Riding the Tiger: Ireland 1990–2011 in the Fictional Families of Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle
Riding the Tiger: Ireland 1990–2011 in the Fictional Families of Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle
Danielle Margaret O’Leary
20726267
B.A. (Hons), Curtin University, 2009
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia
School of Humanities English and Cultural Studies
2015
Dedication and Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge and thank my supervisor, Professor Andrew Lynch. Your guidance and encouragement have been vital. I will miss our meetings full of your inspiring intelligence and AFL analysis. Acknowledgements also to the Graduate Research School Coordinator Professor Kieran Dolin and all members of the English and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Western Australia; to the staff at the Reid Library and the staff at the Graduate Research School at the University of Western Australia. Furthermore I would like to acknowledge the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures; the staff at T.L. Robertson Library at Curtin University; the staff at the Boole Library at the University College Cork; Russell Library at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; and James Hardiman Library at the National University of Ireland, Galway. I would also like to thank for their inspiring writing and advice, Margaret McIntyre, Dr. Stefanie Lehner, Dr. J. Edward Mallot and Dr. Cormac O’Brien. My love and thanks to Ray Monahan and Michael Campion for helping me to understand the Irish economy; to Jack O’Connor for loaning me a book that became vital to my thesis; to all of my Irish families, especially the Monahan and Punch families, for looking after me during my research trip in 2011; to my friends who have supported me throughout this process. To Liz Byrski – thank you for your advice and precious friendship. To Lynda O’Leary – thank you for your support and love. To Jonathan Wall – thank you for your love and for making me so happy.
This doctorate is dedicated to my parents, Gerard and Gerardine O’Leary. You are the most incredible people that I know. Thank you for moving to Australia, giving me two places that I call home.
Table of Contents
Abstract ………………………………………………. v Declaration …………………………………………… vi Introduction …………………………………………... 1 Chapter One …………………………………………... 35 Chapter Two ………………………………………….. 98 Chapter Three ………………………………………… 145 Chapter Four ………………………………………….. 208 Aftermath ……………………………………………... 300 Reference List ………………………………………… 305
iv
Abstract
This thesis examines selected prose fiction of three major writers – Anne Enright,
Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín – in relation to societal and economic change in
Ireland in the prelude, duration and aftermath of the boom called the ‘Celtic Tiger’. In particular, the thesis discusses how their representations of Irish families trace major shifts in the nation’s life and consciousness over this period, and engage with broader questions of history, memory and national identity. The theme of the family has a
long tradition in Irish fiction. It offers writers an opportunity for a rapprochement
with the past that registers recent and contemporary developments: dissatisfaction
with traditional nationalism and the rise of historical revisionism; the declining status
and influence of religion, with associated changes in laws and community customs;
sudden economic prosperity and decline, leading both to new levels of consumerism
and to widespread unemployment; and the social challenge of greatly increased
immigration. Other specific issues, such as the clerical sex abuse scandals of recent
years, domestic violence, inter-generational conflict, and non-standard relationships are also articulated through the medium of their domestic narratives. The thesis examines a range of novels by Enright, Tóibín and Doyle from the 1990s to 2011, and also considers the significance of their collective turn to the explorative short story form as the boom declined. Overall, it concludes that the hectic circumstances of the
Celtic Tiger’s rise and fall drew from these writers a major reassessment of the formerly accepted co-ordinates and goals of Irish society, saw them assert the necessity of a break with existing cultural visions, and challenged their imagination to provide new visions for the future. In their family narratives – often observing new forms of inter-relation between fathers, mothers and children – these writers have offered a conspectus of both continuity and change in the wider Irish social context.
v
Declaration
This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication.
Student Signature ______
vi
Introduction
Irish people, it may be said, are amongst those who are, at one and the same time, deeply archaic and immediately contemporary.1 – Robert Welch
In October 2010, this satirical advertisement was stapled onto a makeshift wall of an abandoned shop on Shandon Street, Cork City, Ireland:
2
1 R. Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing, London, Routledge, 1993, p. xi. 2 Personal Photography, 22 October 2010.
1
Ireland, it seemed, was for sale; the idea of Ireland, anyway. According to the poster,
Ireland was in a state of poverty and despair through the policies of the then Finance
Minister Brian Lenihan and (unnamed) Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Surrounding the
poster were a large number of photocopied newspaper articles, outlining the state of
the nation. Spray paint and offensive language were not required to mark the wall and
express contempt; the current newspaper articles were deemed insulting enough. The
makeshift wall of information served as a canvas on which the frustration of the
nation was represented.
The years leading up to the creation of this poster, however, were very
different. The ‘Celtic Tiger’ – an appellation created by a London-based economist,
Kevin Gardiner, who used it in a report for his employers, the investment bankers
Morgan Stanley, on 31 August 19943 – was the period of unprecedented economic growth from 1994 to 2008 in the Republic of Ireland. It took three years for the phrase
‘to take off’4 and it then become synonymous with accelerated change in almost every
aspect of Irish life. Transcending its original economic boundaries, the Celtic Tiger
became the hegemonic signifier for all that changed in the social and cultural world of
the mid–late 1990s in Ireland. During this time, the literary representation of Ireland
was transformed by a flourishing of activity that projected a strong sense of national
consciousness which was, simultaneously, confident and confused.
For all the heady novelty of the Celtic Tiger years, the uncertain national
mood that it represented was in some ways familiar, recalling Daniel Corkery’s
sentiments in 1931: ‘[o]ur national consciousness may be described, in a native
3 L. Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2008, Oxford, John Wiley & Sons, 2013, p. 6. 4 H. Shaw, ‘What is the Celtic Tiger?’, in A. Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp. 16–18, p.16. 2
phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing.’ 5 It has been said that the Irish national consciousness as represented in literature, the characteristic text of the nation, must always be understood as ‘a process, unfinished, fragmenting’.6 The social and fiscal transformations experienced in the Celtic Tiger resulted in an extreme contemporary transitional period: a pseudo-transformational, liminal space that continually offered the hope for a prosperous future without ever providing a rationale for that hope.
In the words of Liam Harte, the Celtic Tiger was ‘paralleled by an uncommon flourishing of literary and artistic creativity’.7 This flourishing literature in and around the Celtic Tiger period is the subject of my inquiry in this thesis. I analyse selected fiction from 1990 to 2011 by Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín, examining and evaluating three major literary voices that enhanced, challenged and redefined Ireland in a series of differing representations that capture this tumultuous period. Their narratives, while significantly different in content, all implicitly or explicitly work to reconfigure the relationship between the nation’s past and present conditions, by ‘renegotiating received meanings of nationality and creating spaces for a revised rhetoric of Irishness’.8 In this recent and still developing period of rapid change, the past has proven no longer a powerful guide to understanding of the present, and the traditional preoccupation with the nation’s history has been re- evaluated. This articulation of change ‘is an on-going negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation’. 9
The transformation of Ireland has offered writers the chance to re-situate the nation in
5 D. Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature: A Study, Cork, Cork University Press, 1931, p. 14. 6 D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation, London, Vintage, 1995, p. 120. 7 Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2008, p. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 3. 9 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge Classics, 2010, p. 3. 3
history, or to recast the history of the nation within the contemporary context. In order
to understand the impact of ‘the angular, discontinuous, spliced-together nature of
contemporary Irish reality’,10 the decades that preceded its growth must be examined.
The Robinson Effect
The growth of contemporary Ireland can be traced from the late 1950s where the
country ‘moved from being an essentially rural-based, traditional bound society to
something resembling a modern, urbanised state’.11 The rural, traditional society can
be best understood through Éamon de Valera’s iconic address on Radio Eireann, St
Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1943. In the speech, the then Taoiseach outlines his ideal
Ireland, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Gaelic League (Conradh na
Gaeilge), a group that actively promoted Irish culture and native language. In his speech, de Valera presents an isolationist Ireland deeply loyal to the Catholic Church:
That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who
valued material wealth only as the basis of right living … and devoted
their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would
be bright with cosy homesteads – whose fields and villages would be
joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children,
the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose
firesides would be the forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would,
10 F. O’Toole, ‘Writing the Boom’, Irish Times, 25 January 2001, p. 12. 11 J. Kenny, ‘After the News: Critiquing the Irish Novel since the Sixties’, The Irish Review, no. 25, Winter/Spring 2000, pp. 62–73, p. 65. 4
in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires a man
should live.12
Since de Valera’s imaginings of a rural culture where people live as ‘God desires a
man should live’, Ireland’s social milieu has been complicated by local
socioeconomic and international political developments, resulting in a struggle over
national identity, and a difficult passage to understanding of what it now means to be
Irish. De Valera’s vision of Ireland was as a conservative nation with an emphasis on
self-sufficient agricultural industry, and where the population was encouraged to buy
Irish products as a means to boost the economy and national self-confidence. With
limited national resources, however, de Valera’s protectionist approach was
considered a failure. Under the leadership of Taoiseach Seán Lemass, Ireland’s
economy began to change drastically. As Secretary for the Department of Finance,
T.K. Whitaker wrote a paper, ‘Economic Development’,13 that outlined the future for
the Irish economy, namely foreign investment to stimulate industrialisation. The
paper can be read as a foreshadowing of the Celtic Tiger; Whitaker has been hailed as
the architect of the Celtic Tiger economy.14
Whitaker’s imaginings, however, did not bear fruit until decades later, with
Ireland’s membership of the European Community in 1973 acting as a major catalyst.
This positioned the nation within the European transnational government, leading to a
‘diminishing significance … of national sovereignty’ along with ‘increasing
12 E. de Valera, ‘The Ireland which we dreamed of’, in R. Aldous (ed.), Great Irish Speeches, London, Quercus, 2007, pp. 91–95, p. 93. 13 T.K. Whitaker, Economic Development, Dublin, Department of Finance/Stationery Office, 1958. 14 See: F. O’Muircheartaigh (ed.), Ireland in the Coming Times: Essays to Celebrate T. L. Whitaker’s 80 Years, Dublin, Institute of Public Administration, 1997. 5
obsolescence of a large part of the rhetoric of Irish nationalism’. 15 Ireland ‘looked to
Brussels’ for leadership instead of Catholic Rome, as horizons broadened with Irish
citizens travelling widely in neighbouring European countries, ‘breaking the old
obsession with the English speaking nations Britain and United States of America.’16
Ireland occupies instead ‘a cultural space somewhere between its nationalist past, its
European future and American imagination’.17 In the 1980s Ireland was positioned at
the bottom of European growth with a variety of issues hindering development:
… tariff protection, misguided fiscal policies, a bloated public sector, the
power of sectional interests, a poorly-functioning labour market, the
wrong investment mix, the lack of competition, emigration.18
In 1987, The Program for National Recovery was launched with the aim of introducing stability by 1990, but in that year, Colm McCarthy could write that
Ireland is facing an uncertain outlook for economic development in the
1990s. There are a number of very positive indicators, and there is a
consensus that Ireland will face a pattern of buoyant economic growth and
a continuing improvement in the public finances over the next five years.
Yet there is uncertainty and a belief that the creation of an internal market
15 M.A.G. O’Tuathaigh, ‘Irish Historical ‟Revisionism”: State of the Art or Ideological Project?’, in C. Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938–1994, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1994, pp. 306–326, p. 306. 16 M. Cooper, Who Really Runs Ireland?, London, Penguin, 2009, p. xxiii. 17 M. McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema, London, British Film Institute, 2000, p. 7. 18 C. Ó Gráda, A Rocky Road: The Irish Economy Since the 1920s, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 2. 6
in Europe will result in significant threats for a small peripheral country
such as Ireland.19
Ireland was slowly transforming from a pre-modern, rural community to an urban
society open to foreign investment, but in the late 1980s, the economy was struggling:
the unemployment rate was at a high of 18 per cent20 and between 1982 and 1991 an
‘estimated 210,000 people left the country’.21 With these high unemployment and
emigration numbers, there was no sign that the Celtic Tiger was around the corner. It
would come as a surprise.
For the purposes of this study, I have aligned my analysis of Ireland’s
contemporary metamorphosis with the election of Mary Robinson as Uachtarán na
hÉireann, the President of Ireland, on 9 November 1990. Robinson beat conservative
Fianna Fáil candidate Brian Lenihan to become the first female Irish President. In her inauguration speech on 3 December 1990, Robinson called for an Ireland with a
‘confident sense of … Irishness’22 to contribute to a new integrated Europe:
The Ireland I will be representing is a new Ireland, open, tolerant,
inclusive. Many of you who voted for me did so without sharing all my
views. This, I believe, is a significant signal of change, a sign, however
19 C. McCarthy, ‘Prosperity in Europe: the roles of industry and government’, in D. Kennedy & A. Pender (eds), Prosperity and Policy: Ireland in the 1990s, Dublin, Institute of Public Administration, 1990, pp. 19–30, p. 21. 20 C. Kuhling & K. Keohan, Cosmopolitan Ireland: Globalisation and Quality of Life, London, Pluto Press, 2007, p. 1. 21 E. Hazelkorn, ‘‟We can’t all live on a small island”: the political economy of Irish migration’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish in the New Communities Volume 2, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1992, pp. 180–200, p. 180. 22 M. Robinson. ‘Inaugural Speech in Dublin Castle on Monday, December 3, 1990’, in D. McQuillan, Mary Robinson: A President in Progress, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1994, p. 3. 7
modest, that we have already passed the threshold to a new, pluralist
Ireland.23
It seems more than coincidental that on the eve of Ireland’s transformation, a transformative figure was elected to the presidency. Robinson’s speech had a prophetic effect – ‘a time of exciting transformation when we enter a new Europe where old wounds can be healed’24 – imagining a socially revolutionised Ireland with a newfound confidence on the international stage. The Robinson era not only acknowledged major changes in Ireland’s social legislation, such as her work in the
1970s to legalise contraception and in the 1980s to legalise homosexuality, but also helped Ireland finally to escape the shackles of the past. An enlightened, pluralist future seemed to await. Robinson became emblematic of a fundamental transition in
Irish culture. The political innovation with which Robinson is associated has been aligned with new perspectives and themes in contemporary Irish literature:
With a confidence bolstered by the 1990 election to the Irish presidency
of a female reformist lawyer, Mary Robinson, the Irish began to face up to
their position as modern Europeans …. Where political culture led,
writers followed, and in the publishing boom of the 1990s, the Irish novel
repeatedly highlighted the institutional and ideological failings of the
country, tracing the halting progress of Ireland’s cultural, sexual and
economic evolution, and foregrounding voices of dissent.25
23 Ibid., p. 1. 24 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 25 E. Patten, ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction’, in J. Wilson Foster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 259–275, p. 259. 8
Gerry Smyth coined the neologism ‘Robinsonian Literature’ to describe the work of
emergent writers in the late 1980s and 1990s that represented a willingness to explore
a new version of Ireland.26 Smyth asserts that the literature of that time had a ‘self-
awareness of the role played by cultural narratives in mediating modern … Ireland’s
changing circumstances’.27 Writing three years after Smyth, Fogarty agreed with the
Robinson effect on literature;
The forces of feminist radicalism and political innovation with which
Mary Robinson is associated provide resonant metaphors for the new
perspectives, themes and aesthetics of contemporary Irish fiction.28
Fogarty continues by saying the ‘self-consciously ground-breaking critical
vocabulary’ proposed by Smyth creates a ‘symbolic index of the originality of the
fictional creations of modern Irish writers’.29 In 2007, ten years after his
groundbreaking The Novel and The Nation, Smyth writes:
Being ‘Irish’ has radically altered within a single generation, and this is
something discernable not only in that great mass of industry-generated
statistics produced each year, but in the very fabric of lived experience.
The fact is that Ireland looks, sounds, smells, feels and tastes different
26G. Smyth, The Novel and The Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction, London, Pluto Press, 1997, p. 7. 27 Ibid. 28 A. Fogarty, ‘Uncanny Families: Neo-Gothic Motifs and the Theme of Social Change in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction’, Irish University Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2000, pp. 59–81, p. 60. 29 Ibid. 9
nowadays compared to 1986; the meaning of ‘Irishness’ – wherever and
whenever it is encountered – has as a consequence altered.30
This argument of rapid acceleration in the altering of Irish identity is supported by
Tóibín who, only two years later, wrote how
old definitions would not work … [it is] not useful to suggest that to be
Irish was only to be Celtic in background, have a name beginning with O’
or Mac, be Roman Catholic in religion and get drunk on St Patrick’s
Day. 31
These traditional nationalist versions of Irishness are now of little relevance, and it has been said that Ireland is ‘most at ease with itself, it appears, when the obsession with an exclusive … identity is abandoned’. 32 Highlighted by both Smyth and
Fogarty, the multitude of changes from de Valera’s era to Robinson’s inauguration
saw the
artificially constructed narratives of Irishness that claimed authority since
the foundation of the state … [give] way to a rich diffusion of voices and
perspectives, inflected by a complex interplay of competing artistic,
political and social agendas.33
30 G. Smyth, ‘Tiger, Theory, Technology’, Irish Studies Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2007, pp. 123–136, p. 123. 31 C. Tóibín, ‘What Does It Mean To Be Irish?’, Newsweek, vol. 153, no. 13, 30 April 2009, p 39. 32 R. Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 101. 33 Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007, p. 3. 10
This is the diffuse and unsettled context, the national mood, against which I locate my
reading of how Tóibín, Enright and Doyle represented Ireland and Irishness in and
around the Celtic Tiger period.
A Globalised Ireland
In 2001, seven years after Robinson’s inauguration and during the height of the Celtic
Tiger, the US magazine Foreign Policy issued the annual A.T. Kearney Globalisation
Index, which ranks the most globalised nations in the world, placing the Republic of
Ireland on top of the list, a position it held for the next three years. 34 Considering that
globalisation refers to the ‘large and growing flows of trade and capital investment
between countries’, Ireland had transformed at an incredible rate.35 In terms of
finance, trade and technological development, Ireland’s insular, protectionist and self-
sufficient economy that ‘consisted of little more than Guinness’s Brewery and a large
farm’ had clearly developed.36 European membership was the catalyst for Ireland’s
globalisation by removing government-imposed restrictions and adhering to European
legislation, resulting in an opened economy. Furthermore, the nation’s low corporate
tax enticed a flood of multinational companies to view Ireland as an attractive
gateway to Europe. During the Celtic Tiger years, Ireland became the fastest growing
economy in the developed world, a dramatic turnaround after having the lowest
growth of output per capita in comparison to other European countries for much of
34 ‘Globalization Index 2001’, Foreign Policy, no. 128, 2002. 35 J.A. Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction, London, Macmillan, 2000, p. 15. 36 T.P. Coogan, Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora, London, Arrow Books, 2002, p. xiii. 11
the twentieth century.37 This globalising effect was not all positive, however. Tom
Inglis has suggested that globalisation has weakened the forces that once united
Ireland – religion and family – through a heightened consumer culture: the bank
became the new church, credit became the new faith and Ireland became a place in
which the emphasis was on ‘self-realization’.38
Also with economic prosperity came an unprecedented rise in net inward migration; transforming the country from one of ‘emigrations to one of in- migrations’.39 Immigration in the twenty-first century is as influential and as
definitive of Ireland as emigration was in the twentieth century. With the economic
boom of the 1990s came a reversal of migration flow after the mass emigration of the
1980s. A dramatic employment increase of 55 per cent, or 650,000 new jobs, resulted
in widespread labour shortages, calling for migration into Ireland. 40 By 2005,
Ireland’s 4.13 million population was 6.3 per cent, or 259, 400 people, foreign.41
After almost a century of economic underdevelopment and mass emigration, Ireland became defined by globalising forces of economic hyperactivity. Through participation in the global market, Irish wages rose, unemployment levels sank and immigrants helped create an altered nation.
Some views of the Celtic Tiger have drawn a misleading direct connection between improved economic conditions and national morale. According to the
37 F. O’Toole, ‘Notes from the Notice Box: An Introduction’, in A. Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp. 1–15, p. 8. 38 Ibid., p. 6. 39 A. Ugba, ‘Ireland’, in A. Triandafyllidou & R. Gropas (eds), European Immigration: A Sourcebook, Ashgate, England, 2007, p. 169. 40 G. Hughes, F. McGinnity, P. O’Connell & E. Quinn, ‘The Impact of Immigration’, in T. Fahey, H. Russell & C.T. Whelan (eds), Quality of Life in Ireland: Social Impact of Economic Boom, Dublin, Springer, 2008, pp. 217–244, p. 218. 41 Ibid., p. 219. 12
strategy document of the National Economic and Social Council, ‘Ireland reinvented itself during the 1990s’.42 This document presented a version of a transformed
Ireland, focusing on the seemingly positive and supportive relationship between economy and culture. It offers a positive representation of Ireland’s sudden high productivity and improved economic state resulting in an increased standard of living in the context of European Union. Its extension of economic prosperity to cultural welfare is simplistic, based on unexamined assumptions:
The links between economy and culture have been little explored apart
from a generalised correlation between economic success and a climate of
national self-confidence and creativity.43
Nevertheless, this generalised correlation became the dominant reading of the Celtic
Tiger. Changes experienced were considered positive because of ‘a strong influence on media coverage and public discourse … generating a widespread mood of self- congratulation’.44 Looking back on the Celtic Tiger period, it might be argued instead that unprecedented economic successes resulted in national self-doubt as opposed to national self-confidence. The Celtic Tiger saw few in the nation benefit:
42 Cited in H. Donnan & T. Wilson, The Anthropology of Ireland, Oxford, Berg, 2006, p. 12. 43 P. Kirby, L. Gibbons & M. Cronin, ‘Introduction: The Reinvention of Ireland: A Critical Perspective’, in P. Kirby, L. Gibbons & M. Cronin (eds), Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and Global Economy, London, Pluto Press, 2002, pp. 1–20, p. 2. 44 P. Kirby, The Celtic Tiger in Distress: Growth with Inequality in Ireland, Hampshire, Palgrave, 2002, p. 3. 13
[the] economy ha[d] enriched a small elite while leaving the majority, the
growth in whose wages has been held in check by national social
partnership agreements, relatively worse off.45
This comment highlights the problems of the dominant reading of the Celtic Tiger.
Firstly, it reveals that national economic success cannot be purely equated with an unprecedented level of morale. Secondly, the success was limited to a select few; to speak as if the subsequent affluence was experienced by the nation as a whole is incorrect.
With increasing globalisation, some Irish fiction focused on the past while paradoxically offering a confident sense of Irishness without any foundation of place.
Ireland was in a similar cultural position to the one it occupied after the famines of the mid-nineteenth century, being a ‘sort of nowhere, waiting for its appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it’. 46 And since an imagined community and identity
generally develops through the ‘rise of print capitalism and new genres such as the
newspaper and the novel’, 47 the implications of Ireland’s contemporary transformations for the novel were vast, with signifiers of nation and authenticity breaking loose of nationalist traditions. According to Derek Hand, every event in the
Celtic Tiger can be read as a beginning and an end, heralding both the death of an old
Ireland and birth of a new, but most importantly the Celtic Tiger allowed ‘the novel to flourish where it could not flourish before’. 48 This study analyses the response of Irish
45 Kirby, et al., Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and Global Economy, p. 5. 46 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 115. 47 Hutchinson, The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, p. 110. 48 D. Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 251. 14
prose fiction to the rise, flourishing and fall of the Celtic Tiger. Through a close look
at works produced across the entire period, it charts the response of three very
different leading Irish writers – Tóibín, Enright and Doyle – to a situation in which
the traditional preoccupation with the past as the source of Irish identity has been both
radically challenged and energised by sudden economic, social and cultural change.
Ireland’s economy was ruined in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in
2008, and the slowly recovering country has been left to create a ‘real identity in an
unreal world – a world being globalized on a base of narrow ideological values…’.49
Contemporary Irish fiction works in response to Ireland’s globally integrated identity.
Beyond the study of literature in its own right, attention to complex fictions of Irish
consciousness and experience in this confusing period is one way, as Hand has
expressed it, to ‘give some sense of where the country is now’.50
The Past and Present in the Celtic Tiger
In October 1974, the year after Ireland joined the European Union, Seamus Heaney delivered a lecture at the Royal Society of Literature where he discussed how the contemporary is always defined by its past:
In Ireland in this century it has evolved for Yeats and many others an
attempt to define and interpret the present by bringing it into a significant
49 D. McGonagle, ‘Myths and Mind-sets, or How Can We Be Real?’, in A. Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp. 112–122, p. 112. 50 D. Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 276. 15
relationship with the past, and I believe that effort in our present
circumstances has to be urgently renewed.51
It might be contended against Heaney’s view that in Ireland’s recent and still developing period of rapid change, the past no longer proves a powerful guide to understanding of the present, and the value of Ireland’s preoccupation with its history has been re-calculated. Contemporary Irish writing represents the renewed struggles by both individuals and collectives to come to terms with a history which once appeared to offer a secure source of cultural definition but which is now open to radical contestation, in ‘an on-going negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation’. 52 Fiction of the period 1990–2011, in which the contemporary Irish novel has defined itself and redefined Ireland, offers to analyse the chance to study such transformation. For instance, the shift from a theological to a humanist view of life in Ireland can be traced through the development of the novel; the privileging of the secular individual over the religious subject is revealed through the life stories with which the Irish novel has long been preoccupied.
Endless paradoxes congregate around the subject of contemporary Irish fiction; writers are accused of whingeing when they focus on the past, yet criticised for ignoring their past when they write on the present. According to Terry Eagleton, however, the current Irish condition is to be shamefaced and sarcastic about one’s own culture, and to urge respect for aspects of traditional Irish culture and history is
51 S. Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, London, Faber & Faber, 1980, p. 60. 52 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge Classics, 2010, p. 3. 16
to brand oneself as ‘morbidly nostalgic’.53 In 2010, Julian Gough wrote about
contemporary Irish fiction:
If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in
the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish
fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented. Indeed, they
seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity….54
Gough’s assertion that contemporary novelists do not engage with contemporary
culture fails to acknowledge that historical fiction usually functions as a response to
the times in which it was written. Furthermore, not all of the novels of the Celtic
Tiger period ignore the present. For example, a majority of Doyle’s oeuvre actively
engages with contemporary social circumstances and issues. The paradox of
combining the past and the present in contemporary culture stems from the realisation
that contemporary Irish fiction is, in fact, representing a collision culture, ‘a clash
between ancient and mythical ideas of the nation and a new sense of national self
based on very recent economic growth and social change’. 55 This dynamic clash
results in a ‘crisis of consciousness’56 and presents the writer with a choice: to revert
back to history for material, or to look to contemporary culture for inspiration. The
53 T. Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998, p. 308. 54 J. Gough, cited in A. Flood, ‘Julian Gough slams fellow Irish novelists as ‟priestly caste” cut off from culture’, The Guardian, 12 February 2010,
importance of history and memory was paradoxically heightened in the Celtic Tiger period:
That’s something James Joyce would never understand; he wrote that
Irish history was a nightmare from which he was trying to escape. But
thanks to the boom, Ireland has awoken from its nightmare, and instead of
escaping it, the Irish are increasingly willing to explore it.57
The increasing desire to explore history, and by extension memory, stems from a need to reclaim a sense of identity in an unreal world. While deconstructing the present, the fiction studied in this thesis regularly arches back to the past to validate, deny, continue or disrupt the present. It suggests we need to understand the past to comprehend the present and challenges writers of the present to make a re-appraisal of history. An analysis of contemporary Irish prose literature over the last twenty-one years offers an insight into the triumphant and disastrous transformative changes experienced in Ireland. Why was a vibrant modern country so focused on the past?
The answer may be that when writers could not rely on traditional frameworks of national identity to express current conditions, many avoided writing directly about the boom, and absented themselves from the vulgarities and absurdities of the new version of Ireland.
In a public lecture shortly after Ireland’s independence, W.B. Yeats talked of national confidence and pride:
57 C. Power, ‘What Happened To Irish Art?’, Newsweek, vol. 138, no. 8, August 2001, p. 40. 18
When a nation is immature it is exceedingly vain and does not believe in
itself, and so long as it does not believe in itself it wants other people to
think well of it in order that it might get a little reflected confidence. With
success comes pride, and with pride comes indifference as to whether
people are shown in a good or bad light on the stage. As a nation comes to
intellectual maturity, it realizes that the only thing that does it any credit is
its intellect.58
If literature serves as a negotiable realm to develop a new sense of national identity
and intellect, it raises the question: has a sense of pride in intellect developed from
contemporary Irish literature? Has contemporary Irish fiction adopted an inward-
looking, history-based focus to reclaim, or re-imagine, a sense of Irishness lost in the
contemporary context? Socioeconomic developments have changed Ireland’s culture
considerably, yet relatively few fictional representations appropriate or embrace these
transformations. It can be argued that Irish literature has alienated itself from the real
Ireland by relying on outworn cultural traditions to represent the contemporary. In the
early 1990s it was claimed that the majority of fiction was dominated either
exclusively ‘by Northern troubles or by icons like the Catholic Church, an inbred
peasant hunger for land, red-haired girls on the bog or navvies lusting after pints of
beer.’59 Some writers may continue to create this clichéd version of Ireland for an international audience, but the Ireland of social stereotypes has diminished, at least in prose fiction. The link between nation and novel is as strong as ever:
58 W.B. Yeats, ‘My Own Poetry’, as reported in Irish Times, 25 February 1926. 59 D. Bolger, ‘Introduction’, in D. Bolger (ed.), The Picador Book of Irish Contemporary Fiction, London, Pan Books, 1993, pp. vii–xxvi, p. xi. 19
Despite new times, (Irish) novel and (Irish) nation still appears to be
caught in a bind of mutual fascination. For all these writers, even when
the action is set elsewhere, or when the subject matter appears overtly
non-national, the national narrative is still there, hovering in the
background, still exercising influence at a deep structural and/or
conceptual level.60
A common international reading of Ireland currently focuses on how the nation has developed ‘in the era of globalisation.’61 The notion of ‘a vibrant economy and a
confident culture’ 62 is apt in regard to Ireland’s economic boom, but as Ireland is now
feeling the effects of economic recession and dissolved globalised power; the
reconstruction of a national identity, or national identities, could be in motion.
‘Globalisation has radically redefined what we know as tradition,’63 and thus with the
slowing of globalisation could come the reconfiguration of a more legitimate Irish
identity, a new space to negotiate self-understanding within contemporary culture.
According to O’Toole,
What has happened, essentially, is that the emergence of a frantic,
globalised, dislocated Ireland has deprived fiction writers of some of their
traditional tools. One is a distinctive set of place. To write honestly of
60 G. Norquay & G. Smyth, ‘Waking up in a Different Place: Contemporary Irish and Scottish Fiction’, The Irish Review, no. 28, 2001, pp. 28–45, p. 40. 61 G.H. Fagan, ‘Globalised Ireland, or, contemporary transformations of national identity?’, in C. Coulter & S. Coleman (eds), The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 111. 62 D. O’Hearn, Inside the Celtic Tiger: The Irish Economy and the Asian Model, London, Pluto Press, 1998, p. 57. 63 Fagan, ‘Globalised Ireland’, p. 117. 20
where most of us live now is to describe everywhere and nowhere …. The
other troublesome change is the collapse of the very notion of a national
narrative. Throughout the 20th century, it was possible for Irish writers to
tell stories which seemed in one way or another to relate to a bigger story
of revival, revolution, repression and collapse.… These days, it is by no
means clear what the big story of Ireland actually is, or indeed that the
whole notion of ‘Ireland’ as a single framework has any validity’. 64
The versions of Irish identities presented in contemporary novels reveal a great dislocation of Irish self-understanding and sense of place at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Contemporary social realist fictional interpretations of Ireland are beginning to stress the diversity and fluidity of the Irish identity in an increasingly secularised society, where unemployment and poverty are escalating and traditional attitudes to the church are markedly changing. The Irish novels explored in this thesis can be read as a kind of social realism, one which does not masquerade as an unmediated view of ‘reality’ but which conforms to the tradition of novel writing which emphasises social and economic conditions within the narrative and generally relies on representation of the everyday in its historical period.
This use of social realism seeems significantly related to the need to track the transformations of Ireland during the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. According to
Derek Hand, traditionally
64 O’Toole, ‘Writing the Boom’, p. 12.
21
realism in Irish fiction is not merely a retreat into the conventional modes of
representation, but … after centuries of misrepresentation the careful detailing
of Irish life in all aspects was, and continued to be, a revolutionary act.65
Nevertheless, trying to analyse literary history in relation to contemporary socio-
economic changes is, in itself, problematical. The fast pace of change in the Celtic
Tiger period challenged the tradition of Irish social and historical writing, but that
tradition still afforded space for new representations of what it means to live in
Ireland today. In an uncertain, ambiguous and confusing period, the novel of social
realism also continued another Irish literary tradition, the conflicting relationship between fiction and history:
…the Irish novel’s relationship to realism is further complicated as the act of
fiction writing gets caught up in a broader debate about the nature of truth, and
history writing, between what might be imagined and what actually happens.66
In line with Hand’s perception, the recent changes in Ireland have influenced and
altered the representations of history that currently dominate Irish literature; re- imagination of the past has become another way of attending to the nature of contemporary culture, and of re-imagining the present and future. In fictions of both past and present, the recent transformations in Ireland’s economy and social structures have resulted in a revived social realist literary tradition and a new exuberance of self-
65 Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 130. 66 Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 142. 22
expression. At the same time, writers focusing on the contemporary scene have critiqued and revised the twentieth-century traditions of Irish fiction.
The Irish Family as a Measure of Change
As part of the new treatment of the Irish past that can be associated with Celtic Tiger novel, I examine particularly how in this fiction the Irish family provides a field in which to expose and explore the nation and its history. The ‘elision of the personal and the narrative’ in historical writing is, according to R.F. Foster, ‘a particularly Irish phenomenon’. 67 By extension, Irish literature often takes the image of a troubled or dysfunctional family to explain the state of the nation. My study will explore the work of three Irish fiction writers – Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín – who all, in varying ways, ‘dissect and explain’ Ireland through their representation of the
Irish family. Through its depiction of the family in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century fiction, the work of Doyle, Enright and Tóibín offers a space to reconfigure and renegotiate a representation of a transformed Irish society. Doyle,
Enright and Tóibín offer varying insights into both the contemporary and the past.
Their works both conflict with and complement each other; their fictional styles are significantly different, but their recurring use of family as a main motif unites them.
In selecting these three, I am making no attempt to create a Celtic Tiger canon of literature. Rather, the choice is of three major contemporary novelists whose active engagement with themes of history, memory and national identity, frequently represented through fictions of the family, concentrates and articulates some key preoccupations of the Celtic Tiger period. Their representations of family provide a
67 R.F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. xi. 23
central thread of analysis throughout this thesis; as a fictional theme, the family offers
an opportunity for a rapprochement with the Irish past that nevertheless registers the
vast social changes in recent and contemporary times. In studying the theme of family
in these diverse writers, I aim to situate research on contemporary Irish fiction in its
wider social context, exploring how my selected texts confront and negotiate issues of
religion, politics, economic prosperity, poverty and the social inclusion of new
migrants.
I take as a reference point for modern ideas of the Irish family the limiting
definition stated in the Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht Na hÉireann, 1937), one that ‘reflects a perceived notion of what Irish society is’ by constructing an exclusive, patriarchal, Catholic and nationalist identity.68 In Article 41 1.1,
The state recognizes the Family as the natural primary and fundamental
unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable
and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.69
According to Harte, this recognition of the family within the Constitution ‘enshrined
the family as the heart of national ideology’. 70 The Constitution works as a
foundation of familial representation for this thesis as it outlines not only the
apparent strength of the family unit but also its importance:
The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution
68 P. Hanafin, ‘Defying the female: The Irish constitutional text as phallocentric manifesto’, Textual Practice, vol. 11, no. 2, 1997, pp. 249–273, p. 249. 69 The Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht Na hÉireann, 1937), Dublin, The Stationery Office, 2012, pp. 160–162. 70 Harte, Contemporary Irish Novel, p. 64. 24
and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable
to the welfare of the Nation and the State.71
The definition continues to state, ‘mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity
to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’ positioning women in a
disempowered and marginalised role.72 An ideologically freighted entity, the
representation of the Irish family has been irrevocably altered by social and economic developments since 1937. As Moore perceived, the ‘hidden’ and ‘domestic’ holds secret histories of Irish life and so the family remains the ideal fictional theme to chart the progress of change in Ireland.
The Irish focus on the nuclear family stems from its predominantly Catholic historical traditions, and its colonial past, and
has often been treated as a phenomenon arising out of Catholic ideology
… [and the] dual forces of Christianity, which reinforced a patriarchal
system of familial relationships, and British colonialism, which divided
the land and penalized social formations that did not further British
interests, helped to fix the heterosexual nuclear family as a primary unit
group of Irish society.73
Historically, the Catholic Church defined the position of the Irish State on the notion
of family. Breaking down the normative ideology of the nuclear family becomes a
71 The Constitution of Ireland, Article 41. 1.2., p. 162. 72 Ibid., Article 41. 2.2., p. 162. 73 K. Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, pp. 4–5. 25
vital theme in literature attempting to understand the changing state of the nation. The
symbol and substance of the family has offered Irish prose fiction an ability to explore
and understand contemporary Ireland, in defiance of the family image celebrated in
the Constitution. The family, as a theme, most clearly brings a preoccupation with
history and the preoccupation with contemporary social and economic change into
contact.
The family is the fundamental unit of Irish culture, and according to Anne
Enright, possibly the only unit. 74 The representation of the Irish family in literature
will, in this study, work as a metaphor of cultural transformation in the period before,
during and after Celtic Tiger Ireland. In the past forty years, there has been a
significant pattern of change in the structure and role of the family on a social level. 75
There have been a variety of changes that alter the fabric of the family, for example,
the introduction of generally available contraception in 1987,76 the enactment of
divorce legislation in 1996,77 along with the revelation of the 200,000 family units
‘headed by someone parenting alone, of which 86% were headed by females’.78
Examining the rise and fall of Ireland’s economy and social transformation
through the representation of family – be the family dysfunctional or nuclear – in
contemporary literature treats the family as metaphor for the nation, as a site to
display cultural crisis, and a chart to track social change. Analysing the representation
of family in the work of three selected contemporary Irish writers, reveals a struggle
for identity in which an unsettled national narrative potentially learns new forms.
74 A. Enright, ‘Introduction’, in A. Enright (ed.), The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, London, Granta, 2010, p. xv. 75 J. Canavan, ‘Family and Family Change in Ireland: An Overview’, Journal of Family Issues, vol. 33, no. 10, 2012, pp. 10–28. 76 Ibid., p. 13. 77 Ibid., p. 15. 78 Ibid. 26
Through fictions that often place the present generation in connection with the
dead, these writers establish a split view – looking to the future through discoveries of
formerly repressed truths about the past. Enright and Tóibín use the family as a space
to observe change and to examine an interesting cross-current within histories of both
the self and the nation. Each provides a strong sense of continuity, a sense of the past,
determined in ways that are not simply socio-economically related. Doyle,
alternatively, deliberately resists looking into the past; most of his fiction relentlessly
confronts contemporary issues such as unemployment, religious attitudes and
domestic abuse.
The growing importance in Irish life of a secular individual identity over a
communal religious affiliation is revealed through the Celtic Tiger novel’s frequent
preoccupation with contemporary life stories. Texts set in the present suggest hope for
a better future through reconfigurations of identity and an understanding of the
complex intersections of contemporary Irishness. Roddy Doyle, famous for his
rejection of traditional views of Ireland as clichéd, insists Irish people now live in
exciting times for artistic expression, if they want them; ‘opportunities are hopping in
front of us to invent new stories, new art, new voices, new music’.79 It has also been
said that the study of Irish culture and literature is in a ‘process of transformation with
new critical practices and theoretical frameworks almost inevitably challenging the
orthodoxies of how Ireland is read and what is read as ‘Ireland’’.80 The current state
of Ireland has been seen as a ‘transformation of cultural expectations, based not only
79 R. Doyle, ‘Green Yodel No. 1’, in A. Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp. 69–70, p. 69. 80 C. Graham & R. Kirkland, ‘Introduction’, in C. Graham & R. Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, London, Macmillan, 1999, p. 1. 27
on a new confidence in the wider world by also on the rejection of some authoritarian foundations, as well as the manipulation of certain new-found identities’. 81 Yet despite these fresh identities and opportunities, Irish fiction remains equally preoccupied with images and themes from history, and still faces some traditional challenges. Declan Kiberd insists the Irish writer has still to choose whether to ‘write for the native audience – a risky, often thankless task – or to produce texts for consumption in Britain and North America’. 82 Irish literature’s preoccupation with history is seen to stem from an obsession with ‘history writing in the eighteenth century when the English novel was allegedly emerging as a contributing factor to the sense of nation’.83 Yet, the return to history in contemporary fiction does not mean the Irish are necessarily focused on the past; rather they are ‘obsessed with their power over it, including the power to change its meaning whenever that seems necessary’.84 The representation of Irish history, therefore, can be seen to derive from and to result in a renegotiation of cultural identity, in a possible overcompensation to account for the apparent loss of Irish culture within a globally integrated identity. At the height of the boom came a surge in Irish novel production that offered historical representations. With the decline of the boom came an increased production of short story collections, offering a retrospective representation of the boom period, which was now itself a new ‘history’. The fiction I have selected for analysis, especially in relation to its treatment of the family, reveals a degree of tension between the contemporary Irish situation, and the history and cultural memory which have formerly underpinned the self-understanding of the nation. The work of two of the
81 R.F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970–2000, London, Penguin, p. 149. 82 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 136. 83 Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up In Ireland, p. 4. 84 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, p. 280. 28
selected authors – Tóibín and Enright – exhibits a dual fidelity to the contemporary and the historical, whilst Doyle immerses the reader in a ground-level experience of the present. The engagement with varying texts demands a multi-faceted approach; my methodology alters with each author as their works offer varying opportunities for insight. The thesis is united, however, by its exploration of the relation of literary content and form in the selected writers to the experience of the Celtic Tiger’s rise, flourishing and fall, as understood in their varying representation of the family and by extension, the nation.
My approach to these prose fictions takes in not only their reconfiguration of
Ireland’s national identity but also the cultural position and public expectations of the writer. Doyle, Enright, and Tóibín have had a similar degree of literary success in
Ireland and abroad: Tóibín has been short listed three times for the Man Booker Prize, while Doyle and Enright won the award in 1993 and 2007 respectively. Each writer, directly or implicitly, examines the dilemma of national identity in their work, in the act of redefining and re-examining the Irish literary tradition.
Chapter One explores memory and family in selected novels of Colm Tóibín.
Tóibín’s work exemplifies a fusion of historical representation and revisionism with an image of contemporary society; his novels present a reconfiguration in time to ensure an understanding of how history relates to and influences the contemporary situation. Employing Pierre Nora’s work on memory and history, I attempt to show
Tóibín’s revisionist representation of the Irish family, and by extension, the nation. As a former editor of Magill (in the 1980s), Tóibín’s sharp journalist eye captures subtle nuances of change in dense, multi-temporal narratives. Whether principally set in a contemporary Ireland, in Spain, or in 1950s Ireland and America, his novels frequently change times and places, treating collective and cultural memories as a
29
form of self- and national identity, but also as agents able to break down former versions of identity. My analysis highlights Tóibín’s recurrent narrative of family generational change to capture a sense of Ireland’s recent cultural transformation and multi-layered national identity.
Chapter Two analyses the neo-Gothic representations of family, trauma and the past in selected novels of Anne Enright. In Gothic style, Enright’s fiction represents cultural anxieties of the unknown, the secret and the ambiguous within families which are presented as ideologically freighted entities, transformed from the cripplingly unreal definition of the Irish Constitution to the problematical unit of the contemporary period. I take Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma and the impossibility of memorial recall as a theoretical guide to Enright’s fiction. With its emphasis on the
Gothic, Enright’s at times fragmented storytelling mode, in tandem with her lyrical and evocative use of language, suggests that individual and national identity is not only in constant process, but is under the constant influence of the past, whether that past is consciously understood or not.
The third chapter examines Roddy Doyle’s fictional representation of contemporary social change. Doyle offers a strikingly real representation of urban
Dublin in his novels with a significant focus on the family. A sense of change strongly resonates through the strong characterisations and dynamic representations of the family units in his fiction. Doyle utilises the local sphere and local voice to give his novels a sense of authenticity and cultural intimacy. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin provides a foundation for my study of Doyle’s literary style, along with that of Tom
Inglis for Doyle’s sense of the new globalised Ireland. The development of Doyle’s fiction can be read as charting the shift of national attitudes and as a reconfiguration of what it means to be Irish under recent and current conditions.
30
Chapter Four presents collective analysis of Tóibín, Enright and Doyle’s short
story collections. These writers independently but almost simultaneously turned to the
short story form in the lead-up to the death of the Celtic Tiger. Their shared shift in form is a unifying feature in otherwise varied careers and seems to suggest a link between choice of form and cultural and economic context. Their move to the short story after decades of acclaimed novel production treats the shorter form as a field of mastery rather than apprenticeship. It can be seen to reinforce the relation of cultural,
economic and social factors not only to literary content but also to literary form. The
analytical structure of my thesis follows this shift in form from the novel to the short
story, and places it in the context of recent social and economic changes that inhibit
the confidence required for writing novels.
On the Road to Recovery
On 11 November 2011, Michael D. Higgins was inaugurated as Ireland’s ninth
president. The Ireland to which Higgins addressed himself, and the Irishness to which
he referred, were waning, unlike Robinson’s burgeoning and prosperous Ireland. He
described the Celtic Tiger as a failed chapter in Ireland’s history, a chapter that ‘left
us fragile as an economy, but most of all wounded as a society’.85 Higgins calls on the
power of the individual to ‘recall’ Ireland by opening a new chapter ‘based on a
different version of … Irishness’ that will transform political thought and individual
consciousness.86
The Celtic Tiger is already receding into myth through images of the now
85 Inaugural speech of President Michael D. Higgins. 11 November 2011,
familiar economic ‘crash’ and ‘crisis’ that continue to saturate the Irish media. These
images frame a new way to understand the country – constructed now as a wounded
economy. Ireland’s struggle, however, is not limited to fiscal reform but also includes
the effort to understand the past and create a sustainable, imagined future. Romantic
and proud notions of Irish culture that were projected internationally have disappeared
since the crash. The Celtic Tiger, evidently, did not foster lyricism and the time had
come to regain it:
The boom was resolutely unpoetic, its hard-faced greed posing an
impossible challenge to the lyricism that is the first resort of Irish writing.
There is now a need to somehow make up for that absence, to engage with
the afterlife of a period that was hard to write about when it was
unfolding.87
The rise of the short story in Ireland, after the Celtic Tiger, accounts for a representation of the difficult time to articulate and comprehend. There is now, in the
post-Celtic Tiger era, a need to make up for that absence in some way, to engage with
the afterlife of a period that was so difficult to write about because it was so absurd to
live in. Short stories, especially since 2006, have ‘proved highly effective in rendering the discordant juxtapositions of post 1990 Ireland’.88 The giddy rise and sudden fall
87 F. O’Toole, ‘Now the bubble has burst, we’re left with our real treasure’, Irish Times, 24 September 2011,
of the Celtic Tiger have left some Irish people bitter, and many people broke. News
reporting has yet to transcend the mood of economic depression, ensuring a constant
filtering of negative attitudes into the country.
From the vantage point after the death of the Celtic Tiger, to study the
development of the nation’s literature located between Robinson’s and Higgins’
inaugural speeches provides insight into the social and imaginative transformations
that took place in that period. The Celtic Tiger is a term that functions as an umbrella
conveying, and somewhat justifying, corrupt developments and actions by those in
power. In that respect, Ireland did not reinvent itself in the 1990s, but merely
projected a new and more powerful image that laid its foundations on prospects for
the future. The period is now represented as a version of a hyper-consumerist
capitalist society that suddenly discovered the vain satisfaction of glorifying self-
worth. The trajectory of national perception had a sudden and giddy rise with a
catastrophic fall. The vantage point of retrospect allows writers to draw back from
their immersion in the experience and to grasp, or represent. To do this, we must
explore the literature produced during the Celtic Tiger, if it reflected or refracted an
accurate representation of its times. Ireland is now a ‘sort of nowhere, waiting for its appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it’. 89 The selected literature offers
the chance to explore what both Robinson and Higgins, and at times de Valera, define
by Irishness, and how that meaning is constructed. Despite the call for definition,
novels and short stories do not offer an absolute, self-contained or closed definition of
Irishness. Instead, an outsider’s reading may show how the nation came to understand its changing reflection – either by staring at it, looking through it or avoiding it.
I draw on my experience of living in Ireland for research purposes in 2011,
89 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 115. 33
and of growing up as the daughter of two of the 210,000 Irish people who emigrated
between 1981 and 1990. This thesis began as an exploration of various social changes, presented in the literature of Ireland, that inspired my parents to leave, and transformed into an exploration of the representation of family in the literature of the
Celtic Tiger years. My aim is to present an articulation of how my three selected writers broke down the boundaries of family and nation in order to understand and represent contemporary experience.
34
Chapter One
Conflict and Memory in the Irish Family: Selected Fiction of Colm Tóibín
I am more interested in the intricacies and secrecies of the self than I am in politics and society. 90 – Colm Tóibín
‘For prose writers our duty and responsibility is simple … it is to our sentences,’ said
Colm Tóibín in a speech on the occasion of Ireland Literature Exchange’s 1500th title
in translation. 91 Tóibín continued by referencing W.B. Yeats, who, after the death of
Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, saw an Ireland that seemed at its lowest ebb with no faith in politicians or the church, an Ireland that needed to be ‘moulded and reshaped’ by artists.92 Ireland, now in the wake of the Celtic Tiger, is in a similar cultural
position to that Yeats once saw necessary to remould; Ireland is now a ‘sort of
nowhere, waiting for its appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it’.93 In
2010, Tóibín believed that over the next five years, because of the economic
downturn, Ireland ‘will be treated as an economy rather than a society’.94 As a
novelist, Tóibín has chosen otherwise, making depictions of the Irish family a way of
representing social change in Ireland through the ‘intricacies and secrecies’ of family
life and its effect on individual selves. Rejecting a purely economic understanding of
Irish problems after the crash, Tóibín hoped instead that ‘the rhythms of words used
90 C. Tóibín, cited in J. Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, London, Carcanet Press, 2010, p. 170. 91 C. Tóibín, ‘Speech on the Occasion of Ireland Literature Exchange’s 1500th Title in Translation’, 9 November 2010,
well might matter in ways which are unexpected in a dark time’.95 Analysis of his
fiction offers an opportunity to read social and economic change in Ireland through
the experience of his fictional Irish families.
Tóibín is also deeply invested in the relation of contemporary Ireland to its
past. He focuses his fiction on the evocative energies of his natal landscape and the
area’s powerful resonance with the nation’s history ‘dotted with memorials to
1798’.96 Tóibín was twelve years old when his father died and with his absence came
an overpowering presence of Irish history; his father worked as a teacher and local
historian who founded the local museum in Enniscorthy, and his grandfather fought in
the 1916 uprising for independence. For Tóibín ‘that business of the past … was very
much there’ and the secondary memories from the community and his family have
proved influential on his work.97 While studying English and History at University
College Dublin, Tóibín became disenchanted with the grand narrative of Irish history
that presented a consolidated view of the past:
Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in
the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing
history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which would make us
good, worthy citizens who would keep the Irish 26-county state safe from
the IRA and IRA fellow travellers.98
95 C. Tóibín, ‘Speech on the Occasion of Ireland Literature Exchange’s 1500th Title in Translation’. 96 C. Tóibín, ‘New Ways of Killing Your Father: Review of the book Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History’, London Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 22, 1993, pp. 3–6. 97 F. O’Toole, ‘An Interview with Colm Tóibín’, in P. Delaney (ed.), Reading Colm Tóibín, Dublin, The Liffey Press, 2008, pp 183–208, p. 184. 98 Tóibín, ‘New Ways of Killing Your Father’. 36
During the 1960s, such questioning of mainstream Irish historiography was widely
manifested in public discourse; a ‘disillusionment with the legacy of nationalism’
emerged as a result of ‘the sense of failure of the Irish Republic as a state, marked by
economic decline’.99 Historical revisionism has seen Ireland as a state ‘born in blood
with the enormous damage to national self-confidence inflicted by a bitter civil war’.100 The beginnings of revisionism in Irish historiography have been dated
variously from the ‘revulsion from the officially propagated histories of the post-1922
Irish Free State … to [the] disillusionment with the failure of the Republic to deliver
the promised economic and culture goods by the 1960s generation of Irish who
looked to America and London’.101 Ultimately, ‘revisionism centres on the question
of nationalism in Ireland’ 102 and involves the ‘repudiation of any simple apostolic
tradition of nationalism’. 103
Tóibín, in his 1985 essay, ‘Martyrs and Metaphors’, floated the idea that the
Irish would be happier if their history was pure fiction. He analysed Irish history as a
form of fiction full of constructed events with no realistic continuity. When Tóibín
was a journalist in the 1970s, Irish fiction was going through a renaissance, escaping
the shadow of Joyce, with novelists breaking generic limitations and transcending ‘the
confines of the Chekhovian short story where … [Irish writing] had so long
99J. Hutchinson, ‘Irish Nationalism’, in D.G. Boyce & A. O’Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, London, Routledge, 1996, pp. 100–119, p. 103. 100K. Whelan, ‘The Revisionist Debate in Ireland’, boundary 2, vol. 31, no. 1, 2004, pp. 179–205, p. 181. 101D.G. Boyce & A. O’Day, ‘Introduction: ‟Revisionism” and the ‟Revisionist Controversy”’, in D.G. Boyce & A. O’Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, London, Routledge, 1996, pp. 1–14, pp. 5–6. 102 Ibid., p. 8. 103Hutchinson, ‘Irish Nationalism’, p. 104. 37
excelled’.104 A perceived problem then emerged; novelists were emerging into a
society where, according to Tóibín, the novel could not succeed:
How could a novel flourish in such a world? The novel explores
psychology, sociology, the individual consciousness; the novel finds a
form and a language for these explorations. We require an accepted world
for the novel to flourish, a shared sense of time and space.105
Ireland, in Tóibín’s view, in the decades after joining the European Union in 1973,
did not share an accepted time and place. Ireland’s national identity during much of
the twentieth century, especially the second half, reflected the confusion of a self-
image built ‘upon a powerfully articulated consciousness of past grievances as much
as present discontents’.106 Subsequent to this economic development, Ireland was in a
state of ‘rapid transition’ in ‘undoubtedly less nationalistic times’.107 In Ireland’s
newly transformed circumstances, the confining tradition of nationalism had the
power to create a hostile relationship to the nation’s past within a now more liberal
and diverse culture.
Over the last twenty years, Tóibín has used his sentences, both in fiction and non-fiction, to illuminate a recently dark contemporary Ireland that is not usually
104 R.F. Foster, ‘‟A Strange and Insistent Protagonist”: Tóibín and Irish History’, in P. Delaney (ed.), Reading Colm Tóibín, Dublin, The Liffey Press, 2008, pp. 21–40, p. 23. 105C. Tóibín, ‘Martyrs and Metaphors’, in D. Bolger (ed.), Letters from the New Island, Raven Arts, Dublin, 1987, pp. 6–8. 106R.F. Foster, ‘History and the Irish Question’, in C. Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938–1994, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1994, pp. 122–145, p. 129. 107 G. O’Brien, ‘Irish Fiction since 1966: Challenge, Themes, Promise’, Ploughshares, vol. 6, no. 1, 1980, pp. 138–159, p. 138. 38
visible or understood to the international or Irish reader. Tóibín is working in and against the tradition of Irish literature that includes George Moore, Daniel Corkery and James Joyce. Tóibín moves fluidly between genres and subjects within local and international settings. His prose is understated and austere, creating an absence that projects as much meaning as present images and symbols. His symbolic juxtaposition of history and mythology alongside family conflict can be read as a conscious construct central to his understanding of how contemporary Ireland came to be.
Problems of loss, incompletion and parental absence haunt Tóibín’s fiction, blurring the barriers between historical narrative and personal history. Through stories that emphasise the role of memory within Irish family conflict, Tóibín explores emergent and transformative conditions of Irish identity that clash with nationalist models of the self and the community. These themes are visible over an extensive range of work. His novels include The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004), Brooklyn
(2009) and The Testament of Mary (2012). Tóibín has published two short story collections: Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). He has also published a series of non-fiction studies ranging over a number of topics, including:
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1994), The Signs of the Cross: Travels in
Catholic Europe (1994), Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar
(2001) and New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families (2012).
While his non-fiction tackles contemporary issues, Tóibín’s fiction explores the way the past is spoken about and understood through the collective cultural memories of his central characters within dysfunctional family interactions extending
39
over several generations.108 In Ireland, there has long been a dependence on literature
for the creation and perpetuation of cultural memory. Tóibín’s work, when read as a
whole, reflects that Irish inheritance, ‘but it is simultaneously marked by multiple
(other) cultural memories that form concentric and overlapping circles in his work’.109
There is no single, unchallenged sense of family or cultural ‘tradition’ in his fiction.
In an interview, Tóibín commented on how change is represented, or avoided
in his novels:
I suppose I have not written a novel about the Celtic Tiger and I am not
planning a novel about this recession. … I am more interested in trying to
chart changes in someone’s grief or in a family’s way of knowing each
other, or remembering things. I think I feel free not to bother too much
with large political questions in the novel, or dramatizations of change,
because I am, when not writing novels, really alert to them, and interested
in them. I follow them and know them but I keep the novels pure.110
Tóibín assertion that his novels are ‘pure’ of ‘dramatizations of change’ is arguably incorrect. The recurring theme of the family in Tóibín offers a site to explore Irish identity and it is through the construct of the family that change is dramatised, explored and analysed. Tóibín’s novels are far from pure; they offer the reader an introduction to some big questions in Irish life – migration, sex and sexuality,
108 O. Frawley, ‘‘The Difficult Work of Remembering’: Tóibín and Cultural Memory’, in P. Delaney (ed.), Reading Colm Tóibín, Dublin, The Liffey Press, 2008, pp. 69–82, p. 70. 109 Ibid., p. 72. 110 Tóibín, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, pp. 170–171. 40
religion, the presence of the past – and, most importantly, historical change. In the
same interview, Tóibín claims that instead of living in a country or community, he
lives in three rooms, and says that his fiction ‘dramatises the gap between those three
rooms as a sort of dreamy heaven and the wider world which is confused and
confusing and alien’.111 Part of his work as a writer of fiction about families is to
illuminate the ‘alien’ in the wider world by making its operations and effects visible
within the ‘room’, the domestic space, and so accessible and understandable on a
familial level.
Central to Tóibín’s literary imagination in many of his novels and short stories
is his home landscape, Enniscorthy and its hinterland, as either a main setting, or a
place to return for the central character. Tóibín’s childhood infiltrates his fictional
writing, and whilst he disagrees with many critics who insist his fiction reads as a displaced autobiography, he does admit parts of his life and self are in the prose. In
Tóibín’s view, his fiction works against what he was taught in his university days: ‘in
History you were told that your own family experience, what you know happened, you must leave out. In other words, History was to be pretend as much as
Literature’.112 Tóibín’s oeuvre uses the family – with fictionalised elements of his
own family experiences including the early death of a parent and the importance of
place to individual identity – as a symbol to explore Irish identity in relation to history
and in its changing relationship with contemporary society. The Irish family as
constructed by Tóibín is usually broken or disturbed, either by death or by choice, and
the devastation of parental absence leads to transgenerational conflicts. He
destabilises the notion of the traditional family in the Irish Constitution, patriarchal
111 Ibid., p. 176. 112 F. O’Toole, ‘An Interview with Colm Tóibín’, in P. Delaney (ed.), Reading Colm Tóibín, Dublin, The Liffey Press, 2008, pp. 183–208, p. 208. 41
and religious. To achieve this, Tóibín often focuses on family matriarchs. As an
essayist also, Tóibín has explored the importance of the matriarch and argues that in
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, especially the work of Jane
Austen and Henry James, the mother was a bothersome figure:
Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better
occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and
– as the novel itself develops – by the idea of solitude. It becomes
important to the novel that its key scenes should occur when the heroine is
alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no possibility of
advice. Her thoughts move inward, offering a drama not between
generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or
conflicted self.113
This idea of a ‘wounded, deceived or conflicted self’ within a female protagonist is continually evident throughout the works of Tóibín. But for him, instead of being a hindrance to the narrative, or ‘in the way’, the mother’s wounds, deceits and conflicts often become the purpose of or the motivation for the narrative. Mothers are central to
Tóibín’s work: Katherine Proctor is the protagonist in The South; High Court Judge
Eamon Redmond has the chance to re-define what a mother and a family is in the
Irish Constitution in The Heather Blazing; three generations of mothers are explored throughout the plot of The Blackwater Lightship; and Brooklyn explores the complex
relationship between a mother and daughter with a deceased father. The symbol of the
113 C. Tóibín, ‘The Importance of Aunts’, London Review of Books, vol. 33, no.6, 2011, pp. 13–19,
family, especially the mother, will unify the selected works by Tóibín in this chapter,
as a touchstone of change in Irish society instead of ‘keeping the heroine alone’ as in
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature.
With the emphasis on the mother in his fiction, Tóibín largely positions the figure of the father in the background. In Love in a Dark Time, Tóibín claims that
‘Irish writing seems at its most content where there is a dead father or a dead child and domestic chaos’.114 Using Joyce as proof, Tóibín reminds the reader that in
Ulysses Leopold Bloom’s father has committed suicide and his son is dead, Stephen
Dedalus wants to escape his family in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this
vein, Tóibín’s narratives offer female protagonists or major characters that indicate his departure from the traditional notion of the Irish family by ignoring, or suppressing, patriarchal influence. Complex family relationships with the past serve as a powerful symbol for repressed moments in Irish history. The conflict of transgenerational identities is heightened through the contrast of local tradition and history with globalised contemporary circumstances.
Tóibín’s novels were written, and some are imaginatively set, in the height of
‘contemporary internationalized Ireland’.115 This new understanding of Ireland
developed in the boom of the Celtic Tiger when the country experienced an unwonted
affluence and international profile. From this boom, Ireland emerged with a confused
identity and an uncertain mixture of change and continuity, despite an increasing
sense of contemporary cultural homogenisation. Tóibín’s novels present the reader
with a series of symbols and a pattern of images that suggest cultural changes, but do
not necessarily make the depth of such changes clear: for instance, a scene where
114 C. Tóibín, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar, London, Picador, 2001, p. 26. 115 Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up In Ireland, p. xv. 43
characters drink European red wine alongside local, and stereotypical, Guinness hints that the supposed existence of a new Ireland may be more imaginary than real.116
Alongside the signifiers of a new Ireland, in Tóibín’s fiction ‘the past is painfully present, in its many manifestations and complications … each of his principal characters is forced to confront difficult memories and situate themselves in relation to what preceded them’. Yet there is no opportunity granted his characters to reconstruct their identities through direct recourse to models drawn from the past.
Consequently his narratives work both in and against traditional modes of Irish remembering.
This chapter examines selected works of Tóibín, enriching its analyses with the theoretical insights of historian Pierre Nora and phenomenologist Edward S.
Casey. It will provide a theoretical framework to understand selected fiction by
Tóibín and how he has shaped not only the direction of Irish fiction, but also an understanding of Irish history and contemporary culture through providing a more complex picture of identity within the Irish family.
Nora’s work on French identity and memory, especially his three-volume study Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory, explores the construction of the French past, raising questions about nation, nationalism, national identity and the intimate relationship between history and memory. The collection does not examine
‘France per se but [is] about the nature of its national identity … a France that is indivisible even when understood differently over time and by different segments of the population’.117 It is from this idea of national identity, and how it is understood differently at different moments of a nation’s history, that I unite Nora’s exploration
116 C. Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, London, Picador, 2000, p. 14. 117 H.T. Ho Tai, ‘Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory’, The American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 3, 2001, pp. 906–922, p. 910. 44
of France through memory and history with Tóibín’s imagining of Ireland through
memory and history. The use of memory and history as a means to explore the past of
Tóibín’s characters and, consequently, of Ireland, demonstrates how ‘history, memory and nation enjoyed an unusually intimate communion’.118
In Nora’s theory memory can
serve to articulate or consolidate identity, validate or deny identity of
others, celebrate or mourn past events, or establish claims to argue justice
or nationhood – serving both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ causes, resulting in
triumphant and tragic outcomes. 119
Exploring memory creates not only a dislocation of the temporal present but also a
dual focus in purpose for historical narrative. Memory and history are often
considered virtually synonymous but are ‘in many respects opposed’.120 Memory is
‘life’ bound by emotions and subject to the ‘dialectic of remembering and forgetting’
whilst history is a reconstruction of the past and is ‘destructive to spontaneous
memory’ attempting to demolish and repress it.121 With the development of
historiography, history has, in effect, ‘become a tradition of memory … transformed
into social self-understanding’122 and it is this transition from ‘memory to history’
118 P. Nora (ed.), Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, L.D. Kritzman (ed.), A. Goldhammer (trans.), New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 5. 119 E.J. Mallot, Memory, Nationalism and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 3. 120 Nora, Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, p. 3. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., p. 5. 45
that requires every ‘social group to redefine its identity by dredging up its past’.123
Contemporary Ireland faces a constant redefinition of identity with every revelation of the past, since ‘the gap between history and current affairs seemed at times almost to narrow to nothing’124 because discoveries of previously repressed moments and new knowledge of history ‘impinge so directly on contemporary life’.125
Together with Nora’s, the work of Edward S. Casey on place and identity is suggestive in analysing Tóibín’s fiction which habitually images historical and personal relationships between characters and places. According to Casey:
The relationship between self and place is not just one of reciprocal
influence … but also, more radically, of constitutive coingredience: each
is essential to the beginning of the other. In effect, there is no place
without self and no self without place. 126
The effective construction of place in literature is achieved through repetition of setting. The repetition of place ‘presents a world to its reader – a world in whose construction imagining plays an essential and not merely a decorative role’. 127 Tóibín repeatedly constructs versions of Enniscorthy – versions altering in relation to action and time – in his fiction. When read as a whole, his work functions as an archeological layering of history through the imagined voices of those who, according
123 Ibid., p. 11. 124 F. O’Toole, cited in Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 3. 125 Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 2. 126 E.S. Casey, ‘Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 91, no. 4, 2001, pp. 683–693, p. 684. 127 E.S. Casey, ‘Imagination and Repetition in Literature: A Reassessment’, Yale French Studies No. 2. Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy, 1975, pp. 249–267, p. 250. 46
to Tóibín’s version of his tertiary studies, would have been ignored by history. Casey
argues that the representation of absence, of what is not there, is as important as the
representation and repetition of presence in literary representation of place. Noted
absences in Tóibín’s work reveal what is not remembered, or what has been purposely
repressed, within an Irish family and, by symbolic extension, the nation. The
recurring construction of Enniscorthy gives the cultural and collective memories a
location, and physical place for the imagined memories of the characters.
An unsettling characteristic of Tóibín’s narratives is that despite the strong sense of locality, characters are often represented as disoriented and lost within their overtly familiar settings. His imagined contemporary Ireland is at risk of becoming an indifferent state reminiscent of nothing, a ‘disarray of place’ that stands for a disarray of national and self-identity. His characters face a difficulty, though never an impossibility, of re-adapting to the family and the nation. 128 Place itself continually
shifts and reforms in Tóibín: the dissolving ‘marl’ of Wexford’s coastal cliffs is as
strong a symbol of Ireland for him as the mountain ‘rocks’ of Munster were for
Daniel Corkery.
The South
While not all of Tóibín’s work is limited to a Wexford setting, a principal
character usually has an emotional anchor that holds them to that place. Exemplifying
this is Tóibín’s debut novel, The South, that showcases not only Tóibín’s understanding of changing social conditions in Ireland but also the benefit of international influence on Irish subjects and the movement between Ireland and
128 Casey, ‘Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?’, p. 683. 47
another place. The novel is the product of Tóibín’s time in Barcelona; he arrived there in 1975 two months before the death of dictator Francisco Franco and lived there for three years. In The South, Tóibín ‘expresses the confinement and repression of Irish artistic life before the 1960s’129 through the unlikely protagonist of Katherine Proctor, a wealthy Protestant with haunting memories of the Troubles, who in 1950 leaves her husband and son in Enniscorthy to become a painter in Fascist Spain. The book's title, simultaneously alluding to the twenty-six county Republic of Ireland and Keats’s ‘O for a beaker full of the warm South’,130 is important: not only is the character transformed by her time in Spain, but foreshadows, from the early 1950s setting of the book, the fact that the Republic of Ireland will be transformed by its membership in the European Union: The South ends in the 1970s.
The novel opens with a chapter entitled ‘Katherine Proctor’, written in a first- person, epistolary mode that offers vague details of her life in Ireland, with mention of her husband and ten-year-old son that she has left behind. In this opening section, it is clear the protagonist rejects the dominant patriarchal expectations of her subservient role within the family. After leaving Ireland and before travelling to
Spain, Katherine spends time in England with her mother who made a similar escape when Katherine was a child. The prose offers insight into a traumatised and depressed protagonist who is desperately attempting to escape her own history and the decline of
Protestant Ireland. The opening chapter also establishes the imagery of light, associating grey with the past and Ireland, and vivid lively colours –red and orange – with her time in Spain:
129 Foster, ‘‟A Strange and Insistent Protagonist”: Tóibín and Irish History’, in P. Delaney (ed.), Reading Colm Tóibín, p. 24. 130 J. Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819), The Poems of John Keats, London, Nottingham Court Press, 1979, p. 302. 48
The past has happened: it is empty and grey like the narrow streets of San
Sebastian at four in the afternoon with the shops closed and their shutters
pulled down. The future is wide open.131
Without a clear plan for her time in Barcelona, Katherine joins a painting class where she meets Miguel, a fellow painter, Republican and anarchist survivor of the Spanish
Civil War with whom she falls in love. She also meets Michael Graves, an Irish
Catholic also from Enniscorthy, whom she befriends despite an initial reluctance. The mirroring of names in Miguel and Michael is important; it simultaneously places the men in similar positions of importance in Katherine’s life, both within her self- imposed exile in Spain and her connections to Ireland, emphasising that no matter how far away Katherine is from Ireland, the past will always be with her; it is inescapable.
Katherine settles in the Pyrenees with Miguel; Tóibín’s representation of rural
Catalonia heightens by contrast the significance of Katherine’s incomplete history in rural Wexford. Her time in the Pyrenees is far from idyllic; she falls pregnant to
Miguel, and has a daughter called Isona. Her time is spent trying to communicate in
Catalan, a language she cannot speak, with locals who do not accept her. An increasingly reclusive and tense Miguel, who is living in his own past, becomes completely preoccupied in finding those who remember the Civil War and spends hours recounting moments from it. Katherine is ‘bored by his obsession with the
131 C. Tóibín, The South, London, Picador, 1990, p. 8. 49
war’.132 In her longing for the past, expressed in a diary entry, she mourns that her daughter will never know where she came from:
There is no one here who will understand how much at certain times she
looks like my father … she becomes the image of him … We have
removed her from a world where that sort of recognition means
anything.133
In rural Spain, Katherine is completely removed from all that she knows, yet the incomplete past still haunts her. In a letter to her mother, she recounts how they never talked about when their house was burnt out during the Troubles in Ireland. Through juxtaposing a violent episode of Irish history with the troubles of the Spanish Civil
War, Katherine is shown as similar to Miguel in her focus on the past. They represent two extreme ways of dealing with the past: to be completely consumed by it in the present, or to attempt to cleanse it from the present despite its power in memory.
Katherine admits in her diary that it is only in Catalonia, away from Ireland, she is
‘without all that weight of history’ and so she can manage this weight differently from
Miguel, despite sharing a version of his own problem with the past.134 In the letter to her mother, Katherine questions everything she was never told, trying to remember what she never knew:
What do you remember? Please tell me what happened. How did you get
out? How did I get out? How many of them came? Why did you leave and
132 Ibid., p. 86. 133 Ibid., p. 113. 134 Ibid., p. 115. 50
never come back? … No good came of it. Did it? I want to know about it,
so I can think about it.135
Katherine wants to turn her mother’s memories into historical facts so that she can rely on and learn from them. This interrogation of the past reveals the intimate relationship between history and memory; Katherine may be able to try to escape her history but cannot escape the memories that are not clear nor completely understood.
According to Nora’s theories on memory, Katherine must bring up what she does not know about her past to understand where she is, and who she is, now. Tóibín, through
Katherine’s letter to her mother, effectively constructs a sense of Ireland as a nation around the tension created when the affirmation of personal identity intersects with the understanding of history.
The narrative moves from epistolary form to third person intimate narration.
This style shift is important in showcasing what Katherine sees, rather than thinks. An artist, she sees and observes the world in a very distinct way – in terms of light and
colour and their influence on landscape. The imagery of painting, associated with
light and landscape, works on multiple levels on the novel. In an interview, Tóibín
said ‘if you wanted to divide the world, you divide the world into places that have
been painted and the places that have not been painted’.136 When Katherine returns
back to Ireland in the early 70s to be with her son Richard she sees the (inevitably
changed) landscape. Signifiers of modernising change are flickered sparsely through
Katherine’s arrival scenes – continental food, red wine – yet the idea remains for
135 Ibid. p. 89. 136 J.U. Neilsen, ‘An Interview with Colm Tóibín’, Nordic Irish Studies Network, 1998,
Katherine that Enniscorthy is still the same, with the Irish ‘grey light as the dawn
came’137 and elements of the town remaining traditional.
Katherine begins the ambitious task of painting the landscape of Wexford onto a series of canvases too large:
She asked him to help her stretch a canvas, so big that she would have to
leave it outside at night covered by plastic. He [Michael Graves] told her
it was too ambitious, he told her to go easy, but she insisted. She would
start with the grey Wexford light on a grey July day, with a certain pale
yellow warmth. And work from memory with the canvas leaning against
the side of the hut. She would make everything fade into itself, build the
colours up carefully so there was texture: the sea a vague shimmer of
grey light.138
The repetition of grey creates an image of dullness, yet the pale yellow warmth
signifies a positive glow, a positive hope for the future, for her contented self and for
the nation. For the first time in her life, despite the abstract nature of her landscapes,
Katherine is settled in a place, and wants to capture what is around her. The imagery
of painting becomes more than itself; it becomes the representation of creating an
image of Ireland, of imagining a certain Ireland. Katherine ‘started to paint as though
she was trying to catch the landscape rolling backwards into history, as though the
horizon was a time as well as a place’.139 The primary feature of landscape is the
horizon. Within Katherine’s experience it signifies not the end of her own personal
137 Tóibín. The South, p. 209. 138 Ibid., p. 214 139 Ibid., p. 226. 52
history that she had for so long tried to escape, but the beginning of a new place not yet found. Casey has written extensively on the horizon, insisting that it is ‘an arc within which a given landscape has come to an end … the horizon does not merely close off the landscape; it opens it up for further exploration’.140 Only when time and place are concatenated for Katherine does she accept the landscape that is ‘in front’ of her both physically and temporally, the Ireland that she once ran from.
The Heather Blazing
Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, can be read as a revisionist attempt not only to demystify the Irish nationalist tradition but to challenge the nationalist metanarrative of Irish history. Tóibín has also said that the novel ‘is partly autobiographical and partly about my father and his generation’.141 The novel offers a comprehensive analysis (perhaps too programmatic) of Ireland’s nascent social transformations towards the end of the twentieth century and how they relate to changing attitudes to nationalist history. Published in 1992, it predates the economic boom and is situated on the cusp of change, thus acting as an ideal orientation to my project of inquiry. The novel guides the reader though an initial sense of personal dislocation, and subsequently considers the relation of the Irish present and past through an exploration of nationalist repression and the effect of earlier isolationism on identity and self-understanding.
The novel attempts to decipher contemporary national identity through a narrative of the development of nationalist thought and belief. Furthermore the novel
140 Casey, ‘Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?’, p. 690. 141 Tóibín, cited in J. Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 173. 53
represents the transformation of cultural expectations, ‘based not only on a new
confidence in the wider world but also on the rejection of some authoritarian
foundations, as well as the manipulations of certain new found identities’.142 Tóibín
contextualises these discoveries of previously repressed moments and knowledge of
history that ‘impinge so directly on contemporary life’.143
The Irish nationalist tradition, despite stretching back for at least two
centuries, was ‘communicated to a newly literate mass audience’ at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.144 For analytical purposes, cultural and political nationalism should be differentiated, the former focusing on the moral restoration of a distinctive historic community, and the latter concentrating on the establishment of an autonomous modern state based on citizenship equality. The value of political and, thus, cultural nationalism was ‘strategic rather than inherent; it helped to break up the self-hatred within an occupied people, which led them to dream of a total, seamless assimilation into the colonial culture’. 145 Its newfound
strength at the turn of the twentieth century ensured that nationalist thought
influenced historical narratives and dominated ideological beliefs, endorsing a
‘conscious spiritual launching of the self into patriotism’. 146 The spatial imaginary
constructed by nationalist narratives elevated landscape as a critical part of national
identity, with the rural considered the real Ireland and urbanised spheres regarded as a
by-product of colonialism. Catholicism and Gaelic tradition defined an Irish
nationalist identity, although even in the early twentieth century this was considered
142 Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970–2000, p. 149. 143 Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 2. 144 Ibid., p. 31. 145 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, pp. 146–7. 146 R. Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism, London, Penguin, 2000, p. 195. 54
anachronistic, with literary journals, such as Ireland Today, maintaining that Ireland
was the only country in the world that could be so easily defined: ‘one man
symbolizes nearly all national life and nearly the whole content of national struggle ...
that man is the Irish peasant’.147 This attempt to reduce Ireland’s national identity to a
single symbol was damaging; it ensured all that existed beyond the limited definition
of ‘Irish’ was to be ignored, much like moments in history that did not support the
nationalist narrative.
The concept of nation is ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as
both inherently limited and sovereign’.148 What happens, though, when a nation, in a
sense, loses its borders and its cultural respect for the sovereign power? Ireland’s
socioeconomic and international political developments have resulted in a struggle
over a clear national identity and a difficult passage to understanding of what it means
to be Irish. Tóibín proves these nationalist traditional resonances of ‘Irishness’ to be
of little relevance and the notion of identity is ‘most at ease with itself, it appears,
when the obsession with an exclusive [nationalist] identity is abandoned’.149
According to Neil Jordan, it is now considered a danger for Ireland to have an
ideological nationalism with a ‘pretence to be a self-enclosed and unconfused nation’. 150 With a decrease in the value placed on nationalism comes an inevitable
rise of historical revisionist writings that disturb traditions which legitimise place and
people through fundamental nationalist history. Ultimately, the case of ‘revisionism
147 Cited in B.P. Kennedy, ‘The traditional Irish thatched house: Image and reality, 1793–1993’, in A.M. Dalsimer (ed.), Visualising Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition, London, Faber & Faber, 1993, pp. 165–181, p. 168. 148 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso Books, 1991, p. 6. 149 R. Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 101. 150 N. Jordan, cited in Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, p. 110. 55
centres on the question of nationalism in Ireland’ 151 and involves the ‘repudiation of any simple apostolic tradition of nationalism’. 152
Tóibín is considered to be one of Ireland’s leading fictional revisionists and
the upsurge of the Irish historical revisionist novel implies that ‘history has become
our substitute for imagination’ alongside its function as a provisional touchstone for
national understanding.153 Paradoxes within contemporary Irish fiction stem from the
realisation that these novels are, in fact, representing a collision culture, ‘a clash
between ancient and mythical ideas of the nation and a new sense of national self
based on a very recent economic growth and social change’.154 The clash results in a
crisis of consciousness in which the idea of identity is bound both by the present and
the past, by current stimuli and historic narrative. The Heather Blazing exemplifies an era of expression that explores the transitional identity of a nation in which a clear understanding of the nation itself does not exist, ‘breaking down the boundaries in notions of Irishness’.155 Looking beyond the traditional historical nationalist
narratives helps to produce an alternative identity in the transformed society where ‘a
secret history of modern Ireland emerged’, a history that transcends the repressed and
ignored historical narratives.156 This representation results in a commemorative
consciousness of the past ‘maintained by the artifice and desire of a society absorbed
by its own transformation and renewal’. 157
151 Ibid., p. 8. 152 Hutchinson, The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, p. 104. 153 P. Nora, ‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History’, in Nora (ed.), Rethinking the French Past Volume I, pp.1–20, p. 20. 154 McGonagle, ‘Myths and Mind-sets, or How Can We Be Real?’ in Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, p. 119. 155 Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970–2000, p. 147. 156 Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 9. 157 Nora, Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, p. 6. 56
The Heather Blazing is an important work of Irish historical revisionism as it
positions a representation of the newly affluent European Ireland against the
development of mainstream narratives of nationalism in the early twentieth century.
The title, derived from the famous Irish ballad commemorating the uprising of 1798,
‘Boolavogue’, works in irony against the main character, Dublin High Court Judge
Eamon Redmond who is the personification of all that is traditional and conformist.
The novel is structured with deliberate movement from present to past; initially these are kept firmly separate, but with the development of the narrative, time and space divisions begin to evaporate. The language is spare and unemotional, with little dependence on Irish idioms or indication of accent for certification of place or identity. Eamon Redmond’s name combines two dominant elements of Irish nationalist history: John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at
Westminster until 1918 and Éamon de Valéra, head of the Sinn Féin movement and
founder and leader of Fianna Fáil until 1959. The characterisation of Eamon
Redmond personifies the anxieties of ‘a state preoccupied with being rather than
becoming, a state in which the values of an imagined, textualized nation are
prioritized over those of a complex, changing society’158 and acts as a vehicle to
manoeuvre through the continual temporal shifts in the narrative; present time in
Dublin city and holidays in Cush, and memories of his experience of childhood and
early manhood in rural Wexford between the 1930s and 1960s. It is these shifts in
time that allows an exploration of a ‘deeply interlinked set of theological, historical,
and constitutional narratives’.159
158 L. Harte, ‘History, Text, and Society in Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing’, New Hibernia Review, vol. 6, no. 4, 2002, pp. 55–67, p. 56. 159 Ibid. 57
Eamon, an emotionally distant, refined man ‘in whose life and career there has never been a hint of transgression, and who has lived a life of spiritually numbing fidelity to the letter of the law,’160 was born into a republican Catholic family in
Wexford in the 1930s. His family backgound seems styled by de Valéra’s dream for
Ireland, devoutly nationalist and anti-materialist. His life is haunted by his past and his present is animated by his occupation. As a child, Eamon was subject to fragmented versions of history, savouring rarely offered information from his family who were directly involved with key historical moments in Ireland’s development as a Free State, including the 1916 uprising and War of Independence. The notion of storytelling and remembering was strong for Eamon, with his father, Michael
Redmond, acting simultaneously as a Fianna Fáil activist, schoolteacher of history and Irish, curator for a new museum and a historical columnist for the local paper.
The multiple roles the father plays have ensured Eamon inherits, and cherishes, strong nationalist interpretations of Ireland’s history and, more importantly, without knowing how that nationalist narrative developed. When collecting relics for the museum with his father who is on a mission to privilege a nationalist understanding of the uprisings of 1798, Eamon is told to listen and learn about the uprisings through an account based on indirect memory and anecdotes:
‘She knew about the men of ’Ninety-eight,’ the woman looked
into the fire and then back at the two visitors. ‘She would’ve been
too young to remember it, but they told her about it, or she heard
about it, and it was she who always said that they came down this
160 G. O’Brien, ‘Contemporary prose in English: 1940–2000’, in M. Kelleher & P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature Volume II: 1890–2000, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 421–477, p. 444. 58
way and that was the end of them then. That’s all I remember
now.’161
With the repetition of ‘remember’ and ‘told’, this woman’s account reveals how much nationalist history relies on an element of storytelling and anecdotal memory transforming into historical fact, despite the lack of detail and accountability. In a review of Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History by R.F.
Foster, Tóibín discusses the reliability of the accounts of the rebels’ version of history:
The rebels left no documents, then, only songs and stories, and the victors
got to write history, until Irish nationalists like my father and his friend
became the victors in their own state, to find that there were no reliable
papers written by the rebels, no letters, few memoirs. Second-hand,
second-rate things, as Pakenham so starkly (and perhaps tactlessly) put
it. 162
The clear unreliability, yet its privileged position, reveals the fragmented nature of nationalist history. Tóibín writes of his memories, or lack thereof, of his own father talking about the 1798 rebellion:
161 C. Tóibín, The Heather Blazing, London, Picador, 1992, p. 23. 162 C. Tóibín, ‘New Ways of Killing Your Father: Review of the book Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History’, London Review of Books, vol. 15, no. 22, 1993, pp. 3–6, p. 3. 59
From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say ‘facts’) about
the Rising …. The names of the towns and villages around us were in all
the songs about 1798 – the places where battles had been fought, or
atrocities committed. But there was one place that I did not know had a
connection with 1798 until I was in my twenties. It was Scullabogue.
Even now, as I write the name, it has a strange resonance. In 1798 it was
where ‘our side’ took a large number of Protestant men, women and
children, put them in a barn and burned them to death. … I have no
memory of my father, who was a local historian, talking or writing about
it [Scullabogue].163
Such privileging of certain histories and memories works is critical to The Heather
Blazing’s agenda. Like Tóibín, Eamon is trying to understand his family’s history along with the nation. On examination, the nationalist narrative that Eamon’s father has constructed is not bound by immutable truths but rather full of assumptions and suppressed facts that support and perpetuate the ideology of de Valeran nationalism.
Eamon, consequently, has a naïve and monolithic view of Irish history and holds to an outdated image of Irishness throughout his adult life. Yet he senses problems.
When visiting his Aunt Margaret in Cush years after his father’s death, Eamon wants to know more, to interrogate the family history but knows it is not his role to do so:
There was a great deal he wanted to know, of which he possessed
only snatches now, things which would disappear with her death.
163 Ibid., p. 3. 60
At times he felt like he had been there, close by, when his
grandfather was evicted … Or that had been in the bedroom, the
room above where they were now, when his grandfather came
back to house on Easter Monday 1916 and had sat watching him
as he pulled up the floorboards under which he had hidden a
number of rifles….
Some of these events were so close, they had been recounted and
gone over so much. He realized he that would never fully know
what went on, there were too many details left out.164
The narration continues to reveal that Aunt Margaret’s ‘tone was factual and
melancholy … a troubled look appeared on her face’.165 A personalised revision of
key moments of national emergence offers a humanised representation of history,
atmospherically conveying the damaged psyches and emotional struggles of
individual Irish men and women. According to Pierre Nora, memory is already
history, and the difference between ‘true memory’ and ‘memory transformed by its
passage through history’ must be understood.166 For Eamon, as understood in Nora's
terms, understanding of history, and thus memory, relies on the ‘concreteness of
recording’ and the less ‘memory is experienced from within, the greater the need for external props and tangible reminder of what no longer exists’.167
164 Tóibín, The Heather Blazing, p. 61. 165 Ibid., p. 62. 166 Nora, Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflictions and Divisions, p. 8. 167 Ibid., p. 8. 61
Previously subject to selective accounts of history, Eamon, in a shift of role,
becomes an informant about history for an Irish historian who was ‘looking for leads, and wanted certain things confirmed’.168 While the historian was talking,
Eamon remembered the story about Cathal Brugha and his
father’s going to Dublin to get permission to have the Big Houses
burned. But he said nothing about it. He listened to a story about
Michael Collins, nodding and encouraging the historian to go on,
all the time thinking back to that evening in his grandmother’s
house when he first heard the story. He kept listening, more and
more sure that he should not mention the story about his father
and Cathal Brugha, that he should consign it to the past, to
silence, as his father had done with the names of the men who did
the killings in Enniscorthy.
Eamon, for most of his life wanting to know more about what happened, now
purposely suppresses history for someone who desires to understand. This scene
exemplifies the process of the constant redefinition and reconstruction of history by
revealing how easy it is to airbrush key facts, representing them in a different light or
neglecting them completely. History, instead of being an account of what actually
happened, becomes a ‘strategic attempt to memorialize the past by fixing its meaning
to accord with a triumphalist contemporary nationalist agenda’169 and to remove
certain elements that do not support the image. It also offers an insight into Ireland’s
168Tóibín, The Heather Blazing, p. 175. 169 Harte, ‘History, Text and Society in Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing’, p. 58. 62
relationship with the past with Declan Kiberd’s idea that the Irish are ‘far from being
obsessed with the past, the Irish are obsessed instead with their power over it,
including the power to change its meaning whenever that seems necessary’.170 Nora
explores the idea of official versions of history, such as Eamon is supporting here, and
the recovery of areas of history previously repressed. Nora’s perception that history is
the sphere of the collective, and memory that of the individual – ‘individuals had
memories, collectives had histories’171 – heightens the importance of the exchange between Eamon and the historian. It exposes how individual memory can quickly become new, or transformed collective national history.
Eamon and his wife, Carmel live in Dublin, but every summer on Judgment
Day, the last day of court term, they return to Cush village, where he spent summer holidays as a child. This spatial shift supports the narrative’s return to the past: Cush is constructed in opposition to urban Dublin, represented through Eamon's view as a cold, modern place with no emotional attachments for him in comparison with the
Wexford countryside characterised by deep memory and affection. Through emigration and a shift of population distribution, twentieth-century Ireland changed from a ‘predominately rural country to a more urbanised one’.172 By 2001,
‘approximately 60 percent of the Irish population lived in towns and cities’. 173
Accordingly, Tóibín positions the rural as the place of the past, a place of memory.
170 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, p. 280. 171 P. Nora, ‘Reasons for the current upsurge in memory’, Transit, 19 April 2002,
His novels imply that ‘the burden of history exists not in the metropolis but in rural
Ireland, where the natural attractions of the good earth are vividly at odds with the
violent depredations of man’.174 The surroundings of Cush ignite Eamon’s memories
of the past, making of it a temporally hybrid place where both past and present allow
an exploration of ‘life and death, of the temporal and the eternal … the collective and
the individual, the prosaic and the sacred, the immutable and the fleeting’.175
A recurring metaphor in Eamon’s memories and present situation is the
eroding coast at Cush; ‘It has been so gradual, this erosion, a matter of time … year
after year, the slow disappearance of the one contour to be replaced by another’.176
The outline that bounds the shape of national history, like the contour of the coast, is
subject to constant change. The eroding coast is symbolic of the degrading nature of
nationalist history dependent on the reliability of memory, crumbling with the dying generation of those with immediate experience, those with direct memory and first-
hand accounts. The falling houses on the disappearing coastline are ‘ways to
remember the way this coast was being eaten into’.177 The coastline acts as a constant
reminder that ‘everything is on the verge of disappearing, coupled with the anxiety
about the precise significance of the present and uncertainty of the future’.178 The
duality of fixity and change, of Eamon’s nationalist past and contemporary present, is
symbolised by the topographical landscape.
Eamon’s occupation as a High Court Judge effectively positions the reader to see the inevitable changes in Irish society and the effect of his conservative,
174 O’Brien, The Cambridge History of Irish Literature Volume II: 1890–2000, p. 432. 175 Nora, Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, p. 15. 176 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, p. 32. 177 Tóibín, The Heather Blazing, p. 33. 178 Nora, Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, p. 8. 64
nationalist view of the world. His early characterisation reveals he approaches each
case ‘clearly, factually, coldly’.179 To Eamon, the 1937 Irish Constitution – the supreme textual expression of de Valéra’s nationalism – is ‘sacred’;180 his political
inheritance and the repressed emotional childhood are manifested in his career,
ensuring a privileging of the state over the individual, with marked ambivalence
towards women’s rights. The Irish Constitution ‘reflects a perceived notion of what
Irish society is’, constructing an exclusive patriarchal, Catholic and nationalist
identity.181 In The Heather Blazing, the reader sees the clash of perceived identity and
contemporary reality when three of Eamon’s cases offer an insight into Ireland’s
changing social and political scene; these include a handicapped child’s family denied state assistance for hospital care and support, and another case relating to charges for
IRA membership. The reader, however, gains most insight into Eamon’s thoughts and nationalist beliefs in the case of a female teenager from a country town who has been expelled from her Catholic school for being pregnant. Reading the Irish Constitution,
Eamon realises he ‘had no strong moral views, that he ceased to believe in anything’.182 Despite this, he continues his job and analyses the text of the
Constitution, a task that confuses him even further:
One other matter began to preoccupy him. The family, according
to the Constitution, was the basic unit in society …. What was a
family? The Constitution did not define a family, and at the time
it was written in 1937 the term was perfectly understood: a man,
179 Tóibín, The Heather Blazing, p. 6. 180 Ibid., p. 89. 181 P. Hanafin, ‘Defying the female: The Irish constitutional text as phallocentric manifesto’, Textual Practice, vol. 11, no. 2, 1997, pp. 249–273, p. 249. 182 Tóibín, The Heather Blazing, p. 88. 65
his wife and their children …. It was his job to define and
redefine these terms now. Could not a girl and her child be a
family? And if they were, did the girl have rights arising from her
becoming a mother, thus creating a family, greater than the rights
of any institution?183
Article 41 of the Constitution certifies that the State ‘guarantees to protect the Family
in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order’ and enforces
Catholic religious belief on the definition of the family, including the belief that
‘[m]arriage, on which the family is founded’ is to be protected ‘against attack’ and
that ‘mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the
neglect of their duties in their home’. 184 This section of the Irish Constitution works in
irony against Eamon, as his daughter Niamh personifies a change in social order by
acting as a young financially independent single mother, who does not need marriage
or a dependent relationship to define the basic social unit of a family. Awarding the
case to the school that expelled the pregnant teenager, Eamon, despite seeing the
possibility and necessity of change within the social concept of family, refuses the
chance to redefine the ultimate nationalist text. Despite its seemingly absolute
definition, the representation of the family within the Constitution is challenged, as
the increasing number of definitions of what family is renders Eamon's limiting
construction void. Eamon’s position as a High Court Judge, and his literal interpretation of the Constitution, show how, under the pressure of transformative change, Ireland ‘was becoming detached from this version of national identity the
183 Ibid., p. 89. 184 The Constitution of Ireland, pp. 160–162. 66
Constitution had constructed’.185 According to Patrick Hanafin in his influential study on the Irish Constitution, ‘it is now for the citizen to read the text of the Constitution in a manner reflective of lived experience’ and the notion of literal interpretation is dangerous, as it does not adapt to the dynamics of societal progress.186 Eamon, however, is still bound by his inherited nationalist political views, despite the contemporary death of a certain understanding of nationalist Ireland. The importance of memory and history for self-validation outweigh his contemporary reality where his own daughter is redefining the meaning of family.
Towards the end of the novel, after Carmel’s death, Eamon's reading matter at the house in Cush reveals a transgressive move toward a more European Ireland:
He had brought with him a number of recent books on the law …
Two of the books dealt with the law of the European Community,
about which he knew little. He had left that to his younger
colleagues. But now he felt it was an area he might take up to
keep his mind occupied in the long winter which was to come.187
This choice foreshadows Eamon opening his mind to alternative power and law, a reinvigoration of the self to contemporary times; European law is the signifier of a contemporary Ireland, much as de Valéra’s 1937 Constitution was the signifier of an ideologically ideal nationalist Ireland. Early in the novel, Eamon has demonstrated a fear of change, with an utmost reliance on the literal definition of the Constitution and
185 T. Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2002, London, Harper Perennial, 2004, p. 398. 186 Hanafin, ‘Defying the female: The Irish constitutional text as phallocentric manifesto’, p. 266. 187 Tóibín, The Heather Blazing, p. 214. 67
on history as a ‘closed text comprising a stable narrative of reliable truths’. 188 The end
of the novel, however, represents Eamon as open to change and more content with
ambiguity.
The Heather Blazing is, ultimately, a reaction to a traditional version of
Ireland that was disappearing. It can be considered as an initial remodelling of
contemporary Irish attitudes towards the past and a re-examination of the needs of the
nation’s citizens. The effect of Tóibín’s historic revision is clearly not dismissive
parody; rather it is an examination of the suppression and reconstruction of key
historical moments that acts a synecdoche for a dislocated contemporary identity.
Tóibín’s revisions call for a new mode of self-definition, whereby the people and nation are to respond to the transformations that are already happening around them.
Tóibín’s novel is not an expulsion of nationalism, rather a reminder to embrace contemporary culture, in which there should be new definitions of family and transnational law to which Ireland is subject. Rather than subverting nationalism, it acts as a vehicle to understand how contemporary culture should relate to the past, and in turn, how the past should be commemorated and understood. It can be seen as
an early example of the view that Ireland’s literature is in a
process of transformation with new critical practices and theoretical
frameworks almost inevitably challenging the orthodoxies of how Ireland
is read and what is read as ‘Ireland’.189
188 Harte, ‘History, Text, and Society in Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing’, p. 58. 189 C. Graham & R. Kirkland, ‘Introduction’, in C. Graham & R. Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, London, Macmillan, 1999, p. 1. 68
The Blackwater Lightship
Tóibín’s next novel, The Blackwater Lightship, published in 1999, explores the power of collective memory and, consequently, the crippling effect the past can have on the present. Set in 1993 on the cusp of the Celtic Tiger, the novel focuses on three generations of estranged women – Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily Breen and
granddaughter Helen O’Doherty – and their ongoing feud that seems to have
paralysed their present yet stems from unclear memories. Despite the complex feud
between the women, the novel’s narrative centres on Helen’s brother, Declan, who is
homosexual and dying of AIDS, and it is his plight that unites the three women. The
setting of 1993 positions the novel in a time of change in family and nation; it was the
year that homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland, ‘establishing equality with
heterosexuals regarding privacy codes and age of consent’,190 through the Criminal
Law (Sexual Offences) Bill in June 1993. Beginning in 1977, the campaign to achieve
this result was led by Senator David Norris, who began a case against the Victorian
laws from Ireland’s statute book which criminalised sexual acts between men. After
taking the Irish Government to trial because, he argued, the criminalisation of
homosexuality was unconstitutional; Norris’s case was struck down by the High
Court in 1980 and the Supreme Court in 1983. Then in 1987, with the help of Mary
Robinson who later became President, Norris took the case to the European Court of
Human Rights where it was ruled in 1988 that the Irish laws contravened the
Convention on Human Rights and that they must decriminalise homosexuality or face
expulsion from the EU. Norris’s campaign was supported by the ‘simultaneous
development of the Irish Gay Rights movement, founded in 1974, and the later Gay
190 Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970-2000, p. 50. 69
and Lesbian Equality Network, which combatted censorship as well as the illegal
nature of homosexual nature’.191 According to Foster, the ‘early 1980s’ saw ‘gay
presence’ increasing in ‘Irish public life’.192
The novel has been too quickly assumed to be mainly an examination of contemporary Irish attitudes towards homosexuality, especially through focus on
Declan’s illness and sexuality. Alternatively, it can be read as a novel about broader contemporary social change in Ireland through the construction of one family and their conflicts. In an interview, Tóibín acknowledges that The Blackwater Lightship offers
constant images of change, sudden moments where modernity creeps in –
the arrival of the mobile phone, for example, or central heating, or selling
sites for holiday homes. Or building a computing business. And these
things affect characters and scenes.193
The novel is rife with the rhetoric of the Celtic Tiger, especially with its emphasis on
the IT industry and holiday homes. Development can even be seen in simple signifiers
such as sliced bread and an electric toaster, something that would have once been
novel to grandmother Dora. Through the novel's trans-generational representations
Tóibín exposes readers not only to a new and apparently confident Ireland, but also to
a new appreciation of the Ireland from which it has developed.
191 Ibid., p. 49. 192 Ibid. 193 Tóibín, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 170. 70
The novel opens with Helen, who is a successful teacher like her late father
and is the youngest school principal in Ireland. She lives in south side Dublin with her
Irish-speaking husband Hugh from Donegal and their two small sons. The opening
scene is Helen waking up to her son Manus crying in the middle of the night, going to
him and eventually carrying him to her own bed. The scene foreshadows the
importance of mothering in the book, but also, we discover, the absence of maternal
nurture within Helen’s own childhood.
Helen and Hugh host a party in their home the following night, a party that
seems to offer the reader a confident, European-influenced Ireland that retains a proud
understanding of and respect for the Gaelic tradition. This is signified through a
symbolic matrix of contrasting drinks of Guinness and European red wine, guests
comfortably conversing in Gaelic around Indian immigrant neighbours while eating
chilli con carne and listening to traditional music from the fiddle and uilleann
pipes. 194 The party immediately sets up a binary oppositional theme for the novel:
tradition versus modernity, an opposition that is manifested from conflicts within the
family to suggestions of broader national identity problems. The early contrast of
these oppositions seems to affect no characters besides Helen, who ‘did not want
them [other Irish speakers] to know that she spoke no Irish’.195 This simultaneous
celebration of modernity and tradition represents the notion of Ireland’s experience of
a ‘collision culture’: the ‘clash between ancient and mythical ideas of the nation and a
new sense of national self based on a very recent economic growth and social
change’. 196
194 Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, pp. 14–17. 195 Ibid., p. 17. 196 McGonagle, ‘Myths and Mind-sets, or How Can We Be Real?’, in A. Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, p. 119. 71
The novel shifts focus from Helen and her family life when, the morning after
the party, her brother’s friend Paul arrives on her doorstep to tell her that brother
Declan is sick in hospital and needs to see her. After arriving at the hospital, Helen realises the severity of her brother’s AIDS and how his friend Paul has been the main source of support and comfort to him: ‘Declan, she thought, had replaced his family with his friends’.197 Later in the novel, Helen’s thoughts are confirmed as the reader is
offered insight into Paul’s friendship with Declan. Working for the European
Commission and living in Brussels with his partner François, Paul talks about visits
from Declan, who
was like a small boy, and he’d talk and doze and play with our feet.
François always joked about adopting him; he even bought a child’s
pyjamas for him as a joke and folded them on his bed.198
This excerpt offers highly charged signifiers usually related to the family unit with the notion of ‘child’s pyjamas’, ‘adopting him’ and ‘like a small boy’. This idea of the child in the relationship establishes a questioning of the family unit in The Blackwater
Lightship. Tóibín works against the traditional structure of the Irish family again, not only by removing the father figure, but also by replacing the figure of the nurturing, caring mother with homosexual men. According to Terry Eagleton, the novel ‘is about mothering; and this is a gay issue in the book only because those most proficient at the craft turn out to be a couple of homosexual men’.199 Tóibín defends
197 Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, p. 34. 198 Ibid., p. 174. 199 T. Eagleton, ‘Mothering: Review of the book The Blackwater Lightship’, London Review of Books, vol. 21, no. 20, 1999, p. 8. 72
the legitimacy of homosexual parenthood – in what can also be seen as a retrospective comment on Eamon in The Heather Blazing, who would not identity a single mother and her child as a family. The novel is far from ambiguous in approaching the issue of a homosexual family structure – it rejects conventions about family and presents a supportive image that appears more functional than the traditional structure.
Helen is asked by Declan to tell her grandmother and her mother about his health, and that proves to be a catalyst of change in narrative place and time. The novel retreats to the past: Helen lies in bed, unable to sleep in her grandmother’s former guesthouse home near the cliff in Cush. Its remembered smell, that ‘seemed sharper now’, triggers a shift in time from the present to the past where Helen and
Declan, as children, are sent to live with their grandparents.200 This scene highlights the unreliability of childhood memories. Thinking of her father’s death, Helen recalls her last memory of him:
… it was the last memory she ever had of seeing her father. She knew she
must have seen him later that evening and perhaps the next day, but she
had no memory, absolutely none, of seeing him again. 201
Helen knows she must have seen her father, but cannot remember. It positions all her other memories in an ambiguous light. There is no fluidity in Helen’s remembrance: phrases such as ‘her next memory…’ 202 and ‘maybe two or three weeks later…’203 highlight absences, gaps and ambiguity. Although memory is privileged in this text it
200 Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, p. 56. 201 Ibid., p. 57. 202 Ibid., p. 58. 203 Ibid., p. 67. 73
is uncertain: Helen has no memory of the time following her father’s death, but
‘[s]ome things, however, were still sharp in her memory’.204 The narrative view of the past is more fragmented than in The Heather Blazing; its uncertainty renders memories, at times, invalid and unconvincing. According to Nora,
Places … become important even as the vast fund of memories among
which we used to live on terms of intimacy has been depleted, only to be
replaced by a reconstructed history.205
The Cush house can be defined as one of Nora’s ‘hybrid places – compounded of life and death, of the temporal and the eternal … the collective and the individual, the prosaic and the sacred, the immutable and the fleeting’.206 In her new circumstances,
Helen revisits old memories and meanings, revived under the current pressure of her brother’s illness and impending death.
Through Helen’s exploration of her past, the reader learns of the destructive absence of her parents, notably her mother. As Helen recalls, Lily has left her two children with their grandparents for an indeterminate amount of time while her husband is sick. This absence, and lack of nurturing, is the reason for their estrangement from her. It is not until Lily is introduced in the novel in a contemporary setting that the change in Ireland as a nation is truly represented. Lily is somewhat of a revolutionary in the Irish computing industry; ‘[s]he was the first in the country to include computer skills in her commercial course’ resulting in the company,
204 Ibid., p. 73. 205 Nora, Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, p. 6. 206 Ibid., p. 15. 74
‘Wexford Computers Limited’.207 Arriving in the offices for the first time, Helen
‘noticed how beautiful and bright the room was, and how expensive looking’. 208
Lilys’s entrepreneurial success is based on the computer industry and associated
inward investment for software development. Economic growth in Ireland was
stimulated by receipt of ‘a major share of American-owned electronics projects in
Europe because they agglomerated around other major firms such as Intel’.209 Growth
came
not just by foreign investment but by two relatively distinct modes of
integration into the global economy—the partial local embedding of
global corporate networks and the increasingly successful integration of
local networks of indigenous firms into global business and technology
Networks.210
Lily’s emphasis on the local, emphasised by her business name ‘Wexford Computers
Limited’, offers an interesting contrast to the contemporary emphasis on international companies and their investments. Helen’s business is clearly a by-product of
international modernisation, but the influx of the IT industry in Ireland has powerful
local results. However, her company that strives to improve communication is
ironically situated against her personal inability to communicate with her own family.
207 Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, pp. 92–93. 208 Ibid., p. 94. 209 D. O’Hearn, Inside the Celtic Tiger: The Irish Economy and the Asian Model, London, Pluto Press, 1998, p. 153. 210 S. Ó Riain, ‘The Flexible Developmental State: Globalization, Information Technology, and the “Celtic Tiger”’, Politics & Society, vol. 28, no. 2, 2000, pp. 157– 193, p. 158. 75
Lily’s house is an architectural replica of her offices: ‘a high-beamed ceiling and the same roof-lights, the same cool austerity. It must have been done, she [Helen] thought, by the same designer’. 211 The metaphor of light in both buildings is strong,
apparently symbolic of the Celtic Tiger’s transforming effect – a global light situating
Ireland upon the international stage, with the information technology industry at the centre.
The metaphor of light continues throughout the narrative with sporadic references to the lighthouse, Tuskar. Only towards the conclusion, however, does the importance of the lighthouse become clear. Lily describes to Helen and Paul how there was once a second lighthouse:
It was called the Blackwater Lightship. It was weaker than Tuskar. Tuskar
was built on a rock to last, I suppose. Still, I loved there being two. I
suppose the technology got better, and maybe there’s not as much
shipping as there was. The Blackwater Lightship. I thought it would
always be there. …
I used to believe that Tuskar was a man and the Blackwater Lightship was
a woman and they were both sending signals to each other and to other
lighthouses, like mating calls. 212
This excerpt offers a rare insight into Helen’s emotions and characterisation, an
insight into the crippling effects of absence and longing. The lightship can be read as
a metaphor for something that is lost; something that was once dependable, and as a
211 Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, p. 112. 212 Ibid., pp. 191–192. 76
loss of inter-communication, a slip into isolation. By extension, it can be read as one of many metaphors for the dysfunctional family that offers her little comfort.
Toward the novel’s conclusion, Declan becomes very sick: ‘[w]hen he opened his eyes, it was cleared that he was frightened’.213 The scene echoes the opening of the novel, where, upon hearing her son crying out, Helen rushes to him. In this instance, however, it is her brother that needs her:
As soon as she fell asleep, Helen heard him crying out. She got up and
dressed. It was almost three o’clock in the morning. Her mother and Paul
were sitting by the bed in the darkened room.214
This scene is important on a number of levels: firstly, Helen has been moved from the role of the mother, to the position of the sister; her natural nurturing instinct seen in the opening scene with her son is not necessary here. Secondly, Paul, the figure who wants to ‘adopt’ Declan and has had a more supportive role than any of Declan’s family members, is finally on equal ground with Lily. Lily, however, regains the position of a mother figure rather than a woman on the periphery of Declan’s support network when he calls out for her: ‘‘Mammy, Mammy, help me, Mammy.’’215
The novel shifts dramatically in tone: Helen is waiting for the sun to rise. Light works as a positive symbol in this scene, repeatedly mentioned for a resonating effect:
Slowly, hesitantly, the dawn came up in the eastern sky, the sky over the
sea. From the window, Helen saw chinks of vague light between the black
213 Ibid., p. 257. 214 Ibid., p. 257. 215 Ibid., p. 258. 77
clouds. It was four-thirty; she did not know that the dawn began so early.
… what she had witnessed was merely a glimmer, a hint of the beginning
of day. …
When it brightened, she put on a pullover and walked down toward the
sea. …
The sea was a deep metallic blue; there were black rainclouds on the
horizon, but the sun was coming through now and it was almost bright.216
From the slow glimmer of first light to almost brightness, the progression of images
can be read as a symbolic representation of the development of the family – hardly
functioning in the story’s beginning to a clearer entity toward its conclusion. The
highly figurative language in this scene contrasts with the high proportion of dialogue
and sparer reportage in earlier stages of the book. Helen’s character finds a new
definition in this light, and is given a sense of independence, as she ‘stood at the edge
of the cliff until the sun came out behind the black rainclouds’. 217. Littoral imagery,
often present in Tóibín, opens up here a new prospect of clarity and revelation, as
Helen looks out to sea; the sea offers a moment of clear ‘hard’ vision denied to her
associations with the ever-changing land:
Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices.
They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant
less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten
away by the weather, washed away by the sea. … It might have been
216 Ibid., p. 259. 217 Ibid., p. 260. 78
better, she felt, if there never had been people, if this turning of the world,
and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without
witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to
love. 218
According to Liam Harte, Helen realises that the ‘ocean’s timeless, resistant reality
reveals to her a cosmic truth about the ephemerality of human endeavour and human
suffering’.219 Helen’s bleak realisation of the insignificance of people against the
power and effect of the sea suggests that the conflicts between her and her family
preceding this moment are, indeed, also insignificant, and so potentially contributes
something to a healing process. The sea, even with its destructive force, places her
contemporary situation in a more positive light. It offers clarity and, most important, a
sense of scale and perspective.
The novel ends, as often in Tóibín, with a muted hope; there is a future for
Helen and Lily’s relationship despite the unclear outcome for Declan. After driving
from Dora’s house to the hospital in Dublin, the two women leave him for treatment
and go to Helen’s house to refresh. It is the first time Lily has been in her daughter’s
house, and will soon meet her husband and sons for the first time. Having a cup of tea
before sleep, Lily says
Helen, that is what I dream about now, that you and I could sit here
talking about nothing, and watch the boys playing and Hugh coming in
218 Ibid., p. 260. 219 L. Harte, ‘‟The Endless Mutation of the Shore”: Colm Tóibín's Marine Imaginary’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 51, no. 4, 2010, pp. 333– 349, p. 345. 79
and out of the room. … it would be all easy and casual. That’s what I
dream about now.220
This sense of development and hope for a positive relationship with each other is juxtaposed against fears for Declan. With a fleeting reference in the final sentence of the novel where Lily mentions ‘we’ll go and see Declan later’, the reader is left with an unclear conclusion.221 The sense of hope for Helen and Lily’s relationship is strongly asserted despite concern for Declan, even though the severity of his condition was established. The mother–son bond, which one might have expected to be of climactic importance in the narrative, is to some extent supplanted by the mother– daughter relationship.
Although The Blackwater Lightship is a powerful novel about AIDS and homosexuality within Ireland, its portrait of three generations of estranged Irish women also registers other recent developments in Irish history, including European
Union membership and the early effects of the Celtic Tiger. The three women are carefully matched to different versions of Irish reaction to such changes: Dora is at times more contemporary than any other character – she watches the liberal The Late
Late Show that regularly discusses contraception and divorce and questions religious authority; Helen attempts to hold on to her idea of the past despite the conflicts she experiences between tradition and modernity; Lily personifies the attitudes of the
Celtic Tiger through her employment and lifestyle. Together, their depiction dramatises how broader historical change in Ireland relates to smaller-scale representations of the self.
220 Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, p. 273. 221 Ibid. 80
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the first of Tóibín’s Irish-based novels to maintain a linear
chronology without reverting to the past to establish the identity of the characters and
the history of the nation. The novel is set entirely in the past yet, paradoxically,
captures the mood of its contemporary Ireland. Published in 2009, after the death of
the Celtic Tiger, the novel hints at an understanding of contemporary Irish identity by
having the confidence to explore the past in historical fiction, rather than indirectly
through memory. Despite its backward look, the novel was inspired by the sudden
increase of immigration into Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. Tóibín noticed that
the new arrivals seemed ‘to be between countries, not experiencing Ireland in any real
way’. 222 The migrants, according to Tóibín, were living in a paradox: they were too
busy working to experience Ireland and were slowly losing connections with their
original home. In relation to Ireland’s history, the novel is a hymn to progress; Ireland
was once the place to leave but during the Celtic Tiger, it became the place to arrive.
The Irish were now ‘free from the pain and bitterness of forced emigration … from
the sense of inferiority that comes with a long history of failure’.223 Tóibín’s novel
acts as a strong reminder that the Irish, only decades earlier, were those who were
caught between places, between memories and between identities. Unlike The
Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, the narration in Brooklyn does not
revert to the past for plot progression. There is, nevertheless, another dead father,
222 J. Mullan, ‘Colm Tóibín meets the Guardian book club’, The Guardian online, 15 September 2010,
creating an absence that might be read as a symbol of lost opportunity in Ireland, a
lack of purpose or reason to stay. Brooklyn is, nevertheless, a forward-looking book
that places emphasis on opportunity and potential development.
Brooklyn focuses on youngest daughter Eilis Lacey, the quiet, shy and almost
accidental protagonist, who lives on Friary Street, Enniscorthy with her widowed
mother and single, working sister, Rose. Eilis’ father is long dead, and her three elder
brothers are working in Birmingham. This construction of post-war familial life is
typical of 1950s Ireland with men working abroad in England, sending money home
sporadically. Eilis lives a passive life, working on Sundays in the local shop for Miss
Kelly and reluctantly going to dances in the Athenaeum with her friends Nancy and
Annette. There she is treated with dismissive hostility by local man Jim Farrell, a
scene that mirrors the treatment of Elizabeth Bennett by Mr. Darcy in Pride and
Prejudice. With no employment prospects in sight for Eilis and no romantic love to
keep her in Ireland, her sister invites Brooklyn-based Irish priest Father Flood to
dinner:
And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would
need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a
distance. In the silence that lingered, she realized, it had been somehow
tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America.224
Something of the character’s unrealised identity and lack of agency can be sensed in this reference to herself in the third person. The narrative voice of the novel is limited to Eilis and, subsequently, the narration is subject to her own awareness of what is
224 C. Tóibín, Brooklyn, London, Penguin, 2009, p. 23. 82
happening around and to her. The restraint in Eilis’ observations is due to her inability to understand fully what is happening, with multiple instances where ironic distance is created between the reader and narrator, allowing the reader to understand something
Eilis does not. The novel reads as a Bildungsroman; it explores the development of the central character by showing, not telling, how she comes to a sense of her own identity. It is divided into four parts, each resembling a possible short story. The structure is cyclical, with constant doubling and layering of events and a sense of repetition. Part One is a short insight into Eilis’ life in Enniscorthy, preparation to leave and the tumultuous journey on the ship to Brooklyn. Part Two is her first year in
Brooklyn, dealing with her new job, new people and a bout of homesickness. In Part
Three Eilis falls in love with Brooklyn-born Tony, of Italian ethnicity, who introduces her to a happier version of life in America. Part Four sees Eilis return to Enniscorthy after the death of her sister, with a reintroduction to Wexford life through American eyes.
The novel’s opening sentence, ‘Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house of Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work’,225 creates an immediate intertextual link with the opening of James
Joyce’s short story ‘Eveline’; ‘She sat at the window watching the evening invading the avenue’.226 Both narratives begin as the day is ending, in a metaphorical foreshadowing that each protagonist’s time in Ireland could possibly be coming to an end. ‘Eveline’ is the story of a young Dublin woman who has the chance to leave
Ireland with her lover, Frank, whom she is due to marry. Eveline’s life in Dublin is monotonous and unhappy – her mother is dead, her father is abusive and she must
225 Ibid., p. 3. 226 J. Joyce, ‘Eveline’, Dubliners (1914), Ware, Wordsworth Classics, 2001, p. 23. 83
manage the family home. Eveline is ‘about to explore another life with Frank’ in
Buenos Aires, 227 yet, on the dock, she questions her choice in leaving all that she knows, all that is familiar. In her internal confusion, Eveline is confused by images of escape coupled with a paralysing fear. She eventually finds it ‘impossible’ to go on the boat as she is ‘passive, like a helpless animal’. 228 By recalling the opening of
‘Eveline’, Tóibín foreshadows the exploration of a passive female protagonist’s identity in relation to her separate loyalties to people and place.
Brooklyn is also somewhat similar to George Moore’s novel Esther Waters, the story of an illiterate kitchen maid who raises an illegitimate son in a hostile environment. As in the characterisation of Esther, while Eilis is in Ireland, she is without positive patriarchal influence – both lose their fathers at a young age – and, as a result, she is easily influenced by other men and does not attempt to defy or assert any form of power. And yet, her family, like the other families constructed by Tóibín, is interestingly liberated as well as damaged by the absence of father and brothers. In
Brooklyn, this absence is not filled by a powerful and liberal-minded matriarch like
Dora Devereux from The Blackwater Lightship, who is of the same generation as
Eilis’s mother, and is mentioned in passing in Brooklyn as a strong contrast to a character crippled by grief for her late husband and absent sons. Unhappiness plagues the female Lacey household, an unhappiness that infiltrates and controls Eilis’s personality and outlook. By contrast, while living in Brooklyn and on her return to
Enniscorthy, Eilis experiences an oversupply of men in her life, with her boss, Mr
Bartocci, the influence of her husband Tony, advice from Father Flood and the persuasion from her Wexford love interest, Jim. Her development throughout the
227 Ibid., p. 24. 228 Ibid., p. 26. 84
novel is registered in large part by changes in the way she relates to male authority
and advice.
Controlling the narrative viewpoint through Eilis permits Tóibín to explore a
varied and changing social picture through the often confused mind of his protagonist
rather than by specifically detailing the transformative society around her. Through
limiting her knowledge and understanding, the narrative scope and landscape is, in
turn, narrowed. Eilis’s understated and implicit understanding imposes a system of
silence and omission both on her letters home and in the narrative scope, yet creates
depth in character. The novel, like most of Tóibín's work, has very few clear physical
or visual descriptions of characters and place, and rarely offers scenes which the
reader might expect from other narratives of Irish migration. For example, the
narrative emphasis on Eilis’s departure is not on the stereotypical emotional goodbye
but on the need to complete visa forms and the banality of packing. The goodbye is an
event consciously staged for suitable memory:
What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning
of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling.229
Tóibín perhaps expects that the reader will assume the goodbye to be deeply
emotional and will fill in the gaps in his narrative, but he may also be drawing
attention to the lack of autonomy, and therefore of spontaneity, in Eilis's emotional
life, and beyond that to the emotional sacrifices that she is making for her family's sake while unaware (we discover) of those made by them for her. Similarly, when
Eilis arrives in America there is no sweeping landscape description of the Manhattan
229 Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 31. 85
skyline. Rather, the narrative jumps from Eilis getting ready to disembark the ship to a sleepless night in her rented room in Brooklyn, where she has already begun her new job. The focus on Eilis’s daily life, or rather her sleepless nights, elides the normal narrative high point of discovery, and of idealised escape from Ireland to
America. Furthermore, as in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the proportions of narrative space allowed to different phases of Eilis’s life provide unexpected emphases. The lengthy and detailed dwelling on particular moments, such as her illness in the journey to America, is in stark contrast to the rapid denouement of the story in Part Four.
The Irish idea of America in the 1950s was as a land of promise, opportunity and escape from a poverty-stricken Irish Republic. Tóibín demystifies this idealised image of prosperous America through the representation of a daily life, creating a distance between the expectations of the imagined idea and the reality of America.
This distance is captured aptly through the character Miss McAdams, a fellow lodger of Eilis, who said: ‘I didn’t come all the way to America, thank you, to hear people talking Italian on the street or see them wearing funny hats.’230 Tóibín's comic recreation of Irish parochialism in New York ironises the idea of escape: the supposed solution of sending Eilis to Brooklyn turns out to be as problematic (or perhaps merely as tame) as the prospect of her staying in Enniscorthy, and it is clear that for some Irish the difference in place has made little or no difference in identity.
Furthermore, the symbolic link between Eilis’s name and Ellis Island – the gateway to
America for immigrants from 1892 to 1954 – is provocative. With her name meaning
‘God’s promise’, Eilis stands symbolically not only for the place of promise but for
Ellis Island, the place between where the immigrants have come from and where they
230 Ibid., p. 56. 86
are going. Ellis Island is a liminal space between deprivation and opportunity,
conditions which may exist equally in Ireland or America, and Eilis is constructed as
a character between both places, uncertain of the benefits of either. Additionally, the
1950s as a temporal setting acts as an in-between time – the space where the world
held its breath after the war and before the more restless 1960s.
In her first bout of homesickness, after receiving some letters from home, Eilis
repeatedly dreams of Enniscorthy, signifying that unlike other protagonists in
Tóibín’s novels, she is not separated from her identity by time but by distance:
She was nobody here … Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house
on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them
she was really there … Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty,
she thought.231
In his essay ‘Perceiving and Remembering’, Edward Casey explores the idea of
familiarity as a base for memory and identity. While in Enniscorthy, with Father
Flood in the living room, Eilis’s thoughts foreshadow her future pain where ‘she
would never have an ordinary place, … the rest of her life would be a struggle with
the unfamiliar’.232 To Eilis, in Brooklyn nothing was familiar, nothing signified home.
Memories from Eilis’s previous daily life in Enniscorthy are contrasted with her new
life in Brooklyn; there is nothing to attach memory to, nothing meaningful to aid the
power of memory. The mnemonic energy of her dreams about Enniscorthy hinders
her daily life in Brooklyn, destabilising her sense of individual identity and sense of
231 Ibid., p. 67. 232 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 87
place. The relationship between self and place is constitutive for individual identity,
as Casey says, since ‘there is no place without self and there is no self without
place’.233 Eilis exemplifies here the individual in between, and until she creates a
stable identity in the new place, she will cease to exist there. The novel works to
explore the identity one adopts in unfamiliar places, and what unfamiliarity does to
one’s sense of sense of self. For Eilis, it finally offers a new realm of possibility, with
the future opportunity to work in an office as a bookkeeper, a reality that was not
available in Ireland.
Jan Assmann has shown how collective memory is based on everyday
communications, and when this communication is cut, the memory begins to wane
and individual identity begins to fade.
Each individual memory constitutes itself in communication with others.
These ‘others,’ however, are not just any set of people, rather they are
groups who conceive their unity and peculiarity through a common image
of their past.234
Eilis, even though she is living with other Irish women, cannot find a place of mutual
memory, no similar peculiar identity. As in her life in Enniscorthy, her first months in
Brooklyn are passive and somewhat reclusive, avoiding other lodgers in the morning
and faking illnesses to stay at home from dances. Adding to her reclusiveness is her
strategy of withholding from her family the reality of Brooklyn. As in a dominant
233 Casey, ‘Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in a Place- World?’, p. 683. 234 J. Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, no. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies, 1995, pp. 125–133, p. 127. 88
narrative of emigrant history, Eilis constructs her own narrative that hides the banality
of Brooklyn and perpetuates the image of a glamorous and prosperous America.
During her struggle with homesickness, Eilis concludes that:
None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not
find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this
she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought,
they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they
would have had to realize what this would be like for her.235
Eilis, in her irrational thought, is experiencing a collapse of individual identity
because she is losing touch with her home, and is not developing in her new place.
Here the affirmation of Eilis’s personal identity intersects with cultural memory, and
the deconstruction of this memory when in a new place. Eilis experiences nostalgia, a
feeling that, according to Edward Casey, is too often equated with homesickness:
what is ‘‟nostalged” is a past that we cannot rejoin’ or re-experience.236 The details of
this poignant imagery, provided by the letters Eilis received from home, constitute a
world for Eilis that is not containable in any finite set of recollections. What she
begins to long for is a ‘past that was never given a present’237 which is a product of
not only her imagination and dreaming, but her lack of communication with her
family. Nostalgia creates a ‘paradoxical interplay of the definite and indefinite’ within
her experience, a confusing combination of being in a place and in no place, and of
235 Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 70–71. 236 E.S. Casey, ‘The World of Nostalgia’, Man and World, 20, 1987, pp. 361–384, p. 365. 237 Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 366. 89
living daily life through a veil of imagination and memory. 238 Father Flood,
explaining the experience of homesickness to naïve Eilis, intervenes by enrolling her
in a bookkeeping and accounting course to keep her busy. Eilis is characterised like
Isabel Archer in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady who is intelligent, yet innocent:
‘The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with the finest capacity for
ignorance’.239 Eilis excels in her bookkeeping and accountancy courses, devouring
and relishing the chance to learn. She also begins dating a local Brooklyn man, Tony,
who helps her to experience an Italian-American way of life – revealing that the Irish
are not the only people who are caught between their home and America.
Furthermore, it offers a representation that hybrid, originally immigrant, cultures can
be confident and successful.
Eilis’s relationship with Tony does not showcase the American glamour that
she may have expected. He walks her home from her night classes, they attend Irish
dances and regularly go to the movies. Their courtship is similar to Eveline’s romance
with Frank who, like Tony, would ‘meet her outside the Stores every evening and see her home’ and would also take her to the cinema. 240 With Tony, Eilis lives a life
similar to what she would have in Ireland. Yet, the description of a Brooklyn summer
with trips to Coney Island beach establishes a binary opposition to her trip home in
June after the death of her sister, Rose. Before her temporary return home, Tony
convinces Eilis to marry him only so that he can know she will return. This marriage,
like her experience of homesickness and life in Brooklyn, is another secret Eilis keeps
from her family.
238 Ibid., p. 379. 239 H. James, The Portrait of a Lady, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 220. 240 Joyce, ‘Eveline’, Dubliners, p. 24. 90
Tóibín sets Eilis’s trip back to Wexford in a rarely perfect Irish summer,
whose descriptions work against the harsh Brooklyn winter Eilis has just endured.
This narrative choice emphasises not only the distance between America and Ireland for the reader, but creates an idyllic experience for Eilis in which Brooklyn quickly becomes a distant memory. In this concluding part of Brooklyn, figurations of
immigrant identity in previous Irish writing shine through. In fact, Eilis’s arrival
home reads as an intertextual showcase of Tóibín’s literary influences and Part Four,
in particular, resonates with elements of short stories such as ‘Homesickness’ by
George Moore and ‘Nightfall’ by Daniel Corkery. Like Part Four, the novel overall
reads as an array of Tóibín’s literary influences. Tóibín’s self-positioning within
literary history is highlighted with the influence of Joyce and James, along with
Moore and Corkery, on his writing at its most clear in Brooklyn.
Eilis returns home from Brooklyn, transformed with American fashion that
gives the appearance of a newfound confidence. Despite this, there is a sense that
Eilis has transformed back to the girl she was when she left years prior, suggesting
that as that person she froze on the day she left her Irish home, and never fully
developed in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, her different New York self seems strangely in
abeyance. In Corkery’s ‘Nightfall’, the protagonist emigré, after a life in New
Zealand, returns to West Cork with grey hair and lives as if he was the young man
that left decades prior. He slips into the life he previously lived, by returning to the
local dance hall, much to the hilarity of others in attendance. Eilis, like the Colonial,
quickly adopts the life she left, slipping back into everyday Enniscorthy, responding
to her mother’s grieving emotions and reluctantly attending outings with her friends.
The difference from her life before is that she, while at her original home, is now in
between her old and new life.
91
During her time back at home, the narrative increases in pace in stark
comparison to the three previous parts. The pace is indicative of her newfound energy
and appreciation of her once familiar surroundings. As on arrival in Brooklyn, Eilis
after returning to Enniscorthy begins to lose the identity that goes with her new home.
The distance is never explicit but is implicit in order to be felt by the reader. As in
Brooklyn, Eilis in her previously familiar surroundings questions her own identity, an identity that is split between two places:
She wished now that she had not married him, not because she did not
love him and intend to return to him, but because not telling her mother or
her friends made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy,
something she could not match with the time she was spending at home. It
made her feel strangely as though she were two people, one who had
battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and
fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter, the
Eilis whom everyone know, or thought they knew.241
This idea of a dual identity over two places works in a similar fashion to George
Moore’s ‘Home Sickness’. The protagonist, Bryden, returns home to Duncannon,
Ireland after thirteen years in New York for health reasons. On arrival, ‘the first thing he did was to look around for any changes that might have come to it’.242 Bryden
quickly realises not much has changed in the village, but he has. Bryden’s own
internal development disintegrates as he quickly falls back into the rhythm of village
241 Tóibín Brooklyn, pp. 271–272. 242 G. Moore, ‘Home Sickness’, The Untilled Field (1903), London, Colin Smythe, 1976, p. 33. 92
life and falls in love with a local girl, Margaret Dirken. It is her love that creates stability and a sense of purpose for him to not only stay, but to be happy in Ireland.
However, after receiving a letter from a friend in New York, Bryden’s perspective on
Ireland is refocused from the beautiful landscape to the ‘worn fields, divided by walls of loose stones’.243 The imagery invoked here suddenly creates a sense of Ireland, for
Bryden, to remain in his past; there is no strong foundation for a future. That night
‘the smell of the Bowery slum had come across the Atlantic’244 and resolved his confusion about where to be:
His eyes fell on the bleak country, on the little fields divided by bleak
walls; he remembered the pathetic ignorance of the people, and it was
these things he could not endure … He must get away from this place – he
must get back to the bar room.245
Initially in the narrative, Moore maintains the stereotype of a prosperous America by juxtaposing the seemingly simple rural nature of Bryden’s natal landscape against the apparent excitement of the Bowery nightlife. With the repetition of ‘bleak’, Moore constructs a desolate image of Ireland, imagining a land that offers no hope or prosperity. Bryden leaves Margaret and Ireland, and ‘when the tall skyscraper stuck up behind the harbour he felt the thrill of home that he had not found in his native village’.246 America has become his place of identity, his place of welcoming, his new urban milieu. However, in the conclusion, this apparently exciting life is demystified
243 Ibid., p. 45. 244 Ibid., p. 45. 245 Ibid., p. 46. 246 Ibid., p. 48. 93
when, in his twilight hours after his wife had died, and children had left home, Bryden sits and in his memories ‘saw clearly the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills’.247 The previous thrill of home lies in his memories of Ireland and reveries of Margaret, rather than in his experiences of America. Moore thus perpetuates the confusion of being in between two places and two identities but being allured into the urban, seemingly exciting lifestyle.
As in ‘Home Sickness’, when Eilis arrives home, she begins, albeit reluctantly, to date local Wexford man Jim Farrell, the character that was rude to her in the dance hall at the beginning on the novel. Jim, like Margaret in ‘Home
Sickness’, becomes a possible reason for Eilis to stay and offers the secure, familial life in Ireland Eilis once thought she would have. Eilis falls back into the Enniscorthy lifestyle, but is regularly reminded of her Brooklyn life with letters from Tony that are represented as annoying rather than cherished. In the height of her confusion – caught between not only two places, but also between two men that she loves – she tells her mother that she is married. Responding with very little emotion, her mother tells Eilis that her place to live is obvious. Eilis is not caught in between; by marrying Tony she has created her life and future in Brooklyn, and now only has a past in Enniscorthy.
And alluding to the conclusion of ‘Home Sickness’, Eilis leaves Enniscorthy one morning, without any clear notion to the new man in her life whether nor not she would return:
‘She has gone back to Brooklyn,’ her mother would say. And, as the train
rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined
247 Ibid., p. 49. 94
the years ahead, when these worlds would come to mean less and less to
the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to
herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and
tried to imagine nothing more.248
By leaving Enniscorthy, Eilis tries to focus on her life in Brooklyn and detaching
herself from her original home. Brooklyn acts as a reminder to the Irish; in the midst
of all the new arrivals to the country, the Irish were once those who were drifting, in
between and lost between two homes.
The work of Tóibín, by his own account, avoids depicting big themes and historical changes, but they are nonetheless evident, both on a national and familial level. In his research on Henry James for The Master, Tóibín wrote that James
was acutely alert to the idea that small moments, recurring memories, a
sudden realization, something half understood, random matters, all of
these can make their way into the foreground or background of a novel. 249
It is these moments, memories, realisations in Tóibín’s fiction that offer the reader a
version of contemporary and historical Ireland, where changes and transformations
are explored and deconstructed. Like the fiction of Henry James, Tóibín’s work is
248 Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 251. 249 C. Tóibín, ‘A More Elaborate Web: Becoming Henry James’, The Henry James Review, vol. 30, no. 3, 2009, pp. 227–236, p. 236. 95
concerned with both concealing what should be obvious and revealing what is usually ignored. Small moments and things half understood matter in Tóibín’s novels, bringing the less noticed parts of life, such as intricacies of the family, to the foreground in order to understand the bigger picture, such as the nation. Tóibín’s use of family is fundamental for this: the family works as a symbol that spans generations to capture moments of tradition and transformation. He breaks down versions of
Irishness and explores representations of the Irish family to offer the reader a map to understand the change in Ireland. In 2008, Tóibín wrote an article exploring the disparity between Ireland’s change and its subsequent representation;
If the plays and novels coming out of Ireland in recent years seem dark and
strange; if the fathers are wicked and the mothers are missing, or the
mothers are wicked too … if the dead haunt the country as though some
great darkness had yet to be lifted; if grief seems everywhere on the stage
(and there are no signs in Irish literature that much of this is going to
change); and if foreign audiences … wonder why, since things have never
been better in Ireland, can writers not get sense?–why can bright images
not come from a place that is bright or brightening or brighter than it was?–
the answer does not lie in the artists’ willfulness or refusal to tell the truth
or reflect the world. The answer comes from the figures themselves, the
economic indicators, and the strange and confused ideology that lies behind
them. All you have to do is look.250
250 C. Tóibín, ‘Selling Tara, Buying Florida’, Éire-Ireland, Irish-American Cultural Institute, vol. 43, no. 1, 2008, pp. 11–25, p. 25.
96
Asking (and enabling) the reader to ‘look’ for meaning in small things is the core of
Tóibín’s narrative method, and of his indirect representation of the modern Irish experience of change.
97
Chapter Two
Neo-Gothic Representations of the Irish Family in Selected Novels by Anne Enright
And we must always rewrite the past. That’s what you’re there for, really. Because the past changes as new information becomes available.251 – Anne Enright
In an interview, Anne Enright said that the job of a writer is to ‘pull things down, start
new’. 252 Collectively, her fiction pulls down traditional literary approaches to the
complexities of contemporary Ireland and offers new strategies for representing the
nation. Enright’s literary career precedes, spans and continues after the Celtic Tiger
period. Her fictional engagement with this period displays tension between two
competing forces during the Celtic Tiger – a global force that disembodies local
understandings alongside a local drive that seeks to re-situate their meanings in the
community. The Celtic Tiger marks a period in which the Irish became ‘part of a
culture in which the emphasis is on self-realization’.253 After decades of suppression
of individual identity by a familiar privileging of national identity, this shift in
national understanding created new demands on Irish literature. It can be argued that
Ireland’s fiction has shifted from a theological to a humanist worldview, given its
seemingly endless contemporary preoccupation with individual life stories. In
Enright’s fiction, national identity and self-identity are fragmented, pulled down and built anew within an increasingly confusing globalised culture. Furthermore,
Enright’s fiction subverts many of the restrictive images of Irishness that have
251 A. Enright, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 5. 252 C. Bracken & S. Cahill, ‘An Interview with Anne Enright’, in C. Bracken & S. Cahill (eds), Irish Writers in their Time: Anne Enright, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2011, pp. 13–32. p. 21. 253 T. Inglis, Global Ireland: Same Difference, New York, Routledge, 2008, p. 6. 98
developed from nationalist imaginings. It investigates the constant shifts in the Irish
cultural imaginary, in particular the relationship between national remembering and
forgetting, and the influence of the past upon the present. Additionally, it looks at the
new capitalist modes of production and consumption in Ireland, offering different
ways of being and of self-understanding.
Born in 1962 in Dublin, Enright graduated from Trinity College Dublin in
1985 and then gained a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia
where she was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. Her first publication,
The Portable Virgin (1991) won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. After this
success, Enright quit her producing and directing role at RTÉ, Ireland’s national television and radio broadcaster, to focus solely on her writing. Moving from short stories, Enright then published four novels – The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What
Are You Like? (2001), The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) and the Man Booker Prize winner, The Gathering (2007). She has since published two more collections of short stories, Taking Pictures (2008) and Yesterday’s Weather (2009). Her most recent fiction work is the novel, The Forgotten Waltz (2011).
Enright deploys a disjunctive style that insists on the complexity of the past and prevents any sense of narrative simplicity. From her debut, she was heralded to be
‘a real departure for women’s fiction’ in Ireland. 254 Her earlier adopting of
postmodern literary techniques such as non-linear narration can be read as a stylistic
analogue for a demythologising aesthetic, seeking to renegotiate received meanings of
nationhood in ways that expose contradictions within contemporary Irish identity.
According to Linda Hutcheon,
254 M. Morrissy, ‘Surprising changes of light’, Irish Times, 2 March 1991, p. 37. 99
postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in
fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to
prevent it from being conclusive and teleological. 255
Hutcheon’s statement matches Enright’s comment quoted above, where she asserts
that a writer must ‘rewrite the past … because the past changes as new information
becomes available’.256 Enright’s fragmented storytelling mode, in tandem with her
lyrical and evocative use of language, enforces the notion that personal and national
identity is not only in constant process, but is under the constant influence of the past,
whether that past is consciously understood or not. The postmodern nature of
Enright’s writing stems from her view of Ireland as a historically confused nation in
which traditional novels were
slightly surreal, because Ireland was unreal. They dealt with ideas of
purity, because the chastity of Irish women was one of the founding myths
of the Nation State (well that was my excuse). But they were also full of
corpses … the past … will not shut up, it is the elephant in the national
living-room. 257
Enright’s oeuvre systematically attempts to draw attention to that metaphorical elephant in the nation’s living room by investigating, through fiction, what is not
255 L. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London, Routledge, 1988, p. 110. 256 Enright, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 5. 257 A. Enright, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 193. 100
traditionally talked about, and by redefining archaic expectations of women. Enright utilises effects of the surreal and the fantastic to explore gender constructions: ‘One of the pathways I have been negotiating as a writer has been my relationship with the real. … I like hyperrealism, as a description of what I do’.258 Taken as a whole, her work makes visible her developing response to the changes in Ireland, represented not only through content, but also through form. Her repeated moves between the short story and the novel, and between historical and contemporary fictional settings suggest a continuing preoccupation with finding ways to show Ireland’s rapidly changing state, as also seen in her repeated depictions of unstable protagonists. In each of her texts, furthermore, Enright deploys a collapsing of genres that
challenges traditional belief systems and epistemologies, often conflating
the genres of journalism, history and fiction to problematize our sense of
the past.259
Enright’s problematising of the past is often achieved through representations of the family that can be read as political matters, since in an Irish context they are directly linked to the ideology of the conservative Catholic Church, which traditionally has not encouraged questioning of history or the past. The unreliability of memory in dealing with the past is central in Enright’s work. In an interview, she mentions that she is interested in:
258 H. Schwall, ‘Muscular Metaphors in Anne Enright: An Interview’, The European English Messenger, vol. 17, no.1, 2008, p. 21. 259 C. Moloney, ‘Re-Imagining Women’s History in the Fiction of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Anne Enright, and Kate O’Riordan’, Postcolonial Text, vol. 3, no. 3, 2007, p. 8. 101
the process of recovering memories – that’s already an interesting phase –
the process of remembering and forgetting and undoing the forgetting and
re-remembering … the edges in between, certainly fantasy or imagination
and memory, between memory and history and where we let go of
memory, where it ossifies and turns into history. 260
Her fiction typically focuses on temporal and spatial liminal situations. The Celtic
Tiger as a period itself can be considered a liminal space, a transitional stage for
Ireland, a suspension of normal being. The period exemplifies a time of economic
boom, but also a source of forms of daily uncertainty and unreality. Enright’s oeuvre
charts a retreat toward realist representations of memory, through its increasing use of
Gothic tropes. Gothic conventions in Enright’s fiction have a strong contemporary
relevance; her adoption of neo-Geothic idioms signals a haunted, traumatised society
and disturbances in the national psyche.
‘Gothic’, as a modern literary term, first appeared in the second edition of
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story in April 1765, after its
original publication in 1764.261 The iconography of the Gothic centres on the return of
repressed images and voices of the past, an unwanted past impinging upon a
confusing present. As a term, the ‘Gothic Novel’ is a twentieth-century usage,
analogous to the ‘Gothic Revival’ in architecture.262 Gothic is considered indefinable as a literary genre: it is not limited to a dark narrative with a castle, instead relying on some level of ‘‟internal” (or perhaps ‟latent” or ‟unconscious”) principle that may
260 Ibid., p. 30. 261 E.J. Clery, ‘The genesis of ‘Gothic’ fiction’, in J.E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 21– 40, p. 21. 262 Ibid. 102
not always be explicitly related to the ‟content’ of the genre”.263 Thus, the Gothic becomes an exploration of the repressed unconscious of characters; it is the literary tradition that ‘discovered the unconscious’.264 Gothic tropes in Enright’s work saturate her representation of the contemporary to offer an alternative understanding not only of the present, but also of the past, to the extent that her appeal to the Gothic acts as a mirror for dysfunctional contemporary conditions:
[The Gothic] is a narrative built over a cultural fault line – the point of
conjunction between the discourses of alliance and sexuality, in
Foucault’s sense of those terms. In the earlier world ‘identity’ came from
the family one belongs to, a structure that both manifests and reinforces
the concepts and hierarchies supposedly reiterated in every order
throughout the universe, whether social, political, theological, or physical.
In the newer and contradictory discourse, ‘identity’ evolves in and
through the desiring self’s exploration of the world, in the dynamic
established between the self and other, in a default negotiation between
the pull of inner desire and outer ‘reality’.265
The Celtic Tiger can be considered a cultural fault line, one where Enright’s work exposes uncertainties of character identity and instabilities of knowledge, often based on childhood anxieties. This constructs a Gothic world of paranoia and confusion.
Anne Fogarty points out how ‘Gothic narratives invariably concentrate on taboo subjects and use their symbolic resources to probe fundamental anxieties of a
263 A. Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 15. 264 Ibid., p. 94. 265 Ibid., p. 95. 103
culture’.266 My study does not treat all contemporary Irish writing as production in the
Gothic genre, but finds the term frequently applicable to it. As Siobhan Kilfeather
writes,
If by the Gothic one understands a series of conventions concerning the
representation of landscape, character, history, plot and the supernatural,
and which give a distinctive stamp for character to certain types of fiction,
then it is possible to identify elements of the Gothic in Irish writing from
the 1590s to the present.267
Enright’s work, in particular, employs many of the tropes that pervade Gothic texts,
and finds ways of exposing certain kinds of hidden cultural knowledge that
unmercifully unsettle her reader, ‘engag[ing] … with the generic dominance of realist
fiction through a poetics of fragmentation’.268 As Enright’s fiction has developed since the early 1990s, her use of Gothic techniques and tropes has increased. Instead of offering access to an objective world, Enright’s fiction immerses readers in the psyche of her obsessive protagonists, in ways that both permit and distort a sense of the present and the past. According to Anne Williams,
The new mythos of Gothic moves from background to foreground the
rejected ‘otherness’ that the Realists and Romantics defined their favored
266 A. Fogarty, ‘Uncanny Families: Neo-Gothic Motifs and the Theme of Social Change in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction’, Irish University Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 200, pp. 59–81, p. 81. 267 S. Kilfeather, ‘The Gothic Novel’, in J. Wilson Foster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 78–96, p. 83. 268 Ibid., p. 88. 104
literary modes against: the supposedly irrational, the ambiguous, the
unenlightened, the chaotic, the dark, the hidden, the secret.269
The description applies well to Enright, who investigates contemporary anxieties of
the unknown, the secret and the ambiguous through the representation, and analysis,
of the Irish family. In her fiction, the family as an ideologically freighted entity is
transformed from the cripplingly unreal definition of the 1937 Irish Constitution to
the problematical entity of the contemporary period. Article 41 of the Constitution certifies that the State ‘guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order’ and enforces Catholic religious belief on the definition of the family, including the belief that ‘[m]arriage, on which the family is founded’ is to be protected ‘against attack’ and that ‘mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in their home’. 270 The increase of single-parent households and marital break-ups since
the Irish legalisation of divorce in 1999 has transformed the image and understanding
of what the family is, as an entity holding the secrets of the nation.
Domestic trauma can be read in terms of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, ‘The
Uncanny’. As explored by Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ arises from an admixture of the familiar – the heimlich – with ‘what arouses dread and horror’271 and describes the
obscure and frightening manifestation of what has otherwise remained secret and
hidden:
269 Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 5. 270 The Constitution of Ireland, p. 160–162. 271 S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, J. Strachey (trans.), An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919, 1919), London, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955, p. 219. 105
The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’
[‘homely’], ‘heimsich’ [‘native’] – the opposite of what is familiar; and
we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening because
it is not known and familiar. 272
Freud considers, rather, that the family and the home are sites of the uncanny, since there understandings and knowledge are ‘concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it’.273 This domestic concealment ensures the home and the family become subject to Gothic effects. Literature produces effects of the uncanny ‘when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on’.274 If the Gothic uncanny occurs when metonymic transformations of symbols of the past are manifested in contemporary imaginaries, then the Ireland of the boom and post- boom period provides multiple sites for its operation; because so much of the past remains hidden, the trauma and inarticulacy of repressed memory in contemporary
Irish fiction is effectively explored through the tropes of the Gothic. The contemporary Irish Gothic novel can be read as an alternative form of history writing that questions official sources, including the protagonist’s own conscious memory, through the troubling suggestions of hidden secrets of the past. According to Derek
Hand:
272 Ibid., p. 220. 273 Ibid., p. 223. 274 Ibid., p. 244. 106
a brooding anxiousness remains within the form of the novel: its spiraling
ever inwards towards some moment of truth or revelation that never
finally comes. … Here the Gothic has full reign: the supposed progression
from past to present collapses into the nightmarish ever-present of the
eternal wanderer.275
It can certainly be said that Enright’s fiction explores the troubled psyches of such
‘eternal wanderers’, and of eternal wonderers about the past. Though complicated by its increasingly Gothic tropes, her fiction presents the reader with a complex contemporary version of a distorted and distorting Ireland. The Celtic Tiger period resulted in a distortion of experience, of memory and of understanding; anxieties about the past were simultaneously obscured and exposed. The period became an enigma: history was at once repressed and celebrated; families were considered important whilst the traditional norm was challenged; and personal and national identity was being constantly redefined but never truly definable.
Freud’s theory of the unconscious, with its notion of screen memories, cast doubt on the psychic veracity of conscious recollection. Similarly, Nora’s study of the construction of French national identity shows the difference between memory and history. Nora’s idea of a national identity that is understood differently at different moments of a nation’s history makes his exploration of the construction of ‘France’ through memory and history an interesting analogue to Enright’s exploration of the influence of memory and history on the Irish present. Enright’s fiction demonstrates in an Irish context how ‘history, memory and national identity enjoyed an unusually
275 Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 82. 107
intimate communion’.276 The development of Enright’s fiction is built upon such
discoveries of a previously repressed past which ‘impinge so directly on
contemporary life’.277 Enright’s use of history and personal and collective memory in
her work could be thought to position it as ‘historiographic metafiction’. 278
According to Hutcheon, ‘fiction and history are narratives distinguished by their
frames, frames which historiographic metafiction establishes and then crosses,
positing both generic contracts of fiction and history’. 279 Enright creates fictions to
explore aspects of Irish history and the result is a representation where ‘truth and
falsity may indeed not be the right terms to discuss [the] fiction’.280
Within her historical context, Enright’s fictional narrative of the nation
predating, experiencing and following the Celtic Tiger period offers an unromantic
image that disappoints some traditional expectations:
My romantic idea of Ireland did not survive the killings in the North, and
the realization, in the 1980s, that Irish women were considered far too
lovely for contraception: it foundered, you might say, between Dorothy
McArdle and Canon Sheehan. Perhaps, as a result, I found it difficult to
lose myself in the dream that was the recent economic boom …..281
276 Nora, Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, p. 5. 277 Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 2. 278 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, p. 109. 279 Ibid., pp. 109–110. 280 Ibid., p. 109. 281 A. Enright, ‘Introduction’, in A. Enright (ed.), The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, London, Granta Books, 2010, pp. ix–xviii, pp. xvii–xviii. 108
My analysis of Enright’s fiction in this chapter will suggest that through the symbol
of the family, she offers the reader an Ireland that misunderstands and misvalues its
contemporary changes, whilst still attempting to reconcile with and understand an
oppressive past. Her fictions offer another version of communal memory, one that
evades limited definitions of Irishness to offer small truths about contemporary
experience. Despite her resistance to grand narratives of Irish history, Enright’s
collective work charts the Irish consciousness across its transforming contemporary
experience through the troubled but tenacious memories of her characters.
The Wig My Father Wore
In her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, published in 1995, the reader finds a representation of the effect of Ireland’s changing economic and global climate of the 1990s through the plight of the female protagonist, Grace/Grainne, who works as producer for ‘LoveQuiz’, a dating show in which a single woman must choose to go out with one of three male contestants, presenting the result as true love; Grace herself is ironically unlucky in love. The Wig My Father Wore has been primarily
discussed as a quintessential Irish novel that echoes James Joyce’s Dubliners because
it is set against the spatio-temporal background of a transforming Dublin.282 At the
increasingly globalised time of the early to mid-1990s, the problematic identity of
Ireland in its national literature was an important subject, but an understanding of the
text should not be restricted to that subject. The traditional view in which novel and
nation are bound up in mutual definition contributes to, rather than dilutes, the
problematic sense of personal identity in the era of globalisation. Enright’s novel,
282 H. Hansson, ‘Beyond Local Ireland in The Wig My Father Wore’, in C. Bracken & S. Cahill (eds), Irish Writers in their Time: Anne Enright, pp. 51–66, p. 53. 109
despite being regarded as specifically Irish, begins to break down the exclusive
literary boundaries of representation within Ireland – and reminds the reader that
Ireland is part of a globalised community, in which influences transcending the local
can be poetically powerful. Through a variety of literary techniques and a
representation of the increasingly globalised nature of Ireland, Enright ensures that
the novel’s national origin is not central to its production of meaning.
As alluded to in the title, a parodic reference to the Ulster Orange ballad ‘The
Sash My Father Wore’, Grace’s father’s wig has a prominent role in the narrative, immediately foreshadowing the importance of memory, pride in the past and the positive influence of family. Ironically, the wig in Enright’s novel acts as a symbol to capture the dysfunctional nature of the Irish family, bound by repression and lies
about their familial history. The narrative is structured as if each chapter were an
episode of a television series, similar to the structure of a short story anthology. Some
chapters could exist as single narrative entities, not requiring additional information to
make sense of their story. Enright’s lack of coherent plot structure, as well as repeated
one-liners without punctuation, disrupt the narrative flow and invert commonly
understood ideas. Throughout the novel, the first-person narration subtly critiques the
effect of the new boom on Ireland’s urban society and on attitudes towards the idea of
nation and of the self. The narrative begins:
The angel rang at my door with an ordinary face on him and asked for a
cup of tea, as was his right.283
283 A. Enright, The Wig My Father Wore (1995), London, Vintage, 2007, p. 1. 110
Represented as an actual, rather than figurative, angel, Stephen immediately disturbs
the conventions of straight realist narration in the manner of many magic realist
fictions of the period. Having committed suicide in 1934, his role is to save those who
are on the verge of doing the same. There is no explicit indication throughout the
novel that Grace intends to commit suicide other than the arrival of Stephen. Despite
his angelic status, Stephen has a historical presence as a Canadian bridge builder
whose current hybridity becomes a symbolic representation of the space in between
the real and unreal, the Irish and non-Irish. Stephen adopts a ghostly presence: ‘The
rain didn’t wet him and the wind blew right through’.284 His status of being without
being ‘there’, despite his further involvement in Grace’s life through her family and
colleagues, creates limitless possibilities to reveal what the reader eventually
discovers to be traumatised characters. It is through Stephen that the reader is offered access to Grace’s memories, and he becomes a vehicle for a Gothic relation of the imaginary to the real. As Grace falls in love with him through the narrative, she continually discusses the past with him, as a means to understand her cynical and detached attitude to her own life. Reminiscing about specific events that happened in her childhood, Grace begins to understand the problematic relationship she has with her mother and to analyse the figure of her father, and of his wig that acts as the primary symbol of falsehood throughout the novel. Grace’s family exhibits familiar repressive Irish family tendencies, as seen in her telephone conversation with her mother:
‘I’m fine,’ she said, because we both lie in the same way.
‘Any news?’
284 Ibid., p. 7. 111
‘Nothing much,’ I said (there is an angel in the kitchen, breaking the
toaster), ‘and yourself?’
‘Oh nothing new here.’ (Your father is dying, but so are we all.) So we
hung up.285
The revelation of unspoken thoughts indicates the suppression of reality and
knowledge amongst family members. Convinced that ‘all children are raised on …
simple lies’, Grace, with the help of Stephen, discovers the concomitant unreliability
of her memory and understandings of the past.286 A chapter titled, ‘How It Was’
reveals the ways in which Grace’s version of realities has never existed:
Stephen has, by means Angelic, found a newspaper for July 19th 1969, my
first night’s viewing. And there it is … It is the night of the orbit, not by
Apollo 8 as I had thought, but by Apollo 11, the mission that put the first
men on the moon. These tricks of memory do not distress me …. Now my
childhood rearranges itself …. Because clean as a sword coming out of a
lake, one night of my life presents itself as I knew it, without static or
interference.287
A print replica of the newspaper clipping immediately follows this passage. This break in narrative offers a seeming injection of reality that staunches the narrative flow, reminding the reader of the fictitious nature of the text. Grace tries to hold onto her version of reality by finally understanding her childhood without any influence
285 Ibid., p. 5. 286 Ibid., p. 25. 287 Ibid., p. 31. 112
from her family or any mutation of her own memories, but the discovery of an actual
memory is quickly subverted by her mother’s version of memory:
I rang my mother and she said we were at the seaside in the summer of
1969 and weren’t anywhere near a television, so when it came to the
moon-landing we listened to it on the radio and looked out the window at
the moon. Thanks Ma.288
Again, Grace’s search for a secure childhood identity comes to a halt, and her
rewriting of her own memories becomes increasingly difficult. In its postmodernist
vein, The Wig My Father Wore emphasises the self-reflexive nature of communication and foregrounds its own fictionality, using multiple points of view, unreliable narration, unresolved contradictions in plot and theme and acknowledged uncertainties of fact to emphasise the inaccessibility of the past. The central idea is that it is impossible to access the past or articulate any memory without interference, as exemplified by the television program listing that Stephen retrieves and the immediate subversion of its relevance. The inevitability that understandings of the past will be fragmentary and unreliable is represented through the fragmented and unreliable narration.
The silencing of the past is also represented through a childhood where questions are unanswered and lies are told: ‘Our childhoods were sitting there, with a finger to their lips’. 289 Grace moves to England, and describes her self-imposed exile
from her country and family as ‘mainly a question of contraception and nice
288 Ibid., p. 36. 289 Ibid., p. 48. 113
wallpaper’.290 The fascinating part of her state of exile is, ironically, her return. It
offers the most direct commentary on the state of Ireland, and the role of women
within it:
I came home to the country where you could tell if a man was married,
and if you couldn’t, then you could always find out. Not that I could care
less, because I was in love, whatever that meant, with a man who rang me
one Saturday morning and asked me to have his child. Certainly, I said. In
Ireland we have babies just like that. We have them all the time. 291
The implied passivity of an Irish woman and her sole function of raising children, as outlined in the 1937 Constitution, is defied both by Grace’s adversarial character and her personal experience. She recounts the experience of love and pregnancy, but also a miscarriage in which her ‘body had deserted [her] in its finest hour, … had slammed the door and pissed off home’.292 Then, abandoned by her lover, Grace attempts to
move on by giving up ‘politics with the memory of his voice and of his absolute and
irreducible rightness’. 293 Enright’s creation of this powerful and confused narrative
presence manifests the vision for fiction outlined by former Irish President, Mary
Robinson, in her inaugural speech in 1990 where she proclaimed that she wanted
‘women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history’. 294
In a short, but very powerful, insight into Grace’s past, the reader is positioned to see
the pain of memory. Enright offers the fictional representation of what Robinson did
290 Ibid., p. 56. 291 Ibid., p. 57. 292 Ibid., p. 58. 293 Ibid. 294 Robinson, ‘Inaugural Speech in Dublin Castle on Monday, December 3, 1990’, in McQuillan, Mary Robinson: A President in Progress. p.1. 114
not hope for – women who would experience the pain of exclusion and remain silent,
remain out of history. The narrative exposes a paralysing pressure for women to do
what is culturally expected, making the relationship between Grace and her own
mother perpetually strained:
I blame my mother. I blame her because that is what mothers are for. I
blame her for the wig and for middle age, for the small corpses she hid
behind the sofa and in the wardrobes. Which is to exaggerate, of course.
Which is to exaggerate.295
Enright acknowledges the self-comforting tendency of daughters to blame mothers, not only for their failed expectations but also for their individual failures. In a mirrored effect, Grace’s mother perpetually blames Grace for her father’s stroke and dependence on a wig – a symbol of his inadequacy and of the failed means employed to disguise it. Water, in particular the sea, becomes metaphorically central to the conclusion of the novel. When Stephen participates in the final episode of LoveQuiz, the reader is forcefully reminded he does not have a body and is mere signal. He is transmitted into the air and does not return. The show is cancelled shortly after, and an unemployed Grace discovers she is pregnant with Stephen’s child. She leaves
Dublin and moves to County Mayo, on the opposite side of the country. After moving to the coast, Grace spends a majority of time swimming in the sea where she ‘cannot find the edge of herself’.296 While on her own, the importance of memory and its
effect is paramount: ‘… memory of which is spread through all of you, but gently,
295 Enright, The Wig My Father Wore, p. 169. 296 Ibid., p. 182. 115
like water, like something you cannot pick up.’297 This series of similes creates the
image that memory is not only all consuming and saturating but impossible to match
with ideal truth. The metaphor of fluidity can also be extended to her memories of her
former self continually filtering into her contemporary identity. Throughout the novel,
Grace is simultaneously battling with her present because of the past, and is battling
with her past because of her present; it is a battle that not only cannot be won, but can
never conclude.
The Wig My Father Wore might be said to represent Ireland as a ‘sort of
nowhere, waiting for its appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it’.298 A
sense of being ‘nowhere’ permeates Grace’s experiences in Dublin: in love with a
man who does not truly exist, working on a show that manufactures love, and
adopting an identity that offers no clear understanding of her past and of her parents.
When The Wig My Father Wore was published, Ireland was transforming. The world of the economic boom had offered new forms of unreality, represented in Stephen and in LoveQuiz. The contemporary had become a paradox: those in metropolitan Dublin were too busy to understand the past and what was around them, yet their history
continued to oppress them. The spatial shift of Grace in the novel’s conclusion is vital
in enforcing this concept; in Mayo she finally comes to be, perhaps echoing the
conclusion of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. In Celtic Tiger Dublin, Enright presents a world where an individual identity cannot be manifested because of an increased globalisation that is continually destabilising the real, leaving characters without any sense of their true foundation. Identity becomes defined not by history but by commodities, as best represented in the opening sentence of the novel: ‘By that time I
297 Ibid., p. 183. 298 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 115. 116
needed anything I could get, apart from money, sex and power which were easy but
hurt a lot’.299 Grace’s reliance on consumerism for identity is instantly exposed. Her
need to own things to prove a level of self-worth is painfully apparent, in a context
where gender limits her rise to power. In a rare self-comparison to one of her characters, Enright claims that she was ‘like Grace … a good job and a car and a lot of freedom … a lot of things that people might think are a good thing to have’.300 She
reveals that she was not enthusiastic about the boom: ‘I didn’t actually believe [the
boom], especially towards the end, there was something too frantic and aggressive
about the story people were telling, the money story’.301 Similarly, in The Wig My
Father Wore, Enright expresses severe anxieties about the false and unreliable nature of the boom period through a nervous verisimilitude that plays with the imaginary and the unreal. She anticipates the coming of the Celtic Tiger by suggesting how disastrous an obsession with money and the self-glorified image that comes with it can be. Grace is the embodiment of this obsession, but follows a reverse trajectory of development in which she rejects a superficial existence defined by objects for a life of relative innocence. The end of the novel takes on a new tone of hope.
The Gathering
Enright’s The Gathering, published in 2007 and set in 1998, offers a haunting look at
Ireland’s past through its female protagonist’s search to discover what has happened in her family. The first-person narrator, Veronica Hegarty, is one of twelve surviving children – ‘the whole tedious litany of Midge, Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam,
299 Enright, The Wig My Father Wore, p. 1. 300 C. Bracken & S. Cahill, ‘An Interview with Anne Enright, August 2009’, in C. Bracken & S. Cahill (eds), Irish Writers in their Time: Anne Enright, pp. 13–32, p. 19. 301 Ibid. 117
Veronica, Kitty, Alice and the twins, Ivor and Jem’ – who, along with their ageing mother, come together to bury their recently deceased brother Liam, who has committed suicide by walking into the sea off the coast of England.302 Veronica travels to England to retrieve her brother’s body and attributes his death to a pattern of alleged sexual abuse by their grandmother’s landlord, Lamb Nugent. The novel offers a complex literary exploration of trauma and its debilitating effects, using Veronica in her contemporary context of boom-period Dublin to articulate unspeakable experiences of her past.
The novel’s title is not limited to the family meeting, but implies a gathering of stories and uncertainties, a gathering of ‘sudden convictions where uncertainty spawns’.303 The Gathering melds traumatic personal and national histories in a testamentary crisis diary that reveals equally a problematic relationship with the family’s mother and with the history of Ireland, the mother country. Veronica offers a self-reflexive narration, presenting the story ‘as I see it in my mind’s eye’.304 This filtering of history through personal interpretation and speculation offers a biased, influenced narrative that offers no clarity. As a narrator, Veronica does not acknowledge her bias or her complete blindness to certain events; she is nevertheless a completely reliable guide for the reader in other ways because she explores her history with an intense, honest and emotional truth. Following her lead, the narrative is non-chronological, continually shifting from the past to the present, with constant reassertions that a majority of the memories are the work of Veronica’s imagination and that others are based on a combination of fantasies and recovered memories. The narrative gradually moves forward in time but is retarded by repetition, static scenes
302 A. Enright, The Gathering, Vintage, London, 2008, p. 7. 303 Ibid., p. 2. 304 Ibid., p. 122. 118
and returns into the past. It explores national and self-identity through the invocation of child abuse which, through a series of discoveries made during the recent economic boom, is shown to have been commonplace in post-Independence Ireland. The narrative voice is unreliable but is offered as a means of deciphering why Liam committed suicide, through its traumatic personal and national histories. As a result, the novel’s structure of short and sharp chapters can be metaphorically read as the sequential meetings of a course of therapy. There is a longing for closure and for understanding, but with every chapter more discoveries are made and more shocking imagery is employed.
The unstable structure of this novel is a metaphorical representation of the uncertainty of the country about whom to trust and what to believe. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was established in 2000, and released an executive summary of its findings in 2005. Consisting of five volumes detailing graphic scenes of abuse and charting its traumatic effects, it concludes with a recommendation that resonates hauntingly in The Gathering: ‘The lessons of the past should be learned’.305
Harte writes that The Gathering is the ‘most searing fictional representation to date of
the devastating effects of the trauma of child sexual abuse in Ireland … and of the
corresponding, profoundly difficult need to counteract silence and forgetting through
disclosure’. 306 In The Gathering, the abuse of Liam is a possible individual case, but
represents systematic abuse and acknowledgment of the fact that ‘the system failed
305 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Commission Report, Executive Summary, Recommendation 3, 2009,
the children’.307 By melding collective and personal experience, Enright gives voice
to traumatic memories, previously repressed and denied expression.
Enright deploys a disjointed narrative style that foregrounds the complexity of
the past and prevents a clear sense of linear development. Along with the focus on the
family dynamic, there is a strong undercurrent questioning national identity, even
though the word ‘Irish’ is only used once in the book. Enright’s book came after the
1990s exposure of religious and institutional scandals in Ireland, beginning in June
1994 when Father Brendan Smyth was sentenced to four years in prison for the abuse
of children in Northern Ireland. In a recent interview, Enright discussed the
connection between sex, Ireland and the Catholic Church:
… Ireland wasn’t so much sexually repressed as sexually oppressed, in
that the Catholic Church talked about nothing else, but told you not to do
it at the same time.308
The exposure of child abuse scandals in the 1990s came to saturate Irish media from
2002, after Colm O’Gorman’s television documentary ‘Suing the Pope’ aired in
March. The story of O’Gorman’s childhood traumas exposed the neglect of the
Catholic Church in handling multiple allegations of child sex abuse by the newly
ordained priest, Fr Sean Fortune. It shocked the country by projecting an image of the
Catholic Church as grotesquely manipulative, and sparked a series of investigations,
notably the Ferns Report in 2005. Published two years before the release of The
Gathering, the Ferns Report provides an important context for Enright’s fictionalised
307 Ibid. 308 A. Enright, cited in R. Koval, Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, Carlton North, Scribe, 2010, p. 383. 120
representation of trauma and abuse. This inquiry related to complaints or allegations
made against the Ferns diocesan clergy in relation to events prior to 2002.309 Even
though the report was limited to Wexford, it emphasised not only the destructive act
of child abuse but the Church’s shameful response to it. Its graphic detail was a
necessary corrective measure to the atmosphere of secrecy and shame that oppressed
the victims. In her summary, Catriona Crowe writes:
The most distressing information … worse even than the harrowing
accounts of the abuse is the record of the long-term damage the abuse has
done to the witnesses. Suicide, depression, alcoholism, marital
breakdown, difficulties in relationships, family rifts, self-blame, guilt, fear
of exposure and loss of faith are all detailed.310
Crowe’s account of damage to the witnesses could function as a checklist of characteristics featured in The Gathering. This is a haunting reminder that memory, even if inarticulate and unclear, can cause catastrophic effects on the self years into the future.
The Gathering's highly self-reflexive confessional-style opening paragraph
immediately establishes the instability of identity in the narrator:
I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the
summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I
309 C. Crowe, ‘The Ferns Report: vindicating the abused child’, The Dublin Review, no. 22, Spring 2006, pp. 5–26,
need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me – this
thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put
on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh but the flesh is long
fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones. 311
This statement functions as a proem to the novel, foreshadowing a purpose.
Repetition of ‘I’ in the opening passage immediately establishes Veronica’s narration as a lens through which to view her family history as symbolic representations of herself: ‘roaring inside me’, ‘crime of the flesh’, ‘linger in the bones’. Veronica’s narration is not only about confusion but is created from confusion and incomplete knowledge. Her difficulty in expressing experience shows the long-term effects of childhood trauma. There is a sense that this internal roar has been silenced, until the sudden need has arrived to explore what may or may not have happened. Despite the confused actuality of the foreshadowed events, the reader is led to hope for an eventual clarity. Cathy Caruth, drawing on the work of Freud, defines trauma as ‘a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind’, caused by an experience not fully understood when it occurred, but which repeatedly returns in the subconscious.312 Using Freud’s case of the hero Tancred in Tasso’s Gerusalemme
Liberata, Caruth views
traumatic experience not only as the enigma of a human agent’s repeated
and unknowing acts but also as the enigma of the otherness of a human
311 Enright, The Gathering, p. 1. 312 C. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 3. 122
voice that cries out from the wound, a voice that witnesses a truth that
Tancred himself cannot fully know.313
Trauma repeatedly manifests itself through the subconscious exploration of
catastrophic experiences that can never be fully understood. The wound of the mind
becomes the breach of a knowable experience, not available to a conscious
understanding. In relation to The Gathering, sexual childhood abuse ‘is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs’, thus an eventual understanding
‘simultaneously defies and demands our witness’.314
In Linda Hutcheon’s terms, The Gathering is an example of ‘historiographic
metafiction’, which, ‘like both historical fiction and narrative history, cannot avoid
dealing with the problem of the status of their “facts” and of the nature of their
evidence, their documents.’315 Veronica’s search for what happened, or to clarify
what she thought happened, will never be achieved with the limits of her memory.
Her repeated return to these memories holding traumatic experiences can be read as
an ‘attempt to overcome the fact that [the abuse] was not direct, to attempt to master
what was never fully grasped in the first place’.316
Veronica’s enigmatic narrative testimony resists simple comprehension, with
its fragmented images and misplaced understandings fuelling confusion. Veronica,
like many others, is never truly sure of what happened, and it is in such uncertainty
that the worst possibilities can manifest. Trauma cannot usually take the form of a
clearly remembered event; the resulting incoherency of trauma narratives – both in
313 Ibid. 314 Ibid., p. 5. 315 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, p. 122. 316 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 62. 123
the formal inquiries and in fiction – expresses the horror of child abuse and neglect, both within religious and education institutions and in the home. Veronica makes a connection between the Irish media’s preoccupation with child abuse scandals and her sudden need to tell her own story:
… I remembered Mr Nugent. But I would never have made that shift on
my own – if I hadn’t been listening to the radio, and reading the paper,
and hearing about what went on in schools and churches and in people’s
homes. It went on slap-bang in front of me and still I did not realise
this. 317
The understanding that instances like her brother’s were not uncommon seems to affect Veronica so much that she feels she must add his story to the thousands that had already emerged. Veronica’s act of remembering Mr Nugent suggests that there was a period in which the experience was forgotten or repressed. As a response to the contemporary revelation of traumas throughout the nation, it suggests that trauma ‘is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’.318 Yet although the experience of trauma is shared, in the sense that
it is nationally widespread, according to the nature of trauma it remains an
incomprehensible history.
A connection between Lamb Nugent and the Church is implied by omission
throughout the text; it is presented as an assumption for the reader to make, if only
through the mere link that he was committing crimes associated publicly with the
317 Enright, The Gathering, pp. 172–173. 318 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 24. 124
Catholic Church by abusing his power of authority. He can be read as a metaphor for
the Church – both a ‘private and public figure’ – as being both a friend and the
landlord of Ada’s house.319 Veronica attempts to resolve the fallibility of memory and
construct a narrative of history that can account for her brother’s suicide. She elects to
begin her narrative of history when her Grandmother, Ada, meets Nugent:
The seeds of my brother’s death were sown many years ago. The person
who planted them is long dead – at least that’s what I think. So if I want to
tell Liam’s story, then I have to start long before he was born. And, in
fact, this is the tale that I would love to write; history is such a romantic
place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-button boots. If it would just
stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in
my head.
All right.
Lambert Nugent first saw my grandmother Ada Merriman in a hotel foyer
in 1925. This is the moment I choose.320
Choosing a moment long before Veronica is born reveals the level of fabrication
associated with history. Veronica’s narration recasts her family tale in the newly post-
Independence Dublin of 1925 and reveals an attempt to collate history with a
romantic and justifiable argument for her brother’s demise. It is a version of imagined
history without national currency, rather the personal history of someone who came of
319 H. Schwall, ‘Relationships with the ‟Real” in the Work of Anne Enright’, in C. Bracken & S. Cahill (eds), Irish Writers in their Time: Anne Enright, pp. 205–222, p. 208. 320 Enright, The Gathering, p. 13. 125
age during transformative times and is attempting to understand. The problem of
knowing history is explored here through revelations that the references to it are
indirect and incorrect: ‘we may not have direct access to others’, or even our own,
histories’. 321 Enright describes the repetitive narrative reach into the ‘past as very useful for a writer’ as the ‘grandparent’s generation … [is] a kind of mythic space’. 322
Veronica’s knowledge of Ada is partial and the scenes she describes of Ada and
Lambert meeting are no more than what Veronica feels could be the truth of what
happened. This ‘resituating of history’ is not a means of eliminating the truth but
‘permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not’.323 The reason
why the reader is positioned to witness Ada meeting Lambert does not become clear
or necessary until Veronica recounts Lambert’s molestation of Liam. Throughout
Veronica’s version of history, a fatal dependency of Ada upon Lambert is evident.
The simultaneous sense of guilt and obligation coming throughout the narrative shows
Veronica’s wish to trace the effects of the past upon the present:
I owe it to Liam to make things clear – what happened and what did not
happen in Broadstone. Because there are effects. We know that. We know
that real events have real effects. In a way that unreal events do not. Or
nearly real. Or whatever you call the events that play themselves out in
my head. We know there is a difference between the brute body and the
imagined body, that when you really touch someone, something really
happens (but not, somehow, what you had expected).324
321 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 10. 322 Enright, cited in Koval, Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, p. 384. 323 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 11. 324 Enright, The Gathering, p. 223. 126
The act of abuse, however, is presented without the clarity of an adult vision. It is offered as an image through the eyes of a child, the way Veronica may have seen it when she was young:
What struck me was the strangeness of what I saw … It was as if Mr
Nugent’s penis, which was sticking straight out of his flies, had grown
strangely, and flowered up at the top to produce the large and unwieldy
shape of a boy, that boy, that boy being my brother Liam, who, I finally
saw, was not an extension of the man’s member, set down mysteriously
on the ground in front of him, but a shocked … boy of nine. …
And even though I know it is true that this happened, I do not know if I
have the picture in my mind’s eye … I think it may be a false memory,
because there is a terrible tangle of things that I have to fight through to
get to it, in my head. And also because it is unbearable.325
This description is heightened through the childlike account. The confused processes produce far too many images for the reader, rendering it difficult and painful to read.
There is evident exasperation, questioning, and frustration but above all, the effort to locate this possibly false memory proves far too painful. Veronica is an anagram for
Vera Icon (true icon), a symbolism that suggests her family’s story can be interpreted as an image for larger stories and many families. Veronica links the family and nation
325 Ibid., pp. 143–144. 127
in a powerful way: ‘This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a
family – a whole fucking country – drowning in shame.’326
This projected image of shame is fracturing Ireland’s national identity during
the economic boom while, ironically, Veronica personifies Celtic Tiger Ireland. Wife
to successful information technology industry worker Tom, she lives in one of the
most expensive areas of Dublin; Veronica and Tom seem to mirror Ireland’s move
from post-Independence introversion to a nation whose economy has made it
unsustainably confident and affluent. Yet after her brother’s death, Veronica's
obsessive writing during the night, wandering the house while her family are sleeping,
drinking heavily and driving around the city at night all show the disastrous effect of
these painful stories rising to the surface:
I put the key in the ignition, just for the company of the air-conditioning,
and I turn the radio on low. The urge to drive is very strong, but the
wineglass, when I try it, will not balance in the cup holder … I am
officially mad now, I am a mad housewife – I ease the car away from the
kerb and, drinking all the while, move around the estate in first gear. I
want to fling the empty glass into somebody’s front garden, but of course
I do not do this.327
This episode reveals Veronica’s need for community and a residual level of social
restraint. Despite being self-styled mad, she still sees the problem in throwing a glass into someone’s garden and refrains from embracing complete recklessness. The
326 Ibid., p. 168. 327 Ibid., p. 149. 128
passage continues to recount her drive around Dublin and the bay area, where she is
‘in a state of almost perfect fear’328 for ‘abandoning her children while they sleep,
leaving them unprotected from their dreams’.329 After nights of driving, Veronica
pushes through her subconscious reluctance and drives to Ada’s house, Broadstone,
‘where it happened … [to do] lots of urgent, awful remembering’.330 She finds herself
on the wrong street but at the right numbered house; the correct/incorrect location
reveals how trauma memory can hold crippling power while maintaining a residual
reluctance to face the source of the trauma. These uncontrolled and repetitive
experiences speak her demand for reliable memory, but paradoxically, in her
continual search for what has happened, Veronica seems to be further from the truth.
Throughout her narration, Veronica is almost always alone; her inability to be intimate or even awake with her husband offers the reader insight into her internal pain. Tom is presented to the reader as more object than person, with very little influence on Veronica’s physical and mental state as she repeatedly dismisses his concerns: ‘‟I just don’t know where you are coming from,” he says. A corporate phrase from my corporate boy’.331 Her patronising dismissal, after Tom has been
worried about where she has been, reveals Veronica’s isolation and her understanding
of her husband’s position in the IT world as one that submits to the power of the
corporate body no matter what.
Veronica's continuous amalgamation of fantastic and painful psychic images
is an attempt to impose some level of order on her history and her understanding of
her brother’s death. Her mental state can be read as a typical representation of the
328 Ibid. 329 Ibid., p. 150. 330 Ibid., p. 151. 331 Ibid., p. 152. 129
grief of bereavement, but on closer analysis, it is revealed rather as a literary process of coming to life through recovered memories. At times the writing seems to be a destructive exercise – ‘hacking away at my inner leg’332 – but with eventual clarity comes the narrative’s true purpose. Metaphors of sliding suggest the inevitable fluidity of memory and history, despite Veronica’s consuming need to contain them.
Later in the novel, she offers another version of the definition of history:
History is only biological – that’s what I think. We pick and choose the
facts about ourselves – where we came from and what it means.333
The process of construction that Veronica describes here, a biologically driven selection and combination of facts, creates a simultaneous assertion and undermining of certainty. In her quest to understand her individual and familial past, Veronica explicitly acknowledges that her narrative depends on elements of fiction and speculation. Veronica’s narration becomes a parable for Ireland, a nation with a choice either to face or ignore a disturbing past, but its unreliability suggests a postmodern suspicion of history. Her story exposes the inability of particular individuals and groups to communicate their separate versions of the past, whether in the face of an accepted national imaginary or through silent absences in national memory:
The past is not a happy place. And the pain of it belongs to her more than
it does to me, I think. Who am I to claim it for my own? My poor mother
had twelve children. She could not stop giving birth to the future. Over
332 Ibid., p. 130. 333 Ibid., p. 162. 130
and over. Twelve futures. More. Maybe she liked having all those babies.
Maybe she had more past than most people, to wipe clear.334
The part-erased and palimpsestic idea of the past here could be an image of
Veronica’s own crisis diary as she attempts to uncover the apparent truth of her past.
Veronica, essentially, blames her grandmother and mother for complying with
Catholic mores by having too many children, resulting in their emotional neglect.
Schwall points out that Enright’s female protagonists ‘all want to break open the
mould of silent complicity which a male Catholic ethos imposed on Irish society’.335
As with Grace in The Wig My Father Wore there is a sense of blame towards maternal figures. Furthermore, Veronica reveals a sense of obligation to tell these figures the truth of their neglect:
And I think, I never told Mammy the truth. I never told any of them the
truth.
But what was I supposed to say? A dead man put his hand in a deader
man’s flies thirty years ago. There are other things, surely, to talk about.
There are other things to be revealed.
Like what, though? Like what?336
Here, Veronica begins to question the purpose of understanding the past and
clarifying a traumatic memory. Her questioning reveals a possible redundancy, or
even a further damage, in revealing hidden history: does revelation only continue the
trauma or does it offer a sense of resolution? This passage captures one of Veronica’s
334 Ibid., p. 233. 335 Schwall, ‘Relationships with the ‟Real” in the Work of Anne Enright’, p. 217. 336 Enright, The Gathering, p. 207. Emphasis in text. 131
recurring preoccupations: how are memory and inaccessible history passed through
familial generations? The advent of the Celtic Tiger, with its shallow and distrusted
assertion of a breakthrough in national confidence, prompts the remembrance of what
has happened to silenced voices, and stresses the importance of not failing those who have been continually neglected. Veronica’s response to Liam’s suicide can also be read as a narrative manifestation of a nervous breakdown, yet although she may misremember, be confused and often doubt herself, the reader is never given the impression that she is lying. There is a sense of personal truth, and that her speculations come with a conviction that conveys the depth of her pain.
The conclusion (or rather beginning) of The Gathering presents Ireland as a nation offering potential redemption, at the end of a symbolic journey of self- discovery – a journey to England and back. In Gatwick Airport, Veronica describes her setting by asserting it ‘is not England. This is the flying city. This is extra time’.337
She is in a liminal space, having not yet arrived nor yet left. Standing in a queue,
Veronica looks at those around her and wonders if they are ‘going home or are they
going far away from the people they love. There are not other journeys’. 338 From
here, the pace accelerates sharply for the novel's last two-and-a-half pages. Veronica
suddenly knows what she has to do, she will tell her family – ‘these people I never
chose to love but love all the same’ – the truth ‘even though it is too late for the
truth’.339 The sense of clarity evident in the conclusion is powerful, resulting in the
desire to truly live in her own life combined with her repeated act of falling in love
with her husband; ‘there was love to put me back together again’.340 Her attempt to
337 Ibid., p. 255. 338 Ibid., p. 258. 339 Ibid., p. 259. 340 Ibid., p. 260. 132
find closure in the past is never achieved; it transforms into a falling into her own present life, suggesting a possible true happiness and relief.
The temporal context of The Gathering is fascinating purely for the fact that during the Celtic Tiger, a time when a proud national image of Ireland was internationally projected, the image of the nation’s history was crumbling within.
Enright charts the rise of the Tiger with the fall of the country’s faith in those men who had metaphorically led it for so long. The child sex abuse inquiries, while focusing on criminal acts, also exposed the conspiracy amongst those who should have known, such as Veronica’s mother, who becomes the target of Veronica’s blame for the failings not only in their family but also in Irish culture generally. Here,
Veronica internally verbalises what she has needed to say to her mother for so long:
I am saying that, the year you sent us away, your dead son was interfered
with, when you were not there to comfort or protect him, and that
interference was enough to send him on the path that ends in the box
downstairs. That is what I am saying, if you want to know.341
The repetition of ‘I am saying’, ironically without her saying it, simultaneously reveals and imitates the Catholic Church’s repression of discussions of sex and sexuality. Veronica’s mute version of emotional release is metonymic for the feelings of the nation in the wake of various inquiries: knowing what should be known but fearing to communicate it. Blame, however, is not limited to Veronica’s mother; it extends to Ada, perpetuating the blame along the maternal lineage. In one of her first
341 Ibid., p. 213. 133
explicit examples of abuse against herself, Veronica provides a painful image of neglect:
When I try to remember, or imagine that I remember, looking into Ada’s
face with Lamb Nugent’s come spreading over my hand, I can only
conjure a blank, or her face as a blank. At most, there is a word written on
Ada’s face, and that word is, ‘Nothing’.342
Described as ‘the moment of blame’, this memory, or attempt at memory, shows that the act of child abuse here is not the worst part for Veronica: it is the lack of protest from her grandmother to the abuser we eventually discover to be her landlord. The revelation of this power structure suggests the motivation for complicity and re- situates the mother-critique within a patriarchal context that silences protest and ignores emotional damage. According to Harte, Veronica is able
to read the moral geography of hidden victimization in modern Ireland
and the hegemonic forms of social control that underpinned it, such that
we see her beginning to recognize the prejudices, practices, and
institutions that facilitated at various state-sanctioned levels. Liam, she
now understands, was far from alone in having his identity effaced, his
dignity disregarded.343
In this case, a personal family history is also a national history.
342 Ibid., p. 222. 343 Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007, p. 234. 134
The Forgotten Waltz
Enright's most recent novel, The Forgotten Waltz, is a typical post-boom Irish narrative, documenting through the memories of Gina Moynihan the rise and subsequent fall of an Ireland where ‘everyone over forty wants you to know about their second house’.344 Published in 2011, the novel presents a version of the
protagonist’s life as a confessional testimony, in a similar narrative vein to The
Gathering, recounting a once-idyllic Celtic Tiger lifestyle that turned into a Gothic
imprisonment and abandonment in a childhood home. The intensely present-centred
nature of The Forgotten Waltz positions Enright in close proximity to the nature of a
journalist: her writing effectively captures a particular moment in Ireland, with acute
detail and relevance. Enright’s attention to detail in capturing the contemporary
atmosphere extends and complicates themes which she has touched on elsewhere in
journalistic interviews. A tripartite narrative, the novel reads like a music soundtrack;
its chapters are titled with song names that allude to love and heartbreak, to represent
the rise, fall and rise again of the love affair at the centre of the text. The chapter
structure furthermore reads as a metaphorical chart for the country, tracing the rise of
the Celtic Tiger but set in the snowstorm winter of 2010.
Gina elects to begin her story when, in her sister’s garden in Enniskerry, she
sees Sean Vallely, the man with whom she has an affair. It was 2002, and her sister’s
home was ‘going up by seventy-five euro a day … you could almost feel it, a pushing
in the walls; the toaster would pop out fivers’. 345 Gina and her husband, Conor Sheils,
are the prototype couple of the Celtic Tiger – eastern European languages are her
344 A. Enright, The Forgotten Waltz, London, Jonathan Cape, 2011, p. 81. 345 Ibid., p. 14. 135
specialty and he works in Internet technology. They are seemingly happily married in
a version of Ireland apparently without borders; trips to Budapest and Warsaw are
treated as casually as a bus ride into the city. Her communications job sets up
European companies on the English-language web, and is ‘the kind of place where the lift is big enough to bring your bike upstairs, and the coffee is all fair trade’.346 These
signifiers conjure an image of a more socially aware Ireland that represents caring for
the environment as a fashionable performance rather than a cause, and coffee as a
cosmopolitan choice over the traditional tea. It is an Ireland where, at parties, people
talk about plastic surgery, where women do not ‘eat the chicken skin’ and have ‘the
confused look that Botox gives you, like you might be having an emotion, but you
couldn’t remember which one’.347 Gina's sharp social observations reveal an Ireland obsessed by image, with no articulate concept of self-identity. The instabilities and adversities experienced by the country are revealed in narrative hindsight, as the idea of the Celtic Tiger begins to recede into myth. Gina’s private individual experience becomes a metaphor illuminating the cultural condition, and the image-obsessed party attendees become a metonym for contemporary Irishness.
The novel functions as a picaresque narrative – the protagonist is constantly dishonest but holds a level of appeal and intrigue for the reader. From the vantage point of the post-Celtic Tiger period, it is easier to see the effect of the harmful lifestyle lived by so many. The novel’s preface foreshadows the love affair between
Gina and Sean by focusing on Sean’s daughter Evie, who is ‘special in the old- fashioned sense of the word’.348 The reader becomes aware of never-ending anxiety
346 Ibid., p. 49. 347 Ibid., pp. 84–85. 348 Ibid., p. 1. 136
regarding Evie, a lack of explanation with a ‘sense of things unsaid’.349 Evie, the
reader soon discovers, has epilepsy – a condition not discussed or acknowledged by
the parents. The suppression of this condition is represented as quintessentially Irish,
repressed and rendered even more uncertain through lack of communication. Before
long, Gina and Sean’s affair is exposed and after the economic crash, they move into
Gina’s late mother’s home as a place of temporary sanctuary that transforms into
Gothic imprisonment.
This Ireland is personified as damaged in self-awareness and communicative
function: ‘it was like the place suffered a stroke’.350 The image continues in relevance over the course of the novel as, through the global financial crisis, Ireland regains consciousness in time to see the effect of the Celtic Tiger and its end both on the economy and on the construction of the individual. As the narrative progresses,
Gothic influences become more powerful, in a shift from the euphoric version of
Ireland initially presented by Gina to a darker vision that represents the overwhelming power of things unknown. In this context, Enright's increased use of Gothic tropes constitutes a sign of cultural change, in the manner outlined by Fred Botting:
… a major shift in perceptions of Gothic monstrosity from a horrifying
sight of that which was most unbearable in a culture to a recognition and
embrace of the monster as the image, the inner, often denied aspect, of
who we, in a (post)modern western world, truly are.351
349 Ibid., p. 1. 350 Ibid., p. 15. 351 F. Botting, ‘Preface: The Gothic’, in F. Botting (ed.), The Gothic, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2001, pp. 1–6, p. 3. 137
As I shall show, Enright's Gothic understanding of the Irish contemporary allows the projection of Ireland’s economic rise and fall as a monstrous image, and a catalyst for dark re-evaluations of the self. The Gothic signals the presence of what has previously been denied, allowing ‘dark human fears and desires’ to be included in a catalogue of strange new truths about the development of identity. 352
At first, Gina's affair with Sean is exciting – he acts as a metaphorical drug for her, and she is addicted. Conor, her husband, has been her ‘idea of fun’ in the summer of 2002.353 The allocation of a gradually declining opinion of Conor to this time period reveals the giddy influence of the Celtic Tiger, not only on property sales and consumerism but on love and self-identity: Gina insists at one point that she ‘really did love him, and all the versions of him [she] invented’ when ‘Krug, no less … was nice’. 354 Her coupling of him with expensive champagne shows the consumerist superficiality of the time, and suggests that the same attitude was reserved for love as well. Gina’s love for Conor only flourishes when economic times are strong in
Ireland; the beginning of the fall signals the beginning of the affair with Sean. Her marriage, in retrospect, seems to have been based on a life of surfaces and superficial success.
The beginning of the economic crash also sees Gina’s life become ‘a desolation of boredom, rage and betrayal’.355 So many aspects of Gina’s life become indefinable, and uncontrollable. The future – from her employment to her place of residence – is uncertain. She seems to be balancing on a tightrope, unsure of where her life is heading and why. Interstitial life becomes a metaphor not only for how
352 Ibid., p. 2. 353 Enright, The Forgotten Waltz, p. 11. 354 Ibid., p. 14. 355 Ibid. 138
identity is always transforming, but also how the Celtic Tiger never offered a stable
foundation for understanding the self or the nation. Events during the boom period
can be read as both a beginning and an end, metaphorically connected to the idea of
Gina's affair – the beginning of one relationship and the end of another. Sean and
Gina’s affair does not start until three years after they first meet, with the first betrayal
at a conference in Montreux. On arrival back in Ireland, their relationship is
maintained with flirtation at work, at Friday lunches and during stolen moments at
crowded parties. During the affair, the first cracks in the economy began to show,
according to Gina, in January 2007. Gina’s once prized ability to speak Polish
suddenly becomes redundant, as ‘nobody seemed wild about Poland anymore’.356
With this, the affair becomes more of a relationship:
The sex became less filthy and more fun, the silence filled with talk –
laughter even – and this unsettled me. I might have preferred silence.
Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That
we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen of a hotel room.
Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate.357
Gina and Sean’s existence as a couple is ghostly, existing only in the liminal space of a hotel room, a space that belongs to no one, and they evaporate upon leaving it.
There is no sense of spatial stability within urban Dublin or their relationship; life
takes place only between places. Yet despite (or through) Gina's unsettling anxieties,
356 Ibid., p. 96. 357 Ibid., p. 102. 139
the unreal, not ‘normal’ relationship develops as something that cannot be ignored,
much like the impending economic crash.
Through such imagery, The Forgotten Waltz exploits the Gothic to portray a
haunting and haunted recent era of Irish history, in which the constant troubling of the
quotidian by hidden forces has created a sense of ghostliness in ordinary life. The
Gothic in The Forgotten Waltz functions as a mirror of a postmodern condition –
uncertain in content and form, unreliably subjective in narrative, and damaged by a
traumatic past that does not receive recognition in the present. When Sean is invited
as a guest speaker at a golfing weekend in Sligo, Gina accompanies him with the hope
that, by the end of the weekend, she will ‘strangle’ the affair and ‘throw it in a
shallow grave’.358 The hotel they stay in is a converted asylum, enclosed by two
Gothic chapels at either end of the car park; ‘[i]t was all there: the sackcloth, the raving, the thwarted love’.359 The Gothic imagery is maintained through the hotel,
whose confusing labyrinths give the feeling of ‘going from madness to your dinner
and back again’.360 This gloomy hotel, with its welcomed ghosts, shows the power of
the past upon the present. This trip is the catalyst for Gina; she suddenly realises that
she is in love with Sean, and imagines that if she ‘did not see him soon again, that
[she] would surely die’.361 Her individual transgression, despite her world of guilt and anxiety, shows the power of the Gothic ambience for revealing unconscious desires.
Part One of the novel concludes with Gina’s mother’s stroke, and Part Two
jumps forward almost two years from the mother’s death. Gina’s once idyllic life of
358 Ibid., p. 107. 359 Ibid. 360 Ibid., p. 108. 361 Ibid., p. 112. 140
travel and prosperity has changed to a confinement to her childhood home, where she lives with Sean while refusing to accept the fact:
Not that we are living here. We are just sorting things out. Sean,
especially, is not living here, though it is nearly a year, now, since he
washed up at the door. We are in between things. We are living on stolen
time. We are in love.362
The childhood home becomes more than another liminal space; it becomes, with the added effect of a snowstorm, a recurring version of the Gothic castle that imprisons in unreality. The house also becomes a symbol to represent the fall of the Irish economy; once a nation that bragged about owning second homes, Ireland has become a place where a house is worth nothing – ‘currently worth whistling for’363 – and something that no one ever buys. Gina, caught in an indefinable relationship, working in the alcohol industry – ‘Good times or bad … there will always be Al Co Hol’364 – since her once highly valued qualifications now amount to nothing, is haunted by her past in her dead mother’s house:
Halfway down [the stairs], I step over some version of myself; a girl of
four or six, idling and playing in the place most likely to trip people up.
This is where children sit, I know this now; how they love doorways, in-
362 Ibid., p. 122. 363 Ibid., p. 148. 364 Ibid., p. 149. 141
between places, the busiest spot. This is where they go vague and start to
dream. 365
Gina is, like the childhood version of herself, in between places, serving as an
individual metaphor for the nation. The psychic vagueness represented here and the liminal spaces occupied reveal the lack of identity and confused state of the nation in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Gina insists that she ‘felt ancient…felt like a child’.366 This juxtaposition in age projects a binary of intelligence and immaturity, exhaustion and excitement: of being of no particular age or feeling.
In Part Three, considerably shorter than the previous two parts, the sudden conclusion of the novel reflects the ending of James Joyce’s short story, ‘The Dead’.
Gina’s subjection to her own internal confusion continues as the nation is paralysed under a blanketing snowfall:
The schools are closed. I don’t see any cars on the road, and the
television, when I turn it on, has pictures of frozen confusion, quiet chaos.
Nothing is moving, expect makeshift toboggans and snowballs.367
This period of imprisonment, snow and abandonment while Sean is away in Budapest
leads Gina on a painful path – represented literally and figuratively – to self-
awareness and understanding. In ‘The Dead’ Gabriel envisions the snow as ‘general all over Ireland … falling on every part of the dark central plain’,368 and yet he
365 Ibid., p. 127. 366 Ibid., p. 129. 367 Ibid., p. 204. 368 Joyce, ‘The Dead’, Dubliners, p. 160. 142
acknowledges that the snow is fleeting, and is unusual in Ireland and thus, cannot last
forever. Gina’s long walk into Dublin to collect Evie – ‘I take one treacherous step
after the next, and for the first while, I can not shake the rant’369 – becomes a path to
self-understanding in which she realises that ‘the snow will melt, the houses will sell
– one house, or the other – and Evie will grow and be otherwise lost to me’.370 Gina
senses that Ireland will escape the snow and the economic misery, but also that her
attempt to win the love of her partner’s daughter is without hope of success.
In similar style to Enright’s previous novels, the conclusion of The Forgotten
Waltz increases in pace and action but suggests a continuation of the story beyond the
narrative itself. Gina’s story ends in a continuation of guilt: an accusatory final
sentence – ‘It was you’ 371 – comes from Evie, blaming her for the break-up of Sean’s
previous marriage. Unlike Veronica and Grace, Gina has no final release, no moment
of clarity or newfound innocence, rather a new realisation, perhaps an acceptance, of
the consequences of her actions.
Enright has discussed the process of writing in an interview:
Turning reality into words is already an act of translation, and this first
remove makes writers very fierce about ideas of ‘truth’, or very playful
with them. As to what triggers the shift, into language or into fiction, we
369 Enright, The Forgotten Waltz, p. 219. 370 Ibid., p. 230. 371 Ibid., p. 230. 143
each have a set of creative cogs and ratchets and experience makes it
easier to recognise the first creaks of the machine.372
For Enright, this act of translation, of turning a sense of reality into fiction, is
intimately tied up with understandings of or confusions about the past, be it history or memory. Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three areas of concern: its theoretical awareness of history and fiction as human constructs is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of history.373 According to
Caruth,
For history to be a history of a trauma means that it is referential precisely
to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it
somewhat differently that history can be grasped only in the very
inaccessibility of its occurrence.374
It is this idea of history’s inaccessibility that Enright’s fiction thrives upon and it
repeatedly leads her to assess the difficult and elusive effects that the past has on
contemporary situations. For her, an absolute understanding of these effects is not
necessary or possible, just an active attempt to approach the subject. Her main
approach is through fictions of the family, where uncertain memories linger and haunt
the life of the present.
372 A. Enright, ‘Author, Author: Creative Blockage’ The Guardian, 3 January 2009,
Chapter Three
Finding a New Ireland: Directions in Roddy Doyle’s Fiction
You should bring your passport to bed with you because you’re going to wake up in a different place.375 – Roddy Doyle
Over the last two decades, Roddy Doyle’s fiction has straddled the Celtic Tiger period, offering a vision of Ireland that emphasises inequitable social change. In
Doyle’s work, Ireland is represented in constant transformation; he explores the fluidity of Irish identity at a micro-urban level in contrast to the more overt and broad- scale social commentary that emerges in the fiction of Enright and Tóibín. Doyle engages many of the social issues foregrounded and consciously explored by Enright and Tóibín, but his view of the nation before, during and after the Celtic Tiger emerges in fictions that encompass the local sphere and the local voice.
Doyle is renowned for not only acknowledging but also incorporating in his fiction the inequitable social change that occurred as a result of the Celtic Tiger. In
Doyle’s work, contemporary Irish experience can be read in a pragmatic way, largely based on an attitude to the past that is neither obsessed with progress nor caught up with tradition. His debunking of the romantic view of the Celtic Tiger, for instance in the Paula Spencer novels, relies upon contemporary representations that foreshadow or expose the negative social consequences of the boom. Doyle engages with the changing social milieu of his characters through fast-paced narratives in local urban settings revealing the pressures under which they live. We are given a consciousness
375 R. Doyle, cited in G. Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction, London, Pluto Press, 1997, p. 102. 145
of Ireland through their raw experience rather than through an overt ideological
reading. Doyle’s people unknowingly exhibit the effects of social changes which they
sense to be occurring but do not themselves understand, even while the boom entraps
them within more rigid class distinctions. Typically, Doyle makes us encounter them
not as isolated individuals, but as heavily implicated in family structures.
This chapter will explore how Doyle uses the family as a vehicle for
examining and representing contemporary and historical change in Ireland, through
the correlations he makes between the fortunes of families and the state of the nation,
using localised representations to suggest the bigger picture of Ireland. The
internalised version of national identity in his characters showcases its racism and
self-limiting attitudes within a class-bound society, but this negative and stereotypical portrayal is transformed into a potentially positive image. The development of
Doyle’s fiction since the end of the Celtic Tiger can be read as charting the shift of national attitudes and as a reconfiguration of what it means to be Irish. Through selected works – The Barrytown Trilogy, and the Paula Spencer Series – I will
explore how the concept of family, both contemporary and historical, is vital to
Doyle’s fiction in representing social change in Ireland.
Born in 1958 in the Dublin suburb of Kilbarrack, Doyle was a teacher for
fourteen years before achieving literary success and turning to writing fulltime. His
first novel was a comic attempt about the ‘IRA hunger strikes [that] were causing an
upsurge of sympathy for the movement and its martyrs’ called Your Granny’s a
Hunger Striker.376 It was never published. His first three novels – The Commitments
(1987) (originally self-published), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) – form
The Barrytown Trilogy which Doyle once insisted was not a trilogy: ‘I’d just written
376 Tóibín, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families, p. 170. 146
three books as far as I was concerned. People starting talking about ‟The Barrytown
Trilogy” and I gave up objecting’.377 His fourth novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
(1993), won the Man Booker Prize, quickly became the best seller of all Booker winners to that date, and was translated into nineteen languages. Then came the Paula
Spencer Series, with The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) followed a decade later by Paula Spencer (2006). In 1999, Doyle abandoned the contemporary context to focus on Ireland’s historical quest toward independence with The Last Roundup trilogy: A Star Called Henry (1999), Oh, Play That Thing! (2004) and The Dead
Republic (2010). Doyle has also recently published two collections of short stories:
The Deportees and Other Stories (2007) and Bullfighting (2011). The changing trajectory of Doyle’s fictional mode over his career is clear; he begins with a third- person narrator, emphasising vernacular realism, then moves to the viewpoint of a self-conscious and unreliable first-person narrator-protagonist. The early fiction offers a seemingly light and humorous approach to serious issues, but with the rise of the
Celtic Tiger comes a darkening in Doyle’s fiction when he turns to historical parody about Ireland’s early twentieth-century struggle for independence. In all modes,
Doyle’s work is sharp, at times impertinent, and above all, attentive to the Irish zeitgeist. This study of Doyle’s work will focus on The Barrytown Trilogy and the
Paula Spencer series because of their setting in the contemporary. Paddy Clarke Ha
Ha Ha does indeed respond to contemporary issues but is set in 1960s Ireland. The novel is considered ‘foundational for discussions of the new Irish fiction’s engagement with the family structure in a period of historical and ideological realism’. 378 While I agree with Patten’s assertion about the importance of Paddy
377 R. Doyle, cited in E. Firetog, ‘Interview with Roddy Doyle’, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, no. 50, 2010, pp. 64–80, p. 77. 378 Patten, Eve. Personal Correspondence. p. 4. 147
Clarke, my attention to The Barrytown Trilogy and the Paula Spencer series
maintains the focus of this chapter on how intensely localised and contemporary
settings in Doyle’s work are used to suggest a bigger picture of Celtic Tiger Ireland.
As it has developed, Doyle’s fiction has been structured to represent real
changes in Ireland that occurred before, during and after the economic boom of the
90s. Much of his fiction is set in the fictional Barrytown but is based on Kilbarrack.
Growing up and remaining there, Doyle has utilised a suburb that was once on the
periphery to explore the effect of modernisation and urbanisation:
When I was a kid it [Kilbarrack] was bang at the edge of the city. Quite
literally, on my side of the road you were in Dublin 5 postal district, and
then you crossed the road and you were in County Dublin – you’d left the
city. The city limits were right down the middle of the street. There was a
farm across the road from us. … As I grew up, the city cooperations [sic]
bought out the farms, and the private developers bought out the other
farms, and it gradually grew more inner city.379
In another interview, Doyle expands on this idea and says ‘[m]odernity was coming
up the road as the cement was drying’.380 He sees Dublin as a continually
transforming space in time, a site for representing contemporary developments. Doyle
celebrates the suburban; the extensive use of Barrytown as a setting becomes vital in
his work as a continuing register of change. The main character in The Commitments,
379 R. Doyle, cited in C. White, Reading Roddy Doyle, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2001, pp. 176–177. 380 R. Doyle, cited in C. Taylor, The Salon Interview: Roddy Doyle, 28 October 1999,
Jimmy Rabbitte Jr., is also used repeatedly in later texts such as The Deportees, and
as recently as Bullfighting published in 2011. The life of Jimmy, and the culture
around him, work as an effective chart of change and an individual character’s
response to it. In addition, Doyle’s character Paula Spencer features in two novels –
The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, published a decade apart, in
1996 and 2006 respectively – and so acts as a guide to understand the drastic changes
in Dublin’s experiential cityscape, especially in terms of class and the effects of
immigration. According to Doyle, at the time of the second Paula Spencer novel ‘[t]he
Celtic Tiger cliché wasn’t even quite a cliché’.381 Doyle was updating Dublin, writing
to the moment; Paula Spencer allows an exploration of the confusions and curiosities
of the contemporary, shaping the narrative without possessing the vantage point of
retrospect. He regarded this as an advantage for writers, an opportunity
to invent new stories, new art, new voices, new music. Irish-born artists
and newly arrived, working together and alone. New slang, and new
accents …. New love stories, family sagas, new jealousies, rivalries, new
beginnings and endings. We live in exciting times, if we want them. 382
In this spirit, he reconfigured Irish literature with lively, accessible and realistic
representations of urban Dublin and its inhabitants. It has been argued that Doyle
‘provides for us simple, immediate themes couched in simple, immediate forms’, 383
but in post-Celtic Tiger retrospect, it is unlikely that this particular analysis still holds.
381 Doyle, cited in Firetog, ‘Interview with Roddy Doyle’, p. 78. 382 Doyle, ‘Green Yodel No. 1’, in Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, p. 69. 383 White, Reading Roddy Doyle, p. 3. 149
Doyle utilises the vernacular, and avoids specialised or complex vocabulary, but his work is far from the representation of simple themes in simple forms, because it takes readers into areas where the traditional ways in which fiction has structured and defined Irish experience do not operate.
Doyle’s fiction has consciously focused on what is happening in experience rather than on what is expected in literary representation of Ireland, which he has argued is out of touch:
… I wanted to get away from the clichéd view of Ireland. An England
critic of The Snapper said, ‘Where was the priest? This is a pregnant girl’.
And I wanted to say, ‘Fuck you pal – what do you know? You live in
London’. Priests in working-class parts of Dublin are peripheral figures
[…]. It’s the new picture of Ireland. So there’s no religion, partly because
of my imaginative lack, and also because that’s the reality.384
Doyle’s work from the 1990s has been credited with the creation of ‘a complex social milieu animated by an aggressive economy and the awareness of a greater Ireland beyond the geographical confines of the island’.385 The characterisations in Doyle’s first trilogy, however, have been critiqued for their lack of political awareness or acknowledgement of religious influence. For his characters, what is happening in their own suburb and in their own family is complex enough, and accordingly there is no explicit mention of economic recession, dealings with the European Union, conflict with Northern Ireland or the decline of the Catholic Church. His fiction seems to
384 Doyle, cited in White, Reading Roddy Doyle, p. 15–16. 385 G. Norquay & G. Smyth, ‘Waking up in a Different Place: Contemporary Irish and Scottish Fiction’, Irish Review, no. 28, Winter 2001, pp. 28–45, p. 38. 150
reject these recognisable signifers of the Ireland of this time. Instead, the reader is offered ‘rock ’n’ roll, much wit and shouting, and sex and swearing and soccer’.386
Nevertheless, Doyle insists his novels are political, but adds that he does not force any issues: ‘… I write about Irish, urban characters and they drag the politics behind them, not the other way around’. 387 Paradoxically, the discursive absence of current affairs in each text highlights their political aspects. By dragging the politics behind them, the characters represent the residual or sometimes forceful effect of what they apparently do not care about – class divisions in The Commitments, attitudes to contraception in The Snapper and long-term unemployment in The Van. Each issue, presented as lived experience, is given an urgency that lies in ‘the psychological realism [that] Doyle brings to his characters’ responses to their commonplace dramas, the sympathetic warmth with which he paints their unexceptional lives’. 388 Crown’s references to the commonplace and unexceptional seem unjustified and patronising; such readings perpetuate the assumption that the everyday must be complicated if it is to represent the family and the nation. Another critic has described Barrytown as
‘devoid of history or memory, an unremarkable place which has the sameness of other nameless working-class estates anywhere else in the world’.389 It can be argued that the anonymity and unremarkability of place in the Barrytown Trilogy provides Doyle with a fresh foundation to explore societal, familial and cultural changes. Tóibín
386Tóibín, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, p. 171. 387 R. Doyle interviewed by K. Sbrockey, ‘Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle’, Literary Review, vol. 42, no. 4, 1999, pp. 537–552, p. 537. 388 S. Crown, ‘Roddy Doyle: A life in writing’, The Guardian, 16 April 2011,
writes that Doyle’s setting has a paradoxical effect; it seems to offer anonymity but
strongly resonates with Dublin:
It could have been Liverpool or Birmingham or Manchester, except for
something absolutely central to it, which was the spirit of the city, which
everyone who knew Dublin recognized. Making this image of the city
popular, almost official, as Doyle did in these years, was a seriously
political project in a country whose self-image was rural and Catholic and
conservative and nationalist.390
Constructing an ‘almost official’ image of Dublin seems fanciful, but in relation to
Doyle, it is relevant. It must be clarified, however, that the early narratives are solely set in Barrytown, a suburb three miles from central Dublin, with seemingly little
regard for what exists beyond its borders. The characters all live, work and socialise
in the suburb, which is not clearly described in a physical sense; a sense of the setting
is gained through the use of the vernacular; ideological implications stem from the use
of language itself as the setting. With each novel Doyle writes, the influence of
Dublin increases. At first, the capital city is presented in binary opposition to
Barrytown but, eventually, Barrytown is presented as a continuation of Dublin.
Stereotypical icons have been stripped from the setting and dialogue and replaced
with signifiers identifiable by those familiar with Dublin. Doyle effectively writes the
city against the grain, using Dublin’s outer suburbs to offer insight into the
transformation and change of Ireland in the last two decades. This submerged and
seemingly unconscious exploration of changes and their effects, I argue, has
390 Tóibín, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, pp. 171–172. 152
considerable power to expose and understand change. Doyle justifies his approach to the characters’ lives by saying that he is
… looking at a part of Ireland, a part of Dublin, at an odd angle. I’m
showing the part that’s not in the Bord Failte catalogue.391
Instead, Doyle claims, his work offers both a positive and negative reality, exploring multifarious experiences of the quotidian and the suburban individual.
Limiting the setting to the suburban is not anything groundbreaking in Irish literature. Doyle explores the modern Irish rural/urban split by basically ignoring the rural. His emphasis on the urban can be read as a sign of the contemporary, but can also be read as an anti-nationalist move:
It has long been fashionable in Irish nationalist discourse to denounce the
city as an essentially English phenomenon, a place of fuming chimneys,
dirty factories…. 392
The nationalist privileging of the rural goes back to Éamon de Valera’s ideal vision of
Ireland and beyond, to the Celtic Twilight and Gaelic League. In Roy Foster’s words, the nation was understood as a set
of small agricultural units, each self-sufficiently supporting a frugal
family; industrious, Gaelicist, and anti-materialist. His [de Valera’s]
391 White, Reading Roddy Doyle, p. 11. 392 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and The World, p. 291. 153
ideal, like the popular literary versions, was built on the basis of a
fundamentally dignified and ancient peasant way of life.393
The de Valeran dichotomy of Irish rural and urban might be thought to have been
destroyed well before the Celtic Tiger but such is not the case. In 2001, a conference
entitled Writing the City was held in Dublin to explore how representations of the
Irish capital have developed over the past 100 years. In a flyer, it outlined that
Ireland has long had a problematic relationship with urban life. The city,
passed over routinely by anthologists, painters and poets in their search
for the ‘real Ireland’, has often been seen as an alien intrusion. It has,
however, also been the inspiration for some of the last century’s most
important artistic achievements: the source of another, alternative
construction of identity. 394
Doyle’s fiction is a product of this urban inspiration, and the marked absence of the
rural in his work tacitly maintains the traditional division, in what can be understood
as an ideological stance taken against the nationalist movement. Keeping in mind that
Ireland ‘has gone through in the past century and a half the sort and scale of changes
which took four or five hundred years in other parts of Europe’, it is impossible to
discuss the representation of the city in Irish literature without examining the fiction
of James Joyce.395 Joyce’s Dubliners presents an Ireland
393 R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, London, Penguin, 1989, p. 358. 394 Ibid., p. 298. 395 Ibid., p. 280. 154
in the grip of ecclesiastical paralysis … the moral timidity of the nation
undercut the drive for home rule and independence, and the parochialism
of the country kept it locked in a peasant mentality.396
In Ulysses Joyce presents Dublin as both an ancient and modern world, a paradox that
spreads into Doyle’s urban representation. Doyle presents an Ireland in transition –
paralysed by unemployment yet on the brink of a credit-rich life. In his work, the moral timidity of the nation stems from an increasingly capitalised and globally influenced climate; the peasant mentality has been replaced by urban pretension.
Doyle’s characters have not woken from history, as if realising the hope of Stephen
Dedalus, but have chosen to ignore the influence of history on their contemporary circumstances.
The class and gender inequalities in Doyle’s Barrytown can be traced back to the nation’s founding moments. Doyle reconfigures the imagined community of
Ireland by transposing its traditionally rural problems to the suburbs of Dublin, while rejecting icons of Irish tradition and early modernity such as the land, nationality and
Catholicism. The peasant mentality seen in Joyce now belongs to the working-class fringe-dwellers of Barrytown, who occupy a poor and disempowered position.
Barrytown becomes a local world whole and entire unto itself, offering either to redefine or to vandalise Ireland’s image. Doyle, therefore, is atavistic in continuing the rural/urban dichotomy in the Irish literary tradition, although his characters’ construction is individualistic, not based on a firm sense of nationality.
396 R. Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, p. 105. 155
The Barrytown Trilogy centres on the Rabbitte family, living in a fictional
working-class Dublin suburb considered to be a representation of Doyle’s native
Kilbarrack. Despite Doyle’s assertion that the three novels are not a trilogy, for the
purpose of this analysis, I will examine the three as a pre-Celtic Tiger triptych. Each
novel focuses on a different family member; The Commitments follows Jimmy Jr.’s
creation of a Dublin soul band, The Snapper features Jimmy Jr.’s sister Sharon and
her unplanned pregnancy, and The Van explores unemployment through the plight of
Jimmy Sr.
In The Barrytown Trilogy, Doyle established his trademark style by attempting to keep the narratives ‘narrator free’, to ‘let the characters do their own roaring’.397 He has said that
one of the ways to do this is to use the language that the characters
actually speak, to use the vernacular, and not ignoring the grammar, the
formality of it, to bend it, to twist it, so you get a sense that you are
hearing it, not reading it. That you are listening to the characters. You get
in really close to the characters.398
This approach presents a paradox; Doyle proposes that his style of apparently immediate dialogue offers a more intimate text, but he does this by abandoning novelistic conventions of literary realism, such as direct setting and character descriptions. Without these elements, the reader is given limited orientation in the fictional world. Despite Doyle’s assertion that the novel is narrator-free, there is in
397 Doyle, cited in Taylor, The Salon Interview: Roddy Doyle. 398 Doyle, cited in White, Reading Roddy Doyle, pp. 181–182. 156
fact a form of setting and character through dialogue. When discussing Dostoevsky’s
novels, M.M. Bakhtin wrote that the main characterising is
a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a
genuine polyphony of fully valid voices …. What unfolds in his novels is
not a multitude of characters and dates in a single objective world,
illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of
consciousness with equal rights and each with his own world, combine
but are not merged in the unity of the event [he depicts].399
Thus, the events seem to be constructed beyond the authoritative control of the author.
Reliance on the voices of the characters for all narrative purposes ensures both
increased pace and sporadic confusion, since it can be unclear which characters are
speaking and what they are saying, because the prose can deviate from standard
English. The mode of the vernacular, however, provides a level of authentication by
conforming to the local scene in terms of accent, idiom and subject choices, and in
that way convinces the reader of a version of reality. Doyle is able to refrain from
regular internal character reflection by eliminating a self-conscious narrator or an
authorial narrator addressing the reader.
Doyle employs a laconic Dublin-Northside realism, using a fictionalised representation of his local area to showcase changes in the country. Using Bakhtin’s theory as a theoretical foundation to approach Doyle’s work, the importance of dialect in regards to the representation of class is illuminated:
399 M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, C. Emerson (ed. & trans.), Minneapolis, University of Michigan Press, 1984, p. 6. 157
… the novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects
and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of [a] social diversity of
speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under
such conditions. 400
Diversity, here, is used in the sense of representing a minority voice rather than a representation that incorporates and welcomes a variety of classes and speech types.
The meaning in dialogue that ‘insures the primacy of context over any text’ is the condition of ‘heteroglossia’, as defined by Bakhtin.401 Language as dialogue, in this theory, thus becomes a register of typification, the style pertaining to the Dublin working class. The Rabbitte family uses a substantial amount of profane language; the word ‘fuck’ is used in The Commitments 275 times, to be increased to 300 instances in The Snapper and then over 500 times in The Van.402 This uncensored and repetitive dialogue demonstrates, to varying degrees, features of community and class. Context is enforced by dialogue; experience is, thus, limited by the interplay of language. The dialogue between characters limits narrative exposition while the antagonistic interplay of suburb-specific Dublin dialect and Standard English reveals social diversity and stratifies the social and cultural world.
There is a debate as to whether Doyle’s fiction can be considered literary. His early works in particular read more like screenplays than novels. Doyle said his novels
400 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, M. Holquist (ed.), C. Emerson & M. Holquist (trans.), Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 263. 401 Ibid., p. 428. 402 K.A. Marsh, ‘Roddy Doyle’s ‟Bad Language” and the Limits of Community’, Critique, vol. 45, no. 2, Winter 2004, pp. 147–159, p. 148. 158
were on the list for books to be taught in schools but they’re off the list
now because the Minister of Education decided they weren’t literary. It’s
utter drivel … the idea that they are less literary because they use the
vernacular – I don’t agree. The decision to use the vernacular is a literary
decision. 403
Doyle’s use of the vernacular proves difficult reading even for those who are not only
Irish, but from Dublin. The narratives seem to demand localised knowledge for
ultimate effect – ‘gas’ is used as an adjective and ‘book’ is spelt ‘buke’ imitating the
north-side Dublin accent – but the estranging effect is also an invitation into the
worlds of the characters; readers are given the chance to listen to the dialogue, and to
understand place through their interpretation. Doyle’s stylised representations of
dialogue differ significantly from those of Enright and Tóibín, who do not manipulate
language to suggest a particular dialect or accent. Furthermore, Doyle differs significantly from Enright and Tóibín by avoiding any characters from the older generation. In the life-stories of change that he creates, both on a societal and familial
level, there are no older figures to suggest another experience in history that might
recall traditional family values reminiscent of the Éamon de Valera era. The absence of this older voice works to privilege change in the contemporary context even further; there are no past images to contrast, only the future to work towards out of the feeling of stagnancy or entrapment within the present economic and social situation.
The characters in The Barrytown Trilogy share a short communal memory, with no discussion of grandparents or of the past. They face the future without memory or
403 Doyle, cited in White, Reading Roddy Doyle, p. 5. 159
conscious history of past changes and conflicts. In one way that situation might be
understood as a liberation from a history now irrelevant to these people, but in another
way as a serious lack in their ability to understand the processes of historical changes
enveloping them.
The Commitments
The first novel of the trilogy, The Commitments, introduces the reader to the
Rabbitte family, although the novel is not predominantly about that family. There are
sporadic scenes involving members of the Rabbittes, but the novel’s main focus is on
son Jimmy Jr. managing a working-class Dublin Soul band, The Commitments, in
Barrytown. Reading more like a script than a novel, the dialogue-heavy prose is void
of figurative language and description of setting and character. Identity – both of the
nation and of the characters – manifests itself through dialogue, with limited explicit
references: issues of the nation and history are replaced with issues of class and
suburban Dublin, with occasional intertextual references to international music
suggesting the power of a globalised culture.
In 1989, the year The Commitments was published, it was noted by Economics
Professor Joe Lee that the ‘Irish economic performance has been the least impressive
in western Europe … in the twentieth century’.404 With an unemployment rate of 17.3
per cent two years prior, Ireland had the worst unemployment figures in Europe with
the exception of Spain. 405 Most characters in The Commitments are unemployed or
underemployed: ‘Seven of the ten Commitments worked. Four of them made it into
404 J. Lee, cited in Kirby, The Celtic Tiger in Distress: Growth with Inequality in Ireland, p. 11. 405 Ibid., p. 22. 160
work the next morning’. 406 The notion that the younger characters have few future prospects resonates throughout the novel, and their commitment to a Dublin Soul band shows an usual level of determination. The novel marks a significant generation gap, marking the shift from an irrelevant tradition to a belated version of modernity with influences of international, mainly American, popular culture. The novel is responding to what Doyle sees as the zeitgeist, rather than a romantic imagining of contemporary culture. The main characteristic of the Barrytown youth is their familiarity with and desire for the non-Irish, disrupting established chronotopic identities.
The imagining of Dublin Soul is important for this sub-group in finding identity through language and self-expression. With the effects of globalisation beginning to manifest, it is important to note the paradoxical understandings of conflicting identity, both of the self and of the nation:
During the last half of the twentieth century the forces that brought Irish
people together – religion, family and community – began to be weakened
by a consumer culture that emphasised liberal-individualism. 407
In the context of a younger generation that will not commit themselves to historical norms of church or state, this novel is preoccupied with music as a mode to forge a new identity not only for these individuals, but for Ireland. It begins in a pub with two disenchanted musicians, Outspan and Derek. On the failure of their current band, they turn to Jimmy Jr. for guidance and end up with a manager. This early exchange shows
406 R. Doyle, The Commitments, in The Barrytown Trilogy: The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van, London, Secker & Warburg, 1993, pp. 1–140, p. 51. 407 Inglis, Global Ireland: Same Difference, p. 43. 161
a confidence in their personal worth and ability which refuses to succumb to a destiny of unemployment:
– Yis want to be different, isn’t tha’ it? Yis want to do somethin’ with
yourselves, isn’t tha’ it?
– Sort of, said Outspan.
– Yis don’t want to end up like (he nodded his head back) – these tossers
here. Amn’t I righ’?408
Doyle’s differentiation between these characters and those who are seemingly without a future reveals how both the struggles of working-class youth and the audacious hope of the young are important in imagining a possible new Ireland. When trying to convince Outspan and Derek about the benefits of Soul Music, Jimmy Jr. references their class and identity, alongside a self-conscious dismissal of politics:
– Yeah, politics. – Not songs abou’ Fianna fuckin’ Fail or annythin’ like
tha’. Real politics. (They weren’t with him.)
– Where are yis from? (He answered the question himself.)
– Dublin. (He asked another one.) – Wha’ part o’ Dublin? Barrytown.
Wha’ class are yis? Workin’ class. Are yis proud of it? Yeah, yis are.
(Then a practical question.) – Who buys most of the records? The workin’
class. Are yis with me? (Not really.) – Your music should be abou’ where
you’re from an’ the sort o’ people yeh come from. – Say it once, say it
loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud.
408 Doyle, The Commitments, p. 11. 162
They looked at him.
– James Brown. Did yis know – never mind. He sang tha’. – And he made a
fuckin’ bomb.
They were stunned by what came next.
– The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.
They nearly gasped: it was so true.
– An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin’
everything’. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin. – Say it
loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud.409
This passage has a number of complexities. Firstly, the reference to establishing a
version of identity is achieved through the thematic choice of 60s Soul Music. This
foreshadows a version of historical revisionism to come later in the novel, and later in
Doyle’s oeuvre; the revisionism is based purely upon local identity, rather than a
collective national imagining. The rhetoric used by Jimmy Jr. has been described as ‘a
rapid metonymic slide associating Irishness, Dublinness and Blackness without
substantiating these notions’. 410 The comment has obvious weight, but it can also be
argued that for Jimmy to state that the Irish are the ‘niggers of Europe’ is offered
more as an abandonment of traditional national identity than as a genuinely plausible
racial identification. Dermot McCarthy suggests that ‘Jimmy pushes identification
with African-Americans because he sees the working-class urban Irish to be
systemically economically disadvantaged in the same way that African-Americans are
409 Ibid., p. 13. 410 L. Pirouz, ‘‟I’m Black an’ I’m Proud”: Re-Inventing Irishness in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments’, College Literature, vol. 25, no.2, 1998, pp. 45–57, p. 48. 163
racially’.411 Thus, the comparison is used by him instrumentally to form a combative
local identity which appropriates ‘nigger’ in terms of a popular consumer choice,
understood in that limited way as fitting for the Dublin working class. In style, the
move is certainly unsubtle: the gasp before the realisation is heavily didactic and
melodramatic, claiming an effect it hardly creates. In some other ways, the passage
may be more successful. The parenthetical comments interrupting Jimmy Jr.’s speech
reveal Outspan’s and Derek’s ignorance of what the genre of Soul Music might
potentially mean for them. The interruptions also provide some relief by breaking the
dialogue and the overuse of dialect. The replacement of quotation marks with dashes
lessens the distinction between narrative and dialogue, allowing a fast and fluent
narrative pace.
A moment of irony is provided during rehearsals of the newly established
band:
– An’ yis shouldn’t be usin’ your ordin’y accents either. It’s Walking in
the Rain, not Walkin’ In De Rayen. 412
The unexpected inclusion of correct spelling emphasises, by juxtaposition, both the
power and social limitations of the dialect. Whilst Jimmy Jr. is attempting to separate
the band’s identity from any sense of Irishness – ‘Fianna fuckin’ Fail doesn’t have
soul. The Workers’ Party ain’t got soul. The Irish people – no’413 – he reinvents a version of Irishness through the very medium he uses to escape it. For example:
411 D. McCarthy, Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade, Dublin, The Liffey Press, 2003, p. 33. 412 Doyle, The Commitments, p. 34. 413 Ibid., p. 38. 164
– I’LL SEARCH FOR YOU DOWN ON THE DOCKS
I’LL WAIT UNDER CLERY’S CLOCK
They cheered.
Deco stopped.
– Wha’ was tha’ abou’? Jimmy asked.
– A bit o’ local flavour, said Deco.
– Tha’ was deadly, said Derek.
–Yeh said we were goin’ to make the words more Dubliny, said Deco.414
Clery’s Clock is a Dublin icon situated across from the General Post Office, the central site of the 1916 Easter Uprising. The purposeful addition of symbols of Irish identity shows the importance of a parochial injection – whether or not Deco realises this importance – ensuring that ‘a certain type of audience was coming to see them’.415 Despite attempting to break with any sense of Irish identity, The
Commitments’ music works to redefine it by embracing Dublin idioms. On the brink
of success, after a record deal offer from Eejit Records, The Commitments break up.
The novel has a circular structure, concluding with a conversation between Jimmy Jr.,
Derek and Outspan. In this conversation, Jimmy is proposing not only a new band but
also another style of music:
No fuckin’ politics this time either. – But, yeh know, Joey said when he
left tha’ he didn’t think soul was righ’ for Ireland. This stuff is though.
414 Ibid., p. 50. 415 Ibid., p. 106. 165
You’ve got to remember tha’ half of the country is fuckin’ farmers. This
is the type o’ stuff they all listen to. …
Dublin country, said Jimmy. – That’s fuckin’ perfect. The Brassers. –
We’re a Dublin country group. 416
The simple replacement of the once prized Soul Music with country music suggests
that the seemingly commercially driven change is actually a response to how much
the characters are now influenced by an idea of national identity. They now
acknowledge the influence of the rural, constructing an oxymoronic Urban Country
group. The inclusion of the contemporary urban alongside the historically prevalent
rural foreshadows change that celebrates the new Ireland that is emerging from the
shadow of the past. Yet Doyle’s ending, like his novel-writing mode, leaves wide
open how that gesture towards a new Ireland might be realised in cultural terms, since
one reason why The Commitments represents change in Ireland so effectively is
precisely because it shuns elements of the traditional Irish novel in English. The book
disappointed the literary establishment, with the original Irish Times review
complaining that it ‘has no metaphors, no natural world, no history’.417 The critique
presented by the Irish Times highlights a possible latent wish to develop and privilege a new kind of nationalism; one that is more contemporary and relevant to those reading the novels. According to O’Toole, Doyle’s approach and voice divereged from what had been seen:
416 Ibid., p. 139. 417 N. O’Faolain, ‘Real life in Barrytown’, Irish Times, 7 November 1992, p. 3. 166
[The] way of telling a story is different: there is no single hero on whom
the action focuses, there are no passages of descriptive writing, and there
is no assumption that everything happens in a simple, understandable
place called Ireland.418
The Snapper
The style of Doyle’s debut as novelist continues in The Snapper, which opens with an immediate introduction of the story catalyst, Sharon’s pregnancy:
– You’re wha’? said Jimmy Rabbitte Sr.
He said it loudly.
– You heard me, said Sharon.
…
Sharon was pregnant and she’d just told her father that she thought she
was. She told her mother earlier, before the dinner.
– Oh – my Jaysis, said Jimmy Sr.419
This reaction immediately establishes the focus of the novel. At a glance, The
Snapper can be read as a simple account of Sharon’s unplanned pregnancy, with humorous scenes, and ultimately the positive effect of a supportive familial life. On closer analysis, the story is more sinister: a drunk Sharon is raped by an acquaintance, her neighbour, George Burgess. Her private experience is turned into public ridicule through endless neighbourhood judgments and insults. The public and private spheres
418 F. O’Toole, ‘Brave New World’, Sunday Tribune, 12 April 1987, p. 21. 419 R. Doyle, The Snapper, in The Barrytown Trilogy, London, Secker & Warburg, 1992, pp. 141–340, p. 145. 167
meld in the development of the narrative; what seems a solid family structure is threatened by the opinions of others.
The Snapper was written in 1986 in the wake of the Health Family
Amendment Act in 1985. More commonly known as the Contraception Bill, the act legalised contraception in Ireland without a medical prescription. Until then, only those with the approval of a doctor could access contraception, with the additional cultural imposition that those obtaining contraception had to be married. The issue of abortion was significant in Ireland, with a recorded 3,026 Irish women travelling to the United Kingdom for abortions in 1984.420 Furthermore, eight percent of all births registered in the last three months of 1984 were to unmarried women.421 Doyle’s novel responds to the state of Ireland on the cusp of changing attitudes to unmarried mothers and contraception. In The Snapper, Veronica, Sharon’s mother, is initially more concerned with the reactions of others rather than the welfare of her daughter and soon-to-be grandchild;
As far as Veronica was concerned this was the worst thing that had ever
happened the family. But she couldn’t explain why, not really…
Then she thought of something.
– The neighbours, she said.
– Wha’ about them? Said Jimmy Sr.
Veronica thought for a bit.
– What’ll they say? She then said.
– You don’t care wha’ tha’ lot says, do yeh? said Jimmy Sr.
420 T. Gray, Ireland This Century, London, Warner Books, 1996, p. 314. 421 Ibid. 168
– Yes. I do.
– Ah now, Veronica.422
The notion of privacy within the home is destroyed in The Snapper by the imposition of community ideals, stemming from residual Catholic hegemony. Veronica, a relatively minor character throughout the novel, is the first to suggest the idea of shame to be inflicted on Sharon and their family. Though the novel represents a community relatively comfortable with out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the situation it depicts can be read ‘as a site for the suppression of non-normative family structures and for anxiety about family dynamics’.423
There is initial anxiety at the beginning at the novel, not because of the
pregnancy itself, but rather the mystery of the father of the child. After Sharon refuses
to reveal who the father is, Jimmy Sr. then establishes he is not married and asks:
– He isn’t a black, is he?
– No!
He believed her. The three of them started laughing.
– One o’ them students, yeh know, Jimmy Sr explained.
– With a clatter o’ wives back in Africa.424
The reference to immigration highlights Jimmy Sr.’s relative liberalism towards the
issue of pregnancy out of wedlock in contrast to his attitude towards increasing
422 Ibid., p. 151. 423 M. McGlynn, ‘Pregnancy, Privacy and Domesticity in The Snapper’, New Hibernia Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 2005, pp. 141–156, p. 143. 424 Doyle, The Snapper, p. 150. 169
migration into Ireland. The anxious nature of his humour reveals an ignorance towards the new arrivals in Ireland, suggesting that the family may not come across immigrants in their daily life.
About forty pages into the narrative, Sharon internally processes the night of conception, which ‘could be called rape. She didn’t know’.425 The actual description does not appear until, sitting alone in bed, Sharon realises how she is lonely and would love someone to talk to. Until this point, the narrative has maintained a fast pace with consistent dialogue that suppresses internal exploration, and seemingly allows the characters to avoid unpleasant reflections, such as this:
She was glad she didn’t remember much about it. The bits she did
remember were disgusting. It was a moving memory, like a film. It was
more like a few photographs. She couldn’t really remember what
happened in between. She’d been really drunk, absolutely paralytic …
She was going to be sick. She rushed and pushed over the dance floor,
past the toilets, outside because she wanted cold air… Then there was a
hand on her shoulder. – Alrigh’, Sharon? he’d said. Then it was blank and
then they were kissing rough – she wasn’t really: her mouth was just open
– and then blank again and that was it really. She couldn’t remember
much more. She’d knew they’d done it – or just he’d done it…426
The scene is left open for the reader’s interpretation given that Sharon provides no clear memory of the actual night, yet also provides no acceptance that she was willing
425 Ibid., p. 185. 426 Ibid., pp. 184–185. 170
to be involved. Despite, or perhaps as an effect, of the confusion and lack of clarity in her ‘blank’ recollection, the suggestion of rape emerges, but the scene is not repeated nor discussed with any friends or family. The conclusion of the memory for Sharon suggests a level of internal pain and embarrassment;
There was one more thing she remembered; what he’d said after he’d put
his hand on her shoulder and asked her was she alright.
– I’ve always liked the look of you, Sharon.
Sharon groaned.
The dirty bastard.427
The question of rape does not appear again in the novel and thus is treated as a non- issue. Rape is not the scandal in Barrytown, but the pregnancy itself. The force of community opinion is displayed in a dialogue montage where Sharon imagines what others have said, or will say about her:
– Sharon Rabbitte’s pregnant, did ye hear?
– Your one, Sharon Rabbitte’s up the pole.
– Sharon Rabbitte’s havin’ a baby.
– I don’t believe yeh!
– Jaysis!
– Jesus! Are yeh serious?
– Who’s she havin’ it for?
– I don’t know.
427 Ibid., pp. 185–186. 171
– She won’t say.
– She doesn’t know.
– She can’t remember.
– Oh God, poor Sharon.
– That’s shockin’.
– Mm.
– Dirty bitch.
– Poor Sharon.
– The slut.
– I don’t believe her.
– The stupid bitch.
– She had tha’ comin’.
– Serves her righ’.428
The pace of this imaginary dialogue brings the reader on a metaphoric rollercoaster of judgmental commentary: from seemingly innocent curiosity to shock, with apparently fake sympathy concluding with a sudden jolt of insults. This development reveals the powerful effect of the community forces, despite any actual knowledge of the situation they are talking about.
The Snapper, ultimately, offers the reader a reconfiguration of the Irish family,
in defiance, and probably in ignorance, of Éamon de Valera’s constitutional definition of the traditional Irish family. The Rabbitte family grows in its response to contemporary circumstance and shifting religious and national attitudes, exhibited by its members’ acceptance of Sharon’s pregnancy. Doyle’s representation of change
428 Ibid., p. 206. 172
comes through revealing a version of contemporary reality, rather than analysing the
past.
The Van
The Van, the longest novel in the trilogy, focuses on Jimmy Sr.’s struggle to navigate the economic and psychological difficulties caused by long-term
unemployment. There is a subtle darkness throughout the novel in its reworkings of
masculine identity and the representation of generational change, notably through
Jimmy Sr. and his son, Darren. In comparison to the previous two novels, the pace is
painfully slow, with increased character reflection and decreased dialogue. Readers
are subject to the ways Jimmy Sr. fills his empty days at the snail’s pace that matches
his enthusiasm to find new work, but he is surrounded by the fast-paced lives of his children and his wife who offer an undercurrent of inevitable change. Change and education are the thematic foundation of this novel, represented by Veronica’s night schooling and Darren’s entrance into prestigious Trinity College.
For the first time in the trilogy, the reader witnesses a character venturing out of Barrytown and into the nation’s capital, Dublin. Jimmy Sr. is physically and culturally unfamiliar with his surroundings, despite being so close to his home:
He went into town and wandered around. He hadn’t done that in years. It
had changed a lot; pubs he’d known and even streets were gone. It looked
good though, he thought. He could tell you one thing: there was money in
this town.429
429 R. Doyle, The Van, in The Barrytown Trilogy, London, Secker & Warburg, 1992, pp. 341–633, p. 409. 173
Jimmy Sr.’s estrangement is based on financial differences as much as cultural
differences. His financial situation contrasts significantly with the new developments
he sees around him; ‘[t]he money was the only thing … It was humiliating’.430 The
shift in setting highlights inequitable economic growth. On the first of many trips into
Dublin, Jimmy Sr. spends a majority of his time in the city’s library and plans to do
‘some Leaving Cert subjects next year, next September; at night, like Veronica’.431
Emphasis on the children’s education, for the first time in the trilogy, marks a developing generational gap in Ireland. Alongside babysitting his granddaughter Gina and playing mini-golf, Jimmy Sr. makes plans to fill his days, but the notion of furthering his own education remains only an idea. When his best friend, Bimbo, is made redundant, Jimmy Sr. is delighted:
But Bimbo was sacked; it was a fact. He was hanging around doing
nothing. And Jimmy Sr. was hanging around doing nothing, so the two of
them might as well hang around and do fuckin’ nothing together.432
Jimmy Sr.’s complacency about finding employment while rejoicing that he has
someone to do ‘nothing’ with causes serious tensions with his family. His wife
Veronica becomes a powerful presence, in contrast with her role in the previous
novels, and his son Darren begins to lose respect for him:
– Don’t you forget who paid for tha’ dinner in front of you, son, righ’.
430 Ibid., p. 411. 431 Ibid., p. 410. 432 Ibid., p. 426. 174
– I know who paid for it, said Darren. – The state.
Jimmy Sr looked like he’d been told that someone had died.433
The reminder of his lost position of authority in his own home comes as a shock to
Jimmy Sr. Darren, who works at the bar outside studying, instead of drinking there like his father, becomes representative of the generation of change and a symbol of what his father is not. At the local bar, The Hikers, Darren recommends American beer Budweiser to his father, – a symbolic association of globalised America invading
Irish culture – but Jimmy Sr.’s slow passivity betrays his existential struggle with unemployment. The catalyst for momentum arrives when Bimbo buys an old van for
‘Bimbo’s Burgers’, and suggests Jimmy Sr. helps him out.
Simultaneous with Ireland’s success in the 1990 World Cup, the first time the nation had ever qualified in the tournament, comes the success of Bimbo and Jimmy
Sr.’s food van. The pace of the novel increases significantly with Jimmy Sr.’s employment and the euphoric attitude of Ireland:
The country had gone soccer mad. Oul’ ones were explaining offside to
each other; the young one at the check-out in the cash-and-carry told
Jimmy Sr that Romania hadn’t a hope cos Lacatus was suspended because
he was on two yellow cards. It was great… It was great for business as
well … The whole place was living on chips.…
He’d brought home two hundred and forty quid the second week.
There were going to get a video.
– Back to normal them, said Jimmy Sr. – Wha’.
433 Ibid., p. 440. 175
– Yep, said Veronica. 434
The normality of Jimmy Sr. earning money results in increased self-confidence and the accumulation of items that symbolise wealth, including the video player and eventually, a suit. The structure, with increased dialogue and minimal retrospection, is reminiscent of The Commitments, including examples of singing:
– A NAAY-SHUN ONCE AGAIN –
A NAAAY-SHUN ONCE AGAIN –
…
It was the best day of Jimmy Sr’s life. The people he served that night got
far more chips than they were entitled to. And they still made a small
fortune, sold everything.435
This boost is fleeting. Bimbo and Jimmy Sr.’s success is short lived, revealing a false
correlation between national morale and economic success. Before the fall of the
chipper business, however, Bimbo and Jimmy Sr. decide to take a night off and
celebrate their success in Dublin. In the capital’s centre, the reader is offered a
representation of the younger, seemingly more successful generation:
There were huge crowds out, lots of kids – they were on Grafton Street
now – big gangs of girls outside McDonalds. Not like the young ones in
Barrytown; these young ones were used to money. They were confident,
434 Ibid., p. 508. 435 Ibid., p. 514. 176
more grown up; they shouted and they didn’t mind being heard – they
wanted to be heard. They had accents like newsreaders.436
This acknowledgement of money and confidence in contrast to the girls of Barrytown is a reminder to the reader of the difference, not only of two places, but two different classes. The working-class nature of Barrytown is at odds with increasingly cosmopolitan Dublin, as represented also by the globalised company, McDonald’s.
The most important feature in the passage is the girls’ confident voices: Jimmy Sr.’s reference to newsreaders can be read in reverse to make a joke of his own accent, and indicates his cultural and economic distance from the owners of accents that he otherwise hears only on television. In the final novel of a trilogy comprised mainly of dialogue, the moment is a stark contrast to the dialect-heavy, incorrectly spelled and profane speech that readers have been presented with previously.
Jimmy Sr. and Bimbo head to a wine bar, a signifier of change in Dublin city, providing a different environment from the traditional Irish pub. After meeting two women, Dawn and Anne Marie, Jimmy Sr. attempts a transformation in speech and employment. After ‘forking out twenty-five snots for a poxy bottle of wine’,437 he begins to flirt with Dawn and changes to suit his surroundings:
– What do you do, Jimmy?
– When I’m not here, d’yeh mean?
She laughed, and leaned back against his arm and stayed there.
– Self-employed, he told her. Me an’ Bren.
436 Ibid., p. 580. 437 Ibid., p. 592. 177
– Ver-y good.
– Caterin’.
– Good.438
Jimmy Sr.’s employment in a chipper van is exaggerated to a self-employed catering
company, which he later explains stays ‘local most o’ the time. Our market research
has shown tha’ reliability is important’.439 The sudden development of vocabulary displays Dublin’s class divisions: when Bimbo reveals that the catering company is actually a chipper van, the attempt to charm Dawn becomes ‘hopeless’; when Jimmy
Sr. tries to kiss her ‘[s]he pushed him away, well able for him; he was fuckin’ hopeless’.440 He blames Bimbo:
– I was away on a hack until you opened your fuckin’ mouth –
– How did I?
– You told her abou’ the fuckin’ van, that’s how.
– What’s wrong with tha’?
– Ah –
Jimmy Sr didn’t know how to answer.441
His confused attitude to the chipper van is positioned at a vital stage of the novel. The
van is a source of pride in Barrytown but in Dublin it is a symbol of shame. This clash
of emotions can be read as one more sign of the changes in Ireland, amongst many
438 Ibid., p. 594. 439 Ibid., p. 595. 440 Ibid., p. 596. 441 Ibid., p. 598. 178
others: the influence of the global seen in McDonald’s and the wine bar; the increased economic success represented by younger, more successful people who are used to money; and the attitude of Dawn as symbol of a new and increasingly mercenary Irish future.
The morning after the night in Dublin offers a shocking reality for Jimmy Sr., when his son Darren is awarded seven honours in his Leaving Certificate, gaining acceptance to Trinity College, and Jimmy Sr. ‘couldn’t even get out of bed properly’ to congratulate him because of a hangover.442 Jimmy Sr.’s self-loathing and embarrassment send him back into the spiral of disappointment, first evident in the beginning of the novel through his unemployment, continued in Dublin through his lack of proper employment, and finally through failing his family. Veronica also passes her Leaving Certificate, and registers to do more subjects:
– Geography? Jimmy Sr’d said when she’d come in.
– That’s great. You’ll be able to find the kettle when you go into the
kitchen.
– Humour, said Veronica, imitating Darren.
– Fair play to yeh, he’d said. – I should do somethin’ as well.443
The snide remark hinting that Veronica should be staying in the kitchen is a signifier of change: she is doing something her husband is not. That he says he ‘should’ do something rather than he ‘will’ is a clear indicator of the half-complacent, half- diffident attitude that will leave him behind in a time of change and transformation.
442 Ibid., p. 600. 443 Ibid., p. 605. 179
The chipper van closes down with the threat of a health inspection and Jimmy
Sr. and Bimbo abandon it in the sea. Unemployed, with his children transcending any level of success he has experienced, Jimmy Sr.’s voice concludes the novel with: ‘—
Give us a hug, Veronica, will yeh. – I need a hug’.444 The final line of the trilogy is aptly a piece of dialogue that can be read in multiple ways. Firstly, it emphasises the importance of family in Ireland. In a time of drastic change, represented by differing generations in the Rabbitte family, the family as unit seems to remain strong.
Secondly, it reveals a shift in power within the family, with Veronica throughout the trilogy gaining more of a voice, an education and respect. Her husband’s need for a hug from her can be seen as affectionate, but it is also a symbol of his deterioration throughout the trilogy; he was once the person with the voice and respect in the family. Like Ireland itself, the idea of family is changing. The novel’s ending offers an interesting paradox – it reveals the strength of the family unit in the face of cultural change, but in doing so partly endorses de Valera’s vision of the family as the unchanging basis of the nation after all.
The slow changes in the Rabbitte family play out the changing attitudes of the nation, all the more starkly since the family includes no grandparents as representatives of de Valera’s generation. Doyle’s view omits the elderly, possibly making it easier for him to suggest that change is positive and acceptable. This omission, I believe, works against Doyle as a writer analysing the grass-roots reception of new social conditions. Inclusion of the older generation would offer a potential contrast to his go-ahead view of historical change. In the absence of such characters, longer-range understandings of history in Doyle’s fiction have to be supplied by the reader’s imagination without much guidance from the text.
444 Ibid., p. 633. 180
Suggestions of the values of preceding times are limited, and the study of youth culture in family settings takes place without a deep sense of where the families have come from. Perhaps that lack is part of Doyle’s point about their cultural condition.
The Woman Who Walked into Doors
In the first novel of Doyle’s Paula Spencer Series, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, the personal history of the protagonist provides the core structure. It is a story of domestic abuse through the first-person testimony of the victim, Paula
Spencer. Published in 1996, Paula’s story predates Enright’s Veronica Hegarty from
The Gathering by eleven years, but the narrative similarly coheres around a compulsive exploration of the site and cause of trauma. Paula manifests the crippling effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – ‘an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often uncontrolled, repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’. 445 After enduring seventeen years of abuse by her now late husband,
Charlo, Paula is now trying to capture what happened in retrospective episodic narration. According to Cathy Caruth, trauma
does not rely … on what we simply know of each other, but on what we
don’t we know of our own traumatic pasts. In a catastrophic age, that is,
trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not as a simple
understanding of the pasts of others but rather, within the traumas of
445 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, pp. 57–58. 181
contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departures we
have all taken from ourselves.446
Despite both Enright’s and Doyle’s novels being set in contemporary Dublin, they are focused on its confusing past. The resonance of traumatic memories haunts each text, as the trauma of the protagonists’ pasts becomes their link to understanding their contemporary context. Each text utilises traumatic memories in different and effective ways. They both repeatedly explore moments of trauma and circulate within memories of confusion, yet Paula’s narration is more erratic and somewhat more accessible than Veronica’s representation. Paula’s trauma is effectively submerged in a string of memories, whilst Veronica recognises, to a certain degree, the effect of her past.
The causes of trauma are also different – Veronica focuses on possible sexual abuse she believed she suffered, like her brother, while Paula’s abuse leaves not only emotional but physical scarring. Unlike Veronica, Paula is from a working-class background, with no economic or social power. She has married her husband to escape relentless paternal abuse. The novel’s motivating force is Charlo’s death at the hand of the Guards after he has murdered a local woman. The disjunctive chronology in the novel corresponds to a confused, traumatised protagonist:
It’s all a mess – there’s no order or sequence. I have dates, a beginning
and an end, but the years in between won’t fall into place. 447
446 C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 11. 447 R. Doyle, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), London, Vintage, 1998, p. 203. 182
Throughout the novel, Paula constantly struggles to grasp not only the reality of her past but also the order in which it happened. It is not until Chapter Eighteen that the reader is introduced to the protagonist in any formal sense: ‘My name is Paula
Spencer. I am thirty-nine years old. It was my birthday last week. I am a widow’.448
Various paragraphs throughout the text are repeated, acting as mirror images of experience suggesting a seemingly never-ending attempt to escape from Charlo’s abuse. For example, on pages 164 and 186 respectively, these two paragraphs echo each other:
The doctor never looked at me. He studied parts of me but never saw all
of me. He never looked into my eyes. Drink, he said to himself. I could
see his nose moving, taking in the smell, deciding. …
The doctor never looked at me. He studied parts of me but never looked at
my eyes. He never looked at me when he spoke. He never saw me. Drink,
he said to himself. I could see his nose twitching, taking in the smell,
deciding. None of the doctors looked at me.449
The repetition is haunting; the protagonist is not seen – ‘I didn’t exist. I was a ghost. I walked around in emptiness’450 – and is subjected to a dismissive Irish patriarchal attitude in which domestic violence is ignored. This attitude is demonstrated in the
448 Ibid., p. 86. 449 Ibid., p. 164, p. 186. 450 Ibid., p. 185. 183
scene where Paula is clearly injured from abuse and Charlo accompanies her to the
doctor’s office:
– What made you do that?
Fucking doctors.
– What made you do that?
Stupid fuckin’ bastards. What made me do that? Looking at my eye.
Looking for my eye, behind the pulp. He didn’t want an answer; he
muttered, thought he was being nice. Silly you; look what you did to
yourself. None of them wanted answers.
– A little bit of make-up will cover that up for you.
None of them looked at me.
– As right as rain.
…
– Put this woman to bed the minute you get home, Mister Spencer, and bring
her a cup of tea.
– Yes, doctor.
The two of them, looking after me. Laughing at me. The woman who
walked into doors. They didn’t wink at each other because they didn’t
have to.451
This scene is the site where Doyle transforms the version of a private problem into a symbolic representation that ravages the idea of family and of social cohesion. The reader bears witness to the ludicrous assumption that Paula has injured herself; the
451 Ibid., pp. 189–190. 184
easy non-verbal communication between Charlo and the doctor chillingly suggests a camaraderie, a complicit tolerance of what has happened. Furthermore, the internal anguish articulated by Paula reveals frustration in a situation where she is not acknowledged or asked anything; she becomes a double victim of domestic abuse and of male medical bureaucracy. Throughout the narrative, Charlo repeatedly ensures he has no official involvement in her injuries, regularly orchestrating conversations about her excuse for what happened:
– Where’d you get that?
– What?
– The eye.
It was a test. I was thumping inside. He was playing with me. There was
only one right answer.
– I walked into the door.
– Is that right?
– Yeah.452
Charlo’s false ignorance is a further act of abusive oppression. In this case, Doyle supplies a generational backstory. Paula and her sister repeatedly argue about their father’s treatment of them. Her sister Carmel, who was the preferred victim of his abuse, endlessly disagrees with Paula:
– He was nice, she said. He sang a lot, didn’t he?
– So did Hitler.
452 Ibid., p. 181. 185
– Ah stop, Carmel, will yeh, I said. – Is that the best you can do?
– I know what you’re up to, she said.
– What?
– I know.
– What?
– Rewriting history, she said.
…
(I’m not. What Carmel says. Rewriting history. I’m doing the opposite. I
want to know the truth, not make it up. She has her reasons too.)453
Paula exhibits a relentless positivity, an enduring wish for hope. Her search for what actually happened with her father is continually stunted by her narrative repetition of illusionary happiness. Her rewriting of history foreshadows the relationship with
Charlo where, despite (or because of) constant abuse, she clings to any act of kindness, however small it may be. Paula cannot truly acknowledge the abuse of her father and her husband, insisting both are nice men. Her private version of historical revisionism is an attempt not only to repress the traumatic experience she suffered from her father and husband, but an attempt to grasp any happy memories in her life.
Charlo himself can be considered a revisionist due to his insistence on manufacturing a false story of how she developed her injuries. Her identity is threatened as a daughter and a wife, in a way that subverts the meaning and the role of family.
When recounting a particular night of abuse, Paula recoils into self-doubt:
453 Ibid., pp. 56–57. 186
Do I actually remember that? Is that exactly how it happened? Did my
hair rip? Did my back scream? Did he call me a cunt? Yes, often; all the
time. Right then? I don’t know. Which time was that anyway? I don’t
know. How can I separate one time from the lot and describe it? I want to
be honest. How can I be sure? It went on for seventeen years.454
In this passage, the reader is positioned to recognise that, due to the extent of the abuse, Paula cannot construct a factual or chronological account of her past, reflecting on her inability to recover experience, despite the desire to be honest, and although there is no doubt that the abuse happened. There are none of the ambiguities evident in the memories of The Gathering and there is physical scarring to prove Paula’s pain:
A finger aches when it’s going to rain. Little one on the left; he pulled it
back till it snapped. It happened. I have places where there should be
teeth. There are things I can’t smell any more. I have marks where the
burns used to be. I have a backache that rides me all day. I’ve a scar on
my chin. It happened. I have parts of the house that make me cry. I have
memories that I can touch and make me wake up screaming. I’m haunted
all day and all night. I have mistakes that stab me before I think of them.
He hit me, he thumped me, he raped me. It happened.455
The repetition of ‘It happened’ is an instance of hypotaxis, arranging and unifying the
independent examples, transforming them into a coherent representation that proves
454 Ibid., p. 184. 455 Ibid., p. 185. 187
the seventeen years of abuse. The memories that can be ‘touched’ and that ‘stab’
establish Paula’s of trauma not only as a mental legacy but as a continuing body
condition.
Toward the novel’s conclusion comes a shift in narrative that offers hope and
change. As a result of the abuse, Paula is an alcoholic – ‘[d]rink helped; drink calmed me. Drink gave me something to search for and do’456 – but her attitude changes
when she kicks Charlo out of their home. Fearing that he will transfer his abuse to
their daughter, Nicola, Paula summons strength she didn’t know she had;
I don’t know what happened to me – the Bionic Woman – he was gone. It
was so easy. Just bang – gone. The evil in the kitchen; his eyes. Gone. The
frying pan had no weight. I’d groaned picking it out of the press a few
minutes before. It was one of those big old-fashioned ones. I hated it; a
present from his mother. Maybe there was a secret message in it all along.
Maybe that was it. When I saw him looking. It had no weight when I
picked it up; I was being helped. I didn’t feel the fat falling on me as I
lifted it. Down – gone. His blood on the floor. My finest hour. I was there.
I was something. I loved. Down on his head. I was killing him. The evil.
He’d killed me and now it was Nicola. But no. No fuckin’ way.457
This account reveals how Paula claims a level of identity. Her transformation is
emphasised in the repetition of – ‘I was there. I was something. I loved’. The
repetition not only cements an identity but also the importance of family. The act is
456 Ibid., p. 212. 457 Ibid., p. 213. 188
not done in her own protection but for her daughter. In the following chapter, Paula
repeats the scene with increased detail. The pace of the initial description is slowed
when repeated and extends from an original account of less than a single page to an
eleven-page representation. The reader is subjected to the pleas of her husband:
– Paula –, he said. – Paula.
He sounded like a fuckin’ eejit. Like a baby learning the word.458
This simile captures the sudden ‘existence’ of Paula – she is suddenly there, and her husband is suddenly realising her presence. The child metaphor is continued when, as he attempts to stand after the blow, the noises Charlo makes reminds Paula of the noise ‘a toddler makes when she’s trying to stand up after falling down’.459 Not only
is Charlo reduced to a child, but he is also feminised, resulting in a reversal of power
between the victim and abuser. On the second last page, after Charlo has left the
house, Paula has a conversation with her daughter Nicola that is virtually mirrored on
the final page:
– What now? said Nicola.
– God knows, I said. – But one thing’s for certain. He’s not coming back
in here again.
Her face said it: she heard it before.
– He’s not, I said. – I’ll bet you a tenner.
– Okay, said Nicola.
458 Ibid., p. 217. 459 Ibid., p. 220. 189
It was a great feeling for a while. I’d done something good.460
…
– What now? said Nicola.
– God knows, I said. – But one thing’s for certain. He’s not coming back
in here again.
She’d heard it before.
– He’s not, I said. – I’ll bet you a tenner.
– Okay, said Nicola.
– It was a great feeling. I’d done something good.461
The two passages are very much the same but the important omission of ‘for a while’ in the repetition cements the positive feeling of Paula, and hope for the future.
Situated between these two passages is a clear reportage of Charlo’s final death by the
Guards after he has attempted to kidnap ‘Missis Fleming’.462 The two conversations are situated two years apart: the first immediately after Paula has kicked Charlo out of the house, and the second after they have discovered Charlo is dead. Paula’s concluding self-referential comment is significant as it enforces her defiance of her past and offers an open-ended hope for the future. The ending reveals the power of knowing what has happened to her husband, and how his absence allows a new relation with her children, and through that a new future for herself. The repetitive effect of trauma that is so evident throughout the text weakens towards the conclusion, as Paula gains the confidence to imagine another identity for herself in a reconstituted family, one where Charlo and what he signifies cannot ‘come in’.
460 Ibid., p. 220. 461 Ibid., p. 225–226. 462 Ibid., p. 225. 190
Paula Spencer
A decade later, in 2006, Doyle published Paula Spencer, the sequel to The
Woman Who Walked into Doors. There are many differences between the texts, but the most immediately noticeable is the point of view. The Woman Who Walked into
Doors is narrated by Paula and opens with ‘I was told by a Guard who came to the door’,463 while Paula Spencer is constructed by a third-person omniscient narrator,
beginning with ‘She copes’.464 This shift from first to third person returns to Doyle’s
original style, and offers the reader a more extensive account of the setting around the
protagonist. Furthermore, it suggests that the novel is less personally immediate in
terms of experience: the narrator can be read as a journalist following socio-economic
changes, and hinting at the superficial nature of life as lived in the Celtic Tiger. The
change in title is also important: the first of the novels connotes an anonymous
woman with an implication of domestic violence. The action of the novel, seen from
her point of view, traces a search for self and family community. In the second novel,
the title powerfully refers to the woman herself – now with a secure name. Her
struggle now is with her environment – Ireland in the height of the Celtic Tiger. Set in
2005, the novel has only sporadic references to the recent past – it spans just over a
year in time from just before Paula’s forty-eighth birthday.
When the reader meets Paula again, it has been thirteen years since her
husband Charlo has died. The immediate theme is of coping; coping with alcoholism
– ‘It’s more than four months since she had a drink’465 –, coping with loneliness,
working and the troubled relationships with her children, some of whom are
463 Doyle, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, p. 1. 464 R. Doyle, Paula Spencer, London, Vintage, 2007, p. 1. 465 Ibid., p. 1. 191
successful, others experiencing traumatic memories of the previous domestic
violence. Her eldest son, John Paul, named after the Pope, has become a heroin addict
at 16. Nine years later, John Paul knocks on Paula’s door to tell her he’s changed;
he’s clean, married and a father. All the while, living only four miles away, is Leanne,
Paula’s third child. She is twenty-two, an alcoholic who suffers traumatic memories
of domestic abuse: ‘Leanne wets her bed. Leanne deals with it. It’s terrible’.466 Nicola
and Jack are the relatively normal children, according to Paula. Nicola is married with
two children and has a good job; always giving Paula presents from a phone to a
fridge: ‘that’s fine with Paula. She’s proud to have a daughter who can fling a bit of
money around. The pride takes care of the humiliation’.467 Jack is seemingly the
perfect son; good at school, well behaved with a stable part-time job at the pub. Paula is presented as a semi-comical hero with a traumatised past: she does try to celebrate and enjoy her life as it is, but is constantly reminded of painful memories.
Paula Spencer positions the reader at the crossroads of Irish identity. It is, ultimately, a story about those left behind on the wave of globalisation, about those who have not been able to keep up with the changes of the Celtic Tiger. Doyle critiques the view that Ireland as a whole has undergone an economic boom, whether for good or ill. His representations of attitudes towards the poor and marginalised – either born in Ireland or recently migrated – projects an unflattering image. The reality of a multi-racial nation that is also racist is not the only negative image projected; we also see a class system that is elitist and repressive. Class and race are again controversially treated as comparable discriminators of belonging, as in The
466 Ibid., p. 5. 467 Ibid., p. 3. 192
Commitments. Paula, viewed alongside her immigrant counterparts, is, like them, not
‘Irish’ in the contemporary context of a wealthy, global, yet insular country.
Immigration to Ireland resonates powerfully throughout the novel, as Paula
attempts to understand recent changes. The Celtic Tiger saw a reversal of Ireland’s
traditional problem of emigration. In 2000, the Irish Government granted permits to
over 18,000 non-EU nationals, most of them from Eastern Europe, to fill shortages in
the Irish labour market.468 Applications for asylum also dramatically increased from
39 in 1992 to 10,938 in 2000.469 The effect of the increased immigration is somewhat
positive in Paula Spencer. Her tone is one of curiosity rather than racist hostility,
admitting her personal ignorance and acknowledging fascination:
There’s an African woman on the check-out. Nigerian, or one of the
others. What other African countries do they come from? Paula doesn’t
know. There are wars everywhere; you could never keep up. It’s the first
time she’s seen a black woman working here. Good luck to her. She’s
lovely. Hair up in a scarf. Her long cheekbones. Lovely straight back.
What would Charlo think? she wonders. What would he have said about
it? Charlo was her husband. He died before all these people started
arriving. Before the Celtic Tiger thing.470
468 M. Ruhs & E. Quinn, ‘Ireland: From Rapid Immigration to Recession’, The Migration Policy Institute (online) 1 September 2009,
The Celtic Tiger had by this time became a temporal orthodoxy in discussion of pre- and post-1990s Ireland; history was divided into old and new, boom or bust. For
Paula, Charlo’s death is not only a reminder of a time before all the changes, but it also signals a shift to an entirely new way of understanding them. Charlo’s absence is an effective temporal marker for Paula’s understanding of the Celtic Tiger, as the period can be read as ‘a beginning and end…heralding the death of an old Ireland and the birth of a new’.471 This analogy can be extended to Paula’s characterisation – she is simultaneously beginning her new life whilst struggling to end the memories of her former; pains in her body are reminders of her domestic violence, while her new- found confidence is the birth of a new sense of self:
She presses down on the coffee plunger. Her thumb aches, all the bones
on that side of her hand. But she kind of likes this one. She can worry it
without going back through the years. The pain is new, like the duvets and
Jack’s computer.472
Her present condition is paradoxical, at once in the past and struggling to understand the present, yet also unconsciously accepting recent innovation – the coffee plunger replacing the teapot – in a way that shows her adaptability. There is a sense of temporal displacement, but also a power to accept and continue.
Working as a cleaner, Paula meets a variety of new immigrants but sees the biggest change their arrival has made in gender, rather than ethnic or racial, terms:
471 Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 3. 472 Doyle, Paula Spencer, p. 162. 194
That’s another big change, maybe the biggest. The men doing the cleaning
work. Nigerians and Romanians. She’s not sure if they are legal. She
doesn’t have to know …. She feels sorry for them. It’s not work for a
man; she’ll never think different. The African lads come in dressed to kill,
like businessmen and doctors. They change into their work clothes and
back into their suits before they go home. Ashamed. God love them.
Handsome lads. They deserve better.473
Paula’s view of gender roles shows her traditional mindset, yet also breaks up the idea
of a traditional ‘Irish’ attitude to immigration, since her reading of the situation from a
limited perspective also involves a sympathy for the African and Romanian
immigrants that lacks the ‘working-class’ fear of their presence that she might have
been expected to typify.
For the first time in all Doyle’s narratives set in Barrytown, the reader is
introduced to a character of an older generation. Paula’s mother appears toward the
conclusion of Paula Spencer. Although she is described as ‘not an old woman’, 474 there is a subtle suggestion of dementia in her conversation with her daughter. She confuses Paula with one of her sisters when she says:
– Her husband beat her.
It’s like a slap. When Paula arrived with black eyes or splinted fingers, her
mother never commented. Not once. All those years.
– You fuckin’ oul’ cow, says Paula.
473 Ibid., p. 39. 474 Ibid., p. 186. 195
– Beat her to a pulp, says her mother.475
This surprising inclusion of her mother – who also comments on immigration – ‘The
foreigners … eat goats and all’476 – is an almost refreshing scene. For so much of
Doyle’s fiction, the parents of the protagonists – such as Jimmy Sr., Veronica and, for
the most part, Paula – have been invisible. In such vibrant representations of family,
to ignore a generation is a questionable act. It could possibly relate to Doyle’s
insistence on the contemporary; given that the setting and issues of these books are
limited to the present, the presence of an older generation could skew this emphasis.
Here, this fleeting representation of Paula’s mother – who does not appear again – is
almost redundant. Her presence, as the novel continues, is quickly forgotten and bears
no importance in the plot. The grandmother has no meaning in the family unit. That
Doyle has constructed Paula’s mother with dementia works as a deliberate cut-off of
the elderly generation – she cannot confidently or thoroughly contribute to
conversation, except as a marker of cultural insularity. Accordingly, the true history
of Paula’s family and her father’s behaviour is left muddled by the disagreement of
the three sisters.
Doyle works in contrast to Enright and Tóibín, who both construct dynamic
elderly characters who often have a confident recall of the past. The characters in
Enright and Tóibín’s texts offer a sense of history, providing markers that indicate
new change, and also revealing the many past changes that they have successfully
survived. In Doyle’s fiction, by contrast, the lack of history and the silencing of
elderly voices makes an ideological point about the Irish society that is his subject.
475 Ibid., p. 188. 476 Ibid. 196
Essentially, Doyle is not concerned with rewriting history, but in understanding a particular present with a very limited sense of history. In Paula Spencer’s world of impoverished local consumer culture, there seems to be little sense of history beyond the directly personal, and so little need to revise it. The boundaries of culture and memory seem to be close to the present. The fleeting appearance of Paula’s mother can be read as a statement on the redundancy of history in Doyle’s contemporary Irish world.
Carmel, Paula’s sister, used to work as a cleaner but now typifies the Celtic
Tiger woman. In her patronising tone, Carmel is the representative of an Ireland that has developed without Paula. The first thing Carmel says to Paula on her birthday is that she is buying an apartment in Bulgaria:
– Where’s Bulgaria?
– Eastern Europe, Paula.
– I know. But where? Do people go there on their holidays?
– Yes, Paula.
– Is there not a war there or something? Orphans?
– Not at all. They’re joining the EU in 2007.
…
Clean air, paper bags, apartments in Eastern Europe.
…
– When Bulgaria joins the EU the value of those apartments will go through
the fuckin’ roof.
An investment. They used to talk about EastEnders and their husbands.477
477 Ibid., pp. 28–29. 197
The blatant confusion of Paula is indicative of the increasing pace of Celtic Tiger life
– her lack of knowledge accompanies a sense of displacement and loss of community, exacerbated by her sister’s familiar patronising tone. That women talk of investments instead of their families reveals the consumer-driven side of Irish life that Paula is now subjected to, but whose new values and idiom she cannot fully grasp. This conversation is indicative of Irish social preoccupations in the Celtic Tiger, in that it bases self-worth on property investment:
Between 1996 and 2005, the consumer price index rose by 30 per cent but
the price of houses in Ireland rose 270 per cent …. For those who were
lucky enough to be in the property market, it has developed a sense of
economic well-being and an interest in the comparative value of their own
property.478
Carmel’s need not only to buy investment properties but also to announce them makes her a clear representative of the attitude of the lucky during the Celtic Tiger. Perhaps
Carmel requires this attitude as a screen for a grimmer past. In the previous novel her conversations with Paula have usually been about their families, but with a subtle undertone of paternal abuse:
– I remember Courtown alright, she said. – I remember fuckin’ Courtown
alright.
– Jesus, Carmel; back off.
478 Inglis, Global Ireland: Same Difference, p. 178. 198
– Why should I? she said. – I remember it as well. I know what you’re fuckin’
up to.
…
– What?
– Rewriting history, she said.
– I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said. – I don’t even know what
you mean.
– I’m sure you have your reasons, said Carmel.479
The changing relationship between the sisters reveals changes in Irish social values,
and also suggests their use in contemporary repression of the past. According to
Doyle,
I thought Paula would be a great guide through the changes. She’d be
curious, just a tiny bit bitter perhaps, but not hugely, and fantastically
amused by her sister’s seeming wealth. The wine, and that flat, the
apartment in Bulgaria and the investments. She seemed to me to be a wise
person ….480
In The Woman Who Walked into Doors, their talk concerns the truth of past childhood
and how their history is to be understood. In Paula Spencer, however, conversations
are more shallow, about the future, usually about consumer items, and more divisive
of the sisters than before. Paula muses:
479 Doyle, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, pp. 55–57. 480 Doyle, cited in Firetog, ‘Interview with Roddy Doyle’, p. 78. 199
Ten years ago there wouldn’t have been one black woman on this bus –
less than ten years. It would have been Paula and women like Paula. Same
age, from the same area, same kids. Where are those women now? Carmel
used to do cleaning and now she’s buying flats in Bulgaria.481
This summary of temporal change, signified by her sister’s development, highlights
inequitable social change despite the official insistence that all of Ireland was reaping
the rewards of the Celtic Tiger. Carmel no longer needs to work, and instead spends
her time investing her husband’s money, while exploited migrants and women like
Paula are left working in the menial jobs supposedly not good enough for the Irish.
Carmel’s extraordinary growth is quickly stunted when she discovers she has
breast cancer. With that announcement, the novel shifts in focus; suddenly all that was
important is now invisible: talk of Bulgarian flats, new cars and immigrants
transforms into mastectomies, chemotherapies and death:
– Dead, says Carmel. – That’s the word. You have to get used to it. And
you can’t help looking back …. And the good things kind of glide past
you. 482
With Carmel’s cancer, however, comes clarity about the superficial nature of what the
Celtic Tiger lifestyle entails. The shift toward the end of the novel is not only in subject but also in tone and style. With Carmel’s prognosis increasingly dire, the style
481 Doyle, Paula Spencer, p. 56. 482 Doyle, Paula Spencer, p. 240. 200
of the novel begins to reflect that of The Woman Who Walked into Doors. With the
speed and superficiality of the Celtic Tiger in focus, the beginning of Paula Spencer is dialogue-heavy with minimal internal reflection. Rather as in the Barrytown
Trilogy, the third-person narrative is choppy with images, including sporadic returns to the memory of Charlo:
Everything is hopping. Everything is sweating. Every hole and dent.
Every thump and kick. All of Paula’s past is in her back. It’s there, ready,
breathing. One last kick from a man who died twelve years ago.483
The short and sometimes incomplete sentences are resonant of the style of The
Woman Who Walked into Doors. There are hints that Paula may regress back into her
alcoholism – ‘she’d love a gin and tonic, four or five of them’484 – but the novel
concludes more calmly, and looking ahead. Paula travels to Dublin to visit Carmel,
who is recovering well in hospital – ‘[i]t’s gas to think, her sister’s in a private hospital’.485 Paula is waiting to tell Carmel that she is seeing a man called Joe, just for
‘[a] bit of excitement. A bit of crack’.486 The novel concludes with a similar sense of
hope to The Woman Who Walked into Doors, but a key difference is, that, unlike
Paula in the first novel, this new Paula is not on the brink of change but is living it.
The novel offers a representation of Ireland that embraces transformation on a
foundational level, rather than falling to the charm of the Celtic Tiger. It has been said
that Doyle’s novels ‘rain on the Celtic Tiger parade’,487 shunning all the glory,
483 Ibid., p. 247 484 Ibid., p. 268. 485 Ibid., p. 276. 486 Ibid., p. 277. 487 As per title: McCarthy, Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade. 201
exposing all its faults. Yet Paula has developed an authentic identity within a consumer-driven society that denies her one.
My analysis has been suggesting that Doyle’s novels of contemporary Dublin tend to suppress all history beyond lived personal experience. In his early fiction set in and around fictional Barrytown, his rejection of Irish history can be read as an impatience with the pieties of Irish nationalism. Published in 1999, Doyle’s A Star
Called Henry confirms his position on Irish historical revisionism and was the first book in a trilogy called The Last Roundup with Oh, Play That Thing (2004) and The
Dead Republic (2010). In Doyle’s earlier fiction, Irish history and a sense of nationalism is effectively ignored. However, in the height of the Celtic Tiger Doyle explores his version of Irish history, not surprisingly offering a postmodern parody of the times around Ireland’s independence. Returning to Dublin a century ago, A Star
Called Henry proposes a counter-narrative of Irish independence. The trilogy, as a whole, spans the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. A Star Called
Henry, in relation to this study, is the most important of the trilogy as it is not only marks Doyle’s shift into exploring dominant narratives of Irish history, but calls into question national identity in relation to family.
This novel is important in Doyle’s oeuvre as it is a response to the weakening sense of national identity in the height of the Celtic Tiger, due to international influence and increasing immigration. Unlike Enright and Tóibín, Doyle’s contemporary fiction remains in the contemporary context, with no dependence on the past for narrative progression. In A Star Called Henry, Doyle deals with a formative period in Irish history and for the first time includes many actual historical figures. In
202
this context, his hero, Henry Smart, is emblematic of a contemporary reader who does
not know much about Irish history. Through him, the version of history offered
focuses on the human aspect of events at their time of occurrence, rather than their
historical ramifications that are so often explored in historical literature. Official
history is challenged by unruly personal memory to reclaim moments that have been
forgotten. This is not
to indulge in the self-absorption of victim culture but the opposite: to
engage in an act of ethical imagination in which one’s own uneven
development becomes not just a way in, but a way out, a means of
empathising with other peoples and societies in similar situations today …
If Irish people find it difficult to identify with those parts of their own
history that carry the stigma of poverty, there is little likelihood that they
will be able to relate to those who come to the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger
reminding them of their own unrequited pasts.488
Doyle’s comic irony works, to an extent, to reimagine Irish history and nationhood in
response to the weakening of their traditional versions experienced in the Celtic Tiger.
In the vein of Tóibín’s historiographical revisionism, Doyle looks at the margins – the women and socialists – instead of conforming to the dominant narratives of the nation’s history. For example, Doyle faces the issue of urban poverty through a vivid description of Dublin’s slums in Part One. Poverty in Dublin is exposed through
488 P. Kirby, L. Gibbons & M. Cronin, Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, London, Pluto Press, 2002, pp. 104–105. 203
Henry’s narration; ‘[i]nfested, hungry and unloved, I fell in with the crowd’.489
Dublin had some of the worst slums under British rule:
Dublin retained the worst urban adult mortality rate in the British Isles …
Living conditions were horrific by contemporary standards; the surveys
before 1914 show 25 per cent of Dublin families living in one-room
tenements occupied by more than four people, with at least 16,000
families living below the poverty line. 490
In Doyle’s novel, Henry’s parents live, at times, in severe poverty. The socialist
political leader James Connolly, who also appears as a character in A Star Called
Henry, wrote in 1914 about the ‘high rents, slum tenements, rotten staircases, stinking
yards, high death rates, low wages, Corporation jobbery and margarine wrapped in
butter-paper’.491 This description is echoed by Henry’s stream-of-consciousness style description of his mother’s experience of raising a family in the slums:
Behind her, the damp, scabbed walls, the rotten wood, the wet air, the
leaking, bursting ceilings …. Typhoid and other death in every breath, on
every surface. Banisters that shook when held, floors that creaked and
groaned, timber that cried for sparks …. And the rooms behind the steps
got smaller and darker and more and more evil. We fell further and
further. The walls crumbled and closed in on us. Her children died and
joined the stars …. Mother sat on the crumbling steps, she turned her back
489 R. Doyle, A Star Called Henry, London, Jonathan Cape, 1999, p. 45. 490 Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, p. 437. 491 J. Connolly, cited in Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, p. 437. 204
on the sweating, appalling facts of her life and looked up through the acid
smoke at the stars that twinkled over Dublin.492
In this passage, the construction of a home is personified as painful, with groans and
cries in a scene of desolation and powerlessness. The emphasis on poverty reveals the
novel’s underlying motivation:
I wanted to put in context, without making a political statement, to explain
why the independence movement took off, or why Henry would have
gotten involved. That it wasn’t just a whim. Despite the proximity of
Ireland to Britain and despite the official status of Dublin as the second
city of the empire, in fact it’s a third world city and Ireland was a colony.
And I wanted to just show the starkness of the poverty and try to get
across that most working-class people were not politically motivated at
that stage at all.493
Doyle has constructed Henry Smart as sceptical about Irish nationalism, a literary
reflection of ‘the bankrupt ideologies of nationalism at the end of the twentieth
century’.494 Thus, the motivation for Doyle to write about history stems from his
disdain for the official Irish attitude toward the nation’s past. In A Star Called Henry, through humour and a demystification of history, the novel militates against
492 Doyle, A Star Called Henry, p. 8. 493 Doyle, cited in Taylor, The Salon Interview: Roddy Doyle. 494 J. Brannigan, ‘‟The Battle for the GPO”: Literary Revisionism in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry and Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys’, in H. Mutran & L.P.Z. Izarra (eds), Kaleidoscopic Views of Ireland, São Paolo, Humanitas, 2003, pp. 115– 132, p. 120. 205
retrospective understandings of ordinary people’s participation in history in terms of
conscious political analysis and motivation.
Doyle’s idea that ‘most working-class people were not politically motivated at that
stage at all’ matches the view of life in his novels of contemporary Dublin, where
characters have very limited political consciousness.495 Similarly, his descriptive
minimalism is mostly silent in both contexts about what are normally considered to be
the big issues of the century – Catholicism and nationalist politics – and instead
presents varying perspectives on working-class youth culture, writing of a generation
that was, until Doyle came along, largely disregarded in Irish literature. Doyle’s
significance as an innovative analyst of Irish cultural change – both in his chosen
subject matter and in his fictional mode – should not be underrated. He sees change as
the fundamental experience in his own life:
There have been huge changes in my lifetime. Ireland was a Catholic
country. I don’t think it’s accurate now to call it Catholic. It was a rural
place, which is no longer the case. … The last attempts to make Ireland
into a self-sufficient Gaelic speaking island were still there when I was a
kid. … So it’s all recent times. It’s living history496.
This sense of change is not explicit in his writing but strongly resonates through the
strong characterisations and dynamic representations of the family unit. Harte
suggests that the Barrytown Trilogy
495 Doyle, cited in Taylor, The Salon Interview: Roddy Doyle. 496 Doyle, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 148. 206
properly belongs to a tradition of Irish tragicomedy that stretches back
through Brendan Behan to Joyce and Sean O’Casey, in which the bonds
of family and community are continually tested by manifold internal and
external stresses.497
In the Barrytown Trilogy and the Paula Spencer Series, Doyle offers versions of contemporary Irish life that strongly conflict with the de Valeran ideal but that nevertheless emphasise in their own ways the vital importance in daily life of family and community. For inspiration, Doyle has said all he needed ‘was to look out the window of the school I was in. All I had to do was walk around the area I grew up in.
I’d go into any pub. … The characters were there’.498
497 Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007, p. 28. 498 Doyle, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, pp. 148–149. 207
Chapter Four
The Contemporary Irish Short Story: Understanding the Celtic Tiger
However depressing the facts may be, the story will always be excellent. 499 – Frank O’Connor
In 1978, Declan Kiberd wrote about the condition of Irish literature:
Too many bad short stories are written in Ireland today and too few good
novels. Foolish people convince themselves that the short story is easily
written and that it requires little effort. … The truth is that the short story,
like the lyric poem, is one of the most difficult forms in literature,
requiring a concentration and intense economy of effect possible only to a
true artist.500
Since Kiberd’s announcement that there were ‘too few novels’, the novel has come to
dominate the Irish literary world. Novels saturated the Irish market in the 1990s, as
noted in previous chapters of this thesis, lowering the prestige held by short stories in
the 70s and 80s. It has been suggested that the Celtic Tiger provided a sense of
national confidence that was conducive to the writing of novels. After the economic crash in 2008, a time which, in its beginnings and endings, produced uncertainty, the short story came to flourish again. Showing how economic and cultural circumstances
499 F. O’Connor, in The Bell, May 1942, cited in H. Ingman, A History of the Irish Short Story, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 500 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, pp. 49–50.
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influence form, the Irish short story has undergone a renaissance in the early twenty- first century, bearing out Kiberd’s analysis:
… the short story is particularly appropriate to a society in which
revolutionary upheavals have shattered the very idea of normality. In the
years in which the modern Irish nation took shape, the short story was the
form in which many writers chose to depict their vision of the emerging
Ireland.501
The recent upsurge of the short story, capturing new versions of a changing Ireland, seems like a replay of the earlier scene Kiberd depicts. A view of the history of the
Irish short story is important to understanding the form’s progression since 1990, especially within times of change and transformation.
In Ireland, the short story in English has maintained its identity as a literary form since the late nineteenth century and has been, at times, privileged over the novel. The prominence of the Irish short story stems from a long storytelling culture:
‘vibrancy of oral story telling in Ireland is one of the reasons why the short story established itself as a characteristically Irish form’.502 It was during the Irish Literary
Revival, also known as the Celtic Revival, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that the short story established itself as the preeminent Irish prose form. The focus on short stories as opposed to novels was a result of the cultural privileging of
Irish nationalists of the time, as part of ‘an abstention from the English literary tradition, and this included the “English novel”’. It was felt that ‘the English novel
501 Ibid., pp. 43–44. 502 Ingman, A History of the Irish Short Story, p. 2. 209
written by Irish novelists had tended to demean Ireland’.503 The short story prevailed;
in the words of J. Wilson Foster, the ‘popular novel [is] entirely missing from
standard accounts of Irish fiction between 1890 and 1940’.504 According to John
Kenny, ‘excepting Joyce and a few other isolated instances, the first five decades of
this [twentieth] century have long been regarded as stagnant as far as the novel genre
goes’.505
The stagnancy of the Irish novel in the early twentieth century, according to
William Trevor, was part of the cultural disposition of the time: ‘the Irish genius for the short story is related to the fact that when the novel reared its head Ireland wasn’t ready for it’.506 He compares the timing of the rise of the Irish short story with the
English Victorian novel, suggesting that the indulgence of a ‘stratified society’ where
‘[w]ealth had purchased leisure and a veneer of sophistication’ provided the ultimate
climate for reading novels; this he contrasts with an Ireland where there was
‘disaffection, repressed religion, the confusion of two languages and the spectre of
famine’.507 Thus, the
civilized bookishness of writing novels, and reading them, was as alien in
an uneasy, still largely peasant society as timeless afternoons of village
503 J. Wilson Foster, ‘The Irish Renaissance, 1840–1940: Prose in English’, in M. Kelleher & P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature Volume II: 1890–2000, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 113–180, p. 113. 504 Ibid., p. 114. 505 J. Kenny, ‘‟No Such Genre”: Tradition and the Contemporary Irish Novel’, in P.J. Matthews (ed.), New Voices in Irish Criticism, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 45–51, p. 48. 506 W. Trevor, ‘Introduction’, in W. Trevor (ed.), The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. ix–xvi, p. xiv. 507 Ibid. 210
cricket still are in the busy, aspiring Ireland of the late twentieth
century.508
Trevor’s analogy, which transports the reader from a peasant to a busy, aspiring society, suggests why the Irish short story retained its privilege over the novel, despite great social change. The successful quest for a mode of expression during the Irish
Literary Revival has had a surprisingly long effect.
The Revival ignited a newfound cultural energy and optimism in Ireland, with
W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory at the forefront. In the realm of short prose, George
Moore and James Joyce established the foundation from which the Irish short story would develop. Moore published his first novel, A Modern Lover, in 1883 and did not
turn to the short story form until 1895 with Celibates, a collection that explores sexuality. From here, Moore’s attention remained on the short story, and despite having spent most of the later nineteenth century in London and Paris, he focused his literary work on Ireland. The Untilled Field, published in 1903, established the short story as a national form. In the preface to the collection, Moore casually writes about his involvement with the Revival and insists The Untilled Field is his contribution,
like Yeats’s foundation of a national art theatre.509 The collection, he writes, began
‘out of no desire for self-expression, but in the hope of furnishing the young Irish of
the future with models’.510 He goes on to say that The Untilled Field ‘was a landmark
in Anglo-Irish literature, a new departure’.511 Luckily Moore’s self-assured preface
proved to be true: his book did serve as a foundation for the Irish short story.
508 Ibid., pp. xiv–xv. 509 G. Moore, ‘Preface’, The Untilled Field (1903), London, Colin Smythe, 1976, pp. xvii–xxii, p. xvii. 510 Ibid. 511 Ibid., p. xxi–xxii. 211
Essentially a book about Ireland, the collection thematises Moore’s anti-clerical and
anti-Catholic beliefs, yet resists didacticism by offering a direct representation. It is heavily influenced by the nostalgic and elegiac tone of Ivan Turgenev, especially in depiction of landscape. The collection is situated between the past and a developing sense of modernity, an exploration of the limiting local and the seemingly limitless international. Characters are frequently caught in conflict between longing and an ironic dissatisfaction, uncertain of their true home. Moore’s stories are uneven, varying significantly in ambition and in length; they range from 64 pages to just seven pages. The contrasting offerings ensure a diverse range of what constitutes an Irish short story.
Joyce’s collection Dubliners, published in 1914, breaks with the tradition set by Moore in the Irish Revival. Dubliners can be considered an anomaly in the development of the Irish short story; the 15 stories are closely unified, with a clear pattern running throughout the entire collection. Furthermore, unlike The Untilled
Field, Joyce’s collection drastically breaks from the Gaelic oral storytelling tradition in style. The stories are largely set in middle-class Dublin, showing the darker side of urban life: drunkenness, entrapment, poverty, loneliness and emigration. The stories offer a sense of progression through time with a tripartite development dealing with childhood, adulthood and maturity. Throughout Dubliners, the participation of the reader in constructing meaning is required, as the stories are full of ellipses, hiatuses and silences, where suggestion, implication and omission rather than direct statements, as in Moore, provide a sense of narrative development. The first story,
‘The Sisters’, provides the organising motif for the collection; it guides the reader in the way the collection should be read; the ending offers suspension rather than closure, ambiguity rather than meaning.
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From the redefining collections of Moore and Joyce, the institution of the Irish
short story began to flourish. Two Cork writers, Sean Ó Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, both published seminal theory texts, The Short Story (1948) and The Lonely Voice: A
Study of the Short Story (1962) respectively. These texts offered not only a review of
the position of the short story in Ireland, but of how it was located on an international
stage, especially in comparison to American and Russian short fiction. Furthermore,
the texts served as a theoretical contribution to establishing the short story as a serious
art form. Ó Faoláin’s book begins with a pragmatic approach offering instruction and
direction, then progresses to an analysis of literary technique and of important short
stories by, for example, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov and Elizabeth Bowen.
Referencing the work of de Maupassant, Ó Faoláin describes one of the most
‘successful innovations of the true modern short-story’ as the ‘narrative without any
explanations, preambles, elaborate introductions, apologies, or other notions as to
place, time or occasion’.512 For him the power of the short story lies in ‘suggestion or
implication’ in ‘abrupt openings’. 513 Early in his text, he focuses on Ireland as ‘a
country where circumstances are particularly complicated and difficult for every type
of artist’, and treats the idea that in Ireland the writer is considered ‘almost like the
concept of the priest … a vocation’ as ‘sheer romantic nonsense’.514 Ó Faoláin argues
that Irish writers face the problems of ‘religion, politics, peasant unsophistication,
lack of stimulus, lack of variety, pervasive poverty, censorship, social
compression’. 515 Romantic ideas of writerly vocation have to be ignored in order to
represent Ireland truly.
512 S. Ó Faoláin, The Short Story, New York, Devin-Adair, 1951, p. 150. 513 Ibid. 514 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 515 Ibid., p. 12. 213
O’Connor’s text, by contrast, is written in a near-colloquial, non-academic style. Regularly referencing Turgenev, Sherwood Anderson and Chekhov as comparisons to George Moore and James Joyce – in fact calling Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio the American equivalent to Moore’s The Untilled Field516 –
O’Connor effectively argues for the power of the short story in times of change and,
most importantly, looks at the difference between the novel and the short story from
an ideological perspective rather than in terms of literary form. O’Connor argues that
the distinction of the short story from the novel comes from ‘an attitude of mind’ that
is inspired by ‘submerged population groups, whatever these may be at the time –
tramps, artists, lonely idealists, dreamers and spoiled priests’.517 By nature, according
to O’Connor, the short story is ‘romantic, individualistic, and intransigent’.518
O’Connor’s theory offered not only an analytical review of short stories at the time,
but suggested why and how the short story flourished in certain cultural periods.
The Bell, a political and literary journal founded by Ó Faoláin in 1940, worked to inspire and promote Irish writing, short stories in particular, alongside a reimagining of Irishness, increase in intellectual debate and a new approach to
cultural heritage. The Bell offered the best short stories of this period, from writers
such as Mary Lavin and James Plunkett; contributors to the inaugural edition included
Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and O’Connor. Published
monthly until 1954, the journal had a liberal and modernising approach to literature
and politics with Ó Faoláin outlining the aims in the first edition:
516 F. O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962), Cork, Cork City Council, 2003, p. 19. 517 Ibid., p. 6. 518 Ibid. 214
We are absolutely inclusive … Whoever you are, then, O reader, Gentile
or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small
House— THE BELL is yours.519
The inclusive approach of The Bell reveals an attempt to revise the ideology of the nation, with a shift from the standard representations of Ireland as rural and Catholic under de Valera’s isolationist policies. It denounced censorship, challenged the
Catholic Church and rejected a sense of nationalism by embracing diversity and celebrating change:
The Bell methodically composed a picture of the Irish nation as it really
was, not as nationalist myth would have it. Thus, the nation was described
as a diversity of people, places, activities, functions, and experiences. And
O’Faolain insisted that each and every element of this diversity was
equally Irish. Thus was unveiled the hidden Ireland of the twentieth
century, those aspects of the national life ignored by official Ireland as
incompatible with the national self-image propagated by Gaelicist
myth. 520
This shift in presenting a diverse national image is, in a literary sense, the most important part of The Bell’s constitution. The stories it published allowed an analytical, inward looking representation of individuals and the changes they were experiencing.
519 S. Ó Faoláin, in The Bell, October 1940, cited in L.W. White, ‘Peadar O’Donnell, ‟Real Republicanism” and The Bell’, The Republic, no. 4, 2005, pp. 80–99, p. 94. 520 Ibid., p. 95. 215
With exposure such as The Bell and New Irish Writing, the short story came to
dominate Irish prose literature throughout the 60s and 70s, with Ó Faoláin, O’Connor,
O’Brien and John McGahern in particular publishing extensively. David Marcus
along with Terrence Smith ran the journal Irish Writing from 1946 until 1954.
Marcus’s promotion of the short story in Ireland continued by his founding and
editing the New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press newspaper from 1968. The page
‘gave new impetus to the short story’ and, ultimately, broadened ‘the basis for a more comprehensive awareness of Irish imaginative prose in the second half of the twentieth century’. 521 His ventures, including the yearly periodical Best Irish Short
Stories beginning in 1976, helped establish writers like Edna O’Brien and John B.
Keane. In the introduction to the first edition of Best Irish Short Stories, Marcus
argues that Ireland has ‘no novel tradition’, and that the ‘short story is the repository
of a rich store of social history’.522 Marcus continued to write about Ireland’s new
found freedom in the 70s, arguing that the short stories presented in the edition
represent ‘an Ireland in a state of flux, an Ireland of the old, but not ancient, and of the
new, but not trendy … forced at last to regard the unacceptable face of reality’.523 The
perceived importance of the Irish short story in his view is clear: to offer a challenge,
in a similar vein to The Bell, to preconceived ideas of Irishness.
Marcus’s idea of the Irish short story’s task of cultural challenge in the 1970s
has strong resemblances to its role in the Celtic Tiger period and beyond. As a form,
the short story is most advantageously positioned on the cusp of change: whether
521 G. O’Brien, ‘Contemporary prose in English: 1940–2000’, in M. Kelleher & P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature Volume II: 1890–2000, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 421–477, pp. 422–423. 522 D. Marcus, ‘Introduction’, in Best Irish Short Stories, D. Marcus (ed.), London, Elek Books, 1976, pp. 9–12, p. 10. 523 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 216
between modernity and tradition in the Celtic Revival, between nationalism and revisionism in the mid-twentieth century, or at the change from economic boom to recession in the early twenty-first century. As a form, the short story can represent a transitional state by being at once both confusing and illuminating. The realm of shifting identities is where the short story operates; it offers a portrayal of immediate and quotidian experience rather than a retrospective charting of development and change. The Celtic Tiger saw the weakening representation of the family unit, declining power of the Catholic Church and an unprecedented increase in consumerism, individualism and national confidence. This surge provided inspiration for novels to explore the ideas and concepts presented by the period and the times preceding it, concerning the redefining of ‘notions of Irishness, and in identity politics, manifested through globalization, feminization and other changes in economics, politics and religion’. 524 The link between the huge growth of the novel and the surge in Irish national confidence suggests that novel production can be linked to a notion of cultural stability:
The novel form … is perhaps best suited to deal with and register these
fluctuations. While it would be easy to declare that there has been an
upsurge in the production of the Irish novel in this period – because there
has been such an upsurge – mirroring economic growth, more interesting
is how seriously the contemporary Irish novel is now taken by critics who,
in acquiescing wholeheartedly to the zeitgeist, cannot escape the
pervasive impression that all has changed utterly. 525
524 Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c.1970–2000, p. 147. 525 Hand, A History of the Irish Novel, p. 254. 217
The ‘zeitgeist’ referred to here embraces the dominance of the novel form during the
Celtic Tiger period, as represented by the three authors examined in this thesis. High novel production came at a time of economic prosperity; however, with the advent of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the publication of short stories increased as it became the form to represent best a new instability in national identity. As the effects of the Celtic Tiger’s death began to be felt, this shift is most evident. The short story, as a form, permits silences and suggestions, allows questions to remain unanswered, and registers the confusions of experience in a period of crisis. Trevor’s view of the earlier Irish short story’s relation to its contemporary circumstances seems applicable to describe the later situation also:
The novel had seized upon heroics that for so long had distinguished the
fiction of the myths, the sagas and the parables. The modern short story
grew out of what remained …. It told as little as it dared, but often it
glimpsed into a world as large and as complicated as anything either the
legend or the novel could provide.526
One might say that the contemporary Irish short story captures moments of the dying boom without the need (or perhaps the possibility) of a retrospective explanation that provides answers. As I hope to indicate in the analyses provided in this chapter, it offers complicated representations of fleeting moments without attempting justification or a full picture.
526 Trevor, in Trevor (ed.), The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, p. xiv. 218
A remarkable feature about the Irish novelists featured in this thesis – Doyle,
Enright and Tóibín – is that they all returned to or began writing short stories after the
death of the Celtic Tiger and after establishing successful careers as novelists. This
shared shift in form is a unifying feature in their otherwise varied careers and seems
to suggest the close link between choice of form and cultural and economic context.
Doyle has published The Deportees and Other Stories (2007) and Bullfighting (2011).
Tóibín’s short stories centre on the family so heavily that it permeates the titles of
both collections – Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). Unlike
Doyle and Tóibín, Enright began her literary career with a collection of short stories –
The Portable Virgin (1991) – as John Banville did with Long Lankin (1970) and Neil
Jordan with Night in Tunisia (1976), but she returned to the form in the late Celtic
Tiger period after establishing her career as a novelist with a second short story collection, Taking Pictures (2008). Doyle’s, Enright’s and Tóibín’s almost
simultaneous turning to the short story after decades of novel production indicates
deliberate choice and treats the shorter form as a field of mastery rather than
apprenticeship.
My purpose in combining Doyle, Enright and Tóibín in this penultimate
chapter is to reinforce the relation of cultural, economic and social factors not only to
literary content but also to literary form and its reception. As my survey of its history
has suggested, the Irish short story has been proven to be a form that thrives on the
cusp of change and that offers a chance to explore what is not yet understood. Both
form and content, I shall argue, express the influence and effect of the contemporary
economy and culture; the increasing difficulty in understanding Ireland created the
literary need to produce short stories; in the post-Celtic Tiger era, Ireland became unidentifiable. The changes in Ireland during this period created a cumulative effect,
219
making it ‘difficult for Irish society to develop a coherent image of itself. The place was hard to grasp’.527 Images of the past that dominated the present dwindled, allowing contemporary issues to move into the foreground. With the contemporary filling the pages, the reader was required to construct meaning from hints and fleeting references that deferred conclusions to a future time beyond the narrative scope of the short story form. In their story collections, Doyle, Enright and Tóibín each tackle different aspects of a transforming society and national identity, such as immigration, emigration, gender, sexuality, unemployment and ageing. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which O’Connor’s argument that ‘submerged population groups’ reign in the short story apply to my selected writers.528 Doyle’s stories tend to focus on contemporary versions of these ‘groups’, such as immigrants and the unemployed.
Enright looks at the lives of marginalised or threatened women, whilst Tóibín, at times, focuses on emigrants and priests. In all these examples, the short story seems the appropriate form to deal with situations emerging into cultural consciousness, where no summary or conclusive overview can be provided. O’Connor’s argument that the form is better suited to particular issues and minor population groups may hold true. Shorter fiction explores these issues by exploiting the capabilities and accepting the limitations of the genre in ways suggested by Bakhtin’s contrasting view of the novel:
In order to create a novel it is necessary to learn to see life in terms of the
novelistic story, necessary to learn to see the wider and deeper
relationships of life on a large scale. There is an abyss of difference
527 F. O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, London, Faber & Faber, 2010, p. 180. 528 O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, p. 6. 220
between the ability to grasp the isolated unit of a chance situation and the
ability to understand the unity and inner logic of a whole epoch. There is,
therefore, an abyss between the anecdote and the novel. But the mastery
of any aspect of the epoch – family life, social or psychological life, etc. –
is inseparable from the means of separation, i.e. from the basic
possibilities of genre construction.529
According to Bakhtin’s theory, the novel attempts to capture the ‘inner logic of a
whole epoch’ while the short story takes a complex, confronting issue without
expectations of establishing deep relationships or offering a wider sense of
understanding or sense of completeness. There are, indeed, significant generic
differences between the short story and novel; in particular, the short story possesses
an ability to explore an issue without the need to understand it fully, without the need
for a retrospective look, which is impossible in the current circumstances. The short
story was, thus, the primary literary form for Ireland in the latter stages in the Celtic
Tiger and the years afterward. This is not an absolute distinction; in the view of some
writers, both national economic prosperity and uncertainty had unsettling effects. In
the fiction of the authors I discuss in this thesis – Enright, Tóibín and Doyle –, there
are indications of problems in both prosperity and depression. Yet in the shorter form
all three attempt authenticity in capturing the changing national consciousness
through brief glimpses of Irish life.
529 M.M. Bakhtin & P.M. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, A.J. Wehrle (trans.), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. 134–135.
221
Anne Enright
In describing the attitude of Ireland post-Celtic Tiger, Anne Enright suggests that the
short story is the most suitable form to offer painful truths about the country:
When there is much rubbish talked about a country, when the air is full of
large ideas about what we are, or what we are not, then the writer offers
truths that are delightful and small. We write against our own foolishness,
not anyone else’s. In which case the short story is as good a place as any
other to keep things real.530
The two short story collections by Enright were published together in Yesterday’s
Weather in 2008, serving as an amalgamation of old and new material, so that the
collection represents not only recent rapid cultural change experienced in Ireland but
the process that preceded it. Four novels and seventeen years separate the two
collections; their publication in one volume highlights Enright’s development as a
writer, and reflects not only changes in the form of the short story, but also changes in
Ireland between 1991 and 2008. In an interview, Enright discusses how she approaches representing change:
A lot of the creative impulse is about overcoming restriction. If you look
at how a society changes, there was a stage in Ireland where you could say
that change had effectively happened but that people didn’t yet realise
it. 531
530 Enright, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, p. xviii. 531 Enright, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 2. 222
The short story seems particularly suited to suggest that experience of a state of
unperceived change. The idea of restriction articulated by Enright is relevant to her
early work in particular. The Portable Virgin has a main focus on women’s bodies and desires, foregrounding themes explored in her later novels. Taking Pictures, on the other hand, focuses on mortality. The protagonists of each story are middle aged and are either struggling with or embracing the process of ageing. This most recent collection deals with changes in society with a wider focus, and represents a characteristic of Enright’s writing: moving from experiment to an embrace of tradition. Her early writing is unconventional, surreal and dark, working on a metaphysical level rather than offering realist explanations. Her early short stories are fragmented, interweaving scenes that neither progress the central story nor relate to the concerns of the protagonist. That is not to say The Portable Virgin itself is without metaphorical coherence; it offers a reflection on the process of storytelling, and can be read as breaking down the barrier between the narrative and the reader or, alternatively, as arcing back to the tradition of oral storytelling. Ultimately, the stories reject notions of cultural tradition, hinting at a progressive Ireland through a juxtaposition of tradition and modernity and an emphasis on self-consciousness.
Enright’s early short stories are typified by both anxious alienation and sudden revelations. In a way that has been considered exemplary of the early 1990s, their style breaks down the barriers of literary tradition in an attempt to represent a version of Irish consciousness:
motifs of fragmentation and incompletion are themselves amongst the
most recurrent in recent Irish writing, being especially marked in the
223
contemporary short story, a genre which has proved highly effective in
rendering the discordant juxtapositions of post 1990 Ireland.532
An analysis of The Portable Virgin suggests a close relationship between the form of its stories and the sense of ‘fragmentation and incompletion’ in Ireland of which Harte speaks. Enright’s title story, ‘The Portable Virgin’, opens with three short paragraphs referring to a well-kept woman ‘who was afraid her face might fall off if the tension went out of her eyes’, in contrast to the narrator’s ‘dowdy’ self who is ‘like an old sofa, welcoming, familiar, well-designed’.533 The narrative shifts, quickly, to a direct
admission: ‘[t]his is the usual betrayal story, as you have already guessed’.534
Enright’s acknowledgment of the reader and declaration of fictionality crosses
traditional literary expectations, further emphasised with the repeated references ‘[i]t
is not a story about …’, ‘[i]t is not a story where …’.535 Enright’s metafictional
strategy challenges readers to make sense of the story by constructing their own
connections from early in the narrative. There are few signifiers to situate the story in
a temporal context, but ‘Grafton Street’ and ‘Dollymount Strand’ signal a Dublin
setting. 536
The narrator, Mary, is preoccupied with her husband’s mistress, who is also named Mary, ‘a poor maimed woman who has a law degree and tendency to
532 L. Harte, ‘‟Tomorrow we will change our names, invent ourselves again”: Irish fiction and autobiography since 1990’, in S. Brewster and M. Parker (eds), Irish Literature since 1990 – Diverse Voices, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009, pp. 201–215, p. 201. 533 A. Enright, The Portable Virgin (1991), London, Vintage, 2007, p. 81. 534 Ibid. 535 Ibid., p. 82. 536 Ibid., pp. 85–86. 224
overdress’.537 The story maintains an intense and obsessive focus on the mistress,
with little further suggestion of narrative development or plot:
She is the silence at the other end of the phone. She is the smile that he
starts but does not finish. She is the woman standing at the top of the road,
with cheap nail-polish and punctured ears. She is the girl at the front of
the class, with ringlets and white knees and red eyes.538
The repetitive categorisation of the mistress through ‘she is’ gives the character a
variety of roles, ranging from merely the woman the narrator’s husband is sleeping
with to an imagined version of the mistress as a university student. This paragraph
also sets the mistress in opposition to the narrator, making the story a critique of the
patriarchal virgin/whore dichotomy.539 Mary, the wife, is positioned within the
domestic realm; signifiers of knitting and living rooms permeate her construction.
Mary, the mistress, is described in highly sexualised and feminised terms, as if an
object of male desire.
Mary, the narrator, goes to a hairdressing salon for a physical transformation;
her metamorphosis into her opposite implies that her husband will end the affair, or
indeed ‘break’ up, with the other Mary.540 At the hairdressers, the name Mary becomes synonymous of all women featured in the story: ‘Mary is sitting to my left and to my right’.541 Mary, the narrator, steals a handbag from another Mary at the
537 Ibid., p. 83. 538 Ibid., p. 84. 539 J. Shumaker, ‘Uncanny Doubles: The Fiction of Anne Enright’, New Hibernia Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 2005, pp. 107–122, pp. 108–110. 540 Enright, The Portable Virgin, p. 86. 541 Ibid. 225
salon and in it, she finds ‘a small, portable Virgin … made of transparent plastic,
except for her cloak which is coloured blue’.542 The portable Virgin Mary becomes a
metaphor for Mary, the narrator. Like the plastic ‘present from Lourdes’,543 Mary the
narrator becomes as beautiful as she is fake in the process of remaking herself to win
back her husband’s affection. After her salon metamorphosis she says, ‘[t]he new fake
me looks twice as real as the old’.544
The symbolic value of Mary as both the narrator and her enemy relates to the
image of the Madonna:
Mary is worshipped in places where the symbol of the subject housewife
applies more readily, and therefore both reinforces and justifies the ruling
state of affairs, in which women are expected to be, and are, men’s
devoted mothers and wives.545
The story’s saturation with ambiguous relevance to Mary ensures that the limiting definition of Mary as the symbol of female compliance is deconstructed; Enright has described that as a motivation of her early work:
All beliefs, nearly all kind of national and religious beliefs, involve,
finally, women staying at home …. So that is part of the deconstructive
542 Ibid., p. 87. 543 Ibid. 544 Ibid. 545 M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Culture of the Virgin Mary, New York, Vintage, 1976, p. 191. 226
project …. I thought it was part of my job to say things that Irish women
had not said previously … it was one of my original impulses.546
Accordingly, Enright’s female characters are turned ‘into subjects as part of a broader set of problems about gender and the objectification of women’.547 The main issue of the story is not the husband’s adultery, but rather a dark exploration of the positioning of the women in relation to each other. The ambiguity in the story moves toward a conclusion on an abstract level; the originally dowdy narrator’s heightened performance of femininity shows a need not only to be desired by men but also to experience desire herself. The individual woman as a complex character has become, for Enright, a sustained focus throughout her career.
The opening story of the collection, ‘(She Owns) Every Thing’ focuses on
Cathy, who works at the handbag counter of a department store in Dublin. It begins:
Cathy was often wrong, she found it more interesting. She was wrong
about the taste of bananas. She was wrong about the future of the bob. She
was wrong about where her life ended up. She loved corners, surprises,
changes of light.548
The third person omniscient narrator maintains a certain distance from the protagonist whilst exhibiting a high level of intimate knowledge. The immediate construction of
546 C. Bracken & S. Cahill, ‘An Interview with Anne Enright, August 2009’, pp. 21– 22. 547 Ibid., p. 22. 548 Enright, The Portable Virgin, p. 3. 227
Cathy seems effortless but the use of repetition foreshadows emotional depths that
could possibly be explored in the story.
The monotony of Cathy’s daily life establishes the pace of the narrative.
Everything is organised and in a strict routine; the narrative seems directionless until,
when selling a bag, she hears a snatch of conversation: ‘‟Just a credit card and a
condom,” said one young woman to another and Cathy felt the ache of the times changing’. 549 From here, the story turns into short bursts of imagery that suggest
change not only in women, but in Ireland. For example, Cathy’s categorisation of her
customers becomes a survey of types of women in Ireland:
A woman who cries in the lingerie department.
A woman who laughs while trying on hats.
A woman who buys two coats of a different colour.550
The selection of symbols used here can be read in multiple and varying ways as there
is no obvious representation. Firstly, the crying woman in the lingerie department can
be read as a woman who does not feel like an object of desire, a theme explored in
this collection. The woman who laughs while trying on hats and the woman who buys
two coats of a different colour suggest opulence, recalling the credit card image, and
consumerism. At the time of the collection’s publication, Ireland was on the brink of
the Celtic Tiger with a significant increase in consumer culture and credit card use.
Cathy has married a teacher, with whom ‘[s]ex was a pleasant surprise’.551
The life of routine and organisation is interrupted when
549 Ibid., p. 4. 550 Ibid., p. 5. 551 Ibid., p. 6. 228
Cathy fell in love one day with a loose, rangy woman who came to her
counter and to her smile and seemed to pick her up with the same ease as
she did an Argentinean calf-skin shoulder bag in tobacco brown … It was
quite a surprise.552
This fleeting encounter, in which the customer leaves without buying anything,
transforms Cathy as she delves into a series of sexualised thoughts of the woman.
From here, Cathy begins to slip, her work falters and she empties her savings account
and ‘stuff[s] … the till of her own counter full of notes’ after a shopping spree
creating a strong image of isolation, a consumerist circulation of things going
nowhere. Her self-control diminishes, and acknowledges the moment with the woman as ‘the one fatal bag’.553 This marker of transformation is followed by the concluding
sentence: ‘[s]he started to sleep around’.554 The final sentence offers a mark of change that echoes the ‘ache’ of change Cathy feels when the young women speak of condoms.555 Cathy originally embodies a sense of tradition until her metamorphosis
sends her into the lifestyle she once detested. She functions as a symbol for the drastic
changes that were happening in Ireland, including the influence of a consumer culture
and liberation of the female body – a strange conflation of consumer culture with sexual desire that can be seen as either liberating or capturing the female body.
Cathy’s narrative can be divided in half, between the early image of her marriage and when she begins to be unfaithful to her husband. These contrasted
552 Ibid. 553 Ibid., p. 8. 554 Ibid. 555 Ibid., p. 4. 229
identities emblematise problems of gender expectation and the long-lasting effect of tradition. Cathy’s shift can be linked to consumerism, symbolised by the bag. When the symbol of the bag punctuates the story, two fields of discourse emerge: one of tradition and one of rapid consumerist change. The designer bag becomes a marker of self-worth for Cathy in Ireland’s capitalist age.
‘Liking’ differs from most of Enright’s oeuvre in its narrative method. Almost resembling Roddy Doyle’s work in its structure and pace, the entire story is a series of dialogue conversation snippets totalling three pages. The six conversation snippets seem unrelated and without purpose, but juxtapose different characters and themes.
Unconventional large spaces separate each section, typographically representing postmodern gaps within which the reader is to conjure images and construct meaning.
Each conversation begins in medias res with no contextual set up, sense of plot, or even clear narrative purpose. The reader is offered a fleeting but seemingly significant moment. The snippets, however, employ distinctly Irish patterns of assonance and half-rhyme that becomes a feature of Enright’s writing in her later work. The rhythmic and repetitive structure of the dialogue suggests a setting in a local pub, in a nod to Irish oral storytelling: ‘I’ll tell you what happened now, not an hour past’.556 The dialogue is stylised, with a heightened melodic and rhythmic effect:
‘How would you like it, how would you like it, if you were standing
talking to a man in a bar as far away from me as you are now? How would
you like it, if you said ‘I’ll see you tomorrow so,’ and he said, ‘I’ll see you
556 Enright, The Portable Virgin, p. 49. 230
Jim, good luck?’ How would you like it if he walked out that door, and he
got the head taken off him with the clip of a truck?’.557
Finishing a sentence with ‘so’ instead of ‘then’ is a linguistic trait common in Irish
English as a mark of emphasis or a signifier of agreement. This brief passage, with the
melodic repetition of ‘how would you like it’ and the rhyming of ‘luck’ and ‘truck’
could be read as a miniature short story in itself: it offers setting, character, narrative
development and conflict. The same conversation continues:
‘He did. And how would you like it if you saw O’Neill on the beach?
Because I’ve told you something, but I haven’t told you the whole truth.’
‘Don’t tell me now.’
‘I won’t so.’ 558
The listener in the pub postpones the whole story by insisting the storyteller stops.
This is humorously ambiguous; ‘Don’t tell me now’ could be read as ‘You don’t say’
or ‘That’s terrible’, but then the story-teller seems to take it literally. Alternatively, this could be read as satire on storytelling and listening: in postponement, in silence is knowledge. ‘… I’ve told you something, but I haven’t told you the whole truth’ could be read as a version of the purpose of the entire collection. Enright offers the reader some information, some images, some dialogue but never constructs the whole picture. Like the receiver of the story in the examined conversation, the reader of this collection is left with minimal, highly stylised information. The suggestiveness of
557 Ibid., p. 50. 558 Ibid. 231
silence here offers an effective lack of closure; the open ending not only provides an
ambiguous conclusion but also suggests an ambiguous purpose to the story itself.
The Portable Virgin shakes the representation of Irish women, by bringing
them into a surreal world where traditional expectations are lost and new identities are
found. The short story form permits an open-endedness and ambiguity free from
expectations of clear causality and final resolution. The lack of explicatory detail
opens up a space for the reader to engage with the possibilities of change, in an
Ireland on the cusp of transformation. Enright's characters may experience these
changes as destructive, tearing apart the social fabric of Ireland, but in the absence of
any final judgement, there remains a hint of hopefulness for the as yet unrealised
future of Irish life.
By contrast with The Portable Virgin, Taking Pictures offers a dose of literary
realism, rejecting the postmodern techniques once celebrated by Enright. Instead, the
reader is offered a unified narrative in a more traditional short story style. Taking
Pictures seems to exemplify Valerie Shaw’s view that short stories
often work towards a single moment of revelation … suddenly the
fundamental secret of things is made accessible and ordinary
circumstances are transfused with significance.559
The collection offers explanatory insights and narrative closures not evident in The
Portable Virgin. Its return to traditional form accompanies a revaluation of the
condition of Ireland. The stories are unified by a sense of loss, relating both to a loss
559 V. Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction, London, Longman, 1983, p. 193. 232
of national identity and to themes of ageing and impending death. The moments of
insight offered through the collection still focus on women’s lives, as in The Portable
Virgin, but now the insights are moments of clarity in relation to social change and
damage, rather than intimations of bodily desire as before.
‘Until the Girl Died’ is a highly self-conscious first person narrative about a
woman who is affected by the death of her husband’s mistress, his ‘lapse’.560
Retrospective narration – ‘[a]ll this in hindsight, of course’561 – makes the story read
as if the narrator is speaking to a friend, confiding hidden truths. It opens with
immediate conflict: ‘The girl died. Well, what was it to me? The girl died. … Silly
twit’. 562 The opening section throws the reader into a fast-paced internal reflection where conversational idioms move the plot along:
I don’t think he visits prostitutes – I mean, some men do, some men must.
Or quite a lot of men must, actually – but my husband doesn’t. And I
know, I know, I would say that, but …563
The narrative is represented as unprocessed thoughts, as emphasised though redundant repetition and unfinished sentences. There is doubt in the narrator’s tone when she is trying to convince herself of her husband’s morality. While her husband struggles with the death of the girl, the narrator seems to be on damage control to hold her family and marriage together – ‘He works hard, my husband. I have always been a great asset to him’564 – but pride becomes her motivation: ‘I wasn’t having the mess
560 A. Enright, Taking Pictures, London, Jonathan Cape, 2008, p. 189. 561 Ibid., p. 194. 562 Ibid., p. 189. 563 Ibid. 564 Ibid., p. 190. 233
of it all over my beautiful, hard-won house’.565 The narrator’s performance in the domestic realm becomes captivating, the constant struggle of a woman flirting with the idea of revenge against her husband and the mistress’s family while attempting to retain her domestic bliss. She is emotionally unsure, acknowledging her husband as a fantastic man but, early in the story, cannot name him to the reader: ‘Ke … I can’t say his name. Isn’t that funny?’. 566 This lack of identification with her husband signifies the damage that he has done, and the effect that the girl’s death has had on their lives.
The emotional exploration of the narrator subsequently dims the representation of the husband’s experience of grief; it becomes secondary, a peripheral circumstance to the individual consciousness of the narrator.
The focus on the narrator’s life shows the effect not only of domestic living but also of domestic expectations. For a month, the ‘proud’ narrator ‘watched him – my fantastic, stupid man – lurch around in his life’.567 During this time, their domestic routine is represented by mirroring phrases, italicised in the text for emphasis, situated between paragraphs, and centred on her suspicion of his absences:
Where’s the gas bill gone when will you be home would you pick up
Shauna from her ballet?
…
Where’s the key to the shed when will you be home would you buy a pack
of plastic blades for the Flymo?
…
565 Ibid., p. 191. 566 Ibid., p. 190. 567 Ibid., pp. 196–197. 234
I think that the milk’s gone off when will you be home I really don’t want
the children having TV sets in their rooms.568
The sentences offer an insight into the never-ending domestic standard the narrator
feels she needs to uphold. This is juxtaposed with the theme of death: the husband is
‘[t]hinking it wouldn’t be so bad to be dead, after all. Like she was’.569 The
juxtaposition of domesticity and death represents the extensive damage in the
narrator’s life, marriage and home.
After visiting the grave of the girl, to tell ‘her that she mattered’, the narrator offers an insight into her self-development and healing by being able to name her
husband: ‘I went home and said to Kevin’. 570 ‘Until the Girl Died’ is full of ambiguity
and irony as the story is told in retrospect, but it also offers a clear progress from
domestic turmoil to renewal. The lack of focus on the children and the lack of
description of character and setting suggests that the narrator is speaking to a knowing
listener, someone who knows her well. The sense of emotional depth throughout the
story and its movement towards emotional reconnection between the three characters
can be contrasted with the consumerist desire of ‘(She Owns) Every Thing’, as a
revaluating and traditional statement of what apparently matters.
In ‘The Cruise’, the third-person omniscient narration offers a somewhat
distant exploration of the reality of death and ageing. The story follows the dynamic
between Kate and her elderly parents, and their recent discovery of a love of travel.
The story opens:
568 Ibid., pp. 196–197. Emphasis in text. 569 Ibid., p. 197. 570 Ibid., p. 198. 235
In the spring of that last year, Kate’s parents took a notion and went on a
cruise …. Watching them go through the departure gate at Dublin airport
– her mother wearing a powder-blue tracksuit and her father in white
running shoes – Kate realised that they would die. It was the tracksuit that
did it. 571
Immediately, the story foreshadows a death with the acknowledgement of ‘that last year’. The tracksuit and white running shoes construct an eerie image of an elderly couple, perhaps because they are more appropriate clothing for the young. The narrative progresses as in ‘Until the Girl Died’, told in retrospect with examples of foreshadowing throughout. Despite the focus on Kate’s domestic life – ‘it seemed that a week on a cruise liner had the same number of days and nights [as] in her kitchen’, the focus remains on her parents.572 In discussion of their trip, ‘they seemed slightly disappointed with the world, now that seeing it was so easy’.573 This small insight positions Kate’s parents as a marker of change, come from an Ireland where travel was much less easy and affordable.
The narrative is carried by the excitement of Kate’s parents, re-telling the same stories about their trip. The pace is suddenly arrested by the revelation that
Kate’s father is quite ill. The cruise becomes a ‘fixed point’ of ‘how well [he] looked’.574 He dies soon after:
571 Ibid., p. 209. 572 Ibid., p. 211. 573 Ibid. 574 Ibid., p. 214. 236
… it was just so outrageous: watching the tide of their father’s death wash
over him and recede, wave after wave of it, until, by the end, they didn’t
know if they had wanted him to stay, or to go.575
This highly metaphorical and lyrical passage contrasts with the rest of the narrative’s clear, direct story telling. It is similar to the style Enright exhibits in her novels; the succinct short story effect is, for a moment, abandoned. It works powerfully against the story, slowing its pace while increasing emotional effect, emphasising that loss teaches you what you really value.
Grief has an astounding effect on Kate’s mother: ‘she looked like Bacall might have done at the death of Bogart: untouchable’.576 This simile adds a sense of glamour and elegance to the funeral scene, poised between surface and depth. The story is surrounded and infiltrated by death, first mentioned in the opening paragraph and closing with the death of Kate’s father. Enright’s view of the elderly couple contrasts her focus on themes of adultery, desire and consumerism in middle-aged women. The core images in this story construct it as a snapshot of the condition of an older Ireland in a contemporary setting. There is a metaphorical connection suggested between the travel voyage the two parents embark on at the beginning and the father's death at the end; the notion of going can also be metaphorically linked with the Irish tradition of emigration, usually represented by a younger demographic, but here unlimited by age. It is the old who become estranged, leaving an Ireland which has in other ways left them behind.
575 Ibid. 576 Ibid. 237
‘Taking Pictures’ examines a couple's relationship in the lead up to their
wedding. The narrator ‘laugh[s]’ when she sees the ring, claiming she does not ‘know
what it is to be in love, even less to be married’.577 The story circles around the narrator’s relationship, not with her fiancé Frank, but with her jealous work colleague,
Sarah, who has a personality problem: ‘her problem is that she does not like other people’s personalities’.578
The shift to a younger couple is an interesting move; unlike Enright’s other
characters, they are not in the midst of a domestic routine. Instead, ideas of marriage
are presented in an ambiguous manner: ‘… just for now, married seems to me more.
And less, of course. But mostly more’.579 Uncertainty about marriage saturates the
story, yet it is presented as a secure and safe realm:
I have a feeling that something massive is going to hit me. I feel like I
have been fighting in the surf all my life. Now, out beyond the last, the
biggest wave, there is open sea.580
Enright’s marine imagery here constructs marriage as a space of idyllic calm and
appreciation, beyond the competitive struggles of single life. This illusion is broken
when she invites Sarah and her ‘bisexual boyfriend’ Fiach, to Frank’s flat for dinner;
the story turns into an intense dinner scene full of sexual innuendo and hints of
traumatic pasts, in typical Enright style.581
577 Ibid., p. 93. 578 Ibid., p. 94. 579 Ibid., p. 93. 580 Ibid., pp. 93–94. 581 Ibid., p. 96. 238
Dialogue is quick and superficial, interrupted by sporadic descriptions of the tensions between the four characters. While discussing Fiach’s doing the photography for the wedding, Sarah attempts to set her drink on fire: ‘[f]or a moment, all four of us watch the flames spill across the wood. … The fire gathers the air and loses it; drinking it, slurping it down’.582 This is the first time something consequential happens in the story with an unambiguous clarity and purpose, contrasting the milieu of social hypocrisy, including the narrator’s false friendship with Sarah, and her underlying fear of marriage despite yearning for its security. Enright critiques harmful competition between single women while suggesting that marriage is not the answer to happiness. The title, ‘Taking Pictures’, both describes her own activity as a writer on aspects of contemporary Ireland and attacks a culture of superficiality and false reality in which people pose for various situations in the way that is expected of them.
Enright’s shift from postmodern experiment to a more traditional short story form apparently accompanies and enforces a desire for more clarity and honesty in a changing and unpredictable Ireland, uncertain of both its present and future course.
The development of Enright’s style demonstrates the evolution of her stance as writer on the Irish scene; instead of challenging traditional literary expectations, her more recent stories are written as if Ireland needs a dose of realism. They seek for the realities of life beneath the evasions and disguises of her protagonists as they cope with cultural changes.
Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle’s story collections The Deportees and Other Stories and Bullfighting are a direct response to changing social and economic factors experienced in Ireland, in
582 Ibid., p. 100. 239
particular to immigration and the economic recession. These stories offer stark, ambiguous images of a drastically changing nation.
The Deportees, Doyle’s first formal collection of short stories, has been credited with redefining what it means to be Irish, or rather, extending the definition to include the recent influx of migrants into the country. The 2006 Census, the year before the collection was published, recorded that 420,000 ‘non-Irish nationals living in Ireland at the time of the census in April 2006 came from 188 different countries’ making up 10 per cent of the national population.583 This diversity posed immediate and long lasting questions about integration and acceptance to a society traditionally seen as mono-ethnic. It is argued, however, that
the hegemonic narrative that emigration from a mono-ethnic society has
been replaced by immigration into a rapidly changing, multi-ethnic
society is, in certain respects, misleading. Ireland has been a country of
immigration before. It has also always had a multi-ethnic population and
it has always had an immigrant population … the 1996 Census can be
taken as marking the beginning of a modern period of net immigration.584
This period of net immigration also relates to the increase of those arriving in Ireland to seek asylum. During the 1990s, the numbers of those claiming asylum in Ireland
583 ‘Census 2006 – Non-Irish Nationals living in Ireland’, Central Statistics, 2007,
grew steadily. In 1992, ‘39 people sought asylum in Ireland’,585 rising to around
10,000 per year by 2000 ‘peaking to 11,634 in 2002 before dropping to 7,900 in 2003, and 4,304 in 2005’.586 Furthermore, until 1999, ‘54 per cent of the asylum seeker population came from three countries: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Algeria’.587
In the foreword to The Deportees, Doyle explores changes in Ireland as a result of the boom:
Three or four years into our new national prosperity, I was already reading
and hearing elegies to simpler times, before we became so materialistic –
the happy days when more people left Ireland than were born here; when
we were afraid to ask anyone what they did for a living, because the
answer might be ‘Nothing’; when we sent our pennies and our second-
hand clothes to Africa but never saw a flesh-and-blood African. The
words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ were being flung around the place, and the
stories were doing the rounds.588
It was these stories that Doyle attempted to capture, while exploring issues of racism and national identity. The Deportees began as episodic short stories with 800-word chapters for Metro Éireann, Ireland’s first multicultural newspaper, established in
585 A. White, ‘Irishness, Whiteness and Place: the political geographies of asylum seeker dispersal in contemporary Ireland’, p. 4,
April 2000 by Chinedu Onyejelem and Abel Ugba. Doyle approached the editors and
offered his stories: the premise behind it was to ‘embrace the new changes in Ireland creatively, rather than see them as statistics’.589 The Deportees explores the changing
face of Ireland with a focus on immigration – not only shining a light on characters
previously ignored, but addressing evidence of Irish racism.
Unlike the short stories of Enright and Tóibín, Doyle’s offer little ambiguity,
omission or suggestion. Instead, Doyle captures Ireland with a sometimes extensive
employment of setting, character construction and dialogue. This style may be a
product of Doyle’s writing the stories in episodic chapters for Metro Éireann. Some
of the eight short stories read like shortened versions of his novels, filled with
humorous dialogue in a north-side Dublin setting. Three stories in particular – ‘New
Boy’, ‘Guess Who Is Coming for the Dinner’ and ‘The Deportees’ – typify this
collection. They provide insight into tensions about immigration and asylum seekers, and offer possible resolutions, albeit idealist ones. Doyle asserts that the rise in
immigrants offers an ideal platform for not only new stories but also a new sense of
space:
Follow a Nigerian around Dublin and you’ll walk a new geography –
meeting places, church halls, lanes, supermarkets, corners to go to or
avoid. Follow a Latvian in north County Dublin, and you’ll see men and
women, bending down in the muck, picking potatoes. Follow a Chinese
student walking home – observe his dear. Follow a young Ethiopian
family walking through Arnott’s department store – observe their
589 Doyle, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 148. 242
excitement. Look at the expressions on the faces of the people they pass.
Look at the couple in the Forum Bar, African and Irish, trying to
understand each other, wanting to.590
‘New Boy’ marks a significant shift in Doyle’s fiction, and resonates his sense of observation of change. It shows a level of sophistication and development not seen in his earlier novels. As in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the narration is in the third person, here focalised through nine-year-old Joseph, a new boy on his first day in an Irish classroom. The narration is stunted; short sentences open the story:
He sits.
He sits in the classroom. It is his first day.
He is late.
He is five years late.
And that is very late, he thinks. 591
The simple syntax gives immediate insight into the character’s place in a new environment. The sentences suggest an elementary reader, a mind trying to orientate itself in new surroundings. Throughout the story, it is never quite clear exactly where
Joseph comes from, nor if he is a refugee or a migrant. This ambiguity ensures the protagonist cannot be immediately categorised or positioned in a certain light. The story continues with the repetition of ‘he thinks’ as Joseph attempts to comprehend
590 Doyle, ‘Green Yodel No. 1’, in Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Re-Imagining Ireland, p. 69. 591 Doyle, The Deportees, p. 78. 243
what is around him. It becomes clear to the reader that Joseph is not a local through
this first interaction with a student, Christian Kelly:
– Live-Aid. Hey, Live-Aid. Do they know it’s Christmas?
It is Monday, the 10th day of January. It is sixteen days after Christmas.
This is a very stupid boy.
The reference is to the 1985 dual-venue charity concert, Live-Aid, that raised funds
for the Ethiopian famine, preceded by the 1984 single ‘Do They Know It’s
Christmas?’ This over twenty-year-old reference suggests that Joseph is black, but also reveals that the politics of a classroom, even at age nine, reflect the complexities of race in contemporary Ireland. Preconceptions of race have been passed from one generation to the next. The confusion of Joseph emphasises not only the age of the reference but how far removed it is from his reality.
As in all of Doyle’s fiction, there is much dialogue in ‘New Boy’ to maintain the pace of the narrative, but unusually, there is now internal reflection to interpret and analyse meaning: ‘What did Christian Kelly mean? You are dead. Joseph thinks
about these words and this too is not difficult. It is very clear that Joseph is not
dead’.592 The movement to the character’s internal dialogue and internal confusion
explores what it means to be Irish from Joseph’s point of view and puts the reader in
his mental space. The reader learns only later the difference between Joseph and the
other children:
592 Ibid., p.82. 244
One boy sits very near the door. Unlike Joseph, he wears the school
sweater. Like Joseph, he is black. A girl sits behind Joseph, beside a big
map of this country. She, also, is black. She sits beside the map. And is
she Irish?593
Joseph asks: ‘What do Irish children look like?’594 His question underlies bigger issues, not only increasing immigration but also the nationality of those born in
Ireland to immigrant parents. An ‘overwhelming victory of the ‟yes vote” (79.8 per cent)’ in the 2004 referendum denied constitutional citizenship rights to those born in
Ireland to non-national parents.595 This decision on Irish nationality posed interesting
questions for those immigrants who had already arrived, and who were to have
children. Joseph’s confusion, therefore, echoes larger questions for Irish society.
The story reaches a climax in the fifth episode where Christian Kelly, after throwing a milk carton at Joseph in the playground, starts a fight with him. With the children gathered around them, Joseph’s thoughts move between the present and his life back in an unspecified country in Africa. Seamlessly, Doyle moves between the past and present, the Irish and African settings to create narrative pace and purpose.
The style is not evident in his previous work:
Joseph remembers the soldier.
593 Ibid., pp. 83–84. 594 Ibid., p. 84. 595 S. Brandi, ‘Unveiling the Ideological Construction of the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum: A Critical Discourse Analytical Approach’, Translocations: The Irish Migration, Race and Social Transformation Review, p. 27,
The soldier walked out of the schoolhouse. He held the bell up high in the
air. It was the bell that called them all to school, every morning. It was
louder than any other sound in Joseph’s village, louder than engines and
cattle …. Joseph’s father was the teacher.
– I told you, says Christian Kelly. …
The soldier held the bell up high …. The bell rang out but no children
came running. Joseph hid behind the school wall. …
Christian Kelly takes the step and pushes Joseph. …
The soldiers had gone …. The bullet noise was still alive in his ears, and
the laughing soldiers, his father’s bell – Joseph was too frightened. He
was ashamed, but he could not move. He wanted to call out to his father
but his throat was blocked and too dry. He had dirtied himself, but he
could not move.596
The scene is a fast-paced series of fleeting images. It juxtaposes the death of Joseph’s father, his teacher, with the playground fight he is about to undertake. Doyle suggests that the playground politics he is to endure in his new country are trivial compared to what he has previously endured. The two situations, ultimately, become subtly intertwined. Unlike Doyle’s usual prose, full of dialogue, this is at times poetic and rhythmic. The repetition of ‘he was… but’, ‘he wanted… but’ and ‘he had… but’ suggests a never-ending confliction of race and nationality for Joseph now that he is in Ireland. The conclusion of the story, however, offers hope. Summoned by the teacher, Christian Kelly, Joseph and a third student, Seth Quinn, are held outside in trouble for the playground fight. Quietly mocking the teacher, the three boys laugh
596 Doyle, The Deportees, pp. 93–95. 246
together and the teacher christens them the ‘three musketeers’ as ‘Christian Kelly enters the room. Joseph follows Christian Kelly. Seth Quinn follows Joseph’.597 Yet this symbolic closure with the implication of a heroic solidarity expressed by fighting, and Joseph between the two Irish boys, is a disappointingly sentimental ending.
Doyle’s strong and subtle explorations of race cannot be adequately concluded with this sudden cure. On a surface level, the story can be read as how Joseph made friends the hard way; on a deeper level, it addresses problems of race in the Irish community.
As a snap shot of a day at school the story works well, but in the context of increasing immigration, with racism endemic in the Irish community, Doyle’s quick closure suggests that while there is no end in sight to this ongoing issue, solidarity with immigrants is still a possibility. The story does not attempt to comprehend or represent the whole issue, unlike Doyle’s novels, for example The Woman Who
Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, which present complex issues of domestic violence, alcoholism, and even racism, in a thorough, longitudinal way. The story form permits a snapshot, permits the presentation of a possibility, even though it may appear sentimental and inadequate.
That Doyle focalises the story through the student and gives the teacher a background role is significant in current Irish circumstances. Doyle himself was a teacher, and teachers in Ireland, mainly as a result of the Celtic Tiger, have faced an increasing ethnic diversity in schools. The lack of the teacher's perspective in the story may lead the reader to wonder if this one exemplifies ‘teachers’ constructions of migrants on a continuum of otherness versus normality’. 598 In a study examining the
597 Ibid., p. 99. 598 D. Devine, ‘Welcome to the Celtic Tiger? Teacher responses to immigrating and increasing ethnic diversity in Irish Schools’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, vol. 15, no. 1, 2005, pp. 49–70, p. 65. 247
responses of teachers to increased ethnicity in the classroom, the responses were
deemed to be ‘complex and underpinned by a feeling of ambiguity and insecurity
about what they were doing’. 599 This confusion is represented by the silences and
ambiguities in the teacher’s construction in ‘New Boy’. Yet ironically, the age-old
disciplinary approach that puts the boys in ‘trouble’ for fighting activates another adversarial mindset (pupil versus teacher) and so provides a common ground on which they might build a different relationship. Doyle seems covertly to be teaching his own lesson about the benefits of inclusivity.
The opening item of the collection, ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner’ reads like a classic Doyle story. The title, with the colloquial Dublin inclusion of
‘the’, is a reference to the 1967 film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and works upon a similar storyline. Set in the north-side Dublin home of Larry and Mona
Linnane and their five children, Stephanie, Laurence, Tracy, Vanessa and Nicole, it focuses on issues of racism. The story was first developed by Doyle for his 2001 play of the same name. For the opening three pages, the narrator describes Larry’s love for his family and how nothing ‘ever, ever shocked him’ until ‘Stephanie brought home the black fella’, Ben, a Nigerian refugee who is qualified as an accountant but cannot legally work as one in Ireland.600 Unlike ‘New Boy’, this story focuses on the internal
confusions of the Irish citizen, rather than the migrant. Before Ben comes to the house
for dinner, Larry asks himself some questions that help him to work out ‘why he
didn’t want a refugee in the family’.601 He insists he is not racist because he thinks:
‘Phil Lynott, absolutely brilliant. Neil Diamond, absolutely shite … Mandela, a hero.
Ahern, a chancer’, but it was ‘AIDS … the Live Aid pictures … the civil wars –
599 Ibid. 600 Doyle, The Deportees, p. 3. 601 Ibid., p. 8. 248
machetes and machine-guns, and burning car tyres draped around people’s necks, the
savagery’. 602 This drastic imagery spirals out of control, images of Live Aid working
to represent the cumulative experience of Africa. Larry’s conflicting internal dialogue
is summed up with: ‘It was too different; that was it. Too unknowable, and too
frightening for his daughter’.603 It is the unknowable of what is beyond the confines
of the north side of Dublin that is the issue for Larry. As with other families in
Doyle’s work, the parochial identity is paramount.
When Ben arrives, Larry is surprised that he is dressed in the ‘best, most elegant suit Larry had ever been close to. A small lad – very, very black – and completely at home in the suit. The wall looked filthy behind him’. 604 Larry becomes
nervous, feeling it was ‘like meeting Sidney Poitier’605 and has a ‘sudden, roaring
need to impress him, a demand from his gut to be liked by him’.606 Once, however,
Larry realises Ben is wearing aftershave – ‘the black fella’s perfume’607 – he is
convinced he is hiding something. An intense dinner follows with Larry watching the
‘black fella putting away the spuds like he’d been born and bred in Gorey’. 608 The
family is told a small part of Ben’s former life in Nigeria – with his sister
disappearing, his mother dying and his brother in jail. He speaks also about his
experience in Ireland, how he ‘can’t walk down the street without someone shouting
something at him’. 609 The increase in numbers of asylum seekers and migrants has led
to a significant increase of ‘high levels of racial harassment and discrimination’ and
602 Ibid. 603 Ibid. 604 Ibid., p. 11. 605 Ibid. 606 Ibid., p. 12. 607 Ibid., p. 13. 608 Ibid. 609 Ibid., p. 15. 249
‘high levels of hostility among Irish people’. 610 Before the end of the dinner, Larry
learns that Stephanie and Ben are only friends; he has wasted anxiety about his
daughter marrying him.
Walking Ben to the door, Larry asks him the name of his perfume, ‘Towering
Ebony’. 611 The symbolism here of the small Nigerian man who towers over the Irish
man is a similarly sentimental conclusion to that in ‘New Boy’, keen to be rid of racist
tensions and to offer hope for the future. Doyle, while criticising Irish racism, exposes
the limitations of his short stories as commentary on the issues they raise. These pro
tempore conclusions escape thorough examination because of the limitation of form,
while offering some resistance to what seems otherwise a hopelessly unchanging
prognosis. That may be a product of Doyle’s writing for readers of an immigrant newspaper: the stories provide not only entertainment, but also a sense of the positive amidst the reality of the racism that they acknowledge.
‘The Deportees’ is the centrepiece of the collection and the reader is introduced to Jimmy Rabitte Jr., of The Commitments again. This time, however, he is
just Jimmy; married to Aoife with children, Marvin, Mahalia, Jimmy Two and
Smokey. There is no inclusion of or allusion to the family the readers came to know
so well in The Barrytown Trilogy. Instead, the short story focuses on Jimmy’s
reignited desire to make another band. There is acknowledgement that Jimmy works,
but it is never clear what his job is. With his marriage straining at the prospect of
another band, he remembers a better time: ‘He used to make gigs. He’d managed
bands, some great ones. There was The Commitments (‘The best Irish band ever
610 A. White, ‘Irishness, Whiteness and Place: the political geographies of asylum seeker dispersal in contemporary Ireland’, p. 5. 611 Doyle, The Deportees, p. 26. 250
recorded’ – d’side. ‘Shite’ – Northside News)’.612 When The Commitments broke up despite being offered a recording contract, it was the only time Jimmy had ‘ever been really depressed’.613
Jimmy comes up with the idea for his band when he is knocked over while
looking in the window of an African store on Parnell Street:
A Romanian, a young fella, Jimmy could see, as his head hit the edge of
the path and an Italian courier rode over his hand – an Italian who’d been
in Dublin for a while.
– You theeek fockeeng eeee-jit, he roared as he dashed across to
Malborough Street.
Jimmy’s head was hopping when he stood up, helped by the Romanian
kid and a big African woman. His hand was in a bad way too, fuckin’
killing him. But he was grinning.
Jimmy had his group.614
The amalgamation of a variety of nationalities into this Dublin setting highlights the
changing life of the inner city. The inspiration for his band is to represent this change,
as revealed by the advertisement that he places in the Hot Press Classifieds:
‘Brothers and Sisters, Welcome to Ireland. Do you want the Celtic Tiger
to dance to your music? If yes, The World’s Hardest-Working Band is
612 Doyle, The Deportees, pp. 28–29. 613 Ibid., p. 31. 614 Ibid., p. 35. 251
looking for you. Contact J. Rabbitte at 089-22524242 or
[email protected]. White Irish need not apply.’
Could he write that? He didn’t see why not. It was his fuckin’ band. But
he deleted the last sentence.615
Echoing the original advertisement Jimmy wrote to establish The Commitments, this
advertisement works on many levels. Firstly, it offers a sense of the international
Celtic Tiger zeitgeist. Secondly, it acknowledges that you can be Irish and not be
white, a hint at the possible inclusion of diverse ethnicities in Irishness. Thirdly, it
jokingly recalls the ‘No Irish Need Apply’ signs of past anti-Irish discrimination in the USA, reminding readers that their own race has suffered the many problems of emigration.
In a bar to meet a possible lead singer, King Robert, Jimmy notices the
‘Portuguese-looking barman, Spanish-looking lounge-girl, Chinese-looking girl …
African locals chatting and laughing, Irish locals chatting and laughing’.616 Doyle
constructs an almost idyllic setting in the middle of Dublin and adds a sense of north-
side reality: ‘Jimmy tasted his pint. Grand – and just as well, because it wasn’t fuckin’ cheap’.617 With a ‘kind of southside African’618 lead singer, a drummer from
Moscow, bass player from New York, djembe drummer from Nigeria, singer from
Spain and an accordionist and trumpet player from Romania, Jimmy had his band:
‘The Deportees’.619 Despite his confidence, Jimmy gets regular anonymous phone
calls from ‘a sad bastard with nothing and no one else’ who repeatedly said ‘nigger
615 Ibid., p. 36. 616 Ibid., p. 39. 617 Ibid. 618 Ibid., p. 38. 619 Ibid., p. 53. 252
lover’. 620 This regular injection of racial taunts and negativity is a stark reminder of
the racial tensions still evident despite the short story’s positive representation of
diversity.
The band seems promising but the first performance by the River Liffey is a
disaster. As with The Commitments, as soon as there is a bit of momentum, the band
dissolves. Despite the disastrous first performance, the band is offered a second chance to perform at local Indian restaurant, Celtic Tandoori. As in ‘New Boy’ and
‘Guess Who Is Coming for the Dinner’, the story ends with a sudden pseudo- resolution of Ireland’s race problem. As they are performing, the reader is transported into the future, inserted between the song lyrics as in The Commitments, these punctuate the prose:
– TOO BAD OUR BLISS –
The Deportees will stay together.
– HAS TO MISS OUT LIKE THIS –
For years and albums.
– I’M CHECKIN’ OUT –
GO’OM BYE.
They’ll get better and quite well known. They’ll tour Wales and Nigeria.
…
Their first album will be big in Chad and banned in parts of Texas.621
620 Ibid., p. 48. 621 Ibid., p. 75. 253
The quick summary of the future of The Deportees becomes upbeat to the extent of absurdity. The lead singer, King Robert, will ‘join Fianna Fáil the Republican Party.
He’ll be the city’s first black alderman, and the first mayor to sing ‟Let’s Stay
Together” on Bloomsday’.622 That King Robert joins the conservative political party founded by Éamon de Valera, one of the leaders in promoting exclusionist Irish nationalism, is a blatant piece of sarcasm yet offers a hypothesis, albeit romantic, of the future for Ireland. The ending could be read either as a fantasy or a satirical comment on what will not happen. ‘The Deportees’ is a two-dimensional story where the characterisations are fleeting and the reader is left wondering to what purpose the narrative is presented. Doyle's point could be read as that whatever happens in the unpredictable future, immigration in the Celtic Tiger period means that the conditions of Irish life have changed irrevocably: de Valera's Ireland will never be found again and now seems equally a fantasy.
With direct reference to the changing economic state of Ireland, Doyle said in an interview in 2009:
I suppose as things [the economy] began to pick up my books got darker. I
don’t think it was because the economy began to pick up. But I have to
admit that whatever new book I would write now would be a comedy. Not
just for escapism, to give us a laugh when times are hard. But because one
of the ways that people respond to hard times is by laughing at things that
shouldn’t necessarily be laughed at.623
622 Ibid. p. 76. 623 Doyle, cited in Allen Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, p. 145. 254
Since that interview, Doyle’s Bullfighting offers an often-comic representation of contemporary Ireland. It shifts Doyle’s focus onto an ageing Irish population. Age has rarely been an issue in Doyle’s fiction, but this collection acknowledges a change in attention from the vibrant youth culture of the late 80s and early 90s. The stories are all narrated by men or have male protagonists coping with unemployment or a loss of some sort. Doyle’s The Van also dealt with unemployment, but without an unprecedented boom preceding it. In Bullfighting, the sudden death of the Celtic Tiger has left many of the protagonists numb, unaware of how to deal with or understand the state of contemporary Ireland.
Between 1996 and 2000, the rate of unemployment in Ireland fell from 12 to 4 per cent, maintaining that level until 2006.624 Employment peaked in June 2007, rising to a total of 2.1 million jobs, but between December 2007 and 2011, overall employment has fallen by 315,600 jobs.625 In direct relation to Doyle’s focus in
Bullfighting,
[m]ales were worst affected with a loss of 240,700 jobs or 19.8%. Female
job losses amounted to 74,800 or 8.1%. … Since 2007 alone, male
unemployment, rising by almost 60% accounted for the majority of the
losses.626
624 P. Corcoran & E. Arensman, ‘Suicide and employment status during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy’, European Journal of Public Health, vol. 21, no. 2, 2010, pp. 209–214, p. 210. 625 P.J. Drudy & M.L. Collins, ‘Ireland: from boom to austerity’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, vol. 4, no. 3, 2011, pp. 339–354, p. 348. 626 Ibid. 255
Bullfighting deals with unemployment, but also explores the ramifications of job losses that transcend statistics. Doyle’s focus on males in this collection is a significant shift from his longer prose, where there are so many female protagonists; the collection is a response to the particular effect of the economic crash on men.
In contemporary Ireland, the loss of personal identity exists in a floating relation with the loss of national identity. After the Global Financial Crisis in 2008,
Ireland perceived itself in a difficult position as a nation. On 14 October 2008, the then Minister of Finance, Brian Lenihan, opened the 2009 budget with this statement:
We find ourselves in one of the most difficult and uncertain times in
living memory. We face the most challenging fiscal and economic
position in a generation. The Budget sets out a plan to deal with this most
unfavourable set of circumstances.627
At this time, the Irish Government was crippled under the weight of bailing out the national banking system and the unsustainable bond yields on their national borrowing. The government was forced to ask for a €67.5 billion bailout from the joint International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU) stabilisation fund.628 From this bailout came an agreement for a number of austerity measures inflicted upon Irish taxpayers; including expenditure cuts, significant taxation increases and drastic welfare reductions. By 2010, the year before Bullfighting was published, the struggles of Irish citizens, as a result of the IMF/EU bailout, were noted in the introduction of the Budget:
627 Department of Finance, Budget, Dublin, Stationery Office, 2008. 628 Drudy & Collins, ‘Ireland: from boom to austerity’, p. 346. 256
This has been a traumatic and worrying time for the citizens of our
country. They are concerned that we had to seek external support to help
us with our economic and financial difficulties. They are worried about
the impact of this momentous and difficult decision in their lives. 629
The psychological impact of the economic crash and of the IMF/EU bailout on the individual is what Doyle explores in Bullfighting. With 13 stories, the collection has multiple areas of focus, but is united by the idea of loss. Unemployment and its effects permeate the book but it also focuses on recollections and traumatic memories in the contemporary Irish context.
Bullfighting can be read as Doyle’s strongest work. It takes his usual stance on contemporary issues – social, economical and familial – and transcends the usual, humorous dialogue by offering deeper internal reflection and memories. This is a collection truly of its own time; the stories reflect instances of what is happening in contemporary Ireland, and the short story form, in this circumstance, is vital in allowing approaches to complex issues from a variety of angles.
The first story, ‘Recuperation’, sets the tone of the collection. The story focuses on Hanahoe, whose first name the reader never discovers, and takes place over a walk around north-side suburban Dublin. On doctor’s orders, ‘[h]e walks.
Every day, he walks’. 630 The reader is offered observations, memories and mind- wanderings triggered by what Hanahoe sees on his walk. The story epitomises the use of ambiguity and omission in the short form; there are hints at the protagonist’s
629 Department of Finance, Budget, Dublin, Stationery Office, 2010. 630 R. Doyle, Bullfighting, London, Jonathan Cape, 2011, p. 1. 257
character and past but nothing is ever validated. There is a lack of feeling, a lack of
meaning throughout the story as filtered through Hanahoe’s consciousness, and a
sense of irony since Doyle is offering the reader an ambiguity in meaning that the
protagonist cannot see.
Hanahoe is estranged from his wife, yet lives in the same house; his children
have all grown and left home. The prose shifts seamlessly between Hanahoe’s memories and the present. The walk is not only a physical movement through his surrounding suburbs, but also a metaphorical walk through his life over the previous
decades:
It’s depressing, a life, laid out like that. Mass, driving the kids to football,
or dancing. The pint on Friday. The sex on Sunday. Pay on Thursdays.
The shop on Saturday. Leave the house at the same time, park in the same
spot. The loyalty card. The bags. The routine. One day he knew: he hated
it. 631
The repetitive structuring highlights the monotony of the life Hanahoe once lived. The
alternative, however, does not seem to be an improvement. His daily walks with no
destination suggest a loss of identity.
A lack of meaning permeates the story. The reader is never offered any
validating insight into the characterisation of Hanahoe despite the third person
focalised narration. Instead, the reader is left knowing as little as he does.
631 Ibid., p. 6. 258
Who’s to blame? No one. It just happened. Too late now. He can’t pull
them back, his wife, the kids. They have their own lives. She does; they
do. Maybe grandkids will do something. If there are any. He doesn’t
know. He knows nothing. He feels nothing. He doesn’t even feel sorry for
himself. He doesn’t think he does.
He’s fine. He copes.632
Hanahoe is disconnected from his own feelings of isolation, confusion and struggle,
and perhaps accordingly the story offers no reason either to feel sympathy or to
dislike him. The ambivalence that the reader is positioned to feel toward the
protagonist is similar to his opinion of himself: his claim to ‘know nothing’ and ‘feel nothing’ could be read as apathy, as depression, as a self-protective denial of his own part in creating this situation, and as the bewilderment of a man acted upon by external forces. The oblique narration sets up the question of who or what is to blame.
There are not many contextual factors that help the reader situate the story. A short observation like: ‘There’s one of the Africans there, selling the Herald. He’s never seen anyone buy one. But the Africans are there, every day’633 imply it is
contemporary. More importantly, Hanahoe’s lack of purpose and the fact his doctor
has endless suggestions on how to fill his day suggest he may be unemployed:
– Are you a golf man, Mr Hanahoe?
– No.
– Hill walking?
632 Ibid., p. 10. 633 Ibid., p. 6. 259
– No.
– Do you walk the dog?
– No dog.
…
– Do you get down to the pub at all?
– No.
– The golf club?
– You asked me that the last time. No.634
On a surface reading, the title ‘Recuperation’ suggests that he could be recovering from an illness but on a closer reading of the text, the title implies he is attempting to regain something he once had: a sense of purpose. The ambiguity of the text is effective; the reader knows he has nothing to do every day, but is not sure why.
The story concludes on a conversation with a small girl at the bus stop. Prior to the conversation, the rain is dramatically personified ‘The rain is dying’.635 This drama is centred by the casual conversation with the young girl:
– I’m waitin’ on me mammy.
He’s surprised. He says nothing, at first.
– Where is she?
– At her work, she says. – Comin’ home.
– On the bus?
– Yeah.
634 Ibid., pp. 1–3. 635 Ibid., p. 11. 260
– That’s nice.
– Yeah.
…
– I’ll go on, he says. – Will you be alright there by yourself?
– Ah yeah, she says. I’m grand.
– Good, he says. – Well. Seeyeh.
– Seeyeh.
The rain is gone. It’s bright again.
He walks.
Nice kid. He smiles.
Hanahoe walks home. 636
This simple conversation seems to have transformative effects on the story. It offers the first description of physical emotion in Hanahoe and is the first hint of happiness, albeit fleeting. The shift from dying rain to brightness is significant, as it shows how
Hanahoe’s isolation, experienced prior to the conversation, affects his mood and outlook. A small conversation with a stranger allows him to acknowledge improvement and happiness. Furthermore, the fact that he ‘walks home’ is the first instance of direction and purpose in the entire story; previously he was walking for the sake of walking. There is an ambivalence to Doyle’s inconclusiveness here; its virtue lies in the possibility of change and development beyond the narrative, leaving the future for the protagonist in the imagination of the reader, rather than in a hurried suggestion at the end of the story. The conflict of the story is situated in the
636 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 261
character’s lack of knowledge of his present, including his future; suddenly to cure this confusion would be to ruin the effect of the story.
Like ‘New Boy’ in The Deportees, ‘Teaching’ in Bullfighting focuses on a classroom, with narrative shifts to traumatic memories. The story focuses on the unnamed protagonist, the teacher, and his passive lesson planning interrupted by memories varying from his family relationships to childhood abuse. It is the first day of a school year; the narrative opens with a new student asking if he remembered her mother, a former student:
She wasn’t the first. The last five or six years, kids had been stopping at
his desk. Their first day, their big news. You knew my ma or my da.
This was killing him.
It was getting harder. Getting through the day, the nine class periods. It
was the first week in September.637
As in ‘Recuperation’, there is an immediate sense of struggle in the ageing and unenthusiastic protagonist. This narrative however, does focus on an occupation that he was once passionate for:
Things changed. It wasn’t just him. He wasn’t denying anything: his heart
wasn’t in it. He wished he was somewhere else. …
It wasn’t just him. Something had happened. A kid stopping at the desk, a
boy or girl, had become something to be wary of, almost to dread.638
637 Ibid., p. 30. 638 Ibid., p. 31. 262
The repetition of ‘[i]t wasn’t just him’ separated by only a paragraph suggests that his lack of passion is a product of context, of changing times in the school and in Ireland.
The fear of a student stopping by the desk is related to the protagonist’s own past:
He had an abuse story of his own. He’d been in First Year …. He’d been
sent to the Christian Brothers and he still hadn’t got used to them. They
were strange men, sometimes funny, but savage and unpredictable. …
Once, he remembered, a boy in the room next door was thrown against the
classroom wall, and he watched the blackboard on his side come off its
hinges and fall to the wooden floor. They’d laughed. They’d all laughed.
They’d laughed at everything.639
The repetition of ‘they’d laughed’ emphasises not only the strangeness of the
Christian Brothers outlined by the protagonist, but the collective understanding of the
Christian Brothers as a whole; they seem to be grouped together in negative representations. The passage is important not only in this story, but also within
Doyle’s oeuvre. For the first time in his fiction, the Christian Brother abuse within schools is explored. Doyle’s longer prose avoids representing religion and stories of sexual abuse, unlike the work of Enright and Tóibín.
The Christian Brother in question in this story is Brother Flynn who was
‘alright … a laugh’.640 Other students at school bully the protagonist because Brother
Flynn favours him. One day, he is unwell at school and since his mother is at work,
639 Ibid., p. 32. 640 Ibid., p. 33. 263
Brother Flynn takes him to the house where all the Brothers live next to the school. In
the account of his memory, the protagonist never talks of fear when the Brother
prepares a bed for him. The only instance of fear is when he remembers:
He didn’t move. He remembered that. He remembered the slow terror, in
his legs. 641
This suggestion of psychological paralysis works to foreshadow what is to come for
the protagonist; his sick and vulnerable state is not nurtured but abused. The account
of the alleged abuse, however, is elusive:
He felt the blanket being pulled away from him, but he couldn’t see
Flynn’s hands. Then he saw Flynn’s face, close to his own. He was
leaning over him. The blanket was gone. Then it was back; he felt it land
on his legs, his waist, his chest. He felt Flynn’s hands at his neck … He
was looking down at him. He was smiling.
That was it, all he could remember. He half expected more to open up –
the hand grabbing at his neck, holding him down – but it never did. …
He’d stopped where his memory stopped.642
After the opening of this memory, the word ‘abuse’ is never repeated but is implied.
The passage shows a marked development from Doyle’s earlier overwhelmingly dialogue-driven narration. The short sentences create not only an increased sense of
641 Ibid., p. 25. 642 Ibid., p. 36. 264
pace but also a haunting rhythm. The repetition of ‘he’ and ‘his’ suggest an invasion of privacy, particularly in ‘his legs, his waist, his chest’.643 The protagonist stops at the point where his memory has stopped; his lack of ability to tell the story is not only an acknowledgement of the trauma inflicted by the abuse but also a reference to how difficult it is to represent it in writing. The omission suggests a place where neither the character nor the writer feels able to tread, for fear of unmanageable consequences. The effects of the experience have clearly marked the protagonist, with regular suggestions of alcoholism: ‘He’d stop. The drinking. He wasn’t fooling himself. He knew it was serious’.644 The role of the short story is paramount here, as
Doyle explores the issue with a degree of avoidance and omission that would not be sustainable in the novel form; his guarded treatment suggests that no more developed narrative conclusion can be offered because the issue explored is ongoing, with a continuing effect on the nation’s identity that it cannot yet come to terms with.
‘Animals’, the penultimate story in Bullfighting, is about male unemployment.
The story opens with George reminiscing about all the pets his children had, and all the ‘decent, elaborate burials’ the animals had – ‘Christian, Hindu, Humanist – whatever bits of knowledge and shite the kids brought home from school’.645 George is clearly in love with his wife and children, and reminisces with positivity and pride on the happiness he brought to his family becoming ‘his proudest moment’646 and his reason for living: ‘[t]his is why I live’.647
It is not until eight pages into the story that its real core develops. Walking around his suburb like Hanahoe in ‘Recuperation’, George plays with the idea of
643 Ibid. 644 Ibid., p. 37. 645 Ibid., p. 158. 646 Ibid., p. 161. 647 Ibid., p. 163. Emphasis in text. 265
leaving his dog tied to a bike rack to have a quick pint in the afternoon: ‘[h]e could do
that; he has the time. But he doesn’t want to seem desperate, because that’s how he
feels’.648 Like other protagonists in Bullfighting, George moves in and out of the present, with sudden intrusions of memory. In this story, however, there is more direct acknowledgement of the state of the Irish economy:
The Lost Decade – that was what the American economist called it, Paul
Krugman. … He hadn’t been talking about the last decade; it was the next
one. It already had a name, and George knew he was fucked. …
Suffer, your man Krugman said, when he was asked how Ireland should
deal with the next ten years. Well, this is George, suffering.649
The explicit acknowledgement of suffering explains George’s ambiguous wanderings,
both metaphorical through memory and physical through the suburban streets. He has
been reminiscing in order to be positive, to focus on better times. Paul Krugman, the
American economist referred to by George, has written extensively on the state of
Ireland’s economy and outlook. In an opinion piece in the New York Times published the year before Bullfighting, he writes about the struggles of the Irish individual as a result of the corrupt banks and weak government. Unlike George’s version of
Krugman who tells Ireland to ‘suffer’, the actual commentator criticises the Irish government’s guaranteeing of the banks’ debts, ‘turning private losses into public obligations’650 and the effect this has on the individual:
648 Ibid., p. 165. 649 Ibid., pp. 165–66. 650 P. Krugman, ‘Eating the Irish’, New York Times, 25 November 2010,
Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers
suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged,
the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure
the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts. …
These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private
wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish
citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.651
Doyle presents George as a manifestation of Krugman’s stark observations. George’s unemployment and feeling of suffering are a result of the drastic changes in Ireland’s economy. Krugman continues that:
Ireland is now in its third year of austerity, and confidence just keeps
draining away. And you have to wonder what it will take for serious
people to realize that punishing the populace for the bankers’ sins is worse
than a crime; it’s a mistake.652
Krugman’s focus on confidence matches perfectly the lack of national and individual confidence that resonates throughout Bullfighting. George echoes his rhetoric of crime and punishment, with further links to Ireland's religious traditions:
651 Ibid. 652 Ibid. 267
It doesn’t feel like a sin or a crime. He exploited no one; he invested in
nothing. He has one mortgage, one credit card. One mortgage, no job.
Seven years left on the mortgage and no prospect of a fuckin’ job. He’ll
be near retirement age by the time they – he gets through the lost
decade.653
This emotive passage could be read as a summary of Bullfighting. Encapsulating the feeling of unmerited loss, it also reinforces the lack of hope for the future. Resolute but defeatist, and with a vague understanding of the macro-economic picture, George seems to accept his position in contemporary Ireland and that, over the next decade, there will be no change. Whether Doyle is more saluting the courage or lamenting the tameness in his resignation to victimhood remains unclear.
George’s focus on his family’s animals works on two levels: memories of various pets recall happier times in the past with his wife and children. Secondly, however, animals, as in the story’s title, can refer to the actions and effects of what
Krugman calls ‘private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit’.654
Krugman’s opinion piece is entitled ‘Eating the Irish’, suggesting an animal appetite in those who committed the crimes. Another reading is validated in the short story when George talks about a documentary he saw about dog breeding entitled ‘Bred to
Die’. 655 In the documentary, George describes how ‘the breeders have been playing
God … just so they’ll [the animals] look good – consistent – in the shows. Pugs’ eyes fall out of their heads, bulldogs can no longer mate …’.656 Those seeking nothing but
653 Doyle, Bullfighting, pp. 166–167. Emphasis in text. 654 Krugman, ‘Eating the Irish’. 655 Doyle, Bullfighting, p. 171. 656 Ibid., p. 172. Emphasis in text. 268
their own profit can be read as the breeders while the populace can be read as the suffering dogs. The conclusion of the story confirms this reading, with George and his dog ‘both explod[ing] together’.657 George’s affinity with the animal shows the inevitable effect of what has happened, at the hands of those who have abused their power in the once strong Irish economy. In this scenario the government that chose to
‘punish … the populace for the bankers’ sins’ can perhaps be read as a further deformed and compliant species bred by the financial system.
Doyle’s stories generally attempt to represent the direct effect of socieconomic problems on vulnerable members of society. True to their Metro Éireann origins, his tales are offered as benign short-term interventions to raise consciousness of the lives of suffering people. In making that attempt, a number of his stories seem to strain the form: rather than remaining content to capture a moment, at times Doyle succumbs to the pressure to present a coherent narrative, offering a somewhat forced conclusion that can be read either ironically or as a reason to hope. For all his good will to these people, in making them prove his points about the condition of Ireland, Doyle restricts the autonomy and lessens the energy shown by the characters in his longer fiction.
Colm Tóibín
Like Doyle, Tóibín published his first collection of short stories after establishing a successful career as a novelist. Like Doyle’s, Tóibín’s narrative style remains largely similar in the shorter form. Tóibín’s short stories are elegiac, full of nuances, sad cadences and hints at an old Ireland coming to a slow but definite end. His first story collection, Mothers and Sons, published in 2006, examines a changing Ireland through the family relationship indicated in its title. Furthermore, the title invites
657 Ibid., p. 173. 269
comparison to Ian Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons (1862). Like the Russian
novelist, who was a major influence on George Moore and Frank O’Connor, as
discussed above, Tóibín explores the growing divide between generations, using the
relationship to project the image of a transforming nation.
Tóibín’s venture into the short fiction form has been a timely shift, permitting
him to confront the confusion and contradictions of a turbulent period through a series
of brief studies of family relationships. As if in homage to the statement in Joyce's
Ulysses that the ‘[h]ome always breaks up when the mother goes’,658 the collection entertains the traditional idea of the mother as the heart of the Irish home. This view was enshrined in the Irish Constitution of 1937, which also required the mother to stay within the domestic sphere: ‘… ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’.659
This limiting definition, still in the present constitution, reflects Catholic ideologies
where mothers were seen as ‘paragons of Christian virtue who were happy to stay at
home rearing their children in the love and sight of God’.660 Tóibín challenges this
formulaic and subordinating imagery and offers instead a much wider agency for Irish
mothers in a range of settings from rural Wexford to central Dublin. Tóibín discusses
his representation of the changing role of women:
I’m trying to use the mother-son relationship in these stories to show
women who aren’t religious, who aren’t in the kitchen all the time. I’m
aware of the cliché of Irish motherhood and I’m glad it’s there, you can
658 J. Joyce, Ulysses (1922), H.W. Gabler (ed.), London, Penguin, 1986, p. 124 (Chapter 8, line 30). 659 The Constitution of Ireland, p. 162. 660 T. Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland, Dublin, University College Dublin, 1998, p. 245. 270
usurp it and play with it. I mean, where’s her religiosity? Where’s her
apron? One mother reads theology but she doesn’t practise it. I just wasn’t
having it.661
The collection plays variations on the tradition of Irish motherhood in nine stories, In
all, the figure of the father is subordinated – either dead, left or rendered irrelevant –
while daughters play a minimal role throughout the collection, including limited
dialogue and influence on the narrative. The missing paternal figure works not only to
privilege the female role but also to increase the importance of the son’s relationship
with the mother. Those without children are also marginalised, with women and their
sons constantly in the foreground. Tóibín seems to strive for concentration on that
relationship, as viewed from many angles. The third-person narration in the stories
offers a series of vignettes that reflect the headlines of contemporary Ireland – rise in
divorce, rise in suicide, child sexual abuse and rise in recreational drug use. The short
story form becomes, for Tóibín, an effective way to explore these varying issues
without the vantage of retrospect.
In the first story of the collection, ‘The Use of Reason’, the protagonist is a
criminal who is conducting an art heist. In his internal narration, the essence of
Tóibín’s collection is summarised:
… he brought with him the feeling that behind everything lay something
else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that
the person on display was merely a disguise for another person, that
661 L. McDowell, ‘The Mother of All Short Stories’ The Scotsman, 2 September 2006,
something said was merely a code for something else. There were always
layers and beyond them even more secret layers which you could chance
upon or which would become more apparent the closer you looked.662
This painterly image of layering as both symbolic code and disguise, placed near the
start of the collection, offers some direction on how to read and understand its stories.
Tóibín combines sharp observations of contemporary Ireland with elegiac and
nostalgic suggestions of the past to provide narrative layerings in which further
meaning is always potentially ‘behind’ the surface.
Two of the items in the collection could be considered novellas rather than
short stories. ‘The Name of the Game’ is 67 pages long, second only to ‘A Long
Winter’ at 84 pages. ‘The Name of the Game’ has the pace of a Tóibín novel without
lengthy retrospective shifts to historical settings or characters; instead, the references
to the past are fleeting. It has a considerable level of complexity with a sense of
character development, time lapse and change in scenery. Set in rural Wexford, with
some implications of Enniscorthy, the story focuses on Nancy Sheridan who has
struggled to maintain the family shop since the sudden death of her husband, George,
who left the family in a dire financial position: ‘George left me with three children
and huge debts’.663 The death of George is never directly addressed, but there are
repeated hints of suicide; ‘They never mentioned George or how he had died’.664
Since his death, Nancy has run their local supermarket – ‘… little feck of a supermarket … nothing at all in it’665 – which was once owned by her mother-in-law
662 C. Tóibín, Mothers and Sons, London, Picador, 2006, p. 22. 663 Ibid., p. 101. 664 Ibid., p. 71. 665 Ibid., p. 61. 272
and is a dying industry with the imposing supermarket chains such as Dunnes Stores
nearby. Under her mother-in-law’s ownership, the shop doubled as a bar on a
Saturday: customers ‘had a drink in the little bar to the side of the shop and paid their
bills when it suited them’.666 This narrative arc back to the mother-in-law’s style of management becomes a symbol of traditional ways and a means of contrasting the style of management required in the contemporary context.
The bank manager, Mr Wallace, repeatedly threatens foreclosure. Despite this,
Nancy’s focus is on her son, Gerard, with her two daughters fading into the background of the narrative – ‘she realized that she had not looked at her daughters in six months’.667 Attempting to build a better future for Gerard, she does not want a repeat of her husband’s demise. She establishes a chip shop and off-licence alongside the original supermarket in which the ‘girls took no interest’ whereas ‘Gerard’s interest in both was so intense that Nancy has had to ban him working in the chip shop, except on Saturdays’.668 As Gerard’s interest in the shop grows, his
performance in secondary school diminishes. Nancy soon realises that ‘he presumed
he would be taking over the business in time, just as his own father had taken the
business from his grandmother’.669 Nancy, too, has worked in her own mother’s store
where ‘people had been able to gawk at her as much as they liked, or look past
her’. 670 It becomes clear, as the narrative pace slows down toward the conclusion of
the story, that conflict over the shop will be the catalyst of drastic familial change.
Nancy tells her children that they are selling the business and moving to Dublin, much
666 Ibid., p. 72. 667 Ibid., p. 109. 668 Ibid., p. 107. 669 Ibid., p. 108. 670 Ibid., p. 109. 273
to Gerard’s dismay. For the first time in the story, he talks of his deceased father in an
argument with Nancy:
… ‘it isn’t yours to sell. It was left to us.’
‘Oh, it’s mine all right,’ she said.
‘My father …’ he began.
‘Don’t start that,’ she said. ‘Don’t start that, Gerard.’
‘If Daddy knew what you were doing.’671
This sudden mention of the father comes close to the conclusion and is a stark
reminder of what has been left out of the narrative. It emphasises the role Nancy has
played in keeping her family surviving. For the reader, Gerard is characterised purely
from the perception of his mother; there is no representation of him without the
mediation of her commentary or thoughts. The effect not only extends the force of the
mother and son relationship, but narrows the focus of the story to what Nancy thinks
of Gerard and his possible future, so enacting tacitly what is itself problematical in their relationship.
A side narrative to the story of Gerard’s future is the problem Nancy has in opening the chip shop. That theme works as a measure of change in Ireland, above a subordinate layer of clashing political beliefs. Opening the chip shop without
planning approval, Nancy is immediately visited by the Planning Officer and Health
Officer who are ‘like greyhounds sniffing. Neither of them looked at her directly
…’.672 After being threatened with closure, Nancy visits Ned Doyle, who is the head
671 Ibid., p. 118. 672 Ibid., p. 97. 274
of Fianna Fáil in the town and more powerful than the elected politicians: walking into his home, Nancy notices a ‘photograph of Ned shaking hands with de Valera’.673
Ned talks of George; his assumption that Nancy would be looked after by her late husband’s lifetime of work is ruined when she informs him of the reality of her situation. She asks Ned to use his local power to get the Planning Officer and Health
Office to stop targeting her. When he refuses, she says:
‘So is this what Fianna Fáil does? Puts widows out of business?’ …
The Sheridans had always supported Fine Gael … But Fine Gael had no
power now; all the power was in the hands of Fianna Fáil. 674
The narrative of local politics supplies a contributing reason for the struggle of the story's main character, but also suggests that the conservative party is still dominant in rural towns such as this setting, unlike the progressive Dublin that Nancy dreams of.
Before Nancy leaves, Ned says that Ireland has come far, leading Nancy to think that
Ned and she both had been born in houses which knew nothing about
banks or solicitors or planning permissions, and now they were freely
discussing these matters. This had to be progress, especially, she thought,
if something could be arranged.675
The dual existence of a modern and traditional Ireland in this story is the reason why its narrative layering works so effectively. This is exemplified in the characterisation
673 Ibid., p. 100. 674 Ibid., p. 100. 675 Ibid., p. 102. 275
of Gerard, who wants to continue to run the family business in a rural town despite his mother’s insistence that he break family and town tradition. The gender and generation roles of the mother and son are an interesting fictional reversal of what has been previously seen in fiction; for instance, it is a reversal of the mother and son relationship in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen
Dedalus breaks away from familial, religious and national expectations, while his mother Mary Dedalus insists on his devotion to religion. Like Joyce’s novel, Tóibín’s short story has a father who is in financial difficulty and siblings who do not feature significantly in the narrative. Unlike Joyce’s novel, however, the role of the mother in
Tóibín’s story is paramount. Stephen’s mother is a background character, a compliant mother who relies on her faith in the church. Nancy, by contrast, is a dynamic character who has been thrust into the forefront of the family because of her husband’s death.
All over the town it happened, businesses being passed on from
generation to generation, the sons, as soon as they went to school, fully
sure of their inheritance …. In their late teens, they settled into the
rhythms of middle age. 676
The repetitiveness of tradition is broken in this family where the father figure is absent. Nancy subverts the construction of motherhood in the de Valera Constitution, alluded to through the inclusion of Ned, the Fianna Fáil strongman, and also subverts the tradition of what her son can expect of his future.
676 Ibid., p. 114. 276
‘A Priest in the Family’ is nestled in the middle of the collection, and is one of its most powerful stories. It looks at the relationship between Molly and her son,
Frank, who is a priest about to go through a high-profile trial for alleged sexual abuse of his former students. Molly, who is approaching 80 years old, is dynamic; she has an active social life in her rural town and has even established an email account at the local library. Visited by the local priest, Father Greenwood, who attempts to tell her about Frank’s situation, Molly openly discusses her lack of religion and enjoys her independence:
Years ago the old women spent their lives praying. Now, we get our hair
done and play bridge and go to Dublin on the free travel, and we say what
we like. But I’ve got to be careful what I say in front of Frank, he’s very
holy. He got that from his father. It’s nice having a son a priest who’s very
holy. He’s one of the old school. But I can say what I like to you.
‘There are many ways of being holy,’ Father Greenwood said.
‘In my time there was only one,’ she replied. 677
Molly, as a character, gives insight into the changing relationship of women to religion in contemporary Ireland. The once limited role of the elderly Irish woman – the Sean-Bhean bhocht – has been transformed, with increased independence and freedom from the church. The poetic motif of Ireland is to change, and it is personified in Molly. Tóibín is offering an alternative to tradition and a pragmatic representation of the contemporary situation. In a study into contemporary Irish
Catholic identity published in 2007, Inglis acknowledges how, in Ireland, ‘going to
677 Ibid., p. 152. 277
Mass was not just a personal identification, it was an ascribed social identity: one did not have a choice’, 678 a sentiment echoed by Molly’s assertion that in the past, women did not have a choice of whether to be religious. Inglis continues:
It would also seem that identification with the Church was particularly
important to mothers. When their children rebelled about going to Mass
on Sunday, it was a source of scandal. The identity of mothers, what it
was to be a good mother, would seem to have been closely linked to
identification with the Catholic Church. 679
In the contemporary context, the situation is recovered. The once proud position of being a priest’s mother has become a potential source of social shame. Like the reader, Molly is kept unaware of Frank’s abuse scandal. Various elements of foreshadowing occur throughout the first half of the story, but Molly’s spirited characterisation permeates the narration; her energy and enthusiasm overshadow the subtle hints of downfall.
One afternoon in the library, Molly sees two women ‘studying her with immense curiosity’: 680
‘Look at you, Molly. You’ve gone all modern,’ one of them said.
‘You have to keep up with what’s going on,’ she said.
678 T. Inglis, ‘Catholic Identity in Contemporary Ireland: Belief and Belonging to Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 22, no. 2, 2007, pp. 205–220, p. 211. 679 Ibid. 680 Tóibín, Mothers and Sons, p. 155. 278
‘You never liked missing anything, Molly. You’ll get all the news from
that now.’681
The irony of Molly’s efforts to keep up to date with relevant information and technology is lost on the reader as the abuse scandal is yet to be revealed.
Furthermore, when asking Jane, her sister-in-law, if Frank had recently visited her,
Molly noticed that she ‘glanced up at her, almost alarmed. For a moment a look of pain came on her face’.682
Molly’s confusion comes to an end when Father Greenwood returns to her house. When he tells her that Frank is ‘in trouble’, Molly
… knew what this meant, and then thought no, her first reaction to
everything else had been wrong, so maybe this too, maybe she thought,
maybe it was not what had automatically come into her mind. …
‘Abuse?’ She said the word which was daily in the newspapers and on the
television, as pictures appeared of priests with their anoraks over their
heads so that no one would recognize them, being led from court-houses
in handcuffs. 683
Molly’s immediate and correct assumption reveals how the Irish Child Sexual Abuse scandals have dominated the national consciousness. The fluid yet conflicting thoughts in the first part of the passage quoted are far removed from Tóibín’s normal controlled narrative style; the transient and frantic nature of Molly’s thoughts is
681 Ibid., p. 155. 682 Ibid., p. 157. 683 Ibid., pp. 159–160. 279
indicative of the horror of the situation. The repetition of ‘maybe’ suggests uncertainty and confusion combined with the slightest hope that it is not what she originally thinks. The signifiers in the second part of the excerpt allude to how a once respected position can now easily be associated with something so disgraceful.
Signifiers of the media – ‘newspapers and … television’ – recall how stories of alleged clerical abuse have saturated contemporary news with lasting images of priests under arrest vainly attempting to hide their identity.
The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in Ireland was established in
2000, following the Government apology by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to the victims of child abuse on 11 May 1999.684 The Taoiseach announced the establishment of the
Commission to inquire into child abuse from 1936 onwards. The Commission began on a non-statutory, administrative basis but soon developed into an independent statutory body that investigated physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and neglect in Irish institutions. The final 2,600 page report that was published in May
2009 had 43 conclusions, one of which outlined that ‘[s]exual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions’ and that it will be ‘impossible to determine the full extent of sexual abuse committed in boys’ schools’. 685
Tóibín approaches the issue of abuse in an alternative way by focusing the narrative on the mother of the abuser. Abuse is usually treated from the point of view of the victim, as in Tóibín’s second collection of stories, The Empty Family. The alternative representation is effective in showing the ripple effect of a scandal, how it
684 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, CICA Investigation Report, 2009, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Establishment of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA)
effects more than the victim and the alleged abuser. Molly’s daughters are minimal characters in the story in contrast with the figure of the son. She finds out that they and the rest of the town have kept the abuse scandal from her. The daughters encourage her to leave Ireland for a holiday, to escape the news reports of the court trial. She refuses to leave, and the story shifts forward in time to two days before the trial. Her son visits to warn her that there will be a lot of information in the papers about the abuse. Molly ‘wondered if they would let him say Mass when he was in prison, or have his vestments and prayer books’.686 The last three pages give an insight into Molly’s relationship with her son; albeit distant, she is supportive:
When he lifted his head and took her in with a glance, he had the face of a
small boy.
‘I mean, whatever we can do, we will do, and none of us will be going
away. I’ll be here.’687
The allusion to Frank’s childhood face is a chilling inclusion in the context of his allegations. The absence of a paternal character is effective; the ambiguity leads to a variety of theories of why Frank turned out this way. There are no suggestions that his father was abusive, and no details of the trial charges. Instead, the lack of information is powerful in its silence, leading the reader to formulate possible causes. Molly asserts that she will be there for her son, suggesting that the authority of Irish tradition has not been mediated through the church, but through motherhood; the priests
('fathers') have in actuality been children dependent on the mothers. Molly’s
686 Tóibín, Mothers and Sons, p. 169. 687 Ibid. 281
characterisation celebrates in an unexpected way the traditional ‘little Irish Mother’
represented in the 1921 poem of that name by John O'Brien, showing a similar sense of independence and compassion, but in circumstances O'Brien would have been appalled to contemplate.
‘A Priest in the Family’ has an open ending; it concludes with Frank driving
away; the court trial is omitted. Yet there is and has been so much information in the
Irish media regarding the outcomes of trials such as Frank’s that a resolution is not
needed for the reader. The lack of explicit resolution works effectively in the short
story form – Tóibín is able to construct a literary sketch of a current issue without the
need for deep background or projection into the future. Through the slow process of
revelation of the scandal, to the reader and to Molly, he has given the narrative its
own sense of temporal depth. The observations made are timely and poignant in the
sociopolitical context in Ireland; the story explores a new angle on the issue in an
alternative to its saturated media representation, without being obligated by form to
explain causes and offer all the answers.
‘Three Friends’ is a significantly different story from the others in the
collection, since it examines the effect of recently losing a mother. The story begins in
a funeral parlour in Wexford where the protagonist Fergus sits with his mother’s body
and notices that ‘[h]er dead face had none of her live face’s softness’.688 The story
opens at a slow pace, with subtle observations of the mother, and bland conversations
with people recalling her memory, leaving no indication of how she died. This initial
uncertainty drives the narrative until the funeral where Fergus sees his friends from
Dublin, and as he follows the coffin down the centre aisle of the cathedral, he is
688 Ibid., p. 185. 282
tempted to whisper to his friends and ‘ask laughingly if they had any drugs’.689 Here
the focus shifts away from the mother into a narrative of hedonism in contemporary
Ireland.
Fergus’ friends, Mick, Alan and Conal, have a much more powerful influence
in his life than his mother and siblings, who remain unnamed for the entire narrative.
Not long after his arrival home in Dublin, Fergus and his friends travel to a beach rave
north of the city, ‘somewhere between Drogheda and Dundalk but heading directly
towards the coast or driving parallel to it’.690 The direction north into County Meath
and County Louth on the Northern Ireland border, instead of south to County
Wexford, is symbolic. Very rarely do Tóibín’s characters venture from Wexford or
Dublin; the symbolism of potential progression or development is evident, even if it is unclear, like the direction in which they are driving. Fergus arrives at the rave in a drug-fuelled state: ‘the Ecstasy tablet had not begun to affect him, the cocaine, the dope and the fresh sea air made him feel exhilarated, ready for a night which would not end’. 691 This ominous reference to a never-ending night ties back to repressed grief for the mother, an effective way to continue the presence of the mother throughout the story despite her death.
Fergus and his friends become representative of a surge in recreational drug use during the Celtic Tiger period. During the 1990s, alongside the use of cannabis and heroin, there was a ‘rise in demand for Ecstasy and cocaine’.692 In Ireland, there
was a solid increase over the early 2000s in the lifetime prevalence of illegal drug use.
689 Ibid., p. 189. 690 Ibid., p. 194. 691 Ibid., p. 196. 692 I. O’Donnell. ‘Violence and social change in the Republic of Ireland’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, vol. 33, no. 2, 2005, pp. 101–117, p.110. 283
Cocaine in particular – a notably high-market drug – increased significantly. A more
than double increase in the percentage of males between the ages of 15 and 64 using
cocaine in their lifetime was recorded, from 4.3% in 2002/3 to 7.0% in 2006/7, rising
to 9.9% in 2010/11.693 By comparison, the same research on females using cocaine
offered 1.6% in 2002/3 rising to 3.5% in 2006/7 with a minimal increase to 3.8% in
2010/11. The increase in drug use in Ireland during the period of Celtic Tiger
affluence is used as a backdrop by Tóibín to explore Fergus’s response to his mother’s death and his subsequent relationship to others. The narrative layering –
Fergus's past relationship with the mother both obscured by and hinted at in his relationships in the present – suggests a variety of potential connections, including homosexual identity as well as drug culture. Convergence comes when the four male characters decide to go for a naked swim the morning after the beach rave:
As his feet touched the water, Fergus stepped back. He watched the other
three cavorting further out, swimming with energy and abandon…
His mother, he remembered, had always been so brave in the water, never
hesitating at the edge for a single section, always marching determinedly
into the cold sea.694
Since the funeral, the mother has been omitted from the story. Her memory serves a
powerful purpose here, encouraging Fergus to move forward. From here, he and Mick
engage in sexual activity in the water – the first time Fergus’s homosexuality has been
693 Health Research Board, ‘Ireland: new developments, trends and in-depth information on selected issues’, Dublin, Health Research Board, pp. 33–34,
addressed. During this scene, the writing becomes rough and harsh with repetitive
description – the ‘inhospitable half-light’695 of the morning is acknowledged again:
in the half-light of the morning, he began to touch Mick’s face, feeling the
bones, sensing the skull behind the skin and the flesh, the eye sockets, the
cheekbones, the jawbone, the forehead, the inert solidity of teeth, the
tongue that would dry up and rot so easily, the dead hair.696
This scene juxtaposes a living and dead body, resonating with the story's opening
scene in the funeral parlour where Fergus looks upon his mother’s lifeless face. The
description of feeling Mick’s face is a mixture of Fergus’s ‘drug-lined grief and pure
excitement’.697 The present action of Fergus’ sexual encounter becomes secondary to
the grief. It has been suggested that this scene becomes a ‘baptismal cleansing’ in
which Fergus ‘expels his mother’s ghost’.698 The scene of unity at the end of the story is a transition from the orphaned Fergus – whose father is never alluded to – to a strong friendship unit. Thus, the normative symbol of Irish family is appropriated by a group of four homosexual men. The story finishes, like the others, ambiguously; on arrival home in Dublin, Mick and Fergus spend the afternoon together with a hint of a future relationship. The cleansing, furthermore, can be read positively in relation to the mother; the memory of her courage gives him new experiences in life.
In The Empty Family, Tóibín extends his exploration of the family in stories which explore characters who are isolated, regretful or hindered by pride. The
695 Ibid., p. 200. 696 Ibid., p. 202. 697 Ibid., p. 202. 698 R. Murphy, ‘The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín’s ‟Three Friends” and ‟A Long Winter”’, Irish Studies Review, vol. 17, no. 4, 2009, pp. 485–498, p. 488. 285
collection regularly moves back and forth in time and spans a variety of settings –
Barcelona, America and Ireland – along with a range of protagonists, from male gay
academics to Pakistani immigrants in exile.
‘One Minus One’ opens the collection with a psychologically symbolic and
intensely literary landscape:
The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother. She is full
tonight, and brighter than the brightest neon …. I have never seen a moon
so low and so full of her own deep brightness. My mother is six years
dead tonight, and Ireland is six hours away and you are asleep.699
As a reference to Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, ‘The moon is my
mother’700 invites associations of the seemingly still scene with psychic haunting,
death and ‘blackness and silence’. The symbolic image of the self-renewing moon, always changing yet staying the same, perhaps reflects the protagonist’s experience in living abroad, with his distant mother as an influence ‘hanging low’, over his life. To
what seems to be a former lover in Ireland, the unnamed protagonist continues to
speak; ‘If I called you now, it would be half two in the morning’.701 He reiterates the
need to call, to discuss the death of his mother six years earlier. Hints such as, ‘I was
living in New York then, the city about to enter its last year of innocence’,702 imply it was in 2000 or 2001, before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. The
699 C. Tóibín, The Empty Family, London, Penguin, 2010, p. 1. 700 S. Plath, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, l. 17, in T. Hughes (ed.), Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, London, Faber & Faber, 1981, p. 173. 701Tóibín, The Empty Family, p. 1. 702 Ibid., p. 2. 286
setting of Texas, where the character is stationed ‘for a few months only’703 could be considered an autobiographical reference to Tóibín’s stint as visiting writer at the
Michener Centre at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. The two references mark out the six-year gap between the story's present-tense narration and the mother's death.
The narration retrospectively explores the days when the protagonist arrived in
New York City and the ‘days when no one in Ireland could find me to tell me that my mother was dying’.704 The representation of family in this story differs from others by
Tóibín; instead of the usual strong relationship between the characters, be it loving or not, the protagonist’s sister speaks of the family ‘as though it were as distant as the urban district council or the government or the United Nations’.705 This unusual association of family and government works as an effective metaphor – there may not be a huge amount of love, but there is an attempt at functionality and support.
After learning of his mother’s approaching death, the protagonist heads back to Ireland. While checking in at the airport in New York, an Aer Lingus employee,
Joan Carey, who ‘had lived next door to my aunt’s house, where myself and Cathal were left when my father got sick’, looks after him.706 From there, he reaches back to the time he and his brother were left at the house:
And my memory, usually so good, is not always clear. …
And all I know is that our mother did not get in touch with us once, not
once, during this time. …
703 Ibid. 704 Ibid., p. 3. 705 Ibid., p. 4. 706 Ibid., p. 5. 287
This should be nothing, because it resembled nothing, just as one minus
one resembles zero.707
The combination of these three sentences works to capture the entire story.
Frequently, the protagonist’s memory moves back and forth, covering his childhood, allusions to his relationship with the unnamed person he is speaking to, and the details leading up to his mother’s death. The admission, however, that his memory is not clear questions the reliability of the majority of the story. The pain of knowing his mother did not contact his brother and himself while his father was sick shows the effect of childhood experiences that, in his opinion, ‘should be nothing’, but instead have a traumatic effect. The factual unreliability of his memory is juxtaposed with the real knowledge of the recurring pain of the mother’s silence. The metaphoric suggestion of ‘one minus one’ is enacted throughout the collection, with other protagonists focused on something in their past that could be considered meaningless, a zero, but which signifies a loss that has a lingering, powerful effect into later life.
Arriving by his mother’s beside just days before she dies; the protagonist experiences a deep sense of regret:
I regretted how much I had let those months apart from her in the limbo of
my aunt’s house, and the years afterwards back in our own house, as my
father slowly died, eat away at my soul.708
707 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 708 Ibid., p. 10. 288
This clear admission works against the uncertainty of the majority of the story; it halts
the narrative in a moment of honest clarity not seen elsewhere. Extending the
ambiguity of the narrative, however, is the mother’s silence. She had a stroke before
the protagonist arrived, and remained silent until her death. This silence could be
considered a continuation of the silence the protagonist received from her as a child;
offering no comfort or direction. In an interview with the New York Times, Tóibín
discusses how, like the protagonist, his mother died in 2000 and how, like the
protagonist, he was left as a child when his father was sick. Tóibín never talked to his
mother about the time his father was sick and she did not contact him:
She had gone through a lot, and she picked herself up really marvelously.
She was having a terrific old age, really tremendous in how she was
dealing with everything, and the idea of having her son looking for what,
pity? Give us a break.709
The role of the mother in this story is far removed from the mothers represented in
Tóibín's earlier short story collection; the intensity of the characterisation could stem from the hints of Tóibín’s reality. The protagonist, who has wandered far, in various
ways, is getting rid of the need for his mother to be a fixed point, always there for
him, and is learning to forgive her for having her own life. The resolution, thus,
accepts the mother’s departure from her allotted role in the family drama into an
existence as her own person with her own development beyond the symbolic presence he has made her into. The narrative exposes its initial ‘haunted’ reading of the mother
709 C. Tóibín, cited in A. Witchel, ‘His Irish Diaspora’, New York Times, 3 May 2009,
as moon-mother as a narcissistic view in which she is allowed to exist only for her son.
‘The Empty Family’ is the title story of the collection, and the shortest. At only nine pages, the story is an intense exploration of the definition of home.
Landscape is used to construct the narrative. As in ‘One Minus One’, the protagonist remains unnamed and also addresses an ambiguous figure. In the opening, the sense of return is clear, and of obsessive repetition:
I have come back here. I can look out and see the soft sky and the faint
line of the horizon and the way the light changes over the sea. …
I have come back here. In all the years, I made sure that the electricity bill
was paid and the phone remained connected and the place was cleaned
and dusted. …
You must know I am back here.710
Emigration is hinted at in this opening excerpt, along with the suggestion that someone important had been left behind. The imagery of light along with the symbolism of the sea becomes a defining feature of what home means, in comparison to the protagonist’s other home, revealed to be California. This connection between
landscape and identity becomes paramount:
I missed home.
710 Tóibín, The Empty Family, p. 29. 290
I missed home. I went out to Point Reyes every Saturday so I could miss
home. 711
Port Reyes is a prominent cape north of San Francisco, California where the ‘Pacific
Ocean [is] at its most relentless and stark’.712 The narrative, from here, quickly becomes a comparative exploration of the Pacific Ocean of California and the Irish
Sea of Wexford. The passage is typical of Tóibín’s preoccupation with sea-cliffs and shorelines, liminal spaces of transition, departures and returns.
Another obsessive and shifting Tóibín preoccupation in the story is home:
Home was this empty house back from the cliff at Ballyconnigar, a house
half full of objects in their packages, small paintings and drawings from
the Bay Area ….
Home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of
Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road. …
Home was also two houses that they left me when they died and that I
sold at the very height of the boom in this small strange country ….713
The repetition of ‘home was’ works effectively to unite three contrasting, separate passages. The use of the past tense places emphasis on death and belonging. That his parents are dead and have left him the two houses that he sold at the height of the
Celtic Tiger affects his present sense of belonging, creating an epiphanic awareness that, without his family, there is no home to come back to; home, as a symbol,
711 Ibid., p. 33. 712 Ibid., p. 33. 713 Ibid., pp. 34–35. 291
remains in the past tense. Through this awareness, the title of the story and the
collection gains meaning; the somewhat oxymoronic ‘empty family’ works as a
symbol not only of the loss of loved ones, but of loss of identity and belonging. Like
Mothers and Sons, this collection has a unifying theme; instead of being about a
relationship between family members, it is about the loss of relationships, the longing
for relationships or self-imposed exile and isolation. In this story, the notion of
returning home amounts to nothing; ‘home’ becomes a place in the past. The
landscape of 'home' becomes historicised; it makes of the past a tangible and separate
concept, a spatial frame outside which the sense of belonging and identity cannot
effectively operate.
The landscape-driven narrative explores not only what home is, but also where home is for the character. There is a hint of a traumatic or painful past that he is
‘desperate to evade, erase, forget’,714 but it is never clear what needs to be forgotten.
The story ends with the protagonist trying to decide whether to stay in Ireland or go
back to California; there is no clue to a resolution, instead a continuation of marine
imagery; ‘… the whiteness of the waves, will not work against the fullness of
watching the rich chaos they yield and carry’. 715 This visceral apprehension of the sea’s power echoes the conclusion of The Blackwater Lightship:
Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices.
They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea.716
714 Ibid., p. 37. 715 Ibid., p. 33. 716 Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship, p. 260. 292
The chaos and fullness of life travel with the protagonist everywhere he goes, an
everlasting presence like the sea in his two places of residence. The repeated
significance of marine imagery in Tóibín’s novels is effectively transferred into his
short stories. This story, in effect, pays homage to the sea; the protagonist’s
metaphysical response to the sea is the motivating force behind the narrative.
‘The Pearl Fishers’ is a longer story that marks a significant shift from the
narrative style seen in ‘One Minus One’ and ‘The Empty Family’. Unlike other short
stories in the collection, there is extensive dialogue, fast pace, and a shift in temporal
representation. ‘The Pearl Fishers’ is a reference to Les Pêcheurs de Perles, the
French opera by Georges Bizet, first performed in 1863. The opera tells the story of how two men’s eternal friendship is threatened by their love of the same woman, a priestess. The opera is included in the narrative, with the three main characters seeing the performance as students. Tóibín, however, uses this tripartite relationship of two men and a woman to subvert it – one man, the unnamed protagonist, has always been
in love with the other male, Donnacha. Donnacha is married to Gráinne who is a
‘fierce believer in the truth’717 and writes a weekly newspaper column ‘about the state
of the Church and the soul of the nation’.718 The three characters have known each
other since school.
Speaking in the first person, the narrator offers a somewhat exacerbated and
tired representation of an Ireland in transition; ‘I had long lost interest in arguments
about the changing Ireland’. 719 It is a story of layers, with subtle hints littered
throughout the prose that build to a multitude of revelations; the story offers an
unflinching examination of the recent alleged child abuse scandals in Ireland. The
717 Tóibín, The Empty Family, p. 63. 718 Ibid. 719 Ibid. 293
layers of the story grow: the narrator first avoids Gráinne, then meets Gráinne and
Donnacha for dinner, where they reminisce about first sexual experiences before a discussion about their relationships with their former theology teacher and the question of faith.
It is quickly established that the story is set in the present with a gay protagonist when the narrator mentions ‘Gaydar’ – a portmanteau of gay and radar – an online site whose members can contact each other ‘for what they call sex with no strings attached’.720 In this temporal shift, the story gains momentum and is reminiscent of a Tóibín novel in style and narrative depth. The narrator becomes explicit when talking about Father O’Neill, a science teacher who organised debating in the school. Unlike in Tóibín’s novels, there is no progressive revelation; instead the narrative approaches the issue without hesitation or metaphor:
Later, everybody who took part in those debates must have read the
evidence against Father O’Neill, the science teacher who organized them
within the school, and presumed that we, who travelled with him so many
times, must have known about him or even suffered because of him. …
According to the evidence given, it was only after our time at St Aidan’s
that he brought boys to his room and fucked them.721
The allegations against Father O’Neill are used as a backdrop to the protagonist’s and
Donnacha’s exploration of their homosexuality. The story, however, quickly turns into a reflection of Tóibín’s 2005 essay, ‘At St Peter’s: The Dangers of Priestly
720 Ibid. 721 Ibid., pp. 68–69. 294
Education’.722 His essay uses anecdotes of his education at St Peter’s College,
Wexford to help analyse the findings of The Ferns Report published in 2005.723 Ferns
Diocese was the subject of a Government Inquiry, which examined complaints and allegations made against clergy of the Diocese of Ferns prior to April 2002, and the responses of the Church and the civil authorities to these. The Ferns Inquiry Report was presented to the Irish Government on 25 October 2005. The Diocese of Ferns covers part of County Wicklow and County Wexford, where Tóibín attended school.
There are a number of similarities between the essay and the short story, with parallels offering increasing insight into the construction of the protagonist. In ‘At St
Peter’s’, Tóibín writes, ‘being friends with a priest meant that you could go up to his room and hang out, make phone calls, listen to music, watch TV’.724 The essay has a fond tone during this section, reminiscing about albums he listened to and the sweets he ate. He reveals that ‘[i]t was only afterwards that I learned what had been happening all around me’, despite ‘vague whisperings about Father Collins’.725 In
1998, Father Collins pleaded guilty to charges of indecent assault and gross indecency at St Peter’s College between 1972 and 1984 and was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.726
The protagonist in ‘The Pearl Fishers’ talks about visiting Father
Moorehouse’s room, and a similar fondness is represented with discussions of theology and literature, at times making an ‘excuse to go to [his] room again’.727
722 C. Tóibín, ‘At St Peter’s: The Dangers of Priestly Education’, London Review of Books, vol. 27, no. 23, 2005, pp. 3–6. 723 F. Murphy, H. Buckley & L. Joyce, The Ferns Report, Dublin, Government Publications, 26 October 2005. 724 C. Tóibín, ‘At St Peter’s: The Dangers of Priestly Education’. 725 Ibid. 726 Ibid. 727 Tóibín, The Empty Family, p. 73. 295
Developing a regular attendance, the protagonist was ‘surprised to see Gráinne
Roche’ with a friend in Father Moorehouse’s room. There is no suggestion of
Gráinne’s relationship with the priest, merely that she ‘was very quiet and appeared almost embarrassed’.728
From here, the narrative shifts back to the dinner where Gráinne informs the protagonist that she is publishing a book about her relationship with Father
Moorehouse. Revealing she had sex with the priest, the protagonist realised ‘there was nothing, not a single detail, not a blush, for example, on either of their faces, not a thing usually out of place that I had noticed or could now recall’.729 This attempt to remember contrasts with the embarrassment he had noticed in Gráinne. When asked to be a witness to the abuse, the protagonist resists resulting in an argument:
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘I was vulnerable. That is me speaking for myself. And you were
vulnerable too, just in case you don’t remember.’
‘You were vulnerable enough to arrive earlier and double back?’
‘He had us in his thrall.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘I repeat – he had us in his thrall. Are you denying that?’
‘I didn’t have sex with him.’
‘That is hardly the point.’
‘What is the point?’ 730
728 Ibid. 729 Ibid., p. 79. 730 Ibid., p. 79. Emphasis added. 296
Even in such a short exchange, the mirroring of the characters’ dialogue suggests the direct likeness of their situations despite their adversarial stance. The repetition of
‘speak’/‘speaking’ for ‘yourself’/‘myself’ involves questions of identity and community, isolation and solidarity. The plot becomes complicated with two characters presenting two different versions. The questioning of ‘the point’ presents the purpose of the story. Behind Gráinne’s book is her need to search and reveal the truth, indicative of the contemporary Irish media, and to expose the man behind it all.
It is hard to know how to react to this impulse; is Gráinne retrospectively simplifying past events to fit her experience into a currently acceptable and culturally powerful form?; is the narrator’s blank response a culpable lack of concern for Gráinne as victim, a failure of community and compassion, and a failure to recognise historical inequalities of access to effective speech and agency? His repetition of ‘Speak for yourself’ 731 seems ironic, as there is a strong suggestion that what he would need to say in his own case could be intolerable. Yet beyond that, ‘Speak for yourself’ could also be understood as an injunction to individuals to examine their own histories honestly rather than try to read or write them according to the prescriptions of contemporary master narratives.
Tóibín has written elsewhere that to him ‘nothing ever happened’.732 This parallel between the two narratives, fictional short story and non-fiction essay, offer a fascinating insight and alternative examination to the saturation of media information about Catholic clerical scandals. Tóibín avoids response to the Catholic scandals in novels but they are explored in his short stories, both here and in ‘A Priest in the
Family’ in Mothers and Sons. These stories do not attempt in-depth analysis nor any
731 Ibid., p. 79. 732 Tóibín, ‘At St Peter’s: The Dangers of Priestly Education’. 297
resolution or overall understanding. Instead, the short narratives offer a fleeting, yet keen, insight into a contemporary issue by imagining it as personal experience.
By shifting from the novel to the short story form, each of the selected writers offers rapid, incomplete, insightful, and, at times in Doyle’s case, disappointing representations of the changes. Each of the examined writers demonstrates how different their approach to the short story is in comparison to their novels. The novels of Enright and Tóibín, for example, are at times poetic, dense and lack pace. Their short stories, however, offer a different style. For Tóibín, while the representation of landscape is still important, dialogue and character development are privileged;
Enright’s writing becomes more dynamic with increased pace. Both these writers challenge the reader in a variety of ways; issues are presented without cushioning, and they offer no sense of happy ending or conclusion. Doyle, however, seems to approach the short story with more of an ambition for entertainment. Unlike Enright and Tóibín, Doyle attempts to find means of providing conclusive endings that stand in for or give the illusion of not only national confidence, but also accepted national diversity and cohesion. His stories offer seemingly definite conclusions that seem presumptuous, fantasy or even satire.
The short stories examined in this chapter are all set in the present. That differs significantly from the novels of Enright and Tóibín, but not from those of
Doyle. In the novels of Enright and Tóibín, there is a much stronger sense of engagement with and understanding of the past. This is not evident in their stories, where past and future perspectives are limited. The short story form does not give the
298
contemporary situation a clear direction, nor offer the space for anticipated retrospection that Peter Brooks has associated with the novel form:
If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know the
past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait
for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of
retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master
trope of its strange logic.733
Enright, Doyle and Tóibín’s examples of short stories prove rather that there can be virtue in writing in the dark, writing without retrospect, without complete understanding or the ability to ‘make sense’, just as there is virtue in writing about people often submerged, ignored or avoided in longer fiction. O’Connor’s theory that the short story developed from ‘an attitude of mind’ inspired by ‘submerged population groups, whatever these may be at the time’ is sustained over fifty years after it was written.734 In turning or returning to the short story in the last years and immediate aftermath of the Celtic Tiger, Enright, Doyle and Tóibín might be seen as part of a long Irish tradition that writes in the short form for the time when that seems all that can be written.
733 P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 23. 734 O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, p. 6. 299
Aftermath: Where to now?
[U]nderstanding the future requires an expanded sense of what has just happened, and a map of the landscape receding so bewilderingly behind us. 735 – R.F. Foster
In a lecture delivered in 2012, Gerry Smyth poses this question: ‘[W]hat does it mean
– what can it mean – to be Irish in the wake of the Celtic Tiger?’736 Instead of
offering quick answer, Smyth presents a strong argument that ‘the cornerstone of any
new definition of Irish identity must be the development of a new moral vision’. 737
The sentiment for a ‘new moral vision’ is, according to Smyth, born out of ‘the crash
of 2008’ that saw ‘the return of the real with a vengeance and it’s clear to see that the
waves from that momentous, ignominious fall are still crashing on the shores of the
Irish consciousness today’.738 The notion of a ‘return of the real’ effectively positions the Celtic Tiger experience as unreal, fleeting and false, and yet, as noted in the introduction to this study, the period was ‘paralleled by an uncommon flourishing of literary and artistic creativity’,739 much of which sought to discover the new realities
of a rapidly changing country. My selected analysis of fiction by Anne Enright,
Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín from 1990 to 2011 has presented narratives that
enhance, challenge and redefine the idea of Ireland in a series of differing
735 Foster, Luck and The Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970–2000, p. 189. 736 G. Smyth, ‘Lecture: Irish National Identity after the Celtic Tiger in New Perspectives on National Identity Series’, Estudios Irlandeses, Number 7, 2012, pp. 132 – 137, p. 136. 737 Ibid. 738 Ibid. 739 Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2008, p. 1. 300
representations that capture (or obliquely reflect) this tumultuous period. For all their differences, all three writers implicitly or explicitly work to reconfigure the relationship between the nation’s past and present conditions by ‘renegotiating received meanings of nationality and creating spaces for a revised rhetoric of
Irishness’.740 Each of the writers discussed here is well known to a range of print and media audiences through interviews and extensive discussions of their work in the
Irish public sphere, and through non-fiction works. The novelist’s proximity to journalism is, according to Eve Patten, ‘a feature of this generation of writers’.741
Often, in the selected works dealt with in this thesis, each undertakes a quasi- journalistic role, offering contemporary cultural commentaries written to a present moment in time.
Nevertheless, any selection of just three writers can give only a partial view, and the conclusions of this thesis have been influenced by my choice of writers whose works all show a strong sense of contemporary social engagement. If I had examined the work of John Banville as a marker for change, it could be argued that the Celtic
Tiger never happened. His focus on high art and Greek mythology in novels such as
The Sea and The Infinities creates a realm that does not reflect or refract contemporary circumstance; instead it seems to offer a parallel universe.
The Celtic Tiger is not an open and shut case. I believe it will be a period in
Ireland’s literary history that is examined with as much energy and in as much detail as the Celtic Twilight has been. I have shaped my thesis around only three authors because I needed not only to examine and analyse individual texts in detail, but also to trace writers’ development of characteristic preoccupations over a twenty-year
740 Ibid., p. 3. 741 Patten, Eve. Personal Correspondence. p. 3. 301
period. Therefore, I recognise that this thesis is not a comprehensive study of the time
period as a whole; rather, it provides a selective focus on how three prolific Irish writers encountered the Tiger. My thesis would easily have transformed into
something quite different if I had focused on Banville, Sebastian Barry and Neil
Jordan, or Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Edna O’Brien and Emma Donoghue. With each
grouping, the findings would have been significantly different. And that is the
exciting thing; the Celtic Tiger’s effect is not absolute, formulaic or even close to
completely understood. Instead, the time period offers, and is still offering, a
multitude of varying images and representations. This thesis is offered as but one
contribution to the kaleidoscopic academic explorations of the time period.
My study has explored the work of three Irish fiction writers – Roddy Doyle,
Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín – who all, in varying ways, ‘dissect and explain’
Ireland through their representation of the Irish family. This project began as an
examination of contemporary Irish literature without an initial focus on the family.
My main motivation was to look at the effects on prose literature during and after the
Celtic Tiger. The choice of the selected three writers happened organically; either
their work kept coming into the foreground as I explored the material or I noticed an
absence of literary criticism on particular novels. Then, in considering the work of my
selected writers, the family emerged as the predominant field of representation in
which their fiction attempts to capture the state of contemporary Ireland.
My choice of 2011 as a terminus has also necessarily limited the scope of my
enquiry into the continuing Irish literary scene. Since 2011, Enright has published The
Green Road (2015) but Tóibín, on the other hand, has published the short novel The
Testament of Mary (2012) and novel, Nora Webster (2014). Doyle has published two
novellas – Two Pints (2012) and Two More Pints (2014) and a novel, The Guts
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(2013), that returns to Barrytown and the main characters of The Commitments. Their
recent shift back to writing novels, after some time spent in short stories, may
possibly suggests some recovery of confidence to speak of Ireland in the longer form,
as the nation looks back on a crisis which has very recently been described as
‘incredibly predictable and absolutely preventable’.742
For Ireland’s literature, there can be no reliable long-term view of what will happen. Ireland has been, or has been perceived to be, in this situation of cultural flux many times. In 1942, Frank O’Connor wrote an article in which he presented a series of musings on his opinions, fears and hopes for the future for Irish literature. He first asserts that, contrary to belief, Irish literature ‘did not spring entirely out of Yeats’ head’.743 Instead, ‘[i]t was part of a whole national awakening when a small, defeated
and embittered country began to seek the cause of its defeat in itself rather than in its
external enemy’. 744 He talked about what needed to happen for Irish literature to
survive World War Two: firstly a theatre other than the Abbey Theatre; secondly that
‘the Irish writers must be prepared to come into the open; we must have done with
romanticism for the next twenty years or so and let satire have its way’. O’Connor’s
wish for Irish writers to ‘come into the open’ has come to pass. Since the time he
wrote, Irish literature has not only developed within the nation, but has also received
much recognition on the international literary stage. Yet the call for Irish writers to
spearhead a national cultural reform is still frequently raised. For all the uncertainty
and disruption it has caused, the Celtic Tiger experience has revealed and even
742 David McWilliams, RTÉ News, 26 February 2015. 743 F. O’Connor, ‘The Future of Irish Literature’, Horizon, January 1942; reprinted in D. Pierce (ed.), Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, Cork, Cork University Press, 2000, pp. 500–503. 744 Ibid. 303
strengthened the belief that Irish literature not only should, but does, matter deeply to
the interests of the country at large.
Discussion of contemporary literature presents a paradox; on the one hand, the
analysis is enriched by the availability of relevant and topical articles, and reportage
of contemporary circumstances and situations. On the other hand, there is limited
space for retrospect and analysis of major trends. Much like writing a short story,
analysis of contemporary literature is of the moment, and cannot offer grand
narratives or fixed conclusions. The writers whose fiction I have discussed here are
continuing to publish; their work may end up contradicting my present findings. What
I hope to have shown is that during a time of crisis and transformation, such as Ireland
experienced in the period of my study, contemporary narratives focusing on the family became a means to question and transform previous understandings of the nation, and to capture the profound impact of emerging social and economic change
on the lived experience and consciousness of Irish people.
304
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