The Wren, the Wren

Nell is obsessed with bridging the gap between people through language, which is why she opens the novel with the suggestion that the key function of human connection isn’t empathy but translation. From her perspective, anyone and anything can be understood if one arrives at the words to capture that object’s inner state. The imperative to define the world through language stems primarily from Nell’s fears of losing things to obliteration, the decay of the material world, and the loss of memory. These assumptions are, however, fundamentally why her relationship with Felim frustrates her so much.

Felim is someone Nell feels an intense love almost as soon as she meets him. Because the feeling is so tangible and she can compare her experience to the experience of deaf children hearing for the first time, Nell assumes that her love possesses the texture of validity. The deeper they get into their relationship, the more Nell realizes she has much less power in governing the dynamic between them. One crucial moment sees Nell confronting Felim about their exclusivity. When Felim expresses that he hadn’t known they were exclusive, it leaves Nell feeling like a fool, as she thought Felim reciprocated her intense feelings. Nell becomes increasingly alienated by the incongruence of Felim’s words and actions. She cannot trust the gesture that meeting his family represents because he antagonizes her almost immediately after they leave. She cannot figure out why Felim would present his ex as his former romantic partner, even when all signs point to them still being together. When Felim finally breaks up with Nell, he calls her “babe,” a pet name he had never given her before. This raises the question of whether Felim means to break up with Nell or someone else. Unable to arrive at the truth on her own, Nell escapes.

Nell’s reliance on language stems from the imagined relationship she has with her poet grandfather, Phil—itself, a connection built entirely through language rather than experience. Since Phil died before Nell was born, Nell hasn’t had the opportunity to know Phil through his affections and flaws. All she has are the lines that speak directly to Nell’s experience. As Phil says in a television interview, the only poems he writes speak of unrequited love, primarily because he doesn’t think any other kind of poem is possible. This frames the world through a very specific lens, which may or may not accurately represent all of Nell’s reality. Hence, her frustration gradually turns into despair. An escape from anxiety transforms into a personal quest for meaning.

Nell realizes that language may not be enough to capture the world and preserve it from obliteration. The novel ends with her encountering a bullfinch in her mother’s back garden. While trying to describe the bullfinch, Nell realizes that the attempt to comprehensively represent it through language is counterproductive. It does a disservice to the reality of the bullfinch to describe it because a bullfinch is so much more than the words people ascribe to it, all the way down to its name. This revelation implicitly allows her to distinguish between poetry’s function as a beautiful object and language’s capacity as a carrier for truth. In poems, meaning can arise from the tension between what it says and what it does not say. She thus cannot mistake language for reality and thinks herself so important as the only thing standing between the world and its eventual eradication.