'Without a Blink of Her Lovely Eye': The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and Visionary Scepticism (Critical Essay‪)‬

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) is a historical novel with a female figure at its centre, set in nineteenth-century Paris and Paraguay. It is a remarkable achievement which deserves much more attention from critics and readers of serious Irish literary fiction than it has as yet received. In this, her third novel, Anne Enright constructs a plot and realizes a fictional milieu in which she can allow her anarchic imagination full creative play. Far from a costume drama, as it was partly marketed and received, the book engages in a searching analysis of both feminine and masculine ways of being in the nineteenth-century world. The surreal character of her vision comes into its own in this gradually emerging representation of a world in disintegration, of European values, knowledge, and order being tested to destruction in South America. A certain deliberate excess of linguistic effect over fictional cause creatively disturbs the surfaces of her previous works, set in quotidian Dublin: this was already evident in some of the most promising stories of The Portable Virgin (1991), and in the anarchic satirical comedy of The Wig My Father Wore (1995), her best work before Pleasure, games with language play an important role in generating a coruscating account of 1990s Irish postmodernity at the moment just before the economic boom. (1) In Pleasure, she has changed mode, and the ultimately comic vision of Wig is supplanted by dark political and ethical ironies. But her characteristic sardonic insight enables her brilliantly to stage the sheer weirdness of Paraguay and the freakish genius of her central character Eliza, who as she plays out her life goes from "Angel of Mercy to Angel of Death, without a blink of her lovely eye" (p.122). (2) To choose a nineteenth-century South American setting as Enright does, and to place a female character at the centre of the narrative, is already to perform an implicit rejection of those narratives of masculine identity-formation--within a primarily local, often rural, context--which until very recently have dominated Irish literary tradition. This may help to account for the failure to take much notice of the book in Ireland, and to understand it specifically as an Irish novel. Pleasure cannot readily be pigeon-holed either, however (and thereby confined), in the 'women's writing' box: it definitely explores feminine agency, but not in the sense in which first- and second-wave feminists sought that agency or liberation. It is markedly postmodern in its stress on the performative, and its gender representations are downbeat and wry rather than liberationist. It prompts reflection about questions of post-colonial identity, among other themes, but Enright avails of the distancing afforded by the historical givens of her plot and characters to do this in subtle and non-parochial ways. The book fleetingly and ironically invokes national identities, via Eliza Lynch's own Co. Cork origins--is she "the right kind" of Irish? (p.141)--and the Scottishness of Stewart the doctor and Whytehead the engineer (from Edinburgh and Orkney respectively). But these topics take their places within a larger interest: to use the decalage between Europe and its present or former colonies in the nineteenth century to show the melting away of apparently solid European systems of order and belief in the utter difference of South America. Enright weaves together all these themes in an exceptionally elegant, sardonic, and morally disturbing narrative.