Irish Fiction and Drama of the First World War (1915-2015): Narrativizing Trauma, Memory, and the Combatant in a Divided Ireland
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IRISH FICTION AND DRAMA OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1915-2015): NARRATIVIZING TRAUMA, MEMORY, AND THE COMBATANT IN A DIVIDED IRELAND By ANDRÉA CALOIARO A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2016 © 2016 Andréa Caloiaro To my loving mother and father, Mary and Ozzie Caloiaro, and my unceasingly supportive wife, Lillian Vargas-Caloiaro ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest love and heartfelt gratitude go first to three of my family members, my parents, Ozzie and Mary Caloiaro, and my wife Lillian Vargas. This project would not have come to be if it were not for their unfailing loyalty, support, and words of encouragement. They have believed in me whenever my confidence wavered, and for that I could not be more grateful. While I owe them a debt that can never be fully repaid, I will do my best through love and devotion. Secondly, for their generosity in time, intellect, and for the invaluable advice they have afforded me over these past five years, I also express my sincere gratitude to my committee members, Dr. R. Brandon Kershner, Dr. Marsha Bryant, Dr. Phillip Wegner, and Dr. Jessica Harland-Jacobs. A special thanks goes to my director, Dr. Kershner, whose groundbreaking dialogical and cultural studies approaches to Joyce and Irish Studies have indelibly shaped my own critical methods and classroom pedagogy. Dr. Kershner is an ideal teacher and mentor; his openness to new ideas and his encouragement for this project have truly made my graduate experience an unforgettable time of scholarly freedom and development. I am also indebted to Dr. Bryant, who has been an exemplar of scholarly ambition, professional development, and of always keeping research and teaching fresh, collaborative, and sustainable. She has shown me what to strive for as a future professor. I would not be here at University of Florida if it were not for Dr. Wegner. Supportive and sharply incisive, Dr. Wegner has graciously served on my committee even though I did not have the pleasure of enrolling in one of his much-praised courses. And I am surely thankful for his feedback on both my teaching and on pursuing an academic career. Lastly, my gratitude extends to Dr. Harland-Jacobs for helping me refine my project’s historical accuracy and scope, and 4 for letting me be a small part of her course on the 1916 Rising and the First World War. Her facilitation of interdisciplinary courses and collaboration has been inspirational to me. Lastly, I thank Lillian and my two brothers, Adriano and Matteo, for showing me what it means to labor perseveringly at what one loves. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 A WARRING INTRODUCTION TO IRELAND’S 20TH CENTURY: NARRATIZING VIOLENCE, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY ......................................... 10 Intervention and Scope ........................................................................................... 10 Interlude: James Joyce ........................................................................................... 22 Outline of the Chapters ........................................................................................... 39 2 DURING COMBAT, 1914-1918: TRANSNATIONALITY AT WAR .......................... 46 Bernard Shaw ......................................................................................................... 46 St. John Ervine and James Owen Hannay (George A. Birmingham) ...................... 64 Patrick MacGill ........................................................................................................ 79 3 AFTER COMBAT, 1921-1965: MYTHS OF 1916, MASCULINITY, AND REVISIONARY NARRATIVES ............................................................................... 90 Patrick MacGill and Liam O’Flaherty ....................................................................... 93 Sean O’Casey ....................................................................................................... 112 Iris Murdoch .......................................................................................................... 128 4 VIA MEDIA: THE ANGLO-IRISH BIG HOUSE NOVEL, GREAT WAR SOLDIERY, AND TROUBLED NARRATIVES ...................................................... 136 Elizabeth Bowen ................................................................................................... 143 James Gordon Farrell ........................................................................................... 152 Jennifer Johnston ................................................................................................. 162 5 MEMORY PLAYS IN THE TWO IRELANDS: POSTTRAUMATIC LEGACIES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND FIGHTING FOR RECOVERY ..................... 176 Frank McGuinness ................................................................................................ 184 Christina Reid ....................................................................................................... 200 Sebastian Barry .................................................................................................... 210 6 EPILOGUE: THE NEW COMBAT NOVELS OF SEBASTIAN BARRY AND ALAN MONAGHAN .............................................................................................. 226 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 234 6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 245 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy IRISH FICTION AND DRAMA OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1915-2015): NARRATIVIZING TRAUMA, MEMORY, AND THE COMBATANT IN A DIVIDED IRELAND By Andréa Caloiaro August 2016 Chair: R. Brandon Kershner Major: English This dissertation focuses on Irish fiction and drama of the First World War with attention on the way these texts narrativize trauma, memory, and combat in relation to Ireland’s historiographic narratives and shared memories of 1914-1918. While my study aims to fill a gap in literary studies, it also answers why this gap exists in the first place; the Republic gradually occluded its Great War experience by commemorating the 1916 Rising while conversely, Northern Ireland incorporated the war into its unionist teleology. This study examines literature’s intervention on this tension. Although unacknowledged, Ireland has produced much literature on the First World War. And rather than simply supplying or corroborating with the Republic’s and Northern Ireland’s publically-received or endorsed national myths, I argue that these texts are contiguous narratives conveying more varied and self-critical depictions of Irishmen’s and women’s experiences of warfare, its physical and psychological traumas, and performative rubrics of masculinity between 1914-1918. In investigating how the south and the north have processed the First World War, this dissertation focuses on inscriptions of trauma – the trauma of those lives lost or 8 injured, and more figuratively, the trauma induced by political factions claiming political utility of sacrificial idioms (of the thousands of Irish casualties, for instance) in order to legitimize state-formation. This dissertation shows how Ireland’s fiction and drama portray the complexities of Irishmen’s motivations for, and levels of awareness and pressure in becoming actors, so to speak, in the north’s and south’s political stakes in the war. The novels and drama herein elucidate how the political determinations during the War years strongly influenced which traumatic events were to be selected for inscription: for the south, the 1916 Rising’s casualties superseded its 200,000 Great War soldiers, while for the north, the Somme that same year became a ubiquitous symbol of unionist sacrifice, despite many northern soldiers’ indifference to such claims. This literature not only exposes the limitations of such selectivity, but it anticipates and critiques how such events would be narrativized into myth and memory by reflecting an overt consciousness toward such “processing” of memory. 9 CHAPTER 1 A WARRING INTRODUCTION TO IRELAND’S 20TH CENTURY: NARRATIZING VIOLENCE, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY Intervention and Scope As I write, Ireland has entered into an important time, one heralding in what President Michael D. Higgins has already anticipated as a decade-long span devoted to centenary commemorations beginning with the First World War. Since August 2014, the Republic and Northern Ireland will look back at one hundred years since entering that war. But even a century later, the First World War is part of a past that some hope to forget as much as others hope to remember. If in Ireland over last few decades remembering and forgetting are words are so often reiterated in the same breath as the War, it is because many of its modern conflicts and traumas are inextricably bound to it – the Easter Rising and the Somme Offensive in 1916, Ireland’s Independence and Civil Wars from 1919-23, Partition in 1922, even the Troubles, beginning in 1968 and finally ending in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Certainly Ireland’s twentieth century has been fraught