Unsayable Narration in Milkman
D. W. White
Literary Criticism
How do we find language, how do we put the complex shape of our interiority—its vast weblike structure—into the straight line of the sentence?
Renee Gladman, “The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture”
You thought of ev-ery-thing/
But some things can’t be thought
Built To Spill, “Velvet Waltz”
In considering first person narration in the novel, we often come to see that what is not said offers a more potent accelerant that what is. In moving towards the book’s compositional (narrower) and artistic (broader) goals, the most effective first persons work in something of a silent (rather, unsayable1), trust with the reader: that is, there is an understanding achieved “behind the back” of the protagonist about the nature of the fictive world, the thematics of the narrative, and generally the meaning and significance of the book writ large. Too didactic a first person often leads to little room for the reader amidst the moralizing, instructive tonal register; meanwhile novels that attempt to work via the first person towards a direct articulation of inner experience (most perniciously in the present tense) fail to achieve either verisimilitude or a compelling rendering of consciousness, accounted most directly by the simple inexpressibility (we might think, in the Wittgensteinian “sense”), of inner lived experience—consciousness as extra-linguistic. Thus does the “discursive mood,” while distressingly popular in contemporary mainstream fiction, fall flat as a mode of compelling literary art in first or in third (in the latter, this is essentially due to an overabundance of “omniscience” and a predilection for “telling” over “showing”).
As an example of first person narration which not only elides these issues but commands and weaponizes them into its architecture, Anna Burns’ Milkman demonstrates the abilities of the technique by which an idiosyncratic employment of language—and, at times, words, which as we will come to see are not always simultaneous—can both be bounded by and revel in the unsayable. Following Wittgenstein’s remarks on language, this paper will look at the narrational method used in Milkman to understand how Burns’ narrator renders herself at once trapped within language rules and a challenger to them, elaborating varying degrees of self-possession within a fictive world that she both creates and struggles against. The narrator’s “agency,” to use another term, is, necessarily, a given to her narrational project (as with all first person narrators) while sharply delimited not only by the community she finds herself living in, but the ways in which she can—meaning here both is able to and is allowed to—express that lived reality. This approach equally results in a rejection of the traditional female narrative, one defined by linearity and emergent from the 19th century marriage plot, for a trajectory of a more ambivalent morality.
Through language the narrator of Milkman comes up against language, thereby inhabiting a space in late Wittgenstein novelistic application analogous to the location Kate—protagonist of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and a literary ancestor of our narrator—commands in that of early Wittgenstein.2 In her world, the narrator of Milkman serves as both Minotaur and Daedalus, spilling out labyrinthine sentences that wind elliptically towards a core of self—a creation which emerges through the novel’s narration rather than its narrative and thereby rests comfortably outside the linear plot and comprehensive of the narrated self.
Milkman is set in the Belfast of the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of the Troubles, and narrated by a young woman around eighteen years old, from a Catholic family and community, who finds herself caught up in the incredibly—literally unspeakably—intricate sectarian complications of the time and place. Alongside our narrator’s name, the specifics of most of the previous sentence are left unsaid in the novel, instead emerging from context and composition.3 That is, in many ways, the point of the novel as a whole. The most distinguishing feature of Burns’ prose is the vague specificity through which her narrator works; the highly tense, politically charged atmosphere of her surroundings is one vectored through allusion and bespoke emanations of language that express far more than they elucidate; in capturing and forging this language, our narrator realizes the limits of her world and her responses to them.
The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one…that forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years’ difference was disgusting, that he was married and not to be fooled by me for there were plenty of quiet, unnoticeable people who took a bit of watching. It had been my fault too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman. But I had not been having an affair with the milkman. I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing and attempting an affair with me. I did not like first brother-in-law either. In his compulsions he made things up about other people’s sexlives. About my sexlife. When I was younger, when I was twelve…[he] made lewd remarks about me to me from the first moment he met me — about my quainte, my tail, my contry, my box, my jar, my contrariness, my monosyllable — and he used words, words sexual, I did not understand. He knew I didn’t understand them but that I knew enough to grasp they were sexual. That was what gave him pleasure. He was thirty-five. Twelve and thirty-five. That was a twenty-three years’ difference too.
Milkman, 1-2.
The relentless first page of Milkman inaugurates two main currents which will run throughout: the peculiarities of language in both novel and fictive world, and the associated order by which interpersonal relations are regulated—the latter especially piqued with respect to gender norms. On a narrative level, this extended opening paragraph showcases the book’s affinity for associative thought and skillful range, segueing smoothly from the eponymous milkman to the sexual codes—grounded in language—which define women in the community of the book. Narrationally, the passage works by immediately instantiating the type of nonspecific yet unmistakable use of language, particularly in terminology, that underlies Burns’ technique. The page’s closing emphasis on the crude terms used by the narrator’s first brother-in-law for her vagina forms the first half of a referential diptych alluding to Courbet’s L’Origin du monde, the second part of which closes the opening chapter in a more pointed image and serves to illustrate the dualities of creation and confinement that define the protagonist’s roles as both narrator-of-novel and woman-in-community.
Her idiosyncratic use of language, in both reportage and narration, is brought out somewhat more clearly two pages later, when the narrator recounts the first time she was accosted by the milkman, who stops her (while she’s walking-and-reading Ivanhoe4) and, leaning out of his “small, white, nondescript, shapeshifting” van, says, “‘You’re one of the who’s-it girls, aren’t you? So-and-so was your father, wasn’t he? Your brothers, thingy, thingy, thingy and thingy, used to play in the hurley team, didn’t they? Hop in. I’ll give you a lift.’” (3).
The first extended instance of the vague-yet-precise language that lies at the heart of the book, this is also among the strongest. The reader, despite being less than three full pages into the novel, understands precisely the strangeness of the milkman’s speech and the menace that lurks behind it, precisely because of its reproduction, by the narrator, as utterly ordinary.5 This act of world-creation is taken as a given, lending the novel greater verisimilitude by not articulating the full extent of the strangeness; the reader instead is immersed in it, and much like the specific of time and place in the book’s setting, the way the characters operate within language is posited rather than justified. In this way the narrator of Milkman creates a world more than she explains one.
These opening pages find added effectiveness in aligning the reader with our narrator, not only due to the human sympathy elicited from the events told about her past, but also in the highly stylized, idiosyncratic manner she has of speaking and, in turn, revealing the fictive world to us. Even when her words and descriptions don’t quite make “sense,” they are possessed of an indelible meaning, one that forges a strong readerly contract with the novel and gets the reader “onside” with the narrator to a degree unusual even for intimate first person accounts.
This concept of meaning-making has resonance with Wittgenstein’s tenet of meaning as derived from use, one that straddles the line between public and private much in the way of Milkman’s narrator in her navigation of her interpersonal relationships: “But isn’t it our meaning it that gives sense to the sentence? (And here, of course, belongs the fact that one cannot mean a senseless sequence of words.) And meaning something lies within the domain of the mind. But it is also something private! It is the intangible Something; comparable only to consciousness itself” (Philosophical Investigations, §358). This notion of Wittgenstein’s, which might be seen as developing an idea of how words at once possess publicly-defined meanings while being used to express private (individual) feelings, can be applied to novelistic narration in a number of ways. Especially in the High Modernism of the early 20th century, the literary art at times invoke words which have meaning without sense—indeed their not having sense is their sense. Within the context of the narrational project, they pick out and are themselves things in the world, thereby becoming that which, in these situations, they look to depict; Episode 18 of Ulysses, or parts of Finnegans Wake, could be taken as the most obvious examples, although passages from Woolf and Dos Passos, among others, operate similarly.
In Milkman, our narrator displays an inherence of this tradition at once more restrained and applied more deeply. Interestingly, for the protagonist, it is less her account of the world that operates along the type of neo-grammatical lines seen in the heterodiegetic narrational projects of High Modernism so much as it is her interactions in it. Put another way, where in Woolf or Joyce there is a third person narration that at times employs words in a way that works in very specific contexts to evoke an inner sensation rather than explain it, in Milkman our first person narrator recounts and adopts the vague-yet-specific language as it is used in her lived (fictive) reality. Her initial encounter with the milkman, as well as the opening sentence of the novel, are paradigmatic examples of near-nonsense phrasing that at times reads like something from Dr. Seuss (“Somebody McSomebody”; “who’s-it girls”; “thingy, thingy, thingy”) obtaining, because of narrational context, a precise and potent meaning.6 Both the narrator, who grew up in this world, and the reader, who is coming to know it, experience what Wittgenstein emphasizes as “the relation between learning the meaning of the word and making use the world” (The Blue and Brown Books, 11).
Later on in the novel, when our narrator explains how neologisms work in her community, we see an example of how concepts can exist around, and independent of, their verbalized expressions, as well as the rigid function of language in the book: “I didn’t know shame. I mean as a word, because as a word, it hadn’t yet entered the communal vocabulary. Certainly I knew the feeling of shame and I knew everybody around me knew that feeling as well.” (53). Internal states, then, have an unstable relationship to community-forged language, and words themselves might hover between personal, connotative resonance and public, denotative strictures. An especially striking example comes, briefly, when our narrator refers (obliquely and indirectly, of course) to the Irish name for a particular neighborhood as opposed to an English one, noting how the area “was really called something or other in my native language which I didn’t speak” before giving a few terms from “the translated language which I did speak.” (43). In Milkman, this role of language leaves it as impossible to define and immediately comprehensible, emerging through the novel’s narration as artistic technique.
From the opening scene, “reading-while-walking” (or its variations) becomes another of the narrator’s neologisms anda key piece of evidence, used by the community, in favor of her aberrant behavior. In this way it is perhaps the most readily apparent example of the novel’s language signposting significant fictive events, and therefore a manner by which Burns accelerates her book’s claims—about feminism, violence, and selfhood—through the stylistic skill of her narration. Much of this work is accomplished via the manner in which language, and indeed specific words, achieve a cosmopoietic status in the novel, creating the world of story and composition alike.
During her second encounter with the milkman, in which he appears and intrudes into her run, our narrator offers a rare bit of exposition that illustrates the creative, and destructive, potential of language:
An audible ‘click’ sounded as the milkman and I ran by a bush and this was a bush I’d run by lots of times without clicks coming out of it. I knew it had happened this time because of the milkman and his involvement, and by ‘involvement’ I mean connected, and by ‘connected’ I mean active rebellion, and by ‘active rebellion’ I mean state-enemy renouncer owing to the political problems that existed in this place.
Milkman, 7.
Our narrator notes how she is now in a file someplace “over the water.” Not only do words possess the peculiar meaning that vacillate between vague and specific as we have been seeing so far, but their power to enact effect onto the real world is nearly unlimited. Much of the novel’s narrative progression, such as it is, consists of the protagonist’s recounting the histories of people in her community who had been impacted by the exercise of words. In the world of the novel, as the reader comes clearly to see, to be termed a “renouncer” can often lead directly to death.
For the narrator, this potency of language is most strongly felt in regards to the gendered expectations she faces, from the milkman, her mother, and her “maybe-boyfriend.” Together, these three characters constitute something of a trinity of gender norms in the novel. Her mother represents the constricting encroach of traditional expectations—demanding of her daughter “‘what of your female destiny?’” and insisting that marriage “was a divine decree, a communal duty, a responsibility” (50);—the milkman exemplifies the dangers both of specific men and a woman being unmarried and therefore open to gossip; and maybe-boyfriend acts as a somewhat (perhaps dangerously) iconoclastic figure who not only cares for the narrator but even, it seems, recognizes her as an extant being possessed of a selfhood, something even she herself struggled always to do.7
She introduces maybe-boyfriend via contrast not only with the milkman but with much of the community as a whole, in the process giving a compact primer on gendered relations in her world, in which there were rules governing “what you could say if you were a girl to a boy, or a woman to a man, or a girl to a man, and what you were not — at least not officially, least not in public, least not often — permitted to say. This was certain girls not being tolerated if it was deemed they did not defer to males, did not acknowledge the superiority of males…the male wayward, a species insolent and far too sure of herself” (8). Amidst this literal de-possession of female selfhood, however, our narrator points out that not all men in the area are the same, and one of those outliers is her “almost one year so far maybe-boyfriend” with whom she nonetheless enjoys a strange and compelling relationship to language, in which a linear, coherent, teleological narrative seems not fit into their grammar:
I would have liked to have been a proper pairing and to have been officially dating and said so at one point to maybe-boyfriend, but he said no, that that wasn’t true, that I must have forgot and so he’d remind me. He said that once we tried — with him being my steady boy and me being his steady girl, with us meeting and arranging and seemingly moving, as did proper couples, towards some future end. He said I went peculiar. He said he also went peculiar, but that never had he seen me with so much fear in me before. Vaguely, as he spoke, I remembered something of what he was recounting. Another part of me though, was thinking, is he making this up?
Milkman, 9.
The most extended example of the peculiarities of language (and images) with respect to maybe-boyfriend is the story our narrator tells about the Bentley car part he has which, being adorned (we infer) with the Union Jack, is a matter of intense suspicion and controversy. However, for the purposes of gender norms and Milkman’s insouciant orientation towards the traditional female narrative and lineal plots, the manner in which she explains why she has declined to tell her mother about maybe-boyfriend is more apt:
There was no way, ever, I was going to give her him. She’d have done a process, had him through the system, one assessment question after another assessment question — hurrying things, hurrying things, trying to complete on things, complete on things, end things (which meant dating), begin things (which meant marriage), tie things up (which meant babies), to make me, for the love of God, get a move on like the rest.
Milkman, 46.
Words indeed possess a power in the novel, one that mediates the ambiguous selfhood our narrator navigates. The very appellative she gives to her significant other is perhaps the most direct and convincing example of her idiosyncratic use of language and its relationship to her narrational act. Their interactions with each other orbit the words used about them in a mutually gravitational dynamic that sees language at once as all-powerful and insufficient to explicate either the world of the novel or the way in which the characters move through it. Her attempts later in the narrative to ignore-by-silence the rumors that swirl around her, as well, point to a rejection of the power structures immanent of language and one’s complicity in them; a refusal to refuse that can only work for so long. For Wittgenstein, when faced with such odd uses of language, we do not call them nonsense, but rather “we say that we don’t understand the meaning of such a phrase. It combines well-known words, but combines them in a way we don’t yet understand. The grammar of this phrase has yet to be explained to us” (The Blue and Brown Books, 10). In Milkman, the articulation of its peculiar neo-grammar is a principle task of the narrational project itself, one that sees our narrator giving life to and feeling compromised by the linguistic apparatus of her fictive world.
As the novel proceeds, Milkman typifies another High Modernist trait, that of exploring the mind of its perspective character in a manner beyond the direct dialectics of its sentences. We of course come to understand far more about our narrator than she tells us, and perhaps more than she knows of herself (at least, of her younger, fictive past self). As Banfield puts it, “It is the language of narrative which renders this mediating language opaque by separating it from the communicative function. By purely and simply recounting events, language is transformed into an externalized, objective knowledge; by simply representing consciousness, language renders its subjective aspects opaque. Just as it is narration which knows what happened, so it is the language of represented consciousness which knows as its subject knows. Event and subjectivity become reified as narration or history and represented consciousness” (528).8 While not done with the same profundity or rigor as in quintessential Modernisms of the third person, Burns’ approach achieves similar compositional goals fitted to the parameters of her work.9
Perhaps the most powerful emanation of Milkman’s terminology is the subtle reveal that the narrator and her partner use these same terms towards each other in conversation (another bit of supporting evidence along the lines of footnote five above). Talking about the Bentley and other cars he collects while the two of them stand in his living room, maybe-boyfriend explains that they’re looking at a supercharger. “…I said ‘Uh-huh,’ and he said, ‘No, you don’t understand, maybe-girlfriend” (19). A bit later, our narrator says, about the Bentley part, “‘New car coming?’ I asked. ‘Cars plural, maybe-girl,’ said maybe-boy” (35). In both her direct narration and her recounting of events in the fictive past, our narrator—and those in the community alongside her—relies on the type of vague-yet-specific instantiations of words that constitute their lived reality.
Bouncing off essential concepts from Philosophical Investigations while calling to mind earlier Wittgenstein’s understanding of language as setting the limits of the world, in Milkman the protagonist and maybe-boyfriend seem to exist in between the slats of their rigid, paranoid surroundings, seeking ways to manifest themselves as both individuals and selves in a reality as strange and unforgiving as the Tractatus-ized Wittgenstein’s Mistress. While they irrevocably respond to and participate in the life- and language-rules of their community, they—and, as the first-person creator of everything in the novel, our narrator most of all—nonetheless posit themselves as ontologically viable entities, relying on their own bespoke phenomenology of words to attain a circumscribed, and therefore all the more vital, degree of selfhood. In Milkman, operating through a precise narrational project that expresses more than it explains, that which is unsayable is indeed a more powerful silence.
Endnotes
- This is distinct from Ann Banfield’s narratological notion of the “unspeakable” sentence in fiction (although her work will come into relevance later), and instead points to a philosophical realm of “real life”—there are things that even we, the critics and readers, cannot say. ↩︎
- These spheres blend, however; as our title tells us (shows us?) there is a fair bit of earlier Wittgenstein in Milkman as well. ↩︎
- She does tell us her age fairly precisely, and a few film references can be used to pin down a date, but the rest is left to be inferred to a remarkable degree of commitment. ↩︎
- Later on she tells us that while walking she always preferred to read “a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth-century,” playfully complicating—and thereby strengthening—the rejection of a Victorian-style linear narrative that her account embodies. See p5. ↩︎
- Readers may differ on whether they think the narrator’s report of dialogue in scenes such as the first one with the milkman are “real,” in that they accurately reflect the interaction as it took place in the fictive world, or if she is in effect summarizing. Based on the way she speaks directly to us, however, it seems that the way the milkman speaks in dialogue with our narrator is congruous with how everyone in the community talks, and therefore we can, so to speak, take her at her word. ↩︎
- In this way too the phrasings, for Wittgenstein, would not be “nonsense” at all, but rather elucidating expressions that thereby have sense. While the issue is a bit outside the bounds here, see Moyal-Sharrock, “The Good Sense of Nonsense,” esp. 158. ↩︎
- The other figure who seems to recognize the narrator in a similar manner is third brother-in-law, whose “mental aberration” is that he does not fight women but instead expects them to stand up to him, and whom the protagonist enlists as a running companion to ward off the milkman. ↩︎
- This idea also points towards the reasons why heterodiegetic narration is far more capable of rendering consciousness directly (verisimilarly) than homodiegetic. ↩︎
- Third-person narration, by design and definition, can attain a deeper, because more direct, access to a character’s inner state than first, which is always mediated by the teller. Both are limited by the Wittgensteinian inability, in reality or fiction, of language to completely capture that what we might call “consciousness.” This is where our (and Wittgenstein’s) “unsayable” differs from Banfield’s “unspeakable;” the latter is a facet of narration where the former is a fact of existence navigated by narration. ↩︎
References
Banfield, Ann. “Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction” in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, Michael McKeon, ed. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000.
Burns, Anna. Milkman. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf. 2018.
Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle. “The Good Sense of Nonsense: A Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as Nonself-Repudiating.” Philosophy Number 82. 2007.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper. 1958.
D. W. White is the Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, Prose Editor of West Trade Review, and Publisher of Indirect Books. A Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, his criticism and prose appear in 3:AM, The Florida Review, New Critique, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He teaches fiction workshops at UIC and a graduate seminar on Rachel Cusk in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University. His book-length study of narration in Cusk’s novels, The Revolution Comes From Within, will be published next year by Indirect Books.
Photo Credit: Tommy Bond on Unsplash.
L'Esprit Literary Review 