sexual Identity." Lacan.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Mar.

2013. <http://www.lacan.com/nonexist.htm>.

Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1988. Print.

Zizek, Slavoj. "Thou Shalt Love Thy Symptom as Thyself." YouTube. YouTube, 26 Aug.

2012. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM12ddwbHOE>.

Zizek, Slavoj. "Slavoj Zizek-Bibliography/Slavoj Zizek: A Primer." Lacan.com. N.p., n.d.

Web. 22 Mar. 2013. <http://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm>.