Contributor’s Marginalia: Claire Wahmanholm on “A Childhood Illness” by Erin O’Luanaigh

I love prose poems. I love how direct they are, how startling. They have the pleasing density of an artist’s chop or seal. They take up space and insist on their heft. They leave pressure marks on me, like a laden safe on a soft carpet. Prose poems are so often perverse, wrong-handed, rule-breaking. They are claustrophobic, airless, compressed. They are dangerous in your mouth: an ideal vehicle for the sinister, the odd, the surreal. The witch’s hut of prose poems is one I am at home in.

Russell Edson has described his ideal prose poem as “a small, complete work, utterly logical within its own madness.” Prose poems are not expected to follow the logic, the “sense,” of prose. They lie in poetry’s protective shadow, thereby sharing its alinear privilege. Their logic operates in another dimension; similar to our world, but decidedly atilt. It is the uneasy toggling between the two that often lends prose poems their uncanniness.

In his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), Freud describes an emotional reaction/response—a “dread and creeping horror,” bordering on repulsion—that results from an encounter with something that is simultaneously familiar and strange; he calls this feeling “the uncanny,” and it is frequently trigged by an effacement of “the distinction between imagination and reality.” It is not a horror of the unknown, of the utterly alien—it is the eeriness that surrounds a glitch in the otherwise ordinary machinery of reality. In contemporary culture, the most common examples are mannequins or dolls that are slightly too lifelike for comfort (see “The Uncanny Valley”), but other examples might include Cicada shells, or Naglfar, the mythological Norse ship constructed entirely of the finger- and toenails of corpses. These are objects that are almost within the realm of ordinary, but twist away from it at the last minute, like skipping the last step of a staircase.

The world of Erin O’Luanaigh’s “A Childhood Illness” strikes me as uncanny in this sense of the word. The title promises something quotidian, something banal enough for nearly everyone to have experienced (indeed, it is a childhood illness, not my childhood illness). The poem opens with the family rallying around the twelve-year-old speaker, determined to celebrate Christmas six-weeks early in case her illness proves fatal. So far so reasonable. But it isn’t long before we get a fitful, fluttering sensation that something isn’t quite right. I am reminded of the shot in E.T. where E.T. is hidden among the stuffed animals and Elliot’s mother’s gaze pans right over him. The uncanny is the thing you wouldn’t necessarily notice unless you were looking for it. It wouldn’t jump out at you (this isn’t, after all, a horror film—the disquiet of the Uncanny comes from the lack of jump-scares).

Once the family is determined to give the speaker a “normal” adolescence before she dies, they fall in love with their project. The poem begins accelerating exponentially. The speaker’s thirteenth birthday is celebrated three months early. Then Easter four months early. And then a combination of the 4th of July, seventh grade graduation, and a sixteenth birthday party, all on New Year’s Day. The poem only runs from mid-October to mid-January, and yet, in a vertiginous distortion of time, the family ends up cramming four years’ worth of occasions into those three months.

One of the disquieting aspects of this poem is how quickly the speaker’s death becomes a given. The family experiences the opposite of denial—all too ready to accept the fact that their daughter is not long for this world, all too keen to be efficient, almost ravenous to check milestones off the list, to wrap up the speaker’s childhood and be done with it. They cannot even wait five minutes for the Polaroids to develop before “sticking them, gray, into silver photo albums.” “What a lovely ceremony,” they say, in tones that manage to be simultaneously wistful and self-congratulatory. They are in love with their own graciousness, which at its height manifests in the ridiculous gesture of gifting a twelve-year-old a convertible (“It’s yours, they said. Don’t bother with thank-you notes”). It becomes clearer and clearer that the poem, though spoken in her voice, is not about the speaker at all. In fact, she is conspicuously passive. She is posed for photos (“I held a diploma warm from the printer in one hand, a hotdog in another”; “they snapped pictures of me in a graduation gown over a big puffer coat”); she is spoken for (“she can’t miss the Fourth of July, they said. That’s her favorite”); she is literally positioned “in the passenger seat.” The true focus of the poem is the family: the poem begins and ends with their pronouns rather than the “I,” suggesting that the speaker’s voice can only exist within the boundaries that “they” mark out for her. Once they’ve decided that they’ve “done everything [they] could,” that “[t]here’s nothing left to do,” they sit back, self-satisfied in their resignation, and wait for the illness to carry her off.

Except that it doesn’t, which is where it gets awkward.

Freud’s theory of the Uncanny revolves around an etymological examination of the word heimlich and its opposite, unheimlich. While heimlich translates approximately to “homey,” “familiar,” or “cozy,” it also means “intimate,” “private,” or “concealed.” Its opposite, the unheimlich, is therefore what is eerie, dangerous, or uncomfortable, as well as something previously suppressed that has been inadvertently revealed—the domestic secret, family shame, etc. Freud called this “the return of the repressed”—something you recognize, but which would be taboo to articulate. The answer to the question you have been forbidden from asking. What penetrates and infects the home.

O’Luanaigh’s poem hits peak Uncanny at the end. After “a quiet week passed, then two, then three,” and it becomes clear that the speaker will not die after all, she reports feeling “embarrassed”—like she’d “let [her family] down.” The most horrifying anxiety of childhood is that your parents might not love you. That when you slam your bedroom door in a fit of pre-teen pique, screaming Someday I’ll be dead and you’ll be sorry! they won’t be sorry at all. Naturally, this is a deep taboo, and you will put yourself through all sorts of psychological contortions to defend yourself against this idea because if it were true, it would literally destroy you. The family’s willingness to wash their hands of the speaker has been exposed in a way that is psychologically intolerable, and so rather than feel wounded by her family’s behavior, she feels that it was she who did something wrong. Not dying—simply continuing to exist—becomes a faux-pas. Rather than feeling relief at being alive, she feels guilty at not bringing about the anticipated result of her illness. That her family is able to effect this switch this is where the terror of the poem truly lies.

A disclaimer: if “A Childhood Illness” were traditionally lineated, I would never suspect foul play. I would likely read the poem as a genuine reflection of a family’s coping in the face of potential tragedy. But the prose poem invites me—practically compels me—to enter a doppelganger world where our deepest-rooted nightmares might flourish. A perfectly innocent poem becomes a creeptastic existentialist romp the minute the lines disappear. And I love that more than anything. We are allowed to stand in the black lake and watch our feet disappear into it; we are allowed to see our faces upside down in the water—maybe for a minute, maybe for longer—before stepping safely back into wholeness.