![]() ![]() To cut a long story short and to use a clear-cut oxymoron, her work is enchantingly disenchanted on an intimate level little compatible with collective simplifications or indictments inherent to nationalist or committed dialectics or their grandiose purple patches. Ireland becomes a local anecdotal though necessary backdrop in her fiction, not a major frontal theme. This strong, individualized, idiosyncratic flavor does not really allow for the perpetuation of any complacent flamboyant mythologised discourse on Irishness or any given ideology at that. Secondly, her stories all more or less deal with the way one relates to their own expectations from life and conversely their frustrations, and the ensuing comical or derisive deflation at an individual level. For her short fiction doubtless remains profoundly marked by feminine voices and a peculiar kind of humour often related to that feminine dimension. ![]() Beyond Tóibín’s witty ternary remark, if one had to qualify and ascertain the recurring features of Enright’s short fiction-while sticking to the triads so dear to their fellow Irish writer Flann O’Brien, as ironically proven in his At Swim-Two-Birds -another three characteristics would loom large, which would eventually turn up complementary to those stated by Tóibín: feminine, disenchanted, strange. 3 To come back to Tóibín’s characterization of Enright’s work, let us say it deserves some further critical investigation in itself. 2 As regards short fiction, one could also add her enigmatic contribution to Dermot Bolger’s experimental Finbar’s Hotel. Most of her short stories can be found in the collection entitled Yesterday's Weather (2009), which gathers most of the stories from The Portable Virgin and those pertaining to the more recent Taking Pictures (2008). One should also mention an interesting collection of essays on motherhood entitled Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004), which shares some noteworthy thematic features with the short stories under scrutiny here, namely sexuality, humour, love, a quirky sense of everyday life, family. Her collection of short stories The Portable Virgin was published in 1991. Before writing novels such as The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What Are You Like? (2000), The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), Enright practised her art in short fiction. Let us remind first that Anne Enright is probably best known now by the general public thanks to or because of the boon or doom that the Man Booker Prize represented in 2007 when she was awarded that most prestigious token of literary recognition in the English-speaking world for her rather sombre novel The Gathering. 1 We shall come back to this revealing triad of qualities-to which one could certainly have added ‘post-modernist’ with some theoretical profit. 4 Read for instance “Mr Snip Snip Snip,” “Juggling Oranges” or “Fruit Bait” ( Portable Virgin ), where (.)ġ In his introduction to The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999) which Colm Tóibín edited, he describes Enright’s work as “post-Freudian and post-feminist and, of course (three cheers!), post-nationalist” (xxxiii).3 Finbar’s Hotel is an experimental collection of short stories where for each story the author’s ide (.).2 In Yesterday’s Weather, 7 short stories originally published in The Portable Virgin are missing: “J (.). ![]() 1 Enright’s work is actually given great prominence in that book since she corresponds to Tóibín’s co (.).Le volet psychanalytique renforce encore cette interprétation postmoderne de l’écriture d’Enright, étrange, drôle et désenchantée, adogmatique, puisant ses thèmes orphiques dans des invariants mythologiques insoupçonnés résonnant fortement avec la pensée d’un Ihab Hassan ( The Dismemberment of Orpheus). De même, Enright réussit à dépeindre une irlandité authentique sans avoir recours aux marqueurs habituels de la nation pourtant bien présente métonymiquement. Il en ressort que les nouvelles d’Enright déploient un féminisme très idiosyncratique et syncrétique entre deuxième et troisième vagues (Cixous, Butler). L’examen de chacune des trois autres révèle en regard de ce quatrième attribut une tension systématique tantôt ludique et délibérée, tantôt spontanée entre norme et transgression. ![]() Après un état des lieux des récits courts d’Enright, une quatrième caractéristique se fait jour rapidement : celle de postmoderne. En effet, selon lui la fiction d’Anne Enright se prête à une analyse post-freudienne, post-féministe et post-nationaliste. Cet article a pour but de parcourir l’ensemble des nouvelles d’Anne Enright publiées entre 1991 et 2008 afin d’en identifier les caractéristiques singulières et ce à partir de l’analyse que fait Colm Tóibín de son travail dans son anthologie de la littérature irlandaise (1999). ![]()
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