Phenomenological Fiction: Aidan Higgins via Edmund Husserl

Aidan Higgins remains best known for his first novel, Langrishe, Go Down (1966) after which his work is generally regarded to have declined; this essay however makes the case for a re-evaluation of his experimental second novel, Balcony of Europe (1972), arguing that, accepted on its own terms, it is an interesting and valuable (if somewhat flawed) alternative to the conventional realism of most of his peers. Taking one of the novel's ‘rejected epigraphs’ as its starting point, the importance of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology for understanding Higgins's fiction is outlined for the first time. The principal value of Balcony, it is contended, lies in its depiction of how consciousness negotiates with its past, and thus it is a mistake to expect a conventional plot or even conventional characterisation, since the idealist or subjective viewpoint adopted for narration does not allow for either the telling of a tale or the detachment necessary to develop a cast of well-drawn or rounded individuals. Through its demonstration of how the novel's unusual form is to some extent determined by its participation in Husserl's phenomenological project, the essay shows the value of Higgins's fiction for comprehending reality and how it thereby transcends mere autobiography.