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The Life and Times of an Irish Policeman in the British Empire in Sebastian Barry’S the Steward of Christendom*

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The Life and Times of an Irish Policeman in the British Empire in Sebastian Barry’S the Steward of Christendom* (473~494)이형섭白 2011.7.5 5:36 PM 페이지473 English Language and Literature Vol. 57 No. 3 (2011) 473-93 “To every life an after-life. To every demon a fairy tale”: The Life and Times of an Irish Policeman in the British Empire in Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom* Hyungseob Lee I was no longer looking for demons, but trying to wrench a life from the dead grip of history and disgrace, to strike a bit of light into the for- bidden room, to allow to a forgotten person not so much his history, which I did not know, but a story, all I had, made from the tangled string and bockety nails at my disposal. To every life an after-life. To every demon a fairy tale. (Barry, “Following” ix) I The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to trace the trajectory of Sebastian Barry’s dramatic works in terms of retrieving the hidden (hi)stories of his family members, and second, to analyze his most suc- cessful play to date in both critical and commercial senses, The Steward of Christendom, in terms of the tension or even rupture between Irish national history and the dramatic representation of it. If contemporary Irish drama as a whole can be seen as an act of mirroring up to nation, Barry’s is a refracting than reflecting act. Whereas drama in the south has tended to help, however inadvertently, consolidate the nation-state by imagining Ireland through its other (either in the form of the British empire or the Protestant Unionist north), Barry’s drama aims at cracking the surface homogeneity of Irish identity by re-imagining “ourselves” (a forgotten part of which is a community of southern Catholic loyalists) in all its plural difference and irreducible multiplicity. * This paper was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-2008-361-A00005). (473~494)이형섭白 2011.7.5 5:36 PM 페이지474 474 Hyungseob Lee II Unlike Stephen Dedalus who was desperately trying to awake from the nightmare called history, too many Irish dramatists have decided to stay in the bed of history, dreaming on. Lynda Henderson wasn’t the first or the last who has offered a trenchant critique of the Irish fascination with the past when she wrote in 1988 that “A concern for history is a perverse desire to remain fallen, to make no attempt to rise, to spend your life con- templating your naval.” “Too many contemporary Irish plays,” she went on to say, “bleat plaintively of old wounds” (18). Evidence seems to sup- port Henderson’s sweeping argument and it would suffice to mention a few canonical works of contemporary Irish drama: Tom Murphy’s Famine (1968) that dramatizes the Irish potato famine, Brian Friel’s Freedom of the City (1973) which deals with the horrible events of Bloody Sunday, Translations (1980) on the mapping of Ireland by colo- nial forces and the loss of Irish language and Making History (1988) that focuses on the 1601 Battle of Kinsale, and Stewart Parker’s Northern Star (1984) which is about the 1798 uprising. One could even draw up a bird’s-eye view of Irish history by chronologically ordering the events that have been picked up by Irish dramatists. However, critics of the Irish preoccupation with the traumatic past may as well be reminded of Joyce’s little coda to the oft-quoted passage from Ulysses. When Stephen Dedalus retorts on Mr Deasy by equating history with a nightmare, the narrator slyly comments: “What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?” (42). History has proven to be a suffocating and divisive force, perhaps more so than ever, in post-Independence Ireland, and it is nearer the mark when the concern in contemporary Irish play- writing with history is understood as a collective response to, and a fight back against, history’s back kick. Henderson’s indictment on contemporary Irish drama’s penchant for history play is based on the conception of history as a series of sequen- tially ordered and distinguishable temporal entities, that is, on the clear distinction between the past and the present. Once this distinction comes to blur and it is admitted that concern for history stems from the desire to understand the nature of dilemmas and conundrums of the present and to resolve them, the Irish obsession with the literary representation of the historical past can be seen from a different light. Frank acknowledge- ment of the presentist view of history would lead us to see Irish history plays as more about historiography and less about history per se. (473~494)이형섭白 2011.7.5 5:36 PM 페이지475 “To every life an after-life. To every demon a fairy tale” 475 According to Fintan O’Toole, a preeminent Irish cultural critic, Considering how much popular interest there is in Irish history, it is remarkable there are so few history plays in our theatre. In most European countries, and especially in England, there is a substantial body of drama in which the past is recapitulated, recovered and redefined. Here-perhaps because history still has a present tense-there isn’t. What we have are not history plays but plays about history: how it is made and why. In its title and content, Brian Friel’s Making History, a play not about Hugh O’Neill but about the construction of a historical narrative around him, is emblematic. Recently, two brilliant plays have gone even further, and reversed the usual relationship between theatre and history. Instead of taking a historical event and then dramatizing it, they have taken a theatrical event and given it a historical reference. In Tom Mac Intyre’s Good Morning, Mr Collins and in Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom, the border between the past and the present has ceased to exist. The chronological logic of history has been replaced by the radical openness of theatre in which all that matters is, . “you and I are alive in time at the same time.”(Critical Moments 174- 75) Thus O’Toole contrasts the English history play with the Irish historio- graphical play and cites Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom as an extreme example of the Irish historiographical play in which “the border between the past and the present has ceased to exist.” O’Toole points to the differing attitudes that England and Ireland have each shown toward their pasts, whether respective or entangled. The post- imperial sense of the radical disjunction of past and present, often accompanied by the wistful nostalgia for the former glory, gives the English an ironic self-assurance that their past is safeguarded from the ever-descending fortunes of their present. On the other hand, the post- colonial anxiety in Ireland to establish and verify a radical break between its past and present tends to backfire precisely because there exists pro- found continuities as well as evident discontinuities between its colonial past and its postcolonial present. Instead of attempting naively to repre- sent history, Irish historiographical plays like The Steward of Christendom “offer a rich analysis of the ideological and psychological imperatives which control the ways in which history is remembered, transmitted and employed, and its potent power to whisper persistently (and sometimes perniciously) in the ear of the present” (Gleitman 219). (473~494)이형섭白 2011.7.5 5:36 PM 페이지476 476 Hyungseob Lee With the six counties of North partitioned off and its Anglo-Irish Protestant constituency radically diminished, post-Independence south- ern Ireland has taken on a remarkable social and cultural homogeneity. As much burdened as any other society with class and regional conflicts and social stratification, the Irish society nevertheless exhibits “its social and cultural sameness” (Grene, Politics 242) underpinned by the intricate interplay between nationalism and the Catholic church. As Nicholas Grene points out, in a state where more than 90 percent of the people share and practice the same religion, a religion, what’s more, which has tended to admit of very little variation; in a society where nationalist belief, active or inert, is so widely accepted, so little challenged-in such as state, in such a society, the imagination of anything other than being Catholic and nationalist becomes genuinely difficult. (Politics 242) In his classic essay “What Is a Nation?” which is included with approval in Homi K. Bhabha’s Nation and Narration, Ernest Renan writes that “it is good for everyone to know how to forget” (16). He even goes further and maintains that “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (11). When placed in the Irish context, Renan’s thesis on the nature of a nation enables us to see that not only for its creation but for its maintenance, the Irish nation- state (especially with its colonial past) needs to forget those citizens who do not fit comfortably into the national narrative and will keep on forget- ting them. Thus echoing Renan’s thesis, the Oxford historian R. F. Foster pithily describes the independent Ireland’s policy toward the extent of Irish col- laboration with the British imperial and war efforts in terms of “inten- tional amnesia” (Modern Ireland 472). Having secured the Home Rule Bill in 1914, John E. Redmond, the leader of the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party, urged the Irish people to volunteer to fight on the British side. He believed that common sacrifice for the British war effort would create a new basis for Irish unity.
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