A Poetics of Ghosting in Contemporary Irish and Northern Irish Drama
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A Poetics of Ghosting in Contemporary Irish and Northern Irish Drama A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Mary Katherine Martinovich IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Margaret Werry Advisor April 2012 © Kay Martinovich, April 2012 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincerest gratitude must be extended to those people who were with me as I traveled on this extraordinary journey of writing about Ireland’s ghosts. To my advisor, Margaret Werry: for her persistent support that was also a source of inspiration as I revised and refined every step of the way. She was the colleague in my corner (reading draft upon draft) as well as the editor extraordinaire who taught me so much about the process itself. She offered unyielding guidance with great wisdom, clarity, and compassion. Go raibh míle maith agat as chuile shórt. Tá tú ar fheabhas! To my committee members Michal Kobialka, Sonja Kuftinec, and Mary Trotter: Michal gave me an incredible piece of encouragement just when I needed it – I thank him for his insightful feedback and commitment to my project. Sonja’s positive spirit also energized me at just the right time. Her comments were always invaluable and oh so supportive – I thank her profusely. From the beginning, Mary has been an enthusiastic advocate for me and for my work. With her vast knowledge of Irish theatre, I have been quite fortunate to have her on my side – my heartfelt thanks to her. To my friends Vivian Wang, Kathleen Andrade, Maggie Scanlan, Matt O’Brien, James S. Rogers, Linda Freeman, Mary Flaa, Kathleen Heaney, Jane and Mike Windler, Eileen Vorbach, Chuck Quinn, Marie Palmer, Fintan Moore, and Ute Tegtmeyer and to my colleagues at the University of Minnesota and the American Conference for Irish Studies: you have given me creative inspiration, words of encouragement, quick laughs, silent prayers, and all around friendship – I simply cannot you enough. Special thanks must go to Malin Palani, Jeanne Willcoxon, David Cregan, and Robert Katz for being there when I needed a scholarly sounding board. Or when I wandered into the rough, for giving me such great insight, comfort, and a sense of peace. The best thing, though, was their ability to bring me back to a place of laughter and joy. For this I am eternally grateful. My family has provided me with unending love and support – my sincerest appreciation to all of them. I am particularly indebted to my sisters Margaret Norstebon and Trish Pariseau and my mom Kathleen Martinovich, who all gave unfailingly of their time and devotion. Throughout this process, I relied on my sisters the same way a player relies on her coaches: their positive attitude continually pushed me forward. My mom always listened intently – from whole paragraphs to whole pages as I read on…and on. Ever the English major, her constant refrain was “That sentence is too long.” By way of the utmost patience and understanding, they gave me a daily regimen of hope and faith. No way could I have done this without them. Nor would I have wanted to… i DEDICATION To R.J. Martinovich, Annie Martinovich, and Mark Martinovich My very cherished Irish ghosts… ii ABSTRACT In this dissertation I examine the poetics of ghosting in nine Irish and Northern Irish dramatic texts. In these texts by Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Michael Duke, Brian Friel, Ben Hennessy, Frank McGuinness, Stewart Parker, and Vincent Woods, the ghost’s story interrogates yet unites multiple narratives of history, identity, and memory. Together these plays represent a significant strain of Ireland’s dramatic literature that dwells on historical trauma specifically through the figure of the ghost. Each chapter focuses on a historical event or problem as yet unresolved in the late 20th century: the historical remembrance and forgetting of Irish soldiers who served in World War One; the cycle of violence and trauma of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and the home/scape that trapped women between the ideals of Mother Ireland and the everyday violences, disappointments, and impossibilities of actual motherhood. In the plays, the corporeal ghost is part of a past that has been invisibilized by stronger historical and political forces and thus makes its presence known in order to speak to, and as, the irresolvability of that past. A dramaturgy of ghosts and haunting emphasizes both a material manifestation and a collective haunting of the historical legacy of trauma. I argue that the ghost in dramatic representation points toward a cultural need to allow the conflicts of the past to remain unresolved, while the ghost also invites the imagining of a different future. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Dedication ii Abstract iii Table of Contents iv CHAPTER ONE 1 Introduction: Ghosts and Ireland CHAPTER TWO 27 Ghosts of the Great War: Irishmen on the Battlefield At Home and Abroad The Steward of Christendom by Sebastian Barry 36 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme by Frank McGuinness 56 Boy Soldier by Ben Hennessy 78 CHAPTER THREE 95 Ghosts of the Troubles: Violence, Trauma, and the Politics of Haunting At the Black Pig’s Dyke by Vincent Woods 105 The Freedom of the City by Brian Friel 129 Revenge by Michael Duke 152 CHAPTER FOUR 171 Mother Ireland Is Dead Ghost Mothers of the Late 20th Century: Haunted Women, Haunted Spaces The Mai by Marina Carr 183 Pentecost by Stewart Parker 202 By the Bog of Cats… by Marina Carr 220 CONCLUSION 244 ENDNOTES 255 BIBLIOGRAPHY 274 iv CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Ghosts and Ireland In Ireland, as Seamus Deane has remarked, all ghosts are political.1 Ghosts, as political beings, are figures of an unresolved past. Seamus Deane’s statement calls us to consider two things: one, that on the island of Ireland the past is always political; and two, that the political is entwined in an historical web of cultural and religious identity. In other words, Ireland’s ghosts are always already connected to identity and the land, and connected by what it means to be Irish, British, or Northern Irish or to be from the North or the South. Ghosts are political in Ireland because they are part of a historical landscape that has been the site of conflict for centuries, repeatedly reappearing in places in which the deceased people they represent have been marginalized or un-remembered. That historical landscape includes the conditions of colonialism, post-colonialism, partition, and civil war as well as the struggles on behalf of nationalism, unionism, and religious and political sectarianism. Since Ireland’s ghosts are tethered to the politics of place and to the historical conditions of their death, they are also mired in the politics of remembrance and forgetting. If ghosts are political, then so too is memory: to remember on either side of the border has historically meant to acknowledge those events that correspond with often narrow configurations of nationalism or unionism within the larger trajectory of Ireland’s history. This overriding narrative frequently produced a reification of the historical past, which was then contained within the framework of Irish nationalism. On the island remembering the past becomes fraught with complications due to a vested interest on all 1 sides in claiming a past that often does not take into consideration the many complexities of the history of the Irish nation or of the social, political, and historical situation in the North. Alvin Jackson writes of the “fissiparous nature” of Irish nationalism and Irish unionism, but believes that “there was always a tendency toward producing a simplified and unifying historical creed” for the masses to consume.2 Remembering the past then becomes part of this unifying creed. For my purposes here, memory refers to political memory: those events of history that a nation or group of people choose to remember so as to promote the formation of ideology and a strong national/group identity. Forgetting in this context is a political forgetting, meaning the invisibilization of non-conforming narratives involving historical events that fail to align with a circumscribed political identity and ideology. As we know, political memory becomes materialized by way of commemorations, parades, monuments, symbols, flags, and social and cultural organizations. Furthermore, as Aleida Assmann argues, nations and states “do not ‘have’ a memory; they ‘make’ one for themselves,”3 which suggests that political memory is a methodical (re)construction of the past. Ghosts inhabit the spaces in and around political remembering and forgetting because they return from a past that has yet to be resolved into a stable historical narrative, thereby troubling how we think about the past. What does the notion of an unresolved past really mean in/for Ireland? This question is at the heart of my project as it points toward not only what an unresolved past looks like in Ireland today, but also what it portends for future generations. Around the world, examples of unresolved histories abound – the history of slavery in the United States, the historical relationship between aboriginal communities and non-indigenous settlers in Australia, and the historical event of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe – all of 2 which revolve around the systematic dehumanization of peoples outside the dominant culture. In Ireland, unresolved histories have less to do with stories of abjection than with those stories that do not support the meta-narrative of Ireland’s history (nationalist and unionist) or to be more precise, with marginalized issues that constitute contested memories/histories of “the way it was,” or in some instances, how the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland came to be.