| Title | : | In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel (Irish Literature) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1564783235 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781564783233 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 235 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1970 |
In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel (Irish Literature) Reviews
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Let’s get this out of the way first before we begin. Brigid Brophy receives not only absolution for the blasphemy, but full sanction for future blasphemy, of
Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without (CBR : “Only fifty?”) on account of her novel, In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel. But I’ll keep my Moby-Dick and a heck of a lot more.
So but if
Rikki Ducornet gets to be “Lady Rabelais” I think Brophy gets to be Lady something or other. And for that I’m going out on a limb here, even without authorization from our local Gil’s Boy who may not endorse this suggestion (but I’m out on a limb I said) but I’ll say that Brophy is our Lady Sorrentino. If that suggestion is just too much then I’ll be happy to leave her filed in among those Irish greats :: Joyce - O’Brien - Beckett - Brophy (who else?). But In Transit is pretty fantastic.
I really do not want to go all
Blue Pastoral in this Review. But I maybe=might understand why our under=discussion book didn’t flip the switches of Sorrentino’s executor (oh, wait, that other O’Brien’s published this ; so perhaps a few divisions in Camp O’Gil) ; because here was my thought through this one, “I haven’t had this much loose and locker fun with a book having punnable=funnable with language jokes and jakes since the days of
Gilligan's Wake: A Novel.” Honest, I’m not going all Blue Pastoral here ; I’m just trying to account for a difference in preference with a reader who ought to be within everyone’s preference ; honest. Let me say only that the two excerpts in Dear MJ’s review represent only two of the many languages which are played In Transit ; and so in addition to the funnable=punnable it becomes a delicious bowl of Stew.
But isn’t that the problem with making aesthetic judgements about a novel based upon prose? Making sentence=level judgments about novels? That the kind of impressionistic aesthetic of a Ford Madox Ford (turn to page 96 and read the first full sentence ; the book will be like that -- to take a parodic version of the method), or an aesthetic judgement which plays always and only off the pinnacles of such-like experimental masters as James or Woolf, can only level (verb) the effect of a novel like In Transit which is not modernist or impressionistic or shimmering and shining with prose described with this adjective and that adjective :: no, I mean the ax I’m grinding here is that a novel written out of Rabelais’ Codpiece is a a different kind of beast :: and the prose is judged not under the rubric of “is it beautiful” but rather, Does this prose do what it is supposed to do? So the question of “bad” prose is moot.
Okay, too, this is a smart novel. With an additional 300=odd pages it’d be a shoe=in for one of those excellent encyclopedic novels, those fat bricks everyone’s talking about. But meanwhile Heroicyclic will do just fine. So I’ve said already that it dances with poly- poly- poly-language (with enough crackers to feed the flock) ; I did not catalog those languages, but there are plenty ;; and a few of those languages, like some of the extended anal-ytic scenes are just as cramped and dull as they are intended to be ;;; such is the nature of anal-ysis. But then so what ; wait around for that cracker-barrel to crack open. And then there’s the thing that you may not be interested in things like : latin and greek and logic and sin=tax and Gaelic orthography and opera and bifocal narrative columns and jumping first/second/third person narratives or even knowing quite what’s going on. But it’s a smart novel and the smart reader will delight. I mean, this is literature much more sophisticated than the NYT Sunday Crossword Puzzle. [do i have to add also that smart readers may differ]
Okay, too, and just as a continuation of that hollow question I asked in my recent Woolf review ; the thing about the Türing Test for Gender. This is where it operates and becomes explicit. The (classic) Türing Test : to determine whether the interlocutor (let’s say s/he is in a box) is a machine or a human (i.e., a Q related to Q’s of AI). But the Türing Test for Gender here is like this :: take a piece of prose ; determine whether it is written by man or woman. My readerly contortion of this test : take a reader-response statement (fir-instance, a single responsive sentence summarizing the reading) ; was it man or woman who read? Or, in the instance of In Transit : take the protagonist ; is it male or female? I’ll tell you this, Dear Review Reader, the protagonist of In Transit has Gender Amnesia ; and stuck in a social situation, an airport, must determine which h/se is because that bladder is getting full...... etc. But that is only one of the many events in transit ; there is also a revolution.
Okay so I said something about style and I said something about content. That should be enough for today. This is really fantastic. I want more Brophy please.
This has not been a
Blue Pastoral. -
Let’s face it, heroi-cyclic novels aren’t my speed. As with most Dalkeys, the blurb sounds like the greatest book experience ever: “a transsexual adventure . . . with an unrelenting stream of puns, word games, metafictional moments and surreal situations (lesbian revolution in the baggage area).” YES! And the book begins with sentences like:
No more can you detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experience. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past. History is in the shit tense. You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.
YES! But then sentences pop up like:
I am incensed (I swing my savage indignation at you: aspersions ad te: bad on you: ego absolvere te nolo) by the cinemorgan design of twentieth-century cathedrals, all of which look as though they had risen out of the ground in a play of coloured-icecream lighting (but Fool-stop the organist has broken the mechanism which should, and would it would, cause them to sink down again).
Er, come again? And these sentences, basically, are the narrative, i.e. egghead Irish absurdism of the incomprehensible variety. Sorry, Brigid. You seemed like a super lady, a real counterculture battleaxe. -
So sugared with word play, multilingual punning, and narrative games as to throw even Christine Brooke Rose into diabetic shock. I admired the relentless cleverness, sentence to sentence, while initially completely failing to be drawn in throughout the opening quarter of the novel. But this was a section given over to the development of "linguistic leprosy" -- was this prose so absurdly self-reflexive as to be actually decomposing into unreadability by intention? I faired better in central two sections about about gender uncertainty -- initially via the oddities of sex in language, then something odder, if later remaining overly prone to forced dichotomies (the text literally splits in two, not the most-up-to-date metaphor). By the end though, all was in conflagration and collapse that should have generated a cataclysmic urgency but I couldn't feel a thing, semiotics supplanting semantics in a broken universe. So: intellectual interest throughout, engagement fleeting.
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What the hell happened there? The first 3rd of this is great. Very introspective, lot of different ideas, lot of puns, mostly its about language i think.
Its very experimental and 60s. The puns and other humour had a certain rythmn to them that made it feel almost like beatnik poetry in places.
The setup, person waiting in an airport, an important minor point is that they have a copy of the Story of O. Or some equivalent work, i think this one was something like the Language of Oc.
This 'Story of O' parody i eventually realise is another joke, with Oc representing language /grammer itself and the joke being that grammer is being tortured by authors these days or somthing.
Its also about sex, mostly it seems because in certain languages, such as french, all objects are made either male or female, a fact the author seems obsessed with. The tongue apparently is female.
However after the first third things start happening, events occur, and it becomes more external and less internal and far less interesting. I thought it might recover after this clunky middle section but instead it just turns into surreal parody with noir and fantasy bits and invasions of nuns and revolutionaries... its just complete bollocks.
Its all still quite tolerable with its puns and its nonsense but very disappointing after that opening. I'm trying to think if i've actually liked any of the so called experimental literature of the 60s?
In any case, this is another one thats more Frankenstein than Lisa (weird science). -
oh bunk. i just typed a bunch of oh so witty thoughts on Brophy and her novel, but to be lost to the ether. so in short summation, a wonderful, funny novel about being stuck in the airport, the meaning of life and our narratives (especially the ones we tell ourselves are "true"). here is a quote about our lives-in-books, and out of them:
"No more can you detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experiences. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past.
History is in the shit tense. You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.
Hence the hold fictional narrative exerts on modern literate man. And hence the slightly shameful quality of its hold." -
Video review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UzA7... -
After finishing Gravity’s Rainbow back in October I wanted to take a bit of a break from reading Postmodern fiction. I was eager to jump back into something else in the genre but I didn’t want to move on too quickly from this monolithic book. While that is the case, I also have been excited to get into this book, In Transit, ever since I bought it last summer. I think two months was a pretty respectable layover between the two.
In Transit is a 1969 postmodern, metafictional novel written by the Irish author Brigid Brophy. I came across this book by chance looking at Open Books amazing collection of Dalkey Archive books. I bought this based on the description which highlighted a few favorite things of mine to read; 1960s Postmodern metafiction, an obscure work of mystery and intrigue, linguistics, an exploration of gender, an exploration of syntax and the written word, and a setting of an international airport. Even just two of these concepts in combination would have my interest peaked but this felt too good to be true. In the last six months since buying it, it's been on my mind in anticipation of finally reading it.
So what is In Transit? This book is split into four parts. The first part opens with our protagonist at an airport in Italy. They navigate their way to the transit lounge and Brophy does an amazing job describing this airport, painting it in ways most people would not have previously considered an airport to be.
An airport is a transitive state. No one lives at an airport and unless you work at a kiosk or gate you do not go to the same spot on a daily basis. The airport is not an end destination but a conductor from point A to B. Everyone you see at the airport is also going from one place to the next and is most likely not taking the same route as you. This state of transience and middle ground is explored further through language, which is where we get to a lot of the Postmodern writing.
Brophy utilizes the 235 pages that make up this book as a literary playground. I haven’t read a book with as great a wordplay as this since reading Rick Harsch’s The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, and I haven’t seen a play with form and syntax like this since reading Philip Freedenberg’s America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic. Those are much more modern works so I wouldn’t compare them any further than my own reading experience but I found similar components of what I liked about the writing in those here in this book.
Brophy does a lot with syntax that I haven’t seen somewhere else. One of my favorite elements are these bracketed sections. She will enclose a segment of a sentence with brackets and give you two options to pick from for how to interpret the sentence. These are used in a variety of different ways. An early example goes as follows:
“There you are: fixed in your high (by several thousand feet) chair or wedged into your push (by jet engine) chair, dependent on h{a/u}rried n{u/a}nny’s finding a moment to play attendant to you.” -page 19.
It’s almost like Brophy is providing you with a “choose your own adventure” to complete the sentence and how you see fit to interpret it. Astute readers will take both interpretations into account but this is a smaller facet of the grander scheme of the novel. Blurring the lines between two binaries.
During this time Brophy also utilizes the setting of an international airport to explore the multilingual aspect. Pointing out signs in three different languages, she introduces you to this concept of language as having more interpretation than just what can be expressed in English. A prominent component of this is the gendered nouns of various other Latin derived languages; a hint towards what’s to come.
Part one closes with our protagonist listening to an Italian opera in the lounge waiting for their flight, contemplating the Italian meanings and how that applies to their Irish upbringing. This book helps if you are someone interested in linguistics and knowledgeable of various languages and cultures. I would particularly highlight Italian and Irish for this reason of understanding the character more so. This opera goes on for so long that our character has missed their flight and eventually comes to the realization that they don’t know what gender they are.
Parts two and three are spent following our protagonist as they try to determine what gender they are with societal signifiers but no clear conclusion is made. For a moment the character will come to one conclusion and all pronouns and language are shifted to male but then that conclusion will be dismantled by some new revelation and then everything will shift to female. This process will keep happening until no sense of confident conclusion can be made.
Switching from Pat to Patricia, our protagonist ends up in a lot of wacky scenarios. These moments feel very Pynchonian. I will remind those reading this review that this book came out four years prior to Gravity’s Rainbow. Maybe it’s just because I have read that book so recently but I was amazed by how similar it felt reading this. Pynchon had written V and The Crying of Lot 49 by this time but nothing in those books comes close to how wacky some of these scenarios feel (maybe the alligator chase scenes in V). A favorite standout moment from this section is having our Protagonist end up on the baggage conveyor belt area of the airport and coming upon the collection of workers who are all women and are referred to as the “lesbian underground”. This secret society, conspiracy also have a very Pynchon feel to it.
I reference Pynchon a lot here as he is the author of contemporary to Brophy that I’ve read the most of. I also see a lot of similarities to John Barth in the writing here, particularly in the syntax and experimentation of form.
You also can’t talk about an Irish Postmodern author without talking about Joyce. While I haven’t read any of Joyce’s wilder works yet, there is a clear connection here and In Transit is not shy from referencing that point.
Part four is dedicated to the exploration of a group of revolutionaries hijacking the airport. These revolutionaries are set on blurring the binary between masculine and feminine, a task started by following our protagonist and now implemented on a wider scale. Once again, the setting of an airport is a perfect vehicle for this narrative. Whether it be the monitors that once told departure and arrival times being used to project messages by this group or the collision of two planes as a metaphorical culmination of our two binaries being thrust together and jumbled up in the end.
Going into this book I was expecting some dated outlooks to gender considering the time period it was written in. I’m a big fan of Sci Fi and experimental literature from this time, which comes with the issue of a lot of dated outlooks on gender, sexuality, and race. Considering this factor, I was surprised how little of it felt off by today’s standards.
Granted I am not a Gender Studies expert, but I found Brophy’s outlook here to be quite modern and one akin to a lot of gender fluid and non binary perspectives we hear about today. I’m not sure how much of these ideas were explored in her time but I think this book really could do well with more people of our time reading it.
In 1969, gender roles were a lot more strict. The binary of masculine and feminine were a lot stronger and the way Brophy collides the two in this book is something to admire. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if our protagonist was male or female. As the revolutionaries in the final section proclaim “WE ARE ALL HUMAN AND HUMANS ARE ALL THOROUGHLY NICE PEOPLE”- page 231.
In our traditional society we are made to hold masculine and feminine at two polar opposite ends of the spectrum and never are they two intertwined but of course that is not reality. You don’t have to be nonbinary or gender fluid to inhabit both masculine and feminine traits. I don’t care what you say, you could be the most “masculine man” or the highest of “femme females” and you probably still exhibit some level of thought or action that could be attributed traditionally to the other end of the spectrum.
This book really upholds the “gender is a spectrum” concept and that is something I have felt long before picking up this book. It is amazing to see that idea conveyed so well here in a book from over 50 years ago. Beyond this overall theme this is just an amazingly written and constructed novel. Sure there are probably some elements that could be smoothed over and there is a lot I missed here on a first read but that is the marker of any great Postmodern work. I’ll leave this review with a section of text that really stood out to me. The double meaning of the words is something that I’ve marveled at ever since reading it and I would go so far as to say, these words are better constructed than many full novels I’ve read.
“She could see, chalked on the concrete in vast letters, two inscriptions, one on each side of the flap she was headed for.
The left read
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE.
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE
BUT YOUR LABOUR PAINS
The right complimented the doctrine with
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE.
YOU HAVE EVERYTHING TO
GAIN - IN PARTICULAR,
YOUR DAISY CHAINS.” -Page 132. -
This is a kind of experimental novel where our protagonist is hanging out in an airport and comes down with 'linguistic leprousy', which means that their language gets all screwed up and they start making a lot of puns and plays on words. they also forget which gender they are and have trouble working it out. sometimes it's cool and sometimes it's kind of irritating, and i didn't really 'get' the genre pastiche parts or the section near the end where some lesbians stage a revolutionary takeover of the airport.
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Here’s a fantastic, explorative novel.
Brigid Brophy’s free-range narrative skips, slides, slips and meanders over a range of philosophical, political, theological, linguistic and social theorems. At the core of the story, though, is the narrator’s exploration of identity. How do we self-identify or identify ourselves to ourselves? By what means and how do others identify us? Who are we when we converse with ourselves? What are we? Male, female, other, neither? Does the voice in our head have a gender? Is it fixed or fluid? Are our identities, genders, sexualities fixed or fluid?
Brophy explores all these questions in In Transit and does so in a way that feels fun and fresh. The writing is liberally laced with puns – clever, funny, thought-provoking puns. Very few eye rolling ones. The play on language is one of the most engaging aspects of her writing.
Reading this so closely on the heels of
Claude Cahun's
Disavowals: Or Cancelled Confessions, I couldn’t help seeing parallels even though Cahun was writing in the 1930s and Brophy in the 1960s. Both were born and raised as women and both are interested in gender and language. Both explore gender as identity and both question gender and its relationship to identity. Strikingly, they both do so by playing with language. They pun. They morph and invent and trick out words. Idioms are battered and punted about. They employ homonyms as a way to make the reader take a second look at what is being communicated. They change up the written form and even the appearance of the text on the page, all in the name of better revealing/concealing the thrust of their discourse. Both authors weave other forms of art into their writing – Cahun with photomontage and Brophy with music, particularly opera.
Brophy’s In Transit is fresh, lively and playful while still maintaining a certain gravitas. Gender and identity needn’t be such a chore or cage or conundrum. Being freed of gender is freedom from ego and its impositions seems to be Brophy’s message. But for Cahun, gender was entirely a chore, a cage and a conundrum. There is an underlying malaise in Disavowals that never quite dissipates. Perhaps that Disavowals is non-fictional and that Cahun, in essence, wrote it auto-biographically accounts for this difference. Brophy’s fictional protagonist undertakes the adventure of his/her/their transit identity, his/her/their non-gender in the bubble of an airport transit lounge, instead of the day in and day out interactions of real life.
Recommended reading for anyone who likes linguistic adventures. -
I honestly don't know what to think of this novel. It was just painfully slow with a few good puns (and a lot of mediocre ones). Most of all did the random parenthesis, capital letters, language changes, and unindicated changes of points of view/focus bother me just too much to properly enjoy the witty and interesting observations of the main character.
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Hilarious and quirky and mind-bending at times. No wonder Brophy was described as the brainiest woman of her time.
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kind of obsessed with the ending
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I bloody loved it and good thing I did because I wrote my final exam on it. It's absolutely bonkers but in a way that's SO fun with all the little plays on words, juggling with genre, and transgressing gender boundaries in every possible sense. One day I'll reread it without a deadline and then I'll try to find all the little clues, references, and puns hidden in there.
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I wonder if SNL's androgynous skit staring "Pat" might have been nicely lifted from this zany cut-up of a meta this meta that skirmish of a what? Fun jibber-jabber reading, puny mish-mash who-dun-it squabbled rot! I'm out.
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Probably quite prophetic in its own way.
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Cyborg seduction manual.
