Breathing Lessons

In 2019 I wrote a long essay on Anna Burns's Booker-prize winning novel, Milkman, for the journal Textual Practice. I wanted to explain the novel to other readers, some of whom seemed to me to have missed what I found so wonderful about the book. I hoped to guide other readers into the novel, to help them make sense of a landscape many seemed to find disorienting. I could do this because I knew the novel, or rather, I felt it: the psychic landscape it depicts has been the context of my whole life, born and bred in Belfast as I am. I remember one particular day of writing when I watched a video with a street full of houses marked "TAKEN" above their doors, a sign to the soldiers that the men of the house had already been forcibly removed.

While I watched, I wept. My breathing was shallow. I got dizzy.

What happens when you go a house, arrest without charge the men who dwell there, and intern them without trial? What does that do to the men who are taken, to the women and children who are left behind, to the soldiers who enter private dwellings at the break of day, soldiers licensed to interrogate those they captured using methods that fell short of "torture" only because the British government withheld evidence from the European Court of Human Rights?

What does this take?

Watching those videos, I thought about my daddy, who only later that year told me about the shooting matches he'd had to duck on his way to primary school, and about how the British army were at first welcomed by civilians in Belfast who naively thought they might restore some order for the majority who wanted no part of the unrest brewing in the city. My daddy told me about what it was like to know that the same regiment who carried out the Ballymurphy massacre were being deployed on the streets of Derry, where they would go on to make bloody a sacred day. I watched this video and I thought about my daddy, about his whole life, which ended too soon, last year, and which was always hard — so hard, so much harder than anyone's life should be. In Belfast, a hard man is a fella who can handle himself, a man who is intimately acquainted with violence and its many uses. My daddy, who was over six feet tall, told me once about the time he threw a lad over his shoulder when messing about at work: the guy flew through the air and hit a metal tank, breaking his leg. Daddy saw him again a few years later in a pub, by which time his leg had healed and he had become the head of the Irish National Liberation Army.

The thing is, my daddy wasn't a hard man. He wasn't hardened. He was as soft as they come.

He died in the end because he couldn't get air into his lungs. It wasn't a fist, a bullet, or a bomb. It was the insufficiency of air that did him in, and every day I wish I could breathe life into him again. In this essay, I want to follow these ideas in tribute to my daddy, Robert Martin Malone: I want to think about what it takes to refuse hardness, closedness, a shutting down of the self, in a world where nothing is easy. I want to think about breath and life; about what violence takes from us and what tenderness can give us.

Anna Burns's body of work charts a journey through the terrain of terror from her first novel, No Bones (2001) to her second, Little Constructions (2007), and finally, gloriously, Milkman (2018). In Milkman, the rage that animated Little Constructions has cooled: rather than an unknown omniscient narrator with a predilection for digression and a tendency to agitation, as we see in Little Constructions, Milkman is a novel that marshals the voice of its protagonist (middle sister) in service of allowing the authority of experience to be fully felt. Anger can render experience chaotic. The strength of its force can colour and distort even the best of intentions. This distortion can make it very difficult to recognise just what it is that makes us angry, or to articulate the harm that arouses our righteous sense of injustice. But one cannot live inside a wound; there can, by definition, be no healing from such a position.

Instead of this woundedness, I want to think about capaciousness, possibility, space. I want to tell you why I love Milkman; I want you to love it too. Love is a way of forward-feeling; it is propulsive and full of possibility because, in its truest form, it must by necessity imagine a future: a new world with the beloved, in which we are made again by the transfigurative power of attention.2 The work of future-building is difficult, particularly as it requires us to imagine the unknown. If every change you've ever witnessed has been for the worse, would you risk hope? To imagine that something might be different, that the past might not decide or determine the future, that one's place in the world might not be dictated by some accident of race, gender, class, or any other point of "difference": that's a risk.

This is exemplified in Milkman by the wilful avoidance of intimacy practiced by the primary cast of characters, that which narrator middle sister calls the "wrong spouse" business. Middle sister's twin brother marries a woman whom he doesn't love, rather than the "shiny girl" he does love, to whom he eventually finds his way back, as part of "the usual unquestioned, unconscious, self-protective thing":

To open yourself to possibility is to open yourself to the possibility of loss. When sudden violent death is an everyday fact of existence, as it is in conflict societies, one risks the totality of loss every time hope glimmers. This fearfulness writes itself in a hundred different ways on our lives, and everything that might seem like a given to you who have grown up in a relatively stable environment (if anyone reading this is fortunate enough to have had such an experience) is alien to us. Nothing is obvious here. Nothing is given.

I don't think I stretch too far, then, when I describe Burns's novel as a gift. For so many of us in the "dark North," Milkman was like a lock in a key, opening a door we thought was shut forever. There's so much we've never said. There's so much we'd like to say. If only we could feel our way toward the words, without fear of exposure, exclusion, embarrassment, reprisal. In the broad-brush strokes of tribal warfare that are used to diminish what happened here and to deny its ongoing reverberations, we lose the detail, the specificity, the way it felt, feels. When people try to simplify or reduce our history, we lose our voice(s), or rather, we have them taken from us, and we are left with only the violence of inarticulacy; the gag of silence; the lie of consensus.

To give an illustrative example of the power of language from the novel, one may think of the much-remarked French class and their teacher's complication of their claim: "Le ciel est bleu!"4 The class "do their best to insist that the sky is blue because everyone knows that the sky is blue, which is to say that language should express the basic facts of a situation as they ought to be, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary — a sky full of colours, none of them blue."5 This is an instance of consensus thinking that shows how people can come to accept the tacitly unacceptable, as well as pointing to the slipperiness of language: the sky, it turns out, is not blue at all. 

We only perceive the sky as blue. The light that we see is made of all the colours of the rainbow, but blue light has the shortest wave frequency, and so it is blue that we receive, recall, perceive. The sunset that the French teacher asks her class to observe reveals this, and this is a nifty move that reconfigures the dimming of light — the ending of the day — as a point of possibility: the lower the sun sits in the sky, the more blue light is scattered, the more those other, often unseen frequencies can be beheld. Complexity may be more challenging than simple consensus but when we unsettle the givens by which we frame our view of the world, we make possible a clearer window on the world. Reframing the world in a language foreign to her students, middle sister's French teacher wriggles open the closedness of their minds, even if only for a moment.6

This French class is middle sister's second encounter with sunsets; her first was a week earlier, under the tutelage of her maybe-boyfriend, whose negotiation of masculinity deserves an essay all its own. Looking at the sky with her maybe-boyfriend, whose true love is his best friend, chef, middle sister felt a transfiguration:

The "shock of the sky" registered only slowly, working through the protective barrier of indifference used by middle sister and the other inhabitants of her world.8 The truth of the senses exceeds containment by language, though in the moment middle sister can find no words to express this — as she suggests, she quite simply doesn't know what all this means. She holds her tongue. She stays quiet. It seems like the safest option, at least until she realises silence is its own sort of trap. Without the bridge of language to connect her to others, middle sister is marooned in a sea of experience the meaning of which constantly escapes exceeds and confounds her. Except that she's not, anymore; she's telling us her story, after all. Building the bridge.

In this essay I am considering Burns's novel from a perspective that finds much common ground with other Indigenous literatures and storytelling practices and thinking about the place of breath in the novel of voice and the question of keeping life in translating the oral to the textual. We may close a book but that does not mean a story ends, as Leslie Marmon Silko would remind us, and Burns's work draws extensively on the oral traditions of Ireland that pre-exist its colonisation and partition.

The standardisation of language is a tool and toll of colonial conquest, as is the degradation and destruction of Indigenous languages. To regulate expression by standardising language is to seek to contain all the transgressive power of dissenting voices.

Julietta Singh's work in Unthinking Mastery (2018) anticipates my suggestions here. Singh's methodology against mastery draws on various modes of displacing anthropocentrism, key amongst which is a certain "animating" of the world around us.9 Introducing this reading under the sign of "new materialism," Singh explicitly problematises the lack of attention to literature within this critical milieu, positing that this results in part from new materialism's:

We make language with our bodies. We draw in air, we coordinate our lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. We generate soundwaves that we shape in sounds recognisable to others who have learned to shape their words thus. In elaborating on the idea of interpenetration and imagining a feminist political ecology, Irma Kinga Allen writes explicitly of air: "It goes without saying that air is the 'implicit condition of bodily existence.' (Sloterdijk, 2009) But that going without saying is precisely why air and, more so, breath have received relatively little attention within Western social theory, including body studies. Air has largely been unaired; breath, moreover, barely spoken of." 11

Like the blueness of the sky, the air we breathe, and that we breathe air, is one of the invisible facts of our everyday existence. It goes unspoken.

I discussed the importance of understanding Milkman as a novel of voice in my Textual Practice essay, gesturing towards the utility of storytelling as an empowering process. I want to extend that reading here, following Walter J. Ong"s work on "participatory poetics" of older oral cultures (i.e. those that precede "literature" as the categorical type we tend to assume within the discipline of criticism). In such a poetics, "Speaker, audience, and subject form a kind of continuum" that can also be imagined through the mechanics of storytelling; the way in which voice is produced within the body and borne through the air on soundwaves that arrive with and within the listener, who receives the story thus.12

The motion of air, the unit of breath. The life it takes with it. Inhalation. Expiration.

One of the most wonderful jokes of Burns's novel emerges from middle sister's attitude to the technology of the telephone, a machine of modernity in line with the gramophone, the radio, and all those other apparatus that sever voice from body, breath from life. At its top line, this joke takes its engine from the bizarre incursion of surveillance technology into the putatively private realm of the domestic:

The absurdity of the surveillance state in which middle sister finds herself reveals the underlying absurdity of many of our "givens": how strange to use a machine to transmit and thus mediate our most "ordinary things," including "vulnerable romance things," when these communications might be and often are subject to interception, misrepresentation, distortion, manipulation, any number of deformations.14

Underlying this ironic top line is the second-level commentary on the technology of text itself and the associated phenomenon of authorship. If one mistrusts the telephone, then what is one to make of the text, where language is rent from a speaker and sent forth into the world with no body to animate it but the body of text in which language is entombed? And what of the author, who rarely speaks but tends instead to narrativize (at best)?

Perhaps I ought to be suspicious of my own drive to categorise, to explain; as a radio book programme broadcasts in Little Constructions, "It's always best to reread a second time in order to be more critical and in that way we can really train ourselves not to like it."15 Combined with Milkman's condemnation of "educationalese" as a language spoken so proficiently by experts as to be unintelligible to any other audience, a literary critic working within the confines of the academy might themselves start to become a little sensitive here. Or so I imagine.

Did I tell you that my daddy went to a Christian Brothers school? Hard to say how much good that education did him. He was endlessly curious about the world, an expert plant tender and winemaker and technician, but his schooling was rather interrupted by the time he had to fight one of his teachers and lock him in a cupboard to stop him beating other boys in the class.

In considering the limitations of an academic approach, we can look once more to the remarkable experience shared by middle sister's cohort in the adult evening French class, where the group move from their usual learning space into the classroom of the littérateurs, empty that evening because "they [the littérateurs, or literary people] had gone to the theatre with pens, flashlights and little notebooks to watch and critique Playboy of the Western World."16 It's hard to know where to start with the joke here: the invocation of the stagiest of Oirish through reference to Synge's patricidal and violently received play, in which chaos and "primitivism" are writ large; the dumb show of the play's early performance following the perceived innuendo of "shift"; the context of cultural crisis that many have noted as backdrop to the play.17 And that's before we get to the audience of critics ready to anatomise the entertainment to near-death through their scrupulous notes.

This insistence on ways of knowing that exceed or defy the "Rationalist assumptions underpinning academic training and teaching [that] continue to privilege ideas of research and fieldwork as an accumulative acquiring of knowingness" is part of a move to problematize the givens of academia, explored by Maria-Adriana Deiana in an article that reflects on the ways in which the "aesthetic narrative" of the novel form might offer a fuller entry into the idea of "feeling" as a way of knowing.18 I draw attention to Deiana's work because of the way in which she centres her experience of reading. Expecting to find the novel "easy going" given her professional familiarity with the context, Deiana found instead that Milkman:

Attempts to read this novel as one "about" the "Troubles" will only leave a reader confounded, as Burns seeks to unsettle "the context of the place [that] both standardises violence and exceptionalises the state(let)."20 This is particularly significant given how codified the "two tribes" narrative of the Troubles has become, effacing the role of the British state and the complexity of relations for those abandoned by the state, enclaves and "communities" — a dangerous word, that — who found themselves policed by paramilitaries, who often drew their authority from that intimacy with violence I described at the start of this essay.

Fittingly for an audience conditioned by pervasive paranoia and near-constant surveillance, middle sister and her cohort in the adult evening French class express deep suspicion of the exotic adjectival landscape their French teacher offers them, a landscape that resists fixity in language as it changes minute by minute, the quality of light — the waves through air that travel like the sound of the teacher's voice as she gently reprimands the class for turning their backs on the vision that unfolds before them — as unpredictable as feeling itself, which never seems to arrive in quite the way we think it will. By resisting the closure of language usually associated with the technology of text, Burns's novel makes an article of faith of middle sister's story.

My daddy was asthmatic. In his eulogy, his brother, my uncle, recalled this as a repeated motif of their family life: my father, breathless and furious about it. In the hospital or the sickbed as a kid; barely older, smoking a pouch of tobacco a day and labouring on a site filled with asbestos. Fighting for breath his whole life, my uncle said. Fighting his whole life. Riding his bicycle with one electric wheel and gathering apples by the towpath and inexplicably ending every text message with the cowboy-hat-wearing smiley face emoji. Fucking softhead.

There are ways of saying something and ways of saying something. The trick of lenition — the softening or weakening of consonants — is relevant here: a phenomenon of breath, referring to a certain movement of air through the body; the pulmonic ingressive air stream, or paralinguistic sympathetic ingressive affirmative, as it is sometimes known. There are arguments around its function, particularly regarding the question of whether lenition constitutes a weakening or a strengthening.21 What is generally agreed, though, is that lenition refers to a certain softening; Patrick Honeybone's work is particularly useful (and lucid) on this, paraphrased here by Azhar A. Alkazwini:

According to Honeybone, many words such as "soft", "smooth", "mild", "gentle", "easy", "calm", "moderate", "lenient" were found in Latin-English dictionaries when he searched for possible translations of the word "lenis", but none of the dictionaries mentioned the term "weak" as a possibility.22

Of all these possibilities it is softening on which my eye alights, which matches best the changes I associate with the séimhiú in Irish, anglicised now as the insertion of a "h" in order to modify the pronunciation of a word. As well as lenition, this is known as aspiration, a term which may be more familiar to English speakers. I hope by now we're all on the same page, as I'm going to try a bit of fancy footwork to mine an extra layer of humour in the last lines of Burns's novel, which I can't call a close, of course, because they gesture so clearly to an opening:

This softening here comes from breath. Aspiration is audible breath, and we use a "h" to signify this in Irish because our consonants don't always make the sounds you might be inclined to formulate were you speaking English. The relative presence or absence of this aspirant, "h," in its own pronunciation is, of course, one of the famous "tells" of affiliation, as seen in Bernard MacLaverty's short story "Walking the Dog" when two paramilitaries request a recitation of the alphabet from a kidnappee whose hedging — "aitch, haitch" — fails to impress. Aspiration shares a root with aspire, too, an infusion of spirit, the presence of desire, the very state middle sister strives towards, the direction in which we as readers dance with her. The informational content of language, all that might be surveilled, (mis)interpreted, disseminated without consent, tells us less than the sense of things that we get from this moment of release. In the aspirant ending of Burns's novel, in which the brea(d)th of language and its capacities are given full and capacious room despite the litany of encroachment that the narrator recalls throughout, we find room to breathe, where the world might otherwise suffocate.

The morning of the day my daddy died, he phoned me, my husband, my sister, her partner. I missed his call, though I was at his house minutes later (we lived only one street apart). In the disorder of that day, I didn't check my phone. Weeks later, stuck in my voicemail, he spoke:

He was there at my beginning and I was there at his end. When I think of him, I still lose my breath sometimes. But now I laugh too, sometimes, because I'm still here, and that way so is he. I believe this even as I know I've lost the north of my compass and I spin and spin trying to orient myself in a world I can no longer coordinate.

Robert Malone is survived, as we here survive; and we laugh, and we weep, and we sing. And we should tell our stories with whatever words we can, we should try, we should trust, even when everything seems to tell us not to. All we really have is each other. Anna Burns is right. People in this place [do] give a fuck. I can feel it in the air.

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Tricia Malone is a scholar of modern and contemporary literature. She has published on authors such as Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Anna Burns, and is currently working on her first book, Reality Hunger: Fictions of the Attention Economy. 

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